by Frank Norris
Lloyd’s gorge rose with anger and disgust. Even if Dan had been killed, it had been in fair fight, and there could be no doubt that Dan himself had been the aggressor. She could even feel a little respect for the conqueror of the champion, but to turn upon the dead foe, now that the heat of battle was past, and (in no spirit of hate or rage) deliberately to eat him. What a horror! She took out her whip.
“Shame on you!” she exclaimed. “Ugh! what a savage; I shan’t allow you!”
A farm-hand was coming across the plank bridge, and as he drew near the cart Lloyd asked him to hold Rox for a moment. Rox was one of those horses who, when standing still, are docile as a kitten, and she had no hesitancy in leaving him with a man at his head. She jumped out, the whip in her hand. Dan was beyond all help, but she wanted at least to take his collar back to Mrs. Applegate. The strange dog permitted himself to be driven off a little distance. Part of his strangeness seemed to be that through it all he retained a certain placidity of temper. There was no ferocity in his desire to eat Dan.
“That’s just what makes it so disgusting,” said Lloyd, shaking her whip at him. He sat down upon his haunches, eyeing her calmly, his tongue lolling. When she had unbuckled Dan’s collar and tossed it into the cart under the seat she inquired of the farm-hand as to where the new dog came from.
“It beats me, Miss Searight,” he answered; “never saw such a bird in these parts before; t’other belongs down to Applegate’s.”
“Come, let’s have a look at you,” said Lloyd, putting back the whip; “let me see your collar.”
Disregarding the man’s warning, she went up to the stranger, whistling and holding out her hand, and he came up to her — a little suspiciously at first, but in the end wagging his tail, willing to be friendly. Lloyd parted the thick fur around his neck and turned the plate of the collar to the light. On the plate was engraved: “Kamiska, Arctic S.S. ‘Freja.’ Return to Ward Bennett.”
“Anything on the collar?” asked the man.
Lloyd settled a hairpin in a coil of hair at the back of her neck.
“Nothing — nothing that I can make out.”
She climbed into the cart again and dismissed the farm-hand with a quarter. He disappeared around the turn of the road. But as she was about to drive on, Lloyd heard a great clattering of stones upon the hill above her, a crashing in the bushes, and a shrill whistle thrice repeated. Kamiska started up at once, cocking alternate ears, then turned about and ran up the hill to meet Ward Bennett, who came scrambling down, jumping from one granite outcrop to another, holding on the whiles by the lower branches of the scrub oak-trees.
He was dressed as if for an outing, in knickerbockers and huge, hob-nailed shoes. He wore an old shooting-coat and a woollen cap; a little leather sack was slung from his shoulder, and in his hand he carried a short-handled geologist’s hammer.
And then, after so long a time, Lloyd saw his face again — the rugged, unhandsome face; the massive jaw, huge almost to deformity; the great, brutal, indomitable lips; the square-cut chin with its forward, aggressive thrust; the narrow forehead, seamed and contracted, and the twinkling, keen eyes so marred by the cast, so heavily shadowed by the shaggy eyebrows. When he spoke the voice came heavy and vibrant from the great chest, a harsh, deep bass, a voice in which to command men, not a voice in which to talk to women.
Lloyd, long schooled to self-repression and the control of her emotions when such repression and control were necessary, sat absolutely moveless on her high seat, her hands only shutting tighter and tighter upon the reins. She had often wondered how she would feel, what was to be her dominant impulse, at such moments as these, and now she realised that it was not so much joy, not so much excitement, as a resolute determination not for one instant to lose her poise.
She was thinking rapidly. For four years they had not met. At one time she believed him to be dead. But in the end he had been saved, had come back, and, ignoring the plaudits of an entire Christendom, had addressed himself straight to her. For one of them, at least, this meeting was a crisis. What would they first say to each other? how be equal to the situation? how rise to its dramatic possibilities? But the moment had come to them suddenly, had found them all unprepared. There was no time to think of adequate words. Afterward, when she reviewed this encounter, she told herself that they both had failed, and that if the meeting had been faithfully reproduced upon the stage or in the pages of a novel it would have seemed tame and commonplace. These two, living the actual scene, with all the deep, strong, real emotions of them surging to the surface, the vitality of them, all aroused and vibrating, suddenly confronting actuality itself, were not even natural; were not even “true to life.” It was as though they had parted but a fortnight ago.
Bennett caught his cap from his head and came toward her, exclaiming:
“Miss Searight, I believe.”
And she, reaching her right hand over the left, that still held the reins, leaned from her high seat, shaking hands with him and replying:
“Well — Mr. Bennett, I’m so very glad to see you again. Where did you come from?”
“From the City — and from seventy-six degrees north latitude.”
“I congratulate you. We had almost given up hope of you.”
“Thank you,” he answered. “We were not so roseate with hope ourselves — all the time. But I have not felt as though I had really come back until this — well, until I had reached — the road between Bannister and Fourth Lake, for instance,” and his face relaxed to its characteristic grim smile.
“You reached it too late, then,” she responded. “Your dog has killed our Dan, and, what is much worse, started to eat him. He’s a perfect savage.”
“Kamiska? Well,” he added, reflectively, “it’s my fault for setting her a bad example. I ate her trace-mate, and was rather close to eating Kamiska herself at one time. But I didn’t come down here to talk about that.”
“You are looking rather worn, Mr. Bennett.”
“I suppose. The doctor sent me into the country to call back the roses to my pallid cheek. So I came down here — to geologise. I presume that excuse will do as well as another.” Then suddenly he cried: “Hello, steady there; quick, Miss Searight!”
It all came so abruptly that neither of them could afterward reconstruct the scene with any degree of accuracy. Probably in scrambling down the steep slope of the bank Bennett had loosened the earth or smaller stones that hitherto had been barely sufficient support to the mass of earth, gravel, rocks, and bushes that all at once, and with a sharp, crackling noise, slid downward toward the road from the overhanging bank. The slip was small, hardly more than three square yards of earth moving from its place, but it came with a smart, quick rush, throwing up a cloud of dust and scattering pebbles and hard clods of dirt far before its advance.
As Rox leaped Lloyd threw her weight too suddenly on the reins, the horse arched his neck, and the overhead check snapped like a harp-string. Again he reared from the object of his terror, shaking his head from side to side, trying to get a purchase on the bit. Then his lower jaw settled against his chest, and all at once he realised that no pair of human hands could hold him now. He did not rear again; his haunches suddenly lowered, and with the hoofs of his hind feet he began feeling the ground for his spring. But now Bennett was at his head, gripping at the bit, striving to thrust him back. Lloyd, half risen from her seat, each rein wrapped twice around her hands, her long, strong arms at their fullest reach, held back against the horse with all her might, her body swaying and jerking with his plunges. But the overhead check once broken Lloyd might as well have pulled against a locomotive. Bennett was a powerful man by nature, but his great strength had been not a little sapped by his recent experiences. Between the instant his hand caught at the bit and that in which Rox had made his first ineffectual attempt to spring forward he recognised the inequality of the contest. He could hold Rox back for a second or two, perhaps three, then the horse would get away from him. He shot a glance ab
out him. Not twenty yards away was the canal and the perilously narrow bridge — the bridge without the guard-rail.
“Quick, Miss Searight!” he shouted. “Jump! We can’t hold him. Quick, do as I tell you, jump!”
But even as he spoke Rox dragged him from his feet, his hoofs trampling the hollow road till it reverberated like the roll of drums. Bracing himself against every unevenness of the ground, his teeth set, his face scarlet, the veins in his neck swelling, suddenly blue-black, Bennett wrenched at the bit till the horse’s mouth went bloody. But all to no purpose; faster and faster Rox was escaping from his control.
“Jump, I tell you!” he shouted again, looking over his shoulder; “another second and he’s away.”
Lloyd dropped the reins and turned to jump. But the lap-robe had slipped down to the bottom of the cart when she had risen, and was in a tangle about her feet. The cart was rocking like a ship in a storm. Twice she tried to free herself, holding to the dashboard with one hand. Then the cart suddenly lurched forward and she fell to her knees. Rox was off; it was all over.
Not quite. In one brief second of time — a hideous vision come and gone between two breaths — Lloyd saw the fearful thing done there in the road, almost within reach of her hand. She saw the man and horse at grapples, the yellow reach of road that lay between her and the canal, the canal itself, and the narrow bridge. Then she saw the short-handled geologist’s hammer gripped in Bennett’s fist heave high in the air. Down it came, swift, resistless, terrible — one blow. The cart tipped forward as Rox, his knees bowing from under him, slowly collapsed. Then he rolled upon the shaft that snapped under him, and the cart vibrated from end to end as a long, shuddering tremble ran through him with his last deep breath.
V.
When Lloyd at length managed to free herself and jump to the ground Bennett came quickly toward her and drew her away to the side of the road.
“Are you hurt?” he demanded. “Tell me, are you hurt?”
“No, no; not in the least.”
“Why in the world did you want to drive such a horse? Don’t ever take such chances again. I won’t have it.”
For a few moments Lloyd was too excited to trust herself to talk, and could only stand helplessly to one side, watching Bennett as he stripped off the harness from the dead horse, stowed it away under the seat of the cart, and rolled the cart itself to the edge of the road. Then at length she said, trying to smile and to steady her voice:
“It — it seems to me, Mr. Bennett, you do about — about as you like with my sta-bub-ble.”
“Sit down!” he commanded, “you are trembling all over. Sit down on that rock there.”
“ — and with me,” she added, sinking down upon the boulder he had indicated with a movement of his head, his hands busy with the harness.
“I’m sorry I had to do that,” he explained; “but there was no help for it — nothing else to do. He would have had you in the canal in another second, if he did not kill you on the way there.”
“Poor old Rox,” murmured Lloyd; “I was very fond of Rox.”
Bennett put himself in her way as she stepped forward. He had the lap-robe over his arm and the whip in his hand.
“No, don’t look at him. He’s not a pretty sight. Come, shall I take you home? Don’t worry about the cart; I will see that it is sent back.”
“And that Rox is buried — somewhere? I don’t want him left out there for the crows.” In spite of Bennett’s injunction she looked over her shoulder for a moment as they started off down the road. “I only hope you were sure there was nothing else to do, Mr. Bennett,” she said.
“There was no time to think,” he answered, “and I wasn’t taking any chances.”
But the savagery of the whole affair stuck in Lloyd’s imagination. There was a primitiveness, a certain hideous simplicity in the way Bennett had met the situation that filled her with wonder and with even a little terror and mistrust of him. The vast, brutal directness of the deed was out of place and incongruous at this end-of-the-century time. It ignored two thousand years of civilisation. It was a harsh, clanging, brazen note, powerful, uncomplicated, which came jangling in, discordant and inharmonious with the tune of the age. It savoured of the days when men fought the brutes with their hands or with their clubs. But also it was an indication of a force and a power of mind that stopped at nothing to attain its ends, that chose the shortest cut, the most direct means, disdainful of hesitation, holding delicacy and finessing in measureless contempt, rushing straight to its object, driving in, breaking down resistance, smashing through obstacles with a boundless, crude, blind Brobdignag power, to oppose which was to be trampled under foot upon the instant.
It was long before their talk turned from the incident of the morning, but when it did its subject was Richard Ferriss. Bennett was sounding his praises and commending upon his pluck and endurance during the retreat from the ship, when Lloyd, after hesitating once or twice, asked:
“How is Mr. Ferriss? In your note you said he was ill.”
“So he is,” he told her, “and I could not have left him if I was not sure I was doing him harm by staying. But the doctor is to wire me if he gets any worse, and only if he does. I am to believe that no news is good news.”
But this meeting with Lloyd and the intense excitement of those few moments by the canal had quite driven from Bennett’s mind the fact that he had not forwarded his present address either to Ferriss or to his doctor. He had so intended that morning, but all the faculties of his mind were suddenly concentrated upon another issue. For the moment he believed that he had actually written to Dr. Pitts, as he had planned, and when he thought of his intended message at all, thought of it as an accomplished fact. The matter did not occur to him again.
As he walked by Lloyd’s side, listening to her and talking to her, snapping the whip the while, or flicking the heads from the mullein stalks by the roadside with its lash, he was thinking how best he might say to her what he had come from the City to say. To lead up to his subject, to guide the conversation, to prepare the right psychological moment skilfully and without apparent effort, were maneuvers in the game that Bennett ignored and despised. He knew only that he loved her, that she was there at his side, that the object of all his desires and hopes was within his reach. Straight as a homing pigeon he went to his goal.
“Miss Searight,” he began, his harsh, bass voice pitched even lower than usual, “what do you think I am down here for? This is not the only part of the world where I could recuperate, I suppose, and as for spending God’s day in chipping at stones, like a professor of a young ladies’ seminary” — he hurled the hammer from him into the bushes— “that for geology! Now we can talk. You know very well that I love you, and I believe that you love me. I have come down here to ask you to marry me.”
Lloyd might have done any one of a dozen things — might have answered in any one of a dozen ways. But what she did do, what she did say, took Bennett completely by surprise. A little coldly and very calmly she answered:
“You believe — you say you believe that I—” she broke off, then began again: “It is not right for you to say that to me. I have never led you to believe that I cared for you. Whatever our relations are to be, let us have that understood at once.”
Bennett uttered an impatient exclamation “I am not good at fencing and quibbling,” he declared. “I tell you that I love you with all my heart. I tell you that I want you to be my wife, and I tell you that I know you do love me. You are not like other women; why should you coquette with me? Good God! Are you not big enough to be above such things? I know you are. Of all the people in the world we two ought to be above pretence, ought to understand each other. If I did not know you cared for me I would not have spoken.”
“I don’t understand you,” she answered. “I think we had better talk of other things this morning.”
“I came down here to talk of just this and nothing else,” he declared.
“Very well, then,” she sa
id, squaring her shoulders with a quick, brisk movement, “we will talk of it. You say we two should understand each other. Let us come to the bottom of things at once. I despise quibbling and fencing as much, perhaps, as you. Tell me how have I ever led you to believe that I cared for you?”
“At a time when our last hope was gone,” answered Bennett, meeting her eyes, “when I was very near to death and thought that I should go to my God within the day, I was made happier than I think I ever was in my life before by finding out that I was dear to you — that you loved me.”
Lloyd searched his face with a look of surprise and bewilderment.
“I do not understand you,” she repeated.
“Oh!” exclaimed Bennett with sudden vehemence, “you could say it to Ferriss; why can’t you say it to me?”
“To Mr. Ferriss?”
“You could tell him that you cared.”
“I — tell Mr. Ferriss — that I cared for you?” She began to smile. “You are a little absurd, Mr. Bennett.”
“And I cannot see why you should deny it now. Or if anything has caused you to change your mind — to be sorry for what you said, why should I not know it? Even a petty thief may be heard in his own defence. I loved you because I believed you to be a woman, a great, strong, noble, man’s woman, above little things, above the little, niggling, contemptible devices of the drawing-room. I loved you because the great things of the world interested you, because you had no place in your life for petty graces, petty affectations, petty deceits and shams and insincerities. If you did not love me, why did you say so? If you do love me now, why should you not admit it? Do you think you can play with me? Do you think you can coquette with me? If you were small enough to stoop to such means, do you think I am small enough to submit to them? I have known Ferriss too well. I know him to be incapable of such falsity as you would charge him with. To have told such a lie, such an uncalled-for, useless, gratuitous lie, is a thing he could not have done. You must have told him that you cared. Why aren’t you — you of all women — brave enough, strong enough, big enough to stand by your words?”
