The Shaman/Chapter 15

I said that Malitka hesitated long to reply to our startled exclamations; but I suppose that it really measured less than half a minute. Human emotions work with such terrific rapidity.

“I am Russian,” she said, as if it were necessary to explain her beginnings. “Once called Krasta, princess of a once royal house.”

The statement further aroused both my comrade and myself; for both of us had lived in that enormous domain whose internal strivings and dissensions, luxuries and destitutions, kindnesses and cruelties have been perpetual mysteries to those dwelling outside its borders. My comrade had passed his youth in Moscow, that distant, glamorous, ever somber heart of the Russian race. In St. Petersburg I, as a youth had But—of me nothing matters—nothing is important or even noteworthy, save this—that I knew Russia, thought or spoke with equal facility in its tongue, knew its traditions, and much of its events. “Princess Krasta!” The name leaped up through years of forgetfulness, recalling contradictory tales, sometimes of blood and ruin, of merciless death and callous murder, or again as an unsullied synonym for humanity, justice, liberty. It was with something akin to amazement that I recalled that long-forgotten name, wondering why and when it had ceased to be one of the compelling ones in the world's interest.

To me it was preposterous that here, in this isolation surpassed only by the majesty of the unknown and unconquered poles, we should listen to the words of one who had once been a meteor flaming across the skies of dispute. So this had been Krasta's end—to be ruler in an unknown Indian village in the very heart of an unknown land! This was the explanation of her disappearance. It was because she had reached this vast, solitude and therein encompassed herself that she was no longer sought and so little remembered. Ten years, remorseless, insidious, relentless, had conquered all memories of both friendships and animosities.

“Yes,” she went on, “it was I who escaped from Siberia, and was—somewhat sought for by the men of the great white czar. But I wasn't what some of them said I was. I did not betray my caste. I fought against an autocracy, because I believed it was unfair. In folly I joined an anarchistic society because I believed it the last hope—until I discovered that futile murder was its highest aim. Fools! No system dies with the death of one—no, or bf a hundred men! They accused me of betraying them, but—by my faith in God—I never did! They wouldn't leave me alone—they threatened death. Perhaps you recall the time when it became a question whether or not the United States would enter into an agreement with Russia permitting the latter to extradite escaped Siberian prisoners?”

I nodded.

“Of course nothing could be more certain than my death if I were returned to Russia. Indeed I would not have gone. The perdition of one's soul by suicide, it seemed to me, could be no worse. I was in despair and in hiding—when I first met Harris Barnes. He was a very brave and very noble man. He sympathized with me, loved me, asked me to marry him. I liked him, admired him, but did not love him. He laughed in that big hearty way of his and—overpersuaded me. I do not think he ever regretted it. I never did, for he was a rock to lean upon, an unselfish guardian and a consider ate husband. That my affection never reached the heights of love was through no fault of his nor of mine; but it did contain the content of perfect friendship, comradeship, partnership.

“Partly because he had loved adventure and the wilds, partly because we had but small capital and he hoped that we might find fortune in the unknown interior of this country, and partly because we were both convinced that here I could be secure until time led my enemies to forgetfulness, we put all our funds into a trading outfit and, covering our tracks as best we could, made our way to Alaska.”

She gave a tiny shrug of her shoulders as if throwing off unpleasant memories and looked at us. We had rested ourselves back in our chairs, absorbed in not only her words but the music of her voice, so well modulated, so distinct, and yet with that softness that is found only in the cultured Italian or cultured Russian tone and inflection.

“You two men know what it is to suffer! Well, so do I! Harris Barnes and I lost more than half of that small trading outfit, the lives of four natives and, worse still, many sled dogs in that trail through which you came. I remember, when we finally came to a place where we could find fuel, shelter, and camp, and took stock of our depleted resources, how it appealed to me as absurd that one of the heaviest weights of the outfit, and seemingly the most useless, was a chest of carpenter's tools and a bundle of enormous whipsaws! Almost as worthless seemed a chest of medicines and surgical instruments that I had insisted on bringing because Well, I haven't explained, perhaps, that at one time I had an ambition to become a woman physician, thinking I might give my services to the poor—and could have easily taken my degree. At any rate, such is the fact.

“Food-on which our lives must depend was lost in that catastrophe, but medicaments and tools, upon which we could not live, were saved. It was—ironical! I sat down in that debris of salvage, and despaired. I wept, for I am but woman, after all, with all the weaknesses of my sex. Harris came to me, I can still remember, and lifted me up with his strong, kindly hands, and words of comfort. 'Girl, it's pretty rough luck,' he said; 'but never mind. You've known worse. We've still got each other!'

“I think I came nearer to loving him then than ever before. He had the exquisite and marvelous ability to accept even the worst with a smile. We took stock of our resources. We had scarcely anything but heavy material left. We had scarcely any food supplies. It was as if a malevolent fate had denuded us of all our most vital possessions and jeeringly spared us everything that could not save our lives.”

For a moment or so she pondered, frowning as if the terrors of a past vicissitude and peril were still keenly felt.

“But that wasn't the worst,” she resumed, still staring abstractedly into the fire. “In the night, after the winds had died and the clouds cleared and the stars shone, our surviving half dozen natives, presumably after consultation and filled with superstitious dread of ill omens, took most of our dogs, all of our firearms, half of our food, and slipped away over the back trail. We were left alone. Marooned in a white isolation! Helpless! Hopeless!

“Even that did not break the spirit of the man whom I trusted above any other I had ever met. The faint moans of the pine trees around our camp to me sounded dirgelike. To him they whispered encouragement. Once he said to me, 'They talk. They say that they have survived, though rooted fast, and that we who still have the ability to move and escape the blasts must not despair.”

“We passed three days there, while he opened every parcel of our possessions, deliberated, and threw aside everything unessential to our survival. He was repairing our broken sled in the noontime of the third day when we heard the yelping of dogs. A solitary man guided and restrained them. It was Peluk.

“You two were in desperate straits when first I saw you. Your dogs were dying on their feet. One of you was snow-blind. But I tell you now that your plight was less pitiable than his when he staggered into our camp. His hands and face were blackened with camp smoke and frost. His feet were frostbitten. He moved upon stumps of half dead members. His eyes were bloodshot with cold and fatigue. His bones protruded outward until they seemed stretching to the utmost their covering of skin. But there glared from his indomitable eyes an unquenched and invincible resolution. He could not speak. He could but stagger, and yet he tried to smile.

“You've seen his smile when the end was very near. Well, that is the way he came to us—Peluk, the shaman! One of his starved dogs fell upon the snow and was dead before we could give it food. He fainted, as if his determination had been overstrained and had suddenly lost its last spark of power in a momentary relaxation. Pitying such horrifying distress, we ministered to him from our scant stores, and when he recovered consciousness, while my husband and I were holding him up and pouring warm liquid foods between his teeth, he opened his eyes and peered at us and smiled again. There was something ghastly in it—quite as if a man long dead had opened his eyes and then grinned.

“His first words were those of bewilderment, inconsequential—but in my Russian native tongue!

“And so it was but natural that when he had recovered sufficiently to speak it was in that tongue that I asked him who and what he was.”

She paused, shifted her chair, and faced us.

“I tell you that Peluk is a remarkable man. You don't know him as well as I do. I am qualified to speak. He is the half-breed son of a Russian trader and a native woman. The trader was an outcast, but all that was great in him, and intelligent, was inherited by his offspring. When the trader prospered and gained riches he deserted, willingly or reluctantly, that native woman and the son that, I think, he loved. In any event he went back to Russia, intending to be gone for but a few months, and—he never returned. The native woman died. The boy, Peluk, left alone, resolved to seek his father.

“He went to Russia, and in Moscow, after long search, learned that his father was dead. I don't know what happened to him after that. I presume that it was a bitter lesson; that it led him to hate those who scorned him because of his mixture of blood and indefinite origin. That seems to be the way of human beings. Any specimen that is not well defined, or physically whole, or cannot account for its breeding is—somehow—aloof. In the end this half-breed hungered for the people from whom his mother sprang and came back to what had become nothing more than a squalid native village.”

I could not refrain from thinking how completely he had fooled me into believing that all he knew of the outside world was Juneau and Kadiak, this crafty, determined man who had traveled over so much of the globe, and how little I had surmised the character that was masked by his ever-ready and disarming grin.

“Well,” Malitka continued. “Peluk forced himself upon his mother's people until through fear, and perhaps superstition, they were fairly well subjugated. He claimed that he had, while away, studied the black art—if one could call it that in native language. But there could be no doubt that his aim and ambition was their betterment. Possibly, too, he had in view his own prosperity. If so, however, I never heard him admit it. Then, in the second season after his return, came a plague that is similar to influenza—then called la grippe—and his people were dying like flies despite his crude efforts to save them. He was desperate, and made up his mind that if they were to be saved he must go to the nearest white settlement and secure medical remedies. He started with two companions. In three days both were dead. But he kept on, relentlessly forcing himself and dogs to make haste. And it was thus he found us, when probably another day would have found him also dead upon the trail.”

She emphasized her words with a gesture of her hands, but did not pause.

“You never saw greater determination than his! When he learned by my speech that I was Russian, and after a time sat up, his eyes fell upon the medicine stores. He actually babbled in the haste with which he explained his needs; but when I told him that I knew something of the physician's and surgeon's arts, he became almost incoherent. He kept repeating over and over one phrase in his own tongue whose sound I remembered and later understood. It was to the effect that his gods had sent me to succor him and his people. That as Mohammed had come to another race so now I had come to his. His gratitude was stupendous, childlike, absurd!

“We could not induce him to rest until he had regained strength. He insisted that we must start at once, lest his people die. He demanded that we throw away everything but the drugs, a small supply of food and our sleeping bags, and swore to me that we should lose not so much as a single article and that he himself would return for them in due time. On the next day we decided to take the risks and accede to his appeals. And it is the truth that, despite all he had suffered, that ragged, scarecrow skeleton of a man taxed us and our dogs to the limit of endurance, ever urging us and our dogs on as if he were half mad, or we fleeing from rather than into a pestilence. The journey was terrible! But it was nothing compared to the ghastliness that was to come when three days later we reached this village.

“There were so many dead that the survivors had not troubled to bury them. In some of the barrabaras whole families lay on the earthen floors, in corners, anywhere—as death had overcome them.

“Despite the fatigue of our forced journey, the shaman had regained some strength, buoyed up by hope as well as food, and now he took command in a way that was as stern and inflexible as one could possibly conceive.

“'You tell me what they must do to save themselves,' he declared to me, 'and by the gods of the icons of your own land, I swear they shall do it! If they do not, with my own hand I will slay those who disobey!'

“What could one do with such a man? Such a phenomenal mixture of ruthless savage, enwisdomed wanderer, and benevolent despot! Willing to kill those he would save! Intent on forcing succor upon those who had not, the intelligence to be succored and fought against it! He issued my orders and saw that they were scrupulously carried out. He saw to it that the dead were carried to temporary scaffolds, outside the village, scorned the native rites of placing the dead man's possessions by his side in those elevated tombs, and when any one complained fell upon him with fists, feet, and the threat of a knife that was ready to cut a throat. A benevolent murderer, this Peluk, in that time of distress!

“I never knew until long afterward that he had asserted that I had come down to him in a cloud of snow and that my husband had appeared with me carrying my chest of medicines and surgical tools together with all my personal possessions, strapped upon his back. Another miracle, for the weight would have been some hundreds of pounds! But what convinced them more than any other proof, was the fact that between us we saved their lives. My credit for being heaven-sent was secure, and his—the shaman's—for being my discoverer and agent—was established. Moses had no more authority over the children of Israel than was ours over these natives.

“Within a few days more our lost possessions were returned. Not even the tiniest and most useless thing was missing. And it was on the following night that the shaman came to us in the barrabara that had been placed at our disposal, and after making certain that we were alone, disclosed some of his ambitions. He wished, first of all, to assist his mother's people. He declared that to do so he must have an autocratic power.

“He laid out a plan whereby he was to be subordinate to us—my husband and me. And then he took from a wrapping and unrolled from a strip of tanned moosehide two great nuggets of gold. 'That,' he said, 'is the key to the white man's ambition or power. I found it. My people know not what it is. I do. I cannot tell how much more may be found in that distant place from which this came; but if you will assist me to do what I wish we shall learn. You will do so, because it must be that which you seek. Otherwise, you shall go your way, whither you list, assisted by me and my people, and I must try alone.'

“Of course our agreement was immediate. We had come to this country in the hope of enriching ourselves as well as in quest of refuge.”

Malitka dropped back into her chair with an attitude of finality amounting to relaxation.

“There's not much more to tell,” she said. “Harris Barnes was at first infatuated with the prospect of gold and latterly with the creative impulse. The barrabaras gave way to well-built houses. The natives appreciated the values of thrift and better living. They starved no more in seasons when there was no game. I don't know by what method of selection Peluk admitted others; but slowly they came until we now have some hundreds. Peluk and my husband opened up the big placer deposits back in the mountains, worked them, and Peluk has made several hard trips out to buy supplies and manufactured articles for the comfort of ourselves and the villagers. Has he ever mentioned these trips to you?”

“Yes,” I answered; but I did not tell her that on at least one of those trips he had ruthlessly destroyed those who endeavored to follow him and learn whence he came. She was troubled enough without that additional burden. And, furthermore, trying to be just and consider the shaman's actions from his personal viewpoint I was not certain that I blamed him much. He was, in a small way, a Kosciusko fighting for the welfare of his own people, and if he had to adopt merciless measures when his people's welfare—yes, their very existence—was endangered

Malitka's voice disturbed my thoughts.

“The results you have seen. Our people are comfortable, better disciplined, and, I like to think, nearer civilized than any other natives of which I know.”

“But,” I asked, still bearing my mission in mind, “of Harris Barnes” and paused, not wishing to bluntly ask her for proofs of his death.

She moved quietly to her desk in the corner of the room, took from a drawer a metal safety box and returned with some papers in her hands.

“There,” she said, opening one and handing it to me, “is our marriage certificate. And there two photographs, one of him alone, one of us together. Here is a photograph of his grave that I took but last summer. Those, with my solemn statement of his death, should be sufficient for your purpose. He died nearly five years ago of pneumonia.”

So, whoever the scar-faced man killed by Peluk had been, it evidently was not Barnes after all.

“As far as I personally am involved in this estate,” she went on, “I want nothing of it. Furthermore, I should prefer that those interested know as little of me as possible—or be permitted to think that I, too, am dead.”

“But—surely,” I protested, “the widow's share of that inheritance is worth consideration.”

She made a tiny gesture of contempt with her hands.

“Worthy of consideration? Harris Barnes took precautions to provide for me,” she said. “He made two trying trips into the outside world to insure that point. He took gold from the mine to make certain. If I were ever to leave here and again live in the outer world all my needs would be adequately provided for.”

“But, Malitka, why not go out? Why bury yourself here any longer?” Jack demanded, leaning toward her.

“Your government might turn me over to the tender mercies of Russia,” she said. “And—I have not been unhappy here—until you men came. When you are gone I shall be”

Her hands clenched as if miserably fighting against loneliness and despair. I read all that she concealed in that instant. My heart ached for her. I looked at Jack to see him bending forward, his whole attitude one of love, sympathy, and the desire to shield and protect. I jumped to my feet, stepped across, and for the first time laid a familiar hand on her half-drooping shouder [sic]. She did not resent it. She looked up at me gratefully as if comprehending my attitude.

“Malitka,” I said, “Don't be a fool! Life can't give us all we have perhaps craved. Nearly all our ambitions, attained or unattained, eventually prove themselves to have been follies. That which is above all else is love. I know because—I failed!”

I turned from her and moved toward the door.

“Stay! I have yet to tell you that I appreciate you and your great heart, andthat”

Her voice was broken, but I paid no heed. For at least once in my life I knew what to do. I reached the door and my foot awkwardly caught the corner of a rug so that I had to straighten it to close the door behind me. I had a glimpse of my friend rushing forward as if to throw himself down by her side, of Malitka suddenly collapsed and bending over an arm of her chair, and then I succeeded in closing the door and leaving them alone.