THE MASTER-GIRL BY THE SAME AUTHOR MEMOIRS OF A PERSON OF QUALITY LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT THE BY ASHTON HILLIERS WITH EIGHT ILLUSTRATIONS BY SECOND EDITION METHUEN & CO, LTD. First Published April 28th 1910 Second Edition 1910 TO MY CAVE MOTHER Quarried from world-old gloom, A.H. CONTENTS LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Love at First Sight Frontispiece THE MASTER-GIRL He had come gently and observantly up the glen, tapping here and scratching there as he climbed, and ever and anon straightening an elderly back to deliver a small cough. Also at intervals he would turn his face to the way by which he had come to rest the plantar muscles and study the lie of the land. Chance-led he came and unadventurously, as one might say, and with no more premonition of impending change, or of this being a White Day in his life than had you, yourself, dear reader, when you left your breakfast-table this morning. He was a little person in the clerical wideawake and dark tweeds of a don in vacation, elderly and grey, with heavy, lower-middle-class features refined by expression as a sunset refines a dull street. Something about the rounded shoulders and narrow chest bespoke the bookish man, the "scholar's slope," they used to call it. His hands were large and broad at the finger-tips, such must have done manual labour in their time, pick-and-shovel work, possibly. At the moment of his walking into this story they were—I will not say dirty, but redolent of the soil, for as he went he would still be fumbling in a roomy wallet which pulled down his shoulder, and be taking therefrom for close and loving inspection this or that shapeless fragment of stone which he would presently return to the society of its fellows. "It never came here by accident—there is no such thing," he murmured, conversing with himself, thought discussing matters with thought, as do the thoughts of those of us who live the single life, or cherish interests which are unshared by those with whom we cohabit. "We have no example from this level," he went on, turning in hand a something small and angular which he had picked up a few yards down the slope, a fragment of grey chert it was. "Three conchoidal fractures are sufficient, when associated with such patination. Here are—six—eight minor flaws in these cutting edges, apart from the cross-fracture—(patinated too). Yes, undoubtedly a used-up flake. And the thing hasn't travelled half-a-mile from home.... Where's the floor?" "And, to think," he went on, "that such evidence would be lost—wasted upon that young doctor-fellow. It is almost incredible, the crass ignorance of our so-called scientific men.... Tried to interest him ... no use.... 'Out here to climb,' he says!... And with lovely things like these under his feet.... Amazing!" In fact, the professor exhibited the impatience which the man of one idea feels for the man of another, and had even the personal repulsion which a man with the Oxford manner experiences for one who begins all his sentences with "M'yess!" From which disjointed self-communings the reader will have already deduced that the professor was an ethnologist, one of that small band of heroes who during the past hundred years have quietly dug out and fitted together the buried past of the human race, pelted all the while by Ignorance and Bigotry as they delved. The little grey professor had come in for his share of pelting: not very recently, for his science has won her right to exist and speak her mind. Dogma, which would have burned the ethnologist some time back, and more recently did her best to starve him, has of late lifted the boycott. He is now merely glanced at with a pitying shrug and passed over when anything good is going, as "Eminent in his own line, but—peculiar," and forthwith, the good thing goes to a safe man, someone who never did anything, nor ever will. This is Dogma's way of coming round. The sons of the men who pelted us will build our sepulchres, never fear, whilst themselves making a cock-shy of some other poor devil whom their sons will canonise in turn: for the bigots, and the poor, ye have always with you. So it had come to pass that the professor by dint of giving to fossil-grubbing the forty-five years of life which he might have given to money-grubbing, and spending upon the collection and verification of tiny fragments of unpopular evidence the time which he might have spent more profitably in the delivery of sermons in St Mary's, which would have delighted the stupid by the "safety" of what they didn't see the bottom of, and amused the clever by the preacher's address in skating upon cat-ice, had come to know as much as was known about the Magdalanian Period. Others worked at River-drift, Thames gravels and the terraces north of Amiens: and other some questioned the Plateaux deposits for eoliths and got but uncertain answers, as to which our professor reserved his judgment, unconvinced, but not wishing to be found sitting in the seat of the scornful at the Last Day. Neoliths he pretended to know nothing about whilst knowing everything that had been written. It was the men of the Madelaine Cave, the giant hunters of Mentone and their artist fellows to whom he had given his life. Now some studies can be pursued by the fireside, the mathematics of a boomerang, for instance, or why a breakfast egg, if you set it spinning vigorously upon its side, will presently arise and spin upon its end. For the collation of Syriac gospels the neighbourhood of the Bodleian is as good a neighbourhood as any, but our professor, whose fireside was within a stone's-throw of the Bodleian, cared for neither mathematics nor codices, and as regards his own particular study had long since known that to prosecute it as it should be prosecuted entailed days and weeks in clammy dark caverns long miles from anywhere, and subsequent months put in with a series of little sieves and acids and gelatine and what not, cleaning-out and piecing together the uncleanly little bits of brittle rubbish which eventually would constitute a New Fact and take a place in the growing chain of evidence. "To anybody capable of weighing testimony," muttered the professor, "this flake, which can only have been brought eighty miles up-stream by human agency, is as good evidence of Early Man at this end of the valley as if I had projected myself back a thousand centuries and seen the fellow break his tool and drop it." He was somewhat out of breath with his climb, moreover the going was none of the best; there was no path, and the slope was clothed with a tall growth of flowering weeds, mountain coltsfoot, and the great purple gentian, dogwood, juniper and aconite. He replaced his hat after wiping his forehead, and, turning, parted the brush to find himself faced by a low bluff, an outcrop of the underlying bedrock, jutting through the rough slope of dÉbris into which the at-one-time precipitous sides of the glen had broken down. The bluff bore a ludicrous resemblance to the countenance of some ancient person asleep and half buried in bedclothes; there aloft was a massive nose and receding rocky forehead, nearer an upper lip overhung a transverse fissure, an open mouth, nearly filled with a tongue of soapy-looking brown stalagmite resting upon a lower jaw of the same material hidden by a growth of Martagon lilies. The professor, unaware of what Fate had in store for him, and, to tell the truth, expecting nothing out of the way, for a man of his years and experiences is past being sanguine, peered through the lush greenery and saw beneath the edge of that lower lip a jumble of small broken stone loosely cemented like ill-compacted concrete into which water has percolated (which was precisely what the material was and what had befallen it). And, peering thus, a Something caught the professor's eye. Now the Thing, whatever it might turn out to be, could not fly away, nor was its finder a callow novice that he should howk out his trove at sight and, maybe, destroy evidence in so doing, so he made himself a mental rough sketch of its surroundings before disturbing them. "A lot of weathering just here," he muttered. "Glen half filled-up since the watershed was cut back and the stream diverted. This was a cliff once upon a time, and this was a cave. Roof fallen in and cemented down to an ancient stalagmite floor ... breccia beneath with, apparently, a layer of charcoal in it.... If you please!" this to the lilies; they did please, or at least made way for him; he was down upon his elderly knees in the moist dirt breaking away the perished flooring of the old cave with his hammer; interested, of course, for the case was exactly in his line, but still without enthusiasm, when (see how our best things approach us unsought) the man made his great find, the chance of his lifetime came to him, such a trove as he had ceased to expect, for, despite many long vacations and snatched Easters spent in patient and systematic grubbing, the man had not been one of the successful cave explorers. But this was his day; a plate of stalagmite came away, and the disintegrated breccia beneath it gave to his cautious and practised handling, and lo, he drew forth the whole and perfect shoulder-blade of a Cave Bear, the mighty Ursus spelÆus himself, glazed all over back and front with a transparent film of carbonate of lime. The relic bore abundant marks of the chert knife, a shard of which was cemented down to it; but, what raised its interest and value to the nth power, and made its discoverer's heart to flutter in his bosom, was the clear, boldly-drawn lines of the picture with which the flat surface of the bone was etched. Here was a find indeed, a leaf from the sketch-book of a Primitive, as good as anything found by Lartet and Christy. "Delightful! a find at last!" exclaimed the professor. "A contemporary picture of SpelÆus, positively our first, I think. A bear attacking two humans, of opposite sexes, eh, what? but that seems unlikely. And what is this bent object in the hand of the indeterminate figure?—Weapon?—But what?" screwing up his eyes. "Bent throwing-stick, Egyptian type? Boomerang?—very curious. Same object repeated in corner of picture behind bear; conceivably boomerang in flight. But as to this—er—epicene figure—I doubt its being female somehow!—and yet—" He turned the bone, "Hey, what have we here?—this I might almost say justifies a feminine interpretation, there apparently was a woman in the case," for adhering to the back of the scapula was a bone needle! "Rough work this, for a female," remarked the professor, wagging his head whilst polishing his glasses, and attempting to realise the scene. "This fellow was as big as a horse, a grizzly would be considerably smaller and with inferior jaw power. The Magdalanian type was tall, I grant you,—she might have stood six feet and an inch, but—" he wagged his head again in disapproval of a woman participating in so rough a field sport as this sketch indicated. The professor was an old bachelor with mid-Victorian conceptions of the functions of womanhood. "There is no getting over the charcoal—it was a cooking-place, a hearth. The design, here, implies leisure and permanent residence, and the needle a lady. This was a home, a housekeeping." He wrapped the relic in a silk handkerchief; it was more precious in his eyes than the arm of St Mark in those of a Venetian, and at least as authentic. This done he turned to take stock of the place, conversing gently with himself the while. "Cave more roomy at one time—hardly to call a cave now, possibly was never better than un abri, just the rock shelter that I once spent an uncomfortable night under among the Spanish Pyrenees." He glanced up at the overhang, fringed with fern. "Calls for systematic exploration.... Costly business at this height, short season and no quarters within any reasonable distance. Entails a camp, I fear. Wonder if the University would come down with a grant?... Who were these people?" he stroked the handkerchief. "We get no nearer; a hundred thousand years is a wide gap—very. It makes the pre-dynastic Egyptian seem neighbourly. We dig, we fit together, but—they are too remote. Personally, I despair of getting to closer quarters with them in my time." He mused with half-shut, speculative eyes. "The Myers and Gurney business gives unsatisfactory results at its best, and what communications they claim to have received seem chiefly from the recently deceased.... Classic idea of a genius loci might have had something behind it ... but, they approached the Surmise with propitiatory sacrifices,—we try the planchette—and get piffle! Other plan seems sounder, but, how to set about it? Language question a difficulty. Something might be attempted with an Esperanto of Eskimo and Bushman roots, eh?" he smiled. "And the offering? Coarsish tastes, I conceive...." In common with some three hundred millions of his fellow Europeans, the professor had never seen a sacrifice offered. The conception, once universal, has completely passed out of our ken. That a trousered, cravatted white man should take anything which he really valued—a horse, a motor, a family heirloom, a prize pedigree ram, a cask of claret—what you will, and deliberately destroy it in public for some definite religious object, or to purchase some visible result, recompense or immunity, is unthinkable. The professor's mind fell back from this impermeable wall of alien thought and custom. He sighed and shifted himself as if about to rise, still muttering. "I'd give a good deal," said he, without the faintest idea that he was really and veritably offering Something to Someone, but, sincere as far as he went, "for one hour's genuine confab, sÉance, communication (call it what you like) with this couple, here. What wouldn't I give?—ah—say a clear month out of my life—" He said no more for that time, in fact he stopped short in the middle of his sentence and fell forward doubled up into a soft mass of the greenstuff which he had treated with so little ceremony, nor did he fall alone; a sheet of stalactite, part of the ancient roof of the cave, had detached itself from the impending lip and fallen upon and with him. Was it possible that the genius loci had taken him at his word? LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT The younger girls picked fast in fear of the Master-Girl's hard little hand, eating surreptitiously when her eye was off them. They made small progress, for what with the badgers and the birds and the lateness of the season the whortleberries were getting thin upon that rock. The Master-Girl ran a critical eye over the steep face below them. It was blue with fruit, but dangerous, for the strata dipped and the stuff was soft. She peeped into her pupils' skin wallets and uttered words of counsel, took the biggest satchel and went over the edge. It was finger-and-toe work and loose in places; she could hear smothered giggling above her as she climbed, and knew that the youngsters were indulging, but held upon her way. The fruit she had reached was blue-black, dead-ripe, and for some reason untouched by the birds for days past. She had never tried this face before; she began to pick. Then, all suddenly, her hands stopped, her eyes fixed, and every muscle grew tense, for from just below her feet had sounded a little faint sneeze! DÊh-Yān was sixteen, full woman as her people counted, the biggest, strongest and bravest of the unmarried lasses of the Little Moons. She could throw a chert-headed assegai forty strides and make it spin as it flew. She could handle a stone hatchet dexterously, skin, cut up, and roast. She could rub fire out of two sticks more quickly than any member of the tribe, could use her bone needle and split sinew to admiration. In fact she was more than well-grounded in the domestic arts then practised by woman, and hence the chief, and the head-wife of that chief, were in no hurry that this household treasure should marry out of the clan, and had set her in permanent charge over the younger children. DÊh-Yān was the First Governess. When a modern woman is startled she shrieks, a perfectly useless expenditure of energy, and worse, for the sound and its reaction upon the system of the shrieker prevent her from hearing more; also she not uncommonly shuts both eyes to shriek the better. DÊh-Yān neither shrieked nor shut her eyes, although thoroughly startled and indeed frightened. Now DÊh-Yān was not easily frightened; there were in fact but three or four things which she really feared, a wolf in open country, a bear or lion in any country, and a wife-hunter from beyond the ranges. This sneeze was the sneeze of a man, of a strange man in a neighbourhood and in times in which a stranger was an enemy confessed. So, the girl held her breath tightly and remained perfectly rigid for a few seconds, strung for such activities of flight as might be possible under the circumstances. Nothing happened. Her presence was plainly unsuspected. And now the woman-nature in her proved itself. That small muffled sneeze excited in her bosom a vehement curiosity. Her duty, her safety, the safeties of the brats committed to her guardianship, depended upon a silent and prompt retreat, but, she must needs first see this man who had sneezed. With infinite precaution she lowered herself to a ledge a few feet beneath her, crawled, leaned and peeped; farther and yet farther she craned for a view, and—there he was!—She found herself overlooking the brow of a cave, a fissure in the limestone, and there, at the cave's mouth, sate her enemy! One steady, all-embracing glance assured the girl that this interloper was not of her clan, nor of its allies. The stone-axe beside him was plumed with crimson feathers, the wings of a Wall Creeper. Its owner must needs be a Sun-Disc man, an enemy from the other side of the mountains, and one who was presumably hunting herself. What should she do?—Another girl would have crept stealthily away up the cliff; another girl would already have been in full flight, and would have run shrieking to camp. Then the braves would have turned out and found—nothing!—and that girl would have been beaten for crying Wolf! DÊh-Yān did not relish being beaten. She knew all about it; if she had to run any risks these should not include that risk. She knew herself as strong as some men and as clever as most. In her heart of hearts she was somewhat jealous of men. She would have liked enormously to have been a man and a chief. Moreover she had been for some time in silent rebellion against her lot. She was well aware that by right and usage she should have been sold in marriage any time within the past two years. An old maid was an unknown creature among her people. Savages do not appreciate the utility of old maids, any more than does our working-class to-day. Nothing but the covetousness of the old chief stood between this girl and a husband of one of the allied totems. She was too useful to part with at any price which her suitors could pay. DÊh-Yān knew all this, there is not much that a savage woman aged sixteen does not know which concerns herself. There is nothing which answers to false modesty in your savage. Hence DÊh-Yān was as discontented as a young person is likely to be whose future is blocked. This girl panted for a larger life than she was enjoying. She wanted to score, but being only a woman she was never allowed an innings. She knew by fair trial that she had the legs of any young brave in her tribe; that she was a far better climber than most, and could handle a man's weapons as well as any lad of her age. Yet, when there was anything to be done with axe or assegai it was their call, while she must be stitching a kaross or gathering sticks! The unfairness of it! And there had been no war in their country for some years, nor any chance for her to prove her capacity and courage in emergency. Here was her chance; here, just beneath her feet. 'Twas now or never, she would kill this woman-hunter and take his scalp back to camp. It would be a glorious feat, the women would be jealous, no doubt, and so might the younger men, but someone would make a song about it, and her name would be remembered. That would be something that would comfort her when after a few brief years of overwork and child-bearing she was no longer supple and swift, and had shrivelled into a blear-eyed, haggard old squaw of thirty-five, bullied and bidden about by her own sons. And it was really quite easy. As the villain sate there exactly below her he was so utterly in her hand. One smashing down-cast and her hatchet would be in his brain, and—well, it would spoil the scalp! Was there no other way? She would peep again. He had not changed his position. From signs she could see that he had not changed it for days. His left foot fell inwards unpleasantly; it was broken above the ankle. The man was starving to death. Water he did not want for, a trickle oozed near him. Then DÊh-Yān understood why the whortleberries upon that cliff-face had ripened untouched. Then the Alternative occurred to her. The Custom of the Country considered it sound practice that an enemy taken alive should be tortured before being eaten. The girl knew this as a matter of course, just as a modern duchess knows that a garotter is whipped and a murderer hanged by the neck, nor is broken of her sleep by the knowledge. DÊh-Yān had listened with horrified interest to the talk of old women who professed to have watched the process out, or nearly out. Immemorial Custom sanctioned a woman's presence at the salutary spectacle. The girl was no more responsible for the usages and customs of her people than a St Louis belle is responsible for lynching. So, there remained the Alternative, a dreadfully thrilling catch-you-by-the-throat alternative, of giving this wife-hunter over to the tribe. She played with the idea for a moment—women think quickly—then she acted, as women act, upon impulse. She would have a good look at the wretch first, would have her fill of jibing at him, teasing him, terrifying him if that were possible. At least she would tell this outlander who had come for her—(proposing, as she knew, to knock her over the head in the dusk at the dipping-hole down by the river and drag her off half-stunned to be his trophy and slave for the term of her natural life), she would tell this raider, I say, in good set terms precisely what was in store for him, and see how he took it. She peered and dropped a pebble. He looked up, and, albeit neither knew it, her business, and his too, was done. Incidentally the fates of countless millions of humans were spun by that brief passage of eyes. The horoscopes of empires were cast then and there. There and then was delimitated the eastern frontier of Old Rome, the Parthian march, which the legion was never to cross. The issue of Senlac was decided; Agincourt and Crecy were lost and won. The seated man below leaned slowly back and turned his face up. It was the handsomest face the girl had ever seen. He wasn't at all what she had fancied, not by any means a brute, but quite young and—and—nice. "You there?" said the man, quite naturally. DÊh-Yān studying his face did not answer. "Come down and talk to me. I shall not eat you," he smiled wearily. The girl pouted; this was putting the moccasin upon the wrong foot. And then the bush she was holding by parted without warning. She snatched, but failed in getting hold, snatched again at sliding rock and stone, saw firmaments of constellations, and went to sleep. A few minutes later, not more, she awoke with a wet face. Someone was dabbing her sore head with water. Who—Where? She opened her eyes. The hunter, his own head bleeding from a fallen stone, was holding a sponge of wet moss to hers. She struggled up dizzily and sate, within his reach, for the sill of the cave was narrow and the face beneath it fell steeply. There was no escape for her if he were still strong enough to strike. She thought for a moment that he had struck, for she was running red, she was sitting in a red puddle, but it was whortleberry juice. Her wallet had partially broken her fall. "I shan't eat you," he repeated. Nature had been pressing him to experiment. He had got so far as to finger his knife. "Why?" she asked stupidly, thinking aloud. One of her Little Moon braves in similar circumstances would have regarded the tumble of an enemy-woman as a sheer food-gift from the God of the Hills. "Sun-Men don't eat girls," he was saying. "Now you are well again, what will you do?" "I—don't—know," said DÊh-Yān. He was not only very—very beautiful, but incredibly gentle; wholly, quite absolutely different from the young braves of her clan who had been making eyes at her, and whom the old chief had warned off, Pong-Gu, Low-Mah and Gow-Loo, rough boastful fellows whom she had known and played with as boys on an equality, but who, since their midnight initiations had seen fit to treat her as the dirt under their noble masculine feet. "Run away, now, if you feel strong again," said the man quite gently, and seemed to mean it. "Run and fetch your braves. I am tired of sitting here." (He looked dead tired, and oh, so thin!) "They will take my scalp and eat me. You Little Moons are not nice feeders." "They will roast you first, alive!" said DÊh-Yān very low, and covered her mouth with her hand; the unpleasantness of the practice coming home to her for the first time. "Yes, I know ... 'tis my risk.... I took it.... But, unless they come quickly I shall be—dead first." His words came slowly. He leaned back and—fainted. DÊh-Yān looked him over as he lay and was conscious that new, and strangely pleasant, and unnamed feelings were moving within her. She no longer feared this man; he had given her a horrid fright, but that was over, and had left no after effects—savages are insensible to what doctors call shock. Nor did she hate him as she had thought she hated all Sun-Disc men, and had been prepared to hate this one until he had turned his face up to her and spoken gently. The girl's wallet lay where it had fallen disgorging crushed berries and disclosing a certain ration of jerked meat which she had brought with her for the day. An extraordinary and wholly irrational desire suddenly possessed her to capture and tame this man. He promised to be nice in another sense than the gastronomical. She really was pitying him, but of this she was unaware, for pity was an emotion unknown to the Little Moons, who had no equivalent for the word in their speech. Having bathed his head in her turn and brought him round, the girl fed her man with bits of meat and presently found him stronger. It was not that the food was assimilated; it would be an hour before it passed out of the stomach and was picked up and distributed, but the nerves sent word along that help had arrived and the system responded sympathetically. He looked better, more beautiful than any man had ever looked to DÊh-Yān. Besides he was her discovery, her capture. No one else, man or woman, should share her possession; he was her very own. Here came into play the sense of property, but behind it gratitude awoke, a very rare growth in palÆolithic times, as rare as pity. She sate thinking, hand to mouth, her man still slowly eating, restraining his ravenousness, enjoying the food as he had never enjoyed food in his life of seventeen years or so. What was to do next? A shrill cry from above brought on the crisis. The children had missed her and were growing anxious: if one of those youngsters caught a glimpse, had the faintest inkling, she would lose her treasure. Necessity was upon her, she must act, and act decisively. Swiftly shovelling with both hands the rest of her day's food from the bottom of the wallet into the lap of the man, she whispered quick and low, "More to-morrow!" and began to re-climb the face. The boys above saw her coming and grinned roguishly at her slow movements, and more at her empty wallet and juice-stained kilt and bleeding head. She got her breath before chasing and smacking the biggest, then, marshalling her little army, she kept it hard at work until the sun dipped behind the snows and 'twas time to be making for camp. A HOUSEKEEPING "More to-morrow," the Master-Girl had said, but to-morrow has a knack of taking the bit in its teeth. When DÊh-Yān looked forth at the weather very early next morning she knew that her path was blocked. Snow had fallen in the night and was still falling from clouds which were creeping down the wooded shoulders of the foot-hills after powdering their bare polls with the first fall of autumn. The nine white giants which never changed were hidden, and the horrid, bitter, frozen river of ice which came winding down from the closed valley which we call the Lap of the Gods, bearing dirt and stones upon its cracked and dirty back, was hidden too. The old chief sniffed more snow in the sky and bade strike the wigwams, the summer homes of his people. 'Twas ho, for their winter quarters, the range of southward-facing limestone caverns, a ten-fingers' march down-stream. Certain braves were sent on ahead to prospect and smoke out the hyÆnas which were pretty sure to have usurped possession. Preparations began at once and the Master-Girl must make herself conspicuously useful and prominent in the flitting with whatever heart she set to it. As she worked and packed she thought hard and keenly as she had never thought before in her life. Hitherto her thoughts had been solely for her tribe, and upon topics upon which she could think aloud, but, now, and for the first time, she had thoughts for someone outside the circle which had enclosed her since she could first remember, and thoughts which must most carefully be kept to herself; yes, so rigorously that she gabbled loudly, as girls who work in company will when they fear the suspicion of having any private thoughts at all. Before mid-day the march was begun, and the Master-Girl, still chatting loudly and thinking hard, must take her place on the trail, albeit with a very backward-looking heart. How was her man getting on?—This cold was bad for him, he had no bison-skin robe with him. A wife-hunter's kit is light, and no doubt the weather had been warmer when he left his people upon the other, the sunny side of the ranges. Another night of this would finish him. She had given him her word, too, and the Master-Girl was as truthful as girls went in those days, which means she didn't lie from choice, and had a natural pride in doing the thing which she had said she would do, even if it proved unexpectedly difficult. Thus it befell that without committing herself to any specific plan the Master-Girl kept a definite end resolutely in view, even to the extent of selecting for her special burdens on the march certain articles which on another occasion she might have placed upon the back of one and another of her pupils. The braves formed line and scouted for game ahead of the old men in the centre. The squaws and girls staggered slowly behind bowed beneath the property of the tribe, the accumulated gettings of a summer's hunting. There were also the household stuff and the babies. So big were the flakes that progress was difficult from the first, and presently became impossible, the smaller and more heavily-laden girls could not be kept going. It was no use beating the stragglers. The old chief called a halt. When young things begin to get behind, someone will presently be missing. The braves, who had come upon bears' sign, might follow it up; but a camp must be pitched for the night at any rate, and the girls must drop their burdens and forth for firing before the snow covered all. Down went ill-secured bundles of skins, sheaves of assegais, wallets of jerked deer-meat, the miscellaneous lumber of a tribe of hunters, and out went the stick collectors; 'twas then or not at all. A little girl near the edge of the covert saw the Master-Girl bending beneath a faggot, saw her drop it and run, heard her shriek "Bear!" There was a headlong race through swirling flakes over and under fallen trunks and laden boughs: five minutes later the last of the runners was safe in camp. The mother-squaws were scolding, counting, cackling, but where was DÊh-Yān? The hunters must be recalled, but were far ahead running a trail. By the time they were told of what had happened, and the pack had been lifted, the snow had covered all marks, indeed a good deal of property which had been thrown down in the confusion was temporarily lost. For the rest of the short dark day the braves cast forward up this gully and that glen, but it was upon their return that a hound scratched up from under a drift a skin wallet stiff and red. The finder of this grim relic brought it to the old chief in good faith. The elder looked, sniffed, snarled, "Fool!—this is not blood, but berry-juice!" whereat Gow-Loo, a somewhat jolter-headed young savage, slunk away cursing the lost girl and wishing the bear a good meal of her. Later he cursed her more bitterly still. A hasty camp was pitched, ill-warmed, ill-lighted. The squaws huddled amid their shuddering children, the men never laid down their arms all night. A cannibal bear was the most terrible enemy known to the tribe; a taste for human flesh once acquired, and the fear of man once overcome, there was no knowing to what lengths such a beast might go. 'Twas opined to be no brown bear either, but a grizzly, or worse, a cave monster, one of the sort that even the lions feared, a brute that hung around the mammoth herd on its march, and occasionally cut off a calf. Nobody slept, and there was but one topic of conversation, the fate of DÊh-Yān. One boy, indeed, the boy whom she had spanked the day before, stuck to it that she had outrun him whilst making for camp, had passed him running silently and running wide, but none believed him, for he was not a truthful boy, nor did his tale obtain a moment's credence from the fact that next morning certain assegais, axes and skins were missing. Such losses are incidental to a panic when women and girls run and cry out and drop things; they would be found, if and when the snow melted. But the snow did not melt. So, a day later, the Little Moons trailed down in close order to their winter quarters, leaving their summer camp under a robe of new snow. The fate of the First Governess added a delicious piquancy to the nightly tremors of the children whom she had whipped. The women regretted, grumbled and speculated without a misgiving, but a doubt remained in the mind of a certain young brave, which doubt he later imparted to a couple of his comrades, who turned it over silently in their minds. The man with the broken leg had made a poor night of it. He had finished the jerked deer-meat and was ravenously hungry, sickeningly, dreadfully hungry, and quite desperately cold. He had been telling himself all night between the brief naps permitted him by the various pains, cramps and gnawings which assailed him, that this girl could not return, yet, all through, something within him kept the spark of hope alight. A dark, thick, long-delayed morning, with eddying flakes as big as beech-leaves, put that spark out. Such weather he knew would break up the summer camp at once. The girl, who, under other circumstances, might conceivably have paid him a single surreptitious visit, would be tied to her burden and to the line of march; every hour would lengthen the distance between them. No, it was all up ... he must die ... and this dying was very slow work ... and abominably painful.... He wished the braves of her tribe had found him.... He would have shown those dirty Little Moons how a Sun-Disc man could stand fire. Ugh!—he was a fool to have given the creature a second thought—a mere Little Moon woman, useful perhaps when properly trained, but one of a backward tribe that ate snake (think, snake!) and plumed their axes with owls' feathers. The contempt and hatred felt by a savage for a man of another totem and habits is almost inconceivably bitter, nearly as fierce and irrational as the loathing entertained by an Orangeman for a Papist, or a Wee Free for a United. So the broken-legged man sate and shuddered involuntarily, for he was true to stock, and made no more moan about his condition and prospects than does a trapped wolf. He had gone over his chances and appraised and laid the last of them down—worthless! But, there was one which he had given not a thought to—the ardent strength of a woman's first passion. "Man, I am come." His dim eyes opened very slowly. 'Twas no dream, she was there, dark bronze-red with exertion and exhaling warmth. She was burdened too; he marvelled dully how she had got such a bundle down that rock-face. A bison-robe was drawn under him, another laid over him: he was fed again, and again he revived, but more slowly, for this time he was far gone with cold and exhaustion. He had not spoken. She was gone. He wondered. Then the mouth of the cave was darkened once more, and she was back with something, a small sheaf of assegais, two axes, and a dozen flake-knives. A second absence and a second return revealed her in another character, for there lay her fire-sticks, and scrapers, yes, and more skins, a housekeeping! The man's eyes were clear by this time. "What will the Little Moons say to this?" he asked, his brown cheek bulging with food. The girl frowned and plucked at the hair of her kilt. "I am dead. A bear got me at our first camp. Oh, I did it well! We were out for wood; the snow was falling thickly; I laid a trail of my things up a side glen, mittens, wallet, and an old kaross, then I cried Bear! and sprinted back to camp, picked up these things (none of mine—no scent for the pack—am I a child?) and doubled on our trail across the open where tracks were many. If a hound opens on my line they will whip him off for running heel!—But there was no padding me after the first minute—the snow saw to that!" She grinned. "Neither spoor nor scent!—And while they are casting forward on a false line, I am here,—with you!" Her eyes shone, her voice, hard and hunter-like at first, fell softly and almost shyly at the end. Here again, as at their first interview, the man's intelligence followed the girl's speech laggingly. Her people and his had been separated for many generations by mutual distrust and mountains. Intertribal trade did not exist, nor peaceful communication, but internecine wife-stealing had kept alive a common glossary. When she had passed to another subject he recalled something strange in her story: "the pack," she had said, she had referred to "a hound" ("good wolf" was her word—Pŭl-Yūn knew bad wolves only). He did not interrupt his meal and her recital at the time with questions, but learnt later that the Master-Girl's people, more backward than his in most respects, had recently domesticated wolf-whelps. The man touched the skins wistfully, he hardly understood as yet. "But a bear would not eat bison-robe and hatchets. When you go back to camp—" he began, feeling his way towards the incredible. "I am not going back to camp," said DÊh-Yān, in a whisper. "This is my camp." The broken-legged man sucked in both lips and stared, but his eyes kindled and smiled. "It seems that I am to get my wife after all," he said softly. The Master-Girl brought to the point—the point for which she had been scheming and working for the past day and night, was already modern woman enough to cover her mouth with her hand and shiver. After all then, she would belong to this man, not he to her; her captive had caught her, and thus soon!—Well, it was to be, she had no retreat open to her, and—and—he was gloriously beautiful, and—and—so gentle! She nodded assent, her hand still over her mouth. The young people's eyes met. It meant marriage. "It is well," said the man. "We will—live!"—his eyes shone—"for a little while, perhaps. But, who knows? The Gods of your hills may be kind to us. They have been kind to us so far, and have covered my hiding-place and your tracks with the ptarmigan's feathers. Let us praise them! I do not know their names. As for the God of my tribe, She is hidden. She must wait. I will greet Her when next She shows me Her face. Meanwhile, be our time together long or short, I will sing my wedding-song." He sate as erect as he was able, staying himself upon his palms and, filling his chest, began to chant trumpet-lipped the hymn of his people, the one reserved for such occasions. Its exact terms are, perhaps fortunately, irrecoverable. It was even then of an immemorial antiquity (nothing changes more slowly than the wedding custom of a primitive people), this was an archaic survival, sanctioned by use and wont and age; there were words and idioms in it which were wholly foreign to the girl—imbedded fragments of the long-dead River-drift men's gabble, frog-like guttural cluckings of tongue and the tonsil mingled with newer and nobler speech, vocables truly human and musical. The girl listened and panted and glowed, tingling to the tips of her toes. This was life!—Life!—If, by any hap, she were tracked, caught and dragged back to her tribe to suffer the frightful penalty reserved for a girl who so far forgot herself as to "steal her man"—as their speech had it (a phrase still used by our peasantry)—well, she would grin it out to the very last. She had lived! How shall we picture the youngsters? Were they handsome? According to modern canons—no. High in the cheek, narrow and low in the brow, and something heavy in the jaw, one fancies; strongly outlined sketches of the race to come after. Comely enough though, in one another's eyes—oh (a detail this, but worth preserving), stalwart exceedingly—he a good seven feet in height by our measure, and the Master-Girl six feet three. Suddenly in mid-chant the singer's eyes rolled inward, his lip was drawn up from the teeth and he was sinking back. She caught and cherished him to warmth and comfort. He was splendidly plucky, but weak. So passed the first day of these young people's housekeeping. The girl got some kindling in before the light went, and made fire, and watched the night out beside her sleeping patient. The First Nurse. Before dawn she recognised and prostrated herself to the crescent moon, her totem, to whom she gave credit for her successful elopement, and to whose mercy she committed her husband and herself. The next day he was better. DÊh-Yān found herself able to leave her new treasure. It was hard, but business is business, and the girl was as practical as she was enthusiastic. "It has stopped. I go to hunt—for us." "The fall is too young," he objected. "Nothing will be afoot yet—no spoor." "You shall see," said the girl. "At least I can be getting more wood." At the edge of the covert below the face DÊh-Yān, moving slowly and with eyes all around her, saw a something tiny and black moving upon the whiteness, the jetty tail-tip of an ermine in his winter pelage. Pursing her lips she gave the shrill, small squeal of a leveret in difficulties, and was presently looking into the face of the eager little robber who had raced to her lure. Her throwing-stick broke his back. DÊh-Yān was not fond of stoat, no one is, but meat is meat; she cut out the gland and pouched him. Observing that his muzzle was bloody, she worked his line to heel, and coming upon the hole he had just left, dug down to a family party of hedgehogs laid up for their winter sleep in beech leaves, each as fat as butter, and only one of them sucked. Here, with economy, was meat for three days at a pinch. She returned to the cave silently pleased with herself to meet the silent approval of her man. For the rest of the day she accumulated firewood. Her man should be warm. At night Pŭl-Yūn, as he bade her call him, groaned in sleep. By daylight his wife would examine his hurt. The limb was sufficiently wasted to show the overlapping of the bones. It was a simple fracture of the fibula, and the muscle was enfeebled enough to tempt her to put into practice the woman's lore learnt of the old chiefs head-wife. "Hold to the rock—hard—I shall pull." He braced himself, she drew with slow power and felt the limb give, then, venting pent breath, relaxed and heard the broken ends of the bone cluck neighbourly as they came to a renewed understanding. "Now, lie upon your sound side, and the leg will keep its shape." Her man took breath, for the operation had hurt him abominably, albeit he had not let the least little moan. "O woman, what talk is this?—It is a moon-and-a-half of a matter before broken leg-bone knits strongly; how am I to keep it in one shape so long?—when I am sleeping, say? Wah! You are very clever, but I shall break it again before morning." The girl thought hard, sitting at the entrance of the cave and studying the curve of the young moon just visible, afloat in the darkening blue, her people's totem and her own, and her favourite object among the heavenly host. "O Moon, Little Moon, teach me to medicine my man!" she murmured. "Here are not the things which we of your people use in such a case. This cave-floor is hard rock, I cannot drive little pegs to keep the limb in place, nor while this frost holds can I dig clay to make a mould to hold it firm. What shall I do for him, O Little Moon?" And, behold it came, a Thought, an Expedient, bright and wonderfully simple, and perfectly novel and practicable. Arising without a word, she fetched six straight hazel wands, and, having wound the limb carefully in a deer's hide, bound it within a cradle of splints. 'Twas new practice, she had never seen nor heard of such work before, nor had her man, but he let her have her way with him, for he was not only very weak and weary, but the fellow saw that he had fallen into the hands of a wise woman. We, too, are by way of recognising that here was that rare and invaluable creature, a born inventor. Such are of altogether incalculable value to the race. And, bethink you, how seldom do they appear. Our own age, verily an age of miracles, is altogether exceptional; never in the whole course of man's history has there been such a time. Dimly one descries a period, the so-called Second Dynasty, when the Egyptian brain, then young and new and plastic, scintillated once in a century or so, admirable inventions, the wedge, the lever, inclined plane, wheel-and-axle, but who invented anything since until our own day?—Gunpowder and printing, the arch, and steel, the mariner's compass, you'll remind me, and what else in the course of six thousand years? Within the memory of living men if an Oxford don wanted light in haste he had recourse to flint and steel and an oil lamp. If he wished to reach London in haste a good horse was his best servant. Rameses the Great would have done no otherwise in either emergency. Most of earth's greatest men have harboured an inexplicable prejudice against inventors, the Greek philosophers, for instance; even the greatest generals in history would trust nothing that was new, Alexander, Hannibal, Marlborough conquered with the ordinary weapons of their day; Wellington distrusted the rocket and preferred Brown Bess to the rifle, Napoleon (fortunately for Liberty and England), sneered at inventions and had a nickname for inventors. No, not only the practice of invention, but the very theory of it is modern: the mere idea that there is anything that can be discovered (without mortal sin) is of yesterday. Your ancient inventor investigated at the risk of his life, and published his invention in terror. However obvious and useful it might chance to be, if it hit a vested interest, or offended a priest, the man would be burned for having commerced with the devil. So with the lowest savages; not the filthiest of their foods, the most objectionable of their customs, or the silliest and clumsiest of their tools or weapons, but is bound up in some way with their religion, and protected from innovation by its sanctions. Did not Mumbo Jumbo give them the throwing-stick in the days before the Moon began to chase his sister the Sun?—Who so presumptuous then as to suggest any improvement upon the throwing-stick, the divinely-inspired throwing-stick? Let him be skinned alive and eaten, says Mumbo Jumbo, and let the best and tenderest of his chops be the portion of me, Rum Tum, the High Priest of Mumbo Jumbo. Thus hampered, man's intelligence moves slowly, and racial advance has not been precipitate in Korea, say, or Spain. Among the Little Moons the very possibility of inventing anything had been long forgotten. From his childhood to his death each member of the tribe moved in a web of routine, and did what he did at stated times because it was the custom of the community. There was never any change, improvement was impossible, for the corpus of the law which regulated his life and bound him hand and foot, resided in the retentive memories of the oldest and most pig-headed of his people, themselves brought up in a similar environment and mentally incapable of breaking away from it in any one smallest particular. Hence this departure from practice in the matter of treating a broken leg filled the man's bosom with wonder too deep for words. He found himself encumbered with novel feelings, feelings for which he had no suitable vocabulary. When a young brave went on a wife-hunt it was not to be supposed that he should respect or reverence the dejected and sulky captive whom he drove home before him. That in the course of years their mutual relations might improve, that some regard for the mother of his sons, some admiration even for her capacity and judgment might arise was possible, but at the first her lot was a sorry one; she stood for the proof of her captor's strength, courage and address; his slave, no more. But, DÊh-Yān stood for nothing of the kind. And what she did stand for Pŭl-Yūn was at a loss to explain to himself. Having nothing to do, he watched her about the cave and marvelled at her—also at himself and at something which was going on inside him. And in her, though he did not know it. The first passage of their eyes had begun it, but much had happened since. She had touched him. She had handled, lifted, supported him—given him exquisite pain (as she knew by intuition), fed him, rubbed his cold stiff limbs back to warmth and suppleness. Needless to say that this girl had never had occasion to deal thus with a man-creature of her own age hitherto. What she had done, she had done with a steady and purposeful hand, but now it was over, she found herself shaking as if from cold. Yet she was not cold. What was it?—DÊh-Yān could put no name to this novel experience, and whilst she thought upon it, seated as far from her patient as the limits of the cave permitted (for the revulsive fit was upon her) it came over her with a horrid clearness how near she had been to handing this delightful, troublesome, beautiful, helpless, bewilderingly strange creature-comrade of hers over to the braves of her tribe. With a momentary gleam of insight, she saw him as he might have been at the stake. The sight wrung her heart. "Ooh!"—she groaned, and clapped a hand over her mouth. Then, with a second gleam of prescience, she saw herself in a like predicament—as yet might be her fate—and laughed! "What are you laughing at?" her man was asking weakly. "I was thinking that I must get to my hunting—we cannot live long upon a stoat and a walletful of hedgehogs. Also I am thinking we must have skins for leggings and mittens," smiled the girl, lying glibly to conceal feelings of which she was half ashamed. The frost had not given, and wild-life, hunger-nipped, was getting over the first paralysing fear of making tracks. The big game, elephants and bison, would have moved down-stream for the winter, and lion would have followed them, and bear laid up to sleep off his fat. She knew as much. The edge of the covert was printed thickly with slot of hare, badger, fox and marten. She could see that chamois and stone-buck had come down, but chamois and stone-buck were kittle cattle. There were the broad pads of a big tom-lynx. The girl looked them over narrowly, and knew them from wolf by the sign of hair upon the soles of the feet. She dreaded lynx, but meat she must have. There among the tangle of creeping pine (the Pinus pumulus which makes such desperately hard going) was the well-beaten run of capercaillie. DÊh-Yān followed it into the scrub as far as a fallen spruce and set that log with twenty springes of deer-sinew, then, fetching a circle, she beat the covert with some small outcry back towards her nooses, and with results. The master-cock, a great black-bearded tyrant, twice as big as his wives, had got a hairy leg into trouble but had broken away, but not before six youngsters and hens, hastening to their lord's assistance, had been themselves ensnared. "Good!" said the man when the huntress panted up the cliff face carrying an almost throttling necklace of heavy birds, "we have food for days. Give that covert a rest, DÊh-Yān. Also I have another reason. Listen. I dreamed of a hare whilst you were away. Danger is near." Without a word, weary as she was, the girl left the cave and ascended the rock face, climbing slowly and very carefully, keeping to the bare exposures lest she should leave incriminating sign, and ensconcing herself in a juniper bush, spied far and long over the white expanse. The dream had already come true. There, below her and more than four miles away by our measurement, three tiny black specks moved slowly across a snow-field between two dark belts of wood. The girl watched with a hardening mouth, bending upon these crawling black specks the wonderful, long-sighted eyes of a savage. Nearer they came and nearer, she made out and named each. There was Low-Mah, there was Pongu, and, worst of all, there was the detested Gow-Loo, a brave whom she most particularly disliked, and with whose property she had accordingly made free when she left the tribe. Plainly the man had missed his axes and spears, had revisited the camp where they had last been seen and had not found them. Pongu in like manner had missed his bison-robes, and Low-Mah certain deer-skins, properties which if cast away by girls in a panic-stricken rush would have lain where they fell. Each had his dog with him, and having failed in finding what they sought at the site of the snow-camp, were casting up the glen with a certain air of grim determination which the watcher did not like. They had reasoned the matter out and had ceased to believe in that bear, albeit, just what had induced an unmarried girl to break away from her tribe and make a winter-hunting of her own was beyond them. It was a matter which needed clearing up. There must be no fire for her man that day, nor next day, nor for a handful of days. DÊh-Yān spied from her bush, her patient from his cave, and once heard the three hunters pass below him. A sprinkle of fresh snow had covered the girl's tracks, or this story would never have been written, but they had lit upon one of her springes and were justly scandalised. Her motive in absconding was still a mystery, but such conduct was outrageous. They would see the matter out, and were curious in devising punishments for the truant. But next day the girl beheld them in full flight down the glen before an angry bear. This was to exchange one danger for another. It might well be that the dream portended this. Wolf the dwellers in the cave did not fear, for no wolf could climb so steep a face, but wherever a man can go on rocks a grizzly can go. DÊh-Yān told her fears to her husband, who bade block the cave-mouth with big stones and let a spear be always beside him. Poor defence, but better than none; his arms were regaining flesh. THE GHOST-BEAR The cold increased. Pŭl-Yūn, debarred his usual exercise, suffered in his circulation and felt nipped within the robes which his nurse heaped upon him. "Mittens thou shalt have," said she, and made her promise good at the charges of a brace of blue hare, whose longs-and-shorts she patiently followed up until her throwing-stick decided the ownership of the peltries which she claimed. Pŭl-Yūn watched her stitching: a needle snapped. "My wife will be wanting a touch of my skill," he said, and selected a shank-bone, slim and straight, split it, and scraped the more promising piece to a point. "That is all very well," said the Master-Girl, "but how about the eye?—I have no bits small enough for drilling a needle-eye. We must punch our holes in the skin, and poke the sinew through with a forked bone, as when one nets." THE GHOST-BEAR "That makes clumsy stitches," remarked the man. "No, I do not think we shall come down to the punch. Thy needles are pit-eyed—" "We always make them so; how else?—with the centre-bit, a bent stick, a twist of hazel," said the girl. "But we use the strung-drill. Hast never seen it?" She stared. "Then there is something that even a Little Moon woman can learn from her man!" He spoke in humorous mockery, but with a spice of malice, for truly this astonishing squaw of his had forereached upon her master in a manner beyond all precedent; would he ever get the whip-hand of her again? She understood; she crawled to him cooing gently; patted his hand; they rubbed noses. "Why are my needles clumsy?" she asked humbly, and he showed her that her people's method of boring the eye, a funnel-shaped hole driven from each side and meeting midway, necessitated a broader head than a small true hole drilled straight through at one asking. "Our holes are big and shallow, yes, like ant-lion pits," she laughed. "That is because our centre-bit wobbles; but how can one help the centre-bit wobbling?" From the raffle of bones upon the floor (Cave-man was an untidy fellow, or 'tis little we should know about him)—from the remains of his yesterday's dinner Pŭl-Yūn chose a young roe's shin-bone, sawed off the joint with care and sucked out the marrow. "I want," said he, "a small sharp stone, to sit in that hollow: there are such in the bellies of bigger stones,"—he meant quartz crystals, and the Master-Girl nodded; so far his requirements presented no difficulty. "And I must have," he went on, "a couple of smooth rods of rowan or hazel as long as my arm; also an elder-stick as long as my hand." There was meat in the larder for two days; the nurse was keen to provide play-things for her convalescent, nor was she herself loth or incurious; within the hour she was back with a handful of sparkling gems from the hollow of a big pebble and a pair of rods, one of which she watched her husband bend and string with a thong of deer-skin. |
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