# Lars the Unthinking

Extracted from Everybody's magazine, May 1917, pp. 529-540. Illustrations by Percy E. Cowen may be omitted.
LARS THE UNTHINKING
By Harold Titus
AN HOUR, possibly, passed after a rush of water licked off the other two and left them alone, before Tim Bell, cowering in the shelter of Larsen's hulking body, an arm linked through a stiff coil of line for safety, lifted his pinched, sharp face and whimpered:
“Don't let me go, Lars!”
The unpleasant voice struck through the squeal of the wind in the rigging, through the hiss of cheated combers, through the ice that clung in the big Dane's ears, and he responded with a shake of his head. He growled:
“Ay won't. Move. You'll freeze.”
Then, as he strained against the wheel to hold the distressed schooner on what he hoped was her course, his slippery footing gave and he floundered heavily to regain uprightness and keep his stiff hands in control of the reluctant steering-rig.
Bell made no response; Lars added nothing.
Each time the Elsa, caught off her poise, failed to rise to the heave of the lake and shoved her ugly snout into the swift gray seas, she came up more slowly, for the ice accumulated that fast. When the other two had been there they had chopped—chopped until the axes slipped from their frozen mittens and disappeared into Lake Michigan with a negligible spatter and a sound that could not be distinguished. But the other two were gone, after their axes; and Tim Bell was so afraid to die that he could not fight to live; and the ice casting on the bows grew heavier—along the rails, too, and up the masts, and in Larsen's thin, pale mustache.
The bitter air over the warmer water formed a scudding blanket of steam to mingle with the fine, dry snow, and even the wild gale could not tatter the thickness enough to give Lars a bearing-point; so he guessed where he sailed and guessed meagerly, for his imagination was not fertile.
Tim Bell did not move as Lars had told him to do. He was afraid to leave the loop of frozen line. His shoulders sagged low and lower toward the deck and his face became more livid and the flying spray sheathed his bowed back.
Of a sudden the ship staggered and recoiled as the furious lake struck from a fresh angle, and he rolled to his side. The hooked arm slid from its anchorage and he fought clumsily against the pitch of the ice-coated deck.
“Lars!” he cried in a voice weak from low vitality, from high terror.
The man at the wheel, straining to pull his schooner up on even keel again, looked quickly. His lips opened and let out an inarticulate cry that might have been prayer or curse, or, perhaps, both, and in his vivid blue eyes flamed the light of helplessness.
Bell, on elbows and knees, shed his ice-mail in flakes as he pawed unavailingly for hold. The water, pouring over the rail, reached for him. He raised his hatchet-face again, and seeing the bright look of horror in his eyes Larsen let go the wheel. It spun with a sharp rattle of chains and his great body thudded dully as he fell beside Bell, threw an arm about his shoulders and fought back toward the wheel and problematical safety.
The unguided schooner swung round in sodden impotence and righted with a lurch that half threw Lars erect again. He dragged Bell to his knees and they swayed there a moment, balancing ponderously while they watched the hoary crest of a wave stand high above them. Lars heard, with strange attention to such detail, the popping of ice-hung rigging as the strain upon it shifted.
Then the water was about his ankles and his knees and thighs; the deck seemed to swell and the other's scream rose shrill in his ears. He felt Tim's arms clutch at him frantically. He felt his hand-hold beneath the man's armpit give; felt the strain on his shoulder-tendons relax and turned and flailed for a grip on Bell's slipping body and fought against the water that would sweep him, too, out over the lost rail into the lake.
Somehow he clasped Tim Bell's head between his hands. The weight of the water tearing at his burden made his clamp slip. He could not let go to fasten elsewhere because the release of a pound's resistance would let the lake suck Tim from him, and he bared his teeth as he strove to shove his hands tighter together against the man's head, moaning aloud in desperation. Bell tried to clasp Larsen's knees, but his efforts against the greedy water only made the Dane's hold on his head slip—faster—until his wrists came against the brim of Tim's hat and bent it upward and put weight on the chin-strap until Bell gave a sound of strangling; then the strap broke and the hard hat fell off, and Lars, with that dull cry again, grappled with gloved fingers that were heavy from cold for a hold in the black, tangled hair. Just an instant he delayed the finish, and the deck's new tilt, causing a change in the current which gurgled for them, swung Bell's body over on its back, and his beseeching eyes met the Dane's. Then he was gone.
His black rubber coat bellied stiffly and let him go under slowly. The last of him to slip from sight was a white, white hand, stripped of mitten in the struggle. It struck above the black water a moment and its movement might have been a gesture of last appeal or, in a flash of tardy courage, a brave farewell. No matter. It disappeared in a patch of silver foam scarcely whiter.
Then Lars found himself winding his arms in the wheel to stay on deck and felt the schooner righting drunkenly, and in a queer, detached way took up the fight for his life and the schooner's life and the safety of the cargo which meant so much to the fishing people back there on Petit Blanc; and as he let his weight fall on the slippery spokes he called aloud the name of the girl: “Sigrid! … Sig …”
He did not think of his slim chance of life, of the improbability of being able to pull the Elsa through, nor of the island village back somewhere in the lake; he was seeing again the light of eager anticipation in a girl's face as she gazed into Tim Bell's beady eyes when he promised with bravado to grant the useless, precious trifle for which he had encouraged her to wish. Most men, had they confronted the situation Lars had faced through those months, would have put her from their minds long ago; and, anyhow, had they been in his place then with the thick gale and the lake and the cold reaching for the life in him, they would have cried out to their God rather than to a slender, distant woman!
But he was Lars, Lars the unthinking, and he could deal only with those things which, to him, were essential. Just now life and the safety of his cargo were secondary matters. He had forgotten his torture at the girl's whims. He remembered only that he loved her, just as he had loved her even while Tim Bell loved her. Only then it had been a forlorn love and now it was leavened by hope. He had learned how to hold a woman's love. That was what made him put aside fear of the lake, the blizzard, thought of his single-handedness, as inconsequential trifles!
SIGRID had grown up in a springtime, as girls of the open often develop. One week Lars had thought her just a child of Petit Blanc, working about her father's house, in the evening playing on the white beach with the other children; one of the several of negligible age to whom he waved his hand at rare intervals when he put out into the lake, and who, at other times, he told gruffly to go away from where he worked on shore. But the next time he noticed the girl—ah, she had become a woman! Not one to wave the hand at, not one to order out of his way. One to watch longingly one to encourage by brief, grinning banter to come closer and stay longer as he painted floats or mended nets.
A fair creature she was, with the silver of flashing gulls' wings in her light hair and the color of the lake brimming in her eyes; a flush in her cheeks like a ripened peach, and a shyness, a delicacy that set her as far apart from the other women as—as the lawyer's yacht differed from the gray fishing-tugs.
The lawyer's being there was what removed her a second time from the child Lars had not noticed. The lawyer's house was the most luxurious of the half-dozen summer homes which topped the bluff off into the north where the low mainland stretched endlessly. The other cottages were more magnificent than anything any of the villagers could have dreamed, unassisted; but the lawyer's was quite beyond their comprehension. The ways of the lawyer's household were equally strange.
Before Sigrid went there to work she was as simple and direct in her thinking as the life her people led. She loved and accepted love with almost the same matter-of-factness as she did her share of the housework and took her portions of food and shelter. When she learned about another life she changed.
Lars was her first lover. Perhaps because he was the first to notice that the girl had grown up; perhaps because Sigrid's delicacy was, in the eyes of the other unmarried men, a weakness, making her less desirable than the big-hipped girls of the island.
Their courtship began when Lars, swinging his feet from the wharf in early evening, tossed a chip so it splashed water on Sigrid as she walked back with a group of girls. The rest screamed and ran, but Sigrid's eyes, meeting the Dane's, lowered quickly and her shy smile became suffused with a flush. She had always known Lars; she had never seen him do so unserious and playful a thing; she knew his intention as soon as their glances met.
The second evening Sigrid strolled apart from the others, in timid but eloquent invitation, and Lars joined her, blushing, silent, but purposeful. Within the week she came from her home to talk in brief, in frequent sentences with him as he calked a boat, and it was no time at all until they paused under a whispering pine-tree through which the sharp stars shone, and Lars's arm, as sturdy as the limbs above them, trembled as it dropped about her waist. Sigrid's low laughter vibrated her white, smooth throat, and she turned, face against his rough shirt, and lifted her cool, firm arms to his weather-burned neck. They kissed after a silent interval, and when their lips had met and Lars had stroked the hair back from her brow and looked seriously into her eyes, they both laughed happily.
“We'll get marriet, yeah?” he said soberly.
Sigrid nodded and sighed.
“My mother, she'll be sick with a baby in September. I'll have to wait till she's well.”
Lars did not protest. He was accustomed to letting circumstances dictate. He calculated his meager savings and told his old mother and dreamed in his limited, short-visioned way of his new household. He was very happy, though no one but his mother could have known it. Her sight was failing, but that was no handicap, because Lars gave no evidence that eyes could detect. He radiated something.
The troth was made late in May; early in June the lawyer's family came, and, attracted by the wage, Sigrid went to work in his house until her mother should need her. That was the first time any of the islanders had been employed as house servants for the people who escaped heat and found quiet on Petit Blanc; their help had always been brought from the city. Consequently the inner workings of the homes on the bluff would have been mysteries had the island people been curious. They were not curious. That is, such a condition prevailed until Sigrid went to work for the lawyer.
The girl returned to the village and her waiting Lars, that first evening, with a strange volubility. She was confused by what she had seen, and her seemingly endless descriptions were unintelligible because she would not quite finish telling of one thing before commencing another; the whole narrative a jumble of unconvincing fragments; just enough to stimulate wonder. Her talk remained so for the first evening or two, and then, growing accustomed to her new environment, Sigrid could make her people comprehend, to a certain extent, the incredible grandeur of it. Many listened eagerly; but when Lars understood that she talked only of silver and rugs and pictures and unheard-of foods and clothing, he lost interest, for those things were unnecessary, did not influence his life—therefore unimportant. When she paused and gave him opportunity to speak, his short sentences were always of their own world, usually repetitions of something he had already said.
Secretly he did not favor Sigrid's enthusiasm. He always had taken his living by the efforts of his bare hands; he had never laid by more than enough to carry him and his old mother safely over to another producing season. His horizon of thought shut down at food, shelter, and, now, Sigrid. Some latent bitterness was roused by ideas of useless luxuries, of words, or actions, or material things that were not needed, that did not bear directly on the problem of existence.
And to annoy him further, one of the articles in the lawyer's house which demanded a growing interest from Sigrid was a clock on the dressing-table of his eldest daughter's boudoir. Clocks on Petit Blanc were rare. The few in the village were either old-country timepieces or rackety, unreliable alarm-clocks. But this one was of pale china, painted with flowers, having a sweet, soft, deliberate chime; and the lawyer's daughter did not even think enough of it to wind it at the required interval!
To the island daughter that fact epitomized the spirit of life on the bluff; any clock was a luxury; this clock was so dainty, so beautiful that to possess it was quite beyond belief; yet the girl whose it was did not value it enough to keep the gold hands turning.
Sigrid told Lars of it and he shrugged his shoulders, saying: “I have never had a clock. She is foolish to have that kind.”
“But it is so pretty!” came the protest. “If we could only have one like it!”
“It would not help me fish; it would not help you wit' babies”—surlily. After a time Sigrid's enthusiasm over those fresh experiences subsided. On several occasions she told Lars of the clock, but with each repetition he chided her stolidly for thinking of foibles; and so she gave up talking about that treasure, even. But in Lars's mind was planted a disquieting suspicion. He did not think that the girl was content with the old way; the silent passages when they were together seemed to make her uneasy, their cramped conversational circle found her less readily responsive. And all because of foolishness … silver knives and varnished floors and clocks and such!
Came August and the young man to see the lawyer's daughter—and Tim Bell.
Once again Sigrid's mind was occupied with the new, and this time the result was disquieting complexity. The visitor at the big house was a lover, as was Lars; the lawyer's daughter was a beloved, as was she. And yet …
She watched closely; she saw his constant attentions, his alert search for services he might render, his ceaseless effort to discover for his sweetheart the fresh, the unusual; saw how completely his thought was centered around the girl, excluding all ideas of self or of the life about them when those ideas did not have a direct bearing on his lady's comfort or interest. And after a day of watching, Sigrid would go to Lars, to walk or sit silently, speaking, when they did speak, of the fishing, of the other people on Petit Blanc; gentle, in his way, true, but unthinking—unthinking of how the girl longed for solicitude, longed for him to talk of her, plan for her, to be lovingly trivial. …
And at that time of unrest the newcomer, Tim Bell, set his beady eyes on Sigrid and loosed his glib tongue for her. His eyes made her uneasy, but his talk thrilled. He had a way of looking at her so insolently that it made her back chill; but he called her kiddo and told her she was pretty and fed her growing hunger for flattery with a hard cunning. He was so different from Lars! The big Dane's glances never frightened her the way this man's did; but his talk did not thrill her, either. Tim Bell's attentions came somewhere near answering the yearning set in her heart by her knowledge of luxuries and of the young lover's constant concern for the lawyer's daughter; unnecessary, yet so precious!
Lars was slow to comprehend. His mother saw, though, and warned him curtly.
“But why?” he asked, surprised into accented speech. “He is little and weak; he's not a good fisherman, even!”
His old mother laughed deprecatingly and answered in their tongue:
“She has got notions. She has got notions up yonder”—nodding toward the bluff. “She is a good girl, but those notions have turned her head. She wants you to say pretty things to her; she wants her ears tickled with soft words!”
Lars stared dumbly at his plate.
“His talk is wasted wind,” he growled. “It does not make him a good worker; it will not feed a woman. I am a good fisherman. I will give her a good home.”
“Tell her about it, then! Tell the same thing in sixty ways!” his mother shrilled, old eyes dancing. “You think all the time of work and sleep; you are unthinking about the things that make girls' hearts light; you are always long-faced, like a sick old man. You should laugh and joke and be silly!”
“Foolishness won't put bread in our bellies,” he scoffed.
“No, but it'll put Sigrid's babies in your cradle. You'll learn. She wants you to talk nonsense! If you don't—euh!”—with an apprehensive shrug.
But Lars could not follow that advice. He could say only the direct, simple things that came from his prosaic, sincere heart. He experienced a strange weakness about his middle when he saw Tim Bell glance at Sigrid and grin. He disliked the man, yet he knew that Bell possessed something he did not, and that, secretly, he wanted and could not have because he was so engrossed with the rudiments of life that he could find no thinking space for lighter subjects; only of course, he did not realize this reason.
A coolness came between Lars and Sigrid. They walked less alone on the sand. It made him dumber than ever. He did not see her every day and then she was not to be found when he went for her one evening—until late, when she strolled into the village with Tim Bell whispering in her ear. The next Sunday she said to Lars: “We won't get married.”
“No?” he queried, stupefied; and again: “No? You don't like me?”
The girl swallowed sharply between quick breaths.
“Tim Bell,” she said just above a whisper. “He and I——”
Lars took one step forward, quickly, almost in a threat; then turned and walked away, hands driven deeply into his pockets, shoulders hunched. He did not see people who spoke to him as he passed. A strange, sharp ache was in his throat.
It required no time for the news to fly throughout the village that Lars and Sigrid were not to marry; and on its heels went the story that Bell was to be the girl's husband. This was received with grunts or shrugs or lifted brows, causing its ripple of surprise; then the fact was accepted, and, being accepted, was no longer discussed; and Petit Blanc gave up looking rather hard at Lars Larsen.
September, and Sigrid's prolific mother was delivered again. In a week she was about; within the fortnight she helped with the washing; and the time the girl had set for her marriage arrived. No ceremony was announced, however. She had told Lars she must wait until her mother was well; no longer. With Tim Bell she dallied.
“Don't you see what's wrong?” Larsen's mother asked with the poke of a gnarled finger and a laugh he did not like. “Are you as blind as your old mother, euh?”
“Why?” he asked dully.
The old woman's cackling voice broke into shrill mirth as she stood with palms on her pudgy hips.
“She's waiting for your tongue to loose!” she chuckled, thrusting her face close into his. “She's waiting for your eyes to open! She's waiting for you to think of the things that will make her glad.” She bent back again and surveyed her big son as he sat hunched over the cook-stove.
“She's nothing to stop the wedding only she doesn't like the bridegroom! Haven't you seen her, for weeks and weeks, following you with her eyes? Listening for your voice? Expecting you back beside her every evening?
“It's a way girls have, hurting their lovers. This other, this slick-tongued dwarf, he grew stale, like old butter. Can't you see she only used him to punish you for being as solemn as a judge in the court? Can't you see? All she wants is some of his foolishness from you and she'll come running. Don't wait too long!”
But Lars did not believe his mother. She was so old that she talked to herself. Anyhow, no such explanation could be warranted, for each time he saw Tim and Sigrid together, he noticed that the girl, seeing him, talked the harder, became the more attentive to the man who had supplanted him.
The big Dane went about his work with a wretched spirit. The hurt in his breast grew worse instead of curing with time. Now and then he envied Tim Bell consciously. He would not admit to himself the belief that Sigrid could be won back by mere words, but he would have given his standing as a fisherman—his most-prized possession—to know how to go about following his mother's advice. He loved her so! so helplessly, so dumbly! And he mistrusted Bell, feared he did not mean well by little Sigrid; he knew other men of the village felt the same way. but it was none of their affair—no more than it was his!
OCTOBER passed, with no wedding. Lars did not detect the change in Sigrid's quick glances at him—the alarmed quality. All he saw was her attentiveness to Tim Bell, and he could not even catch the uneasiness in that. November came and the flow of island life was broken by plans for the season's last shipment of salted fish.
Old Jens who owned the Elsa was down with rheumatism and to Lars he gave command of his stubby craft that was to beat the length of the lake to Chicago with the cargo of heavy casks and bring back flour and other staples, to last from the time navigation closed until solid ice formed; because during that span of weeks—which often totaled over three months—the island was cut off from the world.
Lars's old mother was proud to have him in charge of an event of so much importance. She came, a shawl pinned about her face, a crooked stick helping her limbs, to watch them off.
Four were to sail; one was Tim Bell. He, too, had some one to wave a special good-by—Sigrid.
“See,” Lars's mother whispered, poking his shins with her stick, “she watches you while she talks to him! Say something pretty to make her remember you; bring her a present from the city. Her tongue is for him, but her eyes are for you—and a girl's heart is in her eyes.”
Surely this last was wisdom, but Lars only shook his head stupidly. He could not believe in words for words' sake; he resented the idea of presents, because presents were useless. Anyhow—and this was the idea which rankled—he did not know how to delight a girl!
“Don't wait too long!” the old woman warned, very seriously. “It's your chance. If you wait too long she'll think you don't care. And she'll marry him to save her face if she thinks you don't care. …”
And at that he flung himself aboard and began work, a thrill of apprehension running through and through him. For a moment he hated himself for his stupidity, for his thick tongue, his heavy wits. Then the emotion was gone; he just felt helpless, with the ache in his throat.
Shortly he straightened, and there, not ten feet from him, stood Tim Bell saying farewell to Sigrid.
“You know it,” he cried, “I'll bring you somethin'! What'll it be?”
Sigrid thought a moment, slow color mounting; then she looked at him quickly.
“A clock?” she said, timidly, daringly, half questioningly, clasping her hands. “A little china clock, with flowers painted on it?”
It was a wish for the most desired possession of all those impossible things she had learned about that summer; asking for it was a wild plunge into the zone of improbabilities. Because of this her answer to Bell's question was in the form of a question itself; and she leaned forward from the hips as though she shyly dared ask this man just how far he would go to please her. And when he replied, he overwhelmed her and roused in her an admiration that made her breath catch, for he said lightly: “You're on, kiddo! That'll be it! Nothin”s too good for you!”
Lars saw her eyes kindle, saw her lips part, saw the joy in her face; and he realized that then her eyes were for Tim Bell, as well as her tongue. Never had he seen her look that way before; never could he hope to rouse such a look of ecstasy!
In his consciousness rang his mother's warning: “Don't wait! She'll think you don't care—you don't care——”
All the way out into the lake those words were confused with the creak of blocks and noises from the rigging. All that day when they dawdled over a surface that faded from bright blue to dead gray he saw the girl's face before him, looking eagerly into the greedy eyes of Tim Bell as the man promised foolish uselessness! And once Lars asked himself why he had not thought of such a simple thing before it was too late—as his mother had said it would be too late—as it was too late! Her eyes and heart may have been for him until that morning; they were no longer. That easy, boastful promise of a senseless gift had made her forget him—wholly.
So occupied was he with that misery, those regrets, that he did not feel apprehensive when the southwest muddied and thickened and the water became ominously flat; and even as he felt the air chill and caught the first slap of wind that he knew meant a gale, he was not wholly unmindful of the hurt in his throat, set there anew by the sudden realization of the importance of a puny trifle like a china clock!
And all through that wild night with its death he clung to the wheel with a queer, detached hopelessness depressing him, making him somehow heedless of the fact that life might last no longer than the next moment! Life should be the only thing that really' mattered. But values had changed so strangely!
Then Tim Bell went overboard, and he was alone, crying the girl's name into the freezing weather! And while he shouted he knew that that repressed misery in his heart was liberated; knew that the ache in his throat was through; knew that when he told the others back on Petit Blanc how Tim Bell had gone out, sniveling and cringing and surely shortening, if not wasting, lives by his cowardice, no barriers of rivalry would stand between him and Sigrid——
Yet a barrier was between them: this winter hurricane, perhaps, squealing for one more life from the Elsa. If so, he did not reckon it. Something else remained, something to be accomplished, more essential, even, than living—and so essential for Lars the unthinking! A sense for the necessity of accomplishment burned in his consciousness, a white-hot wire of thought standing sharp and clear against mental confusion; and he clamped his jaws and spread his feet wider and took up his lone-handed fight against wind and water and frost with a swelling joy in his heart! This was something he could do, he could do. …
Some time passed before he discovered that the flood which swept Tim Bell away had filled his boots and that his legs were numbing. He stamped to keep the blood going, but the effort seemed only to spread the cold up his thighs and into his torso. The oilskin sleeves, strapped at the wrist, had not excluded water, either, and the thick Mackinaw jacket beneath held the sop against his laboring arms, driving back the warmth that exertion started. That chill, too, worked back toward his heart, and soon his whole body was in a quivering convulsion.
All but his face. Another cloud of fine ice particles had come on the gale. He had not noticed the sting of them before, but now the sharp bits drove into his face with a force that pricked the skin painfully. They stung his eyes until tears ran out on his reddened cheeks. And those cheeks burned; they were as hot as his body was cold. His ears seemed to be crisping; he felt the skin about his mouth shrivel, and thought it crackled when he stirred the muscles beneath it.
A hand slipped from the spoke it held and he did not notice until he drew up heavily and found his clamped fingers grasping nothing. He swore softly. He bent a knee to stamp again and, driving it downward, saw that its force fell on the instep of his other foot. He grinned at that, for his sense of feeling did not make the miscalculation known; he happened to see. And he grinned because the situation was so bad that he might as well.
The schooner had ceased to roll so violently. She lifted slower to the seas that broke against her, for each left some of its weight in crystals to drag her down. She was steadier, with portentous poise. She did not fall away quickly before the wind; nor, when she did, could Lars bring her back as easily. The encrustment on rail and spar and line grew thicker, took on a greener cast. The Elsa was becoming a hunk of ice …
The stinging squall passed and with surprising abruptness the sun silvered the scud. Larsen stared up at a fleeting patch of blue, but low about him the mist blanket held. Snow swirled again as he looked. Land might be a few lengths off for all he knew.
So Lars drove on blindly, urged by the one idea about which his whole life had centered. He stamped his feet and flung his arms to keep that life in his body, but not for life's sake. Life had become one of the trivial things of living. He did not try to analyze his reason for himself. He only knew that he must somehow sail that schooner to port, must beat the lake and the gale and the cold! So he grinned at the daylight which mocked of comfort, and sailed with all the seamanship he had learned in a life of it.
Hours before he had said to Tim Bell: “Go help, you fool. T'ree men can't keep her goin'.”
Tim Bell had not gone to help chop the determined ice, and Lars had grown eloquent for a breath to express his contempt for a man who would not fight death. And now he, Lars Larsen, was alone—doing the work he had said three men could not do, and not for the flicker of an instant doubting his capacity for the task!
He knew his feet were freezing; knew the frost was working into his fingers; knew the flame within his breast was flickering; knew the craft under him was afloat then by the grace of the God who grows white oak; knew the time must come when her hoary prow would burrow for the last time; yet somehow he passed those certainties by as matterless. Something more important kept stirring in his deadening mind—the white-hot thought wire held its intensity, urged him on, heedless of the death which sailed beside him.
Lars thought that he stared at the thundering, flapping thing many hours before he could name it, but it must have been mere moments; because when he could think through the cold thickness in his mind, and know it was the rag of a jib, freed by a parting jib-sheet, the ice dust was still being shaken from the canvas in a shimmering cloud; so his comprehension could not have been so tardy after all.
Time moved slower; that explained it. White-headed combers poised above the rail an incredible period; and when he moved it seemed with extreme deliberation. The intervals between rushes of water which so frequently rippled about his ankles and at times slapped his knees, grew to be like weeks; and when he rolled the wheel to meet some new prank of the seas, the task was as a day's hard labor.
He breathed through his mouth now and his tongue was tortured by that cold dryness, worse by incalculable odds than a parching. His throat grew brittle, too, from the sucking in of that air, and the chill draft did not stop at his lungs; it went on down to his vitals, to petrify them as the seeping water had made his trunk rigid—away back there—when some one went overboard.
His body was no longer cold; just numb—and rather heavy.
Then, with a racking mental effort, he roused and for a moment stamped and flung one arm viciously, moving as far as he dared from his station squarely before the wheel. He shut his mouth and breathed deeply through his nostrils and drew his chin in against his chest and rumbled a phrase of determination, making it carry through to his sluggish understanding.
And in the midst of his battle with sleeping concern the schooner plunged and staggered, and he had to fling himself flat on the steering-rig and hold so a lengthy period. When he was safe again for the moment he had forgotten the necessity of staying alive—it was only an accessory, anyhow.
The only required thing for the present was to keep going; not toward safety for its own sake, but for a reason he could not stop to remember in this clutter of really inconsequential detail. All he knew now was that the essential fact of all existence waited—out yonder; and that he was driving toward it …
With a gloved hand he brushed at his mouth to break the chunk of ice in his mustache, and the unwieldy arm struck a blow that started blood from the lips. Taste of it roused him again to a necessity—some necessity.
The fine ice particles; then sunshine; following that, deeper gloom. And always the ghastly, fleeting thickness; not the damp, feelable kind, but just bitter cold, like the rest of living.
Lars heard his own voice. He was talking to himself, like his old mother. And what about? What about? He could not recall why he should talk—with no one to listen—as his mother did. Talking required effort; he needed all his strength—another of those things that didn't matter.
“Sigrid!” he heard a voice say, and straightened with a sharpness that sent a stinging pain down his spine. “Sigrid?” he called sharply and tilted his head as if straining for an answer. None came—just the dismayed yelp of the wind as it grappled for hold on the slippery rigging.
But the girl's name visualized her for Lars, and he felt his cold heart thumping in his congested chest. He looked up and back and about with a wild glare in his eyes and a suggestion of being startled, even in his heavy movements. Then he gripped the wheel and shook it savagely; shook his head, too, and roared chestily through his wide-open mouth.
He did not know why! Down in him, below the decks of his consciousness, in the hold of his heart, frozen there, buried where he could not get at it, the reason for all this was hidden, and he could not know what it was until—until——
Until what?
He did not know that, either, and flung back his head and cried aloud, a crazy yell.
On that scream, as though the waters had heard and drawn back, he sensed a change in the reluctant roll of his craft. The seas were not so high, the roaring of the rigging not so loud in his ears. Yonder the white murk thinned, and through it he saw the black line of land—near!
“Grand Traverse,” he heard himself say.
Then he laughed, for it was funny, this slipping into the bay by chance, cheating the lake. Losing the fight would not have mattered much, in itself, anyhow; the ship, the cargo—everything was of such little count, except …
He was still laughing, sagged against the wheel, when they came alongside, the bang of the tug's motor sharp above the storm; and he was crying when they carried him into their deck-house and made fast to his boat and gathered headway toward the buildings banked on the slope that rose from the shore.
They tried to make him tell how many he had lost; they told him he had beaten the worst gale the Lakes had ever known; they told him his schooner, his cargo, were safe, they told him he had done it alone—what no man could have done alone.
But he only shook his head and stared blankly. He drank their whisky and after a time lifted a hand to peer at it thickly. One of the men took it in his to look at the discolored flesh and Larsen drew it back resentfully.
They docked, and Lars rose reeling to his feet, lurching from them and sprawling on the wharf. They said he was crazy as he shoved them away after they helped him up. He did not hear. In his blue eyes was a perplexed look. He was trying to remember—trying to remember, and his mind rebelled at its office.
“Take it easy,” the tug's master said, grasping one arm and moving slowly along the wharf. “Doc's house is right close by.”
They progressed uncertainly toward the double row of false-fronted stores, facing one another across the rutted, frozen street. They tried to guide Larsen into the first building, but, still mute, breathing hard, he disengaged their supporting hands, shaking his head as in drunken suspicion. He moved away, staggering. He stumbled and heaved against the window of a store, threatening the glass. He paused there, breath sobbing, staring unblinkingly at the interior as he tried to remember—to remember. After a moment he went on, sideways, with shuffling, labored steps, supporting himself by both hands against the building.
Men and boys came running and grinning, then stopped, and whispered, with wide eyes. The tug captain, who had followed, stammering unheard entreaties, gave up and ran for the doctor, whimpering that the Dane was crazy from his fight with the lake.
A watchmaker, glass in one eye, looked up, startled by the apparition that fell against his door and burst it open, crushing his weight upon the little show-case and jamming it back against the shelves, penning him behind it. The blue eyes that laboriously sought and clung to his were fired with the light seen in the eyes of men who are crazed by one idea, whose mentality is consumed with its intensity.
“What the devil!” the man cried, undecided on flight or protest. “What do you want here?"
Lars steadied himself. His breath hissed in and out through shut teeth. He lifted a hand, the thumb and forefinger of which showed that horrid violet tint of frosted flesh and drew it across his brow; then with the half-closed fist tapped his forehead as if to loose the frozen thought processes there.
What did he want?
He could not remember—after all that had happened! He looked about slowly, brows gathered in a fretful frown, at the shelves, at the meager display of silver in the case, at the long, slowly swinging pendulum …
He started forward with a jerk; a quick, childish smile displaced the scowl and lighted his senseless eyes; his brows lifted high as if in jest and he pointed the frosted finger at the other.
“A clock!” he said in answer and laughed weakly. “A clock—a leetle—chiny—clock— wit' flowers—painted on—painted on——”
His knees gave. He clutched for support, but his bungling hands had done their work for that day. He drooped to a sitting posture, head tilted, nodding down and to one side, ice-water running from his great shoulders.
“——wit' flowers,” he whispered, a sob replacing the laughter in his voice, “—an' chiny—chi——”
He fell forward on his face just as the self-possessed, confident young physician elbowed through the congested doorway.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1967, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 56 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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