Children of the Frost | Page 4

midst of his most graphic battle
descriptions, he would become suddenly conscious of the black eyes burning into him,
and would stumble and flounder till he could catch the gait and go again. Fairfax, hands
clasped round knees, pipe out, absorbed, spurred him on when he lagged, and repictured
the world he thought he had forgotten.
One hour passed, and two, and Fairfax rose reluctantly to his feet. "And Cronje was
cornered, eh? Well, just wait a moment till I run over to Tantlatch. He'll be expecting you,
and I'll arrange for you to see him after breakfast. That will be all right, won't it?"
He went off between the pines, and Van Brunt found himself staring into Thom's warm
eyes. Five years, he mused, and she can't be more than twenty now. A most remarkable
creature. Being Eskimo, she should have a little flat excuse for a nose, and lo, it is neither
broad nor flat, but aquiline, with nostrils delicately and sensitively formed as any fine
lady's of a whiter breed--the Indian strain somewhere, be assured, Avery Van Brunt. And,
Avery Van Brunt, don't be nervous, she won't eat you; she's only a woman, and not a
bad-looking one at that. Oriental rather than aborigine. Eyes large and fairly wide apart,
with just the faintest hint of Mongol obliquity. Thom, you're an anomaly. You're out of
place here among these Eskimos, even if your father is one. Where did your mother come
from? or your grandmother? And Thom, my dear, you're a beauty, a frigid, frozen little
beauty with Alaskan lava in your blood, and please don't look at me that way.
He laughed and stood up. Her insistent stare disconcerted him. A dog was prowling
among the grub-sacks. He would drive it away and place them into safety against
Fairfax's return. But Thom stretched out a detaining hand and stood up, facing him.
"You?" she said, in the Arctic tongue which differs little from Greenland to Point Barrow.
"You?"
And the swift expression of her face demanded all for which "you" stood, his reason for
existence, his presence there, his relation to her husband--everything.
"Brother," he answered in the same tongue, with a sweeping gesture to the south.
"Brothers we be, your man and I."

She shook her head. "It is not good that you be here."
"After one sleep I go."
"And my man?" she demanded, with tremulous eagerness.
Van Brunt shrugged his shoulders. He was aware of a certain secret shame, of an
impersonal sort of shame, and an anger against Fairfax. And he felt the warm blood in his
face as he regarded the young savage. She was just a woman. That was all--a woman.
The whole sordid story over again, over and over again, as old as Eve and young as the
last new love-light.
"My man! My man! My man!" she was reiterating vehemently, her face passionately dark,
and the ruthless tenderness of the Eternal Woman, the Mate-Woman, looking out at him
from her eyes.
"Thom," he said gravely, in English, "you were born in the Northland forest, and you
have eaten fish and meat, and fought with frost and famine, and lived simply all the days
of your life. And there are many things, indeed not simple, which you do not know and
cannot come to understand. You do not know what it is to long for the fleshpots afar, you
cannot understand what it is to yearn for a fair woman's face. And the woman is fair,
Thom, the woman is nobly fair. You have been woman to this man, and you have been
your all, but your all is very little, very simple. Too little and too simple, and he is an
alien man. Him you have never known, you can never know. It is so ordained. You held
him in your arms, but you never held his heart, this man with his blurring seasons and his
dreams of a barbaric end. Dreams and dream-dust, that is what he has been to you. You
clutched at form and gripped shadow, gave yourself to a man and bedded with the wraith
of a man. In such manner, of old, did the daughters of men whom the gods found fair.
And, Thom, Thom, I should not like to be John Fairfax in the night-watches of the years
to come, in the night-watches, when his eyes shall see, not the sun-gloried hair of the
woman by his side, but the dark tresses of a mate forsaken in the forests of the North."
Though she did not understand, she had listened with intense attention, as though life
hung on his speech. But she caught at her husband's name and cried out in Eskimo:--
"Yes! Yes! Fairfax! My man!"
"Poor little fool, how could he