The Night-Born | Page 6

waiting to dishwashing.
She cooked most of the time as well. And she had four years of it.
"Can't you picture her, this wild woods creature, quick with every old
primitive instinct, yearning for the free open, and mowed up in a vile
little hash-joint and toiling and moiling for four mortal years?
"'There was no meaning in anything,' she said. 'What was it all about!
Why was I born! Was that all the meaning of life--just to work and
work and be always tired!--to go to bed tired and to wake up tired, with
every day like every other day unless it was harder?' She had heard talk
of immortal life from the gospel sharps, she said, but she could not
reckon that what she was doin' was a likely preparation for her
immortality.
"But she still had her dreams, though more rarely. She had read a few
books--what, it is pretty hard to imagine, Seaside Library novels most
likely; yet they had been food for fancy. 'Sometimes,' she said, 'when I

was that dizzy from the heat of the cooking that if I didn't take a breath
of fresh air I'd faint, I'd stick my head out of the kitchen window, and
close my eyes and see most wonderful things. All of a sudden I'd be
traveling down a country road, and everything clean and quiet, no dust,
no dirt; just streams ripplin' down sweet meadows, and lambs playing,
breezes blowing the breath of flowers, and soft sunshine over
everything; and lovely cows lazying knee-deep in quiet pools, and
young girls bathing in a curve of stream all white and slim and
natural--and I'd know I was in Arcady. I'd read about that country once,
in a book. And maybe knights, all flashing in the sun, would come
riding around a bend in the road, or a lady on a milk-white mare, and in
the distance I could see the towers of a castle rising, or I just knew, on
the next turn, that I'd come upon some palace, all white and airy and
fairy-like, with fountains playing, and flowers all over everything, and
peacocks on the lawn..... and then I'd open my eyes, and the heat of the
cooking range would strike on me, and I'd hear Jake sayin'--he was my
husband--I'd hear Jake sayin', "Why ain't you served them beans?
Think I can wait here all day!" Romance!--I reckon the nearest I ever
come to it was when a drunken Armenian cook got the snakes and tried
to cut my throat with a potato knife and I got my arm burned on the
stove before I could lay him out with the potato stomper.
"'I wanted easy ways, and lovely things, and Romance and all that; but
it just seemed I had no luck nohow and was only and expressly born for
cooking and dishwashing. There was a wild crowd in Juneau them days,
but I looked at the other women, and their way of life didn't excite me.
I reckon I wanted to be clean. I don't know why; I just wanted to, I
guess; and I reckoned I might as well die dishwashing as die their
way."
Trefethan halted in his tale for a moment, completing to himself some
thread of thought.
"And this is the woman I met up there in the Arctic, running a tribe of
wild Indians and a few thousand square miles of hunting territory. And
it happened, simply enough, though, for that matter, she might have
lived and died among the pots and pans. But 'Came the whisper, came

the vision.' That was all she needed, and she got it.
"'I woke up one day,' she said. 'Just happened on it in a scrap of
newspaper. I remember every word of it, and I can give it to you.' And
then she quoted Thoreau's Cry of the Human:
"'The young pines springing up, in the corn field from year to year are
to me a refreshing fact. We talk of civilizing the Indian, but that is not
the name for his improvement. By the wary independence and
aloofness of his dim forest life he preserves his intercourse with his
native gods and is admitted from time to time to a rare and peculiar
society with nature. He has glances of starry recognition, to which our
saloons are strangers. The steady illumination of his qenius, dim only
because distant, is like the faint but satisfying light of the stars
compared with the dazzling but ineffectual and short-lived blaze of
candles. The Society Islanders had their day-born gods, but they were
not supposed to be of equal antiquity with the..... night-born gods.'
"That's what she did, repeated it word for word, and I forgot the tang,
for it was solemn, a declaration of