Journey (11 page)

Irina Kozlok remained with them for several troublesome days. Because Lord Luton was determined to forge ahead against the coming of winter, they traveled continuously, and this presented problems about tending to their needs with a woman aboard. Previously the men had adopted simple, sanitary systems, and now they were inhibited, but the ice was broken by Fogarty, who, after he could control himself no longer, finally blurted out: “Madam, will you please look the other way?” and with the quiet ease of a duchess she replied: “Gentlemen, I've been married. I have brothers. This is no
problem,” and then she added, flashing the first smile since the wreck of her boat: “And I'll expect the same courtesy from you.”

Philip was mortified by this discussion, for like any young romantic he had to believe that it had been more than accident that Irina saved his life in Edmonton, for that is how he now thought of her caution against the overland route, while he had saved hers on the shore of the Great Slave. To himself he mumbled: “It was fate,” and the more he saw of her courageous resolve, and the handsome appearance she made when her uniform was dried and she could wear it again, the more he was reminded of his reaction on that night of their first meeting in Edmonton: Wouldn't it be wonderful to have a wife like that…? and by the end of the second day with her he found himself a confused mixture of pity, admiration and deep attraction. In his infatuation he interpreted her slightest gesture of politeness as reciprocation of his feelings.

The first of the other four team members to recognize that young Philip was falling in love with a woman much older than himself was Lord Luton, and like a true Bradcombe he stiffened, summoning all the traditions of his ancient and distinguished family. The Bradcombes had survived when many other families had crumbled, he reminded himself, because through the centuries they had consistently protected their young men from the snares of attractive French women, and English commoners, and pert Irish lassies and, in recent decades, from the daughters of aspiring American millionaire families. With unerring rectitude they had allowed marriages only with the safest young women from the best English families, and although Luton himself was not yet married, he felt certain that when the time came the elders of his family would identify some young woman of impeccable qualification. He never visualized himself as “falling in love,” but only as “getting married” in the pattern established long ago by the cautious men of his family.

In this context Irina Kozlok was a threat, an uneducated girl…from where was it? He did not care to remember a name like North Dakota. And it was his inherited obligation to see that his nephew, a Bradcombe, did not become entangled with her to any degree more complicated than unlucky chance had already provided. The boy must be prevented from repeating the grave mistake his mother had made. Since Harry was also more or less a Bradcombe, being married to one, Luton enlisted him in his schemes: “Harry, we've got to get that woman off this boat. To protect young Philip.”

“Highly sensible, Evelyn. You've spotted a real danger.”

“How far is it to the next settlement…of any kind?”

“If I recall, Fort Norman. We might make it before the freeze.”

“And if we don't?”

“Seems obvious. We'd be stuck with her through the winter.”

“Oh my God!”

And that afternoon they had real cause for worry, because they heard Irina tell Philip: “Those are handsome boots, really, but with that polish they're more suited for an expensive fishing trip than for mucking about in the arctic.”

“Do you think so?” he asked, all eagerness to please, and she said: “Indeed I do. What you need are heavy leather boots like mine,” and when, some time later, he asked his uncle and Carpenter: “D'ya think that perhaps I ought to wear leather boots?” they could scarcely hide their irritation, for back in Edmonton they had lectured him on this very matter and he hadn't listened. Now this American girl was delivering the same caution but with a smile, and the ninny was beside himself.

Disgusted with his nephew, Luton whispered: “Damn me, Harry, we've got to do something,” but what he did not know. During one conversation he told Carpenter: “When the others aren't looking, we could shove her overboard,” but as the last word left his lips he felt his arm caught in a tight grip and heard Harry's voice coming at him with unprecedented force: “Evelyn! Even to think such a thing in jest is a mortal sin.” Then, asserting his elder status for the first time on the journey, he said almost menacingly: “We'll have none of that, Evelyn. None, I warn you.”

Shaken by the fury of Harry's words, Evelyn asked contritely: “But what shall we do?” and Carpenter replied: “God obviously sent us to save her, so she's our obligation until we can rid ourselves of the burden. Good Samaritan and all that.”

But this did not ease Luton's feelings, which were intensified when he watched as Irina sat forward with Philip, kepi off and the wind blowing her silvery hair attractively about her face. Her little gestures in pushing it back were, Luton thought, so damned Slavic she could be a Russian princess, and then he found himself speculating on whether Estonians were Slavs; he decided they weren't.

He was not merely frustrated; as leader of an expedition and at present the captain of a ship, small though it was, he could not stop himself from reviewing scenes from British naval history in which
disruptive forces had destroyed otherwise solid explorations, and in his distress he called Harry aft for a serious consultation: “Have you ever read the old accounts of how this chap Bligh, an untidy sort, lost his ship that had been commissioned to carry breadfruit from Tahiti to Jamaica?”

“Of course.”

“What did him in? Native girls corrupting his sailors. And did you follow what happened when the mutineers fled to that tiny island somewhere?”

Harry hadn't, for that part of the old naval tragedy was not so well known, but Luton had: “Same thing. The English sailors handled things quite well, really, if you forgive them their mutiny, but they fell to squabbling over native girls, and I believe they killed one another. None survived.”

The two veterans contemplated this for some moments, agreeing that to have any woman penned up with five men in a small cabin over a prolonged winter was running a risk that was formidable, and, said Luton, pointing forward to where Irina's silvery hair was once more tumbling about in the wind: “To have that particular one amongst us would be suicidal. I could see Philip and Trevor battling for her at first, and ultimately, believe me, you and I would be at it. And she would sit there all the while in the corner of the hut like some Circe, smiling and combing her hair and plotting to turn us into her swine.” His fear of what Irina might very possibly do had generated a hatred so intense that he could not think rationally.

Nor did she help. Eager to prove to the men that she would not be a hindrance to their voyage, she kept discovering ways to be helpful and performed more than her share of the tasks: she prepared the meals once Harry laid out the rations that only he controlled; she cleaned up afterward; she was remarkably alert in moving out of the way if the men had duties in adjusting the sails; and regardless of what she did, she maintained her appearance of responsible gravity, broken now and then by that ravishing smile which seemed to fill her entire squarish face. In short, she made herself an ideal passenger.

For Lord Luton that was the problem, because he could see that her impeccable behavior was winning over not only youthful and impressionable Trevor Blythe, who read her poems from Palgrave, but also Harry Carpenter, a married man who should have known better. After carrying out her voluntary duties, she would move to the front
of the boat, “where everyone has to look at her,” Luton grumbled to himself, “and take off her kepi, allowing her beautiful hair to dance in the breeze.” At such moments he saw her as one of the Sirens, perched not on the prow of his boat but on a jagged rock toward which she was luring his men to their destruction; he imagined she carried a lyre which she strummed as she worked her charms.

Even Fogarty proved susceptible, and one evening Luton caught him staring as she fixed her hair, his eyes glazed over. “Fogarty!” Luton cried snappishly. “Tend the sails!” The Irishman's response was most unfortunate: “She does remind me of me wife, Jenny.” Luton, infuriated, wanted to cuff some sense into his ghillie, but controlled his temper, muttering: “Him too?”

Realizing that only he was impervious to her seductive plotting, he resumed his study of ways to dispose of her: I could maroon her at some promontory where the trading ships would have to see her; of course we'd leave food for her. But I doubt the men would permit this. Or when we make camp, we could build a little hut for her, off to one side. But I'm sure the others would sneak over there at night, after I was asleep. And then came that hideous image, of pushing her off the
Afton
on some dark night, and the others running about: “Where is she? What could have happened?” This hateful nightmare he tried to chase out of his mind, but he was powerless to exorcise it.

Reprieve came in the sudden appearance on the Mackenzie of a sizable river steamer hurrying back to civilization at the completion of her last trading trip of the brief summer season, and when Luton signaled frantically, her captain hove to while the men in the
Afton
explained how they happened to have a castaway woman aboard: “Bunch of Dakota farmers wrecked their craft at Great Slave. You're to take her back to Athabasca so she can go on down to Edmonton and on to her home.” When the captain asked: “Who pays her fare?” Lord Luton with indecent haste leaped forward to cry “I do!” and he gave the captain not only the requested fare but also a bonus of five dollars. While this was happening, Carpenter quietly slipped Irina a handful of bills and a fatherly admonition: “Go back to Dakota, Irina. Give up your dreams of gold.”

In gratitude she went to each of her saviors in turn and kissed him. When she reached Philip he blushed furiously, but the reaction was quite different when she came at last to Lord Luton. Stiffly, with his best silent-sneer, he drew back, refused to kiss her but did accept from a proper distance her warm handshake.

Ignoring this rejection, she transferred to the larger ship, and after reaching down for her tiny package of clothes the men had given her, she remained at the railing as the two craft separated there in the center of the great river, with never a tree or a hut visible. As Philip watched her slowly vanish upstream, his heart felt a heaviness it had not known before. He acknowledged to himself that she was much older than he, and that she was an American of uncertain lineage, but he also knew that she was a vibrant, heroic woman with a sense of humor and compassion, and he was aware that her naturalness had overwhelmed him. But his two older companions who were watching him closely, Evelyn and Harry, knew from their own experiences as young men that this sense of romantic tragedy would pass. It always did.

—

Luton and his party continued their journey on the Mackenzie without seeing one evidence of human habitation and scarcely a sign that others had ever passed this way. As they stared at the banks lined with increasingly dwarfed trees they agreed that this was indeed one of the ends of the earth.

When they finally turned northwest for the climactic run of nearly seven hundred miles to the delta, they had an opportunity to see the great river at its most powerful; at times it broadened out to two or three miles, until Philip and Trevor thought they were entering another lake, but then it would contract into a swift-moving channel. The vistas were endless and the loneliness almost terrifying, but the grandest part came during the night runs when occasionally the heavens would be charged with electricity as the enormous northern lights filled the sky with luminous patterns.

One night as Luton and Trevor Blythe tended the craft while the others slept in the little deckhouse, the display lasted for three breathless hours, at the end of which Trevor said: “I've headed a new page in my notebook
Borealis
. Wouldn't that be a wizard title for a small book of poems about the arctic?”

Now Luton's party became willful players in one of the most tantalizing and fatal games of geography. Always aware that the Mackenzie was running roughly parallel to their target river, the Yukon, which lay a constant three or four hundred miles to the west, they asked continually: “Where will it be most practical for us to leave the Mackenzie and leapfrog over to the Yukon, which we can then use to
float down to Dawson or row up, depending upon where we make our interception?”

The variables in this game were many, for numerous inviting streams, some considerable rivers, joined the Mackenzie from the west, and if one paddled and portaged upstream to their headwaters, one would be close to some other stream which dropped down to the Yukon. But even the most inviting route posed two harsh requirements. It would be murderously hard to row upstream against the current, and when one did reach the headwater, one still had to portage a heavy boat and all gear over the Continental Divide, as Harry Carpenter had pointed out repeatedly and kept reminding them as they drifted north.

Now the travelers entered into a kind of hypnotic trance which rendered sensible decisions impossible, for even though they knew that winter was approaching, the days remained tantalizingly inviting, and often they sailed with no covering but their flimsy shirts. The sun continued visible and warm, and the mighty river itself almost lulled them to sleep, so purposefully did it seduce them northward, always bearing them closer to the Arctic Circle. It ran so steadily, its current was so smooth and rapid that it seemed to sing: “I'm not luring you away from the gold fields; I'm carrying you always closer to the goal.” But the goal to which it was speeding them was the river's goal, the arctic, and not the men's.