Jack London's Stories of the North - Complete Edition. Jack LondonЧитать онлайн книгу.

      The Priestly Prerogative

      This is the story of a man who did not appreciate his wife; also, of a woman who did him too great an honor when she gave herself to him. Incidentally, it concerns a Jesuit priest who had never been known to lie. He was an appurtenance, and a very necessary one, to the Yukon country; but the presence of the other two was merely accidental. They were specimens of the many strange waifs which ride the breast of a gold rush or come tailing along behind.

      Edwin Bentham and Grace Bentham were waifs; they were also tailing along behind, for the Klondike rush of ‘97 had long since swept down the great river and subsided into the famine-stricken city of Dawson. When the Yukon shut up shop and went to sleep under a three-foot ice-sheet, this peripatetic couple found themselves at the Five Finger Rapids, with the City of Gold still a journey of many sleeps to the north.

      Many cattle had been butchered at this place in the fall of the year, and the offal made a goodly heap. The three fellow-voyagers of Edwin Bentham and wife gazed upon this deposit, did a little mental arithmetic, caught a certain glimpse of a bonanza, and decided to remain. And all winter they sold sacks of bones and frozen hides to the famished dogteams. It was a modest price they asked, a dollar a pound, just as it came. Six months later, when the sun came back and the Yukon awoke, they buckled on their heavy moneybelts and journeyed back to the Southland, where they yet live and lie mightily about the Klondike they never saw.

      But Edwin Bentham—he was an indolent fellow, and had he not been possessed of a wife, would have gladly joined issued in the dog-meat speculation. As it was, she played upon his vanity, told him how great and strong he was, how a man such as he certainly was could overcome all obstacles and of a surety obtain the Golden Fleece. So he squared his jaw, sold his share in the bones and hides for a sled and one dog, and turned his snowshoes to the north. Needless to state, Grace Bentham’s snowshoes never allowed his tracks to grow cold. Nay, ere their tribulations had seen three days, it was the man who followed in the rear, and the woman who broke trail in advance. Of course, if anybody hove in sight, the position was instantly reversed. Thus did his manhood remain virgin to the travelers who passed like ghosts on the silent trail. There are such men in this world.

      How such a man and such a woman came to take each other for better and for worse is unimportant to this narrative. These things are familiar to us all, and those people who do them, or even question them too closely, are apt to lose a beautiful faith which is known as Eternal Fitness.

      Edwin Bentham was a boy, thrust by mischance into a man’s body,—a boy who could complacently pluck a butterfly, wing from wing, or cower in abject terror before a lean, nervy fellow, not half his size. He was a selfish cry-baby, hidden behind a man’s mustache and stature, and glossed over with a skin-deep veneer of culture and conventionality. Yes; he was a clubman and a society man, the sort that grace social functions and utter inanities with a charm and unction which is indescribable; the sort that talk big, and cry over a toothache; the sort that put more hell into a woman’s life by marrying her than can the most graceless libertine that ever browsed in forbidden pastures. We meet these men every day, but we rarely know them for what they are. Second to marrying them, the best way to get this knowledge is to eat out of the same pot and crawl under the same blanket with them for—well, say a week; no greater margin is necessary.

      To see Grace Bentham, was to see a slender, girlish creature; to know her, was to know a soul which dwarfed your own, yet retained all the elements of the eternal feminine. This was the woman who urged and encouraged her husband in his Northland quest, who broke trail for him when no one was looking, and cried in secret over her weakling woman’s body.

      So journeyed this strangely assorted couple down to old Fort Selkirk, then through fivescore miles of dismal wilderness to Stuart River. And when the short day left them, and the man lay down in the snow and blubbered, it was the woman who lashed him to the sled, bit her lips with the pain of her aching limbs, and helped the dog haul him to Malemute Kid’s cabin. Malemute Kid was not at home, but Meyers, the German trader, cooked great moose-steaks and shook up a bed of fresh pine boughs. Lake, Langham, and Parker, were excited, and not unduly so when the cause was taken into account.

      ‘Oh, Sandy! Say, can you tell a porterhouse from a round? Come out and lend us a hand, anyway!’ This appeal emanated from the cache, where Langham was vainly struggling with divers quarters of frozen moose.

      ‘Don’t you budge from those dishes!’ commanded Parker.

      ‘I say, Sandy; there’s a good fellow—just run down to the Missouri Camp and borrow some cinnamon,’ begged Lake.

      ‘Oh! oh! hurry up! Why don’t—’ But the crash of meat and boxes, in the cache, abruptly quenched this peremptory summons.

      ‘Come now, Sandy; it won’t take a minute to go down to the Missouri—’

      ‘You leave him alone,’ interrupted Parker. ‘How am I to mix the biscuits if the table isn’t cleared off?’

      Sandy paused in indecision, till suddenly the fact that he was Langham’s ‘man’ dawned upon him. Then he apologetically threw down the greasy dishcloth, and went to his master’s rescue.

      These promising scions of wealthy progenitors had come to the Northland in search of laurels, with much money to burn, and a ‘man’ apiece. Luckily for their souls, the other two men were up the White River in search of a mythical quartz-ledge; so Sandy had to grin under the responsibility of three healthy masters, each of whom was possessed of peculiar cookery ideas. Twice that morning had a disruption of the whole camp been imminent, only averted by immense concessions from one or the other of these knights of the chafing-dish. But at last their mutual creation, a really dainty dinner, was completed.

      Then they sat down to a three-cornered game of ‘cut-throat,’—a proceeding which did away with all casus belli for future hostilities, and permitted the victor to depart on a most important mission.

      This fortune fell to Parker, who parted his hair in the middle, put on his mittens and bearskin cap, and stepped over to Malemute Kid’s cabin. And when he returned, it was in the company of Grace Bentham and Malemute Kid,—the former very sorry her husband could not share with her their hospitality, for he had gone up to look at the Henderson Creek mines, and the latter still a trifle stiff from breaking trail down the Stuart River.

      Meyers had been asked, but had declined, being deeply engrossed in an experiment of raising bread from hops.

      Well, they could do without the husband; but a woman—why they had not seen one all winter, and the presence of this one promised a new era in their lives.

      They were college men and gentlemen, these three young fellows, yearning for the fleshpots they had been so long denied. Probably Grace Bentham suffered from a similar hunger; at least, it meant much to her, the first bright hour in many weeks of darkness.

      But that wonderful first course, which claimed the versatile Lake for its parent, had no sooner been served than there came a loud knock at the door.

      ‘Oh! Ah! Won’t you come in, Mr. Bentham?’ said Parker, who had stepped to see who the newcomer might be.

      ‘Is my wife here?’ gruffly responded that worthy.

      ‘Why, yes. We left word with Mr. Meyers.’ Parker was exerting his most dulcet tones, inwardly wondering what the deuce it all meant. ‘Won’t you come in? Expecting you at any moment, we reserved a place. And just in time for the first course, too.’ ‘Come in, Edwin, dear,’ chirped Grace Bentham from her seat at the table.

      Parker naturally stood aside.

      ‘I want my wife,’ reiterated Bentham hoarsely, the intonation savoring disagreeably of ownership.

      Parker gasped, was within an ace of driving his fist into the face of his boorish visitor, but held himself awkwardly