Part 47 (2/2)
The winds blew irregularly, sometimes roaring through the cave, and filling it with a whirl of smoke and snow, and sometimes creeping along the floor with the malevolence and stealthiness of a serpent.
Marion had blocked up the entrance with small logs and limbs, but the winds and draughts made scorn of this loose barrier. Her clothes were fast falling from her body. She essayed crude patchwork with strips of deerskin and pins of wood, but these efforts were rendered futile by wear and tear and the rotting of the cloth itself. She began to be embarra.s.sed when her flesh showed through the rents in her garments; but Haig, with a mingling of frankness and tact that might indeed have been less easy in other circ.u.mstances, effectually helped her to banish all false modesty from a situation in which they were reduced to primitive habits and almost to primitive familiarities.
She was less able to accustom herself to the dirt, from which there was no escape, but which irked her nevertheless more than all else.
She was no longer able to keep clean in any sense of cleanliness a.s.sociated with civilization. Was.h.i.+ng with water melted from snow, without soap or towels, had only the effect, as it seemed to her, to fix the grime more deeply in her skin. And the hair that had been her pride had now no more the golden lights in its tawny ma.s.ses, and was becoming dark and harsh and sheenless in spite of her most a.s.siduous attention.
”Don't worry!” said Haig one day, in a grim attempt at humor. ”Just imagine you are a belle of the Eskimos.”
”Philip! How can you?” she cried.
”Was.h.i.+ng,” he went on, ”is only another error of civilization. I have seen whole tribes of most respectable aborigines that never bathed.
And they seemed to be quite happy. It saves a lot of time. But that's another queer thing. The more time we need, the more we waste it on matters that are really unimportant. Like most of our attempts to improve on nature, it costs more than it's worth, and--”
”That will do, Philip!” she protested. ”I can forget I'm hungry, but--ugh! not this!”
But she spoke too bravely about her hunger. Their food by this time had begun to pall. The good venison, of which they had eaten joyously at first, became tasteless and then disgusting. They had no salt. The bacon and the bread had long since been consumed, and the chocolate also. There was left nothing but the flesh of deer and rabbits. Marion stewed it, broiled it, baked it under hot ashes; and they even nibbled at it raw; but the time came when only the relentless pangs of hunger, the hunger of the animal, the sheer clamor of their stomachs could force them to eat the nauseating food. In consequence of this revulsion, they were always hungry; and sometimes, in spite of their resolution, they descended to torturing each other with talk of the good things there were in the world to eat.
”Claire makes the most gorgeous apple dumplings!” said Marion on one of these occasions.
”Apple dumplings? Ye-es,” replied Haig judiciously. ”But what about plain dumplings in chicken gravy?”
”Frica.s.see!” cried Marion.
”No. Maryland.”
”Still, Philip, if I had my choice it wouldn't be chicken at all.”
”What then?”
”Potatoes. Big, baked potatoes, split open, you know, with b.u.t.ter and salt and paprika.”
”Or sweet potatoes swimming in b.u.t.ter.”
”And salad--lettuce and tomatoes and oil and vinegar.”
”And then pie. Think of blackberry pie!”
”And jam. I do love jam spread on toast.”
”I'll tell you something,” said Haig recklessly. ”I could even eat sauerkraut!”
Their worst craving was for salt. Marion could fairly taste the spray of the Atlantic on the bathing beaches. She dreamt of salt,--barrels of salt and oceans of salt and caves she had read of in which salt hung in glittering stalact.i.tes. And Haig too. He described a desert where salt had risen to the surface and gleamed in crystals in the sand. And once he had lived a long time on salt pork, which he had thought the most insufferable food. But now! The taste of it came back to him, and went tingling through every nerve.
To free their minds from such tormenting memories, Haig went deep into his adventures, his wanderings, his search for excitements. He told her of strange lands and peoples, of the beautiful spots of the world, of battles and perils and escapes,--everything he had been through, with one exception. That--the story of Paris--was still a closed book to her. And similarly, there was one chapter of her life that she did not open to him. A certain delicacy, rendered more vital by their very situation, in which few delicacies could be maintained, restrained them from the uttermost self-revelation. The one subject that was not touched upon in the most intimate of their conversations was that dearest to Marion's heart and most incomprehensible to Haig's reason.
Partly this avoidance was intuitive, and partly deliberate; where there was so much suffering that could not be escaped, they were scrupulous to inflict upon each other no unnecessary pain or embarra.s.sment. Between a more common man and a less fastidious woman, placed in such propinquity, there would almost inevitably have been concessions and compromises but between these two there remained a barrier that might have been pa.s.sed by Marion's unquestioning love, but never by Haig's inclinations, curbed as they had been through many years, and still reined in by his distrust.
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