Part 45 (1/2)
In a large and commodious house two of the owners of the mine lived, their wives being with them for the summer. They were gay and charming women, fond of society, and pining for the fleshpots of San Francisco.
The white women living between Kodiak and Dutch Harbor are so few that they may be counted on one hand, and the luxurious furnis.h.i.+ngs of their homes in these out-of-the-way places are almost startling in their unexpectedness. We spent the afternoon at the mine, and the ladies returned to the _Dora_ with us for dinner. The squalls had taken themselves off, and we had a prosaic return in the mine's launch.
”What do we do?” said one of the ladies, in reply to my question. ”Oh, we read, walk, write letters, go out on the water, play cards, sew, and do so much fancy work that when we get back to San Francisco we have nothing to do but enjoy ourselves and brag about the good time we have in Alaska. We are all packed now to go camping--”
”_Camping!_” I repeated, too astonished to be polite.
”Yes, camping,” replied she, coloring, and speaking somewhat coldly. ”We go in the launch to the most beautiful beach about ten miles from Unga.
We stay a month. It is a sheltered beach of white sand. The waves lap on it all day long, blue, sparkling, and warm, and we almost live in them.
The hills above the beach are simply covered with the big blueberries that grow only in Alaska. They are somewhat like the black mountain huckleberry, only more delicious. We can them, preserve them, and dry them, and take them back to San Francisco with us. They are the best things I ever ate--with thick cream on them. I had some in the house; I wish I had thought to offer you some.”
She wished she had thought to offer me some!
On the _Dora_ we were rapidly getting down to bacon and fish,--being about two thousand miles from Seattle, with no ice aboard in this land of ice,--and I am not enthusiastic about either.
And she wished that she had thought to offer me some Alaskan blueberries that are more delicious than mountain huckleberries, and thick cream!
CHAPTER x.x.xV
I have heard of steamers that have been built and sent out by missionary or church societies to do good in far and lonely places.
The little _Dora_ is not one of these, nor is religion her cargo; her hold is filled with other things. Yet blessings be on her for the good she does! Her mission is to carry mail, food, freight, and good cheer to the people of these green islands that go drifting out to Siberia, one by one. She is the one link that connects them with the great world outside; through her they obtain their sole touch of society, of which their appreciation is pitiful.
Our captain was a big, violet-eyed Norwegian, about forty years old. He showed a kindness, a courtesy, and a patience to those lonely people that endeared him to us.
He knew them all by name and greeted them cordially as they stood, smiling and eager, on the wharves. All kinds of commissions had been intrusted to him on his last monthly trip. To one he brought a hat; to another a phonograph; to another a box of fruit; dogs, cats, chairs, flowers, books--there seemed to be nothing that he had not personally selected for the people at the various ports. Even a little seven-year-old half-breed girl had travelled in his care from Valdez to join her father on one of the islands.
Wherever there was a woman, native or half-breed, he took us ash.o.r.e to make her acquaintance.
”Come along now,” he would say, in a tone of command, ”and be nice.
They don't get a chance to talk to many women. Haven't you got some little womanly thing along with you that you can give them? It'll make them happy for months.”
We were eager enough to talk to them, heaven knows, and to give them what we could; but the ”little womanly things” that we could spare on a two months' voyage in Alaska were distressingly few. When we had nothing more that we could give, the stern disapproval in the captain's eyes went to our hearts. Box after box of bonbons, figs, salted almonds, preserved ginger, oranges, apples, ribbons, belts, pretty bags--one after one they went, until, like Olive Schreiner's woman, I felt that I had given up everything save the one green leaf in my bosom; and that the time would come when the captain would command me to give that up, too.
There seems to be something in those great lonely s.p.a.ces that moves the people to kindness, to patience and consideration--to tenderness, even.
I never before came close to such _humanness_. It shone out of people in whom one would least expect to find it.
Several times while we were at dinner the chief steward, a gay and handsome youth not more than twenty-one years old, rushed through the dining room, crying:--
”Give me your old magazines--_quick_! There's a whaler's boat alongside.”
A stampede to our cabins would follow, and a hasty upgathering of such literature as we could lay our hands upon.
The whaling and cod-fis.h.i.+ng schooners cruise these waters for months without a word from the outside until they come close enough to a steamer to send out a boat. The crew of the steamer, discovering the approach of this boat, gather up everything they can throw into it as it flashes for a moment alongside. Frequently the occupants of the boat throw fresh cod aboard, and then there are smiling faces at dinner. It is my opinion, however, that any one who would smile at cod would smile at anything.
The most marvellous voyage ever made in the beautiful and not always peaceful Pacific Ocean was the one upon which the _Dora_ started at an instant's notice, and by no will of her master's, on the first day of January, 1906. Blown from the coast down into the Pacific in a freezing storm, she became disabled and drifted helplessly for more than two months.