Название: Love of Life and Other Stories
Автор: Jack London
Издательство: Public Domain
Жанр: Зарубежная классика
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“We just wanted to know if there is any other cabin around here,” he said, at the same time glancing over the unfurnished state of the room. “We thought this cabin was empty.”
“It isn’t my cabin,” Messner answered. “I just found it a few minutes ago. Come right in and camp. Plenty of room, and you won’t need your stove. There’s room for all.”
At the sound of his voice the woman peered at him with quick curiousness.
“Get your things off,” her companion said to her. “I’ll unhitch and get the water so we can start cooking.”
Messner took the thawed salmon outside and fed his dogs. He had to guard them against the second team of dogs, and when he had reentered the cabin the other man had unpacked the sled and fetched water. Messner’s pot was boiling. He threw in the coffee, settled it with half a cup of cold water, and took the pot from the stove. He thawed some sour-dough biscuits in the oven, at the same time heating a pot of beans he had boiled the night before and that had ridden frozen on the sled all morning.
Removing his utensils from the stove, so as to give the newcomers a chance to cook, he proceeded to take his meal from the top of his grub-box, himself sitting on his bed-roll. Between mouthfuls he talked trail and dogs with the man, who, with head over the stove, was thawing the ice from his mustache. There were two bunks in the cabin, and into one of them, when he had cleared his lip, the stranger tossed his bed-roll.
“We’ll sleep here,” he said, “unless you prefer this bunk. You’re the first comer and you have first choice, you know.”
“That’s all right,” Messner answered. “One bunk’s just as good as the other.”
He spread his own bedding in the second bunk, and sat down on the edge. The stranger thrust a physician’s small travelling case under his blankets at one end to serve for a pillow.
“Doctor?” Messner asked.
“Yes,” came the answer, “but I assure you I didn’t come into the Klondike to practise.”
The woman busied herself with cooking, while the man sliced bacon and fired the stove. The light in the cabin was dim, filtering through in a small window made of onion-skin writing paper and oiled with bacon grease, so that John Messner could not make out very well what the woman looked like. Not that he tried. He seemed to have no interest in her. But she glanced curiously from time to time into the dark corner where he sat.
“Oh, it’s a great life,” the doctor proclaimed enthusiastically, pausing from sharpening his knife on the stovepipe. “What I like about it is the struggle, the endeavor with one’s own hands, the primitiveness of it, the realness.”
“The temperature is real enough,” Messner laughed.
“Do you know how cold it actually is?” the doctor demanded.
The other shook his head.
“Well, I’ll tell you. Seventy-four below zero by spirit thermometer on the sled.”
“That’s one hundred and six below freezing point-too cold for travelling, eh?”
“Practically suicide,” was the doctor’s verdict. “One exerts himself. He breathes heavily, taking into his lungs the frost itself. It chills his lungs, freezes the edges of the tissues. He gets a dry, hacking cough as the dead tissue sloughs away, and dies the following summer of pneumonia, wondering what it’s all about. I’ll stay in this cabin for a week, unless the thermometer rises at least to fifty below.”
“I say, Tess,” he said, the next moment, “don’t you think that coffee’s boiled long enough!”
At the sound of the woman’s name, John Messner became suddenly alert. He looked at her quickly, while across his face shot a haunting expression, the ghost of some buried misery achieving swift resurrection. But the next moment, and by an effort of will, the ghost was laid again. His face was as placid as before, though he was still alert, dissatisfied with what the feeble light had shown him of the woman’s face.
Automatically, her first act had been to set the coffee-pot back. It was not until she had done this that she glanced at Messner. But already he had composed himself. She saw only a man sitting on the edge of the bunk and incuriously studying the toes of his moccasins. But, as she turned casually to go about her cooking, he shot another swift look at her, and she, glancing as swiftly back, caught his look. He shifted on past her to the doctor, though the slightest smile curled his lip in appreciation of the way she had trapped him.
She drew a candle from the grub-box and lighted it. One look at her illuminated face was enough for Messner. In the small cabin the widest limit was only a matter of several steps, and the next moment she was alongside of him. She deliberately held the candle close to his face and stared at him out of eyes wide with fear and recognition. He smiled quietly back at her.
“What are you looking for, Tess?” the doctor called.
“Hairpins,” she replied, passing on and rummaging in a clothes-bag on the bunk.
They served their meal on their grub-box, sitting on Messner’s grub-box and facing him. He had stretched out on his bunk to rest, lying on his side, his head on his arm. In the close quarters it was as though the three were together at table.
“What part of the States do you come from?” Messner asked.
“San Francisco,” answered the doctor. “I’ve been in here two years, though.”
“I hail from California myself,” was Messner’s announcement.
The woman looked at him appealingly, but he smiled and went on:
“Berkeley, you know.”
The other man was becoming interested.
“U. C.?” he asked.
“Yes, Class of ’86.”
“I meant faculty,” the doctor explained. “You remind me of the type.”
“Sorry to hear you say so,” Messner smiled back. “I’d prefer being taken for a prospector or a dog-musher.”
“I don’t think he looks any more like a professor than you do a doctor,” the woman broke in.
“Thank you,” said Messner. Then, turning to her companion, “By the way, Doctor, what is your name, if I may ask?”
“Haythorne, if you’ll take my word for it. I gave up cards with civilization.”
“And Mrs. Haythorne,” Messner smiled and bowed.
She flashed a look at him that was more anger than appeal.
Haythorne was about to ask the other’s name. His mouth had opened to form the question when Messner cut him off.
“Come to think of it, Doctor, you may possibly be able to satisfy my curiosity. There was a sort of scandal in faculty circles some two or three years ago. The wife of one of the English professors-er, if you will pardon me, Mrs. Haythorne-disappeared with some San Francisco doctor, I understood, though his name СКАЧАТЬ