Chapter XXX--The Lesson of the Wilderness

by Bram Stoker

　　In the West the two years flew. Time seemed to go faster there,because life was more strenuous. Harold, being mainly alone, foundendless work always before him. From daylight to dark labour neverceased; and for his own part he never wished that it should. In thewilderness, and especially under such conditions as held in NorthernAlaska, labour is not merely mechanical. Every hour of the day isfraught with danger in some new form, and the head has to play itspart in the strife against nature. In such a life there is not muchtime for thinking or brooding.At first, when the work and his surroundings were strange to him,Harold did many useless things and ran many unnecessary risks. Buthis knowledge grew with experience. Privations he had in plenty; andall the fibre of his body and the strength of his resolution andendurance were now and again taxed to their utmost. But with a manof his nature and race the breaking strain is high; and endurance andresolution are qualities which develop with practice.Gradually his mind came back to normal level; he had won seeminglythrough the pain that shadowed him. Without anguish he could nowthink, remember, look forward. Then it was that the kindly wisdom ofthe American came back to him, and came to stay. He began to examinehimself as to his own part of the unhappy transaction; and straymoments of wonderment came as to whether the fault may not, at thevery base, have his own. He began to realise that it is insufficientin this strenuous world to watch and wait; to suppress one's self; toput aside, in the wish to benefit others, all the hopes, ambitions,cravings which make for personal gain.Thus it was that Harold's thoughts, ever circling round Stephen, cameback with increasing insistence to his duty towards her. He oftenthought, and with a bitter feeling against himself that it came toolate, of the dying trust of her father:'Guard her and cherish her, as if you were indeed my son and she yoursister . . . If it should be that you and Stephen should find thatthere is another affection between you remember I sanction it. Butgive her time! I trust that to you! She is young, and the world isall before her. Let her choose . . . And be loyal to her, if it isanother! It may be a hard task; but I trust you, Harold!'Here he would groan, as all the anguish of the past would rush backupon him; and keenest of all would be the fear, suspicion, thoughtwhich grew towards belief, that he may have betrayed that trust. . ..At first the side of this memory personal to his own happiness wasfaintly emphasised; the important side was of the duty to Stephen.But as time went on the other thought became a sort of corollary; atimid, halting, blushing thought which followed sheepishly, bornedown by trembling hope. No matter what adventure came to him, thethought of neglected duty returned ever afresh. Once, when he laysick for weeks in an Indian wigwam, the idea so grew with each day ofthe monotony, that when he was able to crawl out by himself into thesunshine he had almost made up his mind to start back for home.Luck is a strange thing. It seems in some mysterious way to be thedivine machinery for adjusting averages. Whatever may be the measureof happiness or unhappiness, good or evil, allotted to anyone, luckis the cause or means of counter-balancing so that the main resultreaches the standard set.From the time of Harold's illness Dame Fortune seemed to change herattitude to him. The fierce frown, nay! the malignant scowl, towhich he had become accustomed, changed to a smile. Hithertoeverything seemed to have gone wrong with him; but now all at onceall seemed to go right. He grew strong and hardy again. Indeed, heseemed by contrast to his late helplessness to be so strong and hardthat it looked as if that very illness had done him good instead ofharm. Game was plentiful, and he never seemed to want. Everywherehe went there were traces of gold, as though by some instinct he wastracking it to its home. He did not value gold for its own sake; buthe did for the ardour of the search. Harold was essentially a man,and as a man an adventurer. To such a man of such a race adventureis the very salt of existence.The adventurer's instinct took with it the adventurer's judgment;Harold was not content with small results. Amidst the vast primevalforces there were, he felt, vast results of their prehistoricworking; and he determined to find some of them. In such a quest,purpose is much. It was hardly any wonder, then, that in time Haroldfound himself alone in the midst of one of the great treasure-placesof the world. Only labour was needed to take from the earth richesbeyond the dreams of avarice. But that labour was no easy problem;great and difficult distance had to be overcome; secrecy must beobserved, for even a whisper of the existence of such a place wouldbring a horde of desperadoes. But all these difficulties were atleast sources of interest, if not in themselves pleasures. The newHarold, seemingly freshly created by a year of danger and strenuoustoil, of self-examining and humiliation, of the realisation of duty,and--though he knew it not as yet--of the dawning of hope, founddelight in the thought of dangers and difficulties to be overcome.Having taken his bearings exactly so as to be safe in finding theplace again, he took his specimens with him and set out to find theshortest and best route to the nearest port.At length he came to the port and set quietly about finding men.This he did very carefully and very systematically. Finally, withthe full complement, and with ample supply of stores, he started onhis expedition to the new goldfields.It is not purposed to set out here the extraordinary growth ofRobinson City, for thus the mining camp soon became. Its history haslong ago been told for all the world. In the early days, wheneverything had to be organised and protected, Harold worked like agiant, and with a system and energy which from the first establishedhim as a master. But when the second year of his exile was coming toa close, and Robinson City was teeming with life and commerce, whenbanks and police and soldiers made life and property comparativelysafe, he began to be restless again. This was not the life to whichhe had set himself. He had gone into the wilderness to be away fromcities and from men; and here a city had sprung up around him and menclaimed him as their chief. Moreover, with the restless feelingthere began to come back to him the old thoughts and the old pain.But he felt strong enough by this time to look forward in life aswell as backward. With him now to think was to act; so much at leasthe had gained from his position of dominance in an upspringing city.He quietly consolidated such outlying interests as he had, placed themanagement of his great estate in the hands of a man he had learnedto trust, and giving out that he was going to San Francisco toarrange some business, left Robinson City. He had alreadyaccumulated such a fortune that the world was before him in any wayhe might choose to take.Knowing that at San Francisco, to which he had booked, he would haveto run the gauntlet of certain of his friends and businessconnections, he made haste to leave the ship quietly at Portland, thefirst point she touched on her southern journey. Thence he got onthe Canadian Pacific Line and took his way to Montreal.What most arrested his attention, and in a very disconcerting way,were the glimpses of English life one sees reproduced so faithfullyhere and there in Canada. The whole of the past rushed back on himso overpoweringly that he was for the moment unnerved. The acutefeeling of course soon became mitigated; but it was the beginning ofa re-realisation of what had been, and which grew stronger with eachmile as the train swept back eastward.At first he tried to fight it; tried with all the resources of hisstrong nature. His mind was made up, he assured himself over andover again. The past was past, and what had been was no more to himthan to any of the other passengers of the train. Destiny had longago fulfilled itself. Stephen no doubt had by now found some oneworthy of her and had married. In no dream, sleeping or waking,could he ever admit that she had married Leonard; that was the onlygleam of comfort in what had grown to be remorse for his neglectedduty.And so it was that Harold An Wolf slowly drifted, though he knew itnot, into something of the same intellectual position which haddominated him when he had started on his journeying and the sunsetfell nightly on his despairing face. The life in the wilderness, andthen in the dominance and masterdom of enterprise, had hardened andstrengthened him into more self-reliant manhood, giving him greaterforbearance and a more practical view of things.When he took ship in the Dominion, a large cargo-boat with somepassengers running to London, he had a vague purpose of visiting insecret Norcester, whence he could manage to find out how matters wereat Normanstand. He would then, he felt, be in a better position toregulate his further movements. He knew that he had already asufficient disguise in his great beard. He had nothing to fear fromthe tracing of him on his journey from Alaska or the interest of hisfellow-passengers. He had all along been so fortunate as to be ableto keep his identity concealed. The name John Robinson told nothingin itself, and the width of a whole great continent lay between himand the place of his fame. He was able to take his part freelyamongst both the passengers and the officers. Even amongst the crewhe soon came to be known; the men liked his geniality, andinstinctively respected his enormous strength and his manifest forceof character. Men who work and who know danger soon learn torecognise the forces which overcome both. And as sufficient time hadnot elapsed to impair his hardihood or lower his vast strength he wasfacile princeps. And so the crew acknowledged him; to them he was aborn Captain whom to obey would be a natural duty.After some days the weather changed. The great ship, which usuallyrested even-keeled on two waves, and whose bilge keels under normalconditions rendered rolling impossible, began to pitch and roll likea leviathan at play. The decks, swept by gigantic seas, were injuredwherever was anything to injure. Bulwarks were torn away as thoughthey had been compact of paper. More than once the double doors atthe head of the companion stairs had been driven in. The bull's eyeglasses of some of the ports were beaten from their brazen sockets.Nearly all the boats had been wrecked, broken or torn from theircranes as the great ship rolled heavily in the trough, or giant waveshad struck her till she quivered like a frightened horse.At that season she sailed on the far northern course. Driven stillfarther north by the gales, she came within a short way of south ofGreenland. Then avoiding Moville, which should have been her placeof call, she ran down the east of Britain, the wild weather stillprevailing.