Motion Picture Magazine (Aug 1918-Jan 1919)

3TI0N piCTURF, MAGAZINE ^ L He went back — lived thru another Arctic winter — all alone — all alone did you ever see a woman's eyes when her baby "kisses her ? Her eyes were as tender as that . . . oh, as tender as heaven . . . and blue like the sky is blue . . . and her hair . . .all gleamy as if the sun shone on it, and there wasn't a sun to shine . . . and her voice was like a cradle-song to make men babes again . . . that Girl ! I'm three thousand miles away, old man, but . . . She opened her eyes and came across the room, sort of uncertain-like. There wasn't any fear about her, just a gentle questioning, a soft perplexity. 'Where have you come from?' asked Burke. 'Why are you here?' he spoke very careful, very measured. I asked him why. He turned to me, and his smile was piteous. 'Dont you see,' he told me, 'that this — child — has left — her mind behind her?' "Mears slumped suddenly in his chair, as tho a great weight had suddenly been dropped off his shoulders, and Ave noticed, for the first time, that his face was as yellow as a piece of bum tallow. But we weren't thinking anything about Mears. We were thinking how she had come . . . from where . . .and why. We knew she had been driven here by some tremendous power, some incalculable need. Only a supernatural force could have pushed her, fragile and slender, into this ice-locked death. . •_ ' T had to come/ she said, softly, still perplexedly, and -he passed her little hand over her brow. 'I'm looking for some one,' she said, at last, and her lower lip quivered like a child's, uncertainly. 'I'm hungry,' she added, plaintively. I think I fell in love with her then and fT\ there. It had such a human sound, such a comfy, con p60 1A££ fiding sound. I swore to myself that not all the dangers of Sourdough, not all the nightmares of the North should so much as breathe their breath upon her. She was a child to be guarded. She was a woman to be loved. Burke knew it, too. In his wounded eyes a healing began to take place, a healing compounded in equal parts of reverence and dreaming. "I cant describe those days up there to you — not as they ought to be described. The dark — like 'a claw upon our brains' — Marston fighting the demon that had him by the throat — fighting, too, as if he knew he was vanquished before he had even begun — the angel that was entering his heart — Mears, with his sullen, furtive look intensified, sneering at Burke's good fight — triumphing when the call was too strong — suspecting when there was no cause . . . I . . . but I just loved the Girl . . . did nothing else . . . thought of nothing else ... and all of us just waiting . . . waiting ... for the moment when the veil should lift that was covering the Girl's troubled mind. 'The Yukon takes its toll/ we said, and knew that it was so. "There came the day when, her eyes still vague, she told me that she liked Burke Marston — but she liked me better. She told me with the simplicity of the child, but I felt that the heart of the woman was speaking. You can guess my joy. You can guess, too, my pain. Burke had fought so long, had fought so hard — had lost so many times — so many things. I knew that this girl had come and illumined the path he had thought forever darkened. I knew that she was, to him, his Land of Beginning Again. There, in the awful night, she was the promise of a sun to rise again. Once I heard him say to her, 'My name is Burke Marston. I am the chap who loses all the aces — who wastes his trumps — the joker in the pack.' And she had stroked his hand and felt sorry for him, tho she knew not what he was saying. "There came the day ... I happened to be out . . . Marston had had a bad fall from grace and was in a sorry way. Ruth — that is the Girl's name — had found some little artificial flowers in her coat, and he was playing with them. All at once, as a fog clears away and objects only vaguely outlined become suddenly and disconcertingly, sometimes, clear and sharp and distinct, the fog rolled back from Ruth's brain. She saw a crowded courtroom, a stripling, clean-eyed lad on trial for a filthy crime, a crooked lawyer convicting him, a jury sealing the twisted verdict. The crooked lawyer was Mears. "The sudden cleavage in her mind unbalanced her good judgment. She fairly sprang at Mears, and her young voice was so shrill that it half-aroused Marston from the torpor he was in. 'Now I know !' she cried, standing squarely in front of the terrified man ; 'now I know" — why I have come1 — how long I have been coming — all about it. You — you convicted my brother of a crime you yourself committed. You sent him to jail — for life — that boy — that mere boy who had never gone beyond his happy dreaming — you fastened filth upon (Continued on page 107)