Now of course I shall never know how important the business was that made it necessary for Kerrigan to take that hurried six-day trip to the nearest telegraph, or by just what reasoning, either of hers or his own, he was persuaded to leave her alone for those six days and nights.

Of course Kerrigan protested, but in the end he went. He would be back in the quickest possible time, but with the best of luck it would take six days.

All of the first day she had the sense of Kerrigan's retreating figure. She could see him within range of her imagi

It was a matter of some instruments of which Kerrigan stood in pressing need, and some urgent message to be sent to his associates in the States. There was no other way for it. He would have to go in to the nearest station where there was a telegraph. He put the problem before her. Since there was no one to stay with her, she would have to go along. He was sorry, for the trip had its discomforts and dangers at that time of year. She said it wasn't the trip she minded, but she did dislike being a hindrance, an impediment; her going would entail such elaborate preparations which he, alone, could do without. It would mean slower progress, added responsibility, altogether a nuisance in every way. Of course he replied that there was no alternative except staying alone, and certainly she would be afraid to do that, wouldn't she? She said-Afraid? There wasn't anything to be afraid of; they hadn't seen even a caribou for weeks. He suggested that she might be afraid of not seeing anything, of the silenceof just being alone. And then it occurred to her that probably never again in her life would there be a combination of circumstances which would make it possible for her to experience six whole days and nights of unbroken solitude-it couldn't really happen anywhere else. She would like trying it; she had a notion that one found out all sorts of queer things about oneself at times like that. The more she thought of it, and weighed it against the trip, the more reasonable it appeared to her. There was really nothing to fear, and she would have Big Jim, the malamute, to protect her in case of emergency.

away-into the distance toward the South. By evening it had grown a little dim, as if her mind's eye could no longer quite follow him. By night he was completely gone.

Silence closed in away on every side

...

about her spread

endless and white. There was the sensation of lighting the lamp, of being the single point of light in the heart of that vast darknessof exposing herself thus to the stealthy silence that lay like an entity outside. And then that faded, too; and she put out her light and went to bed. The malamute lay on the floor at her feet, restless at first with his master gone, but after a little ceasing to stir.

It was then, if ever, that she had expected fear. She was alone the only living, sentient thing in her universe. It was eerie. It was different. But she was not afraid.

She lay there thinking about it. After all, she supposed, she was too civilized, too oversophisticated, to feel afraid. Fear was a primitive thing, and wouldn't bear thinking or reasoning. Children and savages had it. . . . She remembered being afraid when she was a child, and she lay there in the dark remembering things she had been afraid of years before, and smiling to herself at how absurd they were, until at last, as on any other night, she fell asleep.

She woke to a sharp sense of surprise that it was morning, and that she had slept all night. The dog lay blinking at her, waiting for her to wake, and when she opened her eyes he beat his tail on the floor and gave a little friendly yelp. She got up, and began the second day.

It passed as the first one had passeda little strange because Kerrigan was not

there, a little different, but nothing to make her afraid. No, she had left that behind with her childhood, which was, she supposed, a good thing if one were to be much alone in such places as that. When she spoke to the dog now and then she was conscious that the sound of her voice struck queerly into the solitude. And she would go on improvising upon the theme, imagining what effect solitude might have if you stayed long enough alone; and, thinking of it, she would lose all sense of its present reality.

It wasn't imagination, she thought, that made people afraid; it was the lack of it.

And neither that day, nor the night that followed, nor the day after that, was she so much as brushed by fear.

There were times when she was conscious of a sheer intoxication of identity. And there were times when, waking at night she felt herself to be wholly one with the stillness and the dark-her identity utterly blotted out; and moments when her consciousness seemed suddenly to approach near to the ultimate mystery. These were sensations too keen and too near ecstasy for fear. Knowing Enid Lang, I can imagine how she made of those days a "fairly interesting experience.'

It was about nine o'clock on the third night that, sitting reading beside her lamp, she saw across the top of her book the malamute abruptly lift his head. His ears were pricked, his body tense, his eyes fixed on the door.

She did not put down her book, but sat perfectly still watching the dog.

With a snarl he got up and went toward the door. His hair bristled on his back.

She still sat motionless, holding her book before her in her hand. It could be no one. No human being, at least. Some prowling animal. . . . That was what the dog invariably did when he heard animals about the cabin at night.

. It was not wolves; she would have heard them long ago. . . . It was some small prowling animal.

The dog went closer to the door, ears pricked, and growling steadily.

With a quick, decisive movement, remembering how Kerrigan always did, she put down the book, crossed to the door, and opened it.

Like a shot the dog was past her, across the tiny square of illumined snow, and swallowed up in the night. She waited. There was one sharp, harsh yelp, and after that silence. She called after him, "Jim!" but the black night gave back no sound. She stood a moment irresolute, searching the darkness beyond, then closed the door. Big Jim had gone in pursuit. She would hear him when he came back. He would whine and scratch at the door.

Afterward, long afterward, she admitted to herself that from the first she really hadn't expected the dog to come back. From the instant of his one short, harsh yelp, she felt that something-she couldn't know what-had happened to Big Jim. Why else did she sit there rigidly hours into the night, pretending to read and to wait for him? And why else was it that only by telling herself over and over again the reasonable story that he had gone in pursuit of his prey, and would come back presently panting and victorious, did she persuade herself to put out her light, and, wrapped in a thick fur robe, lie down on the bed, where at last, by sheer exhaustion, she fell asleep?

Hours later, awakened, as she thought, out of some deep, bewildering dream, with the sound of it still in her ears, she lay a moment in that half-conscious state between waking and sleep. Still struggling to recall the dream, she slowly opened her eyes. It was dawn—dim and bleak and gray. But that sound-?

It was still in her ears-an insistent, allenveloping sound. . . . Was it not then part of a dream? She raised her head, listening. Was it coming from outsideoutside the cabin? It seemed to come from no direction-but to be pressing in, beating in upon her from all sides, from everywhere an uneven, throbbing

sound, a sequence of three repeated over and over and over, without pause, endlessly. . . . It was louder now. What was it? Where?

She sat upright, got to her feet, crossed the cabin to the little square window, and, gripped by some horrible premonition, drew aside the curtain and looked out.

Fear swept her, unreasoning, sickening; every nerve of her body informed before her brain. . . . In the gray dawn, at a distance of twenty yards, a ring of barbaric figures encircled the cabin . . facing inward, shoulder to shoulder, three deep; their faces, like the faces of grotesque animals, almost obscured by fur. Only their eyes were visible in the dim light, and their slightly open mouths, every one open alike. And from them there issued unceasingly that amazing repetition of three. . . . Human voices they were, yet no intervals ever heard in the human voice before. . . . Not only her nerves, but all the tissues of her body seemed to respond to it to some uncanny intent in the sound, some knowledge her brain refused to receive. .

A scene came back to her a scene and a voice... Kerrigan's voice, in Lombard Street-telling a legendary tale-"They say it's absolutely true, no man ever survived the thing more than two or three days." The voice of a normal man telling of magic in which he beAnd a page in a book, with a phrase midway of the page, "the aboriginal rite of Singing to Death, by which they rid themselves of an enemy. ... She could see the capital S and the capital D. . . . She could hear the voice, see the bright scene. A tale to tell. A sentence in a book. But never . . .

lieves....

...

...

She must wake up! It was some hideous nightmarish dream. Why had she gone to sleep, still dressed, wrapped in the fur robe? She had been waiting for something. What?

It came back to her with another sickening surge of certainty. She had been waiting for the dog, Big Jim.... Big Jim, what had become of him? She looked about the

Very cautiously she moved inward toward the center of the room. The discordant rhythm followed her, louder, more insistently. And as she went there reached her, not a consecutive thought, but a single flash of realization that seemed to insert itself between the waves of sound . . . like a message direct and sinister. . . . They knew she was alone. Kerrigan was their enemyhe sought their land-if he came back and found her dead, her whom he loved, without mark or wound, he would go away forever, and leave their land in peace.

Her mind accepted the motive without question or surprise. It seemed even to bring a kind of sanity in its wake, to renew something within her which a moment before had been destroyed; to bring the thing that was happening into the realm of possibilities.

She was standing upright in the center of the room. The destroying waves of sound beat inward, converging upon her, with their horrible sickening intent. She moved away, avoiding the center of the room-and the sound seemed to pass through her flesh, leaving it quivering.

With all of her strength she sought to resist, to gather her forces together to think-to think.

If it would only pause for an instantlong enough to finish a thought. If only the rhythm would vary-slower, faster, anything! But on and on and on it went, never abating, never changing, on and on and on.

Again and again she was driven inward to the center of the room. Again and again she moved away, but always came back to it. At last, impelled by some instinct to save her strength, she forced herself to sit down in a straight chair, beside the table. And so she sat, head bowed, her thin, firm fingers tightly gripped and interlaced, while hours passed-beating themselves by in that hideous heavy rhythm of three, that filled the cabin, that filled the world! And her strength was spent in

She had lost all sense of time. Three days! Was it possible that any human soul had ever survived it a single day? With an effort she lifted her head, as against some inconceivable weight-and turned her eyes to the clock, the nickel clock that hung against the wall. It had stopped-at four minutes past eight it had stopped-its rhythm succumbed to that other rhythm from without, as sooner or later the rhythm of her own heart would succumb. . .

The terrible sequence of three tore through her flesh in three different ways -tearing, catching, beginning againtearing, catching, beginning again-not smooth and cutting like knives, but jagged-edged, rough, like broken bits of iron and steel-a body caught and mangled in some catastrophe of invisible machinery. . . . Unless something happened, unless she could think, there would soon begin the ghastly dissolution of her will. Already her thoughts were torn and mangled, as her body was. Yet somewhere in the incorruptible center of her being her shocked and habit-driven intelligence groped toward the secret of that unbearable progression, those monstrous intervals.

She had risen again and begun to walk -up and down and across-up and down and across.

But suddenly she was standing still, head up, as if somewhere in those inimical vibrations she had heard a clue. . . . Then deliberately she moved to the center of the room. Her hands went out, and with a strong, wide gesture of her arms she seemed to be sweeping up into herself all those conflicting intervals! It had come-the secret was hers! She, too, was a sorcerer! Her power against their power-her magic against theirs! . . .

Fearless triumphant toward the door. . .

she moved

Imagine now that scene: The lone cabin, and that weird circle surrounding

it-like some strange, dark-hued flower set in that vast expanse of snow. The colors rich and glowing under the midday sun and shedding inward steadily its poisoned sorcery of sound. Then suddenly the door of the cabin flung wide-and in it a woman-and a Voice. A voice that swept upward those three notes, and by some magic more potent than their own, transformed, sustained them there, and, leaping far above them then, poured forth from that amazing throat-a single, high, victorious aria!

Like petals blown upon by some unforeseen and devastating wind, the grotesque figures fell apart, then paused, bewildered, dazed. And, seeing her stand defenseless in the door, one arm still upraised, they fell upon their faces in superstitious awe of the strange white woman with the blazing eyes and pale, triumphant face, who by some miraculous power had done what had never been done by mortal before, what could never have been done except by intervention of the gods. They remained prostrate before her, their foreheads touching the snow, until at last first one and then another began cautiously to rise, and to retreat, backward, as if fearing to turn their faces away from her.

At a safe distance, they turned and fled swiftly toward their hills, never pausing to look back at the solitary figure in the door. .

It was so that Kerrigan found her. Kerrigan who, tortured by remorse, and smitten with some sudden premonition of danger for her, had turned back on the second day of his journey to race with his unnamable fear back over the way he had gone . . . and, coming at last in sight of the cabin, he beheld the last of those terrible figures departing swiftly over the snow.

Then he saw her-standing alone in the cabin door empty-handed and unhurt.

How much she found it possible to explain to him—and how much he was

able to understand of it-I do not know. But she made it, seeing his terror and remorse, as simple and as natural as there were simple and natural words for it. She used, I believe, wireless, and all sorts of electrical analogies, transformers, wave lengths, things acceptable to him as material realities. One can imagine that she kept away from music and all musical terms-by which she might, to a musician, so easily have explained. In the end, I believe, he professed to understand.

Well-I see them now and then, but only occasionally. I've been away from San Francisco a good deal these last few years. They still live safely and contentedly, to all appearances, in their charming and hospitable house; even more in love with each other, I think, than they were at first. But whenever I

see them together, I am reminded of the letter Davis wrote me just after their return, when I happened to be away. "You would think," he wrote, "that she had sufficiently demonstrated her 'realities' to him. But I honestly believe, no matter how much he professes to understand, that Kerrigan really suspects her of some kind of magic, or some queer feminine wile that he hasn't got the straight of yet. He simply can't believe in the reality' of the thing she did!"

I am reminded of it because more than once it has occurred to me that he is still just a little afraid of her.

She has always wanted to go back again to the North. But Kerrigan will never go.

So, there you have it-Davis's opera one moment in it, at least, to satisfy the most imperious diva's dream.