Chris made up her mind to stop this foray into the future.

“Mrs. Raffsky?” she ventured.

“What you want to know about Leah?”

“I mean—she’s so lovely-looking and—and different. And young—and kind of—well—mysterious.” She glanced rather apprehensively then at Thor, but he was smiling and listening, amiably enough.

“Sure she’s young, Leah was twenty years younger than me when we were married. I guess she is yet. Leah’s mother was half Eskimo, her father was a missionary up here in the old days in the Arctic Circle. And what do you think he was? A rabbi! Did you ever hear before of such a thing! Catholics and Presbyterians and Quakers and Methodists and Baptists you’ve heard of, missionaries. But Leah’s father was a Jewish rabbi and a missionary. From Russia. It’s a story.”

“I’ve always wondered why they didn’t do more proselytizing,” Thor mused. “They’re so stiff-necked about their religion. Leah’s father is the only Jewish missionary I’ve heard of since Jesus.”

20

ROSS GUILDENSTERN had not appeared at dinner, he had not come in during the evening. The evening lengthened to nine, to ten o’clock. Dinner finished, the women sat in the big pink sitting room. The men had remained in the dining room, they formed a close little huddle at one end of the table after the dishes had been cleared away. In the manner of masculine groups their voices were low, their interest concentrated. For the time the world of women had ceased to exist.

Chris drifted over to Bridie on the couch, she stood behind her ostensibly to pat into place a waved lock of fashionably slate-gray hair which did not need patting. Chris pitched her voice low for Bridie’s ear, but not so low as to be drowned by the constant music of the phonograph.

“What do you suppose they’re talking about in there?”

“Alaska.”

“Such old-fashioned behavior. I feel like a harem inmate. I’d like to go in and hear what they’re talking about”

“You’re in Eskimo country.”

The ten o’clock night sun glared boldly through the wall of plate glass. From outside came sounds usually associated with daytime; the high voices of children, laughter, the yapping of dogs, the tattoo of a hammer pounding on wood. The Raffsky girls were handing round coffee for the third time since dinner. The remains of the massive cake, reduced now to a Roman ruin, lay dejectedly on a side table. Chris found herself listening for the sound of an airplane in the clear Arctic air. She wandered over to the window that faced the water. Under that bright sky the beach path was busy as a boulevard. For Chris there was nothing remarkable about this activity during the summer-night hours. Baranof, too, tried to cram a year of sun and fun and work into two summer months. Eskimo women, their ugly bright-colored cotton shifts covering their parkas, paced the path with their curiously waddling gait. Almost invariably a solid round lump protruded at the back, from waist to shoulder blade. A sleeping baby tucked away cosily, with a cushion of moss for a diaper and mattress. Bands of small children screeched and ran and played, they skipped stones into the open water beyond the ice blocks, the older boys jumped onto the swift-moving frozen blocks and were borne perilously downstream, though a single foot-slip might seal them forever beneath the ponderous rushing plateaus. An Eskimo was working on his boat, he had mounted it on trestles, it was his hammer that rang clearly. Two small girls were bumping up and down on a haphazard seesaw with a flimsy box for a fulcrum. But they were not seated. They stood upright. Each time the board hit the pebbled beach they yelled with happy shock. The length of the beach, as far as the eye could see, was etched with poles and racks on which hung the diamond-shaped pieces of seal blubber and seal meat, out of reach of the hungry leaping sled dogs. Oogruk wasted little time on sleep during the precious sun nights. The long months of black winter days and starlit winter nights were the time for sleep and sleep and sleep.