Five Nights

Victoria Cross

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• Publié par: idwie
• Publié le: 01 décembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 36
• Langue: English

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The Project Gutenberg eBook, Five Nights, by
Victoria Cross
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Title: Five Nights
Author: Victoria Cross
Release Date: July 24, 2004 [eBook #13017]
Language: English
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG
EBOOK FIVE NIGHTS***
E-text prepared by Rose Koven, Juliet Sutherland,
Cathy Smith, and Project Gutenberg Distributed
Proofreaders
FIVE NIGHTSA Novel
By
Victoria Cross
1908
By Victoria Cross
Five Nights
Life's Shop Window
Anna Lombard
Six Women
Six Chapters of a Man's Life
The Woman Who Didn't
To-morrow?
Paula
A Girl of the Klondike
The Religion of Evelyn Hastings
Life of my HeartCONTENTS
PART I
The Gold Night
I THE TAKU INLET II THE TEA-SHOP III IN THE
WOOD
PART II
The Violet Night
IV AT THE STUDIO V THE CALL OF THE
CUCKOO
PART III
The Black Night
VI IN MAYFAIR VII FREEDOM
PART IV
The Crimson Night
VIII LOSS IX IN 'FRISCO X IN THE SHADOW OFTHE VOLCANO XI THE WAY OF THE GODS
PART V
The White Night
XII THE FLAMES OF LIFE'S FURNACEFIVE NIGHTS
"The nights have different colours. Some
nights are black, the nights of storm: some
are electric blue, some are silver, the moon-
filled nights: some are red under the hot
planet Mars or the fierce harvest moon. Some
are white, the white nights of the Arctic winter:
but this was a violet night, a hot, mysterious,
violet night of Midsummer."
LIFE'S SHOP WINDOW.INTRODUCTION
As one looks over any period of one's life, it
appears behind one as a shining maze of brilliant
colour with spots in it here and there of brighter or
darker hue. Each spot represents a period of time
when our happiness has glowed brighter or waned;
sometimes it is a day, more often it is a night.
Looking back now, over a stretch of my existence I
see many such spots gleaming brightly; they are
nights of colour. The history of many of these is
too sacred to be written, but there are Five Nights,
which, though not the dearest to my memory, have
yet stamped themselves and their colour on it for
ever. And the record of these five nights is
contained in the following pages.
TREVOR LONSDALE.PART ONE
THE GOLD NIGHTCHAPTER I
THE TAKU INLET
It was just striking three as I came up the
companion-stairs on to the deck of the Cottage
City, into the clear topaz light of a June morning in
Alaska: light that had not failed through all the
night, for in this far northern latitude the sun only
just dips beneath the horizon at midnight for an
hour, leaving all the earth and sky still bathed in
limpid yellow light, gently paling at that mystic time
and glowing to its full glory again as the sun rises
above the rim.
Our steamer had left the open sea and entered the
Taku Inlet, and we were steaming very slowly up it,
surrounded on every side by great glittering blocks
of ice, flashing in the sunshine as they floated by
on the buoyant blue water. How blue it was, the
colouring of sea and sky! Both were so vividly blue,
the note of each so deep, so intense, one seemed
almost intoxicated with colour. I stepped to the
vessel's side, then made my way forward and
stood there; I, the lover of the East, dazzled by the
beauty of the North! The marvellous picture before
me was painted in but three colours, blue, gold,
and white.
The sides of the inlet were jagged lines of white,
the sparkling crystalline whiteness of eternal snowon sharp-pointed, almost lance-like mountain
peaks; the water a broad band of blue, the sky
above a canopy of blue, and there at the end of
the inlet, closing it, like some colossal monster
crouched awaiting us, lay the Muir, the huge
glacier, a solid wedge of ice, white also, but a
transparent white full of blue shadows.
Who shall describe the wonderful air and
atmosphere of the North? Its brilliancy, its delicacy,
its radiant diamond-like clearness? And the silence,
the enchanted stillness of the North? Now as we
crept slowly onwards over the vivid water between
the flashing icebergs, there was no sound.
Complete silence round us, on earth and sea and
in the blue vault above, impressive, glittering
silence. None of the passengers had broken their
sleep to come up to the glory above them, and I
stood alone at the forward part of the vessel gliding
on through this dream of lustrous blue. Slowly we
advanced towards the Muir; very slowly, for these
shining bergs carried death with them if they
should graze hard against the steamer's side, and,
cautiously, steered with infinite pains, the little boat
crept on, zigzagging between them. A frail little toy
of man, it seemed, to venture here alone; small,
black, impertinent atom forcing its way so hardily
into this magnificence of colour, this silent
splendour, this radiant stillness of the North. Into
this very fastness of the most gigantic forces of
Nature it had penetrated, and the sapphire sea
supported it, the transparent light illumined it, the
lance-like mountains looked down upon it, and the
glistening bergs forbore to crush it, as if disdaining