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Locating Memory Photographic Acts 1st Edition Annette
Kuhn Digital Instant Download
Author(s): Annette Kuhn; Kirsten Emiko McAllister
ISBN(s): 9781782381990, 1782381996
Edition: 1
File Details: PDF, 29.47 MB
Year: 2006
Language: english
 Locating
Memory
Copyright © 2006. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Locating Memory : Photographic Acts, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2006. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Remapping Cultural History
General Editor: Jo Labanyi, New York University and University of
Southampton

Published in association with the Institute of Germanic & Romance

Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London

The theoretical paradigms dominant in much of cultural history

published in English tend to be derived from northern European or North
American models. This series will propose alternative mappings by
focusing partly or wholly on those parts of the world that speak, or have
spoken, French, Italian, Spanish or Portuguese. Both monographs and
collective volumes will be published. Preference will be given to volumes
that cross national boundaries, that explore areas of culture that have
previously received little attention, or that make a significant contribution
to rethinking the ways in which cultural history is theorised and narrated.

Cultural Encounters: European Travel Writing in the 1930s

Edited by Charles Burdett and Derek Duncan

Images of Power: Iconography, Culture and the State in Latin America

Edited by Jens Andermann and William Rowe

The Art of the Project: Projects and Experiments in

Modern French Culture
Edited by Johnnie Gratton and Michael Sheringham
Copyright © 2006. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Locating Memory: Photographic Acts

Edited by Annette Kuhn and Kirsten Emiko McAllister

Locating Memory : Photographic Acts, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2006. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Locating
Memory
Photographic Acts

Edited by

Annette Kuhn and Kirsten Emiko McAllister

Copyright © 2006. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Berghahn Books
New York • Oxford

Locating Memory : Photographic Acts, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2006. ProQuest Ebook Central,
Kuhn_final:Kuhn_final 6/16/08 6:35 PM Page iv

First published in 2006 by

Berghahn Books
www.berghahnbooks.com

© 2006, 2008 Annette Kuhn and Kirsten Emiko McAllister

Paperback reprinted in 2008

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the
purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be
reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and
retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written
permission of Berghahn Books.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Locating memory : photographic acts / edited by Annette Kuhn and Kirsten

Emiko McAllister
p. cm. — (Remapping Cultural History ; v. 4)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Copyright © 2006. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

ISBN 9781845452193 (hardback : alk. paper) 9781845452278 (pbk. : alk.

paper)
1. Photography --Philosophy. 2. Photography --Social aspects. 3. Space
and time. 4. History --Sources. I. Kuhn, Annette. II. McAllister, Kirsten
Emiko.

TR183.L63 2006
770 22
2006019693
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Printed in the United States on acid-free paper

978-1-84545-219-3 (hbk), 978-1-84545-227-8 (pbk)

Locating Memory : Photographic Acts, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2006. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Contents

List of Illustrations vii

Acknowledgements xiii

1 Locating Memory: Photographic Acts – An Introduction 1

Annette Kuhn and Kirsten Emiko McAllister

Part I: Identities

2 Re-placing History: Critiquing the Colonial Gaze through 21

Photographic Works by Jeffrey Thomas and Greg Staats
Andrea Walsh

3 Photography, ‘Englishness’ and Collective Memory: 53

The National Photographic Record Association, 1897–1910
Elizabeth Edwards

4 A Story of Escape: Family Photographs from Japanese 81

Canadian Internment Camps
Kirsten Emiko McAllister

Part II: Dis/Locations

5 The Return of the Aura: Contemporary Writers Look Back 113

at the First World War Photograph
Copyright © 2006. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Marlene A. Briggs

6 ‘There Was Never a Camp Here’: Searching for Vapniarka 135

Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer

7 The Space Between: Photography and the Time of 155

Forgetting in the Work of Willie Doherty
Andrew Quick

8 Displaced Events: Photographic Memory and 173

Performance Art
Nick Kaye

Locating Memory : Photographic Acts, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2006. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 vi Contents

Part III: Reframings

9 Vietnam War Photography as a Locus of Memory 201

Patrick Hagopian

10 Speaking the Album: An Application of the 223

Oral-Photographic Framework
Martha Langford

11 Talking Through: This Space Around Four Pictures 247

by Jeff Wall
Jerry Zaslove and Glen Lowry

Bibliography 269

Notes on Contributors 283

Copyright © 2006. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Locating Memory : Photographic Acts, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2006. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 List of Illustrations
2.1 Indians Bound for Cannery Work Boarding SS Princess
Macquinna. Courtesy: British Columbia Archives and
Records Service, D-06893 23
2.2 Harrison River. Chehalis Indians Confirmation Class,
1938. Courtesy: British Columbia Archives and Records
Service, F-00267. 24
2.3 Cowichan Indians Performing Whale Dance, 1945.
Courtesy: British Columbia Archives and Records Service,
I-27569. 25
2.4 Staircase. Jeffrey Thomas. Buffalo, New York, 1981.
Courtesy: Jeffrey Thomas. 28
2.5 Warrior Symbols. Jeffrey Thomas. Buffalo, New York,
1983. Courtesy: Jeffrey Thomas. 30
2.6 Graffiti in a Winnipeg Alley. Jeffrey Thomas. Winnipeg,
Manitoba, 1989. Courtesy: Jeffrey Thomas. 31
2.7 Kam Lee Laundry. Jeffrey Thomas. Buffalo, New York,
1981. Courtesy: Jeffrey Thomas. 32
2.8 Culture Revolution. Jeffrey Thomas. Trent, Ontario, 1984.
Courtesy: Jeffrey Thomas. 35
2.9 I Don’t Have to be a Cowboy. Jeffrey Thomas, assembled
1996. Courtesy: Jeffrey Thomas. 37
Copyright © 2006. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

2.10 Indian Treaty no. 1. Jeffrey Thomas. Lower Fort Garry,

Manitoba, 1989. Courtesy: Jeffrey Thomas. 38
2.11 Founder of the New World. Jeffrey Thomas. Winnipeg,
Manitoba, 1988. Courtesy: Jeffrey Thomas. 39
2.12 Indian Heads. Jeffrey Thomas. Toronto, Ontario, 1994.
Courtesy: Jeffrey Thomas. 41
2.13 Bear. Jeffrey Thomas. Toronto, Ontario, 1995.
Courtesy: Jeffrey Thomas. 42
2.14 Untitled. Jeffrey Thomas. 1984. Courtesy: Jeffrey Thomas 43
2.15 Memories of a Collective Reality – Sour Springs. Greg
Staats. 1995. Courtesy: Winnipeg Art Gallery. 45
2.16 Memories of a Collective Reality – Sour Springs. Greg
Staats. 1995. Courtesy: Winnipeg Art Gallery. 46

Locating Memory : Photographic Acts, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2006. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 viii List of Illustrations

2.17 Untitled. Greg Staats. Six Nations Reserve, Brantford,

Ontario, 2001. Courtesy: Indian Art Centre, Hull, Quebec. 48
2.18 Untitled. Greg Staats. Six Nations Reserve, Brantford,
Ontario, 2001. Courtesy: Indian Art Centre, Hull, Quebec. 48
3.1 Corby Pole Fair, Northamptonshire: Chairing and Poling
the Visitors. Sir Benjamin Stone. May 1902. Platinum print
mounted on card. Courtesy: V&A Images/Victoria and
Albert Museum, E4557-2000. 59
3.2 The Houses of Parliament: The Throne and Royal Chairs
in the House of Lords. Sir Benjamin Stone. 1897. Platinum
print mounted on card. Courtesy: V&A Images/Victoria
and Albert Museum, E3834-2000. 63
3.3 Great Leighs Church, Essex. George Scamell. 1908.
Platinum print mounted on card. Courtesy: V&A
Images/Victoria and Albert Museum, E2218-2000. 65
3.4 Fonts from Gloucestershire Churches: St. Mary’s Church,
Berkley, Tewkesbury Abbey and Holy Trintity Church,
Deerhurst. Mrs Catherine Weed Ward. 1903. Platinum
prints mounted on card. Courtesy: V&A Images/Victoria
and Albert Museum, E2285-2000. 66
3.5 London Street Hawkers: Firewood. Photographer: Edgar
Scamell, 1895. Platinum print mounted on card. Courtesy:
V&A Images/Victoria and Albert Museum, E3603-2000. 67
4.1 Scene from the Lillooet Camp. Circa 1944. Courtesy:
Nakashima family. 81
4.2 Nakashima Family in Vancouver Photography Studio.
Copyright © 2006. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Circa 1937. Courtesy: Nakashima family. 82

4.3 Okada Family in Front of Tar Paper Shack. Circa 1943.
Courtesy: Japanese Canadian National Museum,
JCNM 94/45.005 84
4.4 Homma Family: Slocan Valley. Circa 1945.
Courtesy: Japanese Canadian National Museum,
JCNM 94/88.3.005. 90
4.5 Nakashima Family outside their shack. Circa 1943.
Courtesy: Nakashima family. 96
4.6 Nakashima Family inside their shack. Circa 1945.
Courtesy: Nakashima family. 97

Locating Memory : Photographic Acts, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2006. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 List of Illustrations ix

4.7 Page from the Ezaki photograph album. Circa 1943.

Courtesy: Japanese Canadian National Museum,
JCNM 96/182.1.009, JCNM 96/182.1.010 and
JCNM 96/182.1.011. 103
4.8 Detail of the Ezaki photograph album. Circa 1943.
Courtesy: Japanese Canadian National Museum,
JCNM 96/182.1.011. 103
5.1 Queuing to Recruit. Courtesy: Hulton Archive/Getty
Images. 117
5.2 British Infantry Soldier. Courtesy: Imperial War
Museum, London, Q 23834. 123
5.3 Rfn. Lewis Newton Braddock, 17th (County of London)
Bn., London Regiment, 1894–1918. Courtesy: Terry Castle. 126
5.4 Soldier with Severe Facial Injuries. Courtesy:
Bettmann/CORBIS. 129
6.1 Romania, 1941–42, showing Transnistria. From Radu
Ioanid, The Holocaust in Romania: The Fate of Jews and
Gypsies in Fascist Romania, 1940–1944. Washington,
1999. 136
6.2 Model of Vapniarka. Courtesy: Kibbutz Lohamei
Hageta’ot Museum. 139
6.3 The remaining camp building. Leo Spitzer. July 2000. 144
6.4 David Kessler by the ‘kindergarten’. Leo Spitzer.
July 2000. 145
6.5 Transport to Vapniarka. Moshe Leibel. 1943. Courtesy:
Copyright © 2006. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

David Kessler. 146

6.6 Vapniarka gate. Moshe Leibel and Ilie. 1943. Courtesy:
David Kessler. 146
6.7 Vapniarka gate. Moshe Leibel. 1943. Courtesy: David
Kessler. 147
6.8 Vapniarka building. Aurel Marculescu. 1943. Courtesy:
Kibbutz Lohamei Hageta’ot Museum. 147
6.9 Vapniarka infirmary. Moshe Leibl and Ilie. 1943.
Courtesy: David Kessler. 149
6.10 In Bucharest, after their liberation from Vapniarka and
Transnistria. Front, left to right: Dr Arthur Kessler,
Dr Moritz, Ing. Davidovici; 2nd row, l to r: Polya Dubs,

Locating Memory : Photographic Acts, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2006. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 x List of Illustrations

Dr Dora Bercovici. From Matei Gall, Finsternis:

Dürch Gefängnisse, KZ Wapniarka, Massaker und
Kommunismus. Ein Lebenslauf in Rumänien, 1920–1990.
Konstanz: Hartung-Gorre Verlag, 1999. 150
6.11 The memorial stone. Leo Spitzer. September 2000. 152
7.1 The Other Side. Willie Doherty, 1988. Courtesy: Willie
Doherty. 158
7.2 Last Bastion. Willie Doherty. 1992. Courtesy: Willie
Doherty. 160
7.3 Strategy: Sever/Isolate. Willie Doherty. 1989. Courtesy:
Willie Doherty. 161
7.4 Protecting/Invading. Willie Doherty, 1987. Courtesy:
Willie Doherty. 161
7.5 Blackspot. Willie Doherty, 1997. Courtesy:
Willie Doherty. 163
8.1 RE. Vito Acconci, 1968. Courtesy: Vito Acconci. 177
8.2 Following Piece. Vito Acconci. 1969. Courtesy: Vito
Acconci. 178
8.3 Throw. Vito Acconc. 1969. Courtesy: Vito Acconci. 180
8.4 Blinks. Vito Acconci. 1969. Courtesy: Vito Acconci. 181
8.5 Sitemarker #10. Dennis Oppenheim. 1967. Courtesy:
Dennis Oppenheim. 182
8.6 One Hour Run. Dennis Oppenheim. 1968. Courtesy:
Dennis Oppenheim. 184
Copyright © 2006. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

8.7 Rocked Circle – Fear. Dennis Oppenheim. 1971.

Courtesy: Dennis Oppenheim. 186
8.8 Arm and Wire. Dennis Oppenheim. 1969. Courtesy:
Dennis Oppenheim. 188
8.9-8.10 From Michelangelo Pistoletto, LE STANZE
(THE ROOMS). 1975. Courtesy: Michelangelo
Pistoletto. 190–191
8.11-8.12 From Michelangelo Pistoletto, LE STANZE
(THE ROOMS). 1975. Courtesy: Michelangelo
Pistoletto. 194–195
9.1 Kim Phuc after Napalm Strike, Highway 1, Trang Bang,
June 8, 1972. Nick Ut. Courtesy: AP/Wide World. 204

Locating Memory : Photographic Acts, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2006. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 List of Illustrations xi

9.2 Civilians on a Path at My Lai. Ron Haeberle. 1969.

Courtesy: Ron Haeberle/Life Magazine. 206
9.3 The Immolation of Thich Quang Duc. Malcolm Browne.
1963. Courtesy: AP/Wide World. 209
9.4 General Loan Shooting A Viet Cong Suspect. Eddie
Adams. 1968. Courtesy: AP/Wide World. 210
9.5 ‘South of the DMZ’, [Wounded Soldiers in a Muddy
Battlefield]. Larry Burrows. 1966. Courtesy: Time/Life. 214
9.6 Four More Years, [Anti-war poster reproducing Ron
Haeberle’s photograph of Massacred Civilians on a
Path at My Lai]. Art Workers’ Coalition. 1972. Courtesy:
Collection of the Division of Political History, National
Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. 217
9.7 Electronic Warfare Is Our Business, [Anti-war poster
reproducing Ron Haeberle’s photograph of Civilians on
a Path at My Lai and Philip Jones Griffiths’s photograph
of a Victim of War in Quang Ngai Province]. Courtesy:
Collection of the Division of Political History, National
Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. 218
10.1 Margery Paterson snapshot album, 1925–1945,
page 1 with 5 snapshots. Courtesy: Notman
Photographic Archives, McCord Museum of
Canadian History, Montreal, MP-1999.3.2.1-5. 228
10.2 Margery Paterson snapshot album, 1925–1945,
page 6 with 4 snapshots. Courtesy: Notman
Photographic Archives, McCord Museum of
Copyright © 2006. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Canadian History, Montreal, MP-1999.3.2.5006. 232

10.3 Margery Paterson snapshot album, 1925–1945,
page 14 with 3 snapshots. Courtesy: Notman
Photographic Archives, McCord Museum of
Canadian History, Montreal, MP-1999.3.2.5014. 233
10.4 Margery Paterson snapshot album, 1925–1945,
page 37 with 6 snapshots. Courtesy: Notman
Photographic Archives, McCord Museum of
Canadian History, Montreal, MP-1999.3.2.5037. 234
10.5 Margery Paterson snapshot album, 1925–1945,
page 9 with 5 snapshots. Courtesy: Notman
Photographic Archives, McCord Museum of
Canadian History, Montreal, MP-1999.3.2.5009. 238

Locating Memory : Photographic Acts, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2006. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 xii List of Illustrations

10.6 Margery Paterson snapshot album, 1925–1945,

page 38 with 6 snapshots. Courtesy: Notman
Photographic Archives, McCord Museum of
Canadian History, Montreal, MP-1999.3.2.5038. 239
10.7 Margery Paterson snapshot album, 1925–1945,
page 42 with 6 snapshots. Courtesy: Notman
Photographic Archives, McCord Museum of
Canadian History, Montreal, MP-1999.3.2.5042. 240
10.8 Margery Paterson snapshot album, 1925–1945,
page 40 with 5 snapshots. Courtesy: Notman
Photographic Archives, McCord Museum of
Canadian History, Montreal, MP-1999.3.2.5040. 242
11.1 Swept. Jeff Wall. Transparency in lightbox,
216.2 × 174.8 cm. 1995. Courtesy: Jeff Wall. 248
11.2 Morning Cleaning, Mies van der Rohe Foundation,
Barcelona. Jeff Wall. Transparency in lightbox,
206 × 370 cm. 1999. Courtesy: Jeff Wall. 253
11.3 The Storyteller. Jeff Wall. Transparency in lightbox,
229 × 437 cm. 1986. Courtesy: Jeff Wall. 259
11.4 Bad Goods. Jeff Wall. Transparency in lightbox,
229 × 347cm. 1985. Courtesy: Jeff Wall. 263
Copyright © 2006. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Locating Memory : Photographic Acts, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2006. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Acknowledgements
The initial inspiration for Locating Memory: Photographic Acts came
from a symposium of that title co-organised by us in the Institute for
Cultural Research at Lancaster University. A number of the contributors
to this volume took part in that event as speakers or respondents. We are
greatly indebted to them for their continued enthusiasm for, and support
of, the ‘Locating Memory’ project.
The symposium was supported by funding from the British Academy;
Canada Council for the Arts; and the University Research Committee, the
Faculty of Social Sciences and the Institute for Cultural Research (ICR)
at Lancaster University. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research
Council of Canada funded the postdoctoral fellowship which enabled
Kirsten McAllister to pursue her research on photography and Canadian
Second World War internment camps at Lancaster. Students and
members of the academic and administrative staff in the ICR who
contributed to the organisation of the symposium included: Rachel
Clarke, Joanne Mitchell, June Rye and Scott Wilson. We owe a special
debt of thanks to all the speakers, as well as to the respondents and
symposium participants. In particular, alongside the contributors to this
volume, we would like to acknowledge the assistance of Canada House,
London and Folly Gallery, Lancaster; as well as Rosemary Betterton,
Anne-Marie Fortier, Gerald McMaster, Maureen McNeil and Jackie
Stacey. In conjunction with the symposium, the Scott Gallery at
Lancaster University hosted a reception and an installation, ‘Concerning
Memory’, by video artist Cate Elwes.
Copyright © 2006. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

In producing this book, we have enjoyed support and assistance from

many organisations and individuals, among them the Office of Research
Services at Simon Fraser University, The Faculty of Arts and Social
Sciences Research and Enterprise Fund Committee at Lancaster
University, Kate Hodgkin, Kate Milberry, Glen Lowry and Zoe Druick. We
are grateful to the authors, artists, and individual and institutional owners
of rights who gave us permission to reproduce the photographs and poems
discussed in the chapters that follow: see the List of Illustrations for credits.
For permission to reprint poems discussed in Chapter 5, thanks to Farrar,
Strauss and Giroux (U.S.) and Faber (U.K.). Photographs in Chapter 8 for
Michelangelo Pistoletto’s ‘LE STANZE’ are by Paolo Mussat Sartor with
English translation of the text by Malcolm Skey. ‘LE STANZE’ was first
published in Italian and English by TAU/MA in Bologna. This version was
subsequently reprinted by Routledge in Nick Kaye, Site-Specific Art:

Locating Memory : Photographic Acts, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2006. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 xiv Acknowledgements

Performance, Place and Documentation (2000). Michelangelo Pistoletto

retains copyright over ‘LE STANZE’.
We would like, finally, to extend special thanks to two colleagues whose
support and encouragement have remained unfailing throughout. Through
their example as dedicated and generous scholars of cultural memory, as
well as in innumerable practical ways, Jo Labanyi and Susannah Radstone
have been the ‘angels’ of the ‘Locating Memory’ project.

Annette Kuhn
Kirsten Emiko McAllister
August 2005
Copyright © 2006. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Locating Memory : Photographic Acts, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2006. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Chapter 1

Locating Memory
Photographic Acts – An Introduction

Annette Kuhn and Kirsten Emiko McAllister

As a visual medium, the photograph has many culturally resonant

properties that it shares with no other medium. Above all, the photograph
is widely held to be a record, a piece of evidence that something
happened at some time, somewhere – in the time and the place in front of
the camera. Unlike cinema, the photograph holds this recorded moment
in stillness, capturing and offering up for contemplation a trace of
something lost, lending it a ghostly quality. In this sense, the photograph
confronts us with the fleeting nature of our world and reminds us of our
mortality. In seeming to capture times and places lost in the past, the
photograph can disturb the present moment and the contemporary
landscape with troubling or nostalgic memories and with forgotten, or all
too vividly remembered, histories.
Copyright © 2006. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

The essays in this collection develop innovative strategies for reading

photographs: strategies that capture the shadowy presence of what has
been forgotten, lost or eradicated in contemporary landscapes. The
authors work with war photographs, family snapshots, images of
colonised landscapes and art photography, examining them in situ: where
they were found in archives, private collections, art galleries; or as they
circulate intertextually and internationally across time and across
multiple media. The authors literally locate – place – the images in the
social world, bringing them ‘to life’. They outline the ideological and
institutional systems through which the photographs are produced,
ordered and stored for future generations. They trace the movement of the
images across time as they pass between family and community members
and between different audiences, accruing meaning and affect even as the
details of names and places begin to fade. Some of the authors use

Locating Memory : Photographic Acts, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2006. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 2 Annette Kuhn and Kirsten Emiko McAllister

photographs as a means to return to a moment or place in the past that

troubles their own memories. But in such attempts to return, photographs
do not always disclose clues, nor lead us to the sites we imagine, nor
release us from what lies in the silences and the ambivalent traces
imprinted onto their surfaces.1 Other contributors examine photographic
installations by postcolonial and conceptual artists that work as
‘provocations’,2 intervening in the relations of looking through which
we locate ourselves in, as well as construct, our social landscapes,
unravelling the collective forms of remembering and denial that lodge us
in place.
As the photographs are brought ‘to life’, we are brought closer to
them. Even when they are disturbing, they appear familiar. Faded
snapshots of unknown families and portraits of long-dead soldiers can be
found in many an old family album, local museum or fleamarket.
Landscape photographs, whether records of a Nazi concentration camp in
Eastern Europe, archival records of landmarks from pre-industrial
England, or images of the marginal urban zones occupied by displaced
Aboriginal people, make us wonder about similar sites in the places we
now inhabit. Could the ruins of a factory or the neat rows of shacks in a
nearby town be the remains of a concentration camp or a detention
centre? Do the contours of a town mark the presence of an older
settlement obliterated in the process of colonisation? Iconic photographs
of the Vietnam War, images of sites of violence in Northern Ireland and
of monumental modern architectural spaces also elicit a sense of
recognition, but for other reasons. War photographs are part of our
everyday mediascape, just as modern architecture can be found in cities
across the globe. Once we begin to question their ubiquity, the insidious
Copyright © 2006. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

flow of capital and knowledge across borders begins to emerge into

consciousness.

The chapters in Locating Memory: Photographic Acts address a number

of key questions. As a medium of representation, in what ways does
photography recover or, alternatively, repress forgotten histories that
shape our social landscapes? As a visual practice, can photography be
deployed to interrupt the processes of reification, commodification and
the colonial gaze that position us in the social world? Following from
this, can photographs be the locus of corporeal – embodied – memories,
or do they privilege a disembodied gaze? Underlying these questions are
issues prominent in early twentieth-century discussions about the
properties of photography as a medium in relation to ‘human sense
perception’. In his influential essay, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction’, Walter Benjamin wrote that

Locating Memory : Photographic Acts, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2006. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Locating Memory: An Introduction 3

the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence.
The manner in which human sense perception is organised, the medium in which it is
accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well.3

Those historical circumstances, as Benjamin himself demonstrated,

include not only the rapid expansion of industrialisation, the
commodification of culture and the rise of fascism, but also the efforts of
writers and artists to create innovative ways to employ, as well as to read,
visual media such as the photograph.
Writing during the 1920s and 1930s, in the period of catastrophic
economic and political change following the Great War, Siegfried
Kracauer and Walter Benjamin described how photography was in many
ways paradigmatic of the dual potential of modern memory.4 On the one
hand, with regard to mass culture, Kracauer noted that the
aim of the illustrated newspapers is the complete reproduction of the world accessible to
the photographic apparatus … [The photographs might appear to] remind us of the original
object …. But the flood of images sweeps away the dams of memory. The assault of this
mass of images is so powerful that it threatens to destroy the potentially existing awareness
of crucial traits.5

On the other hand, both Kracauer and Benjamin were fascinated by the
properties of photography as deployed by avant-garde artists.6 Kracauer
claims that photographic images differ from ‘memory images’, which
‘retain what is given only insofar as [they have] significance’, but their
meaning will be ‘opaque’ as long as the images remain ‘embedded in the
uncontrolled life of the drives’.7 In contrast, photographic images can
present ‘the inert world in its independence from human beings … .
[allowing us to recognise] the provisional nature of all given
Copyright © 2006. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

configurations, and perhaps even to awaken an inkling of the right order

of the inventory of nature’.8 Likewise, Benjamin claimed that
‘[photography] makes aware for the first time the optical unconscious,
just as psychoanalysis discloses the instinctual unconsciousness’: the
invisible structures of seeing through which we view our worlds and
through which they have been in part constituted.9 Benjamin describes
how the photographic records of Paris made by Eugène Atget during the
early twentieth century make us aware of these invisible structures of
seeing. Atget refused to draw on established structures of seeing –
bourgeois genres and aesthetic forms – and instead ‘sought to strip reality
of its camouflage’10 in order to generate new modes of perception.

What of visual culture today? Is the way that photography is deployed in

contemporary visual culture paradigmatic of the complexities of
postmodern memory? Does the proliferation of photographic images of

Locating Memory : Photographic Acts, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2006. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 4 Annette Kuhn and Kirsten Emiko McAllister

people and places from other times and places offer a pleasurable retreat
into endless re-fabrications of one’s own past and self-identity? Or is
there potential for a radical politics with, for example, tactics for
recognising the fragmented, contradictory, stories and the excluded
voices amidst the plenitude: stories and voices that demand that we
acknowledge multiple ways of seeing and that, in turn, question the basis
for our own subject positions and social order?
In this volume, developing tactics for recognising other voices and ways
of seeing is particularly important for contributors who are working with
photography and memories of violent events. They explore how photographs
may be creatively employed in (post)memory projects of reworking the
traumatic experiences of past generations: experiences that continue to haunt
the present. ‘Postmemory’, a concept developed by Marianne Hirsch
specifically with respect to the children of Holocaust survivors,
characterises the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded
their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous
generation shaped by traumatic events that can neither be understood nor recreated.11

The ability to recognise the layers of other voices and gazes in the painful
and often confusing postmemories that trouble the children of survivors
is crucial in their struggle to mourn, and so to transform their relations to
the violence of the past. This brings to the fore the ethical issues raised by
the uses of, and the relations of looking implied in, the very varied
photographs discussed in these essays; and indeed many of the authors
self-reflexively question the methods they develop for interpreting
photographs and for presenting their texts as memory work.
Locating Memory: Photographic Acts contributes to a growing debate
Copyright © 2006. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

around cultural memory, a debate in which ‘cultural memorialisation [is

viewed] as an activity occurring in the present, in which the past is
continuously modified and re-described even as it continues to shape the
future’.12 At the same time, it is a contribution to the study of visual culture,
where the field of the cultural takes into account the history, infrastructures
and effectivities of visual technologies, as well as the material and social
resources at work in their operation.13 Distinctively, however, it brings
research on cultural memory and visual culture to bear on the analysis of
photographs and photography, drawing on three strands of analysis.
First, a concern with vision and with relations of domination draws, on
the one hand, on Foucault’s studies of knowledge/power and, on the other,
on postcolonial studies of the gaze.14 This strand focuses on the role of
photography in the production of modern knowledge, where sight
operates as the foundation of a system of classification and control; and,
relatedly, on the role of photography in producing colonial knowledge

Locating Memory : Photographic Acts, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2006. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Locating Memory: An Introduction 5

structured by the desire and the gaze of the coloniser. Secondly, the
collection draws on the contributions of feminist theorists and Holocaust
scholars who, in the process of analysing the discourses deployed through
photography, interrogate their own investments in the images they
study.15 These scholars create new methods of analysis, novel narrative
strategies, and ways of engaging with photographs that fundamentally
challenge existing power structures. The third strand, as suggested above,
draws on earlier phenomenological studies of photography by Roland
Barthes, Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer,16 the last two writing
when electronic communication technologies began to capture the
public’s imagination, superseding the wonder that older mechanical
technologies, like the camera and phonograph, once held.17 While
Benjamin mourns the loss of aura in the age of science and mechanical
reproduction, both he and Kracauer note that photographs still bear
material traces of the phenomena recorded by the camera. This work is
concerned with the way photography, as a visual technology, raises
existential and epistemological questions – questions about the nature of
existence and about how we can know the world, questions about how
photography can become implicated in our knowing the world.18
In common with recent studies that consider the cultural, as well as the
institutional and social, uses of photography,19 the essays which follow
are concerned with how images operate in specific locations. Paying
close attention to the settings in which the photographs were made and
have subsequently been used – whether these be family collections,
public archives, museums, political campaigns, newspapers, or art
galleries – they consider how meanings in photographs may be shifted,
challenged and renewed over time and for different purposes, from
Copyright © 2006. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

historical inquiries to quests for personal, familial, postcolonial and

national identities.
All these essays develop distinctive innovative strategies for working
with photographs – not only as texts, but also as visual practices,
mnemonic devices, repositories of collective knowledge and powerful
imagery that mediates social realities. Nick Kaye, Andrew Quick, Andrea
Walsh, and Jerry Zaslove and Glen Lowry all focus on the practices of
recent and contemporary visual artists who use photographs to intervene in
the modern gaze that classifies and orders, as well as commodifies, the
very event (and/or the image itself as art) being recorded. The ‘ocular
mastery’20 that permits possession of and control over subjects, events and
territories is challenged in different ways in the work of such varied artists
as Jeff Wall, Vito Acconci, Greg Staats, Jeffrey Thomas and Willie Doherty.
The contributions by Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer, Marlene
Briggs and Kirsten McAllister approach the photograph as a visual object

Locating Memory : Photographic Acts, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2006. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 6 Annette Kuhn and Kirsten Emiko McAllister

that can be incorporated into imaginative (post)memory projects as a

mnemonic device. These authors describe how those haunted by ‘family
secrets’,21 political persecution and the wars of previous generations can
use photographs in memory work, to challenge, critically and creatively,
silences and collective myths and create new stories and relations to the
past. In the contributions by Elizabeth Edwards, Martha Langford,
Andrea Walsh and Kirsten McAllister, the role of photographic archives
as repositories of collective memory is examined: photographs are
analysed both as visual documents and as sets of records collected and
preserved by institutional bodies (structured by similar contradictions of
the institutional politics and interests which are also inherent in national
projects of remembrance). While colonial and state institutions have used
photography as a means to accurately monitor, assess and either
‘improve’ or isolate deviant subjects in projects to produce modern
populations, these authors show that as a medium, photographs are far
from transparent documents that can offer veracity. Like memory, they
provide only partial, incomplete narratives. Both Edwards and Walsh
show that photographs used in national projects ultimately fail to capture
their ‘subject matter’, whether heritage sites or indigenous people. Walsh,
Langford and McAllister explore how these records can be critically
reread years later and how new generations of artists can appropriate
photography to re-member the shadowy presence of those violently
extricated from the social landscape.
Patrick Hagopian, Andrew Quick, Marlene Briggs, Marianne Hirsch
and Leo Spitzer, Nick Kaye, and Jerry Zaslove and Glen Lowry consider
how photographs mediate our apprehension of reality. Hagopian and
Briggs artfully trace the changing meanings of war images and memories
Copyright © 2006. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

of senseless battlefield carnage, as the images move across different

media over time. In the poetic memory work of Hirsch and Spitzer, a
photograph operates less as a representation than as a threshold on their
journey to find a Nazi concentration camp, opening up an entry to a
route across unknown territory. Zaslove and Lowry, and Quick, examine
art that disrupts the dominant ways of seeing typified by photorealism
and by neoclassical pictorial genres which position us as voyeurs in
relation to scenes of violence and exploitation. By contrast, Kaye
considers how photographic records of work by conceptual artists
function in effect to refuse access to the original works, not only to
subvert their commodification but also, at a metaphysical level, to
question established notions about the nature of presence.
As inspiration for new creative, scholarly and curatorial activities, all the
essays in Locating Memory: Photographic Acts explore the emancipatory
potential for reframing, through photographic acts, our ‘normative’

Locating Memory : Photographic Acts, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2006. ProQuest Ebook Central,
Other documents randomly have
different content
Cheviot. “She’s as happy in a ‘norther’ as one o’ my windmills.” And
he sent a rattling laugh after them as they two went down the
swinging deck.
“How different everybody looks to-day—it’s the sunshine.”
“Yes, I think they do look different.” But he did not say it was the
sunshine.
“I don’t see my Blumpitty, nor, what’s more important, Mrs.
Locke.”
“That’s the woman you’re so much with?”
“Yes. It looks as if she’d gone below.” What did it matter? Nothing
mattered now. Miss Mar had a distinct sense of repressing a quite
foolish sense of radiant content, not to say elation. How this having
a friend along lit up the rude and sordid ship! Not the first time this
particular friend had wrought this particular miracle in her sight. The
fact that Louis’s eyes rested on things constrained them to reveal an
“interestingness” unsuspected before.
“There are my three financiers,” she whispered. “They aren’t as
splendid as your Don Quixote, but they’re very nice to me at table.”
“I’m relieved to hear you’ve found some one who contrives to be
‘nice’ there. I’ve wondered how you were getting on,” he chuckled.
The temptation to confess was strong upon her. But no. Even
Louis would be obliged to say, “I told you so.”
“At first,” she said, with the detached air of the investigator, “I
watched my neighbors, because everything they did was so
surprising. But by and by I got so I could see nice distinctions and
fine shades. Some of the roughest-looking haven’t by any means the
roughest manners.”
“Oh, you’ve discovered that, have you?”
“Yes. This man here”—it was necessary to draw close and to
whisper again—“he’s Mr. Simeon Peters, from Idaho. He shouted
across the table to me at dinner yesterday to pass the butter. He
was just plunging his own knife into it as everybody at our table
does.”
“As everybody at every table does,” Cheviot corrected.
“Well, but wait. You don’t know how elegant we are down at our
end. Mr. Sim Peters hesitated, and you could see a misgiving
dawning behind his spectacles. He drew back just before he reached
the butter-dish, and carefully and very thoroughly he licked his knife
the whole length of the blade. Yes! Then he felt quite happy about
plunging it in the public butter.” She was able to laugh now at what
had driven her from the table in that dark yesterday. Louis laughed,
too; he even carried his genial good-will the excessive length of
joining in the conversation of those same financiers.
“Did you succeed in getting your plant on board?” he asked the
nearest of the trio.
“Yes. But we had to pay another fellow to take off half his stuff to
make room for ours,” said financier number two.
“What process have you got?”
“Oh, the McKeown,” said number three.
“And it’s the greatest ever?”
“That’s right,” said all three together.
But why, Hildegarde wondered, why did he talk to financiers,
when he might talk to her?
“Them innercents think that about the McKeown,” said a grizzled
man across Cheviot’s shoulder, “only jest becuz they ain’t never seen
the Dingley workin’.”
“You got the Dingley?” Cheviot asked; just as though it mattered.
“No good goin’ to Nome ’nless y’ have got the Dingley.” And while
Cheviot lingered to hear just why it was the Dingley could “lick
creation,” Hildegarde leaned against the stanchion, watching him
with that interest the better-born American woman commonly feels
in seeing something of what she has less opportunity for than any
member of her sex in Europe, viz., the way her men folk bear
themselves with men. She had the sense that again the American
enjoys in its quiddity, of making acquaintance with a new creature,
while observing her old friend in this new light. Cheviot was not only
at his ease with these people, he put them at ease with him. They
were content to reveal themselves, even eager before the task. Was
it because he looked “a likely customer,” or did men commonly turn
to him? Now Mr. Isaiah Joslin and his sour-dough friend were
pushing in between Hildegarde and the group where Cheviot had
been buttonholed. Joslin was scoffing at the Dingley as well as the
McKeown. “Yes, sir!”—he demanded Cheviot’s attention by striking
his fist in his palm under that gentleman’s nose—“I’ll do more with a
plain rocker that any feller can make for himself out of a store box
and three sticks, than all these cheechalkers and their new-fangled
machines.”
“Maybe that’s so,” said a broad, squat Ohioan, the man Hildegarde
had noticed before, going about the ship with a tiny bottle, a little
square of sheet copper, and a deal of talk. “Maybe that’s right. But
you old sour-doughs lost a terrible lot o’ leaf and flour gold
whenever you didn’t use amalgam plates in your rockers.”
“’Tain’t so easy gittin’ plates.”
“’Tis now!” said the Ohioan, producing, as it were, automatically,
his little square of copper and his bottle of fluid.
“Quicksilver, isn’t it?” Hildegarde came nearer Cheviot to ask.
“Quacksilver, I guess,” but still he followed the discussion about
the McKeown “process” as though Hildegarde had been a hundred
miles away.
“Now, you just time me,” the Ohioan was challenging Cheviot. “I
can silver-plate this copper in twenty seconds by the watch.” And he
did it. The only person there who was not a witness to the triumph
was the girl whose clear eyes seemed to follow the process with a
look of flattering interest. Should she, after all, tell Louis, not how
glad, but just that she was glad of his coming? Hadn’t he earned
that much? Not that he seemed to care greatly about
acknowledgments from her. He seemed to have forgotten her
existence already, and they hadn’t been together twenty minutes. All
the simpler, then!
“I tell you what!”—the Ohioan had raised his voice and enlarged
his sphere of influence—“I tell you there’s a lot o’ poor prospectors
would have been rich men to-day if only I’d discovered sooner how
to make amalgam plates this easy and this cheap.”
“Cheap, is it?”
“Yes, a damned lot cheaper than losin’ half your gold. Cheaper
than linin’ your rockers—yes, and your sluices, too, with silver dollars
as some fellers did. Now, this little piece of copper”—he produced a
new bit—“a child can turn that into an amalgam plate by my
process. Here, let the lady show you.” Before Hildegarde knew what
was happening, the fragment of metal was in her hand and the
owner had tipped the tiny bottle till a drop of the liquid ran out on
the copper. “Quick! Rub it all over.”
As she did so, she saw that Cheviot’s attention was now
undividedly hers. He did not look as if he altogether approved her
acting as show woman. But not to disappoint the inventor,
Hildegarde rubbed the silvered tip of her finger lightly and evenly
over the copper. “Why, yes!” she cried out. “Look!” And as she held
up the miraculous result the Ohioan roared with satisfaction, “Ain’t I
been tellin’ you?” The copper was turned into a sheet of silver. “Rub
and rub as hard as you like now”—he passed the object-lesson
round—“you can no more budge a particle of that stuff than you can
rub off triple plate. And that’s what you want to line your rockers
with!”
“Looks like that silverin’ business might be worth somethin’.”
“Worth a clean million,” says the Ohioan, as he pocketed his bottle
of miracle and walked jauntily away in the sunshine.
Hildegarde and Cheviot, exchanging smiles, went on down the
deck in his wake. But suddenly the Ohioan stopped and wheeled
about in the direction of a voice that had just said: “No, siree, I ain’t
worrittin’ with no Dingley and no nothin’ I ain’t never tried.” The
inventor of amalgam-plated copper, as though he’d heard himself
called by name, retraced his steps with a precipitation that nearly
capsized Miss Mar. The gentleman who had just declined Dingley
squared his shoulders and announced to all and sundry: “No, siree!
Y’ got to show me. I’m from Missoura.” Hildegarde caught at
Cheviot’s arm. “They’ve got hold of our saying!”
“Oh, that’s everybody’s saying now,” he answered. “I’ve heard it
twenty times since I came on board.” She waited, incredulous,
listening. “If I got any minin’ to do,” the man from Missouri went on,
“give me Swain’s Improved Amalgamator every time. D’ye know
what they done to test Swain’s Improved Amalgamator?”
“Nop.”
“Well, lemme tell yer. They took a gold dollar and they pulverized
it.”
“I’ve pulverized many a dollar in my day,” says a gloomy and
familiar voice. While the deck chuckled with sympathy. Hildegarde
whispered, “That’s my Blumpitty.”
“Well, sir,” the other went on unmoved, “they passed that dollar in
gold dust that I’m tellin’ y’ ’bout, they passed it through a sixty-mesh
sieve, and they mixed it good and thorough with a ton—a ton, sir, of
gravel and sand. And they run that through Swain’s Improved Gold
Amalgamator, and what do you think they got?”
“Guess,” says Mr. Blumpitty, “they got to know that any feller can
pulverize a dollar—”
“Haw, haw.”
“—but it’s the daisy that can pick one up.”
“Well, sir, Swain’s Improved Amalgamator’s jest that kind of a
daisy. It picked up jest exactly ninety-eight cents out of that gold
dollar.” And every owner of a rival invention roared with derision.
 “Oh, Mr. Purser!” Louis Napoleon Brown was hailed with a
suddenness that arrested his steps, but did not deprive him of his
haughty mien. “I find I owe you an apology,” said Miss Mar.
His sternness of visage relaxed slightly. “Well, you have treated
me mighty mean,” he admitted in a low voice.
Cheviot was staring and making his way to the girl.
“Yes,” she said, with a subdued air that might, to the purser, have
seemed to be penitential, but she spoke so that Cheviot could hear,
“You must have thought it very forward of me to call you ‘Louis,’ that
first evening. I meant this gentleman, who is an old friend of mine.
I’ve only just realized how mystified you must have been.”
Wherewith she took Cheviot’s arm, and away the two went, leaving
the purser transfixed.
Oh, the sun-warmed wind blowing in your face! Oh, this seeing
the brave world, with a friend at your side!
“I don’t remember you at meals,” she said to him.
“I never was at meals.”
“Where did you eat?”
“Up in the captain’s room.”
“Well, you won’t any more, will you?”
“I don’t know.”
“You want us to eat apart!”
“I don’t ‘want.’ But I can’t turn anybody out of his seat, and
they’re all taken.”
Well, if he were content with this arrangement it hardly behooved
her to protest. “Come and be introduced to my Blumpitty. I can tell
from the look on his face exactly what he’s talking about.”
“What?”
“Come and listen.”
 “Ya-as,” Blumpitty was saying, ostensibly to Governor Reinhart,
but really to a distinguished and rapidly increasing circle, “Ya-as,
queerest feller ever I see.”
“Who was?”
“Why, the feller I found dyin’ on the coast up above Cape Polaris.
The man that gave me the tip. I can see that feller now. Couldn’t get
his face out o’ my head fur months. His eyes—used t’ see them eyes
in my sleep.” Blumpitty paused, and seemed to struggle feebly with
an incubus. “Never see such eyes in any man’s head ’fore nor since.”
Again he paused an instant to think out something. “Reckon it
makes a man look like that.”
“What does?” demanded the Governor.
“Knockin’ up agin the Mother Lode.”
“Oh, the Mother Lode!” said Reinhart, slightingly.
“Ya-as; those of us that’s practical miners”—his look weeded out
the Governor—“guess we all know that every bit o’ gold that’s found
its way to the creek bottoms and the coast, it’s all come from the
Mother Lode, off there in them low ground—down hills to the North.”
The breathless respect with which this information was received
by the rest, was broken in upon by the Governor’s roaring a great
infidel laugh. “Why, Joslin, here, tells me the gold comes out o’ the
sea!”
“Maybe he believes it,” says Blumpitty, sympathetically.
“Believe it!” bellowed Isaiah, sticking his head over Dr. Daly’s
shoulder. “So’ll you believe it when you get to Nome. The further out
you go at low tide the richer you’ll find it.”
Blumpitty’s pale-eyed pity for his delusion seemed to get on
Joslin’s nerves.
“Wasn’t I there when Jake Hitz and Tough Nut went way out with
a wheelbarra’?”
“Any man can go out with a wheelbarra’,” said Blumpitty.
 “Yes, but it ain’t every man can come back with pay dirt and rock
out what they did.”
Blumpitty just smiled.
“Twenty-two hundred dollars, sir!”
“Guess you weren’t watchin’ which way they went for that dirt?”
said one of the capitalists.
“That’s right!” laughed his partner. “Tough Nut must have got that
twenty-two hundred out of the tundra.”
“Hope that isn’t where you fellows count on findin’ gold,” said
Joslin, sympathetically.
“We just about are.”
“Why, don’t you know the tundra’s froze the year round?”
“That’s why we’re takin’ up thawin’ machines—$90,000 worth.”
“Might as well take up ninety thousand pianners and play toons to
the tundra.”
As though this idea had some special significance for him, a
poorly-dressed boy detached himself from the group with a cheerful
whistling of the eternal Boulanger march.
“There’s a hell of a lot o’ machinery goin’; I ain’t sorry I’m takin’ in
chickens m’self,” observed Hildegarde’s table companion.
Cheviot caught the eye of the whistling boy as he went by. “What
are you taking in?”
The boy held up a banjo. “This!” he laughed, and went briskly
back to the dancers in the steerage.
Hildegarde smiled into Cheviot’s eyes. “Wasn’t that nice?” How
easily he made people say amusing, revealing things. “Do you notice
how happy everybody looks to-day?”
“Yes,” he admitted. “The Los Angeles is a pretty dismal place, but
most of these people have been happier on this horrible ship than
they’ve been for years. Happier, some of them, than they’ve ever
been before.”
She didn’t quite like him to speak so of the Los Angeles. Yesterday
she would have agreed. But to-day—“How do you know they’re
happier here?” (Shame on him if he wasn’t. But it was just as well.
Oh, much simpler!)
“Talk to them and you’ll see. Everybody on the ship has had the
worst luck you ever heard of; and all through ‘circumstances over
which’!” His voice made a period, with that old trick of assuming a
phrase complete, when you could finish it for yourself. “Even those
that look prosperous like you and me, they’ve all failed at the main
business of life.”
So far as she was concerned in this review she felt only
impatience at his going back upon old loss and pain. What if you
have been sorry and sad. It wasn’t the part of a friend to remind you
of it. But if Louis must talk of failure here was a ship-load of it! She
told herself this thought was the hag that was riding her happiness
down. She looked round her. The world was a pretty terrible place,
after all, “for the mass,” that Mrs. Locke had taunted her with not
caring about. The wind blew out a wisp of straight, fair hair till it
played like a golden flame above the brim of her hat of Lincoln-
green.
“A whole ship-load of failure!” she said aloud. A sense of the grim
business life was for “the mass” pressed leaden, and the scarlet
mouth closed pitiful upon the words, “Poor, poor people!” But
Cheviot, with his eyes on that beguiling little flame of gold, was
ready to reassure her. It didn’t matter if every soul on board had
seen unmerciful disaster follow fast and follow faster, up to the hour
he set foot upon the ship. Hildegarde needn’t waste her pity. Look at
their faces, listen to them making incantations with McKeown and
Dingley. Anything would do to work the spell. Why? Because the
place they were bound for had the immense advantage of being
unknown. No one could say of any of these contrivances, “It’s been
tried.” “Not a soul on the ship but has his thawing machine or his
banjo, or—”
“Or her black cook.”
He nodded. How well they understood each other, “Some
talisman.”
“What’s ours?” said the girl quickly.
“Our what?”
“Our talisman.”
“Oh, I wasn’t thinking of us.”
“Think now.”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, I know what mine is.”
“You won’t tell me, I suppose.”
“Why not?” She spoke lightly, even a little teasingly. “It’s a sort of
rough diamond, my talisman. Or”—her sunny look flashed in his face
—“perhaps it’s adamant. Which is the most unyielding?” Then, with
sudden gravity, “It’s a wonderful thing, the trust you make people
feel. Nothing can shake it.”
“I thought we were talking about talismans.”
“It makes every difficult thing seem easy. And it makes every
dangerous thing seem safe.”
“Well, it’s the very last effect I intend to produce!”
She swept his declaration aside. “Impossible to feel anything can
go very wrong now that you’re here.”
His face was so unmoved by this handsome tribute that she found
herself venturing further. “I don’t know why I should pretend I don’t
appreciate. I’ve been so afraid these last days—”
He caught at that. “Afraid, were you?”
 “Afraid that one of us two would die before I had a chance to tell
you.” Should she go on? She had meant to write—it was different
saying it.
“Tell me what?”
“That I’ve got over minding your having opposed me so.” If she
expected any outburst of joy on his part she was denied the
spectacle. “I’ve come to understand such a lot of things on board
this ship.” She waited an instant, but he leaned over the railing quite
silent, staring down into the water. “Among other things,” she went
on, “I see when I look back that you’ve always been the one to bring
me strength. A feeling that I’d set my feet upon the rock—”
“And it wasn’t rock, after all, what you set your feet on,” he said
quietly.
She tightened her hands on the railing, and something like veiled
warning crept into the words: “You’ve made me feel safer, Louis,
than any one else in the world. I owe you a great deal for that.”
“Oh, owe!” He turned away impatiently.
Not the sea-birds sweeping so low over the water that their white
feather brooms raised a dust of silver in the sunlight; not the motley
crew upon the ship half as clear to the girl’s vision as that little figure
with the flags in his hat patroling a deserted street in the dawn.
“One reason people depend on you so is, I suppose, because they
see as I do, it isn’t only that you’re good to some particular one.
You’d be good to anybody.”
“Oh, would I!”
“Just as you gave up your Fourth of July to be watchman for the
neighbor’s boy.”
“How did you get hold of that yarn?”
“Barbara—”
“Well, look here”—he moved his square shoulders uneasily, like
one in an ill-fitting coat. “Look here, if you’re thinking of trying to
make a hero out of me—it isn’t any earthly—”
“Hero? Nonsense. We were talking about talismans,” she said, with
recovered gaiety. “I haven’t brought along a machine of any sort,
and I haven’t got a black cook. Not even a banjo! But I’ve got a
friend!” she triumphed. “So I can’t be scared now any more than the
rest of the wild adventurers.”
“Then you were scared?”
“Oh, here she is! Mrs. Locke! This is ‘the sort o’ watchman’ I was
telling you about.”
In the act of holding out her hand, the woman’s delicate face took
on that marble look that once or twice Hildegarde had seen there.
And the hand dropped before it reached Cheviot’s.
Hildegarde looked from one to the other. “Why, what is it?”
“We have met before,” said Mrs. Locke.
“When was that?”
“On the Seattle wharf.”
“Oh, I didn’t remember.”
“I do. You are the man who nearly broke my arm.”
 CHAPTER XX
rs. Locke had gone below and left them staring at one
another.
“I haven’t the smallest recollection of the woman.”
She clutched at hope. “You couldn’t have been the
one.”
“She doesn’t seem to have much doubt about it.”
“But you didn’t—I’m sure you didn’t.”
“I certainly did push my way about in that crowd.”
“So did everybody.”
“I’m afraid it stands to reason a man does that kind of thing more
effectually than a woman. Your Mrs. What’s-her-name may be right.”
“Oh, Louis!”
“If she is, I’m sorry.”
“You simply couldn’t have—”
“Well, I don’t know. I remember perfectly, I was frantic at not
finding you.”
Ashamed of the warmth his words brought welling up about her
heart—“And you didn’t think much of the women you did find. Yes, I
remember what you said about the women who go on this sort of
journey. But you’re wrong, you see. I know them now.”
He made no answer. Just stood there, hands in pockets, arctic cap
rolled back, so that it sat turban-like on the crown of his head; the
perplexity in the face giving way to a somewhat dogged good-
temper that declined to be ruffled by the incident.
 “Some of the women are just as—are more deserving of being
treated well than I am.”
“Oh, I dare say some of them are all right.” He leaned against the
railing, his square chin lifted, and he studied the man in the crow’s-
nest—but he went on saying in that cool way, “I’m not denying that
I would have broken any number of bones rather than not get to
you in time to save you from coming to harm.”
“Oh, don’t say it! That’s exactly what Mrs. Locke thinks.”
“Oh, Mrs. Locke!”—he moved his shoulders impatiently—“I’m sorry
if she got hurt. But in my opinion neither of you ought to have been
there. Don’t think my view about that is altered by your having come
off scot free so far. You see somebody did suffer.”
“Mrs. Locke.”
“It’s just a chance it wasn’t you.”
“Don’t you see that it wouldn’t be a chance if men treated all
women as well as you’d have treated me?”
“Men would have to feel about all women as I feel about you
before that could come about, and that wouldn’t even be desirable.
It certainly isn’t practical politics.”
“Oh, I wish I were clever and could argue. I know there are things
to say only I don’t see how to put them.”
“There’s this to say”—he stood up, a little impatiently—“I’ve never
posed as a passive individual. If I see things in my way I”—he made
an expressive little gesture—“I set them aside. If I hurt Mrs. Locke in
setting her aside, I’m sorry. But women have no business being in
the way at such times.”
“I am glad to think you aren’t in your heart taking it as lightly as
you pretend.”
But the incident rather spoilt things. Instead of being able to yield
unreservedly to the comfort, yes, the joy of his being there, a
counter influence was at work. A watchfulness, critical, even painful.
Not so much of Cheviot as of herself. Was she the kind of girl Mrs.
Locke had meant?—the kind who said, “I’m all right. What does it
matter about other women.” Something in her soul revolted at the
charge. In other moods she was conscious only of a blind rebellion
against this evil trick fate had played her—perversely thrusting into
the foreground a thing so little representative of the man. Offering
this, forsooth, as a symbol of all that lay behind. A lying symbol. He
wasn’t like that. Was he? He had been “frantic” about her. Ah, the
subtle danger of that solace, feeding self-love, divorcing her from
her less fortunate sisters.
Few people minded the lowering weather the next day, since it
brought a sight of land. Yet one had need to be at sea for a week
and a half to find comfort in this vision of a dim gray rock rising out
of a gray sea to starboard; or on the port side, a range of snow-
flecked hills, with clouds hanging low over the crater of an extinct
volcano. How bleak the world up here in the Aleutians! Then
suddenly, for Hildegarde, the chill vision warmed and glowed. “This
is the kind of thing John Galbraith is looking at on the other side of
the globe!”
To every one’s huge satisfaction the Los Angeles, skirting
Ounalaska, showed no sign of pausing. Instead of turning off toward
Dutch Harbor to learn if the ice had yielded up yonder and the way
was clear, boldly the ship took the short cut through Unimak Pass
into the Bering Sea. What splendid time they were making under the
convoy of this best of all captains! People went about boasting,
“Nome by Sunday!”
“We’ll make the record trip!”
“—Make the big fortunes!”
“We’ll beat creation!”
“Splendid fellow, our captain!”
Never such luck before in this bedeviled course.
 Toward three o’clock the next morning Hildegarde was waked by
the noise of hurrying feet above her head and a great hubbub in the
saloon.
“Mrs. Locke?” Her berth was empty.
In the narrow cabin two half-dressed women were agitatedly
hunting their belongings, while the dressmaker, Miss Tillie Jump,
screamed through the door to know if there was any danger.
“What’s happened?” asked Hildegarde, tumbling down out of her
berth.
“We are in the ice.”
“Masses all round us high as the ship.”
Certainly Mrs. Locke had vanished. “I’m very calm,” said Miss Mar
to herself, with a certain admiring surprise. And then her self-esteem
fell from her with the realization that in the back of her head she
knew there could not possibly be any immediate danger, or Cheviot
would have made some sign. All the same, her tranquillity did not
prevent her from picturing a shipwreck, in which the clearest
impression was that of Cheviot saving Mrs. Locke’s life at risk of his
own. The lady’s heartfelt acknowledgments and tableau.
On deck, in the gray milky light, a different picture. No Cheviot
and no discernible danger. Plenty of broken, moving ice, but nothing
like the towering bergs of saloon rumor. Going forward at low
pressure the Los Angeles was picking her way among the water-
worn shapes that stood dazzling white, each on a pale green base,
submerged yet partly visible. Strange sculpture of the sea, that, like
a Rodin statue, gained meaning as you gazed. This rough-hewn
mass was a crouching polar bear; that a saurian, antediluvian, vast.
Some of the ice-cakes, flat, featureless, were mere lonely white rafts
drifting from nowhere, bound nowhere; others manned by dwarf
snowmen, misshapen, spectral.
Though so unlike report, there was something here expected,
hauntingly familiar, like a single surviving impression out of a
vanished life. From a long, long distance O’Gorman’s voice recalled
her as he came down the deck with Mrs. Locke. “What do you think
of this for a change?”
Hildegarde was still looking round for Cheviot, as she answered,
“It’s all much flatter and less tremendous than I expected.”
“Three fourths of the ice is under water. I’m afraid you’ll find it
quite tremendous enough.”
Here at last was Louis! “What’s going to happen?” Hildegarde
hailed him.
He only pulled off his cap for her benefit. It was to O’Gorman he
said, half aside, “We’ll have to get out of this.”
While the two men stood there looking gravely out, the ship put
her nose into the ice-pack, shivered, and drew back.
“What’s happening?”
“They’re reversing engines.”
Hildegarde had put her question with a dawning sense of obscurer
energies here at work than she had apprehended, and with that the
thought of Galbraith took on a sudden something like its old
ineluctable hold on her imagination. These the forces that had
fashioned life for him. Yes, and for others, too.
The whole of that raw morning she haunted the upper deck, for
the most part alone. If Mrs. Locke avoided her, it would seem that
Cheviot was inclined to do the same. He had struck up a friendship
with O’Gorman. They walked about or sat together in the smoking-
room. The feeling of tension that pervaded the Los Angeles was
manifest even in the Kangaroo Court. No livelier precinct hitherto on
the Los Angeles than this part of the fo’c’sle, where, from the
eminence of the judge’s bench (a great coil of rope), Mr. Gedge
imposed upon his much-diverted public a parody of those forms of
legal procedure learned in his experience as a shorthand reporter of
“cases,” or, as he called himself, a court stenographer. Gedge
modeled his style upon those administrators of justice who think
because a man has disobeyed one law, his fellow-creatures may with
respect to him (or rather without “respect”) break all rules governing
human intercourse. With the aid of unlimited audacity and a ready
tongue, Mr. Matthew Gedge made things lively within the precincts
of the Kangaroo Court. And with impunity, for an unwritten law
ordains that no one, however great a personage, shall dare to defy
the authority of the mock court, or can safely set aside its
judgments. Woe betide any one who seriously persists in so
unpopular a course. Whatever the case being tried, no bystander, no
unwary passer even, but goes in peril of being summoned. If he
know himself unable to beat Gedge at the sharp word game, it
behooves the witness to bear himself meekly. If he thinks to flee, let
him expect to hear Gedge roar with grim zest, “Constable! Do your
duty. Arrest that man!” and sometimes half way to cover the
offender is caught and haled back amid a general hilarity, to find
himself, however confused, speechless or unwilling, clapped into the
witness-box (a big iron boiler) and kept stewing there while he
meets as best he may a fire of merciless questions and the bubbling
merriment of the deck.
But to-day the sittings of the Court were suspended. The loungers
who came to Gedge for diversion or enlightenment, got only a
grumbled, “I pass!” or “Guess we’re euchred!” And even such
popularity as Gedge’s was threatened with eclipse for putting into
words the silent misgivings of all men. The very sky looked evil. The
ragged gray-brown clouds had been racing across the heavens like
tatterdemalions hearing of mischief afoot and eager for a share. Now
they were massed there in the southwest, a dirty, featureless mob,
in which the ineffectual units were lost and the whole fused into a
vast somber-hued menace.
The faithful Blumpitty sought out Miss Mar. “No—o,” he drawled,
rolling his eye among the fantastic ice shapes. “No—o, it don’t look
good to me, this don’t.” But Blumpitty had news. “That feller who
discovered—yes. And wus dyin’ as hard as he could last fall. Well,
he’s alive yet.”
 “How do you know?”
“Joslin says so. He had a letter at Seattle from a man who’d come
down to Nome from Polaris over the ice at Christmas. Not that it
matters much. The sick feller don’t seem to have let on to them
others. Anyways, they’s good and plenty in the Mother Lode. What I
don’t see is how he managed it.”
“Managed what?”
“To hang on. If ever I see death in a man’s face! But I always said
they wusn’t like anything I ever seen before.”
“What wasn’t?”
“Them eyes.”
“Near Nome, is it—the place where he—”
“Oh, no, a good ways north.”
“Heavens, north even of Nome?”
“Yes, it’s the farthest north camp they is. Think o’ him hangin’ on
all through the winter. In that place!” Blumpitty’s pale gaze sought
vainly for enlightenment among the moving ice masses.
“People do get through in worse places than that,” said his
companion.
“They ain’t no worse places than Polaris.”
“Yes, there’s Franz Josef Land.”
“Never heard o’ that camp.”
“I wish I were going as far as Polaris.”
“Why, come right along.”
She laughed. “I only wish I could. I’d like to know a man who’d
lived in the farthest north camp of all—the farthest on our side.
What’s that?”
“Where?”
 “Out there.” She pointed to a ghostly something, faint as smoke
against the high light of the ice rim on the far horizon.
Blumpitty stared. “Reckon it’s a cloud. They’s two more! And
another. No, by gum, it’s ships!”
And ships they were, five of them, the first seen since leaving
Vancouver!—spectacle to stir the chilled blood of watchers on the
Los Angeles. For these dreamlike apparitions were vessels such as
theirs, threatened like them with ice-pack and with storm. A
detachment of the Nome fleet! None came any nearer, except the
Ohio and the little Charles Nelson. They spoke and passed, the Ohio
speedily to vanish; Charles Nelson to tack about, hunting an outlet,
and then, discouraged, turn south as the bigger Los Angeles pushed
valiantly through the ice to the North. “Turn back! No use!” Charles
Nelson warned, and then, quicker than ever you saw in your life, the
fog swooped down and wiped everything off the ocean except the
nearer ice. The Los Angeles turned and tacked about to the tune of
the fog-horn, trying to find a way through the heavier floe, only to
be headed off by bigger masses looming through the haze, majestic
slow-sailing ice-ships, some like white gondolas, some like sturdy,
low-built castles set fantastically on a field of fleece, for the exposed
parts of the berg had rotted in the sun, and in the wind been
rippled, so that a nearer sight showed the surfaces honeycombed,
disintegrate. And again to Hildegarde Mar came that sense of its all
being familiar, as though she had been here before. So she had, in
spirit. With a thrilling sense of recognition she discovered the original
of more than one picture in that book of Galbraith’s that she and
Bella had pored over in their school-days.
When, early in the afternoon, the fog lifted a little, a message
came from the captain inviting Miss Mar to the bridge that she might
have a better view. By the time she had obeyed the summons the
wind had risen. The captain was looking through his glass, and Mrs.
Locke was at his side. He left both visitors with harassed face and
called down to Cheviot walking below with O’Gorman. And now Louis
stood beside the captain on the bridge, looking to the northeast, and
talking in an undertone.
“What does he know,” said Mrs. Locke, referring to Cheviot for the
first time, “about navigation?”
“Nothing, I should think,” said Hildegarde serenely, yet with that
stirring of pride that visits a woman when the man she is interested
in is called to counsel. “You see Louis has been up here before, and
so few people have.”
“Oh!” Mrs. Locke turned indifferently away and looked out over
the white-patched water. The girl felt anew and keenly the
embarrassment that had come of the confrontation of these two.
Impossible for her to think it didn’t matter. No vulgarity of soul
helped her to meet the issue with, “Mrs. Locke’s ‘nobody,’—a little
book-keeping woman we shall never see again!” She could not even,
as a feebler nature would, simply ignore the incident of the day
before, accepting for Louis Mrs. Locke’s evil opinion, accepting for
Mrs. Locke his professed regret but real indifference, verging on
dislike.
“Of course,” Hildegarde drew closer, “I’ve thought a great deal
about what happened yesterday—I mean what happened on the
wharf.”
“Oh, put it out of your head.”
“It’s hardly been out of my head a minute, except the two hours I
slept this morning.”
“I ought to have held my tongue.”
“I’m glad you didn’t. Because now I know something more than
that he hurt you.”
“What do you know?”
“How much he can hurt me,” was on her tongue, but the only
answer she made was, “I mustn’t let you think that I’m going to turn
a cold shoulder on my friend because—”
 “Oh, no.” It was said not scornfully—just accepting it.
“I think a month ago I would either not have believed it or I would
have explained it all away to myself. I’d have said he didn’t know
what he was doing. He—he was—Oh, there are a dozen excuses I
might have made for him.”
“Yes, dozens.”
“But now I don’t make one. I say, ‘Yes, he did it, and he doesn’t
even realize how terrible it was.’”
Mrs. Locke glanced at her curiously. “It’s true a good deal has to
happen before men and women can treat each other fairly.”
Hildegarde nodded. “I’m beginning to see that. Louis hasn’t begun
—not yet. But about other things he’s always been the one who’s
helped and taught me. Done it for lots of other people, too, of
course,” she hastened to add. “I’d never once thought of him as a
person I could help.”
“And now—”
“Now—” Her grave look went as far as that of the blind who seem
to descry Truth riding on the viewless air, or sitting on the round
world’s uttermost rim. Certainly Hildegarde had been given such
extension of vision in these hours that plainly enough she saw that it
was not till a cloud settled on Cheviot’s fame that she knew how
much its fairness meant to her. Acceptance of that had brought her
acquainted with yet another new aspect of experience. Here was a
man that had everybody and everything to recommend him—up to
yesterday. Since yesterday she knew not only that his nature and his
outlook were on one side defective, she had glimpses of a faith that,
precisely because of this, he had a need of her beyond the one he
had been used to urge. A light shone in the thought that there was
something she could do for him that perhaps no other creature
could. A perception this of infinite significance to such as Hildegarde
Mar, belonging as she did to the bigger of the two camps into which
womankind are naturally divided. For, pace the satirists, those of her
sex who make most stir in the world and cause most commotion in
the hearts of men—those daughters of the horse leech, whose
unappeased hunger cries ever “More, more! Give! and give again!”
they are in the minority. To the larger, if less striking army, those
whose primal passion is to give—of them was Hildegarde.
“It looks as if—for all Louis is so wonderfully clear-headed and I’m
so—the other way, there are some things I can see plainer than he.
But it seems to me that’s only a reason for”—her voice dropped a
little—“for—”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Locke.
Hildegarde flushed faintly. “For trying, I don’t mean by preaching,
but trying to help him to see—well, some of the things you’ve given
me an inkling of.” She laid her hand gently on the older woman’s.
Mrs. Locke’s fingers closed round the girl’s, but she said nothing.
“So, though he nearly broke your arm, you will have done him a
service.”
The white face smiled its enigmatic little smile. But presently, “I’m
glad I know you,” she said.
“Are you? Then let’s be friends!”
As though some tangible barrier had been beaten down they went
nearer the two men. The captain was ending, “—and if the ice closes
in behind us we’ll be trapped.”
“Oh, is that all!” said Cheviot, glancing toward Hildegarde.
“No, it isn’t all. We’d be carried wherever the floe goes—and that’s
not Nome.” Gillies lowered the glass, and his strained-looking eyes
fell on the two he had forgotten. “Sorry, ladies, you must go below.”
Not only rather snubbed, but feeling now the gravity of affairs,
Hildegarde and her companion departed with some precipitation,
while the captain’s hoarse shout rang out in an indistinguishable
order to some invisible officer.
A few minutes later, standing on bales of merchandise for’ard on
the upper deck, they watched the altering of the course and the race
for that single opening, narrow and ever narrower in the close-
packed ice. It was exciting enough, for they got out just in time.
Thirty-four hours afterward the Los Angeles was still beating about
on the edge of the pack, looking for another break in the long white
line.
The spirits of the passengers steadily sank. To their jealous
imagining all those phantom ships, and the score unseen, were now
forging ahead. Only the Los Angeles besieged the ice in vain. Men
stood in knots discussing the captain’s mistakes and airing their own
knowledge. They had expected this state of things if he persisted in
keeping so far to the east. Hour by hour Gillies’s credit fell.
The only break in the dead monotony of the afternoon was
suggested in the general invitation to come for’ard and hear Gedge
roast the captain. It went ill that day with any witness in Gillies’s
favor.
In the middle of dinner people looked up from their plates and
said: “What’s that?”
The bean-feaster was the first to find his tongue. “By ——,” he
said, “we’ve stopped!” The passengers dropped their knives and
forks and rushed on deck. The bean-feaster was right. In trying to
get round the eastern shoulder of the floe, the Los Angeles had run
aground in Norton Sound, thirty miles from the mainland. The
engines were reversed, and the water round the propeller was set
boiling. The ship never budged. The deck resounded to the uproar of
many tongues. To waste thirty-six hours feeling her way round the
floe was bad enough, but to be “hung up on a sand-bar,” a hundred
and fifty miles from Nome, with a wicked-looking ice-pack bearing
down on you from the west—! And here comes the Charles Nelson
once more, very perky this time, profiting by the object lesson and
steering clear of the bar. The Los Angeles humbled her pride to ask
for a line. “Can’t get near enough,” the word came back. “I’m in
three fathom now!” and away Charles Nelson goes, leaving the big
steamer to her fate.
 “What’s that feller calls himself a captain, what’s he goin’ to do?”
demanded Mr. Gedge of his satellites. “‘Wait for the tide!’ Yah! He’s
got the most high-spirited idears of any man I ever—‘Wait!’ After
wastin’ two days and nights a’ready! ‘Wait!’ While the other fellers
are knockin’ the bottom out o’ Nome!”
This was a harassing thought, but the captain still had his
apologists, even in the Kangaroo Court. It was O’Gorman’s friend
with the fiery beard who dared to point out, “Mr. Gedge told us on
Friday and Saturday the captain was ‘incompetent and foolhardy.’ On
Sunday and Monday he’s ‘over-cautious and damnably slow.’ To-night
Mr. Gedge tells us—”
“To-night,” that gentleman shouted, “I’m tellin’ you still more
about this —— captain. Did they or did they not say to us in Seattle
that Gillies was a first-rate seaman?”
“Yes, and so he is!”
“Did they or did they not tell us he knew his job?”
“Right! Knows this ship as you know the way to your mouth.”
“Yah! Knows what she can do on the Japan route. But this,
gentlemen and ladies, ain’t the road to Manila. And do you know
what? This here is Captain Gillies’s first trip to Alaska!” Gedge
brought it out with a sledge-hammer effect. The audience felt they
were expected to be dumfounded. They complied.
But a voice was heard: “It’s most people’s first trip to Alaska.”
“I tell you,” said Gedge, judicially, “he knows as little about these
northern seas as that boy there with the banjer.”
“This self-appointed judge,” Cheviot’s voice rose steadily above the
growing murmur, “hasn’t heard apparently that nobody knows these
waters.”
“Would you mind repeatin’ that, sir?”
“Not at all. In the first place, the Bering is a practically uncharted
sea. That may be a disgrace to our Coast Survey, but it’s hardly the
captain’s fault.”
Gedge looked stumped for a moment. If this were true it wouldn’t
do for him not to know it.
Cheviot was making good the diversion in the captain’s favor,
when Gedge interrupted: “Does the captain’s friend pretend to say
that the whalers and sealers and fellers who’ve been up here before
gold was thought of—that none o’ them don’t know enough to keep
off a damned sand-bank?” Looking his wiliest: “Now, if we had one
o’ them sort here—” Then, with a highly effective coup: “Ladies and
gentlemen, we got him!”
“Here on this ship?”
“Right here on board the Los Angeles!”
“Where? Who, who? Name?” Everybody but Cheviot and a few
women were shouting themselves hoarse.
“What y’ got to say to that, Mr.— You, there, with the arctic cap
and the tender heart fur captains?”
“I’ve got this to say. That even the men who sailed along here last
fall, don’t know Norton Sound this summer.”
“Wot?”
“Can’t know it.”
“And why not?”
“For the good reason that new sand-bars are formed up here
every spring. Not a ship that sails for any port on the northwest
coast but goes on what’s practically an exploring expedition. That’s
our true danger. The captain’s no less than ours.”
“Oh, yes, we all know you’re in with his nibs, but what my friends
don’t know is that Billings & Co. sent a pilot aboard this ship.”
“Why, then,” roared half-a-dozen voices, “why ain’t he pilotin’!”
“Why?” Mr. Gedge shouted above the din. “I can tell—” His
sentence was jerked to an abrupt close. “What in hell’s up?”
 Two or three women had uttered little shrieks, and, “What was
that?” people asked one another. Men turned and looked in each
other’s faces. “What was it?”
The sudden jar and vibration of the ship lent added force to Mr.
Gedge’s charge. “The reason the pilot ain’t pilotin’ is because the
captain ordered him off the bridge the second day out.”
“Now I know what it means when the papers say, ‘Sensation in
the court’!” a little Canadian hospital nurse whispered to Mrs. Locke.
But in another second she was clinging to that lady and her eyes
were scared and wide; for, as if under the assault of a battering-ram,
the Los Angeles was shaking from stem to stern.
Hildegarde felt a warm hand laid on her two, tight-clasped and
cold. Cheviot had put an arm through the outer fringe of the group
where she and Mrs. Locke were standing. “Come for’ard,” he said.
“Was that the ice?” Mrs. Locke whispered, allowing herself to be
drawn along.
All the rest of the people stood hushed for a moment as if stunned
by the concussion. The three who alone in those first instants
seemed to retain power of movement quietly made their way out of
the throng, while every ear was filled with the horrible secondary
sounds of that mighty impact—a slow grinding, a horrible gritting, as
of granite jaws reducing the bones of prey to powder.
“I want you to stay here till I come back.” Cheviot left the two
women under the bridge. As Hildegarde listened with beating heart
to the sound of the ice against the ship, she said to herself: “These
are moments Jack Galbraith has known. After to-night I shall
understand better. I shall be closer to a part of his life than Bella
ever will.” Every sense was set to note the change that in the last
few minutes had come over the spirit of the ship. No wild
commotion, a hush rather. But a thing of eery significance. No more
shrill harangues in the Kangaroo Court. No dancing on the upper
deck. No tink-a-tink of banjo in the steerage. Men gathering in
groups, talking for the most part quite quietly, but agreed that “the
old sea tramp” wouldn’t stand much of this kind of thing. With a
single mind the women, as soon as they had pulled themselves
together, hastened down below.
“I think I’ll go down, too, and see—” Hildegarde began. “I won’t
be two minutes.”
“Where are you going?”
“To the cabin. Do you want anything brought up?”
“No.”
The girl was longer than two minutes, but she was no less
surprised when, upon her reappearance with a small hand-bag, she
found Cheviot talking to Mrs. Locke. “The current is carrying the ice
out all right. Probably the only danger is the passengers making
fools of themselves. But if they’ll only go quietly to bed—”
“They won’t,” said Mrs. Locke. The two discussed this quite in the
tone of being allies. “Nobody will go to bed to-night,” she assured
him.
“What do they want to do?” he demanded.
“Sit up till one in the morning,” Mrs. Locke answered, “and see the
tide float us off the bar.”
“Well, the women at all events”—Cheviot looked about with an air
of relief—“the women have gone to bed already.”
“No, indeed,” said Hildegarde. “They’re tumbling over one another
down in the saloon, in and out of the state-rooms collecting their
things. Some are saying their prayers, and some—”
“Do you sing?” Cheviot demanded.
“I?” Mrs. Locke stared. “No.”
“Who does?” he appealed to Hildegarde.
“I don’t know.”
“Yes, I heard a woman yesterday—”
 “Oh, that awful Miss Pinckney, you know, with the draggled
feathers!”
“Well, go and find her and get her to sing now.”
“Sing?”
“Yes, sing. It may make just all the difference.” Cheviot was in the
act of bolting back to the captain.
“She can’t sing.” Hildegarde followed him a step.
He misunderstood it for an untimely musical criticism. “Then let
her make a noise of some sort.”
“Oh, she’s doing that—screaming with hysterics down in the
saloon.” Cheviot flashed back to say confidentially, not to Hildegarde,
but to Mrs. Locke: “Go and see if you can’t get up a concert.” With
which cool and apparently crazy suggestion he vanished.
Twenty minutes later a woman, wearing diamond ear-rings and a
sealskin jacket, paused in her flight up the companionway and
leaned an instant, panting, against the music-room door. Now she
was lifting her head with a slow incredulity, as an unsteady voice
near by began to quaver out a rag-time ballad, highly offensive to
sensitive ears, but a tune familiar and to many on the ship most
dear. The woman peered round the half-open door, staring from one
to the other of those callous creatures within, making merry on the
brink of destruction—Miss Mar at the piano, and at her side the
draggled Miss Pinckney. Ah, no, that red-eyed woman wasn’t callous.
She sang the inane words with lips that trembled. Now she was
breaking down.
“No, no. Go on,” Miss Mar insisted. “Think of the others.”
“They’ll never listen. Everybody’s too—too—”
“Well, let’s see. Now!” and very ineffectually Hildegarde took up
the second verse. Miss Pinckney plucked the strain away as two men
looked in. There was nothing especial to take them up or down.
They stood near the woman with the diamond ear-rings, hardly
knowing that they listened. In that first twenty minutes, every time
the ice struck the ship, Miss Pinckney would hesitate and her voice
would fly off the scale in a faint scream.
“Oh, please! That’s enough to scare anybody!” and Hildegarde
played doggedly on. “Now, let’s try again!” It was, however, as if not
Miss Mar’s admonishing, but the rude insistence of the tune dragged
Miss Pinckney along, pulling her out of the pit of her fears and
landing her “Down along the Bowery,” or “In Gay Paree,” or some
place equally remote from the sand-bar in the Bering Sea.
Mrs. Locke, with the Blumpittys and a brace of doctors in tow,
appeared in the act of descending for a muster of “the company.”
Cheviot came flying down behind them, two steps at a time. He was
about to turn in at the music-room, when a woman pushed past
him, showing a panic-stricken face above the sleeping child that she
carried clutched tight against her breast. A sudden jar made the
sleeper lift a cropped head and look about with wide eyes.
“Hello!” said Cheviot reassuringly, in a cheerful and commonplace
voice. “This is a passenger I haven’t seen before. Aren’t you rather
too big, sir, to be carried?”
—“hasn’t been well!” muttered the woman, taking breath to
recommence the ascent.
“Look here, where are you going?” And without waiting to know,
“Some of us can carry—” He was taking the burden out of the thin
arms.
“No,” remonstrated the woman, as Cheviot turned in at the music-
room, “we must go up to father.”
“I’ll send him down to you.”
“No, no. We’ve got to go up and—be ready.”
“Ready for what?” He fixed upon the woman a pair of faith-
inspiring eyes so unclouded that she stared.
 “Don’t you want to listen to the singing?” Cheviot bent smiling to
the little person who lay quite content in his arms, studying the
man’s face with the solemn absorption of childhood.
Not many there besides him, but because Cheviot had come in the
concert had begun. Others besides Hildegarde felt this quickening of
life in any room he entered. Miss Pinckney remembered she had the
music of a “reel pretty song” out of the “Belle of New York.” She’d go
and get it.
“Do you hear that?” Cheviot said, depositing the child on one of
the rickety chairs. “You’ve just come in time,” and he stood a
moment talking to the mother. The child sat askew, with its father’s
great waterproof cape hitched up on one side and trailing on the
other. When the little figure made the slightest movement the lop-
sided chair wobbled and threatened collapse. Instantly the child
desisted and became nervously engrossed in the problem of a nice
equilibrium. The little face took on a look of tense uneasiness. It was
plain that courage was lacking so much as to pull a good deep
breath lest it draw ruin down. Cheviot, still talking with the mother,
turned to take in his the small child hand that clutched the chair.
Was it the look of heavy responsibility in the small face, or was it
another onslaught of ice against the ship that made him say,
“Music’s soon going to begin, little—what’s your name?”
The child opened thin lips and emitted a careful sound.
“Joseph? Well, I hope you’ll like the concert, Joseph.” That was
too much for the occupant of the siege perilous. There was a howl
above the mother’s reproachful correction. “Her name’s
Josephine,”—a general giving way to overstrain, and chair and child
were in ruins on the floor.
Miss Mar, glancing over her shoulder, shaking with hysterical
laughter, saw that Louis, gathering up the sobbing Josephine, bit his
lip as though in mere dismay, forbearing to wound the luckless one
by laughing at her discomfiture.
 “Yes, that’s like him, too,” Hildegarde said to herself, as one
welcoming one more of a cloud of witnesses. She fell upon the piano
with redoubled vigor. Loud and fast she hammered out the wildest
jig she could remember. Miss Pinckney coming back, music in hand,
stopped with a scream. Bang! Bang! Grit! Grind! went the ice.
Josephine shrieked without intermission till Cheviot, having found a
chair with more than three legs, anchored her securely in that
haven. With the first words of Miss Pinckney’s song, Cheviot was
flying back to the deck.
Bang! Grit! Grind! Was she awake, Hildegarde asked herself, or
was this fetid room and were these harsh, assailing sounds a form of
nightmare? Steadily she played on. Cheviot looked in again, but it
was to Mrs. Locke he whispered: “We must break up the Kangaroo
Court. Musical talent going to waste there.” She followed him out. In
passing Hildegarde he had bent his head. “Keep it up,” he said.
“Whatever you do, don’t stop.” She reflected a little enviously that
she could be quite as happy running about the deck with Louis as
pinned to the moth-eaten music-stool, grinding out cheap airs. Then
she found herself smiling. Not the least strange part of this strange
evening that Louis should be sending Mrs. Locke on errands, and
that Mrs. Locke should be going. The room was filling. Upon the
lady’s reappearance with the banjo boy and the cross-eyed flute-
player, the concert was in full swing. Now Mrs. Locke was telling
Hildegarde to play the “Battle Hymn,” and presently several of the
men were helping Miss Pinckney to send John Brown’s soul marching
on. Oh, for a little air! Surely there wasn’t room for any more people
in this overcrowded space. But still they came. It was curious to
watch the new faces at the door peering over the shoulders of those
who stood about the piano. Little by little you could see the strain
going out of the tense features. Not that their anxieties vanished,
but they were softened, humanized through the humble agency of a
ramshackle piano and an untrained voice in a song. Even the steps,
from the very top to the bottom of the companionway, were
crowded now. That fact of itself made for quiescence on the decks.
People could no longer run freely up or down. While they paused
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