Gypsy - Lesley Pearse [197]
‘The little lady I’ve got here tonight climbed the Chilkoot in February last year. She lost her brother to drowning in the Squaw Rapids too. But she battled on here, carrying her famous fiddle, and enchanted us all with her music.
‘I remember the first time I heard her play, and it was in this very saloon, just a couple of days after she’d arrived. Her reputation had gone before her, but I hadn’t expected that the English fiddle player that captured hearts in Skagway would be a mere slip of a girl.
‘That night she brought tears to my eyes, she made my feet tap and my heart sing, and like every other man in town I was dazzled by her guts, talent and beauty.’
Turnball turned towards Beth, indicating she was to come up on stage.
With a flamboyant, open-armed gesture, he raised his voice to a boom. ‘I give you now, our very own darling. The world-famous Beth Bolton, the Klondike Gypsy Queen!’
To a round of applause Beth jumped up on to the stage with her fiddle in her hand and dropped a curtsey to the huge crowd beneath her. For old times’ sake she began with ‘Kitty O’Neill’s Champion,’ and within seconds the crowd were tapping their feet and smiling up at her. Next was ‘The Days of ’49’, the old ‘California Gold Rush Jig’, then ‘The Lass of Glenshee’.
She paused to tumultuous applause. Waving her bow for silence, she addressed her audience.
‘I composed this next number myself,’ she said. ‘I hope you’ll hear in it the blizzard blowing in my face on the Chilkoot Pass, the saws of the boat builders on Lake Bennett, and our joy at setting sail when the ice broke. A middle section is the heartbreak of my brother’s drowning, and the beauty of the Yukon in spring. Finally, there is the gaiety of Dawson City at the end of the trail.’
Jack had heard her playing something beautiful many times while he was working at Oz’s claim, a number he hadn’t heard before. He had thought it was a classical piece, and had always meant to ask her to play it one evening, for him.
Now, as she began to play, he realized this was what he’d heard before. From the achingly beautiful, chill-to-the-bone opening bars, he found himself reliving the Chilkoot Pass. He could feel himself bent almost double with the load on his back and dragging the sledge behind him as he struggled onwards and upwards through the snow. Somehow she’d managed to portray in her music the desperation, exhaustion and fear all the stampeders went through. Yet at the time he only remembered her smiling brightly whenever he looked at her.
There was gay humour in the saws of Lake Bennett, and he noticed many of the Sourdoughs looking at one another and smiling as they recalled their bitter arguments.
Everyone in the audience, whether they’d been on the trail or not, could feel the joy of setting sail, for Beth had managed to inject the flavour of a sailor’s hornpipe, the fluttering of wind in the sails and even the warmth of the spring sunshine on their backs.
A fast, spine-tingling passage mirrored the thrill and terror of the rapids in Miles Canyon, but it flowed into a plaintive memorial to Sam. Jack could see him as they pulled him from the water, dark red blood from the wound on his head staining his blond hair. He could picture Beth kneeling beside his body, her sobs cutting through him like a knife. And then laying him to rest in his riverside grave, and singing ‘Rock of Ages’ after they’d prayed over him.
A lump came up in Jack’s throat because all this was in the music. When he looked around him he could see that even those in the audience who knew nothing of Sam or the Miles Canyon understood Beth’s anguish.
In her portrayal of the voyage on down the Yukon, all her heartbreak and feeling of hopelessness were there, but she’d also managed to paint in the beauty of the winding river, the surrounding mountains, spring flowers, and moose drinking at the water’s edge.
On that journey, they had come upon Dawson suddenly. Beth illustrated this by an abrupt change of tempo.