IX
While I stood watching Pierce busied at his instruments Simmons came climbing up with word that Mr. Chanler wished me to come to his stateroom. The sky had begun to clear to the eastward by now; a rift of clean blue Spring heaven was showing through the great pall of Winter-like gray clouds; and as I entered Chanler’s stateroom the sun broke through and relieved the ugly monotony of the raw day.
Chanler was trailing his mandarin-like dressing-gown behind him as he paced the room, and his face was not the face of a man at ease.
“Gardy,” he said, “I want to talk with you. Got to talk with you. Brack’s all right to drink with; Doc Olson doesn’t talk at all; you’re the only one fit to talk to on board. ’Member I started to tell you yesterday how I discovered I had to do something useful, and then I changed my mind and didn’t tell you after all? Well, I’m going to tell you the whole story now. Gardy, how much do you know about women—girls?”
By this time I was prepared for any turn of thought on Chanler’s part and replied—“Not as much as you do, that’s sure.”
The careless reply seemed exactly what he wished to hear. He nodded gravely.
“That’s right. You don’t know how right that is. You may know a lot about ’em, Gardy, but I know more. I’ve learned a lot about ’em lately, a whole lot. You think that Brack, and those Petroff Sound mammoths, and old Doc Harper are responsible for this little trip we’re on. Well, they’re not.”
He paused, then concluded slowly—
“Gardy, it’s a girl.”
I recalled Chanler’s bachelor fear that some day a shrewd mama would snare him for her young daughter, and the determination with which he had fled whenever he found himself growing interested in a girl in a way that threatened his bachelor’s liberty.
“Arctic Alaska is a long way to run away,” I laughed.
“Hang it, Gardy!” he snapped. “Don’t talk that way. I’m not running away.”
“No?”
“No. I—I’m doing this because I want to—want to—I know it will shock you—but, hang it, Gardy! I want to marry her.”
I had an uncomfortable series of visions: Chanler entangled by some woman, a light actress, probably; family objections, and George being sent away to the Arctic Circle while the family money convinced the woman that she had made a mistake.
“You mean that you’re being sent up here?” I asked.
“Yes,” he replied, his chin sunk on his chest. “Yes, that’s it; I’m being sent up here.”
“By——”
“By—her.” He looked straight out of the window, gnawing his underlip nervously. “By a little girl, almost a kid, by Jove!”
He paused again, then went on didactically:
“The trouble with girls, Gardy—young girls; pretty, clever, charming girls, you know—the trouble is they’re too popular. Too many pursuers. Men are too eager to marry ’em. Fact. Girls have too many chances. Get an exaggerated idea of their own importance, and pick and pick before they decide on a chap, and then they demand that the one they’ve picked is—is a little, white god. Fact. Even the common ones. Ordinary man try to marry one—hah! Got to show ’em. Money? Oh, yes; big percentage, show ’em money and they don’t ask anything else. Limousine and poodle-dog type.
“But, hang it, Gardy, there’s a new kind of girl growing up in this country at present, and she’s the one who makes a man trouble. New American breed. She doesn’t look back over her shoulder to make you follow her. Hang it, no! She stands right up to you and looks you square in both eyes. She won’t notice when you show her money; what she’s looking at is you. Fact. Not what you got; but what you are. New type.
“Rotten world for men it’s getting to be. Our own fault, though. We chase ’em; make ’em think themselves worth too much. Men ought to quit—lose interest. That’d bring ’em to their senses, and they wouldn’t ask a man uncomfy questions. But hang it, it’d be too late now to do me any good,” he concluded gloomily. “I’m shot.”
I said nothing, and he soon went on.
“Shot, by Jove! Shot by a little girl. Just like a kid fresh from school. Hit so hard I’ve got to have her, and, hang it! She’s one of that—that new kind.”
Still I remained silent, and for many seconds Chanler struggled with his next words.
“Gardy!” he broke out in mingled anger and awe. “She wouldn’t have me!”
Once more we sat in silence, an uncomfortable silence for me. I had no desire to discuss affairs of the heart with any one. Up to that time I had never felt the need of any woman in my life.
Presently Chanler opened his writing-desk and drew out a small photograph which he passed to me.
“There she is, there’s the cause of this expedition, Gardy.”
I looked with interest at the picture in my hand.
It was as poor a specimen of the outdoor picture as any amateur ever made on a sunny Sunday. It represented a bareheaded girl in tennis costume, her hair considerably tousled as if she had just finished a set; but as the picture had been taken against the sun the face was so dark as to be scarcely discernible. Just an ordinary outdoor girl, apparently, as ordinary as the photograph.
“That’s the reason for this trip,” said George, carefully returning the picture to its place. “She isn’t anybody you know or have heard of. She’s nobody. She’s just a common doctor’s daughter from a little town in the Middle West, and I want to marry her, Gardy, and by Jove—she wouldn’t have me!”
He was started now, and there was no opportunity to stop him had I so wished. I listened in humble resignation. I was Chanler’s hired man. I was engaged as his literary secretary, but probably he counted me paid for listening to him while he poured out his amazement and despair at having been refused.
“She wouldn’t have me, Gardy,” he repeated over and over again; and, considering how many girls had fished for Chanler’s name and money, I wondered what sort of a girl this could be.
“I met her down at Aiken last Winter. She was visiting some folks—but that didn’t count. I met her at the tennis court. By Jove!” A new light came into his cynical eyes, a clean light, and for the time being his face was almost fine. “Can’t stand athletic girls as a usual thing, you know that, Gardy; but she—she was different.”
They had danced together that night at the club ball. If she had been stunning on the courts, she was overwhelming in evening dress. He scarcely had dared to touch her.
They had spent a great part of the next day rolling slowly about country roads in one of his roadsters. Sometimes they had stopped at convenient points along the road and had sat silent and looked at each other. Again they had halted and picked flowers along the roadside. And between times they had rolled along at six miles an hour and—talked.
“Oh, hang it, Gardy. For the first time in my life I wished I was clever like you and had done something. It ain’t fair. Nobody ever made me do a thing; what chance have I had to amount to anything? And then a fellow meets a girl like this, who likes you from the start and when she asks you what you’re doing, or have done, or are going to do, and you say nothin’, she looks at you in a certain way as if to say: ‘Why, what excuse do you make to yourself for cumbering the earth?’ No, by George, it ain’t fair; is it, Gardy?
“I told her I had money, and she laughed and said she didn’t understand how a man could be satisfied to have money and nothing else, and money that his father had earned at that. Then I asked her to marry me, so I would have something besides money. Hang it, old man, she cried. Yes, she did, just for a little while. Then she looked up and laughed at me, and said: ‘George, I’ve known you less than two days, and I’ve learned to like you so much that I wish I dared like you more. But if I liked you any more,’ she says, ‘I’m afraid I’d want to marry you, and have to depend upon you for my future happiness, and to be the father of my children,’ and says she, ‘you haven’t the right to ask that, George, so long as you play around like a thoughtless boy, and do nothing that a man should do.’
“Jove! That was enough to make a fellow pull up and think, wasn’t it? I said to myself right there: ‘I’m going to do something.’ And I am. I ain’t clever like you, Gardy, and I haven’t got business experience like some fellows, but—” he smiled with self-satisfaction—“I have got money.”
It all ended there. He had money; he need have nothing else. The new look vanished from his eyes and they became cynical and supercilious again. His underlip protruded cunningly.
“Science is a great help if you know how to use it, Gardy,” he chuckled. “What’s your opinion of our little expedition now?”
“I don’t see any reason why what you have told me should alter my opinion of the expedition.”
“Ha! I thought maybe that old conscientious streak in you would get troublesome. You don’t quibble about motives then, Gardy?”
“Why should I? I am your hired writing man——”
“Oh, hang it, Gardy! Don’t put it that way. Don’t be so precise. As one chap to another, you know—what do you think?”
“I see nothing wrong with your motive, Chanler. In fact, I think it rather fine. As I understand it you are undertaking this expedition because you wish to prove to this girl that you can and will do something useful.”
“Right-o. That’s why I undertook it—in the first place.”
“That surely established an excellent motive, for a man in your sentimental frame of mind, at least.”
“Yes,” he said with a hollow laugh, “there’s nothing wrong with that, is there?”
“And if the expedition is successful the results will be a credit to you—a genuine success—irrespective of what your motives might be.”
“Now you’re shouting, Gardy!” he cried vehemently, striking the desk. “The results, that’s what counts. Not the motive or the means. Who asks a winner why or how? Win out! Get what you want! That’s the idea. And, by Jove! What I want I get; and I want Betty Baldwin to be my wife!”