II
The room was long, carpeted but uncurtained, and lighted by that most depressing of all forms of illumination, a skylight. Dwarf bookcases ran round it, and the walls were covered with frames and glass cases, primitive weapons, and a multitude of quaint and curious things. There was a low couch, covered with seal skins and feather rugs, and a leather writing-chair was set at the table, which had on it a fine microscope and many scientific instruments, of which the uses were unknown to the head of the Hawting-Hollidays of Hirlmere. Piles of dusty papers there were, and a couple of battered ship’s logs, stained and discolored by sea-water and grease. And in the writing-chair, with his feet on a magnificent Polar bear-skin and the receiver of a telephone at his ear, sat the Scientific Buffer of sorts, staring fixedly before him, apparently over an illimitable waste of frozen drift-ice covering uncharted Polar seas.
“Arthur!� said Mrs. Magellison, with a cold kind of impatience, rattling the handle of the door as if to attract his attention. He came back with a start and hung up the receiver, and rose. He had a simple, courteous manner that won upon the suitor who had just proposed to his wife; and oddly enough, the appearance of a servant with a message that summoned the lady to an interview with her modiste was not greatly regretted by Hawting-Holliday.
“I have seen you before, of course,� said his host, making him free of a rack of Esquimaux pipes and pushing over a jar of Navy-cut.
“Have you though?� rose to the visitor’s lips, but the words were not allowed to escape. Looking round he saw that there were piles of receipted accounts, and orderly piles of tradesmen’s books upon the table with the reams of dusty MSS., and as servants came in for orders and went away instructed, and messages were telephoned to various purveyors, Hawting-Holliday arrived at the conclusion that Mrs. Magellison’s husband was regarded less in that capacity by Mrs. Magellison and her household than as major-domo, head-bailiff and house-steward.
The two men chatted a little, and presently one spoke while the other listened. The capacity for hero-worship is quick in every generous nature, and the extravagant, impoverished, high-bred county gentleman and man-about-town was conscious that this modest, absent-minded little ex-naval Commander was of the stuff that went to build great heroes. Franklin and Nansen were brothers to this man, and that the justly-honored names of Shackleton and Peary, and the cognomen of Cook (King of terminological inexactitudinarians), were hot upon the public’s mouths just then, mattered nothing to Hawting-Holliday, as he heard how in the year of Our Lord Nineteen Hundred and Six, ten men sailed from San Francisco for Bering Sea on board a sixty-ton schooner, to settle the question of the existence of Undiscovered Ranges of Volcanic Origin in Alaska to the North. And how great storms and awful blizzards hindered the Coastal Survey Expedition, and sickness crippled its members, yet they struggled gamely on.
“Good God!� said Hawting-Holliday, whose pipe had long since gone out. He heard next how the Expedition suffered the loss of their ship and all their stores, and how their leader sent his crew home by a passing whaler and, for the enlargement of his own experience, chose to journey back to civilization along the Alaskan coast, three thousand miles of solitary sledge-traveling, aided only by the Esquimaux he chanced on in his terrible journey. And as he went on narrating in his calm and even voice, enforcing a point by a modest gesture of the hand that had lost the top-joints of the first and second fingers, and sometimes looking through and beyond the face of the listener with those strange, sorrowful, far-away eyes, what he related the other man saw, and——
“Good Lord!� said Hawting-Holliday again, “what an Odyssey the whole thing is! And so you got back to Ithaca after eighteen months of tramping it on your lonesome along a frozen coast and sleeping in holes dug in the snow, and living on blubber and seal-meat or boiled skin-boots when you couldn’t get anything else; and gathering knowledge and experience when there wasn’t even reindeer moss to scrape off the rocks!� He got up and held out his hand. “As a perfectly useless and idle kind of beggar, I don’t know that my sincere admiration and respect are worth having, Captain, but if they were!——�
He gulped, and went, quite clumsily, away, but came back again, and so a friendship grew between the “perfectly useless and idle kind of beggar,� Hawting-Holliday, and the hero of the three-thousand-mile tramp back to Civilization. Perhaps Hawting-Holliday had really never been seriously attached to the handsome piece of statuary that bore Magellison’s name. It is certain that her cold neglect and open contempt of her husband eventually kindled the wrath of Magellison’s newly-won champion to boiling-point. Not that the Captain gave any perceptible sign of suffering under the icy blizzard of his wife’s scorn. Endurance was the lesson he had learned best of all, and he agreed with her in regarding himself as a Failure.
“A beautiful and gifted woman has a right to be ambitious for the man she marries,� he said once to Hawting-Holliday. “And if he has no power to keep at high-level, if he makes no more way than a schooner frozen in the floe, it is natural that she should feel keenly disappointed and—and manifest the feeling by a—a certain change of attitude as regards him.�
“The schooner may be frozen in the floe, Captain,� said Hawting-Holliday, lounging in the window-seat of the Captain’s big, bare room at Edengates, that was—only barring the skylight—exactly like the Captain’s other big bare room at 000, Chesterfield Crescent. “But the floe is traveling all the time. That’s a bit of scientific information that I got from you. And I rather pride myself on applying it neatly.�
The Captain looked hard at him, and Hawting-Holliday noticed for the first time that the curly fair hair that topped the deep-lined pale-bronze face was growing white. Then Magellison said, with a queer smile:
“You have found me out, I see! And yet I thought I had kept the secret—or rather, the arrangement, quite closely. But on the whole I’m rather glad you guessed. For I like you, young man�—Hawting-Holliday was at least thirty-five—“and I shall give you the parting hand-shake with sincere regret—with very sincere regret, when the ice breaks up and the little engine helps the hoisted sails, and the floe-bound vessel that never really stopped, although her journey was only of inches in the month—moves on not North but South, along the thawed and open sea-lanes——�
He stopped, for Hawting-Holliday dropped his pipe and got off the window-seat, and caught the maimed right hand and wrung it until its owner winced.
“You gave me credit for too much perspicuity, Captain. I hadn’t seen as much as the cat’s tail until you let her out of the bag. Where are you going, man, and when do you go?�
Briefly, Magellison told him.
“All right, Captain,� said Hawting-Holliday. “You’re going to take charge of the Steam and Sail Antarctic Geological Research Expedition, financed by the Swedish Government, sailing from Plymouth for King Edward Land in April, so as to get the summer months of December, January, and February for exploration, botanizing, deep-sea-dredging, and scientific observations. You calculate on being away not quite three years. Very well, but remember this! If you don’t turn up in three years’ time and no definite news has reached us as to your whereabouts, the most useless and idle dog of my acquaintance—and that’s myself—will take the liberty to come and look for you. I swear it—by the Great Barrier and the Blue Antarctic Ooze!�
They shook hands upon it, laughing at the humorous idea of the Captain’s not coming back, and a little later the news of her husband’s impending departure was imparted, per the medium of the Press, to the marmorean lady to whom the explorer had frozen himself some few years previously. She was radiant with smiles at the revival of newspaper interest in Magellison, and postponed her spring visit to the Riviera for the purpose of giving a series of Departure Dinners in honor of the Captain. All the leading scientific lights of the day twinkled in turn about the board. And Geraldine wore all her diamonds, and was exceedingly gracious to her Distinguished Man. She saw him off from Plymouth, one balmy April day, and shed a few discreet tears in a minute and filmy pocket handkerchief as the Swedish oak-built, schooner-rigged steamship-sailer Selma ran up the Swedish colors and curtsied adieu to English waters at the outset of the long South Atlantic voyage, and the petrol steam-launch containing the friends and relatives of the Expedition rocked in her wake, and the red-eyed people crowding on the oily-smelling little vessel’s decks raised a quavering farewell cheer. Two men stood together at the Selma’s after-rail: a short, square man of muscular build, with a slight stoop that told of scholarly habits, and thick, fair hair, streaked with white, and a deeply-lined, clean-shaven face, with pale, far-seeing eyes that were set in a network of fine wrinkles. The other man was Hawting-Holliday, who had announced his intention, at the last minute, of accompanying the Expedition as far as Madeira for the sake of the sea-blow.
“Tell Geraldine I shall mail home from the Cape and Melbourne,� the leader of the Expedition said, three days later, as the boat that was to convey Hawting-Holliday ashore bobbed under the Selma’s side-ladder in a clamoring rout of tradesmen’s luggers and Funchal market-flats. “Tell her I shall certainly communicate from Lyttelton, and after that she must trust to luck and homeward-bound whalers for news of me.� He wrung Hawting-Holliday’s hand, and added, “And in case—anything should happen to me—not that such a chance is worth speaking of!—I know that I can rely upon you to act towards my—my dear girl as a friend!� The Captain’s voice shook a little, and a mist was over those clear, wide-pupilled, far-away-gazing gray eyes.
“I promise you that, faithfully,� said Hawting-Holliday, and gripped the maimed right hand of the man he loved as a brother, and went down over the side of the Selma with a sore heart.
That was in April, 1910, and news of the loss of the Selma, in the ice of the Antarctic Circle was cabled from Honolulu at the beginning of last month. An American Antarctic Expedition, having concluded a mission of exploration in the summer season of 1910, finding upon the coast of King Edward Land the few survivors of the Swedish Steam and Sail Antarctic Research Expedition making preparations to winter in a wooden hut built out of the wreckage of their teak-built sailing-steamer—rescued and carried them on their homeward route. The saved men, later interviewed at San Francisco, were unable to give news of their leader, save that the Captain, taking a dog-sledge and a little stock of provisions and instruments, and a hearty leave of all of them, turned that lined bronze face of his and those eyes with the far-away look in their wide pupils, to the dim, mysterious, uncharted regions lying South, in the lap of the mysterious Unknown, and with a wave of a fur-gloved hand, was lost in them.
“He is dead, Arthur is dead!� moaned Geraldine Magellison, in the depths of conjugal anguish and a lace-covered sofa-cushion, when the Press and Hawting-Holliday broke the news between them. “Dead!—and I loved him so—I loved him so!�
“It is a pity, under the circumstances,� said Hawting-Holliday, carrying out his promise of being a friend to Magellison’s wife by telling that wife the truth, “that you were so economical in your expressions of affection. For I do not think that when the Captain left you he had any remaining illusions as to the nature of your regard for him.�
“How cruel you are—how cruel!� gasped Geraldine, as her maid bore in a salver piled with the regrets of Learned Societies and the sympathy of distinguished Personages and private friends.
“Let me for once use the trite and hackneyed saying that I am cruel only to be kind!� said Hawting-Holliday, emphatically, “and that I speak solely in the interests of—a friend whom I love.�
Mrs. Magellison flushed to the roots of her superb golden hair, and consciously drooped her scarcely-reddened eyelids as she held up a protesting hand.
“No, no, Sir Robert!� she pleaded. “If I—as you infer—have gravely erred in lack of warmth toward poor, poor, dearest Arthur! let me at least be ungrudging in respect of his great memory. Forget what you have said, carried away by a feeling which in honor you subdued after the rude awakening of many months ago, and do not revert to—the subject for—for at least a year to come!�
At that Hawting-Holliday got upon his legs, and thrusting his hands deep into his trouser-pockets, made the one and only harangue of his existence.
“Mrs. Magellison, when you suggest that in the very hour when the intelligence of grave disaster to your husband’s vessel has reached us, I am capable of addressing you in what the poetic faculty term—Heaven knows how idiotically and falsely!—the language of love, you gravely err. The friend in whose interests I spoke just now, was—your husband. Is your husband—for I do not accept by any means the theory that because he has been lost sight of, he is dead. I believe him to be living. I shall go on believing this until I see his body, or meet with some relics of him that supply me—his friend!—with the evidence that you, his wife, are so uncommonly ready to dispense with.�
His eyes burned her with their contempt. She gasped:
“You—you mean that you are going South to try and find him?�
“You comprehend my meaning perfectly,� said Hawting-Holliday, and bowed to Mrs. Magellison with ironical deference and left her.
He was, though not a wealthy man, far from being a poor one. He chartered a stout vessel that was lying in Liverpool Docks, the Iceland Coast Survey Company’s steam-and-sail schooner Snowbird, and equipped and provisioned and manned her with a speed and thoroughness that are seldom found in combination. The Snowbird’s own skipper goes in charge of his ship, but Hawting-Holliday is the Leader of the Expedition.
And yesterday the Snowbird sailed, in search of that man who has been swallowed up by the great Conjecture. And of this I am sure, that whether Hawting-Holliday succeeds or fails, lives or dies, he will grasp the hand of his friend again Somewhere. Either upon this side of the Great Gray Veil that hangs in the doorway of the Smoky House, or upon the other....
THE END
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.
Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.