The Turnstile

by A. E. W. Mason

"Wasn't I wise, Harry? It's a little disconcerting, isn't it, when a woman shows you something you know nothing about. Just a little disconcerting, isn't it?"

She left him standing in the room and went upstairs. She had made her plea with all the frankness which had been the condition of their marriage. She would not ask for a like frankness in return. It was for him to give it. She had made it quite plain that on her side she wanted frankness. More she would not do. Not for anything would she ask what secret thing he had hidden under the papers upon his table. But she knew that there was a secret thing and her feet dragged as she mounted the stairs.

She had been in bed according to her reckoning for about an hour when she heard a noise of the shutting of a door. And the door was the front-door of the house. Cynthia sprung from her bed and lifting the blind looked out from the window. It was a dark night, but there was no fog. By the light of the street lamps she saw a man crossing the road toward the corner of South Audley Street. He had the look of her husband. She flung up the window and the sound of his footsteps made her sure. Her eyes gazing into the tempered darkness of a London street might well have deceived her, her ears could not. There was no one else walking in Curzon Street at that moment; the sound of his footsteps reverberated unmistakably, diminishing as the distance between him and the window increased. The man who now vanished into South Audley Street was Harry Rames.

Cynthia switched on the light and looked at her watch. It was one o'clock in the morning. She wrapped a dressing-gown about her and sat down trying to think calmly, seeking to discover, if she could, some other reason for his departure than the obvious one. But the obvious one recurred again and again in her thoughts. It explained everything, fitted in with everything, as no other reason did. His sudden indifference to his career, his furtive movement at his writing-table upon her appearance, his refusal to meet frankness with frankness could all thus be accounted for. His departure from the house was thus explained. He had not come up into his room next to hers; he had waited in his study for an hour; he had given her time to fall asleep; he had gone out. It was a woman then who had twisted the current of his life as she, Cynthia, could not, who had moved him to passion as she even that evening had failed to do. Cynthia raged in fury against herself for having so weakly betrayed herself. She sat in torture. Then her jealousy flamed up. That--no! Her pride must give way. If there was another woman in her story--why then the other woman must look to herself. Cynthia would fight. She hurried down-stairs into the study. She switched on the lights and tumbled hither and thither the papers on the writing-table for the one so swiftly hidden which should betray the other woman's name and her abode. But she found nothing to satisfy her. She looked round the room. From a drawer in a bureau against the wall Harry's keys had been dangling. That she had noticed; and the keys were gone now. She tried the drawer. It was locked. In that drawer then was hidden the key to his secret. So much knowledge at all events Cynthia was sure that she had gained. She went back to her room and lying in bed ran over all the names of her acquaintances, even of her friends. She was not in the mood to trust any of them, but she could not fix upon any of them either. One and all they were cats and treacherous. Cynthia was no longer afraid; she was simply furious; and her fury was not diminished when she heard the front-door open and shut once more, almost noiselessly--so much caution was being used.

But Cynthia, though she was right in her facts, had never been so mistaken in her conclusions. The scroll which Harry Rames had pushed beneath his papers was simply a chart of the Antarctic seas; whereon lines distinguished one from the other by the manner of their tracing recorded the journeys of successive explorers and marked each one's "farthest South." He stood for a little while after Cynthia had left him on the same spot half-way between his chart and her position at the door. Then he turned back to his writing-table and spread out the map once more. The call of the unknown places was loud in his ears that night.

"Come back! Come back!"

Six weeks ago it had been the merest whisper--flashed to the wireless poles on the roof of the Admiralty and heard by him one afternoon, a message very small and clear amidst the clatter of Parliament Street. But the whisper had gathered volume and vehemence, until the map before him seemed a mouth shouting it, and the room throbbed with it as though the walls would burst asunder.

"Come back! Come back!"

It seemed to him that the command was not to be denied or must ring in his ears forever; and that arena of the House of Commons, where man fought with man, became a trivial place of meanness and intrigue compared with the vast battle-ground in the South, where one fought in a grandeur of silence with the careless, stubborn elements of a wild and unknown world.

He bent over his map and across it, as across the table of a camera obscura he saw moving, in miniature and brilliantly defined, the ships of the men who had sailed to the South. James Cook's two vessels, the Resolution and the Adventure, crossed the Antarctic circle as it seemed underneath his eyes--the first, of all the ships that were ever built, to sail upon these waters. Bellingshausen of Kronstadt came next and dropped his anchor under the shelter of Peter I Island and gave to it its name. He was followed by the whaling captains, each choosing his own line, great navigators inspired by a great and spirited firm. Weddell and Biscoe in their brigs. Balleny in his schooner. The later ships of the scientific expeditions under D'Urville of France and Wilkes of Chesapeake Bay moved southward in the track of the whaling captains, and close upon their heels James Ross from England with the Erebus and the Terror burst for the first time in the history of the world through the ice-pack into the open sea beyond and sailed from west to east along the great ice-barrier. There were other lines where the Challenger had sailed, and the official expeditions; and there was yet another, the longest of all the lines upon the chart, a line stretching out to a harbor never visited before, and against that line in tiny letters was printed "Rames." He followed the course of his ship from his first harbor in the Antarctic continent with the wooden cross high on a hill above it, which marks the grave of a naturalist of a past expedition. He fell to speculating where the Perhaps lay now. Parliament had met in the first days of January. It was just before the opening of Parliament that Hemming had started on the mail steamer to New Zealand to pick up his ship in Lyttelton Harbor. Allow him five weeks for his journey. The second week of February would have come to an end before the Perhaps had steamed out past the headland. Hemming himself had recognized that he was late. The difficulty of collecting money to finance the expedition had detained him beyond his time. A fortnight out from New Zealand, where was the Perhaps now? She might still be in the stormy seas on the outer edge of Ross's pack with the petrels and the albatrosses like a cloud about her yards. Or she might have touched at one of the northerly harbors of the continent. Perhaps winter was coming early on to wrap her about with snow and ice. If that happened, Hemming's chance was gone, for he had only money for one year. He must reach the Pole this next summer or not at all. He must therefore winter well to the South.