I did not expect it for a long distance yet, but it was our plan to leave no step of the way unexamined, and certainly there was plenty beside to repay us. Edith Gale seemed fairly lost in the color glories of this supernatural, elemental world. Chauncey Gale declared it was like the Chicago Fair, where one could have spent a lifetime and still not have seen it all. He made his initial attempt at naming birds one morning when a penguin, the first we had seen, came by on a small pan of ice. The bird regarded us solemnly, and in return we laughed at him. Edith Gale was overjoyed at his arrival.
“Now, Daddy, what’s that? You were going to name things, you know.”
“That,” replied Gale gravely, “is a ‘Billy Watson.’ He looks exactly like a fellow I used to know by that name, when he had his dress suit on.”
We didn’t consider it much of a name, but it had a sticking quality, and all penguins became “Billy Watsons” to us thereafter. There were “Big Billy Watsons” and “Little Billy Watsons.” Also, some that had feathers in their hats, and these we called “Dandy Billy Watsons.” When we came to some sea-leopards and crab-eating seals he tried his hand again as a naturalist.
Two Impressions of Billy Watson. First, by Chauncey Gale. Second,
by Nicholas Chase.
“Those,” he said, “are ‘Moon-faced Mollies.’”
But this was regarded as a failure. Anyhow, it was my turn. The Captain had referred to them indiscriminately as seals, whereupon I produced their true names and my authority for conferring them, thus adding another instalment to Mr. Biffer’s respect for my scientific attainments, which, though slight enough, were sufficient to impress him considerably.
During these days Ferratoni had almost nothing to say. He walked the deck for hours as we pushed through the drifting ice, listening to its crushing under the iron sheathing below and looking always to the south, as if something lay there from which, across that wireless, frozen waste, to him alone came tidings. Now and then he ascended to our fighting-top to peer still farther into those polar depths. We all felt very close to creation’s secrets here in this primeval world, but we realized that Ferratoni was nearer to the invisible than the others.
“I feel sometimes that he can read our very souls and all the mystery of the air,” Edith Gale said to me, after one of these visits. “When he looks at me I know that I may as well have put my thoughts into words. He believes, too, you know, that we shall be able to converse mentally, by and by, and at any distance. It would be simply the chording of the thought vibration, he says, and that there is really no need of words—that they are but a poor medium at best, and, as somebody has said, invented more to conceal thought than to convey it.”