“Yes, you have plenty of time. But for me there’ll be barely enough,” and the face that he turned an instant toward the ship— Oh, beyond doubting, his time was short!
Out of her cow-boy hat she drew a long pin, and going to the foot of the bed she thrust the hatpin several inches into the peat wall above where the dog lay. But her near presence was so resented by the great explorer, Ky, that before the watch could be hung upon the pin, Hildegarde must needs retreat. She remembered the luncheon in her pocket, and offered Ky a share. No; Ky wanted nothing of a stranger.
“Throw it down by the door,” said her master, and it was done. When Hildegarde had retired, the dog came down, and when he turned his blind eye about again, lo, a shining thing upon the wall.
“So!” the sick man sank back satisfied. “Now to get you to help me about Ky, I must put twenty years into an hour. More than twenty, for I can’t remember when I began to think about finding the Pole. I played at it all my boyhood. I’ve worked at it ever since.” An instant Hildegarde dropped her shrinking eyes. For he was putting out that maimed hand for the cup. She heard the grate of rusty tin on the cracker-box, as his cleared voice went on, “I began by going in a revenue cutter to Port Barrow; and I had been in two arctic expeditions before the one I’m telling you about. But on both of those others I was the one man who wasn’t going for the Pole. I was going for experience. I never believed my chiefs would get there, but I always believed I would—later. I had theories.”
“Oh, I wish you had known a friend of ours—”
“I had a friend of my own. The year after I got back from the second voyage, I met one night, at a club in New York, a young Russian-American who was nearly as keen about polar problems as I was. We talked arctic exploration all that winter of ’95 and ’96. We both believed tremendously in Nansen.”
“So did he—our friend.”
“We agreed we’d have given ten years of life to have had the honor of going along with the Norwegian. But he had been away now nearly three years. How far had he got? What had happened? Even experts began to say: ‘Another expedition crushed in the arctic ice.’ But neither my Russian nor I believed that Nansen was dead, and we began privately to discuss a rescue-party. We agreed that if we carried out our idea, and if we found Nansen unsuccessful, we’d offer him our ship to come home in and we—we’d push straight on. Ours shouldn’t be any trumpeted ‘dash for the Pole’—how we loathed the cheap gallantry of the phrase!” The voice that had flared up an instant fell again as he said: “We knew something, even then, of the snail’s pace of that laboring on; that doing battle for every yard; that nightmare of crawling forward inch by inch—only so, we knew, might a man make his ‘dash for the Pole.’ But the plan of setting off without saying to any one what it was we were hoping to do supplied my Russian and me with our first condition for making the attempt.”
Was it indeed only water in the cup, that after another draught of it he should seem to throw off weakness as you might a burdensome cloak? “My friend had money, so had I. No need of a public appeal. No need to beat the big drum and talk tall. Both of us had felt the irony of each explorer’s coming back to assure the world that he had never meant to find the Pole. What he had gone for was exploration of the ice-fields this side. Ha! Ha!” It was strange that such a feeble little laugh could give out such a world of irony. “Or else, what he’d gone for was to ascertain the salinity of the polar seas, or to determine the trend of arctic currents. Or to explain”—again that hardly audible laughter—“how the Jeanette’s oilskin breeches got to the Greenland coast; anything under heaven, except reaching the paltry Pole. So as we knew we were made of no better stuff, if as good, as our predecessors, we said that we, too, if we came back with only some deep sea dredgings, a few photographs of ice-pressure effects—sketches of Aurora Borealis, and a store of polar bearskins and walrus tusks, we, too, would find ourselves pointing to these as the treasures we’d staked life and reputation for. So hard it is to suffer the extremity and still have to say ‘I failed’!”
He lay silent so long that Hildegarde quoted Cheviot. “They say it’s harder for an American.”