Under those vision-filled eyes, the crippled dog, still sleeping, made a muffled sound. “Ky is dreaming,” said the sick man, absently, “that she hears a seal crying ‘Ho-o-o,’ with his nose above the ice. Or she thinks she hears the ‘Kah! kah! sah! sah!’ of the auks. So do I, sometimes.”
“But you promised ‘the face’ you wouldn’t think of the arctic any more.”
“Yes,” and weakness of the flesh or weight of memory held him a moment silent. “She always said that if the Norwegian had been successful she and I would never have quarreled. She wrote that in every letter after I left her. I don’t know. She was very young. She never understood”—he glanced at Hildegarde—“never understood what was the most interesting place on the map. She thought it was Paris.” He smiled. “Maybe she was right. I don’t know. All I do know is”—and a subtle animation invaded voice and air—“a few weeks after I read Nansen’s news in the London street, Borisoff came across from Christiana to talk things over. All this time that I had been looking at the face he had been building a ship as good, he said, as the Fram. No man would dare say more. He had made agreements with a crew and company of picked men, some of them his old whaling people. He had news that the Finlander we’d sent the year before to Siberia, after Olenek dogs, would be waiting with the pack up there on that bleak shore, between Chelyuskin and the Kara Sea—‘waiting for you and me,’ said Borisoff.” The sick man’s eyes were shining. “Borisoff was a tremendous fellow! I never knew but one person who didn’t believe in Borisoff. You couldn’t expect a girl—” he broke off. “But the great bond between him and me was that we both had that passion for the North, that is like nothing else on earth in the way of land love. Talk of the South! A man loves the South as he loves a soft bed and the warm corner by the fire. But he loves the North as he loves his prey.” He brought one hand away from his beard and he fastened it afresh in the knotted oilskin at his side, with an air of one about to rise up and continue his journey. “Well, one day I said to Borisoff, ‘Of course we can’t do the damned thing if Nansen couldn’t—so come along, and let’s try!’
“We sailed from Tromsö that July.
“But we didn’t call ourselves arctic explorers, and we never once said Pole—not even after we reached the edge of the ice-pack, north of Sannikof Island. It wasn’t till we got into north latitude 78° that we called a council of war. By that time we knew our men and they knew us. We were sure of six, but we put it to the other four as well. We engaged to extricate the ship from the floe and send her home, if any man of them wanted to turn back. What were Borisoff and I going to do? one of the doubtful four asked. Well, we had our famous steel launch, and we had sledges, dogs, kyacks, provisions, and—we had—an idea we’d like to see what it was like—farther on. I’ve always believed our not saying anything about ‘a dash,’ or so much as naming the great goal, gave Borisoff’s words their most compelling eloquence. If we’d said then that we wanted to try for the Pole, some one would have felt himself obliged to object and talk prudence. As it was, we twelve sat there as one man in the little saloon of the Narwhal, with the loose ice grinding against the ship’s sides. And no one said, but every one was thinking, ‘We’ll find the Pole.’ Borisoff was a born leader. Not a soul on the ship but believed Borisoff would do anything he set out to do. They all knew by now how extraordinarily well equipped we were. Borisoff showed again and again how we should profit by the failure of our forerunners. Well, that was in September. We were frozen in, and we drifted with the ice all that winter and following summer—drifted in the dark, with bears prowling round the ice-shrouded ship—drifted in the midnight sun with guillemots and fulmars circling about our rigging.”
He sat there some seconds staring through the peat wall, never seeing the open watch, forgetting the irrevocable hour. As though she, too, shared in some chill vision, the dog shivered.
To bring the master back, “Ky is cold,” said Hildegarde, and would have thrown over her a trailing end of blanket.
“No, no, she’s not cold here,” the sick man answered, but in a voice so faint and far Hildegarde wondered if he would ever speak again.
To mask her creeping fear and bridge the silence, “Why does she shiver, if she’s not cold?”
His absent eyes came slowly back to where the dog was uneasily dozing. “Thinks we’re crossing the ice-moraines, thinks she can’t go on, then remembers the whip. The whip that flies out when you least expect it, eh, Ky?—and bites the hair off clean.” He bent forward, and gently laid his distorted hands on the scarred and trembling hide. The dog was quiet again.