CHAPTER V
Jack Galbraith replied to Mr. Mar’s letter by return of post. He apologized for not writing more at length, but he was up to his eyes in proof-correcting. He was seeing through the press—(“Yes, yes, but all that was singularly irrelevant”)—book about his experiences (“Hum! hum!”), “extreme northern Siberia.” (“Siberia, forsooth!”); no white man had ever been there before. (“And to think he might have spent that time in Alaska!”) He was “making a genuine contribution to science”—oh, yes, quite so—“most travelers too imperfectly equipped.” (“He couldn’t have had my letter when he wrote this.”) The implication was, of course, that Galbraith’s own equipment left nothing to be desired. He even touched airily upon his claims to be considered geographer as well as navigator, electrician, geologist, philologist, biologist, and the Lord knows what, beside. Yes, Jack had a large way of envisaging human endeavor, especially his own. But certainly their letters had crossed. Hum! he had “covered areas in science never before exploited by a single man.” The result Mar should presently see. For Galbraith would leave word that a copy of the great work should be sent to his old friend. It would be two years before he himself could see the thing in book form. (“What’s this?”) “Off again, to join an expedition!” And wasn’t it strange? He was going to the arctic as Mar was recommending. Not precisely to Norton Bay, but (“Then he had got the letter!”) “with the Swedish explorer Nordenskjöld to see if by good luck” they could find the North Pole. And why shouldn’t they “come home via Norton Bay?” he asked, with irresponsible arrogance, adding, characteristically: “I’ll mention it to the Swede. Perhaps we’ll crawl over the crown of the world and coast down the shore of Alaska till we come up against your Anvil Rock. If we do, I promise to go and see after the gold-mine for you. Thank you for saying I’m to have my share—but thank you most of all for telling me such a mighty fine story when I was a kid. It had a great deal to do with the shaping of my ambition, and the direction of my multifarious studies.”
And this was Galbraith’s good-by.
These events had taken place nearly two years before Bella Wayne began her meteoric career at the Valdivia School for Young Ladies.
If Hildegarde had recovered somewhat from her disappointment at Jack’s failure to visit California, her father had not ceased silently to lament, and secretly to contemn Galbraith’s wounding flippancy in his choice of a route to Alaska.
When Madeleine Smulsky’s family took her away to live in Wyoming, Hildegarde would have been even more desolate but for her espousal of Bella Wayne’s cause, and consequent preoccupation with that not altogether satisfactory protégée.