“You see, Professor, I feel about this thing this way. I guess you’re not far wrong about this new land; it’s exciting enough to think of it. I calculated there was room up there for a little more glory after I heard your lecture before the Philosophical Society at Christiania last November; glory for some of us, such as Peary and Amundsen, Scott, Shackleton, Nansen, Stefansson, have won, and I thought it over. I fell in with Erickson and Goritz at Stockholm and we canvassed the matter, sort o’ stuck our heads together and thought it out; then we sent for you, and the demonstration seems straight enough. Some rigmarole! Don’t get angry Professor, that’s my way and, anyhow, I’m not going back on you, not so much as the thickness of a flea’s ear, and I think you’ll allow that can’t count; but the more I looked at the matter the more I wondered if there was anything about it the least bit more substantial than glory.
“And that wasn’t all, either. I think I’d like to get back again.”
“Yes, Professor,” it was Goritz speaking, with his head tilted back, as he followed the scurrying flight of sparrows amid the tasseled larches of the opposite gaard, “dead bodies are rather indifferent to glory. If we are great enough to get there, we must be great enough to get back. It would be no consolation for us to have our relatives and friends sing;
‘Sa vandra vara stora man
Fran ljuset ned til skuggan.’”[[1]]
[1]. Thus our great men wander from the light down into the shades.
Hopkins smiled; he was neither hurt nor confused. He shook his head assentingly, and his faint drawl prolonged itself somewhat in his mocking rejoinder:
“That’s all right, Goritz. As a corpse you probably would attract a little more notice than either Erickson or myself, but buried fathoms deep in an Arctic sea, or just rolled over by a nameless glacier in this nameless land, your own chances for a newspaper obituary might shrink to very small proportions. You might not even have your dimensions mentioned.”
Goritz looked approvingly at the American, and benignantly raised his hat and bowed.
But the impatient Professor was in his chair, his hands spread out before him; his smile had vanished, his encroaching eyes had retreated, his serrated lips were puckered, his eyebrows frowned, and altogether he assumed such a sudden portentousness of suppressed eagerness and concealed thought that we rocked with delight and the momentary restraint was forgotten. And with our laughter there stole back into the Professor’s face its usual smile, but it had enigmatically deepened into a sort of mute expostulation.