“Arthur!� said Mrs. Magellison, with a cold kind of impatience, rattling the handle of the door as if to attract his attention. He came back with a start and hung up the receiver, and rose. He had a simple, courteous manner that won upon the suitor who had just proposed to his wife; and oddly enough, the appearance of a servant with a message that summoned the lady to an interview with her modiste was not greatly regretted by Hawting-Holliday.
“I have seen you before, of course,� said his host, making him free of a rack of Esquimaux pipes and pushing over a jar of Navy-cut.
“Have you though?� rose to the visitor’s lips, but the words were not allowed to escape. Looking round he saw that there were piles of receipted accounts, and orderly piles of tradesmen’s books upon the table with the reams of dusty MSS., and as servants came in for orders and went away instructed, and messages were telephoned to various purveyors, Hawting-Holliday arrived at the conclusion that Mrs. Magellison’s husband was regarded less in that capacity by Mrs. Magellison and her household than as major-domo, head-bailiff and house-steward.
The two men chatted a little, and presently one spoke while the other listened. The capacity for hero-worship is quick in every generous nature, and the extravagant, impoverished, high-bred county gentleman and man-about-town was conscious that this modest, absent-minded little ex-naval Commander was of the stuff that went to build great heroes. Franklin and Nansen were brothers to this man, and that the justly-honored names of Shackleton and Peary, and the cognomen of Cook (King of terminological inexactitudinarians), were hot upon the public’s mouths just then, mattered nothing to Hawting-Holliday, as he heard how in the year of Our Lord Nineteen Hundred and Six, ten men sailed from San Francisco for Bering Sea on board a sixty-ton schooner, to settle the question of the existence of Undiscovered Ranges of Volcanic Origin in Alaska to the North. And how great storms and awful blizzards hindered the Coastal Survey Expedition, and sickness crippled its members, yet they struggled gamely on.
“Good God!� said Hawting-Holliday, whose pipe had long since gone out. He heard next how the Expedition suffered the loss of their ship and all their stores, and how their leader sent his crew home by a passing whaler and, for the enlargement of his own experience, chose to journey back to civilization along the Alaskan coast, three thousand miles of solitary sledge-traveling, aided only by the Esquimaux he chanced on in his terrible journey. And as he went on narrating in his calm and even voice, enforcing a point by a modest gesture of the hand that had lost the top-joints of the first and second fingers, and sometimes looking through and beyond the face of the listener with those strange, sorrowful, far-away eyes, what he related the other man saw, and——
“Good Lord!� said Hawting-Holliday again, “what an Odyssey the whole thing is! And so you got back to Ithaca after eighteen months of tramping it on your lonesome along a frozen coast and sleeping in holes dug in the snow, and living on blubber and seal-meat or boiled skin-boots when you couldn’t get anything else; and gathering knowledge and experience when there wasn’t even reindeer moss to scrape off the rocks!� He got up and held out his hand. “As a perfectly useless and idle kind of beggar, I don’t know that my sincere admiration and respect are worth having, Captain, but if they were!——�
He gulped, and went, quite clumsily, away, but came back again, and so a friendship grew between the “perfectly useless and idle kind of beggar,� Hawting-Holliday, and the hero of the three-thousand-mile tramp back to Civilization. Perhaps Hawting-Holliday had really never been seriously attached to the handsome piece of statuary that bore Magellison’s name. It is certain that her cold neglect and open contempt of her husband eventually kindled the wrath of Magellison’s newly-won champion to boiling-point. Not that the Captain gave any perceptible sign of suffering under the icy blizzard of his wife’s scorn. Endurance was the lesson he had learned best of all, and he agreed with her in regarding himself as a Failure.
“A beautiful and gifted woman has a right to be ambitious for the man she marries,� he said once to Hawting-Holliday. “And if he has no power to keep at high-level, if he makes no more way than a schooner frozen in the floe, it is natural that she should feel keenly disappointed and—and manifest the feeling by a—a certain change of attitude as regards him.�