[Illustration:
THE POLICE FOLLOW RIDDLE’S CUE
]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE NEW
NORTHLAND
BY
L. P. GRATACAP
WITH 16 DESIGNS
BY
ALBERT OPERTI
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
THOMAS BENTON
1915
------------------------------------------------------------------------
COPYRIGHT 1915
BY
L. P. GRATACAP
PRINTED BY
THE EDDY PRESS CORPORATION, CUMBERLAND, MD.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
KROCKER LAND
A ROMANCE OF
DISCOVERY
BY
ALFRED ERICKSON
PROF. HLMATH BJORNSEN
ANTOINE GORITZ
SPRUCE HOPKINS
THE NARRATIVE BY
ALFRED ERICKSON
EDITED BY
AZAZIEL LINK
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTENTS
_Page_
Preface (Editorial Note) 7
Chapter I The Fiord 39
Chapter II Point Barrow 63
Chapter III On the Ice Pack 89
Chapter IV Krocker Land Rim 116
Chapter V The Perpetual Nimbus 141
Chapter VI The Crocodilo-Python 162
Chapter VII The Deer Fels 184
Chapter VIII The Pine Tree Gredin 203
Chapter IX The Valley of Rasselas 228
Chapter X Radiumopolis 246
Chapter XI The Crater of 271
Everlasting Light
Chapter XII The Pool of Oblation 288
Chapter XIII Love and Liberty 308
Chapter XIV Goritz’s Death and the 332
Gold Makers
Chapter XV My Escape 348
Chapter XVI The Sequel 376
------------------------------------------------------------------------
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
_Page_
The Police Follow Riddles’ Cue 28
(Frontispiece)
The Fiord 39
The Professor and the Pribylof 69
Seals
On the Ice Pack 98
Krocker Land Rim 131
The Perpetual Nimbus 158
The Crocodilo-Python and the Wild 180
Pig
The Deer Fels 190
The Pine Tree Gredin 215
Meeting the Radiumopolites 226
The Valley of Rasselas 239
Ziliah and Her Father 292
The Pool of Oblation 300
Goritz’s Death 334
Erickson’s Escape 375
Erickson’s Rescue 382
------------------------------------------------------------------------
EDITORIAL NOTE
This remarkable narrative of Arctic exploration is itself a remarkable
confirmation of the wisdom of that tireless hunt for NEWS which has
become second nature to the newspaper man, and while distinctively a
mark of his calling, has attached to his profession the opprobrium of
“yellowness.” The appropriation of this color—so intimately associated
in nature with the golden illumination of the noon, the royal charm of
lilies, and the enduring lure of gold—to designate an irresponsible and
shameless sensationalism has never been adequately explained. The
“yellowness” of the live journalist, turning with an instinctive scent
to follow to its end every new trail of incident, sniffing in each
passing rumor the presence of hidden and serviceable scandal, and
ruthlessly breaking through the sham obstruction of modesty to snatch
the culprit or to free the victim, cannot certainly be referred to the
torpor marked by the _jaundice_ of the invalid, nor to the weakness of
the last stages of an emaciating fever. Perhaps if the reproach is to be
made, or can be made, intelligible, the yellow color finds its subtle
analogue in a mustard plaster.
That popular cataplasm has a dignified and ancient history, and is
gratefully recorded in literature for nearly two thousand years as a
_contrarient_ of value, allaying hidden aches through the excoriation of
the uninjured and painless surfaces. The process seems to involve an
injustice in principle, but it is, in spite of abstractions, a
beneficent practice. The “yellowness” of newspapers may amaze modesty,
startle discretion, and afflict innocence, but it cures interior
disorders, and the unpleasantness of an ulcerated or inflamed skin
should be condoned or forgotten for the benefit of a regulated stomach
or a renovated joint.
However, this all _en passant_, as only remotely, and yet diffidently,
related to the manner of my obtaining the circumstances and facts of the
following adventure. I have attributed my success to the pertinacity of
instinct and the olfactory sense of mischief. It is true. Without one or
the other—though the combination of both rendered failure impossible—I
might not now be in the enviable position of proclaiming a “beat” on my
professional rivals which no amount of editorial venom, aspersion,
contempt and innuendo will ever obliterate from the annals of
journalism, as unprecedented.
I am indeed afflicted at moments with a sort of discomfiture over my own
modesty in not having ransacked to better advantage the commercial
possibilities of my tenacity and acumen. Incredible and hypnotizing as
is this story of Mr. Alfred Erickson, as a foil to its romantic daring
and its transcendent interest, the brief relation of the episode—and its
development—that led to its publication, has a delightful thrill of
excitement, and an up-to-date volubility, so to speak, of incident, that
frames the story in the most exhilarating contrasts.
An office boy, a temporary expedient for a messenger and page, Jack
Riddles, mercurial, vagarious, and quick-witted, a sandy haired,
long-limbed, peaked-nosed and weazel-eyed creation, with flattened
cheeks, whose jackets were always short, and whose trousers despised any
intimacy with the tops of his shoes, got me the story.
Jack is destined for great things in our metropolitan annals. In the
mission of the Progressive party, with its millennial attachments, Jack
and his sort would be progressively eliminated. Crime exists for
detection, and detection is Life at its _n_th power for such as he. Jack
is endowed with a rare intuition of ways and means when the center of a
reportorial mystery is to be perforated, and the process of “getting
there” to _him_ is as inevitable as the first half of the alphabet.
Riddle’s only counterpart was Octavius Guy, alias Gooseberry, Lawyer
Bruff’s boy in Wilkie Collin’s story of the Moonstone.
He began his exploit on the top of a Fifth Avenue ’bus, and it was about
the middle of September, 1912. Jack has a Hogarthian sense for the
multitudinous, the psychological, the junction of circumstance and
expression in revealing a plot or betraying a criminal. To hang over the
railing of a Fifth Avenue ’bus and watch the crowds, the motor cars,
each vibratory shock, as the behemoth shivers and plunges, bringing your
interpretative eye unexpectedly into a new relation with the faces of
that ceremonious throng, was intoxication for Jack. It evoked
exuberantly the passion of espionage. There was indeed concealment here,
in the packed and methodical progression of people and people, and yet
more people. Yet with an average dumbness or dullness, or just the
homogeneous stare of business, or the vapid contentment of contiguity to
riches and fashion, Jack caught glimpses, direct, profound, of dismay or
discontent; of the pallid, revolting grimace of suffering, the snarl of
envy, or the deeper placidity of crime.
They were rare, but Jack watched for them; his precocity ran that way
and he was rewarded. It used up his dimes, it widened the solutions of
continuity in his nether garments and brought his feet more familiarly
in contact with the hard flagging. Some supersensual instinct urged him.
The succeeding story attests the splendor of the revelation he
uncovered. Jack may have been about eighteen years of age.
It was opposite the Public Library, just below Forty-second Street on
Fifth Avenue and on the west side of that thoroughfare that Jack’s eyes,
after a long stop which held up an endless phalanx of automobiles, fell
upon a man and woman who conveyed to his thought a hint of crime. The
woman was beautiful too, a Spanish siren, full in form, with developed
curves that yielded so slightly to the sway of her tight fitting mauve
dress as to start the conjecture that she did not belong to the more
rarified types of Venuses. A light feather boa, deliciously pearly gray
in tone, heightened the carnation of her cheeks. These in turn yielded
to the orbed splendor of her eyes, and that to the wealth of black hair
darkly globed underneath a maroon velvet turban-like cap, in whose folds
twinkled a firmament of greenish stars. Jack literally devoured her
radiance, so near was he to her as she descended with her companion the
last terrace to the sidewalk between the amorphous lions of the Public
Library.
The man with her was inordinately, insolently handsome, dark and tall,
dressed a little beyond the form of reticence, as was the woman. Herein
perhaps lurked the confession of their mutual depravity to Jack, an
untutored psychologist; to all besides it appealed as a momentary
sensation, to some as barely an infringement of good taste.
The man wore a light fedora hat that suited the bravado of his curled
and graceful moustache, the ovate outlines of his face, his liquid,
voluptuous eyes, the sensuous thickness of his lips. Observation stopped
short at his face where he intended it should. Its arrest was made
imperative by a blue and ormolu tie, relieved against a softly-tinted
yellow shirt, carrying a horseshoe of demantoid garnets in a wreath of
little diamonds. His feet were encased in tan gaiters, a permissible
distraction. For an instant only the spectator was rewarded with an
appreciation of their admirable _tournure_. Otherwise he was in black,
relieved by the white lining at the lapels of his coat, and he carried a
cane in his gloved hand.
It was a few instants after Jack’s ravished eyes had fastened on this
entrancing couple, that the cane was raised sharply in the air to
descend abruptly on the woman’s head. The attack involved the man’s
slight retreat—a backward gesture—and his turning aside, whereby his
profile cut keenly across the sunlit stone behind him, and Jack was
shocked into a delighted recognition of the same profile in a print in
the show window of Krauschaar’s gallery. He remembered the title; it was
“Mephistopheles, A Modern Guise of an Old Offender”; a smiling, swarthy
beau at the feet of a remonstrating and beautiful _ingenue_.
The explosion was evidently the climax of an altercation. Jack recalled
the previous animated demeanor of the couple. Explanatory reflections
were cut short by the velocity of the woman’s defense. She flung herself
on the man, caught his arms with her outstretched hands, and kicked him
viciously. Infuriated, he tore himself away, raised the cane and the
next moment would have inflicted a harsher insult on the defiant Amazon,
into whose face, so Jack thought, had sprung a tigerish fury, when, from
the stupified and expectant crowd before them, half shrinking and half
jubilant, shot a tall figure, whose interposition transfixed both
contestants.
This meteoric stranger was remarkable for his broad shoulders, and a
peculiar taper in his frame downward to his feet, that made him
figuratively a human top, the impression of any actual deformity arising
from his immense chest, on which, by a connection scarcely deserving
consideration as a neck, sat his squat, contracted head. Prodigious
whiskers covered his face, invading his high cheeks almost to the outer
limits of his sunken eyes.
This hirsute prodigality contrasted with his cropped cranium and his
closely shaven lips. The latter were long and thin-compressed, they
seemed to separate his chin from the rest of his face by a red seam. His
forehead was low and his head was covered with a steamer-tourist’s cap.
His clothes were of plaid.
As he rushed between the wranglers he caught each by the shoulder, and
he pushed them apart. He had turned toward the avenue, facing the
wondering throng, and Jack heard him speak quickly and sharply, but in a
guttural, obscured way that suggested something that was not English or,
if it was, it was hopelessly incoherent to Jack’s ears from its
imperfect articulation.
The man and woman seemed stunned into immobility, and then obeying his
gesture, followed him on the sidewalk, jostled and pressed by the crowd
which at first, inquisitive but timorous, had recoiled a little from the
enigmatical encounter and then, almost obstreperous and decidedly
interested engulfed the trio, who however pushed their way through,
energetically piloted by the stranger. How quickly a drama evolves!
All three had almost simultaneously stepped into the little _scenario_,
and yet by the illusion of an assumed sequence the last actor seemed a
novelty, related as unexpected, to the other two, as more familiar and
apparent. None of the three spoke, nor did they heed the interruption of
the spectators who tardily parted to let them pass. The moment
Forty-second Street was reached the leader turned toward Sixth Avenue.
Jack standing on the roof of the ’bus, which slowly swung off into the
restored movement northward as the obstruction somewhere ahead
disappeared, saw them enter an automobile opposite the northern entrance
to the library and dash westward.
Jack did not argue the matter with himself. He had no compunctions. He
jumped straight for the to him (as perhaps to anyone) tangible certainty
that he had struck a trail of iniquity. But how to follow it? His
ruminations were cut short by the loud honk of an automobile and there,
returning to Fifth Avenue at Fiftieth Street, he saw the yellow
limousine which contained the suspects wheeling into the procession and,
forced by the unrelieved pressure to relax its impatience, moving with
the limping concourse at the same pace.
Jack watched it eagerly. His eyes never left it. It swayed a little to
the right and to the left as the driver, probably under threats or
persuasion, endeavored to insert his vehicle into the chance spaces that
opened before him. This irregular and tentative progress brought the
automobile at length directly alongside of the ’bus which had on it the
Nemesis of its (the automobile’s) occupants. It was underneath Jack’s
very eyes; he could have dropped on its roof almost unnoticed. Jack’s
heart beat with trip-hammer throbs, and his mind rehearsed the
possibilities of murder, arson, burglary, brigandage, kidnapping, etc.,
gathering headway in that uncanny conference going on there below under
that burnished but impenetrable roof. But he was exulting too with the
steel-clad certainty of having a “case,” and that a little intensive use
of his wits would promote him from the office floor to a reserved seat
in the Reporters’ Sanctum.
A jolt, a lurching swing, the vituperative shriek of an ungreased axle,
and the ’bus followed a meandering lane that brought it into an
unimpeded headway. Jack sprang to his feet and watched behind him the
still imprisoned limousine—it too shot ahead; noiselessly as a speeding
bird it overtook the ’bus and then with a graceful curve, almost as if
in mockery of his impotence, it vanished into east Fifty-eighth Street.
Jack had a message for the Director of the Metropolitan Art Museum. It
was from myself in response to an inquiry as to what space we could
afford for a description of a new Morgan exhibit. Jack was a safe
messenger, unmistakably accurate, but we always discounted his celerity,
because of his preferences for a ride on a Fifth avenue ’bus and the
little delinquencies of delay his observational powers tempted him to
perpetrate. He was an hour later than the most generous allowance of
time would justify. Jack was to bring back “copy” for the next day’s
issue. I lectured him. He was sullenly respectful, indifferently
contrite, and showed a taciturn preoccupation that impressed my
reportorial instinct as significant.
As a matter of fact the missing hour was used in traversing Fifty-eighth
Street. The fruit of Jack’s search was diminutive but it was conclusive.
On the pavement in front of No. — east Fifty-eighth Street, Jack picked
up a microscopic green glass star. He knew where it belonged—the
spangled turban on top of the massed hair of that afternoon’s
_debutante_; _debutante_ to Jack’s official criticism.
This minute betrayal had dropped from her hat, from nowhere else, and
the belligerent cane of her escort had dislodged it. It had lain
somewhere in the folds and creases of the soft velvet, to fall just
there, unsuspectedly at the entrance of her retreat—a frail enamel bead
releasing to the world a marvelous secret. For Jack Riddles intended to
watch that house; he would enter it; if it concealed some half
consummated plot of SIN, if indeed the plot was over, its victims
disposed of, and the conspirators were there enjoying the harvest of
their guilt, he would know it, and—the eventuality of failure never
entered his head. He felt, in every fibre, a certainty of wrong-doing,
something shadowy, perhaps darkly cruel in these people. His prescience
was involuntary; he never explained it, he never himself understood it.
Jack lived in Brooklyn, with his wifeless father. That night as he left
the office he dropped a postal at a lamp post and took a car north. He
was following the trail. A little transposed I submit Jack’s story as he
gave it to me the next morning.
He came to the office a little late, and knocked at my door. On entering
I saw instantly that he was in an advanced stage of nervous excitement.
He was pale, and a fluttering involuntary movement of his hands, one
over the other, as he stood before me, with a glitter in his peculiarly
shaped and small eyes betrayed his mental agitation. He was quite wet,
had probably been drenched, and the first symptoms of a chill showed
that precautions were necessary to avert a possible collapse. I told him
to sit down, opened a cellarette, which had its professional and
commercial uses, and poured out a rather stiff jorum of the best whisky
I owned.
As he swallowed in a gulping manner the proffered contents of the glass,
he was rather a ludicrous and yet pitiful and heart-moving object. His
disordered hair, shabby clothes and a certain forlorn wistfulness in his
glance upward to me, combined with his lean and disjointed anatomy gave
him an expression that was at once tender and laughable. Only a
Cruikshank could have done it justice. His spirits revived, animal heat
reasserted itself, and back with it, as if it had stood somewhere aside
until invited to return, came boastingly his invincible pugnacity and
confidence.
“Mr. Link,” his speech was customarily hesitating with a deprecatory
manner as if forestalling interruption or correction, and impeded by a
slight stutter, but now, in the tide and torrent of his thoughts, under
the sway of the elation over his first bit of detective work, it was
rapid but coherent, and oddly picturesque. “Mr. Link, I’ve nipped a
pretty piece of mischief in the bud—seems so to me. Of course I’m just
on the trail, and fetching up to the big game that I think is in sight,
barring the trees—may take more work than I think. But the proposition
is as clear as glass that there’s a crooked game being pulled off at —
east Fifty-eighth Street, and I’m convinced that ‘the deceits of the
world, the flesh and the devil,’ as it goes in the prayer book, are
behind it. Now here’s the evidence—not much you may say, but I’ll hang
up my reputation on it—you know, Mr. Link, I have a little hereabouts at
finding out things, and I’m just convinced _it_—won’t drop.
“I was on the ’bus, stalled just below Forty-second Street, opposite the
Library. I saw a couple of people, a man and a woman, coming down the
steps to the street. The woman—Well, I couldn’t begin to tell you how
stunning she was. Beauty was just all over her, thick too, from her feet
to her head. I remember now the thought struck me as I looked at her
that she’d make a brass man turn round to see her when she’d passed. And
the goods on her were as sweet and gay as herself—a picture, Mr. Link, a
real picture, if ever a woman made one. The man was with her,
good-looking and cruel; neat, too, and Hell painted on him so plain it
would make an angel throw a fit—if an angel could, supposin’.
“Now Mr. Link I hadn’t looked that long,” Jack snapped his fingers,
“before I felt, sir, that they were _rotten_, not four flushers, but the
_real bad_, like those the Sunday School man told us of, who ‘build a
town with blood, and establish a city by iniquity.’” The pause Jack
interpolated here was as oracular as the quotation. I did him a great
injustice to seem indifferent and impatient. Really I felt the thrill of
an inevitable sensation approaching, and—I saw beyond it hypnotizing
_copy_. Jack desiderated encouragement, approval—I looked at the clock
over my desk and yawned. Surely it was deliberate malice.
“Like that, sir!” Jack clapped his hands loudly; the ruse broke through
my affectation, and startled me into attention that he was keen enough
to see was as intense as he wished it to be.
“Like that, sir, they hit out at each other, and there was a fight on!
Then a husky— Well, a—white-hope you might have called him—bounced in;
they knew him, he knew them, and the three chased off in an automobile.
I lost ’em, found ’em, and tracked ’em down east Fifty-eighth Street.
She had green stars in her hat—things you could hardly see—but they
_shone_! I found one on a doorstep—and last night _I watched the
house_!”
The typical story teller who at such a juncture lights a cigar, finishes
an unsmoked pipe, empties a glass of grog, or rises with unconcealed
surprise over his neglect to fulfill an engagement _elsewhere_, could
not have surpassed the self-control with which Jack, for the same
purpose, intimated his own retirement. He rose, crushing in his thin
fingers his poor bleached blue cap, his small sparkling eyes raised to
the clock, which a moment before I had invoked so heartlessly to aid the
hypocrisy of my assumed exemption from common weaknesses.
“I think, Mr. Link, it’s time for me to see Mr. Force.” Mr. Force was an
assistant in the press-room.
The rebellious spirit of honesty which I had shamelessly essayed to
crush, got decidedly the best of the situation now; behind it was the
pressure of my own exorbitant curiosity.
“I think Jack, you’ll sit down and finish your story.”
Jack sat down.
“There was a vacant or closed house opposite. I perched on the top step
of the porch and glued my eyes on No. —. I think, sir, that if any man
or woman inside had winked an eye at me from across the street, I’d have
seen it. But it wasn’t light enough for long to watch trifles, and I
just kept looking at the front door and the windows. It was right funny
how the lights changed. They broke out first on the second floor, then
they dropped to the basement, then they climbed to the third story, down
again to the first, but they ended in the attic windows and they stayed
there. Everything else was as black as the tomb.
“The wind hustled about a little, splashes of rain hurried along with
it, and it grew dark in the street. Once or twice the shades lifted and,
Mr. Link”—Jack was a picture of poignant eagerness—“I saw the big peach
and her man, the two of the Library steps, just the same as I see you.
They’d open the window too and look out together down into the street. I
knew why, sir. They expected that limousine—and it came.”
The constraint of any position more repressive than sitting to Jack, now
on the edge of his exposure could not be imagined. He stood up, moved
towards me, the color mounting in his pale cheeks, his body bent a
little forward, and his eyes lighting up with an interior brilliancy
that suddenly made me realize Jack might become a good-looking man.
“After that they’d go away from the window farther back; I think they
carried a lamp with them for the light would fade away, or else they
turned the gas off. At eleven o’clock—I could hear the clock bells from
the steeples—the wind was racing and it began to rain hard. I got some
shelter under the doorway; the light never left the attic across the
street. I felt it all over me, sir, that IT was coming. I’m not sure, I
may have fallen asleep, but I came to with a bounce. Lightning was
chasing through the sky and the thunder was booming and—the door of No.
— was open; the light from the hall flickered over the wet sidewalk, but
the shower had passed. The man and the woman both stood there for an
instant, then they went in and the door shut with a slam. I thought,
sir, I had lost the trail. I never felt worse. I hated them, Mr. Link.
Good reason, too.” His hands suddenly searched his vest, they were
unrewarded; his face grew blank and he dropped his hands helplessly,
while a piteous look of consternation and utter despondency shot from
his eyes to mine, by this time fully sympathetic and as lustrous as his
own.
His glance fell on his hat that lay at his feet on the floor, a flood of
revived remembrances followed; he snatched it up, fumbled in its lining
and pulled out a scrap of wrinkled paper. The returning sunshine of
confidence renewed again the handsome look I had noticed before. He
certainly was working up his effects with a remarkable melodramatic
insight that was captivating.
“I ran down the steps into the street, I had heard a distant croak of an
auto-horn, and on top of it came the toll of one o’clock from a tower. I
had been asleep over an hour. There was no light in No. — except
upstairs, as before, in the attic. Then the croak seemed to come from
towards the East River, and I saw two balls of light rushing at me. IT
WAS THE LIMOUSINE. I started back, and stumbled over a small cobble
stone. It looked like an intervention—a message, Mr. Link—who knows? I
picked it up, and I pulled out a jack knife I had in my pants. Why? I
didn’t know, but, sir, they both came in handy.
“The auto sneaked up quiet enough, wheeled round facing East River, and
crept in a little to one side of No. —. Mine wasn’t the only pair of
eyes watching for it. It had hardly grazed the curb when the front door
opened and there stood Mephistopheles, behind the beautiful woman, both
in the half dark. I knew them, alright. The man came down the steps
bareheaded, he carried a short something in his right hand. The sprinkle
started again, and a smash of thunder roared overhead, and a clot-like
gloom came out of it. Under that cover I dashed over the street like a
hare, and crept tight up to the back of the car. In it sat Husky—the
peg-top fellow that met ’em in Fifth Avenue—and another man, smaller,
and sort of muffled up. The chauffeur in front never stirred from first
to last.
“Meph. opened the door; Husky stepped out; he shook the little man. I
heard him mutter ‘Come out here. Be fly, but quiet, or by God, I’ll
stick yer through and no compunctions, mind yer.’ The bundle inside
stirred; I peeped in from behind, a little higher; he was in a black bag
or something like it, and as he stooped under the door and stumbled out,
the two caught him, lifted him and started up the steps, where the woman
leaned forward—it seemed to me she kept clapping her hands together
softly as if she couldn’t hold in for delight. Then, sir—”
Jack straightened himself, bent back, relaxed, pitched forward with one
outstretched arm, projected like a catapult, in front of him, “then,
sir, I let fly—not at them—I didn’t know who I might hit and anyhow, hit
or miss, they’d slipped off through that door quicker’n snakes. That was
no use. The cobble stone slammed through the glass side of the
limousine, it went through that and split the window opposite. I haven’t
pitched for the Bogotas for nothing, sir. Before they had time to think,
I jabbed my jack knife through the tire and off it went like a mortar.
Everything was quiet then up above and the crash and the explosion had
the center of the stage, as you people say. I guess it made their hearts
jump. They looked around, the woman screamed, and—I screamed—and that
chauffeur didn’t even turn about. For nerve or sheer fright he had the
record. Perhaps at such times, sir, you can’t distinguish. Eh?
“Well, they lost their grip on the bundle, for it was a pretty uneasy
load to carry now; the interruption perhaps gave the fellow inside some
hope. He rolled down the steps onto the pavement like a bag of beans,
moving slightly like a strangled dog. I heard Husky’s voice, ‘Inside,
inside with him! Don’t stop, swat him,’ and then the black scoundrel
raised his cudgel and beat the poor creature insensible. I heard him
groan where I stood. I was crazy with rage; I felt myself suffocating. I
had been shouting, ‘Help! Help!’ but my voice left me; I discovered that
I was very wet, and then a strange vertigo came over me, a pain crossed
my chest, and a fire seemed to rage in my throat. I was sick, sir. I
am—”
Jack tottered. I caught him, poor fellow; exposure and overstrained
emotions had prostrated him. And he was still damp; perhaps
breakfast-less. I had been thoughtless, but no time was to be lost.
There was an emergency room in the building, and there Jack was hurried.
Strengthened with nourishment, and warmed again into animation with
stimulants, revived by sleep—he hardly stirred for sixteen hours, so
deathlike was his slumber—he just escaped a serious illness.
Recuperation was instantaneous; his own mental energy worked wonders and
when two days later he returned to the theme of his story hardly a trace
of his weakness was betrayed. He was keen to engage in the solution of
the midnight mystery and he implored me not to share his discovery with
anyone else except the police to whom indeed I had already related
Jack’s experience. Jack realized that their co-operation was
indispensable. It was then he showed me the wrinkled scrap of paper
which he had secreted in the lining of his cap, and afterwards stuck in
his trousers’ pocket, and which I had forgotten.
There was printed on it in pencil, “I am a prisoner. My life is in
danger. A. E.”
The paper was of the thin and excellent quality used in engineers’
pocket tables and handbooks.
It appeared that Jack upon feeling the sudden desertion of his strength
had stolen again to the doorway of the empty house opposite No. — and
must have drowsed away there the rest of the night, urged apparently by
his ineradicable hope of further disclosures. His persistency was
rewarded by finding this puzzling and startling bit of evidence. He
found it, most remarkably, on the floor of the abandoned limousine.
The car had remained undisturbed all night in the street, and this
strange neglect on the part of its previous users could only be
explained by the supposition that they feared some unpleasant
complications, involving disagreeable explanations with its actual
owners, unless they were the owners of it themselves. Jack crawled over
to the car in the earliest hour of the morning before the dawn had yet
grown strong enough to make its outlines visible, while night
practically covered the street. No. — was dark from basement to attic,
not a light shone in it anywhere. He remembered that very distinctly.
He had had an indefinite premonition or fancy that something left behind
in the car might be found; clues like that figured in all the romances
of detection. He explored with his hands the corners, the cushions, and
the floor, when, passing his hand along the edge of the carpet mat
covering the floor, it encountered a bit of paper rolled up into a
pellet. After the discovery of the writing he went to an owl wagon
restaurant, and then hastened to the newspaper office.
But two hours later, when the daylight swept through the city, he
returned to Fifty-eighth Street, from a restless feeling of suspicion,
and agonized too with the thought of the abused and helpless prisoner.
_The auto was gone_, and the mysterious house revealed nothing, with its
shades drawn down and its immobile identity with the other sandstone
fronts hopelessly complete. If murder dwelt behind its expressionless
stories, or some dastardly drama of persecution, extortion, torture,
effrontery and crime had been enacted there, no telltale signal betrayed
it. And yet to Jack’s inflamed imagination it confessed its guilt;
somehow to his obsessed eye he saw the meanness of its degradation, as
if it shrank away from its orderly and decent neighbors; as if indeed
its neighbors frowned upon it. He returned to the office and told me his
story.
A newspaper man has the keenest sort of scent for sensation—especially
the _yellow_ newspaper man, and I fail to recoil from making the
confession of my personal _yellowness_ in that respect. He is seldom
bewildered by scruples, seldom daunted by danger; he doesn’t think of
them. He starts the engines of exposure and arrest, and records the
result. Half an hour after Jack’s story was told Captain B— of the —
precinct was closeted with me, and I repeated Jack’s adventure.
Jack’s description of the three principals in this suspicious criminal
alliance was insufficient or inadequate to enable Captain B. to
recognize them among the notables of both the under and the upper worlds
with whom he was acquainted. I had not then seen the paper Jack found.
“Mr. Link,” Captain B. finally said, after a short silence following my
communication, “you feel pretty sure of this young fellow, Jack Riddles?
The name suggests an equivocal character.”
“I feel a good deal surer of him, perhaps, than I do of myself—if you
can understand.”
“Oh I catch that. Well No. — will be watched night and day for a short
time. Your young friend’s rather violent exploit may have scared its
tenants off. The auto went. Perhaps they went with it. It won’t do to
break in at once. We must have some evidence of occupation and a line on
the occupants that runs straight with Riddles’ description.”
“But that wretched man? Suppose they kill him. A little less
carefulness, Captain, might save him and, under the circumstances, I
don’t think I’d be squeamish over precedents.”
“Oh, that team isn’t ready for murder yet—they’re not thinking of it.
They’ve kidnapped someone for one reason or another. Bagging him that
way showed they wanted something out of him. I’ll place them in twelve
hours or so, and if they cover the same size Riddles gave I’ll take the
risk and search the house.”
“Of course you’ll let us in, Captain, on the ground floor so to speak?”
“Sure! I’ll tip you on the first peep we hear. But get that boy on his
legs; we’ll need him.”
It was just a day and a half later that a policeman brought me a sealed
envelope. Of course I knew who had sent it. There was no answer the
policeman said, and left. I opened the missive expectantly. I was not
disappointed. Its contents were more rapturously thrilling to my
journalistic hunger for marvels and mysteries, and those labyrinthine
prodigies of subterranean deviltry that Cobb, or Ainsworth, or George
Sand revelled in, than any mess of crime I had tumbled on _or in_, since
Joe Horner, our chief city reporter, went through a hatchway in the
Bronx and dropped into a hogshead of claret (Zinfandel) with two dead
bodies in it!
Captain B.’s note ran: “Riddles corroborated. They’re there; three of
them and a squeegee. Up to mischief—perhaps forgery—something like it.
Pounce on them tomorrow. We’ve moved like mice, and the trap has been
set quietly. Nothing more simple. Guess you might like to be in at the
death. Bring Riddles. We break cover at 11 p.m. Meet at the police
station * * *”
Riddles was then on the mend, and when I told him how matters stood, the
boy smiled grimly, caught my hand and exclaimed: “Good medicine for me,
Mr. Link. I feel it to the end of my toes. That’s the tonic I need.
Trust me, I’ll be with you, strong and hearty.” He was.
Captain B. had arranged the affair tactfully. He had conveyed his
suspicions to the householder on the west side of No. — and had secured
his permission to admit three plain-clothes men through his backyard to
the backyard of No. —; also his own party of six, with Riddles and
myself as press agents, onto the roof, whence we expected to effect an
entrance through the roof door or skylight, while a few men on the
street would intercept flight in that direction. Riddles was radiant; it
was a beautiful tribute to his sagacity; all this had come about through
his quick insight, his instantaneous sense of obliquity, alias
crookedness, when he saw the quarreling pair on the Public Library
steps. As we cautiously climbed over the low parapet separating the two
roofs, with only the light of the stars to guide us, not altogether
appropriately I recalled Jonathan Wild’s chase of Thomas Dauell over the
housetops, and also the burglary at Dollis Hill in Jack Shepard. There
were more apposite occurrences in fiction to compare our maneuvers with,
but I thought of these.
I had shown to the Captain the pathetic call for rescue scrawled on the
paper scrap. It was palpably written by a foreigner, perhaps a German,
certainly someone of Teutonic origin, and the paper had been torn from a
book, some such technical guide for engineers as I had suggested. It did
not interest Captain B. greatly. He told me, before we started out, that
the “peg-top” man—a Hercules—the beautiful woman and “Mephistopheles”
had all been seen, and no one else, but that dark ruby glass, identical
he thought with that used by photographers, had been inserted in the
front attic windows, where he suspected the imprisoned man was kept at
work in some nefarious trade, from which the trio derived support or
profit. As to the criminal character of “the bunch” he had no doubts.
The two men almost invariably carried bundles into the house, but none
out.
We were at the doorway of a little triangular erection which covered the
stairway leading from the roof to the attic and our approach, in
rubbers, had been almost noiseless. The door was shut, but only locked;
the precautions against invasion had been forgotten or overlooked. It
was not even bolted. Evidently the conspirators or counterfeiters, or
whatever they were, apprehended nothing; we might catch them red handed.
A stout chisel enabled us to force the door inward, and a dark lantern
revealed a dilapidated stairway below, ending in a kind of storage room,
cluttered up with the refuse of successive occupancies, a dangerously
inflammable chaos of rubbish, in which a feebly sputtering match could
create a conflagration before it was suspected. It required some
discrimination to cross this _debris_ without starting some crumbling
avalanche of fragments in the boxes, baby carriages, stoves, chairs,
trunks, picture frames, racks and easels. As it was, with our best
efforts slides occurred, and the mastodon-like tread of the detectives
sank noisily through an occasional bandbox. We paused anxiously—I did,
at least—at such moments, but the crash, so it sounded to me, brought no
response. I reasoned the house must be vacant, and that our quarry had
escaped.
We found that a closed door opened upon a narrow hallway, and as we
softly drew it back loud voices most unexpectedly became audible,
certainly proceeding from the front rooms of that very floor; from that
front room wherein Jack had noticed the light, and where the detectives
reported the insertion of the ruby panes. A hoarse dominant swelled up
in the excited conversation. Jack leaned towards me and whispered
“That’s Husky”; Captain raised a warning finger, and we filed out, one
by one, gingerly tiptoeing toward the room which now unquestionably
contained the objects of our search. The familiar scare or thrill which
submerges all lesser emotions, as the danger point in an encounter is
approached, decidedly manifested itself somewhere in my anatomy, or
probably all over it.
Any mental analysis of my feelings was abruptly halted by the threats or
altercation now heard very clearly in the room before us.
We had reached the door, beneath which a streak of light gave a
penumbral illumination to the end of the little hallway. Below, in the
house itself, absolute silence reigned, and apparently as complete
darkness. Our approach was unnoticed. The excitement or rage that
overpowered the speaker, breaking out in threats that now became
intelligible and startled us into a fierce impatience to interfere, had
certainly stopped his ears. The suffocation of anger had made him deaf.
“Damn you—you’ll show us the trick, or else your starved and scorched
body will take the consequences. We know well enough you can do it.
You’ve led us on with blind promises, but now we’ve got you where we
want you. You can’t get out of this, remember, until we get what we
want. Can you understand?”
“And then you’ll kill, I suppose?” The voice was strained, thick,
foreign in accent, and low.
Riddles stretched himself up to my ear again and whispered “A. E.?” I
nodded assent.
“No! No! Oh, no; but—you must not stay here.” The voice was a woman’s.
“We’ll take care of you. Nicely too, Diaz, I guess. We’ll keep you where
you won’t tell tales.” A mean, cynical laugh followed, a muttered
corroboration from a third person, who had evidently crossed the room.
It was this last voice that continued the harangue of the prisoner in a
smooth, polished, plausible manner that thinly veiled its heartlessness;
its crafty insinuation betrayed a designing selfishness, but it seemed
welcome after the barking hoarseness and ferocity of its predecessor,
and the cruelty of that feminine sneer. Its climax came at the close
with a threat of fiendish wickedness that broke the tension of our
restraint.
“Alfred Erickson, perhaps you can understand your predicament a little
better, if you will stop to think it over. You are a stranger here, and
you are in our power. That, you probably realize pretty well by this
time. There is something else you may not so clearly comprehend, and
that is, we are not afraid of consequences, because in your case, so far
as we are concerned, there will be no consequences! You can extricate
yourself easily enough if you will be sensible. Obstinacy has its merits
under some circumstances; your perseverance in your Arctic experiences
was rewarded—and we know exactly how—but obstinacy is of no avail just
now, and no rescuing party from Norway, or even from the New York police
will save you from, perhaps, an unfortunate calamity.”
This allusion appealed facetiously to the others, and there arose a
musical outburst of laughter from the lady, with an accompaniment of
harsh bass grunts from the first speaker. The voice continued:
“You possess a secret that the whole world has been hunting for, and we
propose that the world will go on hunting for it before you will ever be
able to tell it. Share with us and, under reservations, you will be well
cared for. Refuse and, as we have gone so far, we will find—and you
too—the rest of the way very simple. You’re not at this moment likely to
be able to help yourself. That little incident outside,” Riddles nudged
me again, “meant nothing. You’re as much buried alive in this attic in
the first city of the world, as if you occupied a tomb of the Pharaohs.
We’re not as self-controlled as you seem to be. We may get restless.
Then, sir”—we heard him step forward; I imagined him leaning close to
his victim, for it was evident the man was in some way confined—“then,
sir, up you go—you and your secret—in smoke.”
His smothered rage broke out then, and we heard him strike the man and
curse him. There was the remonstrance of a cry—that was all. The next
instant we would have forced our way through a stone wall had we been
against it, but Captain B. raised his hand. His trained endurance amazed
me. The voice resumed:
“Now what do you propose to do?”
“Yes, what?” from the first ruffian.
We held our breaths and listened with all our ears.
“Let me get up. Let me talk this over with you. You are driving me
crazy! I can’t think. I will forget what you say I know. You—”
“Hell with your parleying. I’ll untie your tongue. I guess your memory
will work quick enough after this”; it was Husky threatening.
Then succeeded the jeering encouragement of the woman and, strange
paradox, the voice was rich, enticing, but mocking.
“Oh, yes; just a little stimulation will hurry up matters. Diaz we can’t
wait much longer and,” the menad fury broke loose, “if this miserable
creature holds out much longer we shall be ruined. Burn him—burn
him—scald it out of him, Huerta; the dolt, simpleton, idiot—”
There was a shuffling movement inside, the sudden bristling, rushing
sound of an airblast (Could it be a naphtha lamp?) and then a raving,
rending, terrifying cry, something that meant fear and rage and madness,
the awful, marrow-chilling shriek of insanity.
Quicker than thought a man behind me shoved us aside. He raised an iron
mallet; it struck the door with a splintering crash—another and
another—the door burst inwards, torn from its lock, torn from its
hinges, and we all rushed forward. I heard a shot, then another; the
group in front of me parted and an extraordinary scene was revealed, one
I can never forget. A huge broad-shouldered man was crumpled upon the
floor. There had fallen from his hand a thick, long soldering iron; it
had been red or white hot; fallen on the floor it was burning into the
boards, and little swinging flames encircled it. Near at hand was the
large form of a plumber’s furnace with the blue whistling flame still
shooting from it. Huddled in a corner, cowering behind a menacing
man—quickly subdued, however, by a pointed revolver—was the beautiful
woman, a half dishevelled creature in a deep yellow wrap, fastened a
little distance below her peerless throat by a big turquoise brooch. Her
abundant hair had become loosened, and it poured over her shoulders in a
raven tide.
The man in front of her was Riddles’ Mephistopheles. He was pale, and
the pallor hardly became him. Although strikingly handsome it gave a
peculiar expression to his face, of craven hate and sinister fear, if
that can be understood. In both his and the woman’s eyes shone a
horrible surprise. But the overpowering object in the room was the
half-naked figure of a man with extended arms and divergent legs,
strapped to a narrow table by iron bands. These latter passed over his
wrists and ankles, and were actually screwed to the table. His face was
not readily deciphered; whiskers covered his chin, a high forehead
beneath overhanging light hair and a large mouth formed together the
suggestion of a very dignified and intelligent face. His condition was
heart-rending; bruises covered his body, one eye seemed swollen and
shut, and scars—I shuddered at the thought of their having been caused
by the iron in the hands of the prostrate fiend—marked the white but
defaced skin of his shoulders and arms.
There was little furniture in the room—the tortured man had probably
been kept on the table at night—a few chairs, a second table, and
towards the front of the room a long table covered with a confusion of
physical apparatus. It was the work of a minute to search the criminals,
and to handcuff them; though the woman cried bitterly at the degradation
Captain B. was taking no chances, and then the liberation of the
pitiable victim of these inhuman miscreants was effected. The stiffness
of his limbs almost forbade movement, and he cried with pain—and for
that matter I am sure with joy too—as we tenderly raised him, lifted him
into a chair, and tried to relax the rigid muscles. His agony, crucified
so on his back, must have been incalculable; evidently his resolute
refusal had driven his tormentors furious, and made them incarnate
demons. But what was it—the SECRET? Reader, you are not to know, except
as you find it out yourself, by reading this almost incredible story.
With our prisoners—the Hercules was carried out; his femur had been
split by the Captain’s bullet and he was in desperate pain—we made our
way down through the house. There seemed to be only two rooms showing
any signs of habitation, two rooms on the second floor used as bedrooms,
and their furnishment was a droll mixture of bareness and luxury.
Shreddy and hanging wallpaper, a superb rug or so, a sumptuous easy
chair, and then wooden kitchen chairs, plain bedsteads, but a bureau or
toilet table covered with jewel boxes, and in a corner odds and ends of
silver utensils, heaped up into quite a noticeable hillock. Was it these
that the men had been seen carrying so constantly into the house? Our
prying about uncovered some decanters of wine incongruously stowed away
in a pantry below a washbasin. Their contents helped Erickson, and some
of the rest helped themselves.
Riddles had been gloating over the capture of his game; his eyes never
left the sullen, downcast face of Mephistopheles, distorted too at
moments with angry scowls, nor the disturbed shadowed splendor of the
woman’s countenance. At an unguarded instant Mephistopheles sprang out
of the hold of his captors, and brought his clenched, handcuffed wrists
down on the head of Jack, who promptly dropped.
“You dirty little fox, you did this. I know now. I’ve seen you hanging
about here. I’ll mark you! I’ll mark you! I’ll tear your liver and heart
out yet. Oh, I don’t forget. Diaz never forgets.”
He was jerked back into decorum and silence, and somewhat injuriously
rebuked as well, but a little scar, bare of hair, was to remain as a
memento of his regard for Jack Riddles for many a long year afterwards.
I bargained successfully with Captain B. for the possession of Erickson,
and I took him home in a taxi, greatly to my journalistic bliss. He was
pretty dangerously ill for days; the nervous breakdown was dreadful. He
raved and shouted and was almost maniacal in his outbreaks. It was the
natural reaction of a powerful mind and nature against the circumstances
of his degradation and insult. But he finally came round all right, the
glow of health covered his cheeks, and his earnest eyes welcomed me with
sanity and gratitude. Then he told me his story, in two parts. The first
part explained the predicament in which we found him here in New York,
the second— Well, the reader has it before him in this volume, exactly
as it appeared in the daily issue of the _New York Truth Getter_.
A few words more to explain Mr. Erickson’s equivocal, abject position in
New York, as we found him, and this Editorial Note will no longer
restrain the puzzled and vexed subscriber. These words will be very few
indeed, and may indeed prove very unsatisfactory. Yet they will
conveniently make a skeleton framework or outline for deductions, with
which the reader may fill its expressionless and yawning blanks, after
the gift of his imagination or the bias of his temperament, upon reading
the ensuing narrative.
Alfred Erickson reached San Francisco from the Arctic Exploration,
herein circumstantially described. In San Francisco he formed, rather
rapidly, the acquaintance of Angelica Sigurda Tabasco, and Diaz Ilario
Aguadiente. There were mutual prepossessions. Mr. Erickson also
fascinated his new friends by certain wonderful claims, which were
however partially supported by ocular demonstration. They all came to
New York. In New York Mr. Erickson came to grief. He had come too far
from the base of his operations, and he suffered from a complicated
treatment. We rescued him from its worst effects. I think that is all. I
will not trust myself to say more for fear of my own remorse over
misleading statements. Angelica and Diaz were never prosecuted. Erickson
was afraid to tell his story before he wrote his book (this book), and
we all agreed he acted wisely from a commercial standpoint, and the
police so impressed Angelica and Diaz with their—the police’s—contiguity
under any and all circumstances, in this country anywhere, anyhow, that
they left it. And Jack’s “Husky” turned out to be a hardened
photographed and historic criminal, who had played the heavy villain in
the little mystery under the same impelling motive that animated the
minds and tongues of Angelica and Diaz. He had also captivated this
captivating pair by blandishments less peculiar than beauty, and he had
wound up Alfred Erickson into the tightest kind of a knot of physical
embarrassments, from whose Gordian embrace Erickson had been delivered
through the intervention of the very humble instrument of Fate, Jack
Riddles.
“Husky’s” name eluded determination for a while, but was revived through
his own inadvertence in talking in his sleep, wherein the confession
transpired of his having “done up” Blue Brigsy at a time when he himself
carried the soubriquet of “Monitor Dick.” The clue was slight; it proved
sufficient, and landed him in Sing Sing for a quarter of a century.
Jack Riddles was “lifted.” He was taken out of the proletariat, the
pages, office boys and messengers, and placed among the police
reporters, where he was duly taken in hand under instruction to acquire
the current cursorial gait and speed of the slam-bang reportorial style.
He will get it. This relieves the situation created by Riddles’
opportune circumspection from the top of the Fifth Avenue ’bus.
The reader, albeit he may demur at the jejune skipping around the
explanation of the mystery at No. — east Fifty-eighth Street, has hereby
had the situation sufficiently cleared to feel himself ready to enjoy
Erickson’s story, and I assure him, he may look forward with expectancy
to find the residue, or the heart, of that mystery resolved at, let me
say, page 400 or thereabouts, assuming that by that time he cares any
more about it. So that, pleasantly impelled by the spur of curiosity, as
regards a secret yet undivulged, let him accept our editorial
invitation— Does he not see our obeisance, and the sweep of our hand
pointing to a door opening upon unimaginable wonders?—to peruse the
history of a voyage more marvelous than that of Marco Polo, of Father
Huc, of Mandeville, of Munchausen, of Sinbad, the Aethiopics of
Heliodorus, of Ariosto, of Gulliver, of Ulysses, of Peter Wilkins, of
Camoens, of Pomponius Mela.
_Sive per Syrtes iter aestuosas,
Sive facturus per inhospitalem
Caucasum, vel quae loca fabulosa
Lambit Hydaspes_
His unappeased wonder over a bit of unraveled criminality will vanish in
the excitement of discovery, of adventure, of revelation, but at the
other end, as the book drops from his hand, finished and admired, he
will approve our reticence at this end, for then he will know HOW
Erickson got into his difficulty, and WHY.
Erickson’s story was published in the _New York Truth Getter_—of course
the reader never saw it there—prepared from his verbal narrative, his
notes, and memoranda, and so expressed in English as to retain the glow,
enthusiasm, amazement, and graphic delineation of the original. It was
told to me in my library overlooking the sunlit tides around Throg’s
Neck; in the short winter afternoons at times, at times through the long
winter evenings, with Erickson hanging over the hearth where, as Max
Beerbohm puts it, “gradually the red-gold caverns are revealed,
gorgeous, mysterious, with inmost recesses of white heat.” Past all
dreams of wizardry, more remote from thought than any visions of magic,
stranger than the hallucinations of invention, was this picture of the
unreal and terraced world descending in titanic steps to the heated
regions of the earth’s mass, peopled with an impossible people, alive
with animal abundance and clothed in the vestal glory of innumerable
plants. In it were enacted those transmutations which Science predicts
as the last triumph of human knowledge, and in it a wealth transcending
the maddest hopes of Avarice had accumulated in an Acropolis of SOLID
GOLD!
There in the frozen north, walled in by ice, hidden in fogs, almost
impenetrably concealed or protected by storm, lay this incredible
continent of wonders, unsuspected by the world of one thousand million
people around it, the goal of whose ambition it had already reached, the
course of whose evolution it illustrates, and who had, in these latest
years, begun to grope blindly for its guessed at shores.
AZAZIEL LINK.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration:
THE FIORD
]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER I
THE FIORD
How well I remember it! The solemn, beautiful fiord, framed within the
pine tressed walls, flecked with patches of sunlight, where its waters
glistened with beryl hues. Shaded in the recesses of the cliffs where
the lustreless flood softly murmured with the faintest rhythmic cadence
against the rocky rims, immobile and caressed as they had been for
hundreds of thousands of years, and in a few places yielding slowly to
decay in shingled beaches. And the music of nature united with the
appeal to the eyes of color and form, to entrance the visitor.
A rushing brook singing like a girl hurrying to some holiday joy, broke
from the highlands, a silvery thread, then a braid of pearls, then a
sloping cataract of splintered and rainbowed waves, then in silence for
a while, catching its breath, as the girl might catch it, for a new
descent, and then the renewed song, through a tiny gorge, its jubilation
softened to a murmur, and then the flash and chorus of its outspread
ripples as it leaped into the fiord. And that was the light soprano of
the music around us, and under it rolled the bass notes, muted and
_sfuggendo_, of the distant waterfall—_foss_—at the inland head of the
fiord, and towards which were even then starting the pleasure boats,
launches and steam yachts of the tourists.
The sense of smell contributed its intoxication to the charmed surrender
of eye and ear, for there was flung down from the tree-crowned cliffs
the scent of wild flowers and the clean, resinous odors of the spruce.
The wind singing, too, like a chord accompaniment to the cheerful ballad
of the brook, and the heavy recitative of the waterfall, brought this
fragrance to us, even as it swept in capricious rushes outward over the
fiord to its gateway, through which the distant sea lay motionless like
a blazoned shield, beyond the _Skargaard_.
A shelf of land, dropping off in a slope to the waters of the fiord and
pierced by a roadway whose climbing curves led at last to the summit of
the cliffs, and which ended on the shore in a dock, then gay with the
summer glories of young girls and men, held the picturesque red houses
of a few farmers, and the wandering walls of the comfortable hotel. The
brilliant green of the cut lawn, like an enameled sheath, covered the
little tableland, and venturesome tongues and ribbons ran flame-wise up
crannies, ledges and narrow glades, to be lost in the shadows of the
firs and the sprayed and silken birches high above.
Round a table on the broad piazza of the hotel, in an angle where we
looked straight through the eyelet of the rocks to the sleeping ocean, a
gold-backed monster like a leviathan covering the earth, slumberously
heaving in the sun, I was sitting with three companions.
There was my best friend, Antoine Goritz, a man thickly bearded, with a
broad, unwrinkled brow sparingly topped by light wisps of straggling
hair, with a straight Teutonic nose, deep-set blue eyes under carven
ivory lids, beneath eyebrows deeper tinted than his hair, and with a
physical frame, strong, massive, large, effective, perhaps a trifle
overdrawn in its suggestion of muscular power.
It was a titan mould, but the face above it was humorously still and
observant. I often compared him to Sverdrup, Nansen’s captain, but he
was a bigger man. Like him he possessed the docility of a child, the
energy of a giant. Slow of speech ordinarily, as he was slow of
movement, but in stress and excitement convulsed with his rapid,
headlong utterance, and rising to a momentum of action that was
irresistible and swift. He sat upright in a thick brown plaid with a
blue sailor’s scarf around his broad neck and a straw hat like a coracle
on his head.
Next to him sat Professor Hlmath Bjornsen, a very tidy man of ordinary
build and stature, but oddly distinguishable by his abundant red hair,
the crab-like protuberance of his eyes (he wore no glasses), his
indented lips, which looked as if stitched up in sections, also
undisguised by any covering of hair, his patulous, projecting ears. His
homeliness was saved by the merit of cheerfulness at least, by a pug
nose, a rosy complexion and a demure, winning sort of smile that was
generally _a propos_ of nothing, but was retained habitually as nature’s
protective grace against the premature prejudices of first
acquaintances. Professor Bjornsen was a man learned in rocks, minerals,
mines, geology, the hard and motionless properties of the earth. He was
scrupulously neat, and his frequent inspection of himself, especially
his hands, was equally disconcerting and amusing.
Spruce Hopkins was the next man, alongside of myself, and probably he
would have been the first man whom an approaching stranger would have
looked at the longest, and concerned himself with knowing the most. He
was a Yankee, an American of Americans, but of that Grecian phase which
rejects _toto-coelo_, the newspaper type, the Brother Jonathan
caricature, the cheap idiosyncracies of the paragraph writer,
unassimilable even with the more credible picture,
of one who wisely schemed
And hostage from the future took,
In trained thought and lore of book.
Large-brained, clear-eyed—of such as he
Shall Freedom’s young apostles be.
Spruce Hopkins boasted no particular thrills. His thoughts followed
really a rather narrow gauge, and he could weigh with premature or
precocious carefulness the two sides of a practical question when his
decision would have halted perhaps at alternatives involving the
emotions.
He had a superb figure, graceful, plastic, and eloquent of strength. His
face leaned, so to speak, a little to the Brahmin type, but any
introspection it might have accompanied or suggested was lost in the
radiance of the eyes, the tempting sweetness of his smile, the
full-blown glory of his infectious laughter, the spiced offerings of his
genial tongue, the crisp charm of his wavy, glossy, chestnut-tinted
hair, and that slight but irreducible _soupcon_ of swagger which gave
him distinction.
And then there was myself; you see me, a hardy man (a blush rose to
Erickson’s cheeks; he could not overcome some apprehension of my
recalling his recent humiliation), a sailor man with a little land
schooling, loving yarns, telling yarns, and—believing ’em.
“Why, yes, Erickson,” I interrupted, “I suppose you have been quite
willing to believe some gilded tales that those friends, your late
companions here in New York, told you, but even a captivating
gullibility hardly explains how a young giant like you were found on
your back, strapped to a table, and about to be skewered like a spitted
pig.”
“Ah, sir, patience. You shall know all, but—at the end, at the end; even
if I could resist a plausible story, I could not always resist what goes
with a good story.”
“SCHNAPPS?” I interjected.
“Please, sir, patience. It is worth while. I have seen what no living
man— Perhaps I shall never see again my fellow travelers, the three who
sat with me on the hotel porch three years ago.” He bent his head, his
bruised, rough hand was passed over his face, and I thought a flare of
flame, shot from a cleaving coal, showed on it the glistening trail of
moisture. “—what no living man has ever seen, a country more wonderful
than dreams or legends or fairy stories have described or painted. Oh,
sir, in that new world in the north, something of the imagery of the
mythology of my forefathers seems repeated; very vaguely indeed. There I
have seen Nilfheim, I have seen Hwergelmer and Muspelheim, the world of
fire and light, but different, yes very different, and perhaps— Well,
no, not Valhalla, but something like Yggdrasill, and if it was not
Gladsheim, what was it?”
He resumed.
It was Professor Bjornsen speaking, with his big hands clutching his
head on either side, buried indeed in the luxuriant wealth of his ruddy
hair, with his staring eyes fixed on the table as if he saw through it,
looking at the land of his prophecies, while we all listened, with our
eyes measuring the cliffs up to the green fringes that ran, a dark zone
against the sky, on their sun-blazed peaks.
“Signs, signals, came to the explorers of Europe long before Columbus
set his face westward; long before, standing at the peak of his little
caravel, he dared the perils and the powers of the bewitched western
ocean, the woods and weeds of Cipango floated to the shores of Europe.
There are signs and signals now, gentlemen”; the Professor brought his
long fingers down with a smart, startling slap on the table that brought
our own hands nervously to the sides of the unsupported glasses, lest
they capsize in his assault of enthusiasm, while his disordered hair
flamed aureole-like over his bulging forehead, beneath which smiled
exultantly his piercing green eyes.
“Signs that an untouched continent is hidden in the uncharted wastes of
the western Arctic Sea. A vast area of waters, a blank space on the map
lies there, but that is simply the refuge, for cartographic lucidity, of
our ignorance. What really lies there is reciprocal on the west of
Greenland on the east, of the Franz Josef Archipelago and Spitzbergen
north of us. There is there another large fragment of that original
circumpolar continent that Science, in a moment of intuitional
certainty, points to as the source of the world’s animal and vegetable
life. And the signs? You ask me, your faces do, what they are. They are
negative indeed but they are convincing. Payer reached 82°5´ North
Latitude, on an island, Crown Prince Rudolf’s Land, and still further
north he thought he could see an extensive tract of land in 83°. He
called it Petermann’s Land. Driftwood on the east of Greenland comes
from Siberia, circuitously perhaps around the pole, not across it, since
the ‘Fram’ drifted from the north of Cape Chelyuskin in 1893 to north of
Spitzbergen in 1896. The wood is Siberian larch and alder and poplar.
Articles from the American ship ‘Jeannette,’ which foundered near
Bennett Island, had taken the same course, being picked up on the east
coast of Greenland. Professor Mohr held that they drifted over the pole.
Why did not the ‘Fram’ drift over the pole? The set of the waters that
way is obstructed, and that obstruction is a continental mass. Nothing
surer.
“Dr. Rink has reported a throwing stick, used by the Eskimos in hurling
their bird darts, not like those used by the Eskimos of Greenland, and
attributed by him to the natives of Alaska. The path traversed by this
erratic could not have been directly eastward from Alaska, threading an
impenetrable and devious outlet in the Canadian archipelago, neither was
it over the pole, as any pathway there would, constructively, have
reached northern and not eastern Greenland. Again that invisible
obstruction, as patent, as real, as the influence of the undiscovered
Neptune in the perturbations of Uranus, which led Leverrier and Adams to
make their prophetic directions for its detection.
“Sir Allen Young, appreciating the nucleal density of the land towards
the pole, and speaking of Nansen’s promised attempt to drift over it,
said, ‘I think the great danger to contend with will be the land in
nearly every direction near the pole. Most previous navigators seem to
have continued to see land, again and again farther and farther north.’
“Peary has seen Krocker Land. Over the western verge of the horizon its
peaks rose temptingly to invite him to new conquests. That was a
segment, a tiny fraction, a mere hint of the unknown vastnesses beyond.
But the most convincing symptoms—Ah, a feeble word to designate a
fact—of this continent are the observations of the United States’
meteorologists. Dr. R. A. Harris, a competent authority, has shown that
the tides, mute but eloquent witnesses, testify to its existence. The
diurnal tides along the Asiatic and North American coasts are not what
they would be if an uninterrupted sweep over the Arctic Sea prevailed.
Their progress is delayed and along narrow channels is accelerated or
heightened, as past the shores of Grant Land. Why? Again that
undiscovered country.”
“Harris, a clever fellow. Met him in Washington just two years ago this
autumn—a crackerjack at mathematical guessing. The way he can figure and
run off a reel of equations on anything from the rate sawdust makes in a
wood mill to a mensuration of the average dimensions of turnips is
surprising. If he says Krocker Land is there—why, then I guess IT IS,”
was Spruce Hopkins’ comment, while we all turned our eyes from the
cliffs to catch the Professor’s rejoinder, and Goritz leaned towards
him, fixing him with those luminous orbs of his that betrayed his
suppressed excitement.
“What does this man Harris say?” asked Goritz.
“He says,” answered Bjornsen, thrusting his hands in his pockets after
he had looked them over in his habitual manner of inspection, “he says
this. The diurnal tide occurs earlier at Point Barrow than at Flaxman
Island; the diurnal tide or wave does not have approximately its
theoretical value; at Bennett Island, north of Siberia, and at Teplitz
Bay, Franz Josef Land, the range of the diurnal wave has about one-half
of the magnitude which the tidal forces acting over an uninterrupted
Arctic basin would produce; the average rise and fall at Bennett Island
is 2.5 feet, but the rise and fall of the semi-daily tide is 0.4 at
Point Barrow, and 0.5 feet at Flaxman Island. And he makes this point.”
The Professor drew a red chalk from his vest pocket, stood up, and
pushing our glasses aside, drew a squarish outline, broader on one side,
with a tail standing out at its lower right-hand corner. He drew a
circle a little above its long side, and scribbled Pole within it, then
a jagged scrawl to either side, representing the coasts of Asia and
America, with an indentation like a funnel for Behring Straits.
“He points out that the ‘Jeannette’, an American ship sent out by the
proprietors of the _New York Herald_, stuck in the ice here”, he jabbed
his crayon, which crumbled into grains under his pressure, to one side
of a projecting point of the outline, “and that the ice drift carried
her eastward”; he made a flourish under the fascinating trapezoid that
we now understood embodied the suggested continent; “while the ‘Fram’
stuck here,” again a red splotch above the diagram, “and was carried
westward toward Greenland. Again why? Because at a critical point
between their two positions the ice current is divided by the influence
of a terminal promontory of Krocker Land. It splits, so to speak, the
trend over the pole of the ice drift, turning one arm of it eastward,
the other westward. His creative vision goes farther. A point of this
new land lies just north of Point Barrow in Alaska, that causes the
westward tide at the point; and he thinks it is distant from Point
Barrow five or six degrees of latitude, 350 to 420 miles. Harris claims
the ice in Beaufort Sea, north of Canada, here—” Another flaming signal
was scrawled on the white tablecloth below the right-hand corner of the
fascinating outline that now, assuming a magical premonition of some
great geographical reality, kept our eyes fastened on it almost as if it
might sprout before us with mimic mountains and ice fields.
“Harris says that the ice in Beaufort Sea does not drift freely
northward, and is remarkable for its thickness and its age. He says the
ice does not move eastward, for you see,” the Professor flung his hands
over the cryptogram on the tablecloth like an exorcising magician, “you
see Beaufort Sea is a sea, land-locked by Krocker Land, that here
approaches Banks Island. Are you convinced?”
We looked at each other a trifle slyly and disconcertedly, and Goritz
laughed, but it was Spruce Hopkins who suddenly turned to the Professor,
caught his arm and held him for a moment without speaking but with his
face yielding slowly to some growing impression of wonder within him
until he became quite grave.
“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]
Footnote 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.
“Listen,” he said, and he waved his hands, inviting us to a closer
attention; his voice fell; I thought his peering eyes glanced to either
side to avert the proximity of eavesdroppers. “There is good reason to
believe that this new world of the north is neither inclement nor
barren. I believe it is a place of wonders; in it rest secrets,
REVELATIONS.” There was now a sorcery in the Professor’s voice that made
us lean toward him, drawing the circle a little closer, like
conspirators over an incantation. “What they are no once can tell. You
ask, Why? I believe this. I can hardly explain; my faith in this is a
growth, a coalescence of many strands of feeling and many lines of
study. My conviction is complete. I admit that extrinsically, as I may
say, it is unreasonable; intrinsically it is now as inexpugnable as a
theorem from Euclid, or the evidence of my own senses.
“That there is a new world south of the pole is maintained by Science;
it is the unalterable belief of the explorers, the hydrographers, the
geographers. But what may that world be like? What was it like? Long
millions and millions of years before our time the Arctic north was the
procreant cradle of ALL LIFE! From it streamed the currents of animal
and vegetable creation; it was warm; forests of palms flourished along
river and lake-side, and within them roamed the creatures of tropical or
semi-tropical climates. Paleontologists from Saporta to Wieland, from
Keerl to Heer have pointed this out, with an emphasis that has varied
with temperament or knowledge, from conviction to surmise. G. Hilton
Scribner, a clever American _litterateur_ says”—the Professor
ludicrously grasped for something in an inner coat pocket and revealed a
little book, exquisitely bound, of scraps and extracts, and read from a
page whose smoothness he had marred by folding a leaf—“he says, ‘thus
the Arctic zone, which was earliest in cooling down to the first and
highest heat degree in the great life-gamut was also the first to become
fertile, first to bear life, and first to send forth her progeny over
the earth.’
“And Wieland, a remarkable Yale scholar, an authority on fossil cycads
and Chelonia, the latest to speculate authoritatively along this line,
writes”—another creased page was turned to—“‘in a word, that the great
evolutionary _Schauplatz_ was boreal is possible from the astronomical
relations, probable from physical facts, and rendered an established
certainty by the unheralded synchronous appearance of the main groups of
animals and plants on both sides of the great oceans throughout
post-Paleozoic time.’”
“But Professor,” it was my remonstrance that now interrupted him, “that
was millions of years ago. It’s a dead world up there. Surely you don’t
think—”
The Professor broke in with a deprecatory gesture of regret at his own
impatience. “I know. True, true, for the most part, but perhaps not for
all—not for all. It’s a deep matter.”
Professor Bjornsen’s eyes were glistening with enthusiasm; his manner
became extravagantly mysterious, and his words boiled out feverishly
from his scarred lips. “The north, to whose enchantment the whole world
bows; a strange, magical region, lit by the supernal splendors of
heavenly lights, and wrapped in eternal snows, was the Eden of our race.
It was that _navel_ of the world related in all mythologies from India
to Greece, from Japan to Scandinavia; it was the Paradisaic earth
center, the fecund source of every manner of life, endowed by the
Creator with original unrestrained powers of exuberance. Here man
originated; here was his primal home, here his first estate, dressed as
he was in every faculty of mind, and enriched by all the gifts of
nature. As President Warren, another American, eloquently wrote
twenty-six years ago—”
Again the Professor dove into his pocket, produced his amazing little
scrapbook, while we all gazed at the excited gentleman with a new
fascination and astonishment. Here was the man of crystals and
mensuration, of ores, adits, drifts and strata, riding the high horse of
mystical and religious analogy, and somehow we felt ourselves drawn into
the vortex of his cerebral excitement! We were quite dazed in a way, and
yet felt an elation that kept us spellbound.
“Ah, here it is. He wrote, President Warren, ‘the pole symbolizes Cardo,
Atlas, Meru, Hara-berezaiti, Kharsak-Kurra, every fabulous mountain on
whose top the sky pivots itself, and around which all the heavenly
bodies ceaselessly revolve.’
“Assume this; assume that here the finger of God first impressed this
insensate whirling globe of unconscious matter with the touch and
promise of life and Mind. Is it likely that all vestiges, all signs, all
remainders of that consecrated first endowment should have quite
disappeared, succumbed ingloriously to the stiffening embrace of cold,
congealed in an eternal sleep beneath the glaciers and the snows? I
think not, my friends, _I think not_.”
“But,” it was the protesting voice of Goritz who now voiced our
incredulity, “haven’t the expeditionists, the geographers, the
explorers—hasn’t everything we have been told, everything we have read,
all we know about it, and that’s a good deal, from Franklin to Peary
made it clear that at the pole there is nothing but death, desolation,
and ice?”
“Antoine!” Here the Professor turned abruptly to the big Dane, thrusting
his umbrageous crown of red hair almost into the thin locks of his
friend, and whispered hoarsely, “Ah! Antoine, the secrets are hidden in
that uncharted land beyond the ice packs north of Point Barrow. The
reservations of life are there. You have all heard,” the rufous glory
now moved towards Hopkins and myself, “of Symmes Hole? Of course you
shrug your shoulders; it was preternatural simplicity you say, the mad
dream of a fool, uproariously derided. Yes! Symmes was not a fool; he
was a brave man, a soldier, chasing a reality through the distortions of
an hallucination. There is _no_ hole; the earth is not hollow, but—there
is a depression; there must be. The depression is at the North Pole
somewhere. It has not been found, and the Arctic seas have been
_parcourired_ by explorers, as you notice, Goritz. The depression is
Krocker Land. If profound its climate is temperate. Life, the remnants
of its first evolutionary phases, may be there—but mark me!” The
Professor positively dilated, everything in him enlarged as if his
bounding heart sent fuller currents of blood to all its outposts; his
eyes were refulgent; I thought they were an emerald green; his hair rose
in the thrill of his vaticination and his mouth opened into a vast
exclamatory _rictus_, in which flashed his big white incisors like
diminutive tusks. “Mark me, there too will be found the last
evolutionary phases of the human race!”
Here was a climax, and the mental stupefaction of the Professor’s
audience was exactly reflected in the prolonged silence that ensued. It
was entertaining, however, to watch Spruce Hopkins’ fixed,
expressionless perusal of the Professor’s face, and the immobile glory
in the Professor’s answering stare. Hopkins spoke first:
“Well! I like your certainty about that depression, Prof. Can’t see it
noway. You’re making things interesting enough, but surely that
depression isn’t the gospel truth. Is it?”
The Professor relaxed; he laughed, and his laugh was the most curious
blend of a chuckle and a whistle, utterly impossible to describe except
by reproduction. It always affected Hopkins hilariously; he said the two
elements in the Professor’s laugh were satisfaction and astonishment;
the chuckle meant the first, the whistle the second, and the state of
the Professor’s mind could be well gauged from the predominance of one
or the other. Just then the chuckle had the best of it.
“Mr. Hopkins,” he said, “you are a very intelligent man. Don’t you see
that a rotating and solidifying viscosity cannot become solid without
forming a pitted polar extremity?”
Hopkins withstood this assault with admirable stolidity; he even looked
injured.
“My dear Professor; really your statement is too simply put to appeal to
the complicated convolutions of my gray matter. Your manner is juvenile.
Such a subject should be treated in a becoming obscurity of terms.”
After our amusement had subsided, Bjornsen explained his view. It was
easily understood. The earth had cooled down from some initial gaseous
or lava-like stage, and, if the congelation had not progressed far or
fast enough at the poles, centrifugal force at the equator would have
withdrawn enough matter to effect a depletion at one pole or the other,
with the consequent result (I recall how particular the Professor was
over this point) of forming a graduated, evenly rounded and smoothish
concavity, if the polar areas were not too rigidly fixed; or a broken,
step-like succession of terraces if they were. Later we were
triumphantly reminded by the Professor of this prediction. Then too he
involved his theory with demonstrations of the vertical effect of
rotation, producing inverted cones or funnels in liquids, as is
familiarly seen in the discharging contents of a washbasin. We were not
convinced, and our evident apathy or dissidence chilled the Professor
into a taciturnity from which he was scarcely aroused when cries from
the water’s edge of the fiord announced the return of a fishing fleet, a
phalanx of _jaegts_, the single masted, square sailed, sturdy boats
familiar to tourists in sea journeys along the fair Norwegian shores. It
was welcomed with shouts and salutations, and the waving of flags and
handkerchiefs, in which we joined.
But the hidden springs of wonderment, the latent impulse in young,
strong men for adventure, discovery, perhaps some marvelous realization
of the unknown, had been stirred within us. The Professor would have
been gratified if he had known how restlessly Goritz and myself rolled
about in our beds that night, or how with sleepless eyes, flat on our
backs, we rehearsed his strange statements, or in dreams encountered
polar bears, threading our way through devious leads to the wintry
coasts of a NEW CONTINENT. The imagery of the north was familiar to us.
We had both visited Spitzbergen and the Franz Josef Archipelago. As
Hopkins had said, we had met him at Stockholm and discussed together the
sensation of the hour, Bjornsen’s lecture at Christiania. We were all
three of us idlers—I by compulsion—but firm in body, ambitious in
spirit, and half exasperated at our uselessness in the world’s affairs.
Goritz was a rich man, an only son, heir to the fortune of a successful
fish merchant in Stockholm; I had a bare competency, and Spruce Hopkins,
a vagabond American, seeing the world but yearning for sterner work, had
already gained in Europe an unenviable reputation for reckless
extravagance. It was at Hopkins’ suggestion that we had invited the
Professor to meet us at the fiord, and we were all wondering how far we
might go in this strange experiment of finding Krocker Land. Should we
go at all?
Whatever satisfaction the Professor might have felt over Goritz’s and my
own agitation, his most sanguine hopes of producing an impression would
have been inflamed to exultation had he known that the Yankee had not
slept a wink, had not taken off his clothes, but had just, as he
characterized it, “stalled on everything,” until he got his bearings on
this “new stunt.”
The Professor’s equanimity was restored when we met him in the
diningroom at breakfast the following morning, and he most
good-naturedly accepted professions of contrition at our mental
obduracy. But it was the American who confounded him by his sudden
determination and a precipitant proposition to “_get away on the first
tide_.”
“Prof.,” he exclaimed clapping the smaller man on the shoulder with a
cordial gaiety that shocked Goritz, “I’m willing to take the chance.
It’s a big stake to win, though,” his whimsical smile propitiated the
Professor completely. “I’m not buffaloed on all your talk about the
tropical climate we’re likely to meet. Of course, I’ve looked into the
matter a little, on my own hook, and just now the plan of action is
something like this. These two good friends,” he waved his hands
genially toward Goritz and myself, “know a good deal about zero
temperatures, polar bears, walrus, starvation and ice floes; you have
surveyed Spitzbergen, and as for myself—Well, honestly, I’m a tenderfoot
but young, hardy, sound as a steel rail, a good shot, a prize rower, and
once Prof., take it from me, I strangled a mad dog with these hands.”
Hopkins never looked handsomer than at that moment, his face burning
with an expectant eagerness, the color rising to his temples beneath the
waves of chestnut hair, his frame and figure like an Achilles.
The Professor nodded his approval and assent.
“We’ll make a strong quartette; quite enough for the jaunt. These big
outfits are a blunder. I’ve always thought that was the mistake the
English made. Plenty of dogs, rations and a few mouths go farther, with
less strain and less risk. And another thing, friends,” he wheeled round
from the Professor, and addressed us, “no big ship, no ‘Fram’, no
‘Roosevelt.’ We’ll get the stiffest and most flexible and biggest wooden
naphtha launch that can be made; stock her; carry her up on a hired
whaler from San Francisco, bunk at Point Barrow, pick our best chance
through the leads in the open weather, and then with dogs, sleds, and
kayaks, take to the main ice and scoot for the happy land of—Krocker!
Eh?”
Goritz and I heard the extraordinary daredevil plan with consternation.
It seemed the limit of foolishness, and absurdly ignorant. We waited for
the inevitable crushing denunciation of such folly from the informed
lips of the Professor. To our amazement the Professor grew radiant,
seized Hopkins’ hands, shaking them vigorously, his pop-eyes starting
out with the most amiable encouragement, while his beaming smile
endorsed Hopkins’ lunacy with mad enthusiasm.
“Right, Mr. Hopkins! Right—the very thing. No reserve, no retreat, no
store ship is necessary. I had convinced myself of the absolute
propriety of just such a course of action, but I expected to find it a
hopeless task to persuade anyone to believe me. Krocker Land will supply
us with everything, and the ice course will be far more simple and easy
than Nansen’s trip from 86° to Franz Josef Land, or Peary’s over North
Greenland; a straight-away run with a few water breaks. No great
hardships. At least,” and the Professor in a burst of audacious
nonchalance knocked over a few glasses and a water carafe in his
swinging ambulations, “none greater than the ordinary experiences of an
Arctic traveler. I congratulate you, Mr. Hopkins, on your
perspicacity—American shrewdness. Ah! American—what you call GAMENESS.
Eh? Let me assure you that had you been a hardened, experienced North
Pole explorer you would never have hit on this; NEVER. You’d have stuck
to the old plans. And the only reason you are right now is that Krocker
Land is an exceptional proposition, to be negotiated by exceptional
methods. I promise you exceptional results.”
For a few moments Goritz and I were dumb with astonishment, and I think
Goritz was almost choking with indignation. Somehow he suppressed his
threatening outbreak and only muttered, “I suppose we will never want to
come back—never need to?”
A ripple of comic commiseration crossed Hopkins’ face:
“Come now, Goritz. WHERE I COME BACK is just _here_,
‘_Sa vandra vara stora man
Fran ljuset ned til skuggan._’”
The situation was so funny, with that tantalizingly humorous face of the
Professor looking on in perplexity, that Goritz burst into laughter, in
which I joined, and his evanescent rage was swept away.
But the Professor answered his implied sarcasm quite literally.
“Antoine,” he said, both hands raised imploringly, “trust me; we shall
find food in Krocker Land, an abundance; the launch can return to Point
Barrow with a small crew, and when we want it on our return—why—”
His indecision or uncertainty or the blankness of his mind about it was
quickly relieved by Goritz.
“We’ll send a telegram ordering it over, and _wait_—for it?”
“Oh it’s no joke Goritz”—Goritz admitted _sotto voce_ that it certainly
was not. “We can get back without it, our kayaks will answer. And you
forget the People of Krocker Land.”
“Why Professor,” I protested, “we haven’t heard of them before.”
The Professor assumed a surprised air, became portentously solemn, and
then—I never felt quite certain whether he actually winked at Hopkins or
not—gravely answered.
“The people of Krocker Land, Erickson, are an assured certainty. An
unpeopled continent is as much a _lusus naturae_ as an unfilled vacuum.”
“Certainly, Erickson. Didn’t you know that? Somebody must be provided to
pocket the revenues from whale blubber and walrus ivory, not to mention
the conservation bureau for glaciers, the output of icebergs, and the
meteorological corps for the standardization of blizzards,” and Hopkins
hid his face in his hands to stifle his screaming mirth.
But the Professor was neither ruffled nor amused; he went on oracularly:
“Erickson, the expectation is a little discouraging. Well I’ll say from
your point of view it is almost impossible of belief that an unknown
people exists in an unknown land near the North Pole. Now Stefansson’s
discovery of the so-called Blond Eskimos has nothing to do with my
confidence in this matter. It rests upon a broad deduction, an _a
priori_ necessary assumption. If the original Eden, the primitive center
of dispersion, on the basis of the unity of the human race—if—”
Behind the Professor, whose labyrinthine locution, sounding higher and
higher, was attracting some general attention among the guests of the
hotel, stood Hopkins with two tumblers of water in his hands. He raised
them suddenly above his head and dropped them. The crash was startling,
and it was followed by an equally unexpected yell of pain from Hopkins,
who apparently slipped, fell, seized the tablecloth and dragged to the
floor a varied array of glassware and cutlery in a clatter that was
deafening.
Confusion, explanations, reparation and a tumult of amusement followed,
and in it disappeared the Professor’s voluminous harangue. It was never
resumed.
Hopkins recovered his seriousness, and we attacked the novel project he
had suggested, critically. All that next day we argued over it,
thrashing it out with the illuminative references Goritz, the Professor
and myself could make to our own experiences, Hopkins listening and
pertinaciously sticking to his original suggestions. His plan grew more
and more attractive; its reasonableness developed more and more under
examination. Of course all four of us were now thoroughly excited; the
lure of discovery almost maddened us, and the necromantic charm of the
Professor’s amazing predictions, which we actually were unwilling to
resist, instilled in us the wayward and fantastic hope that we were on
the verge of a world-convulsing disclosure. We have not been
disappointed.
The project finally took this shape: Hopkins and Goritz volunteered to
bear all the expenses connected with the expedition; Hopkins would go to
America, consult naval architects, and have a naphtha-propelled launch
devised, combining, as to its hull, features of the “Fram” and
“Roosevelt” in a diminutive way. Goritz would follow and buy the
supplies, clothing and equipment. Then would come the Professor with
instruments and books, and finally myself with three chosen men—Hopkins
demanded they should be selected in America—who would be the captain,
engineer and crew of the launch on its return to Point Barrow, and who
would look for us the next summer. How preposterously sure we were that
we would find land and game! But how ineffectually paltry after all were
our expectations compared to the reality.
When everything was ready—the end of a year’s time was fixed for the
date of our departure—we would have the launch set amidships on a
whaler, and sail for Point Barrow, our prospective headquarters on the
North American continent.
The last question Hopkins put to the Professor before we parted was
about the mineral wealth of the new land, which had now incorporated its
actuality with every sleeping and waking moment, seeming as certain as
any other unvisited realm of Earth which we had seen on maps, but never
visited.
Of course the Professor was quite equal to this demand upon his
imagination.
“Mineral wealth? Probably immense. The mother lodes of the gold of
Alaska have never been found. They lie north of Alaska; the geological
extension of the mineral deposits of Alaska is naturally in that
direction, and the enrichment of the primary crystallines with the
precious metals can be reasonably asserted to surpass the mythical
values of Golconda or California.”
“That suits _me_,” was Hopkins’ laconic comment.
At last the whole scheme was pretty thoroughly worked out, down to its
details. Correspondence would be maintained during the summer. The
Professor left for Christiania, Goritz and myself for Stockholm, and
Hopkins steamed away to Hull on the English ship “North Cape.” Our
conference had lasted just a week.
How wonderfully lovely was the day and scene when he left us that June
morning three years ago. If portents of our success could be discerned
in its delicious, enveloping glory of light and beauty, then surely we
might be hopeful. The great gulls were sweeping with deep undulations
through the upper sky, exulting in their splendid power, the summer wind
faintly stirred the dark spruces, whose gentle expostulation at its
intrusion reached us with a sound like the washing of waves on a faraway
shore. The granite rocks of peak and cliff flashed back the unchecked
sunlight; the road, like a white ribbon, spun its loops to and fro over
the hillside, through meads where the glistening red farm houses stood,
that seemed like rubies set in an emerald shield while the waters of the
fiord slumbered at our feet, a liquid mass of beryl.
It now seems to me as if a quarter of a century had passed since then.
And, if events are the measure of duration to the subjective sense, it
might seem even farther away. I recall Spruce Hopkins, radiant and
handsome, amid a throng of new acquaintances—he gathered friends about
him as frankly and quickly as roses attract bees—among whom not a few
young women offered him their mute but eloquent admiration; I remember
him leaning over the rail of the steamer’s deck and reciting in a
rollicking drawl:
“When the sea rolled its fathomless billows
Across the broad plains of Nebraska;
When around the North Pole grew bananas and willows,
And mastodons fought with the great armadillos,
For the pine-apples grown in Alaska.”
(Editorial Apology. The foregoing chapter in its diction and in certain
studied phases of construction will disturb the reader’s sense of
congruity, perhaps. He will be inclined to doubt its authenticity as the
exact narrative of Alfred Erickson. The suspicion is partly creditable
to his literary acumen. The editor admits substantial emendations useful
for the purpose of imparting a literary atmosphere.)
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