Well, the memory seems to be getting rather impaired now, rather weak.
What, for instance, was the name of that parson who preached, just
before the _Boreal_ set out, about the wickedness of any further attempt
to reach the North Pole? I have forgotten! Yet four years ago it was
familiar to me as my own name.
Things which took place before the voyage seem to be getting a little
cloudy in the memory now. I have sat here, in the loggia of this Cornish
villa, to write down some sort of account of what has happened--God
knows why, since no eye can ever read it--and at the very beginning I
cannot remember the parson's name.
He was a strange sort of man surely, a Scotchman from Ayrshire, big and
gaunt, with tawny hair. He used to go about London streets in shough
and rough-spun clothes, a plaid flung from one shoulder. Once I saw him
in Holborn with his rather wild stalk, frowning and muttering to
himself. He had no sooner come to London, and opened chapel (I think in
Fetter Lane), than the little room began to be crowded; and when, some
years afterwards, he moved to a big establishment in Kensington, all
sorts of men, even from America and Australia, flocked to hear the
thunderstorms that he talked, though certainly it was not an age apt to
fly into enthusiasms over that species of pulpit prophets and
prophecies. But this particular man undoubtedly did wake the strong dark
feelings that sleep in the heart; his eyes were very singular and
powerful; his voice from a whisper ran gathering, like snow-balls, and
crashed, as I have heard the pack-ice in commotion far yonder in the
North; while his gestures were as uncouth and gawky as some wild man's
of the primitive ages.
Well, this man--what _was_ his name?--Macintosh? Mackay? I think--yes,
that was it! _Mackay_. Mackay saw fit to take offence at the new attempt
to reach the Pole in the _Boreal_; and for three Sundays, when the
preparations were nearing completion, stormed against it at Kensington.
The excitement of the world with regard to the North Pole had at this
date reached a pitch which can only be described as _fevered_, though
that word hardly expresses the strange ecstasy and unrest which
prevailed: for the abstract interest which mankind, in mere desire for
knowledge, had always felt in this unknown region, was now, suddenly, a
thousand and a thousand times intensified by a new, concrete interest--a
tremendous _money_ interest.
And the new zeal had ceased to be healthy in its tone as the old zeal
was: for now the fierce demon Mammon was making his voice heard in this
matter.
Within the ten years preceding the _Boreal_ expedition, no less than
twenty-seven expeditions had set out, and failed.
The secret of this new rage lay in the last will and testament of Mr.
Charles P. Stickney of Chicago, that king of faddists, supposed to be
the richest individual who ever lived: he, just ten years before the
_Boreal_ undertaking, had died, bequeathing 175 million dollars to the
man, of whatever nationality, who first reached the Pole.
Such was the actual wording of the will--_'the man who first reached'_:
and from this loose method of designating the person intended had
immediately burst forth a prolonged heat of controversy in Europe and
America as to whether or no the testator meant _the Chief_ of the first
expedition which reached: but it was finally decided, on the highest
legal authority, that, in any case, the actual wording of the document
held good: and that it was the individual, whatever his station in the
expedition, whose foot first reached the 90th degree of north latitude,
who would have title to the fortune.
At all events, the public ferment had risen, as I say, to a pitch of
positive fever; and as to the _Boreal_ in particular, the daily progress
of her preparations was minutely discussed in the newspapers, everyone
was an authority on her fitting, and she was in every mouth a bet, a
hope, a jest, or a sneer: for now, at last, it was felt that success was
probable. So this Mackay had an acutely interested audience, if a
somewhat startled, and a somewhat cynical, one.
A truly lion-hearted man this must have been, after all, to dare
proclaim a point-of-view so at variance with the spirit of his age! One
against four hundred millions, they bent one way, he the opposite,
saying that they were wrong, all wrong! People used to call him 'John
the Baptist Redivivus': and without doubt he did suggest something of
that sort. I suppose that at the time when he had the face to denounce
the _Boreal_ there was not a sovereign on any throne in Europe who, but
for shame, would have been glad of a subordinate post on board.
On the third Sunday night of his denunciation I was there in that
Kensington chapel, and I heard him. And the wild talk he talked! He
seemed like a man delirious with inspiration.
The people sat quite spell-bound, while Mackay's prophesying voice
ranged up and down through all the modulations of thunder, from the
hurrying mutter to the reverberant shock and climax: and those who came
to scoff remained to wonder.
Put simply, what he said was this: That there was undoubtedly some sort
of Fate, or Doom, connected with the Poles of the earth in reference to
the human race: that man's continued failure, in spite of continual
efforts, to reach them, abundantly and super-abundantly proved this; and
that this failure constituted a lesson--_and a warning_--which the race
disregarded at its peril.
The North Pole, he said, was not so very far away, and the difficulties
in the way of reaching it were not, on the face of them, so very great:
human ingenuity had achieved a thousand things a thousand times more
difficult; yet in spite of over half-a-dozen well-planned efforts in
the nineteenth century, and thirty-one in the twentieth, man had never
reached: always he had been baulked, baulked, by some seeming
chance--some restraining Hand: and herein lay the lesson--_herein the
warning_. Wonderfully--really _wonderfully_--like the Tree of
Knowledge in Eden, he said, was that Pole: all the rest of earth lying
open and offered to man--but _That_ persistently veiled and 'forbidden.'
It was as when a father lays a hand upon his son, with: 'Not here, my
child; wheresoever you will--but not here.'
But human beings, he said, were free agents, with power to stop their
ears, and turn a callous consciousness to the whispers and warning
indications of Heaven; and he believed, he said, that the time was now
come when man would find it absolutely in his power to stand on that
90th of latitude, and plant an impious right foot on the head of the
earth--just as it had been given into the absolute power of Adam to
stretch an impious right hand, and pluck of the Fruit of Knowledge; but,
said he--his voice pealing now into one long proclamation of awful
augury--just as the abuse of that power had been followed in the one
case by catastrophe swift and universal, so, in the other, he warned the
entire race to look out thenceforth for nothing from God but a lowering
sky, and thundery weather.
The man's frantic earnestness, authoritative voice, and savage gestures,
could not but have their effect upon all; as for me, I declare, I sat as
though a messenger from Heaven addressed me. But I believe that I had
not yet reached home, when the whole impression of the discourse had
passed from me like water from a duck's back. The Prophet in the
twentieth century was not a success. John Baptist himself, camel-skin
and all, would have met with only tolerant shrugs. I dismissed Mackay
from my mind with the thought: 'He is behind his age, I suppose.'
But haven't I thought differently of Mackay since, my God...?
* * * * *
Three weeks--it was about that--before that Sunday night discourse, I
was visited by Clark, the chief of the coming expedition--a mere visit
of friendship. I had then been established about a year at No. II,
Harley Street, and, though under twenty-five, had, I suppose, as _élite_
a practice as any doctor in Europe.
_Élite_--but small. I was able to maintain my state, and move among the
great: but now and again I would feel the secret pinch of
moneylessness. Just about that time, in fact, I was only saved from
considerable embarrassment by the success of my book, 'Applications of
Science to the Arts.'
In the course of conversation that afternoon, Clark said to me in his
light hap-hazard way:
'Do you know what I dreamed about you last night, Adam Jeffson? I
dreamed that you were with us on the expedition.'
I think he must have seen my start: on the same night I had myself
dreamed the same thing; but not a word said I about it now. There was a
stammer in my tongue when I answered:
'Who? I?--on the expedition?--I would not go, if I were asked.'
'Oh, you would.'
'I wouldn't. You forget that I am about to be married.'
'Well, we need not discuss the point, as Peters is not going to die,'
said he. 'Still, if anything did happen to him, you know, it is you I
should come straight to, Adam Jeffson.'
'Clark, you jest,' I said: 'I know really very little of astronomy, or
magnetic phenomena. Besides, I am about to be married....'
'But what about your botany, my friend? _There's_ what we should be
wanting from you: and as for nautical astronomy, poh, a man with your
scientific habit would pick all that up in no time.'
'You discuss the matter as gravely as though it were a possibility,
Clark,' I said, smiling. 'Such a thought would never enter my head:
there is, first of all, my _fiancée_----'
'Ah, the all-important Countess, eh?--Well, but she, as far as I know
the lady, would be the first to force you to go. The chance of stamping
one's foot on the North Pole does not occur to a man every day, my son.'
'Do talk of something else!' I said. 'There is Peters....'
'Well, of course, there is Peters. But believe me, the dream I had was
so clear----'
'Let me alone with your dreams, and your Poles!' I laughed.
Yes, I remember: I pretended to laugh loud! But my secret heart knew,
even _then_, that one of those crises was occurring in my life which,
from my youth, has made it the most extraordinary which any creature of
earth ever lived. And I knew that this was so, firstly, because of the
two dreams, and secondly, because, when Clark was gone, and I was
drawing on my gloves to go to see my _fiancée_, I heard distinctly the
old two Voices talk within me: and One said: 'Go not to see her now!'
and the Other: 'Yes, go, go!'
The two Voices of my life! An ordinary person reading my words would
undoubtedly imagine that I mean only two ordinary contradictory
impulses--or else that I rave: for what modern man could comprehend how
real-seeming were those voices, how loud, and how, ever and again, I
heard them contend within me, with a nearness 'nearer than breathing,'
as it says in the poem, and 'closer than hands and feet.'
About the age of seven it happened first to me. I was playing one summer
evening in a pine-wood of my father's; half a mile away was a
quarry-cliff; and as I played, it suddenly seemed as if someone said to
me, inside of me: 'Just take a walk toward the cliff'; and as if someone
else said: 'Don't go that way at all'--mere whispers then, which
gradually, as I grew up, seemed to swell into cries of wrathful
contention! I did go toward the cliff: it was steep, thirty feet high,
and I fell. Some weeks later, on recovering speech, I told my astonished
mother that 'someone had pushed me' over the edge, and that someone else
'had caught me' at the bottom!
One night, soon after my eleventh birthday, lying in bed, the thought
struck me that my life must be of great importance to some thing or
things which I could not see; that two Powers, which hated each other,
must be continually after me, one wishing for some reason to kill me,
and the other for some reason to keep me alive, one wishing me to do so
and so, and the other to do the opposite; that I was not a boy like
other boys, but a creature separate, special, marked for--something.
Already I had notions, touches of mood, passing instincts, as occult and
primitive, I verily believe, as those of the first man that stepped; so
that such Biblical expressions as 'The Lord spake to So-and-so, saying'
have hardly ever suggested any question in my mind as to how the Voice
was heard: I did not find it so very difficult to comprehend that
originally man had more ears than two; nor should have been surprised to
know that I, in these latter days, more or less resembled those primeval
ones.
But not a creature, except perhaps my mother, has ever dreamed me what I
here state that I was. I seemed the ordinary youth of my time, bow in my
'Varsity eight, cramming for exams., dawdling in clubs. When I had to
decide as to a profession, who could have suspected the conflict that
transacted itself in my soul, while my brain was indifferent to the
matter--that agony of strife with which the brawling voices shouted, the
one: 'Be a scientist--a doctor,' and the other: 'Be a lawyer, an
engineer, an artist--be _anything_ but a doctor!'
A doctor I became, and went to what had grown into the greatest of
medical schools--Cambridge; and there it was that I came across a man,
named Scotland, who had a rather odd view of the world. He had rooms, I
remember, in the New Court at Trinity, and a set of us were generally
there. He was always talking about certain 'Black' and 'White Powers,
till it became absurd, and the men used to call him
'black-and-white-mystery-man,' because, one day, when someone said
something about 'the black mystery of the universe,' Scotland
interrupted him with the words: 'the black-and-white mystery.'
Quite well I remember Scotland now--the sweetest, gentle soul he was,
with a passion for cats, and Sappho, and the Anthology, very short in
stature, with a Roman nose, continually making the effort to keep his
neck straight, and draw his paunch in. He used to say that the universe
was being frantically contended for by two Powers: a White and a Black;
that the White was the stronger, but did not find the conditions on our
particular planet very favourable to his success; that he had got the
best of it up to the Middle Ages in Europe, but since then had been
slowly and stubbornly giving way before the Black; and that finally the
Black would win--not everywhere perhaps, but _here_--and would carry
off, if no other earth, at least _this_ one, for his prize.
This was Scotland's doctrine, which he never tired of repeating; and
while others heard him with mere toleration, little could they divine
with what agony of inward interest, I, cynically smiling there, drank in
his words. Most profound, most profound, was the impression they made
upon me.
* * * * *
But I was saying that when Clark left me, I was drawing on my gloves to
go to see my _fiancée_, the Countess Clodagh, when I heard the two
voices most clearly.
Sometimes the urgency of one or other impulse is so overpowering, that
there is no resisting it: and it was so then with the one that bid me
go.
I had to traverse the distance between Harley Street and Hanover Square,
and all the time it was as though something shouted at my physical ear:
'Since you go, breathe no word of the _Boreal_, and Clark's visit'; and
another shout: 'Tell, tell, hide nothing!'
It seemed to last a month: yet it was only some minutes before I was in
Hanover Square, and Clodagh in my arms.
She was, in my opinion, the most superb of creatures, Clodagh--that
haughty neck which seemed always scorning something just behind her left
shoulder. Superb! but ah--I know it now--a godless woman, Clodagh, a
bitter heart.
Clodagh once confessed to me that her favourite character in history was
Lucrezia Borgia, and when she saw my horror, immediately added: 'Well,
no, I am only joking!' Such was her duplicity: for I see now that she
lived in the constant effort to hide her heinous heart from me. Yet, now
I think of it, how completely did Clodagh enthral me!
Our proposed marriage was opposed by both my family and hers: by mine,
because her father and grandfather had died in lunatic asylums; and by
hers, because, forsooth, I was neither a rich nor a noble match. A
sister of hers, much older than herself, had married a common country
doctor, Peters of Taunton, and this so-called _mésalliance_ made the
so-called _mésalliance_ with me doubly detestable in the eyes of her
relatives. But Clodagh's extraordinary passion for me was to be stemmed
neither by their threats nor prayers. What a flame, after all, was
Clodagh! Sometimes she frightened me.
She was at this date no longer young, being by five years my senior, as
also, by five years, the senior of her nephew, born from the marriage of
her sister with Peters of Taunton. This nephew was Peter Peters, who was
to accompany the _Boreal_ expedition as doctor, botanist, and
meteorological assistant.
On that day of Clark's visit to me I had not been seated five minutes
with Clodagh, when I said:
'Dr. Clark--ha! ha! ha!--has been talking to me about the Expedition. He
says that if anything happened to Peters, I should be the first man he
would run to. He has had an absurd dream...'
The consciousness that filled me as I uttered these words was the
_wickedness_ of me--the crooked wickedness. But I could no more help it
than I could fly.
Clodagh was standing at a window holding a rose at her face. For quite a
minute she made no reply. I saw her sharp-cut, florid face in profile,
steadily bent and smelling. She said presently in her cold, rapid way:
'The man who first plants his foot on the North Pole will certainly be
ennobled. I say nothing of the many millions... I only wish that I was
a man!'
'I don't know that I have any special ambition that way,' I rejoined. 'I
am very happy in my warm Eden with my Clodagh. I don't like the outer
Cold.'
'Don't let me think little of you!' she answered pettishly.
'Why should you, Clodagh? I am not bound to desire to go to the North
Pole, am I?'
'But you _would_ go, I suppose, if you could?'
'I might--I--doubt it. There is our marriage....'
'Marriage indeed! It is the one thing to transform our marriage from a
sneaking difficulty to a ten times triumphant event.'
'You mean if _I_ personally were the first to stand at the Pole. But
there are many in an expedition. It is very unlikely that _I_,
personally--'
'For _me_ you will, Adam--' she began.
'"_Will_," Clodagh?' I cried. 'You say "_will_"? there is not even the
slightest shadow of a probability--!'
'But why? There are still three weeks before the start. They say...'
She stopped, she stopped.
'They say what?'
Her voice dropped:
'That Peter takes atropine.'
Ah, I started then. She moved from the window, sat in a rocking-chair,
and turned the leaves of a book, without reading. We were silent, she
and I; I standing, looking at her, she drawing the thumb across the
leaf-edges, and beginning again, contemplatively. Then she laughed dryly
a little--a dry, mad laugh.
'Why did you start when I said that?' she asked, reading now at random.
'_I_! I did not start, Clodagh! What made you think that I started? I
did not start! Who told you, Clodagh, that Peters takes atropine?'
'He is my nephew: I should know. But don't look dumbfoundered in that
absurd fashion: I have no intention of poisoning him in order to see you
a multimillionaire, and a Peer of the Realm....'
'My dearest Clodagh!'
'I easily might, however. He will be here presently. He is bringing Mr.
Wilson for the evening.' (Wilson was going as electrician of the
expedition.)
'Clodagh.' I said, 'believe me, you jest in a manner which does not
please me.'
'Do I really?' she answered with that haughty, stiff half-turn of her
throat: 'then I must be more exquisite. But, thank Heaven, it is only a
jest. Women are no longer admired for doing such things.'
'Ha! ha! ha!--no--no longer admired, Clodagh! Oh, my good Lord! let us
change this talk....'
But now she could talk of nothing else. She got from me that afternoon
the history of all the Polar expeditions of late years, how far they
reached, by what aids, and why they failed. Her eyes shone; she listened
eagerly. Before this time, indeed, she had been interested in the
_Boreal_, knew the details of her outfitting, and was acquainted with
several members of the expedition. But now, suddenly, her mind seemed
wholly possessed, my mention of Clark's visit apparently setting her
well a-burn with the Pole-fever.
The passion of her kiss as I tore myself from her embrace that day I
shall not forget. I went home with a pretty heavy heart.
The house of Dr. Peter Peters was three doors from mine, on the opposite
side of the street. Toward one that night, his footman ran to knock me
up with the news that Peters was very ill. I hurried to his bed-side,
and knew by the first glance at his deliriums and his staring pupils
that he was poisoned with atropine. Wilson, the electrician, who had
passed the evening with him at Clodagh's in Hanover Square, was there.
'What on earth is the matter?' he said to me.
'Poisoned,' I answered.
'Good God! what with?'
'Atropine.'
'Good Heavens!'
'Don't be frightened: I think he will recover.'
'Is that certain?'
'Yes, I think--that is, if he leaves off taking the drug, Wilson.'
'What! it is he who has poisoned himself?'