place he was fitting out an expedition for Kamtchatka which was to be
the big thing of his life, and cause him to be spoken of together with
Speke, Nansen and Stanley; second because the manager of the lecture
bureau with whom he had signed, had scheduled him to deliver his two
lectures there, as he had already done in Boston, New York, and
elsewhere; and, third because Victoria Boyden lived there.
When Toppan got back, the rest of Victoria's men friends shrank
considerably when she compared them with Toppan. They were of the type
who are in the insurance offices of fathers and uncles during the
winter, and in the summer are to be found at the fashionable resorts,
where they idle languidly on the beaches in white flannels or play
"chopsticks" with the girls on the piano in the hotel parlors. Here,
however, was the first white man who had ever crossed Thibet alive, who
knew what it meant to go four days without water and who could explain
to you the difference between the insanity caused by the lack of sleep
and that brought about by a cobra-bite. The men of Victoria's
acquaintance never had known what it was to go without two consecutive
meals, whereas Toppan at one time in the Himalayas had lived for several
weeks upon ten ounces of camel meat per day, after the animals had died
under their burdens. Victoria's friends led germans, Toppan led
expeditions; their only fatigue came from dancing. Upon one occasion on
Mount Everest, Toppan and his companions, caught in a snow-storm where
sleep meant death, had kept themselves awake by chewing pipe-tobacco,
and rubbing the smarting juice in their eyes. He had had experiences,
the like of which none other of her gentlemen friends had ever known and
she had cared for him from the first.
When a man tells a girl that he loves her in a voice that can speak in
the dialects of the interior Thibetan states around the Tengrinor lake,
or holds her hand in one that has been sunken deep in the throat of a
hunger-mad tiger, she cannot well be otherwise than duly impressed.
To look at, Victoria was a queen. Just the woman you would have chosen
to be mated with a man like Toppan, five feet, eleven in her tennis
shoes, with her head flung well back on her shoulders, and the gait of a
goddess; she could look down on most men and in general suggested
figures of Brunehilde, Boadicea, or Berenice. But to know her was to
find her shallow as a sun-shrunken mill-race, to discover that her
brilliancy was the cheapest glitter, and to realise that in every way
she was lamentably unsuited for the role of Toppan's wife. And no one
saw this so well as Toppan himself. He knew that she did not appreciate
him at one-tenth his real value, that she never could and never would
understand him, and that he was in every way too good for her.
As his wife he felt sure she would only be a hindrance and a
stumbling-block in the career that he had planned for himself, if,
indeed she did not ruin it entirely.
But first impressions were strong with him, and because when he had
first known her she had seemed to be fit consort for an emperor, he had
gone on loving her as such ever since, making excuses for her
trivialities, her petty affectations, her lack of interest in his life
work, and even at times her unconcealed ridicule of it. For one thing,
Victoria wanted him to postpone his expedition for a year, in order that
he might marry her, and Toppan objected to this because he was so
circumstanced just then that to postpone meant to abandon it.
No man is stronger than his weakest point. Toppan's weak point was
Victoria Boyden, and he acknowledged to himself with a good deal of
humiliation that he could not make up his mind to break with her.
Perhaps he is not to be too severely blamed for this. Living so much
apart from women as he did and plunged for such long periods into an
atmosphere so entirely different from that of ordinary society, he had
come to feel intensely where he felt at all, and had lost the faculty
possessed by the more conventional, of easy and ephemeral change from
one interest to another. Most of Victoria's admirers in a like case,
would have lit a cigarette and walked off the passion between dawn and
dark in one night. But Toppan could not do this. It was the one weak
strain in his build, "the little rift within the lute."
One of the natural consequences of their intercourse was that they were
never happy together and hailed with hardly concealed relief the advent
of a third person. They had absolutely no interests in common, and
their meetings were made up of trivial bickerings. They generally
parted quarrelling, and then immediately sat down to count the days
until they should meet again. I have no doubt they loved each other
well enough, but somehow they were not made to be mated--and that was
all there was about it.
During the month before the Kamtchatka expedition sailed Toppan worked
hard. He commanded jointly with Bushby, a lieutenant in the Civil
Engineer Corps, and the two toiled from the dawn of one morning till the
dawn of the next, perfecting the last details of their undertaking;
correcting charts, lading rifles and ammunition, experimenting with beef
extracts and pemmican, and corresponding with geographical societies.
Through it all Toppan found time to revise his notes for his last
lecture, and to call upon Victoria twice a week.
On one of these occasions he said; "How do you get on with my book, Vic,
pretty stupid reading?" He had sent her from Bombay the first copy that
his London publishers had forwarded to him.
"Not at all," she answered, "I like it very much, do you know it has all
the fascination of a novel for me. Your style is just as clear and
strong as can be, and your descriptions of scenery and the strange and
novel bits of human nature in such an unfrequented corner of the globe
are much more interesting than the most imaginative and carefully
elaborated fiction; those botanical and zoological data must be
invaluable to scientific men, I should think; but of course I can't
understand them very well. How do you do it, Fred? It is certainly
very wonderful. One would think that you were a born writer as well as
explorer. But now see here, Freddy; I want to talk to you again about
putting off your trip to--what do you call it--for just a year, for my
sake."
After they had wrangled over this oft-mooted question they parted
coldly, and Toppan went away feeling aroused and unhappy.
That night he and Bushby were making a chemical analysis of a new kind
of smokeless powder. Bushby poured out a handful of saltpeter and
charcoal upon a leaf torn from a back number of the _Scientific Weekly_
and slid it across the table towards him. "Now when you burn this
stuff," remarked Toppan, spreading it out upon the table with his
finger, "you get a reaction of 2KNO3+3C=CO2+CO+, I forget the rest. Get
out your formulae in the bookcase there behind you, will you, and look
it up for me?"
While Bushby was fingering the leaves of the volume, Toppan caught sight
of his name on the leaf of the _Scientific Weekly_ which held the
mixture. Looking closely he saw that it occurred in a criticism of his
book which he had not yet seen. He brushed the charcoal and saltpeter to
one side and ran his eyes over the lines:
"Toppan's great work," said the writer, "is a book not only for the
scientist but for all men. Though dealing to a great extent with the
technicalities of geography, geology, and the sister sciences, the
author has known how to throw his thoughts and observations into a form
of remarkable lightness and brilliancy. In Toppan's hands the book has
all the fascination of a novel. His: style is clear and strong, and his
descriptions of scenery, and of the weird and unusual phases of human
nature to be met with in such an unfrequented corner of the globe are
much more interesting than most of the imaginative and carefully
elaborated romances of adventure in the present day. His botanical and
zoological data will be invaluable to scientific men. It is rare we
find the born explorer a born writer as well."
As he read, Toppan's heart grew cold within his ribs. "She must have
learnt it like a parrot," he mused. "I wonder if she even"--
"Equals CO2+CO+N3+KCO3," said Bushby turning to the table again, "come
on, old man, hurry up and let's get through with this. It's nearly
three o'clock."
The next evening Toppan was to deliver his lecture at the Grand Opera
House, but in the afternoon he called upon Victoria with a purpose. She
was out at the time but he determined to wait for her, and sat down in
the drawing-room until she should come. Presently he saw his book with
its marbled cover--familiar to him now as the face of a child to its
father,--lying conspicuously upon the center table. It was the copy he
had mailed to her from Bombay. He picked it up and ran over the leaves;
not one of them had been cut. He replaced the book upon the table and
left the house.
That night the Grand Opera House was packed to the doors and the street
in front was full of hoarse, over-worked policemen and wailing coachmen.
The awning was out over the sidewalk and the steps of the church across
the street were banked with row upon row of watching faces. It was
known that this was to be the last lecture of Toppan's before he plunged
into the wilderness again, and that the world would not see him for five
years. The mayor of the city introduced him in a speech that was too
long, and then Toppan stood up and faced the artillery of opera-glasses,
and tried not to look into the right-hand proscenium box that held
Victoria Boyden and her party.
He kept the audience spell-bound for an hour, while he forgot his
useless notes, forgot his hearers and the circumstances of time and
place, forgot about Victoria Boyden and their mean little squabbles and
remembered only that he was Toppan, the great explorer, who had led his
men through the interior of Thibet, and had lived to tell it to these
people now before him. For an hour he made the people too, forget
themselves in him and his story, till they felt something of what he had
felt on those occasions when Hope was a phantom scattering chaff, when
Resolve wore thin under friction of disaster, when the wheels of Life
ran very low and men thanked God that they _could_ die. For an hour he
led them steadily into the heart of the unknown: the twilight of the
unseen. Then he had an inspiration.
He had worked himself up to a mood wherein he was himself at his very
best, when his chosen life-work made all else seem trivial and the
desire to do great things was big within him. In this mood he somehow
happened to remember Victoria Boyden, which he should not have done
because she was not to be thought of in connection with great deeds and
high resolves. But just at that moment Toppan felt his strength and
knew how great he really was, and how small and belittled she seemed in
comparison. She had practiced a small deception upon him, had done him
harm and would do him more. He suddenly resolved to break with her at
that very moment and place while he was strong and able to do it.
He did it by cleverly working into his talk a little story whose real
meaning no one but Victoria understood. For the audience it was but a
bright little bit of folk-lore of upper India. For Victoria, he might
as well have struck her across the face. It was cruel; it was even
vulgarly cruel, which is brutal, it was vindictive and perhaps cowardly,
but the man was smarting under a long continued bitterness and he had at
last turned and with closed eyes struck back savagely.
The exalted mood which had brought this about, was with him during the
rest of the evening, was with him when he drove back to his rooms in his
coupe with Bushby, and was with him as he flung himself to bed and went
to sleep with a deep sigh of relief for that it was now over and done
with forever.
But it left him during the night and he awoke the next morning to a
realisation of what he had done and of all he had lost. He began by
remembering Victoria as he had first known her, by recalling only what
was good in her, and by palliating all that was bad. From this starting
point he went on till he was in an agony of grief and remorse and ended
by lashing himself into the belief that Victoria had been his
inspiration and had given zest and interest to every thing he had done.
Now he bitterly regretted that he had thrown her over. He had never in
his life before loved her so much. He was unfitted for work during all
that day and passed the next night in unavailing lamentations. His
morning's mail brought him face to face with the crisis of his life. It
came in the shape of a letter from Victoria Boyden.
It was a very thick and a very heavy letter and she must have spent most
of the previous day in writing it. He was surprised that she should
have written him at all after what had passed on that other evening, but
he was deeply happy as well because he knew precisely what the letter
would be, before he opened it. It would be a petition for his
forgiveness and a last attempt to win him back to her again.
And Toppan knew that she would succeed. He knew that in his present
mood he would make any sacrifice for her sake. He foresaw that her
appeal would be too strong for him. That was, if he opened and read her
letter. Just now the question was, should he do it? If he read that
letter he knew that he was lost, his career would stop where it was. To
be great he had only to throw it unopened into the fire; yes, but to be
great without her, was it worth the while? What would fame and honour
and greatness be, without her? He realised that the time had come to
choose between her and his career and that it all depended upon the
opening of her letter. Two hours later, he flung himself down before
his table and took her letter in his hand. His fingers itched for the
touch of it. Close to his elbow lay a little copper knife with poison
grooves, such as are used by the Hill-tribes in the Kuen-Lun mountains.
Toppan kept it for a paper cutter; just now he picked it up. For a long
time he remained sitting, holding Victoria's letter in one hand, the
little knife in the other. Then he put the point under the flap of the
envelope and slowly cut it open.
Two weeks later the Kamtchatka Expedition sailed with Bushby in command.
Toppan did not go; he was married to Victoria Boyden that Fall.
Last season I met Toppan at Coronado Beach. The world has about
forgotten him now, but he is quite content as he is. He is head clerk
in old Mr. Boyden's insurance office and he plays a capital game of
tennis.
_*A Caged Lion*_
In front of the entrance a "spieler" stood on a starch-box and beat upon
a piece of tin with a stick, and we weakly succumbed to his frenzied
appeals and went inside. We did this, I am sure, partly to please the
"spieler," who would have been dreadfully disappointed if we had not
done so, but partly, too, to please Toppan, who was always interested in
the great beasts and liked to watch them.
It is possible that you may remember Toppan as the man who married
Victoria Boyden, and, in so doing, thrust his greatness from him and
became a bank clerk instead of an explorer. After he married, he came
to be quite ashamed of what he had done in Thibet and Africa and other
unknown corners of the earth, and, after a while, very seldom spoke of
that part of his life at all; or, when he did, it was only to allude to
it as a passing boyish fancy, altogether foolish and silly, like
calf-love and early attempts at poetry.
"I used to think I was going to set the world on fire at one time," he
said once; "I suppose every young fellow has some such ideas. I only
made an ass of myself, and I'm glad I'm well out of it. Victoria saved
me from that."
But this was long afterward. He died hard, and sometimes he would have
moments of strength in his weakness, just as before he had given up his
career during a moment of weakness in his strength. During the first
years after he had given up his career, he thought he was content with
the way things had come to be; but it was not so, and now and then the
old feeling, the love of the old life, the old ambition, would be
stirred into activity again by some sight, or sound, or episode in the
conventional life around him. A chance paragraph in a newspaper, a
sight of the Arizona deserts of sage and cactus, a momentary panic on a
ferry-boat, sometimes even fine music or a great poem would wake the
better part of him to the desire of doing great things. At such times
the longing grew big and troublous within him to cut loose from it all
and get back to those places of the earth where there were neither
months nor years, and where the days of the week had no names; where he
could feel unknown winds blowing against his face and unnamed mountains
rising beneath his feet; where he could see great, sandy, stony
stretches of desert with hot, blue shadows, and plains of salt, and
thickets of jungle-grass, broken only by the lairs of beasts and the
paths the steinbok make when they go down to water.
The most trifling thing would recall all this to him, just as a couple
of notes have recalled to you whole arias and overtures. But with
Toppan it was as though one had recalled the arias and the overtures and
then was not allowed to sing them.
We went into the arena and sat down. The ring in the middle was fenced
in by a great, circular, iron cage. The tiers of seats rose around
this, a band was playing in a box over the entrance, and the whole
interior was lighted by an electric globe slung over the middle of the
cage.
Inside the cage a brown bear--to me less suggestive of a wild animal
than of lap-robes and furriers' signs--was dancing sleepily and allowing
himself to be prodded by a person whose celluloid standing-collar showed
white at the neck above the green of his Tyrolese costume. The bear was
mangy, and his steel muzzle had chafed him, and Toppan said he was
corrupted of moth and rust alike, and the audience applauded but feebly
when he and his keeper withdrew.
After this we had a clown-elephant, dressed in a bib and tucker and vast
baggy breeches--like those of a particularly big French _Turco_--who had
lunch with his keeper, and rang the bell and drank his wine and wiped
his mouth with a handkerchief like a bed-quilt, and pulled the chair
from underneath his companion, seeming to be amused at it all with a
strange sort of suppressed elephantine mirth.
And then, after they had both made their bow and gone out, in bounded
and tumbled the dogs, barking and grinning all over, jumping up on their
stools and benches, wriggling and pushing one another about, giggling
and excited like so many kindergarten children on a show-day. I am sure
they enjoyed their performance as much as the audience did, for they
never had to be told what to do, and seemed only too eager for their
turn to come. The best of it all was that they were quite unconscious
of the audience and appeared to do their tricks for the sake of the
tricks themselves, and not for the applause which followed them. And
then, after the usual programme of wicker cylinders, hoops, and balls
was over, they all rushed off amid a furious scrattling of paws and
filliping of tails and heels.
While this was going on, we had been hearing from time to time a great
sound, half-whine, half-rumbling guttural cough, that came from
somewhere behind the exit from the cage. It was repeated at rapidly
decreasing intervals, and grew lower in pitch until it ended in a short
bass grunt. It sounded cruel and menacing, and when at its full volume
the wood of the benches under us thrilled and vibrated.
There was a little pause in the programme while the arena was cleared
and new and much larger and heavier paraphernalia was set about, and a
gentleman in a frock coat and a very shiny hat entered and announced
"the world's greatest lion-tamer." Then he went away and the tamer came
in and stood expectantly by the side of the entrance, there was another
short wait and the band struck a long minor chord.
And then they came in, one after the other, with long, crouching,
lurching strides, not at all good-humouredly, like the dogs, or the
elephant, or even the bear, but with low-hanging heads, surly, watchful,
their eyes gleaming with the rage and hate that burned in their hearts
and that they dared not vent. Their loose, yellow hides rolled and
rippled over the great muscles as they moved, and the breath coming from
their hot, half-open, mouths turned to steam as it struck the air.
A huge, blue-painted see-saw was dragged out to the centre, and the
tamer made a sharp sound of command. Slowly, and with twitching tails,
two of them obeyed and clambering upon the balancing-board swung up and
down, while the music played a see-saw waltz. And all the while their
great eyes flamed with the detestation of the thing and their black
upper lips curled away from their long fangs in protest of this hourly
renewed humiliation and degradation.
And one of the others, while waiting his turn to be whipped and bullied,
sat up on his haunches and faced us and looked far away beyond us over
the heads of the audience--over the continent and ocean, as it were--as
though he saw something in that quarter that made him forget his present
surroundings.
"You grand old brute," muttered Toppan; and then he said: "Do you know
what you would see if you were to look into his eyes now? You would see
Africa, and unnamed mountains, and great stony stretches of desert, with
hot blue shadows, and plains of salt, and lairs in the jungle-grass, and
lurking places near the paths the steinbok make when they go down to
water. But now he's hampered and caged--is there anything worse than a
caged lion?--and kept from the life he loves and was made for"--just
here the tamer spoke sharply to him, and his eyes and crest
drooped--"and ruled over," concluded Toppan, "by some one who is not so
great as he, who has spoiled what was best in him and has turned his
powers to trivial, resultless uses--some one weaker than he, yet
stronger. Ah, well, old brute, it was yours once, we will remember
that."
They wheeled out a clumsy velocipede, built expressly for him, and,
while the lash whistled and snapped about him, the conquered king heaved
himself upon it and went around and around the ring, while the band
played a quick-step, the audience broke into applause, and the tamer
smirked and bobbed his well-oiled head. I thought of Samson performing
for the Philistines and Thusnelda at the triumph of Germanicus. The
great beasts, grand though conquered, seemed to be the only dignified
ones in the whole business. I hated the audience who saw their shame
from behind iron bars; I hated myself for being one of them; and I hated
the smug, sniggering tamer.
This latter had been drawing out various stools and ladders, and now
arranged the lions upon them so they should form a pyramid, with himself
on top.
Then he swung himself up among them, with his heels upon their necks,
and, taking hold of the jaws of one, wrenched them apart with a great
show of strength, turning his head to the audience so that all should
see.
And just then the electric light above him cackled harshly, guttered,
dropped down to a pencil of dull red, then went out, and the place was
absolutely dark.
The band stopped abruptly with a discord, and there was an instant of
silence. Then we heard the stools and ladders clattering as the lions
leaped down, and straightway four pairs of lambent green spots burned
out of the darkness and traveled swiftly about here and there, crossing
and recrossing one another like the lights of steamers in a storm.
Heretofore, the lions had been sluggish and inert; now they were aroused
and alert in an instant, and we could hear the swift pad-pad of their
heavy feet as they swung around the arena and the sound of their great
bodies rubbing against the bars of the cage as one and the other passed
nearer to us.
I don't the think the audience at all appreciated the situation at
first, for no one moved or seemed excited, and one shrill voice
suggested that the band should play "When the electric lights go out."
"Keep perfectly quiet, please!" called the tamer out of the darkness,
and a certain peculiar ring in his voice was the first intimation of a
possible danger.
But Toppan knew; and as we heard the tamer fumbling for the catch of the
gate, which he somehow could not loose in the darkness, he said, with a
rising voice: "He wants to get that gate open pretty quick."