other thing. Suffice it, as the popular three-volume novelist used
to say when not compelled to pad, that, to all outward seeming, the
couple agreed. But I think that when the high tide of Fame receded (as
during 1909, when the thrilling adventures of the dauntless explorer,
Blank, were electrifying the newspaper-reading world, it certainly
did, leaving nothing but a vague halo of heroism and adventure hanging
about the name of Magellison, and a sedimentary deposit of honorary
letters at the tail of it) the woman who had married Magellison knew
disillusion. As for Magellison, he had always been a silent, absorbed
and solitary man. And that strange look in those wide-pupilled
pale gray eyes of his, the eyes of one who has lived through the
half-year-long twilight of Arctic nights, and seen the ringed moon with
her mock moons glimmer through the ghostly frost-fog, and the pale pink
curving feathers of the Aurora Borealis stream across the ice-blue
sky, and the awful crimson of the Polar Day rush up beyond the floe
and strike the icy loneliness into new beauty and new terror--never
changed. Perhaps, in discovering the true nature of his Geraldine,
the Explorer found himself traversing a colder and more rugged
desert than he had encountered when he led the Scottish-Northumbrian
Polar Expedition in quest of those volcanic ranges proved to be
non-existent--in Alaska to the North.
I believe he really loved the woman he had married. I know that, while
he acted as the unpaid steward of her estates, he spent nothing beyond
his half-pay, eked out by articles which he wrote now and then for
the kind of Scientific Review that rewards the contributor with ten
shillings per page of one thousand words, _plus_ the honor of having
contributed. In his own houses--his wife’s, I should say--he was a
pathetic nonentity. At 000 Chesterfield Crescent, and at Edengates in
Clayshire, the recent Miss Dycehurst’s country seat, he hugged his own
rooms, about which, arranged in cases and hung upon the walls, were
disposed native weapons, stuffed birds, geological specimens, dried
algæ, water-color sketches, and such trophies of the Survey Expedition
as had not been presented by Magellison to needy museums. When his name
appeared in newspaper-paragraphs as the writer of one of the articles
referred to, or as the donor of such a gift, his wife would pluck him
from his beloved solitude, and compel him to tread the social round
with her. But as the slow years crept on, the man himself, long before
the ebbing tide of Fame left a desolate stretch of seaweedy mud where
its waters had heaved and whispered, was so rarely seen, in his wife’s
company or out of it, that her all-but-newest friends believed Mrs.
Arthur Magellison to be the wife of an incurable invalid, and the most
recent were convinced that she was a widow. Proposals of marriage were
sometimes made to the lady, who by the way was handsomer and stonier
than ever, by Eligibles or Ineligibles laboring under this conviction.
“I am extremely sensible of the honor you have done me,” said Mrs.
Magellison upon one of these occasions, “but as a fact, my husband is
alive. Which relieves me of the necessity--don’t you think?--of coming
to a decision!”
The man who had proposed, a barely middle-aged, extremely good-looking,
well-made, well-bred Hawting-Holliday of Hirlmere, sufficiently
endowed with ancient, if embarrassed, acres, and a sixteenth-century
Baronetcy, to have tempted the marble Geraldine, had her frosty hand
been disengaged, to its bestowal on him, was, though impecunious enough
to be strongly attracted by the lady’s wealth, yet honestly enamored
of her sculpturesque person. Consequently as the final syllable of
the foregoing utterance fell from the lady’s lips, he assumed, for a
fleeting instant or so, the rosy complexion of early adolescence, and
stared upon the conquering Geraldine with blank and circular eyes. Then
he said:
“By--Jove! that does let me out, doesn’t it? My dear lady, I entreat
you to consider me as prostrate in humiliation at your feet. With”--he
felt over the surface of an admirably thought-out waistcoat for his
eyeglass, which was still in his eye--“with sackcloth and ashes, and
all the appropriate trimmings. Let me retrieve my character in your
eyes by saying, that if it--ahem!--gives you any gratification to
have a live husband at this juncture--I will endeavor to share the
sentiment. But you really have run him as a Dark Horse, now haven’t
you?”
He lifted his eyebrows in interrogation, and the eyeglass leaped into
the folds of his well-chosen cravat, the kind of subdued yet hopeful
thing in shades a man of taste and brains would put on to propose in.
“My dear Sir Robert,” Mrs. Magellison said, in well-chosen language and
with an icy little smile, “I am not an adept in the use of sporting
phraseology. Captain Magellison is of studious habits, retiring
nature, and--shall I say?--an indolent disposition. It would not very
well become me if I insisted on his society when he is not disposed
to bestow it upon me, and therefore I generally go out alone. When,
unless I give a formal dinner, upon which an occasion my husband must
necessarily take his place at the other end of the board--when I
entertain intimates----”
“You put your people at a round table,” said Hawting-Holliday
of Hirlmere. “And a round table is the very deuce--and--all for
obliterating a husband!” He found his eyeglass and screwed it firmly in.
“I do not altogether blame the table,” said Mrs. Magellison coldly.
“Because, upon nine occasions out of ten my husband prefers a cutlet in
his rooms. Pray do not suppose that I find fault with the preference.
He is not by nature sociable, as I have said, and prefers to follow, at
Edengates and in Scotland and in Paris, as well as here in town, his
own peculiar bent. And what that is you are probably aware?” She turned
her head with a superb movement, and her helmet of pale hair gleamed
in the wintry sunshine that streamed through the lace blinds of the
Chesterfield Crescent drawing-room.
“I had a general idea,” said the man she addressed, who, hampered in
early life by the fact of being born a Hawting-Holliday of Hirlmere,
had not succeeded in being anything else, “that the late--I beg your
pardon!--the present Captain Magellison was--I should say is--a
Scientific Buffer--of sorts!”
Mrs. Magellison smiled coldly and rose.
“The term you employ is slang, of course,” she said, “but it is quite
appropriate and really descriptive. My husband was once a famous man,
he is now a Scientific Buffer--and as you say--of sorts. Would you like
to see him?”
She moved to the drawing-room door and turned her head with another
fine movement, and Hawting-Holliday’s eclectic taste was charmed with
the sculpturesque pose. He followed her and they crossed a landing,
and Mrs. Magellison knocked at the door of one of a suite of rooms
that had been thrown out over what had been a back-yard. And as nobody
said “Come in,” she entered, followed by the visitor.
II
The room was long, carpeted but uncurtained, and lighted by that most
depressing of all forms of illumination, a skylight. Dwarf bookcases
ran round it, and the walls were covered with frames and glass cases,
primitive weapons, and a multitude of quaint and curious things.
There was a low couch, covered with seal skins and feather rugs, and
a leather writing-chair was set at the table, which had on it a fine
microscope and many scientific instruments, of which the uses were
unknown to the head of the Hawting-Hollidays of Hirlmere. Piles of
dusty papers there were, and a couple of battered ship’s logs, stained
and discolored by sea-water and grease. And in the writing-chair,
with his feet on a magnificent Polar bear-skin and the receiver of
a telephone at his ear, sat the Scientific Buffer of sorts, staring
fixedly before him, apparently over an illimitable waste of frozen
drift-ice covering uncharted Polar seas.
“Arthur!” said Mrs. Magellison, with a cold kind of impatience,
rattling the handle of the door as if to attract his attention. He came
back with a start and hung up the receiver, and rose. He had a simple,
courteous manner that won upon the suitor who had just proposed to his
wife; and oddly enough, the appearance of a servant with a message that
summoned the lady to an interview with her _modiste_ was not greatly
regretted by Hawting-Holliday.
“I have seen you before, of course,” said his host, making him free of
a rack of Esquimaux pipes and pushing over a jar of Navy-cut.
“Have you though?” rose to the visitor’s lips, but the words were
not allowed to escape. Looking round he saw that there were piles
of receipted accounts, and orderly piles of tradesmen’s books upon
the table with the reams of dusty MSS., and as servants came in for
orders and went away instructed, and messages were telephoned to
various purveyors, Hawting-Holliday arrived at the conclusion that
Mrs. Magellison’s husband was regarded less in that capacity by Mrs.
Magellison and her household than as major-domo, head-bailiff and
house-steward.
* * * * *
The two men chatted a little, and presently one spoke while the other
listened. The capacity for hero-worship is quick in every generous
nature, and the extravagant, impoverished, high-bred county gentleman
and man-about-town was conscious that this modest, absent-minded
little ex-naval Commander was of the stuff that went to build great
heroes. Franklin and Nansen were brothers to this man, and that the
justly-honored names of Shackleton and Peary, and the cognomen of
Cook (King of terminological inexactitudinarians), were hot upon the
public’s mouths just then, mattered nothing to Hawting-Holliday, as he
heard how in the year of Our Lord Nineteen Hundred and Six, ten men
sailed from San Francisco for Bering Sea on board a sixty-ton schooner,
to settle the question of the existence of Undiscovered Ranges of
Volcanic Origin in Alaska to the North. And how great storms and awful
blizzards hindered the Coastal Survey Expedition, and sickness crippled
its members, yet they struggled gamely on.
“Good God!” said Hawting-Holliday, whose pipe had long since gone out.
He heard next how the Expedition suffered the loss of their ship and
all their stores, and how their leader sent his crew home by a passing
whaler and, for the enlargement of his own experience, chose to journey
back to civilization along the Alaskan coast, three thousand miles of
solitary sledge-traveling, aided only by the Esquimaux he chanced on
in his terrible journey. And as he went on narrating in his calm and
even voice, enforcing a point by a modest gesture of the hand that had
lost the top-joints of the first and second fingers, and sometimes
looking through and beyond the face of the listener with those strange,
sorrowful, far-away eyes, what he related the other man saw, and----
“Good Lord!” said Hawting-Holliday again, “what an Odyssey the whole
thing is! And so you got back to Ithaca after eighteen months of
tramping it on your lonesome along a frozen coast and sleeping in
holes dug in the snow, and living on blubber and seal-meat or boiled
skin-boots when you couldn’t get anything else; and gathering knowledge
and experience when there wasn’t even reindeer moss to scrape off
the rocks!” He got up and held out his hand. “As a perfectly useless
and idle kind of beggar, I don’t know that my sincere admiration and
respect are worth having, Captain, but if they were!----”
* * * * *
He gulped, and went, quite clumsily, away, but came back again, and
so a friendship grew between the “perfectly useless and idle kind of
beggar,” Hawting-Holliday, and the hero of the three-thousand-mile
tramp back to Civilization. Perhaps Hawting-Holliday had really never
been seriously attached to the handsome piece of statuary that bore
Magellison’s name. It is certain that her cold neglect and open
contempt of her husband eventually kindled the wrath of Magellison’s
newly-won champion to boiling-point. Not that the Captain gave any
perceptible sign of suffering under the icy blizzard of his wife’s
scorn. Endurance was the lesson he had learned best of all, and he
agreed with her in regarding himself as a Failure.
“A beautiful and gifted woman has a right to be ambitious for the man
she marries,” he said once to Hawting-Holliday. “And if he has no power
to keep at high-level, if he makes no more way than a schooner frozen
in the floe, it is natural that she should feel keenly disappointed
and--and manifest the feeling by a--a certain change of attitude as
regards him.”
“The schooner may be frozen in the floe, Captain,” said
Hawting-Holliday, lounging in the window-seat of the Captain’s big,
bare room at Edengates, that was--only barring the skylight--exactly
like the Captain’s other big bare room at 000, Chesterfield Crescent.
“But the floe is traveling all the time. That’s a bit of scientific
information that I got from you. And I rather pride myself on applying
it neatly.”
The Captain looked hard at him, and Hawting-Holliday noticed for
the first time that the curly fair hair that topped the deep-lined
pale-bronze face was growing white. Then Magellison said, with a queer
smile:
“You have found me out, I see! And yet I thought I had kept the
secret--or rather, the arrangement, quite closely. But on the whole I’m
rather glad you guessed. For I like you, young man”--Hawting-Holliday
was at least thirty-five--“and I shall give you the parting hand-shake
with sincere regret--with very sincere regret, when the ice breaks
up and the little engine helps the hoisted sails, and the floe-bound
vessel that never really stopped, although her journey was only of
inches in the month--moves on not North but South, along the thawed and
open sea-lanes----”
He stopped, for Hawting-Holliday dropped his pipe and got off the
window-seat, and caught the maimed right hand and wrung it until its
owner winced.
“You gave me credit for too much perspicuity, Captain. I hadn’t seen as
much as the cat’s tail until you let her out of the bag. Where are you
going, man, and when do you go?”
Briefly, Magellison told him.
“All right, Captain,” said Hawting-Holliday. “You’re going to take
charge of the Steam and Sail Antarctic Geological Research Expedition,
financed by the Swedish Government, sailing from Plymouth for King
Edward Land in April, so as to get the summer months of December,
January, and February for exploration, botanizing, deep-sea-dredging,
and scientific observations. You calculate on being away not quite
three years. Very well, but remember this! If you don’t turn up in
three years’ time and no definite news has reached us as to your
whereabouts, the most useless and idle dog of my acquaintance--and
that’s myself--will take the liberty to come and look for you. I swear
it--by the Great Barrier and the Blue Antarctic Ooze!”
They shook hands upon it, laughing at the humorous idea of the
Captain’s not coming back, and a little later the news of her husband’s
impending departure was imparted, _per_ the medium of the Press, to the
marmorean lady to whom the explorer had frozen himself some few years
previously. She was radiant with smiles at the revival of newspaper
interest in Magellison, and postponed her spring visit to the Riviera
for the purpose of giving a series of Departure Dinners in honor of
the Captain. All the leading scientific lights of the day twinkled
in turn about the board. And Geraldine wore all her diamonds, and
was exceedingly gracious to her Distinguished Man. She saw him off
from Plymouth, one balmy April day, and shed a few discreet tears
in a minute and filmy pocket handkerchief as the Swedish oak-built,
schooner-rigged steamship-sailer _Selma_ ran up the Swedish colors
and curtsied adieu to English waters at the outset of the long South
Atlantic voyage, and the petrol steam-launch containing the friends and
relatives of the Expedition rocked in her wake, and the red-eyed people
crowding on the oily-smelling little vessel’s decks raised a quavering
farewell cheer. Two men stood together at the _Selma’s_ after-rail:
a short, square man of muscular build, with a slight stoop that told
of scholarly habits, and thick, fair hair, streaked with white, and a
deeply-lined, clean-shaven face, with pale, far-seeing eyes that were
set in a network of fine wrinkles. The other man was Hawting-Holliday,
who had announced his intention, at the last minute, of accompanying
the Expedition as far as Madeira for the sake of the sea-blow.
“Tell Geraldine I shall mail home from the Cape and Melbourne,” the
leader of the Expedition said, three days later, as the boat that
was to convey Hawting-Holliday ashore bobbed under the _Selma’s_
side-ladder in a clamoring rout of tradesmen’s luggers and Funchal
market-flats. “Tell her I shall certainly communicate from Lyttelton,
and after that she must trust to luck and homeward-bound whalers for
news of me.” He wrung Hawting-Holliday’s hand, and added, “And in
case--anything should happen to me--not that such a chance is worth
speaking of!--I know that I can rely upon you to act towards my--my
dear girl as a friend!” The Captain’s voice shook a little, and a mist
was over those clear, wide-pupilled, far-away-gazing gray eyes.
“I promise you that, faithfully,” said Hawting-Holliday, and gripped
the maimed right hand of the man he loved as a brother, and went down
over the side of the _Selma_ with a sore heart.
That was in April, 1910, and news of the loss of the _Selma_, in the
ice of the Antarctic Circle was cabled from Honolulu at the beginning
of last month. An American Antarctic Expedition, having concluded a
mission of exploration in the summer season of 1910, finding upon
the coast of King Edward Land the few survivors of the Swedish
Steam and Sail Antarctic Research Expedition making preparations to
winter in a wooden hut built out of the wreckage of their teak-built
sailing-steamer--rescued and carried them on their homeward route. The
saved men, later interviewed at San Francisco, were unable to give
news of their leader, save that the Captain, taking a dog-sledge and a
little stock of provisions and instruments, and a hearty leave of all
of them, turned that lined bronze face of his and those eyes with the
far-away look in their wide pupils, to the dim, mysterious, uncharted
regions lying South, in the lap of the mysterious Unknown, and with a
wave of a fur-gloved hand, was lost in them.
* * * * *
“He is dead, Arthur is dead!” moaned Geraldine Magellison, in the
depths of conjugal anguish and a lace-covered sofa-cushion, when the
Press and Hawting-Holliday broke the news between them. “Dead!--and I
loved him so--I loved him so!”
“It is a pity, under the circumstances,” said Hawting-Holliday,
carrying out his promise of being a friend to Magellison’s wife by
telling that wife the truth, “that you were so economical in your
expressions of affection. For I do not think that when the Captain left
you he had any remaining illusions as to the nature of your regard for
him.”
“How cruel you are--how cruel!” gasped Geraldine, as her maid bore in a
salver piled with the regrets of Learned Societies and the sympathy of
distinguished Personages and private friends.
“Let me for once use the trite and hackneyed saying that I am cruel
only to be kind!” said Hawting-Holliday, emphatically, “and that I
speak solely in the interests of--a friend whom I love.”
Mrs. Magellison flushed to the roots of her superb golden hair, and
consciously drooped her scarcely-reddened eyelids as she held up a
protesting hand.
“No, no, Sir Robert!” she pleaded. “If I--as you infer--have gravely
erred in lack of warmth toward poor, poor, dearest Arthur! let me at
least be ungrudging in respect of his great memory. Forget what you
have said, carried away by a feeling which in honor you subdued after
the rude awakening of many months ago, and do not revert to--the
subject for--for _at least_ a year to come!”
At that Hawting-Holliday got upon his legs, and thrusting his hands
deep into his trouser-pockets, made the one and only harangue of his
existence.
“Mrs. Magellison, when you suggest that in the very hour when the
intelligence of grave disaster to your husband’s vessel has reached us,
I am capable of addressing you in what the poetic faculty term--Heaven
knows how idiotically and falsely!--the language of love, _you_ gravely
err. The friend in whose interests I spoke just now, was--your husband.
_Is_ your husband--for I do not accept by any means the theory that
because he has been lost sight of, he is dead. I believe him to be
living. I shall go on believing this until I see his body, or meet with
some relics of him that supply me--his friend!--with the evidence that
you, his wife, are so uncommonly ready to dispense with.”
His eyes burned her with their contempt. She gasped:
“You--you mean that you are going South to try and find him?”
“You comprehend my meaning perfectly,” said Hawting-Holliday, and bowed
to Mrs. Magellison with ironical deference and left her.
He was, though not a wealthy man, far from being a poor one. He
chartered a stout vessel that was lying in Liverpool Docks, the
Iceland Coast Survey Company’s steam-and-sail schooner _Snowbird_, and
equipped and provisioned and manned her with a speed and thoroughness
that are seldom found in combination. The _Snowbird’s_ own skipper
goes in charge of his ship, but Hawting-Holliday is the Leader of the
Expedition.
And yesterday the _Snowbird_ sailed, in search of that man who has
been swallowed up by the great Conjecture. And of this I am sure, that
whether Hawting-Holliday succeeds or fails, lives or dies, he will
grasp the hand of his friend again Somewhere. Either upon this side of
the Great Gray Veil that hangs in the doorway of the Smoky House, or
upon the other....
THE END
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.
Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.