"H'm! That will do later."
"What is it?" I would ask.
"Oh, nothing, nothing!" he would answer.
"Hand it out, sir," I would say, and then I would find a fierce delight
in sending six freezing words of refusal to some impudent woman who was
trying to play upon the tender side of my big-hearted boy.
Oh, it was delightful! My whole being seemed to be renewed. If only the
dear sweet hours could go on and on for ever!
Sometimes my husband and Alma would look in upon us at our work, and
then, while the colour mounted to my eyes, Martin would say:
"I'm fishing with another man's floats, you see."
"I see," my husband would reply, fixing his monocle and showing his
front teeth in a painful grin.
"Just what dear Mary loves, though," Alma would say. "I do believe she
would rather he sitting in this sunless room, writing letters for Mr.
Conrad, than wearing her coronet at a King's coronation."
"Just so, ma'am; there _are_ women like that," Martin would answer,
looking hard at her; and when she had gone, (laughing lightly but with
the frightened look I had seen before) he would say, as if speaking to
himself:
"I hate that woman. She's like a snake. I feel as if I want to put my
foot on it."
At length the climax came. One day Martin rushed downstairs almost
beside himself in his boyish joy, to say that all the money he needed
had been subscribed, and that in honour of the maturing of the scheme
the proprietor of the newspaper was to give a public luncheon at one of
the hotels, and though no women were to be present at the "feed" a few
ladies were to occupy seats in a gallery, and I was to be one of them.
I had played with my temptation too long by this time to shrink from the
dangerous exaltation which I knew the occasion would cause, so when the
day came I went to the hotel in a fever of pleasure and pride.
The luncheon was nearly over, the speeches were about to begin, and the
ladies' gallery was buzzing like a hive of bees, when I took my seat in
it. Two bright young American women sitting next to me were almost as
excited as myself, and looking down at the men through a pair of
opera-glasses they were asking each other which was Martin, whereupon my
vanity, not to speak of my sense of possession, was so lifted up that I
pointed him out to them, and then borrowed their glasses to look at the
chairman.
He seemed to me to have that light of imagination in his eyes which was
always blazing in Martin's, and when he began to speak I thought I
caught the note of the same wild passion.
He said they were that day opening a new chapter in the wonderful book
of man's story, and though the dangers of the great deep might never be
entirely overcome, and the wind would continue to blow as it listed, yet
the perils of the one and the movements of the other were going to be
known to, and therefore checked by, the human family.
After that, and a beautiful tribute to Martin as a man, (that everybody
who had met him had come to love him, and that there must be something
in the great solitudes of the silent white world to make men simple and
strong and great, as the sea made them staunch and true) he drank to the
success of the expedition, and called on Martin to respond to the toast.
There was a great deal of cheering when Martin rose, but I was so
nervous that I hardly heard it. He was nervous too, as I could plainly
see, for after a few words of thanks, he began to fumble the sheets of a
speech which he and I had prepared together, trying to read it, but
losing his place and even dropping his papers.
Beads of perspiration were starting from my forehead and I knew I was
making noises in my throat, when all at once Martin threw his papers on
the table and said, in quite another voice:
"Ship-mates, I mean gentlemen, I never could write a speech in my life,
and you see I can't read one, but I know what I want to say and if
you'll take it as it comes here goes."
Then in the simple style of a sailor, not always even grammatical yet
splendidly clear and bold and natural, blundering along as he used to do
when he was a boy at school and could not learn his lessons, but with
his blue eyes ablaze, he told of his aims and his expectations.
And when he came to the end he said:
"His lordship, the chairman, has said something about the good effects
of the solitudes of Nature on a man's character. I can testify to that.
And I tell you this--whatever you are when you're up here and have
everything you want, it's wonderful strange the way you're asking the
Lord to stretch out His hand and help you when you're down there, all
alone and with an empty hungry stomach.
"I don't know where you were last Christmas Day, shipmates . . . I mean
gentlemen, but I know where I was. I was in the 85th latitude, longitude
163, four miles south and thirty west of Mount Darwin. It was my own bit
of an expedition that my commander has made too much of, and I believe
in my heart my mates had had enough of it. When we got out of our
sleeping bags that morning there was nothing in sight but miles and
miles of rolling waves of snow, seven thousand feet up on a windy
plateau, with glaciers full of crevasses shutting us off from the sea,
and not a living thing in sight as far as the eye could reach.
"We were six in company and none of us were too good for Paradise, and
one--he was an old Wapping sailor, we called him Treacle--had the name
of being a shocking old rip ashore. But we remembered what day it was,
and we wanted to feel that we weren't cut off entirely from the world of
Christian men--our brothers and sisters who would be going to church at
home. So I dug out my little prayer-book that my mother put in my kit
going away, and we all stood round bare-headed in the snow--a shaggy old
lot I can tell you, with chins that hadn't seen a razor for a month--and
I read the prayers for the day, the first and second Vespers, and
Laudate Dominum and then the De Profundis.
"I think we felt better doing that, but they say the comical and the
tragical are always chasing each other, which can get in first, and it
was so with us, for just as I had got to an end with the solemn words,
'Out of the depths we cry unto thee, O Lord, Lord hear our cry,' in
jumps old Treacle in his thickest cockney, 'And Gawd bless our pore ole
wives and sweethearts fur a-wye.'"
If Martin said any more nobody heard it. The men below were blowing
their noses, and the women in the gallery were crying openly.
"Well, the man who can talk like that may open all my letters and
telegrams," said one of the young American women, who was wiping her
eyes without shame.
What I was doing, and what I was looking like, I did not know until the
lady, who had lent me the opera-glasses leaned over to me and said:
"Excuse me, but are you his wife, may I ask?"
"Oh no, no," I said nervously and eagerly, but only God knows how the
word went through and through me.
I had taken the wrong course, and I knew it. My pride, my joy, my
happiness were all accusing me, and when I went to bed that night I felt
as if I had been a guilty woman.