When the Dipsey, the little submarine vessel which had started to make
its way to the north pole under the ice of the arctic regions, had sunk
out of sight under the waters, it carried a very quiet and earnestly
observant party. Every one seemed anxious to know what would happen
next, and all those whose duties would allow them to do so gathered
under the great skylight in the upper deck, and gazed upward at the
little glass bulb on the surface of the water, which they were towing by
means of an electric wire; and every time a light was flashed into this
bulb it seemed to them as if they were for an instant reunited to that
vast open world outside of the ocean. When at last the glass globe was
exploded, as a signal that the Dipsey had cut loose from all ties which
connected her with the outer world, they saw through the water above
them the flash and the sparks, and then all was darkness.
The interior of the submarine vessel was brightly lighted by electric
lamps, and the souls of the people inside of her soon began to brighten
under the influence of their work and the interest they took in their
novel undertaking; there was, however, one exception--the soul of Mrs.
Block did not brighten.
Mrs. Sarah Block was a peculiar person; she was her husband's second
wife, and was about forty years of age. Her family were country people,
farmers, and her life as a child was passed among folk as old-fashioned
as if they had lived in the past century, and had brought their
old-fashioned ideas with them into this. But Sarah did not wish to be
old-fashioned. She sympathized with the social movements of the day; she
believed in inventions and progress; she went to school and studied a
great deal which her parents never heard of, and which she very promptly
forgot. When she grew up she wore the widest hoop-skirts; she was one of
the first to use an electric spinning-wheel; and when she took charge
of her father's house, she it was who banished to the garret the
old-fashioned sewing-machine, and the bicycles on which some of the
older members of the family once used to ride. She tried to persuade her
father to use a hot-air plough, and to give up the practice of
keeping cows in an age when milk and butter were considered not only
unnecessary, but injurious to human health. When she married Samuel
Block, then a man of forty-five, she really thought she did so because
he was a person of progressive ideas, but the truth was she married him
because he loved her, and because he did it in an honest, old-fashioned
way.
In her inner soul Sarah was just as old-fashioned as anybody--she had
been born so, and she had never changed. Endeavor as she might to make
herself believe that she was a woman of modern thought and feeling, her
soul was truly in sympathy with the social fashions and customs in which
she had been brought up; and those to which she was trying to educate
herself were on the outside of her, never a part of her, but always
the objects of her aspirations. These aspirations she believed to be
principles. She tried to set her mind upon the unfolding revelations
of the era, as young women in her grandfather's day used to try to set
their minds upon Browning. When Sarah told Mr. Clewe that she was going
on the Dipsey because she would not let her husband go by himself, she
did so because she was ashamed to say that she was in such sympathy with
the great scientific movements of the day that she thought it was her
duty to associate herself with one of them; but while she thought she
was lying in the line of high principle, she was in fact expressing the
truthful affection of her old-fashioned nature--a nature she was always
endeavoring to keep out of sight, but which from its dark corner ruled
her life.
She had an old-fashioned temper, which delighted in censoriousness.
The more interest she took in anything, the more alive was she to its
defects. She tried to be a good member of her church, but she said sharp
things of the congregation.
No electrical illumination could brighten the soul of Mrs. Block.
She moved about the little vessel with a clouded countenance. She was
impressed with the feeling that something was wrong, even now at the
beginning, although of course she could not be expected to know what it
was.
At the bows, and in various places at the sides of the vessel, and
even in the bottom, were large plates of heavy glass, through which the
inmates could look out into the water, and there streamed forward into
the quiet depths of the ocean a great path of light, proceeding from a
powerful searchlight in the bow. By this light any object in the water
could be seen some time before reaching it; but to guard more thoroughly
against the most dreaded obstacle they feared to meet--down-reaching
masses of ice--a hydraulic thermometer, mounted on a little submarine
vessel connected with the Dipsey by wires, preceded her a long distance
ahead. Impelled and guided by the batteries of the larger vessel, this
little thermometer-boat would send back instant tidings of any changes
in temperature in the water occasioned by the proximity of ice. To
prevent sinking too deep, a heavy lead, on which were several electric
buttons, hung far below the Dipsey, ready at all times, day or night,
to give notice if she came too near the reefs and sands of the bottom of
the Arctic Ocean.
The steward had just announced that the first meal on board the Dipsey
was ready for the officers' mess, when Mrs. Block suddenly rushed into
the cabin.
“Look here, Sammy,” she exclaimed; “I want you, or somebody who knows
more than you do, to tell me how the people on this vessel are goin'
to get air to breathe with. It has just struck me that when we have
breathed up all the air that's inside, we will simply suffocate, just as
if we were drowned outside a boat instead of inside; and for my part
I can't see any difference, except in one case we keep dry and in the
other we are wet.”
“More than that, madam,” said Mr. Gibbs, the Master Electrician, who,
in fact, occupied the rank of first officer of the vessel; “if we are
drowned outside in the open water we shall be food for fishes, whereas
if we suffocate inside the vessel we shall only be food for reflection,
if anybody ever finds us.”
“You did not come out expectin' that, I hope?” said Mrs. Block. “I
thought something would happen when we started, but I never supposed we
would run short of air.”
“Don't bother yourself about that, Sarah,” said Sammy. “We'll have all
the air we want; of course we would not start without thinkin' of that.”
“I don't know,” said Sarah. “It's very seldom that men start off
anywhere without forgettin' somethin'.”
“Let us take our seats, Mrs. Block,” said Mr. Gibbs, “and I will set
your mind at rest on the air point. There are a great many machines
and mechanical arrangements on board here which of course you don't
understand, but which I shall take great pleasure in explaining to you
whenever you want to learn something about them. Among them are two
great metal contrivances, outside the Dipsey and near her bows, which
open into the water, and also communicate with the inside of her hull.
These are called electric gills, and they separate air from the water
around us in a manner somewhat resembling the way in which a fish's
gills act. They continually send in air enough to supply us not only
with all we need for breathing, but with enough to raise us to the
surface of the water whenever we choose to produce it in sufficient
quantities.”
“I am glad to hear it,” said Mrs. Block, “and I hope the machines will
never get out of order. But I should think that sort of air, made fresh
from the water, would be very damp. It's very different from the air we
are used to, which is warmed by the sun and properly aired.”
“Aired air seems funny to me,” remarked Sammy.
There was fascination, not at all surprising, about the great glass
lights in the Dipsey, and whenever a man was off duty he was pretty sure
to be at one of these windows if he could get there. At first Mrs. Block
was afraid to look out of any of them. It made her blood creep, she
said, to stare out into all that solemn water. For the first two days,
when she could get no one to talk to her, she passed most of her time
sitting in the cabin, holding in one of her hands a dustbrush, and in
the other a farmer's almanac. She did not use the brush, nor did she
read the almanac, but they reminded her of home and the world which was
real.
But when she did make up her mind to look out of the windows, she became
greatly interested, especially at the bow, where she could gaze out
into the water illuminated by the long lane of light thrown out by
the search-light. Here she continually imagined she saw things, and
sometimes greatly startled the men on lookout by her exclamations. Once
she thought she saw a floating corpse, but fortunately it was Sammy who
was by her when she proclaimed her discovery, and he did not believe
in any such nonsense, suggesting that it might have been some sort of a
fish. After that the idea of fish filled the mind of Mrs. Block, and she
set herself to work to search in an encyclopaedia which was on board for
descriptions of fishes which inhabited the depths of the arctic seas. To
meet a whale, she thought, would be very bad, but then a whale is clumsy
and soft; a sword-fish was what she most dreaded. A sword-fish running
his sword through one of the glass windows, and perhaps coming in
himself along with the water, sent a chill down her back every time she
thought about it and talked about it.
“You needn't be afraid of sword-fishes,” said Captain Jim Hubbell. “They
don't fancy the cold water we are sailin' in; and as to whales, don't
you know, madam, there ain't no more of 'em?”
“No more whales!” exclaimed Sarah. “I have heard about 'em all my life!”
“Oh, you can read and hear about 'em easy enough,” replied Captain Jim,
“but you nor nobody else will ever see none of 'em ag'in--at least, in
this part of the world. Sperm-whales began gittin' scarce when I was
a boy, and pretty soon there was nothin' left but bow-head or right
whales, that tried to keep out of the way of human bein's by livin' far
up North; but when they came to shootin' 'em with cannons which would
carry three or four miles, the whale's day was up, and he got scarcer
and scarcer, until he faded out altogether. There was a British vessel,
the Barkright, that killed two bow-head whales in 1935, north of
Melville Island, but since that time there hasn't been a whale seen in
all the arctic waters. I have heard that said by sailors, and I have
read about it. They have all been killed, and nothin' left of 'em but
the skeletons that's in the museums.”
Mrs. Block shuddered. “It would be terrible to meet a livin' one, and
yet it is an awful thought to think that they are all dead and gone,”
said she.