THE CALL
Cynthia went that night alone to a dinner party in Seamore Place. But
she was ill at ease and as soon as she could get away she hurried
home. She had not seen her husband that day. He had returned at five
o'clock, had been closeted for a long while with M. Poizat and had
then departed, leaving a message that a series of divisions would
compel him to dine at the House of Commons. The couple, however, had
made it a habit to reserve for themselves, whenever the House was not
sitting late, an hour or so at the close of even the busiest day, and
Cynthia was fairly sure that she would not have to wait long before
Harry Rames came home. As a fact, he was already in his study. The
door was ajar and through the opening the light streamed out into the
hall.
Cynthia pushed the door open. Harry was sitting at his writing-table
on the opposite side of the room and studying with a complete
absorption a scroll which he held down unrolled beneath his eyes.
Cynthia stood in the doorway for a moment or two watching him with a
tender smile upon her face, and speculating idly upon the document
which so riveted his attention. For the moment her trouble was quite
driven from her thoughts. He was here, after all, in the house with
her: he, the loved one: and with a sort of fierceness she was content.
Then he looked up and saw her standing in the doorway. His face
changed; he had the aspect clearly of a man at bay. He swept a pile of
letters and printed papers over his scroll, spreading them out. He
rose and stood between her and the writing-table, hiding it from her
view.
"You are home early," he said.
"Earlier than you expected! Yet I am later than you."
"Oh, I paired at ten o'clock."
"I see."
The furtive movement of her husband increased her fears and at the
same time wounded her pride. They were to be frank with one another.
That was the pledge which each had given to the other. And here was
the pledge broken, for Harry was definitely practising concealments.
Cynthia, however, did not belong to the tribe of the clamorous. She
stepped within the room and left him to continue the conversation.
Rames spoke hastily to engage her attention.
"Poizat came to see me this afternoon."
"Yes?"
"He was desperate. We talked over his position. I recommended him to
go to Tangier and settle there. He has a little money. He will find
compatriots, and I should think it's the place where people will be
least likely to trouble about him. I fancy that he will go there. But
it's a bad business to have to start life all over again at seventy."
"Yes," said Cynthia.
She watched him as he walked up and down the room, making up her mind
that on her side at all events the pledge should not be broken.
"M. Poizat said something to me which I think is true. That nothing
one has ever done is ever quite done with."
Harry Rames stopped in his walk. He stood quite still for a few
moments.
"Oh, surely that's not true," he said carelessly and resumed his
pacing. But Cynthia was aware of a change in him. Before he had been
thinking of Poizat and his destiny; now he was alert and waiting upon
her words.
"I believe that it's more true than he knew. For even if nothing
actual comes of the thing done, it's still there, recorded in the
character. Harry, we are in the clutch of finished things."
Her voice rose in a low cry and brought Harry swiftly round upon his
heel. Her words hit him shrewdly, but her aspect more shrewdly still.
She was still standing close by the door. She was dressed in a gown of
pale blue and gold with a bright ribbon of blue in her hair. Her cloak
had slipped from her shoulders to her feet, her gloves were twisted in
her hands, her eyes wide and dark with trouble looked out from a face
which was piteously wistful. She made unconsciously a poignant appeal
to him. The delicate loveliness of her youth and the gay panoply of
her attire contrasted so strikingly with the quivering misery of her
face.
"What makes you believe that, Cynthia?" He crossed the room to her
side and shook her arm with a friendly gesture familiar to her.
"Poizat's case is not enough to build a world of theory on."
"Nor do I," replied Cynthia. "I was adding to that case another."
Harry Rames flinched.
"What other?" he asked with an effort.
"Years ago in Argentina I once listened at a door," she began, and in
Harry's eyes shone a great relief. "What I heard frightened me. I lay
awake in terror all that night. I have lived in fear ever since. I
could not shake fear off even after I knew there was no longer any
cause for fear. I can find causes anywhere. Fear's the truth of me.
Most of the things which I have done have been done from fear."
"I never understood that, Cynthia."
"I never spoke of it before."
"Fear even prompted your marriage?"
Cynthia looked him frankly in the face.
"Yes. You were so frank, so honest about yourself. I felt safe with
you. And after we were married--I escaped from fear. I was reprieved."
"Thank you," said Harry with a quiet sincerity. Then he moved away
from her to the fireplace and turned again.
"Why do you tell me this for the first time tonight?"
"Because fear's awake in me again to-night," she answered simply. "I
have had another visitor today besides M. Poizat."
"Who?"
"Howard Fall."
Harry Rames's voice hardened.
"He came to complain of me, I suppose."
"It wasn't complaint; it was regret. He thought it would be such a
loss if you ceased to be interested in Parliament. He was afraid that
Colonel Challoner's death had been a shock to you."
Harry Rames looked curiously at his wife.
"And what did you say?"
"That I knew you well enough to be sure that wasn't the case. He said
you had not spoken once since the debate on the Address and that the
organization against the land bill was tumbling to pieces."
Harry's face cleared.
"There's a very good reason for that. The government programme is
overloaded and Devenish's bill won't come on this year after all. Our
opposition shook their confidence in it besides. No, it won't come
on."
Cynthia moved swiftly forward to the fireplace.
"You know that?"
"Yes. Hamlin told me in confidence."
"When, Harry?"
"A month ago at least. We can always whip up the opposition to
Devenish's bill when it becomes once more a practical proposition."
Perhaps after all the Government's change of plan was the simple
explanation of the change in her husband. Cynthia sank down into a
chair. Before now, she remembered, she had tortured herself with
unnecessary fears.
"Oh, I am glad. I am glad," she cried. All her heart was in her voice
and tuned it to a note full and low and wonderfully sweet. Harry was
moved by the music of it. There was a joy, a tenderness, which he had
noticed more than once of late, but which had never rung so clear as
it did to-night. He planted himself in front of her with a wry sort of
smile upon his face.
"Cynthia."
"Yes."
"You want me to go on--just as I am going? You are satisfied? There
have been times when you have wanted more----"
But Cynthia broke in upon him. She shut her eyes upon her ideals and
her dreams. They were for the girl steeped to the lips in romance, not
for the woman made real by love. Something had come between them.
Something secret. Something which threatened even such community of
life as they had. She was in revolt against it.
"Yes, yes," she cried passionately. "I do want you to go on. I want
you to make a great career. I want my share in it, my pride in it. I
shall be satisfied. I shall be thankful. Oh, my dear, are you blind?"
She rose abruptly and stood in front of him. "What I want and all that
I want is to keep you." If she had never spoken the words, the
eagerness of her voice and the prayer of her clasped hands would have
uttered them for her. But she had spoken them deliberately. She knew
very well the danger for a woman in telling a man who does not love
her, that she loves him. But she accepted the danger. She was playing
for a great stake that night, and great stakes are not to be won
without great risks. She laid her reticence aside and made her appeal.
But it seemed that her appeal failed. Harry Rames stood watching her,
at a loss for words, with a face which concealed carefully all his
thoughts. Cynthia stooped and gathered up her gloves which had fallen
to the floor.
"I shall go up now," she said.
Yet she waited; and Harry still was silent. A moment of passion had
caught him unprepared with any words.
"What are you thinking about, Harry, so profoundly?" Cynthia asked in
an indifferent voice. His silence was a rebuff most bitter to her. But
she would not betray herself a second time. Her eyes and her hands
were busy with some imaginary fault in the fit of her dress.
"That you have never shown me yourself before," he said, moving toward
her. She stood quite still as he came close. He put his arm about her
and she asked quietly:
"Wasn't I wise, Harry? It's a little disconcerting, isn't it, when a
woman shows you something you know nothing about. Just a little
disconcerting, isn't it?"
She left him standing in the room and went upstairs. She had made her
plea with all the frankness which had been the condition of their
marriage. She would not ask for a like frankness in return. It was for
him to give it. She had made it quite plain that on her side she
wanted frankness. More she would not do. Not for anything would she
ask what secret thing he had hidden under the papers upon his table.
But she knew that there was a secret thing and her feet dragged as she
mounted the stairs.
She had been in bed according to her reckoning for about an hour when
she heard a noise of the shutting of a door. And the door was the
front-door of the house. Cynthia sprung from her bed and lifting the
blind looked out from the window. It was a dark night, but there was
no fog. By the light of the street lamps she saw a man crossing the
road toward the corner of South Audley Street. He had the look of her
husband. She flung up the window and the sound of his footsteps made
her sure. Her eyes gazing into the tempered darkness of a London
street might well have deceived her, her ears could not. There was no
one else walking in Curzon Street at that moment; the sound of his
footsteps reverberated unmistakably, diminishing as the distance
between him and the window increased. The man who now vanished into
South Audley Street was Harry Rames.
Cynthia switched on the light and looked at her watch. It was one
o'clock in the morning. She wrapped a dressing-gown about her and sat
down trying to think calmly, seeking to discover, if she could, some
other reason for his departure than the obvious one. But the obvious
one recurred again and again in her thoughts. It explained everything,
fitted in with everything, as no other reason did. His sudden
indifference to his career, his furtive movement at his writing-table
upon her appearance, his refusal to meet frankness with frankness
could all thus be accounted for. His departure from the house was thus
explained. He had not come up into his room next to hers; he had
waited in his study for an hour; he had given her time to fall asleep;
he had gone out. It was a woman then who had twisted the current of
his life as she, Cynthia, could not, who had moved him to passion as
she even that evening had failed to do. Cynthia raged in fury against
herself for having so weakly betrayed herself. She sat in torture.
Then her jealousy flamed up. _That_--no! Her pride must give way. If
there was another woman in her story--why then the other woman must
look to herself. Cynthia would fight. She hurried down-stairs into the
study. She switched on the lights and tumbled hither and thither the
papers on the writing-table for the one so swiftly hidden which should
betray the other woman's name and her abode. But she found nothing to
satisfy her. She looked round the room. From a drawer in a bureau
against the wall Harry's keys had been dangling. That she had noticed;
and the keys were gone now. She tried the drawer. It was locked. In
that drawer then was hidden the key to his secret. So much knowledge
at all events Cynthia was sure that she had gained. She went back to
her room and lying in bed ran over all the names of her acquaintances,
even of her friends. She was not in the mood to trust any of them, but
she could not fix upon any of them either. One and all they were cats
and treacherous. Cynthia was no longer afraid; she was simply furious;
and her fury was not diminished when she heard the front-door open and
shut once more, almost noiselessly--so much caution was being used.
But Cynthia, though she was right in her facts, had never been so
mistaken in her conclusions. The scroll which Harry Rames had pushed
beneath his papers was simply a chart of the Antarctic seas; whereon
lines distinguished one from the other by the manner of their tracing
recorded the journeys of successive explorers and marked each one's
"farthest South." He stood for a little while after Cynthia had left
him on the same spot half-way between his chart and her position at
the door. Then he turned back to his writing-table and spread out the
map once more. The call of the unknown places was loud in his ears
that night.
"Come back! Come back!"
Six weeks ago it had been the merest whisper--flashed to the wireless
poles on the roof of the Admiralty and heard by him one afternoon, a
message very small and clear amidst the clatter of Parliament Street.
But the whisper had gathered volume and vehemence, until the map
before him seemed a mouth shouting it, and the room throbbed with it
as though the walls would burst asunder.
"Come back! Come back!"
It seemed to him that the command was not to be denied or must ring in
his ears forever; and that arena of the House of Commons, where man
fought with man, became a trivial place of meanness and intrigue
compared with the vast battle-ground in the South, where one fought in
a grandeur of silence with the careless, stubborn elements of a wild
and unknown world.
He bent over his map and across it, as across the table of a camera
obscura he saw moving, in miniature and brilliantly defined, the ships
of the men who had sailed to the South. James Cook's two vessels, the
_Resolution_ and the _Adventure_, crossed the Antarctic circle as it
seemed underneath his eyes--the first, of all the ships that were ever
built, to sail upon these waters. Bellingshausen of Kronstadt came
next and dropped his anchor under the shelter of Peter I Island and
gave to it its name. He was followed by the whaling captains, each
choosing his own line, great navigators inspired by a great and
spirited firm. Weddell and Biscoe in their brigs. Balleny in his
schooner. The later ships of the scientific expeditions under
D'Urville of France and Wilkes of Chesapeake Bay moved southward in
the track of the whaling captains, and close upon their heels James
Ross from England with the _Erebus_ and the _Terror_ burst for the
first time in the history of the world through the ice-pack into
the open sea beyond and sailed from west to east along the great
ice-barrier. There were other lines where the _Challenger_ had sailed,
and the official expeditions; and there was yet another, the longest
of all the lines upon the chart, a line stretching out to a harbor
never visited before, and against that line in tiny letters was
printed "Rames." He followed the course of his ship from his first
harbor in the Antarctic continent with the wooden cross high on a hill
above it, which marks the grave of a naturalist of a past expedition.
He fell to speculating where the _Perhaps_ lay now. Parliament had met
in the first days of January. It was just before the opening of
Parliament that Hemming had started on the mail steamer to New Zealand
to pick up his ship in Lyttelton Harbor. Allow him five weeks for his
journey. The second week of February would have come to an end before
the _Perhaps_ had steamed out past the headland. Hemming himself had
recognized that he was late. The difficulty of collecting money to
finance the expedition had detained him beyond his time. A fortnight
out from New Zealand, where was the _Perhaps_ now? She might still be
in the stormy seas on the outer edge of Ross's pack with the petrels
and the albatrosses like a cloud about her yards. Or she might have
touched at one of the northerly harbors of the continent. Perhaps
winter was coming early on to wrap her about with snow and ice. If
that happened, Hemming's chance was gone, for he had only money for
one year. He must reach the Pole this next summer or not at all. He
must therefore winter well to the South.
Rames got up from his chair, trying not to hope that Hemming's
expedition would fail. He looked up from this map to the spot where
Cynthia had stood close to the door, and a smile came upon his face.
"She was wrong," he said. "We are in the clutch of the unfinished, not
the finished things."
He carried his map over to a bureau which stood against the wall and
opened a drawer from the lock of which his bunch of keys was dangling.
There were other charts in the drawer, a barometer which had hung in
his cabin in the _Perhaps_ throughout the three years during which
that ship had been his home, a shell or two dredged up from the depths
of the sea, and a brown paper package tied up with a piece of string.
The charts lying there were all the charts which existed of the
Antarctic seas, arranged in the order of their making. He added to
them now his map, the last of them all; the printed facsimile of his
own chart. Then reluctantly he locked the drawer. The reverberation of
the seas seemed to fill the room and through it imperative and loud
rang the call of the South. Yet he was aware, too, of Cynthia standing
in her delicate blue frock, subduing her pride, revealing herself in a
passionate appeal. He was stirred to shame at the poverty of his own
response. She had been friend, counsellor, wife in the normal way.
They had jogged side by side along the low road of his endeavor.
To-night she pleaded for more, she offered more. He could never quite
look upon her as he had been wont to. For she had stirred him to
shame.
He slipped the key off the ring and swung it round upon his finger. At
all events he would keep his bargain.
"It's a queer piece of irony," he said to himself, "that the very
thing which I would give my soul to do, she was urging me to do two
years ago; and now I must keep my longing hidden. Our positions are
quite reversed."
But he would keep to his bargain. Perhaps after all Hemming would
succeed; and sooner or later no doubt the reverberation of the seas
would die away in the porches of his ears.
He went out into the hall, carrying the key in his hand, and let
himself out at the front-door. He walked quickly up South Audley
Street, turned to the left, and crossed Park Lane into Hyde Park. He
walked to the stone bridge which crosses the Serpentine. The night was
quiet and dark about him, and from afar off the never ceasing roar of
the London traffic came to him like the roar of distant seas. He
leaned over the parapet and stretching out his hand opened it. He
heard a tiny splash in the water beneath the bridge.
He walked back more slowly than he had come to where the glare of the
sky indicated the houses and the streets. As he crossed Park Lane
again two men arm-in-arm passed him and one of them stopped.
"Is that you, Rames?" asked a friendly and solicitous voice.
Rames recognized it at once as the voice of Hamlin the chief Whip.
"You had paired for to-night," Hamlin continued, "hadn't you? You
didn't miss much. But I want to be able to rely on you for Thursday.
We know, of course, that you are against us over Devenish's land bill.
That's all right. But you are with us on the rest of our policy and we
want your help."
"I shall be there on Thursday," answered Harry Rames. "It's quite true
that I have not been so much in the House this session as I used to
be. But you will see me in my old place to-morrow. Good-night."
He walked on and Hamlin rejoined his companion.
"It was Rames," he said. "We're not going to lose him. I am glad. He's
marked out for a great position if he doesn't throw it away."
But Rames through the roar of the traffic, carriages rolling home,
wagons lumbering in to Covent Garden, heard louder than ever the boom
of Southern seas and the wind whistling between the halyards of a
ship.