by Frank Norris
But what they said then they could never afterward remember. The golden haze of the sunset somehow got into their recollection of the moment, and they could only recall the fact that they had been gayer in that moment than ever before in all their lives.
Perhaps as gay as they ever were to be again. They began to know the difference between gayety and happiness. That New Year’s Day, that sunset, marked for them an end and a beginning. It was the end of their gay, irresponsible, hour-to-hour life of the past three months; and it was the beginning of a new life, whose possibilities of sorrow and of trouble, of pleasure and of happiness, were greater than aught they had yet experienced. They knew this — they felt it instinctively, as with a common impulse they turned and looked back upon the glowing earth and sea and sky, the breaking surf, the beach, the distant, rime-incrusted, ancient fort — all that scene that to their eyes stood for the dear, free, careless companionship of those last few months. Their new-found happiness was not without its sadness already. All was over now; their solitary walks, the long, still evenings in the little dining-room overlooking the sleeping city, their excursions to Luna’s, their afternoons spent in the golden Chinese balcony, their mornings on the lake, calm and still and hot. Forever and forever they had said good-by to that life. Already the sunset was losing its glory.
Then, with one last look, they turned about and set their faces from it to the new life, to the East, where lay the Nation. Out beyond the purple bulwarks of the Sierras, far off, the great, grim world went clashing through its grooves — the world that now they were to know, the world that called to them, and woke them, and roused them. Their little gayeties were done; the life of little things was all behind. Now for the future. The sterner note had struck — work was to be done; that, too, the New Year had brought to them — work for each of them, work and the world of men.
For a moment they shrank from it, loth to take the first step beyond the confines of the garden wherein they had lived so joyously and learned to love each other; and as they stood there, facing the gray and darkening Eastern sky, their backs forever turned to the sunset, Blix drew closer to him, putting her hand in his, looking a little timidly into his eyes. But his arm was around her, and the strong young force that looked into her eyes from his gave her courage.
“A happy New Year, dear,” she said.
“A very, very happy New Year, Blix,” he answered.
A MAN’S WOMAN
After first running as a serial in newspapers, Doubleday and McClure published Frank Norris’, A Man’s Woman, in 1900. The novel is both a romance and an adventure story, following the protagonist, explorer Ward Bennett through the hardships of his initial unsuccessful polar expedition through his eventual return where he contracts typhoid fever and then begins a stormy relationship with his nurse, Miss Lloyd Searight, and eventually returns to lead another expedition to the North Pole. Although dismissed by many critics today, the novel received several positive reviews in its time. The November 17, 1900 issue of The Speaker, for example, compared Norris’ style favorably with Kipling’s, while also pointing out some of its apparent flaws:
Mr. Frank Norris’ A Man’s Woman (London: Grant Richards) is a very good type of that class of fiction which is written by American admirers of Mr. Rudyard Kipling. It is “strong” and realistic with that kind of realism which strives to parade a greater knowledge of a business than its own professors. The effect is good enough in its way, though, if the Arctic exploration part of the book is as laughable technically as a doctor to whom we showed it found the medical part, it is not in the way that Mr. Norris would have preferred. The adventures in frozen latitudes of the Freja Expedition are certainly vigorously described, and we read them with much more interest than we did the accounts of the relations between its leader and “the man’s woman.” In Kolyuchin Bay Ward Bennett was a man, but in his treatment of Lloyd Searight he was undeniably a brute. In fact, during the greater part of the book one is inclined to believe both of them rather less than human. This is redeemed by the ending of the book, in which we see again, what we saw in Blix, that Mr. Norris’ great gift is in saving sentiment from sentimentality by a certain breeziness of style and clear vision of the normal. The abnormal is best left to the giants, and Mr. Norris, though he can write a very readable novel, is but of mortal stature.
However, a reviewer in the April 1900 issue of The Critic disagreed about Norris’ “realism” in its assessment, although pointed out the author’s vigor and power:
It may be that there are people so misguided as to apply to “A Man’s Woman” that much-abused adjective, “realistic.” It is the last word in the world to describe what Mr. Norris has done. He has created an improbable man and an impossible woman, put them into an unimaginable situation, and then breathed the breath of life into them. They live and move, there is no doubt of that. They are vital, vivid, colossal if you like, but they are no more realistic than the Yellowstone Park or the Grand Canyon of the Colorado. That is, they are freaks of Nature, not her normal products. But they are worth while...But when indignation has exhausted itself, interest still remains. Whether we like what he does with it or not, such lavish power as Mr. Norris shows is an exhilarating spectacle. His prodigious, brutal beings are tonic as the great West itself is tonic, and the air in which they live and breathe yields an intoxicating oxygen.
Doubleday & McClure, 1900, first edition
CONTENTS
I.
II.
III.
IV.
V.
VI.
VII.
VIII.
IX.
X.
XI.
New York: Garden City Publishing Company, 1926 edition
NOTE.
The following novel was completed March 22, 1899, and sent to the printer in October of the same year. After the plates had been made notice was received that a play called “A Man’s Woman” had been written by Anne Crawford Flexner, and that this title had been copyrighted.
As it was impossible to change the name of the novel at the time this notice was received, it has been published under its original title.
F.N.
New York.
I.
At four o’clock in the morning everybody in the tent was still asleep, exhausted by the terrible march of the previous day. The hummocky ice and pressure-ridges that Bennett had foreseen had at last been met with, and, though camp had been broken at six o’clock and though men and dogs had hauled and tugged and wrestled with the heavy sledges until five o’clock in the afternoon, only a mile and a half had been covered. But though the progress was slow, it was yet progress. It was not the harrowing, heart-breaking immobility of those long months aboard the Freja. Every yard to the southward, though won at the expense of a battle with the ice, brought them nearer to Wrangel Island and ultimate safety.
Then, too, at supper-time the unexpected had happened. Bennett, moved no doubt by their weakened condition, had dealt out extra rations to each man: one and two-thirds ounces of butter and six and two-thirds ounces of aleuronate bread — a veritable luxury after the unvarying diet of pemmican, lime juice, and dried potatoes of the past fortnight. The men had got into their sleeping-bags early, and until four o’clock in the morning had slept profoundly, inert, stupefied, almost without movement. But a few minutes after four o’clock Bennett awoke. He was usually up about half an hour before the others. On the day before he had been able to get a meridian altitude of the sun, and was anxious to complete his calculations as to the expedition’s position on the chart that he had begun in the evening.
He pushed back the flap of the sleeping-bag and rose to his full height, passing his hands over his face, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. He was an enormous man, standing six feet two inches in his reindeer footnips and having the look more of a prize-fighter than of a scientist. Even making allowances for its coating of dirt and its harsh, black stubble of half a week’s growth, the face was not pleasant. Benn
ett was an ugly man. His lower jaw was huge almost to deformity, like that of the bulldog, the chin salient, the mouth close-gripped, with great lips, indomitable, brutal. The forehead was contracted and small, the forehead of men of single ideas, and the eyes, too, were small and twinkling, one of them marred by a sharply defined cast.
But as Bennett was fumbling in the tin box that was lashed upon the number four sledge, looking for his notebook wherein he had begun his calculations for latitude, he was surprised to find a copy of the record he had left in the instrument box under the cairn at Cape Kammeni at the beginning of this southerly march. He had supposed that this copy had been mislaid, and was not a little relieved to come across it now. He read it through hastily, his mind reviewing again the incidents of the last few months. Certain extracts of this record ran as follows:
Arctic steamer Freja, on ice off Cape Kammeni, New Siberian Islands, 76 deg. 10 min. north latitude, 150 deg. 40 min. east longitude, July 12, 1891.... We accordingly froze the ship in on the last day of September, 1890, and during the following winter drifted with the pack in a northwesterly direction.... On Friday, July 10, 1891, being in latitude 76 deg. 10 min. north; longitude 150 deg. 10 min. east, the Freja was caught in a severe nip between two floes and was crushed, sinking in about two hours. We abandoned her, saving 200 days’ provisions and all necessary clothing, instruments, etc....
I shall now attempt a southerly march over the ice to Kolyuchin Bay by way of Wrangel Island, where provisions have been cached, hoping to fall in with the relief ships or steam whalers on the way. Our party consists of the following twelve persons: ... All well with the exception of Mr. Ferriss, the chief engineer, whose left hand has been badly frostbitten. No scurvy in the party as yet. We have eighteen Ostiak dogs with us in prime condition, and expect to drag our ship’s boat upon sledges.
WARD BENNETT, Commanding Freja Arctic Exploring Expedition.
Bennett returned this copy of the record to its place in the box, and stood for a moment in the centre of the tent, his head bent to avoid the ridge-pole, looking thoughtfully upon the ground.
Well, so far all had gone right — no scurvy, provisions in plenty. The dogs were in good condition, his men cheerful, trusting in him as in a god, and surely no leader could wish for a better lieutenant and comrade than Richard Ferriss — but this hummocky ice — these pressure-ridges which the expedition had met the day before. Instead of turning at once to his ciphering Bennett drew the hood of the wolfskin coat over his head, buttoned a red flannel mask across his face, and, raising the flap of the tent, stepped outside.
Under the lee of the tent the dogs were sleeping, moveless bundles of fur, black and white, perceptibly steaming. The three great McClintock sledges, weighted down with the Freja’s boats and with the expedition’s impedimenta, lay where they had been halted the evening before.
In the sky directly in front of Bennett as he issued from the tent three moons, hooped in a vast circle of nebulous light, shone roseate through a fine mist, while in the western heavens streamers of green, orange, and vermilion light, immeasurably vast, were shooting noiselessly from horizon to zenith.
But Bennett had more on his mind that morning than mock-moons and auroras. To the south and east, about a quarter of a mile from the tent, the pressure of the floes had thrown up an enormous ridge of shattered ice-cakes, a mound, a long hill of blue-green slabs and blocks huddling together at every conceivable angle. It was nearly twenty feet in height, quite the highest point that Bennett could discover. Scrambling and climbing over countless other ridges that intervened, he made his way to it, ascended it almost on hands and knees, and, standing upon its highest point, looked long and carefully to the southward.
A wilderness beyond all thought, words, or imagination desolate stretched out before him there forever and forever — ice, ice, ice, fields and floes of ice, laying themselves out under that gloomy sky, league after league, endless, sombre, infinitely vast, infinitely formidable. But now it was no longer the smooth ice over which the expedition had for so long been travelling. In every direction, intersecting one another at ten thousand points, crossing and recrossing, weaving a gigantic, bewildering network of gashed, jagged, splintered ice-blocks, ran the pressure-ridges and hummocks. In places a score or more of these ridges had been wedged together to form one huge field of broken slabs of ice miles in width, miles in length. From horizon to horizon there was no level place, no open water, no pathway. The view to the southward resembled a tempest-tossed ocean suddenly frozen.
One of these ridges Bennett had just climbed, and upon it he now stood. Even for him, unencumbered, carrying no weight, the climb had been difficult; more than once he had slipped and fallen. At times he had been obliged to go forward almost on his hands and knees. And yet it was across that jungle of ice, that unspeakable tangle of blue-green slabs and cakes and blocks, that the expedition must now advance, dragging its boats, its sledges, its provisions, instruments, and baggage.
Bennett stood looking. Before him lay his task. There under his eyes was the Enemy. Face to face with him was the titanic primal strength of a chaotic world, the stupendous still force of a merciless nature, waiting calmly, waiting silently to close upon and crush him. For a long time he stood watching. Then the great brutal jaw grew more salient than ever, the teeth set and clenched behind the close-gripped lips, the cast in the small twinkling eyes grew suddenly more pronounced. One huge fist raised, and the arm slowly extended forward like the resistless moving of a piston. Then when his arm was at its full reach Bennett spoke as though in answer to the voiceless, terrible challenge of the Ice. Through his clenched teeth his words came slow and measured.
“But I’ll break you, by God! believe me, I will.”
After a while he returned to the tent, awoke the cook, and while breakfast was being prepared completed his calculations for latitude, wrote up his ice-journal, and noted down the temperature and the direction and velocity of the wind. As he was finishing, Richard Ferriss, who was the chief engineer and second in command, awoke and immediately asked the latitude.
“Seventy-four-fifteen,” answered Bennett without looking up.
“Seventy-four-fifteen,” repeated Ferriss, nodding his head; “we didn’t make much distance yesterday.”
“I hope we can make as much to-day,” returned Bennett grimly as he put away his observation-journal and note-books.
“How’s the ice to the south’ard?”
“Bad; wake the men.”
After breakfast and while the McClintocks were being loaded Bennett sent Ferriss on ahead to choose a road through and over the ridges. It was dreadful work. For two hours Ferriss wandered about amid the broken ice all but hopelessly bewildered. But at length, to his great satisfaction, he beheld a fairly open stretch about a quarter of a mile in length lying out to the southwest and not too far out of the expedition’s line of march. Some dozen ridges would have to be crossed before this level was reached; but there was no help for it, so Ferriss planted his flags where the heaps of ice-blocks seemed least impracticable and returned toward the camp. It had already been broken, and on his way he met the entire expedition involved in the intricacies of the first rough ice.
All of the eighteen dogs had been harnessed to the number two sledge, that carried the whaleboat and the major part of the provisions, and every man of the party, Bennett included, was straining at the haul-ropes with the dogs. Foot by foot the sledge came over the ridge, grinding and lurching among the ice-blocks; then, partly by guiding, partly by lifting, it was piloted down the slope, only in the end to escape from all control and come crashing downward among the dogs, jolting one of the medicine chests from its lashings and butting its nose heavily against the foot of the next hummock immediately beyond. But the men scrambled to their places again, the medicine chest was replaced, and Muck Tu, the Esquimau dog-master, whipped forward his dogs. Ferriss, too, laid hold. The next hummock was surmounted, the dogs panting, and the men, even in that icy air, reeking with
perspiration. Then suddenly and without the least warning Bennett and McPherson, who were in the lead, broke through some young ice into water up to their breasts, Muck Tu and one of the dogs breaking through immediately afterward. The men were pulled out, or, of their own efforts, climbed upon the ice again. But in an instant their clothes were frozen to rattling armor.
“Bear off to the east’ard, here!” commanded Bennett, shaking the icy, stinging water from his sleeves. “Everybody on the ropes now!”
Another pressure-ridge was surmounted, then a third, and by an hour after the start they had arrived at the first one of Ferriss’s flags. Here the number two sledge was left, and the entire expedition, dogs and men, returned to camp to bring up the number one McClintock loaded with the Freja’s cutter and with the sleeping-bags, instruments, and tent. This sledge was successfully dragged over the first two hummocks, but as it was being hauled up the third its left-hand runner suddenly buckled and turned under it with a loud snap. There was nothing for it now but to remove the entire load and to set Hawes, the carpenter, to work upon its repair.
“Up your other sledge!” ordered Bennett.
Once more the expedition returned to the morning’s camping-place, and, harnessing itself to the third McClintock, struggled forward with it for an hour and a half until it was up with the first sledge and Ferriss’s flag. Fortunately the two dog-sleds, four and five, were light, and Bennett, dividing his forces, brought them up in a single haul. But Hawes called out that the broken sledge was now repaired. The men turned to at once, reloaded it, and hauled it onward, so that by noon every sledge had been moved forward quite a quarter of a mile.
But now, for the moment, the men, after going over the same ground seven times, were used up, and Muck Tu could no longer whip the dogs to their work. Bennett called a halt. Hot tea was made, and pemmican and hardtack served out.