by Frank Norris
Lloyd turned her head away, leaning it against one of the veranda pillars. A sudden dimness swam in her eyes, the choking ache she knew so well came to her throat. Ah, life was hard for her. The very greatness of her nature drove from her the happiness so constantly attained by little minds, by commonplace souls. When was it to end, this continual sacrifice of inclination to duty, this eternal abnegation, this yielding up of herself, her dearest, most cherished wishes to the demands of duty and the great world?
“I don’t know what I want,” she said faintly. “It don’t seem as if one could be happy — very long.”
All at once she moved close to him and laid her cheek upon the arm of his chair and clasped his hand in both her own, murmuring: “But I have you now, I have you now, no matter what is coming to us.”
A sense of weakness overcame her. What did she care that Bennett should fulfil his destiny, should round out his career, should continue to be the Great Man? It was he, Bennett, that she loved — not his greatness, not his career. Let it all go, let ambition die, let others less worthy succeed in the mighty task. What were fame and honour and glory and the sense of a divinely appointed duty done at last to the clasp of his hand and the sound of his voice?
In November of that year Lloyd and Bennett were married. Two guests only assisted at the ceremony. These were Campbell and his little daughter Hattie.
X.
The months passed; Christmas came and went. Until then the winter had been unusually mild, but January set in with a succession of vicious cold snaps and great blustering winds out of the northeast. Lloyd and Bennett had elected to remain quietly in their new home at Medford. They had no desire to travel, and Bennett’s forthcoming book demanded his attention. Adler stayed on about the house. He and the dog Kamiska were companions inseparable. At long intervals visitors presented themselves — Dr. Street, or Pitts, or certain friends of Bennett’s. But the great rush of interviewers, editors, and projectors of marvellous schemes that had crowded Bennett’s anterooms during the spring and early summer was conspicuously dwindling. The press ceased to speak of him; even his mail had fallen away. Now, whenever the journals of the day devoted space to arctic exploration, it was invariably in reference to the English expedition wintering on the Greenland coast. That world that had clamoured so loudly upon Bennett’s return, while, perhaps, not yet forgetting him, was already ignoring him, was looking in other directions. Another man was in the public eye.
But in every sense these two — Lloyd and Bennett — were out of the world. They had freed themselves from the current of affairs. They stood aside while the great tide went careering past swift and turbulent, and one of them at least lacked even the interest to look on and watch its progress.
For a time Lloyd was supremely happy. Their life was unbroken, uneventful. The calm, monotonous days of undisturbed happiness to which she had looked forward were come at last. Thus it was always to be. Isolated and apart, she could shut her ears to the thunder of the world’s great tide that somewhere, off beyond the hills in the direction of the City, went swirling through its channels. Hardly an hour went by that she and Bennett were not together. Lloyd had transferred her stable to her new home; Lewis was added to the number of their servants, and until Bennett’s old-time vigour completely returned to him she drove out almost daily with her husband, covering the country for miles around.
Much of their time, however, they spent in Bennett’s study. This was a great apartment in the rear of the house, scantily, almost meanly, furnished. Papers littered the floor; bundles of manuscripts, lists, charts, and observations, the worn and battered tin box of records, note-books, journals, tables of logarithms were piled upon Bennett’s desk. A bookcase crammed with volumes of reference, statistical pamphlets, and the like stood between the windows, while one of the walls was nearly entirely occupied by a vast map of the arctic circle, upon which the course of the Freja, her drift in the pack, and the route of the expedition’s southerly march were accurately plotted.
The room was bare of ornament; the desk and a couple of chairs were its only furniture. Pictures there were none. Their places were taken by photographs and a great blue print of the shipbuilder’s plans and specifications of the Freja.
The photographs were some of those that Dennison had made of the expedition — the Freja nipped in the ice, a group of the officers and crew upon the forward deck, the coast of Wrangel Island, Cape Kammeni, peculiar ice formations, views of the pack under different conditions and temperatures, pressure-ridges and scenes of the expedition’s daily life in the arctic, bear-hunts, the manufacture of sledges, dog-teams, Bennett taking soundings and reading the wind-gauge, and one, the last view of the Freja, taken just as the ship — her ice-sheathed dripping bows heaved high in the air, the flag still at the peak — sank from sight.
However, on the wall over the blue-print plans of the Freja, one of the boat’s flags, that had been used by the expedition throughout all the time of its stay in the ice, hung suspended — a faded, tattered square of stars and bars.
As the new life settled quietly and evenly to its grooves a routine began to develop. About an hour after breakfast Lloyd and Bennett shut themselves in Bennett’s “workroom,” as he called it, Lloyd taking her place at the desk. She had become his amanuensis, had insisted upon writing to his dictation.
“Look at that manuscript,” she had exclaimed one day, turning the sheets that Bennett had written; “literally the very worst handwriting I have ever seen. What do you suppose a printer would make out of your ‘thes’ and ‘ands’? It’s hieroglyphics, you know,” she informed him gravely, nodding her head at him.
It was quite true. Bennett wrote with amazing rapidity and with ragged, vigorous strokes of the pen, not unfrequently driving the point through the paper itself; his script was pothooks, clumsy, slanting in all directions, all but illegible. In the end Lloyd had almost pushed him from his place at the desk, taking the pen from between his fingers, exclaiming:
“Get up! Give me your chair — and that pen. Handwriting like that is nothing else but a sin.”
Bennett allowed her to bully him, protesting merely for the enjoyment of squabbling with her.
“Come, I like this. What are you doing in my workroom anyhow, Mrs. Bennett? I think you had better go to your housework.”
“Don’t talk,” she answered. “Here are your notes and journal. Now tell me what to write.”
In the end matters adjusted themselves. Daily Lloyd took her place at the desk, pen in hand, the sleeve of her right arm rolled back to the elbow (a habit of hers whenever writing, and which Bennett found to be charming beyond words), her pen travelling steadily from line to line. He on his part paced the floor, a cigar between his teeth, his notes and note-books in his hand, dictating comments of his own, or quoting from the pages, stained, frayed, and crumpled, written by the light of the auroras, the midnight suns, or the unsteady, flickering of train-oil lanterns and blubber-lamps.
What long, delicious hours they spent thus, as the winter drew on, in the absolute quiet of that country house, ignored and lost in the brown, bare fields and leafless orchards of the open country! No one troubled them. No one came near them. They asked nothing better than that the world wherein they once had lived, whose hurtling activity and febrile unrest they both had known so well, should leave them alone.
Only one jarring note, and that none too resonant, broke the long harmony of Lloyd’s happiness during these days. Bennett was deaf to it; but for Lloyd it vibrated continuously and, as time passed, with increasing insistence and distinctness. But for one person in the world Lloyd could have told herself that her life was without a single element of discontent.
This was Adler. It was not that his presence about the house was a reproach to Bennett’s wife, for the man was scrupulously unobtrusive. He had the instinctive delicacy that one sometimes discovers in simple, undeveloped natures — seafaring folk especially — and though he could not bring himself to leave his former chi
ef, he had withdrawn himself more than ever from notice since the time of Bennett’s marriage. He rarely even waited on the table these days, for Lloyd and Bennett often chose to breakfast and dine quite to themselves.
But, for all that, Lloyd saw Adler from time to time, Kamiska invariably at his heels. She came upon him polishing the brasses upon the door of the house, or binding strips of burlaps and sacking about the rose-bushes in the garden, or returning from the village post-office with the mail, invariably wearing the same woollen cap, the old pea-jacket, and the jersey with the name “Freja” upon the breast. He rarely spoke to her unless she first addressed him, and then always with a precise salute, bringing his heels sharply together, standing stiffly at attention.
But the man, though all unwittingly, radiated gloom. Lloyd readily saw that Adler was labouring under a certain cloud of disappointment and deferred hope. Naturally she understood the cause. Lloyd was too large-hearted to feel any irritation at the sight of Adler. But she could not regard him with indifference. To her mind he stood for all that Bennett had given up, for the great career that had stopped half-way, for the work half done, the task only half completed. In a way was not Adler now superior to Bennett? His one thought and aim and hope was to “try again.” His ambition was yet alive and alight; the soldier was willing where the chief lost heart. Never again had Adler addressed himself to Lloyd on the subject of Bennett’s inactivity. Now he seemed to understand — to realise that once married — and to Lloyd — he must no longer expect Bennett to continue the work. All this Lloyd interpreted from Adler’s attitude, and again and again told herself that she could read the man’s thoughts aright. She even fancied she caught a mute appeal in his eyes upon those rare occasions when they met, as though he looked to her as the only hope, the only means to wake Bennett from his lethargy. She imagined that she heard him say:
“Ain’t you got any influence with him, Miss? Won’t you talk good talk to him? Don’t let him chuck. Make him be a man, and not a professor. Nothing else in the world don’t figure. It’s his work. God A’mighty cut him out for that, and he’s got to do it.”
His work, his work, God made him for that; appointed the task, made the man, and now she came between. God, Man, and the Work, — the three vast elements of an entire system, the whole universe epitomised in the tremendous trinity. Again and again such thoughts assailed her. Duty once more stirred and awoke. It seemed to her as if some great engine ordained of Heaven to run its appointed course had come to a standstill, was rusting to its ruin, and that she alone of all the world had power to grasp its lever, to send it on its way; whither, she did not know; why, she could not tell. She knew only that it was right that she should act. By degrees her resolution hardened. Bennett must try again. But at first it seemed to her as though her heart would break, and more than once she wavered.
As Bennett continued to dictate to her the story of the expedition he arrived at the account of the march toward Kolyuchin Bay, and, finally, at the description of the last week, with its terrors, its sufferings, its starvation, its despair, when, one by one, the men died in their sleeping-bags, to be buried under slabs of ice. When this point in the narrative was reached Bennett inserted no comment of his own; but while Lloyd wrote, read simply and with grim directness from the entries in his journal precisely as they had been written.
Lloyd had known in a vague way that the expedition had suffered abominably, but hitherto Bennett had never consented to tell her the story in detail. “It was a hard week,” he informed her, “a rather bad grind.”
Now, for the first time, she was to know just what had happened, just what he had endured.
As usual, Bennett paced the floor from wall to wall, his cigar in his teeth, his tattered, grimy ice-journal in his hand. At the desk Lloyd’s round, bare arm, the sleeve turned up to the elbow, moved evenly back and forth as she wrote. In the intervals of Bennett’s dictation the scratching of Lloyd’s pen made itself heard. A little fire snapped and crackled on the hearth. The morning’s sun came flooding in at the windows.
“... Gale of wind from the northeast,” prompted Lloyd, raising her head from her writing. Bennett continued:
Impossible to march against it in our weakened condition.
He paused for her to complete the sentence.
... Must camp here till it abates....
“Have you got that?” Lloyd nodded.
... Made soup of the last of the dog-meat this afternoon.... Our last pemmican gone.
There was a pause; then Bennett resumed:
December 1st, Wednesday — Everybody getting weaker.... Metz breaking down.... Sent Adler to the shore to gather shrimps ... we had about a mouthful apiece at noon ... supper, a spoonful of glycerine and hot water.
Lloyd put her hand to her temple, smoothing back her hair, her face turned away. As before, in the park, on that warm and glowing summer afternoon, a swift, clear vision of the Ice was vouchsafed to her. She saw the coast of Kolyuchin Bay — primordial desolation, whirling dust-like snow, the unleashed wind yelling like a sabbath of witches, leaping and somersaulting from rock to rock, folly-stricken and insensate in its hideous dance of death. Bennett continued. His voice insensibly lowered itself, a certain gravity of manner came upon him. At times he looked at the written pages in his hand with vague, unseeing eyes. No doubt he, too, was remembering.
He resumed:
December 2d, Thursday — Metz died during the night.... Hansen dying. Still blowing a gale from the northeast.... A hard night.
Lloyd’s pen moved slower and slower as she wrote. The lines of the manuscript began to blur and swim before her eyes.
And it was to this that she must send him. To this inhuman, horrible region; to this life of prolonged suffering, where death came slowly through days of starvation, exhaustion, and agony hourly renewed. He must dare it all again. She must force him to it. Her decision had been taken; her duty was plain to her. Now it was irrevocable.
... Hansen died during early morning.... Dennison breaking down....
... December 5th — Sunday — Dennison found dead this morning between Adler and myself....
The vision became plainer, more distinct. She fancied she saw the interior of the tent and the dwindling number of the Freja’s survivors moving about on their hands and knees in its gloomy half-light. Their hair and beards were long, their faces black with dirt, monstrously distended and fat with the bloated irony of starvation. They were no longer men. After that unspeakable stress of misery nothing but the animal remained.
... Too weak to bury him, or even carry him out of the tent.... He must lie where he is.... Last spoonful of glycerine and hot water.... Divine service at 5:30 P.M....
Once more Lloyd faltered in her writing; her hand moved slower. Shut her teeth though she might, the sobs would come; swiftly the tears brimmed her eyes, but she tried to wink them back, lest Bennett should see. Heroically she wrote to the end of the sentence. A pause followed:
“Yes—’ divine services at’ — I — I—”
The pen dropped from her fingers and she sank down upon her desk, her head bowed in the hollow of her bare arm, shaken from head to foot with the violence of the crudest grief she had ever known. Bennett threw his journal from him, and came to her, taking her in his arms, putting her head upon his shoulder.
“Why, Lloyd, what is it — why, old chap, what the devil! I was a beast to read that to you. It wasn’t really as bad as that, you know, and besides, look here, look at me. It all happened three years ago. It’s all over with now.”
Without raising her head, and clinging to him all the closer, Lloyd answered brokenly:
“No, no; it’s not all over. It never, never will be.”
“Pshaw, nonsense!” Bennett blustered, “you must not take it to heart like this. We’re going to forget all about it now. Here, damn the book, anyhow! We’ve had enough of it to-day. Put your hat on. We’ll have the ponies out and drive somewhere. And to-night we’ll go into town and see a show
at a theatre.”
“No,” protested Lloyd, pushing back from him, drying her eyes. “You shall not think I’m so weak. We will go on with what we have to do — with our work. I’m all right now.”
Bennett marched her out of the room without more ado, and, following her, closed and locked the door behind them. “We’ll not write another word of that stuff to-day. Get your hat and things. I’m going out to tell Lewis to put the ponies in.”
But that day marked a beginning. From that time on Lloyd never faltered, and if there were moments when the iron bit deeper than usual into her heart, Bennett never knew her pain. By degrees a course of action planned itself for her. A direct appeal to Bennett she believed would not only be useless, but beyond even her heroic courage. She must influence him indirectly. The initiative must appear to come from him. It must seem to him that he, of his own accord, roused his dormant resolution. It was a situation that called for all her feminine tact, all her delicacy, all her instinctive diplomacy.
The round of their daily life was renewed, but now there was a change. It was subtle, illusive, a vague, indefinite trouble in the air. Lloyd had addressed herself to her task, and from day to day, from hour to hour, she held to it, unseen, unnoticed. Now it was a remark dropped as if by chance in the course of conversation; now an extract cut from a newspaper or scientific journal, and left where Bennett would find it; now merely a look in her eyes, an instant’s significant glance when her gaze met her husband’s, or a moment’s enthusiasm over the news of some discovery. Insensibly and with infinite caution she directed his attention to the world he believed he had abjured; she called into being his interest in his own field of action, reading to him by the hour from the writings of other men, or advancing and championing theories which she knew to be false and ridiculous, but which she goaded him to deny and refute.
One morning she even feigned an exclamation of unbounded astonishment as she opened the newspaper while the two were at breakfast, pretending to read from imaginary headlines.