by Frank Norris
“You would have expected precisely an opposite effect, but it has knocked our chances with Congress into a cocked hat. Our member, who was to father the bill, declared to us that so sure as it was brought up now it would be killed in committee. I went to Washington at once; it was this, and not, as you supposed, private business that has taken me away. I saw our member and Tremlidge’s head correspondent. It was absolutely no use. These men who have their finger upon the Congressional pulse were all of the same opinion. It would be useless to try to put through our bill at present. Our member said ‘Wait;’ all Tremlidge’s men said ‘Wait — wait for another year, until this English expedition and its failure are forgotten, and then try again.’ But we don’t want to wait. Suppose Duane is blocked for the present. He has a tremendous start. He’s on the ground. By next summer the chances are the ice will have so broken up as to permit him to push ahead, and by the time our bill gets through and our ship built and launched he may be — heaven knows where, right up to the Pole, perhaps. No, we can’t afford to give England such long odds. We want to lay the keel of our ship as soon as we can — next week, if possible; we’ve got the balance of the summer and all the winter to prepare in, and a year from this month we want our American expedition to be inside the polar circle, to be up with Duane, and at least to break even with England. If we can do that we’re not afraid of the result, provided,” continued Mr. Campbell, “provided you, Mr. Bennett, are in command. If you consent to make the attempt, only one point remains to be settled. Congress has failed us. We will give up the idea of an appropriation. Now, then, and this is particularly what we want to consult you about, how are we going to raise the twenty thousand dollars?”
Lloyd rose to her feet.
“You may draw on me for the amount,” she said quietly.
Garlock uncrossed his legs and sat up abruptly in the deep-seated chair. Tremlidge screwed his monocle into his eye and stared, while Campbell turned about sharply at the sound of Lloyd’s voice with a murmur of astonishment. Bennett alone did not move. As before, he leaned heavily against the mantelpiece, his hands in his pockets, his head and his huge shoulders a little bent. Only from under his thick, knotted frown he shot a swift glance toward his wife. Lloyd paid no attention to the others. After that one quiet movement that had brought her to her feet she remained motionless and erect, her hands hanging straight at her sides, the colour slowly mounting to her cheeks. She met Bennett’s glance and held it steadily, calmly, looking straight into his eyes. She said no word, but all her love for him, all her hopes of him, all the fine, strong resolve that, come what would, his career should not be broken, his ambition should not faint through any weakness of hers, all her eager sympathy for his great work, all her strong, womanly encouragement for him to accomplish his destiny spoke to him, and called to him in that long, earnest look of her dull-blue eyes. Now she was no longer weak; now she could face the dreary consequences that, for her, must follow the rousing of his dormant energy; now was no longer the time for indirect appeal; the screen was down between them. More eloquent than any spoken words was the calm, steady gaze in which she held his own.
There was a long silence while husband and wife stood looking deep into each other’s eyes. And then, as a certain slow kindling took place in his look, Lloyd saw that at last Bennett understood.
After that the conference broke up rapidly. Campbell, as the head and spokesman of the committee, noted the long, significant glance that had passed between Bennett and Lloyd, and, perhaps, vaguely divined that he had touched upon a matter of a particularly delicate and intimate nature. Something was in the air, something was passing between husband and wife in which the outside world had no concern — something not meant for him to see. He brought the interview to an end as quickly as possible. He begged of Bennett to consider this talk as a mere preliminary — a breaking of the ground. He would give Bennett time to think it over. Speaking for himself and the others, he was deeply impressed with that generous offer to meet the unexpected deficiency, but it had been made upon the spur of the moment. No doubt Mr. Bennett and his wife would wish to talk it over between themselves, to consider the whole matter. The committee temporarily had its headquarters in his (Campbell’s) offices. He left Bennett the address. He would await his decision and answer there.
When the conference ended Bennett accompanied the members of the committee downstairs and to the front door of the house. The three had, with thanks and excuses, declined all invitations to dine at Medford with Bennett and his wife. They could conveniently catch the next train back to the City; Campbell and Tremlidge were in a hurry to return to their respective businesses.
The front gate closed. Bennett was left alone. He shut the front door of the house, and for an instant stood leaning against it, his small eyes twinkling under his frown, his glance straying aimlessly about amid the familiar objects of the hallway and adjoining rooms. He was thoughtful, perturbed, tugging slowly at the ends of his mustache. Slowly he ascended the stairs, gaining the landing on the second floor and going on toward the half-open door of the “workroom” he had just quitted. Lloyd was uppermost in his mind. He wanted her, his wife, and that at once. He was conscious that a great thing had suddenly transpired; that all the calm and infinitely happy life of the last year was ruthlessly broken up; but in his mind there was nothing more definite, nothing stronger than the thought of his wife and the desire for her companionship and advice.
He came into the “workroom,” closing the door behind him with his heel, his hands deep in his pockets. Lloyd was still there, standing opposite him as he entered. She hardly seemed to have moved while he had been gone. They did not immediately speak. Once more their eyes met. Then at length:
“Well, Lloyd?”
“Well, my husband?”
Bennett was about to answer — what, he hardly knew; but at that moment there was a diversion.
The old boat’s flag, the tattered little square of faded stars and bars that had been used to mark the line of many a weary march, had been hanging, as usual, over the blue-print plans of the Freja on the wail opposite the window. Inadequately fixed in its place, the jar of the closing door as Bennett shut it behind him dislodged it, and it fell to the floor close beside him.
He stooped and picked it up, and, holding it in his hand, turned toward the spot whence it had fallen. He cast a glance at the wall above the plans of the Freja, about to replace it, willing for the instant to defer the momentous words he felt must soon be spoken, willing to put off the inevitable a few seconds longer.
“I don’t know,” he muttered, looking from the flag to the empty wall-spaces about the room; “I don’t know just where to put this. Do you—”
“Don’t you know?” interrupted Lloyd suddenly, her blue eyes all alight.
“No,” said Bennett; “I—”
Lloyd caught the flag from his hands and, with one great sweep of her arm, drove its steel-shod shaft full into the centre of the great chart of the polar region, into the innermost concentric circle where the Pole was marked.
“Put that flag there!” she cried.
XI.
That particular day in the last week in April was sombre and somewhat chilly, but there was little wind. The water of the harbour lay smooth as a sheet of tightly stretched gray silk. Overhead the sea-fog drifted gradually landward, descending, as it drifted, till the outlines of the City grew blurred and indistinct, resolving to a dim, vast mass, rugged with high-shouldered office buildings and bulging, balloon-like domes, confused and mysterious under the cloak of the fog. In the nearer foreground, along the lines of the wharves and docks, a wilderness of masts and spars of a tone just darker than the gray of the mist stood away from the blur of the background with the distinctness and delicacy of frost-work.
But amid all this grayness of sky and water and fog one distinguished certain black and shifting masses. They outlined every wharf, they banked every dock, every quay. Every small and inconsequent jetty had its fringe of b
lack. Even the roofs of the buildings along the water-front were crested with the same dull-coloured mass.
It was the People, the crowd, rank upon rank, close-packed, expectant, thronging there upon the City’s edge, swelling in size with the lapse of every minute, vast, conglomerate, restless, and throwing off into the stillness of the quiet gray air a prolonged, indefinite murmur, a monotonous minor note.
The surface of the bay was dotted over with all manner of craft black with people. Rowboats, perilously overcrowded, were everywhere. Ferryboats and excursion steamers, chartered for that day, heeled over almost to the water’s edge with the unsteady weight of their passengers. Tugboats passed up and down similarly crowded and displaying the flags of various journals and news organisations — the News, the Press, the Times, and the Associated Press. Private yachts, trim and very graceful and gleaming with brass and varnish, slipped by with scarcely a ripple to mark their progress, while full in the centre of the bay, gigantic, solid, formidable, her grim, silent guns thrusting their snouts from her turrets, a great, white battleship rode motionless to her anchor.
An hour passed; noon came. At long intervals a faint seaward breeze compressed the fog, and high, sad-coloured clouds and a fine and penetrating rain came drizzling down. The crowds along the wharves grew denser and blacker. The numbers of yachts, boats, and steamers increased; even the yards and masts of the merchant-ships were dotted over with watchers.
Then, at length, from far up the bay there came a faint, a barely perceptible, droning sound, the sound of distant shouting. Instantly the crowds were alert, and a quick, surging movement rippled from end to end of the throng along the water-front. Its subdued murmur rose in pitch upon the second. Like a flock of agitated gulls, the boats in the harbour stirred nimbly from place to place; a belated newspaper tug tore by, headed for the upper bay, smoking fiercely, the water boiling from her bows. From the battleship came the tap of a drum. The excursion steamers and chartered ferryboats moved to points of vantage and took position, occasionally feeling the water with their paddles.
The distant, droning sound drew gradually nearer, swelling in volume, and by degrees splitting into innumerable component parts. One began to distinguish the various notes that contributed to its volume — a sharp, quick volley of inarticulate shouts or a cadenced cheer or a hoarse salvo of steam whistles. Bells began to ring in different quarters of the City.
Then all at once the advancing wave of sound swept down like the rush of a great storm. A roar as of the unchained wind leaped upward from those banked and crowding masses. It swelled louder and louder, deafening, inarticulate. A vast bellow of exultation split the gray, low-hanging heavens. Erect plumes of steam shot upward from the ferry and excursion boats, but the noise of their whistles was lost and drowned in the reverberation of that mighty and prolonged clamour. But suddenly the indeterminate thunder was pierced and dominated by a sharp and deep-toned report, and a jet of white smoke shot out from the flanks of the battleship. Her guns had spoken. Instantly and from another quarter of her hull came another jet of white smoke, stabbed through with its thin, yellow flash, and another abrupt clap of thunder shook the windows of the City.
The boats that all the morning had been moving toward the upper bay were returning. They came slowly, a veritable fleet, steaming down the bay, headed for the open sea, beyond the entrance of the harbour, each crowded and careening to the very gunwales, each whistling with might and main.
And in their midst — the storm-centre round which this tempest of acclamation surged, the object on which so many eyes were focussed, the hope of an entire nation — one ship.
She was small and seemingly pitifully inadequate for the great adventure on which she was bound; her lines were short and ungraceful. From her clumsy iron-shod bow to her high, round stern, from her bulging sides to the summit of her short, powerful masts there was scant beauty in her. She was broad, blunt, evidently slow in her movements, and in the smooth waters of the bay seemed out of her element. But, for all that, she imparted an impression of compactness, the compactness of things dwarfed and stunted. Vast, indeed, would be the force that would crush those bulging flanks, so cunningly built, moreover, that the ship must slip and rise to any too great lateral pressure. Far above her waist rose her smokestack. Overhead upon the mainmast was affixed the crow’s nest. Whaleboats and cutters swung from her davits, while all her decks were cumbered with barrels, with crates, with boxes and strangely shaped bales and cases.
She drew nearer, continuing that slow, proud progress down the bay, honoured as no visiting sovereign had ever been. The great white man-of-war dressed ship as she passed, and the ensign at her fighting-top dipped and rose again. At once there was a movement aboard the little outbound ship; one of her crew ran aft and hauled sharply at the halyards, and then at her peak there was broken out not the brilliant tri-coloured banner, gay and brave and clean, but a little length of bunting, tattered and soiled, a faded breadth of stars and bars, a veritable battle-flag, eloquent of strenuous endeavour, of fighting without quarter, and of hardship borne without flinching and without complaining.
The ship with her crowding escorts held onward. By degrees the City was passed; the bay narrowed oceanwards little by little. The throng of people, the boom of cannon, and the noise of shouting dropped astern. One by one the boats of the escorting squadron halted, drew off, and, turning with a parting blast of their whistles, headed back to the City. Only the larger, heavier steamers and the sea-going tugs still kept on their way. On either shore of the bay the houses began to dwindle, giving place to open fields, brown and sear under the scudding sea-fog, for now a wind was building up from out the east, and the surface of the bay had begun to ruffle.
Half a mile farther on the slow, huge, groundswells began to come in; a lighthouse was passed. Full in view, on ahead, stretched the open, empty waste of ocean. Another steamer turned back, then another, then another, then the last of the newspaper tugs. The fleet, reduced now to half a dozen craft, ploughed on through and over the groundswells, the ship they were escorting leading the way, her ragged little ensign straining stiff in the ocean wind. At the entrance of the bay, where the enclosing shores drew together and trailed off to surf-beaten sand-spits, three more of the escort halted, and, unwilling to face the tumbling expanse of the ocean, bleak and gray, turned homeward. Then just beyond the bar two more of the remaining boats fell off and headed Cityward; a third immediately did likewise. The outbound ship was left with only one companion.
But that one, a sturdy little sea-going tug, held close, close to the flank of the departing vessel, keeping even pace with her and lying alongside as nearly as she dared, for the fog had begun to thicken, and distant objects were shut from sight by occasional drifting patches.
On board the tug there was but one passenger — a woman. She stood upon the forward deck, holding to a stanchion with one strong, white hand, the strands of her bronze-red hair whipping across her face, the salt spray damp upon her cheeks. She was dressed in a long, brown ulster, its cape flying from her shoulders as the wind lifted it. Small as was the outgoing ship, the tug was still smaller, and its single passenger had to raise her eyes above her to see the figure of a man upon the bridge of the ship, a tall, heavily built figure, buttoned from heel to chin in a greatcoat, who stood there gripping the rail of the bridge with one hand, and from time to time giving an order to his sailing-master, who stood in the centre of the bridge before the compass and electric indicator.
Between the man upon the bridge and the woman on the forward deck of the tug there was from time to time a little conversation. They called to one another above the throbbing of the engines and the wash of the sea alongside, and in the sound of their voices there was a note of attempted cheerfulness. Practically they were alone, with the exception of the sailing-master on the bridge. The crew of the ship were nowhere in sight. On the tug no one but the woman was to be seen. All around them stretched the fog-ridden sea.
Then at last, in
answer to a question from the man on the bridge, the woman said:
“Yes — I think I had better.”
An order was given. The tug’s bell rang in her engine-room, and the engine slowed and stopped. For some time the tug continued her headway, ranging alongside the ship as before. Then she began to fall behind, at first slowly, then with increasing swiftness. The outbound ship continued on her way, and between the two the water widened and widened. But the fog was thick; in another moment the two would be shut out from each other’s sight. The moment of separation was come.
Then Lloyd, standing alone on that heaving deck, drew herself up to her full height, her head a little back, her blue eyes all alight, a smile upon her lips. She spoke no word. She made no gesture, but stood there, the smile yet upon her lips, erect, firm, motionless; looking steadily, calmly, proudly into Bennett’s eyes as his ship carried him farther and farther away.