“‘I suppose you think I have something very valuable here?’”
“‘I suppose you think I have something very valuable here?’”
He still clutched the oilskin with such anxious hands that Hildegarde felt it mere humanity to win him to forget his fears. So she looked away from the gaunt figure, over the threshold and over the surf to where the white sails of theBelugashone.
“I’ve been ‘up yonder,’ too,” she said.
“What!”
“Yes, I’ve seen the North Siberian shore quite plain. I’ve been as far as the Bering Straits.”
“Oh, the Bering Straits!” he echoed, as one inwardly amused at a traveler who should boast of getting as far as the adjoining county.
“Yes, and—and I’d like to go further still.”
“Better not—better not.”
“But, of course, I would!” She put her hand in the pocket of her long cloak and drew out the “latest map” of extreme northwestern Alaska. “I’m like the rest. The more I see up here, the more I want to see.” She sat down on the earthen floor just inside the threshold, and spread out the yard square tinted paper. As she bent over it, “What part of the map lures you most?” she asked, wandering if she would hear where was the home of this curious being dying up here alone.
As he did not answer at once, she looked up, laying her hand on the paper and saying, “This for me.”
She saw him take surer hold on the packet he was guarding, and he leaned across it to see precisely what portion of the earth’s surface her hand was covering.
“You want to know the name of the most interesting country in the world?” she asked smiling.
“Well, what do you say?” He seemed to humor her.
“The name of the most interesting country on the faceof the globe is under my hand.” She lifted it. He peered down. She pushed the rustling paper across the uneven floor, till leaning over he could read, in big black letters, the word “UNEXPLORED.”
“Ah!” he said softly, with as great a light in his face as if those letters had indeed spelled home. “Youfeel that? I didn’t know that women—” He broke off, and absently took a fresh hold on the bundle, as though anticipating some adroit attempt upon his treasure.
His foolishness about that packet had got upon Hildegarde’s nerves. “People who don’t know them think Chinamen are all alike. Men who know little of women think the same of us.”
He smiled. “Do you mean you realize how precious those blank spaces are?” Again he craned weakly over the bundle and stared down at the map. The thought again occurred to her that his look was like the look a wanderer turns home. Wondering about him she hardly listened to the words he was saying, how the kingdom of the unknown shrinks and shrinks and soon shall vanish from the maps—worse still, own no dominion any more over the minds of men.
Whether he was indulging some fantasy of fever she could not tell, but the scarred face wore a look so high and sorrowful that she found herself saying, “Surely the only value of the empty space is that some man may one day set a name there.”
He threw her a pitying look. And he stroked the oilskin as a child might caress a kitten.
“I see,” she said, trying in self-defense to be a little superior, “youdon’t, after all, sympathize with the explorer spirit.”
At which the strange eyes rewarded her with sudden smiling. “If you mean you do,” he said, “think for a moment what a power the unknown has been in history. Think what it’s done for people—a mere empty space upon the map—”
“Yes,” she threw in, “it has made heroes.”
“It has made men.” But for all the restrained quietness of tone his look evoked a glorious company.
“Yes,” she agreed. “It made Columbus, and it made Cortez. It made Magellan, Drake, and Cook, Livingstone and—”
“And all the millions more,” he interrupted, still on that quiet note, “who only planned or dreamed.” But while he spoke his maimed fingers wandered over the oilskin—a brain-sick miser guarding his gold. And though she listened to what he said, her eyes, against her will, kept surreptitiously revisiting the uncouth bundle he was fondling with abhorrent hands.
“I feel like a son of that land”—one hand left the bundle an instant and pointed down at the map—“The Unexplored. Like a man who sees his mother country filched from him bit by bit, parceled out and brought under subjection. Yes”—he raised his voice suddenly to such a note as set the girl’s nerves unaccountably to thrilling—“yes, I resent the partition of that empire. It is the oldest on the earth. I am glad I shall not see its passing.” He leaned back, and a grayness gathered on his face as he ended: “Many a man will be without a country, many a soul will be homeless when the last province of that kingdom yields.”
She only nodded, but he suddenly began afresh, as though she had contributed something convincing. “Ihave never talked of these things to a woman, but since you seem to feel the significance of—” He broke off, and then slowly, “It might be you could help me,” he said.
“How could I—”
Still clinging feverishly to the knotted oilskin, he dragged himself with difficulty to an upright posture and craned forward to stare through the open door. Not this time northward solely, but down the beach as well as up.
“What are you looking for?” asked the girl.
As he sat there huddled, silent, she became conscious that he was listening—listening with that sort of strained intentness that almost creates sound, does create it to the sense accessible to hypnotic influence.
“Who is that outside?” he said very low.
“No one,” she answered, though it seemed to her, too, there must be some one there.
“Look out and see.”
As she got up to obey him, “But you won’t go away,” he said suddenly.
“No, only as far as—”
“Don’t go out of sight!” There was an excitement in his voice that gave her a moment’s fear of him. Out of the dank little hut his voice followed her into the sunshine: “Is he there again?”
“No one,” she answered, “no one at all! Except—”
To the south, on the edge of the tiny settlement, a group of Esquimaux. It must have been their voices his quick ear had caught now and then above the surf.
Northward, up the curving beach, two men calking a boat. But though they stood out vivid in that wonderfullight, Hildegarde knew they must be half a mile away; and so she told him.
“Is that all?”
Nothing more. Not a creature on the treeless hill rising behind the hovel. In front of where the girl stood no soul nearer than where the barkBelugaset her transfigured sails against the western limit of the world. Between her and that sole link with her own life, only the long barrier of the battling surf. From within, the feeble voice saying indistinguishable words that yet conveyed some feverish purpose. A sudden temptation seized the girl to call her dog and run.
“You are sure”—the weak voice came to meet her as she turned back—“sure there isn’t an old man about—fellow with a hungry face and a long, lank beard?”
“And an hour-glass and a scythe,” she filled out the picture to herself. Yes. One like that is lurking here at the door, and no man can bar him out and none refuse to follow at his call. But aloud, “No one,” she said.
“Then come in and shut the door.” And again she thought of flight, and again put the impulse by. But she said if the door were shut she must go, and made her excuse the need to keep an eye out for her friend. Then she sat down as before, where she could command the beach.
The sick man was obviously ill-pleased and not a little scornful. “You will understand why I don’t want to be overheard when I tell you—” Again he sent the searching glance into that square of the world the driftwood lintel framed, and his voice was half a whisper. “You’ll understand when I tell you I have a legacy to leave.” He waited.
“Yes,” said Hildegarde.
“How did you know!” he demanded, and the eyes were less friendly.
“Oh, I didn’tknow.”
“You suspected—”
“Well, most people, however poor, have something to leave, however little.”
He lifted his hand to silence the platitude, and his whisper reached her clear and sharp: “I am leaving more than ever a man left before.”
It was true then about the Mother Lode. She waited, hardly breathing. He had said she could help him. He wanted a letter written or witness to a will, but he had fallen back upon that strained listening. “You have children?” Hildegarde asked.
He made a barely perceptible motion, no.
“Brothers and sisters?” She tried to help his memory.
“No.”
“Who, then?”
“My legacy’s too great to leave to any individual.” Hildegarde’s eyes kindled with excitement. All the talk about Nome had given her a sense of living in an atmosphere of mighty enterprise, of giant losses, and of fabulous gain. She was primed to hear of lucky millions stumbled on by chance.
“You want to make a bequest to the nation?” Why was he hesitating, she wondered impatiently, as he flung again that same intent look out of doors? She knew he could see nothing but the wild, white horses climbing the rocky shore to look across the tundra. She knew he couldhear nothing but the thunder of their hoof-beats on the beach.
At last he spoke. “They said my trouble was ambition.” And still his ears waited for some sound beyond Hildegarde’s hearing, and still his eyes saw more than hers.
He was silent so long she adventured in the dark, “Did you leave ambition ‘up yonder,’ too?”
“Yes, up yonder!” But he brought out the words triumphantly, and he paused upon a broken breath still listening. “Ky,” he whispered, “the lady likes exploring, but she’s afraid to shut the door. Go out, Ky, and see if that old villain’s hanging about.Ky!”
The beast took her nose out of the blanket, and seemed to implore him to reconsider his command.
“Go out and explore! Go—once more!” There was a curious gentle note in the weak voice.
“Don’t send her out,” Hildegarde pleaded. “My dog’s out there now. Poor Ky.” She was conscious that her kindness for the maimed beast pleased the owner.
“Have you ever cared about a dog?” he said.
“Well, if I haven’t, I know some one who has, and that’s Red’s master. Why do you ask me?”
“Because I find myself with all my wealth wanting two things at the last.”
“What things?”
“A little fire that I haven’t strength to make, and a friend for Ky.”
“I’ll help you about the fire.” She reached out and picked up the fallen pieces of wood.
While she was opening her knife, “I believe,” he said,“yes, I believe you would help me about Ky—if you knew.”
“Help you, how?”
He fastened his eyes on the girl’s face. “Ky is one of us,” he said very low.
“What do you mean?”
“Only she is better at the game.”
Hildegarde leaned nearer to catch the husky words. “No one who ever braved the North, no one who ever grappled with the ice, not one of them all has done it more courageously than Ky.” The shadow-ringed eyes sought the girl’s again. “Nobody could be quite indifferent to Ky who cared about—who—” He broke off, exhausted by his fruitless effort to sit upright. He dropped forward on his elbows and rested his bearded chin in his hands. The tawny tide poured in streams through his fingers, and hid the horror of them. “To-morrow,” he said, with his eyes on Hildegarde, “to-morrow Ky will be the sole survivor of the only expedition that ever reached the Pole.”
Silent the girl sat there. But senses less alert than the hermit’s would have felt the passion of wonder that held her motionless. For all the world of difference between these two, the same light was shining in each face.
“How does the time go?” He made a movement toward his pocket, and then dropped his hand. “Curious how I still forget—I left it—” Again the motion. “Will you put your watch where I can see it?”
“Oh, go on; go on!” she urged. “My companion won’t go back without me.”
“Yes, you have plenty of time. But for me there’ll be barely enough,” and the face that he turned an instant toward the ship— Oh, beyond doubting, his time was short!
Out of her cow-boy hat she drew a long pin, and going to the foot of the bed she thrust the hatpin several inches into the peat wall above where the dog lay. But her near presence was so resented by the great explorer, Ky, that before the watch could be hung upon the pin, Hildegarde must needs retreat. She remembered the luncheon in her pocket, and offered Ky a share. No; Ky wanted nothing of a stranger.
“Throw it down by the door,” said her master, and it was done. When Hildegarde had retired, the dog camedown, and when he turned his blind eye about again, lo, a shining thing upon the wall.
“So!” the sick man sank back satisfied. “Now to get you to help me about Ky, I must put twenty years into an hour. More than twenty, for I can’t remember when I began to think about finding the Pole. I played at it all my boyhood. I’ve worked at it ever since.” An instant Hildegarde dropped her shrinking eyes. For he was putting out that maimed hand for the cup. She heard the grate of rusty tin on the cracker-box, as his cleared voice went on, “I began by going in a revenue cutter to Port Barrow; and I had been in two arctic expeditions before the one I’m telling you about. But on both of those others I was the one man who wasn’t going for the Pole. I was going for experience. I never believed my chiefs would get there, but I always believed I would—later. I had theories.”
“Oh, I wish you had known a friend of ours—”
“I had a friend of my own. The year after I got back from the second voyage, I met one night, at a club in New York, a young Russian-American who was nearly as keen about polar problems as I was. We talked arctic exploration all that winter of ’95 and ’96. We both believed tremendously in Nansen.”
“So did he—ourfriend.”
“We agreed we’d have given ten years of life to have had the honor of going along with the Norwegian. But he had been away now nearly three years. How far had he got? What had happened? Even experts began to say: ‘Another expedition crushed in the arctic ice.’ But neither my Russian nor I believed that Nansen was dead, and we began privately to discuss a rescue-party. Weagreed that if we carried out our idea, and if we found Nansen unsuccessful, we’d offer him our ship to come home in andwe—we’d push straight on. Ours shouldn’t be any trumpeted ‘dash for the Pole’—how we loathed the cheap gallantry of the phrase!” The voice that had flared up an instant fell again as he said: “We knew something, even then, of the snail’s pace of that laboring on; that doing battle for every yard; that nightmare of crawling forward inch by inch—only so, we knew, might a man make his ‘dash for the Pole.’ But the plan of setting off without saying to any one what it was we were hoping to do supplied my Russian and me with our first condition for making the attempt.”
Was it indeed only water in the cup, that after another draught of it he should seem to throw off weakness as you might a burdensome cloak? “My friend had money, so had I. No need of a public appeal. No need to beat the big drum and talk tall. Both of us had felt the irony of each explorer’s coming back to assure the world that he had never meant to find the Pole. What he had gone for was exploration of the ice-fields this side. Ha! Ha!” It was strange that such a feeble little laugh could give out such a world of irony. “Or else, what he’d gone for was to ascertain the salinity of the polar seas, or to determine the trend of arctic currents. Or to explain”—again that hardly audible laughter—“how theJeanette’soilskin breeches got to the Greenland coast; anything under heaven, except reaching the paltry Pole. So as we knew we were made of no better stuff, if as good, as our predecessors, we said that we, too, if we came back with only some deep sea dredgings, a few photographs of ice-pressure effects—sketches ofAurora Borealis, and a store of polar bearskins and walrus tusks, we, too, would find ourselves pointing to these as the treasures we’d staked life and reputation for. So hard it is to suffer the extremity and still have to say ‘I failed’!”
He lay silent so long that Hildegarde quoted Cheviot. “They say it’s harder for an American.”
“What is?”
“To accept defeat. Harder for us than for the others.”
“Why do they say that?”
“I’ve heard it’s because we make such a fetish of success.” Still he lay there silent. It was as if the oil in the lamp had failed. “Yes, yours was a good plan,” she said. “Even those others, the Old-World people, that they say are soberer than we—” She saw that he turned his hollow eyes toward her, listening. “If even they made excuses, and shirked saying they’d failed—yours was the best— Oh, it was a splendid plan!”
“Are you saying we’re a nation of boasters?”
Good! that had roused him. “Do you say we are not?”
“We are everything under the sun: most vain and braggart; most discreet and self-effacing; most childish and obvious; most subtle and complex. The extreme of anything, good or evil, that’s the American.” His eyes found out the tiny watch face on the peat wall. Ah, that was the tonic that was acting like a cordial mixed with magic. Right or wrong, he was under the dominion of a terror that this last flickering up of energy would fail before he had turned it to account. Even to rememberthat small shining disk seemed to nerve him anew. Each look a lash. It whipped him on.
“As I’ve said, my Tatar and I laid our heads together and agreed. ‘For fear we fall into the old snare, we won’t say we’re going at all,’ not even to find Nansen, for fear we should promise too much. We would make the great attempt under the guise of a whaling expedition. My Russian had already sent out two, and had once gone along with one of them. I had spent a winter with the Samoyedes.”
“What!Youdid that?” His eyes, though not his mind, took in the girl’s breathless agitation. He paused, but his thoughts were too far away. “I thought only one man had ever—” began the girl trembling, and then: “Go on; go on!”
“We were both still young. Yes, six years ago I was young; and hard as a husky. But not so hard as a man need be who goes exploring in the mild climate of the drawing-room.”
Hildegarde bent toward him, with wildly beating heart.
“We were just on the point of chartering our ship, when one evening—” He looked through the peat wall a thousand leagues.
“One evening—what?”
“I saw a face. A girl’s soft face, but it cut the cables of my ship and set her afloat—drifting, derelict, for all I cared. A little doll’s face. But it shut out everything else under the skies!”
Oh, Bella, Bella, was it yours—that face? “Go on,” breathed the girl at the door.
“When her people said she should never marry a manwho might any day go off on one of these protracted voyages, I looked at the face, and I said I would never explore again.” The glazed eyes turned to Hildegarde, but it was the old bright vision they saw, not this newer, softer presence, with wet cheeks, by the door.
“I told my Russian to draw on me for half the funds, and to find another fellow-traveler. But she was too young to marry, they said. We must wait a year. I said I would wait. When the year was half gone, I was in London—because the face was there.” Still looking through the wall he groped for the cup. Hildegarde rose, and put it in his hands. Oh poor, poor hands! No need to turn shuddering away. They were softly wrapped from her sight in a mist of pitiful tears.
He gave her back the cup. “We had been to a skating party,” he said. Something grotesque conjured by the contrast of that light phrase wafted out of a butterfly world to fall in such a place at such an hour made for the unreality, not of far-off London, nor of parties where pretty ladies play at being in a world of ice—the conjuration merely lifted the dim hut and its wild occupant into the realm of the phantasmagoric. The girl saw all in a wavering dimness, shot dazzlingly with splinters of sunshine. But the man went on in that level tone: “I remember her saying it was the first party given in London on artificial ice—an absurd affair. But she said: ‘Wasn’t it nice of me to get you an invitation, too? It will seem quite like going to your horrid North Pole.’”
How plain Bella’s voice sounded in the room. That was why he was smiling. Bella could always bring that look into the eyes of men.
“I said, ‘quite like the North Pole.’ And I went and skated with her. Afterward, at the door, I had just seen her and her mother into the carriage, when my eye fell on the orange-colored bill of the ‘Pall Mall Gazette.’ And three words printed there blared out like trumpets.
‘NEWS FROM NANSEN.’
‘He’s found it!’ I said to myself—‘Nansen’s found the Pole!’ and I could have flung up my hat and cried hurrah in the sober street. As I called to the newsboy I was ashamed of my voice. I thought people would notice how it shook. When I pulled my hand out of my pocket it trembled so I dropped the coin and it rolled away into the street. The boy ran after it, and I damned him for his pains. ‘Never mind! Give me a paper!’ I called out. But the boy ran on. As I stood there waiting for him to disentangle himself from the traffic and come back, I seemed to live a lifetime. How had he done it, that splendid fellow, Nansen? What had it been like? Well, soon I should know. The knowledge that had cost so much, soon I should have it in my hand—for a penny! The awful majesty of the upper regions fell away.”
With a growing excitement painfully the sick man lifted himself up. “It was then,” he said, “then—a queer thing happened.” He seemed to wait for something. Turning to the girl, “You see, this was the moment I’d been living for in a way.”
“Of course; of course.”
“And yet, now that it had come, my spirit had gonedown like the sounding lead on a deep-sea bottom. I stood there in the street with a sense of unmitigable loss. Something so sudden and acute that I didn’t myself understand at first what was going on in me. For it was something quite apart from any feeling that I’d like to have been the one to do the thing. There had been for months no question of that. No. It was just a poignant realization that almost the last of the jealous old world’s secrets had been forced out of her keeping. This thing that men had dreamed about before ever they’d girdled the globe—it was no more the stuff of dreams. The thought of Captain Cook and Franklin flashed across my mind, and I remembered the men of theJeanette. But it wasn’t till I remembered the men unborn that I measured the full extent of the disaster. The generations to come would never know what it had stood for—this goal the Norwegian had won. They wouldn’t have to spend even a penny to hear all about it. It would be thrust at them, this shining and terrible thing men had died to gain—one leaden fact the more, conned in a heavy book, stripped to the lean dimensions of a date! Discovery of America, discovery of the Pole—who thrills over these things when they are done? And now the newsboy was coming slowly back, rubbing the mud off my half-crown. In a second I should be reading how the last great stronghold of wonder was destroyed. ‘Well, the world’s grown poorer!’ I said to myself, and I counted my change, thinking less of Nansen’s news than of those men of the future. He had taken from them the finest playground ever found for the imagination—the last great field for grim adventuring.
“I opened the paper and read that Nansen had turned back before reaching the eighty-seventh parallel.
“The Pole was still to be found.”
Ah, Bella, when you saw that look go traveling so far, so far, you must have known that he would follow. Poor little Bella!
Under those vision-filled eyes, the crippled dog, still sleeping, made a muffled sound. “Ky is dreaming,” said the sick man, absently, “that she hears a seal crying ‘Ho-o-o,’ with his nose above the ice. Or she thinks she hears the ‘Kah! kah! sah! sah!’ of the auks. So do I, sometimes.”
“But you promised ‘the face’ you wouldn’t think of the arctic any more.”
“Yes,” and weakness of the flesh or weight of memory held him a moment silent. “She always said that if the Norwegian had been successful she and I would never have quarreled. She wrote that in every letter after I left her. I don’t know. She was very young. She never understood”—he glanced at Hildegarde—“never understood what was the most interesting place on the map. She thought it was Paris.” He smiled. “Maybe she was right. I don’t know. All I do know is”—and a subtle animation invaded voice and air—“a few weeks after I read Nansen’s news in the London street, Borisoff came across from Christiana to talk things over. All this time that I had been looking at the face he had been building a ship as good, he said, as theFram. No man would dare say more. He had made agreements with a crew and company of picked men, some of them his old whaling people. He had news that the Finlanderwe’d sent the year before to Siberia, after Olenek dogs, would be waiting with the pack up there on that bleak shore, between Chelyuskin and the Kara Sea—‘waiting for you and me,’ said Borisoff.” The sick man’s eyes were shining. “Borisoff was a tremendous fellow! I never knew but one person who didn’t believe in Borisoff. You couldn’t expect a girl—” he broke off. “But the great bond between him and me was that we both had that passion for the North, that is like nothing else on earth in the way of land love. Talk of the South! A man loves the South as he loves a soft bed and the warm corner by the fire. But he loves the North as he loves his prey.” He brought one hand away from his beard and he fastened it afresh in the knotted oilskin at his side, with an air of one about to rise up and continue his journey. “Well, one day I said to Borisoff, ‘Of coursewecan’t do the damned thing if Nansen couldn’t—so come along, and let’s try!’
“We sailed from Tromsö that July.
“But we didn’t call ourselves arctic explorers, and we never once said Pole—not even after we reached the edge of the ice-pack, north of Sannikof Island. It wasn’t till we got into north latitude 78° that we called a council of war. By that time we knew our men and they knew us. We were sure of six, but we put it to the other four as well. We engaged to extricate the ship from the floe and send her home, if any man of them wanted to turn back. What were Borisoff and I going to do? one of the doubtful four asked. Well, we had our famous steel launch, and we had sledges, dogs, kyacks, provisions, and—we had—an idea we’d like to see what it was like—farther on. I’ve always believed our notsaying anything about ‘a dash,’ or so much as naming the great goal, gave Borisoff’s words their most compelling eloquence. If we’d said then that we wanted to try for the Pole, some one would have felt himself obliged to object and talk prudence. As it was, we twelve sat there as one man in the little saloon of theNarwhal, with the loose ice grinding against the ship’s sides. And no one said, but every one was thinking, ‘We’ll find the Pole.’ Borisoff was a born leader. Not a soul on the ship but believed Borisoff would do anything he set out to do. They all knew by now how extraordinarily well equipped we were. Borisoff showed again and again how we should profit by the failure of our forerunners. Well, that was in September. We were frozen in, and we drifted with the ice all that winter and following summer—drifted in the dark, with bears prowling round the ice-shrouded ship—drifted in the midnight sun with guillemots and fulmars circling about our rigging.”
He sat there some seconds staring through the peat wall, never seeing the open watch, forgetting the irrevocable hour. As though she, too, shared in some chill vision, the dog shivered.
To bring the master back, “Ky is cold,” said Hildegarde, and would have thrown over her a trailing end of blanket.
“No, no, she’s not coldhere,” the sick man answered, but in a voice so faint and far Hildegarde wondered if he would ever speak again.
To mask her creeping fear and bridge the silence, “Why does she shiver, if she’s not cold?”
His absent eyes came slowly back to where the dog was uneasily dozing. “Thinks we’re crossing the ice-moraines,thinks she can’t go on, then remembers the whip. The whip that flies out when you least expect it, eh, Ky?—and bites the hair off clean.” He bent forward, and gently laid his distorted hands on the scarred and trembling hide. The dog was quiet again.
“That first winter,” he went on, “one of our men was killed by a bear, and one died from a natural cause. He would have died at home. Early in the summer came the day when the ice gripped us. Our tough ship might have been an egg-shell. But we were ready.”
“You had to abandon her?”
He gave a short nod. “Sledges out on the ice away from the pressure area, packed, and kyack-loaded. We had kept the dogs in condition by short journeys, and we knew they were as splendid animals for work as they were terrible for fighting. We couldn’t prevent them from tearing each other to pieces, but between whiles they carried us on. Eh, Ky? You carried us on, for you carried our means of life. Or maybe we carried you, with our whips and clubs and curses. It’s horrible to look back, that’s why I do it, to save Ky any more—” His eyes implored the dumb creature’s pardon. “Those days and months of forcing the dwindled pack over the pressure ridges!—and when the patient beasts stopped from sheer exhaustion, shouting at them till our own voices tore our nerves and burst our very ear-drums, hardening our hearts, beating the splendid animals, till they lay down one by one on those desolate ice-plains and died. Well, well, well,”—he made sure of the bundle again,—“the dogs had the best of it.Weblood-marked many a mile of the polar ice, we stumbled from floe to floe, we stormed the pressure ridges, andwhen the teams had dwindled and the ice opened in long reaches, we took the remaining dogs into our canvas boats and along the water lanes we sailed and sailed.”
“To the Pole? Youdidfind the—”
“Lord!” he interrupted, “finding the Pole isn’t a patch on hunting for it! That’s what the men of the future will never know. You can read the kind of thing we went through in any arctic book. You can read it all, and then know nothing about it. We did impossible things—things any man will say he can’t do. And then he does them because he must, and because human endurance is the one miracle left in the world.”
An instant he stopped for breath. “Good men, all our fellows. But their bones are up yonder. Good dogs, too. Ky’s the one that’s left.”
There was a long silence in the dim little room.
“But you reached the Pole, Borisoff and you!”
Slowly he shook his wild head. “Not Borisoff.” There was silence for a while.
“It must have been very horrible for you when he—”
“Yes,” said the sick man, and Hildegarde saw the mouth set harder yet under the tawny cloud. “The day he died we came upon a great piece of timber frozen aslant in the ice. Borisoff had been queer, wandering all those last days. But that great shaft that had come from some land where the trees grow glorious and tall, the sight of it excited him so that it cleared his head. He said it was Siberian spruce, and had come from his own forests of the Yenisei. And he talked about the currents that had carried it so far—talked rationally. We found initials carved on one end: ‘F. N.—H.’ If ever there had been more the record was frayed out ofexistence by the timber catapulting against the ice. ‘I’ll rest here,’ Borisoff had said, and”—a long time seemed to go by—“I’ve no doubt he rests well. Splendid fellow, Borisoff.
“The next day I cut his name on the great log, and I went on alone.”
“You and Ky!”
He nodded. “Ky and the dogs that were left, fighting our way over the ice-moraines in a hard, fierce light, that seemed to come from every point of the compass at once. I remember a curious optical delusion overtook me. I lost all faculty of seeing the snow-covered ice I walked on. I could feel it, of course, at every step. I could see my snow-shoes sharp as if they’d been silhouettes poised in air. But the terrible white light that bathed the universe seemed to be flooding up from under my feet as well as beating on my head. Round that white bossed shield of the frozen sea the sun moved in his shrunken circle, with no uprising and no setting, abhorring shadow. Like that, day and night, night and day.”
“For how long?”
“For a thousand years. A dog killed to feed the rest, and still on, ‘for miles on miles on miles of desolation—leagues on leagues on leagues, without a change.’ In a world as dead and white as leprosy.” He closed his eyes, as if the midnight glare still dazzled him.
In her sleep again the dog had been moving and moaning.
“Ky is in pain,” said the girl, very softly, hardly daring to whisper.
The sick man opened his eyes and faintly shook hishead. “Only dreaming. I do the same myself. Wake in the dark, and think the pressure has sent the ice towering above us. And while we try to get across the broken blocks, suddenly they begin to grind and growl and to writhe and thunder, as if moved to hatred of us. Ky lost a yoke-fellow in such a place, crushed between the shrieking boulders. Quiet, Ky! The exploring’s all done. At least”—he looked up—“I’d like to think—”
“You may.”
“Thank you,” said the sick man.
“Yes, Ky,” Hildegarde spoke with a little break in her voice. “The exploring’s all done.” As if the dog had heard and comprehended, and so been delivered from evil dreams, she got up, came shakily down from the bed, and stood for a moment at the door, looking out.
“What’s ahead of us, Ky?” he asked, dreamily. “An ice sky or a water sky?”
“How was it you could tell?”
“Oh, you learn. The field-ice reflection is the brightest, a little yellow; drift ice, purer white; new ice, gray. And where there’s open water the ‘blink’ is slatey, isn’t it, Ky? Or blue, like the skies of California.”
“But the Pole?” The word brought a startled look into his face, and his eyes guarded the threshold so fiercely she sunk her voice to meet his humor. “What was it like?” she whispered.
“Ky knows,” he answered, warily. “Ky got there.”
With a supreme humility, or was it a high indifference on her part, the great explorer crossed the threshold and sat outside in the sun.
“I’ve wondered about it a good deal, as I’ve lain here,” said the sick man. “It almost seems as if nothingin the world-scheme were so precious as suffering. Men feel that when they recall their early hardships. Dimly they see that nothing they’ve found later was of such value to them. Yes, yes, beside, the days of the struggle the days of the harvest are dull. And it’s this”—he crouched over the oilskin, and dropped his voice—“this incentive to the greatest struggle that men can embark upon—this is the Great Legacy I shall leave behind!”
“But what,” she pointed to the thing he was hugging between gaunt arms, “what is in that?”
“The proofs,” he whispered, and started when the word was out. It seemed to Hildegarde that he held the weather-beaten bundle tighter still, and still he put off telling what she wanted most to know. As if he couldn’t bring himself, after all, to yield the secret up. “Think,” he whispered. “We could set the world ringing with it, Ky. Only we mustn’t.”
“Yes, yes, but you must!” Hildegarde half started to her feet.
“No. Not after—I swore an oath, you see.”
“To—”
That motion of the wild head: “The One up yonder.”
“What One up yonder?” Hildegarde’s voice was as hushed as his own.
“Kyome.”
“Who is that?”
“The god of the unknown North. Hadn’t you heard that in all the old lands, from Greece to Mexico, there was always an altar to the unknown god?”
She nodded.
“When men in their foolishness threw down those temples, the old gods fled to the farther countries. Last of all to the world’s waste places.” He held up one horrible hand, and made a grotesque motion of “Come nearer.”
She obeyed.
“The greatest of these gods of the unknown—he sat on a throne of ice at the top of the world. The others—they had found no rest from the men of the West. Behind the Great Wall of China we hunted them out. We forced our way to them through Japan ports. We let the garish day into the dim temples of Korea, and the gold terraces of holy Lhasa are trod by alien feet. But the uttermost North was all inviolate till I came. I made the kingdom mine. But now”—he lifted the maimed right hand like one taking oath—“now I abdicate. I will destroy my title-deeds. Fire! a little fire!”His hands fumbled among the shavings in the blanket, and feverishly he caught up the knife.
“No, no. Let me,” she said. “I’ll do it for you. See, I can split the kindling straight down.” She strained to make good the boast. “Just a moment! Oh, but this kind of wood is tough! What is it? Not a piece of drift—so flat and smooth?”
“Piece of a broken skee—my snow-shoe.” While she forced the sharp blade down, he was calling out, “Ky! D’you hear that fellow laughing at us?”
The dog turned obedient, and both her pointed ears seemed to be pricking at the silence.
“Whenever I begin to hope, I hear that walrus guffaw.” Ky’s master was listening with all his shrinking soul, and his eyes looked straight through the wall, but he spoke as quietly as before. Hildegarde shivered a little. Death itself could hardly remove him further than he had wandered in those few seconds. “Oh, come back!” she said in her heart, and then aloud, “Tell me, please tell me, how I shall manage about Ky?”
“Ky?” His eyelids fluttered as he obeyed the call.
“Yes, how am I to make her follow me?”
“Give her more of your pilot bread.”
“Will she leave you at the last for that?”
“She won’t know it’s the last, and she is hungry. Aren’t you, Ky?”
Hildegarde laid down the knife an instant, took a fragment from her pocket and held it out to the dog.
Very doubtfully Ky came nearer. But still she couldn’t make up her mind to trust the new friend’s hand. So Hildegarde laid the coveted morsel down.
When Ky had cautiously snapped it up, she hobbledto the bedside and turned her dim eyes to the old familiar bundle.
“Yes, I’ve got it safe.” He circled it with an arm, still looking down at the dog.
Would he ever let it go of his own free will? What vain notion was this of a fire!
Now he was muttering absently, as he smoothed the oilskin: “Our harvest, yours and mine. Whatever we went through in the sowing, it was all nothing, wasn’t it, Ky?—just nothing to bringing the harvest home.”
“It wasn’t possible for coming to be worse than going!”
“Borisoff would have said no. But Borisoff only tried one way.Weknow—Ky and I.” In the pause the eyelids closed over lusterless eyes. It was only while he spoke of the journey that he seemed alive. As she looked again at the face, as blank and cold as a grate without a fire, horror fell upon her lest he should die before Cheviot came back.
Hildegarde’s little store of splinters and shavings had grown into a heap. “If I make kindling for the fire, I deserve to be told—things—don’t I? Besides, then I can tell her—the face.”
“How could you do that?”
She must break it gradually. “Wouldn’t it be possible for me to find her out and tell her?”
He looked at Hildegarde dreamily an instant. “I wonder,” he said.
“I’ll do it, if only you’ll go on—go on.”
He made a faint “no,” with the wild head, smiling dimly. “Any one may have a nightmare. No one has ever told a nightmare, so it didn’t sound absurd. It’sa thing you can’t pass on, fortunately. You can’t recover it even for yourself. Of all those last weeks, only three things stand out clear: one was the day I saw the first fox track in the snow.”
“You were glad of that?”
“Glad of the first sign of life?”
“And the second thing?”
“The day when I looked south and saw the sky was yellow.”
“What did that mean?”
“Land. All the rest’s a blur. And in the blur two shadows—Ky and I, on the homeward journey—the journey that I knew even then wouldn’t end at home. Ky and I. All our companions dead. The last dog, even our infinitesimal rations of pemmican, gone. Everything gone, but Ky and my title-deeds.”
“I don’t see how you bore it—how you kept alive.”
“Idon’t know. Later we fed on the small crustaceans in the ice-channels, then the narwhal. But in the strain I think my wits went. Mercifully I can’t recover much in that blur of agony till the moment that stands out clear as conflagration in the dark—that moment when I set our course by the shadow my staff cast, and saw—” He dropped his hollow jaw, staring at some horror unspeakable.
“What was it you—”
“I saw that while we were stumbling blindly toward the blessed South—faster still the ice that we were on was drifting north.”
“Carrying you back to—”
“Back to the Pole.”
Her fingers lost their hold upon the knife.
He didn’t even notice that she was no longer keeping her part of the compact. “Talk of Sisyphus! Talk of torture! Ky and I, like half-frozen flies crawling over the roof of the world, while the greater forces carried us calmly back to the North! It remains burnt into my memory as the final type of hopeless human striving. Each day I would read the message of the shadow on the ice, till I began to say to myself: the penalty for having reached the Pole is that you must stay there. No use to struggle. You are surrounded, captured, brought back. The spirit of the violated place won’t allow a man to carry his victory home. It was then I understood.” Palm across palm he laid his fumbling hands, but his faint-moving lips brought no sound forth.
“You prayed?”
“Prayed? Something of the sort. I made a vow. By the unknown god I swore if I were allowed to get back alive no soul should ever know—except just one among all the living. Strange it should be you!”
“Of course you were thinking of little—of—”
“Yes. I’d tell nobody, I swore, but a girl. I meant a girl with a little doll face—a girl who wouldn’t understand. Our national phrase for any sort of success kept running in my head. I still felt I’d like her to know I hadn’t failed ‘to get there.’ Foolishness, of course. What I really wanted was that she should have a share in that vision no man’s eyes but mine had seen. I meant to show her these.”
It was terrible to see his hands trying to undo the treasure. But while again she hacked at the unyielding wood, Hildegarde followed fascinated each grotesque move the sick man made. At last the tight-drawn knotshad yielded. Between the four corners of the ancient oilskin, creased and twisted and stained, the harvest of John Galbraith’s life lay open in the hollow between his knees. Hildegarde stood up with knife caught in a cleft of the skee, staring. He turned over the little hoard of discolored papers that lay on a flat chart-box, a theodolite, a pocket sextant, and a record cylinder.
“Notes, sketches, tables of temperature and magnetic variation, casual phenomena. Oh, I found out strange secrets! The whole story’s here. I’d sooner have left my bones up yonder than not bring her back the proofs.” He opened out the chart and hung over the grimy, tattered sheet as though it were some work of art triumphant—a perfection of beauty unimagined in the world before. As he sat there hugging the shabby heap between his knees, you would have thought that stained and sea-soaked store must be splendid with color, or resonant with the organ music of the deep and of great winds harping in the waste—fit record of a pilgrimage no soul had made before.
“In my heart,” he said, “I hoped, when I took her these, she might, at last, realize—”
A torn and dirty book, with corners worn round and curling, and a look about its tough, discolored pages as though it had come down a thousand years. “My diary.” He turned a page. “She couldn’t have read it, wouldn’t want so much as to touch it. Still, it was for her that even at the last I carried it rather than food.”
Opening the other side of the shallow chart-box that was fitted with grooves in which sheets of stout drawing-paper were slipped and firmly held in place, he drewwhat that first glance seemed to reveal as a meaningless smudge of violent color. “There it is!” and no sooner had he said the words, than nervously he was sheltering the thing behind one knee. “You are sure that old fellow isn’t hanging about?”
She glanced out. “Quite sure.”
Cautiously he brought the paper up from its moment’s hiding, but his low voice dropped to a deeper register, “That’s what it’s like!”
From the hoarse triumph in the tone she knew that however clear before his actual eyes had been once this picture in his hand, they saw it now no more.
“That’s what Borisoff and the rest died to have a glimpse of. This is what I found, instead of the palæocrystic sea. Here is where the ice-hills rise. There’d been a storm. The low cloud-masses—they were incredible! Like that! And the zenith clear, except for the banners of light.”
Plain he had no guess that the colored crayon was both marred and bettered; that the picture he had set down, with some fair skill, had been less moving, less poetic, even less true than this, that chance had wrought with a blind but faithful artistry. For as Hildegarde stared at the prismatic haze, a kind of wild meaning dawned there upon the paper. Yes, surely, chance had craftier hands than any but the greatest among the sons of men. For the picture brought that almost religious conviction of the truth that great art gives. Just so, and no otherwise, must this thing have been. The dome of the sky up yonder was an inverted bowl of brass. And in the heavenward hollow of it a giant brood of serpents flamed and writhed above a wild white waste,warmed here with violet, cooled there with silver and pearl.
“And that,” she said, only to have assurance of his voice again, “that’s what the world is like up there?”
“Do you think men go so far, and walk through hell, to bring home a lie?”
Looking no longer at the orgy of color on the paper, but at the reflection of the actual scene in the dying face, “It was like the Day of Judgment,” said the girl.
“You can see that!” The craftsman’s pleasure in his handiwork brought out a gleam, and then, with a sudden passion, he tore the paper across and across, while Hildegarde cried out:
“Ah, don’t! Let me take it to—her!”
“Take it to the fire!—and leave the great legacy unencumbered. Fire, fire!” He was gathering up the splinters and shavings that he had whittled from the skee in the hours before Hildegarde’s coming. “Here! Here!”
A sense of impotency shackled her spirit as well as lamed her tongue. Blindly she took the fragments over to the embrasure of some blackened stones, just inside and to windward of the threshold.
“No one is about?”
“No one.”
“This is to start it, then.” He held out something. “This will catch easiest.”
“I have some thin paper here.” She twisted a wisp of her own map of the North, with a vague instinct of putting off an evil hour.
But the sick man followed with eager eyes the laying of every crosswise stick, his gaunt frame huddled overhis treasure while he watched the making of the sacrificial fire that should devour it. If his eyes left Hildegarde’s hands a moment, it was only that they might guard the door against surprise.
Once again, “Look out,” he said, “and see—”
“There’s no one. But wouldn’t youlikesomebody to come in? Some face out of the past—”
“To comenow!”
“Some one who could bring you news of—that girl you—”
“Remember wood’s worth more than gold up here! Keep a little back.”
“Keep some back?”
“Paper like this burns slow. As you say some one might interrupt—” No hospitality in the look he sent to the door. “Before you light it, have everything over there, ready to feed the fire.” His thin arms gathered up the store. Ky growled uneasily as Hildegarde drew near, the girl wondering what was best for Galbraith’s peace, what was of any avail.
He made a motion to give her all he held, but what he actually handed over was the torn crayon, and even in the act of giving up that he set one fragment against another, looking his last.
“Oh, keep it—let me keep it—for her. Could you bear to hear—”
But that mysterious arctic current, about which the greatest geographers are not agreed, it had carried him back again to the Pole! With vacant eyes on the colored paper, “We left him a feather for his ice-cap, didn’t we, Ky?”
“A feather.”
“Or a ribbon. Didn’t you see?”
“See—?”
“This. You didn’t notice we planted the stars and stripes there?”
“Oh-h. You see I thought you said no one was ever to know—”
“—and I carved a B. on the flagstaff. It was Borisoff’s snow-shoe staff. But the B.—it didn’t stand for Borisoff.”
“No?”
“No. The bamboo stood up there so light and slender—” Again the look that only one remembrance could bring into his eyes.
“It must have seemed like Bella upholding our country’s flag.”
His whole face warmed into smiling. The death shadows fled for that moment of his saying, “Had I told you her name? Yes, I brought the record cylinder away, and left there only something that would perish.”
“You make a fetish of that oath you swore!”
“It isn’t because of the oath. Why should I take an empty fame out of the world with me? Should I rest the better?”
“You think only of yourself. But there’s the gain to science. What right have you to deprive the world of that?”
He smiled. “You speak like a green girl, or like a newspaper. Forgive me! But you don’t realize. The gain to science is the by-product. The true gain is to the human soul. You don’t believe me? Read the most inspiring books ever written about the arctic.”
“Perhaps I have. Who wrote them?”
“Franklin, Greely, and De Long—the three who failed. Here’s to them!” He lifted up the cup, emptied it, and dropped it with a ringing of rusty tin, an eye cleared and preternaturally bright. “In the past it was all different, you know. Enough and to spare in the physical world to be conquered. But the things to be conquered in the future, do you know what they are?”
Voiceless she shook her head.
“Moral weakness and physical self-indulgence. In America we are all so comfortable we are all like to be damned!”
She could have wept aloud to hear the half-whimsical, half-delirious tone of the wreck upon the camp-bed deprecating comfort.
“If Borisoff had lived—I don’t know. But Borisoff is sleeping in the lee of that great shaft of Siberian pine, and I—if I know anything in the hereafter, I shall be glad that I left the hope behind me for other men.”
“Left it for some new Norse Viking maybe, or some sea-faring Briton. And America will never know—”
“’Sh. I’m not sure whether I’m more sorry that America shouldn’t know she was first at the goal, or whether I’m not more proud that it should be an American who wins the race and refrains from making the world resound with it. That it should be an American, after all, to do just that. One, too,”—he smiled with a curious sweetness,—“one as guilty of boasting as his brothers are. So you see I keep some spark of vanity to light me—out. Here!” He gathered the hoard in his arms an instant, and held it half-hidden under his beard.
But it seemed as hard for him to loose his arms from about his treasure as for a mother to part from her child.
Hildegarde made a tender, half-unconscious motion of protecting both the broken man and the toys his dying hands still clung to. But he, not comprehending, said faintly: “I’ve carried this little bundle of papers across the crown of the world to—to give it to a strange woman at last!”
“No, no.” She fell on her knees by the bed. “I am not strange! I am Hildegarde.”
His blazing eyes looked over her bowed head at the little heap among the blackened stones. “Here!” he whispered.
“What’s this?”
“A wind-match. Careful! there’s only one more.”
She rose unsteadily, with a sense of the utter uselessness of any help now for this man who had been Jack Galbraith. But as she struck the match, and the fire caught among the sticks, once more the life leaped up in the man. He sat erect, exultant, horrible to look upon, tearing the leaves of a book, holding them up in sheaves, and crying out: “Here, take the rest! I keep my word. I give the Kingdom back to the oldest of the gods!” And with that he fell together and lay with eyes hidden, breathing hoarsely.
When she saw that the last pages, not even smoldering any more, lay charred among the stones, she turned again to the bedside. Was he dead? A long time she stood there. What sound was that above the surf? Again the long shrilling note. She went to the door. Again! Of course; the steam whistle of theBeluga, calling the travelers back. And this other traveler, had heheard a call? Was he, too, gone home? With trembling knees she made her way back to the low bed. Again the strident sound. It set the nerves a-shake. Painfully the gaunt figure moved. It lifted up its face. It sent little-seeing eyes to the stony altar. They seemed to search among the ashes.
Again the wind bore over the water that harsh summons to be gone. “Everything is burned,” said the girl, and with a little strangled cry of “Bella! Bella!” Hildegarde buried her face in her hands, sobbing: “Oh, I think I was mad to help you. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
“I’m glad.”
She dropped her hands.
“Glad ... haven’t spoiled ... finest game in the world ... the men who come after. Don’t know—what they’ll do—when they’ve found it—but—hunting the Pole—will last them ... good while yet. Ky—won’t tell!”
Again theBeluga’spiercing call.
It carried Hildegarde to the door. Where was any counsel? Where was Cheviot? Ah, yes! From the heights behind the hut, he must have made the signal agreed on before leaving theBeluga. Hildegarde could see the small boat putting off now from the whaler. What was she to do? If, after Cheviot’s promise, there were delay, who could doubt the choleric captain would not scruple to leave his undesired passengers behind. Or if there were only threat of that—her father’s bewilderment and misery. What to do! As she turned her eyes away from the shining world without the door, her dazzled vision found only shadows in the hut. She had dreamed it all! No; that voice again: “—Still heels fourdegrees to starboard! One point? No; only a motion of the floe in azimuth. I tell you we’re locked fast.”
“Please listen. I’m Bella’s friend. I—oh, come back a moment.”
“Tell Borisoff—can’t hear with this infernal shrieking of the boulders. By the Lord!”—he raised himself on an elbow—“ten yards of this living, moving ice would hold Goliath back. And it’s sixty miles to the sea!”
She turned her wet face to the door again. The tossing boat out yonder seemed to go down before her eyes.
“Don’t let any one in!”
“No, no.” There it was again, like a toy boat dancing wildly before destruction.
“What I mind most,” the faint voice whispered, “is not holding out till—I got across to Alaska. All those months—all that sacrifice—all that suffering—and fail in such a little thing!”
“Why,” interrupted the girl, “why did you want to get to Alaska?”
“Why? I—I don’t seem to remember. There was a reason. But it’s too far.”
“You don’t mean—”
“I shall never get there now. Do you hear the music, Ky?”
“The music?”
“Screaming of the ptarmigan. Music to us, wasn’t it?” In a changed voice, rational, but weak: “I can’t see you, Ky.”
“She’s here, with me, at the door.”
“Then she’s dim as she used to be when she plodded on in front, wrapped in her cloud of frost-smoke.”
“Please try to listen. I—see the sailors bringing the little boat through the surf.”
“That’s easy. Let ’em try the ice!”
“They’re coming for me.”
“You—you?”
“You don’t remember.”
“Yes, I do.”
“I am—”
“Ky’s friend. Thank you.” Feebly he put out his hand. But he would have drawn it back, if hers had not closed trembling over it.
“Oh, Jack! Jack!” she cried to herself, conscious of an anguished impulse to hide the marred hands in her breast to see if pity might not heal them!
“I think whatever comes of it,” she said brokenly, “I mustn’t go.”
The glazed eyes looked at her in faint wonder.
“Because I am Hildegarde.”
“That wasn’t her name.”
“No, no. I amHildegarde Mar.”
“A nice name.”
“But you’ve heard it before.”
“Hildegarde—?” The faintest motion of the wild head making “No.”
“Yes, yes.” She was on her knees by the bed. “My father was your friend. My father is Nathaniel Mar.”
He said nothing for a moment. She thought he was trying to coördinate the memories her words recalled. But when he spoke it was to say, “No one must know but Bella—only Bella in all the world.”
“Only Bella,” said the girl, and rose upright. But through her tears she saw that his lips still moved.
“Will you—” he whispered. She bent down again to catch the words. “Will you stand at the door—till the boat is beached?”
Hoping, with a catch at the heart, that old association dimly stirred by the name Mar had brought him some warmth of her presence in this chill hour, she tried to find a voice to ask why he wanted her to wait those few poor minutes at the door. But she had no need to put the question. His eyes made answer, trying to follow Ky, as the dog left the threshold and went with her slow, halting gait, aimless, half across the little strip of tundra to the sea.
“Don’t say—anything to me. And don’t”—the wild face twitched with pain—“don’t look at me. Just—stand there, with Ky—till the boat’s ready. And when you go—don’t speak.” Again the dimming eyes sought on the tundra for that vague shadow that was his fellow-explorer and his friend. “I shall watch you, Ky—till the whaler—takes you—South.”
As Hildegarde, bending lower, tried to form speech with her quivering lips, “No,” he whispered. “You’ve done—all—you—can. All, but this last thing. I’d like—to see her as long as ever—But don’t speak, and—don’t—look—back.”
His eyes went past the girl, went straining after the dog, as though Ky were in truth as dim to-day as on that gray morning when he saw her first, standing in front of the pack, wrapped in mist, nose to the north, waiting for him “up yonder” by the Kara shore.
Out there, on the tundra edge again, the great explorer, Ky, stood like some old coastguard reading the signs of the sea.
Behind, at the door of the hut, Hildegarde Mar. But though the girl, too, looked straight across the surf, toward the islands named for those in the Adriatic afterthe Argive king, what she saw was not the nearer Diomede and not the little boat fighting its way through the surf; not even her lover running along the shore and looking among the high-piled rocks; not John Galbraith, dying behind her there in the shadow. Clearer than if she’d held it in her hand, she saw the colored crayon sketch that lay charred among the ashes. So it was like that!—the terrible, beautiful place that would still go luring men with its lying legend on all the maps, crying out in every tongue in Europe—
UNEXPLORED REGION!
COME AND FIND ME!