THE LAST EXPEDITION
SUPPOSE that you see Captain Arthur Magellison, late of His Majesty’s Royal Navy, with the eyes of the writer’s remembrance, as a thick-set, fair man of middle height, neat in appearance and alert in bearing. His skin was a curious bleached bronze, and his wide-pupilled pale gray eyes, netted about with close, fine wrinkles, had looked on the awful desolation of the Arctic until something of its loneliness and terror had sunk into them and stamped itself upon the man’s brain, never to be effaced, or so it seemed to me. For his wife, once the marble Miss Dycehurst, who had not married a semi-Celebrity for nothing, took her husband much with her into London Society, and at gossipy dinner-tables and in crowded drawing-rooms; on the Lawn at Ascot and in a box on the Grand Stand at Doncaster, as on a Henley houseboat, and during a polo tournament at Ranelagh, I have seen Magellison, to all appearance perfectly oblivious of the gay and giddy world about him, sitting, or standing with folded arms and bent head, and staring out with fixed and watchful eyes, over Heaven knows what illimitable wastes of snow-covered land or frozen ocean....
I have described Captain Arthur Magellison as a semi-Celebrity. Erstwhile Commander of the Third-class Armored DestroyerSidonia, he became, after his severance from the Royal Navy, and by reason of the adventures and hardships by him undergone as leader of the Scottish Alaskan Coastal Survey Expedition of 1906-1908,something of a hero. A series of lectures, delivered at the Edinburgh Hall of Science, in the course of which the explorer, by verbal descriptions as well as cinematographic effects, completely disposed of the theory regarding the existence of a range of active volcanoes to the north of Alaska, previously accepted by the illuminati, made a sensation among scientists, and induced, in the case of Sir Jedbury Fargoe, F.R.G.S., M.R.I., a rush of blood to the cerebrum, followed by the breaking out of a Funeral Hatchment over his front door, a procession in slow time, with wreaths, palls, and feathers, and a final exitpertrolley into the Furnace at Croking Crematorium.
The Public, never having bothered about the volcanoes, remained unmoved by the intelligence of their non-existence, but the Professors and the Press shed much ink upon the subject. Upon a wave of which sable fluid Captain Arthur Magellison was borne, if not into the inner court, at least into the vestibule of the Temple of Fame. Then the wave, as is the way of waves, receded; leaving Magellison, by virtue of certain researches and discoveries in Natural History, Botany and Physiology, a Member of the Royal Institution, Associate of the Zoological Society, Fellow of the Institute of Ethnology, and the husband of the marble Miss Dycehurst.
Never was a more appropriate sobriquet bestowed. Down in Clayshire, her native county, the statuesque Geraldine, orphan heiress of a wealthy landholder not remotely connected with the Brewing interests of his native isle, dispensed, under the protective auspices of a maternal aunt of good family—Miss Dycehurst’s mother’s deceased papa had wedded a portionless spinster of noble blood—dispensed, I say, a lavish but stonyhospitality. In London she went out a great deal, looking like a sculptured Minerva of the Græco-Latin school,minusthe helmet butplusa tower of astonishing golden hair, received proposals from Eligibles and Ineligibles, petrified their makers with a single stare, and proceeded upon her marmorean way in maiden meditation, fancy free. Until she attended that series of lectures, delivered at the Edinburgh Hall of Science by the eminent Arctic Explorer, Captain Arthur Magellison.
Society in Clayshire and Society in London expressed ardent curiosity to know how the engagement had been brought about? All that is known for certain is, that after the lecture, when the Explorer held a little reception in a draughty enclosure of green baize screens, Miss Dycehurst, looking rather like a mythical goddess of the Polar Regions, her frosty beauty crowned with its diadem of pale golden hair, and her fine shape revealed in greenish-blue, icily-gleaming draperies, asked a local magnate to present the lecturer, and met him at a public dinner given in his honor upon the following night. Later on in London, where the lecture was, by invitation of the learned heads of the nation, repeated, Miss Dycehurst with a large party occupied the second row of stalls. Later still, Magellison dined with the heiress at 000, Chesterfield Crescent, her town address, and later still the couple were Hanover-Squared into one flesh. It was in May, and the sacred edifice was garlanded with white Rambler roses and adorned with lilies and smilax and palms. A Bishop tied the knot, and the choir rendered the anthem with exquisite effect, as well as “Fight the Good Fight� and “The Voice that Breathed——.� And the Bride, in dead white, with a swansdown train and a Malines veil, and ropes of pearls and brilliants, and a crown of diamond spikes that might have beensparkling icicles, gleaming and scintillating on the summit of her wonderful tower of hair, looked more like the Lady of the Eternal Snows than ever.
No one knew whether the Magellisons’ married life was happy or the other thing. Suffice it, as the popular three-volume novelist used to say when not compelled to pad, that, to all outward seeming, the couple agreed. But I think that when the high tide of Fame receded (as during 1909, when the thrilling adventures of the dauntless explorer, Blank, were electrifying the newspaper-reading world, it certainly did, leaving nothing but a vague halo of heroism and adventure hanging about the name of Magellison, and a sedimentary deposit of honorary letters at the tail of it) the woman who had married Magellison knew disillusion. As for Magellison, he had always been a silent, absorbed and solitary man. And that strange look in those wide-pupilled pale gray eyes of his, the eyes of one who has lived through the half-year-long twilight of Arctic nights, and seen the ringed moon with her mock moons glimmer through the ghostly frost-fog, and the pale pink curving feathers of the Aurora Borealis stream across the ice-blue sky, and the awful crimson of the Polar Day rush up beyond the floe and strike the icy loneliness into new beauty and new terror—never changed. Perhaps, in discovering the true nature of his Geraldine, the Explorer found himself traversing a colder and more rugged desert than he had encountered when he led the Scottish-Northumbrian Polar Expedition in quest of those volcanic ranges proved to be non-existent—in Alaska to the North.
I believe he really loved the woman he had married. I know that, while he acted as the unpaid steward of her estates, he spent nothing beyond his half-pay, eked out by articles which he wrote now and then for the kind ofScientific Review that rewards the contributor with ten shillings per page of one thousand words,plusthe honor of having contributed. In his own houses—his wife’s, I should say—he was a pathetic nonentity. At 000 Chesterfield Crescent, and at Edengates in Clayshire, the recent Miss Dycehurst’s country seat, he hugged his own rooms, about which, arranged in cases and hung upon the walls, were disposed native weapons, stuffed birds, geological specimens, dried algæ, water-color sketches, and such trophies of the Survey Expedition as had not been presented by Magellison to needy museums. When his name appeared in newspaper-paragraphs as the writer of one of the articles referred to, or as the donor of such a gift, his wife would pluck him from his beloved solitude, and compel him to tread the social round with her. But as the slow years crept on, the man himself, long before the ebbing tide of Fame left a desolate stretch of seaweedy mud where its waters had heaved and whispered, was so rarely seen, in his wife’s company or out of it, that her all-but-newest friends believed Mrs. Arthur Magellison to be the wife of an incurable invalid, and the most recent were convinced that she was a widow. Proposals of marriage were sometimes made to the lady, who by the way was handsomer and stonier than ever, by Eligibles or Ineligibles laboring under this conviction.
“I am extremely sensible of the honor you have done me,� said Mrs. Magellison upon one of these occasions, “but as a fact, my husband is alive. Which relieves me of the necessity—don’t you think?—of coming to a decision!�
The man who had proposed, a barely middle-aged, extremely good-looking, well-made, well-bred Hawting-Holliday of Hirlmere, sufficiently endowed with ancient,if embarrassed, acres, and a sixteenth-century Baronetcy, to have tempted the marble Geraldine, had her frosty hand been disengaged, to its bestowal on him, was, though impecunious enough to be strongly attracted by the lady’s wealth, yet honestly enamored of her sculpturesque person. Consequently as the final syllable of the foregoing utterance fell from the lady’s lips, he assumed, for a fleeting instant or so, the rosy complexion of early adolescence, and stared upon the conquering Geraldine with blank and circular eyes. Then he said:
“By—Jove! that does let me out, doesn’t it? My dear lady, I entreat you to consider me as prostrate in humiliation at your feet. With�—he felt over the surface of an admirably thought-out waistcoat for his eyeglass, which was still in his eye—“with sackcloth and ashes, and all the appropriate trimmings. Let me retrieve my character in your eyes by saying, that if it—ahem!—gives you any gratification to have a live husband at this juncture—I will endeavor to share the sentiment. But you really have run him as a Dark Horse, now haven’t you?�
He lifted his eyebrows in interrogation, and the eyeglass leaped into the folds of his well-chosen cravat, the kind of subdued yet hopeful thing in shades a man of taste and brains would put on to propose in.
“My dear Sir Robert,� Mrs. Magellison said, in well-chosen language and with an icy little smile, “I am not an adept in the use of sporting phraseology. Captain Magellison is of studious habits, retiring nature, and—shall I say?—an indolent disposition. It would not very well become me if I insisted on his society when he is not disposed to bestow it upon me, and therefore I generally go out alone. When, unless I give a formal dinner, upon which an occasion my husband must necessarilytake his place at the other end of the board—when I entertain intimates——�
“You put your people at a round table,� said Hawting-Holliday of Hirlmere. “And a round table is the very deuce—and—all for obliterating a husband!� He found his eyeglass and screwed it firmly in.
“I do not altogether blame the table,� said Mrs. Magellison coldly. “Because, upon nine occasions out of ten my husband prefers a cutlet in his rooms. Pray do not suppose that I find fault with the preference. He is not by nature sociable, as I have said, and prefers to follow, at Edengates and in Scotland and in Paris, as well as here in town, his own peculiar bent. And what that is you are probably aware?� She turned her head with a superb movement, and her helmet of pale hair gleamed in the wintry sunshine that streamed through the lace blinds of the Chesterfield Crescent drawing-room.
“I had a general idea,� said the man she addressed, who, hampered in early life by the fact of being born a Hawting-Holliday of Hirlmere, had not succeeded in being anything else, “that the late—I beg your pardon!—the present Captain Magellison was—I should say is—a Scientific Buffer—of sorts!�
Mrs. Magellison smiled coldly and rose.
“The term you employ is slang, of course,� she said, “but it is quite appropriate and really descriptive. My husband was once a famous man, he is now a Scientific Buffer—and as you say—of sorts. Would you like to see him?�
She moved to the drawing-room door and turned her head with another fine movement, and Hawting-Holliday’s eclectic taste was charmed with the sculpturesque pose. He followed her and they crossed a landing, andMrs. Magellison knocked at the door of one of a suite of rooms that had been thrown out over what had been a back-yard. And as nobody said “Come in,� she entered, followed by the visitor.
The room was long, carpeted but uncurtained, and lighted by that most depressing of all forms of illumination, a skylight. Dwarf bookcases ran round it, and the walls were covered with frames and glass cases, primitive weapons, and a multitude of quaint and curious things. There was a low couch, covered with seal skins and feather rugs, and a leather writing-chair was set at the table, which had on it a fine microscope and many scientific instruments, of which the uses were unknown to the head of the Hawting-Hollidays of Hirlmere. Piles of dusty papers there were, and a couple of battered ship’s logs, stained and discolored by sea-water and grease. And in the writing-chair, with his feet on a magnificent Polar bear-skin and the receiver of a telephone at his ear, sat the Scientific Buffer of sorts, staring fixedly before him, apparently over an illimitable waste of frozen drift-ice covering uncharted Polar seas.
“Arthur!� said Mrs. Magellison, with a cold kind of impatience, rattling the handle of the door as if to attract his attention. He came back with a start and hung up the receiver, and rose. He had a simple, courteous manner that won upon the suitor who had just proposed to his wife; and oddly enough, the appearance of a servant with a message that summoned the lady to an interview with hermodistewas not greatly regretted by Hawting-Holliday.
“I have seen you before, of course,� said his host, making him free of a rack of Esquimaux pipes and pushing over a jar of Navy-cut.
“Have you though?� rose to the visitor’s lips, but the words were not allowed to escape. Looking round he saw that there were piles of receipted accounts, and orderly piles of tradesmen’s books upon the table with the reams of dusty MSS., and as servants came in for orders and went away instructed, and messages were telephoned to various purveyors, Hawting-Holliday arrived at the conclusion that Mrs. Magellison’s husband was regarded less in that capacity by Mrs. Magellison and her household than as major-domo, head-bailiff and house-steward.
The two men chatted a little, and presently one spoke while the other listened. The capacity for hero-worship is quick in every generous nature, and the extravagant, impoverished, high-bred county gentleman and man-about-town was conscious that this modest, absent-minded little ex-naval Commander was of the stuff that went to build great heroes. Franklin and Nansen were brothers to this man, and that the justly-honored names of Shackleton and Peary, and the cognomen of Cook (King of terminological inexactitudinarians), were hot upon the public’s mouths just then, mattered nothing to Hawting-Holliday, as he heard how in the year of Our Lord Nineteen Hundred and Six, ten men sailed from San Francisco for Bering Sea on board a sixty-ton schooner, to settle the question of the existence of Undiscovered Ranges of Volcanic Origin in Alaska to the North. And how great storms and awful blizzards hindered the Coastal Survey Expedition, and sickness crippled its members, yet they struggled gamely on.
“Good God!� said Hawting-Holliday, whose pipe had long since gone out. He heard next how the Expedition suffered the loss of their ship and all their stores, and how their leader sent his crew home by a passing whaler and, for the enlargement of his own experience, chose to journey back to civilization along the Alaskan coast, three thousand miles of solitary sledge-traveling, aided only by the Esquimaux he chanced on in his terrible journey. And as he went on narrating in his calm and even voice, enforcing a point by a modest gesture of the hand that had lost the top-joints of the first and second fingers, and sometimes looking through and beyond the face of the listener with those strange, sorrowful, far-away eyes, what he related the other man saw, and——
“Good Lord!� said Hawting-Holliday again, “what an Odyssey the whole thing is! And so you got back to Ithaca after eighteen months of tramping it on your lonesome along a frozen coast and sleeping in holes dug in the snow, and living on blubber and seal-meat or boiled skin-boots when you couldn’t get anything else; and gathering knowledge and experience when there wasn’t even reindeer moss to scrape off the rocks!� He got up and held out his hand. “As a perfectly useless and idle kind of beggar, I don’t know that my sincere admiration and respect are worth having, Captain, but if they were!——�
He gulped, and went, quite clumsily, away, but came back again, and so a friendship grew between the “perfectly useless and idle kind of beggar,� Hawting-Holliday, and the hero of the three-thousand-mile tramp back to Civilization. Perhaps Hawting-Holliday had really never been seriously attached to the handsome piece of statuary that bore Magellison’s name. It is certain thather cold neglect and open contempt of her husband eventually kindled the wrath of Magellison’s newly-won champion to boiling-point. Not that the Captain gave any perceptible sign of suffering under the icy blizzard of his wife’s scorn. Endurance was the lesson he had learned best of all, and he agreed with her in regarding himself as a Failure.
“A beautiful and gifted woman has a right to be ambitious for the man she marries,� he said once to Hawting-Holliday. “And if he has no power to keep at high-level, if he makes no more way than a schooner frozen in the floe, it is natural that she should feel keenly disappointed and—and manifest the feeling by a—a certain change of attitude as regards him.�
“The schooner may be frozen in the floe, Captain,� said Hawting-Holliday, lounging in the window-seat of the Captain’s big, bare room at Edengates, that was—only barring the skylight—exactly like the Captain’s other big bare room at 000, Chesterfield Crescent. “But the floe is traveling all the time. That’s a bit of scientific information that I got from you. And I rather pride myself on applying it neatly.�
The Captain looked hard at him, and Hawting-Holliday noticed for the first time that the curly fair hair that topped the deep-lined pale-bronze face was growing white. Then Magellison said, with a queer smile:
“You have found me out, I see! And yet I thought I had kept the secret—or rather, the arrangement, quite closely. But on the whole I’m rather glad you guessed. For I like you, young man�—Hawting-Holliday was at least thirty-five—“and I shall give you the parting hand-shake with sincere regret—with very sincere regret, when the ice breaks up and the little engine helps the hoisted sails, and the floe-bound vessel that neverreally stopped, although her journey was only of inches in the month—moves on not North but South, along the thawed and open sea-lanes——�
He stopped, for Hawting-Holliday dropped his pipe and got off the window-seat, and caught the maimed right hand and wrung it until its owner winced.
“You gave me credit for too much perspicuity, Captain. I hadn’t seen as much as the cat’s tail until you let her out of the bag. Where are you going, man, and when do you go?�
Briefly, Magellison told him.
“All right, Captain,� said Hawting-Holliday. “You’re going to take charge of the Steam and Sail Antarctic Geological Research Expedition, financed by the Swedish Government, sailing from Plymouth for King Edward Land in April, so as to get the summer months of December, January, and February for exploration, botanizing, deep-sea-dredging, and scientific observations. You calculate on being away not quite three years. Very well, but remember this! If you don’t turn up in three years’ time and no definite news has reached us as to your whereabouts, the most useless and idle dog of my acquaintance—and that’s myself—will take the liberty to come and look for you. I swear it—by the Great Barrier and the Blue Antarctic Ooze!�
They shook hands upon it, laughing at the humorous idea of the Captain’s not coming back, and a little later the news of her husband’s impending departure was imparted,perthe medium of the Press, to the marmorean lady to whom the explorer had frozen himself some few years previously. She was radiant with smiles at the revival of newspaper interest in Magellison, and postponed her spring visit to the Riviera for the purpose of giving a series of Departure Dinners in honor of theCaptain. All the leading scientific lights of the day twinkled in turn about the board. And Geraldine wore all her diamonds, and was exceedingly gracious to her Distinguished Man. She saw him off from Plymouth, one balmy April day, and shed a few discreet tears in a minute and filmy pocket handkerchief as the Swedish oak-built, schooner-rigged steamship-sailerSelmaran up the Swedish colors and curtsied adieu to English waters at the outset of the long South Atlantic voyage, and the petrol steam-launch containing the friends and relatives of the Expedition rocked in her wake, and the red-eyed people crowding on the oily-smelling little vessel’s decks raised a quavering farewell cheer. Two men stood together at theSelma’safter-rail: a short, square man of muscular build, with a slight stoop that told of scholarly habits, and thick, fair hair, streaked with white, and a deeply-lined, clean-shaven face, with pale, far-seeing eyes that were set in a network of fine wrinkles. The other man was Hawting-Holliday, who had announced his intention, at the last minute, of accompanying the Expedition as far as Madeira for the sake of the sea-blow.
“Tell Geraldine I shall mail home from the Cape and Melbourne,� the leader of the Expedition said, three days later, as the boat that was to convey Hawting-Holliday ashore bobbed under theSelma’sside-ladder in a clamoring rout of tradesmen’s luggers and Funchal market-flats. “Tell her I shall certainly communicate from Lyttelton, and after that she must trust to luck and homeward-bound whalers for news of me.� He wrung Hawting-Holliday’s hand, and added, “And in case—anything should happen to me—not that such a chance is worth speaking of!—I know that I can rely upon you to act towards my—my dear girl as a friend!�The Captain’s voice shook a little, and a mist was over those clear, wide-pupilled, far-away-gazing gray eyes.
“I promise you that, faithfully,� said Hawting-Holliday, and gripped the maimed right hand of the man he loved as a brother, and went down over the side of theSelmawith a sore heart.
That was in April, 1910, and news of the loss of theSelma, in the ice of the Antarctic Circle was cabled from Honolulu at the beginning of last month. An American Antarctic Expedition, having concluded a mission of exploration in the summer season of 1910, finding upon the coast of King Edward Land the few survivors of the Swedish Steam and Sail Antarctic Research Expedition making preparations to winter in a wooden hut built out of the wreckage of their teak-built sailing-steamer—rescued and carried them on their homeward route. The saved men, later interviewed at San Francisco, were unable to give news of their leader, save that the Captain, taking a dog-sledge and a little stock of provisions and instruments, and a hearty leave of all of them, turned that lined bronze face of his and those eyes with the far-away look in their wide pupils, to the dim, mysterious, uncharted regions lying South, in the lap of the mysterious Unknown, and with a wave of a fur-gloved hand, was lost in them.
“He is dead, Arthur is dead!� moaned Geraldine Magellison, in the depths of conjugal anguish and a lace-covered sofa-cushion, when the Press and Hawting-Holliday broke the news between them. “Dead!—and I loved him so—I loved him so!�
“It is a pity, under the circumstances,� said Hawting-Holliday, carrying out his promise of being a friend to Magellison’s wife by telling that wife the truth, “thatyou were so economical in your expressions of affection. For I do not think that when the Captain left you he had any remaining illusions as to the nature of your regard for him.�
“How cruel you are—how cruel!� gasped Geraldine, as her maid bore in a salver piled with the regrets of Learned Societies and the sympathy of distinguished Personages and private friends.
“Let me for once use the trite and hackneyed saying that I am cruel only to be kind!� said Hawting-Holliday, emphatically, “and that I speak solely in the interests of—a friend whom I love.�
Mrs. Magellison flushed to the roots of her superb golden hair, and consciously drooped her scarcely-reddened eyelids as she held up a protesting hand.
“No, no, Sir Robert!� she pleaded. “If I—as you infer—have gravely erred in lack of warmth toward poor, poor, dearest Arthur! let me at least be ungrudging in respect of his great memory. Forget what you have said, carried away by a feeling which in honor you subdued after the rude awakening of many months ago, and do not revert to—the subject for—forat leasta year to come!�
At that Hawting-Holliday got upon his legs, and thrusting his hands deep into his trouser-pockets, made the one and only harangue of his existence.
“Mrs. Magellison, when you suggest that in the very hour when the intelligence of grave disaster to your husband’s vessel has reached us, I am capable of addressing you in what the poetic faculty term—Heaven knows how idiotically and falsely!—the language of love,yougravely err. The friend in whose interests I spoke just now, was—your husband.Isyour husband—for I do not accept by any means the theory that because he hasbeen lost sight of, he is dead. I believe him to be living. I shall go on believing this until I see his body, or meet with some relics of him that supply me—his friend!—with the evidence that you, his wife, are so uncommonly ready to dispense with.�
His eyes burned her with their contempt. She gasped:
“You—you mean that you are going South to try and find him?�
“You comprehend my meaning perfectly,� said Hawting-Holliday, and bowed to Mrs. Magellison with ironical deference and left her.
He was, though not a wealthy man, far from being a poor one. He chartered a stout vessel that was lying in Liverpool Docks, the Iceland Coast Survey Company’s steam-and-sail schoonerSnowbird, and equipped and provisioned and manned her with a speed and thoroughness that are seldom found in combination. TheSnowbird’sown skipper goes in charge of his ship, but Hawting-Holliday is the Leader of the Expedition.
And yesterday theSnowbirdsailed, in search of that man who has been swallowed up by the great Conjecture. And of this I am sure, that whether Hawting-Holliday succeeds or fails, lives or dies, he will grasp the hand of his friend again Somewhere. Either upon this side of the Great Gray Veil that hangs in the doorway of the Smoky House, or upon the other....
THE END