Part 21

“I won’t go so far as to say that he would not have done something desperate,” continued the man who was telling the story, “had not Mariette--who may or may not have suspected that things were getting to a desperate pitch--appeared upon the scene. ‘Poor lamb! thou art in despair’--thus she addressed Shelmadine in the affectionate idiom with which her native language abounds--‘confide in Mariette, who alone can restore the silhouette that seems for ever lost to thee. Seems only, Monsieur; for at the bidding of me, myself, it will return. A little condition is attached to the recovery of thy figure, my child--not to be carried out if I cannot be as good as my word. _Passe moi la casse, je te passerai le séné._ All I want, Monsieur, is senna for my rhubarb--your written promise to marry Mariette Duchâtel, daughter of Marius Duchâtel, druggist of Geneva, if within three months you recover your beautiful figure. What do you say? Is it a bargain? Will you be fat and free, or slim and no longer single? Speak, then! You agree? _Pour sûr!_ I thought you would!’”

“And did he marry his lady’s-maid?” asked the listening man quite eagerly.

“He did not,” said the teller of the tale, “though he was very near it. Fortunately for Shelmadine, the girl he had met on the Dolomittenweg Promenade stepped in. She was an American, original, independent, and determined. When Shelmadine wrote--on Ordnance Office paper--to her in Paris, saying that Fate had stepped in between them, and that she never could be his, she asked the reason why. Not getting a satisfactory answer, she ran over to London to see for herself ... bringing her mother--a vast person, who wore a diamond tiara, mittens, and diamond shoulder-straps in the evening, and carried them in a hip-bag by day--with her.”

“The American mother is an appendage,” said the listener, “rather than a necessity.”

“The sight of Shelmadine, who had expanded like a balloon in the filling-shed since the happy days at Klümpenstein, was to Miss Van Kyper--Miss Mamie Van Kyper was her complete name,” went on the man who had been called Bonson--“an undoubted shock.”

“Of course,” agreed the man who was being told the story.

“They met at the Carlton Hotel, where she had engaged a suite of reception-rooms for the interview.”

“Not being quite certain whether one would hold Shelmadine?” suggested the other.

“And the matter was thrashed out satisfactorily in five minutes, where an English girl would have taken five weeks. ‘I guess there’s a good deal more of you than ever either of us expected there would be,’ said Mamie; ‘but I’ve got to choose between having too much of the man I love, or nothing at all. And it seems mighty unreasonable--when I felt plum-sure at Klümpenstein that I could never have enough of you--that I should be miserable here in London because there happens to be a good deal more than there was then.’ With a gush of warm and affectionate devotion she twined her arms as far round Shelmadine as they would go, and he, in accepting the fate that made him the husband of Miss Mamie Van Kyper, renounced his silhouette for ever!”

“But you said he got it back again!” said the second man.

“He has,” said the first man.

“Without the assistance of Mariette Duchâtel, daughter of Marius Duchâtel, herbalist, of Geneva?” queried the second man.

“Mariette,” said the first man, “on finding Shelmadine indisposed to accept her offer, first attempted to commit suicide in a cistern; then threw up the sponge and made a clean breast of everything. A peculiar vegetable preparation, the secret of which she had had from her father, the herbalist of Geneva, administered in Shelmadine’s food, had caused the extraordinary accumulation of adipose tissue. The antidote, which she had promised to administer in the intervals of her own designs on my poor friend’s freedom, she confided to him, with bitter tears and many entreaties for forgiveness, before she went out of the Bond Street flat and Shelmadine’s life for ever.”

“He married Miss Van Kyper immediately. He has an Assistant-Principal clerkship at the Ordnance Office; he has recovered his silhouette, but he no longer cares for clothes. You could scare rooks with him as he dresses now. Fact!”

“Facts are confoundedly rummy things!” said the man who had been told the story.

A NOCTURNE

“You look,” He said nastily, as She raised her disheveled _coiffure_ and tear-blurred features from the center of a large muslin-flounced and covered cushion that sat at the end of the lounge that opened like a box, and held frilled petticoats--“you look like a wilted prize chrysanthemum.”

She mechanically put up one hand to drive home deserting hairpins into the mass of hair He had, in the lyrical days of early passion, celebrated as Corinthian gold-bronze, in a halting sonnet of which he was now profoundly ashamed. Stifling the recurrent hiccough that accompanies a liberal effusion of tears, she stared at him blankly.

A silver timepiece, a wedding present from His mother, who had objected to the match, struck the midnight hour. The thin sound of the last stroke, spun into tenuity by silence, died, and the clanking, hooting, nerve-shattering scurry of racing motor-buses went by like a wild hunt of iron-shackled fiends. A private car passed with its exhaust wailing like an exiled banshee, a belated hansom or two bowled along the sloppy asphalt, the raucous screech of a constable-defying nymph of the pavement rent the muggy air. He hardly heard it; he had been agreeing with his mother ever since the clock had struck. To-morrow he would go and look in at 000, Sloane Street, and tell her that she had always known best. In imagination he was telling her so, when the sable-bordered tail of a dove-colored Indian cashmere dressing gown he had worshiped during the honeymoon swept across the feuille-rose carpet in the direction of the boudoir; Sada Yacco and Abé San, snub-nosed, blue-and-pink-bowed canine causes of the conjugal quarrel, joyously yelping in its wake.

“Aren’t you going to bed?” He demanded.

“You did not seem inclined to go to your dressing-room,” She returned with point, “and as I have to write an important letter, I may as well do it now!”

He knew that the letter would be addressed to Her mother, who had also objected to the match, and would contain a daughter’s testimony to the correctness of the maternal judgment. Sada Yacco and Abé San, sitting on their haunches, with their pink tongues lolling, looked as though they knew it too. How he loathed those Japanese pugs! As he glared at them she gathered them up, one under each arm, protectingly.

“Don’t be afraid!” He said, with the kind of laugh described by the popular novelist as grating; “I am not going to murder the little brutes, after paying thirty pounds for the pair.” This was a touch of practical economy that made Her lip curl. “What I say is, I decline to have those animals galloping over me in the middle of the night.”

“It is the middle of the night now,” She said, concealing a yawn behind three fingers--his wedding ring and keeper upon one--“and they are not galloping over you. Men are supposed to be more logical than women. I have often wondered why since last May.”

“We were married in May,” He said, folding his arms after a method much in favor with the popular novelist when heroes are grim.

“It seems,” She said, rather drearily, “a long time ago.”

“If I had told you last May,” He retorted, “that I object to wake in the middle of the night with one Japanese pug snorting upon my--ah--my chest, and the other usurping the greater part of my pillow, you would have sympathized with my feeling, understood the objection, and relegated Sada Yacco and Abé San to their comfortable basket in the corner of the kitchen--or anywhere else,” he added hurriedly, seeing thievish early errand-boys on the tip of her tongue, “except your bedroom!”

The popular novelist would have described her pose as “sculpturesque,” her expression as “fateful,” and her tone as “icy,” as She said:

“The bedroom being mine, perhaps you will permit me to remind you that you possess one of your own, and that it is nearly one o’clock!”

It was, in fact, a quarter-past twelve. But the door closed behind Him with such a terrific bang that the thready little utterance of the silver timepiece was completely unnoticed.

She put her hand to her throat, as a leading actress invariably does in moments of great mental stress, and uttered a choking little laugh of sorrow and bitterness. Men were really like this, then! Fool, oh, fool, to doubt! Had she not read, had she not seen, had not other women whispered?... And had her mother not plainly told her that this man--now her husband!--was more like other men than any of the other men resembled others? She sobbed a few sobs, dried her eyes, and prepared for bed. But when arrayed in white samite, mystic and wonderful, with the traces of tears effaced by perfumed hot water, the pinkness of nose and eyelids ameliorated by a dab or two of powder, the gold-brown tresses He had once sonneted, and now sneered at, brushed out and beautiful, she took up the double basket owned by Sada Yacco and Abé San, placed it in the boudoir, returned for the canine couple, deposited them inside it, and then, resolutely shutting the door of communication upon their astonished countenances, got into bed, cast one indifferent glance at the twin couch adjoining, shrugged her shoulders, and switched off the light.

“S’n’ff!”

That was Abé San snuffing inquiringly at the bottom of the door. Sada Yacco joined him, and they snuffed together. It was impossible to sleep, especially when they began to discuss the situation in whimpers and short yelps. Then they began to race round the boudoir, barking in whimpers. Then, just as She had made up her mind to buy peace by letting them in, there was a sharp bark from Sada Yacco, a joyous scrape at a distant door, and a rattling of claws as the couple, emancipated from vile durance in the boudoir, joyously galloped down the passage. Then sleep soporifically stole over the senses of a wronged and brutally injured woman. It was not chilly, sloppy December: it was radiant July. She was not in a London flat. She was in a well-known back-water above Goring-on-Thames, cosy in a red-curtained punt, with a Japanese umbrella and two Japanese pugs and a husband, very handsome, almost quite new, madly devoted, not the quite plain, absolutely sulky, unspeakably disagreeable He now conjecturally snoring on the opposite side of the passage. And so She slept and dreamed.

He was not asleep. Propped up in his own beautiful little bed in his own cosy dressing-room, he was smoking a long cigar, and, as a further demonstration of bachelor independence, a brandy and Apollinaris stood untouched beside him. By the electric light dangling over his head, where sardonically hung suspended a wooden Cupid--ha, ha!--he was perusing a book. She objected to reading in bed, that was why--ha, ha! again. The thin-paper volume, supposed to be an enlightening work on Oval Billiards, proved, by a tricky freak of Fate, to be an English translation of _Thus Spake Zarathustra_. This is what he read:

“Calm is the bottom of my sea: Who would divine that it hideth droll monsters? Unmoved is my depth, yet it sparkleth with swimming enigmas and laughters. An imposing One saw I to-day--a solemn One, a penitent of the Spirit.... Should he become weary of his imposingness, this imposing one....”

There came a scratch at the bottom of the door, a snuffling sound, and a sneeze he knew well. What did Abé San straying about draughty passages by night? But it was no business of his. Let the beast’s owner see to it. He read on:

“Gracefulness belongeth to the generosity of the magnanimous.”

Sada Yacco had joined her lord. Together they burrowed, mutually they snuffed. It was not to be borne. He got up and opened the door. Sada Yacco and Abé San rushed in, their tongues lolling, their eyes bulging with curiosity, and, after a brief excursion round the apartment, which they found small, fawned upon him with a sickening devotion. He scowled on the small black-and-white silky handfuls. Then he yielded to the impulse that plucked at his maxillary muscles and grinned. The little brutes were so painfully sorry for him. They were so clearly under the impression that he was in disgrace.

He got back into bed, and lay there, grinning still, if unwillingly. Sada Yacco, with the forwardness of her sex, scrambled up and sat upon him. Abé San scratched at the coverlet imploringly, until, hoisted upward by the scruff, he, too, gained the desired haven. They had plainly come to stay, so He resigned himself with a sigh, switched off the electric light, and fell asleep before Abé San had turned round the regulation number of times.

Meanwhile She, wakened by the toot of a belated motor-taxi, began to wonder whither the Japanese couple had strayed. Urged and wearied by the unbroken silence, she rose, arrayed herself in her dressing gown, armed herself with a lighted wax taper in a silver candlestick--another wedding present--and began a tour of discovery. The pugs had vanished. Had the maids yielded to their entreaties and taken them in? She listened at two doors; the steady snoring of the sleepers within was unmingled with snort or slumbering whimper of Sada and her mate. Then, returning, she noticed that His dressing-room door was open.

Taper in hand, She went in. He was sound asleep, Sada Yacco sweetly slumbering on the surface covered by daylight with a waistcoat, Abé San curled up, a floss-silk ball, on the pillow by his ear. If he had seen her eyes as she bent over him, shading the light, he would have regained his old opinion of them in the twinkling of the tear She dropped upon His cheek.

Don’t say there are no such things as guardian angels. His woke him up just as She kissed him--the kiss was so light it would not have wakened him by itself.

THE LAST EXPEDITION

I

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 Destroyer _Sidonia_, 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 exit _per_ trolley 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 stony hospitality. In London she went out a great deal, looking like a sculptured Minerva of the Græco-Latin school, _minus_ the helmet but _plus_ a 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 been sparkling 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 of Scientific Review that rewards the contributor with ten shillings per page of one thousand words, _plus_ the 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?”