The months passed; Christmas came and went. Until then the winter had been unusually mild, but January set in with a succession of vicious cold snaps and great blustering winds out of the northeast. Lloyd and Bennett had elected to remain quietly in their new home at Medford. They had no desire to travel, and Bennett's forthcoming book demanded his attention. Adler stayed on about the house. He and the dog Kamiska were companions inseparable. At long intervals visitors presented themselves—Dr. Street, or Pitts, or certain friends of Bennett's. But the great rush of interviewers, editors, and projectors of marvellous schemes that had crowded Bennett's anterooms during the spring and early summer was conspicuously dwindling. The press ceased to speak of him; even his mail had fallen away. Now, whenever the journals of the day devoted space to arctic exploration, it was invariably in reference to the English expedition wintering on the Greenland coast. That world that had clamoured so loudly upon Bennett's return, while, perhaps, not yet forgetting him, was already ignoring him, was looking in other directions. Another man was in the public eye.
But in every sense these two—Lloyd and Bennett—were out of the world. They had freed themselves from the current of affairs. They stood aside while the great tide went careering past swift and turbulent, and one of them at least lacked even the interest to look on and watch its progress.
For a time Lloyd was supremely happy. Their life was unbroken, uneventful. The calm, monotonous days of undisturbed happiness to which she had looked forward were come at last. Thus it was always to be. Isolated and apart, she could shut her ears to the thunder of the world's great tide that somewhere, off beyond the hills in the direction of the City, went swirling through its channels. Hardly an hour went by that she and Bennett were not together. Lloyd had transferred her stable to her new home; Lewis was added to the number of their servants, and until Bennett's old-time vigour completely returned to him she drove out almost daily with her husband, covering the country for miles around.
Much of their time, however, they spent in Bennett's study. This was a great apartment in the rear of the house, scantily, almost meanly, furnished. Papers littered the floor; bundles of manuscripts, lists, charts, and observations, the worn and battered tin box of records, note-books, journals, tables of logarithms were piled upon Bennett's desk. A bookcase crammed with volumes of reference, statistical pamphlets, and the like stood between the windows, while one of the walls was nearly entirely occupied by a vast map of the arctic circle, upon which the course of the Freja, her drift in the pack, and the route of the expedition's southerly march were accurately plotted.
The room was bare of ornament; the desk and a couple of chairs were its only furniture. Pictures there were none. Their places were taken by photographs and a great blue print of the shipbuilder's plans and specifications of the Freja.
The photographs were some of those that Dennison had made of the expedition—the Freja nipped in the ice, a group of the officers and crew upon the forward deck, the coast of Wrangel Island, Cape Kammeni, peculiar ice formations, views of the pack under different conditions and temperatures, pressure-ridges and scenes of the expedition's daily life in the arctic, bear-hunts, the manufacture of sledges, dog-teams, Bennett taking soundings and reading the wind-gauge, and one, the last view of the Freja, taken just as the ship—her ice-sheathed dripping bows heaved high in the air, the flag still at the peak—sank from sight.
However, on the wall over the blue-print plans of the Freja, one of the boat's flags, that had been used by the expedition throughout all the time of its stay in the ice, hung suspended—a faded, tattered square of stars and bars.
As the new life settled quietly and evenly to its grooves a routine began to develop. About an hour after breakfast Lloyd and Bennett shut themselves in Bennett's "workroom," as he called it, Lloyd taking her place at the desk. She had become his amanuensis, had insisted upon writing to his dictation.
"Look at that manuscript," she had exclaimed one day, turning the sheets that Bennett had written; "literally the very worst handwriting I have ever seen. What do you suppose a printer would make out of your 'thes' and 'ands'? It's hieroglyphics, you know," she informed him gravely, nodding her head at him.
It was quite true. Bennett wrote with amazing rapidity and with ragged, vigorous strokes of the pen, not unfrequently driving the point through the paper itself; his script was pothooks, clumsy, slanting in all directions, all but illegible. In the end Lloyd had almost pushed him from his place at the desk, taking the pen from between his fingers, exclaiming:
"Get up! Give me your chair—and that pen. Handwriting like that is nothing else but a sin."
Bennett allowed her to bully him, protesting merely for the enjoyment of squabbling with her.
"Come, I like this. What are you doing in my workroom anyhow, Mrs. Bennett? I
think you had better go to your housework."
"Don't talk," she answered. "Here are your notes and journal. Now tell me what to write."
In the end matters adjusted themselves. Daily Lloyd took her place at the desk, pen in hand, the sleeve of her right arm rolled back to the elbow (a habit of hers whenever writing, and which Bennett found to be charming beyond words), her pen travelling steadily from line to line. He on his part paced the floor, a cigar between his teeth, his notes and note-books in his hand, dictating comments of his own, or quoting from the pages, stained, frayed, and crumpled, written by the light of the auroras, the midnight suns, or the unsteady, flickering of train-oil lanterns and blubber-lamps.
What long, delicious hours they spent thus, as the winter drew on, in the absolute quiet of that country house, ignored and lost in the brown, bare fields and leafless orchards of the open country! No one troubled them. No one came near them. They asked nothing better than that the world wherein they once had lived, whose hurtling activity and febrile unrest they both had known so well, should leave them alone.
Only one jarring note, and that none too resonant, broke the long harmony of Lloyd's happiness during these days. Bennett was deaf to it; but for Lloyd it vibrated continuously and, as time passed, with increasing insistence and distinctness. But for one person in the world Lloyd could have told herself that her life was without a single element of discontent.
This was Adler. It was not that his presence about the house was a reproach to Bennett's wife, for the man was scrupulously unobtrusive. He had the instinctive delicacy that one sometimes discovers in simple, undeveloped natures— seafaring folk especially—and though he could not bring himself to leave his former chief, he had withdrawn himself more than ever from notice since the time of Bennett's marriage. He rarely even waited on the table these days, for Lloyd and Bennett often chose to breakfast and dine quite to themselves.
But, for all that, Lloyd saw Adler from time to time, Kamiska invariably at his heels. She came upon him polishing the brasses upon the door of the house, or binding strips of burlaps and sacking about the rose-bushes in the garden, or returning from the village post-office with the mail, invariably wearing the same woollen cap, the old pea-jacket, and the jersey with the name "Freja" upon the breast. He rarely spoke to her unless she first addressed him, and then always with a precise salute, bringing his heels sharply together, standing stiffly at attention.
But the man, though all unwittingly, radiated gloom. Lloyd readily saw that Adler was labouring under a certain cloud of disappointment and deferred hope. Naturally she understood the cause. Lloyd was too large-hearted to feel any irritation at the sight of Adler. But she could not regard him with indifference. To her mind he stood for all that Bennett had given up, for the great career that had stopped half-way, for the work half done, the task only half completed. In a way was not Adler now superior to Bennett? His one thought and aim and hope was to "try again." His ambition was yet alive and alight; the soldier was willing where the chief lost heart. Never again had Adler addressed himself to Lloyd on the subject of Bennett's inactivity. Now he seemed to understand—to realise that once married—and to Lloyd—he must no longer expect Bennett to continue the work. All this Lloyd interpreted from Adler's attitude, and again and again told herself that she could read the man's thoughts aright. She even fancied she caught a mute appeal in his eyes upon those rare occasions when they met, as though he looked to her as the only hope, the only means to wake Bennett from his lethargy. She imagined that she heard him say:
"Ain't you got any influence with him, Miss? Won't you talk good talk to him? Don't let him chuck. Make him be a man, and not a professor. Nothing else in the world don't figure. It's his work. God A'mighty cut him out for that, and he's got to do it."
His work, his work, God made him for that; appointed the task, made the man, and now she came between. God, Man, and the Work,—the three vast elements of an entire system, the whole universe epitomised in the tremendous trinity. Again and again such thoughts assailed her. Duty once more stirred and awoke. It seemed to her as if some great engine ordained of Heaven to run its appointed course had come to a standstill, was rusting to its ruin, and that she alone of all the world had power to grasp its lever, to send it on its way; whither, she did not know; why, she could not tell. She knew only that it was right that she should act. By degrees her resolution hardened. Bennett must try again. But at first it seemed to her as though her heart would break, and more than once she wavered.
As Bennett continued to dictate to her the story of the expedition he arrived at the account of the march toward Kolyuchin Bay, and, finally, at the description of the last week, with its terrors, its sufferings, its starvation, its despair, when, one by one, the men died in their sleeping-bags, to be buried under slabs of ice. When this point in the narrative was reached Bennett inserted no comment of his own; but while Lloyd wrote, read simply and with grim directness from the entries in his journal precisely as they had been written.
Lloyd had known in a vague way that the expedition had suffered abominably, but hitherto Bennett had never consented to tell her the story in detail. "It was a hard week," he informed her, "a rather bad grind."
Now, for the first time, she was to know just what had happened, just what he had endured.
As usual, Bennett paced the floor from wall to wall, his cigar in his teeth, his tattered, grimy ice-journal in his hand. At the desk Lloyd's round, bare arm, the sleeve turned up to the elbow, moved evenly back and forth as she wrote. In the intervals of Bennett's dictation the scratching of Lloyd's pen made itself heard. A little fire snapped and crackled on the hearth. The morning's sun came flooding in at the windows.