CYNTHIA went that night alone to a dinner party in Seamore Place. But she was ill at ease and as soon as she could get away she hurried home. She had not seen her husband that day. He had returned at five o’clock, had been closeted for a long while with M. Poizat and had then departed, leaving a message that a series of divisions would compel him to dine at the House of Commons. The couple, however, had made it a habit to reserve for themselves, whenever the House was not sitting late, an hour or so at the close of even the busiest day, and Cynthia was fairly sure that she would not have to wait long before Harry Rames came home. As a fact, he was already in his study. The door was ajar and through the opening the light streamed out into the hall.
Cynthia pushed the door open. Harry was sitting at his writing-table on the opposite side of the room and studying with a complete absorption a scroll which he held down unrolled beneath his eyes. Cynthia stood in the doorway for a moment or two watching him with a tender smile upon her face, and speculating idly upon the document which so riveted his attention. For the moment her trouble was quite driven from her thoughts. He was here, after all, in the house with her: he, the loved one: and with a sort of fierceness she was content. Then he looked up and saw her standing in the doorway. His face changed; he had the aspect clearly of a man at bay. He swept a pile of letters and printed papers over his scroll, spreading them out. He rose and stood between her and the writing-table, hiding it from her view.
“You are home early,” he said.
“Earlier than you expected! Yet I am later than you.”
“Oh, I paired at ten o’clock.”
“I see.”
The furtive movement of her husband increased her fears and at the same time wounded her pride. They were to be frank with one another. That was the pledge which each had given to the other. And here was the pledge broken, for Harry was definitely practising concealments. Cynthia, however, did not belong to the tribe of the clamorous. She stepped within the room and left him to continue the conversation. Rames spoke hastily to engage her attention.
“Poizat came to see me this afternoon.”
“Yes?”
“He was desperate. We talked over his position. I recommended him to go to Tangier and settle there. He has a little money. He will find compatriots, and I should think it’s the place where people will be least likely to trouble about him. I fancy that he will go there. But it’s a bad business to have to start life all over again at seventy.”
“Yes,” said Cynthia.
She watched him as he walked up and down the room, making up her mind that on her side at all events the pledge should not be broken.
“M. Poizat said something to me which I think is true. That nothing one has ever done is ever quite done with.”
Harry Rames stopped in his walk. He stood quite still for a few moments.
“Oh, surely that’s not true,” he said carelessly and resumed his pacing. But Cynthia was aware of a change in him. Before he had been thinking of Poizat and his destiny; now he was alert and waiting upon her words.
“I believe that it’s more true than he knew. For even if nothing actual comes of the thing done, it’s still there, recorded in the character. Harry, we are in the clutch of finished things.”
Her voice rose in a low cry and brought Harry swiftly round upon his heel. Her words hit him shrewdly, but her aspect more shrewdly still. She was still standing close by the door. She was dressed in a gown of pale blue and gold with a bright ribbon of blue in her hair. Her cloak had slipped from her shoulders to her feet, her gloves were twisted in her hands, her eyes wide and dark with trouble looked out from a face which was piteously wistful. She made unconsciously a poignant appeal to him. The delicate loveliness of her youth and the gay panoply of her attire contrasted so strikingly with the quivering misery of her face.
“What makes you believe that, Cynthia?” He crossed the room to her side and shook her arm with a friendly gesture familiar to her. “Poizat’s case is not enough to build a world of theory on.”
“Nor do I,” replied Cynthia. “I was adding to that case another.” Harry Rames flinched.
“What other?” he asked with an effort.
“Years ago in Argentina I once listened at a door,” she began, and in Harry’s eyes shone a great relief. “What I heard frightened me. I lay awake in terror all that night. I have lived in fear ever since. I could not shake fear off even after I knew there was no longer any cause for fear. I can find causes anywhere. Fear’s the truth of me. Most of the things which I have done have been done from fear.”
“I never understood that, Cynthia.”
“I never spoke of it before.”
“Fear even prompted your marriage?”
Cynthia looked him frankly in the face.
“Yes. You were so frank, so honest about yourself. I felt safe with you. And after we were married—I escaped from fear. I was reprieved.”
“Thank you,” said Harry with a quiet sincerity. Then he moved away from her to the fireplace and turned again.
“Why do you tell me this for the first time tonight?”
“Because fear’s awake in me again to-night,” she answered simply. “I have had another visitor today besides M. Poizat.”
“Who?”
“Howard Fall.”
Harry Rames’s voice hardened.
“He came to complain of me, I suppose.”
“It wasn’t complaint; it was regret. He thought it would be such a loss if you ceased to be interested in Parliament. He was afraid that Colonel Challoner’s death had been a shock to you.”
Harry Rames looked curiously at his wife.
“And what did you say?”
“That I knew you well enough to be sure that wasn’t the case. He said you had not spoken once since the debate on the Address and that the organization against the land bill was tumbling to pieces.”
Harry’s face cleared.
“There’s a very good reason for that. The government programme is overloaded and Devenish’s bill won’t come on this year after all. Our opposition shook their confidence in it besides. No, it won’t come on.”
Cynthia moved swiftly forward to the fireplace.
“You know that?”
“Yes. Hamlin told me in confidence.”
“When, Harry?”
“A month ago at least. We can always whip up the opposition to Devenish’s bill when it becomes once more a practical proposition.”
Perhaps after all the Government’s change of plan was the simple explanation of the change in her husband. Cynthia sank down into a chair. Before now, she remembered, she had tortured herself with unnecessary fears.
“Oh, I am glad. I am glad,” she cried. All her heart was in her voice and tuned it to a note full and low and wonderfully sweet. Harry was moved by the music of it. There was a joy, a tenderness, which he had noticed more than once of late, but which had never rung so clear as it did to-night. He planted himself in front of her with a wry sort of smile upon his face.
“Cynthia.”
“Yes.”
“You want me to go on—just as I am going? You are satisfied? There have been times when you have wanted more——”
But Cynthia broke in upon him. She shut her eyes upon her ideals and her dreams. They were for the girl steeped to the lips in romance, not for the woman made real by love. Something had come between them. Something secret. Something which threatened even such community of life as they had. She was in revolt against it.
“Yes, yes,” she cried passionately. “I do want you to go on. I want you to make a great career. I want my share in it, my pride in it. I shall be satisfied. I shall be thankful. Oh, my dear, are you blind?” She rose abruptly and stood in front of him. “What I want and all that I want is to keep you.” If she had never spoken the words, the eagerness of her voice and the prayer of her clasped hands would have uttered them for her. But she had spoken them deliberately. She knew very well the danger for a woman in telling a man who does not love her, that she loves him. But she accepted the danger. She was playing for a great stake that night, and great stakes are not to be won without great risks. She laid her reticence aside and made her appeal. But it seemed that her appeal failed. Harry Rames stood watching her, at a loss for words, with a face which concealed carefully all his thoughts. Cynthia stooped and gathered up her gloves which had fallen to the floor.
“I shall go up now,” she said.
Yet she waited; and Harry still was silent. A moment of passion had caught him unprepared with any words.
“What are you thinking about, Harry, so profoundly?” Cynthia asked in an indifferent voice. His silence was a rebuff most bitter to her. But she would not betray herself a second time. Her eyes and her hands were busy with some imaginary fault in the fit of her dress.
“That you have never shown me yourself before,” he said, moving toward her. She stood quite still as he came close. He put his arm about her and she asked quietly:
“Wasn’t I wise, Harry? It’s a little disconcerting, isn’t it, when a woman shows you something you know nothing about. Just a little disconcerting, isn’t it?”
She left him standing in the room and went upstairs. She had made her plea with all the frankness which had been the condition of their marriage. She would not ask for a like frankness in return. It was for him to give it. She had made it quite plain that on her side she wanted frankness. More she would not do. Not for anything would she ask what secret thing he had hidden under the papers upon his table. But she knew that there was a secret thing and her feet dragged as she mounted the stairs.
She had been in bed according to her reckoning for about an hour when she heard a noise of the shutting of a door. And the door was the front-door of the house. Cynthia sprung from her bed and lifting the blind looked out from the window. It was a dark night, but there was no fog. By the light of the street lamps she saw a man crossing the road toward the corner of South Audley Street. He had the look of her husband. She flung up the window and the sound of his footsteps made her sure. Her eyes gazing into the tempered darkness of a London street might well have deceived her, her ears could not. There was no one else walking in Curzon Street at that moment; the sound of his footsteps reverberated unmistakably, diminishing as the distance between him and the window increased. The man who now vanished into South Audley Street was Harry Rames.
Cynthia switched on the light and looked at her watch. It was one o’clock in the morning. She wrapped a dressing-gown about her and sat down trying to think calmly, seeking to discover, if she could, some other reason for his departure than the obvious one. But the obvious one recurred again and again in her thoughts. It explained everything, fitted in with everything, as no other reason did. His sudden indifference to his career, his furtive movement at his writing-table upon her appearance, his refusal to meet frankness with frankness could all thus be accounted for. His departure from the house was thus explained. He had not come up into his room next to hers; he had waited in his study for an hour; he had given her time to fall asleep; he had gone out. It was a woman then who had twisted the current of his life as she, Cynthia, could not, who had moved him to passion as she even that evening had failed to do. Cynthia raged in fury against herself for having so weakly betrayed herself. She sat in torture. Then her jealousy flamed up. That—no! Her pride must give way. If there was another woman in her story—why then the other woman must look to herself. Cynthia would fight. She hurried down-stairs into the study. She switched on the lights and tumbled hither and thither the papers on the writing-table for the one so swiftly hidden which should betray the other woman’s name and her abode. But she found nothing to satisfy her. She looked round the room. From a drawer in a bureau against the wall Harry’s keys had been dangling. That she had noticed; and the keys were gone now. She tried the drawer. It was locked. In that drawer then was hidden the key to his secret. So much knowledge at all events Cynthia was sure that she had gained. She went back to her room and lying in bed ran over all the names of her acquaintances, even of her friends. She was not in the mood to trust any of them, but she could not fix upon any of them either. One and all they were cats and treacherous. Cynthia was no longer afraid; she was simply furious; and her fury was not diminished when she heard the front-door open and shut once more, almost noiselessly—so much caution was being used.
But Cynthia, though she was right in her facts, had never been so mistaken in her conclusions. The scroll which Harry Rames had pushed beneath his papers was simply a chart of the Antarctic seas; whereon lines distinguished one from the other by the manner of their tracing recorded the journeys of successive explorers and marked each one’s “farthest South.” He stood for a little while after Cynthia had left him on the same spot half-way between his chart and her position at the door. Then he turned back to his writing-table and spread out the map once more. The call of the unknown places was loud in his ears that night.
“Come back! Come back!”
Six weeks ago it had been the merest whisper—flashed to the wireless poles on the roof of the Admiralty and heard by him one afternoon, a message very small and clear amidst the clatter of Parliament Street. But the whisper had gathered volume and vehemence, until the map before him seemed a mouth shouting it, and the room throbbed with it as though the walls would burst asunder.
“Come back! Come back!”
It seemed to him that the command was not to be denied or must ring in his ears forever; and that arena of the House of Commons, where man fought with man, became a trivial place of meanness and intrigue compared with the vast battle-ground in the South, where one fought in a grandeur of silence with the careless, stubborn elements of a wild and unknown world.
He bent over his map and across it, as across the table of a camera obscura he saw moving, in miniature and brilliantly defined, the ships of the men who had sailed to the South. James Cook’s two vessels, the Resolution and the Adventure, crossed the Antarctic circle as it seemed underneath his eyes—the first, of all the ships that were ever built, to sail upon these waters. Bellingshausen of Kronstadt came next and dropped his anchor under the shelter of Peter I Island and gave to it its name. He was followed by the whaling captains, each choosing his own line, great navigators inspired by a great and spirited firm. Weddell and Biscoe in their brigs. Balleny in his schooner. The later ships of the scientific expeditions under D’Urville of France and Wilkes of Chesapeake Bay moved southward in the track of the whaling captains, and close upon their heels James Ross from England with the Erebus and the Terror burst for the first time in the history of the world through the ice-pack into the open sea beyond and sailed from west to east along the great ice-barrier. There were other lines where the Challenger had sailed, and the official expeditions; and there was yet another, the longest of all the lines upon the chart, a line stretching out to a harbor never visited before, and against that line in tiny letters was printed “Rames.” He followed the course of his ship from his first harbor in the Antarctic continent with the wooden cross high on a hill above it, which marks the grave of a naturalist of a past expedition. He fell to speculating where the Perhaps lay now. Parliament had met in the first days of January. It was just before the opening of Parliament that Hemming had started on the mail steamer to New Zealand to pick up his ship in Lyttelton Harbor. Allow him five weeks for his journey. The second week of February would have come to an end before the Perhaps had steamed out past the headland. Hemming himself had recognized that he was late. The difficulty of collecting money to finance the expedition had detained him beyond his time. A fortnight out from New Zealand, where was the Perhaps now? She might still be in the stormy seas on the outer edge of Ross’s pack with the petrels and the albatrosses like a cloud about her yards. Or she might have touched at one of the northerly harbors of the continent. Perhaps winter was coming early on to wrap her about with snow and ice. If that happened, Hemming’s chance was gone, for he had only money for one year. He must reach the Pole this next summer or not at all. He must therefore winter well to the South.
Rames got up from his chair, trying not to hope that Hemming’s expedition would fail. He looked up from this map to the spot where Cynthia had stood close to the door, and a smile came upon his face.“She was wrong,” he said. “We are in the clutch of the unfinished, not the finished things.”
He carried his map over to a bureau which stood against the wall and opened a drawer from the lock of which his bunch of keys was dangling. There were other charts in the drawer, a barometer which had hung in his cabin in the Perhaps throughout the three years during which that ship had been his home, a shell or two dredged up from the depths of the sea, and a brown paper package tied up with a piece of string. The charts lying there were all the charts which existed of the Antarctic seas, arranged in the order of their making. He added to them now his map, the last of them all; the printed facsimile of his own chart. Then reluctantly he locked the drawer. The reverberation of the seas seemed to fill the room and through it imperative and loud rang the call of the South. Yet he was aware, too, of Cynthia standing in her delicate blue frock, subduing her pride, revealing herself in a passionate appeal. He was stirred to shame at the poverty of his own response. She had been friend, counsellor, wife in the normal way. They had jogged side by side along the low road of his endeavor. To-night she pleaded for more, she offered more. He could never quite look upon her as he had been wont to. For she had stirred him to shame.
He slipped the key off the ring and swung it round upon his finger. At all events he would keep his bargain.
“It’s a queer piece of irony,” he said to himself, “that the very thing which I would give my soul to do, she was urging me to do two years ago; and now I must keep my longing hidden. Our positions are quite reversed.”
But he would keep to his bargain. Perhaps after all Hemming would succeed; and sooner or later no doubt the reverberation of the seas would die away in the porches of his ears.
He went out into the hall, carrying the key in his hand, and let himself out at the front-door. He walked quickly up South Audley Street, turned to the left, and crossed Park Lane into Hyde Park. He walked to the stone bridge which crosses the Serpentine. The night was quiet and dark about him, and from afar off the never ceasing roar of the London traffic came to him like the roar of distant seas. He leaned over the parapet and stretching out his hand opened it. He heard a tiny splash in the water beneath the bridge.
He walked back more slowly than he had come to where the glare of the sky indicated the houses and the streets. As he crossed Park Lane again two men arm-in-arm passed him and one of them stopped.
“Is that you, Rames?” asked a friendly and solicitous voice.
Rames recognized it at once as the voice of Hamlin the chief Whip.
“You had paired for to-night,” Hamlin continued, “hadn’t you? You didn’t miss much. But I want to be able to rely on you for Thursday. We know, of course, that you are against us over Devenish’s land bill. That’s all right. But you are with us on the rest of our policy and we want your help.”
“I shall be there on Thursday,” answered Harry Rames. “It’s quite true that I have not been so much in the House this session as I used to be. But you will see me in my old place to-morrow. Good-night.”
He walked on and Hamlin rejoined his companion.
“It was Rames,” he said. “We’re not going to lose him. I am glad. He’s marked out for a great position if he doesn’t throw it away.”
But Rames through the roar of the traffic, carriages rolling home, wagons lumbering in to Covent Garden, heard louder than ever the boom of Southern seas and the wind whistling between the halyards of a ship.
Back | Words Home | A.E.W. Mason Home | Site Info. | Feedback