Works of Robert W Chambers

by Robert W. Chambers

  “The object of your expedition, therefore, is not to be the quest of Philohela quinquemaculata; your duty now is to corroborate the almost miraculous discovery of Professor Bottomly, and to disinter for her the vast herd of frozen mammoths, pack and pickle them, and get them to the Bronx.

  “Tomorrow’s morning papers will have the entire story: the credit and responsibility for the discovery and the expedition belong to Professor Bottomly, and will be given to her by the press and the populace of our great republic.

  “It is her wish that no other names be mentioned. Which is right. To the discoverer belongs the glory. Therefore, the marsh is to be named Bottomly’s Marsh, and the Glacier, Bottomly’s Glacier.

  “Yours and mine is to be the glory of laboring incognito under the direction of the towering scientific intellect of the age, Professor Bottomly.

  “And the most precious legacy you can leave your children — if you get married and have any — is that you once wielded the humble pick and shovel for Jane Bottomly on the bottomless marsh which bears her name!”

  After a moment’s silence we three men ventured to look sideways at each other. We had certainly killed Professor Bottomly, scientifically speaking. The lady was practically dead. The morning papers would consummate the murder. We didn’t know whether we wanted to laugh or not.

  She was now virtually done for; that seemed certain. So greedily had this egotistical female swallowed the silly bait we offered, so arrogantly had she planned to eliminate everybody excepting herself from the credit of the discovery, that there seemed now nothing left for us to do except to watch her hurdling deliriously toward destruction. Should we burst into hellish laughter?

  We looked hard at Dr. Delmour and we decided not to — yet.

  Said I: “To assist at the final apotheosis of Professor Bottomly makes us very, very happy. We are happy to remain incognito, mere ciphers blotted out by the fierce white light which is about to beat upon Professor Bottomly, fore and aft. We are happy that our participation in this astonishing affair shall never be known to science.

  “But, happiest of all are we, dear Dr. Delmour, in the knowledge that you are to be with us and of us, incognito on this voyage now imminent; that you are to be our revered and beloved leader.

  “And I, for one, promise you personally the undivided devotion of a man whose entire and austere career has been dedicated to science — in all its branches.”

  I stepped forward rather gracefully and raised her little hand to my lips to let her see that even the science of gallantry had not been neglected by me.

  Dr. Daisy Delmour blushed.

  “Therefore,” said I, “considering the fact that our names are not to figure in this expedition; and, furthermore, in consideration of the fact that you are going, we shall be very, very happy to accompany you, Dr. Delmour.” I again saluted her hand, and again Dr. Delmour blushed and looked sideways at Professor Lezard.

  IV

  It was, to be accurate, exactly twenty-three days later that our voyage by sea and land ended one Monday morning upon the gigantic terminal moraine of the Golden Glacier, Cook’s Peninsula, Baffin Land.

  Four pack-mules carried our luggage, four more bore our persons; an arctic dicky-bird sat on a bowlder and said, “Pilly-willy-willy! Tweet! Tweet!”

  As we rode out to the bowlder-strewn edge of the moraine the rising sun greeted us cordially, illuminating below us the flat surface of the marsh which stretched away to the east and south as far as the eye could see.

  So flat was it that we immediately made out the silhouettes of two mules tethered below us a quarter of a mile away.

  Something about the attitude of these mules arrested our attention, and, gazing upon them through our field-glasses we beheld Professor Bottomly.

  That resourceful lady had mounted a pneumatic hammock upon the two mules, their saddles had sockets to fit the legs of the galvanized iron tripod.

  No matter in which way the mules turned, sliding swivels on the hollow steel frames regulated the hammock slung between them. It was an infernal invention.

  There lay Jane Bottomly asleep, her black hair drying over the hammock’s edge, gilded to a peroxide lustre by the rays of the rising sun.

  I gazed upon her with a sort of ferocious pity. Her professional days were numbered. I also had her number!

  “How majestically she slumbers,” whispered Dr. Delmour to me, “dreaming, doubtless, of her approaching triumph.”

  Dr. Fooss and Professor Lezard, driving the pack-mules ahead of them, were already riding out across the marsh.

  “Daisy,” I said, leaning from my saddle and taking one of her gloved hands into mine, “the time has come for me to disillusion you. There are no mammoths in that mud down there.”

  She looked at me in blue-eyed amazement.

  “You are mistaken,” she said; “Professor Bottomly is celebrated for the absolute and painstaking accuracy of her deductions and the boldness and the imagination of her scientific investigations. She is the most cautious scientist in America; she would never announce such a discovery to the newspapers unless she were perfectly certain of its truth.”

  I was sorry for this young girl. I pressed her hand because I was sorry for her. After a few moments of deepest thought I felt so sorry for her that I kissed her.

  “I felt so sorry for her that I kissed her.”

  “You mustn’t,” said Dr. Delmour, blushing.

  The things we mustn’t do are so many that I can’t always remember all of them.

  “Daisy,” I said, “shall we pledge ourselves to each other for eternity — here in the presence of this immemorial glacier which moves a thousand inches a year — I mean an inch every thousand years — here in these awful solitudes where incalculable calculations could not enlighten us concerning the number of cubic tons of mud in that marsh — here in the presence of these innocent mules—”

  “Oh, look!” exclaimed Dr. Delmour, lifting her flushed cheek from my shoulder. “There is a man in the hammock with Professor Bottomly!”

  I levelled my field-glasses incredulously. Good Heavens! There was a man there. He was sitting on the edge of the hammock in a dejected attitude, his booted legs dangling.

  And, as I gazed, I saw the arm of Professor Bottomly raised as though groping instinctively for something in her slumber — saw her fingers close upon the blue-flannel shirt of her companion, saw his timid futile attempts to elude her, saw him inexorably hauled back and his head forcibly pillowed upon her ample chest.

  “Daisy!” I faltered, “what does yonder scene of presumable domesticity mean?”

  “I — I haven’t the faintest idea!” she stammered.

  “Is that lady married! Or is this revelry?” I asked, sternly.

  “She wasn’t married when she sailed from N-New-York,” faltered Dr. Delmour.

  We rode forward in pained silence, spurring on until we caught up with Lezard and Fooss and the pack-mules; then we all pressed ahead, a prey, now, to the deepest moral anxiety and agitation.

  The splashing of our mule’s feet on the partly melted surface of the mud aroused the man as we rode up and he scrambled madly to get out of the hammock as soon as he saw us.

  A detaining feminine hand reached mechanically for his collar, groped aimlessly for a moment, and fell across the hammock’s edge. Evidently its owner was too sleepy for effort.

  Meanwhile the man who had floundered free from the hammock, leaped overboard and came hopping stiffly over the slush toward us like a badly-winged snipe.

  “Who are you?” I demanded, drawing bridle so suddenly that I found myself astride of my mule’s ears. Sliding back into the saddle, I repeated the challenge haughtily, inwardly cursing my horsemanship.

  He stood balancing his lank six feet six of bony altitude for a few moments without replying. His large gentle eyes of baby blue were fixed on me.

  “Speak!” I said. “The reputation of a lady is at stake! Who are you? We ask, before we shoot you, for purpose o
f future identification.”

  He gazed at me wildly. “I dunno who I be,” he replied. “My name was James Skaw before that there lady went an’ changed it on me. She says she has changed my name to hers. I dunno. All I know is I’m married.”

  “Married!” echoed Dr. Delmour.

  He looked dully at the girl, then fixed his large mild eyes on me.

  “A mission priest done it for her a month ago when we was hikin’ towards Fort Carcajou. Hoon-hel are you?” he added.

  I informed him with dignity; he blinked at me, at the others, at the mules. Then he said with infinite bitterness:

  “You’re a fine guy, ain’t you, a-wishin’ this here lady onto a pore pelt-hunter what ain’t never done nothin’ to you!”

  “Who did you say I wished on you?” I demanded, bewildered.

  “That there lady a-sleepin’ into the nuptool hammick! You wished her onto me — yaas you did! Whatnhel have I done to you, hey?”

  We were dumb. He shoved his hand into his pocket, produced a slug of twist, slowly gnawed off a portion, and buried the remains in his vast jaw.

  “All I done to you,” he said, “was to write you them letters sayin’s as how I found a lot of ellerphants into the mud.

  “What you done to me was to send that there lady here. Was that gratitood? Man to man I ask you?”

  A loud snore from the hammock startled us all. James Skaw twisted his neck turkey-like, and looked warily at the hammock, then turning toward me:

  “Aw,” he said, “she don’t never wake up till I have breakfast ready.”

  “James Skaw,” I said, “tell me what has happened. On my word of honor I don’t know.”

  He regarded me with lack-lustre eyes.

  “I was a-settin’ onto a bowlder,” said he, “a-fig-urin’ out whether you was a-comin’ or not, when that there lady rides up with her led-mule a trailin’.

  “Sez she: ‘Are you James Skaw?’

  “Yes, marm,’ sez I, kinder scared an’ puzzled.

  “‘Where is them ellerphants?’ sez she, reachin’ down from her saddle an’ takin’ me by the shirt collar, an’ beatin’ me with her umbrella.

  “Sez I, ‘I have wrote to a certain gent that I would show him them ellerphants for a price. Bein’ strictly hones’ I can’t show ’em to no one else until I hear from him.’

  “With that she continood to argoo the case with her umbrella, never lettin’ go of my shirt collar. Sir, she argood until dinner time, an’ then she resoomed the debate until I fell asleep. The last I knowed she was still conversin’.

  “An’ so it went next day, all day long, an’ the next day. I couldn’t stand it no longer so I started for Fort Carcajau. But she bein’ onto a mule, run me down easy, an’ kep’ beside me conversin’ volooble.

  “Sir, do you know what it is to listen to umbrella argooment every day, all day long, from sun-up to night-fall? An’ then some more?

  “I was loony, I tell you, when we met the mission priest. ‘Marry me,’ sez she, ‘or I’ll talk you to death!’ I didn’t realise what she was sayin’ an’ what I answered. But them words I uttered done the job, it seems.

  “We camped there an’ slep’ for two days without wakin.’ When I waked up I was convalescent.

  “She was good to me. She made soup an’ she wrapped blankets onto me an’ she didn’t talk no more until I was well enough to endoor it.

  “An’ by’m’by she brooke the nooze to me that we was married an’ that she had went as far as to marry me in the sacred cause of science because man an’ wife is one, an’ what I knowed about them ellerphants she now had a right to know.

  “Sir, she had put one over on me. So bein’ strickly hones’ I had to show her where them ellerphants lay froze up under the marsh.”

  V

  Where the ambition of this infatuated woman had led her appalled us all. The personal sacrifice she had made in the name of science awed us.

  Still when I remembered that detaining arm sleepily lifted from the nuptual hammock, I was not so certain concerning her continued martyrdom.

  I cast an involuntary glance of critical appraisal upon James Skaw. He had the golden hair and beard of the early Christian martyr. His features were classically regular; he stood six feet six; he was lean because fit, sound as a hound’s tooth, and really a superb specimen of masculine health.

  Curry him and trim him and clothe him in evening dress and his physical appearance would make a sensation at the Court of St. James. Only his English required manicuring.

  The longer I looked at him the better I comprehended that detaining hand from the hammock. Fabas indulcet fames.

  Then, with a shock, it rushed over me that there evidently had been some ground for this man’s letters to me concerning a herd of frozen mammoths.

  Professor Bottomly had not only married him to obtain the information but here she was still camping on the marsh!

  “James Skaw,” I said, tremulously, “where are those mammoths?”

  He looked at me, then made a vague gesture:

  “Under the mud — everywhere — all around us.”

  “Has she seen them?”

  “Yes, I showed her about a hundred. There’s one under you. Look! you can see him through the slush.”

  “Ach Gott!” burst from Dr. Fooss, and he tottered in his saddle. Lezard, frightfully pale, passed a shaking hand over his brow. As for me my hair became dank with misery, for there directly under my feet, the vast hairy bulk of a mammoth lay dimly visible through the muddy ice.

  What I had done to myself when I was planning to do Professor Bottomly suddenly burst upon me in all its hideous proportions. Fame, the plaudits of the world, the highest scientific honours — all these in my effort to annihilate her, I had deliberately thrust upon this woman to my own everlasting detriment and disgrace.

  A sort of howl escaped from Dr. Fooss, who had dismounted and who had been scratching in the slush with his feet like a hen. For already this slight gallinaceous effort of his had laid bare a hairy section of frozen mammoth.

  Lezard, weeping bitterly, squatted beside him clawing at the thin skin of ice with a pick-axe.

  It seemed more than I could bear and I flung myself from my mule and seizing a spade, fell violently to work, the tears of rage and mortification coursing down my cheeks.

  “Hurrah!” cried Dr. Delmour, excitedly, scrambling down from her mule and lifting a box of dynamite from her saddle-bags.

  Transfigured with enthusiasm she seized a crowbar, traced in the slush the huge outlines of the buried beast, then, measuring with practiced eye the irregular zone of cleavage, she marked out a vast oval, dug holes along it with her bar, dropped into each hole a stick of dynamite, got out the batteries and wires, attached the fuses, covered each charge, and retired on a run toward the moraine, unreeling wire as she sped upward among the bowlders.

  Half frantic with grief and half mad with the excitement of the moment we still had sense enough to shoulder our tools and drive our mules back across the moraine.

  Only the mule-hammock in which reposed Professor Bottomly remained on the marsh. For one horrid instant temptation assailed me to press the button before James Skaw could lead the hammock-mules up to the moraine. It was my closest approach to crime.

  With a shudder I viewed the approach of the mules. James Skaw led them by the head; the hammock on its bar and swivels swung gently between them; Professor Bottomly slept, lulled, no doubt, to deeper slumber by the gently swaying hammock.

  When the hammock came up, one by one we gazed upon its unconscious occupant.

  And, even amid dark and revengeful thoughts, amid a mental chaos of grief and fury and frantic self-reproach, I had to admit to myself that Jane Bottomly was a fine figure of a woman, and good-looking, too, and that her hair was all her own and almost magnificent at that.

  With a modiste to advise her, a maid to dress her, I myself might have — but let that pass. Only as I gazed upon her fresh complexion and the softly parte
d red lips of Professor Bottomly, and as I noted the beautiful white throat and prettily shaped hands, a newer, bitterer, and more overwhelming despair seized me; and I realized now that perhaps I had thrown away more than fame, honours, applause; I had perhaps thrown away love!

  At that moment Professor Bottomly awoke. For a moment her lilac-tinted eyes had a dazed expression, then they widened, and she lay very quietly looking from one to another of us, cradled in the golden glory of her hair, perfectly mistress of herself, and her mind as clear as a bell.

  “Well,” she said, “so you have arrived at last.” And to Dr. Delmour she smilingly extended a cool, fresh hand.

  “Have you met my husband?” she inquired.

  We admitted that we had.

  “James!” she called.

  At the sound of her voice James Skaw hopped nimbly to do her bidding. A tender smile came into her face as she gazed upon her husband. She made no explanation concerning him, no apology for him. And, watching her, it slowly filtered into my mind that she liked him.

  With one hand in her husband’s and one on Dr. Delmour’s arm she listened to Daisy’s account of what we were about to do to the imbedded mammoth, and nodded approval.

  James Skaw turned the mules so that she might watch the explosion. She twisted up her hair, then sat up in her hammock; Daisy Delmour pressed the electric button; there came a deep jarring sound, a vast upheaval, and up out of the mud rose five or six dozen mammoths and toppled gently over upon the surface of the ice.

  “Out of the mud rose five or six dozen mammoths.”

  Miserable as we were at such an astonishing spectacle we raised a tragic cheer as Professor Bottomly sprang out of her hammock and, telling Dr. Delmour to get a camera, seized her husband and sped down to where one of the great, hairy frozen beasts lay on the ice in full sunshine.

  And then we tasted the last drop of gall which our over-slopping cup of bitterness held for us; Professor Bottomly climbed up the sides of the frozen mammoth, dragging her husband with her, and stood there waving a little American flag while Dr. Delmour used up every film in the camera to record the scientific triumph of the ages.