Transcriber’s Note:

The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

To

My Parents.

“The South Pole for us all!”—Frontispiece, Page [58].

The
Great White Way
A Record of an Unusual Voyage of Discovery, and some
Romantic Love Affairs amid Strange Surroundings.
The Whole Recounted by one Nicholas Chase,
Promoter of the Expedition, whose
Reports have been Arranged
for Publication by

ALBERT BIGELOW PAINE

Author of “The Van Dwellers,” “The Bread Line,” etc.

with drawings by BERNARD J. ROSENMEYER,

sketches by CHAUNCEY GALE, and maps,

etc. from Mr. CHASE’S note book

New York

J. F. TAYLOR & COMPANY

1901

Copyright, 1901,

By J. F. TAYLOR & CO.

CONTENTS.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

DRAMATIS PERSONÆ
OF
THE GREAT WHITE WAY.

Nicholas Chase, a young man with a dream of discovery, and an inherited love of the sea.

Chauncey Gale, a merry millionaire, with a willingness to back his judgment.

Edith Gale, his daughter, a girl with accomplishments and ideas.

Zar, colored maid and former nurse of Edith Gale. A woman with no “fool notions” about the South Pole.

Ferratoni, an Italian electrician with wireless communication, and subtle psychic theories.

Captain Joseph Biffer, Master of the Billowcrest. An old salt, with little respect for wild expeditions.

Terence Larkins, First Officer of the Billowcrest, with a disregard of facts.

Mr. Emory, Second Officer of the Billowcrest.

William Sturritt, Steward of the Billowcrest, and inventor of condensed food tablets.

Frenchy, a bosun who stirs up trouble.

Prince of the Purple Fields, a gentle despot of the Port of Dreams.

Princess of the Lilied Hills, His Serene Sister, whose domain is the deepest South.

Three maidens of the Land of Dreams and Lotus.

A shipwrecked sailor, whose rescue is important to all concerned.

Cabin boy, stewardess, and crew of the Billowcrest.

Courtiers, populace, etc., of the Land of the Sloping Sun.

THE GREAT WHITE WAY.

I.
ANSWER TO AN OLD SUMMONS.

For more than ten generations my maternal ancestors have been farers of the sea, and I was born within call of high tide. At the distance of a thousand miles inland it still called me, and often in childhood I woke at night from dreams of a blue harbor with white sails.

It is not strange, therefore, that I should return to the coast. When, at the age of thirty, I found myself happily rid of a commercial venture—conducted for ten years half-heartedly and with insignificant results—it was only natural that I should set my face seaward. My custom, of which there was never any great amount, and my goodwill, of which there was ever an abundance, I had disposed of to one who was likely to reverse these conditions—his methods in the matter of trade being rather less eccentric than my own. He had been able to pay me in cash the modest sum agreed upon, and this amount I now hoped to increase through some marine investment or adventure—something that would bring me at once into active sea life—though I do not now see what this could have been, and I confess that my ideas at the time were somewhat vague.

II.
I RENEW AN OLD DREAM.

Perhaps first of all I wished to visit the South Pole—not an unreasonable ambition it would seem for one backed by ten generations of sea captains and ocean faring—but one that I found not altogether easy to gratify. For one thing, there was no Antarctic expedition forming at the time; and then, my notions in the matter were not popular.

From boyhood it had been my dream that about the earth’s southern axis, shut in by a precipitous wall of ice, there lay a great undiscovered world. Not a bleak desolation of storm-swept peaks and glaciers, but a fair, fruitful land, warmed and nourished from beneath by the great central heat brought nearer to the surface there through terrestrial oblation, or, as my geography had put it, the “flattening of the poles.”

I had held to this fancy for a long time on the basis of theory only, and, perhaps, the added premise that nature would not allow so vast a tract as the Antarctic Continent to lie desolate. But, curiously enough, about the time I arrived in New York I met with what seemed to me undoubted bits of evidence in the reports of some recent polar observations.

Borchgrevink, a Norwegian explorer, returning with a poorly fitted Antarctic expedition, reported, among other things, a warm current off Victoria Land, at a point below the 71st parallel, and flowing approximately from the direction of the pole![^[1]]

[1]. “It seems to me,” he says, in an article printed in the Century Magazine (January, 1896), “that an investigation of the origin and consequences of the warm current running northeast, which we experienced in Victoria Bay, is of the greatest importance.”

True, Borchgrevink believed the Antarctic Continent to be an exceptionally cold one, but for this he was not to blame. No man can help what he does or does not believe in these matters regardless of sound logic and able reasoning to the contrary.—N. C.

Nansen, another Norwegian, in the Arctic Polar Sea, had been astonished to find that the water at a great depth, instead of being colder than at the surface as he had expected, was warmer! He had also found that as he progressed northward from 80° the thermometer had been inclined to rise rather than to fall. To be sure, when he arrived at a point within a little more than two hundred miles of the earth’s axis, he had found only a continuance of ice—a frozen sea which undoubtedly extended to the pole itself; but this frigidity I attributed to the fact that it was a sea into which, from the zone of fierce cold below, were constantly forced huge ice-floes. These, as I conceived, would maintain the condition of cold in the Arctics by shutting out the under warmth, through which, however, they would be gradually melted—to be discharged in those great Arctic currents which Nansen and other explorers had observed. The lack of thickness in the ice forming about the pole had also been noted with some surprise. This too, I claimed, was due to the warm earth beneath it which, while it could not much affect the general climate, when some three miles of very chilly water and several feet of substantial ice lay between, did serve as a provision of nature to prevent the northern sea from becoming one mighty solidified mass.

Now, ice-floes could not be forced inland, as would have to be the case in the Antarctics where there was admittedly a continent instead of a sea. Around this continent, it was said, there lay a precipitous frozen wall which no man had ever scaled. What lay beyond, no man of our world had ever seen. But in my fancy I saw those ramparts of eternal ice receding inward to a pleasant land, as the snow-capped Sierras slope to the verdant plains of California. A pleasant land—a fair circular world—temperate in its outer zone, becoming even tropic at the center, and extending no less than a thousand miles from rim to rim. There, I believed, unknown to the world without, a great and perhaps enlightened race lived and toiled—loved and died.

III.
EVEN SEEKING TO REALIZE IT.

But scientists, I was grieved to find, took very little stock in these views. Even such as were willing to listen declared that the earth’s oblation counted for nothing. Most of them questioned the existence of a great central heat—some disputed it altogether. The currents and temperatures reported by Nansen, Borchgrevink and others, they ascribed, as nearly as I can remember, to centrifugal deflections, to gravitatory adjustments—to anything, in fact, rather than what seemed to me the simple and obvious causes. As a rule, they ridiculed the idea of a habitable world, or even the possibility of penetrating the continent at all. When I timidly referred to a plan I had partially conceived—something with balloons in it—they despised me so openly that I was grateful not to be dismissed with violence. I cannot forego one brief example.

He was a stout, shiny-coated man, with the round eyes and human expression of a seal. He took me quite seriously, however, which some of them had not. Also himself, and the world in general. When I had briefly stated my convictions he put his fingers together in front of his comfortable roundness and regarded me solemnly. Then he said:

“My dear young man, you are pursuing what science terms an ignis fatuus, commonly and vulgarly known as a will-o’-the-wisp. You are wasting your time, and I assure you that neither I nor my associates in science could, or would, indorse your sophistries, or even stand idly by and see you induce the unthinking man of means to invest in an undertaking which we, as men of profound research and calm understanding, could not, and therefore would not approve.” He cleared his throat with a phocine bark at the end of this period and settled himself for the next. “Men in all ages,” he proceeded, “have undertaken, in the cause of science, difficult tasks, and at vast expenditure, when there was a proper scientific basis for the effort.”

He paused again. My case was hopeless so far as he was concerned—that was clear. I would close the interview with a bit of pleasantry.

“Ah, yes,” I suggested, “such as the ‘hunting of the snark,’ for instance. Well, perhaps I shall find the snark at the South Pole, when I get there, who knows?”

The human seal lifted one flipper and scratched his head for a moment gravely. Then he said with great severity:

“Young man, I do not recall the genus snark. I do not believe that science recognizes the existence of such a creature. Yet, even so, it is most unlikely that its habitat should be the South Pole.”

I retired then, strong in the conclusion that the imagination of the average scientist is a fixed equation, and his humor an unknown quantity. Also that his chief sphere of usefulness lies in being able to establish mathematically a fact already discovered by accident. The accident had not yet occurred, hence the time for the scientist and his arithmetic was not at hand.

I now sought capital without science, but the results though interesting were not gratifying.

A millionaire editor, a very Crœsus of journalism, was my final experience in this field. He didn’t have any time to throw away, but I seemed reasonably well-fed, and he saw I was in earnest, so he was willing to listen. He put his feet upon a table near me while he did it. When I got the bald facts out and was getting ready to amplify a little he broke in:

“How long would it take you to go there and get back?” he asked.

“I hardly know—five years, perhaps—possibly longer.”

The millionaire editor took his feet down.

“Humph! Hundred thousand dollars for a Sunday beat and five years to get it! No, I don’t think we want any South Poles in this paper——”

“But in the cause of human knowledge and science,” I argued.

“My friend,” he said, “the only human knowledge and science that I am interested in is the knowledge and science of getting out, next Sunday and the Sunday after, a better paper than that lantern-faced pirate down the street yonder. When you’ve found your South Pole and brought back a piece of it, come in, and I’ll pay you more for the first slice than anybody else, no matter what they offer. But you’re too long range for us just at present. Good day!”

IV.
TURNING TO THE SEA, AT LAST, FOR SOLACE.

Having thus met only with rebuff and disaster in the places where it seemed to me I had most reason to expect welcome and encouragement, I turned for comfort to those who, like my forbears, went down to the sea in ships. Along South Street, where the sky shows through a tangle of rigging, and long bowsprits threaten to poke out windows across the way, I forgot my defeats and even, for a time, my purpose, as I revelled in my long-delayed heritage of the sea.

It was the ships from distant ports that fascinated me most. My Uncle Nicholas—a sailor who was more than half a poet—had been in the foreign trade. I remembered him dimly as a big brown-faced man who had told me of far lands and shipwrecks, and rocked me to sleep to the words and tune of an old hymn, of which I could still repeat the stanza beginning,

“The storm that wrecks the winter sky.”

His vessel with all on board had disappeared somewhere in the dark waters below Cape Horn more than twenty years before. I had inherited half of his name and a number of precious trinkets brought home during his early days of seafaring—also, it was supposed, something of his tastes and disposition. In a manner I was his heir, and the tall-masted, black-hulled barks that came in from the Orient—to be pushed as quietly into place at the dock as if they had but just been towed across the East River from Brooklyn—these, it seemed to me, were his ships, hence, my ships that were coming in, at last.

I found in them treasures of joy unspeakable. Those from around the Horn seemed to bring me direct messages from the lost sailor. I felt that had he lived he would have believed in my dreams and helped me to make them reality. At times I even went so far as to imagine that his ship had not gone down at all, but had sailed away to some fair harbor of the South, whence he had not cared to return.

It thrilled me even to touch one of those weather-beaten hulls. The humblest and most unwashed seaman wrought a spell upon me as he made a pretense of polishing a bit of brass or of mopping up the afterdeck. He had braved fierce storms. He had spent long nights spinning yarns in the forecastle. Perhaps he had been wrecked and had drifted for weeks in an open boat. It might be that he had been driven by storms into those gloomy seas of the South—even to the very edge of my Antarctic world!

When they would let me I went on board, to fall over things and ask questions. My knowledge of shipping was about what could be expected of one whose life had been spent on the prairies of the West, with now and then a fleeting glimpse of a Mississippi River steamer. I suppose they wondered how I could be so interested in a subject, concerning which I displayed such a distressing lack of knowledge. They were willing to enlighten me, however, for considerations of tobacco or money, and daily I made new bosom friends—some of them, I suspect, as unholy a lot of sea-rovers as ever found reward at the end of a yard-arm.

I did not seek technical instruction. What I yearned for was their personal experiences, and these they painted for me in colorings of the sea and sky, and in such measure as the supplies were forthcoming. Almost to a man they readily remembered my Uncle Nicholas, but as they differed widely concerning his stature, complexion and general attributes, I was prone to believe at last that they would have recalled him quite as willingly under any other name; and indeed I found this to be true when I made the experiment, finally, of giving his name as Hopkins, or Pierce, or Samelson, instead of the real one, which had been Lovejoy.

I gathered courage presently to interview the officers, but these I found rather less entertaining, perhaps because they were more truthful. Only one of them recalled my Uncle Nicholas, a kindly first mate, and I suspect that even this effort resulted from a desire to please rather than from any real mental process or strict regard for verities.

I suppose I annoyed them, too, for I threw out a hint now and then which suggested my becoming a part of their ship’s company, though in what capacity or for what purpose neither I nor they could possibly imagine. As for my Antarctic scheme, I presently avoided mentioning it, or, at most, referred to it but timidly. Indeed, I demeaned myself so far at times as to recall it in jest as the wild fancy of some mythical third party whose reasoning and mentality were properly matters of ridicule and contempt.

For I had discovered early in the game that the conception of a warm country at the South Pole appealed as little to the seaman as to the scientist. The sailors whom I had subsidized most liberally regarded me with suspicion and unconsciously touched their foreheads at the suggestion, while the kindly first officer, who had been willing to remember my uncle, promptly forgot him again and walked away.

I passed my days at length in wandering rather silently about the docks and shipping offices, seeking to invest my slender means in some venture or adventure of the sea that would take me into many ports and perhaps yield me a modest income besides. I consulted a clairvoyant among other things, a greasy person on Twenty-third Street, who took me into a dim, dingy room and told me that I was contemplating something-or-other and that somebody-or-other would have something-or-other to do with it. This was good as far as it went. I was, in fact, contemplating most of the time. I was ready for anything—to explore, to filibuster, to seek for hidden treasure—to go anywhere and to do anything that would make me fairly and legitimately a part and parcel with the sea. I read one morning of a daring voyager who in a small boat had set out to sail around the world alone. I would have given all that I possessed to have gone with him, and for a few moments I think I even contemplated a similar undertaking. But as I did not then know a gaff from a flying-jib, and realizing that my voyage would probably be completed with suddenness and violence somewhere in the neighborhood of Sandy Hook, I resisted the impulse. As for my Antarctic dream, its realization seemed even farther away than when as a boy I had first conceived it, some fifteen years before.

V.
I OVERHAUL THE STEAM YACHT, BILLOWCREST.

It was early spring when I had arrived in New York, and the summer heat had begun to wane when I first set eyes on the Billowcrest, and its owner, Chauncey Gale.

On one of those cool mornings that usually come during the first days of August I was taking a stroll up Riverside Drive. Below me lay the blue Hudson, and at a little dock just beyond Grant’s Tomb a vessel was anchored. Looking down on her from above it was evident, even to my unprofessional eye, that she was an unusual craft. Her hull was painted white like that of a pleasure yacht and its model appeared to have been constructed on some such lines. Also, an awning sheltered her decks, suggesting the sumptuous pleasures of the truly rich. But she was much larger than any yacht I had ever seen, and fully bark-rigged—carrying both steam and sail. She was wider, too, in proportion to her length, and her cabins seemed rather curiously disposed. A man laboring up the slope took occasion to enlighten me. He had just investigated on his own account.

“Great boat, that,” he panted. “Cost a million, and belongs to a man named Gale. Made his money in real estate and built her himself, after his own ideas. He wasn’t a sailor at all, but he’d planned lots of houses and knew what he wanted, and had the money to pay for it. No other boat like her in the world and not apt to be; but she suits him and she goes all right, and that’s all that’s necessary, ain’t it?”

I said that it was, and I presently went down to look at her. I do not now remember that I was prompted by any other motive than to see, if possible, what a man looked like who could afford to disregard the laws and traditions of ship architecture, and build and own a million dollar steamer after his own model, and for his own pleasure. Also, I had a natural curiosity to learn something of what sort of vessel would result from these conditions.

As I drew nearer I was still further impressed with her remarkable breadth of beam, suggesting comfort rather than speed, and by the unusual flare and flatness of her hull, reminding me of the model of Western steamers built for log jams and shallow water. Connecting with the dock was a small gangway, at the top of which stood a foreign-looking sailor in uniform. Across his cap, in white letters, was the word, “Billowcrest.” He regarded me distrustfully as I walked up and down, and one or two suggestions I made, with a view of conveying to him my good opinion of his boat, as well as the impression that I knew a lot about yachts in general, he acknowledged grudgingly and in mixed tongues. I disapproved of him from the start, and as later events showed, with sufficient reason. Having looked over the vessel casually I halted at last in front of the gangway.

“I should like to come on board,” I said.

The polyglot dissented.

“No admit. Mis’r Gale command.”

“Is Mr. Gale himself on board?”

I assumed a manner of severity with a view of convincing him that I was of some importance, and at the same instant ascended the gang-plank, extending my card before me. Of course the card meant nothing to him except that I was able to have a card, but I could see that he hesitated and was lost. Evidently he had little knowledge of the great American game when I could intimidate him with one card.

He returned presently, and scowlingly led me into a little saloon forward. Then he disappeared again and I was left to look at my surroundings. A desk, a fireplace with a gas-log, some chairs suggestive of comfort, a stairway, probably leading to the bridge above. The evidences of the real estate man’s genius were becoming apparent. I might have been in the reception hall of any one of a thousand country cottages in the better class suburbs of New York. I had barely made these observations when a door to the right of the stairway opened. In a cottage it would have led to the dining-room, and did so, as I discovered later, on the Billowcrest. A tall, solemn-looking man entered, and I rose, half extending my hand, after the manner of the West.

“Mr. Gale,” I said.

The solemn man waved me aside—somewhat nervously it seemed.

“No—I’m—that is, I’m not Mr. Gale. I’m only the—his steward,” he explained. “Mr. Gale is—er—somewhat busy just now and would like to know if your errand is im—that is, I should say, a personal matter. Perhaps I—I might answer, you know.”

My heart warmed instantly toward this sober-faced man with thin whitening hair and nervous hesitation of manner. I was about to tell him that I only wanted to go over the yacht, and that he would do admirably when I thrilled with a sudden impulse, or it may have been an inspiration.

“Please tell Mr. Gale,” I said, “that I am sorry to disturb him, but that I would really like to see him personally. I will not detain him.”

The solemn man retired hastily, leaving the door slightly ajar behind him. I heard him murmur something within, which was followed by a rather quick, hearty response.

“All right, Bill. Newspaper man, I guess,—tell him I’m coming!”

The tall man whose name, it seemed, and inappropriately enough, was Bill, returned with this announcement. Close behind him followed a stout, clear-eyed man of perhaps fifty. A man evidently overflowing with nerve force and energy, appreciative of humor, prompt and keen in his estimate of human nature, and willing to back his judgments with his money. Undismayed and merry in misfortune, joyous and magnanimous in prosperity, scrupulously careful of his credit, and picturesquely careless of his speech—in a word, Chauncey Gale, real estate speculator, self-made capitalist and American Citizen.

I did not, of course, realize all of these things on the instant of our meeting, yet I cannot refrain from setting them down now, lest in the reader’s mind there should exist for a moment a misconception of this man to whom I owe all the best that I can ever give.

He came forward and took my hand heartily.

“Set down,” he commanded, “and tell us all about it.”

“Mr. Gale,” I began, “I have been admiring your yacht from the outside, and I came on board to learn more about her purpose—how you came to build her, what you intend to do with her, her dimensions, and so on.”

I was sparring for an opening, you see, and then he had taken me for a reporter.

“What paper you on?”

I was unprepared for this and it came near being a knockout. I rallied, however, to the truth.

“I’m on no paper, Mr. Gale; I’m a man with a scheme.”

“Good enough! What is it?”

“To go to the South Pole.”

We both laughed. There had been no suggestion of annoyance or even brusqueness in Mr. Gale’s manner, which was as encouraging as possible, and as buoyant. But half unconsciously I had adopted its directness, and perhaps this pleased him.

“Say, but that’s a cool proposition,” he commented. “We might get snowed up on that speculation, don’t you think so?”

“Well, of course it might be a cold day before we got there, but when we did——”

Mr. Gale interrupted.

“Look here,” he broke in, “I’m glad you ain’t on a paper, anyway. I’ve not much use for them, to tell the truth. I’ve paid ’em more’n a million dollars for advertising, and when I built this yacht they all turned in and abused me. They got what they thought was a tip from some sea-captain, who said she wouldn’t steer, or float, or anything else, and that I’d never get out of the harbor. Well, she floats all right, doesn’t she?”

I looked properly indignant and said that she did.

“I’ve been around the world twice in her,” he continued, “me and my daughter. She isn’t fast, that’s a fact, but she’s fast enough for us, and she suits us first-rate. I don’t know whether she’d do to go to the South Pole in or not. I’ll tell you how she’s built, and what I built her for, and you can see for yourself.”

I did not allow myself to consider Mr. Gale’s manner or remarks as in the slightest degree encouraging to my plans. The fact that he had cut short my attempted explanation rather indicated, I thought, that this part of our interview was closed.

“I built her myself,” he proceeded, “after my own ideas. She’s a good deal on the plan of a house we used to live in and liked, at Hillcrest. My daughter grew up in it. Hillcrest was my first addition, and the Billowcrest is my last. I’m a real-estate man, and all the money I ever made, or lost, came and went in laying out additions. I’ve laid out and sold fifty-three, altogether. Hillcrest, Stonycrest, Mudcrest, Dingleside, Tangleside, Jungleside, Edgewater, Bilgewater, Jerkwater and all the other Crests and Sides and Hursts and Waters and Manors you’ve heard of for the past twenty years. I was the first man that ever used the line, ‘Quit Paying Rent and Buy a Home,’ and more people have quit paying rent and bought homes from me than from any man that ever took space in a Sunday paper. My daughter is a sort of missionary. She makes people good and I sell ’em homes and firesides. Or maybe I sell ’em homes first and she makes ’em good afterwards, so they’ll keep up their payments. Whichever way it is, we’ve been pretty good partners for about twenty-five years, and when the land and spiritual improvement business got overdone around here I built this boat so we could take comfort in her together, and maybe find some place in the world where people still needed homes and firesides, and missionary work. She’s two hundred and sixty feet long and fifty feet in the beam, twin screw and carries sixteen thousand square feet of calico besides. She’s wide, so she’ll be safe and comfortable, and I built her flat so’s we could take her into shallow water if we wanted to. She’s as stout as a battle-ship and she’s took us around the world twice, as I said. We’ve had a bully time in her, too, but so far we’ve found no place in this old world where they’re suffering for homes and firesides or where they ain’t missionaried to death. Now, what’s your scheme?”

It seemed the opportune moment. My pulse quickened and stopped as I leaned forward and said:

“It’s to find a new world!”

“At the South Pole?”

“At the South Pole.”

“What’s the matter with the North?”

“The North Pole is a frozen sea—a desolation of ice. At the South Pole there is a continent—I believe a warm one.”

“What warmed it?”

“The oblation of the earth, which brings the surface there sufficiently near the great central heat to counteract the otherwise low temperature resulting from the oblique angle of the direct solar rays.”

I had gone over this so often that in my eagerness I suppose I parroted it off like a phonograph. Gale was regarding me keenly—mystified but interested.

“Look here,” he said. “I believe you’re in earnest. Just say that again, please; slow, and without any frills, this time.”

I was ready enough to simplify.

“Mr. Gale,” I began, “you are aware, perhaps, that when we dig down into the earth we find that it becomes rapidly warmer as we descend, so that a heat is presently reached at which life could not exist, and from this it has been argued that the inner earth is a mass of fire surrounded only by an outer crust of some fifty miles in thickness. We also know by observation and experiment that the diameter of the earth between the poles is some twenty-six miles less than it is at any point on the equator. This is known as the earth’s oblation, or, as the school-books have it, the flattening of the poles.”

I paused and Gale nodded; apparently these things were not entirely unfamiliar to him. I proceeded with my discourse.

“You will see, therefore, that at each polar axis the earth’s surface is some thirteen miles nearer to this great central heat than at the equator, and this I believe to be sufficient to produce a warmth which prevents the great ice-floes of the Arctic Sea from solidifying about the North Pole; while at the South, where there is a continent into which ice-floes cannot be forced, I am convinced that there will some day be found a warm habitable country about the earth’s axis. Whoever finds it will gain immortality, and perhaps wealth beyond his wildest dreams.”

I had warmed to this explanation with something of the old-time enthusiasm, and I could see that Gale was listening closely. It may have appealed to his sense of humor, or perhaps the very wildness of the speculation attracted him.

“Say,” he laughed, as I finished, “the world turning on its axle would help to keep it warm there, too, wouldn’t it?”

I joined in his merriment. The humors of the enterprise were not the least of its attractions.

“But that would be a bully place for a real-estate man,” he reflected. “First on the ground could have it all his own way, couldn’t he? Build and own railroads and trolley lines, and lay out the whole country in additions. Sunnybank, Snowbank, Axis Hill—look here, why ain’t anybody ever been there before?”

“Because nobody has ever been prepared to surmount the almost perpendicular wall that surrounds it, or to cross the frozen zone beyond. The ice-wall is anywhere from one to two thousand feet high. I have a plan for scaling it and for drifting over the frozen belt in a balloon to which, instead of a car, there will be attached a sort of large light boat with runners on it, so that it may also be sailed or drawn on the surface, if necessary. The balloon idea is not, of course, altogether new, except——”

But Gale had gone off into another roar of merriment.

“Well, if this ain’t the coldest, windiest bluff I ever got up against,” he howled. “Think of going up in a balloon and falling off of an ice-wall two thousand feet high! Oh, Lord! What is home without a door-knob!”

“There does appear to be an element of humor in some phases of my proposition,” I admitted, “but I have faith in it, nevertheless, and am quite sincere in my belief of a warm Antarctic world.”

“Of course you are. If you hadn’t been I wouldn’t ‘a’ let you talk to me for a minute. Let’s hear some more about it. Do you think this ship would do? When do you want to start?”

“As for the ship,” I hastened to say, “it would almost seem that she had been built for the purpose. With her splendid sailing rig, her coal could be economized, and used only when absolutely necessary. Her light draught makes it possible to take her into almost any waters. The shape of her hull and her strength are calculated to withstand an ice-squeeze, and her capacity is such that enough provisions in condensed forms could be stored away in her hold to last for an almost indefinite length of time. As for starting——”

A cloud had passed over Gale’s face at the mention of an ice-squeeze, but now he was laughing again.

“Condensed food! Oh, by the great Diamond Back, but that will hit Bill! That’s his hobby. He’s invented tablets condensed from every kind of food under the sun. You saw Bill awhile ago. Used to be my right-hand man in real estate, and is now my steward, from choice. Never had a profitable idea of his own, but honest and faithful as a town clock. What he calls dietetics is his long suit. He don’t try many of his experiments on us, but he does on himself; that’s why he looks like a funeral. Oh, but we must have Bill along—it’ll suit him to the ground!”

He touched a button at his elbow.

“Food tablets might prove a great advantage,” I admitted, “especially if we made an extended trip in the balloon.”

“Bill can make ’em for us all right. Soup tablets, meat tablets, bread tablets—why, you can put a meat tablet between two bread tablets and have a sandwich, and carry a whole table d’hôte dinner in a pill-box. Here, boy, tell Mr. Sturritt to step up here, if he’s not busy. Tell him I’ve got important news for him.”

Clearly it was but a huge joke to Mr. Gale. I was willing to enter into the spirit of it, however. He turned to me as the boy disappeared.

“Of course, we can’t expect to find anybody living there.”

“Why not? Nature never yet left a habitable country unoccupied. We shall undoubtedly find a race of people there—perhaps a very fine one.”

He regarded me incredulously a moment, and then thumped the desk at his side vigorously.

“That settles it! Johnnie’s missionary work’s cut out for her. It’s a great combination, and we can’t lose! Balloons, tablets, missionary work, and homes and firesides! A regular four-time winner!”

He was about to touch the bell again when there came a light tap at the door near me, and a woman’s voice said:

“Mayn’t I have some of the fun, too, Daddy?”

My spirits sank the least bit. The mental image I had formed of Miss Gale, the missionary, was not altogether pleasing, while her advent was likely to put a speedy end to any thread of hope I may have picked up during my rather hilarious interview with her father. Gale, meanwhile, had risen hastily to admit her, and I had involuntarily turned. It is true the voice had been not unmusical, but certainly I was wholly unprepared for the picture in the doorway. Tall, lithe and splendid she stood there—the perfect type of America’s ideal womanhood.

Gale greeted her eagerly.

“Of course you can hear it—I was just going to send for you. Johnnie, here’s a young man that’s going to take us to the South Pole to convert the heathen there, and provide ’em with homes and firesides. Mr. ——,” he glanced at my card, which he had kept in his hand all this time—“Mr. Nicholas Chase, my daughter, Miss Edith Gale, sometimes, by her daddy, called Johnnie, for short.”

Miss Gale held out her hand cordially. I took it with no feeling of hesitation that I can now recall. And it seemed to me that I would be willing to go right on holding a hand like that and let the South Pole discover itself, or remain lost through all eternity.

“I have been telling Mr. Chase,” Chauncey Gale began, when we were seated, “of our missionary-real-estate combine; how I provide outcast humanity with homes and firesides in this world, and how you look out for a home without too much fireside in it in the next; and how all the territory in this world seems to be pretty well covered in our line. Now he’s found for us, or is going to find, he says, a new world where we can do business on a big scale. Is that correct, Mr. Chase?”

I looked at Miss Gale, upon whose face there was an expression, half-aggrieved, half-mystified. For one thing, it was evident that, like myself, she could not be quite certain whether her father was altogether, or only partly, in jest. She beamed graciously on me, however, which was enough.

“Why, how fine that is,” she assented. “We have been wishing for some new thing to do, and some new where to go, but we never dreamed of a new world. If you can take us to one we will reward you—even to the half of our kingdom.”

“Poor trade,” said Gale. “Whole world for half a kingdom. Try again.”

“Oh, well, he shall have”—she hesitated, seeking a way out, then in frank confusion—“he shall name his reward, as they do in the story-books.”

I joined in the laugh. But my heart had grown strangely warm, and my pulses were set to a new measure. I had never fully believed in love at first sight till that moment.

“Tell us your scheme again, Chase,” commanded Gale.

The familiar form of his address stimulated me. I felt that I had known this robust man since the beginning of all things.

“Wait,” he interrupted, “here comes Bill—he must hear it, too. Mr. Chase, I present you to His Royal Tablets, Mr. William Sturritt, caterer extraordinary to the Great Billowcrest Expedition for the discovery and development of the warm Antarctic World. Bill, old man, your tablets are going to have their innings at last. Mr. Chase is just going to tell us how to climb a two thousand foot ice-wall in a balloon.”

I shook hands heartily with the thin, solemn man, who made an anxious attempt to smile and seated himself rather insecurely on the edge of a chair. Then I began as gravely as possible, and reviewed once more my theories and purpose, adding now the brief but important bits of evidence concerning temperatures and currents, supplied by recent explorers. The warm northerly current reported by Borchgrevink I dwelt upon, and suggested that by following it a vessel might meet with less formidable obstructions in the way of field ice, and perhaps reach the ice barrier at no great distance from the habitable circle beyond. It even might be possible, I said, to follow this current directly to the interior continent, though this I considered doubtful, believing rather that it would flow out from amid fierce and shifting obstructions that would make navigation impracticable.

I then reviewed my plan for scaling the ice barrier and crossing the frozen strip by the aid of a balloon, to which would be attached the light boat-shaped car before mentioned. This car, I said, might be constructed to hold four, possibly six, men. In it could be stored light instruments for photography, observation, etc. Also such furs and clothing as would be needed, and a considerable supply of food in condensed forms.

During this recital I had been interrupted by scarcely a word. Once, when I mentioned the ice-wall, Gale had put his hands together and murmured to himself, “Oh, Lord, two thousand feet high—now I lay me!” But for the rest of the time he was quite silent and attentive, as were both of the others. Miss Gale (and it was to her that I talked), Edith Gale listened without speaking, moveless, her eyes looking straight into mine, but far beyond me, to the land of which I spoke—a land of fancy—the country of my dreams, now becoming hers. Gale turned to Mr. Sturritt as I finished. The meager face of the latter was flushed and animated. Credulous, visionary and eager, the dream had become his, too. It seemed to me that there was a quality of tenderness in Gale’s voice as he addressed him.

“Well, Bill,” he said, “what do you think of it? Chance of your life, ain’t it? Think of provisioning a voyage to the South Pole. Why, you can fairly wallow in tablets!”

Mr. Sturritt shifted a bit in his chair.

“I think it the most wond—the most marvelous undertaking of the century,” he said eagerly, “and the most plaus—er—that is, the most logical. For my own part in it, I may say to Mr. Race—that is, Chase, that I have perfected a sort of system of food tab—I should say lozenges, that might, I believe, be found advantageous in supplying the balloon with food—that is—er—I mean the people in the balloon, where space and lightness would be considerations. They are, I think I may say without claiming—taking credit, that is, for the entire originality of the idea—more nutritious and—er—more wholesome than any other food lozenge I have seen, besides being less bulk—er—I should say—more compact in form, and not so hard to—to—I mean, in fact quite easy——”

“Not so hard to take,” put in Gale. “That’s right, Bill, they’re not bad at all—I’ve tried ’em. I threw a fit afterwards, but that wasn’t your fault—I didn’t take ’em right.”

“Papa insisted on eating all the dessert tablets, because they were pink and flavored with wintergreen, and they made him ill,” commented Miss Gale, who seemed to waken from her reverie.

“They should be taken—er—used, I mean, according to direc—that is—in proper sequence,” explained Mr. Sturritt. “White, followed by blue and red, in order to work well—to secure hygienic results, I should say. The white contains the gently stimulating nutriment of meat and bivalve juices, and is—er—the soup course, so to speak. The blue contains the solids required to supply strength, while the pink or rose wafer combines the essence of creams, fruits and nuts—the delicacies, as it were, of food diet. White, blue and red is the proper combi—er—that is—sequence, and I shall soon have other varieties.”

“I thought they ought to go red, white and blue,” said Gale, “like the colors in the flag. But, see here, Johnnie, what do you think of Mr. Chase’s scheme, anyway? Ain’t it a bully chance for opening our business on a big scale?”

“Please don’t, Daddy,” protested Miss Gale. “Mr. Chase must have a very unfair opinion of us from what you have told him. He must stay to luncheon, and learn to know us better.”

At this point Mr. Sturritt rose and excused himself.

“I am not really a missionary, you know,” Edith Gale continued. “In fact not at all. I have just a little hobby—a very little one—of helping people to better ideals through a truer appreciation of the beautiful in nature.” She said this quite unaffectedly—much as a child would explain a little game of its own. I nodded eagerly and she proceeded.

“It has always seemed to me that the people who see only firewood in trees, weather-signs in skies, and water-supply in rivers, miss a good deal of what is best in this world, and are perhaps not so well prepared for what they find in the next. And sometimes even those who care in a way for the beauties of the earth and sky miss a good deal of them, or care not in the best way. Sometimes they cut their trees into queer shapes, or chop away all the pretty tangle of foliage from a river bank, or lay out their gardens with a square and compass. I sketch and paint a little, and now and then I try to make people realize the beauty as well as the usefulness of nature, and that it’s a waste of time to do all those artificial things to it. It is quite simple to explain with pictures, you know, like an object lesson, and I show them that star-shaped flower-beds, and bare river banks, and ornamentally trimmed trees do not make as pretty pictures as they would the other way, and then sometimes I go further and say that maybe children, and grown folks, too, would be better and less artificial themselves if they were taught to care less for nature in its unnatural forms, and more as God made it. Your dream of an Antarctic world and an undiscovered race is very fascinating to me. I, also, have long had a dream of finding such a people, though it is far more likely that I should go to them to learn than to teach.”

Chauncey Gale had been watching her admiringly while she spoke. As for myself, if there had been one thing needed to complete my conversion, it was this revelation of her gentle doctrines. Gale, however, could not be long repressed.

“You’ve no idea how that sort of thing takes with commuters,” he said reverentially. “It’s sold more additions for me than all my advertising put together.”

“Oh, Daddy, how can you!”

“Look at that air of innocence,” said Gale, “it would deceive the oldest man living. You know very well, Johnnie, that the Bilgewater lots would never have moved in the world if you hadn’t gone out there and got those people all crazy on art values. Why, the art value of every lot in Bilgewater doubled in ten days, and they went off like chromos at a picture auction.”

“Papa!” said Miss Gale severely, “I went to Bridgewater, or Bilgewater, as you persist in calling it, and showed the people my pictures out there, because I was invited to do so, and because I saw by their lawns and gardens that they needed me. I had no thought of the material value and sale of your old lots, I can assure you, and I don’t believe my going made a particle of difference. If I had thought it possible, I shouldn’t have gone.”

It was evident that Gale’s fond pride in his daughter grew with every sentence.

“She’d deceive anybody in the world, except her old Daddy,” he persisted. “Get your pictures, Johnnie, and let Mr. Chase see them.”

I hastened to assure Miss Gale that I should consider it a privilege to look at her work, and she rose, leaving me with her father, whose eyes followed her proudly. For myself, I was in a decidedly miscellaneous condition, mentally. I could not permit myself even to hope that Gale really intended to undertake the expedition I had proposed. Yet there had been something about it all that suggested a sincere interest in my plans, in spite of the fact of his rather boisterous and perhaps undue tendency to levity. It seemed to me that his daughter, and his old-time associate, Sturritt, had taken him seriously, and they must know his moods better than I. At most I would not allow myself to do more than hope. I had waited so long—I could restrain the frenzy of joy in me a little longer. One thing was assured. I was to sit at luncheon with Edith Gale, and even should there be no voyage to the South, I might hope to see her again, when from time to time I could make the excuse of coming to her father with new sources of amusement. I reflected that I would invent the most absurd propositions that human ingenuity could devise, for Chauncey Gale to play with, if he only would let his daughter take part in the merry pastime.

Gale, meantime, had turned to me, and was about to speak when Miss Gale entered. She was accompanied by a stout, resolute-looking colored woman, bearing a large portfolio.

“Put it right down on the rug, Zar, against the chair, so.”

Miss Gale herself adjusted the heavy book, then seated herself comfortably on the floor beside it. The servant withdrew. Gale slid over to a low stool, and, half unconsciously, I slipped from my chair to a position on the floor between them. We were like a group of children around a toy book.

The cover of the portfolio was turned back and the first picture, a bit of landscape in water color, was shown. I had no great technical knowledge of art, but I could see at a glance that Miss Gale’s work was of unusual quality. The admiration, at first expressed in words, soon became the silence of unquestioned tribute. Yet I was not surprised that Edith Gale should do this masterly work. What did surprise me was the genuine appreciation of her father, as shown by his occasional comment. Evidently the daughter’s ability had not been wholly due to the dead mother. At the end of the portfolio there was a series of illustrations for an old Yorkshire ballad.

“Daddy and I always sing this when folks will let us,” announced Miss Gale, with an affected diffidence that made her all the more beautiful, I thought.

“You can’t get away now till after lunch, Chase,” said Gale; “you’ve got to stand it.”

Edith Gale had set the first of the series up before us, and sang the opening lines of the ballad in a voice that might have come from the middle strings of a harp. Then, at the refrain, there joined in a deep, rich resonance that I could hardly realize proceeded from her father. I came in at the end of the second stanza—feebly at first, but gaining in courage until I sang with volume enough to have spoiled everything had I not been more fortunate than usual and kept to the right key.

“Well,” said Gale, “what do you think? Do you think those pictures and that singing of hers will convert the heathen?”

I looked at the wonderful girl, who was laughing and closing the portfolio.

“They would convert me,” I said fervently, “to anything.”

Gale seemed to enjoy this enthusiasm.

“People mostly like us when they know us, eh, Johnnie?”

But Miss Gale was retiring with the portfolio. He turned to me.

“That’s a great girl,” he said. “The only piece of property but one that I never wanted to part with. The other one was her mother. Johnnie came just in time to take her place, and I don’t know what I’d’ a’ done if she hadn’t. Being a mother to her kept me busy, and she’s been mother and father and whole family to me. She’s kept me going straight for about twenty-five years now, and is about the finest south-slope blue-grass addition that the Lord ever helped lay out. And she cares more for her old daddy than for anybody else in the world. Her old daddy and her pictures. She never saw a young man that she cared to look at twice, unless he could do something, and then it was for his talents, and not for him. When they fall in love with her she generally gets tired of their paintings, or their music, or whatever it is, and they go away. They all seem to do it, though. You’d be in love with her yourself in a week, if you lingered about this ship. It’s in the air, and everybody gets it. I wouldn’t say much about it, though, if it was me. If we should go to the South Pole, you’d want to stay with the expedition, and after we got out to sea you’d have some trouble getting ashore again in case you didn’t find the ship comfortable. There’s another young man that comes here. He’s got a scheme for——”

But Miss Gale re-entered at that moment. She had made some slight changes in her toilet, and was more entrancing than ever. Her father had been right, I thought, only he had named too long a period. He had said “in a week.” His prophecy was already fulfilled.

“I say, Johnnie,” greeted Gale, “why wouldn’t our wireless telegraphy scheme go well with this expedition, especially with the balloon part? How about that, Chase? Would it fit in?”

“Perfectly, but Marconi seems to have it all in his own hands, as yet.”

“Not by a jug-full! Johnnie’s got a young man, I was just going to mention him when she came in, a sort of portigee——”

“Protégé Papa! Though he’s not that, either. He’s——”

“Oh, well, protyshay, then. Anyway, he’s got a system that beats Macarony’s to death. I call this chap Macarony, too, because he’s Italian, and his name is a good deal the same.”

“His name is Ferratoni, Papa, and the other isn’t Macaroni, either, but Marconi. Papa never calls anything by its right name, if he can help it,” she apologized. “He gets into dreadful trouble sometimes, too, and I’m glad of it. He should be more particular.”

“All right, then, it’s Ferry—Ferry what? How is it again, Johnnie?”

“Fer-ra-toni.”

“Now we’ve got it. Oh, well, let’s compromise and call him Tony, for short. Well, Tony’s got a system that does all that Macarony’s does, and goes it one better. Obstructions in the way don’t seem to make much difference, and you can use it with a telephone attachment instead of a—a what do you call it—a knocker?”

“A sounder, Daddy.”

“A sounder, that’s it, instead of a sounder. We tried it here the other day, and could talk to him over in the Tract building as well as if we’d been connected with the central office. He’s perfecting it now for long distance, and we might take him right along with us, and let him experiment between the balloon and the ship. How’s that?”

“It would complete our plans perfectly,” I agreed, “if his system of communication prove successful. But do you think he would care to go on such a voyage?”

Gale looked at his daughter.

“Do you think he would go, Johnnie?” he asked, and I thought there was a suggestion of teasing in his voice. Also, it seemed to me that there was a little wave of confusion in Miss Gale’s face, though the slight added color there may have been due to other causes.

“I—why, I think he might——” she began hesitatingly. “I think he would consider it an opportunity. He is deeply interested in what he calls chorded vibrations. Wireless telegraphy, or telephoning, is like that, you know, but Mr. Ferratoni goes much farther. He attributes everything to vibrations. He analyzes my poor little hobby until there’s nothing left of it. He may be here to luncheon to-day, and you can talk with him,” she added, and I thought the blush deepened.

Assuredly he would come to luncheon, and of a certainty he would go to the South Pole, or anywhere that Edith Gale went, and would let him go. It was too late now, however, for me to raise objections. My only comfort lay in the memory of her father’s assurance that it was in their talents, and not in her protégés themselves, that his daughter was interested.

Still, I argued miserably, there must some day come a time—I was sure she had blushed——

A cabin boy entered bearing a tray on which there was a card. He presented it to Miss Gale.

“Mr. Ferratoni,” she said, glancing at it, and an instant later I saw in the doorway a slender figure, surmounted by a beautiful beardless face—the face of southern Italy—of a poet.

My heart sank, but I greeted him cordially, for I could not withstand the beauty of his face and the magnetism of his glance. It seemed to me that it was a foregone conclusion, so far as Miss Gale was concerned, and then I suddenly realized that the South Pole without Edith Gale would not be worth looking for. Even a whole warm Antarctic continent would be a desolation more bleak than people had ever believed it. Yet I would find it for her if I could—and then my reward—she had said I should name it—it had been but a jest, of course——

I realized that Miss Gale was speaking.

“We were just talking of you, Mr. Ferratoni. We have a plan which we think will interest you. Mr. Chase will talk to us about it during luncheon.”

VI.
WHERE ALL THINGS BECOME POSSIBLE.

We passed out into the dining saloon—a counterpart, I learned later, of the dining-room in Mr. Gale’s former cottage at Hillcrest. We were presently joined by a stout and grizzled man of perhaps sixty, with a slight sinister obliquity in one eye. He was arrayed in a handsome blue uniform, and was presented to me as Mr. Joseph Biffer, captain of the Billowcrest. I was pleasantly surprised to see that Mr. Sturritt was also to be with us. The customs on the Billowcrest, as I presently learned, were quite democratic, and William Sturritt, though nominally steward, remained the trusted friend and companion of Chauncey Gale, as he had been for many years. It is true there was an officers’ mess, at which both Mr. Sturritt and Captain Biffer usually preferred to dine, but at the Admiral’s table (they had conferred the title of Admiral on Gale) there was always a welcome for his officers, while on occasions such as this they were often present by request. Gale and his daughter were seated at opposite ends of the table, Ferratoni and myself next Miss Gale, while Captain Biffer and Mr. Sturritt occupied the same relative position to the Admiral.

The Admiral wasted no time in coming to the fun.

“Captain Biffer,” he said, “we want you to take us to the South Pole.”

Mr. Biffer continued the grim process of seasoning his soup for several seconds without replying. Perhaps some rumor of the expedition had already come to him. Then he fixed his sound eye severely on Gale, while he withered the rest of us, and particularly myself, with the other.

“When do you want to start?” he asked.

There was that about Mr. Biffer’s tone and attitude which indicated, so far as he was concerned, an entire lack of humor in the proposition. Even Gale, I thought, seemed a trifle subdued as he answered:

“Oh, I don’t know; we’ll consider that after Mr. Chase has told us what we are going to need to be ready. In three or four months, perhaps.”

Once more the deflected vision of Captain Biffer laid its scorn heavily upon us.

“And get down there and stuck in the ice below Cape Horn about the middle of March, just when their winter and six months’ night begins.”

It was a clean hit for the Captain, and I gave him credit. Gale was clearly out of it for the time being, and looked at me helplessly. His very dismay, however, encouraged me. A man must be in earnest, I thought, to look like that. I hastened to his rescue.

“I have naturally considered the Antarctic solar conditions,” I said, with some dignity, though I confess that with the Captain’s piercing searchlight upon me, the latter was not easy to maintain. “I am aware that their seasons are opposed to ours, and that the year at the poles is divided into a day and a night of six months each.”

Gale, who had been regarding me anxiously, at this point relieved himself in an undertone.

“Six months,” he murmured. “Think of going out to make a night of it in a country like that! Oh, Lord, what is life without a latch-key?”

“I have considered these facts,” I repeated, “and while a period of several months of semi-darkness and cold is not a cheering anticipation to those accustomed to the more frequent recurrence of sunlight, I am convinced that, under favorable conditions, it is not altogether a hardship; also, that in the pleasant climate which I believe exists about the earth’s axis, the extended interval of darkness and semi-twilight would be still less disturbing, and may have been overcome in a measure, or altogether, by the inhabitants there, through artificial means.”

I could see that Chauncey Gale was reviving somewhat as I proceeded, and this gave me courage to continue, in spite of the fact that the Captain’s contempt was only too manifest. As for Mr. Sturritt, he was non-committal, while Ferratoni appeared to have drifted off into a dream of his own. But Edith Gale sustained me with the unshaken confidence in her eyes, and my strength became as the strength of ten.

“As for the time of starting,” I continued——

“Wait,” interrupted Gale, “go over the whole scheme again for the benefit of those who didn’t hear it before. Then we can consider ways and means afterwards.”

Accordingly, and for the third time that day, I carefully reviewed my theories and plans for the expedition. As I proceeded I observed that Captain Biffer’s contempt softened into something akin to pity, while, on the other hand, Chauncey Gale rapidly regained his buoyant confidence.

“That’s where you come in, Bill,” he laughed, as I spoke of the balloon car and its condensed stores.

Mr. Sturritt nodded eagerly.

“And you, Johnnie,” as I referred again to the possible inhabitants in the undiscovered world.

“And Mr. Ferratoni is not to be left out,” answered Miss Gale. “Mr. Chase says that a wireless telephone is the one thing needed to make his plan perfect.”

“To keep the balloon in communication with the ship, in event of our making the voyage overland would be of the greatest advantage,” I admitted, “if it can be done.”

Ferratoni’s face flushed.

“Yes, oh, yes,” he said anxiously, “it can be done. It is the chance.”

“And would you be willing to go on a voyage like that, and leave behind your opportunities of recognition and fortune?” I asked.

Ferratoni’s face grew even more beautiful.

“Fortune? Recognition?” He spoke musically, and his English was almost perfect. “It is not those that I would care for. It is the pursuing of the truth, the great Truth! Electricity—it is but one vibration. There are yet many others—thought, life, soul! Wireless communication—the answering of electric chords—it’s but a step toward the fact, the proving of the Whole Fact. To-day we speak without wires across the city. Later, we shall speak across the world. Still later, between the worlds—perhaps even—yes, yes, I will go! I have but shown the little step. I would have the time and place to continue. And then the new world too—yes, oh, yes, I will go, of a certainty!”

A respectful silence had fallen upon the table. Chauncey Gale’s face showed thoughtful interest. Mr. Biffer was evidently impressed. Me he had regarded as a crazy land-lubber with fool notions of navigation. In Ferratoni he acknowledged a man of science—a science he did not understand and therefore regarded with reverence and awe. Edith Gale’s face wore the exalted expression which always gave it its greatest beauty. For myself, I had been far from unmoved by Ferratoni’s words. I felt that it would be hard to feel jealousy for a man like that, and still harder not to do so. Gale recovered first, and turned to me.

“What about the superintending of the balloon?” he asked. “Who have you got for that?”

I knew as little of practical ballooning as of navigation, but as a boy I had experimented in chemistry, and the manufacture of gases. More lately I had done some reading, and I had ideas on the subject. I said therefore, with becoming modesty, that I had made some study of aeronautics and that, as the science had not yet progressed much beyond the first principles of filling a bag with gas and waiting until the wind was in the right quarter, I believed I might safely undertake to oversee this feature of the enterprise, including the construction of the boat-sledge-car combination.

“And I can take a hand in that, too,” said Gale.

“I’ve got a pretty good mechanical head myself; I’ve planned and built about a million houses, first and last. Commuters say I can get more closets and cubbyholes into a six-room cottage than anybody else could set on the bare lot. I’ll take care of that boat. Now, how about the time, Chase? When do we start?”

“I had thought,” I answered, “that it might require a year for preparation. If we started a year from now, or a little later, we would reach the Antarctics easily by the beginning of the day or summer season, and might, I believe, hope to reach a desirable position at or near the ice-barrier by the beginning of the winter night. During this we would make every added preparation for the inland excursion to be undertaken on the following summer——”

“Say, we’d be apt to get some frost on our pumpkins laying up against an ice-wall through a six months’ night, wouldn’t we?” interrupted Gale.

I called attention to the comfort with which Nansen and his associates had passed through an Arctic night with far fewer resources than we should have on a vessel like the Billowcrest.

“Look here,” said Gale, “what’s the use of waiting a year? Why not go this year?”

“Why,” I suggested, “we could hardly get ready. There will be food supplies to get together, instruments, implements, the balloon, and then the engaging of such scientists as you might wish to take along——”

“Scientists,” interrupted Gale, “what kind?”

“Well, perhaps a meteorologist, a geologist, an ornithologist——”

“See here, what are all those things? What are they for?”

“To observe and record conditions,” I said. “An ornithologist, for instance, would classify and name any new birds that we might find in the Southern Hemisphere, and an——”

“Hold on,” interrupted Gale, “we don’t want any of that yet. We’ll discover the country first. We’ve got science enough right here to do that, I guess, if anybody has. Besides I’m a pretty good hand at naming things myself, and if we find any strange animals or birds wandering about down there without titles, I’ll just give ’em some.”

“Oh, Papa,” laughed Miss Gale.

“Why, yes, of course; and now as to those other things. Mr. Sturritt here can give an order in five minutes for enough provision to last ten years, and have it on board in twenty-four hours. Whatever instruments and material you need for your balloon and telephone machine can be had about as quick, I’m thinking, and if we need any mechanics of any kind I can put my finger on a hundred of them to-morrow. If we’ve got to lay up six months against an ice-wall we’ll want something to do, and will have time enough to build things to fit the case in hand. What I want to know is, if we can be ready to start from here in a week, so’s we’ll miss this winter up here and get safe in the arms of that ice-wall before winter sets in down there! I’m simply pining to get up against that two thousand foot ice-bluff, and I don’t want to wait a year to do it. What do you say, Bill, can we be ready to start from here in a week?”

My heart sank. It was but a huge joke then, after all, and this was his way out of it. But Sturritt, who knew him, was taking it seriously.

“Yes—that is—why certainly, in—er—three days!” he said with nervous haste.

“I can be ready to-morrow,” said Ferratoni, quietly.

“I am ready to start to-night,” said Edith Gale.

I hastened to add that the materials needed for the balloon could doubtless be procured without delay.

“And you, Biffer?” Gale turned to the Captain who had been a silent unprotesting martyr during this proceeding. “Are you ready to start in a week for the South Pole?”

“Admiral,” said the Captain solemnly, and making a sincere effort to fix him with both eyes at once, “you own this boat and I’m hired to sail it. I don’t believe in no South Pole, but if there is one, I don’t know of a better place for a crowd like this. And if you give the order to go to the South Pole, I’ll take you to the South Pole, and sail off into space when we get there, if you say so!”

Mr. Biffer’s remarks were greeted with applause and a round of merriment in which the Captain paid himself the tribute of joining.

“We’ll have the balloon for navigating space, Captain Biffer,” said Edith Gale.

“And my opinion is that we’ll need it, ma’am, if we ever get back.”

But amid the now general enthusiasm Chauncey Gale had sprung to his feet. There was a flush of excitement on his full handsome face, and when he spoke there was a ring of decision in his voice.

“Everybody in favor of starting a week from to-day, for the South Pole, stand up!” he said.

There was a universal scramble. Captain Biffer was first on his feet. Gale seized a glass of wine and holding it high above his head, continued:

“To the Great Billowcrest Expedition! Missionary work for Johnnie; electricity for Ferratoni; balloons for Chase; tablets for Bill; the ship for the Captain; homes and firesides for me, and the South Pole for us all!”

VII.
I LEARN THE WAY OF THE SEA, AND ENTER MORE FULLY INTO MY HERITAGE.

The sun lifting higher above Long Island touched the spray under the bow and turned it into a little rainbow that traveled on ahead. I leaned far out to watch this pleasant omen of fortune, endeavoring meanwhile to realize something of the situation, now that we were finally under way and the years of youth and waiting, of empty dreams and disappointments, lay all behind.

It had been a week to be remembered. A whirl of racing from ship to shop, and from shop to factory—of urging and beseeching on my part, of excuses and protestations on the part of tradesmen and manufacturers. I had been almost despairing at last in the matter of material for the balloon bag, when one morning—it was the fourth day—I heard of a very large completed balloon, made to order for an aeronaut whose old one had missed connection with it by one day. When they had come to deliver it, the undertaker was just driving off, and the aeronaut had made his farewell ascension.

I found it to be of really enormous proportions—one of the largest ever manufactured, I was told—so large, in fact, that the maker was as glad to part with it as I was to secure it.

My associates also had been somewhat occupied. Mr. Sturritt’s delivery teams had been lined up on the Billowcrest dock from morning till night, unloading provisions in various forms, enough it would seem for an army. Ferratoni had laid in his cells, coils, transmitters, detectors and heaven only knows what besides, while Miss Gale had undertaken to supply, in addition to her own requirements, the warm clothing and bedding likely to be needed for an Antarctic winter.

As for Chauncey Gale, he had sat all day at a little table on the afterdeck and signed checks; checks, many of them, that would have wrecked my former commercial venture at any time during the ten years of its existence; and he whistled as he did it, and called out words of comfort to Captain Biffer, who, with a fierce eye on each end of the vessel, strode up and down where boxes, barrels, rolls, rope, chains, etc., were piled or still coming over the side—rending the Second Commandment into orders and admonitions that would have turned a clergyman gray in a night.

Now it was all over. The weird maelstrom of whirling days and nights that had added unreality to what was already dreamlike and impossible, had subsided. We were going down the harbor under full sail. Leaving the others still at breakfast, I had come out here alone to find myself.

I could not grasp it at all. The little farm boy who in the night had wakened and cried for the sea, going back to it, at last. The youth who had carried into manhood the fancy of a fair unknown land, and of one day sailing away to the South to find it, entering suddenly into an Aladdin-like realization of his dreams. It seemed to me that every vessel in the harbor ought to be decorated and firing salutes—that every soul of the vast city ought to be waving us adieu.

To be sure, we hadn’t told anybody. Gale was rather down on the papers, and we had left so suddenly that they had little chance to find out what we were doing. One of them—that of the millionaire editor—got an inkling of it in some way, and in its Sunday Magazine of two days before had filled a page with strange vagaries purporting to be our plans, and disturbing pictures of the lands and people we expected to discover. But as no one ever believes anything printed in a Sunday newspaper, even when backed up by sworn statements, these things appeared to have passed unnoticed. There had been one exception, however; my scientist of the snark and flipper, who had appeared on Monday morning to enter his promised protest.

He came at a busy time. About a hundred teams were backing into each other on the dock, whence arose a medley of unjoyous execration, and a line of men were waiting at Gale’s little table for checks. It was this auspicious moment that my scientist selected for his mission. Captain Biffer, to whom he first appealed, acknowledged him with an observation which no magazine would print, and waved him toward Gale.