|
Main
- books.jibble.org
My Books
- IRC Hacks
Misc. Articles
- Meaning of Jibble
- M4 Su Doku
- Computer Scrapbooking
- Setting up Java
- Bootable Java
- Cookies in Java
- Dynamic Graphs
- Social Shakespeare
External Links
- Paul Mutton
- Jibble Photo Gallery
- Jibble Forums
- Google Landmarks
- Jibble Shop
- Free Books
- Intershot Ltd
|
books.jibble.org
Previous Page
| Next Page
Page 84
Much of their time, however, they spent in Bennett's study. This was a
great apartment in the rear of the house, scantily, almost meanly,
furnished. Papers littered the floor; bundles of manuscripts, lists,
charts, and observations, the worn and battered tin box of records,
note-books, journals, tables of logarithms were piled upon Bennett's
desk. A bookcase crammed with volumes of reference, statistical
pamphlets, and the like stood between the windows, while one of the
walls was nearly entirely occupied by a vast map of the arctic circle,
upon which the course of the Freja, her drift in the pack, and the route
of the expedition's southerly march were accurately plotted.
The room was bare of ornament; the desk and a couple of chairs were its
only furniture. Pictures there were none. Their places were taken by
photographs and a great blue print of the shipbuilder's plans and
specifications of the Freja.
The photographs were some of those that Dennison had made of the
expedition--the Freja nipped in the ice, a group of the officers and
crew upon the forward deck, the coast of Wrangel Island, Cape Kammeni,
peculiar ice formations, views of the pack under different conditions
and temperatures, pressure-ridges and scenes of the expedition's daily
life in the arctic, bear-hunts, the manufacture of sledges, dog-teams,
Bennett taking soundings and reading the wind-gauge, and one, the last
view of the Freja, taken just as the ship--her ice-sheathed dripping
bows heaved high in the air, the flag still at the peak--sank from
sight.
However, on the wall over the blue-print plans of the Freja, one of the
boat's flags, that had been used by the expedition throughout all the
time of its stay in the ice, hung suspended--a faded, tattered square of
stars and bars.
As the new life settled quietly and evenly to its grooves a routine
began to develop. About an hour after breakfast Lloyd and Bennett shut
themselves in Bennett's "workroom," as he called it, Lloyd taking her
place at the desk. She had become his amanuensis, had insisted upon
writing to his dictation.
"Look at that manuscript," she had exclaimed one day, turning the sheets
that Bennett had written; "literally the very worst handwriting I have
ever seen. What do you suppose a printer would make out of your 'thes'
and 'ands'? It's hieroglyphics, you know," she informed him gravely,
nodding her head at him.
It was quite true. Bennett wrote with amazing rapidity and with ragged,
vigorous strokes of the pen, not unfrequently driving the point through
the paper itself; his script was pothooks, clumsy, slanting in all
directions, all but illegible. In the end Lloyd had almost pushed him
from his place at the desk, taking the pen from between his fingers,
exclaiming:
"Get up! Give me your chair--and that pen. Handwriting like that is
nothing else but a sin."
Bennett allowed her to bully him, protesting merely for the enjoyment of
squabbling with her.
"Come, I like this. What are you doing in my workroom anyhow, Mrs.
Bennett? I think you had better go to your housework."
"Don't talk," she answered. "Here are your notes and journal. Now tell
me what to write."
In the end matters adjusted themselves. Daily Lloyd took her place at
the desk, pen in hand, the sleeve of her right arm rolled back to the
elbow (a habit of hers whenever writing, and which Bennett found to be
charming beyond words), her pen travelling steadily from line to line.
He on his part paced the floor, a cigar between his teeth, his notes and
note-books in his hand, dictating comments of his own, or quoting from
the pages, stained, frayed, and crumpled, written by the light of the
auroras, the midnight suns, or the unsteady, flickering of train-oil
lanterns and blubber-lamps.
What long, delicious hours they spent thus, as the winter drew on, in
the absolute quiet of that country house, ignored and lost in the brown,
bare fields and leafless orchards of the open country! No one troubled
them. No one came near them. They asked nothing better than that the
world wherein they once had lived, whose hurtling activity and febrile
unrest they both had known so well, should leave them alone.
Previous Page
| Next Page
|
|