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Page 85
Only one jarring note, and that none too resonant, broke the long
harmony of Lloyd's happiness during these days. Bennett was deaf to it;
but for Lloyd it vibrated continuously and, as time passed, with
increasing insistence and distinctness. But for one person in the world
Lloyd could have told herself that her life was without a single element
of discontent.
This was Adler. It was not that his presence about the house was a
reproach to Bennett's wife, for the man was scrupulously unobtrusive. He
had the instinctive delicacy that one sometimes discovers in simple,
undeveloped natures--seafaring folk especially--and though he could not
bring himself to leave his former chief, he had withdrawn himself more
than ever from notice since the time of Bennett's marriage. He rarely
even waited on the table these days, for Lloyd and Bennett often chose
to breakfast and dine quite to themselves.
But, for all that, Lloyd saw Adler from time to time, Kamiska invariably
at his heels. She came upon him polishing the brasses upon the door of
the house, or binding strips of burlaps and sacking about the
rose-bushes in the garden, or returning from the village post-office
with the mail, invariably wearing the same woollen cap, the old
pea-jacket, and the jersey with the name "Freja" upon the breast. He
rarely spoke to her unless she first addressed him, and then always with
a precise salute, bringing his heels sharply together, standing stiffly
at attention.
But the man, though all unwittingly, radiated gloom. Lloyd readily saw
that Adler was labouring under a certain cloud of disappointment and
deferred hope. Naturally she understood the cause. Lloyd was too
large-hearted to feel any irritation at the sight of Adler. But she
could not regard him with indifference. To her mind he stood for all
that Bennett had given up, for the great career that had stopped
half-way, for the work half done, the task only half completed. In a way
was not Adler now superior to Bennett? His one thought and aim and hope
was to "try again." His ambition was yet alive and alight; the soldier
was willing where the chief lost heart. Never again had Adler addressed
himself to Lloyd on the subject of Bennett's inactivity. Now he seemed
to understand--to realise that once married--and to Lloyd--he must no
longer expect Bennett to continue the work. All this Lloyd interpreted
from Adler's attitude, and again and again told herself that she could
read the man's thoughts aright. She even fancied she caught a mute
appeal in his eyes upon those rare occasions when they met, as though he
looked to her as the only hope, the only means to wake Bennett from his
lethargy. She imagined that she heard him say:
"Ain't you got any influence with him, Miss? Won't you talk good talk to
him? Don't let him chuck. Make him be a man, and not a professor.
Nothing else in the world don't figure. It's his work. God A'mighty cut
him out for that, and he's got to do it."
His work, his work, God made him for that; appointed the task, made the
man, and now she came between. God, Man, and the Work,--the three vast
elements of an entire system, the whole universe epitomised in the
tremendous trinity. Again and again such thoughts assailed her. Duty
once more stirred and awoke. It seemed to her as if some great engine
ordained of Heaven to run its appointed course had come to a standstill,
was rusting to its ruin, and that she alone of all the world had power
to grasp its lever, to send it on its way; whither, she did not know;
why, she could not tell. She knew only that it was right that she should
act. By degrees her resolution hardened. Bennett must try again. But at
first it seemed to her as though her heart would break, and more than
once she wavered.
As Bennett continued to dictate to her the story of the expedition he
arrived at the account of the march toward Kolyuchin Bay, and, finally,
at the description of the last week, with its terrors, its sufferings,
its starvation, its despair, when, one by one, the men died in their
sleeping-bags, to be buried under slabs of ice. When this point in the
narrative was reached Bennett inserted no comment of his own; but while
Lloyd wrote, read simply and with grim directness from the entries in
his journal precisely as they had been written.
Lloyd had known in a vague way that the expedition had suffered
abominably, but hitherto Bennett had never consented to tell her the
story in detail. "It was a hard week," he informed her, "a rather bad
grind."
Now, for the first time, she was to know just what had happened, just
what he had endured.
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