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Page 93
The old boat's flag, the tattered little square of faded stars and bars
that had been used to mark the line of many a weary march, had been
hanging, as usual, over the blue-print plans of the Freja on the wail
opposite the window. Inadequately fixed in its place, the jar of the
closing door as Bennett shut it behind him dislodged it, and it fell to
the floor close beside him.
He stooped and picked it up, and, holding it in his hand, turned toward
the spot whence it had fallen. He cast a glance at the wall above the
plans of the Freja, about to replace it, willing for the instant to
defer the momentous words he felt must soon be spoken, willing to put
off the inevitable a few seconds longer.
"I don't know," he muttered, looking from the flag to the empty
wall-spaces about the room; "I don't know just where to put this. Do
you--"
"Don't you know?" interrupted Lloyd suddenly, her blue eyes all alight.
"No," said Bennett; "I--"
Lloyd caught the flag from his hands and, with one great sweep of her
arm, drove its steel-shod shaft full into the centre of the great chart
of the polar region, into the innermost concentric circle where the Pole
was marked.
"Put that flag there!" she cried.
XI.
That particular day in the last week in April was sombre and somewhat
chilly, but there was little wind. The water of the harbour lay smooth
as a sheet of tightly stretched gray silk. Overhead the sea-fog drifted
gradually landward, descending, as it drifted, till the outlines of the
City grew blurred and indistinct, resolving to a dim, vast mass, rugged
with high-shouldered office buildings and bulging, balloon-like domes,
confused and mysterious under the cloak of the fog. In the nearer
foreground, along the lines of the wharves and docks, a wilderness of
masts and spars of a tone just darker than the gray of the mist stood
away from the blur of the background with the distinctness and delicacy
of frost-work.
But amid all this grayness of sky and water and fog one distinguished
certain black and shifting masses. They outlined every wharf, they
banked every dock, every quay. Every small and inconsequent jetty had
its fringe of black. Even the roofs of the buildings along the
water-front were crested with the same dull-coloured mass.
It was the People, the crowd, rank upon rank, close-packed, expectant,
thronging there upon the City's edge, swelling in size with the lapse of
every minute, vast, conglomerate, restless, and throwing off into the
stillness of the quiet gray air a prolonged, indefinite murmur, a
monotonous minor note.
The surface of the bay was dotted over with all manner of craft black
with people. Rowboats, perilously overcrowded, were everywhere.
Ferryboats and excursion steamers, chartered for that day, heeled over
almost to the water's edge with the unsteady weight of their passengers.
Tugboats passed up and down similarly crowded and displaying the flags
of various journals and news organisations--the News, the Press, the
Times, and the Associated Press. Private yachts, trim and very graceful
and gleaming with brass and varnish, slipped by with scarcely a ripple
to mark their progress, while full in the centre of the bay, gigantic,
solid, formidable, her grim, silent guns thrusting their snouts from her
turrets, a great, white battleship rode motionless to her anchor.
An hour passed; noon came. At long intervals a faint seaward breeze
compressed the fog, and high, sad-coloured clouds and a fine and
penetrating rain came drizzling down. The crowds along the wharves grew
denser and blacker. The numbers of yachts, boats, and steamers
increased; even the yards and masts of the merchant-ships were dotted
over with watchers.
Then, at length, from far up the bay there came a faint, a barely
perceptible, droning sound, the sound of distant shouting. Instantly the
crowds were alert, and a quick, surging movement rippled from end to end
of the throng along the water-front. Its subdued murmur rose in pitch
upon the second. Like a flock of agitated gulls, the boats in the
harbour stirred nimbly from place to place; a belated newspaper tug tore
by, headed for the upper bay, smoking fiercely, the water boiling from
her bows. From the battleship came the tap of a drum. The excursion
steamers and chartered ferryboats moved to points of vantage and took
position, occasionally feeling the water with their paddles.
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