"Why," I said, looking at him, with my disgust speaking in my face
(Heaven forgive me! ), "I call it nothing less than murder." Lemarchant laughed, and lit his cigar; but after that, somehow, the
other men didn't much care to talk to him in an ordinary way more than
was necessary for the carrying out of the ship's business. And yet he was a very gentlemanly fellow, I must admit, and well read
and decently educated. Only there seemed to be a certain natural
brutality about him, under a thin veneer of culture and good breeding,
that repelled us all dreadfully from the moment we saw him. I dare say
we shouldn't have noticed it so much if we hadn't been thrown together
so closely as men are on an Arctic voyage, but then and there it was
positively unendurable. We none of us held any communications with him
whenever we could help it; and he soon saw that we all of us thoroughly
disliked and distrusted him. That only made him reckless and defiant. He knew he was bound to go the
journey through with us now, and he set to work deliberately to shock
and horrify us. Whether all the stories he told us by the ward-room fire
in the evenings were true or not, I can't tell you--I don't believe they
all were; but at any rate he made them seem as brutal and disgusting as
the most loathsome details could possibly make them. He was always
apologizing--nay, glorying--in bloodshed and slaughter, which he used to
defend with a show of cultivated reasoning that made the naked brutality
of his stories seem all the more awful and unpardonable at bottom. And
yet one couldn't deny, all the time, that there was a grace of manner
and a show of polite feeling about him which gave him a certain external
pleasantness, in spite of everything. He was always boasting that women
liked him; and I could easily understand how a great many women who saw
him only with his company manners might even think him brave and
handsome and very chivalrous. I won't go into the details of the expedition. They will be found fully
and officially narrated in the log, which I have hidden in the captain's
box in the hut beside the captain's body. I need only mention here the
circumstances immediately connected with the main matter of this
confession. *       *       *       *       *

One day, a little while before we got jammed into the ice off the Liakov
Islands, Lemarchant was up on deck with me, helping me to remove from
the net the creatures that we had dredged up in our shallow soundings. As he stooped to pick out a _Leptocardium boreale_, I happened to
observe that a gold locket had fallen out of the front of his waistcoat,
and showed a lock of hair on its exposed surface. Lemarchant noticed it
too, and with an awkward laugh put it back hurriedly. "My little girl's
keepsake!" he said in a tone that seemed to me disagreeably flippant
about such a subject. "She gave it to me just before I set off on my way
to Hammerfest." I started in some astonishment. He had a little girl then--a sweetheart
he meant, obviously. If so, Heaven help her! poor soul, Heaven help her! For any woman to be tied for life to such a creature as that was really
quite too horrible. I didn't even like to think upon it. I don't know what devil prompted me, for I seldom spoke to him, even
when we were told off on duty together; but I said at last, after a
moment's pause, "If you are engaged to be married, as I suppose you are
from what you say, I wonder you could bear to come away on such a long
business as this, when you couldn't get a word or a letter from the lady
you're engaged to for a whole winter." He went on picking out the shells and weeds as he answered in a
careless, jaunty tone, "Why, to tell you the truth, Doctor, that was
just about the very meaning of it. We're going to be married next
summer, you see, and for reasons of her papa's--the deuce knows
what!--my little girl couldn't possibly be allowed to marry one week
sooner. There I'd been, knocking about and spooning with her violently
for three months nearly; and the more I spooned, and the more tired I
got of it, the more she expected me to go on spooning. Well, I'm not the
sort of man to stand billing and cooing for a whole year together. At
last the thing grew monotonous. I wanted to get an excuse to go off
somewhere, where there was some sort of fun going on, till summer came,
and we could get spliced properly (for she's got some tin, too, and I
didn't want to throw her over); but I felt that if I'd got to keep on
spooning and spooning for a whole winter, without intermission, the
thing would really be one too many for me, and I should have to give it
up from sheer weariness. So I heard of this precious expedition, which
is just the sort of adventure I like; I wrote and volunteered for it;
and then I managed to make my little girl and her dear papa believe that
as I was an officer in the naval reserve I was compelled to go when
asked, willy-nilly. 'It's only for half a year, you know, darling,' and
all that sort of thing--you understand the line of country; and
meanwhile I'm saved the bother of ever writing to her, or getting any
letters from her either, which is almost in its way an equal nuisance." "I see," said I shortly. "Not to put too fine a point upon it, you
simply lied to her." "Upon my soul," he answered, showing his teeth again, but this time by
no means pleasantly, "you fellows on the _Cotopaxi_ are really the
sternest set of moralists I ever met with outside a book of sermons or a
Surrey melodrama. You ought all to have been parsons, every man Jack of
you; that's just about what you're fit for." *       *       *       *       *

On the fourteenth of September we got jammed in the ice, and the
_Cotopaxi_ went to pieces. You will find in the captain's log how part
of us walked across the pack to the Liakov Islands, and settled
ourselves here on Point Sibiriakoff in winter quarters. As to what
became of the other party, which went southwards to the mouth of the
Lena, I know nothing. It was a hard winter, but by the aid of our stores and an occasional
walrus shot by one of the blue-jackets, we managed to get along till
March without serious illness. Then, one day, after a spell of terrible
frost and snow, the Captain came to me, and said, "Doctor, I wish you'd
come and see Lemarchant, in the other hut here. I'm afraid he's got a
bad fever." I went to see him. So he had. A raging fever. Fumbling about among his clothes to lay him down comfortably on the
bearskin (for of course we had saved no bedding from the wreck), I
happened to knock out once more the same locket that I had seen when he
was emptying the drag-net. There was a photograph in it of a young lady. The seal-oil lamp didn't give very much light in the dark hut (it was
still the long winter night on the Liakov Islands), but even so I
couldn't help seeing and recognizing the young lady's features. Great
Heaven support me! uphold me! I reeled with horror and amazement. It was
Dora.