The fallen noble drew himself up in his threadbare coat. "Sir," said he, "a gentleman is never cold." One's consideration for others as well as one's own self-respect should check the grumble. This self-suppression, and also the concealment of pain are two of the old noblesse oblige characteristics which are now little more than a tradition. Public opinion should be firmer on the matter. The man who must hop because his shin is hacked, or wring his hand because his knuckles are bruised should be made to feel that he is an object not of pity, but of contempt.
The tradition of Arctic exploration is a noble one among Americans as well as ourselves. The next book is a case in point. It is Greely's "Arctic Service," and it is a worthy shelf-companion to Scott's "Account of the Voyage of the Discovery." There are incidents in this book which one can never forget. The episode of those twenty-odd men lying upon that horrible bluff, and dying one a day from cold and hunger and scurvy, is one which dwarfs all our puny tragedies of romance. And the gallant starving leader giving lectures on abstract science in an attempt to take the thoughts of the dying men away from their sufferings--what a picture! It is bad to suffer from cold and bad to suffer from hunger, and bad to live in the dark; but that men could do all these things for six months on end, and that some should live to tell the tale, is, indeed, a marvel. What a world of feeling lies in the exclamation of the poor dying lieutenant: "Well, this _is_ wretched," he groaned, as he turned his face to the wall.
The Anglo-Celtic race has always run to individualism, and yet there is none which is capable of conceiving and carrying out a finer ideal of discipline. There is nothing in Roman or Grecian annals, not even the lava-baked sentry at Pompeii, which gives a more sternly fine object-lesson in duty than the young recruits of the British army who went down in their ranks on the Birkenhead. And this expedition of Greely's gave rise to another example which seems to me hardly less remarkable. You may remember, if you have read the book, that even when there were only about eight unfortunates still left, hardly able to move for weakness and hunger, the seven took the odd man out upon the ice, and shot him dead for breach of discipline. The whole grim proceeding was carried out with as much method and signing of papers, as if they were all within sight of the Capitol at Washington. His offence had consisted, so far as I can remember, of stealing and eating the thong which bound two portions of the sledge together, something about as appetizing as a bootlace. It is only fair to the commander to say, however, that it was one of a series of petty thefts, and that the thong of a sledge might mean life or death to the whole party.
Personally I must confess that anything bearing upon the Arctic Seas is always of the deepest interest to me. He who has once been within the borders of that mysterious region, which can be both the most lovely and the most repellent upon earth, must always retain something of its glamour. Standing on the confines of known geography I have shot the southward flying ducks, and have taken from their gizzards pebbles which they have swallowed in some land whose shores no human foot has trod. The memory of that inexpressible air, of the great ice-girt lakes of deep blue water, of the cloudless sky shading away into a light green and then into a cold yellow at the horizon, of the noisy companionable birds, of the huge, greasy-backed water animals, of the slug-like seals, startlingly black against the dazzling whiteness of the ice--all of it will come back to a man in his dreams, and will seem little more than some fantastic dream itself, go removed is it from the main stream of his life. And then to play a fish a hundred tons in weight, and worth two thousand pounds--but what in the world has all this to do with my bookcase?
Yet it has its place in my main line of thought, for it leads me straight to the very next upon the shelf, Bullen's "Cruise of the Cachelot," a book which is full of the glamour and the mystery of the sea, marred only by the brutality of those who go down to it in ships.