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Third Circle

<h2>Toppan</h2> When Frederick Woodhouse Toppan came out of Thibet and returned to the world in general and to San Francisco in particular, he began to know what it meant to be famous. As he entered street cars and hotel elevators he remarked a sudden observant silence on the part of the other passengers. The reporters became a real instead of a feigned annoyance and the papers at large commenced speaking of him by his last name only. He ceased to cut out and paste in his scrap-book, everything that was said of him in the journals and magazines. People composed beforehand clever little things to say to him when they were introduced, and he was asked to indorse new soaps and patented cereals. The great magazines of the country wrote to him for more articles, and his "Through the Highlands of Thibet", already in its fiftieth thousand, was in everybody's hands. And he was hardly thirty. To people who had preconceived ideas as to what an Asiatic explorer should be like, Toppan was disappointing. Where they expected to see a "magnificent physique" in top boots and pith helmet, flung at length upon lion skins, smoking a nargile, they saw only a very much tanned young gentleman, who wore a straw hat and russet leather shoes just like any well dressed man of the period. They felt vaguely defrauded because he looked ordinary and stylish and knew what to do with his hands and feet in a drawing-room. He had come to San Francisco for three reasons. First because at that place he was fitting out an expedition for Kamtchatka which was to be the big thing of his life, and cause him to be spoken of together with Speke, Nansen and Stanley; second because the manager of the lecture bureau with whom he had signed, had scheduled him to deliver his two lectures there, as he had already done in Boston, New York, and elsewhere; and, third because Victoria Boyden lived there. When Toppan got back, the rest of Victoria's men friends shrank considerably when she compared them with Toppan. They were of the type who are in the insurance offices of fathers and uncles during the winter, and in the summer are to be found at the fashionable resorts, where they idle languidly on the beaches in white flannels or play "chopsticks" with the girls on the piano in the hotel parlors. Here, however, was the first white man who had ever crossed Thibet alive, who knew what it meant to go four days without water and who could explain to you the difference between the insanity caused by the lack of sleep and that brought about by a cobra-bite. The men of Victoria's acquaintance never had known what it was to go without two consecutive meals, whereas Toppan at one time in the Himalayas had lived for several weeks upon ten ounces of camel meat per day, after the animals had died under their burdens. Victoria's friends led germans, Toppan led expeditions; their only fatigue came from dancing. Upon one occasion on Mount Everest, Toppan and his companions, caught in a snow-storm where sleep meant death, had kept themselves awake by chewing pipe-tobacco, and rubbing the smarting juice in their eyes. He had had experiences, the like of which none other of her gentlemen friends had ever known and she had cared for him from the first. When a man tells a girl that he loves her in a voice that can speak in the dialects of the interior Thibetan states around the Tengrinor lake, or holds her hand in one that has been sunken deep in the throat of a hunger-mad tiger, she cannot well be otherwise than duly impressed. To look at, Victoria was a queen. Just the woman you would have chosen to be mated with a man like Toppan, five feet, eleven in her tennis shoes, with her head flung well back on her shoulders, and the gait of a goddess; she could look down on most men and in general suggested figures of Brunehilde, Boadicea, or Berenice. But to know her was to find her shallow as a sun-shrunken mill-race, to discover that her brilliancy was the cheapest glitter, and to realise that in every way she was lamentably unsuited for the role of Toppan's wife. And no one saw this so well as Toppan himself. He knew that she did not appreciate him at one-tenth his real value, that she never could and never would understand him, and that he was in every way too good for her. As his wife he felt sure she would only be a hindrance and a stumbling-block in the career that he had planned for himself, if, indeed she did not ruin it entirely. But first impressions were strong with him, and because when he had first known her she had seemed to be fit consort for an emperor, he had gone on loving her as such ever since, making excuses for her trivialities, her petty affectations, her lack of interest in his life work, and even at times her unconcealed ridicule of it. For one thing, Victoria wanted him to postpone his expedition for a year, in order that he might marry her, and Toppan objected to this because he was so circumstanced just then that to postpone meant to abandon it. No man is stronger than his weakest point. Toppan's weak point was Victoria Boyden, and he acknowledged to himself with a good deal of humiliation that he could not make up his mind to break with her. Perhaps he is not to be too severely blamed for this. Living so much apart from women as he did and plunged for such long periods into an atmosphere so entirely different from that of ordinary society, he had come to feel intensely where he felt at all, and had lost the faculty possessed by the more conventional, of easy and ephemeral change from one interest to another. Most of Victoria's admirers in a like case, would have lit a cigarette and walked off the passion between dawn and dark in one night. But Toppan could not do this. It was the one weak strain in his build, "the little rift within the lute." One of the natural consequences of their intercourse was that they were never happy together and hailed with hardly concealed relief the advent of a third person. They had absolutely no interests in common, and their meetings were made up of trivial bickerings. They generally parted quarrelling, and then immediately sat down to count the days until they should meet again. I have no doubt they loved each other well enough, but somehow they were not made to be mated—and that was all there was about it. During the month before the Kamtchatka expedition sailed Toppan worked hard. He commanded jointly with Bushby, a lieutenant in the Civil Engineer Corps, and the two toiled from the dawn of one morning till the dawn of the next, perfecting the last details of their undertaking; correcting charts, lading rifles and ammunition, experimenting with beef extracts and pemmican, and corresponding with geographical societies. Through it all Toppan found time to revise his notes for his last lecture, and to call upon Victoria twice a week. On one of these occasions he said; "How do you get on with my book, Vic, pretty stupid reading?" He had sent her from Bombay the first copy that his London publishers had forwarded to him. "Not at all," she answered, "I like it very much, do you know it has all the fascination of a novel for me. Your style is just as clear and strong as can be, and your descriptions of scenery and the strange and novel bits of human nature in such an unfrequented corner of the globe are much more interesting than the most imaginative and carefully elaborated fiction; those botanical and zoological data must be invaluable to scientific men, I should think; but of course I can't understand them very well. How do you do it, Fred? It is certainly very wonderful. One would think that you were a born writer as well as explorer. But now see here, Freddy; I want to talk to you again about putting off your trip to—what do you call it—for just a year, for my sake." After they had wrangled over this oft-mooted question they parted coldly, and Toppan went away feeling aroused and unhappy. That night he and Bushby were making a chemical analysis of a new kind of smokeless powder. Bushby poured out a handful of saltpeter and charcoal upon a leaf torn from a back number of the Scientific Weekly and slid it across the table towards him. "Now when you burn this stuff," remarked Toppan, spreading it out upon the table with his finger, "you get a reaction of 2KNO3+3C=CO2+CO+, I forget the rest. Get out your formulae in the bookcase there behind you, will you, and look it up for me?" While Bushby was fingering the leaves of the volume, Toppan caught sight of his name on the leaf of the Scientific Weekly which held the mixture. Looking closely he saw that it occurred in a criticism of his book which he had not yet seen. He brushed the charcoal and saltpeter to one side and ran his eyes over the lines: "Toppan's great work," said the writer, "is a book not only for the scientist but for all men. Though dealing to a great extent with the technicalities of geography, geology, and the sister sciences, the author has known how to throw his thoughts and observations into a form of remarkable lightness and brilliancy. In Toppan's hands the book has all the fascination of a novel. His: style is clear and strong, and his descriptions of scenery, and of the weird and unusual phases of human nature to be met with in such an unfrequented corner of the globe are much more interesting than most of the imaginative and carefully elaborated romances of adventure in the present day. His botanical and zoological data will be invaluable to scientific men. It is rare we find the born explorer a born writer as well." As he read, Toppan's heart grew cold within his ribs. "She must have learnt it like a parrot," he mused. "I wonder if she even"— "Equals CO2+CO+N3+KCO3," said Bushby turning to the table again, "come on, old man, hurry up and let's get through with this. It's nearly three o'clock." The next evening Toppan was to deliver his lecture at the Grand Opera House, but in the afternoon he called upon Victoria with a purpose. She was out at the time but he determined to wait for her, and sat down in the drawing-room until she should come. Presently he saw his book with its marbled cover—familiar to him now as the face of a child to its father,—lying conspicuously upon the center table. It was the copy he had mailed to her from Bombay. He picked it up and ran over the leaves; not one of them had been cut. He replaced the book upon the table and left the house. That night the Grand Opera House was packed to the doors and the street in front was full of hoarse, over-worked policemen and wailing coachmen. The awning was out over the sidewalk and the steps of the church across the street were banked with row upon row of watching faces. It was known that this was to be the last lecture of Toppan's before he plunged into the wilderness again, and that the world would not see him for five years. The mayor of the city introduced him in a speech that was too long, and then Toppan stood up and faced the artillery of opera-glasses, and tried not to look into the right-hand proscenium box that held Victoria Boyden and her party. He kept the audience spell-bound for an hour, while he forgot his useless notes, forgot his hearers and the circumstances of time and place, forgot about Victoria Boyden and their mean little squabbles and remembered only that he was Toppan, the great explorer, who had led his men through the interior of Thibet, and had lived to tell it to these people now before him. For an hour he made the people too, forget themselves in him and his story, till they felt something of what he had felt on those occasions when Hope was a phantom scattering chaff, when Resolve wore thin under friction of disaster, when the wheels of Life ran very low and men thanked God that they could die. For an hour he led them steadily into the heart of the unknown: the twilight of the unseen. Then he had an inspiration. He had worked himself up to a mood wherein he was himself at his very best, when his chosen life-work made all else seem trivial and the desire to do great things was big within him. In this mood he somehow happened to remember Victoria Boyden, which he should not have done because she was not to be thought of in connection with great deeds and high resolves. But just at that moment Toppan felt his strength and knew how great he really was, and how small and belittled she seemed in comparison. She had practiced a small deception upon him, had done him harm and would do him more. He suddenly resolved to break with her at that very moment and place while he was strong and able to do it. He did it by cleverly working into his talk a little story whose real meaning no one but Victoria understood. For the audience it was but a bright little bit of folk-lore of upper India. For Victoria, he might as well have struck her across the face. It was cruel; it was even vulgarly cruel, which is brutal, it was vindictive and perhaps cowardly, but the man was smarting under a long continued bitterness and he had at last turned and with closed eyes struck back savagely. The exalted mood which had brought this about, was with him during the rest of the evening, was with him when he drove back to his rooms in his coupe with Bushby, and was with him as he flung himself to bed and went to sleep with a deep sigh of relief for that it was now over and done with forever. But it left him during the night and he awoke the next morning to a realisation of what he had done and of all he had lost. He began by remembering Victoria as he had first known her, by recalling only what was good in her, and by palliating all that was bad. From this starting point he went on till he was in an agony of grief and remorse and ended by lashing himself into the belief that Victoria had been his inspiration and had given zest and interest to every thing he had done. Now he bitterly regretted that he had thrown her over. He had never in his life before loved her so much. He was unfitted for work during all that day and passed the next night in unavailing lamentations. His morning's mail brought him face to face with the crisis of his life. It came in the shape of a letter from Victoria Boyden. It was a very thick and a very heavy letter and she must have spent most of the previous day in writing it. He was surprised that she should have written him at all after what had passed on that other evening, but he was deeply happy as well because he knew precisely what the letter would be, before he opened it. It would be a petition for his forgiveness and a last attempt to win him back to her again. And Toppan knew that she would succeed. He knew that in his present mood he would make any sacrifice for her sake. He foresaw that her appeal would be too strong for him. That was, if he opened and read her letter. Just now the question was, should he do it? If he read that letter he knew that he was lost, his career would stop where it was. To be great he had only to throw it unopened into the fire; yes, but to be great without her, was it worth the while? What would fame and honour and greatness be, without her? He realised that the time had come to choose between her and his career and that it all depended upon the opening of her letter. Two hours later, he flung himself down before his table and took her letter in his hand. His fingers itched for the touch of it. Close to his elbow lay a little copper knife with poison grooves, such as are used by the Hill-tribes in the Kuen-Lun mountains. Toppan kept it for a paper cutter; just now he picked it up. For a long time he remained sitting, holding Victoria's letter in one hand, the little knife in the other. Then he put the point under the flap of the envelope and slowly cut it open. Two weeks later the Kamtchatka Expedition sailed with Bushby in command. Toppan did not go; he was married to Victoria Boyden that Fall. Last season I met Toppan at Coronado Beach. The world has about forgotten him now, but he is quite content as he is. He is head clerk in old Mr. Boyden's insurance office and he plays a capital game of tennis. <div class="vspace" style="height: 4em"></div> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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