Steampunk Prime_ A Vintage Steampunk Reader - Mike Ashley [42]
“And I wouldn’t like you to hear you say one syllable more. You’ve said just what I wanted you to say, just what I thought you would say, and that’s about good enough for me. We go from South to North through the core of the earth, or stop and be smashed up somewhere midway or elsewhere, but we’ll do it together. If the inevitable happens, I will kill you first and then myself. If we get through, you will be, in the eyes of all men, just what I think you are now, and — well, that’s about enough said, isn’t it?”
“Almost,” she said, “except — ”
And then, reading what was plainly written in her eyes, he caught her closer to him.
Their lips met and finished the sentence more meaningfully than any words could have done.
“I thought you’d say that,” he said afterwards.
“I don’t think you’d have asked me to marry you if you hadn’t thought it,” she said.
“No,” he said. “I wouldn’t. It seems a bit brutal to say so, but really I wouldn’t.”
“And if you hadn’t asked like that,” she said, once more looking him straight in the eyes, “I should have said ‘No,’ just as I did before.”
She looked very tempting as she said this. He pulled her towards him; and as she turned her face up to his, he said, “Has it ever struck you that there is infinitely more delight to a man in kissing lips which have once said ‘No’ to him, and then ‘Yes,’ than those which have only said ‘Yes’?”
“What a very mean advantage to take of an unprotected female.”
A kiss ended the uncompleted sentence.
Then she began again —
“And when shall we start?”
“Seven tomorrow morning — that is to say, by our watches, not by the sun. Everything is on shore now, and we shouldn’t make it later. I’m going to the Professor to help him up with the fixings, and I suppose you want to go into the tent and see after your domestic business. Good night for the present.”
“Good night, dear, for the present.”
And so was said the most momentous “Good night” that man and woman had ever said to each other since Adam kissed “Good night” to Eve in Eden.
IV
The next day — that is to say, a period of twelve hours later, measured according to the chronometers of the expedition (for the pale sun was only describing a little arc across the northern horizon, not to sink below it for another three months or so) — the members of the Pole to Pole Expedition said “Goodbye” to the companions with whom they had journeyed across the world.
There was a strong, steady breeze blowing directly from the northward. The great box-kites were sent up, six of them in all, and along the fine piano-wire cables which held them, the lighter portions of the stores were sent on carriers driven by smaller kites.
Princeps and Brenda had gone up first in the carrier-slings. The Professor remained on the beach with the bluejackets from the cruiser, who, with huge delight and no little mystification, were giving a helping hand in the strangest job that even British sailors had ever helped to put through. Their remarks to each other formed a commentary on the expedition as original as it was terse and to the point. It had, however, the disadvantage of being mostly unprintable.
It was twelve hours later when the Professor, having shaken hands all round, a process which came to between three and four hundred handshakes, took his seat in the sling of the last kite and went soaring up over the summit of the ice-wall. A hearty cheer from five hundred throats, and a rolling fire of blank cartridge from the cruiser, reverberated round the walls of everlasting ice which guarded the hitherto unpenetrated solitudes of Antarctica as the sling crossed the top of the wall, and a pull on the tilting-line bought the great kite slowly to the ground.
As the cable slackened, it was released from its moorings on the beach. A little engine, driven by liquid air, hauled it up on a drum. Three tiny figures appeared on the edge of the ice-cliff and waved their last