• CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE •

THE WAINSCOTED WALLS OF THE BANQUET HALL OF THE NEW Willard Hotel were hung with bunting, semi-circles of red, white and blue. The four hundred guests would sit at twelve long, mead hall-like tables on which crystalware, silver cutlery and white bone china sparkled beneath a constellation of chandeliers. Dr. Cook and I would sit near the head of table number six, twenty feet from the centre of the dais where Peary was to give his speech.

That morning, the papers had proclaimed: “PEARY TO BID FAREWELL TO EXPLORATION”; “PEARY TO RETIRE AT EXPLORERS’ BANQUET”; “PEARY: NORTH POLE UNREACHABLE.” All the papers referred to an unnamed source within the Peary Arctic Club. In the very brief stories that accompanied the large headlines, no mention was made of Dr. Cook or the rumours that Peary would recommend as his successor the man who had saved his wife and child.

Bridgman, Amundsen told us, had been unable to resist showing Peary’s speech to others besides Dr. Cook, who had been sensibly discreet. I, too, had told no one, but it seemed that Amundsen was right, that everybody “knew.” Peary was only nominally the guest of honour. It would soon be revealed that the true guest of honour was Dr. Cook.

I was, unlike Dr. Cook, unable to conceal my excitement. I looked so openly expectant, was such a picture of youthful anticipation, that everyone who looked at me could not help smiling. I rendered pointless, almost comic, Dr. Cook’s contained, reserved manner. Standing there beside him, I was like a caricature of his inward self, the self that he thought he was concealing from the world, but that was following him about the room like a mime whose presence he was unaware of.

There was no sign of Peary yet, though it seemed that almost everyone else was there, including more than twenty senators and twice that many congressmen.

“There is much talk about you, too, Devlin,” Amundsen said. “For the first time ever, Peary and the young man who saved his life will meet in public.”

I was anxious, for there was no telling when Peary might appear at my side, hand extended to shake mine a second time while all around us people gaped. I tried to prepare myself, knowing that if he took my hand, I would recall the first time when he all but crushed it in his, when he spoke about my mother and Francis Stead as though he was casting their curse on me. I had rehearsed a few pleasantries and was prepared to keep smiling for as long as our conversation lasted.

The unmistakable sense in the room that something momentous was imminent grew more palpable as the time for the start of the banquet approached.

“It is as Captain Cagni said,” Amundsen told us. “Peary plans to go out in such a way that it will never be forgotten. I dare say he is in the hotel somewhere, waiting until the last moment.” Amundsen examined Dr. Cook’s face closely, hoping that now, on the brink of the announcement, he would admit that the rumours were correct. Dr. Cook shook his head and smiled. “I think you and Peary must be in this together,” Amundsen said.

A phalanx of trumpeters blaringly announced that the serving of dinner would soon commence. But there was still no sign of Peary.

Herbert Bridgman went to the head table and announced from the dais that Commander Peary was unavoidably detained but had insisted that dinner proceed without him. There were many shouted protests, but soon the delegates and guests began to search out their seats at the tables.

As dinner began, Dr. Cook sat there, unable to do anything but smile and nod when people spoke to him.

“This is taking suspense too far,” said Cagni. “Peary is the congress president and the banquet’s guest of honour. What can he be up to, Dr. Cook?”

Dr. Cook smiled as if all was going according to plan.

The middle four settings of the head table were still unoccupied an hour later. The guests cast glances at the head table and at Bridgman, shaking their heads as if they were not only puzzled, but considered this behaviour of Peary’s to be bad form. And why were four settings unoccupied? Two were for Peary and his wife, but what about the other two? The president of the National Geographic Society and his wife were sitting to the right of the empty chairs, a senior senator and his wife to the left. It seemed that everyone but the Pearys was accounted for.

Several delegates wandered up to the head table and passed a word with Herbert Bridgman, who faintly shook his head and was clearly trying not to show how mortified he was. He looked genuinely baffled.

How, those people who were seated with Dr. Cook and me wondered, could the Hubbard Medal be presented without Peary? Speculation began that perhaps he really was sick—sicker even than those who had believed this explanation for his absence from the congress had imagined. I looked questioningly at Dr. Cook, who faintly shrugged.

The last of the dessert dishes were being cleared and it seemed that most of the guests had resigned themselves to not setting eyes on Peary that night when the large front doors of the banquet hall were ceremoniously opened by two white-gloved butlers. A lone man dressed in scarlet livery stepped into the room.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he shouted, “the President of the United States of America and the First Lady, Mrs. Roosevelt.”

As if it had followed the president to the hotel from the White House but was not allowed into the banquet room, an unseen brass band struck up “Hail to the Chief” somewhere outside the room.

Like an apparition, Teddy Roosevelt and his wife appeared, walking arm in arm, encircled by aides and a two-man colour guard, the beefy president looking uncomfortably crammed into his tuxedo, the overhead lights reflecting in his monocle, which glittered like a brooch. His wife wore a long white dress that flared out slightly at the hem. Her ample form was contained by a tightly tucked bodice from which a slight pouch depended, and she wore around her shoulders a long white fur boa that extended almost to the floor. Her flat, dark hat looked like an extension of her hair, so that it seemed the hat had earflaps, as if she and the others had made the trip from Pennsylvania Avenue on foot through the snow.

The Roosevelts were followed by the Pearys, Peary in full navy uniform. Restored to what I took to be his normal weight, he looked almost nothing like he had at Etah. He carried his hat beneath his arm. His red hair and florid red moustache were newly coiffed. The front of his jacket was festooned with medals and ribbons, its back almost comically bare by comparison. Mrs. Peary’s expression seemed to say that at last exploration had yielded something of which she wholeheartedly approved. She wore a flowing dinner gown made of some filmy, gauze-like material, with a narrow frill of transparent lace at the neck and loose transparent sleeves. The skirt, which dragged the floor, was edged with several layers of lace flounces. The dress had a wide waistbelt with a chatelaine bag, a silver-chain purse and, hanging lowest of all from the belt, a thin lorgnette, as if she intended from the head table to examine the assembled guests as one might the cast of some expansive opera.

Peary shuffled along like a man whose toes were bent beneath his feet. It might have been Peary’s peculiar, pathetic gait that broke the spell that had fallen over everyone as the foursome arrived, for at last the guests rose to their feet with much scraping of chairs to acknowledge the president, who, the expression on many faces seemed to say, really was here, however unlikely it seemed.

Somewhere in the room there was a burst of applause that was taken up by the rest of us, “an ovation for the President and the First Lady, and for the President of the congress and his first lady,” one of the papers would later say.

As we all clapped and watched the presidential procession make its way between the tables towards the dais, many eyes turned towards Dr. Cook and me. Otto Sverdrup, Amundsen, Cagni—all smiled as if to say that Roosevelt was here as much to honour Dr. Cook as to honour Peary. Roosevelt, after whom Peary had named his last ship and who had intervened with Congress to help raise funds for his most recent expedition, would witness and confer his blessing on the passing of the torch to Dr. Cook. It was plain that all of them were not only happy for Dr. Cook but far more fond of him than they were of Peary, whose farewell address they were eagerly awaiting.

Dr. Cook’s colour rose as though every eye in the banquet hall was turned his way, as though he alone had just been announced by the butler and was the object of this thunderous ovation.

It felt as if the announcement had already been made and all that remained was for Peary to place upon it the final flourish of an eloquent goodbye.

Once the Roosevelts and the Pearys were seated, the president of the National Geographic Society, Willis Moore, went to the lectern and read an obviously rehearsed welcome to the newly arrived head-table guests. There was much nodding among the tables, as if everyone was saying they had known all along that Willis Moore knew what was keeping Peary, known all along that he would never allow his annual banquet to fall as flat as for a while it had seemed certain to do.

Among the head-table guests was Dr. Alexander Graham Bell, upon whom Moore called to “say a few words.” Dr. Bell, he said, had been a founding member of the society and its second president, and was therefore better suited than anyone for the task he was about to perform.

Dr. Bell had been speaking for some time before I realized that the subject of his address was Dr. Cook, whose colour was even higher than before; he really was the cynosure of all eyes.

“We have with us, and are glad to welcome, Commander Peary, explorer of the Arctic regions, but in Dr. Cook we have one of the few Americans, if not perhaps the only American, who has explored both extremes of the world, the Arctic and the Antarctic regions. And now he has been to the top of the American continent and therefore, if I may presume to say so, to the top of the world.”

There was a marked pause. “The top of the world.” Dr. Bell had said, the expression normally used to describe the North Pole.

As if, all at once, the crowd decided that this unfortunate choice of words could be erased only one way, there followed an ovation louder and more vigorous than the one that had greeted the arrival of the president.

Everyone stood, Dr. Cook included, and everyone applauded with the exception of Dr. Cook, who suddenly seemed quite composed, accepting the ovation by bowing to all corners of the room.

Then, like an actor inviting the audience to acknowledge the brilliance of his co-star, Dr. Cook extended his hands as if to say, “I give you Mr. Stead.” The ovation rose in volume as I heard Amundsen and Cagni roaring, “Hear, hear.” Amundsen, as though he was a referee and I a triumphant boxer, raised my hand in the air and turned me once about in a circle, with his free hand exhorting everyone around us to cheer louder.

As he did so, I looked up at the head table and saw Peary applauding but not looking my way, instead staring out above the crowd as though interested in something taking place at the back of the room.

When Amundsen released my hand and clapped me on the back, Dr. Bell began to speak again and the guests sat down. My pulse was racing, the blood pounding at my temples. I looked at Dr. Cook, who warmly smiled at me. It was to be our night, not just his.

“I would ask Dr. Cook and Mr. Stead to speak,” said Dr. Bell, “except that I have been told that a more appropriate moment for them to do so is still to come.” At these words, knowing looks were universally exchanged.

When Dr. Bell finished speaking, Willis Moore called on President Roosevelt to award the Hubbard Medal to Peary.

The president, who either was extemporizing or had memorized his speech, began. “Civilized people,” he said, surveying the guests with a glance that seemed to say that they were the epitome of civilized people, “live under conditions of life so easy that there is a certain tendency to atrophy of the hardier virtues. But Commander Peary is proof that, in some of the race at least, there has been no loss of the hardier virtues.”

I looked at Jo Peary. How much healthier she was than when I had seen her last. I remembered the narrow, furrowed nape of her neck; her cropped hair hidden by her cap, so that it seemed she might be bald beneath it. Despite how she and her husband had parted at Etah, they had somehow reconciled and here she was, publicly supporting him. More forbearing than Mrs. Cook, it seemed.

I don’t know how long I was looking at Jo Peary before I realized that she was looking back at me. She smiled, which at first I took to be an acknowledgment of what we both knew—of the announcement Peary was about to make, from which Dr. Cook and I would benefit. But then I saw that the smile meant something else. It said, How far we are, Mr. Stead, from the place where we met. How different that world is from this one, and how oblivious to that other world all these people are. It was as though we were sharing a joke. I smiled back, and after a second or two she looked away, still smiling.

“The basis of a successful national character must rest upon the great fighting virtues,” President Roosevelt said, “which can be shown quite as well in peace as in war. For months in and months out, Commander Peary, year in and year out, you have faced perils and overcome the greatest risks and difficulties while having to show, in circumstances that were surely like those of war, the moral and compassionate qualities of peace. You bore, in short, the burdens of both war and peace, and even so nearly made it to the pole, came closer to doing so than any other man who ever lived. You have, if I may say so, led your Roughriders up the San Juan Hill of exploration. I present you with this, the first Hubbard Medal, in recognition of the great deed you have done for your country, for the world and for all mankind.”

There was an enthusiastic but not riotous ovation, as if that were being saved for the last note of Peary’s swan song.

Peary, with assistance from his wife and Willis Moore, rose and scuffed to the podium like some slipper-shod invalid. He shook the hand of President Roosevelt and fought to keep his balance when the president embraced him.

I felt sorry for him. I could summon up no malice for him now, not because of the injury he did my hand, the words he whispered to me or his niggardly acknowledgment of the debt he owed me. Why should I hold anything against him, I asked myself, now that his day had come and gone, now that he was on the verge of saying so?

While he had been seated, he had forever stroked his moustache, but standing, he could not do so because to keep his balance while not moving he had to cling to something. When the president released him, he all but lurched to the lectern, which he grabbed with both hands.

For several seconds he stood there, the lectern wobbling as though he was trying to subdue it but could not. His face, for a few moments, took on the ghastly expression it had worn while he hung from my hand between the Erik and the Windward. Now and then his right hand twitched, as though he wished he could raise it to his face to stroke his moustache.

Peary, I realized, was trying to find some way of standing that would make bearable the pain in his feet. He was wearing formal leather shoes, as round in the toe as the occasion would allow. That his weight was restored to its normal two hundred pounds boded well for the health of everything except his feet, which had to bear that weight, and which, only a few months ago, had somehow sustained him through the rigours of his farthest north. There had been rumours that he had stayed on his dog-pulled sled the entire time, while Matthew Henson, who was not in attendance at the banquet, did the driving, often pushing the sled over great obstacles of snow and ice.

Finally, he stopped shifting his weight from one foot to the other and, grimacing, began to speak. The flow, the rhythm of the words, seemed to ease or distract him from the pain. About once every fifteen seconds, between sentences, he clenched his teeth, his face as red as if he were enraged. He spoke as if he were enraged, as if only at a wrathful shout could his voice be trusted not to break.

He recited a retrospective of his accomplishments. It was a suspenseful moment each time he had to remove one hand from the lectern to put aside the page that he had just read. He teetered to the point that I wondered if he ought not to have someone beside him to move the pages for him, or if he ought not to have opted to give his speech while sitting down.

Each item in his inventory of accomplishments was met with some applause, in which, following Dr. Cook’s lead, I took part. Peary mentioned the North Greenland expedition of 1892, on which the man thought by the world to be my father had disappeared. I applauded. Even for what I suspected were embellished stories about his last failed attempt to reach the pole, I applauded.

No one unfamiliar with his history could have guessed that he was only fifty years old. His skin was like that of a man who, just the night before, had stepped off a ship from Greenland after two years in the Arctic. He was but ten years Dr. Cook’s senior, but he could have passed for his father. His face did not revert to normal between expeditions, like those of other explorers. He had got to the point where the leathering of skin that derives from long exposure to sun, wind and cold was permanent.

There was something grand, almost noble, it seemed to me again, as it had in Etah, in his physical ruination. There was about him the splendour of a monument whose installation no one could remember. I felt more magnanimous towards him, more willing to forgive his many wrongs, than I ever had before. Lear, at the end, was more to be pitied than blamed, and Prospero, through whom Shakespeare bade to the world his own farewell, bowed out with a wistful grace born of old age and experience. Such were the thoughts I was having, thoughts that seemed appropriate to the occasion.

Finally, Peary began to sound as though he was leading up to his great pronouncement. He said that between 1903 and 1905 he had, for the first two consecutive years since 1891, not been north of the Arctic Circle.

“How I missed the Arctic only those of you who have been there can understand. And yet, I felt stirring within me memories of what my life was like before I set foot in the Arctic, what it was like not only to live normally, but to have normal expectations, to not be hounded forever by the knowledge of a task not yet completed—a task many times undertaken which must be taken up again, which would not let me rest, no matter how I longed to be rid of it, to be free of it forever. Again, my fellow explorers will understand.”

He paused and drew a great breath, as though to stifle the urge to weep.

“Which brings me to the present,” Peary said and paused again.

There was a stir in the banquet hall. Here at last was the great pronouncement.

“Let no one doubt,” Peary said, “that I believe in doing the thing that has been begun, and that it is worth doing before shifting to a new object.”

There was much nodding and some applause. Then people throughout the hall began to stand. Soon everyone was standing in silent tribute and anticipation.

“The true explorer does his work,” Peary said, “not for any hope of rewards or honour. The fact that such names as Abruzzi, Cagni, Nansen, Greely and Peary are indelibly inscribed upon the white disc close to the pole shows that the polar quest is the most manly example of friendly international rivalry that exists. It is a magnificent galaxy of flags that has been planted around the pole, and when eventually some one of them shall reach the pole itself, it will add to its own lustre without in any way detracting from the lustre of the others or leaving any sense of injury or humiliation in its wake.

“But tonight, Mr. President, the Stars and Stripes stand nearest to the mystery, pointing and beckoning. God willing, I hope that your administration may yet see those Stars and Stripes planted at the pole itself.”

I assumed that this was the prelude to his abdication.

“This is a thing which should be done for the honour and the credit of this country.” He paused, looked up from his speech and surveyed the mass of delegates before him from around the world.

“This is the thing which it is intended that I should do,” he shouted. “It is the thing that I must do. It is the thing that I will do.”

There was perfect silence in the hall. I think we believed that we had misheard him, that he would yet say something to correct himself, to sweep aside the misunderstanding he had caused.

But Peary took up the pages of his speech and began to shuffle back across the stage towards his chair, beside which Mrs. Peary was standing.

I looked at Dr. Cook, who was staring at the tablecloth, his mouth slightly open, leaning on the table on the knuckles of his two clenched fists. I looked at Amundsen and saw that his eyes were filling with tears, which he left unchecked when they began to trickle down his face. Cagni was shaking his head in disbelief, looking at Dr. Cook as if he could not understand what was keeping him from falling to the floor. I looked around and saw that many people were looking at Dr. Cook, and at me—some with astonishment, some with undisguised pity, a few smiling.

How could we have so profoundly misperceived everything? Absolutely nothing was what, mere seconds ago, it had seemed to be.

I put my hand on Dr. Cook’s, and he responded by moving his hand and beginning to applaud, loudly, and at long intervals, as if he was the only person of the four hundred gathered to whom it had occurred that Peary’s speech had yet to be acknowledged.

Suddenly, there was an ovation that caused the floor to shake beneath my feet. Cups rattled and spoons jumped as men pounded on the tables with their fists. The word “hurray” or something like it was shouted in many different languages. Old men stamped their feet and applauded with their hands above their heads.

After a few dumbfounded seconds, I managed to join the others in applauding. “Without leaving any sense of injury or humiliation in its wake.” I was stung by the irony of Peary’s words.

I wondered if the great effort I was making to control myself and conceal my disappointment was apparent to those around me. I felt as self-consciously foolish as if my every thought since arriving at the banquet had been heard by the other delegates.

It occurred to me that in his announcement, Peary had slighted, if not Dr. Cook in particular, then that group of explorers who had done what Peary said he did not believe in doing: “shifting to a new object” before finishing “the one that has been begun.” Like Mt. McKinley. Like the South Pole. Peary’s ambition for the pole had been unswerving and remained so. Dr. Cook had been more versatile, more catholic in his pursuits. Now it seemed to me that he was being rewarded for his versatility by being lumped in with the gadflies of exploration.

I wondered what had gone wrong, why Bridgman had spoken to Dr. Cook the way he had, what speech it was that he had shown Dr. Cook. Might the whole thing have been a hoax engineered by Bridgman? To what end?

I knew that the man Dr. Cook had examined three years ago in Greenland would not, even if he regained all the strength it was possible for him to regain, reach the North Pole. How could anyone believe that the man who had hobbled and shuffled from his place at the head table to the podium would one day reach the pole? That the Arctic club members would unknowingly be wasting their money on Peary when they might have got the ultimate return for it from Dr. Cook and me was something I wished I could have stood up and shouted. I wished I could have told them all that Peary was in denial of what to all the explorers of the world was obvious. Yet Dr. Cook and I had been made to look like fools.

While the ovation was still at its height, Dr. Cook stopped applauding and again rested his hands on the table, this time palms down, though his head was unnaturally erect, as if he were fighting the impulse of his body to assume a posture of dejection. He began to applaud again, then stopped, again leaned on his hands, perhaps resisting a wave of dizziness or nausea.

The instant Peary made his announcement, Dr. Cook’s expectations, which everyone in that banquet hall had shared with him, seemed absurdly grandiose. Everyone had looked at him as if he had led them to believe that he would be taking Peary’s place—as if he had been spreading the rumour all week that he had been chosen to replace Peary, something that otherwise would never have occurred to them.

Amundsen was now standing beside Dr. Cook, and the two of them, though not looking at each other, were speaking, Dr. Cook nodding and somehow managing to smile, to convey the impression that he and Amundsen were conferring about Peary’s announcement just like everybody else.

As the ovation at last began to subside, I was able to hear what they were saying.

“I know,” said Dr. Cook, “but the speech I have prepared is entirely inappropriate.”

“Shall I tell them you are ill?” Amundsen said. “Shall I speak in your place?”

“No, no,” Dr. Cook said. “I must speak. I must say something. Otherwise they will see, they will know. Though perhaps they have already seen.”

“You are among friends, Dr. Cook,” Amundsen said fervently.

The delegates sat down. Dr. Bell invited Dr. Cook to give the closing remarks. There was vigorous applause from which a few, including Amundsen and Cagni, tried to work up an ovation, but it petered out. Dr. Cook rose and made his way to the head table and the lectern.

Eyes downcast, he acknowledged the head table, starting with President and Mrs. Roosevelt. He thanked Dr. Bell for his earlier tribute and thanked the National Geographic Society and the organizers of the congress. At last he looked up.

“What an extraordinary evening this has been,” he said. “In this room are gathered or represented all the great explorers of the world. I myself have gone exploring with many of you. May I say what a privilege that has been. I shall not forget it. Nor shall I forget the camaraderie and fellowship that all of us have shared these past few days. Thank you, all of you. And until we meet again, goodbye.”

This time there was polite, bemused applause that ended quickly when the unseen orchestra struck up the anthem, after which the Roosevelts and the Pearys began to make their way from the head table to the doors, though their path was soon blocked by well-wishers.

When Dr. Cook took me by the arm and led me towards the back of the room, no one seemed to take much notice. I wound my way with him and Amundsen among the tables. Suddenly, our route became a gauntlet. Hands clasped Dr. Cook’s and mine, others thumped our backs. I heard myself addressed over and over but did not reply. It was all well meant, a sympathetic tribute of some sort. But I felt as though the whole assembly was extending its condolences to us. We might have been leaving the company of these people for good. I felt that at the age of twenty-six, I was being consoled for having failed.

By the time I made it to the door, it seemed that my life depended on my getting out into the open air within the minute.

I pulled myself away from Dr. Cook and Amundsen and, wearing only my hat and tails, hurried outside, where it was snowing heavily. I walked along the sidewalk at what, to observers, might have seemed to be a briskly cheerful pace.