A Mans Woman

A Man's Woman

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Title: A Man's Woman
Author: Frank Norris

Release Date: June 20, 2005 [eBook #16096]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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A MAN'S WOMAN
by
FRANK NORRIS
1904

The following novel was completed March 22, 1899, and sent to the
printer in October of the same year. After the plates had been made
notice was received that a play called "A Man's Woman" had been
written by Anne Crawford Flexner, and that this title had been
copyrighted.
As it was impossible to change the name of the novel at the time this

notice was received, it has been published under its original title.
F.N.
New York.

A MAN'S WOMAN

I.
At four o'clock in the morning everybody in the tent was still asleep,
exhausted by the terrible march of the previous day. The hummocky ice
and pressure-ridges that Bennett had foreseen had at last been met with,
and, though camp had been broken at six o'clock and though men and
dogs had hauled and tugged and wrestled with the heavy sledges until
five o'clock in the afternoon, only a mile and a half had been covered.
But though the progress was slow, it was yet progress. It was not the
harrowing, heart-breaking immobility of those long months aboard the
Freja. Every yard to the southward, though won at the expense of a
battle with the ice, brought them nearer to Wrangel Island and ultimate
safety.
Then, too, at supper-time the unexpected had happened. Bennett,
moved no doubt by their weakened condition, had dealt out extra
rations to each man: one and two-thirds ounces of butter and six and
two-thirds ounces of aleuronate bread--a veritable luxury after the
unvarying diet of pemmican, lime juice, and dried potatoes of the past
fortnight. The men had got into their sleeping-bags early, and until four
o'clock in the morning had slept profoundly, inert, stupefied, almost
without movement. But a few minutes after four o'clock Bennett awoke.
He was usually up about half an hour before the others. On the day
before he had been able to get a meridian altitude of the sun, and was
anxious to complete his calculations as to the expedition's position on
the chart that he had begun in the evening.
He pushed back the flap of the sleeping-bag and rose to his full height,
passing his hands over his face, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. He
was an enormous man, standing six feet two inches in his reindeer
footnips and having the look more of a prize-fighter than of a scientist.
Even making allowances for its coating of dirt and its harsh, black
stubble of half a week's growth, the face was not pleasant. Bennett was
an ugly man. His lower jaw was huge almost to deformity, like that of

the bulldog, the chin salient, the mouth close-gripped, with great lips,
indomitable, brutal. The forehead was contracted and small, the
forehead of men of single ideas, and the eyes, too, were small and
twinkling, one of them marred by a sharply defined cast.
But as Bennett was fumbling in the tin box that was lashed upon the
number four sledge, looking for his notebook wherein he had begun his
calculations for latitude, he was surprised to find a copy of the record
he had left in the instrument box under the cairn at Cape Kammeni at
the beginning of this southerly march. He had supposed that this copy
had been mislaid, and was not a little relieved to come across it now.
He read it through hastily, his mind reviewing again the incidents of the
last few months. Certain extracts of this record ran as follows:
"Arctic steamer Freja, on ice off Cape Kammeni, New Siberian Islands,
76 deg. 10 min. north latitude, 150 deg. 40 min. east longitude, July 12,
1891.... We accordingly froze the ship in on the last day of September,
1890, and during the following winter drifted with the pack in a
northwesterly direction.... On Friday, July 10, 1891, being in latitude
76 deg. 10 min. north; longitude 150 deg. 10 min. east, the Freja was
caught in a severe nip between two floes and was crushed, sinking in
about two hours. We abandoned her, saving 200 days' provisions and
all necessary clothing, instruments,