An Old Captivity

by Nevil Shute

  “Our pilot told me a very odd story, last night.”

  The girl said: “I know, Daddy. You mean his dream.”

  He looked at her in surprise. “Did he tell you about it?”

  She shook her head. “No—I was awake last night. I heard him telling you.”

  “Did you hear all of it?”

  “I think so.”

  He was silent for a moment. Then he said: “What did you think of it?”

  She did not answer immediately. They reached the seaplane and walked round it absently; then she sat down on the bow of one of the floats. He repeated his question.

  She said slowly: “I don’t know what to think. What did you think of it, Daddy?”

  He turned irritably aside. “I don’t know. One thing is clear. We’ve got to face the fact that he’s been very ill, much worse than we realised.”

  She said testily: “I don’t know what you realised. I thought at one time he was going to die.”

  He turned back to her. “I know,” he said more gently. “I meant that, mentally, he’s been through a great strain.”

  She nodded slowly. “That may be. If he has, he’s come out of it all right. But anyway, that’s no real explanation why he should start talking about Leif Erikson.”

  Her father said: “Well, that’s quite easily explained. He must have read the sagas at some time or other. It’s all in Hauk’s Book and the Flatey Book.”

  “All of it?”

  He hesitated. “Well, some of it.”

  He turned to her. “It’s really rather interesting. He must have read the sagas at some time or other, or heard somebody lecturing on them. Those impressions sink down into the subconscious mind. In a time of great mental strain they come to the surface again, mixed up with a great mass of other memories, some recent, some far distant. The result is what we call a dream. Generally in a dream the story is an incoherent muddle. Sometimes by coincidence it makes a rational account. That’s what this one is.”

  She shook her head. “He’s not the sort of man who goes to lectures on Leif Erikson. You know he’s not.”

  He said doggedly: “He’s heard the story from the sagas in some way or other.”

  She eyed him for a moment. “Do you really think that?”

  “It’s the only possible explanation.”

  She was silent. He filled and lit a pipe. “It’s possible to trace it all out,” he said meditatively. “One must assume, to start with, that he has some knowledge of the sagas, buried deep down in the background of his mind. Next, in his dream he sees the cove where we were camping. Well, that’s perfectly natural. A very recent memory. But he sees a house there, that isn’t there in fact.”

  The girl nodded. “It’s not so easy to explain away that one.”

  The don smiled. “It’s not so difficult. A badly lit house, with a sleeping-bench running the length of it, dividing it in two. It’s the Eskimo house—the one where we spent the night.”

  Alix stared at him in wonder. “I never thought of that.”

  Her father smiled. “That feature puzzled me at first. But you’ve got to put yourself in his shoes and try to sort back through his memories. It’s quite clear to me now—that part of his dream was just a flash-back to the Eskimo house.”

  The girl said slowly: “What sort of houses did the Norsemen in Greenland live in, anyway?”

  The don said: “Stone houses, roofed with thatch or turf on wooden beams. There was generally a dais.”

  She asked: “Was a dais like a sleeping-bench?”

  “I suppose so.”

  The girl said: “It seems to me that a Viking house was very like an Eskimo house. Do you think the Eskimos learned to build them from the Norsemen?”

  “They may have done.” He turned to her. “You mustn’t try and stretch the evidence,” he said. “A dream memory of the Eskimo house is the most likely explanation, and it’s backed by so much else.”

  She asked: “What else?”

  He smiled: “For one thing, the sea voyage. While he was unconscious we put his stretcher on the boat and rowed across the cove. The motion of the boat and the sound of the oars penetrated into his sleeping mind, and he dreamed of a long voyage in an open boat.”

  She was silent. Her father went on:

  “Then there’s the feature of the wonderful land he found, sunny and beautiful, and fertile. I think that’s what psychologists would call a contrast-impression. In the last month he’s been in barren lands, continually strained and anxious about ice, and storms, and fog. Subconsciously he must loathe all this sort of country. So when he dreams, he dreams about a perfect country, happy and wonderful. That’s probably a country that he’s seen before some time—perhaps in Canada.”

  He paused, and then he said: “Running—that’s just the nervous urge of our journey, expressed in a different mental form, I think.”

  The girl stirred and said: “I see you can account for most of the incidents, Daddy. But one still has to explain his knowledge of the people, Leif Erikson and Tyrker, and the girl Hekja.”

  “Leif Erikson and Tyrker come from his memory of the sagas. The girl has another explanation, of course.”

  She stared at him. “What’s that?”

  He smiled a little. “A girl with short, fair hair, wearing a white overall, who was his companion in his work. You don’t have to dig far into his memories to find somebody like that.”

  She was silent for a moment. Then she said: “You mean, that was me.”

  He said gently: “I think so. I imagine that’s what they call wish-fulfilment.”

  There was a long silence. The water lapped upon the beach by their feet, the sea-birds cried around, beneath them the yellow seaplane quivered in the breeze like a live thing. At last Alix turned to her father, smiling a little. “Well,” she said, “I suppose one can take it as a compliment.”

  “I suppose you can,” he said drily. “The biggest one he has it in his power to pay you.”

  She stood up suddenly, and changed the subject. “What are your plans now, Daddy? Do you want to go back to Brattalid again?”

  He shook his head. “Not particularly. I can’t do much out there alone, and it’s really only working in the dark until we’ve studied the survey. I’m quite prepared to leave it till next summer, now, and come back with a digging party. What do you want to do?”

  “It’s your expedition, Daddy, and your work. I’ll do whatever you decide.”

  He eyed her for a moment. “What do you want to do?” he repeated gently.

  She turned away. “I want to get away from here,” she said in a low tone, “as soon as ever we can. I want to get back home.”

  Presently they went up to the hut again and went in quietly; the pilot was asleep. They left without disturbing him and strolled back to the seaplane; deprived of the house and of the services of the pilot they were without occupation for the day. They walked up and spent an hour with the doctor, gossiping; then they went to see the pastor, who showed them his church. At lunch-time the pilot was still sleeping; they went and had lunch with the governor, who showed them his Leica enlargements of the seaplane.

  He took them round the castle farms in the afternoon, and explained his scheme for raising good stock for the Eskimos. It was half-past six when they got back to the hut; the pilot woke as they went in.

  Lockwood asked him how he felt. He said: “Fine, sir. I must have slept all day. I’ll get up to-morrow.”

  “I should think you might, at this rate. Do you feel like sleeping to-night?”

  “I think so.”

  Alix was busy at the table with the evening meal; her father turned to her. “What does he get for supper?”

  “Bread and milk again, Daddy.” She did not come over to the bed, nor speak directly to the pilot.

  The don said: “I’m going to wind up the expedition now, Mr. Ross. I understand that there’s a little more to be don upon the survey, but we’ll do that from here.”

  The oth
er nodded. “Two flights ought to finish it, I think. You don’t want to go back to Brattalid yourself, sir?”

  Lockwood shook his head. “I’ve finished all that I can do there, for this year. As soon as the photography is done, we’ll go back home.”

  “I see.” The pilot thought about it for a minute. “You aren’t doing this for me, sir? I’ll be perfectly fit to go on in a day or so.”

  “I think you will be. But the work is done.”

  “All right. We can probably finish off the survey in one good long flight.”

  Lockwood smiled. “Two comfortable, easy ones, I think.”

  “All right.”

  He lay silent for a minute, pondering his work. Then he said: “I had a dump of fuel and a mooring put at Battle Harbour. If you agree, sir, I’d like to go back that way.”

  “Over to Labrador and then down to New York?”

  “That’s right. I’d rather do that than go back to Angmagsalik. We might get into awful trouble in that ice.”

  From the stove the girl said to her father: “Would we fly straight to New York from Battle Harbour, Daddy?” It was a question that she might have asked the pilot.

  None of them failed to notice the constraint. The don looked at Ross to answer. “I don’t think so, sir,” he said to the man beside him. “It’s too far for one hop. We’ll have to spend a night at Halifax, or somewhere.”

  Lockwood said smoothly: “I’m quite in your hands, Mr. Ross.” Behind him the girl went on with her cooking. “The only thing is this. I don’t want to start from here till you feel perfectly fit, and able to tackle these long flights again. It’s only the fourteenth of August now—we’ve plenty of time in hand.”

  The pilot nodded. “We’ll run off these two little survey flights, and see how they go. But it’s the ice that made the real worry on the trip out, sir. We shan’t find this run down to New York very difficult.”

  He thought about it for a minute. “There’s another thing. We’ll have done with the seaplane when we get it to New York. As soon as we get there, I’ll have a chat with Eddie Hanson on the telephone, down in Baltimore. We’ve got to sell her second-hand, and I believe he could shift her as well as anyone. If Sir David agrees to that, I’d fly her on to Baltimore and turn her over to him.”

  The don asked: “How far is it from here to Battle Harbour, Mr. Ross?”

  The other shrugged his shoulders. “Six-fifty—seven hundred miles, perhaps. I’ll fix it with the operator here to keep transmitting, and we’ll run down the bearing. We shan’t have any difficulty, long as the motor keeps on turning.”

  The girl brought a steaming bowl over to the bed. “Here’s your bread and milk, Mr. Ross.” She turned away.

  Nothing happened during the evening to relieve the constraint. The pilot sat up in his sleeping-bag checking and re-checking his lists of film exposed against the canisters of the film itself, and against the map of the survey and his pencilled log, in order to assure himself that no gap in the survey had been left unphotographed. The girl washed some clothes and went to bed early, to try to read in bed by the flickering light of a candle. The don pondered his notes of his dig at Brattalid, and made pencil amendments. Presently they were all in bed, and the lights out.

  The pilot was the only one who slept right through the night.

  He got up in the morning, fit and well; when the girl put in an appearance she looked tired and jaded. She found that the pilot and her father had made the breakfast; there was nothing for her to do but sit down and eat it. They talked in monosyllables throughout the meal; the girl did not eat much.

  As soon as possible Ross made his escape, and went down to the seaplane. He had his work to do, clean, practical and material work with metal parts and oil and grease, fit healers for a sick mind. He took the covers off the float compartments and sponged out the bilges; he took off the cowling ring and tappet covers and changed his eighteen sparking plugs for new ones, saved for the crossing of the open sea to Labrador. At one o’clock he went back to the shack for lunch, grimy and with a mind at rest.

  Alix had spent the morning without proper occupation, restless and tired. At lunch she said casually: “Do you want a hand this afternoon, Mr. Ross?”

  He shied away from her proposal. He said: “It’s very good of you, Miss Lockwood, but there’s really nothing much that you could do to-day. I’ll let you know if you can help me at all.”

  He went back to the seaplane directly he had finished eating, relieved to get away. In love, he felt, you cannot put the clock back; she was too much Hekja to him ever to be Alix again. He plunged back into his work, setting his tappets with a feeler gauge, cleaning the sumps, changing the oil. He did not know that for part of the afternoon the girl was sitting a quarter of a mile away upon the hillside, alone, watching him at work. Once a tear trickled irrationally down her cheek; she wiped it angrily away.

  He worked till supper-time on the machine, and went on after supper refuelling till dusk, helped by Ajago and another Eskimo. In the twilight that passed for night, at about eleven o’clock, they launched the seaplane at the high tide and took her to the mooring. Ross got back to the hut at midnight, went to bed, and slept perfectly all night till eight o’clock.

  They breakfasted, and were in the air by nine upon a survey flight. The girl was tired and listless; she had slept badly for the third night in succession. The pilot had reverted to “Miss Lockwood” when he spoke to her; in turn she was stilted and polite to him in spite of herself, and hated herself for being so. At times she was unbearably like Hekja. Then the pilot felt something turning over deep inside him; he addressed himself woodenly to his work.

  They flew all morning on the survey, Ross at the front end of the cabin and the girl crouched by the camera at the back. In the five hours of the flight they barely exchanged a dozen words. They landed back at Julianehaab at about two o’clock, tired and thick in the head. Ajago met them with the motor boat; as they stood in the boat going towards the shore the pilot said:

  “You’re looking tired, Miss Lockwood. Five hours is a lot of flying at one time. Why don’t you take a lie down after lunch?”

  She said indifferently: “I may do that.”

  He had not finished with the seaplane. He went out to her again upon the mooring in the afternoon to grease and look over the controls, and to make a succession of small jobs that would keep him busy until evening, that would keep him with the machine and away from the girl. In the shack Alix went and lay down for a time; presently she fell asleep, and woke after an hour hot and muzzy, with a slight headache.

  Lockwood was in the main room of the hut, the pilot was still out upon the seaplane. She made her father a cup of tea and had one herself; then they went for a short walk.

  He asked her about the survey. “It’s practically done,” she said. “In fact, I think it is done, but Mr. Ross thinks that we left a strip gap on the first day. He wants to go out again to-morrow morning and take some of it again, just to make sure.”

  Her father nodded. “He’s very thorough.”

  She said: “I wish he wasn’t. We could get away to-morrow, really.”

  “To Battle Harbour?”

  “That’s where we’re going, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.” He paused. “You want to get away as soon as possible, don’t you?”

  She said quietly: “Yes please, Daddy. I want to get back to Oxford. A Cunard boat leaves New York each Saturday. It’s Wednesday the day after to-morrow. If we start then we could catch the one this week.”

  “Don’t you want to stop and see America?”

  “Not this time, Daddy. I want to go home.”

  He changed the subject, and they talked of other things. In the hut that evening he proposed to Ross that they should leave on the Wednesday morning.

  “Suits me, sir,” said the pilot. “Soon as the job’s done I’ll be glad to see the last of this place. It’s been a miracle the weather’s lasted like it has. Once we get over on the other
side, to Labrador, I don’t care if it snows ink. We can go home by boat. But if we pile her up in this place we might spend the winter here, likely as not.”

  They flew again next day and finished off the survey, finally and without ambiguity. They were back at Julianehaab by half-past twelve. After lunch Ross made a check development of the two sets of exposures in the dark room at the governor’s house; the girl did not offer to help him, but he found a willing assistant in the governor. The films were satisfactory; he returned to the machine and began refuelling for their departure, helped by Ajago.

  Once as they rested, the Eskimo said: “Go to-morrow?”

  “That’s right,” said the pilot.

  The man pointed to the north-east. “Angmagsalik?”

  Ross shook his head, and pointed to the west. “To Labrador.”

  The man understood. “Good.” He leaned over to the pilot. “For you”—he leaned further and tapped Ross on the chest—“for you, Greenland not good place. For others, Greenland good. Not good for you.”

  The pilot nodded slowly. “Maybe you’re right.” He eyed the Eskimo curiously. “What’s wrong with Brattalid?”

  It is doubtful if the man understood him properly. He made a gesture of distaste. “Brattalid no good,” he said. “Alle ved det.”

  They got up, and went on with the refuelling. In the hut Lockwood and his daughter were sorting out their stores. They packed the camera to be shipped back to England at the next opportunity, whenever that might be. They took with them in the seaplane only the sleeping-bags, the emergency provisions, and the films of the survey.

  When Ross came back to the hut, they began an orgy of giving things away. They gave their surplus photographic supplies to the governor, most of the medicine chest to the doctor, and the surplus of tinned foods to Ajago. He received them with delight. “It is too much,” he said in Danish. “These foods cost many krone.”

  Alix said: “Take them all, Ajago. You’ve been so good to us.”