by John Buchan
Bit by bit Falconet’s story came out. He and Paulsen had reached Gundbjorns Fjord a month later than they had planned, owing to storms on the ice-cap. They had made camp in the cleft, and, believing that they had still ample time to rejoin the ship by the coast route, had set out to explore the coast to the west. Their dogs had been reduced to six, but, since the coast depots would enable them to travel light, this loss did not trouble them. They had pushed forty miles or so along the shore and had discovered and surveyed a new fjord, living largely off the ptarmigan and duck which they shot. On their return, when they were within a mile of their camp, they passed under a great nose of ice, which had been loosened by a spell of warm weather. It fell on them, killing Paulsen, killing or maiming all the dogs, and leaving Falconet himself unconscious under a corner of the avalanche. He had come to his senses, extricated Paulsen’s body, and somehow dragged it and himself back to camp.
All this had happened nine weeks earlier. Since then he had been in constant pain, and had had much ado to get himself the means of life, for every movement had become agony. He was almost too weak to cook meals, and had subsisted largely on chocolate and meat lozenges. But indeed food mattered little to him, for the torture of his body forced him to have recourse to opiates from the medicine box, and thirst vexed him more than hunger. He had made up his mind for death, and had been growing so lightheaded that he was scarcely conscious of his surroundings. Adam’s arrival had startled him into sanity, but presently he fancied that it was Paulsen he saw, and his mind wavered miserably between the living and the dead.
Adam boiled water on the stove and washed the foul body. He set the broken arm in splints, and dressed such of the wounds as had become sores. He forced him to drink a bowl of hot soup, found him a change of shirt, and did his best to make him a softer bed. Falconet was asleep before he had finished these ministrations. It was rough nursing, but the best he could give. As he watched the figure in its restless sleep, looking for all the world like some peasant victim of a Russian famine, he could not refrain from smiling, for he remembered that this was Jim Falconet, who had once captained a famous polo team on their visit to England, and was believed to be the third or fourth richest man in the world.
Then he set about making an inventory. There was enough dog-feed to last the winter, and Falconet’s stores and his own ought to carry the two of them through. The risk lay in running short of petroleum, which would have to be strictly rationed. Clearly the man could not be moved for weeks. Adam believed that he had suffered no serious mischief, and that with care his strong physique would right itself. . . . He tidied up the hut, which was in a hideous mess, and found quarters for his dogs in an alcove near the entrance. Then out of some broken packing-cases he made a fire, more for the comfort of his mind than of his body, and as he watched its tiny glow struggling with the velvet dark he had a moment of satisfaction. He had carried out the first part of his task.
Very soon Adam found that what had been his fancies on the ice-cap had become grim truth. For the wide Arctic world was narrowed for him to a few stuffy cubic feet in a cranny of rock, and his problem to a strife not with wild nature but with a human soul.
Falconet’s body was the least part of the task. The problem was to avoid blood-poisoning, and Adam put all his wits to the job. His own case of medicines was well stocked, but Falconet’s was in dire disorder; but out of the two he got enough drugs on which to base a simple regime. Diet was the trouble, for to a sick man the coarse satisfying Arctic food was ill suited. Adam managed, before the last daylight disappeared, to shoot some ptarmigan on the fringes of the ice-cap, and to give the patient a few days of fresh chicken-broth. With careful dressing the sores began to mend, and the swollen and displaced muscles after much bandaging came slowly into order. The arm, too, set well, and presently Falconet was able to move more comfortably. But acute attacks of neuritis followed, and the flow of returning strength into the man’s veins seemed to be as painful as the running back of the blood to a frozen limb.
Meantime the daylight ebbed, till at noon there was only a misty grey twilight. There was a spell of fine weather in November, when the stars blazed so bright that they seemed to be set not in two dimensions on a flat plane but hung solidly in receding avenues of utter blackness. The brightest time was night, when there was a moon, and the cliffs and the fjord swam in frosty silver. With December came storms, which howled among the crags and blocked up the entrance to the hut with forty-foot drifts. The place became as cold as a hyperborean hell, cold and yet airless. There was no means of making fire, and there was little light, for the petroleum, if it was to last the winter, had to be jealously conserved. Already with the constant melting of snow and boiling of water for Falconet’s dressings it had run lower than Adam’s plans allowed. He would have made an effort to get a further supply from the cache at Independence Fjord if he had dared to leave the sick man alone for a week.
By Christmas Falconet’s body had mended, and he was able to walk to the door in a lull of the weather and breathe fresh air. But this return of his physical powers seemed to be accompanied by a disorientation of mind. In his lonely vigil before Adam’s arrival he had brought himself to face death with calmness, but, having been plucked from the grave, it appeared that he could not recover his bearings. He was morose and peevish, and liable to uncontrollable rages. The spirit of a grown man had been exchanged for the temper of a suspicious child. He had lost the power of self-restraint, and there was no companionship to be got out of him. He babbled to himself, his voice acquired a high querulous pitch, and he became the prey of childish nightmares. For no apparent cause he would lie shivering and moaning, and when Adam tried to soothe him he screamed like an animal. . . . On Christmas night a little extra feast was prepared, a fire was made of empty boxes, and two cigars were added to the rations. But the festival was a tragic failure, for the cigar made Falconet sick, and, when Adam tried to cheer him with talk about the world they had left, he cursed and wept and went sulking to his sleeping-bag. For the better part of a week his wits seemed to leave him altogether, and Adam had to watch his every movement lest he should cut his throat.
The two men in the hut came to loathe each other. Adam confessed it to himself with shame. His tending of the other’s body in all its noisomeness had given him a horror of it. As the cold increased it was necessary for warmth that they should creep close together, and he shrank with a kind of nausea from such contacts. Falconet’s growing witlessness added to the repulsion, for the gaunt hairy creature seemed to have shed all that made humanity tolerable. Days and nights were alike dark, for they could afford little light. They rarely spoke to each other, and never conversed. They sat or lay in their sleeping-bags in a dreadful frozen monotony of dislike. Adam’s one relaxation was to tend the dogs. He would bury his head in their fur, for the smell of it brought back to him a happier world. To feed them and exercise them seemed his one link with sanity. The dark world out-of-doors was a less savage place than the squalid hut.
He realised that he was facing the severest test of his life, for he had himself to conquer. Here at the back end of creation he was bound to a lunatic, and all the terrors and perils of the Polar night were narrowed to the relation between two human souls. In his loneliness during the war he had had at any rate the free use of his mind, but now under the strain he felt his mind warping. He had to fight down crude and petty things which he thought he had long since put behind him — above all he had to conquer the sane man’s horror of the insane, the clean man’s repulsion from the foul. This was a fiercer trial than he had envisaged when he set out from England. He had desired space and solitude and he had found them; he had wanted to inure his body to extreme fatigue and he had done it; but he had not reckoned upon this spiritual conflict in a kennel darker than a city slum. . . . But he must go through with the job he had undertaken. Falconet had been a great man and was worth saving, and the task could not be left half-finished.
Adam nerved himself for a su
preme effort. Through all his outbreaks and spasms he nursed Falconet with patient tenderness. He soothed him and coaxed him and in the end he quieted him. By the beginning of February Falconet’s increased bodily well-being reacted on his mind. Now and then he talked rationally. He began to fuss about Paulsen’s grave, which, he feared, might be exposed when summer thinned the snow. Once or twice he stammered a few words of gratitude.
One February day, while Adam was feeding the dogs, he saw in the south a strange glow. For a moment he was puzzled and thought of some new kind of aurora borealis; then an explanation flashed on him, and he called excitedly to Falconet to come out. The two men watched the glow deepen, till their eyes, so long accustomed to darkness, ached at the sight. Then suddenly one of the ice peaks above the fjord flushed into deep rose, and the glow from the south seemed to run across the frozen ocean to meet them. A ray, an authentic ray of sunlight, made a path in it, and over the edge of the world appeared a semicircle of blood-red. The dogs in the hut felt its advent, for they set up a wild barking. The sun had come back to the world.
Adam and Falconet moved down towards the shore, bathed in the cold primeval radiance. For the first time for months they saw their shadows, ghostly indeterminate things running far behind them into the north. Then they heard a croak overhead, and looked up to see a raven. He had been flying west to the icecap, but the sight of the sun made him change his course, and with a steady beat of wings he flew south to welcome it.
Falconet grinned, and his face was that of a sane man.
“We’ve got to follow that old bird,” he said. “It knows what’s good for it.”
IV
They started for home on the first day of March, when the allowance of daylight was still scanty. The easier road to Independence Fjord was by the shore ice, but it would have been three times as long, so, since the petroleum supply was very low, Adam decided to return as he had come, by the ice-cap. The advent of spring had worked a miracle with Falconet. His great bodily strength came back in waves, the hollows in his cheeks filled out, his voice lost its ugly pitch, and he became at moments almost jolly. Adam shut away the memory of the dark days of hatred, and set himself to rediscover his companion. One thing he realised with alarm. The winter’s strain had told on his own health. He looked at food with distaste, and he began to suffer from blinding headaches.
The ice-cap greeted them with violent gales, and once again among the nunataks they had to lie up for days, desperately cold, for they had only a minimum of petroleum to carry them to Independence Fjord. The dogs’ pads had become soft during the winter, and every one went lame and left blood in its tracks. After the gales came a clammy fog, through which the sun’s rays never penetrated. It was hard travelling for both men, for their reindeer-skin kamiks had been worn into holes, and there was no fresh sedge-grass with which to stuff them. The novel light induced snow-blindness in both, and they had to fumble along with their eyes partially bandaged. Adam felt his strength steadily ebbing. Tasks which on the outward journey he would have made light of were now beyond his power. His gums were swelling, and the skin all over his body was mysteriously peeling off in strips. Worst of all he suffered from distressing fits of light-headedness, during which every ice-fall became an Alpine peak and the nunataks danced like dervishes around him.
When they reached the depot at Independence Fjord and could get warmth and light again, Falconet insisted that they should keep camp for two days to give Adam a chance to recover. The rest cured his snow-blindness, and, since Falconet managed to shoot a bear, he had a diet of beef-tea which put a little vigour into his bones. Also the signs of the returning spring seemed to unlock his past again. There were gulls about — Sabine’s gull and the ivory gull — and skuas and king-eiders, and the sight brought back Eilean Bàn. In baking days in Anatolia he had thought most pleasantly of that island as wreathed in mist or scourged by spring hail, but now he pictured it as green and flowery, sleeping in the blue of summer afternoons. In this world of ice and rock he drew warmth from the vision of its graciousness.
The winter rôles were reversed, and Falconet took charge. There was a fierce kindliness in the man, and, as they lay at night in the little tent, he talked — talked well, with an obvious purpose of cheering his companion. He asked many questions about Adam’s past, and, since two men in such a position have no need of reticence, he heard the full truth.
“I was a soldier,” Adam told him. “Then I had to leave the army, for I went to prison.”
“So!” Falconet whistled. “I wonder whom you were shielding. Skip that bit, sonny, and get on to the war. What front were you on — the Western, Palestine, Mespot?”
“None. I wasn’t a combatant — except for a few months when I wore German uniform with the Turks. For nearly four years I was behind the enemy lines.”
Falconet’s eager questions bit by bit drew out the story. Adam told it candidly, for he had no self-consciousness about it — he saw small credit in the course which had been the only one open to a man in his position. But Falconet was loud in his exclamations.
“Say,” he asked. “What did your Government give you for your four years in hell?”
“I was restored to my regimental rank.”
“Yes. That’s the sort of thing you would want. . . . Great God, man, I never heard a yarn like yours. You must have a nerve like a six-inch cable. What’s to be done with you? You’re not going to throw all that training away?”
“Not if I can help it. I came out here to round it off.”
Falconet pondered. “I see the sense in that. You wanted to get away from mankind for a bit . . . and you struck the most ill-conditioned specimen on the American continent. You saved that specimen’s life, too. But for you I should have been a corpse in that bloody hut. . . . Now you’re going to drink some soup and get off to sleep again.”
They moved on in a flush of fine weather, and crossed the mouth of Danmarks Fjord on snow which was beginning to break up into channels and rivulets. The sun shone and they journeyed in a world of gleaming crystal, out of which would rise towards evening wonderful mirages of hills and cities. Close to the land the ice was smooth and bare, and it was possible to hoist a sail and travel fast. But the first day out Adam realised that the days of rest had not cured his malady. So far he had had no fever, but now his temperature rose high, and he became so weak and giddy that he could not keep up with the sledge, even when holding on to the uprights. There was nothing for it but that he should become a passenger, which was possible, since they travelled light, having the depots to count on for supplies. He wandered off into a mad world, and one day he was so delirious that he had to be tied on to keep him from rolling off in his wild starts. To make things worse they struck a bad patch of shore ice, seamed with water lanes and acres of deep slushy snow.
Of these days Adam had no clear remembrance. He seemed to be perpetually sinking into gulfs and screaming warnings . . . and then he would know nothing till he saw Falconet’s anxious face and felt hot soup being fed to him in spoonfuls. Nelles had carried out his orders, and had taken little from each depot, so there was no lack of petroleum and man’s food and dogs’ food. Once they made camp on a shore where the spring had begun to melt the snow, and mosses were showing, and willow scrub and greening grass. Here Falconet was lucky enough to shoot a bear, and, following some wild lore of his boyhood, he stripped Adam and wrapped him in the reeking pelt.
The fever may have run its natural course, or the bearskin may have had some therapeutic power, for from that night Adam began to mend. His temperature fell, the giddy world became stable, his limbs moved again according to his will. Soon he could leave the sledge and stagger beside it, and he could help to set up the tent in the evening. Falconet would have none of his aid till he was satisfied that he was a whole man once more.
“There’s one thing you’ve got to learn,” he said fiercely, “and that’s to take. So far you’ve only known how to give. But if a fellow isn’t ready to take from
a friend when he’s in need, then his giving is only a darned insult and an infernal bit of patronage. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Mister Melfort.”
Suddenly something went wrong with the depots. They came to one which looked as if it had been pulled about by wild beasts. The boxes were stove in and their contents scattered and spoiled, and there was not a drop of petroleum in the cans. They put the mischief down to a bear, and, since the stage from the last depot had been over difficult ice, it did not seem worth while to go back and collect the supplies which still remained there. They decided to push on to the next cache.
But the next cache, reached after a desperate toil over shore ice from which the snow was fast melting, proved no better. Nelles seemed to have made a fire and burned up everything, for among the ashes they found only a crumpled petroleum tin and some twisted iron fragments which had once been the hoops of a barrel.
They held a council, for the position was grave. Nelles had broken faith — or he had lost his wits — or someone or something coming after him had rifled the depots. They had with them food at the utmost for seven days and petroleum for a little longer. They could not go back, for though they had left a fair quantity of stores at the first caches there was not enough to enable them to reach Shannon Island. On they must go in the hope that in the next depot, or the next, there would be supplies, or that they might meet a search-party from the ship, which by this time must have reached the Greenland coast. They slept ill that night and next morning reduced their rations to a pound a day. There were no biscuits left — only pemmican, some tinned vegetables and a little tea.
At the next depot they found the same devastation, and they found also the clue to it. Two of Nelles’s dogs lay dead with split skulls, their bones picked clean by the ravens. The man had gone mad — berserk mad — and had raged down the coast rioting in destruction. Adam remembered his lowering brows and sullen brooding eyes.
