by John Buchan
Every day the going became harder. From the icecap above the shore cliffs waterfalls were thundering, and the beaches were chains of little torrents. The snow was melting fast from the sea ice, and soon that ice would begin to break up, and they would be forced to keep to the terrible moraines of the land. They were now on half a pound of food a day and the dogs had become miserable bags of skin and bone. Presently one died, and his companion lost his senses and ran round in circles till they were forced to shoot him. The sledge was light enough, but with only two dogs they made slow going among the slush and the water-logged ice. Once the sledge toppled into a voe, and Falconet’s diaries were only rescued by a miracle. Each depot told the same tragic tale of blackened desolation, except that in one they found an undamaged tin of cocoa.
Presently they were forced to kill the remaining two dogs, and relinquish the sledge. This meant that each had to carry a load, and stumble painfully along the boulder-strewn shore. Their one hope now was a search-party from the ship, and that was only a shadow. Dog-flesh is not good for human beings, but it was sufficient to keep life in them, and that and a little tea were all they had. They had petroleum to last for two days more. In grim silence they struggled on, savage with hunger, their feet so heavy that to lift them at all was an effort. They made short days with long rests, and the nights in the open were bitter. They would rise from the tortures of cold and emptiness and take the road without looking at each other, as if each feared what he might see in his companion’s eyes.
Once Falconet said: “If we come out of this, we two are going to keep together for the rest of our lives. How do you reckon the chances? A million to one against?”
“Evens,” said Adam. “They’re never worse than evens if you keep up your heart.”
That day Falconet shot a goose and, finding a patch of scrub and heather on the edge of a small fjord, they made a fire and roasted it. The meat carried them on for two days, while they traversed a much-encumbered beach under huge dripping cliffs where there was no hope of game. After that they had half a pound of pemmican and a rib of dog to carry them to the next depot — their tea and petroleum were finished.
Next morning Adam’s bleared eyes studied the map.
“We shall make the depot before evening,” he said.
“And leave our bones there,” said Falconet.
That day their exhaustion reached the outside limit of what man can endure. The sharpness of the hunger-pangs had gone, but both men were half-delirious. They constantly fell, and Falconet twisted his ankle so badly that they could only move at a snail’s pace. Neither spoke a word, and Adam had to concentrate all his vanishing faculties to keep in touch with solid earth. Sometimes he thought that he was walking on clouds, till he found himself lying among the stones with blood oozing from his forehead. He took Falconet’s pack on his own shoulders, and had to give Falconet a hand over the icy streams. “I will not go mad,” he told himself, and he bent his mind to the road, fixing a point ahead, and wagering with himself about the number of steps he would take to reach it. According to the map a depot lay beyond a rocky cape which bounded the long beach over which they were floundering.
They turned the cape in the late afternoon and looked on a little bay with a beacon on a knoll. A wild hope rose in Adam’s heart. Surely this place was still intact — the demented Nelles must have broken down before he reached it. Hope put strength into his legs, the more as he found his feet suddenly on soft herbage.
But Nelles had reached it. There was something dark and crumpled lying half-buried by a patch of old snow. He had reached it and died beside it, for the stones had not been moved from the cache’s mouth. Adam’s feeble hands uncovered the food box, which was intact. “We have won on the post,” he whispered to Falconet, for his tongue had swollen with starvation. “Lie flat on your back till I get a fire going. We touch nothing but soup to-night, but tomorrow we shall breakfast in style.”
They made a mighty bonfire and slept beside it for twelve hours. Next day Falconet nursed his ankle, and dozed in the sun, and in the evening two men, plucked from the jaws of death, feasted nobly, since the rest of the depots were safe and there was no need to hoard. Falconet had come out of his stupor, and sat staring into the green dusk, which was all the night at that season.
“We’re two mighty small atoms,” he said, “to have beaten old man Odin and his bunch. And the dice weren’t kind to us. My God, I’ve taken some risks in my day, but nothing like this. . . . Do you know, I asked you a week back what the chances were, and you said ‘Evens.’ I expect you were a bit loony at the time — we both were.”
“No, I meant it,” said Adam. “It’s the strength of the human spirit that matters. Man can face up to anything the universe can pit against him if his nerve doesn’t crack. Our trouble was not snow and cold and famine but the human part. Something gave in Nelles’s brain, and he played the deuce with a perfectly sound scheme. The hell of that winter hut of ours was not the cold and the dark but the boredom — the way you and I got across each other. . . . We’re going back to a badly broken world, and the problem is to find the men big enough to mend it. Our business is to discover genius and put quality into humanity.”
“That’s the job you’ve been training for?”
“I think so.”
“Well, you can count me in to my last dime,” said Falconet.
A week later the two men met the party from the ship which had been sent out to find them.
CHAPTER IV
At Reykjavik in Iceland Adam and Falconet were met by the latter’s yacht. Falconet was, among other things, a newspaper proprietor on a large scale, and he was able to control the curiosity of the press. The message which he sent off from Reykjavik merely announced his safe return, accompanied by his companion Mr Melfort, after wintering in North Greenland, adding that the scientific results of the expedition would in due course be given to the world. This was published copiously in the American press, and to a lesser degree in the English papers, many of which left out the name of Falconet’s companion. Not more than half a dozen people realised that Adam was back from the wilds.
The yacht touched at Liverpool, where Falconet turned a flinty face to enquiring journalists. There Adam left it, and, dressed in a suit of Falconet’s which did not fit him, returned to the rooms in the Temple which he had taken when he came out of prison, and had retained ever since. His first business was to provide himself with clothes and other necessaries. Then he engaged a servant, a man called Crabb, who had once been his footman and had lost his left arm in the war; he had found on his arrival a letter from Crabb asking for employment, and had some difficulty in disinterring him from a Rotherhithe slum. After that he set himself down for two long days to read the weekly papers for the past year. Then, having got his bearings, he rang up Christopher Stannix, who, he gathered from his reading, had become lately a prominent figure in the national life and was now a member of the Government.
Stannix came to the Temple that evening during a slack interval in the House. To Adam’s eyes he seemed to have put on flesh, and his face had acquired that slightly frozen composure which is a necessary protection for those who are much in the limelight. What he thought of Adam may be judged by his behaviour. He dragged him to the window and looked at him from all sides, and then dropped into a chair and laughed.
“Man, you have come back ten years younger — more — twenty years. You don’t look twenty-five. I’ve seen Falconet, who told me something. Not much, for he said you didn’t want it talked about — but I gather that the two of you went through a rather special hell. It has shaken Falconet, but you seem to have thriven on it. . . . But for God’s sake, get a new tailor. . . . What’s your next step? Whom do you want to meet? I’m rather tied up just now, but I’m entirely at your service. . . . Oh, Adam, old fellow, I’m glad to see you. You’re like somebody recovered from the dead.”
“I want to meet Scrope, if he’s alive. I told you about him — the old fellow in Northamp
tonshire that Ritson sent me to see in September ‘14.”
“That’s a queer thing, for he wants to meet you. I had a letter from him this morning. He knows that you’re home, as he knows most things. I’ll get in touch with him at once.”
Stannix telephoned next morning that Scrope was coming to town, and desired Adam to dine with him three days thence. That afternoon there arrived an emissary from Scrope in the shape of a tall young man with perfect clothes and a pleasant vacant face. He introduced himself as Captain Frederick Shaston, late of the 9th Lancers, and now an idle sojourner in the metropolis.
“Mr Scrope sent me to be kind to you, sir,” he said with a very boyish grin. “I gather you’ve been having a tough time, and he thought you ought to frisk a bit, so I’ve come to show you round. . . . It’s a jolly morning, and I’ve got my car here. What about a run down to the country? You’d like to see England again at her best.”
So Adam spent a day of clear sunshine on the roads of the southern midlands. They climbed the Chilterns, where the beeches were in their young green livery, and ran across the Aylesbury vale among blossoming hawthorns and through woods which were a mist of blue. High up on Cotswold they had the kingdoms of the earth beneath them, and from the Severn scarp looked over to the dim hills of Wales. Shaston would stop at some view-point, and make some enthusiastic comment, but Adam noted that the banality of his speech was at variance with the cool appraising eyes which he turned on him. In the bright afternoon they slipped slowly down the scented valley-roads of Thames. Adam said little, but after a year of barrens and icy seas the ancient habitable land was an intoxication.
That evening Shaston took him to dine at a restaurant with a party of young men, who treated him at first with nervous respect. But, though he was not disposed to talk of himself and had still the slow formal speech of one who had not spoken English much for years, his friendliness presently dispelled their shyness, and the evening ended merrily with a visit to a boxing match and a supper of broiled bones and beer. Next day Shaston took him to Roehampton to watch polo, where he, who had not spoken to a woman for years, was compelled to mingle with a group of laughing girls. They went to a play that night with a party, and Adam did not fall asleep.
“Please don’t thank me,” said Shaston when they parted. “I’ve had the time of my life. I can’t tell you what a privilege it is to show you round. I hope you’ll tell Mr Scrope that I didn’t bore you too much.”
“How do you come to know Mr Scrope so well?” Adam asked.
“I don’t know him well,” was the surprising answer. “No one does. But he knows all about me, and about everybody else and everything. He’s about the largest size of man we’ve got, don’t you think?”
Adam rubbed his eyes at the sight of Scrope in the little restaurant in Jermyn Street. He had been a few minutes late, and found his host already seated at a table in a quiet corner. When he had last seen him six years before he had thought him very frail and old, a valetudinarian nearer eighty than seventy, shivering under his plaid on a mild autumn day. The man now before him looked a hale fellow not beyond the sixties, and his Mongolian countenance was ruddy instead of ivory-white. Two things only remained unchanged, his voice husky from cigarette-smoking, and his dreamy heavy-lidded eyes.
Scrope seemed to be no longer a vegetarian, for instead of the mess of eggs and vegetables with which he had once regaled Adam, he had now ordered a well-considered normal meal. He seemed to divine his guest’s surprise.
“I have come out into the world again. I thought I had found sanctuary, but it was ordained otherwise; and if I am to be of use in the world I must conform — ever so little. So must you, my friend. You liked Shaston?”
“Yes. You sent him to find out if I had become a fossil. What did he report?”
Scrope laughed.
“Shaston is what you call a flat-catcher. He looks innocent, and sometimes foolish, but he is very, very acute. He reported that you had not lost touch with common life. He described you as ‘bonhomous,’ which is old-fashioned slang, for he is sometimes old-fashioned. That has laid my fears, but I confess that it has also surprised me. I have acquainted myself with your doings for the past six years, and they have been the kind to drive a man back inside himself, and make him an alien from the ordinary tastes of mankind. By all the rules you should have become a prig, Mr Melfort, and somewhat inhuman. Shaston reports otherwise. He says that you can still feel the elation of a May morning, that you can laugh with simple people at obvious things, and even condescend a little to play the fool. That means that there is something about you that I do not yet know. What is it? You have falsified rules which cannot be falsified. I expected to find you stiff and angular and insensitive, and I thought that it would be my first business to crack your shell. But lo and behold! there is no shell to crack. What has kept you mellow?”
“I will tell you,” said Adam. With this man, as with Meyer, the Belgian Jew who had called himself Macandrew, he could have no secrets. He told him the story of Eilean Bàn.
Scrope listened with his eyes downcast, and his fingers playing tunes on the table-cloth. When Adam stopped his face was marvellously wrinkled by a smile, so that he looked like the good mandarin from a willow-pattern plate.
“That is right. You have had a fountain in the desert. That means that you are hard-trained, but not, as I had feared, over-trained. Eilean Bàn! I think I too could be happy with dreams of such a place. Our race must turn its eyes west when it looks for Mecca.”
Till the meal was over Scrope talked of what had been going on in the world since Adam went behind the northern ice. He talk brilliantly, with hoarse chuckles and much gesticulation of delicate hands, and again the many-wrinkled smile. But when coffee had been served and he had presented Adam with a cigar from a case like a sarcophagus, he fell suddenly silent. There was a party dining a little way off, with a man in it who seemed to claim his attention.
“You know him?” he asked.
Adam saw a short, squarely-built young man with a big head of dark hair, a sallow face with a lofty brow and high cheek-bones, and a strong, slightly protuberant chin. He was talking volubly, and kept his chin thrust forward so that there was something almost simian in his air. He looked like an immensely intelligent ape, poised and ready to bound upon an enemy. But his face was pleasant, for he had a quick smile, and everything about him from the crouched shoulders to the glowing eyes spoke of an intense vitality.
“No. . . . Wait a moment. I think . . . Yes, I have seen him before. A year ago I heard him read a paper at a club — I’ve forgotten its name. Creevey, isn’t he? Some kind of university swell?”
“Creevey — Warren Creevey,” said Scrope. “A very remarkable man. Take a good look at him, for you will see him again. I’ve a notion that you will have a deal to do with him before you die.”
Adam obeyed.
“I don’t like him,” he said.
Scrope laughed.
“You have had to learn in the last five years to judge men rapidly and to go mainly by their faces. I don’t quarrel with your verdict. You have learned also to judge ability by the same test. How do you place Mr Warren Creevey?”
“I should try to avoid antagonising him. If he were my enemy I should cross to the other side of the road.”
“So! Well, you will not meet him just yet, for he swims in a different pool. He is very clever and is making a great deal of money, and he also lives the life of pleasure. But some day . . .”
Scrope kept his eyes fixed on the party for a second longer, and then swung round and looked Adam in the face.
“I have seen Falconet. Have you found your work yet?”
“I know what the world needs.”
“Come, that is something. That’s more than the world itself knows. What is it?”
“Quality.”
“By which you mean leaders?”
Adam nodded.
“Are you going to take on the job yourself?”
“No. I c
an never be in the firing-line. I belong to the underworld. But I can help to find the men we want, and perhaps give them confidence.”
“I see. A midwife to genius.”
There was a big mirror opposite where the two men sat, and, as it chanced, both were gazing at it and saw their faces reflected. Adam had not much interest in his own looks, but as he gazed and saw Scrope’s ruddy Mongolian countenance beside him, and a little way off half the profile of Creevey, he could not but be aware that he looked different from other people in England. Scrope saw the distinction in sharper contrast. He saw a face, irregular and not specially handsome, in which supreme concentration had brought all the parts into unity, and to which cool nerves and peace of spirit had given the bloom of a boy. He laid his hand on Adam’s shoulder.
“You accept that? And yet you are also disappointed? Confess that you are disappointed.”
“I have no cause to be disappointed.”
“Which means that you are. You must be. You have fined down your body till it is like that of a blood-horse — you have every muscle and nerve in proper control — you have taught yourself to endure in silence like a fakir — you have a brain which is a noble machine and which is wholly at your command — and you have forgotten the meaning of fear. Such a man as you was meant to ride beside Raymond into Jerusalem. As it is, you propose to be bottle-holder to something called genius, which you will probably have to dig out of the mud.”
“I might have wished for something different,” was Adam’s reply, “but I must take what is sent me.”
The old hand patted his shoulder.
“You are wiser than Naaman the Syrian,” said Scrope. “I was afraid that I should have to say to you like Naaman’s servant ‘My lord, had the prophet commanded thee some great thing’ — but I find that you have renounced the great thing.”
