The Survivor

by Thomas Keneally

  “No, you did.”

  Ramsey knew the effete boy exaggerated, but there must have been some basis for the overstatement. But he was no rugged sinner, and felt merely sad.

  “I hope I didn’t offend her,” he said.

  The one who hadn’t recently read his Primer of Mythology guffawed.

  That afternoon Ramsey found a penitentially large treatise on the Antarctic continent. So his Antarctic engrossment began in an expiatory key. This was because he dared suspect that a loss of innocence had taken place.

  He thought of Antarctica in literary terms: a prophetic landscape begging a prophet and tailored for seekings and disillusionments of epic proportions. Yet none of the seekers had a literary style to bless themselves with, not the sort of style that counted. He was delighted with a book by Leeming: it took some small account of the gulfs between man and man.

  He would have liked to revolutionize the staid business of Antarctic writing. But behind the desire was a more basic passion to see the continent. This had him by the heart at Wednesday breakfast in his northern pub when he found the expeditionary advertisement in the previous Saturday’s Sydney newspaper.

  He lied to his headmaster and caught the Friday train. On Saturday afternoon the line he joined outside the expeditionary office in lower George Street was stretched five hundred feet along the pavement, filled the hallway and two flights of steps. Most of the men seemed old soldiers, tested and sane. Ramsey waited just the same, and reached Leeming’s office at six-thirty.

  Leeming was tired, all the planes of his thin face sunken. As if he’d placed a bet with himself about the perverse way his quest would end, he asked and accepted questions with a sort of preconceived bitterness. He gave an impression of tightly controlled but almost hysterical testiness. It was with none of the geniality of the railway carriage that he said aloud as Ramsey entered, “Well, at least we know this one’s motives aren’t base.”

  “If it’s hopeless my being here.…”

  “No. Hopelessness and uselessness didn’t prevent half the city milling on our doorstep this afternoon. Sit down please.”

  “I thought they all looked intimidating. A fine group of men. All those old soldiers.”

  “Old soldiers they certainly are. The war is six years over now. The expedition sails at Christmas, you know, and most of the places in it were privately decided months ago. I ask you, what men of that age would be able to abandon their careers and sail for polar waters with two months’ notice? Only a man who has failed here one way or another and who wants a virgin continent on which to practise further fecklessness. No, I’m glad you’ve come.”

  Ramsey was disappointed that late afternoon by the aldermanic attitude Leeming had taken to the long line of applicants, and by the nasty classroom ring of “fecklessness”. That evening Leeming seemed the last man on earth to whom you would confide any plan to revolutionize Antarctic literature.

  He redeemed himself now by nodding at what seemed a long short-list on the desk. “There are exceptions among those old soldiers,” he admitted. “But a certain amount of stability is primary. And I should tell you, Alec, that unfortunately mysticism and art can go hang down there. You said you were a poet?”

  “But possessing broad shoulders.”

  Yet it was found he knew no geology, no magnetism, no physics, no meteorology, nor even the necessary zoology to at least get him to the Oates Coast. He was putatively a churchgoer, and Leeming put stress on this although not himself orthodox. And he was very strong.

  “I’ve put you on the short-list,” Leeming said in an odd voice of complaint, seeming to be cursing himself for feeling bound to do it on account of their overnight companionship on a train from the country.

  Still, no one had ever before shut Ramsey off from one of his horizons, and the éclat of an Antarctic destiny was his for two weeks. Erebus sat above his big shoulders and earned him more authority with his farmboys for less outlay of savagery. Then he received a letter of regret from Leeming. In revenge, he promised himself Bohemia and a world of more self-aware scuttling in the summer.

  October turned to the first day of languid coastal summer. A telegram came. “If still Antarctically inclined report HQ Saturday latest. Nominal pay. Clearance arranged with education department.”

  “Are you good with animals?” Leeming wanted to know on the Saturday. His dog-man, survivor of two expeditions, had been stricken by a disease of the heart. “He always made much of the mysterious husky, as if to keep the proud scientists in their place. Now he’s spent two years breeding huskies with cattle-dogs in the Alps beyond Cooma. We’re going to take some of his cattle-dog ad mixtures with us. He’s very sick, but won’t be invalided. I’m sure you can learn the dog trade from him in two months.…”

  Ramsey felt renewed. For you can’t cease from Calvinism simply by going secretly rationalist at the age of nineteen; you still know by bone-knowledge that abasement and labour are the only fructifiers, and you look to the large intentions of men like Leeming to give your abasement and labour their grandeur.

  At nominal pay.

  With a facility learnt at businessmen’s luncheons and fund-raising circuses Leeming drew down the bold lines of his polar ambitions. They would start with a base on the Oates Coast, if a place could be found where the rise to the Antarctic plateau was gradual. In the first three months of the new year, supplies would be carried inland, and materials for a hut so that some of the party could winter in the interior.

  “It hasn’t been done before,” he explained, but to avoid appearing a mere record-breaker: “It will put the scientists in a far better position to correlate magnetic readings and to take photographs so that the height of the auroral displays can be calculated.”

  Ramsey felt reverent and said he understood.

  After the winter night one party would use the coast hut as base and go out to re-locate the shifting area of the magnetic pole. Another would survey the northern mountains of Victoria Land. A third would spend the summer supplying the inland base for the return of the further three parties who would range out from it.

  Of this second set of parties, one was to survey the central Victoria Land mountains, another to move in the totally unexplored direction of the geomagnetic pole (with some hope of reaching it), a third to act as support party to the latter.

  The demands of this schedule might well mean that they would need to spend a second winter in Antarctica.

  Ramsey’s awe burgeoned. “It must be the greatest Antarctic programme ever devised,” he murmured, feeling silly at the grandiose sentence.

  Leeming squinted at the rough map and ripped it up.

  “You must get used to the idea that you and your dogs are indispensable,” he warned Ramsey. He amplified.

  They were to take four Fordson tractors that ran on kerosene, but a tractor couldn’t adapt itself to polar conditions as dogs could. People had been at him to take an aeroplane, but he thought planes were a spectacle rather than a thing of value. “It is a contest that transcends mechanics,” Leeming said; and the sentiment sounded emotively correct but, even to Ramsey, dogmatic.

  Then the leader spent time urging Ramsey to be humble with the dog-man. “He’ll resent you because you’re educated and also because you’re his replacement. He’ll try to make a fool of you, and it won’t be hard with huskies at his disposal. Be prepared to laugh at yourself at first, but keep asserting yourself and show him that you want to learn the art. He’s a marvellous old man. Shackleton and Mawson both loved him.”

  The marvellous old man was perhaps fifty, but his wit was waspish and pulmonary as a ninety-year-old’s. He was a retired seaman and lived on the edge of a village where snow-drifts remained on the ridges even in summer. Here he and now Ramsey shared life with three cattle-dogs and fifty huskies tethered in teams of nine. The cattle-dogs were friends at table and on the hearth, but those uncouth Siberians were never let into the kitchen, not even to whelp or die. The three-hundred-and-sixty pou
nds of meat needed to feed them each week was paid for out of Leeming’s pocket, which luckily carried inherited wealth.

  On the slopes with dog-team and sledge, Ramsey suffered from the man’s wry sense of humour but learnt to drive a sledge in slush. The dying man had him chasing runaway teams, roaring the word he had been told (wrongly) meant Halt. The peculiar physics of the sledging-whip often wrapped nine feet of rawhide around his own head and shoulders. Yet the one vital hoax the wry and primitive man and dogs played off on him was to convince him that he too was a simple animal made for the large issues of Antarctic journeying.

  The dog-man, pretending to be cautionary and resentful, lived to make Ramsey an expert, and insisted on advancing his own death’s day by building a sort of dog-cart with axles of mountain ash to behave with something more or less like the pliancy of the runners on the sledge; for the sledge could never be taken far, and the ridges were subject to thawing except in the early morning. These were the sick man’s pride, the dog-cart that Ramsey drove up and down on level land, learning the difficult control of the dogs; the élan of the team; and the fluency of the old sledge that had been preserved by his hand. And Ramsey knew that he was close to a phenomenon of beauty when he saw the gasping man, his digitalis unopened above the mantelpiece, nudge the runners with his boot and blink. “Boss Shackleton used ’im; 1908 ’e got used by Boss, an’ ’e’s as good as ever and Dr Leemin’s gonna take ’im south agin. Mountain ash, see. Lovely, bloody lovely.”

  Just before Christmas, they consigned the dogs by train. The old man wasn’t too shattered but breathed morosely, choosing to show little faith in Ramsey when Ramsey shook the grey hand. In anticipation of the death, children had already broken into the yard and were playing admirals in the dog-cart.

  The dogs travelled all night in box-cars, tethered by steel cables to the wall. At each stop Ramsey changed from one car to another for the welfare of his dogs. His boots would thump down on the gravel of country sidings as the engine emitted the sibilants of its rest and the dogs began their lovely ululations to the moonlight. He told himself then that all his contradictions had been jolted into unity by the simplicity of his new life. He would forever enjoy the sanity of his oneness; and even suspected himself of a type of sainthood. Yet his innocence was already forfeit by reason of his Antarctic motives.

  Still the dogs chanted; their priesthood was of the moon; their science was selfhood, for Cybele was their goddess and of her order was the sainthood he felt to be imminent. He knew that tonight there was not one spurious identity left in him.

  He would have done well to listen to the angry milkcans of protestant farmers being taken on board farther down the train.

  The next day was hard, spent in the goods-yards where his parents came to say good-bye. The dogs stood muzzled and chained, a team at a time, to iron rings in the floor. Hot and constrained against their nature, they flashed their mad canines at some neighbour dog’s flank each time one of them was unmuzzled to drink. That morning Ramsey watered them twice, so that afternoon, being themselves, they slept while everyone else, even Ramsey, hurried up and down in the heat being decent British subjects.

  Ramsey’s impersonations in this direction took him to the expedition’s office in lower George Street. Here a large man with a head very like Leeming’s but more proportional to the solid rest of him, stood by the counter reading a letter. The girl in the office welcomed Ramsey and introduced him to the letter-reader, whose name was Dr Arthur Lloyd.

  They said to each other, Ramsey and Lloyd, the wary things that strangers say when about to live together for a long time, but the letter was held in a very obvious way in Lloyd’s hand as something the doctor could scarcely wait to return to. Eventually he said, “Do you know Leeming well?”, patting the letter and then regretting this, since it gave its source away. Ramsey said he felt he knew Leeming well, but that this was probably an illusion since they’d met only three times. Lloyd said, “Don’t misunderstand me when I say this, but do you trust him as a leader? I ask for interest’s sake, that’s all.”

  “Yes.” Ramsey cut down on the fervour, seeing that Lloyd was a fairly prosaic man, disturbed by zeal, probably a returned soldier. “Of course.”

  “I don’t suppose anyone could get Mawson and Shackleton to say the things they’ve said about Leeming unless they believed them?”

  “That’s right.”

  Lloyd filed the letter carefully in his breast pocket. “There are certain tests a man has to pass before he’s a man in my book.” It sounded as if Leeming had failed some sort of scout-manual test. Ramsey was grateful, despising such criteria.

  In the end Lloyd shrugged. “Well, I don’t pass most of the damn things myself,” he said, to make little of his doubt. “I’m off to Melbourne with you tonight.” The fashionably weathered face went into a smile that was mathematically even. Only shallow men had smiles like that; so ugly Ramsey had always told himself. “Two months ago I had my own practice and was a pillar in society. I used to travel around France in box-cars, and thought I’d seen my last one.”

  Ramsey thought Christ and foresaw an Antarctic night made merry with old soldiers’ tales.

  Lloyd turned to the girl. “Well, Stella dear, keep your heart warmed for me.” From the back, minus the shallow refinements of the face, he was built like a wharf-labourer.

  Ramsey kept from the meeting an inchoate willingness to distrust Lloyd based perversely on the very ceaseless reliability the man would be sure to be guilty of.

  There was a short letter of congratulation from Leeming for Ramsey. As he read it the telephone rang and he heard the girl saying, “Very well, Mrs Leeming.” Leeming’s happy young bride.

  “But no, Mrs Leeming, I can’t leave the office because Mr Kable is coming in at half-past-two to do the correspondence.” She was still rosy from Lloyd’s attention. “Perhaps Mr Ramsey could help you.” The telephone was given to Ramsey.

  It was a direct, non-emotive voice. It said that a letter had come from Leeming asking her to gather some of his papers and send them to Melbourne with one of the expedition members from Sydney. At this late date it would have to be Lloyd or Ramsey, and Lloyd had already left the office to visit friends somewhere in the city. Dr Leeming had asked her not to subject these papers to the hazards of the ordinary mails. If she paid for his taxi.…

  He explained that he had care of the dogs. Were they to be fed? Were they thirsty? Then so much for the dogs.

  The taxi took him to a row of new bungalows above one of the smaller, not yet municipally barbarized beaches to the east of the city. The crude art-nouveau windows of No. 16 concealed very well that here lived someone of illimitable perspectives. There was probably a vistaed family fortress of stone forty miles out that busy Dr Leeming found inconvenient.

  Mrs Leeming had also been busy in the bungalow. Opening the door, her hair hanging loose over a smock streaked with primary colours, she showed Ramsey down a hallway and into a living-room where crates of Leeming talent, his and hers, lay everywhere half-unpacked.

  “You have to excuse the mess, Mr Ramsey. Anything serves Leeming as a city base, but I’m the one who has to live here. So I leave things in turmoil.” She smiled back at him, shaking her head, impatient with her hair. “To create an atmosphere of transience.”

  She was no complaining wife, though; a businesslike talker with an unstylized gait, very like the one he would see in Ella fifteen years later. Ramsey was enchanted. She was an unselfconscious succulent, an ideal beauty. Her soldier’s walk infatuated him by making her credible. In his chest he suffered a sense or evaporation from around the heart, which pumped something far more volatile than common-or-garden blood.

  He had, of course, no sexual intentions. Not only was she sacred to Leeming, but the rings that were signs of maturing ran round her neck, which had pink in it and gorgeously threatened, but would never go over to, plumpness. She may have been as old as thirty-five, which in his funny mind made a relationship with her some
thing worse than miscegenation.

  On a table in the centre of the living-room were two ledgers and three or four folders of notes. They made up a manuscript, she told him, that a British publisher visiting Melbourne would like to consider. Dear Leeming would be very grateful.

  “So, you’re off to Antarctica,” she said then, as if Antarctica were a vice he had picked up, after a long resistance, from his elders. “Why do you find it necessary to go?”

  He told her; for the experience.

  “What good is experience?”

  He thought. “It enriches one.”

  She was doubtful about the validity of this. “How does it enrich?” Every time she asked a question she indicted you with her chin.

  “Well, it extends the limits of the type of person you were before.”

  “Ah!” she said in a small, largely ironic triumph. “What type of person are you?”

  He declined definition with a shrug.

  “Then what is the use of extending the limits of the person you are if you don’t first know what person you are? What is the use of extending the limits of something you haven’t explored and exploited? How are you equipped to extend any such thing? It’s like a railway porter promising to extend the limits of science.”

  He chose to do his puzzling smile with his big, easily discomfited lips.

  “If you’ve decided to go,” she admitted, “you might as well. The places one hasn’t been mean a lot to the person who doesn’t know himself. Would you care for tea?”

  He told her no in something like panic, brought on by the image of her pottering about with tea-leaves like any-old frump from the suburbs.

  Would he like beer then?

  The frosted bottle she brought seemed to express for him the naturalness of life, the savour. He was in a risky state of exhilaration, and fancied himself at the business of being a natural man, sitting drinking ale off-handedly with a woman who would have given a stone apostle a hard one; with another man’s wife who had on her easel at that time a more or less finished, fairly curdled and radical-looking picture of Dido on the pyre. He thought of these facts as spectacular symptoms of the new man he had become in the mountains, in the dogs’ and the old man’s unvarnished company.