A Victim of the Aurora

by Thomas Keneally

  ‘I head the said crude list,’ Sir Eugene announced. ‘And, of course, if I’m the responsible party, then we’re all finished.’

  Alec read, Sir Eugene had visited the latrines after lunch and then wrote his journal and a memorandum for Harry Kittery concerning ice-formations. The Leader pestered Harry with dilettante theories about the conditions that cause sea ice, the sequence of states it goes through until it is pack-ice, its decay until it becomes ice-cakes and brash ice. Sir Eugene’s theory was that the sea began to turn to ice only when water vapour fell out of the air and made the first ice crystals on the ocean. Harry Kittery believed that the ocean froze from within itself. A major question, you might say. Yet Sir Eugene often wrote Harry notes about it, as if to put the boy on the right track.

  After this, Sir Eugene (according to the list of movements) had gone to the sailors’ quarters to help in the repair of sleds. He was fetched from there by the news that Victor could not be found anywhere.

  Alec himself spent the afternoon in his corner, writing and illustrating an article on the embryology of Adelie penguins. Harry Kittery had been in the laboratory, reading the memoranda from Sir Eugene perhaps. Paul Gabriel had been embalming his skua. Brian Quincy examined and discussed with his partner Hoosick the function of a new parasite they had retrieved from the gut of one of their more important catches, an Antarctic cod.

  In fact, for Quincy and the restrained American the examination of this tiny bug who infested the intestinal tract of an impressive fish had produced a further and greater scientific success. As the little parasite lay under their microscope it had bled out its minute body secretions which, during the lunch hour, while Quincy and Hoosick were taking a quick meal, had turned to crystals. Hoosick, who had more chemistry than Brian Quincy, tested the crystals and discovered that they were salt. Both men instantly felt a creative excitement, a potent intuition. They knew with a certainty of the blood, rather than of the deductive mind, why Antarctic cod could live un-armoured, un-blubbered and healthily in polar water, at depths where the temperatures were actually below the surface freezing point and should very quickly freeze the cod’s blood. If the small sea-vermin got its saltiness from the cod, then maybe the explanation for the cod’s success was salt. They had already re-frozen the cod’s carcase. It lay in Walter O’Reilly’s storeroom to the east of the hut, the room you got to through a door from the galley. They re-thawed the cod by plunging it in hot water and got what smears of blood they could from it. The results of their tests were not therefore of the highest clinical quality. Nonetheless they found that the blood of the Antarctic cod was a broth of salt and haemoglobin, that it would go on flowing when a salmon’s blood was long frozen.

  Quincy went looking for Victor when the blood was ready for testing, sure that Victor would want to be present for one of marine biology’s more splendid moments. They had delayed the test ten minutes, waiting for Victor to finish in the latrines, but then they had gone ahead anyhow.

  On a normal night Sir Eugene would have made a little speech honouring them and there would have been fish talk all evening till PO Mulroy cut the lights at eleven. But none of us had wanted to talk cod that night.

  The list continued. Barry Fields had been taking notes and Isaac Goodman ground geological specimens. Peter Sullivan was in the darkroom, developing a mediocre plate of the aurora and hand-tinting the results. John Troy worked in the meteorology-room, and on the sled and ration packs being assembled in the sailors’ quarters. Par-axel and Harry Webb helped the sailors repair sled runners.

  Warren Mead stayed in the stables. ‘One of the ponies,’ Alec explained, ‘Tulip I think it is – has symptoms of glanders. Alexandrei was with Warren, melting snow on the blubber stove. Tulip, of course, needs a great deal of drinking water.’

  ‘No symptoms in any of the others?’ asked Sir Eugene, as if glanders were suddenly the main problem.

  ‘Not yet. Warren is confident …’

  In Sir Eugene’s mind, ponies were the innovation which would bring him success. He was sentimental about dogs in any case and found it distasteful to budget into his plans the dog-meat which would become available as the dogs failed in their traces and were shot. He was not so sentimental about Siberian ponies and intended to use them on the glaciers and polar plateaux, as far as they would last. A pony could drag eight hundred or a thousand pounds of food and gear, he’d told us. If the pony were well. Yet there were other, more obvious contrasts between dogs and ponies which Sir Eugene seemed to understand as poorly as any of us did that winter.

  As an instance, Harry Webb, the Canadian dog-man, tethered his dogs in the open, fed them frozen seal meat, left it to them to eat enough snow for good health and had to tend them only when males fought over leadership or bitches. Warren Mead, on the contrary, had to build stables for his ponies and spend most of every other winter day melting water (since they didn’t fancy snow), making mashes, dosing and mixing dosages, working out a dietary balance for them and watching for symptoms of glanders, a sort of horse mumps that had already killed two of his ponies. He was an all-day mother to his troop of fifteen animals. No one liked to mention to him that they would probably all have been eaten by the following autumn. For he seemed to love even the mean shaggy Siberian creature I used to exercise – a gelding called Igor. Igor could, even wearing blinkers, throw a hoof sideways and crack your shin just where the most nerves crossed the bone. When, limping, I returned Igor to the stables one afternoon, I said to Warren, ‘I’m glad they castrated the bastard. He deserves it.’ But Warren did not laugh. Pipe in mouth, chunky, his head cropped like a cavalry recruit’s, he inspected Igor all over, as if I might have bitten him.

  That night in Sir Eugene’s alcove it was not news to me that Warren Mead spent all afternoon with the ponies. Nor that Norman Coote had worked on one of the two tractors. Norman was attentive to his machines. They sat with drained engine blocks in a garage you could get to from the laboratory. The garage was unheated and Coote always used to be testing oil-blends on the moving parts, seeking a lubricant that would not freeze and choke the engine. He spent the winter taking those two machines apart, considering the moving parts, even designing new treads for their tracks and tooling them in the workshop. Later, whenever I visited a technological museum, I always thought of Norman in that distant winter, of the brave red paint, the brass polish, the fine oils he used on his two darlings, keeping them spotless as exhibits in the Smithsonian. This was the way he consoled himself for the loss of the third one, the one that lay a hundred fathoms down in McMurdo Sound, that had fallen through the ice with John Troy in its saddle. Everyone had been grateful John Troy didn’t go down there amongst the salt-blooded codfish with it. But Norman had been bitter about the loss and believed Troy had lost the tractor through reckless driving or lack of the sensitivity men should have for machines.

  Norman spent so many hours, dressed in a greasy greatcoat, dealing with his tractors, because he believed they were central to the expedition, that they would take Stewart across the ice shelf all the way to the base of the Beardmore and – depending on conditions – a long way up it. He believed that the automated future had already come and that when Stewart stood at the Pole he would say, ‘The tractors made this possible.’ So Norman looked on Warren Mead and Harry Webb as keepers of quaint polar pets and on himself as the logistical centre of the enterprise. As the winter went on and we all became more eccentric, he began to say as much. He spent so much time in that unheated garage, he had so little conversation other than tractors, he had so much mechanic’s arrogance, that he was an outsider. It was only the following summer, when both his tractors broke down beyond repair after logging a mere hundred miles between them, that he was forced to take an interest in the rest of us and won friends and became an expert sledder.

  So Norman Coote was in the garage. Walter O’Reilly was cooking in the galley, occasionally visiting his storeroom for cans of meat or pudding. The rest of the sailors worked in their qua
rters. They repaired sleeping bags, made sailcloth containers for supplies, sewed up dog or pony harnesses, mended ski equipment, bound or reinforced the framework of sleds. As a sort of quartermaster’s mate, Henson clerked in a corner by the bunks. Last of all, the Mulroy brothers made new runners in the workshop. The wood-working lathes had whirred all afternoon.

  Alec asked me, did my experience contradict anything in this roster of his? But my afternoon had been experienced as blocks of colour and not in terms of the movements of my colleagues. I apologized.

  4

  A manila folder lay on Sir Eugene’s table. I saw him open it. It was fat with documents.

  ‘I went to Victor’s bunk,’ he said, ‘and took his bags from beneath it and so took possession of his personal effects and documents. He’s written what looks like six excellent articles on our winter work, absolutely suitable as far as I can tell for publication in quality newspapers. He has also written a half-dozen more whimsical articles, rather mocking in tone. They would have been his business – he could have published them in suitable magazines. Here’s one. How to Live with Polar Explorers. It’s clear he thought some of us a little ridiculous.’ Sir Eugene chuckled without malice. ‘You should both read these – there may be something in them, some indication … Here’s another. Hygiene and Male Fashions at –50°. There are also a number of letters from public figures. Poor Victor obviously took them everywhere with him. Here’s a blistering one from Mr George Bernard Shaw. Dear Mr Henneker, I have heard you described at one of the less challenging dinner tables of this city as the poor man’s Bernard Shaw. May I say that I believe that the poor suffer from sufficient economic disadvantage, are cosseted too regularly with the promise of heaven’s draughty porticoes and, in any case, suffer from such deplorably bad teeth that some benevolent editor might well believe they should be further discriminated against by being given a substitute Shaw to chew upon. I can only warn you that even the severest social and political discrimination has not barbarized them to the point where they can stomach you … And more of the same. Poor Victor. He wasn’t easy to insult, was he?’

  ‘He wasn’t sensitive,’ said Alec. ‘He had a very good journalistic reputation. Of course, Mr Shaw thinks all journalists are barbarians.’

  Sir Eugene put the letter down delicately, like an honourable epitaph. ‘There are others, even a death threat from the Sinn Fein. Oh dear.’ He was silent a second. I thought he might even shed a tear. Victor was a terrible man but most people found him hard to hate unless he had injured them in cold print.

  Sir Eugene packed the articles and letters back into the manila folder and closed it. He stared at the knuckle of his right index finger and kneaded it with the fingers of his left hand. ‘It’s incredible that I should ever have to speak like this. Victor has been treated by someone as an object of fear and hate. Alec has sketched a reasonable motivation for Forbes-Chalmers to treat Victor in that manner.’ The way Sir Eugene spoke, a stranger might have believed Forbes-Chalmers had maligned Victor at some dinner table. ‘We have to consider whether any of us had motivation to fear and hate.’ He coughed again and looked straight at me. ‘You see, we three are a kind of Committee of Public Safety. It’s ridiculous, but before this affair is over we may have to be brutal with our friends.’

  There was silence. It grew and weighed. They wanted me to speak first. I was aware, as Stewart had said, that we would all have to speak painfully in the end, for the good reason that anarchy threatened our breath and the tenuous warmth of our blood.

  ‘I have only the most random thoughts,’ I said. But they still waited for them to emerge.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘it seems the news that Victor had been chosen for the Pole party … that it had been pre-determined that he was going … it could have disappointed some of us.’

  ‘Not you. Surely not you.’

  ‘Some of them … they might think they should have been told earlier.’

  Sir Eugene nodded, taking the criticism in. Taut aggression and florid apology were equally foreign to him.

  It was Alec who made the defence. ‘I was in my garden two years ago,’ he said. ‘Down near Exmouth. My wife and children were blackberrying at the end of the garden and I was simply reading. I saw a taxi – a rare sight on those country roads – let off a lady and a gentleman at the bottom of our lane. As they got closer I saw it was Sir Eugene and Lady Stewart. Before I had time to warn my wife and children, Sir Eugene called to me. He said, Alec, I’m going back, all the way to the Pole this time. I would very much like to stand at the Pole with you. My point is that it’s always been agreed that I would go to the Pole, yet none of the expedition was ever told in so many words.’

  I remember I shrugged. He didn’t need to argue the matter with me.

  ‘The eight men,’ he pursued, ‘who were approached yesterday and notified of their selection … they were told to keep it secret. But one of them was so pleased or so well-liquored he passed the list on …’

  Sir Eugene understood me exactly. ‘Anthony has touched on an incentive for violence which is credible however incredible. I could see such motivation operating in the case of Paul Gabriel, who believes that only his short-sightedness stands between himself and the reaching of the Pole.’

  I flinched at the specific name. Sir Eugene had begun to take more notes. When he had finished he looked at the curtains beyond me. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘do you have any more to tell us?’

  My throat became instantly dry. I must restate that the values of the day made ‘homosexual’ the worst label you could put on a man. Pimps and confidence men and sellers of stocks in Peruvian or Australian gold mines were considered as moderate enemies of society. But when you said ‘homosexual’ you were speaking of an outlaw, a man who couldn’t be redeemed. It was like saying ‘Communist’ in the Hollywood of the 1950s. You didn’t willingly apply the word even to the dead.

  I began to mutter something about Petty Officer Mulroy’s distress. About Victor’s attentions to young Able-Bodied Seaman Mulroy …

  Even before I began speaking I was obliquely aware of a new wailing, separate from, sharper than the monotone wail of the blizzard. I thought it might have been the big kettle boiling madly in the men’s quarters. Because, as I said, ‘This is third-hand information …’, the shrilling got louder, as if the door between our quarters and the sailors’ had been opened.

  As I mentioned Victor’s proclivities, someone began hammering on the outside of Sir Eugene’s bookcase. The volume and heftiness of the knocking indicated urgency, and that the curtain was not instantly pulled aside suggested that it was a sailor pounding the bookcase yet, politely, not announcing disaster until requested to. Sir Eugene nodded to Alec, who rose and pulled the curtain back. By now I could tell that the distant noise was a human lamentation, in there, in the sailors’ quarters.

  Petty Officer Percy Mulroy stood by the bookcase.

  ‘Sir,’ he said. ‘One of the Russians’ gone crazy.’

  Sir Eugene instantly got up from the table. I had the impression for a second that he was as pleased to have the distraction of a plaintive Russian as I was.

  At the open door into the sailors’ quarters, Barry Fields, Isaac Goodman and the Reverend Quincy stood. Barry held out a hand to delay Sir Eugene. ‘Watch out, Leader,’ he said. ‘The lunatic’s got a harpoon.’

  As befits an old man with a rotting cerebellum, I remember acutely the scene I saw when looking into the sailors’ quarters. The tall boy Alexandrei, Mead’s pony-handler, stood in the gallery area. In his Asian face the mouth stood wide open and gave out a great piercing wail. The right hand that held the harpoon looked as if it were about to glide into a fluid and expert throw which would pin one of the sailors against his bunk.

  In front of Alexandrei, sitting at the table but back-on to his fellow Siberian, sat Nikolai, the small bullet-headed man who had grieved so loudly out in the blizzard this afternoon. Tonight he seemed more passive, his head hung, there were tears amongst t
he stubble of his face. He looked as if he grieved softly because his friend Alexandrei was so distressed. As well, he knew – and we could see – that he was the only other man in the room who was safe from the harpoon. The sailors were all milling quietly at the bunk end of the room, eyes subtly averted from Alexandrei. Only PO Bertram Wallace sat, squinting at the Russians from beneath a split eyebrow. The pony-handler had cut his eyebrow open with the butt-end of the harpoon. Henson and Jones, men of restless temperament, looked as if they might charge Alexandrei at any second, just to break the hiatus.

  Sir Eugene said, ‘No one move!’

  John Troy joined us in the doorway. His eyes, taking in the crisis, were bright beads of canniness in a face that was older than its 33 years, hooked, crooked, knowing. He reminded me of Druids and those Cornish fishermen who have secret ways of spotting a shoal of halibut.

  He murmured in Sir Eugene’s ear about breaking out a carbine. Sir Eugene thanked him but declined, asking instead for Warren Mead, who knew some Russian.

  Mead was fetched from the stables. He had not heard his handler going berserk in the sailors’ quarters. The wind noise, the hiss of the blubber stove, the snuffling of ponies had filled his hearing, and the slight swelling on Tulip’s underjaw provided him with his sole horizon.

  Before Warren arrived, Stewart and Mulroy began their advance on Alexandrei.

  I stayed by the door jamb, half protected by it. I wanted to call out about the folly of walking up to Alexandrei, of not shooting him first. I’ve found out since that only the very brave are able to estimate the quotient of danger in a situation. Like most men, I’ve spent my life over-estimating perils.

  But because Sir Eugene and Mulroy made their slow way to Alexandrei – Sir Eugene murmuring the man’s name over and over, soothingly – I felt bound to expose half my body to the harpoon; and I cursed not Alexandrei but the knight and the petty officer. I watched the three terrible barbs at the point of the harpoon. I knew it had been deep in the bodies of seals and sea-leopards whose blood had dried on it. These weapons were cleaned but never sterilized. The wound would be terrible for that reason, as well as for the barbs.