Minds of Winter

by Ed O’Loughlin

  Meares had waited for that reply in the hotel lobby, uncharacteristically anxious. He ripped open the envelope and then, with the message half extracted, he stopped and looked at Hugh.

  ‘What time does your office close? In case I need to send a reply.’

  Hugh, who was sweaty from the bike ride, tired after a long day of school and study, spoke before he could think.

  ‘It’s already closed, sir. But it’s alright. They want you to do nothing.’

  Meares looked at him a moment longer, then he took out the message, read it and put it back in the envelope. His expression did not change. He was still smiling, or almost smiling. He put the envelope in one pocket and then, still smiling at Hugh, took out a coin. Hugh saw it in his fingers – the usual half-dollar, held loosely not between index and thumb but between the index and middle fingers. As he watched, Meares began to run the coin back and forth between his fingers without using his thumb, manipulating it from index to middle to third to pinky and back again in a smooth, wave-like motion. It was the kind of trick thimble-riggers performed at the carnival. When Hugh took his eyes from the coin Meares was no longer smiling.

  ‘Have you been opening my messages, young man?’

  ‘I haven’t.’

  Meares took a step closer. ‘You’ve read this one.’

  ‘Yes.’ What the hell had he been he thinking? He had been spying on this man! On his telegrams. Even the police weren’t supposed to do that . . . Still he said nothing, hoping to find a way out.

  Meares looked around the lobby. They were alone apart from a servant watering the flowers arranged round the walls. ‘I think you ought to explain yourself. I’m giving you a last chance to get out of this.’

  ‘I didn’t open it,’ insisted Hugh. He saw the anger in Meares’s expression, and added quickly, ‘I read it in the office. At the Morse key. It was me who took your message off the wire.’

  Meares transferred the coin to his left hand. He was equally adept with that. ‘You took it down? You were operating the telegraph? A messenger boy?’

  ‘I learned Morse at the office, sir. I’ve been doing it for years.’

  Meares’s posture had relaxed a little. ‘Really? And they allow that at Canadian Pacific? Is that not irregular?’

  ‘It’s unofficial. But it’s common enough. That way they can train up people for free, I guess. I got so good that they offered me a full-time telegraph job. But I turned them down. My parents want me to finish high school.’

  Meares put the half-dollar back in his pocket. ‘Can you work the whole thing by yourself? The circuits and the Vibroplex?’

  How does he know about stuff like that? But Hugh no longer dared to wonder about Colonel Meares’s affairs. He decided to sound eager; eager was a cousin of innocent. ‘Oh sure. I even know the Phillips code, although no one in Canada uses it. I learned it from a book, just in case I ever work with foreign reporters or suchlike. I know the Q-codes as well, for shipping and aircraft.’

  ‘That’s very enterprising of you.’

  ‘I’m even building my own wireless at home, sir. It’s a short-wave receiver and transmitter. I saw the plans in Popular Science. I got a lot of the parts for it at the navy dump in Esquimalt. They throw out a lot of stuff that they should really repair. The rest of it I’m buying mail-order.’

  ‘Really?’ Meares took him to the door. To Hugh’s surprise, he followed him out front. It was a mild night, with a fog that wanted to be drizzle. Moisture dripped from the porte cochère onto the gravel. ‘What will you do with this wireless of yours?’

  It was funny, thought Hugh, but he hadn’t even thought of that until asked. The challenge was to get it working. If he had any plan at all, it was really just to listen and wait.

  ‘I’ll make friends with people,’ he lied brightly. ‘You can use short-wave to talk to people all over the world. You listen for their signals, and then you send them a message asking them to acknowledge. Then you write it in a log. Or if it’s a commercial station – a voice broadcaster – and you work out which one it is, you send them a letter saying when and where and how well you received them, and they might send you a QSL card to say thanks. People collect the cards. It’s like collecting postage stamps, only more modern.’ Jesus, he thought. You’re laying it on a bit thick. He’s trying not to laugh at you.

  Meares took a dollar bill from his pocket and handed it to Hugh. ‘I’m not sure when I’ll need you again. I’ll send word if I do.’

  Hugh only heard the ‘if’. Still, he thought, as he got on his bicycle, I shouldn’t feel bad if it turns out it’s over. I don’t think I’m in trouble. And I’ve come out ahead. He could feel the dollar bill in his trouser pocket, the pleasant discomfort of it scraping his thigh through the thin cotton lining. But as he cycled home, wrapped in the thickening drizzle, he couldn’t help feeling that something big, something that was moving, had just left him behind.

  Spring arrived and the Meareses prepared to move on for a spell. A note arrived at the office from the Angela Hotel: from the following week telegrams for Meares and his wife should be re-addressed to the new Olympic Hotel in Seattle.

  The Meareses were to leave on a Saturday. Hugh, working the late shift on Friday, wondered if Meares would send for him one last time, if Meares would want to say goodbye. As the shift dragged on, and there was no summons from the Angela, he told himself that he was glad. What did he care anyway? He’d already been well paid.

  It was a quiet night, like most nights in Victoria, and there was only one other boy in the messenger room. Twenty minutes before closing time they heard the muted dah-dits of the resonator inside the telegraph room, and then the chatter of a typewriter. The telegraph clerk raised his voice.

  ‘Angela Hotel . . . Mr Meares . . . Mister Meares, eh? That’s the first time he’s been a Mister, far as I know. I guess the war is finally over, fellas. He’s your guy, Hugh. You want to take it over there?’

  I don’t care, Hugh thought. It’s none of my business. ‘Hamish can take it, if he wants. It’s on his way home. Meares tips pretty well.’

  That’s it, thought Hugh. I chose not to go. That makes me the winner.

  Now that he was alone, Hugh took out a book of short stories, a well-worn favourite by Jack London. He was deep in the Klon­dike gold fields when the front door opened to admit Sandy Rees, come to close up for the night. He whistled as he came through the counter, some old march-tune from his army days.

  ‘Alright, boys?’ Sandy called to the inner office. ‘Anyone home?’

  ‘I guess,’ said the clerk. ‘Might as well not be.’

  ‘And in there?’

  Hugh tore himself away from the bleak battle of wills between the evil half-breed Black Leclère and his hell-hound Bâtard. ‘Just me, Mr Rees. Hamish has taken a late message up to the Angela. He’ll go on home from there.’

  ‘Right . . .’ Jingling of keys. ‘You might as well go home now, Donald. If anything else comes in the next few minutes I’ll handle it myself.’

  Hugh heard the clerk’s chair scrape on the floorboards. ‘Thanks, Mr Rees. I don’t mind if I do.’

  Hugh went back to his book. The vicious mongrel Bâtard was sauntering towards his bound and helpless master, who teetered on a box with a noose around his neck. And though Hugh had already read this story two or three times, he felt his breath stop. As Rees’s swivel-chair creaked, Hugh heard Black Leclère’s boots scrabble on the slowly tipping plywood.

  The boots danced into thin air. A phone rang in Rees’s office. Hugh jumped at the sound.

  ‘Yes . . . ?’ Rees was quiet for a while. ‘Yes, of course.’ Then the click of the mouthpiece back on the receiver. There was silence for a few moments more, then Rees raised his voice again.

  ‘Hughie? Can you come in here and sit at the key? I have to go out for a minute.’

  Hugh looked at the wris
twatch he’d bought with Meares’s money. It was five minutes to ten.

  Putting his book under his arm, he passed behind the counter into the telegraph room. Only the nearest position was lit. He had his own custom-set Morse key, a Vibroplex ‘bug’ that he’d salvaged from the navy dump and kept in his pigeonhole. Plugging it into the socket, he pulled the swing-arm resonator up to his left ear, wound the ribbon on the typewriter, checked that the circuits were closed and the ‘flash’ bulbs unlit, and opened his book again.

  But he couldn’t concentrate on reading. What was wrong with him tonight? He loved this office very much: it put him almost on the edge of the centre of things. He never minded staying beyond his shifts. But tonight he just wanted to be out of here. He wouldn’t go home when Rees relieved him (and where was Sandy Rees? It was already five after ten): he would cycle through the backstreets of Victoria, away from the brightly lit district round the Empress Hotel. Or maybe he wouldn’t cycle: maybe tonight he would walk. Bicycles and melancholy didn’t really mix . . .

  He raised his eyes from his book and shook his head to clear it. Now he was looking at the spike.

  The spike was a vertical steel prong set in a round wooden base. It sat on the bench a foot from his right hand. On it was impaled a thick wad of tissue papers. Whenever a message came in, the clerk would use an all-capitals Underwood to type it directly onto the telegram form. The purple ribbon of the typewriter used a water-based ink, so that a copy of the form could be made simply by pressing wet tissue against it. These copies were then impaled on the spike.

  The uppermost of those tissues must be the last message that came here. The one for ‘Mr Meares’.

  Hugh looked at the spike, then at his watch again. Ten after ten, and Rees still wasn’t back. The office should be locked by now.

  That message was none of his business. He didn’t even work for Meares any more. He had less right than ever to snoop.

  When he flattened the tissue on the desktop the ink was still a little damp. It came off on his fingers.

  The message had been sent from Nome, Alaska, relayed by Vancouver: ‘Enjoy Seattle. Carpendale.’

  Stupidly, he turned it over to look at the back of it, as if that could show him any more meaning. Then he heard the front door open and footsteps in the lobby. Rees was back, and about time too. He put the tissue back on the spike, remembering to impale it through the original hole, then gathered his book and stood up.

  ‘I’d be grateful if you’d stay,’ said Meares. ‘I need to send a telegram.’

  He was standing in the door that led from the counter. His trench coat was silvered by drops of fine rain. And Hugh, flustered by this unexpected visit, fumbled his book and let it drop to the floor. Had Meares seen him reading the tissue? What if he noticed the ink on his fingers? If he did, would he even know what it was? Hugh was pretty sure that somehow he would.

  ‘We’re closed, sir,’ he managed. ‘I’m just waiting for my boss. He’s supposed to come back and lock up.’

  Meares reached into his coat pocket and took out a large bunch of keys. Hugh recognized Rees’s key fob – the crest of the Signals Corps.

  ‘He says you can lock up afterwards. I’ll make sure the keys get back to him. I have a car outside.’

  Hugh wouldn’t bother pointing out that this wasn’t supposed to happen. Neither would he ask where Rees was, or why Rees wasn’t there to help Meares himself. It was understood that

  Hugh would go along with anything that was asked of him. Any objections would have to be practical. ‘But this station is closed, sir. Everything from here to the outside world goes through Vancouver or Seattle. If we try and send anything after hours they’ll want to know why we’re still operating.’

  ‘We won’t be sending anything out through Vancouver or Seattle.’ Meares came and stood beside him, on his right, so as not to interfere with the resonator at Hugh’s left ear. ‘I want to send a message on a local wire, inside Vancouver Island. You know how to raise the navy signals at Esquimalt.’

  It was a statement, not a question. There’ll be nobody there, thought Hugh. But it wasn’t worth saying aloud. Meares, he was sure, would know what he was doing. ‘What’s the message?’ He picked up a pad. Meares pushed the pad away.

  ‘No writing. Just get them on the line, then I’ll dictate. And don’t give them your sine. They’ll know where it’s coming from.’

  He did as he was told. Moments later, the ‘flash’ light came on for the bush wire to Esquimalt harbour, just down the coast, followed by the naval station’s letters, tapping in the resonator.

  Meares straightened abruptly and walked in a quick circle behind Hugh’s back, as if he were shaking off a sudden cramp.

  ‘Good . . . Send this: “Carpendale just arrived Nome from Siberia”. . .’

  Hugh tapped away at his sideswiper key, the dahs of the button, dits of the paddle. He kept to a slow twenty-five words per minute; the navy people weren’t always as quick as commercial operators like himself.

  ‘. . . “Says offered Blackburn Iris blueprint by Vladivostok freelancer”. . .’

  Blackburn Iris, thought Hugh. That explained it. He still read the boys’ papers: the Blackburn Iris was the RAF’s newest seaplane.

  ‘. . . “Freelancer said English source William Forbes Sempill. He Jap agent. Advise arrest. Dearie”.’

  Dearie. Now Meares was going by a different name entirely, as if it were some kind of code. But what a thin code it was: Meares had even used someone’s name ‘in the clear’ – a term Hugh had learned from his Baden-Powell cipher book.

  ‘Now,’ said Meares, ‘you’re not going to ask me a whole lot of questions, are you, Mr Morgan?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Good. Let me ask you one: do you fancy a cigarette while we wait?’

  ‘We’re not allowed to smoke back here, sir. The ash and grease can clog the relays. Wait for what, sir?’

  ‘For a reply, of course.’

  ‘From Esquimalt, sir?’

  Meares took out a cigarette case. ‘Yes. Leave the line open.’

  Hugh thought about that. It would be almost impossible for anyone outside the island to have eavesdropped on Meares’s last message, sent as it was after hours on a bush line. And in Esquimalt, a Royal Navy station, they would presumably have code books and long-distance wireless. The conversation, whatever it meant, would have moved from Alaska to Seattle to Victoria, then by separate means to Esquimalt, thence again – he had to assume – by coded wireless to London, and now they were waiting for a return. Only one person sat at the centre of the exchange. Only one person could follow it all. Two, if you counted himself.

  He took a cigarette from Meares, although it was forbidden, and he never smoked.

  Meares eased himself into the chair to Hugh’s right. ‘We’ll need something to use as an ashtray.’ His eyes scanned the bench, then spotted Hugh’s book.

  ‘Ah. Jack London . . .’ He nodded at the book. ‘Very interesting fellow. Dead these eight years.’

  ‘You’ve read him, sir? I’ve read all his books.’

  Meares shook aside some litter in the waste bin, making a clear space where he could flick his ash. He lit two cigarettes.

  ‘Read him? No. I’m not a great one for fiction. I never have time. But I met him once. When we were both young fellows knocking about.’

  This was something, Hugh decided, that he could be openly keen about. It was also an excuse to put down the cigarette he’d been holding just short of his lips. ‘Were you a stampeder too?’

  Meares blew a smoke ring at the ceiling. ‘The Klondike Gold Rush? No. I was still in India back then, trying to grow tea . . . But I met Jack London a few years later . . . It’s a story from a war that you’ve never even heard of.’

  ‘I know about the Boer War,’ protested Hugh. ‘My mother’s brother was in it. Imperial Y
eomanry. Were you in that too, sir?’

  Meares put his feet up on the bench, a desecration that could scarcely be believed. ‘I was in the Transvaal Scottish Horse. Promoted all the way up to lance-corporal.’ He pulled a face. ‘Not an honorific I’ve been known to use lately, is it, Mr Morgan? Lance-Corporal Meares, care of the Angela Hotel.’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘I’ll save that one for a real emergency . . . But that’s not where I met Jack London. That happened a couple of years after South Africa, back in ’04.’ He took a silver flask from his pocket and showed it to Hugh. ‘He told me the most wonderful story . . . We could be here a little while yet. Unless you suggest otherwise, I propose to drink alone.’

  The Korea–Manchuria border, 1904

  From The Ghost of the Yalu River by Jack London (1876–1916): memoir, unfinished at the time of his death.

  The ghost first appeared on the night of the battle, that immortal world-shaking engagement in which Kuroki defeated Zasulich and crossed the Yalu stream.

  A Japanese foot patrol, scouting the Russian rout into Manchuria, spotted a dark figure in the gloaming, creeping down a steep hillside towards the Japanese lines. The Japanese corporal, a veteran of ’94, knew well this land and the virtues of patience, so he drew his men into the shadows and waited in silence. At times their quarry disappeared, merging back into the mountain, but then a dim shaft of moonlight would find a pale face as it turned to the sky. This was a white man, like the fleeing Russian soldiers, but coming the opposite way.