My great-hearted, heroic little woman!
All this time I, in my vain belief that our expedition was of some
consequence to the world, was trying to comfort myself with the thought
that my darling must have heard of my safety.
But how could I imagine that she had hidden herself away in a mass of
humanity--which appears to be the most impenetrable depths into which a
human being can disappear?
How could I dream that, to the exclusion of all such interests as mine,
she was occupied day and night, night and day, with the joys and
sorrows, the raptures and fears of the mighty passion of Motherhood,
which seems to be the only thing in life that is really great and
eternal?
Above all, how could I believe that in London itself, in the heart of
the civilised and religious world, she was going through trials which
make mine, in the grim darkness of the Polar night, seem trivial and
easy?
It is all over now, and though, thank God, I did not know at the time
what was happening to my dear one at home, it is some comfort to me to
remember that I was acting exactly as if I did.
From the day we turned hack I heard my darling's voice no more. But I
had a still more perplexing and tormenting experience, and that was a
dream about her, in which she was walking on a crevassed glacier towards
a precipice which she could not see because the brilliant rays of the
aurora were in her eyes.
Anybody may make what he likes of that on grounds of natural law, and
certainly it was not surprising that my dreams should speak to me in
pictures drawn from the perils of my daily life, but only one thing
matters now--that these experiences of my sleeping hours increased my
eagerness to get back to my dear one.
My comrades were no impediment to that, I can tell you. With their faces
turned homewards, and the wind at their backs, they were showing
tremendous staying power, although we had thirty and forty below zero
pretty constantly, with rough going all the time, for the snow had been
ruckled up by the blizzard to almost impassable heaps and hummocks.
On reaching our second installation at Mount Darwin I sent a message to
the men at the foot of Mount Erebus, telling them to get into
communication (through Macquarie Island) with the captain of our ship in
New Zealand, asking him to return for us as soon as the ice conditions
would permit; and this was the last of our jobs (except packing our
instruments tight and warm) before we started down the "long white
gateway" for our quarters at the Cape.
With all the heart in the world, though, our going had to be slow. It
was the middle of the Antarctic winter, when absolute night reigned for
weeks and we had nothing to alleviate the darkness but the light of the
scudding moon, and sometimes the glory of the aurora as it encircled the
region of the unrisen sun.
Nevertheless my comrades sang their way home through the sullen gloom.
Sometimes I wakened the echoes of those desolate old hills myself with a
stave of "Sally's the gel," although I was suffering a good deal from my
darker thoughts of what the damnable hypocrisies of life might be doing
with my darling, and my desire to take my share of her trouble whatever
it might be.
The sun returned the second week in August. Nobody can know what relief
that brought us except those who have lived for months without it. To
see the divine and wonderful thing rise up like a god over those lone
white regions is to know what a puny thing man is in the scheme of the
world.
I think all of us felt like that at sight of the sun, though some
(myself among the rest) were thinking more of it as a kind of message
from friends at home. But old Treacle, I remember, who had stood looking
at it in awed solemnity, said:
"Well, I'm d----!"
After that we got on famously until we reached Winter Quarters, where we
found everybody well and everything in order, but received one piece of
alarming intelligence--that the attempt to get into wireless
communication with our ship had failed, with the result that we should
have to wait for her until the time originally appointed for her return.
That did not seem to matter much to my shipmates, who, being snugly
housed from blinding blizzards, settled down to amuse themselves with
sing-songs and story-tellings and readings.
But, do what I would, to me the delay was dreadful, and every day, in
the fever of my anxiety to get away as soon as the ice permitted, I
climbed the slopes of old Erebus with O'Sullivan, to look through
powerful glasses for what the good chap called the "open wather."
Thank God, our wooden house was large enough to admit of my having a
cabin to myself, for I should have been ashamed of my comrades hearing
the cries that sometimes burst from me in the night.
It is hard for civilised men at home, accustomed to hold themselves
under control, to realise how a man's mind can run away from him when he
is thousands of miles separated from his dear ones, and has a kind of
spiritual certainty that evil is befalling them.
I don't think I am a bigger fool than most men in that way, but I shiver
even yet at the memory of all the torment I went through during those
days of waiting, for my whole life seemed to revolve before me and I
accused myself of a thousand offences which I had thought dead and
buried and forgotten.
Some of these were trivial in themselves, such as hot and intemperate
words spoken in childhood to my good old people at home, disobedience or
ingratitude shown to them, with all the usual actions of a naughty boy,
who ought to have been spanked and never was.
But the worst of them concerned my darling, and came with the thought of
my responsibility for the situation in which I felt sure she found
herself.
A thousand times I took myself to task for that, thinking what I ought
and ought not to have done, and then giving myself every bad name and my
conduct every damning epithet.
Up and down my cabin I would walk with hands buried in my pockets,
revolving these thoughts and working myself up, against my will, to a
fever of regret and self-accusation.
Talk about Purgatory--the Purgatory of dear old Father Dan! That was to
come after death--mine came before, and by the holy saints, I had enough
of it.
Two months passed like this; and when the water of the Sound was open
and our ship did not appear, mine was not the only heart that was eating
itself out, for the spirits of my shipmates had also begun to sink.
In the early part of the Antarctic spring there had been a fearful
hurricane lasting three days on the sea, with a shrieking, roaring
chorus of fiends outside, and the conviction now forced itself on my men
that our ship must have gone down in the storm.
Of course I fought this notion hard, for my last hopes were based on not
believing it. But when after the lapse of weeks I could hold out no
longer, and we were confronted by the possibility of being held there
another year (for how were our friends to know before the ice formed
again that it was necessary to send relief?), I faced the situation
firmly--measuring out our food and putting the men on shortened rations,
twenty-eight ounces each and a thimbleful of brandy.
By the Lord God it is a fearful thing to stand face to face with slow
death. Some of my shipmates could scarcely bear it. The utter solitude,
the sight of the same faces and the sound of the same voices, with the
prospect of nothing else, seemed to drive most of them nearly mad.
There was no sing-songing among them now, and what speaking I overheard
was generally about the great dinners they had eaten, or about their
dreams, which were usually of green fields and flower-beds and primroses
and daisies--daisies, by heaven, in a world that was like a waste!
As for me I did my best to play the game of never giving up. It was a
middling hard game, God knows, and after weeks of waiting a sense of
helplessness settled down on me such as I had never known before.
I am not what is called a religious man, but when I thought of my
darling's danger (for such I was sure it was) and how I was cut off from
her by thousands of miles of impassable sea, there came an overwhelming
longing to go with my troubles to somebody stronger than myself.
I found it hard to do that at first, for a feeling of shame came over
me, and I thought:
"You coward, you forgot all about God when things were going well with
you, but now that they are tumbling down, and death seems certain, you
whine and want to go where you never dreamt of going in your days of
ease and strength."
I got over that, though--there's nothing except death a man doesn't get
over down there--and a dark night came when (the ice breaking from the
cliffs of the Cape with a sound that made me think of my last evening at
Castle Raa) I found myself folding my hands and praying to the God of my
childhood, not for myself but for my dear one, that He before whom the
strongest of humanity were nothing at all, would take her into His
Fatherly keeping.
"Help her! Help her! _I_ can do no more."
It was just when I was down to that extremity that it pleased Providence
to come to my relief. The very next morning I was awakened out of my
broken sleep by the sound of a gun, followed by such a yell from Treacle
as was enough to make you think the sea-serpent had got hold of his old
buttocks.
"The ship! The ship! Commander! Commander! The ship! The ship!"
And, looking out of my little window I saw him, with six or seven other
members of our company, half naked, just as they had leapt out of their
bunks, running like savages to the edge of the sea, where the "Scotia,"
with all flags flying (God bless and preserve her!), was steaming slowly
up through a grinding pack of broken ice.
What a day that was! What shouting! What hand-shaking! For O'Sullivan it
was Donnybrook Fair with the tail of his coat left out, and for Treacle
it was Whitechapel Road with "What cheer, old cock?" and an unquenchable
desire to stand treat all round.
But what I chiefly remember is that the moment I awoke, and before the
idea that we were saved and about to go home had been fully grasped by
my hazy brain, the thought flashed to my mind:
"Now you'll hear of _her!_"