Complete works of hall c.., p.535
Complete Works of Hall Caine, page 535
I passed in review my maidenhood, my marriage, and my love, and told myself that the darkest days of my loneliness in London had hitherto been relieved by one bright hope. I had only to live on and Martin would come back to me. But now I was utterly alone, I was in the presence of nothingness. The sanctuary within me where Martin had lived was only a cemetery of the soul.
“Why? Why? Why?” I cried again, but there was no answer.
Thus I passed my Christmas Day (for which I had formed such different plans), and I hardly knew if it was for punishment or warning that I was at last compelled to think of something besides my own loss.
My unborn child!
No man on earth can know anything about that tragic prospect, though millions of women must have had to face it. To have a child coming that is doomed before its birth to be fatherless — there is nothing in the world like that.
I think the bitterest part of my grief was that nobody could ever know. If Martin had lived he would have leapt to acknowledge his offspring in spite of all the laws and conventions of life. But being dead he could not be charged with it. Therefore the name of the father of my unborn child must never, never, never be disclosed.
The thickening of the fog told me that the day was passing.
It passed. The houses on the opposite side of the square vanished in a vaporous, yellow haze, and their lighted windows were like rows of bloodshot eyes looking out of the blackness.
Except the young waiter and the chambermaid nobody visited me until a little before dinner time. Then the old actress came up, rather fantastically dressed (with a kind of laurel crown on her head), to say that the boarders were going to have a dance and wished me to join them. I excused myself on the ground of headache, and she said:
“Young women often suffer from it. It’s a pity, though! Christmas night, too!”
Not long after she had gone, I heard, through the frequent tooting of the taxis in the street, the sound of old-fashioned waltzes being played on the piano, and then a dull thudding noise on the floor below, mingled with laughter, which told me that the old boarders were dancing.
I dare say my head was becoming light. I had eaten nothing for nearly forty hours, and perhaps the great shock which chance had given me had brought me near to the blank shadowland which is death.
I remember that in some vague way there arose before me a desire to die. It was not to be suicide — my religion saved me from that — but death by exhaustion, by continuing to abstain from food, having no desire for it.
Martin was gone — what was there to live for? Had I not better die before my child came to life? And if I could go where Martin was I should be with him eternally.
Still I did not weep, but — whether audibly or only in the unconscious depths of my soul — more than once I cried to Martin by name.
“Martin! Martin! I am coming to you!”
I was in this mood (sitting in my chair as I had done all day and staring into the small slow fire which was slipping to the bottom of the grate) when I heard a soft step in the corridor outside. At the next moment my door was opened noiselessly, and somebody stepped into the room.
It was Mildred, and she knelt by my side and said in a low voice:
“You are in still deeper trouble, Mary — tell me.”
I tried to pour out my heart to her as to a mother, but I could not do so, and indeed there was no necessity. The thought that must have rushed into my eyes was instantly reflected in hers.
“It is he, isn’t it?” she whispered, and I could only bow my head.
“I thought so from the first,” she said. “And now you are thinking of . . . of what is to come?”
Again I could only bow, but Mildred put her arms about me and said:
“Don’t lose heart, dear. Our Blessed Lady sent me to take care of you. And I will — I will.”
MEMORANDUM BY MARTIN CONRAD
Surely Chance must be the damnedest conspirator against human happiness, or my darling could never have been allowed to suffer so much from the report that my ship was lost.
What actually happened is easily told.
Two days after we left Akaroa, N.Z., which was the last we saw of the world before we set our faces towards the Unknown, we ran into a heavy lumpy sea and made bad weather of it for forty-eight hours.
Going at good speed, however, we proceeded south on meridian 179 degrees E., latitude 68, when (just as we were sighting the Admiralty Mountains, our first glimpse of the regions of the Pole) we encountered a south-westerly gale, which, with our cumbersome deck cargo, made the handling of the ship difficult.
Nevertheless the Scotia rode bravely for several hours over the mountainous seas, though sometimes she rolled fifty degrees from side to side.
Towards nightfall we shipped a good deal of water; the sea smashed in part of our starboard bulwarks, destroyed the upper deck, washed out the galley, carried off two of our life boats and sent other large fragments of the vessel floating away to leeward.
At last the pumps became choked, and the water found its way to the engine-room. So to prevent further disaster we put out the fires, and then started, all hands, to bale out with buckets.
It was a sight to see every man-jack at work on that job (scientific staff included), and you would not have thought our spirits were much damped, whatever our bodies may have been, if you had been there when I cried, “Are we downhearted, shipmates?” and heard the shout that came up from fifty men (some of them waist deep in the water):
“No!”
We had a stiff tussle until after midnight, but we stuck hard, and before we turned into our bunks, we had fought the sea and beaten it.
Next morning broke fine and clear, with that fresh crisp air of the Antarctic which is the same to the explorer as the sniff of battle to the warhorse, and no sign of the storm except the sight of some lead-white icebergs which had been torn from the islands south-west of us.
Everybody was in high spirits at breakfast, and when one of the company started “Sweethearts and Wives” all hands joined in the chorus, and (voice or no voice) I had a bit of a go at it myself.
It is not the most solemn music ever slung together, but perhaps no anthem sung in a cathedral has ascended to heaven with a heartier spirit of thanksgiving.
When I went up on deck again, though, I saw that enough of our “wooden walls” had gone overboard to give “scarey people” the impression (if things were ever picked up, as I knew they would be, for the set of the current was to the north-east) that we had foundered, and that made me think of my dear one.
We had no wireless aboard, and the ship would not be going back to New Zealand until March, so I was helpless to correct the error; but I determined that the very first message from the very first station I set up on the Antarctic continent should be sent to her to say that I was safe and everything going splendid.
What happened on Christmas day is a longer story.
On the eighteenth of December, having landed some of my deck cargo and provisions, and sent up my ship to winter quarters, I was on my way, with ponies, dogs, and sledges and a large company of men, all in A1 condition, to the lower summit of Mount Erebus, for I intended to set up my first electric-power-wave station there — that being high enough, we thought, to permit of a message reaching the plateau of the Polar zone and low enough (allowing for the curvature of the earth) to cover the maximum distance in a northerly direction.
It was a long reach, but we chose the rocky ridges and moraines, trying to avoid the crevassed glaciers, and all went well until the twentieth, when just as we were reaching the steeper gradients a strong wind sprang up, blowing straight down the course before us.
All day long we toiled against it, but the weather grew worse, with gusts of sleet and snow, until the wind reached the force of a hurricane and the temperature fell to 28 degrees below zero.
There was nothing to do but to wait for the blizzard to blow itself out, so we plugged down our tents in the shelter of the rocky side of a ravine that had an immense snow-field behind it.
The first night was bad enough, for the canvas of one tent flew into ribbons, and the poor chaps in it had to lie uncovered in their half-frozen sleeping-bags until morning.
All through the twenty-first, twenty-second, and twenty-third the storm continued, sweeping with terrific force down the ravine, and whirling the snow in dense masses from the snow-field overhead.
Christmas Eve was worse, with the temperature down to 38 degrees below zero and the wind up to eighty miles an hour in gusts, and during the greater part of Christmas Day we were all confined to our sleeping-bags and half buried in the snow that had drifted in on us.
As a consequence we had no religious service, and if anybody said a De Profundis it was between his crackling lips under his frozen beard. We had no Christmas dinner either, except a few Plasmon biscuits and a nip of brandy and water, which were served out by good old O’Sullivan who had come with me as doctor to the expedition.
On St. Stephen’s Day I made a round of the camp and found the ponies suffering terribly and the dogs badly hit. The storm was telling on the men too, for some of them were down with dysentery, and the toes of one poor chap were black from frostbite.
I was fit enough myself, thank God, but suffering from want of sleep or rather from a restless feeling which broken sleep brought with it.
The real truth is that never since I sailed had I been able to shake off the backward thought that I ought not to have left my dear one behind me. In active work, like the gale, I could dismiss the idea of her danger; but now that I had nothing to do but to lie like a log in a sleeping-bag, I suffered terribly from my recollection of her self-sacrifice and my fear of the consequences that might come of it.
This was not so bad in the daytime, for even in the midst of the whirling snow and roaring wind I had only to close my eyes, and I could see her as she came up the road in the sunshine that Sunday morning when she was returning from church in her drooping hat and fluttering veil, or as she looked at me with her great “seeing eyes” at the last moment of all when she compelled me to come away.
But the night was the devil. No sooner did I drop off to sleep than I awoke with a start at the sound of her voice calling me by my name.
“Martin! Martin!”
It was always a voice of distress, and though I am no dreamer and I think no crank, I could not get away from the idea that she was crying to me to come back.
That was about the one thing in the world that was impossible to me now, and yet I knew that getting assurance from somewhere that my dear one was being cared for was the only way to set my mind at rest for the job that was before me.
It may seem ridiculous that I should have thought of that, but everybody who has ever been with Nature in her mighty solitudes, aloof from the tides of life, knows that the soul of man is susceptible down there to signs which would seem childish amid the noise and bustle of the world.
It was like that with me.
I shared my tent with O’Sullivan, the chief of our scientific staff, and Treacle, who thought it his duty to take care of me, though the work was generally the other way about.
The old salt had been badly battered, and I had not liked the way he had been mumbling about “mother,” which is not a good sign in a stalwart chap when his strength is getting low.
So while buttoning up the tent on the night after Christmas Day I was a bit touched up to see old Treacle, who had lived the life of a rip, fumbling at his breast and hauling something out with an effort.
It was a wooden image of the Virgin (about the length of my hand) daubed over with gilt and blue paint, and when he stuck it up in front of his face as he lay in his sleeping-bag, I knew that he expected to go out before morning, and wished that to be the last thing his old eyes should rest on.
I am not much of a man for saints myself (having found that we get out of tight places middling well without them), but perhaps what Treacle did got down into some secret place of my soul, for I felt calmer as I fell asleep, and when I awoke it was not from the sound of my darling’s voice, but from a sort of deafening silence.
The roaring of the wind had ceased; the blizzard was over; the lamp that hung from the staff of the tent had gone out; and there was a sheet of light coming in from an aperture in the canvas.
It was the midnight sun of the Antarctic, and when I raised my head I saw that it fell full on the little gilded image of the Virgin. Anybody who has never been where I was then may laugh if he likes and welcome, but that was enough for me. It was all right! Somebody was looking after my dear one!
I shouted to my shipmates to get up and make ready, and at dawn, when we started afresh on our journey, there may have been dark clouds over our heads but the sun was shining inside of us.
M.C.
[END OF MARTIN CONRAD’S MEMORANDUM]
EIGHTY-FOURTH CHAPTER
Sister Mildred was right. Our Blessed Lady must have interceded for me, because help came immediately.
I awoke on St. Stephen’s morning with that thrilling emotion which every mother knows to be the first real and certain consciousness of motherhood.
It is not for me to describe the physical effects of that great change. But the spiritual effect is another matter. It was like that of a miracle. God in his great mercy, looking down on me in my sorrow, had sent one of His ministering angels to comfort me.
It seemed to say:
“Don’t be afraid. He who went away is not lost to you. Something of himself is about to return.”
I felt no longer that I was to be left alone in my prison-house of London, because Martin’s child was to bear me company — to be a link between us, an everlasting bond, so that he and I should be together to the end.
I tremble to say what interpretation I put upon all this — how it seemed to be a justification of what I did on the night before Martin left Ellan, as if God, knowing he would not return, had prompted me, so that when my dark hour came I might have this great hope for my comforter.
And oh how wonderful it was, how strange, how mysterious, how joyful!
Every day and all day and always I was conscious of my unborn child, as a fluttering bird held captive in the hand. The mystery and the joy of the coming life soothed away my sorrow, and if I had shed any tears they would have dried them.
And then the future!
I seemed to know from the first that it was to be a girl, and already I could see her face and look into her sea-blue eyes. As she grew up I would talk to her of her father — the brave explorer, the man of destiny, who laid down his life in a great work for the world. We should always be talking of him — we two alone together, because he belonged to us and nobody else in the world besides. Everything I have written here I should tell her — at least the beautiful part of it, the part about our love, which nothing in life, and not even death itself, could quench.
Oh the joy of those days! It may seem strange that I should have been so happy so soon after my bereavement, but I cannot help it if it was so, and it was so.
Perhaps it was a sort of hysteria, due to the great change in my physical condition. I do not know. I do not think I want to know. But one thing is sure — that hope and prayer and the desire of life awoke in me again, as by the touch of God’s own hand, and I became another and a happier woman.
Such was the condition in which Mildred found me when she returned a few days later. Then she brought me down plump to material matters. We had first to consider the questions of ways and means, in order to find out how to face the future.
It was the beginning of January, my appointed time was in June, and I had only some sixteen pounds of my money left, so it was clear that I could not stay in the boarding-house much longer.
Happily Mildred knew of homes where women could live inexpensively during their period of waiting. They were partly philanthropic and therefore subject to certain regulations, which my resolute determination (not to mention Martin’s name, or permit it to be mentioned) might make it difficult for me to observe, but Mildred hoped to find one that would take me on her recommendation without asking further question.
In this expectation we set out in search of a Maternity Home. What a day of trial we had! I shall never forget it.
The first home we called at was a Catholic one in the neighbourhood of our boarding-house.
It had the appearance of a convent, and that pleased me exceedingly. After we had passed the broad street door, with its large brass plate and small brass grille, we were shown into a little waiting-room with tiled floor, distempered walls, and coloured pictures of the saints.
The porteress told us the Mother was at prayers with the inmates, but would come downstairs presently, and while we waited we heard the dull hum of voices, the playing of an organ, and the singing of the sweet music I knew so well.
Closing my eyes I felt myself back in Rome, and began to pray that I might be permitted to remain there. But the desire was damped when the Mother entered the room.
She was a stout woman, wearing heavy outdoor boots and carrying her arms interlaced before her, with the hands hidden in the ample sleeves of her habit, and her face was so white and expressionless, that it might have been cast in plaster of Paris.
In a rather nervous voice Mildred explained our errand. “Mother,” she said, “I cannot tell you anything about this young lady, and I have come to ask if you will take her on my recommendation.”
“My dear child,” said the Mother, “that would be utterly against our rule. Not to know who the young lady is, where she comes from, why she is here, and whether she is married or single or a widow — it is quite impossible.”
Mildred, looking confused and ashamed, said:
“She can afford to pay a little.”
“That makes no difference.”
“But I thought that in exceptional cases . . .”
“There can be no exceptional cases, Sister. If the young lady is married and can say that her husband consents, or single and can give us assurance that her father or guardian agrees, or a widow and can offer satisfactory references . . .”
