Complete works of nevil.., p.139
Complete Works of Nevil Shute, page 139
He shook his head. “He’d never let anybody else do that.”
She said irritably, “I know he wouldn’t. But he’s just wearing himself out over it. I think he’s looking awful.”
There was a silence. Presently her father said, “I really don’t know what to do about it, while this good weather lasts. If only we could have a decent gale he’d have to get her up on shore and lash her down, and then he’d get a real rest. But I’m afraid we’ll never get him to give up and rest while this good weather runs away to waste.”
She sighed. “I know. It’s awfully difficult.”
Lockwood began to tell her of his dig at Brattalid. He had unearthed a runic stone and made a rubbing of it, and he had cleared a good portion of the floor of the big church. The girl said, “I’ll come over with you tomorrow, Daddy. I’d like to see it, and Mr. Ross won’t want me for the flight to Julianehaab.”
They strolled a little way up the hill, and got back to their camp at about eight o’clock. Ajago and Mayark were just leaving to go to their own camp for the night; a stew was ready to be put on the fire for cooking. Alix said in Danish:
“Do you still want to sleep over there? It is much better here.”
Ajago shook his head emphatically. “It is very bad here at night. This is a bad place to sleep. One gets ill.”
The girl smiled patiently. “Nobody is ill here, Ajago.”
The man said, “One is ill. Rogg is ill. This is a very bad place to camp.”
The girl fixed her smile. “All right, you go along to your own camp. Be over here early in the morning.”
She watched them pensively as they went away, then turned and told her father what Ajago had said. He stood for a minute looking after them. “It’s quite absurd, of course,” he said at last. “But that’s how superstitions grow up in a primitive community. If Ross should get ill now, in this camp, the reputation of the place would be enormously increased.”
She turned away, shivering a little. “I think it’s about time to start and cook the supper.”
An hour later the alarm went off; presently Ross joined them by the fire. He was refreshed by his sleep, and feeling well. “It’s funny about this place,” he said. “I seem to sleep a damn sight better in the daytime than I do at night. Has anybody else noticed that?”
The others shook their heads.
The pilot said, “I think the reason is, it’s not so cold. I believe my head gets cold at night, or something. I always seem to wake up with a bit of a headache, in the morning. I’ll have to buy myself a woolly nightcap in Julianehaab.”
Alix laughed. “You won’t get that in Julianehaab.”
“Just the sort of place you would get it. The governor’s got one probably. I bet they all sleep in nightshirts, if they sleep in anything at all.”
They sat smoking round the fire for an hour after supper; then Lockwood and Alix went to bed. Ross went down to the shore and adjusted the moorings; the machine was just afloat. Then he settled down for his long watch; for the first hour or two he sat beside the fire, paying only occasional visits to the shore.
At half past twelve the falling tide made it necessary for him to move down to the beach and keep on pushing off the seaplane. He sat there drowsily, cold and stiff, getting up every now and then to adjust the ropes. Presently, at about two o’clock, he heard a movement on the path down from the camp. It was Alix; in her hands she held a steaming mug.
“I made you some Bovril, Mr. Ross,” she said simply.
He got up stiffly. “That’s terribly good of you,” he said. “Did you make any for yourself?”
She nodded. “I left mine up by the fire. I’ll go and get it.”
She joined him presently, and they sat down together on the sandy turf. Both were wearing flying suits and fur-lined boots; they sat together in the half light warming their hands upon their mugs.
Presently he said, “I’m afraid I was very rude to you last night, Miss Lockwood. I was a bit tired. I didn’t think what I was saying.”
She said, “Oh, that’s all right — I knew you were tired. But, Mr. Ross, can’t we do some of this work for you?”
He said, “I’d rather see to it myself. It’s no work, really, just sitting here and giving her a shove from time to time.”
She did not press the point; she was afraid of irritating him again. And presently he said:
“I suppose you think I’m terribly fussy, don’t you?”
She shook her head. “I’d never think of you like that. But I think you’re working much too hard, Mr. Ross.”
“I’m not. But even if I was, I’d rather do that than have a flock of accidents.”
She was silent for a minute. Then she said gently, “Nobody could hold it against you if anything happened to the seaplane on a trip like this. We ought to have had four or five men to help you — proper engineers. My father sees that now. As for accidents, a fragile thing like that is bound to have an accident from time to time.” She pointed to the seaplane, rocking gently on the dark water of the cove.
He said emphatically, almost viciously, “All seaplanes don’t have accidents. Mine don’t. And mine aren’t going to. Accidents don’t just happen of themselves.”
“Why do they happen, then?”
He sat staring out over the dark water of the fjord to the dim mountains on the other side. The night was very still. He said quietly, “Accidents happen because men are foolish, and reckless, and negligent, and lazy. Sometimes, because there isn’t enough money for what they want to do. One crash in a hundred may have been because God willed it so. Not more than that.”
She was silent.
He said, “Sir David has seen that we’ve got enough money for this trip. If God has set his mind on it, we shall have a crash. Apart from that, my job here is to see we don’t, and we’re not going to.”
She sat there with him for the remainder of his watch. At half past three he let the seaplane go aground, and waited till he could see how she was lying. Then they went up together to the camp, taking their mugs with them.
In the half light she stopped by her tent. “Good night, Mr. Ross.”
He stood before her, broad in his flying clothes, a massive figure dimly seen. “Good night, Miss Alix,” he said. “It was good of you to come down and sit up with me. I am sorry I was short with you that time. Don’t mind about that.”
“I don’t mind,” she said softly.
“Good night, Miss Alix.”
“Good night, Mr. Ross.”
He went into the tent where Lockwood was asleep, took a tablet of his Propylin, and fell asleep himself.
He slept for an hour and woke up with a violent start, in a great fright. He raised himself upon one elbow and stared round about him, sweating and rather cold. He was terrified of something; he did not know of what. He got up and went out of the tent to see if the machine was still all right; she stood beached upon the sand far from the receding tide. He went over to the girl’s tent and put his ear to it; the steady, even breathing told him all was well. He stood for a few minutes recovering himself; it was a fine, starry night with an icy little draught straight from the icecap. Everything was quiet and serene. He had made a fool of himself.
He went back to his sleeping bag, but he did not sleep again. He lay dozing, half awake, and watched the blue sky framed in the tent door grow lighter into grey, to broad daylight. Presently he heard Ajago and Mayark moving about the camp; he woke Lockwood and got up himself.
That day he flew to Julianehaab to refuel. The machine was practically empty; with the assistance of the Eskimo boatman and his son he put in about two hundred and forty gallons. It took him all the morning to do that. In the early afternoon he went and had a short talk with the governor at his house; then he took off for Brattalid again. He got back to the camp at three o’clock as the fog was just beginning to close down.
A period of very perfect weather followed then, ideal for survey. They flew the next day and the day after that; on the third he went to Julianehaab again to refuel. Then they went on with the survey. The tides, forty minutes later every day, became high in the early morning, later and later as the days went on. The pilot took his sleep in bits and snatches, as and when he could. He could usually manage to get in two or three hours after the test development, and another two or three hours at some time in the night. After a day or two he found difficulty in sleeping in the daytime at irregular hours, and had to resort to his tablets to assist him in his daytime sleep. For that they worked all right, but they became less satisfactory for his nighttime sleep. Once in the night, dead tired but wakeful, and with only two hours sleep to come, he took two tablets and slept heavily and well. He did not need to take two tablets the next night because that was a refuelling day and he could get a stretch of over five hours on end; when next he took two tablets they had little effect. The next night, in desperation, with the survey all but finished, he took three.
Two and a half hours later the alarm rang in his ear till it ran down, but he did not wake up. After ten minutes Lockwood shook him gently by the arm, and then more vigorously. Then he called Alix from her tent.
EIGHT
THE PILOT LAY on his back in his sleeping bag, with eyes closed and his tanned face drained of colour. The girl knelt by him with her father; they shook him by the shoulder, without effect. He was inert and limp; his respiration was regular, but low.
The girl said, “It’s a sort of a faint. Wait, and I’ll get some water.”
They sponged his face with the cold water from the stream, and raised his head. But he did not come round.
Lockwood was utterly at sea. “I’ve never seen anything like this before,” he muttered. “I suppose it’s just exhaustion.”
His daughter said, “It’s those wretched tablets he’s been taking, I should think.”
The don said sharply, “What tablets are those?”
“He got them at Reykjavik when he couldn’t sleep. He showed them to me once.”
“I never knew he was taking anything of that sort. Do you know where he kept them?”
There were not very many private places in the tent. After a short search Lockwood found the bottle; it was half empty. He read the label with interest and slipped it in his pocket. “Well, that’s the end of that,” he said grimly.
Alix said, “What do you think we’d better do, Daddy?” A hideous feeling of disaster was in the background of her mind.
Her father did not answer for a moment. He knelt there by the pilot staring down at him. They had laid him in what seemed a comfortable position with his head raised; his face was wet and dripping from the water. “I don’t know,” he said irresolutely. “I suppose we’ll have to wait till he comes round. How many of the damn things did he take?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. I never liked to ask.”
They became aware of Ajago and Mayark peering in at them through the opening of the tent. Alix got up and went outside to them. Ajago said in Danish, “Rogg is ill.”
The girl shook her head. “He is only asleep. Very soon he will wake up.”
Mayark said something in an excited tone in Eskimo, evidently in disagreement. Ajago answered him sharply in the same language, and got a volley of words in reply. An incomprehensible argument or quarrel developed between the natives; both grew very much excited. Alix sighed irritably, and went back to the tent.
A quarter of an hour later she discovered Ajago squatting morose and alone beside the fire. She asked him, “Where is Mayark?”
Without moving the native said, “One is foolish, and has gone away.”
“Why has he gone away?”
He raked awkwardly among the ashes. “One has been afraid.”
The girl said, “You are not afraid, Ajago? There is nothing here to be afraid of.”
He raised his eyes to her uneasily. “I will stay here,” he said simply.
“Thank you, Ajago.” She touched his shoulder, and went back into the tent.
She told her father what the Eskimo had said. He bit his lip. “It’s most unlucky,” he said quietly. “They said that someone would get ill if we camped here, and now it’s happened. I suppose Mayark’s gone away for good. Will Ajago stay with us tonight? We’ll be done if they both go.”
“I think he’s all right, Daddy. You’d better come and have a word with him.”
They left the pilot, and went out of the tent. The native was still squatting by the fire; he had some kind of amulet in his hands which he concealed hurriedly as they came towards him. Alix remembered that he was supposed to be a Christian. He got to his feet to meet them.
Lockwood asked, “Where is Mayark, Ajago? Has he gone to the other camp?”
Alix interpreted; the man said something in reply. “He says, Mayark’s gone home.”
“Ask him if he will stay with us.”
The man burst into a torrent of nervous speech, mostly in his own language. Alix interrupted him gently, and told him to speak Danish. For ten minutes they wrestled with the language difficulty.
The girl turned to her father. “What he’s trying to say is that we’re crazy to stay here. He doesn’t want to leave us. But he thinks we’re awful fools to have camped here at all. And of course he’s saying that he warned us this would happen.”
The don stood looking round him, deep in thought. He saw the low, bare hill, the stream, the beach, the low stone walls of the abandoned buildings. Quite suddenly, it was distasteful to him; he came to a decision. “Tell him that as soon as Ross recovers we’ll all move over to the other camp.”
She did so. The man said something to her very earnestly, and repeated it several times.
“What’s that?” asked Lockwood.
She turned to him with a scared face. “He says that if we keep Mr. Ross here he . . . he’ll die tonight.”
“Oh.”
There was a long pause; Lockwood had to do some rapid thinking. If the native felt like that about it, it was most unlikely that he would stay with them; if Ross did not recover very soon, Ajago would desert. Without the Eskimo it would become impossible for them to carry on at all. If they were to retain him, they must make some compromise with his superstition.
“Ask him if he would like us to move over to the other camp today.”
The girl did so; there was very little doubt of Ajago’s feelings on that matter.
The don turned to his daughter. “What do you think, Alix?”
She stared around at the camp site. “I don’t know, Daddy,” she said slowly. “It’s much better here, of course — the water’s good, and there’s more level ground. But we could pull the seaplane right up at high tide, and leave her. There can’t really be anything in what he says, can there?”
Her father hesitated. “Of course there can’t,” he said, a little uncertainly. “Ross has taken too many of those tablets — he’d be just the same in Oxford. Still — I don’t know.”
Alix said, “Daddy, I’d just as soon that we went over there . . .”
“All right.” He turned to the native. “We will wait here till midday,” he said. “If Ross has recovered then, we will stay here. If not, we’ll move him over to your camp this afternoon.”
The girl translated this, and Ajago received it with a smile. They turned back to the tent. The Eskimo came running after them, and said something to the girl.
“What’s that?” asked Lockwood.
She frowned, and hesitated. “Literally, I think he’s saying that Mr. Ross has gone on a journey with the people who used to live here, Daddy,” she said. “In case we didn’t quite understand . . .”
They nodded and smiled at the man, and went back into the tent. The pilot was still lying as they had left him; it seemed to them that the respiration was not quite so strong. They made another effort to rouse him and sponged his face with the cold water again, with not the least success. His hands and feet were growing cold; they filled bottles with hot water and put them in his sleeping bag. Then they had done all that they could do.
At high tide Lockwood went down with Ajago to the water’s edge, and beached the seaplane at the top of the tide. They made her fast to stakes driven into the ground, securing her as firmly as they could. Then they went back to the camp, where Alix was still sitting by the pilot in the tent, immersed in her own thoughts. She had learned, that morning, what the pilot meant to her.
From time to time she sponged his face with the cold water, with absolutely no effect at all. By noon they could not deny that he was a good deal worse. The respiration was very low, and the pulse was feeble. Outside, Ajago was busy constructing a stretcher of birch boughs. Lockwood turned to Alix.
“It’s absolutely crazy,” he said, “but I believe I’d like to take him to the other camp. He’s doing no good here.”
She inclined her head. “It is crazy, Daddy,” she said seriously. “There’s absolutely nothing the matter with this place — we’ve only got the wind up because Ajago’s been talking to us. But I agree with you. If we wait till this afternoon he may be so weak that we won’t want to move him. If we’re going, we’d better go now.”
“I think so, too.”
They went and told Ajago of their decision. He finished the stretcher and went down and brought the motor boat to the beach; then they lifted the pilot in his sleeping bag and laid him carefully upon the stretcher. They carried him down to the boat, and wading in the shallow water laid the stretcher across the gunwales. The stretcher made access to the engine difficult; rather than bother with it for the short trip, Ajago took the oars and rowed the boat across the cove. In half an hour they were carrying him up from the boat to the Eskimos’ tent in the new camp.
At the entrance to the tent Ajago made them lay the stretcher down. Alix asked him the reason in Danish, and the man replied.
She turned to her father. “He says we’ve got to wait,” she said.
They watched the Eskimo, a little irritably. He went into the tent and dragged his own sleeping bag out onto the grass. Then he took down a bunch of vegetation that was hanging in the roof, and began to sprinkle little portions of it on the ground sheet. Satisfied with that, he crushed the remainder in his hands and rubbed it over the cloth entrance flaps. Lockwood watched him, keenly interested.
