For four days now we have been stumbling and sliding our way across this landscape that when solid is more vertical than horizontal, and when thawed turns into soup into which we slip up to our waists. If we attempt to go by water, using the Faltboot, the water hardens into granite. As soon as we try to walk over it, it turns into water again. Under the tent, as we try to sleep, it groans most fearfully. It is always slipping, bumping, grumbling, complaining, and turning underfoot. I have lost track of the time and am convinced it is the twenty-second of the month now only because I have made little marks in my Stockholm pocket calendar each time we have camped-but suppose we have camped more than once a day? Impossible; Waldemer has his stout pocket watch, I have my own, and there are the two chronometers, Kullberg 5566 and Kullberg 5587, to verify them. But the climate or possibly the jolts we have subjected them to are not very good for these last instruments. Two or three nights ago (twenty-two minus three is nineteen, so it must have been Monday) I awoke or half awoke and heard them talking to each other in a smooth even ticking, muted so as not to awaken us.
K. 5566: “Let’s speed up. Make the days go faster, bring their happy or unhappy fate to them more quickly and with less fatigue.”
K. 5587: “We should go slower. That way it will be easier for them to keep up with us.”
K. 5566: “Their pace will accelerate with ours.”
K. 5587: “Whatever we do, we must agree. For one chronometer’s time means nothing. It may be out of adjustment. But what two chronometers say is the truth, and the solar system must follow it. Thus if we speed up so will the sun and the planets…”
And so on. Their voices were unhurried, rational, leisurely, discussing all sides of the question with care. I was struck with the fact that they seemed to have our welfare in mind; this mildly surprised me, and I was also impressed that they had talked quietly so that we should have the maximum amount of sleep and be rested for the next day. When I awoke, however, the implication was that as timepieces they were no longer to be trusted very much. Certain other evidence suggests that the rate of one or the other has changed. Which one? Impossible to tell, since I can verify their accuracy only by comparing one with the other. At that time I was not as tired as I am now and I had the wit to notice that the frozen milk overhead had cleared away temporarily so that the sun and the moon were both visible at the same time. Ah! Professor Crispin. Time for a bit of higher mathematics. The method of lunar distances, which may be used not only to find one’s position but also to check chronometers, has ever since the days of Gemma-Frisius been regarded as the most troublesome and difficult calculation in the art of nautical astronomy. Besides, my hands are numb, all the pens are frozen, and our only pencil has been broken so many times that it is hardly longer than a joint of my finger. But I set to it anyhow: first I cock the sextant at a horizontal angle and draw the two limbs of the sun and moon together to measure the angular distance between them. (The two orbs are approaching each other at a dizzying rate and I have to keep turning the vernier. Perhaps, I think, they will run into each other and that will be the universal end of all problems, including our own.) Then I correct for semi-diameters, enter the logarithm tables and the almanac, and begin covering one of our last pieces of paper with hen scratches.
This method, complete with mistakes and the natural inaccuracies involved in taking arcs with a half-frozen sextant, established our position at 81˚ 42’ north, 36˚ 20’ east, give or take a few hundred miles either way (the pencil was very blunt, my hand a numb primordial paw). Since then we have made our way more or less southward as the configuration of the half-thawed pack permitted. Franz Josef Land is somewhere up ahead and to the left, the main mass of Spitsbergen out of reach to the west. Our hands curved permanently to the diameter of the pulling ropes, we go on toiling over a landscape composed partly of white grand pianos set on edge and partly of soup. Theodor’s face, as I anticipated, is not really suited to this climate. It has turned to a darkish and ironlike blue, the points of the cheeks black with frostbite. The shawl is wrapped around it completely now so that nothing shows except the eyes. But he pulls as hard as the rest of us, and as steadily, setting first one foot and then the other into the yielding and soggy ice. It is Waldemer who seems to be tiring, he that I imagined would be the strongest of us. But he makes no complaint either and seems confident that we will eventually arrive wherever it is that we are headed; he leaves the navigational details to me. He is stocky and his breath comes short; perhaps he has a tendency to asthma. When he talks—and he talks frequently, not for the most part to impart information, but to cheer up himself and us, to improve the morale of the expedition—he confines himself to shorter sentences and often waits between them, to see if he can’t wring a little more oxygen out of this frozen skim milk he is inhaling into his lungs.
“If I ever get out of this … I know where I will spend … the rest of my days.”
The sentences, although short, and separated by intervals of breathtaking, are perfectly constructed at least by journalistic standards; he has no pretensions as a stylist.
“The Lunatic Asylum … at Halifax, Nova Scotia …” Pause for breath. “… is pleasantly situated in the midst … of cheerful green hills, and … provides a very … English, I might say … comfort. I recommend it especially.”
But he is fooling himself; there is no chance of Waldemer being admitted to a lunatic asylum. A single glance would be enough for any alienist to tell that he is hopelessly sane. He encounters one of the grand pianos and measures his length on the ice, and remarks without rancor, “The polar region … is certainly the source … of the idea of the stumbling block.” And a little later, after a slightly more serious mishap (Theodor falls through a soft spot and goes in up to his armpits in a mixture of water and slush, and Waldemer in his efforts to pull him out does the same), he comments, “There’s no hurry … about dying, you know … if we miss it this time … we’ll always have another chance.”
There are no more bears after that first one. That is, we see plenty of blurry white dots on the horizon but don’t approach near enough to get in a shot. There is still a large chunk of frozen rib meat in the Faltboot; we hack pieces off it now and then and masticate them patiently to get out the red juice. Once we follow the tracks of a large male for some distance and find that, like Theodor and Waldemer, he has come to a soft spot and slipped down into the soup; so that even he is not above making mistakes in that regard. A little later Waldemer manages to unlimber the Mannlicher and plunk a seal incautiously taking a nap on a floe only a few metres from us; but the little metal bead through his lungs wakes him instantly, he flops and slithers dying to the water’s edge and sinks like a rock. Waldemer is perplexed, as he always is when some mechanism doesn’t behave according to his expectations. But I know the reason; the sea in July, being composed in large part of melted ice, is thin and won’t support the seal, whose specific gravity is equal to that of salt water.
Theodor can’t understand this point. “How can the ice melt if we are freezing?”
“There are different laws of the universe for people and for inanimate matter.”
“Sometimes I think you make up these laws yourself.”
“I do. And I make them work.”
In spite of this talk of freezing, his clothing—the black woolen jodhpurs, the stylish military coat—exudes a steam into the calm frigid air. There is heat inside him yet, a little fire kindled with bear meat and sheer stubbornness, and in time this may even dry out his clothing. As for me, my feet are permanently wet; not even a long stay in a Nova Scotia asylum could dry them out. (That Austrian journalist who said I was either a fool or a swindler neglected to think of the third possibility, by the way: that I am mad.)
And when was this conversation? Yesterday perhaps, although because of the possibility that we have camped more than once a day such calculations are subject to wild chances of error. I firmly believe in my mind that today is Thursday the twenty-second, I have so noted in my pocket diary, and it is four days therefore since we abandoned the Prinzess. The pack that was still relatively firm then—in that dim past—is now rapidly assuming all the characteristics of the sea around and under it, beginning with its liquidity. Even yesterday it was necessary to ferry across several broad leads of open water, each time unpacking and repacking everything in the Faltboot. For the most part, however, we are still able to progress on foot.
Yesterday (I think it was) I saw visible ahead of us a peculiar vaulted light stretching across the horizon, a light under which odd things appeared, or seemed to appear. Little pieces and needles of the horizon lifting up, squirming, and falling back again. Finally a kind of irregular jagged line sticking up, like white saw teeth, from south-southeast to south-southwest. Lower on the sides, a little higher in the middle. Changing shape constantly but always there, for at least an hour. Waldemer is watching it too. He glances at me but I go on pulling, pretending not to notice. Faint smile forms under his mustache. Secret. Waldemer is capable of secrets, of his own kind; usually they are concrete, concerned with real physical or mechanical things, and they are jokes not intended to deceive anybody. Four fifths of the time he watches the wavering saw teeth; one fifth of the time he glances at me to see if I’ve noticed them yet.
The saw teeth sometimes shift, trade places, and resume their old form again. At one point (I’m not sure Waldemer notices) the whole business is elevated off the horizon completely, leaving a strip of sky underneath. This is only for a moment; it settles down and goes on with its wavery squiggling.
“Major.”
‘’H’mm?”
“There’s, ah. Something. I’ll bet you haven’t noticed.”
“What?”
“There’s. Ah. Land up there ahead now. Not over fifty, sixty miles. Has to be Franz Josef Land. Mountains. Nothing else that high.”
“Ah.” I glance ahead as though noticing for the first time. “Bravo, Waldemer.”
He is surprised I don’t make more fuss over the discovery, especially since the calculations, made by me, put us farther to the west and Franz Josef Land far out of reach a hundred or more miles to the left. But he leaves the navigation to me and perhaps he thinks I have known all along the mountains will be there. Theodor makes no comment. We go on pulling. Waldemer remarks that the pesky mountains don’t seem to be getting any closer. We stop to examine them through the glasses. Or Waldemer does. I don’t bother because I know what they are. Then abruptly, soon after he has put the binoculars away in the Faltboot, they loom much larger. Waldemer is exultant. “Not far now. For a while it seemed … atmospheric effects no doubt.”
No doubt at all. In another twenty minutes we come up to them: some ice hummocks no higher than our knees, thrust upward by refraction into Himalayas and Sierras. We have been chasing these phantoms over the ice for two hours or more. The weak sun, shining on the ice and on the darker leads, has warmed the air slightly near the surface and converted it into a giant lens; a lens with us on the inside. Luckily Waldemer has a sense of humour. He is sheepish, knowing that Theodor will rag him about this later, when they are both less tired and in a mood for humour. We wrench the Faltboot into motion and go on pulling. I know exactly where we are, not only because of the lunar sight on the twentieth, but because of the compass in my blood: about eighty-one degrees north or a little better, White Island directly ahead at a range of perhaps fifty miles. Still a long way to go.
And Theodor or Luisa: the shawl covering everything but the eyes—the eyes luminous against the glimpsed fragments of face—which are the bluish colour of iron with traces of rust, bends against the weight of the pulling rope and plants one foot after the other in the white surface that crumbles and slips with each effort of the boots to get a grip on it. He is on my left and slightly behind me because of the geometry of the pulling ropes, so that I have to turn my head a little in order to look at him. And look at him I do every few minutes, not in order to verify anything and certainly not out of sympathy, but simply out of curiosity that this black-covered and efficient machine manages to go on functioning identically in this way hour after hour, never varying its rhythm and leaving its series of exactly evenly spaced depressions behind it in the soft crust of the ice. The right arm stretching behind it to throw its weight onto the rope, the left arm brought around the front of the chest and onto the rope to add its pull. The body at a diagonal to the vertical in the thrust of its effort, the left foot comes forward and the boot stamps into the ice to make a grip for itself. The knee straightens, the body angles downward a little more as it takes the weight, and the other boot comes forward to print its hole in the ice and wrench the body, the rope, and the weight dragging after it another forty centimeters ahead. It is slow; in an hour in this way it is possible to cover two miles if there aren’t too many hummocks and ice ridges. Occasionally he slips as we all do and falls to his knees or entirely horizontally on the ice. When this happens it is our custom that the others don’t stop and wait; it would mean three or four metres of progress lost. He pushes himself up with his left mitten, the pulling rope still gripped in the right, and in a moment or two catches up and is pulling again. Fifteen hours a day of this, eighteen hours a day, and if we don’t rest too much we can hope to arrive some place or other before winter comes.
In any case, we don’t rest very long because the cold would catch us and we would stiffen. Ten minutes is enough; we heat some cocoa on the primus and gulp it in turn from the saucepan, scalding our tongues and not caring about the brownish crust that immediately freezes on our lips and cheeks; because we spill it, like little children, trying to handle the pan in the clumsy mittens. One day—the second perhaps, or the third—we didn’t rest at all but kept going, especially since the landscape on that part of the journey was composed of jumbled blocks the size of farmhouses and there was no flat space even as large as a pocket handkerchief to set the primus. The next day, the twenty-first according to the pocket calendar, we are stopped a little after eight in the evening by a broad lead that has partly frozen over. I am perplexed at first; it hasn’t seemed cold enough to make sea ice. Then I reflect that there is a layer of partly fresh water on top of these leads, from melted snow or from the slow melting of the old floes, which according to Greely partly free themselves from salt over a period of time and may be melted for culinary water. The layer on the lead indeed looks like glare ice, freshwater ice. It is hard and bluish-white, perhaps four inches thick. I test it with the bamboo pole. Only with a determined stab can the stuff be broken.
What to do? The lead is a half mile or more wide. It might support our weight and the weight of the Faltboot and it might not. In any case, it is too thick for us to break our way through and cross boat-fashion. We might traverse the lead in the hope of finding a narrower place, or a stretch of stronger ice, at some other point. But it stretches away as far as the eye can see in either direction, showing no sign of narrowing. It will have to be crossed on foot.
Leaving the Faltboot behind, we venture out a few metres to test the ice. It seems strong enough to support us. It bends slightly underfoot with a rather ominous creaking noise, and a pool of water instantly collects where it has settled under our weight. But it seems elastic and we don’t actually break through.
We go back for the Faltboot and set out cautiously, fanning out a little more than usual to distribute our weight. It soon becomes apparent that the ice is stronger in some places than in others. Several times we have to stop and detour a spot that is too thin and beginning to sag dangerously underfoot.
“Y’know, Major, someone should go ahead and scout out the best route. Then we wouldn’t have to keep towing this blessed battleship around in circles.”
A good idea, Waldemer. But who? It should be me, by all rights. But Luisa drops her towline and comes slowly toward me, stopping a few paces from me so that she blocks my path across the lead. Because of the shawl I can see only her eyes, but I know the mouth is set firmly with the little creases at the corners.
“I’m the lightest.”
This is folly. I know the ice best and I am responsible for the safety of all. Besides she … but it has been a long time since conventions, chivalry, the ordinary hierarchies of life in the World of Cities seem to have had any significance. I am uncertain; I hesitate.
“He’s right, Major. What d’you weigh, Theodor old man? Not a hundred and twenty, I’ll bet. Go ahead and be careful. We’ll follow.”
We proceed in this fashion, Luisa two hundred metres ahead and Waldemer and I following with the Faltboot, which slips easily over this skating rink of a surface. We walk always in a film of water a centimeter or so deep, which follows us as the depression made by our weight proceeds across the ice.
We are perhaps three fourths across when I notice a peculiar—as I first imagine it—optical illusion. The ice ahead, between us and Luisa, seems to bulge up a hand’s breadth or so, then in another place, a series of bulges traveling rapidly across the ice from left to right. A second later it occurs to me that seals, expecting as little as we that a lead would freeze over this time of the year, are trapped under the ice and are trying to break out breathing holes for themselves. But almost at the same instant this theory is blasted. Not far from Luisa—surely not more than thirty or forty metres from her—the ice is shattered with a dull bump or thud and an enormous black fin shoots up, followed by a glistening back the size of a hansom cab. Luisa has turned and is staring at this thing, staring across it to us. But everything happens very quickly. In another five seconds a dozen killer whales, perhaps, have broken out of the ice in a thrashing of white water. The huge hideous heads shoot vertically into the air through the holes they have smashed. One breaks out so close to us that we can see the tawny head markings, the small glistening eyes, the terrible array of teeth. They are black above, the lower parts white or yellowish-white. There is a distinctive white slash above and behind the little pig eye. They are ten metres long and weigh tons.
Believing from our shadows on the ice that we are seals, they continue to heave up and split it into fragments, thrashing the water into foam in an effort to upset us and take us into those rows of conical white teeth, in a single gulp. What puzzles them—the reason they are unable to make an end of the business immediately—is that we can move faster on the ice than seals. Luisa has turned and is slipping off rapidly to the left, away from the centre of the danger. But the whales are everywhere. An enormous black shadow, like an underwater cloud, passes almost directly under our feet, at great speed.
Waldemer and I sense the same thing almost instantly: that, against all instinct, we must not abandon the Faltboot to flee away to the left in an attempt to rejoin Luisa. The whales are sure to break the ice under the Faltboot, taking it for a large seal, and without the supplies on it we couldn’t last half a day. Without a word we seize the towlines and begin running as fast as we can over the slippery and undulating ice with the Faltboot impeding us. We are attempting to make a large circle to the left and cut back toward Luisa so that we can perhaps be of some help to her. Meanwhile, we wave, indicating to her that she should make directly to the south toward the thicker pack ice only a few hundred metres away.
The ice disintegrates directly ahead of us and the black spike of a fin, two metres long, surges in the opening. A piece of ice the size of a table tips on edge, poises, and upsets. The head appears and the whale blows with a terrific roar. His breath has an odour of something rotten, of fish and death. Waldemer jerks the Faltboot to the right and I follow. The pig eyes inspect us for a moment, then the whale slowly sinks to try again somewhere else.
The near escape distracts us and for a moment—I have to admit—Waldemer and I lose our heads. We jerk the Faltboot along as best we can, skirting the many broken holes in the ice. In our concern to watch for these holes, and in foolishly looking down to glance at the black shapes shooting by underneath, we forget to keep our eyes on Luisa. When we look away to the south again there is no sign of her. A single whale rises slowly, not far from where we last saw her, opens his jaw to reveal the jagged white gleam, and settles with a sigh and a jet of steam.
We stop—another stupidity. Then Waldemer, without speaking, raises his mitten and points ahead and a little to the right. A black patch appears in the water between two floes, then something elongated extrudes from it: an arm. Luisa manages to pull half her body up onto the floe. For an excruciating time she remains thus: clutching the floe, arms outspread, her lower body still in the water. The thought of the teeth in the water under her goes knife—like through me. Everything stops in me: breathing, every nerve fibre, even my heart seems to clutch and stop. Four seconds. Five, six, seven. Why doesn’t she pull herself up? She is exhausted, there is nothing to grip on the ice. There is the boom of another whale striking the ice to my left; I don’t even turn to look at it.
Finally Waldemer and I come to our senses and make away rapidly in her direction. In only a minute or two we are there. By this time she is out of the water and onto the floe. The floe is not very large. There is open water all around it. A shadow goes by underneath like an express train. I drop the towline, find another floe perhaps half as large as Luisa’s, and leap onto it, my momentum sending it tottering across the water like a crude raft. It sinks under my weight; my ankles are in the water. But it bumps against Luisa’s floe and I scramble out onto it.
Waldemer, that fantastic fellow, has detached one of the towlines, coiled it, and thrown it in our direction. The first time I miss it. Then I have hold of the towline and Luisa and I are pulling it. We are back to Waldemer and the Faltboot. No time to attach the third towline again. Luisa flees on ahead, gesturing to right or left as she sees bad ice, and we stagger after with our load.
We are on the pack ice. Some difficulty in pulling the Faltboot up over the brink a half metre or more high. Then Luisa—doesn’t collapse, simply lies down on the ice and breathes deeply, pants, while watching me out of her silent eyes.
It is important that she begin exercising immediately to thaw herself. After a while she stands up, still without saying anything. By this time Waldemer has reattached the towline. She takes it without a word. The three of us pull the Faltboot a little distance, perhaps a mile, to a place where we can take shelter behind a pressure ridge. We tumble everything out of the Faltboot with our frozen hands. The tent is up in a minute; the two bamboos push it upright, some blocks of ice hold it at the corners and around the edges. As soon as this is done Luisa collapses onto the sleeping sack without a word.
“Get out.”
For some reason, perhaps sheer perplexity, Waldemer understands and leaves the tent. In a minute I have Luisa’s clothes off and am rubbing her to turn the blackish white of her body to, at least, a pale pink. She is still silent, only watches me out of her motionless dark eyes. Then I dress her in the spare set of skin trousers and jacket with a hood. She is able to help with this. She crawls into the sleeping sack and closes her eyes instantly as though she were asleep. I bend over her. She is all right, her forehead warm but not hot, her breathing even.
I start the primus to warm the tent. Then I go outside to see what Waldemer is doing. Through the binoculars, the clever fellow, he has found a seal on the ice near a small lead a few hundred metres away, and is making for it with all the complicated skill and cunning of a born hunter. Down on all fours, the rifle concealed on the side invisible to the seal, he is working his way toward it in a simulated waddle, his arms working like flippers, legs wobbling tail-fashion on the ice. The seal is convinced. Imagining that there is a fellow of his own kind on that side, he feels safe, knowing that if a bear approaches the other seal will see it first and give the alarm by splashing into the water. So he concentrates on the other direction, turning his back to Waldemer. Who squirms on patiently, dragging the Mannlicher, to a range of seventy-five meters, where he rests his weapon on a chunk of ice and, after a long wait, squeezes the centre of it with his mitten finger. For some reason I am not aware of the sound of the detonation. The panorama itself is tiny at this distance. The seal kicks once, curls into a tight arc, and straightens again. He has no time to fall into the water or do anything else. Instantaneously he has been converted into seal meat resting motionless on the ice waiting for Waldemer, who gets up and walks toward it with an air of proud manly satisfaction.
He doesn’t know that I’m watching. I go back toward the tent, which with its red and white stripes makes an incongruous effect on the frozen landscape, flamboyant and a little tawdry, a camp of bedouins in a desert of sugar candy. As I come in she wakes up, or opens her eyes, and rises a little on one elbow.
“Sleep. You’re exhausted. Six hours of sleep and we must start again.”
“What were those things, Gustav?”
“Just ordinary killer whales, Orcinus orca. Not common in these parts but found occasionally.”
“They were trying to eat me.”
“They thought we were seals. No malice in them. They were only earning their living, in the way that comes naturally.”
“In that case Mr. Darwin was right, Gustav.”
“I’ve never doubted that he was.”
“I mean that we may be obsolete.”
“That’s what I mean.” “It’s the whole arrangement I don’t like. B must eat A, so C can eat B. Who made the whole thing up?”
“Whoever it was, He doesn’t bother much about our opinion. Close your eyes.”
“If you close your eyes everything is red, and I don’t like that. The insides of things are red. I don’t want to know about the insides of things. The outsides of things are white, pure, clean. I like white things, Gustav. Cold things.”
She goes on for some time, chattering in this toneless abstract way, almost as though she is talking not to me but to herself. I can’t get her to stop.
“It’s Dante again. The bottom of hell isn’t fire and brimstone as people imagine. It’s frozen, a frozen lake. I’d like that. I’d rather be down there frozen with Ugolino than up with Paolo and Francesca, whirling around in a hot wind. Lovers locked together so you can’t escape. No chance to bathe. Imagine the smell of armpits.” She laughs, in an odd cracked voice, a sound I have never heard from her before. I begin to think that she is perhaps not well. “Who are those two that go together so lightly on the wind? Conjure them in the name of their love, and they will stop.”
The tent opens to a chill of cold air. Entry of Waldemer dragging his pinniped, concealing his smile of pride as best he can under his mustache. She shifts to Swedish, forming her phrases with effort so that they come out carefully if not always correctly.
“Minns du, Gustav. Do you remember that time I tried to kill you?”
“Do I? But which time do you mean? The time in the crevasse, or the time with the revolver?”
“The time in the crevasse was only a joke. That other time I meant it. But now, vet du, I’m happy I didn’t. It’s better as it turned out. I like it here where you’ve brought me, in the white world.”
She seems rested now, almost content, although disinclined to move in the sleeping sack, her dark steady eyes fixed on me. Lying half propped on the bag of provisions I have given her for a pillow, her body is a shallow curve arching upward from head to foot, the pose of Goya’s Duchess of Alba.
“In Paris, ser du, there was my world in Quai d’Orléans, and there was your world with your wires and sparks. I was a prisoner in my world, and you wouldn’t come out of yours. And so we were enemies—do I mean fienden?”
“Fiender.”
“We were fiends to each other. And here it is our world. There is nothing else. No one. Nothing but whiteness and ourselves.”
There is Waldemer, but he is busy cutting up his seal, so perhaps she estimates that he doesn’t count.
“Why should I have come out of my world, when it was my world that you wanted to come into? According to your own so fervent declaration.”
“Don’t be fiendish. What I wanted—what we wanted—was to make a world that we could both inhabit. That would be both yours and mine. And we couldn’t do that there.”
“And it didn’t seem to me you were so much a prisoner in your own. Since you could go pretty much where you felt like it. To Stockholm. To Stresa. To Montmartre. To odd places where only men are admitted.”
“Thank you, a list of my sins. Would you like to have a list of your own? But we are quarreling again.”
“There you two squareheads go again. Chattering on. Must have a secret you don’t want a fellow to hear about. Theodor, you caught all that Scandihoovian, I’ll bet, by sleeping in the same bag as the Major.”
“Must you murder that poor thing in here? It looks like a baby with whiskers.”
The seal, a fine young male specimen of Phoca barbata, is turning into meat under our eyes. Unlike the menagerie bear, he is fat and seems to have only a moderate number of bones for his size.
“I murdered him out on the floe. Seventy-five metres. A single shot through the head. Not bad, if I say so myself. Now I’m making stew out of him. Which you can have for supper. If you ask me nicely in Queen’s English.”
Waldemer, although still jovial, is annoyed at our talking Swedish. What does he suspect? That we are what he would I I call “nancies”? He knows me better than that. Or only that we are making fun at his expense? Probably the latter.
Now he is cutting the reddish and white-streaked jelly into cubes and putting them into the saucepan, setting it on the primus, adding salt, bacon, and some broken pieces of hardtack. An aroma something like New England chowder begins to diffuse into the tent. By Thor and Freya, I still have desires! I am hungry! I wouldn’t have believed it. Waldemer is a good fellow after all, invaluable. What would I we do without him? Even if he is a murderer. But at the risk of offending him I still have something to say to Luisa.
“Hör du mig, I am innocent in this thing. You had seven or eight worlds and I only one. But you bewitched me out of it, time and time again. With only a gesture of your fingers. A breath in my air. Into all those worlds of yours where I was like a dog in breeches. In Stresa, and behind all those doorways.”
“Ah? An agile dog still. A clever one.”
“Chow down, you two squareheads. Savvy plain English? If not I’ll eat it myself.”
“And the Salle Meyer, wasn’t that a world of yours?”
“Ah, you are referring to my musical career.”
“Why not?”
“It was such a success.”
“You are such a charming person, why should you want to be famous as well?”
“Ah, tack så mycket. Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever.”
But there is no hostility in this any more, it is a kind of a game, a casting of phrases back and forth, like those duels of old-fashioned poets jousting with lines that in any case both of them know by heart. The eyes under the reindeer-skin hood are calm, faintly ironic, if not amused any longer, at least resigned to the jest that the Great Nobody enjoys even if we don’t quite as much. Looking at these eyes, I am seized with a slight vertigo of uncertainty, of the strange. Who is I she? There is something elusive and perhaps slightly supernatural about this thing she has created out of herself by sheer force of will, becoming Luisa, Theodor, nexus of erotic magnetism, femme-savante, staid Anglaise in tweeds or angry gypsy, radiating energies of love and hate that are perhaps genuine or perhaps quite synthetic and controlled, coming from a centre of volition hidden deep in some place in her that I can never know and never penetrate. For, if I keep certain places in me hidden from her, why shouldn’t she do the same? To say, as I’ve often said to myself, that her emotions are “all on the surface” is meaningless. The surface of another human being is all we can know. I can only note, in my own sensations, that from her surface now I no longer detect either the pull of willed charm or those emanations of maenadic hatred that once seemed powerful enough to destroy both of us.
“Major’s gone to sleep over his meal. Tired like all of us.”
Because she has already paid me for the Salle Meyer, long ago. And I her. And how in any case should I be responsible for events that originated in her own labyrinthine and rococo but steely will, even if these events, if I am to believe the testimony of Theodor, were directed toward certain aspects of my own personality that I was somehow being asked to apologize for—my talent or alleged genius in realms where “she must leave the position of predominance to me” and “couldn’t hope to compete.” Ah well. Certainly I was out of it in music, but was she in? Not being God or her solfeggio master, I hardly had control over that. In short, what blame or part of blame was to be attached to me for that evening of grandiose fiasco I found it hard to fathom. Although tacitly and obliquely—and at the same time pointedly—invited, I wasn’t even a member of the family party, which included the aunt, the mother, the Polish cousin, and for all I knew the Peninsula and a whole collection of Peruvian diplomats. I hadn’t even, in fact, promised to come, and for all that Luisa knew in any formal and official way, it was not likely that I would be there. When the question of tickets arose I played the imbecile; not a natural role for me, but I did the best I could. “It is next Wednesday evening, you know.” “It? … ah. It.” “If you would like a ticket, Ma Tante has them.” “Ah, has she?” But sins of omission are easy; I never applied to the aunt for that piece of cardboard which would have given me the privilege of sitting gratis between her, perhaps, and the lady neurologist, or the Polish cousin, in a box from which I could not escape and in which, at the very least, I would have been obliged to make noises of a conventional nature that might have been inconsistent with my view of the proceedings and certainly with my character. As it happened, this imbecility, or sin, was very wise on my part.
In any case it was not, if the truth be told, an event that caused widespread reverberations in the artistic world like the premiere of Ubu Roi, and probably that was not what she or anybody else intended. There were brief advance notices in Le Temps, Le Figaro, L’Écho de Paris, Le Gaulois. I bought my ticket at an agency in rue de Rivoli and went alone in a cab, like a spy to an enemy camp. It was a rainy night, which was bad luck. In Avenue Montaigne, in front of the hall, there were only a few cabs, and a pair of gallants in evening cloaks finishing their cigars under the marquee before they threw them in the gutter and went in. Inside, at five minutes to nine—the thing was announced to begin at nine—the long oval hall was perhaps a third full. I took my seat, which was well toward the rear. High ceiling, walls hung in thick burgundy draperies with gold trim. Some boxes along the sides, partly concealed with the same red curtains. At one end was a raised dais with a concert Pleyel sitting on it like a large black insect. The place was full of that kind of hushed and yet magnified twitter common to large rooms where an event of some sort is soon to take place. I crossed my legs I and gravely examined the program as though I didn’t know what it was, still playing the imbecile.
These five-franc seats were occupied mainly by music students and other sorts of waifs from the Latin Quarter. One of them—very friendly, not to say insolent—even bent his elbow over the back of his seat to engage me in a conversation.
“Cette Hickman. Elle a du talent?”
“Parle pas francais. Suédois.”
Probably he didn’t believe me, because he went right on talking. “It’s because, you see, they gave Casimir and me the tickets free, at the Conservatory.”
“Ah, the Conservatory.” I erected a painful sentence in French. “I don’t know. If she has attended. The Conservatory.” This convinced them that I was an imbecile, or a foreigner, which is the same thing, and they left me alone. After that they discussed the matter between themselves. “After all, one has never heard …” “D’accord, but if she did have talent …” “Certainly, but still …”
Entry of the accompanist, who sat down immediately, flapping the tails of his coat over the stool with an adroit professional gesture. Not very much of the chatter in the hall subsided, even when the houselights were dimmed. The student in the seat ahead of me (Gilles, as one gathered from the dialogue) explained to Casimir in a loud voice, “Non, idiot, c’est une américaine.”
Luisa appeared from one side and advanced to the centre of the dais. Her gown was black velvet, with a band of white lace at the throat. Her hair was arranged in the same simple knot in which I had first seen it, at the Musée Carnavalet, and she carried a few violets in a long white ribbon. The audience to some extent stopped their chattering and rattling of programs, and there was a patter of polite applause. The accompanist made a few chords, almost lost in the large hall, and she embarked on the first item of the program.
It was “Queen of the Night” from The Magic Flute of Mozart, which I would describe as a coloratura aria with ha-ha’s. The voice seemed thin in so large a cubic space; the ceiling was ten metres over her head. I suspected that the aria was far too high for her in spite of the extraordinary range of her voice. Still, I was not a music critic. There was one, however, sitting ten or twelve rows ahead of me where the seats changed prices. He was from Le Gaulois and Luisa had pointed him out to me once at a concert. Probably it was obligatory for him to come once the recital had been advertised in his paper. There were also various other recognizable characters from the Parisian musical world, even if they didn’t perhaps represent its very cream: a Balkan pianist, the tenor Jean de Reszke, whom I had met once in Quai d’Orléans, and a wild-headed boy composer whose Concerto for Larynx had been the sensation, or scandal, of last winter’s musical season. Luisa finished “Queen of the Night,” there was a sound from the hall like pattering rain, and she launched into the Bell Song from Lakmé.
The audience seemed restive but not, at this point, in a violent or mutinous mood. After Schumann’s “Frühlingsnacht” there was even a “Brava!” from a single voice. It might have been from Gilles or Casimir, but I couldn’t be sure. At the intermission, however, there was a bad omen; the critic from Le Gaulois lurched up out of his seat and departed, exactly as Sarcey had done at the Théâtre de l’oeuvre, although probably for different reasons. Ahead of me Casimir yawned and stretched his arms. “Alors, Gilles. Tu penses?” ‘Je ne pense pas, je souffre.”
After the intermission Luisa appeared without the flowers, slightly paler than before. The accompanist rattled off his chords and she began with some Brahms lieder. For the first one, “Die Mainacht,” a note in the program warned, “O singer, if thou cannot dream, leave this song unsung.” In spite of this portent the lieder, in my humble and even ignorant opinion, were fairly successful. But when she returned to opera the path was not so smooth; even I could see the rocks she was tripping over. Luisa, the man from Le Gaulois has fled the scene; better follow him!
But she stuck it out. She had saved her real bravura piece, in fact, for the last. This was “Charmant Oiseau” from David’s Perle de Brésil, a confection which required the help not only of the pianist but of a flautist, a plump young man clad like his fellow accompanist in a white tie and tailcoat, who began by licking his instrument as though he were not quite sure he cared for the taste. He and the pianist signaled each other with their eyebrows. They were ready. They turned to Luisa.
The Charming Bird took wing. Luisa was pursuing it in her way and the flautist in his. The more cumbersome piano brought up the rear, like a carriage of ladies following the hunt. The main game of the thing involved Luisa making a little series of trills or la-la’s that—for instance—went up and down in the shape of a tent, whereupon the flautist would attempt as well as he could to imitate this contour. Then she would make her la-la’s in a slightly different way, perhaps going up but not down, leaving the coming down to the next match between voice and instrument.
This folly of setting herself against the precision of a metallic and finely honed instrument was her undoing. By herself she might have prevailed, or at least concluded the evening in some sort of an armistice. But this small tubular machine was remorseless. It followed her every voice-step, and when she faltered even slightly it pounced on her. Soon she was faltering more than slightly. The audience began taking an interest in the proceedings on the dais, for the first time in the evening. Husbands who were asleep were woken up, and the students grinned and nudged each other.
The flautist did his best. He was on her side; after all she was paying him. But he too was helpless against the fine precision of his instrument. There was no way out for him; he had to play the notes in tune. The audience, which before had only tittered, now permitted itself an outright ripple of laughter. Luisa made another of the tent-shaped cadenzas, and this time the flute, in spite of the best efforts of its operator to control it, said distinctly, “I went this way, but you went that.” Luisa’s voice was as it had always been: charmingly lyrical when she wished it to be lyrical, coloratura when she wished it to be coloratura, varying precisely in timbre and tone according to her will. It was only in pitch that it refused to obey her. That little force that drove it slightly up when it should have gone down, slightly down when it should have held level, was the demon of her emotions, a phenomenon I knew well from other incidents quite different in circumstances. It was the nature of her voice to rise when she was excited, to lower when she wished to convey a tone of threat. Now she was in the grip of both these forces. The flute could not have followed her even if it had been Mozart’s magic one, neither could any system of notation. The more the flute reproached her the more excited she became, and the more threatening. She ended in a debacle, three notes from the tonic, in a head-voice, stopped in midair by a catch or a sob.
The applause was immediate. I had always known that Parisian audiences were pitiless and now I saw it for myself. Some clapped their hands so hard they were unable to laugh, and others laughed until they were unable to clap their hands. They rose to their feet. I with them—otherwise how could I see anything? There were only a few whistles to indicate disapprobation. Drowning them out, many bravas. Luisa’s pallor was phenomenal, a medical curiosity, like a patch of brightly illuminated snow.
“Melba, it’s time to retire!”
“Brava!”
“Bis! bis!”
“Charmant Oiseau! Encore!”
“Bis! bis! bis! bis!”
This chant took over the hall. Casimir and Gilles had their due part in it. I might have rapped them over the head, but I had no weapon. I ought to have brought a riding crop. Besides, by this time they had disappeared. The porter, as was customary, was waiting at the rear of the hall with a number of elaborate bouquets, including a horseshoe of carnations and lilies of the valley. These ornaments were appropriated by Casimir and Gilles, assisted by their fellow students. The porter was pushed over backward onto a chair. Luisa, who had come to her senses by this time, attempted to escape to the right. (The flautist and pianist, who should have been her natural protectors, had long since disappeared.) But she was cut off by a volley of flowers, and turning to the left saw her escape barred that way too. The horseshoe of carnations sailed through the air and struck her on the ankles.
“Bis! bis!”
“Fly again, Charmant Oiseau!”
“Brava!”
“Diva! diva! To the Opéra!”
The more respectable of the spectators, myself included, quitted the field at this point. In a box near the dais I caught a glimpse of the aunt, formidable, stoic, her chin tremoring as usual but no more than usual. Then I slipped out through a side aisle onto the street. For all I knew, the students actually carried out their promise, or threat, to attach themselves to Luisa’s carriage and drag her to the Opéra. Why should I intervene? I knew nothing of music.
The rain had stopped; a faint breeze was rustling in the trees along the avenue and the pavements were almost dry. There were no cabs in sight and I decided to walk back to my lodgings by way of the Pont de L’Alma and the quays. It was a good distance and took me almost an hour, but it was a mild evening and the damp, faintly moving air was refreshing. When I arrived in rue de Rennes it was only a little after eleven, and the concièrge was still awake over her coffee and her copy of Le Panorama. When she was awake no one unknown to the house could ascend the stair, and when she went to bed she locked the street door with a rusty old key. I mounted the five flights, let myself in and latched the door behind me, removed my coat and hat, and put some leftover coffee on the stove to warm. Then I got out an Admiralty pilot chart of the Arctic Ocean and stretched it across the table. For some time I had been meaning to make notes on the probable winds for this region in the month of July. Now, as always when I went out to a concert or somewhere else in the evening, I was wakeful and in a mood to work for a few hours before I went to bed.
When the coffee was warm I poured it into a cup and added a little cognac to it, and set it on the table by the chart. The meteorological indications on the chart, as might be expected for so remote a part of the world, were rather meager. Still, there were a number of spidery wind symbols—circles with arrows of various length sticking out of them, to indicate average direction and velocity—in the region between Greenland and Franz Josef Land. For half an hour I happily made notes, even extrapolating the data mathematically so that I was able to draw in a few of my own symbols farther north on the blank part of the chart. Then there was a rap-rap at the door, a rather peremptory one. In the back of my mind I think I expected the concièrge with a telegram, perhaps from Waldemer in New York, otherwise I wouldn’t have been so incautious as to open.
I unlatched the door enough to see who it was and Theodor pushed his way in. Before I could say a word he took a nickel-plated revolver out of his greatcoat and fired it at me point-blank. It was no joke; the sharp bang was enough to break the eardrums and there was a stench of powder. In the space of less than half a second my heart leaped twice and every nerve jangled like a billion electric doorbells: once when he fired and once when I grasped that he had missed me. I ducked to one side with my ears ringing and he fired twice more. A second or so after this there was a sound of descending glass. Probably from a picture on the wall; I didn’t turn my head to look. There were still two shots left in the thing, perhaps three. I wasn’t an expert on firearms but the difference in practical terms was negligible. If he kept on in his present humour, in this small room with no place to hide, he might even hit me eventually. I changed my tactics abruptly and attacked. I managed to get his wrists in my hands just as the infernal contraption went off again. A little storm of dust and grit fell down on us from the ceiling. I was surprised at the steely, fierce, and cunning strength I felt between my fingers; it was like trying to hold two angry pythons by the neck. I let go one of the wrists and concentrated on the other. By coming within a hair of breaking the thumb, I managed to pry the pistol out of the hand. It fell to the floor and, still holding one python and trying to elude the other, I bent down, retrieved it, and pitched it through the open window into the courtyard. But he wasn’t satisfied; he went right on trying to tear me to pieces with his fingernails. Or let us say she now, since the weapon had become a more traditionally feminine one. This was less frightening than the part immediately previous, but even more painful. I had no more desire to be permanently disfigured than to be shot. We fell in a heap on the floor, I on top, the greatcoat and the flailing limbs underneath. For some time I tried to subdue all these arms and legs, but it was uphill work, since I myself possessed only one limb for each of his—of hers. That concièrge! Would she ever get around to sending for the police? I didn’t know whether to hope that she would or hope that she wouldn’t. I decided to hope that she wouldn’t.
She didn’t, evidently deciding that the sounds (shots, glass breaking, bumping bodies) were only from one of my experiments. And what was happening now? The nature of our struggle, it became evident after a while, had gradually metamorphosed without either of us being aware of it. It wasn’t true, I reflected as I meditated in an oddly detached way on my sensations, that I possessed only one limb for each of hers. Tarnation! I swear by Great Thor in Thunderhouse that my chief concern—my only concern—was to get her subdued and to secure my own personal safety and survival, and secondarily to try to bring some sense into her fevered brain. But the very gestures of our struggle—her writhing and trying to scratch, my attempts to immobilize her limbs and defend myself—were only those that multiplied the points of our contact. Not for nothing had the nineteenth century decreed that young ladies and gentlemen were not to engage in wrestling matches while alone in lodgings. Her greatcoat had come open and the rest of her clothing, I noted in a distant part of my mind that I had for some reason kept in reserve, was also considerably disarranged. Her defence, or attack, now chiefly took the form of clutching the lower part of my face and pulling it toward her own. Our four lower limbs had now given up clashing head-on and divided up the field of encounter: hers apart to either side, mine between them. In all honesty I believed—I still believe—that I continued the pretence of struggle longer than she did. Yet it was surely not she who removed the necessary parts of my clothing; this was hardly possible since her fingers, no longer daggers now but velvet and feverish, were playing over the face pressed against her own. Her panting, her feline snarls of menace, had changed into a sound still rhythmic but something like weeping.
“I really wanted to kill you,” she sobbed.
“Yes, and I really wanted to stop you.”
“Then why are we doing this?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why wouldn’t you. Answer when. I spoke Swedish to you?” she wrenched out between sobs.
I paid no attention to her questions, nor she to mine. “Why didn’t you shoot the flautist? Or the music teacher in Passy?”
I didn’t want. You to come. To the recital.”
“Did you ever ask what I want?”
“It was all. It was all for you. Don’t you know that?”
“Elixir Vert-Galant. You deserve whatever—”
‘Now, oh, dearest one, now now now now!”
Only an inch or so from my eyes I saw her teeth grip her lower lip and a bright thread of blood spring out between them. The set teeth only gradually loosened their hold. A convulsive warm thing inside or between us still kicked now and then, more weakly and at widening intervals, like a fish dying. Her head, with a clocklike slowness, turned away from me to the right until I could see only the cheek. I was aware of the sound and rhythm of her breathing under me, not only with her lungs, but with her whole body. Inside, at the point where all the pyrotechnics had taken place, only a little spark crept ant-like now and then through the ashes. When at last, it seemed, the thirst for air in her was sated, the slow undulations spreading from her lungs to her throat, her limbs, gradually ceased.
I became aware of my surroundings again and collected myself to take note of them scientifically. Theodor’s officer cap was upside down against the wall across the room. The greatcoat was sprawled in one direction, essential parts of my own clothing flung in another. Some cataclysm had evidently struck here, one that snapped buttons and tore away garments. The picture with the shattered glass, as I had expected, was an engraving of The Wife of Poetus in which the Latin matron was plunging a sword into her bosom and commenting to her husband, “Non dolet.” Near it a chair had fallen over and was lying with four legs in the air, like a dead animal. A detail that surprised me was that the small nickel revolver was lying on the floor by the window. There were two possible explanations of this. One was that I was mistaken and it had not gone out the window after all. I was sure I had caught a glimpse of it curving through the open rectangle and downward into the darkness, but perhaps I had only been deluded by my boy’s vanity about throwing things. The other was even less plausible: that the concièrge had been annoyed by my throwing things down into her courtyard, which was really only a dank little well in which she kept the trash bins, had retrieved it, climbed up five flights, opened the door, clambered over our wildly convulsing bodies (oh, Major, your experiments), and set it on the floor by the window as a reproach. It was true she was a reproachful person by temperament, but she was not given to such complicated silent gestures. I picked the thing up, found out after a little fumbling how to break it open, and shook out the shiny little brass husks in the cylinder. There were five of them, all empty. Well, she had done her best. I slipped it into the desk drawer, rather furtively, with my back turned.
But she was not interested in the revolver, it was something that belonged to Theodor and it had nothing to do with her. She got up quite calmly now, even matter-of-factly and with a kind of religious simplicity, and began readjusting her clothing, the male gestures she was obliged to fall into in order to fasten certain buttons contrasting oddly with the mass of unpinned hair that fell over her face. Then she went to the sink, dampened a towel, and removed the traces of salty moisture from around her eyes and the blood from her lip. Her manner in doing all this was even and unhurried, stately, with a touch of the austere politeness she always assumed with persons with whom she chose to be a little distant, or when she preferred not to talk. It was as though the act we had just performed was a ritual of purification (now there’s a strange idea, oh, dix-neuvième siècle!) which had restored to her not only her calm but her confidence, her assurance in herself that she was superior to the world around her, along with its vicissitudes and most of its inhabitants. Next in this even sequence of events she filled a not very clean tumbler at the tap and drank the contents, slowly but in a single long draught without taking the glass from her lips. Our eyes met over the top of the glass but she said nothing. Finally she went to the worktable, took up the old red-painted shears I kept there for dealing with things like cardboard and tinfoil, and began cutting off her hair just below the level of the earlobes. The hair had seemed profuse falling over her face, but there was even more of it when it came down handful by handful onto the table. Finally there was a heap of it in the centre of the pilot chart, shadowy, snakelike, faintly iridescent. Working without a mirror in this way she hadn’t done a very good job. It was ragged around the edges and a little lower on one side than on the other. But it sufficed; the ends of her ears appeared under it, and when she tossed her head it flung out and then came back into place again, boy-like. With the cap on she looked the same as before except for the cut on her lower lip. The shears she put in the pocket of the greatcoat.
She came back to the table and seemed uncertain what to do with the hair; not what to do with it but what to use as a container. Finally she rolled it up in the pilot chart itself and put it in my arms, simply and modestly, with a smile, and the air of one conveying a gift. Then, still without a word (she had not spoken after she rose up off the floor), she went out the door, leaving me the hair, and taking for herself the little machine by which it had been cut off like a flower and left to die.
Luisa was going to Stresa, short hair and all. I was not invited. The aunt would go along and the Polish cousin, perhaps the mother. I had to go to Hamburg anyhow, to talk thalers with the brewers. We agreed to meet in Switzerland, somewhere. But it wasn’t just somewhere; she knew exactly the place she had in mind. “Just by the Simplon. When I come up from Italy over the pass you’ll be there. The place is called Brig, in the Valais. There’s an inn. It’s called—I forget what the inn is called. You can find it in the Baedeker. Goodbye.”
She always spoke English now, which avoided the awkward second person in French: tu was too intimate and vous too distant, even impolite. It (vous) would have involved an awkward backing up from where we had been before, whereas tu would have indicated that nothing had changed, everything was as before. What had changed, then? I wasn’t sure exactly. One thing that had changed, it seemed, was that an absolute rule or taboo of our relationship had been violated: the one that decreed that that couldn’t happen in Paris, only in Finland, Stresa, and other far-flung corners of the globe. But had it happened in Paris? As the days went by I meditated on this. Perhaps not. No, it hadn’t. Still, how could I reason thus, with the broken glass from the picture frame still unswept on the floor and the bundle of soft hair rolled up in the chart? I borrowed from Luisa a logic that was circular and retrograde, perhaps devious, but consoling. Since man is free, and woman also according to the aunt, we do exactly what we choose to do in this world. What we have not chosen to do does not happen. And neither of us, I persisted in believing in the face of all evidence, had willed to behave in such an irresponsible and beastly fashion, even when one of us was in danger of his life and the other defending herself against an enraged Swedish lunatic. Ergo and Q.E.D., it hadn’t happened. How to explain then that I had the half-healed scars of her claw marks on my face? They were still there, on that day three weeks later when she said goodbye to me in Quai d’Orléans for the last time. If she noticed them she gave no sign. “Goodbye.” That last English word—so final in contrast to the promise of au revoir or auf Wiedersehen—was spoken dryly, even with a touch of distance or dismissal. Against any risk that I might take her hand, she held both of them behind her. It was very correct. The aunt was present, observing from across the drawing room with faint denying vibrations of her head. Nay, nay! Nothing shall happen in Brig! I took my leave, seeing that this was the only thing in the house for the moment that they wished me to take.
In Hamburg I spent a week with the brewers. A pleasant time, although their notions of entertainment, involving large amounts of pigs’ feet, sauerkraut and bock, tended to increase one’s girth and did no good to the liver. I showed them drawings of Prinzess III, the silk for which was even then being cut by a firm in Grenoble. About the thalers there were no difficulties. They seemed to have an unlimited supply of them, guarded as I imagined by Rhine maidens in some iron-bound old chest. (But this could hardly be, I reasoned heavily, since Hamburg was on the Elbe.) The whole business was transacted in a heady miasma of hops. Herr Oberkellner, another bock for the Major! Another week of this and no balloon would lift me, nor would I care. The efficient machinery of Prinzessin Brauerei G.m.b.H. was even able to solve one of my last problems, that of the third and final member of the crew for the polar expedition. They recommended one of their own employees, a young chemist and amateur athlete named Beispiel who had, among his other accomplishments, swum the Hellespont like Byron and also rescued a dozen women and children from a sinking Elbe ferry boat in winter. (By towing them with his teeth, as I understood.) I was introduced to young Herr Beispiel and in fact he was a fine figure of a Teuton. Strong hands, thick chestnut hair, and a chest like an ale keg. There was the value of his scientific training (he was a specialist in yeast culture) and he had made at least one balloon ascension and come down by parachute, all for sport. There was a logic to this crew: Beispiel cheerful brute strength and agility, Waldemer intelligence, and I—transcendental vision perhaps, or the moral power of spirit. (The word I was groping for was German: Emporhebung.) I told him I would consider it. He, and Prinzessin Brauerei G.m.b.H., regarded the matter as settled.
After a week of pigs’ feet and Gemütlichkeit, the top button of my trousers unfastened for comfort under the waistcoat, I entrained at the Hauptbahnhof for Frankfurt, Basel, Zurich, Lucerne, and eventually Brig. This proved to be a pleasant hamlet on the Rhone full of steep-pointed roofs and picturesque inhabitants. The main attraction of the place was the Stockalperschloss, an improbable castle built by some robber baron in the seventeenth century and consisting mostly of bulbous domes and watchtowers. I inquired for “the inn” and was told there were three. Following the law of averages, the second one I tried was the one where Luisa had descended earlier that afternoon. She had reserved a room for me and one for her, on separate floors as it happened. (“Nay, nay.”) With her hair clipped I had half expected her to make her appearance as Theodor, but instead she was impersonating the young English lady in tweeds. The hair had been trimmed by a coiffeur in Place Vendôme, and it gave her an active-brisk-suffragist look instead of a mannish one. We had dinner according to the rustic local notions, and then she advised me to get early to bed. “I’ve left orders for them to knock on both of our doors” (significant detail) “at five. You have mountain clothing?”
This was a woolen pepper-and-salt suit with knickers, woolen stockings, and sturdy walking shoes. In my room there was a cap that went with it, of the kind with two visors made familiar by Mr. Sherlock Holmes.
She looked sceptical. “Are you in good physical condition, Gustav?”
“We’re only going to climb an Alp. Tourists, old ladies, and other people do it every day.”
She rose from the table. “Good night.” It was like the goodbye in Quai d’Orléans: friendly, correct, austerely polite. Her hands as before remained at her sides. If she had been with a gentleman she might have invited him to kiss her hand. But you know how some people are; if you offer them a finger they take the whole hand, then the arm and shoulder. I was as correct as she; I smiled like a Peruvian diplomat.
In the morning we set off for the Aletsch glacier before the sun was quite up. Luisa had found a guide, a specimen of the local fauna complete with lederhosen and strong red knees. The winding road from Brig to the foot of the glacier we covered in a sort of farm wagon with benches down the middle, so that Luisa and I sat on one side and the guide on the other. When the road ended we got out and everything was unpacked from the wagon. There were light knapsacks with blankets, food, and thermos flasks, and alpenstocks for all. Each of us wound a length of rope around the waist, to tie us together when necessary. The wagon turned and went back down the road, and we set off up the glacier. To the left and above us as we climbed was the Aletschhorn, enormously high, a sword of ice cream sticking up into the cold and absolutely clear spring morning. As Luisa strode I perceived that under the tweed skirt she wore an example of that efficient garment invented by Mrs. Amelia Bloomer, woolen as it seemed, quite smartly cut around the ankles. My salt-and-pepper suit was supplemented by a cloak the innkeeper had lent me. Already my feet were slipping in the shoes designed for walking in English country lanes.
The guide kept us entertained as we went up the glacier by yodeling in his local dialect, which involved a sound as though he were separating egg yolks in his mouth. From time to time, when he was not doing this, he made little comments. “The Herr is a little tired, yo? The Dame not. Women are strong, you know. The femelle of the sex has stronger lungs. The peasants hereabouts, you know, they drive the cows to the high pasture, but they don’t take the bulls. Their lungs would collapse. Yo, yo, the woman sex is strong. My own wife—” And so on.
There may have been something in what he said. My own pulmonary system was already pounding and showing signs of distress. It was borne in upon me for the first time that I came from a flat country and that all these Alps were not really necessary in any rational and efficient scheme of constructing a planet. Still, it was not really fair. I was fat from the week in Hamburg, and she after all had the lungs of a singer; that is, even if she was not a singer artistically, she might be so regarded from an athletic point of view. She went on ahead like a blithe dryad, or did I mean Druid? It was hard to think while panting. The guide presently tied us together with the ropes, explaining that there were crevasses ahead. He knew what he was talking about, this fellow. All morning we toiled up the ice across these fissures large enough to engulf whole armies, some of them treacherously covered with snow. At noon we rested on the Obergletscher, and by five in the afternoon we were at the base of the mountain. Here we camped, or more precisely, rolled ourselves in our blankets in the protection of an overhanging crag and tried to get some rest sitting up all night, warming ourselves now and then with coffee from the thermos flasks. The guide (I never learned his name, and it is possible that in that part of the world they name cows but not sons) built a little fire for us and averted any danger that we would fall asleep by yodeling every hour or so. I believe I did sleep, as a matter of fact. For five minutes; until my head dropped sideways and touched the saw-like piece of granite I was leaning against.
At dawn, after more coffee with some sausage and bread, we set off again. And by noon, rather more easily than I had expected, we were on top of the Aletschhorn. There was a considerable view, for those interested in that kind of thing. The guide pointed out the Jungfraujoch to the north, the Matterhorn and the Dent Blanche to the south. It was cold up there and we soon left the place; there was no entertainment provided and nothing much to do. There were at least two things harder than climbing a mountain, I discovered. One was coming down a mountain. And another was crossing a glacier, either coming up or going down. Especially tied together with an alpine mountain goat and a vigorous suffragist who seeks to make some point by leaping down the crags quicker than one can follow, so that one is dragged along on the rope like a calf going to market.
“And so you” (English; the pronoun neither intimate nor unfriendly) “will be going to Spitsbergen in June.”
“Yes.”
“And then?”
Half sliding, avoiding disaster frequently only through adroit use of the alpenstock, I would just as soon have postponed this interrogation until later. “Northward. With a little luck. We will see.”
“And how many persons will be in your crew?”
“Three.”
“Ah. That’s an odd number.” Three was an odd number. Devil take it, this young woman was a mathematician, no denying that. “Why three, precisely?”
“Because the balloon is designed to carry the weight of exactly three persons.”
“I see. And why is it designed to carry three persons?”
“Because that is the number that will be going on the expedition.”
And she (over her back, giving me an encouraging little pull with the rope that almost upset me): “And who will these three persons be, pray tell?” “Myself. Waldemer. And a young man from Hamburg named Beispiel.”
“H’mm. How very international. And this Herr zum Beispiel. Is he a balloonist?”
“A chemist.”
“Ah. One hardly sees the logic of that. I will come with you of course to see you off.”
“To Trondheim, perhaps.”
“Even to Spitsbergen.”
“To what end?”
“Some member of your crew might not be able to go after all. Such as Beispiel. Through illness or for some other reason.”
“Not likely. He’s as healthy as a performing seal.”
“Still, for even a small chance of going on the expedition, it would be worth taking the trouble. And I would be useful, you have to admit that. In Sweden, after all—”
Devil take Sweden! In this system of cryptography we used for communicating with each other, “Sweden” meant the adroit way she had handled the ropes (dropping the ballast at the wrong time) and “Finland” meant—later, in the cottage. For instance, if she had said, “And I would be useful—in Finland, after all!” it would have meant quite a different thing.
“Beispiel will be very useful. He has made a balloon ascension, and he can swim while carrying children in his teeth. Besides, Beispiel means thalers. The brewers—”
“Ah, the brewers.” She was scornful of material considerations, especially when it suited her. “If you want to argue that way. Why not an expedition around the Eiffel Tower instead, and you can sell sausages afterward in the Champs de Mars.”
At least after that she stopped pestering me. There was total silence for an hour or two while we came back down the glacier and picked our way precariously through the crevasses. Finally, at five o’clock in the afternoon, we were out of them and onto more or less firm ice. I was tired of being jerked along and told the guide to untie us.
“Oh aber. Many more holes.”
“No more holes.” I untied myself and Luisa did the same. Without disputing the matter, the guide coiled up his own rope around his waist and went on a little ahead, yodeling to himself in an undertone. At the foot of the glacier, a kilometer or so ahead, we could see horse and wagon already waiting for us. A hot bath! And afterward coffee with rum, clean clothing, and a dinner in the inn. Descending a little behind Luisa and to one side, I stepped into a slight depression filled with snow, it yielded, and I fell five metres or more in a twinkling of an instant, before I had time to realise what had happened.
I was in a place with bluish light, hard walls pressing on my back and chest, the alpenstock under me, one arm over my head and the other jammed at my side. Except for a knock on one ear and a wrenched hip, I seemed to be all right.
“Gustav?”
“Here.”
There was no concern for my condition, I was interested to note. “What are you doing down there?”
“Thinking.”
“The guide has gone on ahead.”
“I’ll bet he has. Throw me down your rope, will you?”
I didn’t seem to be in any danger. The crevasse was a shallow one and firm at the bottom, full of old ice rubble and packed snow. It was just wide enough so that by struggling a bit and working my arms around I was able to free myself and stand more or less upright, the patch of light above me three metres or so over my head. The hip would probably work if I didn’t place too much weight on it.
There was no sound from above. “What are you doing?” “Thinking. Do you know, Gustav, I think I will come to Spitsbergen. It would be great fun going on the expedition. I mean,” she corrected herself quickly, “not fun only, but a scientific satisfaction and an accomplishment of value. I have nothing else to do in the summer anyhow. Ma Tante and the others are only going to Biarritz, what a bore. Beispiel will have to find something else to do this summer.”
“Out of the question.”
“To tell you the truth, you see, Gustav, that is why I invited you to climb the Aletschhorn. To show you, you see, that I have strong muscles and am not afraid of the cold. It was cold last night, wasn’t it, Gustav? How is it down there? Is it cold?”
“Throw me down your rope, will you please?”
“Because you will have to admit that I went up the mountain all right. Isn’t that true, Gustav? You scarcely had to wait for me at all. And coming down too. I hardly went slower than you.”
Faintly I could hear the guide’s voice coming up over the ice. “Gibt … etwas?”
“The Major is making some glaciological investigations.”
“Yo, yo.”
“So you see, I have set my mind on going on the expedition. I am sorry about Beispiel but perhaps he can go another time.”
“Is it your mind or your heart that you have set?”
“According to you, there is very little difference in us, but I believe it is my mind.”
A half an hour of this went on; it was getting dark. She prattled on blithely. “I really enjoyed the Aletschhorn, didn’t you, Gustav? I thought I might mind the cold but instead I enjoyed it. It’s a matter of dressing properly and staying in motion. And also, I think, of one’s mental attitude. I like the whiteness. I’ve always liked white things. Clean white linen, white snow. Those white dragées from Boissier. You know, the ones they use for weddings. I can eat a pound of them. Is everything white down there, Gustav?”
“Blue.”
There was a faint yodel from below. “Go, go. Go on down to the Gasthaus. The Major and I will come along later.”
“Hurry up, will you? It’ll be dark before I get out of here. My hip has done some strange things and is deciding to get stiff.”
“So I take it, it’s settled?”
“Throw me down the rope.”
“It’s …”
“Settled.”
With a single vigorous stab she set her alpenstock into the ice and jimmied it until it was firm. Then she uncoiled the rope, tied the end of it to the alpenstock, and dropped the other end to me. It stopped only a short distance from my stretching hands. Shifting my position a little, I was able to pry myself up with my own alpenstock until the rope was within reach. Then, my back against the wall of ice, my knees pressing the ice on the other side, I went up the three metres or so to the surface. When I had only another metre to go, perhaps, I felt the rope shift and looked up to see that she was waggling the alpenstock in the ice, perhaps to set it firmer. But it was having the opposite effect; the point began to loosen and the rope slipped a little, losing perhaps a centimeter. Would she take her hands off the blessed thing and leave it alone! The crevasse was wider here and my knees couldn’t reach the other side; I was suspended by my two hands on the rope. Between my legs I could see the dim blue bottom a long way below me.
“So, to be sure the matter is settled, I will ask you for your word as a gentleman. Whatever value that will have.”
“A gentleman’s word holds only with other gentlemen.”
“Your ideas are really medieval, Gustav.”
And to tell the truth she, at least, was a perfect gentleman in Trondheim and also at Spitsbergen. The cropped hair disappeared under the military cap, she ate and did the same as everybody else, she never complained of anything. In the camp at Dane Island she helped erect the balloon house and said nothing when a heavy section of the matchboard wall slipped and bloodied her hand (I was watching out of the corner of my eye).
“I don’t know whether that German fellow will do, you know, Major. He doesn’t look very robust to me.”
“I’ve already told you he’s not German.”
“You cabled me that a German fellow would be going. Lustspiel or something.”
“I also cabled you that it was off and Luisa’s brother would be going.”
“Well, well, you see. I thought the German fellow was Luisa’s brother. He looks German enough, and he has a German hat. What is he then?”
“Three-fifths Goan. Half American. And all man.”
“I suppose that’s another one of your paradoxes. Doesn’t make a pin’s difference to me. Doesn’t look as though he has the complexion for the arctic, though. Ever see an Eskimo with a skin like that?”
I had to admit I hadn’t. “Theodor is very intelligent. He likes Heinrich Heine. He can read poems to us when we have nothing else to do.”
“Sometimes I really can’t follow you, Major. I can’t tell whether you like this Theodor fellow or not. First you defend him warmly, and then you go off into your paradoxes or sarcasms or whatever they are.”
“I wish I could.”
“Could what?”
“Tell whether I liked him or not.”
“Why did you bring him along then?”
“Sometimes one isn’t entirely free in these matters.”
“Ah, you mean the German brewers?”
“Something like that.”
This satisfied him for a minute. But presently his keen journalist’s mind detected the flaw in the argument. “But of course, as you say, he’s not German. So it must have been something else, ah. That, ah. Persuaded you …” He smiled tentatively, then more broadly. “Where there is a brother, there’s a sister. I see now. Ahah! Cherchez la femme, eh, Major?”
He wouldn’t have to look far now, she is right at his feet, her head cradled on his ankles, the rest of her sheltered up inside the bow of the Faltboot. It isn’t a hybrid thing half boat and half sled any more, we took off the oaken runners and threw them away this morning when the pack finally ended, or more precisely, when the proportion of water and ice changed until there was more water than ice. As for the arrangement of persons in the boat, this is more or less dictated by circumstances. There is only room for two in the tiny cockpit, which has a canvas shield to fit around our waists if a spray comes up. One of us must inch up inside and lie flat in the bow, and this is Theodor, he being the lightest. The compartment behind the cockpit, smaller than the one in the bow, is devoted to our few remaining possessions—the sleeping sacks, the tent silk, the provisions, and my navigation instruments and books. I must sit behind Waldemer so I can reach these things and occasionally verify our latitude with a sight. Longitude is pretty much out of the question now because the chronometers can’t be counted on. As a matter of fact, the sun has been hidden in a cloud cover all day, but the sight isn’t really necessary anyhow, because we can see land on the horizon now, probably White Island. This time it is no mirage. Since around noon there have been two sets of clouds in sight, a layer of cirrostratus high overhead and a low bank obscuring the horizon from south-southwest to southeast. Then, about an hour ago, the bank of mist rose and the island stood out clearly in dazzling white, a cloud clinging to its top and drifting away slowly to the east, the whole thing eaten and shimmering in the atmospheric phenomenon that makes everything on the horizon look as though it were drawn with a pen on melting sugar candy. It grows larger only very slowly, and seems to get more solid not at all. How far now? Perhaps ten miles. It seems unlikely that on the morning of this same day we were still struggling over the broken floes and slush with the Faltboot sled in tow. Now, according to Kullberg 5566’s uncertain hands, it is 1800 hours Greenwich.
A squall to the west. Paddle faster, Waldemer and Crispin! This frail craft is not made for storms, and it’s overloaded. A forty-knot wind will raise waves that will swamp it in a minute. We must outrace this squall. No chance to shift and let Theodor take his turn, since it was hard enough getting him wormed up there inside the bow this morning when the boat was safely alongside an ice floe. I thought that Waldemer might perhaps grumble at Theodor for shirking and not doing his part in this respect, but in fact Waldemer has been acting very protective toward Theodor these last few days, not to say tender. This morning when Theodor went behind a pressure ridge to answer a call of nature (Waldemer doesn’t even resent his wish for privacy in this matter now), he commented gruffly, “Have to take it easy on the fellow, you know. Some of us are not as robust as others.”
“Well, but …”
Waldemer can’t express his feelings precisely. And how could he, the poor fellow? He is not in possession of the basic facts that would make him understand why he feels the way he does. Theodor gives out some sort of emanations or waves, that’s all, that pass right through the clothing and make a fellow feel like taking care of him and being sure he’s comfortable. Waldemer doesn’t know he has instincts and he doesn’t believe in spiritualism or thought waves, but in spite of himself he is a fairly subtle animal. He knows, but he doesn’t know that he knows. At the edge of the ice, where we finally gave up and turned the sled into a boat, he told Theodor, “You crawl up inside the bow, old man. Have a nap up there, rest your bones. The Major and I will paddle for a few hours and then you can take your turn.” When Theodor was installed in the bow, his head resting on Waldemer’s ankles, Waldemer beamed jovially and seemed unwilling to meet my eye. It may be necessary to tell Waldemer the truth, in the end, in order to explain his own sensations to him and allay any fear that he is not—manly. As he would put it.
A little after seven. We have been paddling away frantically for an hour and are exhausted, but we have won. The squall will pass to the north of us. But it has left a pesky chop on the sea that doesn’t make our task any easier. The island is nearer now—an oblong white mass rounded like a shield, ringed by sheer ice cliffs except in two or three places where there seem to be small shelves or beaches along the water. For another two hours we work toward it, resting only briefly because it is apparent now that there is an infernal current trying to set us off to the east, where there is no land for two hundred miles. The sea in the direction we are approaching is shallow; several large white icebergs are aground in the neighborhood of the island. As we pass one of these we can hear the groan as the swell lifts it and it grates and crumbles on the bottom. Finally, about nine o’clock, the island is abeam and we rest on our paddles.
The current has set us to the east and the island is between us and the sun. As we approach it we are enclosed in profound shadow, an immense tent of darkness extending out over the sea and gathering us into its embrace. In the swell we rise and fall very slowly. There are teeth of surf along the shore of the island, hissing and growling sleepily. There are no landing places here, but a little farther along on the east shore of the island we find an ice shelf in a tiny semicircular cove with, behind it, some fissures of bare rock showing that might serve as a ladder to climb into the interior of the island. There are swarms of guillemots and ivory gulls, whirling up with sharp cries into the air over our heads where the sun is still shining. Here we land.
We get out and draw the Faltboot up on the shelf, extract Theodor, and stand about looking at our situation. The shelf is not very much larger than a dinner table and doesn’t seem excessively solid. When the confused sea left behind by the squall strikes it, it groans and complains. However, it is perhaps a metre thick. It will do for a temporary platform, but as soon as possible we will have to climb onto the plateau in the interior of the island, where there will be game and where we will have a view of the sea around in those intervals when the murky weather clears. First we set up the tent and prepare a meal: hardtack, what is left of the seal meat, cocoa, and a tin of gooseberry preserves which we pass half-frozen around from one to the other and eat with our single spoon. During this supper I feel content but somehow odd. I am conscious, so to speak, of being the object of interest of spectators, and I even glance around to see who is in the tent. The premonition or vague hallucination I have felt for several days, that there is one more of us than can be counted, has expanded now until it seems like thirteen. Where is Judas? He is at the head of the table. I help myself to more gooseberries.
“Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, eh, Major?”
“I—” between swallows. “Used to gather. Gooseberries in the Stockholm skerries. When I was a boy.”
“You never told me you had been a boy.” Luisa too is in good spirits in spite of her ducking yesterday and her twelve hours of lying in the narrow Faltboot.
“I only was for a brief time. Then they found a doctor—who cured me. He was called Doktor Liv.”
“Which means?”
“Life.” I clean out the can with the spoon. To me the taste of this confection (gooseberries, not life) is deeply provocative in a way that I am not at first able to understand. It isn’t the skerries, or the gooseberries themselves. It is their container, tasting slightly of copper, still shiny from the industrial machine that made it. In these few days I had almost forgotten the World of Cities. This faint tinny tang, the sharpness of bright metal calls me back to it in a way that is somehow ominous and yet at the same time richly promising: a temptation. What have I to do with that world? What would I do there, and what have I done there? Is it possible that horse cars are still clanging down the streets of Philadelphia, that cocottes and their clients are still lighting cigarettes in Montmartre? If so, it is in another existence, a quite different solar system with another sun and planets. I throw the tin away, then retrieve it and put it away with the provisions. It may serve for something or other, perhaps as a second saucepan to stew gull meat in. Our other pan was made in a factory too. The fact is that we cannot live without the World of Cities, or can live only like animals. The tyranny of the cooking pot! Without it there is no Shakespeare or Beethoven, no love of Petrarch for Laura. It is clear that for mankind it has been a long and difficult business to get where we are, and that the heritage of gooseberry tins and symphonies is not lightly thrown away. Save all these scraps of trash, then, lest we turn into polar bears.
After supper we decide that Waldemer will scout the cliff for us to find the best way to the top. Then, perhaps, we can all follow him and pull the provisions and even the Faltboot up after us. He is an experienced climber and looks forward to the task with relish. He slings the Mannlicher over his back—might find a snow fox up there, you know! The fissure he starts up is ideal, a classic rock climber’s chimney. For the first thirty metres the going is easy, then he comes out on a ledge where he is perplexed which way to go next. I stand watching him with Luisa, or perhaps it is Theodor, I’m not quite sure. The top of the cliff, another twenty meters or so above Waldemer, is hidden in a bank of mist. Once or twice the sun gleams through openings in this veil, making dazzling white spots on the ice. Down below we are still in the chill gloom of the shadow. High above Waldemer, above the top of the cliff, the gulls wheel slowly in the sunshine.
Waldemer sets his foot on a kind of step in the rock and reaches to the left for a projecting spur. Hanging by his left hand from this, he swings outward and finds a perch on another ledge, a tiny balcony that projects out of the rock wall for ten centimeters or so over the absolutely empty air beneath it. As he does this, a gleam of sun from above catches him. The balcony is barely large enough for his two feet. His left mitten is still gripping the crag above him and to the left, the right feeling for a handhold at the level of his waist, his two feet pressed together gracefully like a dancer. The balcony breaks and he is unsupported in space.
For a fraction of a second his left hand clings to the crag, then this crumbles, the upward-stretching hand abandoning it only reluctantly. The body with one arm raised and the other extended to the side, feet still together, accelerates downward out of the gleam of sun. The speed of its racing through the shadow below is impressive. It is like a gull flashing down out of the sunlight under a cliff. About halfway down it strikes the ice wall with a heavy muffled thump. Up to this time its pose has been unchanged: one arm over the head, the other at the waist, the feet together like an acrobat or a Spanish dancer. But when it strikes the ice wall this symmetry is deranged and it turns into a rag doll, tumbling the rest of the way first with head up, then feet, then a reaching arm. This rotation seems to drive it even more violently into the ice when it hits. One shoulder touches the ice first, then the legs, which slap onto the hard surface with a second and distinct sound after the first thump. The body comes to rest with one foot in the water and the two arms stretched out over the ice. All this has happened not with dignity but with an absurd and comic swiftness, almost too fast for the eye to follow, like a clown doing something familiar at breakneck speed. The eye wishes to slow the action and understand how it has happened, what the stages of it were and the impulse and necessity of its physics, whether it was really necessary. But it is over before the mind can grasp it.
He raises his head as we come toward him. Smiles. Quickly we slip the rifle off him, lift the foot from the water, touch over his limbs with our hands. He says, “Leg.” It isn’t the right one evidently. He smiles again when our searching fingers find the crux of the difficulty on the left. “It doesn’t hurt.” The wife of Poetus-non dolet! She was either a liar or a humourist, that lady. All the blood has gone out of Waldemer’s face, and although he is still smiling, the smile is like a surgical incision bent upward with retractors. We decide not to bother with splints until we have slipped him over the ice to the tent; on the tiny shelf this is only a few metres. During this journey he speaks once more: “Sorry.” It is in his quite ordinary voice, even with the little clearing of the throat that he makes before speaking, as though he is apologizing to us either for falling off the cliff or for the pain we are causing him.
Then we have him inside the tent and there is something else difficult to do, turning him from his stomach over onto his back. Theodor holds the leg gently and I rotate him; he is heavy. During this he smiles with amusement at how heavily he is sweating. Found a way to keep warm in this climate, by Jove! Break your leg and you’re like toast. It isn’t really a warm sweat, however, but a cold one that leaves his face like milk. He needs the coats over him, all of them, and some cocoa.
“Stupid of me. Now I’ve made a pickle. For everybody.”
“Never mind.”
“Tell you what. You fellows, tomorrow. Had better just go on. Leave me the Mannlicher. In the boat, the two of you. You’ll have a chance. Franz Josef Land …”
“Don’t talk nonsense.”
But he has read enough boys’ adventure stories to know how to behave. In order to play the game he even has to pretend it would really work, our abandoning him and setting out over that deserted sea to the east. “Sealers there. Now and then. In the summer. You can have them. Come back and get me.” He doesn’t complain and he even tells jokes while we improvise a splint for him out of the rifle and some strips of silk torn from the tent. The gunstock fits neatly under his arm and the barrel comes almost to his ankle. We make him comfortable and pour the cocoa into him.
Inside the tent, in the deep shade of the cliff, there is an illusion almost of night. This is restful; the first time that watchful sun has turned away from us in ten days. It makes it colder though and we light the primus. I go outside and pile snow around the edges of the tent to keep out the wind. The rubberized silk which held the far finer atoms of hydrogen for a week will not let the slightest particle of air come through. I make sure the Faltboot is secure, wedged against the rock with the paddles inside it.
Then I go back inside and seal the flap of the tent by piling snow around it. The light that comes through the silk is thin and greyish, a light made out of shadow. The red stripes have scarcely any colour now; they have darkened to the iron of coagulated blood. This banded half-obscurity of light and dark we will call night, for our purposes. It will do. The brandy is for Waldemer. We uncork it and he lies happily with it cradled under his arm. “Cognac Fine Champagne. Very best, by George. Go first class when you go with the Major.” Luisa and I unroll the other sleeping sack and get into it, with a certain alacrity, since we are coatless now.
There is no sound but the faint hush of the wind outside against the silk, and a gurgle now and then as Waldemer lifts the bottle and tilts it. Even inside the sleeping sack it is terribly cold. I turn the primus up to make more heat, and the flame goes yellow and begins to rise off the burner, making a faint popping sound. I know from experience that under these conditions the burner is inefficient and that each molecule of carbon, unable to unite as it would like with two molecules of oxygen, has to be content with a monogamous marriage with one molecule of oxygen; a slight difference statistically, but one of profound importance for us.
“Vet du, Gustav, I am not a little girl any more and I want to know. What will happen now?”
“Do you care?”
We lie quite chastely side by side, our flanks necessarily touching in the narrow sack and a common warmth suffusing the enclosed space, yet aware of each other only in the abstract play of minds and the subdued, distinct, and precise sound of voices.
“Whatever happens, I want it to happen in a way that is—how do you say—renlig—enfaldig. Nettement tu sais, without too many unpleasant details.”
“As in a book.”
“Not like a book exactly, but the way I have already imagined it in my mind.”
“Whatever happens will happen only in your mind anyhow.”
“Hör du, Gustav. Those sealers. Do they exist?”
“Which sealers?” “The ones who come to Franz Josef Land occasionally.”
“They might exist.”
You two. Always talking Squarehead. Discussing your love lives in Paris, probably. Might let a fellow in on it. The words are blurred now, the brandy is working. In an hour he might even go to sleep, from fatigue and through the sheer physiological efficiency of the hunter who can turn off his body when he has no use for it. He is—the idea occurs to me with the quick simplicity of a discovery—he is happy.
“And if they do exist. What then?”
“We can put our friend in the Faltboot and paddle to Franz Josef Land.”
“Is it far?”
“When it happens in your mind it isn’t far. Paddling, it’s quite a way.”
“I’m still strong, do you know, Gustav. I’ve rested all day. You haven’t let me do my share. That’s not fair. On the Aletschhorn—”
“Yes, I know.”
And I have been thinking. It wasn’t really because she wouldn’t let me out of the crevasse that I agreed to let her go. Whether I knew it or not, it was to force her once for all out of her world, the world of couturiers and tea at the Café Royal, and into my world, the world of thought, where everything is clean and abstract. But now I know that here, the place I have brought her, is not her world and not my world, it is no world at all. It is nothing. And perhaps it is better that it should be this way. In her world or mine, one of us was always the enemy, the fool. And now the enemy is nothing. Not the whiteness and cold of a certain region of the world, even as remote as it may be, but the eventual Nothing that now gapes before us like an immense welcoming gate. But this is an enemy I have been careful to protect her from. Both of them. And they have believed me and entrusted themselves to me with a childlike simplicity—all because I have pretended to know, to be stronger than they are in my knowing, to be hard! It is important that this secret should be kept from them to the end—that there is Nothing, that no one among the angelic orders will hear us if we cry out. The other secrets—that no sealers ever come to Franz Josef Land, that it is impossible to cross two hundred miles of open sea against the wind and current—are unimportant and can be concealed with trivial lies. These are analogous to the lies I tell myself, for instance, that I am hard or that I do not care about what is going to happen.
“Hör du, Gustav. I think it was on purpose that you brought me to this place. Because it is called White Island. And I like white things. Isn’t that so?”
I might tell her that sometimes she likes white things and sometimes she doesn’t, and this is profound of her, and I know the reason why, but I won’t tell her, because her belief that she likes white things is necessary for her now, and for what is to come.
“And are you happy here?”
“I am happy. As long as you don’t touch me. And I must not touch you either. Then I am happy. I don’t know why that is.”
“It is because the outsides of things are white. And inside they are red.”
“You mean that part of me? I don’t know. I’ve never looked at it.”
She is not fond of mirrors either. She alone, of all the women I have known, never looks in mirrors. This is something we share. She goes on: “I think it is because God is angry at us that we are condemned to be in pairs. Only he—she—It—is allowed to be one. Do you know, Gustav, the Garden of Eden story is told the wrong way. We weren’t two then but one, and we were happy. Then we did something terrible, told a lie or got into the jam cupboard. And He said: I condemn you to be split in two, and wander around forever looking for the other half, loving and hating at the same time. And ever since we’ve been trying to be one again. But that’s forbidden. It’s forbidden by God. It’s a sin and makes us suffer.”
“So there’s no hope?”
“The only hope is to go where everything is very cold and white. Then this red thing inside us is chilled and we are white all through. Only the minds can touch, and they touch very gently because they don’t want anything from each other. I’m tired of bodies. I have a headache. I don’t know how to say it in Swedish, c’est mes époques qui approchent. I’ve only had this body for twenty years but I’m tired of it already. I’m glad you brought me here, Gustav.”
This is a good place to get rid of it, if that’s what she has in mind. It isn’t really her époques, of course. The symptoms are well known to medicine: the feeling of pressure on the temples as from an elastic band or cap, weakness of limbs, gradual darkening of the vision. Lying quietly in the half darkness after she has finished talking, I imagine the atoms joining together into their silent deadly ether as thin as thought, invisible and merciful like the Grace of God itself. Two by two they steal upward from the yellow flame, clasping each other in their embrace inimical to man but not this embrace of theirs—forbidden by God, instead, it is the manifestation of His precise and infinitely complex will which never errs and which men call chemistry. Rising with a certain difficulty onto my elbow, I locate Kullberg 5566 and establish that it is ten minutes before midnight, and also note that the primus stove is working well, that is to say, it is not working well at all. (Another one of your paradoxes, Major.) To judge from the colour of the flame, it is converting kerosene to carbon monoxide at a highly efficient rate. Crispin’s Axiom: machines are really of use to us only when they work defectively and produce results not anticipated by their designers. A balloon intended to go to one place takes us to another, a Bell telephone earpiece receives messages from the Infinite, and so on. I have to confess that, in spite of my technical education, I am not really much of a believer in the hope that these trivial engines will bring us bliss.
So I have not noted anything in my pocket diary about the Pole, and I have made sure that Waldemer has not kept any record of it in writing either, so that, if the nonexistent sealers or somebody else ever finds our camp, those down below in the World of Cities will not imagine that we have accomplished something significant, and Nansen or Lieutenant Peary or some other worthy person will have the honour of handing to the human race the navel of their planet on a silver platter. For me, for us, these things are unimportant. Because what does this or any of it matter, once we have opened our eyes from our sleep and contemplated at last the ultimate Nothing? Some of us are tired of our bodies at twenty, some at ninety, but we must all tire of them in the end. If man is superior to the universe, it is because he understands his predicament and is able, ultimately, to choose the means and the moment of his confrontation with it. For this, of course, strength is needed. I am happy that I have found this in myself. All modesty aside, and now that I am totally alone.
This is not to say that I am at peace with myself. Far from it! There are too many things in my head for that, too many burdens. Others have trusted in me, and I have betrayed that trust. If I did it because it was best for them, this in no way diminishes what I must take on myself. There is that betrayal, and there is this final crime of mine—and a crime it is, murder pure and simple, and what is worst of all, against persons very dear to me, not the least of whom is myself. But I have to bear these things lightly and not regard them in a sentimental way. It is a shabby Götterdämmerung in the odour of kerosene, and I am only an eccentric Swede whose hair stands on end, perhaps not even a genius, only a minor clairvoyant. What egotism! The Mental Diary has degenerated totally into these first-person pronouns. This childishness is the best argument there is against the immortality of the soul.
Something is changed. Everything is suffused with a swimming pink. My mathematical powers at least have not been impaired. I am aware of what is signified by this subtle changing of light. The sun, curving in its wolf-like lope around the horizon, has reached the point where it shines once more into our cove. I am glad that the others are asleep and not aware of this. The comfortable shadow is gone; the white stripes take the light gradually, the dark ones crawl at the edges and grow red. Midnight: altitude at the minimum, azimuth angle zero. Like a cathedral facing north our tent is aligned exactly with the meridian. This Great Window of Chartres commemorates a Passion, but it is not a holy one. The blood-glow is the sun of Stresa, it forces its way through the shutters of the closed eyelids and will allow no peace. The brocade falls, the curve of surface is a mathematical witchery of shadows. Luisa, det war synd! If this half and that half are brought together into One, it makes a fire that hurts. But she only smiles and glances downward at this most precise and unanswerable geometric theorem of her body. I float toward it and am lost in shadows, I am both the enclosedness and the enclosed, a warmth shudders somewhere at the centre of everything. This Finnish night is terribly cold. Thank God for the featherbed!