An Old Captivity

by Nevil Shute

  Suddenly she leaned forward and said: “Mr. Ross!”

  He swung round in his seat. “Yes?”

  “What’s the matter with the sea? It’s gone a different colour.”

  He looked down quickly. The dark grey had changed to a dirty, milky hue. He said: “Good enough—that means we’re very near. Quick of you to spot that.”

  “Does the sea change colour near land?”

  “It does here, according to the books. It’s the glaciers or something.”

  They peered into the haze ahead. In a minute or two the pilot said:

  “There it is. See? Over there.”

  They followed his direction. A dark lava rock was standing in the sea, ringed with white foam; then there was another, and a little island. Suddenly a rocky and forbidding coast was plain before them; the pilot pulled the seaplane up a little higher. Lockwood stared forward. “What a horrible-looking place!”

  The pilot smiled. “I’ve heard of people coming to Iceland for their summer holiday.”

  Freed from the strain of the last hours, Alix laughed, a little shrilly. The pilot turned in his seat. “Let’s have those sandwiches,” he said. “It’ll be an hour before we get to Reykjavik.”

  The little occupation of unwrapping the sandwiches steadied the girl; the food itself refreshed them and removed their fatigue. The presence of the land raised their spirits; they began to study the countryside with interest and to comment on it cheerfully as they had their lunch. It was a land of little barren farms along by the sea-shore, with hills rising sharply to the north, lined with white streaks of glaciers running down from the ice-cap. Ross flew a little way inland from the coast, homing with his wireless upon the broadcasting station. Presently they crossed a ridge of high land by a lake; in front of them lay Faxa Fjord, and Reykjavik.

  Ross circled over the town, studying the port. “I think I’ll land outside in the fjord and taxi into the harbour,” he said. “There ought to be a red buoy for us, straight opposite the jetty.” He turned to the girl, smiling, “Can you possibly do your stuff again, Miss Lockwood?”

  “Of course.”

  “Good enough. Look, put on one of those life-belts before you get out.”

  He made a wide circuit, throttled back and brought the machine down to the surface by the harbour wall. She touched gently, sank down into the water, and came to rest. In the cabin the girl took off her stockings and put on her sand-shoes and her life jacket; the pilot turned and taxied into the made harbour.

  This time the mooring went off without an incident. The pilot saw his buoy some distance off and taxied over to it; fifty yards away he slowed down to a walking pace and the girl got down on to the float, boathook in hand. He brought the buoy up to her feet; she caught it with the boathook, clipped the spring hook on to it, and threw it back at once.

  She stood on the float looking up at the pilot, leaning sideways out of his window. “How’s that, Mr. Ross?”

  The seaplane drifted back and lay quietly at the mooring. “Money for jam,” he said. “It’s too easy.”

  She laughed. “I didn’t even get my feet wet that time.”

  He stopped the engine and turned off the petrol. A motor boat came out to them from the shore and drew up near to them; the man in it hailed to them.

  “Hvor kommer De fra? Fra Skotland?”

  Ross shook his head. He called out to the man, “Are you Mr. Sorensen?”

  The boatman smiled at them. “Not speak Engelsk,” he said. He added an incomprehensible sentence.

  Alix, still standing on the float, said: “Er De Herr Sorensen?”

  The man addressed himself to her. Presently she turned to Ross, a little doubtfully. “I think he’s saying that Mr. Sorensen has had to go away, and he’ll be back to-night. He’s Sorensen’s man, all right.”

  The pilot stared at her. “Do you speak Danish?”

  “Not properly. I did a month at the Berlitz school before we started.”

  They beckoned to the boat to come alongside. The girl spoke to the boatman for a time, slowly and haltingly, fumbling for her words. Then she turned back to Ross. “He says, Mr. Sorensen told him to look out for us. We can use the boat. He knows where the petrol is, if you want it.”

  The pilot nodded. “We’d better get our things up to the hotel, and then I’ll come back and fill her up. If this fine weather lasts I want to go to Angmagsalik to-morrow. Get along while the going’s good.”

  They collected their personal luggage from the machine and got into the boat. As they went towards the shore the boatman began explaining something to Alix. She listened with strained attention to his many repetitions. Then she turned to Ross.

  “He says he knows a good place where you can get the seaplane on shore, right out of the water, if you want to. It’s something to do with trawlers, I think. I couldn’t quite make out what it is.”

  “Probably a slipway.” The pilot looked around him at the sky. “It all seems pretty settled. Tell him I want to get a weather report. If it’s a good one, we’ll leave her where she is, I think, and go on in the morning.” He smiled at her. “Can you put that over?”

  “I’ll try.”

  She made arrangements for the man to meet him again in an hour’s time for the refuelling; then they landed at the jetty and walked up to the hotel through a small crowd of spectators. The girl felt conspicuous in her overalls, and was glad to get into her room to change. From the hotel, the pilot went alone to the Meteorological Office in the broadcasting building.

  He was welcomed warmly by the meteorologist, who had been responsible for the Reykjavik end of their wireless messages in the morning as they crossed from Scotland. He told Ross at once that the weather between Reyjavik and Angmagsalik was fine that day, but liable to sudden changes. However, they expected it to last for the next day or two.

  Ross talked his programme over with the meteorologist and made arrangements with him for a forecast at six o’clock next morning. A true isobaric forecast would not be available; the best that they could do would be to get a message from Angmagsalik to say what it was like there. If it was good at both ends, he decided, he would start.

  He asked: “Is there much ice in the fjord at Angmagsalik?”

  He was told: “It has been a good season. The pack broke early, and the ice has been not much at Angmagsalik. There has been fog this year—plenty, plenty.”

  Of the two, he would rather have had ice. Both were bad enough.

  He went back to the hotel, and told Lockwood what he had decided. “If you’re game for it, sir, I’d like to get along to-morrow—the weather seems as good as it ever is in these parts. If we did that I wouldn’t mind how long we take to do the rest of it.”

  The don nodded. “You’re quite happy about the machine? You wouldn’t like to have a day here to look her over?”

  The pilot shook his head. “She’s all right. I’m just going down to fill her up, with the boatman; then she’ll be all ready for us in the morning.”

  He went out through the hall of the hotel. Alix was there, dressed in her blue jersey with rather a sad-looking grey skirt. She said: “Are you going to fill up, Mr. Ross?”

  He nodded. “I’m just going down now. I want to get that done right away.”

  “I’ll come with you.”

  He smiled. “Don’t bother about that, Miss Lockwood. I can manage all right with the boatman.”

  “I’d like to come, if I won’t be in the way.”

  He shook his head. “You won’t be in the way. As a matter of fact, you’ll be able to talk to him for me.”

  They found the man down at the jetty. The petrol was in cans in the fuel store three hundred yards from the boat; Ross and the boatman set to work to carry it down, helped by a little boy. The girl stood and watched their work, can after can, journey after journey, from the store to the boat. At the end of three-quarters of an hour of heavy work they were ready to go out to the seaplane.

  The refuelling commenced. The gi
rl squatted in the rear part of the cabin, translating now and again for Ross. Apart from that, there was little she could do to help him. Sitting there and watching, she was amazed and a little shocked at the hard physical work the pilot had to do. First, the contents of the big tank had to be pumped into the service tanks in the wings. The pump was a small double-acting cylinder beside the pilot’s seat, worked by an oscillating handle that could be operated only with one hand. About a hundred and ten gallons had to be pumped from the big tank to the service tanks, five feet higher in the wing. For half an hour the pilot worked the handle; then the boatman took a turn and Ross came aft to Alix, streaming with sweat, mopping his face with a handkerchief.

  She said: “That’s a terrible job, Mr. Ross. Isn’t there any better way of doing it?”

  He said: “It’s not so bad, really. In the air that amount of fuel would last about six hours. You’d have that time to get it up. It’s no work then; the pumping gives you something to do. It’s only when you’re filling up that it’s a bit of trouble.”

  He sat down by her on the sleeping-bags, dazed and fatigued. The strain of the morning’s flight was coming out; he felt sleepy, sick, and muddled in the head. It was impossible to smoke a cigarette because of the petrol fumes. He yawned. “Get to bed early to-night,” he said. “I want to go on early to-morrow morning, if we can.”

  “Wouldn’t you rather wait a day, Mr. Ross? We’ve got plenty of time in hand.”

  “I don’t think we’d better, unless you’re anxious to, Miss Lockwood. We’ve got good weather now. Once it breaks, up in these latitudes, it may be bad for a long time. We might get stuck here for a fortnight.”

  “I suppose so,” Alix said. “Shall we be starting very early?”

  He smiled slowly. “I won’t make you get up at half-past four again. We’ll have an easy day. Breakfast at half-past five.”

  She laughed. “I don’t mind getting up at half-past four, if you want to start then.”

  He shook his head. “There’s no point in it. I must have the weather report before we go, and I can’t get that till six.” He considered for a moment. “Besides, we aren’t going so far. It’s only four hundred and eighty miles to Angmagsalik.”

  The pump sucked. The boatman got down into the motor boat and began passing up petrol cans to Ross. The petrol was in two-gallon cans. The pilot stood in the cabin emptying these cans into a very large duralumin funnel lined with chamois leather; from long experience of the North he was insistent on straining every drop of petrol that went into the machine.

  In all, they put in about a hundred and forty-five gallons: seventy-three cans. Very soon they found the routine. The boatman handed up a can to Alix at the cabin door, who passed it up to Ross at the petrol tank, receiving from him an empty one in exchange. She passed that down to the boatman and took another full one; it went on interminably. The cockpit windows and the cabin door were open, but the cabin was filled with petrol fumes. Before long the girl was faint and dizzy; she had to force herself to go on with the work. The pilot, stooping above the petrol funnel in the close, hot little cabin, worked on doggedly. It took them rather over two hours to put in the petrol.

  After that there was the oil tank to be filled, the filters to be cleaned, and the sumps to be checked.

  The girl sat in the boat while this was going on, recovering herself in the clean air, watching the pilot as he stood upon the floats at his work. It was nearly seven o’clock; they had been working for three and a half hours, and she was very tired. The sun was getting towards the horizon; the mountains and the little town were bathed in the warm glow of evening. The seaplane and the motor boat rocked quietly together on the calm, dappled water of the harbour. The pilot worked on steadily, methodically. For the first time Alix began to understand long-distance flying. It was not courage, or resourcefulness, or ability that counted in this game, though they were necessary subsidiary qualities. It was the capacity to work efficiently at tiring, menial tasks upon the ground that made great flights a success.

  At last Ross was finished. He locked the cabin door and got down into the boat, hot and dirty. As they were carried to the shore she made arrangements with the boatman for Ross to be able to get at the boat if wind should get up in the night, and for the boat to meet them at the jetty at a quarter-past six in the morning. Then they landed, and walked slowly up to the hotel.

  “It’s been very good of you to come and help, Miss Lockwood,” said the pilot wearily. “It’s got us through much quicker.”

  “I never knew that there was so much work in it.”

  “It’s not so bad really. Takes a bit of time. Your Danish carne in very handy.” He glanced at her curiously. “Did you go and learn it specially for this trip?”

  She nodded. “Uncle David said it would be useful.”

  “Uncle David knows his stuff.” They reached the hotel. “Would you like a drink when we’ve had a wash, Miss Lockwood?”

  “I should think we’ve earned it.”

  He nodded. “Sherry? I’ll order it when I get down.”

  He met Lockwood in the lounge as he came down from his room; the don ordered the drinks. “Sherry for Miss Lockwood,” said the pilot. “I’ll have a tomato cocktail.”

  Alix came in as he spoke. “Break your rule and have a whisky and soda,” she said. “It’ll give you an appetite.”

  He shook his head. “I’m all right,” he said smiling. “I’d rather stick to something soft, if you don’t mind.”

  Lockwood said: “Do you make a point of that?”

  The pilot looked uncomfortable. “Well—in a way. I’ll drink a bucket with you when we get down to New York.”

  Presently they went in to dinner. The Lockwoods made a good meal; the pilot was too tired and too sick from the petrol fumes to eat very much. At the end they got up and went to take coffee in the lounge. Ross stretched himself in his armchair and relaxed. “I’d like to take a little walk along by the harbour presently,” he said. “Not very far, and then a spot of bed.”

  Lockwood said: “That’s a good idea: I’ll come out with you. You’ve had a heavy day, Mr. Ross.”

  “Oh, not so bad. But I’ll be glad to get to bed.”

  A stout Icelandic gentleman came bustling into the lounge and asked a question at the desk. Then he crossed the room to them, irradiating bonhomie, and bowed to them stiffly from the waist.

  “Sorensen,” he said. “I am very sorry that I was not here to meet you when you arrived. Just now I have come back from Thorlakshavn.” He explained. “Just now. Directly.”

  The pilot got to his feet; the others followed him. Introductions were made and they all shook hands; Alix got a specially low bow. Ross said: “You left us in very good hands, Mr. Sorensen. Your boatman did everything most efficiently.”

  The stout man beamed. “I am happy. He has said that you are now full up with gas.”

  The corners of the don’s mouth twitched ever so slightly. They talked for a few minutes about the seaplane and about the flight. Ross knew something about the agent; he was a member of the Government and an important man in Reykjavik.

  He said: “You have already eaten? I feel very bad. I have not been in Reykjavik to meet you, and to entertain. In Reykjavik we have great interest in the sciences, and in archæology. Have you yet seen our Cathedral? There is much interesting there.”

  Ross shook his head. “I’m afraid we haven’t had time to see anything of Reykjavik. We’ve been refuelling the machine all the afternoon, and we’re going on in the morning. I want to make an early start to get to Angmagsalik while this good weather lasts.”

  “So? Then we have very little time. We will go now, and I will show you the Cathedral, and the Town Hall, and the Fishing Docks. In my auto we will go—yes. And then we go to my house to meet some members of our Government, who wish to welcome you to Iceland.”

  The pilot’s heart sank. He was resolved to make an early start next morning, and he was longing for his bed. At the same
time, it was clear that he could not refuse this invitation without giving offence. Some sixth sense warned him that he had better not do that; he might have need of Mr. Sorensen.

  He said: “It really is most kind of you. I want to get back early, though. We’ve got to make a very early start tomorrow morning.”

  Lockwood said diffidently: “You do us more honour than we deserve, Herr Sorensen.” He, too, was thinking of his bed.

  The agent bowed stiffly from the waist. “On the contrary, it is Iceland that is honoured.”

  Alix said boldly: “Would you feel it rude of me if I let the men go alone, Herr Sorensen? I’m not really accustomed to flying, and I’m very tired.”

  He excused her and she went to bed at once; Lockwood and Ross went with him to the car. For an hour they drove around the town, still bathed in evening light in those high latitudes, maintaining a flow of polite admiration for the buildings and the harbour works that he showed them with such local pride, in which they could feel little interest. Finally they drew up at a large, well-built house a little way outside the town.

  They went in, and were presented with some ceremony to Fru Sorensen. Then they were presented to six or seven Icelandic business men, sombre in dark clothes, wooden and courteous, and speaking very little English. In this atmosphere of formal hospitality it was impossible for the pilot to refuse a glass of schnapps.

  “It is very healthy to drink Bols in Iceland,” said Fru Sorensen solemnly. “It is necessary for the cold and damp. In Iceland, those who do not drink Bols become ill.”

  Amost immediately the double doors of the salon were thrown open, and supper was announced. They went through to a heavy meal prepared in their honour in the next room. Ross was unable to refuse another Bols; the hot, stinging liquor gave him an appetite, and he ate a good meal. Coffee came, with more Bols, and they settled to the serious business of the evening. Lockwood, on his part, had to give a little lecture on the scientific objects of the flight. He found he had a well-read and attentive audience, who started a discussion upon Celtic influence in Iceland that went on interminably, in very difficult English. Then it was the pilot’s turn, and for half an hour he had to tell them all about the flight.