The storm has lasted now some days without change. The ceaseless howl of the wind and the knowledge of the blackness weigh most heavily on my spirit. I endeavour to occupy myself and as I await the Lord's compassion I have repaired my clothes and made the heels for fifty pairs of shoes. Two or three times a day I cast myself down in prayer. I pray to the Lord that He may hold me sane as well as alive until I shall see His blessed sun again, that He will hold me to this Earth, for there are moments when delusions and dreams come to me more vividly than my actuality.
He writes this and knows that what he writes is not the full truth. But is a man's diary ever the truth? Isn't it always an invention, an idea of a possible truth which he uses to control his understanding of himself? He dips his pen again into the ink that he keeps warm by the edge of the stove.
The truth is that the hardest thing to bear through these frozen days has not been the dreams but the absence of them. The loneliness. He remembers how it was in his illness, how she came to him and slept by him and was a comfort to him. She has not come to him again since the storm began, since that moment when she stood out there beside him beneath the sky.
A short time before the onset of this storm I beheld a most amazing display of lights in the heavens. They appeared high above the northwest horizon and played until the very zenith of the sky was lit with shooting rays of fiery colours such as I had not seen before. No sooner had these vanished and I myself returned and closed myself within the fastness of the tent than there came a rush of sound and the wind began its awful howling. As I had seen no other indication I begin now to wonder whether this very phenomenon of the lights may not have been a harbinger of the weather that was to come.
He writes at the table with the light beside him, puts his pen once more to the ink and sees in the corner of his eye the movement of a shadow against the wall. He looks up, but there is nothing there. The effect can only have been due to the movement of his own arm across the light. He reaches again, experimentally repeating his previous action, and there it is, the same dim shudder. He feels a touch light on his head, but it is no more than a flake of ash that has detached from the chimney. He puts a hand to his eyes for a moment's rest, but pulls it away and opens them sharply, thinking that he has heard the rustle of her skirt in the sound of the flames.
He opens his door at last, clambers up over driven snow. Every surface reflects the moonlight, white and smoothed as the wind has left it, the form of the tent gone into a dune, the boilers, the two remaining shallops, every mark of the whalers erased, his footprints gone from the ground. There was a path he had made to a pool far along the beach where water still ran from beneath the glacier and since the beginning of winter he had been able to break through the ice. It is quite lost now, the landmarks about it eerily altered. He sees that he will not find the spot again but must melt snow for his drinking until the ice itself begins to thaw. He brings out a half-barrel and fills it, ramming his shovel against the hard crust.
The aurora that appears as he works comes without colour or pulsation. He perceives only an increase in the light about him and looks up to see white shining clouds in the sky. Like high cumulus, he thinks, soft and woolly like lambs, but they come and go without pattern, without wind to drive them. And before he turns his eyes back to the ground he sees that she is standing not twenty yards off where the beach merges with the ice.
The air is cold enough to pain his nostrils and freeze a rime on his beard and yet she has only a shawl wrapped about her jacket and her hands tucked into it as into a muff.
'With the baby,' she says, 'I am always warm. It is like a stove within me.' And she is big like a stove and he puts his hand to her so that it might warm him too.
And then she walks off ahead of him and he follows, leaving a single line of new footprints in the untouched surface of the snow. As the aurora dims she becomes no more than a shadow, wavering and faintly drawn. So the Lord led His People through the Wilderness, a cloud by day. On he walks in a state of strange elation, out over the frozen sea, past rocks whose outline he might know and others that he does not know. Ahead she goes, becoming fainter before him until at last the aurora is gone, as if it had never been there, and she is gone with it. Quite gone, not a sign, not a track of her remaining, so that he must know the truth that he has held ignored within him all the time: that she was never there. She was a delusion, his warm and lovely apparition. And if that, then who had brought her to him? Could it be that it was God, bringing solace to him in the darkness, or was it some other? He wakes, it is like a waking, and sees where he has come to. So far. A little time more, another step and another, a dimming of the moonlight, and she might have led him to his death, drawing him, enticing him so far out on to the ice on this night of all nights, this stark night when the snow has fallen deep and orientation is lost. And he had likened her in his mind to the Lord who led the Israelites in the desert. What pride, what blasphemy! He feels the breath chill before his lips and questions if he deserves to live. Yet God is merciful and the moon stays with him. Looking down, he can see his footprints in the snow, and they are indented just enough and the light is just enough for him to make his tentative and shamed way home.
He bends first one and then the other stiffened knee onto the wooden floor, puts together his frozen hands and prays, begs forgiveness for his temptation. She is no work of the Lord, he knows that now; she is not to be confused with any sign of Him. She is weakness and superstition, the softness of his mind. He sobs out contrition along with thanksgiving and vows that he will be seduced by her no more.
His flesh feels sore as if he has been beaten by the cold. One of the fingers of his right hand is blistered by the frost. He rubs it with alcohol, wraps it, and writes with great awkwardness in his log. He chooses not to record his misadventure: December twentieth, by my reckoning, a Friday. I shall keep this day following the cessation of the great storm as a day of fast in gratitude for my deliverance.
No recognition, but only the memory of her will he keep. There cannot be sin, he tells himself, in memory.
As that winter hardened the baby grew within her. She seemed healthy as a cow, he thought, and he saw her fatten all over, saw her cheeks become round and red as apples and began to laugh to see the size of her coming through the narrow cottage door.
As she approached her time her back began to ache and her ankles to swell and she was awake often changing her position in the night. 'I cannot lie comfortably,' she said, 'he is pressing against me.' He, she was sure that it was he, on account of his apparent length within her and the size she was with him. And she would take a pillow and arrange it beneath a part of her and for some time the new position would allow her to rest. Thomas Cave however lay wakeful those nights watching her shadowy outline and listening to the steadiness of her breath. He knew that soon enough she would wake again and that in the darkest hour of the watch there would be fear. The child would turn within her and she would wake again clutching her belly as if he were already breaking out of it.
'He is too big for me, Thomas. I dreamt that he had the long bones of a whale. I saw the bones that came from Greenland, long curved bones that you said came from the jaw of the beast.'
'Nonsense,' he said, and moved on to his side behind her so that he wrapped her in his length. 'You must not let such thoughts prey upon you. You who are so young and fit. It is only that you do not have a mother to tell you so.' He put his arm about her and stroked her calm again, and yet her fear had communicated itself to him as he silently recalled that her own mother had not lived beyond her birth.
There was a woman in the district who knew about these things. He did not feel at ease with her. She had a thin white face and long teeth, and her hair was all put away in a cap as if she might be bald beneath, and yet her ugliness did not prevent her from talking good sense. 'No whale my dear but too much cheese you ate. Those bones you feel will be the boy's legs, for with that shape you have he'll be a boy for sure, and a tall one. Have yo
u not seen how they are, a newborn's legs? They come out bent from being so long cramped up inside, bent like those of a trussed chicken.'
Yet she gave her an ale that she had brewed from sage and other herbs, and returned on the following day and felt Johanne's belly again, and this time she rubbed both her belly and her back with oils of violets and poppies. He saw then that she had soft white hands like those of a lady and that her fingernails were trim and clean. He had more confidence in her, seeing that, and chose to walk with her back to her house. A ship had just come in at the quay and the street was packed with its comings and goings. Their talk was interrupted often as some hasty figure divided them or they must step aside before a trolley or a cart.
'She's all right, isn't she?'
'She's young.'
'And strong. You've seen her.'
'She looks strong enough.'
Again he tried for reassurance.
'The fear is all in her mind, don't you think? You must see that often, the first time.'
'See that she drinks that ale I gave her each morning when she wakes. That will make her strong and help her to hold the baby until her time.'
'And the baby, the baby's well?'
A sailor brushed between them and when they came together again he had just a glance from her small brown eyes. 'Keep some pears in her chamber. Good, big pears. That will stop it from coming too soon.'
That was the week of Christmas. They spent it warmly, the three of them, Johanne, her father and himself. He had money still from his Greenland voyage, and he went about the city and bought them gifts, a length of fine russet wool for Johanne and a piece of fine-tooled Cordovan leather for Hans. He felt sure now that he would be able to settle with them on land, was impatient even to do so after so many years. Just once more would he go to sea, in the summer that followed, and with good whaling bring back enough to set them up. Johanne cooked a goose and for those days she too was happy and seemed to lay her fears aside. He took his fiddle down from the wall and played to them, and if she could not dance in such a lively way as she had before, then she could get up in her pleasure and stamp her foot or clap her hands and sway from side to side so that her loosened hair flowed behind her. Without a word Hans took up his sticks and hobbled away to bed, and he played on and was proud of her, so grand in scale that she might be a figurehead and break the waves and lead men out to sea.
Christmas Day. In celebration I have cooked the last of my hung store of venison stewed with plums. I have awarded myself a flagon of wine and seven inches of tobacco. It has been a mild day, for which God be praised, and I have forsaken my habitual chores and eaten generously and sat long at my table like a lord. At noon I left the cooking upon the stove and took a stroll outside. For a brief time I saw a faint white glow on the horizon that tells me that the glorious sun shines on the day far to the south. I take comfort from knowing that December nears its close and the deepest of this long night is passed.
Strong, heavy food it was, a hunter's food, the meat a little high but the plums and spices and the long cooking made it tolerable enough. Sometimes his gut pines if not with hunger then with need of some other thing to eat. The grasses he gathered lasted well but he has nothing left of them now but a handful of dry and brittle strands. All that he has is dried, salted, preserved, rancid. It is almost a pain to him to imagine greenness, the first bite of an apple, or to think of the freshness of milk, butter, new cheeses, white foods soft as women.
Johanne drank much milk. She had a child's milky breath, a fringe of white about her upper lip. And he brought her sweetmeats as if she were a child, exotic foods, cakes cooked with cinnamon. Any delicacy she wanted, he would go out into the city and find it for her. He allowed himself a little money for luxuries from what he had put by.
'These I got from a sailor from Portugal, candied plums. They are said to be the finest in all of Europe.'
The fruit was the size of a bantam's egg, green like an artificial jewel and glistening with sugar. She ate it delicately, savouring its strangeness. 'You must not do this, Thomas Cave. Not only will you make me fat but you will spoil me for a lady.'
But giving it to her was like giving a sweet thing to a child. He could not resist the way she glowed at a treat. Her eyes lit up and her cheeks became all the pinker, so touchingly young and round beneath her little cap.
That January ice stretched right out across the Sound and the city authorities paid gangs of vagrant men to cut a channel more than a sea mile in length, from the edge of the ice all the way into the town. Down this came a brave Dutch vessel laden with other precious goods from Spain, fancy metalwork and tooled leathers as well as foods and wines. This ship became the centre of a great market on the ice to which all kinds of pedlars came, and also the farmers of the district bringing their produce in carts and sleighs. He thought it a fine and memorable sight, the festive crowd spilling out from the quay on to the frozen sea, lone figures of skaters in the flat white distance, the tall buildings of the town behind, the static ship at the heart of the crowd, sails furled, masts bare, tall like a building itself above the ice.
'Come out this once, Johanne, it'll do you good.'
In two weeks she had barely left the house. She said that her head ached and that she felt a throbbing in her, and her legs hurt when she stood, for all that the old woman had pressed and soothed with her fingers and fed her ales and potions. 'No, I shan't come with you,' she said, 'not into such a crowd. But you go, go and then tell me all about it after.'
'Then what shall I bring you?'
'How can I say until I know what there is?'
'Just give me a hint, my love, of what you would most like. The ship's come from Spain, you know. A land of sun and gold, the richest country in the world.'
Johanne laughed at his eagerness and looked about her at the simple room, the whitewashed walls, the wooden floor, the square glassless window with the shutter half across it and the grey chill of winter outside.
'Bring me a piece of its sun then!'
So he went out alone and saw the spectacle. The ice was frozen right across to Sweden and from there came sledges pulled by tough shaggy ponies that looked far too small for the weight behind them, for the drivers who were huge men in wolfskins and for their loads of furs and meat and wood; and other sledges driven by men and women in coloured and fur-trimmed felts who sold hunting knives and fish hooks carved out of bone. There were braziers where men stood and warmed themselves from the inside with fiery shots of liquor, and he stopped at one of these and went on with sparkling eyes and bought himself bread and charred meat to satisfy the sudden sharp hunger that came upon him.
Close beneath the ship he found a crowd gathered about three of the Spanish sailors who played pipes and drums, and in the space before them was a tiny creature dancing. At first he thought it must be a very small child, but fine and nimble and not sturdy like the toddlers he was used to knowing, a delicate child in a green silk dress weaving gloved hands in the air and hopping from one little fur boot to the other. Then the creature turned its head to the sound of the drum and he saw that the look on its face was weirdly still, its blue eyes, despite the sinuous movement of its body, fixed and quite unblinking. For a second he looked and did not understand, and then at some apparent signal from the pipe, the creature set its little hands to its neck as if to lift away its head. One, two, a roll of drums, and the blue-eyed baby face came off, and beneath it was another one, the wizened, brown, wide-grinning face of a monkey: the dainty dancer was no child at all but a monkey, wearing the head of a life-sized doll. He was so disturbed by the sight that he was suddenly glad that Johanne had not come and seen it. At another sound from the pipe the monkey made a bow, to the right, to the left, to the crowd before it, and took up a red-lined box to collect its pay. Thomas Cave held out a coin and when it came close he thought that its grin seemed a grimace and saw how its arm shivered and its teeth were chattering, and he felt pity that it had its nature taken from it and that it was
so far removed from home and climate. What were men to take a free creature so and play with it and make it like a human? When he went on he was sobered so that the cold began to get to him and drive him in.
For Johanne all he bought was an orange. It was one that he chose with care from a tall pile, and big enough to fill his hand.
He brought it home and gave it to her, and for three days she treasured her piece of sun on the stone window-sill until she could resist no longer. She took it down then and peeled the skin with clumsy fingers and broke it open, and the tang of its scent shot through the room.
8
AGAIN SHE IS there about him. During this spell of hard still days he has relaxed his vigilance and let himself think about her, and his thoughts have brought her back. Even if he does not see her he knows her presence, the slow rustle of her movement about him, her soft breath. 'Oh Johanne, who would have thought it could be like this? The cold is not at all as I could have imagined. The sensation of it when I step outside, how it strikes deep in the stomach, how my muscles seem sore from the effect of it as from a beating, the way it burns as if God made my nerves and sinews to react to fire but never to know this degree of cold. Even here inside the cabin I have touched a piece of metal so cold that it burns and clings to the fingers like birdlime and I must warm it or tear my skin before it can be released. Once too hastily I put a stoneware mug to my lips to drink and it stuck to my beard and lips. It is more intense than anything I could have anticipated but at the same time more bearable. It astonishes me how the time passes and the fire burns down and is built up again and I shape my day between sleep and work and meals and prayer and continue to endure. I eat little, sleep much. I become like an animal that hides itself through the winter and sleeps until spring.'
The Solitude of Thomas Cave Page 6