They got to the bay not a day too soon, for they found that it was already filling with whales. Great herds of them came in to breed at that time of year as the thaw set in and the ice in the sea cracked and broke apart and made a passage through. The ship went in and waited, and the great unsuspecting beasts frolicked in with spouts and grand slaps of their tails as if they gathered to play at a fairground there among the ice.
No fog those first few days and he was light-headed with the brightness and the present moment. It was when they began the hunting that his mood began to change.
Thomas Cave had been whaling before but never till now had he seen it like this. That winter ashore had marked him and put him at a distance from men. He saw his fellows with a strange objectivity as they went about their work, as if he saw them, and himself also, from a distance and without connection. He saw the hugeness of the landscape and of the whales, how small the men and their boats were beside them, small as if they could be picked up and crumpled in God's hand. He saw the dark Biscayans with their harpoons, like pictures he had seen of little devils with their forks, and he saw the leviathans slaughtered; saw, with a strange and dawning horror, the whirlpools about them, the streaming wakes of their flight, the red fountains of blood that spouted up as they died, then the great red stain that spread across the bay, heavy with blubber-oil and the debris of death, and slapped against the ship's side, and the screeching hordes of gulls that dived amongst it. It came to him like an image almost of hell. He saw it and yet he worked on at the heart of the thing, worked on the carcases that they brought in and tied to the side of the ship, climbed the slippery, lice-encrusted bodies and cut the blubber off them. He worked through bright day and light night. He talked little to the others of the crew. When the work stopped and they went on shore, he brushed by them in silence. They sat before a fire and ate the rich whale and walrus meat and drank their ale and talked and swore, but Thomas Cave sat apart.
There was a lad of fourteen who made them laugh, a fresh-faced boy still with a touch of the land to him, who could as well have been an acrobat as come to sea, who somersaulted and turned cartwheels and tumbled before them. He would turn himself over a half-dozen times and land on his hands instead of his feet and walk away like that with his feet in the air and his hair down over his face, or bend his body back so that he was like a crab and scuttle sidelong down to the water's edge, then back up again and turn his head and grin upside-down at the man who stood above him.
'Would you catch a crab, sir?'
Cave did not joke but only shook his head, and the boy sprang upright again, for he was a kind boy and was sobered by an intuition of the sadness in him.
'My name is Thomas Goodlard, I think we have not spoken before. I've been working on one of the whaleboats. It's my first time out.'
'And what do you think of it?'
'It's hard, isn't it, but grand?' The boy was like a puppy and could not sit still. 'Like it's all new and there's no past here and everything's still to happen. I never imagined there could be a place in the world like this.'
Thomas Cave heard the East Anglian inflection in the boy's voice, looked about him at the other men, at the oddity of the gathering on the beach, at the mountains that stood so cold and serene above them in the light of the night. He saw that the boy was wrong: each man before the fire had brought his past with him, a history there whether it was wanted or not, in each face and each voice, and he realised that even here where there were none to remind him he would not forget. He understood that she had come to Greenland with him.
He works the night through. He has gouged out from the wood the shape of his foot, curved the ends of it so that it will roll beneath his step. He takes up a second piece of beech and begins the reverse form for the other foot. Every now and then he makes a test, turns quickly in case she is there in the corner of his eye. Can she really have gone? Was it not just now, this same night, that he saw her out there beneath those whirring lights, walking in the snow with the child on her hip, singing to him?
'This is no place for you. Nor for him most of all. Go back, go away! Why do you bring him here?'
It was she. He could have sworn that it was she. A shawl drawn about the child and over her head so that it hid her face, but he knew her by the way she stood, with a gentle weight as if she had spread roots into the white ground. She stood quite still, some few yards off, and a sudden gust of wind blew specks of snow on to the curve of her head and shoulders and into the folds of the shawl. She did not lift her head to look at him but when he shouted her song stopped, the hum of the lullaby she had been singing.
'Do you hear me? Go, in God's Name. Whatever kind of apparition you are, and I know that you are not Johanne, go.' Each word hurt him as he spoke it.
Still she stood, still as a statue. Then at last she brushed away the snow that had gathered on her shawl and rearranged it, wrapping its end tighter about the child that clung to her side, and when she had finished she took up another song, a livelier song this one, in a stronger tone that carried well against the wind. A Danish song; he could not make out the words but it was jaunty like a nursery rhyme or a playground chant. Again she wrapped the shawl and began to turn away, rocking the little boy on her hip to the rhythm of the song, and the little boy pushed back the shawl so that he saw him for the first time, and put out his head and beat his round fist against her chest and began to laugh.
How long ago had it been? Ten minutes, an hour? The work before him, the work that he has done this night, suggests that it was longer, the surface of the table and the floor about him a curling sea of wooden parings. He feels the chisel in his hand, how his palm is pressed into its shape, has been clenched about it for so long that it is hard to loosen his fingers and release the wood. Yet he puts the tool down and stretches out his hand, and as he does so his own cruel shouts reverberate the louder in his brain.
'Go, go, go!' he called into the wind, and the song still came back to him though he could see them no longer.
'Be gone!'
He sank down then on his knees on the polished crust of ice before the door of the tent and began to pray, formlessly at first, stuttering 'Our Fathers', holding and re-uttering random phrases as if the simple repetition of church words was effective incantation. Then the tears came slowly and froze on his beard and he began to speak what he knew of the service of burial. Let him bury them, bury them again, bury even their memory in the snow. Let there be no more dreams, no more ghosts, no more of superstition. Let there be no more before him than what he knows by his reason, the hard evidence of the material world. Let survival be his sole intent. Ashes to ashes, ice to ice. His breathing had soothed with the order of the words, and the luminosity of the sky faded until there was only a blink of green in the stars above the horizon, and the night became densely black but he could not believe that she was gone.
'Go, God damn you! Go to the Devil. I will not have you here!'
13
TRULY THE LIGHT is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun.' I have read again on this twenty-seventh day of February the lines of Ecclesiastes, and never I believe did any man since the Testament was written know the sun so gloriously resurrected.
I do not know on which day I might first have seen it from my vantage point on the mountain. I have not been able to climb again all these past days on account of my injury. All this week I have had the sense of the sun's closeness, the weather each morning clear and full of promise, the colours of the sunrise holding in the sky the full length of a day, the light falling gold and pink on the ice, and this light becoming so directional at noontime, gilding the mountaintops and throwing their shadows across the clefts behind them, that I must conclude that its orb would already have been visible from the heights. Down here where my cabin lies, just a little above the level of the frozen sea, where I hobble about my tasks with a crutch made up out of whalebone and my ankle, which remains too swollen to fit into a boot, swaddled in bearskin,
I saw not even a slice of it until this day. And then seeing it I left my work, and it drew me, hobbling down the hard path my movements have beaten into the snow, down to the edge of the land and out some short distance on to the ice of the bay where the widest view may be obtained of the southern horizon.
Never has a sight been more welcome, never surely more beautiful: the rosy sky, the soft streaks of yellow in it, the glow that lit from below the few skimming clouds, the sun itself, and all that reflected again on the ice below. My words cannot begin to convey my elation at that moment, my exhilaration that the predicted and sure event in which yet at the darkest moments I had almost ceased to believe, had finally come to pass, my tearful relief which must have been akin to that of the women who saw the stone rolled back and met a living man in the Garden of the Tomb.
The vision was over within minutes, the sun slipping away as eerily as it had come, down behind the curvature of the Earth. And when it had gone the relief burst out in him, and he spread his legs and dug his crutch in firm, took in a great breath and cried out, a great resounding holler fit to shatter all the ice.
And then.
Thomas Cave puts down his pen and reads back what he has written. There is falseness in the words, but does the falseness lie in them or between them? Writing, like speech, is part performance and even when it is true it is not the truth. For he has not written all of it. He will not write the all of it. How the cry died. How the last echo faded off the land behind him as the colours left the sky. How elation turned, and faith was no longer there. How he wept again then, wept on and on, a crumpled man.
He wept until the tears were ice.
And then at last he picked up his crutch and hobbled back, and the pain in his ankle as he put his weight on it was the one vivid point in all the emptiness around and within him.
Fool, he tells himself. Foolish Cave, you should have known. The light of the sun is not spring. Winter is not done with you yet. Survival does not lie in the heavens but in a man's patience, above all.
Even when the darkness was at its worst he had not known such bleak monotony as comes to him during these last months of the winter. The days stretch, each one of them almost tangibly longer than the last, but they do not warm. The equinox comes and is passed, a day of such cold uniform light that almost he wishes to have the dark back. That his soul may sleep, that the sun had not come to wake it. That he might but lie down on the ice through the empty day and sleep.
April first. I record here that according to my calendar March has run into April, yet still there is no change save for this lengthening of the light. Can this indeed be April? Such hope in the word as I have always known it, joy and spring and the rise of sap there just in the word alone, but here in this place it is not any April deserving of the name.
I live. I have food for some weeks more. The days grow, but that is all. Time is barren. I have determined that I shall cease from writing until life stirs inside it.
14
WHITE ON WHITE.
The fox is hard to see even three yards off, just a ripple of white in all the white as it searches through the snow-covered heap of bones and scraps that has grown all winter outside the tent. Thomas Cave constructs a trap like those he has made in the past for shipboard rats, using split scrimshaw whalebone that is strong but fine and flexible and springy, baits it with pieces of meat gone rancid in his store.
The fox was hungry. Next morning it is caught. He hangs it to freeze and dry three days in the biting wind and cooks it then with plums and raisins. He takes up his log once more and records the act, and the flavour of the meat. The meat of the white fox is sinewy and strong, a rough meat but fresh.
A flutter of white is a bird in the snow. It is so long since he has seen a bird. He knows it as a ptarmigan, recognises now its odd rattling call. He has heard this sound off and on for days, a sound that is almost mechanical and that has made him look over his shoulder and unnerved him. Strange soft white bird, so comfortable it looks on the snow. When it is still, only the line of black that runs from its eye to its beak betrays it. Though he has his musket in his hand he does not take it up to aim. There is too much promise in the sight.
He begins to see bears frequently now, coming close up to the tent but also in the distance as they cross the ice, the more easily distinguishable as their fur shows stained and yellowish on bright days against the snow. There are lone bears but often pairs, mothers with their cubs, and when he hunts and kills a mother he is both astonished and distressed to see the devotion with which the cub stays by and must be killed itself rather than leave its mother's side. Over the course of the winter he has developed an admiration for these beasts which the harshest conditions do not deter, and which seem to roam so far and wide, appearing sometimes from across the ice as if they have skated across oceans to reach the island. He sees that they move on the ice like skaters, with long slipping steps, and as the ice begins to melt he is amazed to observe how light they can be in motion, escaping his gun at times by cutting across ice far thinner than he himself would dare to walk on.
At last the thaw becomes a perceptible process although there are days still, sometimes a week together, of blizzard and cold equal to any that he has previously experienced. It is the sky that first tells him that the ice has begun to break} up out beyond the bay, dark streaks of what Captain Duke had called water sky, revealing by the intensity of its reflected colour wherever the darkness of clear sea, rather than the paleness of ice, lies beneath. Out there it is evident also that the sea has begun to move, for daily he witnesses the effects of the tide as its flow and ebb varies the pressure on the ice in the bay and causes it to creak and move and in places to crack open. He sees that ice rots before it dissolves, its texture becoming soft and spongy before it disintegrates into porridge and slush. Where it breaks and pools are revealed, the exposed sea reeks steam into the sunlight as if it had boiled beneath.
With the melt a drab and dirty world which he had almost forgotten begins to re-emerge. There is seaweed, slimy and almost black in colour, which the bears claw up on the strand, and patches of anaemic moss. There is the carcase of a fox that must have frozen as the winter began and become buried in the snow. In the area around the tent the objects of the whale station once more show themselves, and also his own detritus: not only the bones and scraps but every sausage of faeces he has carried out that winter and dumped beside the path. He begins to be aware now as he approaches his lodging of its smell, a smell that has become a constant of his enclosed existence, a fetid and manly smell of smoke and blubber and long-hung meat.
As May reaches its close there are endless days of crystal clarity when the sun at its height feels hot on his face as if it would burn his skin through. He closes his eyes to its brightness, relishes the heat on his lids, on his temples and cheeks as if it touched the bone beneath. One of these days, a day that is fine as the warmest spring day in England, he does at last a thing he has been thinking to do for weeks. He takes off his clothes in the sun, not only the boots and hat and furs of which he often now divests himself, but jacket and breeches, and linen that is grey and stained and comes off like old fruit peel. The skin he exposes is extraordinarily naked beneath the sunlight, so white that it is almost blued where the shadows fall beneath angular bones, in parts coloured darker where clothing has rubbed and it has been chafed and hardened. He observes his body almost objectively: the pale stomach and ribbed chest, his legs like sticks with a wiry mass of hairs on them, his thin arms hollowed at the elbows, hands at their ends that look huge and black as he turns them before his eyes, the dark tidemarks at his wrists, the other tidemark of filth that he cannot see but can only feel where the skin on his neck beneath his beard is both greasy and engrained with dirt.
He wraps his naked body in a cloak and walks down to a hole in the ice close to the shore. There for the first time he washes, rubbing himself until every part of his body tingles, and it is an extraordinary hard pleasure. He takes up the clo
ak again and returns to the tent. In his cabin there is other linen, clean linen. But first he throws a broad plank down on the dazzling patch of snow before his door and lies on the smooth wood in the sunshine and basks himself dry.
When he lies on his back he must put a hand across his eyes to shield them from the brightness, to give himself a filtered view that is criss-crossed by the passage of birds overhead. There are so many birds now, moving in gigantic flocks, thousands of birds at a time that come in from the south forming a band in the sky that seems to reach to the very horizon; he sees them approach at first as so many black specks, like particles blown in the smoke from a fire, separating and weaving and drawn together again, hears then the distant uproar of their cries coming closer, long before he can distinguish the individuals, the beat of their wings. He remembers how astonished he had been when he saw the first flock of seabirds, a little flock sudden as an apparition, no more than half a score of birds twittering on a rock on the mountainside. Later that same day a second group arrived, then others in the days that followed, until after a week the mountain and the glacier behind were entirely covered with birds, and they remained two days and then as unexpectedly as they had come they were gone, and he did not know if it was a change in the weather that drove them away or some purpose, some instinct they had that they must move on and breed on some ground even farther north.
Soon as the weather cleared again other flocks came in their wake, eiders and guillemots and other birds he has known at sea, and an innumerable flock of some grey bird the size of a pigeon for which he had no name, and he was as strange to them as they to him, for the birds showed no fear of him or caution and he could almost pluck them out of the sky or off the ground with his hand. He walked among them where they went to nest on the rocks that were now bare of snow, and there were so many of them that they darkened the sky above his head and he could hear nothing beyond their clamour. The little pigeon birds in particular were not much to eat, so little flesh they had on them, but he used their carcases to bait his traps and caught the foxes that were now to be found in numbers surprising for animals of such solitary nature, attracted to the coast he guessed by the presence of the birds.
The Solitude of Thomas Cave Page 10