Complete Works of Nevil Shute

by Nevil Shute

  Hekja said happily, “Our names are now together, Haki, for as long as the stone shall endure. Leif said so.”

  He leaned towards her on one elbow, and took her hand in his. “This is a good country,” he said earnestly, “better than Greenland. I will ask Leif to let us stay here when the ship goes back, and you shall have your children here.”

  There was a momentary silence.

  Alix forced a laugh. “Wake up, Mr. Ross,” she said, a little tremulously. “You’re still asleep.”

  He turned away and stared at the tent wall, bitterly disappointed.

  TEN

  TOWARDS DAWN THE pilot fell into a doze and slept a little; in his turn, Lockwood lay awake till morning. He had an orderly mind that criticised all evidence, that made a stern distinction between fact and fiction. What Ross had told him was a dream, no more, a figment of a tired, drugged imagination — fiction. It was no more than that. As he rolled round in his sleeping bag, he thought irritably that there was nothing in it to keep him awake.

  For fiction, it was disturbingly concerned with fact. It could not be denied that there had been a man called Leif, the son of Erik, nor that he had discovered a new country on the mainland of America and called it Wineland the Good. The story occurred with variations in three separate sagas. The rational explanation was, of course, that Ross had read the sagas at some time; these memories had been fished up from the depths of his subconscious mind and joined to more recent memories to form a dream. Lockwood was not well versed in the vagaries of the subconscious mind, but he knew that such a combination formed the basis of a great many dreams. It was all quite easily explainable when you came to think of it.

  Quite easily, if you discounted Ajago. He rolled around again, trying to put out of his mind the things the Eskimo had said. No reasonable man would give much weight to those, in any case.

  He did not sleep at all.

  At dawn he saw that the pilot was asleep. The don lay patiently in bed till eight o’clock to give the pilot sleep; then he got up and called Alix. Presently she appeared and began to get breakfast; with the slight noises that she made the pilot woke.

  She crossed over to him. “You’ve been asleep, Mr. Ross. Feel better for it?”

  He yawned. His mind was quiet and at rest for the first time for many days. He said, “I feel fine. I suppose I’d better get up.”

  She sat down on the end of his bed. “You’d much better stay where you are this morning. I’ll give you your breakfast in bed. The doctor said you were to have bread and milk again.”

  He was disinclined to move; the nervous urge that had driven him since they left England had gone altogether. He smiled. “All right. I’ll probably go off to sleep again when I’ve had that.”

  He ate his bread and milk while the other two breakfasted at the table. As soon as possible Alix and her father left the hut, hoping that in their absence Ross would go to sleep again. They walked down to inspect the seaplane on the beach.

  It was a fresh sunny morning with a keen wind from the icecap; gulls wheeled about them with sharp cries, the blue water of the fjord broke in a tiny surf upon the sand. There was a feel of autumn in the air already. As they walked down towards the seaplane, Lockwood said:

  “Our pilot told me a very odd story, last night.”

  The girl said, “I know, Daddy. You mean his dream.”

  He looked at her in surprise. “Did he tell you about it?”

  She shook her head. “No — I was awake last night. I heard him telling you.”

  “Did you hear all of it?”

  “I think so.”

  He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “What did you think of it?”

  She did not answer immediately. They reached the seaplane and walked round it absently; then she sat down on the bow of one of the floats. He repeated his question.

  She said slowly, “I don’t know what to think. What did you think of it, Daddy?”

  He turned irritably aside. “I don’t know. One thing is clear. We’ve got to face the fact that he’s been very ill, much worse than we realised.”

  She said testily, “I don’t know what you realised. I thought at one time he was going to die.”

  He turned back to her. “I know,” he said more gently. “I meant that, mentally, he’s been through a great strain.”

  She nodded slowly. “That may be. If he has, he’s come out of it all right. But anyway, that’s no real explanation why he should start talking about Leif Erikson.”

  Her father said, “Well, that’s quite easily explained. He must have read the sagas at some time or other. It’s all in Hank’s Book and the Flatey Book.”

  “All of it?”

  He hesitated. “Well, some of it.”

  He turned to her. “It’s really rather interesting. He must have read the sagas at some time or other, or heard somebody lecturing on them. Those impressions sink down into the subconscious mind. In a time of great mental strain they come to the surface again, mixed up with a great mass of other memories, some recent, some far distant. The result is what we call a dream. Generally in a dream the story is an incoherent muddle. Sometimes by coincidence it makes a rational account. That’s what this one is.”

  She shook her head. “He’s not the sort of man who goes to lectures on Leif Erikson. You know he’s not.”

  He said doggedly, “He’s heard the story from the sagas in some way or other.”

  She eyed him for a moment. “Do you really think that?”

  “It’s the only possible explanation.”

  She was silent. He filled and lit a pipe. “It’s possible to trace it all out,” he said meditatively. “One must assume to start with that he has some knowledge of the sagas, buried deep down in the background of his mind. Next, in his dream he sees the cove where we were camping. Well, that’s perfectly natural. A very recent memory. But he sees a house there that isn’t there in fact.”

  The girl nodded. “It’s not so easy to explain away that one.”

  The don smiled. “It’s not so difficult. A badly lit house, with a sleeping bench running the length of it, dividing it in two. It’s the Eskimo house — the one where we spent the night.”

  Alix stared at him in wonder. “I never thought of that.”

  Her father smiled. “That feature puzzled me at first. But you’ve got to put yourself in his shoes and try to sort back through his memories. It’s quite clear to me now — that part of his dream was just a flashback to the Eskimo house.”

  The girl said slowly, “What sort of houses did the Norsemen in Greenland live in, anyway?”

  The don said, “Stone houses, roofed with thatch or turf on wooden beams. There was generally a dais.”

  She asked, “Was a dais like a sleeping bench?”

  “I suppose so.”

  The girl said, “It seems to me that a Viking house was very like an Eskimo house. Do you think the Eskimos learned to build them from the Norsemen?”

  “They may have done.” He turned to her. “You mustn’t try and stretch the evidence,” he said. “A dream memory of the Eskimo house is the most likely explanation, and it’s backed by so much else.”

  She asked, “What else?”

  He smiled, “For one thing, the sea voyage. While he was unconscious we put his stretcher on the boat and rowed across the cove. The motion of the boat and the sound of the oars penetrated into his sleeping mind, and he dreamed of a long voyage in an open boat.”

  She was silent. Her father went on.

  “Then there’s the feature of the wonderful land he found, sunny, and beautiful, and fertile. I think that’s what psychologists would call a contrast-impression. In the last month he’s been in barren lands, continually strained and anxious about ice, and storms, and fog. Subconsciously he must loathe all this sort of country. So when he dreams, he dreams about a perfect country, happy and wonderful. That’s probably a country that he’s seen before some time — perhaps in Canada.”

  He paused,
and then he said, “Running — that’s just the nervous urge of our journey, expressed in a different mental form, I think.”

  The girl stirred and said, “I see you can account for most of the incidents, Daddy. But one still has to explain his knowledge of the people, Leif Erikson and Tyrker, and the girl Hekja.”

  “Leif Erikson and Tyrker come from his memory of the sagas. The girl has another explanation, of course.”

  She stared at him. “What’s that?”

  He smiled a little. “A girl with short, fair hair, wearing a white overall, who was his companion in his work. You don’t have to dig far into his memories to find somebody like that.”

  She was silent for a moment. Then she said, “You mean, that was me.”

  He said gently, “I think so. I imagine that’s what they call wish-fulfilment.”

  There was a long silence. The water lapped upon the beach by their feet, the seabirds cried around, beneath them the yellow seaplane quivered in the breeze like a live thing. At last Alix turned to her father, smiling a little. “Well,” she said, “I suppose one can take it as a compliment.”

  “I suppose you can,” he said drily. “The biggest one he has it in his power to pay you.”

  She stood up suddenly, and changed the subject. “What are your plans now, Daddy? Do you want to go back to Brattalid again?”

  He shook his head. “Not particularly. I can’t do much out there alone, and it’s really only working in the dark until we’ve studied the survey. I’m quite prepared to leave it till next summer, now, and come back with a digging party. What do you want to do?”

  “It’s your expedition, Daddy, and your work. I’ll do whatever you decide.”

  He eyed her for a moment. “What do you want to do?” he repeated gently.

  She turned away. “I want to get away from here,” she said in a low tone, “as soon as ever we can. I want to get back home.”

  Presently they went up to the hut again and went in quietly; the pilot was asleep. They left without disturbing him and strolled back to the seaplane; deprived of the house and of the services of the pilot they were without occupation for the day. They walked up and spent an hour with the doctor, gossiping; then they went to see the pastor, who showed them his church. At lunchtime the pilot was still sleeping; they went and had lunch with the governor, who showed them his Leica enlargements of the seaplane.

  He took them round the cattle farms in the afternoon, and explained his scheme for raising good stock for the Eskimos. It was half past six when they got back to the hut; the pilot woke as they went in.

  Lockwood asked him how he felt. He said, “Fine, sir. I must have slept all day. I’ll get up tomorrow.”

  “I should think you might, at this rate. Do you feel like sleeping tonight?”

  “I think so.”

  Alix was busy at the table with the evening meal; her father turned to her. “What does he get for supper?”

  “Bread and milk again, Daddy.” She did not come over to the bed, nor speak directly to the pilot.

  The don said, “I’m going to wind up the expedition now, Mr. Ross. I understand that there’s a little more to be done upon the survey, but we’ll do that from here.”

  The other nodded. “Two flights ought to finish it, I think. You don’t want to go back to Brattalid yourself, sir?”

  Lockwood shook his head. “I’ve finished all that I can do there, for this year. As soon as the photography is done, we’ll go back home.”

  “I see.” The pilot thought about it for a minute. “You aren’t doing this for me, sir? I’ll be perfectly fit to go on in a day or so.”

  “All right. We can probably finish off the survey in one good long flight.”

  Lockwood smiled. “Two comfortable, easy ones, I think.”

  “All right.”

  He lay silent for a minute, pondering his work. Then he said, “I had a dump of fuel and a mooring put at Battle Harbour. If you agree, sir, I’d like to go back that way.”

  “Over to Labrador and then down to New York?”

  “That’s right. I’d rather do that than go back to Angmagsalik. We might get into awful trouble in that ice.”

  From the stove the girl said to her father, “Would we fly straight to New York from Battle Harbour, Daddy?” It was a question that she might have asked the pilot.

  None of them failed to notice the constraint. The don looked at Ross to answer. “I don’t think so, sir,” he said to the man beside him. “It’s too far for one hop. We’ll have to spend a night at Halifax, or somewhere.”

  Lockwood said smoothly, “I’m quite in your hands, Mr. Ross.” Behind him the girl went on with her cooking. “The only thing is this. I don’t want to start from here till you feel perfectly fit, and able to tackle these long flights again. It’s only the fourteenth of August now — we’ve plenty of time in hand.”

  The pilot nodded. “We’ll run off these two little survey flights, and see how they go. But it’s the ice that made the real worry on the trip out, sir. We shan’t find this run down to New York very difficult.”

  He thought about it for a minute. “There’s another thing. We’ll have done with the seaplane when we get it to New York. As soon as we get there, I’ll have a chat with Eddie Hanson on the telephone, down in Baltimore. We’ve got to sell her second-hand, and I believe he could shift her as well as anyone. If Sir David agrees to that, I’d fly her on to Baltimore and turn her over to him.”

  The don asked, “How far is it from here to Battle Harbour, Mr. Ross?”

  The other shrugged his shoulders. “Six fifty — seven hundred miles, perhaps. I’ll fix it with the operator here to keep transmitting, and we’ll run down the bearing. We shan’t have any difficulty, long as the motor keeps on turning.”

  The girl brought a steaming bowl over to the bed. “Here’s your bread and milk, Mr. Ross.” She turned away.

  Nothing happened during the evening to relieve the constraint. The pilot sat up in his sleeping bag checking and rechecking his lists of film exposed against the canisters of the film itself, and against the map of the survey and his pencilled log, in order to assure himself that no gap in the survey had been left unphotographed. The girl washed some clothes and went to bed early, to try to read in bed by the flickering light of a candle. The don pondered his notes of his dig at Brattalid, and made pencil amendments. Presently they were all in bed, and the lights out.

  The pilot was the only one who slept right through the night.

  He got up in the morning, fit and well; when the girl put in an appearance she looked tired and jaded. She found that the pilot and her father had made the breakfast; there was nothing for her to do but to sit down and eat it. They talked in monosyllables throughout the meal; the girl did not eat much.

  As soon as possible Ross made his escape, and went down to the seaplane. He had his work to do, clean, practical and material work with metal parts and oil and grease, fit healers for a sick mind. He took the covers off the float compartments and sponged out the bilges; he took off the cowling ring and tappet covers and changed his eighteen spark plugs for new ones, saved for the crossing of the open sea to Labrador. At one o’clock he went back to the shack for lunch, grimy and with a mind at rest.

  Alix had spent the morning without proper occupation, restless and tired. At lunch she said casually, “Do you want a hand this afternoon, Mr. Ross?”

  He shied away from her proposal. He said, “It’s very good of you, Miss Lockwood. But there’s really nothing much that you could do today. I’ll let you know if you can help me at all.”

  He went back to the seaplane directly he had finished eating, relived to get away. In love, he felt, you cannot put the clock back; she was too much Hekja to him ever to be Alix again. He plunged back into his work, setting his tappets with a feeler gauge, cleaning the sumps, changing the oil. He did not know that for part of the afternoon the girl was sitting a quarter of a mile away upon the hillside, alone, watching him at work. On
ce a tear trickled irrationally down her cheek; she wiped it angrily away.

  He worked till suppertime on the machine, and went on after supper refuelling till dusk, helped by Ajago and another Eskimo. In the twilight that passed for night, at about eleven o’clock, they launched the seaplane at the high tide and took her to the mooring. Ross got back to the hut at midnight, went to bed, and slept perfectly all night till eight o’clock.

  They breakfasted, and were in the air by nine upon a survey flight. The girl was tired and listless; she had slept badly for the third night in succession. The pilot had reverted to “Miss Lockwood” when he spoke to her; in turn she was stilted and polite to him in spite of herself, and hated herself for being so. At times she was unbearably like Hekja. Then the pilot felt something turning over deep inside him; he addressed himself woodenly to his work.

  They flew all morning on the survey, Ross at the front end of the cabin and the girl crouched by the camera at the back. In the five hours of the flight they barely exchanged a dozen words. They landed back at Julianehaab at about two o’clock, tired and thick in the head. Ajago met them with the motor boat; as they stood in the boat going towards the shore the pilot said:

  “You’re looking tired, Miss Lockwood. Five hours is a lot of flying at one time. Why don’t you take a lie-down after lunch?”

  She said indifferently, “I may do that.”

  He had not finished with the seaplane. He went out to her again on the mooring in the afternoon to grease and look over the controls, and to make a succession of small jobs that would keep him busy until evening, that would keep him with the machine and away from the girl. In the shack Alix went and lay down for a time; presently she fell asleep, and woke after an hour hot and muzzy, with a slight headache.

  Lockwood was in the main room of the hut, the pilot was still out upon the seaplane. She made her father a cup of tea and had one herself; then they went for a short walk.

  He asked her about the survey. “It’s practically done,” she said. “In fact, I think it is done, but Mr. Ross thinks that we left a strip gap on the first day. He wants to go out again tomorrow morning and take some of it again, just to make sure.”