An Old Captivity (24 page)

Ross showed him the list of apertures and exposures; they compared it with the strip of negative.

“With this light, as to-day, one hundredth second instead of seventy-fifth, and stop just a leetle smaller. That would be good.”

Ross nodded. “We’ll fly again to-morrow and have another shot at it.”

They sent for Lockwood to join them, and the governor entertained them to coffee and cakes. Over the little meal they discussed their plans for the camp in the sandy cove near Brattalid.

The governor heard them to the end. “I will introduce you to two good men, natives,” he said, “that you may engage for your camp. Each can speak Danish a little, and one of them, Ajago, has a good motor boat.”

Lockwood arranged to meet the governor in the morning to engage these men, while Ross and Alix did another photographic
flight. Presently they thanked the governor for all his help, and went back to the shack. Refuelling the seaplane was not necessary; she had plenty in her for the next day’s flight.

A feeling of utter weariness, almost of collapse, came over Ross when they got back to the hut. For the first time in weeks he had an evening free, with nothing on his mind to worry him and nothing urgent to be done. He went and sat on his bed and smoked a cigarette, held between fingers that trembled a little. With the relaxation from the tension of his worries, fatigue came soaking out of him in great waves.

Lockwood had gone out to pay a formal visit to the pastor. Alix busied herself with the Eskimo woman about the stove; after a time she noticed the pilot, sitting inert and listless on his bed. “Tired?” she said.

He did not hear her. He was far away, sunk in an abyss of fatigue and depression. She glanced at him again, then went and opened a bottle of whisky. She poured out a stiff peg, added a little water, and brought the tumbler over to him.

“Come on,” she said. “Drink this.”

He started and raised his eyes. “Sorry,” he said. “I was just thinking. What’s that?”

“A whisky. Go on and drink it.”

He smiled. “I don’t want that, Miss Alix.”

“Go on and drink it. It’ll do you good.”

“All right.” Obediently he took the glass from her. “But I’m quite all right. I’ll go to bed early to-night.”

She sat down with him on the edge of his bed. “How did you sleep?”

“Not so well. I was thinking about this photography. But I believe we’ve got that buttoned up now.”

“Did you take one of your tablets?”

“No. I don’t think it’s good to take those things every night.”

She nodded. She could not help agreeing with that. The fact remained, though, that she had never seen him look
so utterly worn out. “I should take one to-night, if I were you,” she said gently. “Have a really good night. Then to-morrow we’ll make time for some exercise.”

He glanced at her gratefully, tumbler in hand. “You’ve hit the right nail on the head,” he said. “It’s getting no exercise that makes it difficult upon a job like this. What I want is a ten-mile walk.”

She nodded. “We’ll do that to-morrow afternoon.”

“There’ll be that film to be developed.”

“We can do that any time. It’s more important to keep fit.”

He raised his eyes to hers. “We could walk up towards the head of the fiord. It looked rather pretty up there, I thought.”

“I’d love to do that, Mr. Ross.”

The whisky and the little talk had killed his fatigue; he got up and helped her with the meal. Lockwood came back and they sat down to supper; as they ate they talked about the survey. Afterwards they got out the only map they had, spread it out upon the table, and continued the discussion. Presently the pilot straightened up.

“All right, sir,” he said. “We’ll do the big one first. Forty miles long and fifteen miles wide, with each photograph as nearly half a mile square as we can manage. He considered for a minute or two, and did a calculation with a stub of pencil. “With wasted time, that might be about twenty hours’ flying. Say six days’ work.”

The don nodded. “After that, if we’ve got time, we’ll do the other one.”

Ross said: “There’s not much in that one. Say another two days. If this weather holds, we’ll do that on our heads.”

They went to bed soon after supper. Ross took one of his tablets, and slept almost at once. He slept till about six o’clock in the morning, a restless and uneasy sleep. He woke up suddenly, in a great fright. It seemed to him that he had dreamed of something terrible, disastrous; he could not think of what. He was rather cold about the hands and
feet, but the black hair upon his lean, tanned forehead was all damp with sweat. He lay awake until the others woke, gradually growing calmer, thinking with pleasure of the walk that they were going to take that afternoon.

He planned to take off at nine o’clock and to do his photography above Brattalid, as before. It would have been possible to make a local flight to try out the photography, but he preferred to fly to Brattalid to do it. That was what they had come to photograph, and it was always possible that the trial photographs he took would serve to fill a gap in the mosaic if he should leave one out by mistake.

Shortly before they were ready to leave the hut, the governor came to the door. He had with him the trading manager and the doctor and the pastor, a great part of the Danish population of Julianehaab. Lockwood greeted them warmly.

“We have come,” said the governor, “to see the flying start. That is very interesting, I think.”

They all walked together to the shore, and went out to the seaplane in the motor boat. Ross led the way into the cabin; the visitors crowded in after him, and he showed them the camera, the instruments, and the controls. For half an hour he answered their questions, explaining everything to them.

Then they got down into the boat, and watched with interest while Ross and Alix wound the heavy handle of the inertia starter. The engine fired, and Alix slipped down on to the float and cast off the mooring buoy. She got back into the cabin and closed the door. The seaplane turned with a burst of engine, taxied a little distance away, and headed into wind. Then she took off, swung round in a climbing turn to north, and dwindled in the distance.

The governor turned to Lockwood. “Froken Lockwood has flown much, I think,” he said genially.

The don shook his head. “She had never flown at all before we started on this trip.”

“So? She has managed the setting free of the machine
very well, for so little experience. Herr Ross is a very reliable flyer.”

“I think he’s very careful.”

The governor nodded. “I think so too.”

The doctor stirred beside them. “To fly to Greenland is a great strain.”

Lockwood nodded. “That’s very true. I never realised when we started how difficult everything was going to be.”

The doctor said: “So? Then may I be permitted the word of a friend, Professor?”

“Of course.”

“As soon as your plans will permit, it will be wise that your pilot should rest and be quiet for some days, I think.”

The don nodded. “I am very much obliged to you for the advice,” he said. “I will do my best to arrange things in that way. But with a man like that, it’s very difficult to make him rest until his work is done.”

The governor said: “Jo. That I can well understand.”

The doctor protested: “You understand, I do not know Herr Ross. But I see nervous movements, and large pupils to the eyes, and a tired face, and smoking very many cigarettes, Herr Professor. And I say to myself—I am a doctor, and these things are noticed—I say, there is a good man who works too hard.”

They went on shore, and the governor took Lockwood to interview the Eskimos for their camp. There were two of them recommended by the governor as reliable and experienced men; one of them was the owner of a motor boat. This man was called Ajago, and had a long, lean face like a horse. The other was called Mayark and had a similarly European face; both, however, were pure Eskimo. Neither of them spoke any English, but both spoke a little Danish; with the help of the governor Lockwood settled down to explain the programme to them.

Ross and Alix had an uneventful flight. The girl flew to Brattalid in the front seat next to Ross; then she got into the back and they did their trial strip over a course closely parallel to the former one. Then they went up to twelve
thousand feet, about as high as Ross could make the seaplane go, and ran off another strip at that altitude to test the exposure at that height. They came down as soon as they could; it was bitterly cold up there.

There were no mistakes this time, nothing to be done again. Alix climbed back into the front seat next to Ross, and they flew back to Julianehaab. They landed at about twelve o’clock, taxied in, and made fast to the buoy.

They met Lockwood on his way back to the hut for lunch, and walked up with him. Alix said: “Mr. Ross and I are going to take the afternoon off, and go for a walk. Will you come, Daddy?”

Her father said: “I don’t think so. I said I’d go and see this motor boat, this afternoon.”

The pilot said: “Would you like me to come with you, sir?”

“You’re taking me for a walk this afternoon, Mr. Ross,” the girl said firmly. “It’s no good worrying about the motor boat, because it’s the only one there is to hire. The governor said so.”

Lockwood told them about the men that he had engaged. “I think they’ll be all right,” he said. “It’s a pity that they don’t speak English.”

Ross smiled. “It’s a damn good thing Miss Alix learned that Danish,” he remarked.

They had a light lunch, and started off inland. They crossed the little wooden bridge and went on through the settlement and out through the meadows of the sheep-breeding station. Presently all civilisation was behind them, and they were walking towards the ice-cap over rough screes and through meadows of rough sedgy grass and low scrub. They did not talk very much; the going was too strenuous for that.

Two hours later they stopped for a cigarette before turning homewards. Below them the fiords lay spread out in map-like form, almost as if they had been flying; behind them the ice-cap was very near, grey, dirty and forbidding. They leaned against an outcrop of a basalt rock and rested.

Alix said: “What are you going to do after this, Mr. Ross? I mean, when this job is all over.”

He shrugged his shoulders. “Things seem to be picking up a bit in Canada. What I’d like to do would be to get into Imperial Airways. But they’re pretty particular who they take, these days.”

She was amazed. “But surely they’d take you?”

He smiled down at her. “I’m not such a wizard as all that, Miss Alix. You’ve got to be good to get into Imperials.”

“But you
are
good. I should have thought anyone who could fly out here like this was good enough for them. Doesn’t a flight like this make any difference?”

He glanced at her, flicking the ash from his cigarette. “It all helps. If we get through this job with the seaplane in one piece they might take notice. After all, not so many people come this way in aeroplanes.”

She nodded. “I don’t think Daddy ever knew what sort of trip it would turn out to be.”

The pilot said dourly: “Well, he knows now.” And then he turned and smiled at her.

She said quietly: “You must have thought us beastly people when you met us first of all.”

He glanced sideways at her. The sun shone on her fair, short hair, her lean serious face not quite unlike his own, her slim figure in white overalls. Quite suddenly he knew exactly what he wanted. And being Scotch, he let the moment go.

“Why, no, Miss Alix,” he said. His voice was a little unsteady; he was feeling tired and depressed again. “I just thought you didn’t know much about aeroplanes.”

He ground out the stub of the cigarette beneath his heel.

“Suppose we get on back,” he said. “I want to do those spools of film before we go to bed.”

N
EXT day, at ten o’clock, the ship arrived and anchored off the settlement. She had come down from Godthaab and was only due to stay for a few hours before leaving for Reykjavik and Copenhagen. There was a great state of excitement in the settlement. All boats were launched and everybody crowded on board her as soon as the anchor dropped. The Lockwoods and Ross followed the first rush.

Jameson was lying in his berth with a weight hanging over a pulley to stretch his thigh. “I can’t say how bad I feel that this has happened,” he said. “Letting you down and all. I wouldn’t have had it happen for the world, Mr. Ross.”

The pilot said: “Never mind—we’ll talk about that later. Just take a look at these, because we haven’t got a lot of them.”

The photographer took the spools and passed them quickly through both hands, stretching the film and looking through it at the light from the porthole. Ross told him briefly what they had been doing. “Not bad,” he said. “This is the first one—the over-exposed one, I see. These other two seem quite all right. But they’ve all been overdeveloped, Mr. Ross. You’ve got them much too dense.”

“Right,” said the pilot. “Now you tell us how to do it properly.”

Alix settled down beside the bunk with a pencil and pad. Outside the winches clattered and groaned as bales of pelt were taken on the ship; all round the little cabin was a turmoil of shouted greetings and orders. Two hours later Alix stopped writing; she had covered seven or eight pages with her pencilled notes.

“Well,” said Jameson wearily, “I think I’ve told you everything I can. Don’t forget what I told you about the hardening. I wish I could stay with you, in the house. I
could help with the processing, anyway.” He looked up wistfully. “I suppose you couldn’t get round the governor?”

Lockwood shook his head. “I’m afraid he won’t consider it.”

The man sighed and lay back. “Well, I don’t suppose I’d be much good to you, really. You’ve got the hang of it all right, now. Don’t worry to do much developing out in the field—it’s always a risk of spoiling stuff. Just do one from time to time, to satisfy yourself that it’s all going on all right. Take all the duplicates you can …”

They made him comfortable, provided him with what small luxuries they could arrange, and saw that he had all the money that he needed. Then it was time for them to leave the ship; her loading was completed. They were bundled on shore with the crowd of Danes and Eskimos, and stood on the beach with them and watched her get up anchor, watched her steam away. The little crowd about them dispersed quietly, silent and morose. There would be no other ship at Julianehaab till the following June.