“Skates off first,” said John, as the sledges pulled up under the houseboat’s steep blue sides.
“Give me a leg up,” he said, presently. “Wasn’t the accommodation ladder on the fore-deck?”
“That’s where he bathes from in summer,” said Peggy.
“Remember him walking the plank?” said Titty.
“Did he ever?” asked Dorothea.
“We made him,” said Roger.
Peggy and Susan, being the biggest and strongest, gave John two legs up, and hoisted him up to the fore-deck. He scrambled aboard, and found a little wooden ladder, with two hooks at the top of it, and a rope loop fastened to the bottom step for a swimmer to get a foothold under water against the side of the boat. He hooked it over the side.
“Better have it slung from the after-deck,” said Peggy.
“We can’t have people skipping over the cabin roof,” said Susan, “with all that snow. Somebody’d be sure to come an awful smash.”
“We’ve got sledges to take home the bits,” said Roger.
“Thank you,” said John. “Half a minute while I come down.”
Between them they brought the ladder aft, and hooked it on once more. John went up first. Peggy followed.
“Come along, Dorothea,” she said, getting the key out of her pocket.
“Now, you three,” said Susan, who seemed to count Dick, Roger, and Titty as all of an age.
When Roger was safely on deck, Susan climbed up herself.
Peggy was just fitting the big key in the door. It was a little stiff.
“Are you sure it’s the right key?” said Susan. “We mustn’t force the lock.”
“Probably some rain or snow’s got in the lock and frozen,” suggested Dick, and Dorothea was very pleased to hear John say, “I bet that’s what’s the matter.”
Peggy shook the door handle, and then turned the key as hard as she could. There was a sharp click, and the next moment they were looking into the dim twilight of the cabin. There were no skylights, and curtains had been pulled across all the windows. A queer, musty smell drifted out to meet them.
“Well, it certainly does need airing,” said Susan, “and we’d better draw the curtains for a bit and let some sunlight in.”
Dorothea and Dick were in the houseboat for the first time, and even the Swallows had never been there except as guests of Captain Flint. Voices, for no real reason, were hushed while Peggy and Susan pulled back the curtains from the windows nearest the door.
“Of course, he’s away,” said Titty, “but doesn’t it feel as if someone was here?”
“What about opening the door into the fo’c’sle and trying to get a draught right through?” said Susan.
John worked his way past the long table that ran down the middle of the cabin, past a sturdy little iron stove, and opened a low door, through which Dick and Dorothea caught a glimpse of oilskin coats and cooking things in racks, and a Primus stove or two. But, for the moment, there was enough to look at in the cabin itself. There were the long settees on either side, wide enough for anybody to sleep on. There were the neatly folded red blankets. There were the strong chairs round the table. There were the cupboards that ran along the settees below the level of the windows. And then there were all the things that this strange uncle of Peggy’s had brought back from his travels, a knobkerry, a boomerang, a model catamaran from Ceylon, a bamboo flute from Shanghai, bright-coloured leather cushions from Omdurman, a necklace of sharks’ teeth. All these things, except, of course, the cushions, which were in the corners of the settees, were hung on the walls, out of the way, between the windows; for, though the place was a little like a museum, it had also the neatness of a ship’s cabin. On one side of the door that John had just opened into the fo’c’sle was a barometer, and on the other was a clock.
John tapped the barometer gently, but Peggy, seeing the hands of the clock standing still at half-past three, though it was in the middle of the morning, marched straight up to it, opened it, and wound it up with the key that was hanging beside it. She asked John what the right time was, and when he told her, set the clock and closed its glass door with a sharp click. It was like taking possession.
“There’s a lot of mildew on the cushions,” Dorothea heard Susan saying.
Dorothea was a little disappointed in the books. She, Titty, and Dick began at once to search along the two shelves that held Captain Flint’s houseboat library. All the books seemed to be books of travel. Dorothea had been looking for stories, but there were none except The Riddle of the Sands, and that, when she glanced at the charts in the beginning of it, did not seem her sort of book. But Dick had found almost at once the very book he wanted.
“Here it is,” he said. “Farthest North. The Voyage and Exploration of the Fram, and the Fifteen-Months Sledge Expedition. This’ll tell us everything we want to know.”
“There’s an enormous lot of coal in the fo’c’sle,” said John, presently.
“Well, I’m going to light the stove,” said Susan. “We’re here, anyway, and we may as well do some good. His things’ll be getting dreadfully damp.”
“He’s got a tremendous lot of good stores,” said Roger. “Jams, and pemmican, and sardines and . . .”
“Shut that cupboard door, Roger,” said Susan.
The stove burned very well, after the first few unfortunate minutes, when the smoke poured out in their faces, before they discovered the chimney that needed to be fixed on outside the cabin roof. Once that was done, the houseboat soon warmed up and began to feel, indeed, a little like a greenhouse.
“What are you going to do about tea to have with our sandwiches?” said John. “Our kettle’s up at the igloo.”
“He’s got a beauty,” said Peggy.
“Perhaps, if we clean it properly afterwards,” said Susan.
For water, after a sad experience with the snow on the roof, which, when melted, tasted smoky and very unpleasant, the leaders of the expedition sent Roger and Dick ashore. A cart track came down through the woods to the head of Houseboat Bay, and close by this track in summer a little beck poured into the lake. It was all but dry now, but a trickle still ran over its stones, and under the icicles of a tiny waterfall they found a pool just big enough to let them fill the kettle. The stove was burning so well that there was no need to touch the Primuses, and Susan boiled the kettle in the cabin.
Peggy explored the drawers and cupboards one after another.
“He’s got every possible thing,” she said, just as they were settling down to dinner. “This is the best tin-opener I’ve ever seen; and loganberry jam,” she went on, “in a tin, with pictures of the loganberries on the outside.”
Roger looked sideways down the table at Susan.
“Oh, look here, Peggy, we must leave his things alone.”
“He wouldn’t grudge a tin of jam to a North Polar expedition,” said Peggy.
“But we can’t take it,” said Susan.
“Well, I’ve opened it now,” said Peggy. “It’ll only go bad if we don’t.”
“One tin,” said Roger.
They were very good loganberries, not at all spoilt by being made into jam. The berries were still separate, not squashed.
When the cabin clock told them it was time to go, it seemed as if they had only just finished dinner. Dick was hard at work reading the story of the real Fram, and most unwilling to be disturbed. Titty was reading The First Crossing of Greenland. Dorothea and Roger were helping in the wiping, while Susan and Peggy were still busy with the washing up which somehow had been put off a little because there was so much to look at. John had found a tin of metal polish, and was polishing up the brass work with a rag. Locking the cabin door from the outside, climbing down on the ice, unhooking the ladder and pushing it up on deck, and setting out for Holly Howe and for Dixon’s Farm, felt very much like leaving home.
Even Susan admitted it in a way.
“The cabin could do with a bit more airing tomorrow,” she said.
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CHAPTER XV
DAYS IN THE FRAM
THIS was only the beginning. The airing of the houseboat went on next day, and the day after that, and for many days. Captain Flint, Peggy assured the others, would be very pleased. Anyway, he ought to be. That first tin of loganberry jam was followed by another, and yet another, and it was thought that even in tins sardines would not keep for ever, and that it would be a pity if, when Captain Flint returned, he should have to throw them away. Then nobody could tell if the Primus stoves were in good working order without trying them. There was plenty of oil in the fo’c’sle, and a big bottle of methylated spirits; and though John and Susan did not trust Peggy’s rather rough and ready way with such things they came to think that it would be rather good for the Primuses to be properly used. Before very long even Susan had all but forgotten that the houseboat really belonged to somebody else. It had become the Fram, and there was such a lot to do aboard that Susan began to grudge the time they spent anywhere else, because her housekeeping arrangements, cleaning of pots and pans, etc., kept getting in arrears.
Dick and Dorothea, or one of them, mostly Dick, used to run up to the old barn every morning, just to see what signal was hanging on the end of the house at Holly Howe. But it was always one of two. On days when the doctor had sent word that he was coming, there was a diamond on the top of a north cone, and the D.’s went straight by road to the Jacksons’. On all other days it was a square over a south cone. It had been decided that this signal was to mean “Come to the Fram,” because, as John said, a square on the top of a south cone is very like the midship section of a houseboat. There it was, day after day, when Dick, with telescope to his eye, looked down to Holly Howe. Day after day, in reply, square over south cone was hoisted on the old, barn, to show the others that their signal had been seen and understood. Meanwhile, Dorothea, down at the farm, would be busy stuffing their knapsacks and getting the sledge ready, and they would set out at once for the Fram, sometimes down the field and over the ice, sometimes by road, turning through a gate in the wood half-way between the two farms, and following the cart track down through the trees to the shore of Houseboat Bay, only a few score yards from the icebound ship.
Plans for the day were decided aboard the Fram each morning. The Fram became the main base of the expedition. The igloo was all but deserted except when they went up there for old sake’s sake, to keep it in repair, or because they were tired of skating and wanted some climbing practice. Except that everybody slept in comfortable beds in comfortable farmhouses, and had good suppers and breakfasts cooked by Mrs Dixon and Mrs Jackson, they lived the life of Polar explorers. The Fram became their home, and Nansen himself never waited more anxiously for news of ice conditions in the Arctic than the seven in the houseboat watched the freezing of the lake.
Day by day there was less open water in the middle of the lake. Day by day the areas marked out as dangerous by little red flags grew less and less. More and more people were skating, and several times the explorers were bothered by inquisitive seals, walruses, or Eskimos, who came skating into the bay and peered in at the windows of the Fram, curious to know what was going on in that old boat with a trickle of smoke from the chimney on the cabin roof. And then, one day, the whole expedition, who had taken the sledges down to Spitzbergen, gathering firewood from the wooded shores below High Greenland, strung themselves out along the Alpine rope, and crossed the lake at its deepest, between Spitzbergen and the little rocky patch of Cormorant Island on the farther side. The cormorants had flown away to the sea coast when the ice had put an end to their fishing, but Dick and Dorothea heard a story of treasure-hunting, and were shown the place under the roots of the fallen tree where Captain Flint’s box had been hidden by the thieves.
Once or twice, in the middle of the day, there seemed to be half a promise of a thaw; and the explorers, seeing drops of water on the tips of icicles, looked glumly at each other. But then, as the sun weakened, the frost came hard again, and sometimes for days on end it froze so hard that there was never a hint of melting snow even in the full glow of the sun at noon.
“It’ll never be what it was,” said Mrs Dixon, one night, when Dick and Dorothea had come in too tired from skating even to run up to the barn to look at stars. “Not what it was in ’95, with coaches with four horses and horns blowing crossing the lake from side to side. But it’s a rare frost for all that.”
“How long will it last?” said Dick.
“No signs of its breaking yet,” said Mr Dixon.
Day after day, at Holly Howe and at Dixon’s Farm, the first words said by waking explorers were the question: “Is it still freezing?” and the sharp nip of the morning air was welcomed like warmth in June.
They had plenty to do. Out of doors they were steadily training themselves for long journeys over the ice on skates, towing sledges. In the evenings, sometimes the D.’s went to tea at Holly Howe, and sometimes the others came to tea with them. Once or twice they all went up to the observatory to look at stars with Dick and Dorothea, but there was so much else to be done that Dick felt he was neglecting his astronomy, and used to bring the star-book with him to the Fram, meaning to work at it there, but somehow never could. The others made Dorothea tell them stories, too, but they insisted that all the stories should be about the sea, and then, whenever she said anything about what happened to a ship or a boat, everybody would start talking at once. “But, look here, didn’t you say the wind was against them?” “They couldn’t have done that if they were on port tack.” “But they wouldn’t go aloft to reef that kind of sail.” It seemed to her that she couldn’t mention a ship without going wrong, and yet how could she tell sea stories with no ships in them. Sometimes it was almost more than she could bear, and then they would tell her to go on and say what happened next, and everybody would be quiet for half an hour or so, while something was happening on an island; and then, when she simply had to take her hero to sea, uproar would break out again. It really was easier to read aloud.
AIRING THE FRAM
Even while stories were being told, nobody in the Fram was idle for a moment. For as time went on, they had much more to do than they could manage, work of a kind they had never thought of when first the expedition had been planned. The idea had really come from the silent Mr Dixon.
Ever since that night, when he and Silas had built a sledge for the D.’s, and Dick had driven with him to the blacksmith’s to have the iron runners put on it, Mr Dixon had known something of what was planned. They were going to the North Pole. Mr Dixon knew that, and went on turning it over in his mind. One day, for example, he said to Dick, “You’ll find nowt better than this for keeping wet out of your boots if there’s deep snow about the Pole.” He nodded towards the north, and gave Dick a big tin full of goose-grease. And after that, of course, there was no getting any polish on any of the explorers’ boots, because of the goose-grease that had been rubbed into them. And then, a day or two later, Dorothea had heard him talking with Silas about the far north. Silas said, “Aye. It’s colder up there than here, likely, but with the furs them folk wear they don’t feel it.”
“Furs?” said Mr Dixon.
“Bearskins and such,” said Silas. “Fair wadded out with ’em.”
Mr Dixon grunted, and said no more; but next day, after Dick had been watching him at the evening milking, he had taken him up into one of the lofts and shown him there a great store of sheepskins, roughly cured, with the wool left on them.
“You’ll be wanting summat like this,” he said, “if half’s true they say about yon Pole.”
“But can we really take some?” Dick had asked.
“And welcome,” said Mr Dixon.
So there had been a day when Dick and Dorothea had come to the Fram, with their sledge piled high with sheepskins. Sheepskins had been spread on the bunks and on the floors of the cabin, with an excellent Arctic effect.
Mr Dixon thought of the sheepskins, but that set old Silas thinking too. He talked to Mr
s Dixon, and she got out needle and thread and some scraps of stuff, and old Silas came in with a lot of rabbit skins and between them they made a cap of rabbits’ fur, lined within, and with the fur outside.
Dick was a little shy about putting it on, but Dorothea had said it was the very thing he ought to have, and the moment he saw it, Roger wanted one like it, and if Roger, why not Titty, as Susan said, and it turned out that Silas had any number of rabbit skins, and that Mr Jackson had a good few too. This work, once begun, could not be stopped, and the cabin of the Fram, while Dorothea was telling her stories, was like a tailor’s shop in Siberia, or some such place. There were skins all over the table and the settees, and even on the floor, and Susan was kept busy cutting out, and the whole expedition was hard at work with needle and thread making fur hats like Dick’s. In the end, nobody wanted to be left without one. Nor did it stop at fur hats. Mittens were even more useful. Everybody had felt their hands grow cold, pulling on a sledge rope, or when the snow had melted on a woollen glove. Rabbit-skin mittens, made with the skin double, so that there was fur inside and out, were very easy to pull on and off, very warm, and looked so real that everybody wondered how ever they had thought of going to the North Pole without them.
“Let’s make some for Nancy,” said Dorothea.
“Jib-booms and bobstays, of course we must,” said Peggy, half cross with herself for not having thought of this before.