CHAPTER XIXs
THE D.’S TAKE CHARGE
IN the morning Dick ran up the hill as usual. After all, even if the three elders had slept in the Fram at night, they would have gone back to Holly Howe for Titty and Roger, if not for their own breakfasts, and they would be sure to have hung out a signal.
The signal was there. Square over south cone. “Come to the Fram.” Dorothea was impatient to be off. But their sandwiches were not ready. Mrs Dixon was very busy seeing off Mr Dixon and Silas, who were going to a market town some dozen miles away, and were waiting about in their best clothes. It was no good thinking that they might put in the time by doing some work on the mast for the sledge. So Dick had gone down the field to see what could be done about the reeds in the ice and at the edge of it, that had been a nuisance, always stopping the sledge just when it should have been going its fastest. He cleared a pathway through the reeds, cutting them off close to the ice. By the time he had done that, and gone up to the farm again, he found that Mr Dixon and Silas had already left, and that Dorothea was just packing their dinner into the knapsacks. Mrs Dixon had given them sandwiches, just the same as those she had made for the two men, though, as Dorothea had noticed, she had put no mustard in them. She had also given them a big bottle of milk and two enormous hunks of cake.
“It’s going to be much better tobogganing today,” said Dick, as he put the sledge in position at the top of the field.
A moment later they were flying down the slope towards the lake.
“More to the left,” cried Dick.
Their left heels dug into the snow, and the sledge swerved with a jerk.
“Now then. Hang on. There’ll be a bit of a bump.”
There was. The sledge shot through the cleared pathway, leapt into the air as it hit the ice, came down on the ice again, and, for the first time not braked by the reeds, went hurtling out over the lake.
“It would have gone farther still if only we hadn’t had to put our feet down,” said Dick. “Once it’s on the ice there’s practically no friction at all. That’s why those ice-yachts go so fast.”
“Yes,” said Dorothea, but she was answering only the tone of his voice. If she had been asked what he had said, she would have been puzzled for an answer. There had been the rush of cold air as they flew down the field and out over the ice. There had been the moment when she thought they might be going to turn over. But even in that moment her mind had been elsewhere. Her last thought before she had gone to sleep and her first thought on waking in the morning had been of the Fram and Houseboat Bay. She could think of nothing else. Had they slept in the cabin that night? What had it been like? Had they been bothered by strange Eskimos skating late and coming up to see what the light might be behind the cabin windows? Or had they put the light out and slept there in the dark?
She was putting her skates on, and Dick, after one regretful look up the white slope to the farm, did the same. He would have liked to take the sledge back to the farm, to come down again, to make a better shot for the gap in the reeds, and to come flying out even farther over the ice at the end of the run down the field. But, after all, there would be plenty of time for that. Dorothea was in a hurry, and he, too, wanted to get back to the Fram and to have another look at those pictures of the sailing sledges.
In a few moments the two of them were ready, and the sledge, jerked into motion, slid over the ice behind them.
Away by Long Island there were a lot of people playing hockey on the ice. Here and there, small groups, skating together, moved like black spots over the shining surface. The snow had gone from the trees, melted, perhaps, or shaken down by the wind, and the woods stood out dark against the white hills. Suddenly a white sail shot out between Long Island and the shore.
“There it is again,” said Dick. “Just look at it.”
“Her,” said Dorothea. “They’d never call her ‘it’.”
There was very little wind that morning, but the light-built, spidery ice-yacht was flying fast over the smooth ice.
“Ouch!” said Dick. He had stopped skating when he saw the ice-yacht, but Dorothea had not known he was stopping, and the sledge, too, had known nothing about it, and, swinging on its way, had swept his feet from under him.
“It doesn’t turn over because its skates are so far apart,” said Dick dreamily, “and then it’s got a big area for the wind to catch, and very little friction because its skates are short. But I wish I knew how it manages to sail against the wind.”
“Ask Captain John.”
“They all know,” said Dick, “even Roger. Well, anyhow, even they can’t sail against the wind in a sledge. Ours’ll go all right if we have a wind in the right direction.”
“Do get up and come along,” said Dorothea. “We haven’t got a sail yet.”
“We’re going to,” said Dick. “Mrs Dixon said she’d see what could be done about an old sheet.”
The ice-yacht spun round, flew back towards the islands, and disappeared.
Dick turned to practical things once more. He got up, gave the time, “Right. Left. Right. Left.” and they struck out again for Houseboat Bay. They rounded the point. There lay the Fram, thick smoke pouring from her chimney.
“Susan’s just put some more coal on,” said Dorothea.
“Say when you’re ready.”
“Any time now.”
“Right. Put the brake on.”
They stopped skating, and swerved slightly outwards in opposite directions. The loaded sledge slipped on between them, bothering nobody’s heels. They brought it neatly to a standstill, close beside the houseboat.
A moment later Titty and Roger were on deck, looking down at them.
“Where are the others?” asked Dorothea.
“Below,” said Titty, “in the cabin.”
Dorothea had warned Dick not to say anything to these two about sleeping in the Fram at night. She knew that whatever their elders might do, Titty and Roger would have had to spend the night in their beds.
But Roger spoke of it at once.
“We were here in the middle of the night,” he said. “Titty and I came by ourselves, and Ringman bayed at the moon.”
“Susan didn’t let you sleep here?” asked Dorothea.
“No,” said Titty. “But we did come down on the ice through the wood long after we’d gone to bed.”
The D.’s unfastened their skates, passed them up with their knapsacks to Roger and Titty, and climbed aboard. They went down into the cabin. John, Peggy, and Susan were there, busy with packing-thread and sheepskins.
“Hullo!” said John.
“Hullo!” said the others.
And from the first moment, Dorothea knew that something had gone wrong. Perhaps it was that they had not been able to sleep. Perhaps they had waked up too early. Something was wrong. She had expected a much more cheerful, even a triumphant tone, from explorers who had spent all night in the icebound Fram.
“What was it like in the dark?” asked Dick.
“We had to go home to sleep,” said Peggy.
“It couldn’t be helped,” said Susan.
“It was a sort of promise we’d made to mother,” said John. “The A.B. and the boy are so beastly young.”
“As it was, they were out very late,” said Susan.
Dorothea looked from one to another of the three. They couldn’t really be making excuses, though it sounded very like it. She went straight to the point that was bothering all of them.
“But what are you going to say to Captain. Nancy?” she asked.
“She’ll be as sick as anything,” said Peggy.
“It can’t be helped,” said Susan. “Nancy’d understand if she were here.”
“She wouldn’t,” said John. “Not really. But it can’t be helped, all the same.”
And then, suddenly, Peggy saw a way out.
“Look here,” she said. “What about you? You haven’t promised anything to anybody. You sleep in her. You’re part of the expedition
. Nancy said so ages ago. She’ll be as pleased as anything.”
Dorothea stared. She had never hoped for such an honour for herself and Dick. They had been happy enough at the beginning, just to be allowed to pull the explorers’ sledge. Then they had come to have a sledge of their own, though Nancy had never seen it. But this . . .
“She didn’t mean us when she sent the picture.”
“She put in all seven of us,” said Titty.
“Of course she meant you too,” said Peggy. “She wouldn’t have put you in if she hadn’t. Shiver my timbers, I mean to say. What does it matter who it is so long as it’s someone? She just asked, ‘Who?’ She wants to know which of us is sleeping here. That’s all. Of course, if you’d rather not . . .”
“Let’s,” said Dick. “It would be even better than the observatory for stars, and we could stay up as long as we liked and make up for it by sleeping in the daytime. Why not?”
“But what about you?” said Dorothea to Peggy.
“I’ll sleep here, too, if you will,” said Peggy, and then hesitated. She looked doubtfully at Susan and John. If those two hardened sailors, captain and mate of the Swallow, had set out to sleep in the Fram, and then had changed their minds at the last minute, and gone home again, might not Dorothea and Dick do the same? And that would be much worse. Stay in the Fram by herself she would not. But if the D.’s gave up, they would be going off to Dixon’s Farm, and she would have to go home by herself the other way. She thought of the wood in the moonlight, and shivered. “Look here,” she said, “let her be your ship for one night, just so that we can send an answer to Nancy, and then the next night I’ll come too, if you want me.”
“We’d simply love to,” said Dorothea.
“Good,” said Peggy.
“I do wish we could,” said John.
“Come on,” said Peggy. “Let’s do an answer for Nancy right away.”
“Semaphore, like hers?” said Dick.
“Of course,” said Peggy.
“Just two D.’s,” said Titty, “but you needn’t draw them both alike.”
Peggy sat down to the table at once, borrowed Dick’s fountainpen, and drew her very simple picture. It was as if two of Nancy’s crowd of excited Eskimos had wandered away by themselves. She drew her figures rather bigger than Nancy’s, and, at Titty’s suggestion, gave one of them a pair of spectacles like Dick’s, and the other a couple of pigtails. Each held a right arm straight above its head. There could be no mistaking the letters that they stood for.
“Can’t we put the houseboat in, too?” said Roger.
“No point in letting every Eskimo know what it’s all about.”
The moment the drawing was done, Peggy was in a hurry to be off and away, for fear lest the D.’s, like her ancient allies, should have second thoughts and change their minds. She knew too, that there was quite a good chance of catching the doctor on his rounds this side of Rio, and persuading him to get it quickly to Nancy. Once the message was on its way, it would be hard for anybody to draw back.
“Besides,” she said, “it’s only fair, if they’re going to sleep here, that they should have the ship to themselves just for a bit. Come on. Today, they shall have the Fram, and we’ll go to the igloo.”
Dorothea did not try to keep them.
“Look here, Dorothea,” said Susan. “But how are you going to manage about the Primus?”
“I can boil water on the stove.”
“Ought we to leave them?” said John.
“Nothing can really go wrong,” said Susan.
“I know,” said John.
“Can’t we stop with them?” said Titty.
“No, you can’t,” said Susan. “It’s because of you that we can’t either.”
“Come on,” said Peggy. “We don’t want to go and miss the doctor.”
The things wanted for an expedition to the igloo were hurriedly collected. The Beckfoot sledge was loaded again, and presently Dorothea and Dick were standing alone on the deck of the Fram, waving farewells to a party of explorers who were leaving the ice and disappearing into the trees.
The departing explorers waved back, and were gone.
It was almost like a flight.
*
“Lucky I left my astronomy book here,” said Dick, as he and Dorothea went down into their cabin.
Dorothea could not settle down so easily. Somehow or other she had to find a way of making herself feel that she and Dick were not just visitors, but in command of the ship. She knew the inside of the Fram as well as anybody, but she went all over it once again. She looked into the fo’c’sle, and at the Primus stoves, though she did not touch them. She looked into the cupboards in which there was now very little left of the generous stores they had found there when first they had come aboard. Seven explorers can get through a lot of provisions in a short time. She made sure that there was a supply of tea, and wondered if Susan had remembered to take some with her up to the igloo. She took her bottle of milk out of her knapsack, and put it in the cupboard with the tea. There was still plenty of sugar in the Fram, but that did not matter to her. Mrs Dixon always put a few lumps in a screw of paper for them when they set out in the morning, so that they would have their own share when Susan made the tea. She put her own sugar in the cupboard with the rest. There was no need for all this, but she was trying to get the feel of having the Fram all to herself and Dick. In the end she went to the stove and gave the fire a good poking, just to show that she was at home and in charge. “Two in the Ice.” Perhaps they had been alone in the ship for six months already. She looked at Dick, who had settled down at the table, and was taking his telescope to pieces, unscrewing the lenses one by one. “Two in the Ice.” They might be anywhere. Nansen’s Fram had gone very near it. This Fram might drift across the Pole itself. In a story like that, almost anything might happen.
But from that she came back to reality and Captain Nancy. The answer to Captain Nancy’s picture was already on its way. She and Dick had been allowed into the expedition, and now it was they who were to be the first to sleep in the houseboat. Dorothea did very much indeed want to come up to Nancy’s standard of what was fitting in adventures. Sleep in the Fram at night, in the dark, with ice all round them? Of course they would. And, in a flash, Dorothea saw herself waking up in the morning, and Dick stirring on his berth and wondering where he was. “Wake up, Professor!” she would say. “Wake up! Another day in the ice.” Well, nobody could say her stories never came true. Here they were in the very middle of a story that she herself could hardly have believed was possible three weeks ago, when they had watched that boat rowing down to the island. Here they were in a ship of their own. What would it feel like to come to it over the ice and let themselves in with their own key?
“Come along, Dick,” she said. “We’ve got to get some fresh water.”
“Bother,” said Dick. “Must we go now?”
“Much better,” said Dorothea.
They took the kettle and a jug, and climbed down by the accommodation-ladder. Dorothea pushed the ladder up on deck.
“Why?” said Dick. “We’re just coming back.”
“Let’s come back as if we’d never been here with the others.”
Dick said nothing. If Dorothea wanted a thing, he supposed there was some sense in it, though he could not see it at the moment.
Resolutely she walked ashore without looking back. Not until jug and kettle were full and they were on the beach, ready to start back, did she let herself look at the Fram.
The old houseboat lay there as she had laid ever since the ice formed about her, but Dorothea saw her differently, and looked at her with an almost choking pride. Her ship and Dick’s. The other explorers were up in Greenland, a thousand miles away. She and Dick had the ship to themselves.
She walked back, gloating, and climbed aboard. Dick was in a hurry to get back to his telescope. He never guessed that Dorothea was tasting the pleasures of discovery, and that she opened the cabin door rath
er slowly because she had come aboard for the first time, and did not know what she might find there.
But time was going on, and Dorothea had to live up to Susan’s standards as well as Nancy’s. There was tea to make to drink with their midday dinner. She boiled the kettle on the stove, and when the tea was ready, brought two clean plates out of the fo’c’sle. Sandwiches eaten straight out of a paper packet would have been too much like a picnic. But on plates, cut up with a knife and fork, they were much more like the kind of meal people would have in their own house or ship. There was room for the plates and two mugs on the end of the table, where Dick had pushed back the mess of skins and sewing things so that he could lay his lenses out in a row and look at his star-book while he was polishing them.
“Of course, later on, we’ll have to go back to the farm for more milk,” she said, when their meal was done, “and to ask Mrs Dixon to let us have something, for supper. But we won’t go until evening.”
“I’ll go now and get it over,” said Dick, “so as not to waste any of the dark.”
“Not until they’ve done the evening milking,” said Dorothea. “I’ll go then. There’s a lantern in the fo’c’sle that’ll do for me to take. There’ll be no need for you to come as well.”
She washed the plates up with a handful or two of snow. There was really no need for proper washing up, of Susan’s kind, after sandwiches which leave plates almost as good as new. She spared a little water to rinse out the mugs. She went down on the ice and put on her skates, but did not like to go far from the ship. She skated round the bay for a time, and then took off her skates and climbed aboard once more. Dick was busy in the cabin with paper and pencil and his star-book. It was no use disturbing him. Even if you got an answer out of him when he was like that, it didn’t mean anything. Dorothea did a little hard stitching, trying to carry on the work Susan was doing in making a huge sheepskin rug to go over all the baggage on the top of the Beckfoot sledge. But she knew that nothing would ever make her good at sewing, and presently she gave it up, put on her coat, tied a muffler round her neck, and went on deck, to survey the Arctic scene.