“What are you doing out here at all?” said Susan. “Go home at once.”
“It isn’t fair,” said Roger.
“Anything may have happened,” said Titty. “You said so. You may want all of us to help.”
“Don’t let’s waste time,” said John.
“You may want all the dogs you can get,” said Roger.
Susan looked back into the darkness. If she were to send them back now she would have to go with them, to make sure they got home. While they were all together there was nothing to worry about. It was bad enough to have the two D.’s lost. But if Titty and Roger were out by themselves as well . . . “I don’t know what mother would say,” she said at last.
“But the D.’s are lost,” said Titty. “They’ve got to be found. You know daddy always says that when it’s a case of life and death no rules count.”
“Come along,” said John. “Peggy’s turn with the lantern. The other four of us tow the sledge.”
Titty and Roger flung off their knapsacks and strapped them on the sledge, putting a strap from one knapsack under the rope that held the sheepskins down and buckling it to a strap from the other.
They groped for their harness and were ready.
“Don’t go too far out, Peggy,” said John. “The blizzard may have caught them anywhere, and they’re sure to have tried to get into shelter. We’d better keep pretty close along the shore for fear of missing them.”
In Rio Bay there were no bonfires, no fireworks, and fewer lights than usual. The blizzard had driven the skaters off the ice and they had given it up for the night. Big drifts had blocked the roads. Here and there along the shore by the steamer pier, cars were being dug out of the snow. On land the snow had lain and drifted deep. Out on the lake it was as if a thousand men with brooms had been at work. On that smooth surface, in that gale of wind, the snow had had no chance of resting. The wind had blown the snow before it and the ice was clear enough for skating. But it was deserted. No one saw the Polar Relief Expedition leave the bay and plunge into the northern night.
*
At Beckfoot it had been very hard on Nancy when, at midday, just as she was making ready to start for the Fram, to meet once more the members of the expedition for whom her martyrdom had won a month of holiday, blowing snow had made it impossible to see more than a yard or two, and Mrs Blackett had said that she was not to think of going until it cleared. But it had grown worse and worse, and she had almost forgotten her own disappointment in her fears that the snow-drifts at the head of the lake would be so deep that they would have to put off once more the journey to the Pole that had been planned for tomorrow. She had got some comfort by throwing herself violently into the business of disinfecting. It had been already evening before the wind dropped and the storm was over and then, too late to go to the council, she had put on the fur hat and mittens that today, at last, were hers to handle, and had gone out in the garden. She was wading in the snow there when, as she had hoped he might, her ally, Captain Flint, came skating into the river.
“Hullo!” she shouted to the dim figure, taking off skates on the bank. “What did you do about the council? You told them we’re going to do it tomorrow? We will, won’t we?”
“Hullo! What have you done with those D.’s?”
“I’ve never seen them,” said Nancy.
“Well, where in the world are they?” said Captain Flint. “Where’s your mother?”
Nancy hurried after him to the house. He ran upstairs, calling for her mother. She heard quick, bothered words. “Yes. Serious if they were out in that storm. Is Sammy there? Slip along and tell him. I must go straight back and see if they’ve turned up at the Dixons’.”
He came running down again.
“Are the D.’s lost?” she asked.
“For the moment,” said Captain Flint, and was gone. Nancy hurried after him, but he had got his skates on and was off over the ice by the time she got to the boathouse.
Lost? The D.’s lost? She thought of the way that tremendous snowstorm had gone on and on sweeping up the lake, while she and her mother had been busy lighting sulphur candles and pasting paper round the windows and the door of the bedroom that had been a hospital ward. She had imagined them all sitting in the snug cabin of the Fram while that wind and snow raged over them. And the D.’s had not been there. Where had they been? At the igloo? Or at the barn and then not able to get home? Slowly, feeling her way, Nancy walked along the shore from the boathouse and out towards the point. It was dark now but for the snow-light from the hills. Cold, too. She had been terribly afraid a thaw would come with the snow. Bother those D.’s being lost, and Captain Flint going off like that without telling her what had happened at the council. Anyhow, everything was ready, if only tomorrow would be a fine day. She stood, looking out into the darkness away to the north. Somewhere, far away up there was the Pole, just as she had planned. Better even than she had hoped to make it, thanks to Captain Flint’s return. If only the drifts up there were not too deep. She saw a row of lights twinkling low under the hills, the lights of the village beyond the head of the lake, half a mile or a mile on the other side of the Pole. And then, suddenly, Nancy gasped. What was that? A light lower down, nearer than those distant lights of the village. A light on the shore, at the head of the lake? But there was no house there. The steamer pier was away to the right, and the boat landings. There was nothing there, except . . . Nancy gasped again . . . Was some native messing round and spoiling all that Captain Flint had made ready? And then the light went out . . . flashed . . . went out again . . . flashed and again went out . . . What was happening? Signalling? Nancy watched the flashes. Long. Short. A pause. Short. Long. Long. Short. A pause. And then flashes again, longs and shorts in the same order as before. “Shiver my timbers!” cried Nancy. “Jib-booms and bob-stays! Barbecued billygoats! N.P. . . . N.P. . . . It’s them. Of course it’s them. Morse, too. It can’t be anybody else. They’re at the North Pole. And in all that storm.” She ran, helter-skelter, knee-deep, stumbling in the snow, back to the house.
“Hi! Mother! Where’s mother?”
“She’s gone along to Mrs Lewthwaite’s, has your mother,” said the old cook.
Mrs Lewthwaite was the mother of Sammy the policeman.
Nancy wasted no time. Her knapsack, too, was ready for next day. She charged into the larder. A cake seemed the handiest thing in the way of food. She pushed it into her knapsack. She grabbed her skates. She scrawled on a bit of paper, “They’re at the North Pole. So am I. Tell Uncle Jim. Nancy,” and left it for her mother.
“But, Miss Nancy,” said cook.
“I’ve only grabbed a cake,” said Nancy, and the door swung to behind her.
“What a donk I was not to bring a torch,” she said, as she fastened the straps of her skates by feel. Slowly, carefully, she skated out. The light was still there. But it had stopped flashing. As she watched, it flashed again. “So long as they keep it lit I can’t go wrong,” said Nancy to herself. “Oh blow it, I do wish the others knew.”
And then with steady, even strokes she set out over the silent Arctic, her eyes fixed on the darkness under those dim hills and, in that darkness, on the light, the faint, flickering light, that could be nothing but the Pole itself.
CHAPTER XXVI
THE NORTH POLE
THE little sledge, with Dick and Dorothea clinging to it, as flat as they could lie on the top of their sheepskins and knapsacks, flew on in the snowstorm. The larch-pole mast bent and creaked. The sail, full like a balloon, swayed from side to side and the sledge swayed with it. The ropes thrummed. The iron runners roared over the ice.
“We’re going too fast,” said Dorothea.
Dick saw her lips move. “What?” he shouted.
“Too fast,” she shouted back. “A thousand miles an hour.”
“Probably thirty.” Thirty was a good wind speed. He knew that, and the sledge would not be going faster than the wind.
He lifted his head and trie
d to look back into the blizzard. In a moment his glasses were crusted over with driven snow. He tried to wipe them, but the sledge leapt suddenly as a runner struck some small thing, perhaps a bit of loose ice, or a stone, or perhaps just a crack. The sledge leapt and Dick, holding with only one hand, rolled sideways.
“Don’t let go!” Dorothea almost screamed.
“All right!” shouted Dick, hanging on firmly with both hands again. His glasses would just have to wait. He could see nothing. But how the little sledge was moving.
Dorothea was not blinded like Dick, but she could see very little more than he could. There was the sail, bellying forward and straining almost as if it would burst or lift the sledge into the air. There was the ice shooting by on either side. Snow was lodged in every fold of coat or sheepskin, and was driven, cold and wet, into her mouth whenever she tried to say anything. But on the ice the snow did not rest but blew along and the little sledge blew with it.
“Where are we going?” she shouted, and Dick lifted his head with its two white eyes, huge as his spectacles, though he could not see her through them.
“Straight up the lake . . . Just right.”
“How can you tell?”
“Hills on each side,” shouted Dick. “The wind can’t help blowing straight up. Like blowing through a tube. Peashooter. We’re the pea.”
Dick clung on, blind but happy. Nobody could say this was not sailing. His mast and the sail they had made with the help of Mrs Dixon had really worked. With every minute the wind lasted they were making up for the time lost through starting late.
“Where are we now?” shouted Dorothea.
“Arctic!” shouted Dick.
And suddenly Dorothea knew that she was afraid. Where were they? She could see nothing before, behind, or on either side of the sledge but driving snow. “Arctic!” was all very well. They might be anywhere. Or nowhere. It was as if they had slipped right out of the world into one in which there was nothing but themselves. And they were going on and on, roaring over the ice in this blinding, racing snow. The sledge was white. Dick lay there clinging to it, white all over. He might be looking at her, but instead of his eyes there were only those round white splashes of snow. His hand, the one that had lost its rabbit-skin mitten, was looking wet and blue about the knuckles. She tried, without moving more than she could help, to shelter it for him with a fold of sheepskin. She, too, began to feel cold. It had been hot enough skating along with the sledge, but now, lying on it, being blown along, she felt that the cold was finding its way through everything that was meant to keep it out. Her mind began to run on ahead, but much less pleasantly than usual . . .
Dorothea suddenly shook Dick’s shoulder.
“Let’s stop!” she cried. “Now! At once!”
Dick scraped at one of his glasses with his bare hand. An eye looked dimly out through the place from which he had smudged the snow away.
“We can’t go back,” he said. “We can’t help coming somewhere if we go on.”
Dorothea shook his shoulder almost angrily. How could she know that Dick was trying to calculate how fast they were moving, and wondering how much he ought to allow for friction on the ice, supposing that the speed of the wind was thirty miles an hour. Besides, he was full of delight at having made his sledge go like John’s. The very last thing he wanted to do was to stop it. Cold? Yes, it was cold, and he did not know where they were, but they were moving in the right direction. Why couldn’t Dorothea lie still? There was nothing to worry about. At least, not yet . . . He tried to get some more of the snow off his spectacles.
And then, suddenly, the sledge tilted sharply upwards, flew into the air, touched something hard, leaped . . . Prickly snow filled his mouth. His hat was gone. The sledge was gone. There was snow in his sleeves. Right up to his elbows. He was down, down, floundering in snow like a dog struggling in water. Something hurt his ear. His spectacles had been torn off his face but still hung from one ear. It was the other that was hurting. He put up his hand to feel it. It was bleeding a little. Scratched by the spectacles probably. Lucky they had not gone altogether . . .
What had happened? Where was the sledge? Where was Dorothea?
“Dot!” he shouted into the driving snow.
“Dick! Dick!”
The answer came from only a few yards away, but he could see nothing but snow, snow driving sideways in the wind, and snow lifted like spray from the crest of a wave and blown onwards and upwards.
“Dot!”
He floundered towards her.
She was standing in the deep snow with her back to the wind.
“Are you all right?” she cried, and almost fell towards him in the snow. “Are you all right?”
She was laughing now, in a shaky kind of way and held firmly to Dick’s arm, as if she were afraid it was going to get away from her. Dick peered at her through his spectacles on which the snow was already settling again.
“Dot!” he said in astonishment. “You aren’t crying?”
“It’s mostly snow,” said Dorothea. “But I didn’t know what had happened to you when the sledge turned over and the mast broke . . .”
“The mast broke?” said Dick. “How do you know?”
“It’s here,” said Dorothea – “at least it was.”
The mast was all but hidden, but there was the sail, already heavy with drift snow, and the little yellow quarantine flag still on its stick, fastened to the masthead.
“The sledge is here, too,” said Dick. “Come on, Dot, before we lose it altogether.”
The sledge, upside down, was covered with snow, but though several of the ropes had broken when the mast broke, one of the shrouds still held, so that the sledge and the upper part of the mast were anchored to each other. With a good deal of tugging and pushing, while the snow blew down their necks and up their sleeves and blinded Dick again and again by covering his spectacles, they dragged the sledge clear and turned it the right way up. They had lost much less than might have been expected, because of the sheepskins that had been on the top of their baggage. Dick’s skates, pushed in underneath, were still there, and the lantern, fortunately, came up out of the snow still tied to the strap of a knapsack.
One of the knapsacks was gone, the one with the food. It must have been quite close to them, but they could not find it, though in feeling for it Dick found his rabbit-skin hat. He shook the snow out of the hat, crammed it down on his head, and turned to go on with the work of squashing the sail into manageable size, and lashing it down with the broken mast on the top of as much of the baggage as was still on the sledge. If that knapsack was lost it was lost. There was no time to waste.
“What are we going to do?” said Dorothea.
“We must be right at the head of the lake,” said Dick doubtfully. “The others must be close to us if only we could see. Peggy said the North Pole wasn’t very far from the shore.”
“I wish Peggy was here,” said Dot.
“She wouldn’t know any better than us which way to go in this,” said Dick.
“We must go somewhere,” said Dorothea. “It’s getting worse every minute.”
Suddenly, in all that flurry of driving snow, while Dorothea was growing colder and colder and hopelessly wishing the snow would stop, if only for a few seconds, long enough to let them see where they were, she felt that something had changed in Dick. He had made up his mind what to do, and was burrowing under the frozen sheepskins at the front end of the sledge.
“What do you want?”
“The Alpine rope,” said Dick. He pulled out that great awkward coil of old clothes-line which had seemed so poor a substitute for the real climbing-rope belonging to the rest of the expedition.
“It isn’t strong enough,” said Dorothea. She was dreadfully disappointed. She had thought at first that he had a real idea, and it seemed he was only thinking of mending the rigging.
CAPSIZED AND DISMASTED
“It isn’t very strong,” said Dick, “but it’ll do. Hadn’t
you better get your skates off?” It was not of the rigging that he was thinking.
He unfastened the coil and laid it on the top of the sledge, tying one end of the clothes-line to the broken mast.
“So that we can explore without losing each other,” he said. “Come on. You take the other side of the sledge.”
“But where are we going?” asked Dorothea.
“North for a bit,” said Dick, “the way the snow is driving. And then I’ll feel out first on one side and then on the other, at the end of the rope, so that I’ll be able to get back to the sledge each time. The others must be somewhere quite near.”
“What about shouting?”
“We could try.”
They shouted “Hullo!” both together, three or four times and as loud as they could. But it was like shouting in thick cottonwool. They could not believe anyone could hear them through all that snow. There was no answer at all.
“Let’s get it moving,” said Dick.
The snow was settling thickly over their sledge. They lugged it forward, foot by foot, steering by the way the snowflakes were blowing.
“Anyhow, if we go far enough we’ll come to a road, won’t we?” said Dorothea.
Dick said nothing. The first dozen yards of floundering with the sledge through the drifted snow had been enough to show him that they would stand a poor chance if they had to count on reaching that road that ran round the head of the lake on the other side of the Polar region.
They struggled on another dozen yards, another twenty, by which time Dorothea felt that if they had to go far like this there would be nothing for it but abandoning the sledge. That would be failure of the most dreadful kind. Already they had lost their food. Already they had let the main expedition reach the Pole before them. And now, to have reached the head of the lake, to have crossed the Polar ice, only to struggle to the nearest road without ever seeing the Pole itself, to crawl home without even their sledge . . . it was worse than mere failure. And she had been so sure that Dick would somehow manage . . . She had so clearly seen the others clapping him on the back, and heard Nancy’s loud, cheerful voice telling him he was fit to be a pirate, or something like that . . .