Journey (20 page)

He was reading
Great Expectations
for the third time, not aloud this time, for Luton and Fogarty claimed they had not cared much for it the first time around and had more or less resented the waste of time during the second reading. He was sorry that he had confided to Fogarty his concern about his incipient scurvy, but now he wished he had someone with whom to discuss the matter; to do so with either Luton or Fogarty seemed quite impossible, and what was worse, improper. He suffered his debilitating disease mutely, supposing that Fogarty had informed Luton of the matter. Throughout the cabin, night and day, there was a conspiracy of silence regarding his affliction, and he allowed it to continue.

Fogarty resembled his master in his stolid acceptance of conditions. He ran with Luton on those days he was not searching vainly to find the meat that would ensure their safety, and he maintained that stubborn cheerfulness which made any good Irish servingman a model of his calling. Though not required to wait on his companions, he still found pleasure in heating Lord Luton's shaving water in the morning and in honing and stropping the razor. He helped Carpenter in a dozen ways and strove to maintain good spirits in the cramped quarters. He was appalled that they should be spending a second winter in such surroundings, and he watched almost breathlessly for even the slightest promise of spring: “Soon we'll be over the mountains, that I'm sure, and there'll be gold for the finding!” He was the only one who mentioned gold; the other two had never been obsessed with it and were now concerned only with survival.

As winter waned, so did Carpenter's reserves; each day he grew weaker, until once toward the end of the month he was unable to get
out of bed in the morning, which now showed a clear difference from night. When Luton asked: “You joining us for a bit of running?” he grinned and said: “I shall sit this out in the tea tent,” as if they were participating in a cricket match.

On the next day, when Fogarty returned from the latrine, he saw a pathetic sight: Harry Carpenter was on his weakened hands and knees, trying with the shovel, whose long handle he managed poorly, to grub away the surface of the frozen earth in what the Irishman knew was a search for elusive roots that might help stem his rampant scurvy. He was obviously not having any luck, but with the quiet determination that had always marked him he continued his futile scraping until he fell forward, exhausted, the heavy shovel falling useless beside him.

Fogarty considered for some moments whether he should run to Carpenter's aid, but some inner sense cautioned him that a man like this would want to solve his own problems and would, indeed, resent intrusion from another, so he withdrew out of sight, taking a position from which he could maintain watch over the fallen man. In due course Harry rose, took almost two minutes to steady himself, then walked slowly back to the hut, dragging the shovel behind him. When he saw Fogarty, he brought it sharply up and placed it against his shoulder as if it were a rifle and he on parade.

“I've been giving a touch to our track,” he said as he walked past, but when Fogarty saw his ashen face he breathed a silent cry: Dear Jesus! He's going to die.

No matter how courageous and determined Carpenter was, he could not avoid brooding about the awfulness of dying in these bleak surroundings, where every means that might have enabled him to fight off his debility was missing: the medicines, the proper diet, the good doctors, the nursing, the supervised recuperation…How valuable these things were, how clear an indication that the society which ensured them was properly civilized.

However, his painful reflections did not always center on himself. He thought often of his cousin Julia, nineteen when last he saw her, and a young woman who would never be beautiful in the ordinary sense of that word; she did not even have what was described as a “flawless English complexion,” but she did have what Trevor Blythe had recognized, a positively glowing inner fire that made whatever she said sound reasonable and whatever she did seem humane. “Best of her breed,” Harry whispered to himself as he visualized her running
freely across the lawn, to greet him after a safari in Kenya, “bubbling with life's infinite possibilities.”

Then came the gloom, for he had in his life of moving about, especially among English families living abroad, seen a score of young women like Julia, radiant and of great power but not particularly marketable in the marriage bazaars, and if they failed in their twenties to find the one good man who could appreciate their inner beauty, they might find no one, and have to content themselves, in their forties, with playing the cello, reading good books and doing needlework.

When such thoughts assailed him he recalled Trevor's commission: “When we reached home I intended speaking with your cousin, Lady Julia. Please tell her.” He was certain now that he would not be reaching home, that Julia would never know that a young poet of marked talent had loved her, nor would she receive the gift that would express this love. He became so obsessed with the thought that he would fail to fulfill this mission that for two days he chastised himself, then asked for one of the last precious pieces of paper, on which he tried to tell Julia of Trevor Blythe's death and of the young man's last request: that she be told he would have been coming home to marry her. But he had neither the strength nor the concentration to finish the letter, and as the pencil fell from his almost lifeless hand he realized the true significance of death and murmured in a voice too low for his companions to hear: “It means that messages of love will not be delivered.”

That night Lord Luton, seeing the desolation of spirit which had overcome his chief lieutenant, cried brightly: “I say, men! Isn't it time we attacked another can of our Fort Norman supply,” and as before, Fogarty chopped the can open and brought out the saucepan. This time he was able to throw in a small collection of roots he had grubbed from the thawing soil, and when stew was rationed out, it was twice as tasty as before and the three diners leaned back and smacked their lips, remarking upon what a civilizing effect a substantial hot meal could have upon a hungry man.

But Carpenter was so debilitated that his high spirits did not last the night, and in the morning he had neither the strength nor the resolve to leave his bed. Luton, sick at heart over the weakening condition of his friend, sat beside Carpenter and took him by the shoulders: “Look here, Harry, this won't do. It won't do at all.” Harry, thinking he was being rebuked for purposely malingering and unable because
of his illness to see that Luton was merely using the hale-and-hearty approach of the regimental marshal, took offense at his friend's chiding.

Hiding his distress, he rose on pitifully weakened legs whose sores had never healed but only worsened, put on his heaviest clothing, and said cheerfully: “You're right, Evelyn. I could do with a bit of jog,” and walking unsteadily, he started to step out into the bitter cold, pausing for one fleeting moment to whisper to Fogarty. But what he said, Lord Luton could not hear.

The two men remaining in the hut agreed that spurring him to action had been salutary, but since they did not continue to monitor him as he ran right past the track, they did not see him slow down because of gasping pain near his heart, nor when he was out of sight, begin to take off his outer garments one by one. Heavy parka, gone! Woolen jacket with double pockets, thrown aside! Inner jacket, also of wool, away! Now his good linen shirt came off and next his silk-and-wool undershirt, until he stumbled ahead, naked to the waist in cold that had returned to many degrees below zero.

There was no wind, so for a few minutes he could move forward, but then his scurvied legs refused to function and his lungs began to freeze. Grasping for the branches of a stunted tree, he held himself upright, and in that position froze to death.

When Harry's return was delayed, Lord Luton said to Fogarty: “Good, Harry's whipping himself back into shape,” but when the absence became prolonged, Luton said with obvious apprehension: “Fogarty, I think we'd better look into Harry's running.” From the cabin door they stared at the track, but they saw nothing.

“Whatever could have happened?” Luton asked, and Fogarty had no reasonable surmise. They walked tentatively toward the running oval, and Fogarty spotted the red-and-gray parka lying on the ground and rushed forward to retrieve it. As he did so, Luton, coming behind, spotted the woolen jacket, and then the inner jacket and not far beyond the erect corpse of Harry Carpenter, already frozen almost solid.

When they returned to the shack, a distraught Evelyn could not accept the death of his friend as merely the kind of accident one could anticipate during a protracted adventure. In a voice trembling with anguish and self-doubt he asked: “What did he whisper to you, Fogarty?” and the Irishman replied: “He praised you, sir.”

“What did he say?” Luton cried, his voice an agitated demand,
and Fogarty whispered: “He told me ‘Keep Evelyn strong for crossing the mountains.' ”

“Why would he have said that?” in a higher voice.

“Because he knew we were trapped…by those mountains Mr. Trevor wrote about.”

Luton and Fogarty were to experience an additional horror in Harry's manly suicide. Unable at that moment to dig a grave, and not wishing to bring the corpse into the cabin, they collected his strewn garments and placed them like robes over the stiff body, which they laid in the snow. When they returned the next day they discovered what food the ravens of the arctic fed upon.

—

March was especially difficult, for with the coming of the vernal equinox, when night and day were twelve hours long at all spots on the earth, the two survivors had visible reason for thinking that spring was already here, and desperately they wanted the snow and ice to melt so they could be on their way. But this did not happen, for although the days grew noticeably warmer and those fearful silent nights when the temperature dropped to minus-sixty were gone, it still remained below freezing and no relaxation of winter came.

It was a time of irritation, and one day when Luton was beginning to fear the onset of scurvy himself, he railed at Fogarty: “You boasted last year that you were a poacher extraordinaire. For God's sake, let's see you bag something,” and Fogarty merely said: “Yes, Milord,” but was unable to find anything to shoot.

Even in the closeness of the cabin, Lord Luton maintained separation by caste. Fogarty was a servant, an unlettered man who had been brought along to assist his betters, and never did either man forget that. During two winters, each more than seven months long, Luton never touched Fogarty, although Fogarty sometimes touched him when performing a service, and it would have been unthinkable for Luton to have addressed him by a first name. And had Fogarty referred to His Lordship as Evelyn, the cabin would have trembled as if struck by an earthquake. From these strict rules, hammered out over the centuries, there could be no deviation. If Fogarty had to address Luton directly, it was “Milord” and nothing else; Luton would have considered even “sir” too familiar.

And yet there was mutual respect between these men. The Luton party had started with five, and now only two were left, and at times
Luton had entertained but never voiced the judgment that if in the end there was to be only one to reach Dawson, it would probably be this happy moonfaced Irishman. “Damn me,” he muttered to himself one day as he watched Fogarty running his laps on the oval track where mud was beginning to show. “Peasants have a capacity for survival. I suppose that's why there's so many of 'em.”

In fairness to Luton, he never demanded subservience of a demeaning kind. The original rule still prevailed: “Fogarty is the servant of the expedition, not of any individual member.” And in a dozen unspoken ways he let the Irishman know that the latter's contribution was both essential and highly regarded. It was an arrangement that only two well-intended and thoroughly disciplined men could have maintained under these difficult conditions, and they knew that if they remained obedient to it, they had a fighting chance to bring their odd combination safely to Dawson and its gold fields.

Despite their shared determination to avoid any differences of opinion that might exacerbate tempers already in danger, each had a strong individual attitude toward what should be done with the four remaining cans of meat. Lord Luton, as the descendant of gentlemen for fifteen generations and noblemen for nine, insisted upon living by the code of the endangered aristocrat: “Decency says we must save the cans till the very last. Stands to reason, Fogarty, it would be unconscionable to devour them now, when they may be required in some great extremity.”

Fogarty, on the other hand, was descended from some of the shrewdest, self-protecting peasants Ireland had ever produced, and like the sensible pragmatist he was, he saw even the precious cans of meat only as means to some worthy end, and if there was a good chance of getting to Dawson alive, he would use them now, when they were obviously needed: “I say, with all due deference, Milord, we ought to chop one of them open right now and fill our bellies.”

“We'll have none of that, Fogarty. Those cans are for an emergency.”

At this very moment, in a small Scottish hamlet many thousands of miles distant from this segment of the Arctic Circle, a sentimental little Scottish writer, James Barrie (later Sir James), was brooding over a winsome idea for a stage play, one which would later fill theaters of the world with joy and chuckles.
The Admirable Crichton
dealt with a situation somewhat like the one in which Luton and Fogarty found themselves: a spoiled and pampered family of the English gentry is
marooned on a tropical island along with a trusted retainer, their butler Crichton, and as the family falls apart in this crisis, displaying a lack of both common sense and will power, Crichton reveals himself as a master of every emergency. Only his courage, inventiveness and inexhaustible good sense save the family, but when rescue comes, he, of course, reverts to being their servant. It was neat, amusing and reassuring, and people loved it, especially the upper classes who were the butt of the joke.