The Man who Missed the War (30 page)

Philip was really worried now. They had set out with sixteen days’ rations. Six days had been allowed for the journey, four days to explore the bay and another six days for the homeward journey, if they found no whaling station on the MacKenzie Sea. Actually, they had spent five days on the journey and two on the ridge, so they had only nine days’ rations left. That meant quite definitely that they would have to abandon any idea of pushing on to the bay, since with Gloria badly lamed it might take them all of the nine days to get back to the raft.

The third day she still could not walk more than a few steps without suffering acute pain, so they had to spend yet another day and night shivering on the ridge. By this time they were both grimly aware that it was courting death to remain there very much longer, and on the fourth morning they decided to make a great effort at least to cover the few miles which would get them down to the lower levels, clear of the snow, where they would be able to find shelter from the biting wind.

Gloria made a sling for her foot to keep it off the ground, then using the bivouac pole as a crutch on one side, and supported by Philip on the other, she began the exhausting business of hopping along, while he walked slowly beside her. In this fashion they covered about half a mile, but she found it a terrible strain to carry the whole weight of her body on her good leg, and the more tired it grew, in spite of frequent rests, the more she became inclined to stumble. A snow-covered snag of rock on which she trod caused her to lurch against Philip who was also at that moment on uneven ground, and in attempting to recover his balance he caught his foot in a hole and they fell heavily together.

Muttering imprecations Philip picked himself up, but Gloria had wrenched her injured foot again and, refusing his aid, lay there sobbing in the snow. In vain he besought her to make another effort. She only urged him to leave her there and make his way back to the raft alone, which he flatly refused to do; so the only thing for it was to pitch their minute camp once again.

That night, as Philip lay sleeplessly turning over and over in his mind their desperate plight, he came to the conclusion that she was probably right and that their best hope lay in his making his
way back to the raft. They had seven days’ food left. Unhampered by luggage, he might be able to get back in four days and return with a fresh supply of food in a further four to five. But would she be able to last out the eight or nine days that he was away and, in this wilderness of rock and snow, which seemed to have so few distinguishing marks, if once he left her would he ever find her again?

During the past few days he had thought a great deal of the Canon, and he had practically persuaded himself that he must really have been sleep-walking and dreamt the whole vision. After all, the idea that he should play a leading part in defeating the Germans was pretty farcical on the whole, but it was the height of absurdity now that he was marooned in the Antarctic and almost certain to die there. Yet, when his chattering teeth at last allowed him to sleep that night he dreamed again of Beal-Brookman, and the little Canon was saying:

‘The Gods help those who help themselves, Philip. Have courage, my boy, and delay no longer. Your only hope of saving Gloria is to leave her.’

When he awoke in the morning he told Gloria, and she agreed that it was the only thing to do. He took enough food to keep him going for three days, trusting to reach the raft by the fourth, or, at the latest, the fifth, and left the rest with her. He also left the primus stove and all their coverings except one layer of their triple sleeping-bag in which to wrap himself at nights.

They tried to make light of their parting, but it was a pathetic effort, and they were both very near to tears. He spent a few moments consciously memorising every detail of the landscape, and it was agreed that from the eighth day of his departure she should yodel as loudly as she could ever hour in order to help guide him back to her. Then, raising a feeble smile, he said he would eat his hat if he were not back in under a week, and left her.

To have had an accident himself while crossing the broken ground would have been the end of everything, so he set off at a steady, unhurried pace and picked his way carefully. After covering three miles he was clear of the most broken ground and able to proceed considerably faster, but there were still patches of snow and ice on the downward slopes which forced him to keep
his eyes fixed on the ground ahead. In consequence, he did not see that the Antarctic landscape now held a most unusual feature which he was rapidly approaching.

The crack of a rifle startled him out of his wits. Almost simultaneously the tattered hat, which he had threatened only an hour before to eat, was whisked off his head.

As he jerked to a halt, he saw that, thirty yards further down the slope, a tall black-bearded man was standing. In his hands he held the still smoking rifle from which he had just sent a bullet within an inch or two of Philip’s brain.

Philip was quite convinced that he was suffering from an hallucination. Somehow, when the Canon’s ghost had actually been talking to him there had not seemed anything so terribly abnormal about that; but this was too fantastic to be real. For several days past he had been undergoing severe strain, cold and lowered vitality, owing to lack of hot or really adequate meals, so there could be no doubt about it—his brain had become temporarily affected.

Yet the black-bearded man looked very solid. He was clad entirely in furs, a conical fur hat like Robinson Crusoe’s set at a rakish angle on his head, while behind him there was a small sledge that he had evidently been dragging. Suddenly he called out in English:

‘What’s the matter with you? Can’t you speak?’

‘You
are
real!’ gasped Philip, taking a few steps forward. ‘My God, I’m glad to see you! But why … why on earth did you shoot at me just now?’

Tucking his rifle casually under his arm, the other suddenly broke into peals of boisterous laughter, and it flashed into Philip’s mind that perhaps he had to do with a madman; but after a moment the man stopped and began to walk forward, as he replied: ‘You looked so funny, striding along staring at the ground. I thought it would be amusing to pull you up short with a shot.’

‘But, damn it all, you might have killed me!’ Philip exclaimed angrily.

‘No, no!’ said the man. ‘There was no risk at all of my doing that because I’m a very fine shot. A very fine shot indeed.’

There was something in the way he made the boast, added to the fact that, although he spoke English with great fluency, he had quite an unusual accent, which convinced Philip that the stranger was neither British nor American.

‘Besides,’ the man went on, a grin spreading over his dark face, ‘would it have mattered very much if I had killed you? Who are you, anyway?’

After giving his name Philip asked that of the stranger with as much asperity as he could get into his tone.

‘I,’ replied the man magnificently, ‘was born Prince Fedor Solgorukin, and I am now a King.’

Philip did not believe the first statement any more than the second, and it was now clear to him that he was dealing with a dangerous lunatic; but the fact remained that the self-styled King was well clad and well fed and therefore presumably had a base much nearer than the raft. With Gloria in mind, Philip realised the imperative necessity of humouring the madman, but to address him as ‘Your Majesty’ seemed to be overdoing it, so he said:

‘Well, Prince, I’m more delighted to see you than I can possibly say. I’m the best part of five days’ march from my base, and owing to an accident, I’ve practically run out of stores. I’m sure I can count on your help, and no doubt you’ll be able to put me on the way to the whaling station.’

‘Whether I should be prepared to help you I don’t yet know,’ replied the other guardedly. ‘How long is it since you left the whaling station, and how many people are there in your party?’

That one human being should hesitate even for an instant to give help to another in such circumstances shocked Philip and struck him as being unbelievably callous, and he stared in astonishment at the tall, dark, middle-aged man in front of him. The Prince’s mouth was hidden by the curling blue-black hair of his carefully trimmed beard and moustache. His nose was thin and aquiline, his high cheekbones indicated that he was of Mongolian blood, and his eyes had all the dark inscrutability of the Tartar. It was a proud, strong face, and its striking individuality proclaimed aloud that its owner was a law unto himself. Prince or not, he certainly appeared to be a Russian and an unusual personality. Philip only hesitated a second, then he said:

‘I didn’t come from the whaling station. We were washed up about a hundred miles east along the coast from here, on a raft.

‘Who is we? How many are you?’

‘Only myself and a girl,’ Philip jerked a thumb over his shoulder. ‘She’s back there about three miles away with a sprained ankle. We’ve been hung up for nearly five days, and I wouldn’t have left her unless we’d been absolutely desperate. She can’t walk yet and our only hope was for me to go off and get more food.’

‘A woman, eh?’ The Russian whistled softly, and his eyes narrowed. ‘In that case I can hardly refuse you the hospitality of my kingdom. Lead me to her. As we go, you can tell me about yourself. Since you arrived on a raft I take it you were torpedoed by these filthy Germans?’

‘No, not exactly; although it was owing to a German agent that the raft left the United States without a proper crew in the first place. You see, it wasn’t an ordinary raft. I was carrying out a semi-scientific experiment.’

‘How interesting!’

‘It was rather, because it proved very nearly a hundred per cent successful, but it went wrong at the last moment, and that’s the reason we got washed up here. I’ll tell you about it later, but first can you give me any news of the war? Our radio faded out on us over a year ago, and we’ve heard nothing of the outer world since.’

‘I know only what had happened up to last February. It was still going on then. London had been bombed to hell, but the R.A.F. was still on top of the Luftwaffe, and the Nazis hadn’t the guts to invade Britain without air superiority.’

‘Had the United States come in?’ asked Philip.

‘No, not up to the spring of Nineteen Forty-One. Roosevelt and many of their top men in both parties would bring America in if they could, because they know what she’ll be up against if Britain is defeated. But the great big American public has been doped for so long by Isolationist propaganda that they haven’t really got round to understanding how a Hitler victory might affect them. When I last heard they were ninety per cent pro-Ally and stripping their own cupboards to send bundles to bombed
out Britons, but all the same they were still ninety-five per cent against getting mixed up in this crazy war—and who can blame them?’

‘If they can send bundles they can send other things as well,’ remarked Philip. ‘Thank God our Atlantic Life-Line is still open. I’m the son of a British Naval officer, and I’m particularly interested in everything to do with the war at sea.’

‘Really! I was an officer in the Royal Navy myself for several years.’

Philip shot a sidelong glance at his companion. There could be no doubt about it: the fellow had a screw loose; yet, apart from his
folie de grandeur
, he talked seriously enough. He was continuing smoothly:

‘The U-boats were taking a pretty heavy toll, of course, and it remains to be seen if British and United States tonnage will prove sufficient to see the party through. If Hitler had started the war with another hundred submarines Britain would have been starved out by now. Still, one must hand it to the British that they’re a remarkable people. Nobody would have given a fig for their chances last autumn and at the very moment the world was waiting to count them out they staged a victorious offensive in North Africa.’

‘By Jove! Did they really?’

‘Yes. General Wavell defeated an army six times the size of his own and drove the Italians helter-skelter across half Libya. It’s true that the Eyeties are not in the same class as the Germans, but, even so, they were fighting behind their own well prepared defences, they had thousands of guns, quite a lot of armour and the whole Italian Air Force pitted against about three squadrons of British fighters—so it was a pretty good show.’

‘Gosh, yes! Absolutely marvellous!’ Philip murmured. ‘That’s real generalship. My God! What wouldn’t I give to get home, though, so that I could join up!’

The Russian regarded him curiously. ‘What? You would like to go into the war?’

‘Yes, naturally. Not for the fun of the thing, but because we’ve got to get these blasted Germans down somehow, and every man counts.’

‘I am different. I do not mind fighting man to man. In fact, I
rather enjoy it. But never again will I put on a uniform and allow people to order me about.’

To Philip it seemed so obvious that no country could survive if its young men refused to serve it when it was in danger that it was pointless to pursue the theme, and a few minutes later they came in sight of the tent.

Gloria was as astonished as Philip had been at the appearance of the well-fed, prosperous-looking stranger in such a desolate land; but once she had got over her first delight at being spared the long and lonely ordeal, which that morning she had made up her mind to face, she began to ply him with a dozen questions.

Where was his camp? How far away was it? How long had he been there? Why had he left it? And so on.

‘Patience, Madame!’ he laughed. ‘You shall know in good time. I came down to the coast because I had a mind to shoot a seal if I could find one, but I live three good days’ march away from here in the mountains of the interior. That is quite a good distance, and will take two or three days longer if we have to carry you. However, the dried food that I have in that bundle on my sledge will last me a week, and I understand that you still have rations for six or seven days, so we ought to be able to make it.’

‘Couldn’t you help me to get her to the whaling station instead?’ suggested Philip. ‘We’re both terribly anxious to get home, and that’s the only place we’re likely to find a ship.’