Part 8 (1/2)
When I wrote you that there was ice about, I did not refer to the field ice through which we travelled on my way north. This is the real thing this time--icebergs, and lots of them. They call the little ones ”growlers,” and big and little alike are cla.s.sed as ”pieces of ice”!
They are not my idea of a ”piece” of anything. I know now what the Ancient Mariner meant when he said:
”And ice mast high came floating by As green as emerald.”
It exactly describes them, only it doesn't wholly describe them, for no one could. They loom up in every shape and size and variation of form, pinnacles and towers and battlements, stately palaces of glittering crystal, triumphal archways more gorgeous than ever welcomed a conqueror home. Sometimes they are s.h.i.+ning white, too dazzling to look at; and sometimes they are streaked with great vivid bands of green and azure which are so unearthly and brilliant that I feel certain some fairy has dipped his brush in the solar spectrum and dabbed the colours on this gigantic palette.
A sea without these jewels of the Arctic will forever look barren and unfinished to me after this. Even the sailors, who know too well what a menace they are to their craft, yield to their beauty a mute and grudging homage. To sit in the sun or the moonlight, and watch a heavy sea hurling mountains of water and foam over one of these ocean monarchs is a never-to-be-forgotten experience. So too it is to listen to the thunder of one of them ”foundering”; for their equilibrium is very unstable, and the action of the sea, as they travel southwards to their death in the Gulf Stream, cuts them away at the surface of the water. Blocks weighing unbelievable tons crash off them, or they will suddenly, without a second's warning, break into a million pieces. I can never conquer a creepiness of the spine as I listen to one of these tragedies. It is a startling, new sensation such as we never expect to meet again after childhood has shut its doors on us. In the quiet that follows the gigantic disintegration one half expects to see a new heaven and a new earth emerge out of the chaos of ice quivering in the water.
You often warned me in the course of the past year how dull life would be. You knew how I loved a city. I still do. But the last word on earth one could apply to the life here is ”dull.” Nature takes care of that. I defy you to walk along any street in London and see six porpoises and a whale! That is what I saw this morning. Oh! of course you may counter by telling me that neither can I see an automobile or a fire engine, but I have you, because I can answer that I have seen them already. How are you going to get out of that corner, except by saying that you do not want to see the old porpoises and whales and bergs?--and I know your ”Scotch” conscience forbids such distortion of facts.
I have come to believe in the personality of porpoises. They swam beside the s.h.i.+p, playing about in the water all the while, rolling over and diving, and chasing each other just as if they knew they had a ”gallery.” We did not reward them very well either, for the Prophet shot one, and we ate bits of him for lunch--the porpoise, I mean, not the Prophet. I thought he would make a good companion-piece for the polar bear, and he was quite edible. He only needed a rasher of bacon to make you believe he was calf's liver.
So you see that between puffins and porpoises and whales, and ”growlers” and lost dories, I crowded enough into one day to give me dreams that Alice in Wonderland might covet.
In your secret heart don't you wish that you too were
”Where the squat-legged Eskimo Waddles in the ice and snow, And the playful polar bear Nips the hunter unaware; Where the air is kind o' pure, And the snow crop's pretty sure”?
_July 22_
It has been days since I wrote you, and they have slipped by so stealthily I must have missed half they held.
Since coming aboard I have taken to rising promptly. It is a necessary measure if I am to be able to rise at all. One morning I stuck my head out just in time to see my favourite sweater, which I had counted on for service on the homeward voyage, disappearing over the rail--legitimately, so far as concerned the wearer. Last week, by the merest fluke, I rescued my best boots from a similar fate. The doctor explained lamely on each occasion that they got mixed with the clothing sent for distribution to the poor. This may be a literal statement of fact, but I doubt the manner of the mixing.
We celebrated to-day by running aground on the flats. You can ”squeak”
over them if you happen to strike the channel. The difficulty is, however, that the sandy bottom s.h.i.+fts. To-day it is, and to-morrow it is not. I was eating one of those large, hearty breakfasts which the combination of a dead flat calm and a suns.h.i.+ny brisk air make such a desideratum. I was, moreover, perched on the top of the wheel house, and reflecting on the poor taste of the author of the Book of Revelation when he said that in heaven ”there shall be no more sea.”
At this moment I came to with a lurch. ”She's stuck!” yelled, or as he himself would put it, ”bawled,” the Prophet. For once he was undeniably right. Fortunately the tide was on the flood, and we floated off a short while after.
In the afternoon we visited an Eskimo Moravian station. They--the Eskimos, not the Moravians--are a jolly little people, and picturesque as possible. Not that any aspersions on the Moravians are intended, for I have the greatest respect for them. My s.h.i.+ning leather coat made a great hit. They fondled it and stroked it, and coo-ed at it as if it were a new baby. All the women past their very first youth seemed toothless. I wondered if it could be a characteristic of the tribe--sort of Manx Eskimo. I asked the Prophet what was the cause of the universal shortage, and was told that the Eskimo women all chew the sealskin to soften it for making into boots. You can take this statement for what it may be worth.
Speaking of which I have just finished reading a ludicrously furious attack on the Mission in a St. John's paper, for its alleged misrepresentations. It seems that last year the former superintendent took down a boy from the Children's Home to give him a chance at further education. He had a wooden leg, his own having been removed by an operation for tuberculosis. On his arrival in Montreal the omnivorous reporter saw in him excellent copy, and forthwith printed the following purely fict.i.tious account of the cause of his disability. Little Kommak, so the story ran (the boy is of pure Irish extraction, and is named Michael Flynn), was one day sitting with his mother in his igloo when he saw a large polar bear approaching. Having no weapon, and not desiring the presence of the bear in any capacity at their midday meal, he stuck his leg out through the small aperture of the igloo. The bear bit it off on the principle of half a loaf being better than no bread. The whole thing was a fabric of lies from beginning to end. The St. John's papers discovered the article, pounced upon it, and printed the article ”_que je viens de finir_.”
Of course, if the local editor lacked humour enough to credit the doctor with such a fairy tale, one could pity the poor soul, but his diatribe has rather the earmarks of jealousy.
[Ill.u.s.tration: THE BEAR BIT HIS LEG OFF]
A lovely sunset is lighting up the sea and sky and hills, and turning the plain little settlement, in the harbour of which we are anch.o.r.ed, into the Never, Never Land. The scene is so bewitching that I find my soul purged by it of the bad taste of the attack. I'll leave you to digest the mixed metaphor undisturbed while I go below and help with the patients who have begun pouring aboard.