The Survivor (6 page)

Now he was travelling south to Sydney. Somewhere, towards dusk on the coastal plain, a blunt-shouldered man with a tall man's thin and fine-wrought face and features boarded the train and sat in his compartment. It was hard to say what the man was doing, boarding in that unlikely town with a sawmill grinding overtime in the dusk and the breath of rainforests in the air.

This slightly microcephalic gent made Ramsey feel inferior, made him feel the brashness of his vestless suit and patterned sweater—the uniform of the unarrived. The man had stepped out of the timber town and onto the train in velour hat and raglan and cotswold suit of expensive insipidity, and was off-handedly in possession of some honour adequate to him. This was what Ramsey decided, asking himself, as a private but dedicated bourgeois, what two published Imagist poems (his own) meant beside the substance of this man?

So the man sat, inappositely placed but not aware of it, while the people you expected to be there, tradesmen and their wives from cow and banana towns, sheathed themselves frantically in blankets and made noises of exaggerated sensuality at the presence of foot-warmers.

The stranger read, but seemed to catch Ramsey staring at him. Ramsey was, in fact, trying to see the title of the technical-looking book in the man's hands. He hoped that it was something mean and soiled with trade, such as
The Double-U Drain Fitting in Modern Plumbing
. He saw at last that it was
Notes on the Glaciology of the Victoria Land Mountains
, and sank back once more into his humanist inferiority.

From which he was surprised by finding the man looking at him in an intense and attenuated way. Ramsey thought he had once before seen a face balanced in exactly that way between taut and slack, between will and daydream; the face of a nut-brown businessman with plenty of pubic hair who, in the dressing-room of the Domain baths, had put his hand on Ramsey's naked thigh and whispered that he had a classic figure and such fine legs too.

This unutterable incident, interrupted by other bathers, recurred now to him. He began to read again. What sort of man, he asked himself in alarm, saw sexual messages in other men's eyes?

When he looked again the man's eyes were still on him. Or were they simply focused on the mid-distance, and would go on innocently focusing in this manner all through the night?

Ramsey rose and made for the corridor. Within a minute the man followed him. Ramsey's neck prickled, certain of the man's strange lusts.

“Can you ski?” the man said.

He had at least left the compartment door open; but an asexual wife, grunting in surprise at finding herself warm in a train, closed it behind his back.

“No,” said Alec.

“Of course not.” The man chuckled in his private intense way. “Very little snowfall in the dairying areas, eh?”

“That's right.”

Ramsey read the grafted-looking head as a certain symptom of perversion.

“I've been looking for someone like you.”

“I'll call the guard,” muttered Ramsey, turning away.

Then the man understood Ramsey's idea of this confrontation and began to laugh.

“The penalty of monomania,” he admitted and then, lying but to prove his bona fides, “No, I assure you, I keep a beautiful wife very happy.” Perhaps he would not have said this if he hadn't thought that Alec was a boy from some primitive town where you could hear the cows mourn all night for the bull. “You looked as though you'd be very good at hauling a sledge, that's all. You remind me of my old friend Tom Crean. He was one of Shackleton's Argonauts. You may be too young to have known much about that.”

Alec nodded. “I haven't heard of Tom Crean.” He wanted to say, “And I bet the name of Ezra Pound doesn't mean anything to you.”

Then the man said his name was Stephen Leeming. He was a university man on leave and was mounting an Antarctic expedition, the first post-war one. The sawmill Alec had heard rasping away at that country halt belonged to Leeming's family. He had been five days up in the Divide, marking the hardwoods he wanted cut for expeditionary buildings.

“I think aloud a lot. You get into the habit, putting on the donnish act for students. I suppose I came close to spending the night in jail in Grafton or Nambucca.”

Alec introduced himself, and Leeming had heard of him as he had heard of Leeming. Alec hoped that Leeming read Imagist poetry; but no, it was Ramsey's vulgar reputation that Leeming spoke of. And, of course, Leeming was very much what Ramsey's mother called “physical”, with the sturdy-based throat favoured in statues of Renaissance condottieres.

“I do some writing as well,” Alec said with all the maidenliness of the newly published. “I have a friend who has promised me he'll introduce me to Norman Lindsay.”

But Leeming, unbeaten on the score of clothes, reading-matter, and morals, wasn't now overcome by the prestigious name. “Oh yes,” he said. “Remember me to Norman and ask him if he'd like to winter in the classic groves of Oates Land. My wife used to model for some of Lindsay's disciples, and ended by taking to art herself. Look, speaking of art, I could never understand why you literary chaps never exploited Antarctic material. Of course, Antarctic journals are rather physical records, nothing about what moves the men and what bigotries hold the work back. But the financiers of exploration don't like to discover that their good money has gone to subsidize faraway conflict of character. Perhaps the
bacillus antarcticus
will bite you if you read something of the continent. Why don't you apply when I advertise the vacancies? Not that I could promise a thing. But your shoulders would favour you.”

And they laughed together about the earlier misunderstanding. Nor did Ramsey ever again have reason to suspect Leeming of sins against nature.

From his father's manse in Drummoyne, Ramsey made half a dozen raids upon Bohemia. He met Lindsay, and drank with companionable poets. He talked a full forty minutes with a painter who called him “Dearie” with intent, and felt himself to be urbane and tolerant of foibles like that; and woke one morning in a bed behind partitions in Darlinghurst to see two very pretty girls he could remember from the previous night racing out of doors half made-up, and apologizing to Ramsey and some man prone elsewhere in the big room.

He felt depleted and saddened, and wanted verification of his improbable memories. “What's happened?” he called to the other male.

“Last night's Caryatids,” the other one told him, careless of mythology, “must become this morning's grade-two sales staff behind David Jones' toiletries counter.”

“But what happened?”

“Oh.” The other artistic young man chuckled. “Sick three times and scuttled her twice.”

“You did?”

“No, you did.”

Ramsey knew the effete boy exaggerated, but there must have been some basis for the overstatement. But he was no rugged sinner, and felt merely sad.

“I hope I didn't offend her,” he said.

The one who hadn't recently read his
Primer of Mythology
guffawed.

That afternoon Ramsey found a penitentially large treatise on the Antarctic continent. So his Antarctic engrossment began in an expiatory key. This was because he dared suspect that a loss of innocence had taken place.

He thought of Antarctica in literary terms: a prophetic landscape begging a prophet and tailored for seekings and disillusionments of epic proportions. Yet none of the seekers had a literary style to bless themselves with, not the sort of style that counted. He was delighted with a book by Leeming: it took some small account of the gulfs between man and man.

He would have liked to revolutionize the staid business of Antarctic writing. But behind the desire was a more basic passion to see the continent. This had him by the heart at Wednesday breakfast in his northern pub when he found the expeditionary advertisement in the previous Saturday's Sydney newspaper.

He lied to his headmaster and caught the Friday train. On Saturday afternoon the line he joined outside the expeditionary office in lower George Street was stretched five hundred feet along the pavement, filled the hallway and two flights of steps. Most of the men seemed old soldiers, tested and sane. Ramsey waited just the same, and reached Leeming's office at six-thirty.

Leeming was tired, all the planes of his thin face sunken. As if he'd placed a bet with himself about the perverse way his quest would end, he asked and accepted questions with a sort of preconceived bitterness. He gave an impression of tightly controlled but almost hysterical testiness. It was with none of the geniality of the railway carriage that he said aloud as Ramsey entered, “Well, at least we know this one's motives aren't base.”

“If it's hopeless my being here.…”

“No. Hopelessness and uselessness didn't prevent half the city milling on our doorstep this afternoon. Sit down please.”

“I thought they all looked intimidating. A fine group of men. All those old soldiers.”

“
Old
soldiers they certainly are. The war is six years over now. The expedition sails at Christmas, you know, and most of the places in it were privately decided months ago. I ask you, what men of that age would be able to abandon their careers and sail for polar waters with two months' notice? Only a man who has failed here one way or another and who wants a virgin continent on which to practise further fecklessness. No, I'm glad you've come.”

Ramsey was disappointed that late afternoon by the aldermanic attitude Leeming had taken to the long line of applicants, and by the nasty classroom ring of “fecklessness”. That evening Leeming seemed the last man on earth to whom you would confide any plan to revolutionize Antarctic literature.

He redeemed himself now by nodding at what seemed a long short-list on the desk. “There are exceptions among those old soldiers,” he admitted. “But a certain amount of stability is primary. And I should tell you, Alec, that unfortunately mysticism and art can go hang down there. You said you were a poet?”

“But possessing broad shoulders.”

Yet it was found he knew no geology, no magnetism, no physics, no meteorology, nor even the necessary zoology to at least get him to the Oates Coast. He was putatively a churchgoer, and Leeming put stress on this although not himself orthodox. And he was very strong.

“I've put you on the short-list,” Leeming said in an odd voice of complaint, seeming to be cursing himself for feeling bound to do it on account of their overnight companionship on a train from the country.

Still, no one had ever before shut Ramsey off from one of his horizons, and the éclat of an Antarctic destiny was his for two weeks. Erebus sat above his big shoulders and earned him more authority with his farmboys for less outlay of savagery. Then he received a letter of regret from Leeming. In revenge, he promised himself Bohemia and a world of more self-aware scuttling in the summer.

October turned to the first day of languid coastal summer. A telegram came. “If still Antarctically inclined report HQ Saturday latest. Nominal pay. Clearance arranged with education department.”

“Are you good with animals?” Leeming wanted to know on the Saturday. His dog-man, survivor of two expeditions, had been stricken by a disease of the heart. “He always made much of the mysterious husky, as if to keep the proud scientists in their place. Now he's spent two years breeding huskies with cattle-dogs in the Alps beyond Cooma. We're going to take some of his cattle-dog ad mixtures with us. He's very sick, but won't be invalided. I'm sure you can learn the dog trade from him in two months.…”

Ramsey felt renewed. For you can't cease from Calvinism simply by going secretly rationalist at the age of nineteen; you still know by bone-knowledge that abasement and labour are the only fructifiers, and you look to the large intentions of men like Leeming to give your abasement and labour their grandeur.

At nominal pay.

With a facility learnt at businessmen's luncheons and fund-raising circuses Leeming drew down the bold lines of his polar ambitions. They would start with a base on the Oates Coast, if a place could be found where the rise to the Antarctic plateau was gradual. In the first three months of the new year, supplies would be carried inland, and materials for a hut so that some of the party could winter in the interior.

“It hasn't been done before,” he explained, but to avoid appearing a mere record-breaker: “It will put the scientists in a far better position to correlate magnetic readings and to take photographs so that the height of the auroral displays can be calculated.”

Ramsey felt reverent and said he understood.

After the winter night one party would use the coast hut as base and go out to re-locate the shifting area of the magnetic pole. Another would survey the northern mountains of Victoria Land. A third would spend the summer supplying the inland base for the return of the further three parties who would range out from it.

Of this second set of parties, one was to survey the central Victoria Land mountains, another to move in the totally unexplored direction of the geomagnetic pole (with some hope of reaching it), a third to act as support party to the latter.

The demands of this schedule might well mean that they would need to spend a second winter in Antarctica.

Ramsey's awe burgeoned. “It must be the greatest Antarctic programme ever devised,” he murmured, feeling silly at the grandiose sentence.

Leeming squinted at the rough map and ripped it up.

“You must get used to the idea that you and your dogs are indispensable,” he warned Ramsey. He amplified.

They were to take four Fordson tractors that ran on kerosene, but a tractor couldn't adapt itself to polar conditions as dogs could. People had been at him to take an aeroplane, but he thought planes were a spectacle rather than a thing of value. “It is a contest that transcends mechanics,” Leeming said; and the sentiment sounded emotively correct but, even to Ramsey, dogmatic.