Sixty Days to Live (38 page)

His behaviour puzzled her extremely. During their first few days in the Ark she had been quite convinced that he had fallen for her but was keeping a tight hold on himself through loyalty to Sam and from a desire not to take advantage of the experience they had been through together during their flight from London.
Yet when she had frankly challenged him, after Derek had been knocked out, he had categorically denied having any feeling other than friendship for her and as the days wore on she had become convinced that he had been speaking the truth.

Whether she was glad or sorry about that she was unable to make up her mind. She was quite sure that she was not in love with him and she had all her work cut out to handle Derek, so she was really rather glad that Hemmingway was not likely to provide a further complication in her relations with Sam. But at the same time it was a sad blow to her vanity that Hemmingway should remain immune from her fascination.

She made no attempt to attract him but she felt that the mere fact of her constant presence should have been enough; and she could never resist the temptation to watch him covertly whenever he was reading to see if he was watching her. But he always appeared to be completely absorbed in whatever he was doing and after a time she became conscious of a queer reaction in her feelings for him. From having considered him, when they had first really got to know each other, as rather a charming and amusing person she reverted to her first opinion that he was a cold, monkish intellectual; and by the time they had been in the Ark a month she was thinking of him as dispassionately as she did of Gervaise or her sister.

Gervaise had taken over Oliver’s job with the instruments as well as carrying on with his own work of writing up the journal of the Ark and issuing the stores. But there had still been no opportunity to use the sextant and take the altitude of the sun, moon or stars, as day after day, night after night, the dense banks of low cloud remained unbroken overhead.

The general level of their spirits sank as the days dragged by. Whenever the weather was too rough for Derek to get his morning exercise he became grumpy with everyone except Lavina. She turned on the gramophone so frequently that they were almost tortured by the incessant repetition of her favourite dance tunes. Margery discovered that Sam had never been confirmed and was taking him stage by stage through the catechism.

On July 24th Gervaise called a conference. Over half their edible supplies had been consumed and he suggested that they should make a reduction in their daily rations. They agreed unanimously, but the fact that they had to do so sounded a warning
note. Their nerves deteriorated and, under the constant strain of watching for the land which never appeared above the grey horizons, they began to be terse with each other and apt to have high words over trifles. Only Gervaise remained calm and secure in his spiritual fastness, the outcome of a lifetime’s study of the great philosophies, and ever ready to restore good feeling between the others with a well chosen word.

Sam, Derek, and Hemmingway took it in turns to look after their mad prisoner. On the day following his capture they brought him up and gave him a very badly needed bath, after which they fitted him out in a suit from one of the bags that Roy had never reached the Ark to claim. He had occasional screaming fits when he would throw himself about, but otherwise gave no trouble, as Gervaise kept him on a low diet and mixed sedatives with his food. With the welding implements, which were among the large collection of such things that had been stored in the Ark, Derek succeeded in forging the ends of a length of chain into two anklets, so that they were able to hobble Fink-Drummond and release him from his other bonds; after which he was able to move freely about his narrow prison but unable to separate his feet more than twelve inches, which rendered him incapable of exerting his full strength in any attack. He made no attempt to escape, however, but became increasingly lethargic rather like a wild beast that has been doped, as he remained obdurately silent although on many occasions they tried to persuade him to talk.

In the latter days of July they had several severe hail-storms during which bits of ice as big as pigeon’s eggs drummed on the outer sphere of the Ark like bullets, making a deafening but harmless din, and on the first of August they saw their first snow.

For thirty hours the fast-falling flakes blotted out the monotonous seascape, but when the snow ceased on the second day they were overjoyed to see that at long last the clouds had broken, revealing the sun. For over five weeks it had remained hidden by the dense clouds which had accumulated as a result of the deluge.

Gervaise quickly got out Oliver’s sextant and took an observation; a very simple matter as it consists only of bringing an image of the sun in a mirror to a point on the sextant’s arc where the rim of the image just touches the rim of the sun itself seen through a smoked glass. Hemmingway, meanwhile, stood by to take the
time on the chronometers which, although probably inaccurate now from the buffeting the Ark had received, could not be far out as they had never stopped.

The two of them then worked out the easy sum which gave the Ark’s latitude, and it proved to be 71° 17′ north.

Finding their longitude was a different matter, as neither of them knew more than the rudiments of nautical astronomy, but they hoped that they would be able to do so if they could get observations of some of the stars.

The discovery that they had drifted so far north was extremely perturbing as, following the 70th parallel of north latitude on the map, they saw that it ran from Baffin Land, across the middle of Greenland, past the North Cape, and through the Arctic Ocean to Siberia.

Gervaise and Hemmingway both felt convinced that their calculation had been correct but hoped, as did the whole party, that it had been wrong. Even if they sighted land now it looked as if they would be faced with the grim prospect of fending for themselves in some desolate region of the Arctic.

Yet the weather seemed to confirm the reckoning, as they had more snow and sleet in the days that followed, and when the sun broke through again for a brief period on the 5th of August further observations gave their latitude as 71° 20′ N., which established the fact that they were still drifting in a northerly direction.

It was on the 7th of August that Sam, going into the kitchen first thing in the morning to help prepare breakfast, found Margery lying there motionless, face downwards on the floor.

His first thought was that Fink-Drummond had escaped during the night and was responsible for this new outrage. His second, that she was dead and that he had lost her. Only then did he realise how much her companionship had meant to him through all these desperate weeks.

It was not that he no longer loved Lavina; her grace and beauty still played havoc with his senses, but her youthful vitality, her insistence that they must always be doing something even though they were shut up in the narrow confines of the Ark, and her insatiable craving for amusement had proved a great strain on him lately, in spite of the fact that Derek and Hemmingway occupied a good part of her time.

Sam was a strong man, but from his first youthful struggles in Bradford he had worked himself unmercifully and he was now getting on for fifty. He had been young for his age when he went on his honeymoon with Lavina but the strain of the last seven weeks had told upon him and he now looked, and felt, even older than his years. The holocaust which had swept all his worldly possessions away had revived something primitive in him. Gone was the veneer which had so long overlaid his simple inbred habits. Even his voice had changed, the vowels broadening as he reverted to his childhood tongue.

He wanted a peace and repose that Lavina could never give him, but that Margery could. Lavina’s finer qualities, her courage, her independence, her sense of fair play and her real integrity were so masked by her apparent irresponsibility that Sam was only faintly conscious of them, whereas Margery’s straightforwardness, thoughtfulness for others and unselfishness had stood out all the more by comparison because she lacked the glamour of her younger sister.

As the mistress of his great house in St. James’s Square Lavina could have been unsurpassable, but Margery would have made a real home for her man and her children anywhere; and now that money, position and power had all been swept away from him, Sam knew that he would never miss them in the least if the future held a simple home for him like that which he had known with his mother in Bradford.

While these thoughts raced through his brain, Margery stirred. In an instant he was on his knees beside her and had taken her in his arms. Her eyes opened; his heart began to hammer in his chest. Before he knew what he was doing he was kissing her feverishly and pressing her to him.

‘Sam—oh, Sam,’ she murmured, leaning her cheek against his. Then, as realisation dawned upon her, she pushed him back, exclaiming, ‘Oh, what are we doing? We’re mad! You mustn’t, Sam!’

‘I—I couldn’t help it—in my relief at finding you weren’t dead,’ he stammered. ‘I love you, Margery. I love you.’

‘So that—is that,’ said a quiet voice from the doorway, and, swinging round, Sam saw Lavina standing there, a cigarette dangling from her lips.

‘Margery fainted and I—I—’ Sam stuttered, coming slowly to his feet.

‘No need to explain,’ said Lavina, with dangerous quietness. ‘I understand the situation perfectly,’ and, swinging on her heel, she slammed the door.

‘Oh, God!’ groaned Sam, ‘what a hellish mess! I’m sorry, Margery—most terribly sorry—to have let you in for this.’

But Margery was smiling. It was her hour, her triumph, her vindication as a woman. She had loved Sam from the moment that he had kissed her in the cloakroom at Stapleton on his wedding-day. His strength, his kindness and his uprightness of purpose made him all that she had ever wanted in a man. She had not consciously gone out to get him because he was her sister’s husband, and her code forbade that; but all her scruples had gone overboard the moment she had come round to find herself in his arms. Morality was man-made; she was woman, aching to be loved. And, joy piled on joy, after Lavina had casually taken every man that had come into their ken, the final victory lay with her, for she, without even scheming to do so, had taken Lavina’s own husband.

With an enormous effort of will she forced herself not to show the incredible happiness she was feeling. Sam must be played quietly now. He would become remorseful and she would lose him if she followed her burning impulse to fling her arms round his neck.

‘It’s all right, Sam,’ she said, as she scrambled to her feet. ‘If you feel that way you couldn’t have helped it; so you’re not to blame. I would have done just the same if I had found you lying on the floor and thought you were dead.’

‘You would?’ he exclaimed, seizing one of her hands.

She quickly withdrew it. ‘Of course. You can never know what our friendship has meant to me. I haven’t had a very happy life
and when you walked into it you were Lavina’s fiancé. I know I ought to have forced myself not to think of you but I simply couldn’t help doing that. But it wouldn’t have been right for me to show you that I loved you.’

‘Oh, Margery—Margery!’ He passed a hand over his eyes. ‘I’m not worthy. This is a terrible thing that I’ve done.’

‘No, Sam. A Providence that sees into all our hearts willed that we should at least have the joy of knowing of each other’s love.’ Margery was playing her part superbly and she knew it. All the old clichés rolled automatically off her tongue and she could see that for Sam they were the words of the perfect woman. She wondered if she dared risk saying, ‘We must forget this—never, never think of it again,’ but decided that she had better not chance it. Sam might take her at her word, and that was the last thing she wanted. Instead, she went on: ‘We have our duty; we must think of others, not of ourselves. I leave myself in your hands, Sam dear, knowing that whatever you decide will be right.’

Sam hardly knew what to reply to this. Margery was perfectly right, of course. They must think of Lavina, not of themselves. They must not let their guilty passions blind them to their sense of duty. How like her it was to voice those high ideals. The fact that during his long bachelor-hood Sam had from time to time kept numerous young women in very comfortable flats did not stand him in any stead now. They had been invariably beautiful and usually empty-headed little gold-diggers without any moral principles, but they had served the purpose of providing him with light recreation during the few hours of leisure he was able to snatch from his preoccupation with big business. Now, for the first time in his life, he was up against something totally different; a woman with ideals, a good woman such as his mother had been; and he felt the enormous responsibility that the declaration of her love had laid upon him. But, for the life of him, he could not see what decision could be taken.

There had been no misconduct. Such a thing was almost unthinkable in connection with Margery. So, in a normal world, Lavina would have had no grounds for divorce, but matters might have been arranged so that he could have persuaded her to give him his freedom; whereas here, in the Ark, how could he possibly
even suggest casting off his young wife with a view to marrying her elder sister? In any case, there was no one to divorce or remarry him, unless the father of the two girls could be considered to have special powers as Captain of the Ark; and the fact of Gervaise being with them seemed to make the position even more impossible. Yet Margery obviously expected him to do something about it.

After a moment, the habit of years reasserted itself and, using the same technique as that which he had applied on innumerable occasions when difficult problems had arisen at board meetings, he said firmly:

‘Leave this to me. We mustn’t hurry things. But after a little thought I’m sure I shall find a way.’

Margery was equally puzzled as to what step could next be taken, but that, she thought, was Sam’s affair and, in the meantime, he had definitely committed himself, which was all that really mattered.