A Victim of the Aurora (27 page)

‘A little slow with that cooker, Tony,' Paul called to me and smiled absent-mindedly. The expeditionary zest of the boy! He should have been able to see our pallor, even under that blotted moon.

‘Dryden knows,' I whispered.

‘Of course.'

The weight of Stewart and Dryden was more frightening still. The weight of their stability, of their harmony. I thought for the first time that the concept of execution was not an aberration of Sir Eugene's. It was high policy. The King and the chancellor had put it together.

‘He wore a false face?' Quincy asked. ‘All day?' He sounded hollow, as oratorical as I did. Sir Eugene answered only by telling Quincy to take the cooker to the door of the main tent and asking me to carry the canvas supply pack indoors.

‘You won't do it,' I asked, ‘while we're …?'

I see now that by such questions Quincy and I were giving consent.

I did what I was asked, dragging and wriggling through the canvas entry, wriggling and clawing my way out again. Upright I went straight to where Paul worked on the frozen lashings of Quincy's sled.

‘Paul,' I said quietly, ‘Sir Eugene has some idea about executing you.'

He raised his face to me. There was a slight frown on it. Then he turned back to work on the knot.

‘He said I could go to Cape Crozier.'

Paul sighed when the frozen lashing came undone. One of the pleasures of polar sledding, he seemed to be saying.

‘Quincy and I won't let him do it.'

‘Oh?' he said loudly, raising his eyebrows slightly. ‘Does that mean I have nothing to fear?'

I saw Alec Dryden pause in his work and dump the sleeping bags he had just unloaded. He knew what we were talking about.

‘I'm telling you so that you'll be able to …'

‘To run away?' he suggested.

He brushed past me as if I were irrelevant, and walked to the point where Sir Eugene stood alone by the front sled making no pretence of unloading. Alex and I trailed behind him.

‘Sir Eugene,' he said. ‘You want to punish me. Is that right?'

‘Not punish you, Paul,' Sir Eugene told him primly.

Quincy had also joined the audience. I had the dismal sense that that was all we were. An audience, the witnessing citizens prescribed by law.

Taking time, Sir Eugene inhaled and raised his chin so that it pointed at Paul in what was somehow a gesture of immeasurable authority. I don't know what it is that suddenly endows the average features of a man with that kind of authority. I saw it later when officers with everyday faces, someone's uncle, someone's perhaps not too loving husband, would all at once take on mysterious authority adequate to make a thousand humans stop running and face front. Sometimes misguidedly but sometimes to their benefit.

Quincy said loudly, ‘It doesn't have to be, Paul. Tony and I … we'll get in his way.'

The promises rattled like gravel against the two in the middle, the assiduous two who seemed to be working together towards the execution, defining it, declaring it inevitable.

They were the two who spoke to each other.

‘You said I could go to Cape Crozier.'

‘That isn't possible, Paul. You killed a man. Very savagely, Paul. Very savagely.'

‘If I'd done it less savagely? Would you still want to execute me?'

‘Yes. But the savagery gives me certain indications. I'm very sorry, but I couldn't give a man who performed such savagery the option of taking his own life. I couldn't put a weapon in such hands.'

Paul began crying softly. ‘Do you trust me so little?'

Sir Eugene comforted him by the elbow, ‘Come, Paul. Come.'

‘I suppose it's to be straight away?'

Sir Eugene nodded. ‘We aren't jailers,' he said. ‘Since you know that it's to be, it has to be now. We can't contain you, Paul.'

Quincy denied and threatened. ‘Let him live out here,' he called. Admitting his belief that some sort of casting-off might be necessary.

I may not have Quincy's words exactly but I know there was a point where he gave in, having yelled and argued his way round to Sir Eugene's view.

When that stage came, I had already moved to the sled and taken hold of Quincy's ice pick. ‘I'll attack you, Sir Eugene,' I promised. My trembling left hand, I remember, could not take an adequate grip of the handle. ‘You'll have a second act of bloody savagery,' I insisted. My voice reminded me of an escaped bird. It fluttered and was not subject to me.

Six Eugene didn't answer. Paul answered. ‘For sweet Jesus's sake, Tony!'

‘What?' I said. For I found it hard to distinguish words. I was locked up in a dazed intention to use the pick on Sir Eugene if he produced the gun.

‘Let it all happen with a little decency,' Paul said.

I lowered the sharp end of the pick to the ice. ‘You're going to die graciously?' I asked.

‘The news we'll take home,' Sir Eugene promised him, ‘is that you fell into a crevasse on this journey. This estimable journey. Your mother …'

‘My mother won't really understand whatever you tell her. Her address, you'll notice on the letter I gave you, is a nursing home in Hampstead.'

That statement unstrung me further. The head of the ice pick wavered. I had always thought of Thea Gabriel as enjoying eccentric and spirited retirement, dancing amongst jonquils somewhere in the country. I thought, if they can put Thea Gabriel in a nursing home, perhaps they can execute her son.

Sir Eugene said, ‘Do you want to speak to Brian?'

Quincy's mouth was wide open. He didn't know what was expected of him.

Paul smiled. ‘The Reverend Quincy and I … we've always been friends.'

It was clear Quincy would not rush forward, anxious to confer an instant, institutional salvation.

Sir Eugene himself wanted to see things more formal. ‘Perhaps a prayer,' he said.

‘No,' Quincy said. ‘No prayer. No blessing. No.'

‘Come now,' Sir Eugene argued.

‘You'll have to do it without a blessing,' Quincy reiterated.

Yet I could see that that was the extent of his protest. I raised the pick again and again said that I wouldn't permit it. But this time no one answered me. I was excluded from the tableau. My gesturing with the pick, they implied, was painful to everybody, and futile. In the end, I dropped it and went direct to Paul.

‘You haven't made any protest,' I accused him. I tried to shake him by the shoulders.

‘What happens in
The Sea-Wolf
, Tony?'

‘For God's sake!'

Yet I could see it was not gibbet gallantry. Like a child, he wanted to know, and not to leave a half-resolved plot.

I found myself saying, ‘Wolf Larsen gets harpooned and Peter van Weyden takes command of the whaler and turns it home towards Holland.' It was so improbable a gallows duty that I turned mean. ‘Would you like the plot of
Trilby
while I'm at it?'

Paul smiled and began eating snow. We all knew: he did not want to die thirsty. Though we were all thirsty too we did not stoop to eat snow with him.

He stood up after a second mouthful and said, ‘You're all my friends. All four of you.'

Sir Eugene coughed. ‘Would you like a restraint, Paul.'

Paul said, ‘No,' and instantly turned his back, at the same time pulling down his hood to expose the back of his neck. This movement seemed rehearsed.

I suppose I have always been grateful that Alec Dryden threw his arms around me then, implying that I was a danger to the event. Yet what can anyone do for a victim who performs his execution so professionally?

Grappled, I saw Sir Eugene put his hand on Paul's shoulder, pressing him gently to a kneeling position. He took out his revolver and placed it to the back of Paul's head. At this second Quincy's mouth and mine both opened in a wail of pain of Which Paul would have heard only the beginning.

Sir Eugene asked us for no help. We mourned, raved, threatened, got in the way while he and Alec covered the stains on the snow, wrapped and tied Paul in sailcloth, carried him a little way off to an unlidded crevasse, lowered him with a rope, threw the rope in after him.

Necessities then sealed the event. We had to get inside the tent, we had to take the offered food into our bodies.

When he had eaten, a virulent Quincy said, ‘It occurs to me, Sir Eugene, that Paul may have been the sort of man to take crimes on himself. Whether or not he had committed them. It seems to me that that would be his nature.'

I saw with useless joy the second's fear as Sir Eugene looked up from his mug of hoosh. ‘We don't know,' I said, turning the knife, ‘who Victor's friend was. We won't know ever.'

But Sir Eugene shook his head. ‘Gentlemen,' he told us, ‘you know I would not proceed with an action like this unless I had made sure …'

‘I want to go to Crozier,' said Quincy, helplessly trying to give Paul some continuance.

‘Don't forget,' Sir Eugene said gently, ‘your responsibility. The responsibility of survival.'

He left the next morning, hauling the half-sledge behind him. He had not asked for our future silence.

In the next two weeks we lacked time knowingly to grieve. One night our tent blew away and we sheltered in the lee of our sleds, under a sheet of canvas, debating at the shout whether this was death by exposure. In the morning we recovered the tent, fortuitously blown a mere two hundred yards instead of a similar number of miles; and with its double canvas, we retrieved our lives. We collected a half-dozen Emperor eggs; grotesquely, Alec fell into a crevasse with one in each hand. He was hauled out unhurt but the Emperor's egg shell is one of the most fragile.

Returning towards Frye on an afternoon of –80°, Quincy – the man with an eye for surfaces – fell with his sled into the worst of pits. By lantern light we saw the shattered load on an ice ledge thirty feet down, and Quincy lying amongst it with a broken wrist. Only Quincy was recoverable. The following day a week-long blizzard began and we sat inside the tent, and Alec fed Quincy tiny amounts of morphine, mindful of the perils of the drug and also that our supply was small.

And during that time of darkness and bemusing cold and Quincy's fever, I came to accept Sir Eugene's act the way you accept the acts of statesmen and generals, aware of the neat and detached mechanisms of their decisions. It was an acceptance necessary to my survival in that place where loading the sled teased your burning fingers for an hour morning and night, and the cold frosted the brain and froze the lubricants of your eyeballs, where thirst was a delirium as positive as Quincy's delirium as he rode crooked and mumbling on top of the sled.

The world knows how Stewart and the others died on the return from the Pole. Stewart and Dryden, Troy and Mead and Mulroy. I have always wondered what influence the business of Paul's crime and execution had on Sir Eugene and Alec in the part of the brain that says
go on
or
no, stop and sleep
.

I wonder what influence it had on Quincy, to make him leave the church in 1914 and become an eternal ranker in one of those industrial city regiments that were used for battle mulch on the Somme.

As for me, I have already indicated: it was the act which rendered the condition of the century terminal. Nothing ever since has surprised me.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1977 by Thomas Keneally

ISBN: 978-1-5040-3807-2

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