The Elder Ice: A Harry Stubbs Adventure Page 2
I must have looked perplexed at this, because he laughed aloud. “Evidently you don’t know my history. I thought the whole world knew… I'm not sure whether to be flattered or insulted. If you represent the law, well, I am a criminal, a convicted fraudster—accused, tried, sentenced, and duly punished.” He struck a dramatic pose as though handcuffed and smiled at my discomfort.
Of course, I knew he must have changed his name from Shackleton to Mellors for some reason but had not guessed it was anything so serious. “I’m sorry to hear it, sir.”
“It’s water under the bridge. I still get pestered with a few feeble attempts at blackmail or harassment. These days I live very quietly, though ‘the sword outlives the scabbard’ and all that. I assumed you were here on my account rather than dear Ernest’s.”
“Oh, no. And if you should think of anything in connection with your brother’s legacy, I'd be very pleased to hear from you.”
He seemed about to say something but closed his mouth and held out his hand. “You’re chasing wild geese if you expect money out of Ernest,” was all he said. “Goodbye, Mr Stubbs.” He shook hands limply. I had expected a robust, booming sort of man like his explorer elder brother. I would say Mellors was more the aesthetic type.
I procured a stock of ham sandwiches from the station refreshment room to sustain me on the journey back to Victoria. On the way back, I confess I read Kim rather than any law books. I tried to ignore a man in the compartment with a bushy beard who kept stealing glances at me. I do not believe the spectacle of eating ham sandwiches is such a remarkable thing. Considering that my observer wore a beard like a privet hedge, which might itself be the object of some remark, I thought he could have had better manners.
I reflected that the crock of gold to which Mellors had referred seemed as elusive as ever—if not actually imaginary, as he clearly believed. It was not my place to question the instructions of my superiors. If they wished to send me in pursuit of wild geese, off I went. Perhaps they might find something useful in my report, in which I attempted to transcribe the whole conversation. It seemed to be all hints and suggestions but nothing solid. Nothing I could get to grips with. I just made the notes; better brains than mine could solve the mystery.
I spent an hour at the gymnasium that evening, mainly working out on the heavy bag. Some boxers make the mistake of taking a breather every thirty seconds, but you need to practice as you fight, with a continuous rhythm of punches for three minutes at a stretch. It’s a good exercise, and one that helps make up for the physical inactivity of life as a pen pusher. It is a relaxation too, mixing with men whose minds are of a more down-to-earth cast. By the time we had watched some young lads sparring and discussed Jack Dempsey’s latest bout, I was feeling myself again.
Round Two: The Naturalist
Again, they put me to asking what Shackleton brought back from the desolate polar wasteland, so valuable it was worth dying for. What mysteries did his expedition encounter, of which they never spoke a word?
Sir Ernest Shackleton is remembered as our second-greatest polar explorer. Most put him a rung below Robert Falcon Scott, “Scott of the Antarctic” as the newspapers always call him, although the title is not genuine at all. It is simply a made-up epithet, no more official than Harry ‘the Norwood Titan’ Stubbs. I don't rate Scott so high; Shackleton will always be the greater of the two.
Neither man achieved the South Pole, but Shackleton made it to within a hundred miles on the Nimrod Expedition before deciding to turn back. That was the difference between them: Scott's men perished because he decided to go on—and they failed to reach the pole anyway—but Shackleton nobly put the lives of his men first. He turned back rather than continuing to his goal. Some thought it would have been better if he had planted the Union Jack at the Pole in 1909 and died there. He could have been a martyr to the Empire, as Scott later martyred himself. But Shackleton brought his men back alive, every one of them, from that expedition. Even more remarkably, he did the same with the Endurance expedition that followed it.
Shackleton had a genius for coping with disaster. When ice trapped the Endurance, he knew he would have to maintain morale in the icebound ship for several months until the spring melt. Months later, when the ice groaned, squeezed, and crushed the vessel, he abandoned ship and led his men, dragging two lifeboats, on an heroic trek across the ice. After months of travel and many adventures, they made it to the sea and left the ice at last, taking to the boats. Six days later, they finally made Elephant Island, where they hoped whalers would pick them up.
Shackleton then understood that their supplies would not last until the whaling season. With a handful of men, he undertook the eight-hundred-mile journey to South Georgia with rudimentary navigation tools in open boats. After sixteen gruelling days, dehydrated and exhausted, Shackleton finally made landfall. Then he discovered they were on the wrong side, and winds prevented them from sailing round the island to the whaling station. Shackleton faced his greatest trial, crossing the snow-clad mountains of South Georgia with no equipment.
Still he showed endless resource. When finally they arrived at a peak above their objective, Shackleton fashioned a toboggan from a coils of rope and they flew down the last two miles. I should have been no more astonished if he had woven a magic carpet.
With every setback, he picked himself up and set a new goal. And he did not stop until he steered a Chilean ship to Elephant Island and rescued every single one of his men.
It's not just because Shackleton came from Norwood, like me, or because he had humble origins, like me, that I rate him greater than Scott. No, it's because he gave up glory in the name of humanity. That is the stuff of greatness. I would have followed him anywhere, if he'd have had me.
Any other man might have hung up his boots after Endurance, a great enough adventure for any three lifetimes. But not Sir Ernest. Like Sinbad the sailor, he kept going back for another adventure. Settled life never satisfied him.
Sir Ernest was a British hero, and it is not for the likes of me to pass comment on his heroism. However, I do feel able to say a word about Mr Shackleton the private man, speaking as one who takes a professional interest in such matters. His management of domestic economy was shocking. His wife and children survived on a pittance, supplied by her own private means.
Not so much credit as pure optimism funded his expeditions, and he started arranging one before he had even paid off the debts for the last. He spent money he did not have in the expectation that somebody would foot the bill afterwards.
In my line of work, I often meet dreamers. They are men of great conviction and, more often than not, very great talkers. These are, without exception, men with large debts and no way of paying them. They always want to explain why you should not bother about money but follow your dream.
I am not so much a dreamer. I am sent to collect money.
In the boxing game, a man who harbours illusions will get them knocked out of him. No, I don't seek to look very far beyond the facts and the hard reality of coins and folding stuff. Give us this day our daily bread, and the rest can look after itself.
Shackleton was a dreamer, and he left forty thousand pounds of debt when he died. Debt, promises of payment, and the notion of a great treasure that would pay for the lot. He dropped many hints to people around him. Most people, like Frank Mellors, assumed these were empty promises of El Dorado. But some, my employers among them, detected a germ of truth in his tales. And that was why I found myself on the outskirts of Croydon, clutching a parcel wrapped in brown paper and looking for the house of a certain Dr Evans.
I did not wish to presume by arriving early, and my watch was not exact to the minute. Too cold to wait around, I walked up and down until a church’s chimes struck the hour. As I turned around to go back to the house, a man scuttled away at the end of the street, and it seemed to me that he must have been following me. Now he was gone. I checked up and down the road before knocking at the door, firmly but politely.
“Would you be Dr Evans?” I asked.
“No indeed, I wouldn’t,” he said, in the lilting singsong of a Welshman. “But I think she’s expecting you. Come in, come in.”
This was Mr Evans. The Dr Evans I was looking for was his wife. Like him, she was in her sixties. Her untidy grey hair was done up in a bun, with many strays wisps escaping. I did not have the impression that she troubled excessively over personal appearance. But she was a lively individual, and she showed me into a little parlour as neat as anything I could have wished for, with a fine oak dresser and plates displayed on the wall—good quality hand-painted china imported from Wales, I judged. Watercolours depicting coastal scenery adorned the walls, and there was a framed embroidery in a foreign language above the fireplace. It felt I had stepped out of London into another country.
The only slightly disagreeable aspect was a pervasive smell of damp earth.
Mr Evans insisted that I have some tea and perhaps something to eat. I attempted to decline—rumour said that Welshmen eat seaweed for a delicacy and I did not wish to give offence —but his great persistence compelled me to accept. The maid was exiled to the scullery while Mr Evans bustled about in the kitchen. His wife sat down to talk with me like a man: no small talk but straight to business.
“This is the item I mentioned in my correspondence.” I produced the parcel.
Dr Evans unwrapped it and extracted the battered volume with a smile of recognition.
“Your name is written inside the cover,” I said. “I believe you loaned this book to Sir Ernest Shackleton, Dr Evans. I am pleased to be able to return it to you.”
“It's Lucetti,” she said. “I had been wondering what had happened to him. Yes, I suppose I did lend it to that explorer—Shackleton?”
“Sir Ernest Shackleton,” I supplied. “The noted Antarctic explorer. Now deceased.”
“He died, did he? There's a pity; he was such a nice man. And it's so nice talking to someone who takes a real interest.”
“I would never ask you to break a confidence, Dr Evans, but it might be useful to my investigation if you could tell me something of the substance of what passed between you.”
At that point, the return of Mr Evans with a tray bearing all the necessaries of teatime, which he distributed about with great skill, interrupted us. The tea was like English tea, and the tea cakes were excellent. Afterwards he sat down to a book with a title in a language I could not read.
I was explaining Shackleton’s financial embarrassment and the possibility of a reward, but Dr Evans was reminiscing. “He was a gentleman, that Shackleton,” she said. “So polite and very jolly, he was. And he was interested in my work with the tardigrades, as you can imagine.”
I paused in my note taking. “Your work with what?”
“Tardigrades,” she said clearly. “That's my field of study, tardigrades. Some people say I'm a bit of an authority when it comes to tardigrades, though I wouldn't make any claims for myself. All I know is how much I don't know. They're stranger than you can imagine.”
“T-a-r-d-i-g-r-a-d-e-s.” I spelled the word as it sounded.
“Slow walkers. Moss piglets. Water bears. The most indestructible creatures on the planet, found in every corner of earth. Unchanged for hundreds of millions of years.” She reached past me for a book and opened it to a drawing showing a peculiar creature like nothing I had ever seen. It had six legs, and peculiar tendrils sprouted from its head. It looked like something from a fairy-tale, but the book was a perfectly respectable scientific textbook with a Latin name on the drawing.
“They are found on every corner of the planet. Would that include Antarctica?”
“Well yes, of course.”
“I wasn't aware there were animals other than penguins there. Isn't it rather inhospitable?”
“Nothing is too inhospitable for tardigrades.” Evans laughed. “They thrive on it! Heat, cold, even the vacuum of interplanetary space, they can survive anywhere.” She raised her eyebrows. “Perhaps they even came from space. We don't know enough about their taxonomy to say just yet. Fascinating, they are.”
Interplanetary space, I noted and added a question mark of my own.
“The thing about tardigrades, you see, is that they can suspend their animation. They need water, but when there’s none, they just shut themselves down. If there's no food, or it's too dry or too cold, they withdraw their limbs into a barrel-shaped form with a tough outer layer, called a tun. Their body chemistry changes in all sorts of ways we can’t begin to understand, depending on the conditions. And they stay like that until conditions improve. I thought Sir Ernest might bring me back some Antarctic tardigrades. They're very rare.”
“And valuable?” I asked hopefully.
“No! Who'd pay money for a tardigrade? Shackleton was interested in suspended animation, and I can see why.”
“Why would that be?”
She stopped, as though the question of why anyone would be interested had never occurred to her. “I imagine it would be for these expeditions, do you see? The men can't move in winter and they just stay there, cooped up, eating food and using fuel—and going potty from the cold and the dark, look you. But if they could go into suspended animation, they could just sleep through the winter and wake up in spring.” Evans beamed at me, full of enthusiasm. “And the same for the long sea voyages. You could pack passengers in the hold like sacks of coal.”
“It's a remarkable proposition,” I said. “Science uncovers new wonders every day.”
“Unfortunately nobody knows how tardigrades do it, so we can’t copy the trick. Not yet, anyhow. But I am pursuing, as you might say, some lines of enquiry. Would you like to see a tardigrade? I have a laboratory of sorts next door.”
“You mean to say you have one in the house? Are they dangerous?”
“No indeed, Mr Stubbs, they're not dangerous. Let me show you.”
After exchanging a few words in a foreign language with her husband, she led me to the garden and into a spacious wooden structure. The interior looked more like a potting shed than a scientific laboratory. I could see no pens or cages, but all became clear when Evans adjusted some apparatus and gestured for me to take a look. It was a scientific microscope.
I had never used a microscope before. It took a minute for me to get the trick; the illuminated circle danced away from me until I found how to look through properly. But when I stood perfectly still, my jaw fell as I saw it. A creature with a clumsy, segmented body was pushing its way through tiny green fronds. It undulated in a most odd fashion. This creature was even more striking than the one in the drawing. It raised its head and seemed to look up at me for a second before carrying on.
“Echiniscus,” said Evans. “Collected from my own garden. Shake out any piece of moss anywhere in the world, and you’ll always find a few tardigrades.”
“How big...?”
“One-sixteenth of an inch for an adult specimen. But it depends on the species. Some are bigger than others.”
Perhaps only size makes a monster. The tardigrade had something of the mythical beast about it but shrunk to such a scale it was curious rather than horrible. Perhaps if I were a foot shorter, people would not look at me so.
“It's gone,” I said. The creature had meandered out of view.
Evans shoved me out of the away—something most men hesitate to do—and adjusted the slide. Once more, I watched the little beast pushing through its miniature jungle. It might have been a monster in the rain forests of tropical Venus.
“I have never seen anything like it in my life,” I said. “I'm ve
ry grateful to you for the opportunity. What is it the poet says about there being more things in heaven and earth than we dream of?”
“Yes indeed,” said Dr Evans, beaming. “And the more you look at tardigrades, the more you see.”
“But as for the reason for Sir Ernest's interest...”
She paused, one hand on the microscope. “Well, we did talk up and down about suspended animation and how long it might last for. He asked me if a tardigrade might be revived after thousands of years in the ice.”
“Thousands of years?”
She held up her hands. “And of course we don't really know; we haven't been experimenting long enough. But who knows? I wouldn't like to say it was impossible myself. That would be something, a living being older than an oak tree, older than the pyramids, pre-dating all human history.”
I wrinkled my forehead as I wrote down her words. An ancient tardigrade would be a wonder of the scientific world, to be sure, but I doubted somehow that it carried any great value. It wasn’t the sort of thing one could exhibit in a travelling menagerie unless substantially larger than the flea-sized creature I had witnessed.
“I recall now,” she said. “He did ask a most unusual question. He asked me how tardigrades communicated.”
“And how do they communicate?”
“It's a very good question, but I'm afraid science isn't ready for it yet.” She held her finger and thumb about an inch apart. “This is how much we know about tardigrades.” She spread her arms wide to measure out a fathom. “And this is what we don't know about them. But as I said to your Mr Shackleton, I'm working on it.”
I thanked Dr Evans fulsomely for her time. She seemed pleased that she had found another student. My head was buzzing with strange monsters, and animation suspended for thousands of years, and ships full of frozen passengers. I returned to the office to write up my report for Mr Rowe.
I did not feel entirely at ease in the office. It was not just that the narrow doorways and cramped spaces were uncomfortable for my size; it was the atmosphere of the place. Solicitors’ offices are, I suppose, intimidating to anyone not born to the business. I couldn’t help feeling out of place; the brisk young clerks and the indifferent older clerks generally did not have much to say to me. The secretaries were polite, and the errand boys were talkative but sometimes cheeky—I sometimes got calls of “A pound of minced beef and four pork chops!” when I walked in. To the partners themselves, I was of course invisible.