Brenda Clough - May Be Some Time
2024-11-24
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30 页
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file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruiswijk/Mijn%20documenten/spaar/Brenda%20Clough%20-%20May%20Be%20Some%20Time.txt
MAY BE SOME TIME
by Brenda W. Clough
Copyright (c) 2000
From _Scott's Last Expedition_ by Robert Falcon Scott:
_Friday, March 16, or Saturday, 17_ [1912]_. Lost track of dates, but think the last correct. Tragedy
all down the line. At lunch, the day before yesterday, poor Titus Oates said he couldn't go on; he
proposed we should leave him in his sleeping bag. That we could not do, and we induced him to come
on, on the afternoon march. In spite of its awful nature for him he struggled on and we made a few
miles. At night he was worse and we knew the end had come._
_Should this be found I want these facts recorded ... We can testify to his bravery. He has borne
intense suffering for weeks without complaint, and to the very last was able and willing to discuss
outside subjects. He did not -- would not -- give up hope till the very end ... He slept through the night
before last, hoping not to wake; but he woke in the morning -- yesterday. It was blowing a blizzard. He
said, "I am just going outside and may be some time." He went out into the blizzard and we have not
seen him since ... We knew that poor Oates was walking to his death, but though we tried to dissuade
him, we knew it was the act of a brave man and an English gentleman. We all hope to meet the end with
a similar spirit, and assuredly the end is not far._
* * *
It's said that death from exposure is like slipping into warm sleep. Briefly, Titus Oates wondered
what totty-headed pillock had first told that whisker. He no longer remembered what warmth was. He
had endured too many futile hopes and broken dreams to look for an easy end now. Every step was like
treading on razors, calling for a grim effort of will. Nevertheless without hesitating he hobbled on into
the teeth of the storm. He did not look back. He knew the Polar Expedition's tent was already invisible
behind him.
Finer than sand, the wind-driven snow scoured over his clenched eyelids, clogging nose and mouth.
The cold drove ferocious spikes deep into his temples, and gnawed at the raw frostbite wounds on brow
and nose and lip. Surely it was folly to continue to huddle into his threadbare windproof. What if he
flung all resistance aside, and surrendered himself to the wailing Antarctic blizzard? Suddenly he
yearned to dance, free of the weighty mitts and clothing. To embrace death and waltz away!
He had left his finnesko behind. Gangrene had swollen his frozen feet to the size of melons, the
ominous black streaks stealing up past the ankles nearly to the knee. Yesterday it had taken hours to
coax the fur boots on. Today he had not bothered. Now his woolen sock caught on something.
Excruciating pain jolted his frozen foot, suppurating from the stinking black wounds where the toes used
to be. Too weak to help himself, he stumbled forward. His crippled hands, bundled in the dogskin mitts,
groped to break his fall. They touched nothing. He seemed to fall and fall, a slow endless drop into blank
whiteness.
And it was true! A delicious warmth lapped him round like a blanket. Tears of relief and joy crept
down his starveling cheeks and burnt in the frost fissures. He was being carried, warm and safe. Rock of
Ages, cleft for me!
For a very long time he lay resting, not moving a muscle. Stillness is the very stuff of Heaven, when
a man has marched nearly two thousand miles, hauling a half-tonne load miles a day for months, across
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the Barrier ice, up the Beardmore Glacier, to the South Pole and back. He slept, and when he wasn't
actually asleep he was inert.
But after some unknowable time Titus slowly came to awareness again. He felt obscurely indignant,
cheated of a just due. Wasn't Heaven supposed to be a place of eternal rest? He'd write a letter to the
_Times_ about it...
"Maybe just a touch more?" one of the celestial host suggested, in distinctly American accents. Silly
on the face of it, his unanalyzed assumption that all the denizens of Heaven were British...
"No, let's see how he does on four cc. How's the urine output?"
Shocked, Titus opened his eyes and looked down at himself. He was lying down, clothed in a pure
white robe, all correct and as advertised. But were those a pair of angels lifting the hem? He used the
drill-sergeant rasp he had picked up in the Army. "What the _hell_ are you at!"
Both angels startled horribly. Something metallic slipped from a heavenly hand and landed with a
clatter on the shiny-clean floor. A beautiful angel with long black hair stared down at him, sea-blue eyes
wide as saucers. "Oh my God. Oh my God, Shell! Look at this -- he's conscious! Piotr will be like a dog
with two tails!"
"Damn it, now the meter's gone."
As the other angel stooped nearer to pick up her tool Titus stared at her face. It was tanned but
flushed with irritation. The nose had freckles. She wore huge coppery hoop earrings, and her short curly
hair was dull blonde, almost mousy. "You," Titus stated with conviction, "are not an angel."
The happy angel -- no, blister it, a woman! -- exclaimed, "An angel, Shell, did you hear that? He
called you an angel."
"He did not! Don't you ever listen, Sabrina? He just said I was _not_ an angel."
"This isn't the afterlife," Titus pursued doggedly. "Am I even dead?"
"Shell, this what we have you for. Hit it, quick!"
The irritable angel elbowed her companion into silence and spoke, clear and slow. "No, Captain
Oates, you are not dead. We are doctors. I am Dr. Shell Gedeon, and this is Dr. Sabrina Trask. You are
safe here, under our care."
Titus could hardly take her words in. His mind hared off after irrelevancies. He wanted to retort,
"Stuff and nonsense! Women can't be doctors. They don't have the intellect!" But he clung to the
important questions: "What about my team? Bowers, Wilson, Scott: Are they safe too?"
Dr. Trask drew in a breath, glancing at her colleague. Dr. Gedeon's voice was calm. "Let's stop the
drip now, why don't we?"
"Excellent idea. If you'll pass me that swab..."
"They are all right, aren't they?" Titus demanded. "You rescued me, and you rescued them." The
doctors didn't look round, fiddling with their mysterious instruments. "Aren't they?"
He wanted to leap up and search for his friends, or shake the truth out of these fake ministering
angels, these impossible doctors. But a wave of warm melting sleep poured over him, soft as feathers,
inexorable as winter, and he floated away on its downy tide.
* * *
Again when he woke he was met with pleasure: smooth sheets and a cool clean pillow. No reindeer-
skin sleeping bag, no stink of horsemeat hoosh and unwashed men! He lay tasting the delicious sleek
linen with every nerve and pore. How very strange to be so comfortable. His gangrened feet no longer
hurt even where the covers rested on them. Double amputation above the knee, probably -- the only
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treatment that could have saved his life. He had become reconciled to the idea of footlessness. Lazily he
reached down the length of his leg with one hand to explore the stump.
The shock of touching his foot went all through his body, a galvanic impulse that jerked him upright.
He flung back the covers and stared. His feet down to the toes were all present and accounted for, pink
and clean and healthy. Even the toenails were just as they used to be, horn-yellow, thick and curved like
vestigial hooves, instead of rotten-black and squelching to the touch. He wiggled the toes and flexed
each foot with both hands, not trusting the evidence of eyes alone. It was undeniable. Somehow he had
been restored, completely healed.
He examined the rest of himself. At the end, in spite of the dogskin mitts, his fingers had been
blistered with frostbite to the colour and size of rotten bananas. Then the fluid in the blisters had frozen
hard, until the least motion made the tormented joints crunch and grate as if they were stuffed with
pebbles. Now his fingers were right as ninepence, flexing with painless ease: long, strong and sensitive,
a horseman's hands.
The constant stab from the old wound in his thigh, grown unbearable from so much sledging, was
gone. He leaped to his feet, staggering as the blood rushed dizzily away from his head. He sat for a
moment until the vertigo passed, and then rose again to put his full weight on his left leg. Not so much
as a twinge! He was clad in ordinary pyjamas, white and brown striped, and he slid the pants down. The
ugly twisted scar on his thigh had opened up under the stress of malnutrition and overwork, until one
would think the Boers shot him last week instead of in 1901. Now there was not a mark to be seen or
felt, however closely he peered at the skin. Most wondrous of all, both legs were now the same length.
The army doctors had promised that with the left set an inch shorter than the right, he would limp for the
rest of his life.
He had to nerve himself before running a hand down his face. Such a natural action, but the last time
he'd tried it the conjunction of blistered fingers and frozen dead-yellow nose had been a double agony so
intense the sparks had swum in his eyes. But now it didn't hurt at all. His nose felt normal, the strong
straight Roman bridge no longer swollen like a beet-root. No black oozy frostbite sores, but only a rasp
of bristle on his cheek. Even the earlobes -- he was certain he'd left those behind on the Polar plateau!
Incredulous, he looked round the room for a glass.
It was a small plain chamber, furnished with nothing but the bed and a chair. But there was a narrow
window. He leaned on the sill, angling to glimpse his ghostly reflection in the pane. He ran his tongue
over his teeth, firmly fixed again and no longer bleeding at the gums. His brown eyes were melancholy
under the deep straight arch of brow bone, and his dark hair was shorn in an ordinary short-back-and-
sides.
Suddenly he saw not the glass but through it, beyond and down. He leaned his forehead on the cool
pane, smearing it with a sudden sweat. He was high, high up. Below was a city the like of which he had
never seen, spread from horizon to horizon in the golden slanted light of either dawn or sunset.
Buildings spangled with lights, gleaming in sheaths of glass, reared mountain-high. His own little
window was thousands of feet up, higher far than the dome of St. Paul's even. Far below, vastly
foreshortened, people scurried along the pavements. Shiny metal bugs teemed the ways and flitted
through the skies.
"This isn't London." His voice had a shameful quaver. He forced himself to go on, to prove he could
master it. "Nor Cairo. Nor Bombay..."
"You are in New York City, Captain Oates. As you will have observed, you have traveled in both
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分类:外语学习
价格:4.9玖币
属性:30 页
大小:92.3KB
格式:PDF
时间:2024-11-24