Tuny, at a chance meeting with Phyllis, summed the attitude up: 'I'm sure things like that must be frightfully interesting if one happens to be the kind of person who finds just being interested in things enough. What seems to me so feeble is that having found out all this they don't stop them doing it.'
'Well,' said Phyllis, 'stopping icebergs is probably pretty difficult '
'I don't mean stopping icebergs, I mean stopping the Russians from making icebergs.'
'Oh,' said Phyllis, 'are they? making them, I mean?'
'But of course! Just look at it logically,' Tuny told her. 'You don't get things like this suddenly happening for no reason at all. The Russians always seem to think they have more rights in the Arctic than anyone else although they were years after other people in getting to the North Pole, and I expect they're now claiming that they discovered it some time in the nineteenth century because they don't seem to be able to bear the thought that anybody else ever discovered anything, and where was I?'
'I was wondering why they should be making icebergs,' Phyllis said.
'Oh, yes. Well, that's all part of their general policy. I mean, everyone knows that their idea is to make trouble everywhere they can. And look at the wretched summer we've been having; things cancelled one after another, and now they're saying that Wimbledon may have to be washed out altogether. And the whole thing is due to these icebergs they keep on sending into our Gulf Stream. The scientists all know that, but nobody does anything about it. People are beginning to get fed-up with evasiveness, I can tell you. They want a strong line, and a clean-out that will stop this kind of thing. It's been allowed to go on much too long already. Surely they can blow them up, or something.'
'The Russians, or the icebergs?' asked Phyllis.
'Well, I meant the icebergs. If they just blow them up and show the Russians it isn't going to work, they'll probably stop it.'
'But er are you quite sure the Russians are responsible for them?' Phyllis said.
Tuny regarded her closely.
'I must say,' she remarked, 'it seems to me very odd indeed how concerned some people seem to be to justify the Russians on every possible occasion.' And shortly afterwards they parted.
Meanwhile, the interchange of Notes across the North Pole continued. Neither side particularized on the steps taken to deal with the offence in its own area, but the State Department admitted that its area of fog was, when undisturbed by wind, now greater than before; the Kremlin was less committal, but claimed no resounding successes.
The dreary summer passed into a drearier autumn. There seemed to be nothing anybody could do about it but accept it with a grumbling philosophy.
At the other end of the world spring came. Then summer, and the whaling season started in so far as it could be called a season at all when the owners who would risk ships were so few, and the crews ready to risk their lives fewer still. Nevertheless, some could be found ready to damn the bathies, along with all other perils of the deep, and set out. At the end of the Antarctic summer came news, via New Zealand, of glaciers in Victoria Land shedding huge quantities of bergs into the Ross Sea, and suggestions that the great Ross Ice-Barrier itself might be beginning to break up. Within a week came similar news from the Weddell Sea. The Filchner Barrier there, and the Larsen Ice-Shelf were both said to be calving bergs in fantastic numbers. A series of reconnaissance flights brought in reports which read almost exactly like those from Baffin Bay, and photographs which might have come from the same region. Again the more sober illustrated weeklies ran rotogravure views of great masses plunging into seas already dotted for miles with gleaming bergs, and produced studies of individual bergs above such captions as 'Nature's Majesty: With Gothic pinnacles aspiring, a new Everest of the sea sets out upon her lonely voyage. The menacing beauty of this berg freshly calved by the David Glacier in the Ross Sea, is romantically caught by the camera. In many parts of the Antarctic coastline the production of such bergs has been so extensive that ice-shelves hitherto regarded as permanent have been shattered by their fall, and open water now replaces the frozen sea.'
The attitude of polite patronage towards Nature, and the reception, with well-bred congratulatory restraint, of the clever turns she put on to edify and amuse the human race might have continued unruffled for some months longer than it did, but for the urchin quality of Dr Bocker.
The Sunday Tidings, which had for some years been pursuing a policy of intellectual sensationalism, had never found it easy to maintain its supply of material. The stuff of mere emotional sensationalism, as used by its cheaper and less dignified contemporaries, lay thickly all around, easily malleable into shapes attractive to the constant human passions. Intellectual sensationalism, however, was a much more tricky business. In addition to avoiding the suggestion of sensationalism for sensationalism's sake, it required knowledge, research, careful timing, and, if possible, some literary ability. Inevitably, therefore, its policy was subject to lamentable gaps during which it could find nothing topical on its chosen level to disclose. It must, one fancies, have been a council of desperation over a prolonged hiatus of the kind which induced it to open its columns to Bocker.
That the Editor felt some apprehension over the result was discernible from his italicized note preceding the article in which he disclaimed, on grounds of fairmindedness, any responsibility for what he was now printing in his own paper.
With this auspicious beginning, and under the heading: The Devil and the Deeps, Bocker led off:
'Never, since the days when Noah was building his Ark, has there been such a well-regimented turning of blind eyes as during the last year. It cannot go on. Soon, now, the long Arctic night will be over. Observation will again be possible. Then, the eyes that should never have been shut must open .'
That beginning I remember, but without references I can only give the gist and a few recollected phrases of the rest.
'This,' Bocker continued, 'is the latest chapter in a long tale of futility and failure stretching back to the sinkings of the Yatsushiro, and the Keweenaw, and beyond. Failure which has already driven us from the seas, and now threatens us on the land. I repeat, failure.
'That is a word so little to our taste that many think it a virtue to claim that they never admit it. But blind stupidity is not one of the virtues; it is a weakness, and in this case it is a dangerous weakness, masked by a false optimism. All about us are unrest, inflating prices, whole economic structures changing and, therefore, a way of life that is changing. All about us, too, are people who talk about our exclusion from the high seas as though it were some temporary inconvenience, soon to be corrected. To this smugness there is a reply; it is this:
'For over five years now the best, the most agile, the most inventive brains in the world have wrestled with the problem of coming to grips with our enemy and they are still no closer to a solution than when they began. There is, on their present findings, nothing at all to indicate that we shall ever be able to sail the seas in peace again
'With the word "failure" so wry in our mouths it has apparently been policy to discourage any expression of the connexion between our maritime troubles and the recent developments in the Arctic and Antarctic. It is time for this attitude of "not before the children" to cease. I do not know, and I do not care, what kind of pressure has been preventing our more percipient men from pointing out this connexion; there are always cliques and factions anxious to keep the public in the dark "for its own good" a "good" that is seldom far from the interests of the faction advocating it.