A gasp. The flustered orchestra, which was composed mostly of penguins, struck up the tempo. The gallery was filled with jostling polar bears, several of whom wore Santa Claus hats. They had come in late and were having a disagreement over the seating. In their midst sat Mrs. Godfrey, glassy-eyed, who sat eating ice cream from a harlequin-patterned dish.
Suddenly, the lights dimmed. The tenor bowed and stepped into the wings. One of the polar bears craned over the balcony and—throwing his Santa hat high in the air—roared: “Three cheers for Captain Scott!”
There was a deafening commotion as blue-eyed Scott, his furs stiff with blubber grease and coated with ice, stepped onto the stage shaking the snow from his clothes and lifted a mittened hand to the audience. Behind him little Bowers—on skis—emitted a low, mystified whistle, squinting into the footlights and raising an arm to shield his sunburnt face. Dr. Wilson—hatless and gloveless, with ice crampons on his boots—hurried past him and onto the stage, leaving behind him a trail of snowy footprints which dissolved instantly into puddles under the stage lights. Ignoring the burst of applause, he ran a hand across the block of ice, made a notation or two in a leather-bound notebook. Then he snapped the notebook shut and the audience fell silent.
“Conditions critical, Captain,” he said, his breath coming out white. “Winds are blowing from the north-northwest and there seems to be a distinct difference of origin between the upper and lower portions of the berg, suggesting that it has accumulated layer by layer from seasonal snows.”
“Then, we shall have to commence the rescue immediately,” said Captain Scott. “Osman! Esh to,” he said impatiently to the sled dog which barked and jumped around him. “The ice axes, Lieutenant Bowers.”
Bowers seemed not at all surprised to discover that his ski poles had turned into a pair of axes in his mittened fists. He tossed one deftly across the stage to his captain, to a wild din of honks and roars and clapped flippers, and, shouldering off their snow-crumbled woolens, the two of them began to hack at the frozen block as the penguin orchestra struck up again and Dr. Wilson continued to provide interesting scientific commentary about the nature of the ice. A flurry of snow had begun to whirl gently from the proscenium. At the edge of the stage, the brilliantined tenor was assisting Ponting, the expedition’s photographer, in setting up his tripod.
“The poor chap,” said Captain Scott, between blows of the axe—he and Bowers were not making a great deal of headway—“is very near the end, one feels.”
“Hurry it up there, Captain.”
“Good cheer, lads,” roared a polar bear from the gallery.
“We are in the hands of God, and unless He intervenes we are lost,” said Dr. Wilson somberly. Sweat stood out in beads on his temples and the stage lights glinted in white discs across the lenses of his little old-fashioned glasses. “All hands join in saying the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed.”
Not everyone seemed to know the Lord’s Prayer. Some penguins sang Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do; others, flippers over hearts, recited the Pledge of Allegiance when over the stage—head first, lowered by the ankles from a corkscrewing chain—appeared the strait-jacketed, manacled form of a man in evening dress. A hush fell over the audience as—twisting, thrashing, red in the face—he wriggled free of the strait-jacket and shouldered it over his head. With his teeth, he set to work on the manacles; in a moment or two they clattered to the planks and then—nimbly doubling up and freeing his feet—he swung from the chain suspended ten feet above the ground and landed, arm high, with a gymnast’s flourish, doffing a top hat which appeared from nowhere. A battery of pink doves flapped out and began to dip around the theatre, to the audience’s delight.
“I am afraid that conventional methods will not work here, gentlemen,” said this newcomer to the startled explorers, rolling up the sleeves of his evening coat and pausing, for an instant, to smile brilliantly for the explosive flash of the camera. “I nearly perished twice while attempting this very feat—once in the Cirkus Beketow in Copenhagen and once in the Apollo Theatre in Nuremberg.” From thin air, he produced a jeweled blowtorch, which shot a blue flame three feet long, and then produced a pistol which he fired into the air with a loud crack and a puff of smoke. “Assistants, please!”
Five Chinamen in scarlet robes and skullcaps, long black queues down their backs, ran out with fireaxes and hacksaws.
Houdini tossed the pistol into the audience—which, to the delight of the penguins, transformed into a thrashing salmon in mid-air before it landed amongst them—and grabbed from Captain Scott the pickaxe. With his left hand, he brandished it high in the air, while the blowtorch burned in his right. “May I remind the audience,” he shouted, “that the subject in question has been deprived of life-sustaining oxygen for four thousand six hundred sixty-five days, twelve hours, twenty-seven minutes, and thirty-nine seconds, and that a recovery attempt of this magnitude has never before been attempted on the North American stage.” He threw the pickaxe back to Captain Scott and, reaching up to stroke the orange cat perched on his shoulder, tossed his head at the penguin conductor. “Maestro, if you please.”
The Chinamen—under the cheerful direction of Bowers, who was stripped to the singlet and working shoulder-to-shoulder among them—hacked rhythmically at the block in time with the music. Houdini was making spectacular headway with the blowtorch. A great puddle spread across the stage: the penguin musicians, with great pleasure, shimmied happily beneath the icy water dripping into the orchestra pit. Captain Scott, to stage left, was doing his best to restrain the sled dog, Osman—who had gone berserk upon spotting Houdini’s cat—and was shouting angrily into the wings for Meares to come assist him.
The mysterious figure in the bubbled block of ice was now only about six inches from the blowtorch and the Chinamen’s hacksaws.
“Courage,” roared a polar bear from the gallery.
Another bear leaped to his feet. He held, in his enormous baseball mitt of a paw, a struggling dove, and he chomped its head off and spat it out in a bloody chunk.
Harriet wasn’t sure what was happening on stage, though it seemed very important. Sick with impatience, she craned up on tiptoe but the penguins—jibbing and chattering, standing on one another’s shoulders—were taller than she. Several of them wobbled from their seats, and began to totter toward the stage at a forward list, ducking and wobbling, bills tipped to the ceiling, their wall-eyes loony with concern. As she shoved through their ranks, she was pushed hard from behind, and got an oily mouthful of penguin feathers as she stumbled forward.
Suddenly there was a triumphant shout from Houdini. “Ladies and Gentlemen!” he cried. “We’ve got him!”
The crowd swarmed the stage. Harriet, in the confusion, glimpsed the white explosions of Ponting’s old-fashioned camera, a gang of bobbies rushing in, with handcuffs and billy clubs and service revolvers.
“This way, officers!” said Houdini, stepping forward with an elegant sweep of his arm.
Smoothly, unexpectedly, all heads swung round to Harriet. An awful silence had fallen, unbroken but for the tick tick tick of the melted ice dripping into the orchestra pit. Everyone was watching her: Captain Scott, startled little Bowers, Houdini with black brows lowered over his basilisk gaze. The penguins, in unblinking left profile, leaned forward all at once, each fixing her with a yellow, fishy eye.