The Voyages of Captain Scott | Page 4

would think
of when you saw him bearing down on you with that ball, and it was
the last he asked of you if you were bearing down on him. He was
equally strenuous of work; indeed I have no clearer recollection of him
than his way of running from play to work or work to play, so that there
should be the least possible time between. It is the 'time between' that is
the 'slacker's' kingdom, and Scott lived less in it than anyone I can
recall. Again, I found him the best of losers, with a shout of delight for
every good stroke by an opponent: what is called an ideal sportsman.
He was very neat and correct in his dress, quite a model for the youth
who come after him, but that we take as a matter of course; it is 'good
form' in the Navy. His temper I should have said was bullet-proof. I
have never seen him begin to lose it for a second of time, and I have
seen him in circumstances where the loss of it would have been
excusable.
However, 'the boy makes the man,' and Scott was none of those things I
saw in him but something better. The faults of his youth must have
lived on in him as in all of us, but he got to know they were there and
he took an iron grip of them and never let go his hold. It was this
self-control more than anything else that made the man of him of whom

we have all become so proud. I get many proofs of this in
correspondence dealing with his manhood days which are not strictly
within the sphere of this introductory note. The horror of slackness was
turned into a very passion for keeping himself 'fit.' Thus we find him at
one time taking charge of a dog, a 'Big Dane,' so that he could race it all
the way between work and home, a distance of three miles. Even when
he was getting the Discover ready and doing daily the work of several
men, he might have been seen running through the streets of London
from Savile Row or the Admiralty to his home, not because there was
no time for other method of progression, but because he must be fit, fit,
fit. No more 'Old Mooney' for him; he kept an eye for ever on that
gentleman, and became doggedly the most practical of men. And
practical in the cheeriest of ways. In 1894 a disastrous change came
over the fortunes of the family, the father's money being lost and then
Scott was practical indeed. A letter he wrote I at this time to his mother,
tenderly taking everything and everybody on his shoulders, must be
one of the best letters ever written by a son, and I hope it may be some
day published. His mother was the great person of his early life, more
to him even than his brother or his father, whom circumstances had
deprived of the glory of following the sailor's profession and whose
ambitions were all bound up in this son, determined that Con should do
the big things he had not done himself. For the rest of his life Con
became the head of the family, devoting his time and his means to them,
not in an it-must-be-done manner, but with joy and even gaiety. He
never seems to have shown a gayer front than when the troubles fell,
and at a farm to which they retired for a time he became famous as a
provider of concerts. Not only must there be no 'Old Mooney' in him,
but it must be driven out of everyone. His concerts, in which he took a
leading part, became celebrated in the district, deputations called to beg
for another, and once in these words, 'Wull 'ee gie we a concert over
our way when the comic young gentleman be here along?'
Some servants having had to go at this period, Scott conceived the idea
that he must even help domestically in the house, and took his own
bedroom under his charge with results that were satisfactory to the
casual eye, though not to the eyes of his sisters. It was about this time
that he slew the demon of untidiness so far as his own dress was
concerned and doggedly became a model for still younger officers. Not

that his dress was fine. While there were others to help he would not
spend his small means on himself, and he would arrive home in frayed
garments that he had grown out of and in very tarnished lace. But neat
as a pin. In the days when he returned from his first voyage in the
Antarctic and all