by Nevil Shute
The captain nodded. ‘Sure. I’ll get everything washed and cleaned before he comes again. He’d want you to have the use of the things, and there’s no sense in buying anything.’
He left Keith in the cabin. He had a very welcome shower, his first for a month, and dressed in the soft linen and the light hot-weather grey suit of a wealthy American. He went out a little self-consciously and up into the deck lounge, where he ran into the thirty-year-old red-headed woman that he knew as Mrs Efstathios. She got up to welcome him.
‘Say,’ she said, you must be Mr Keith Stewart. I’ve heard such a lot about you. My name’s Dawn Ferris, and my Pop owns this ship. He never uses it, but he just likes to have it around. Aren’t those his clothes you’re wearing?’
Keith was embarrassed. ‘I hope it’s all right,’ he said. ‘Captain Petersen told me it would be.’
She laughed. ‘Sure. Everyone that comes on board uses Pop’s clothes. He’s never here to use them himself. Say, I remember when you came aboard in Honolulu, only I didn’t know who you were then. When did you arrive here?’
‘We got in the day before you. The day before yesterday.’
‘You must have made a quick trip — we didn’t waste any time. Mr Hirzhorn, he got really worried about you going in that little boat, without any motor or anything. Say, that big ape who came on board with you — I forget his name — is he here, too?’
‘Jack Donelly? Oh yes, he’s here. The Mary Belle’s moored further up the quay, that way. You can’t mistake her; she’s the only boat that’s got tanned sails.’
‘Is that so? I got some shopping to do presently; I’ll take a look and see. Captain Petersen was saying we’d be leaving in the morning for the Tuamotus.’
Keith nodded. ‘I’ve got to go there to see about my sister’s grave. I’d like to leave as soon as the headstone’s finished. That’s supposed to be tonight. Will you be coming with us?’
She said, ‘Well now, I don’t know. I’ve seen the Tuamotus so many times, and it seems like this would be a kind of private party. The Captain says he’ll have to come back here anyway to bring the pilot back before leaving for Seattle. I was thinking maybe I’d move into the hotel for three or four days while you’re away, and explore the island.’
‘I should think that would be very interesting,’ said Keith.
‘It might be,’ she said doubtfully. ‘They all speak French here and I don’t, which makes things kind of complicated.’
They chatted together for a little in the deck saloon. Then she said, ‘Time I went on shore if I’m going. Say, if I’m not back on board for lunch, tell the captain not to wait. If I find a decent-looking restaurant that can understand what I’m saying, I’ll eat there.’
She picked up a broad-brimmed sun hat with a gaudy ribbon, and went off, and up the gangway to the quay. Keith went out on deck and started to explore the polished cleanness of the ship, an entrancing occupation. The boatswain found him and showed him the anchor winch forward and the winches at the foot of each mast. ‘All hydraulic from a central power generator in the engine room,’ he said proudly. ‘Used to be manual, except the anchor winch, which was a great big electric cow of a thing. When Mr Ferris bought the ship, first thing he did was rip all that lot out and send down his engineers from Cincinnati to make a proper job of her. She’s all hydraulic now, steering and all. Ferris Hydraulics.’
Keith was very interested indeed, and spent some time examining the winches and their reduction gears, which evoked his admiration for their clean and efficient design. From the deck the boatswain passed him on to the chief engineer, who took him down into the spotless engine room to show him the power generator, the main diesel, and the stand-by diesel. He spent an hour of sheer delight down there, and was finally discovered there by the steward, telling him that lunch was ready. He had spent the morning with machinery so clean that he hardly had to wash his hands.
He sat down happily to lunch with Captain Petersen, and gave him the message from Mrs Efstathios.
On shore Dawn Ferris wandered through the town, looked unintelligently at the big cathedral, wandered back to the waterfront and looked at the French frigate with the sailors with red pom-poms on their naval caps, and wandered along the quay looking vaguely for a restaurant, past rows of native fishing boats and yachts. Near the end of the row she came upon the Mary Belle, which she recognised by the tanned sails. Jack Donelly was sitting on the foredeck with his legs dangling over the side, fishing with a handline; a little pile of small, silvery fish lay on the deck beside him. He did not believe in buying food when there was food in the sea. He wore a pair of old blue jeans and nothing else; with his deeply bronzed torso he was a fine figure of a man.
Dawn stopped, and said, ‘Hullo, big boy!’
Jack looked up, replied, ‘Hullo,’ and went on fishing.
She asked, ‘What are you catching?’
He jerked a little fish out of the water and added it to the pile. ‘These.’
‘Are they good to eat?’
‘I guess so. They look all right.’
‘Are you having them for dinner?’
The conversation was taking his mind off fish, but anyway he had enough. Enough, maybe, for two. ‘I guess so,’ he said. ‘Fish fried with cornmeal fritters are good chow.’
She was suddenly weary of the sophisticated meals on board the Flying Cloud, and she had difficulty in understanding the French writing on the restaurant menus. ‘Cornmeal fritters!’
He raised his head. ‘Say, can you cook cornmeal fritters?’
‘Can I cook cornmeal fritters! Try me and see.’
He got to his feet, an amiable giant about six feet four in height in his bare feet, all bronzed. ‘Come on down, ’n let’s see how you can do it. I’ll fetch the sack aft into the cabin.’
In the Flying Cloud Keith Stewart was enjoying his first civilised meal for a month, not altogether sorry to be relieved of the somewhat monotonous diet of the Mary Belle. Over lunch he told Captain Petersen that he had given the little generator set to Jack Donelly in lieu of passage money. ‘He’s a nice kind of guy,’ said the captain. ‘He may not know much navigation, but he seems to get from A to B without it. Did you help him much upon the way?’
Keith shook his head. ‘I learned to to take a noon sight for latitude. The officers of the Cathay Princess taught me. But the course was only a point or two east of south, and there was never much more than a hundred miles difference between my sight and his dead reckoning. He’d have got here perfectly all right without my sights.’
The captain laughed. ‘Takes us all down a peg or two. It’s wonderful the way they do it.’ He paused. ‘Make a good boatswain,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘I’d rather have him in the ship than some of the ones we got.’
He sat smoking with the captain for a time, and then went on shore and bought a little oil-can at a hardware store, with an empty bottle, and took them to a filling station to get filled with petrol and oil. With these in hand he walked along the quay to the Mary Belle. Jack Donelly was sitting in his blue jeans in the companion, looking at peace with the world and very pleased with himself.
Keith went down the gangplank to the aft deck and stepped over the tiller. ‘I brought the gas and oil for the little motor,’ he said. He showed them to the captain.
‘Gee, that’s real nice,’ said Jack. ‘Right kind o’ gas and right kind of oil?’
Keith nodded.
Jack was very pleased; everything in the world was rosy. ‘That’ll keep her going a long time.’
‘I’ll just take them down and put them on the shelf,’ said Keith. ‘Then you’ll be all set.’
Jack did not move his big frame from the companion. ‘Don’t go down just yet,’ he said in a low tone, but distinctly. ‘Wait while she gets her dress on.’
Keith stared at him in horror. ‘Wait while who gets her dress on?’
‘The red-head,’ Jack informed him. ‘Some foreign name I forget. But she don’t talk foreign.’ He added though
tfully, ‘or act foreign, either.’ He broke into a happy smile.
Keith thought only of escape from this situation. He thrust the bottle of gas and the oil-can into Jack Donelly’s hands. ‘Here, take these,’ he said. ‘I’ll come over and see you later.’
‘Okay,’ said Jack phlegmatically. ‘Be seeing you.’ Friends and women, he knew, never really mixed.
Keith fled up the gangplank and walked rapidly away up the quay towards the Flying Cloud. On deck he passed Captain Petersen and said something incoherent about going to lie down in his cabin, and went and hid himself below. His first instinct was to keep well out of sight and avoid a meeting with Dawn Ferris. Whatever her problem was, he didn’t want to get mixed up in it.
He lay on his bunk petrified with terror, waiting for the storm to break, till the steward tapped on the door and entered at about five o’clock. ‘Captain says he’s sending up a boy with a hand-truck to fetch the gravestone,’ he said. ‘He wanted to know if you’d like to walk up with him, see the stone before it leaves the yard.’
He ought to do that. Apparently the storm hadn’t broken yet. ‘Tell the captain I’ll be with him in a minute,’ he said. ‘I’ll just put on my shoes.’ As he sponged his face he thought of the gravestone and of Jo, his sister, and he thought of how she would have laughed, for her sense of humour had been broad. He was smiling, a little furtively, himself as he left the cabin to meet the captain up on deck.
As they strolled up the hill he asked casually, ‘Is Miss Ferris coming with us to Marokota?’
‘Not this time,’ said Captain Petersen. ‘She’s seen it all before. She packed two suitcases and moved into the hotel while you were resting. We’ll pick her up when we come back here with the pilot, Thursday or Friday.’
‘She won’t be on board for supper?’
‘I don’t think so. She said not to disturb you, but just tell you hullo, till Friday.’
They walked into the stonemason’s yard. The stone lay upon the bench all ready for delivery, a slab of purple-coloured slate engraved with the simple inscription that he had chosen. He passed his hand over it; when he had done this for Jo and seen it erected there was no more that he could do for her, except to look after Janice. He would see this stone set up above the grave and then he would go away; it was very unlikely that he would come back to see it again. Still, it was something to have got this far; when he had walked out of Mr Carpenter’s office in Bedford Square he had intended to try and make it but had never really thought he would succeed.
The captain was talking to the old Chinese stonemason, who was drawing a little diagram for him upon the back of an envelope to show him how to set up a gravestone so that it would not fall over as the years went by. He arranged that the boy with the hand-truck should bring a bag of cement down with the gravestone to the ship that evening, and he paid the stonemason in American dollars to his great content. Then they were walking down the hill again towards the quay in the soft tropical dusk, through the myriad evening smells of Papeete.
On deck the captain turned to him. ‘I never drink at sea, myself, or in harbour before sunset. But this is after sunset, sir.’ He smiled. ‘Would you join me in a highball?’
Keith wasn’t quite sure what a highball was, but he appreciated the offer. ‘Have you got any beer?’ he asked diffidently.
‘Sure we’ve got beer. We’ve got pretty near every kind of liquor in this ship. We’ve got dark beer, and we’ve got a kind of lager beer.’ It was still hot in the harbour and Keith chose the lager; they sat down in the long canvas chairs on the aft deck and the steward brought them iced beer and rye on the rocks.
Presently Keith asked, ‘What time are we going off in the morning?’
‘Any time you say,’ Captain Petersen replied. ‘Have you got any more to do on shore?’
‘No. I’d like to get away as soon as possible.’ Before the Dawn Ferris storm blew up, he thought. He found it impossible to imagine what was going to happen to Jack Donelly, or himself. If he were to complete his mission to Marokota, however, the sooner he put a considerable distance between Dawn Ferris and himself, the better. ‘Sail tonight if you like,’ he said.
‘I’ve got it all fixed for tomorrow morning first thing,’ said Captain Petersen. ‘Hands to breakfast at six, pilot on board at seven and get under way. Then we have breakfast about half past eight, when we’ve got sail set and all clear.’ A sudden thought struck him. ‘Would you be likely to feel sick? We could have breakfast here any time you say, and get under way after.’
‘I shan’t feel sick,’ said Keith. ‘Not after a month in the Mary Belle with Jack Donelly. At least. I don’t think so. No, that would suit me fine.’
He spent that evening with the captain, dining with him quietly in the big saloon, sitting with him on deck in the vanilla-scented tropical night, watching the reflections on the water. He heard a good deal about Captain Petersen’s family and home at Midlake, and the captain heard a good deal about Keith’s home in Ealing, and about Katie, and about Janice, and about the wreck of Shearwater. Captain Petersen had already picked up local information about that in Papeete. ‘They had bad luck, Mr Stewart,’ he said simply. ‘When that hurricane blew up they were in just the worst possible position they could be in, with no sea room for the change of wind.’ He sat in thought for a minute. ‘I believe in that position I’d have turned right round and headed back to the south-east with the engine at full power, and chance it turning south before it got to me. I think that might have been a better bet, but it’s hard to say. But anyway, they’d only got a little motor, hadn’t they?’
Keith nodded. ‘That’s another thing,’ he said. ‘From what I hear, the motor was taken on shore from the wreck and covered up. It’s probably worth something. If I could get it back to England I could work on it myself and recondition it. Do you think we could get it on board and take it with us to Seattle, and ship it home?’
Captain Petersen considered the matter. ‘We can’t berth there to get it on board,’ he said. ‘We’ve got to lay off shore while you’re on the island, and send the launch into the lagoon. It won’t be much good now, you know. Not after being in the sea.’
‘I’m not so sure,’ said Keith. ‘Things like that often look a fearful mess with external damage and corrosion, but when you strip them down, they’re not so bad. It’s got wet liners to the cylinders, so they’re replaceable quite easily in England. New pistons and liners, and a coat of paint. It might fetch a couple of hundred quid by the time I’ve done with it.’ He paused. ‘Enough to pay my passage back to England,’ he said smiling.
‘Oh, sure.’ It was difficult to keep remembering that this intelligent little man, who had travelled half across the world and who was thought of so highly by so many influential people, had practically no money at all. ‘How much do you think it would weigh?’ he asked.
‘Three or four hundred pounds. I shouldn’t think it could be more.’
The captain nodded. ‘I should think that’s about it. We can do that, Mr Stewart, if that’s what you want. I’d beach the launch in the lagoon. Then we’d need six or eight hands ashore and some baulks of timber, get it in the launch and rig a wire strop round it.’ He thought for a minute. ‘Bring it off to the ship — that’s easy. Then to get it on board from the launch to the ship in the open sea …’ He thought deeply. ‘I’d make up special coir bolsters, four of them, pretty thick and about eight feet long, for the launch to ride against while we lift the motor on board with the launch derrick. That’ll be okay. We can fix that for you, Mr Stewart.’
‘There wouldn’t be any risk of damage, would there?’
‘Only paintwork, at the most.’ He thought again. ‘We can fix that when we come back into harbour here at Papeete before sailing for Seattle. Get some planks when we get back here, too, and knock up a packing case for it, so it’ll be all ready to ship back to England from Seattle.’
‘That would be fine,’ said Keith. ‘I’d give it a bit of first aid befo
re closing up the case. Wash it well out with fresh water, crankcase, cylinders, and all, and leave it to dry in the sun and wind. Then pour a lot of oil into each cylinder and fill the crankcase up with oil. I don’t think she’ll have come to much harm.’
‘Maybe we’re too apt to scrap things in the States,’ said Captain Petersen. ‘The engineers can lend a hand with that.’
They sat in silence for a time. ‘There’s just one other thing,’ said Keith. ‘Marokota is uninhabited at this time of year, isn’t it?’
‘So they tell me,’ said the captain. ‘There’s no regular settlement upon it. The people come there every now and then to pick up the nuts, but they make the copra upon Kautaiva. They happened to be there when Shearwater got wrecked, but of course they couldn’t do anything.’
‘I know …’ He hesitated. ‘Would it be very difficult for me to spend twenty-four hours alone upon the island, after we’ve set up the gravestone?’
The captain turned his head. ‘There’s no difficulty in that from my point of view, if that’s what you want to do. We shall be standing off and on off-shore. We can do that for a week if needs be. But there’s nothing there, you know. I don’t know even if there’s any water.’
‘I could take that with me, with some sandwiches …’ He turned to the captain. ‘I don’t suppose I’ll ever come back here again,’ he said simply. ‘I don’t suppose that Janice — Jo’s daughter, who’s going to live with us - I don’t suppose she’ll ever come here. I want to take a lot of photos — an awful lot of photos, from all kinds of angles, and that’ll all take time. I’d rather not be hurried by having other people about. I’d like to have your little rowing boat and go out to the wreck and take some photos of that. And - well, she was my only sister. I’d just like to be there alone for a bit.’
‘Sure,’ said Captain Petersen, a little huskily. ‘I’ll get a pack made up for you — blankets. It could be cold at night. Beer, water, sandwiches. What we could do is, go in in the launch with the gravestone, towing the dinghy behind. Set up the gravestone and leave you with the dinghy, go back to the ship. Then come off again next day and load up the engine into the launch, and pick you up. How would that be?’