I mustn’t panic—but I’m afraid!
Damn it, I’m getting cramp again.
What will the end be like?
A drink—I must have a drink.
Do people really go mad of thirst?
Shall we all go mad?
God, this is awful!
I’ll go mad if I don’t get a drink!
We’re going to die.
I’m afraid! I’m afraid! I’m afraid!
Over and over went those thoughts almost ceaselessly and varied slightly only according to the time of day. Even the stoutest-hearted among them quailed at the thought of the torture they must suffer before dying of thirst, and the conviction that there was no escape had been growing upon them all.
The ex-mutineers were the greatest sufferers. Fearing another outbreak during the night, Luvia had had them all bound hand and foot and laid out in the bottom of the boat. Even when daylight came again they were not allowed the full use of their limbs, but occupied the five starboard seats on five of the thwarts, and the feet of each were lashed to an oar which passed beneath them, making it impossible for them to move from their places except when specially released to do so. At intervals they were freed one at a time and allowed to stretch their legs in the bow, but for hours they were forced to sit with their ankles roped in the same position. Sullen, resentful, glowering, they sat there cursing in their hearts and casting occasional glances full of hate at the whites.
De Brissac was better. Protected from exposure, lying in such comfort as the collected resources of the boat could afford, and cared for by the two girls, the invalid had an easier time of it than the others; besides which he had been either unconscious or in a drug-induced sleep for the greater part of the time since they had put off from the Gafelborg. Nevertheless, he spoke little and was now fully aware of the terrible end that faced them.
Basil sat with his back against the lower part of the mast amidships. Since the previous evening he had spoken to no one except to decline a pull at Hansie’s flask. Luvia had seen the futility of taking him to task for his raid on the rum, and when he had begun a tentative apology had turned contemptuously away from him.
The Finn had known that Harlem would make trouble sooner or later and regarded Basil’s part in precipitating it as incidental, but he did not attempt to hide his scorn of a man whose craving for drink had led him to forget common decency. Basil, on the other hand, considered himself directly responsible for the outbreak and consequently the Colonel’s death. The fact that he had disliked and despised the pompous old man did not ease his conscience at all; on the contrary, and, illogical though it might be, it made him feel almost as guilty as if he had deliberately engineered the fracas to get an enemy out of the way by treachery.
Under normal conditions he would have been far too well-balanced to allow sentimental remorse for his part in the unpremeditated death of a comparative stranger to influence his future actions, but here, where stark tragedy had gripped them under a cloudless sky in the vast empty wastes of the ocean, and perhaps because he was already a little light-headed from privation, he had formed the quixotic resolve that to punish himself he would not touch another drop of spirit, even if it was offered to him.
Having once made the resolution he experienced almost immediately an unexpected relief from his craving. To his amazement he found that he could regard Synolda now without thinking of her little flask of Van der Hum, and when Hansie offered him a tot of Bourbon he felt a curious joy in refusing it.
He could not bring himself to talk to the others yet as in some ways he was extremely sensitive. The poor view that Luvia took of him was plain to see and he guessed that the rest of them shared the Finn’s condemnation of his conduct. He preferred to deprive himself of their fellowship rather than risk giving them an opportunity to show their feelings openly.
To keep his thoughts off the Colonel’s death and his own misery he wrote some more verses, but they were in a very different strain from those he had written on the previous afternoon.
A constant grim reminder of the previous evening’s events was the presence, some thirty yards astern of the boat, of three triangular fins which cut the water with a steady ripple. No sharks had been in their vicinity before, but blood had been spilled over the side from Steffens’ terribly cut face, and, by some strange mystery of nature, that had brought them racing to the scene.
All the men knew, and hoped the girls did not, that Colonel Carden’s body must have provided a midnight meal for them after Luvia had consigned it to the deep by the light of the hurricane lantern, having spoken a short prayer over it in which the other whites joined.
The long afternoon seemed never-ending. The blacks drooped in their seats under the rays of the strong sunshine; the rest, seeking what shade they could, lolled listlessly, rolling over occasionally to ease their aching limbs.
It was a little after five o’clock when Basil looked up to see Unity coming towards him from the stern. As she crossed the intervening thwarts he was filled with dismay, fearing that she was about to upbraid him for the part he had played in the death of her father.
‘I see you’ve sent yourself to Coventry,’ she opened up quite calmly as she sat down on the bottom boards beside him.
‘Well, more or less,’ he admitted. ‘I didn’t think my society would be particularly welcome in the stern after—’
‘You needn’t have,’ she cut in, ‘at least as far as I’m concerned. I can quite understand the temptation to have a go at that rum proving too much for you.’
‘Thanks,’ his voice was bitter. ‘In that case it would be kinder if you refrained from heaping coals of fire on my unworthy head.’
‘But I mean it,’ she protested, ‘and seeing you look so miserable I wanted you to know that I do understand how a person can want a thing most terribly and decide to take it even when they shouldn’t.’
‘Do you?’ Basil raised his eyebrows. ‘Really?, Well, it was an appalling weakness on my part, anyhow.’
‘Of course, but we all give way to things at times.’
‘I suppose we do, but it isn’t everybody who’ll admit it.’
‘Perhaps, but it happens that I remember just what the after-effects are like.’
To his amazement he caught a sudden twinkle in her grey eyes as he murmured, ‘I’m afraid I don’t quite understand.’
‘How should you? But we can speak frankly now. I mean, there doesn’t seem to be much chance of our being picked up alive, does there?’
‘To be honest, no.’
‘And one’s done so many stupid, harmful things; and left undone so many decent things. Though it sounds pretty sloppy put that way.’
‘It’s true all the same,’ Basil agreed, shooting a quick glance at the face of the girl beside him. He hesitated a second then, on a sudden impulse, pulled out the notebook in which he had been writing. ‘Queer you should say that. It’s just what I’ve been thinking all the afternoon. Care to look at a whine that might be entitled “Lost Opportunities”?’
She took the open book and read the pencilled scrawl:
Our days have been the bones of nothingness
dressed in a scarecrow dress of patchworked tatters;
we tore up all our nights in restlessness,
filled them with the dropping spindles of our chatter;
our lives are the aimless turning of broken looms,
the rustling of beetles’ wings in empty rooms.
Faces have mocked us down our broken ways,
the backless masks of our bent chivalries
as empty as the rent cloak of our days;
flame-like, the clearness of their lips’ dead laughter
came after us, speaking of bittered memories
which had belonged to us, life’s mercenaries.
And yet we could have torn the world apart
if we had loved; we could have rolled the days
back on the nights, lived in another’s heart,
a
nd shod our lips with laughter caught amazed
on the sudden quivering of another’s smile;
… or, as at Troy, have thrown a wave of spears
crescendo-ed in silver against the walls of years.
We could have taught this other, had we won
our way to her, the woven, darling rhyme
which bound our ways together—then undone
our days and slipped them from the leash of time.
… But these are fantasies
Maimed by the masks of our lost opportunities.
‘Thank you,’ she said slowly. ‘That is very beautiful and it was kind of you to show it to me. I had no idea you—well, were the sort of person who had those sort of thoughts, or such a wonderful gift for expressing them.’
‘I don’t, often—have those sort of thoughts, I mean. You’d hate most of the things I jot down at odd moments. Still, there’s some good in the worst of us and a streak of bad in the best of us, I suppose, as the old cliché has it.’
‘Of course there is.’ Unity’s grey eyes held his steadily. ‘I never meant to speak of it again until I saw you looking so miserable; but I thought it might make you feel less bad to hear about my frightful lapse from virtue. I was in Selfridges one morning and I saw a lovely fur. It wasn’t particularly big or valuable, but I couldn’t possibly afford to buy it and quite suddenly I wanted that fur more than anything I’ve ever wanted in my life. My upbringing was very strict and I’d never stolen so much as a peppermint bull’s-eye from anyone before, but I just had to have that fur even if hell’s flames had suddenly leapt up to get me from a crack in the floor. I bagged it and got pinched for shop-lifting.
‘Good Lord! How frightful for you!’ he exclaimed.
‘Yes it was grim—absolutely grim. But I escaped the worst, as Daddy was in Burma at the time and he never got to know. Anyhow, you’ll see now that I really do understand what you felt about the rum.’
He smiled. ‘It’s most awfully decent of you to tell me about your brainstorm so that I shan’t feel quite such a spineless fool. I don’t normally give way to my worst impulses and I’m sure you don’t either.’
‘Of course not.’ She passed her tongue over her dry lips. ‘We’re in a bad enough way without holding things up against each other. Let’s forget it.’
‘I wish I could, but it’s what followed that makes me feel so awful.’
‘You weren’t to know that your grabbing the rum would prove like putting a match to a powder-barrel.’
‘I ought to have thought of it. You see, I did know that the stokers were ripe for mutiny.’
‘Even so, father’s death was an accident. Nudäa swears by all his gods he was only holding the pistol as a threat and never meant to pull the trigger.’
Basil shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t give a bean for anything that slimy rascal says—or his gods. The fact is I was directly responsible for your father getting killed, and, believe me, I’m most desperately sorry.’
‘Why? You never liked him—did you?’
He turned and stared at her in surprise. ‘No, quite frankly, I did not. I’ve known lots of soldiers I do like—and admire, but your father got something in me on the raw. I may be entirely wrong, of course, but he seemed to me the absolute personification of the old style, pompous, narrow, self-opinionated martinet; the type that caused my older friends to hate and despise so many of the professional soldiers they met in the war. It’s not much fun, you know, for an intelligent young man to suddenly find himself under an ill-informed old bigot; particularly when he has to watch good lives being chucked away through his senior’s hidebound stupidity.…’
Basil broke off suddenly and mentally kicked himself for having expressed his views so freely. Unity was silent for a moment, and during it he was so horribly conscious of the ill return he had made to her generous gesture of coming over to rehabilitate him in his self-esteem.
At last she said very quietly: ‘You’re quite right, and since we’re being so frank I’ll tell you something. You’ll probably think it horrible of me to admit it, but he was all you say. Worse, he was not only stupid but mean and beastly. If you want the truth, I hated him more than any man I’ve ever met.’
Suppressing an exclamation, Basil sat quite still. It occurred to him that the heat had got her or that brooding on their desperate situation had already turned her brain, but he was soon convinced of her normality by the sober bitterness which throbbed in her low voice as she went on:
‘“Daddy knows best, my dear!” That was his parrot cry. “Daddy knows best.” I could have screamed sometimes when he brought out that unctuous anachronism as the invariable last word in any argument. He hadn’t imbibed a new idea since he left Sandhurst. Even the war taught him nothing. For him the world was still peopled with only two sorts of men—gentlemen and cads. That’s why your baiting in the saloon of the ship used to drive him into such a frenzy. You’re so obviously the kind of young man his snob mind would place in the category of “gent”; yet you mocked at the old school tie business and all the ballyhoo he held sacred, just as though you were the most utter “cad”. There were times when I’d have given anything to back you up.’
‘I wish I’d known that,’ Basil said quickly. ‘I’m afraid I was far from polite to you once or twice, but that was only because I thought you were tarred with the same brush. You might have given me a hint.’
She shrugged her slim shoulders. ‘I was quite as rude to you as you were to me and I had two perfectly good reasons for not making myself pleasant.’
‘Really! Do tell me what they were.’
‘Well, for one, I didn’t like your habits.’
‘Of course. It seems so long ago that I’d almost forgotten, but I was drinking like a fish—wasn’t I?’
‘You were. I’m not a teetotaller or anything when I’m away from the family; though one of father’s nasty little meannesses was that he didn’t approve of women having anything to drink. “Daddy knew best” what was good for me in that as in everything else. But, all the same, I’ve never had any time for drunks.’
‘Quite understandable. What was the other reason?’
‘My life wouldn’t have been worth living if I’d shown the least sign of encouraging your cynical digs at him after the first night out.’
‘Why? What happened then?’
‘Don’t you remember? You said at dinner the reason they couldn’t get all the recruits they wanted for the Army was because young men didn’t mind fighting for their country, but they kicked at the idea of being pushed into impassable mud-swamps by incompetents like some of the Generals in the last Great War.’
‘Generals who have failed in a supreme trust and thrown the lives of their men away to no purpose should not be allowed to pass into history with glory.’
‘You seem so bitter about it though, and, after all, you could only have been a boy at the time.’
‘I was nine in the summer of the great slaughter. My father, an uncle, and my elder brother were in the same battalion; they all choked out their lives within a few days of each other—just three little units out of the mighty host that were mown down by machine-guns from the almost impregnable pill-boxes they’d been sent to attack across a sea of mud at Passchendaele. Indirectly, too, I probably wouldn’t have made such a mucker of my own life if one of them had been spared to keep an eye on me.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said softly. ‘No wonder you feel so strongly. Anyhow, it doesn’t matter much what you said now, but I thought father would have apoplexy at the time and I wasn’t taking any chances of adding fuel to the fire. I was in his black books badly enough already.’
‘Were you—why?’
She laughed a little ruefully and then swallowed hard because her mouth was so dry. ‘I fell in love with a “cad” last summer. Ghastly, wasn’t it? A board-school boy who’s earning his living as an artist. He was spending his holiday sketching near my home in Norfolk because he’s mad on landscapes, although ordin
arily he does poster work. He’s not making a fortune, but enough for us to have married on, and I’ve got a little money of my own. I was quite mad about him; I still am, a bit, and he was crazy about me.’
‘What happened? I suppose your father kicked?’
‘Yes. My happiness didn’t count, of course, and “Daddy knew best” as usual. I don’t come into my money till I’m twenty-five and he’s my sole trustee; so he sold out some of my shares and made me come on this trip with him.’
‘Could he do that? It hardly sounds legal.’
‘He had power to use part of the money for my education, and travel’s education, isn’t it? Anyhow, I couldn’t stop him without taking action and I hadn’t the courage to burn my boats by running away.’
‘You poor dear. I can imagine him being pretty terrifying to anyone he’d had under his thumb for years.’
‘That’s just it. I knew well enough that he was only a stupid, narrow old man, but there was something about those stony eyes of his that used to freeze the marrow of my bones. He’d already arranged a round of visits in South Africa and Jamaica for this winter so it suited him splendidly to break up my affair and at the same time have me around to do his packing and all the odd jobs he hated doing himself. You must think it pretty beastly of me to say this sort of thing about him now he’s dead, though.’
‘Not at all! “We choose our friends, but our parents are thrust upon us”, as somebody once said very truthfully. It’s quite illogical that we should be expected to love people if they do nothing to earn our affection. Hadn’t you a mother, though, to help you out?’
‘No, mother died when I was sixteen. His selfish slave-driving wore the poor darling out and.… Hallo! What’s that?’
A shout had come from forward of the sail. It was followed immediately by a loud splash and then excited cries in Swedish.
Basil jumped to his feet and pressed forward to see what had happened. At the same moment Unity saw an arm suddenly protrude from the water about ten feet from the side of the boat: it was swept past and disappeared again within a few seconds.
Luvia yelled an order from the stern and the boat was put about; but the triangular fins which had followed in their wake so sinisterly all day had disappeared. A little cloud of bubbles and a sudden reddening of the water, in the place where Unity had seen the arm told the rest of the grim story. Further efforts at rescue were quite useless.
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