Saturn Over the Water

by J. B. Priestley

  ‘If so, your jolly old nose is deceiving you,’ cried Mr Jones. ‘But at least you have got away from those stinking Nazis.’

  I asked him how the rescue had been planned.

  ‘O-ho, you think the gorgeous topping Countess helped me.’ Mr Jones wagged his head. ‘Yes, I saw her this morning at the rock. A capitalist-imperialist vamp. But she had nothing to do with our rescue operation, Bedford old boy. It had already been planned. With the help not of countesses but of waiters and cleaners, the people who are never noticed, who seem to the bosses part of the machinery. But they are men, they are women, they have eyes and ears and they wish to serve the Party. My friend, this is how we come to know so much. We have invisible eyes and ears in our service. That is how it was in Osparas. These little dark men in little white coats – they look all the same to big tall bosses – so who cares about them? We do, old top. Now you savvy?’

  ‘I twig, old bean. And I’m very grateful.’ I waited a moment. The boat was already lurching and shuddering. ‘Now I must tell you that my visit to Osparas was a dead failure. I saw the man I was looking for – Joe Farne. In fact they showed him to me as one of your men in little white coats. But then they spirited him away again – this time to Argentina, Dr Rother thinks.’

  ‘He is wrong,’ said Mr Jones. ‘That is what they may all think and say, but they talk out of their hats. Farne was brought down to Peulla by a waiter called Pablo Mandoza who was going home for a little holiday – to Puerto Montt. Pablo took Farne with him. I spoke with them myself at Peulla, the night before last. He is a sick man, this cousin of yours, Bedford old boy. Pablo was sorry for him. So was I. Now you will find him in Puerto Montt.’

  ‘Mr Jones, that’s wonderful,’ I cried, feeling immensely relieved. ‘You’re a marvel, you really are.’

  ‘I have been told so before, old chap,’ said Mr Jones complacently. But then his wide smile vanished. ‘I must speak with Eugenio. He is not happy.’ Very slowly and carefully, for the boat was anything but steady now, he moved to where Eugenio was balancing himself behind the half-covered cockpit. As they talked in anxious whispers, I saw them look over their shoulders several times.

  Then above the sound of the wind, which was rising, the chugging of the engine, the slapping and occasional crashing of the waves, I heard the roar of an engine far more powerful than ours. A big motorboat, probably one of the cabin cruisers, was somewhere behind us and rapidly catching us up. I began looking back too, but didn’t see anything at first. The waves were rising with the wind; a lot of spray was being whipped across; dark emerald ridges, with gleaming white tops, rose behind us. Poor Rother was no longer standing erect and filling his nostrils with the sweet smell of freedom; he was slumped down, his face nearly as green as the water. I made my way towards Mr Jones and shouted above the din to ask him what was wrong.

  ‘Eugenio says it is the big Osparas boat,’ he yelled. ‘They are after us – the Nazi blighters.’

  We looked back together. Then it suddenly came roaring out of the mist and spray and tumbling water, a fast cabin cruiser, looking enormous. Unable to check itself at that speed, it went round us once in a wide circle, and then came in closer. Eugenio shut off his engine. Though the big boat had slowed up now, it went past us, but then the turbulent water threw us together. As we went shuddering into one trough, its twin propellers, high on the next ride of water, roared and glittered in the air. Both boats seemed to stay like that for some time, like two ships in an old picture, though I don’t suppose it could have been longer than twenty seconds. But it was long enough for Mr Jones to fire six shots from his automatic at those propellers.

  I didn’t know what the damage was or what was happening aboard the cabin cruiser, because, as Eugenio set us going again, we suddenly took a bad roll, first away from the other boat, then dipping so deep towards it that Mr Jones and I were flung down, holding on to anything we could find. It was then we heard a burst from the big boat, probably from a sub-machine-gun, pinging over our heads and then cracking into something. The water rose like a sudden darkness between us and the other boat. Neither Eugenio nor his engine had been hit, and between them they sent us crashing and shuddering, high water piling up behind us, at least out of sight, if not out of range. But Rother had been hit twice, through the left shoulder and somewhere near the right lung.

  The next four hours were slow murder. We had to do what we could for Rother, and doing the simplest thing, just getting a shirt out of my bag and tearing it for bandages, wasn’t easy in that boat. Mr Jones and I had done similar jobs before but neither of us was in the hospital orderly class, and even the Royal College of Surgeons wouldn’t have been very neat and deft on Emerald Lake that afternoon. But we got poor Rother tied up somehow, at least stopping the flow of blood. Then, past caring whether it was good or bad for wounds, we poured some of that whisky I’d brought into him, and, after some choking and retching and general misery, he passed out. We waited until Eugenio was able to steady the boat down a bit, and then between the three of us we managed to wedge our poor little casualty into the cockpit, packing him round with our canvas bags and some sacks, and leaving Eugenio only barely sufficient space in which to attend to that half-hearted old engine of his. But Rother was warm in there and wouldn’t be bounced overboard. He looked terrible, the ghost of a gnome. Mr Jones said he’d live, but I doubted it. He and I and Eugenio then took turns at the whisky bottle.

  An hour later I was beginning to wish I’d passed out with Rother. It was a hell of a trip. Clouds boiled round the mountains; winds came whistling through the passes; and that damnable green lake lashed itself into a fury. It would have been no joke in any kind of craft; even that big cabin cruiser we’d knocked out and left behind would have done plenty of pitching and rolling, bouncing and quivering; but in that little old motorboat, hardly moving forward sometimes, only up and down and almost round and round, we took a murderous beating. I don’t know what Mr Jones and Eugenio felt – we didn’t try to talk any longer – but I know that I felt cold, battered, sick and terrified. I’d been in some dangerous situations before, probably closer to death than I was that afternoon, and I hadn’t felt too bad. But this was different. Once the boat was swamped or we were all swept over the side, that mad green lake, probably a mile deep and ice cold, had us for ever. And it was all such a hell of a way from anywhere. Nobody would ever know what had become of me. ‘Never see Tim Bedford around these days,’ they’d say at the club, while the last bits of me were being chewed by deep lake monsters. And if only cowards die a hundred deaths, then I go with the cowards. That treacherous bitch of a lake, suddenly turning itself into the North Atlantic, shot me up, sent me shuddering down, banged and battered and bashed me, wearing out all fortitude, hammering the old gold of manhood into the thinnest quivering leaf.

  Eugenio, the giggler, the dark skeleton, the minimum ration of leathery dried flesh, was the hero that afternoon. He was Man against all the bitter elements. He was the unconquerable spirit. His engine tried to pack it up time and time again; his boat lost all hope under the weight and crash of the waves, was ready to turn in circles, split or be swamped, go down for ever; but the indomitable Eugenio was still their master, and never once did he give any sign of despair. And at last he brought us into the calmer waters within sight of Petrohué. I made him finish what was left of the whisky. He said ‘Goot ’ealt’,’ and giggled.

  Before we landed I had a row with Mr Jones. I said Rother must be taken to the nearest hospital at once. Mr Jones wouldn’t have it. He said the journey to Puerto Montt or Valdivia would do Rother no good, and that he knew a quiet farm only a few miles from Ensenada where Rother could be visited by a doctor and could rest until he recovered. On the other hand, as soon as Rother arrived in hospital with two bullet wounds, the police would be called in, the Osparas people would be asked for their evidence, and he, Mr Jones, he declared emphatically, would ‘be in the soup, old chap.’ We argued all the way into Petrohué about this. He won in t
he end only because he brought Eugenio in on his side, Eugenio having an equal dislike of dealing with the police, and also because he persuaded me, against my earlier and sounder judgment, that poor Rother was really in better shape than he appeared to be. Indeed, Mr Jones talked about ‘clean bullet wounds’ almost as if they did a man good. So I gave in. Though immensely relieved to be out of that emerald nightmare, I wasn’t feeling in the best of shapes myself. I was soaked through. So were Mr Jones and Eugenio, but I was shivering and letting my teeth chatter, and they weren’t. Either they were tougher than I was, or I was too far from my home ground. There wasn’t much here at Petrohué, just a few buildings between the end of the lake and the wooded slopes, and on what there was of it darkness and rain were now falling.

  While Mr Jones and Eugenio went off to make their arrangements for getting Rother away, I sat in the cockpit with him. He was very weak but conscious again. He didn’t know what had happened between the two boats – he’d been feeling deathly sick at the time Mr Jones used his automatic on the propellers – and that had to be explained to him, as well as the decision about not taking him to hospital. Here, to my surprise, he agreed with Mr Jones, and he gave me the impression that he preferred taking any risk so long as von Emmerick didn’t learn where he was. He spoke slowly, in a faint voice, but I couldn’t stop him talking.

  ‘It is funny how life works out,’ he said. ‘I was a young chemist, a scientist, a young man who believed in reason. A citizen of the new reasonable German Republic. I remember making a long speech – one of those long speeches young men like to make when they are in love and have had a few glasses of wine. I made it to Anna just before we married. I said there was now a life, founded on reason, shaped by it, waiting for us, for everybody. So!’ The little oil lamp gave us just sufficient light for me to see the ironical smile on his ghostly gnome’s face. ‘That is what I said, what I believed. A rational life for us, for all. And ever since I have been at the mercy of madmen. First, Hitler and Göring, Himmler and Goebbels. And now the Arnaldos Institute and Osparas, outposts of some organised madness. Even if I escape it is with Mr Jones, who behind his fatness and little jokes is also a madman. So I go somewhere to recover. For what? For whom? Why?’

  He never did recover. He didn’t want to. I remember the young doctor, an undercover Party member Mr Jones discovered for us somewhere in the neighbourhood of Puerto Montt, telling me that, two or three days later. It was a few hours after little Rother had turned his face to the wall to die. By that time I was a patient too, kept in bed because I was now running a high temperature. It was a very uncomfortable bed, out of which two children had been turned, in a bare back room, cold yet fusty and rank, as if a hundred children had been emptying their bowels and bladders in it for years. Some tattered fowls and a goat kept wandering in and out. The doctor was too young and very worried. He had one of those paper-thin faces that have prominent and too-vulnerable eyes, set like the eyes of some peculiar delicate animal. When my temperature was very high and nothing made any sense, for two or three days following the death of Rother, and he came close to peer at me, his face might almost have been painted on a Chinese lantern, swaying and bobbing in a breeze. But even then I could sense the baffled anxiety in him. Several times since, when sleep must have released a similar feeling in me, I’ve been back in that room returning the stare of a dream face like his. I don’t know whether I needed the powerful anti-biotics he finally fed me with, but about ten days after our rough passage on Emerald Lake, I was up again, feeling empty and shaky, and a mile deep in a black depression.

  Where Rother was buried, I never knew. Mr Jones vanished the night we reached that farm, leaving behind two addresses for me – his own in Santiago, and that of the Osparas waiter, Pablo Mandoza, who had taken Joe Farne to his home in Puerto Montt. Fortunately, I’d had a thick wad of peso notes from that bank in Santiago, the morning Mr Jones picked me up. I was able to leave with the Chileno farmer and his wife, a decent hard-working couple destined for unending failure, far more money than they expected. I was able too to pay the modest bill presented by the doctor, who, when he came to see if I was fit to move on, ran me back to Puerto Montt with him. I’d like to be able to say that I resumed my search for Joe Farne, and my quarrel with whatever Wavy Eight might be, with immediate zest and enthusiasm. But the truth is, I just went through the motions, doing what I knew I ought to do, that’s all. I was still down there in that depression. Perhaps, according to our mood and our approach, we can bend things our way or push them off. Moving round like a zombie, I certainly bent nothing my way. Everything was a dead flop.

  The doctor took me to the Mandozas’ and offered to interpret. I learnt through him and one fat woman and two thin ones that Pablo himself had just gone back to Osparas, and that Joe, accompanied by Pablo’s brother who’d landed a job in an hotel up there, had gone to Santiago either eight (the fat woman and one thin) or nine (the other thin woman) days ago. The next morning I climbed into the old Dakota and when I finally arrived at Santiago, the place seemed hotter than ever. I ate a kind of paella dish for dinner, and was sick half the night. Next morning I trailed round to the British Embassy, and saw the first secretary, who was acting as consul. He said I was looking rather seedy, and I said I was feeling seedy. Yes, Farne had called about a week ago, to ask for assistance to get to Lima, where he had a substantial credit in one of the banks.

  ‘Incidentally, he was looking frightfully seedy – spoke very slowly and in rather an odd way – ’ He broke off, just to give me a very sharp look, as if he thought Joe and I had spent a few weeks attending the same orgy. ‘But we checked his story and were able to arrange an air passage to Lima. Then a miserable thing happened. He was asking about letters and any inquiries for him, and then one of the girls on duty remembered we’d had a message about his wife dying. I had to tell him of course – wretched business – and he took it very badly. However, off he went to Lima.’

  And off I went to Lima, next day. The same runaround. Joe had been and gone, after taking his money out of the bank, a week ago, but now nobody knew where. I tried several airline offices and travel agencies, but had no luck. There was just a chance that he might be still around, so after inquiring at my own hotel, where they’d never heard of him and weren’t sure they’d heard of me, I tried three others, all a blank. Lima was still in the same grey Turkish bath; I sweated like a pig; I didn’t want to eat, strong drink was dangerous, and the tobacco in my pipe might have come from a gardener’s bonfire. Then at last I did what I knew I’d been wanting to do all day. I put a call through to Arnaldos’s house at Uramba. After a lot of false starts and cursing, I heard the blessed voice of my friend, Mrs Candamo.

  ‘This is Tim Bedford – you remember, Mrs Candamo? Could I speak to Rosalia, please?’

  I think I knew the answer before it came, the luck being so far out. ‘Oh – I am sorry, Mr Bedford.’ And I could hear, even over that crackly line, that she really was sorry. ‘Rosalia is not here. She went away – oh – it was just after you left us, Mr Bedford. I’m so sorry – ’

  ‘So am I, Mrs Candamo. Where has she gone?’

  ‘Well – that is difficult – I am not supposed to say – ’

  ‘Please, Mrs Candamo – ’

  She spoke now in a quick low tone. ‘She has gone to Australia – and I hope you will go and find her there, Mr Bedford. Good-bye.’

  Next day I flew back to Santiago, Chile. Why, I don’t know. It didn’t seem to be on the way to anywhere I wanted to go. I went to the address Mr Jones had left with me. And not only was there no sign of Mr Jones, but his office, which pretended to import something or other, was having its furniture moved into the street. So now I hadn’t even Mr Jones’s address, if he still had one. I went to a travel agency and was shown how I could fly to Australia, but there seemed to be so much doubling back and jumping around that I refused to go on with it. Then another man, who looked as if he might be closely related to Mr Jones, said that an Australian
cargo ship, the Yarrabonga, had now arrived at Valparaiso, on her way to Wellington and Sydney. She only carried twelve passengers but one of them – ‘a lady invalid,’ he said, as if this was her profession – had left the ship at Callao, so that for once the Yarrabonga had a vacant berth. I took it, really I think because I needed some time off from the Wavy Eight mystery, as well as a rest, before almost starting all over again in Australia. Joe Farne might have gone there or by this time he might be on his way to New York or Peking. I didn’t know. And I might be still using his wife’s money now, not to look for him but to go chasing after Rosalia Arnaldos. But it seemed to me, after arguing it out with myself, that booking a passage on this ship was at least as good a move as any other.

  Late the following morning I was unpacking my two cases in a small and stuffy single cabin, where traces of the invalid lady were still lingering, on the starboard side of the boat deck of S.S. Yarrabonga. The other eleven passengers were still ashore, sight-seeing. There was a bar of sorts and I went along to see if I could get a drink. It was almost filled by a large oldish steward, who looked like a brown bear dressed in dirty whites and wasn’t pleased to see me, and a fat man, who didn’t turn round but who was wearing a crumpled suit I’d seen before. Yes, it was Mr Jones.

  ‘Jolly damned good!’ he cried, shaking my hand, ‘Mike my friend, now you meet Mr Bedford, the same man I told you about last night, the one I rescued from those bloody Nazis down at Osparas. Shake hands, my friends. Mr Bedford, you are not looking tiptop. I was told you were sick after our poor little Rother died. You are making a sea voyage to Australia? A topping idea – just what the doctor ordered. Mike is an old friend and comrade, he will see you have a ripping old time on this Yarrabonga.’

  ‘I’ll do what I can, Mr Bedford.’ Mike was friendly now but dubious. ‘But don’t expect too much.’