by Sarban
‘Between long silences I exchanged remarks—you could scarcely call it talking—about the incident with the Belgian engineer. We smoked and drank our gin and listened to the loitering clank and beat of the engine, and the monotonous gabble of the Somali hands gossiping somewhere forrad. In spite of the thick weather the trip was going to be exactly the same as all the others I had made in the Mahrusa.
‘I believe I had made that reflection to myself a minute before I felt a queer, soft, sliding jar which, I suppose, I was the last on board to recognise for what it was. I heard the ring of the engine-room telegraph and Kobus swearing vehemently on the bridge outside, and then understood that we were aground. The Belgian had skipped out at the first feel of the grounding; I followed and heard the changed, loud churning of the screw as the engine went astern. I joined Kobus and the mate on the bridge. Peering down over the side, I fancied that the water was lighter in colour than it had been. The dust-haze, burnished by the moon to the colour of a bright sovereign, was all round us still; below, the sea seemed to reflect a ghost of that light and lay, a drear, wan sheet, rippled by waves from our vainly turning screw.
‘ “It’s the Dhahira Reef,” Kobus said. “We ought to be a mile inside it. There’s five miles of deep water between this and your damn Juzur ul Ghaur over there, and I have to go and shove her on it!” He went aft, and I waited on the bridge until, after some time, the engine stopped and Kobus and the engineer returned to the captain’s cabin.
‘We were not badly aground, they had decided. It was the east wind, Kobus said. Normally there would have been depth of water enough where we were for a ship of the Mahrusa’s shallow draught. Part of the reef was bare in normal states of the sea and on anything like a clear night could be sighted at a fair distance. Kobus had allowed for some westward drift, but not enough, it seemed. Now, however, as the wind had been falling since sunset, he concluded that there was no danger of being driven further on, and there was every hope that by morning the wind would be in the north again, for these east winds rarely blow for longer than forty-eight hours at a stretch. A very little rise in the water would take us safely off.
‘The Mahrusa carried no Marconi operator, of course, but Kobus had a small transmitting set in a kind of cupboard off his cabin. He and the engineer had been into the question of asking Port Sudan for a tug and had turned the idea down: we should be afloat again, by all reasonable calculation, before the tug could get across and there would be a long bill to foot for nothing. All the same, Kobus said he would try to call up Port Sudan and get a message to our branch here. So he and the Belgian began fiddling with the wireless, while I, rather guiltily recollecting Colombani after the excitement, went along to see how he was. It was a good deal lighter now than it had been earlier; the moon had climbed high above the haze, and when I had stood a moment outside the cabin I could see about the ship quite clearly. It is strange to feel a ship stationary far from land. I had been aground on reefs often enough in launches and native sailing craft, but on a steamer—even such a squat little canal-barge of a steamer as the Mahrusa—it’s different. There’s a queer, helpless feeling about the thing; you can’t go over the side like the Sambuk sailors and get your shoulders under her and heave her off. With the engine silent and the water sucking and gurgling with a different note round her still hull, she feels, oddly, more a live thing than she does when she’s chugging on: she’s held alive, helplessly bound, waiting for what the sea will do to her. Standing alone there, in the narrow space between the ship’s side and my cabin door, I felt for the first time since our grounding that we were in danger. I felt a danger in the blank elements round us; the ship suddenly felt small and lost and I was aware of the drear, dark waste of hostile waters encompassing us behind and beneath that wan curtain of haze.
‘Colombani seemed all right. I did not put on the light, but struck a match and saw him in its flare lying with closed eyes. I left the door ajar on the hook and returned to Kobus’s cabin, to find that both he and the Belgian had so far failed to obtain anything from the wireless set but a range of remarkably varied squeals and wails and whistles. Not surprisingly, the thing was out of order, but the Belgian said he could make it work, given time. I put on the spare set of headphones and crouched down, listening to his efforts.
‘I don’t know what took me outside again: sheer boredom, I suppose, after half an hour’s unprofitable attention to the radio’s chitterings and squawkings. It may—I don’t know—have been some sound that slid through the machine’s noises with some meaning that my conscious mind was not aware of. I went to the door and stood a moment, as before, accustoming my eyes, I can’t say to the dark, but to the different light. My ears still sang from the penetrating whistles of the wireless set, and I remember pressing my palms to them to relieve the discomfort the headphones had caused. The singing had a curious independent quality—as if it were not in my own head at all: a high, fading but still plangent note that might have been the close of some music wandering over the veiled surface of the sea. I heard it still when I dropped my hands and instinctively shook my head, but I could not be sure then whether it was in fact still vibrating in the air or only in my memory. I believe I looked towards the forecastle, thinking one of the Somali crew might have been playing on one of those primitive lutes they make, or quavering one of their wailing songs, but the sound was like no sound of strings, nor like any Eastern vocal music that I have ever heard. I stepped to the ship’s side and looked aft; then, a few yards from me, near my cabin door, I saw a figure wearing light pyjama trousers.
‘It was Colombani. I was so struck with astonishment I could not speak for a second, and before I could move he had climbed onto the ship’s side, climbed quickly and capably as if he had full control of his strength and faculties again. I sprang towards him, but before I could seize him he had poised himself and dived cleanly overboard.
‘I heard the splash of his dive, and it sounded queerly loud and multiple—not the brief sound of one body cleaving the water, but as if it were the plunging and splashing of several people striking strongly about there. I was shouting “Man overboard!” as I leaned out, peering to see him. The daunting drearness of that palely glinting swirl beyond the black side of the ship checked me. I should have dived over at once, but my heart failed me: I groped for the lifebuoy that hung on the side there, and as I raised it to throw I saw those three shapes again. I say “again”: if they were the same or others God knows, but I knew them for the same kind of creatures that had slid away into the deep gulf of water by the islet where we found Colombani. The length of a man, black-green and glistening, with the moonlight running on the wet curves of bodies that turned with a terrible swift suppleness, they twisted and leapt, sporting for a few seconds like dolphins over and round a sinking white blur. Yet they were not dolphins, nor any creature of the sea that I have seen in life or books, for I saw more than their rounded heads this time, more than the human roundness of their fish-smooth bodies: I saw in that moment before I threw the buoy, black-green arms curving and cutting the water, and, as one glistening body glanced and twisted half over, a pale face looked up at me and before it turned again, disappearing under that strangely silvered sea, I saw a mouth with lips that curved as though they mocked or laughed.
‘Kobus got a boat launched very quickly and hoisted one of his cargo lights to shine well out from the end of the bridge. With the Goanese mate and the engineer and a couple of seamen we pulled back and forth on the port side of the ship half a dozen times and then round the whole ship three or four times, but there was nothing to be seen. Not so much as a sprat broke the surface. We picked up the buoy and abandoned the search, though we kept the cargo light burning all night on a theory of Kobus’s that as Colombani was so clearly out of his wits he might well have dived overboard in some freak of madness and might equally well come swimming back to the ship when he had had enough. So the look-out was told to keep his eyes skinned; I too stayed awake by the ship’s side till dawn
, watching—and listening; but all night nothing more showed on the surface of the water and nothing broke the silence. During the night the east wind dropped as Kobus had predicted, and after an hour’s dead calm the normal northerly breeze sprang up. By sunrise the air was clear of dust and we had water enough over the reef to float the Mahrusa safely off.
‘I tried to tell Kobus what I had seen. No, what I thought I had seen, for by the time I had come on board again after the search I was beginning to doubt that I ever did see the things I’ve just told you I saw. Sharks, said Kobus, or dolphins. There was nothing else in that sea that they could be. Doubtfully, I tried to describe what had seemed to me to be their arms and heads.
‘ “That poor fellow had arms,” said Kobus. “If they were sharks there’d be a nasty swirl in the water. It’s tricky to tell what’s going on in the water at night, particularly for someone who’s not used to watching the sea in all lights.”
‘So, when I gave my evidence at the enquiry the French Consul held, I said no more than Kobus would believe to be fact: and, indeed, no more than I could strictly swear to then, or now.’
***
We looked at each other, Turgoose and I, across the iron-topped table in the corner of the very quiet terrace of the Red Sea Hotel.
‘And yet,’ he said after a long pause, ‘you see from Stanislaw’s tale that there’s one man who knows precisely what I did see. Old Ali Hamdani had the incontrovertible evidence for the sea-things under his eyes, and he’s the most incurious man in Arabia: if he had not accepted the marvel he saw long ago with such orthodox casualness, if he had told it as a tale of wonder about the town so that it had come to my knowledge then, I might have been prepared that night and guessed in time what song Colombani was trying to stop his ears against.’
Number Fourteen
IT WAS MY first free weekend for a very long time and I had decided to make the most of it—the spring being warm and well-advanced—by accepting a long-standing invitation to stay with Charles Pottinger and his wife in the house they had bought not so long before at a little place called Tampers End in Surrey.
I caught a train that got me to King’s Cross in the middle of Saturday afternoon, and, as I came up the platform to the barrier I was surprised and pleased to see Charles waiting for me. He had not said anything about meeting me; he had, in fact, given me the train times from Victoria in his letter and explicit directions for catching the local bus to Tampers End.
‘I wasn’t going to come up,’ he explained, ‘but I got a call last night asking me to see a chap in town this morning and there wasn’t time to let you know.’
He had come up in his car, and, as he had finished the business that had brought him, we set out straightaway, across London and out through the southern suburbs, reaching Tampers End not too late for tea.
I had met Charles’s wife, Constance, several times before. Some people thought her cold and unsociable, but I had always got on very well with her and had never found her particularly reserved; but then, Charles and I were very old friends and I suppose that made a difference. Certainly she was a woman of independent character, somewhat brusque in manner and critical in her approach to any matter.
She had, I imagine, considerable will-power, and I fancy that the air of slightly uncomfortable self-restraint that others noticed in her may have proceeded from the deliberate exercise of self-discipline to control a naturally quick temper and a vivid imagination. These underlying qualities came out when she was at home and at her ease with one or two intimate friends; she would talk very freely and entertainingly then, and her retentive memory and gift of accurate observation enabled her to tell a very good story when she chose.
Charles and she showed me round the garden after tea and afterwards she sat with us for a while, not taking much part in our conversation which had turned to what Charles was now doing in house-designing. He got up and gave me a magazine which contained an article on a country house that his firm had designed. He was pleased with it and asked me what I thought of it. I studied the plans and photographs, and while I was doing so Charles and his wife exchanged a few words about the business that he had been in Town for.
‘By the way,’ I heard him say. ‘I went up Old Mill Lane this morning. They’re pulling Number Fourteen down. That and the one next to it. Going to build a block of flats there.’
The names meant nothing at all to me. Presumably they did to Constance, and I think it was the very absence of any comment from her that made me look up.
She had gone quite white, and she was looking at Charles with a curiously steady, expectant expression, as if she had nerved herself to hear him add something else—something painful or, I thought, frightening. Then she saw that I had noticed and she got up, half-turned away and said,
‘I’m glad to hear it. They ought to have pulled it down long ago. It was a horrible place.’
Charles looked rather embarrassed.
‘Oh I don’t know,’ he said. ‘The house had nothing to do with it surely? They were good old houses; a good deal better to look at than what they’ll put in their place, I’m sure.’
Constance had gone to the door. She paused there. Her colour had come back again; she had evidently mastered her fear, if it was fear, of what Charles might have been going to say.
‘If they’re going to build flats they’ll have to dig out all the foundations, won’t they?’ she asked.
Charles gave her a quick glance and frowned. He stood up.
‘Yes, they’ll go pretty deep. But don’t you go thinking things, Con. It’s quite impossible you know, and you said you were convinced about that yourself.’
She looked down at the carpet.
‘Oh, convinced, yes,’ she said. ‘Convinced by the evidence, or lack of it. All the same—obliterated . . . I can’t quite feel that.’
She went out. I suppose I must have been showing my incomprehension and curiosity on my face, for Charles looked at me in a slightly disconcerted way.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t follow that, of course. It’s an old house in Clapham—well, old as they go. Con knew it a long time ago. When her sister lodged there. . . .’
He paused, as if that ought to convey something to me, but it did not. I had not even known she had a sister. I said so.
‘Well,’ said Charles, still more awkwardly, ‘she hasn’t now. At least . . .’
I uttered the vaguely sympathetic or apologetic noise that one does, having realised that the subject of the conversation is dead.
‘At least,’ Charles repeated, ‘we presume she’s dead. But we don’t know.’
Constance came back into the room at that moment and Charles immediately asked me what I thought about his firm’s house illustrated in the magazine article. It was not until some time later when he and I strolled into the village before supper that I had a chance to ask him what he meant by saying they didn’t know whether his sister-in-law was alive or dead.
‘Look here,’ he said. ‘It was a peculiar affair: at any rate the way Con tells the story she makes it sound as though there was something queer about it; but I never knew her sister myself. It happened before I’d ever met Con. I think,’ he added slowly, ‘I think I’d rather like you to hear the story yourself, from her. I’ve told her that the only possible explanation must be an ordinary and a natural one, and the police told her so, too. She admits herself that it must be, but I think she makes the admission only out of a sense of obligation to her scientific training. She’s not at heart satisfied with the explanation. It’ll be very much on her mind now I’ve told her they’re demolishing Number Fourteen. It might be a good thing for her to go over the facts again with a critical stranger.’
I objected that it might be a painful subject for her.
‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘She doesn’t feel about it like that.’
After supper, when we were settled in the sitting-room he broached the matter with what sounded like a guileless counterfeit of casualness.
>
‘I didn’t mention it before,’ he said to Constance, ‘but I saw Cyril Manton in Town this morning. It was he who told me they were pulling Number Fourteen down. That’s why I went round there, to see.’
He turned to me before Constance could make any reply, explaining,
‘Cyril Manton’s a cousin of mine—or rather, my father’s first cousin. He’s been a Metropolitan Police surgeon for years. He knows about Con’s sister’s case. It was in his division.’
Constance spoke in a flat voice.
‘What did he say today?’
‘Oh, nothing very much,’ Charles said. ‘Only that the place was sold and being demolished to build flats. But he knows what you think. That’s why he told me. It means, in fact, that the police will be keeping an eye on the ground as they clear it.’
Perhaps that was meant to be my cue, but if so, I shirked it. Constance, however, seemed to detect without difficulty what Charles was manœuvring for and seemed willing enough to satisfy my curiosity.
‘Charles is quite right, of course,’ she said. ‘I can’t help thinking about Shirley after what he’s said about the house. As we’ve begun to talk about it I ought to tell you the whole story. No, it doesn’t affect me to talk about it now. Not emotionally, I mean, in the ordinary sense. Naturally, I can’t feel any resignation, as one does at a natural death, or as one does at any sort of death, in time. I might do that if the truth were proved: if, that is, the truth were not something beyond all reason and experience.’