by M. M. Kaye
Breakfast was an even less pleasant meal than dinner had been the night before, and with the exception of Charles, no one made the slightest effort to improve it. They ate for the most part in silence, and at the conclusion of the meal dispersed without hilarity: to assemble an hour later in the hall, coated, hatted, gloved, in possession of prayer books and (it is to be hoped) armed with collection money.
Packing themselves under the waterproof protection of the waiting buggies they covered the few hundred yards that separated Government House from the little English church on Ross where, owing to the violence of the storm and the fact that the ferry was unable to run, the Reverend Dobbie’s Christmas Day congregation had been reduced to a minimum. Mrs Dobbie had done her best to ornament the altar and chancel in a manner she considered suitable to the season, but the sprays of oleander and wilting branches of casuarina had formed a sorry substitute for holly and evergreen, and the church was very dark, for the doors and windows had been tightly shuttered against the stormy day. But no shutters could keep out the draughts, and the candle flames swayed and flickered, streaming out at right angles to their wicks like small, shining flags, while the timeworn carols sounded thin and strange as they rose in unequal competition with the beating of the rain and the howl of the wind.
‘O come, all ye faithful, Joyful and triumphant…’ Copper’s voice supported Valerie’s against the tuneless but determined baritone of Hamish Rattigan, who occupied the pew immediately behind them, and it occurred to her, with no sense of regret, that a year ago she had sung that same carol in one of London’s loveliest churches. There had been hundreds of candles like drifts of golden stars, holly and Christmas roses, a glittering Christmas tree and a world-famous choir: high, pure, boys’ voices, with the deeper tones of the men like tolling bells. And in her heart an echoing waste of loneliness and vague, unformulated longings.
And now once more it was Christmas Day, and the four walls of the little dim church with its wheezy harmonium and meagre congregation contained the whole of Copper’s heart’s desire, while outside the walls, in spite of rain and wind, hurricane and recent death, lay all Romance — a hundred coral-reefed islands scattered over a jade and sapphire sea. Life, Beauty and Adventure: and Nicholas Tarrent, that as yet unknown quantity … who had probably got at least a dozen wives in every port, did one but know! thought Copper, taking herself firmly in hand. At which point in her meditations she discovered that the carol having been concluded, the congregation, with the exception of herself, were again seated, and from his place on the opposite side of the aisle the subject of her reverie was endeavouring to draw her attention to the fact.
Copper sat down hurriedly and for the next fifteen minutes endeavoured to fix her attention on the Reverend Dobbie’s almost inaudible address.
The afternoon continued as wet and wild as the morning, but towards four o’clock the storm showed signs of having blown itself out at last. The wind had dropped again and the rain died away into a light drizzle, and by the time that the house party, whose numbers had been augmented by the addition of several extra guests, collected in the verandah for tea and Christmas cake, the clouds had lifted and Mount Harriet stood out blackly against a sullen grey sky.
‘Let’s go for a walk around the island,’ suggested Valerie. ‘It really does look as though the worst is over, and I’d like to see how much damage has been done.’
‘A considerable amount, I fear,’ said the Chief Commissioner, joining the group in the verandah and helping himself to an egg sandwich: ‘In fact, I’m afraid that you will all have to make up your minds to being marooned on Ross for several days. The hurricane has smashed the jetties and the pier into matchwood, and until something can be done about that no boat can reach us. What is still more annoying is the fact that the telephone wires have gone, and I am told that until this sea goes down there is no chance of repairing them. So for the time being we are completely cut off.’
‘But what about our milk and butter, and things like that?’ demanded Valerie, dismayed.
‘We must make the best of it, my dear. There should be plenty of tinned milk in the house, and we can do without butter and fresh meat for a few days. At least we are in our own homes, instead of being stranded on the wrong side of the bay like Dr Vicarjee and Frank Burton, who, I am afraid, will have to resign themselves to staying in Aberdeen for some days to come.’
‘But what about the dance at the Club and____ Oh, damn! damn, damn!’
‘Cheer up, Val,’ comforted Charles. ‘That’s life, that was. Don’t let’s spend the rest of the day in gloom. Action is indicated. Remember that this is Christmas Day, and as the padre has already pointed out, the motto for the moment is “Peace on Earth, and Goodwill towards Men” — which means me. You girls go and shove a mac on and come for a walk. It will do your tempers good.’
The wind might have dropped, but it had by no means disappeared. It was still blowing in steadily from the south-east — driving the grey seas on to the rocks and the sea-wall of Ross as though with each crashing onslaught it must engulf the tiny island — as Nick, Copper, Valerie and Charles walked arm-in-arm down the steep roadway from the Residency to the jetty and the Club.
Behind them, with her escort, came Mrs Stock, who appeared to have recovered both her looks and her spirits. She showed little sign of the collapse that had followed her ordeal of the previous day, and had temporarily transferred her attention from Nick to Dan Harcourt, to whose arm she now clung, uttering little feminine shrieks and cries as the wind dragged at her skirts and fluttered the ends of the gay silk scarf that she had tied becomingly about her carefully waved head. Leonard Stock had not accompanied the party, but Hamish, her faithful adorer, had possession of her left arm, while George and Ronnie, the latter unusually taciturn, completed her entourage. The rear of the procession was brought up by Amabel and John Shilto, neither of whom appeared to be enjoying the other’s society.
Amabel’s nose was suspiciously pink and her eyes noticeably swollen, and her thoughts ran in continuous and gloomy circles: Why did I have to slap George like that? Not that he didn’t deserve it. He did. But it was all Mrs Purvis’s fault, behaving like a stupid — a stupid____ Amabel’s vocabulary failed to produce a sufficiently withering adjective with which to qualify the extreme stupidity of Rosamund Purvis whose regrettable display of lung power had blasted Amabel’s young life. I wish I were dead, thought Amabel bleakly, then perhaps George would be sorry!
The storm had left a trail of ruin across the little island. Trunks of fallen palm trees, rent from their inadequate moorings or snapped off like broken broomsticks, lay across the paths and tilted drunkenly down the slopes. Leaves, twigs and flowers, stripped from trees and creepers, carpeted the ground and festooned the broken telephone and electric light wires. Coconuts lay smashed upon the roadways, and even now an occasional nut would fall with a thud, bespattering the earth with milky fluid or bouncing unbroken on to the rocks, to be snatched away by the mountainous seas that still crashed upon the broken fragments of Ross jetty, deluging the causeway in clouds of spray and tossing an untidy litter of wreckage over the Club lawn.
The small summer-house that overhung one end of the turtle tank was now roofless, and the water in the tank was higher than Valerie had ever seen it before as she leant over the edge, peering into its murky depths. A huge dim shape flickered for a moment in the heaving darkness of the shadowed water below her and a horny head emerged for a brief second, regarded her with an austere eye, and withdrew abruptly. Valerie laughed and said: ‘If this sea keeps up it may break down the wall, and then you’ll all escape. Good luck, chums! Charles, what about walking round Barrack Point to watch the waves? They’re gorgeous after a storm.’
The wind met them as they rounded the point, and they paused, entranced, to watch the terrible masses of the steel-grey seas driving down upon the island to crash on to the jagged rocks below the sea-wall in a maelstrom of foam. ‘Do let’s go down to the beach,’ begged Copp
er. ‘It’ll look much more exciting from there.’
‘There isn’t any beach we can go down to,’ pointed out Nick. ‘And if you think I’m going to let you climb down on to those rocks, you can think again. You’d be dragged off them and swept out to sea inside five minutes. Use some sense!’
‘I don’t mean here,’ said Copper. ‘I meant farther along, where the sea-wall stops. Even at high tide there is still a strip of sand there that isn’t covered. Look — I’ll show you.’
The small curving beach below the house was protected by two natural breakwaters of rock, and they had little difficulty in scrambling down the steep slope between the palm trees and reaching the narrow strip of sand. And as Copper had predicted, the towering waves that swept down upon the island appeared doubly awe-inspiring when seen from the level of the shore. Like dark hills of water that mounted higher and higher as they neared the shore, their crests and flanks streaked with livid bars of foam, to curl over at last and crash down into acres of boiling surf.
‘Imagine being wrecked in a sea like that,’ shuddered Copper. ‘You wouldn’t stand a chance. There can’t be a lifeboat in the world that could get through it. I’m not surprised that the Sapphire ran for her life!’
‘Wonder where the old girl’s got to?’ murmured Dan Harcourt disrespectfully, screwing up his eyes against the stinging salt-laden wind and peering out to sea: ‘I don’t suppose she’s far off. Except that there isn’t a harbour worth mentioning around here, so she may have made for the coast. Anyway, I’ll bet the boys are all feeling pea-green and peculiar.’
‘What would have happened if they hadn’t left Port Blair?’ inquired Copper, interested.
‘The same thing that happened to the old Enterprise,’ said Ronnie Purvis: ‘Smasho!’
‘Why? What happened to it?’
‘Oh, don’t you know?’ Amabel, who could be counted upon to know the details of any disaster, brightened up a trifle and added her voice to the conversation: ‘They had come here on a visit, like the Sapphire; only of course it was years and years ago — 1891, I think — and a storm got up before they could leave harbour and they got driven on to the rocks off South Point. Ever so many of them were drowned, and there’s a tablet to them in the church. Didn’t you notice it?’
‘No,’ said Copper shortly. ‘I’m thankful to say I did not!’
But Amabel was not to be deflected from the recital of disaster: ‘Well, it’s there; and the new Enterprise presented the ring of bells in the church steeple in memory of them. At low tide you can still see the boilers of the old Enterprise on the rocks off South Point, all covered with barnacles. We sail round them sometimes when we go fishing. I suppose the tide carried the rest of the ship out to sea when it broke up, but these were too heavy. Fancy all those people drowning so close to the shore. It just goes to show, doesn’t it?’
‘Show what?’ inquired Copper irritably. Amabel’s story had spoilt her enjoyment in the sight of the thundering seas, and what had seemed so splendid a spectacle a few minutes ago, now appeared sinister and cruel and strangely menacing. All those people, going to their deaths so close to that same shore, in that same cold, savage sea …
‘The natives say,’ continued Amabel, determined to extract the last ounce of gruesomeness from her story, ‘that when there’s a storm the noise the tide makes coming over those boilers is the voices of the drowned men among the rocks calling for help, and that on stormy nights you can see their faces coming up through the water like…’ She was interrupted by a sudden gasping cry from Mrs Stock, and broke off, staring: ‘What’s the matter?’
Mrs Stock, still retaining her grip upon Dan and Hamish, was peering intently at the waves, her head a little thrust forward. She flushed at the inquiry, and laughed a little uncertainly. ‘It’s funny,’ she said, ‘but for a minute I thought I saw a face looking at me from out of a wave, just before it broke. I suppose that story about the drowned men of the Enterprise is making me see things. But it looked so real that it gave me quite a nasty shock. It was just out there____’ She released Hamish’s arm to point with a vermilion-tipped finger: ‘In the second line of waves. I expect it was one of those seal things. A dugong.’
‘A dugong?’ exclaimed Copper, thrilled. ‘You mean one of those creatures that people used to think were mermaids? Where!… Where!’
They all turned with her to stare into the grey, crashing seas, their eyes confused by blown spray and distracted by bobbing wreckage. ‘There!’ said Valerie suddenly. ‘I believe I saw something over to the right. No, it isn’t — it’s only half a coconut!’
‘No, it’s not,’ said Copper. ‘It’s – it’s____ What is it, Nick?’
The cold ridge of water that was towering to its fall raced in upon the shore, and from beneath its curling crest, pale and glimmering against the dark wall of water and whiter than the boiling foam, there peered a face____
Mrs Stock screamed at the top of her voice as the wave, crashing in spray, surged up the beach and flung its burden at their feet. Ferrers Shilto had returned.
‘Don’t look, dear!’ said Nick sharply. He caught Copper by the shoulder and swung her around forcibly. But Copper had seen, as they had all seen …
He lay on his back where the tide had flung him, his feet in the creaming froth of foam and flotsam, his eyes wide open and his face, unmarked by the jagged coral rocks, wearing an expression of almost ludicrous astonishment. His left hand lay across his chest and something glinted redly: a single splash of scarlet.
‘There’s blood on it!’ sobbed Copper. She wrenched herself from Nick’s hold and faced the thing that lay on the beach. But the foam of the next wave dragged at its feet, disturbing the limp figure so that its hand fell away from its breast and lay palm down on the sand. And there was no blood. Only the red blotch of the big garnet that winked and glowed from the clumsy bronze ring on Ferrers Shilto’s finger.
Nick said: ‘Get these women away, George. Purvis, you’d better get up to the hospital and collect a stretcher. Go on, Copper darling. You and Val see to those two women. George will go with you.’ Copper turned obediently, and taking the shivering Amabel by the arm, dragged her away up the steep grassy slope above the beach, followed by George and Valerie almost carrying the now completely hysterical Ruby between them.
The noise of their departure died away among the palm trunks, and on the beach Nick, Charles and Hamish lifted the limp, wizened body. There was a small pinkish stain where the head had lain, but as Dan Harcourt stooped above it the lash of another wave obliterated it, and he straightened, frowning, and followed to where they laid the dead man above the reach of the waves.
John Shilto had made no move to help them, and now he stood motionless beside the bedraggled object that had been his cousin, staring down at it with a curiously unpleasant expression on his pasty features. I believe the bastard’s actually gloating! thought Nick disgustedly. And turning away, he took out a cigarette and lit it, shielding the match flame from the wind with his cupped hands, and leant back against a palm tree to wait for Ronnie Purvis and the stretcher.
Charles and Hamish followed his example, but Dan Harcourt remained beside the body, staring down at it with an intent expression that suggested, strongly, a terrier at a rat hole. Presently he went down upon his knees and examined the widened pupils of the staring sightless eyes, and then, carefully and minutely, the fingers of both lax hands. The big garnet winked redly as it turned, and he let the cold hand fall and came to his feet again, brushing the sand off his knees.
Charles said: ‘It’s odd that he hasn’t been smashed up at all: you’d have thought all those rocks and reefs would have battered him to bits.’
‘Tide,’ said John Shilto curtly, speaking for the first time. ‘It must have pulled him out of the harbour mouth clear of the rocks. And, as you see, when it turned it landed him back at the one place where there is a clear strip of sand. The current pulls in strongly towards this beach and most of the big wreckage gets flung u
p here.’
‘Oh yes?’ said Hamish without interest, and looked anxiously at his watch. They had left the house just before five but now it was well past six o’clock, and aided by the thick blanket of the storm-clouds the swift tropic darkness was closing in on them: ‘I wish Ronnie would get a move on,’ he said uneasily. ‘It’ll be dark before he gets back.’
‘It’s all right,’ said Charles, ‘here he is now — with young Dutt and a couple of troops, plus stretcher. They must have run most of the way.’
‘Truda is behaving like a lunatic,’ panted Ronnie Purvis, sliding down the bank on to the narrow strip of beach: ‘She says that she won’t have the body in the hospital because she’s there by herself — except for my wife, who for some goddam reason won’t leave, and backs her up. If we insist, we’ll have them both in hysterics. What the hell are we going to do? It’ll be dark inside fifteen minutes and we can’t bury him until tomorrow. We’ve got to park him somewhere for the night.’
‘What about the church?’ suggested Hamish, prompted by some hazy notion of lying-in-state. Ronnie Purvis gave a short laugh. ‘Can you see Mrs Padre standing for it? Or half the old women in the place, for that matter! No. We’ve got to get him under cover somewhere. But I’m damned if I know where.’
‘If I might make suggestion,’ said Dr Vicarjee’s young assistant in his soft, imperfect English, ‘there is Guest House. It is empty and very seldom used. For many months now no one is using.’
‘That’s the ticket!’ said Mr Purvis with relief. ‘Well done, Dutt. Only outside visitors are ever put up in that moth-eaten dump, and they won’t ever hear that it’s been used as a morgue. If we planted him anywhere else you’d find people refusing to live in the house afterwards. Right, then. Take him along to the Guest House, will you.’