South by Java Head

CHAPTER TEN

The lifeboat lay motionless and dead on the motionless mirror of the sea. Nothing moved, nothing stirred, not the faintest ghost of a catspaw to ruffle the shining, steel-blue metal of the ocean that reflected every tiniest detail of the clincher sides with faithful and merciless accuracy. A dead boat on a dead sea, in a dead and empty world. An empty sea, a vast, shimmering plain of nothingness that stretched away endlessly on every side until it blurred in the far distance into the hazed rim of a vast and empty sky. No cloud in sight, and none for three days past. An empty and a terrible sky, majestic in its cruel indifference, and all the emptier for the blinding sun that beat down like an open furnace on the sweltering sea beneath.

A dead boat, too, it seemed, but not empty. It seemed full, rather, packed to capacity, but the impression was misleading. Under such pitiful shade as the remaining tatters of sail provided, men and women lay sprawled or stretched their full length on the benches, thwarts and bottom-boards, spent beyond words and prostrate with the heat, some in coma, some in nightmare sleep, others half-asleep, half-waking, making no movement at all, carefully hoarding what little spark of life was left them and the will to keep it burning. They were waiting for the sun to go down.

Of all that emaciated, sun-blackened shipload of survivors, only two could be seen to be alive. They were in as bad case as the others, gaunt-cheeked, hollow-eyes, with cracked and purpled lips and ugly red suppurating blisters where their saltwater and heat-rotted clothes had laid open patches of untan-ned skin to the burning sun. Both men were right aft in the boat, and they could be seen to be alive only because they were sitting upright in the sternsheets. But for all the movement they made they too might have been dead, or carved from stone. One man sat with his arm leaning on the tiller, though there had been neither wind to fill the torn sails nor men with strength to man the oars for almost four days: the other had a gun in his hand, unwavering, rock-like, and only his eyes showed that he was alive.

There were twenty people in the boat. There had been twenty-two when they had set sail from that little island in the South China Sea six days ago, but only twenty now. Two had died. There never had been any hope for Corporal Fraser, he had already been weakened and ravaged with fever long before the cannon shell from the Zero had all but blown his left arm off as he had fought back at it with his puny rifle from the wheelhouse top of the Viroma. There had been no medical supplies, no anaesthetics at all left, but he had hung on for a lifetime of four days and had died only forty-eight hours ago, cheerfully and in great agony, his arm blackened right to the shoulder. Captain Findhorn had said as much of the burial service as he could remember, almost his last conscious act before he had fallen into the restless, muttering coma from which it seemed unlikely that he would ever emerge.

The other man, one of Siran's three remaining crew members, had died the previous afternoon. He had died violently and because he had completely misinterpreted McKinnon's slow smile and soft Highland voice. Shortly after Fraser's death, McKinnon, whom Nicolson had made responsible for the water supplies, had discovered that one of the tanks had been damaged during the previous night, probably broached, but it was impossible to say: in any event it was empty, and they were left with less than three gallons in the remaining tank. Nicolson had at once suggested that each person in the boat should be limited to one and a half ounces of water twice a day, taken from the graduated drinking cup ― part of every lifeboat's standard equipment: all except the little boy ― he was to have as much as he wanted. There had been only one or two murmurs of dissent, but Nicolson had ignored them completely. The following day when McKinnon had handed Miss Drachmann the child's third drink of the afternoon, two of Siran's men had made their way down the boat from their place in the bows, armed with a heavy metal crutch apiece. McKinnon had glanced quickly at Nicolson, seen that he was asleep ― he had kept guard almost all the previous night ― and quietly asked them to get back, the revolver in his hand backing up his suggestion. One man had hesitated, but the other had flung himself forward, snarling like an animal, the crutch sweeping down in a vicious arc that would have crushed the bo'sun's skull like a rotten melon if it had landed, but McKinnon had flung himself to one side even as his finger had squeezed down on the trigger and the man's own impetus carried him headlong over the stern. He was dead before he hit the water. Then McKinnon had wordlessly lined up the Colt on the other man, but the gesture was unnecessary; the man was staring down at the thin blue smoke still wisping from the barrel of the gun, and his face was contorted with fear. He turned quickly and stumbled back to his seat in the bows. After that there had been no more trouble about the water.

At the beginning, six days ago, there had been no trouble at all. Morale had been high, hopes higher, and even Siran, still suffering from the after-effects of concussion, had been as co-operative as possible and seen to it that his men were the same: Siran was nobody's fool and realised as clearly as any that their survival depended upon common and combined effort: an alliance of expediency, it would last just as long as it suited him.

They had left thirty-six hours after the submarine, twenty-four hours after the last reconnaissance 'plane had passed over the tiny island and failed to find any sign of life. They had sailed at sunset, in a light following swell and the monsoon blowing steadily from the north. All night long and nearly all of the following day they had run free before the wind, and all this time the skies had remained empty and the only boat they had seen had been a prahu, lying far to the east. In the evening, with the eastern tip of Banka Island just lifting over the red and gold horizon to the west, they had seen a submarine surface not two miles away, then move away steadily to the north. Perhaps it had seen them, perhaps not ― the lifeboat might have been lost against the darkening sea and sky to the east and Nicolson had dropped the tell-tale orange sails ― the lug stamped with the even more damning "VA "― as soon as the submarine had broken water: either way it showed no suspicion, and was lost to sight before the sun had gone down.

That night they had gone through the Macclesfield Channel. This, they had thought, would be the most dangerous and difficult part of all, and had the wind dropped or backed or veered a few points either way they would have been lost, and found in clear sight of land when morning came. But the trades had held steadily from the north, they had left Liat on the port hand shortly after midnight and cleared the island of Lepar long before sunrise. It was just on noon of that same day that their luck finally ran out.

The wind had dropped then, suddenly and completely, and all day long they lay becalmed, not more than twenty-five miles from Lepar Island. Late in the afternoon a slow, lumbering seaplane ― it might have been the same one as they had seen previously ― appeared out of the west, circled overhead for almost an hour, then moved off without making any attempt to molest them. The sun was just sinking and a faint breeze beginning to spring up, again from the north, when another aeroplane appeared, again out of the west, flying about three thousand feet and straight at them. No seaplane this, but a Zero, and in no mood for either preliminaries or time-wasting. Less than a mile away it had dropped its nose and come screaming down out of the sky, twin cannon at its wing roots stabbing daggers of red in the gathering dusk, cannon-shells stitching parallel patterns of splashes and spouting spray across the placid surface of the sea right up to the centre of the helplessly waiting lifeboat, through it and away beyond. Or perhaps not so helpless ― not while the Brigadier held the machine-carbine in his hands, for the Zero swung round in a tight turn and headed off back against towards the west in the direction of Sumatra, its sleek fuselage black-streaked with pouring engine oil: less than two miles away it met the seaplane returning, and the two planes disappeared together into the pale golden afterwash of sunset. The boat had been holed, severely, in two places but, remarkably, only one person hurt ― Van Effen's thigh had been badly gashed by a jagged splinter of shrapnel.

Not an hour afterwards the wind had started gusting up to force six or seven, and the sudden tropical storm was upon them almost before they had realised what was coming. It lasted for ten hours, ten interminable hours of wind and darkness and rain strangely cold, then interminable hours of yawing and pitching while the exhausted boat's company baled for their lives all night long as pooping seas swept over the sternsheets and swirled over the sides and water gushed continuously through the jury patches in the bottom of the lifeboat ― the supply of wooden plugs in the repair outfit hadn't gone very far. Nicolson sailed south before the storm with the jib down and the lug sail reefed until he had steerage way and just no more. Every mile south was a mile nearer the Sunda Strait, but he could have done nothing else than let the storm drive him along even if he had wished to: holed by the stern and deep down by the stern, a sea anchor streamed aft would have pulled them under, and it was quite impossible to heave to with a bow anchor out: enough speed, enough steerage way to get them round would have meant enough sail to dismast the boat or capsize her on the turn, and without that steerage way the sluggish, waterlogged boat would have broached to and been driven under in the troughs. The long agony of the night had ended as abruptly as it had begun, and it was then that the real agony had started.

And now, leaning on the useless tiller, McKinnon sitting armed and still watchful by his side. Nicolson tried to thrust aside the nagging, dominating pains of thirst and swollen tongue and cracked lips and sunblistered back and to assess the damage caused, the complete change brought about by those terrible days that had elapsed since the storm had ended, endless, torturing hours under the pitiless lash of the sun, a sun at once dreadfully impersonal and malignant beyond belief, a sun that steadily grew more and more intolerable until it drove helpless, uncaring men over the edge of breakdown and collapse, physical, moral and mental.

The old spirit of comradeship had gone, vanished completely as if it had never been. Where earlier every man had sought only to help his neighbour, now most sought only to help themselves, and their indifference to their neighbour's welfare was absolute. As each man received his pitiful portion of water or condensed milk or barley sugar ― the biscuits had come to an end two days ago ― a dozen greedy, hostile eyes followed every movement of thin clawed hands and thirst-cracked lips, intent on making sure that he received his exact ration and not a drop or nibble more. The greed, the starvation lust in bloodshot eyes, the ivory-knuckled clenching of sun-dark wasting hands, became especially terrible to see whenever young Peter was given an extra drink and some of the water dribbled down his chin and dripped on to the hot bench, evaporating almost as it touched. They were at the stage now when even death appeared an almost attractive alternative to the excruciating torture of their thirst. McKinnon had need of the gun in his hand.

The physical change for the worse was, if anything, even more serious than the moral collapse. Captain Findhorn was deep sunk in coma, but a restless pain-filled coma, and Nicolson had taken the precaution of tying him loosely to the gunwale and one of the thwarts. Jenkins, too, was tied down, although still conscious. Conscious, but in a private hell of indescribable agony: there were no bandages, no protection left for the terrible burns he had received just before they had abandoned the Viroma, and the blazing sun had lacerated every inch of exposed flesh until he had gone crazy with the pain. His finger-nails were blood-stained from his insane clawing of raw burning flesh. His wrists were now lashed together, the rope tied to a thwart, not to prevent further pain-maddened scratching but to prevent him from throwing himself overboard, as he had twice tried to do. For long minutes he would sit without moving, then he would fling all his strength against the rope that held his bleeding wrists, his breathing hoarse and quick with agony. Already Nicolson was wondering whether he should just cut him loose, wondering what moral justification he had for condemning the seaman to die a slow lingering death on the rack instead of letting him finish it all, finish it quickly and cleanly, in the waiting waters over the side. For he was going to die anyway: he had the look of death about him.

Evans's gashed arm and Walters's savagely mutilated wrist were becoming steadily worse. All medical supplies were gone, their recuperative powers were gone and salt-water drying in tattered bandages had inflamed the open wounds. Van Effen was in little better case, but his wound had been more recent and he had innate toughness and reserves of stamina far beyond the ordinary: he lay still for hours at a time, reclining on the bottomboards, shoulders braced against a thwart and staring for'ard. He seemed to have passed beyond the need for sleep.

And the mental breakdown had gone furthest of all. Vannier and the old second engineer had not yet slid over the edge of sanity, but both showed the same symptoms of increasing lack of contact with reality, the same long periods of withdrawn melancholy silence, the same occasional aimless mutterings to themselves, the brief, apologetic half-smiles if they realised they were being overheard, then the relapse once more into melancholy and silence. Lena, the young Malayan nurse, showed only the melancholy, the utter disinterest, but never talked, to herself or anyone, at any time. The Muslim priest, on the contrary, showed no melancholy, no emotion whatsoever, but was silent all the time: but then he was always silent, so it was impossible to be sure of him one way or the other. It was impossible, too, to be sure about Gordon, one moment widely smiling with staring, unfocused eyes, the next, head sunk in unmoving despair. Nicolson, who had the profoundest distrust for Gordon's calculated cunning and who had tried more than once, without success, to persuade Findhorn to get rid of him, watched him with expressionless face: the symptoms might be real enough, but they might equally well be the symptoms of a man who had read some quasi-medical article on manic-depressives and hadn't quite got the hang of it. But there was, tragically, no doubt about the young soldier, Sinclair: all contact with reality lost, he was quite insane and had all the classic symptoms of acute schizophrenia.

But the collapse, the physical and mental breakdown, was not complete. Not quite. Apart from Nicolson, there were two men who remained quite untouched by weakness and doubt and despair ― the bo'sun and the brigadier. McKinnon was the McKinnon of old, unchangeable, apparently indestructible, still with the slow smile and the soft voice and the gun always in his hand. And the brigadier ― Nicolson looked at him for the hundredth time and shook his head in unconscious wonder. Farnholme was magnificent. The more their circumstances deteriorated into hopelessness, the better the brigadier became. When there was pain to be eased, sick men to be made more comfortable or shielded from the sun, or water to be baled ― it was seldom enough, now, that the floorboards weren't covered, and a random bullet on the island had smashed the manual pump ― the brigadier was there, helping, encouraging, smiling and working without complaint or hope of thanks or reward. For a man of his age ― Farnholme would never see sixty again ― it was a quite incredible performance. Nicolson watched him in a kind of bewildered fascination. The fiery and fatuous Colonel Blimp of the up-and-at-'em-sir school he had met aboard the sinking Kerry Dancer might never have existed. Strangely enough, too, the affected Sandhurst drawl had vanished so completely that Nicolson found himself wondering whether he had imagined it in the first place: but there was no questioning the fact that the military expressions and Victorian oaths that had so heavily larded his conversation only a week ago were now so rare as to occasion comment whenever he used them. Perhaps the most convincing proof of his conversion ― if that was the word ― was the fact that he had not only buried the hatchet with Miss Plenderleith but spent most of his time sitting beside her and talking softly in her ear. She was now very weak, though her tongue had lost none of its power for pungent and acid comment, and she graciously accepted the innumerable small services Farnholme performed for her. They were together now, and Nicolson looked at them, his face expressionless, but smiling to himself. Had they been thirty years younger, he'd have laid odds on the brigadier having designs on Miss Plenderleith. Honourable designs, of course. Something stirred against his knee, and Nicolson glanced down. Gudrun Drachrnann had been sitting there for almost three days now, on the lower cross seat, holding on to the little boy when he jumped about the thwart in front of her ― thanks to the unstinted supplies of food and water he received from Miss Plenderleith and McKinnon, Peter Tallon was the only person on the boat with excess energy to dispose of ― and cradling him in her arms for hours at a time as he slept. She must have suffered severely from cramp, but never complained. Her face was thinned down now, the cheekbones very prominent, and the great scar on her left cheek more livid and uglier every hour as her skin darkened under the burning sun. She was smiling at him now, a small painful smile through sun-cracked lips, then looked away and nodded at Peter. But it was McKinnon who caught the look, interpreted it correctly, smiled in return and lowered the dipper into the little warm, brackish water that was left in the tank. Almost as if by a pre-arranged signal, a dozen heads lifted and followed every movement of the dipper, McKinnon's careful transfer of the water from the dipper to a cup, the eagerness with which the little boy clasped the cup in his pudgy hands and gulped the water down. Then they looked away from the child and the empty cup and looked at McKinnon instead, bloodshot eyes dulled with suffering and hate, but McKinnon just smiled his slow, patient smile and the gun in his hand never moved.

Night, when it came at last, brought relief, but relief only of a very limited nature. The burning heat of the sun was gone, but the air was still very hot and stifling and oppressive, and the pitiful ration of water each had received just as the sun had gone down had only whetted their appetite for more, made their raging thirsts all the more painful and intolerable. For two or three hours after sunset people shifted restlessly in their seats in the lifeboat, and some even tried to talk with others, but the talk didn't last very long: their throats were too parched, their blistered mouths too sore, and always, at the back of everybody's mind must have been the hopeless thought that, unless some miracle occurred, for some of them tonight's would have been the last sunset they would ever see. But nature was merciful, their minds and bodies were exhausted by hunger and thirst and by the day-long energy-sapping power of the sun, and by and by nearly all of them dropped off into a restless muttering sleep.

Nicolson and McKinnon went to sleep too. They hadn't intended to, it had been their purpose to share the night watches, but exhaustion had dug its fingers as deeply into them as any, and they dozed off from time to time, heads nodding on their chests, then waking with a start. Once, waking out of a short sleep, Nicolson thought he heard someone moving around the boat, and called out softly. There was no reply, and when he called out again and was again answered with silence, he reached under his seat and brought out his torch. The battery was almost gone now, but the feeble yellow beam was enough to show him that all was quiet, that nobody was out of his or her place, every black and shapeless shadow lying sprawled lifelessly across thwarts and bottqmboards almost exactly where it had been when the sun had gone down. Not long afterwards, just as he was dozing off again, he could have sworn he heard a splash reaching down through his deep-drugged mists of sleep, and again he reached for his torch. But again there was no one there, no one moving around, no one even moving at all. He counted all the huddled shadows, and the number was right: nineteen, excluding himself.

He stayed awake for the remainder of the night, consciously fighting against an almost overpowering tiredness, against leaden eyelids and a woolly, fuzzy mind, ignoring the demands of a parched throat and dry, swollen tongue that seemed to fill all his mouth that he should let go, let his quivering eyelids fall and bring a few hours' blessed oblivion. But something far back in his mind kept telling him that he mustn't let go, that the lifeboat and the lives of twenty, people were in his hands, and when these urgings were not enough he thought of the little boy asleep less than two feet away, and then he was wide awake again. And so a night that was the epitome of all the sleepless nights he had ever known dragged endlessly by, and after a long, long time the first faint streaks of grey began to lighten the eastern horizon.

Minutes passed, and he was beginning to see the mast clearly silhouetted against the greying sky, then the line of the gunwale of the boat, then the separate and distinct forms of the people lying about the boat. He looked first at the boy. He was still sleeping peacefully in the sternsheets beside him, wrapped in a blanket, his face only a white blur in the darkness, his head lying pillowed in the crook of Gudrun Drach-mann's arm. She herself was still sitting on the lower cross seat, twisted round at an uncomfortable angle, her head on the sternsheets. Bending down more closely, Nicolson could see that her head wasn't resting squarely on the seat but against it, the edge of the wood cutting cruelly into her right cheek. Carefully he raised her head, eased a doubled corner of the blanket over the edge of the seat and then, moved by some strange impulse, gently moved back the wave of blue-black hair that had fallen forward over her face, concealing the long, ragged scar. For a moment he let his hand rest there, lightly, then he saw the sheen of her eyes in the gloom and knew that she had not been asleep. He felt no embarrassment, no guilt, just smiled down at her without speaking: she must have seen the gleam of his teeth against his darkly-tanned face, for she smiled in return, rubbed the scarred cheek softly, twice, against his hand then slowly straightened, careful not to disturb the sleeping boy.

The boat was settling deeper in the water, the level inside already two or three inches above the floorboards, and Nicolson knew it was time and past time to bale it out. But baling was a noisy business, and it seemed pointless to wake people from the forgetfulness of sleep to the iron realities of another day when the boat could go at least another hour without being emptied: true, many people were up to their ankles in water, and one of two actually sitting in it, but these were only tiny discomforts compared to what they would have to suffer before the sun went down again.

And then, suddenly, he saw something that drove away all thought of inaction, all thought of sleep. Quickly he shook McKinnon awake ― he had to, for McKinnon had been leaning against him and would have fallen had Nicolson risen without warning ― rose, stepped over the after thwart and dropped down on his knees on the next lower cross seat. Jenkins, the seaman who had been so dreadfully burnt, was lying in a most peculiar position, half-crouched, half-kneeling, his bloodied wrists still tied to the thwart, his head jammed against the tank leading. Nicolson stooped and shook him by the shoulder: the seaman fell further over on his side, but made no other movement. Again Nicolson shook him, more urgently this time, calling his name, but Jenkins would never be shaken awake nor hear his name again. By accident or design ― probably by design, and in spite of the ropes that bound him ― he had slipped off the thwart some time during the night and drowned in a few inches of bilge-water.

Nicolson straightened his back and looked at McKinnon, and the bo'sun nodded, understanding at once. It wouldn't do the lifeboat's morale any good at all if the survivors woke and found a dead man in their midst, and that they should slip him quietly over the side without even a shred of a burial service seemed a small price to pay for preserving the already fading reason of more than one who might lose it entirely if he opened his eyes only to find already in their midst what he knew must eventually come to all.

But Jenkins was heavier than he looked, and his body was awkwardly jammed between the thwarts. By the time McKinnon had cut free the securing ropes with his jack-knife and helped Nicolson drag him to a side bench, at least half the people in the lifeboat were awake, watching them struggle with the body, knowing that Jenkins was dead, yet looking on with eyes lack-lustre and strangely uncomprehending. But no one spoke; it seemed as if they might get Jenkins over the side without any hysterical outbursts or demonstrations, when a sudden high-pitched cry from for'ard, a cry that was almost a scream, made even the most tired and lethargic jerk their heads round and stare up towards the bows of the boat. Both Nicolson and McKinnon, startled, dropped the body and swung round: in the hushed stillness of the tropical dawn, the cry had seemed unnaturally loud,

The cry had come from the young soldier, Sinclair, but he wasn't looking at Jenkins, or anywhere in that direction. He was on his knees on the floorboards, rocking gently to and fro, staring down at somebody lying stretched on his back. Even as Nicolson watched, he flung himself to one side and pillowed his head on his forearms and the gunwale, moaning softly to himself.

In three seconds Nicolson was by his side, gazing down at the man in the bottom of the boat. Not all of his body was lying on the boards ― the backs of his knees were hooked over a thwart, the legs pointing incongruously skywards, as if he had fallen backwards from the seat on which he had been sitting: the back of his head rested in a couple of inches of water. It was Ahmed the priest, Farnholme's strange and taciturn friend, and he was quite dead.

Nicolson stooped over the priest, quickly thrust his hand inside the man's black robe to feel for the heart and as quickly withdrew. The flesh was cold and clammy: the man had been dead for hours.

Unconsciously, almost, Nicolson shook his head in bewilderment, glanced up at McKinnon and saw his own expression reflected there. He looked down again, bent over the body to lift up the head and the shoulders, and it was then that the shock came. He couldn't shift the body more than a couple of inches. Again he tried and again he failed. At his signal, McKinnon lifted one side of the body while Nicolson knelt down till his face was almost in the water, and then he saw why he had failed. The jack-knife between the shoulder-blades was buried clear up to the hilt, and the handle was caught between the planks of the bottom-boards.