South By Java Head (26 page)

"In the name of heaven!" Farnholme was completely exasperated. "Don't you know that there's a time and place for these quaint old Anglo-Saxon notions about fair play and justice. This is neither the time nor the place. This is a matter of survival."
Nicolson nodded. "I know it is. Siran wouldn't recognise a cricket bat if he saw one. Get back in your seat, Brigadier, please. I'm not completely indifferent to the safety of the others in the boat. Cut one of the heaving lines in three, bo'sun, and make a job on these characters. It doesn't matter if the knots are a bit tight."
"Indeed?" Siran raised his eyebrows. "And what if we refuse to subject ourselves to this treatment?"
"Suit yourselves," Nicolson said indifferently. "The brigadier can have the gun."
McKinnon made a very thorough job of immobilising Siran and his two men, and took a great deal of grim satisfaction in hauling the ropes tight. By the time he was finished the three men were trussed hand and foot and quite unable to move: as a further precaution he had secured the three rope ends to the ring-bolt in the for'ard apron. Farnholme had made no further protest. It was noticeable, however, that when he resumed his seat on the benches beside Miss Plenderleith, he changed his position so that he was between her and the stern, and from there he could watch both her and the bows of the boat at the same time: his carbine was lying on the seat beside him.
His work done, McKinnon came aft to the sternsheets and sat down beside Nicolson. He brought out dipper and graduated cup, ready to serve out the morning ration of water, then turned suddenly to Nicolson. Half-a-dozen people in the boat were talking -- the babble wouldn't last long after the sun cleared the horizon -- and his low pitched words could not have been heard two feet away.
"It's a desperate long way to Darwin, sir," he said obliquely.
Nicolson lifted his shoulders in a half-shrug and smiled: but his face was dark with worry. "You, too, Bo'sun? Maybe my judgment was wrong. I'm sure that Siran will never stand trial. But I can't kill him, not yet."
"He's just waiting his chance, sir." McKinnon was as worried as Nicolson. "A killer. You heard the Brigadier's story."
"That's the trouble. I did hear his story." Nicolson nodded heavily, looked at Farnholme, glanced at McKinnon and then stared down at his hands. "I didn't believe a damn' single Word he said. He was lying all the way."
The sun wheeled like a great burning ball above the eastern horizon. Inside an hour nearly all talk was stopped and people were crawling back into their shells of remote indifference, each alone with his own private hell of thirst and pain. Hour succeeded interminable hour, the sun climbed higher and higher into the empty washed-out blue of the windless sky, and the lifeboat remained as she had been for days on end now, motionless on the water. That they had moved many miles south in those days Nicolson was well aware, for the current set due south from Straat Banka to the Sunda Strait eleven months out of twelve: but there was no movement relative to the water surrounding them, nothing that the human eye could see.
Nobody moved aboard the boat any more than the boat moved on the surface of the sea. With the sun swinging high towards the zenith, the slightest effort brought exhaustion in its wake, a panting of breath that whistled shrilly through a bone-dry mouth and cracked and blistered lips. Now and again the little boy moved about and talked to himself in his own private language, but as the day lengthened and the hot and humid air became more and more oppressive and suffocating, his activities and his talk lessened and lessened until finally he was content to lie still on Gudrun's lap, gazing up thoughtfully into the clear blue eyes: but by and by his eyelids grew heavy and dropped, and he fell asleep. Arms outstretched in dumb show Nicolson offered to take him and give her a rest, but she just smiled and shook her head. It suddenly came home to Nicolson, with a sense of something like wonder, that she nearly always smiled when she spoke: not always, but he'd yet to hear his first complaint from her or see the first expression of discontent. He saw the girl looking at him, strangely, and he forced a smile on his face, then looked away.
Now and again a murmur of voices came from the side benches on the starboard side. What the brigadier and Miss Plenderleith found to talk about Nicolson couldn't even begin to guess, but find it they did, and plenty of it. In the gaps in their conversation they just sat and looked into one another's eyes, and the brigadier held her thin wasted hand in his all the time. Two or three days ago it had struck Nicolson as mildly humorous, and he had had visions of the brigadier in a bygone and gentler age, immaculately dressed in white tie and tails and carnation in his buttonhole, hair and moustache as jet black as they were now snowy white, his hansom cab ready while he himself stood at the stage door entrance, waiting. But he couldn't see anything funny in it, not any longer. It was all rather quiet and pathetic, a Darby and Joan waiting patiently for the end, but not at all afraid.
Slowly Nicolson's gaze travelled round the boat. There wasn't much change from yesterday that he could see, except that everybody seemed just that much weaker, that much more exhausted than they had been, with hardly the strength left to move into the few solitary scraps of shade that remained. They were very low. It didn't need any expert medical eye to see that the distance from listlessness to lifelessness was only a very short step indeed. Some were now so far through that it was only by a conscious effort that they could rouse themselves to accept their midday ration of water, and even then one or two found the greatest difficulty in swallowing. Forty-eight hours and most of them would be dead. Nicolson knew where they were, near enough, since he still had his sextant with him: in the vicinity of the Noordwachter light, perhaps fifty miles due east of the coast of Sumatra. If neither wind nor rain came within the next twenty-four hours, then it wouldn't matter after that whether it came or not.
On the credit side, the only cheering item was that of the captain's health. He had come out of his coma just after dawn and now, sitting on a cross seat and wedged between a thwart and bench, he seemed determined not to lose consciousness again. He could speak normally now -- as normally as any of them could speak with thirst choking in their throats -- and he no longer coughed blood, not at any time. He had lost a great deal of weight in the past week, but in spite of that looked stronger than he had done for days. For a man with a bullet lodged either in his lung or the chest wall to survive the rigours of the previous week, and at the same time be denied all medical attention or medicines was something Nicolson would have refused to believe unless he had seen it. Even now, he found Findhorn's recuperative powers -- Findhorn was almost at his retiring age -- difficult to credit. He knew, too, that Findhorn had really nothing to live for, no wife, no family, just nothing, which made his courage and recovery all the more astonishing. And all the more bitter for, with all the guts in the world, he was still a very sick man, and the end could not be very far away. Maybe it was just his sense of responsibility, but perhaps not. It was difficult to say, impossible to say, Nicolson realised that he himself was too tired, too uncaring to worry about it longer. It didn't matter, nothing mattered. He closed his eyes to rest them from the harsh, shimmering glare of the sea, and quietly dropped off to sleep in the noonday sun.
He awoke to the sound of someone drinking water, not the sound of a person drinking the tiny little rations of hot, brackish liquid that McKinnon doled out three times a day, but great, gasping mouthfuls at a time, gurgling and splashing as if he had a bucket to his head. At first Nicolson thought that someone must have broached the remaining supplies, but he saw immediately that it wasn't that. Sitting on a thwart up near the mast, Sinclair, the young soldier, had the baler to his head. It was an eight-inch baler, and it held a lot of water. His head was tilted right back, and he was just draining the last few drops from it.
Nicolson rose stiffly to his feet, carefully picked his way for'ard through the bodies sprawled over seats and benches and took the can from the boy's unresisting hand. He lifted the baler and let a couple of drops trickle slowly into his mouth. He grimaced at the prickly saltiness of the taste. Sea-water. Not that there had really been any doubt about it. The boy was staring up at him, his eyes wide and mad, pitiful defiance in his face. There were perhaps half a dozen men watching them, looking at them with a kind of listless indifference. They didn't care. Some of them at least must have seen Sinclair dipping the baler in the sea and then drink from it, but they hadn't bothered to stop him. They hadn't even bothered to call out. Maybe they even thought it was a good idea. Nicolson shook his head and looked down at the soldier. "That was sea-water, wasn't it, Sinclair?" The soldier said nothing. His mouth was twitching, as if he were forming words, but no sound came out. The insane eyes, wide and flat and empty, were fixed on Nicolson, and the lids didn't blink, not once.
"Did you drink all of it?" Nicolson persisted, and this time the boy did answer, a long, monotonous string of oaths in a high, cracked voice. For a few seconds Nicolson stared down at him without speaking, then shrugged his shoulders tiredly and turned away. Sinclair half rose from his thwart, clawed fingers reaching for the baler, but Nicolson easily pushed him away, and he sank back heavily on his seat, bent forward, cradled his face in his hands and shook his head slowly from side to side. Nicolson hesitated for a moment, then made his way back to the sternsheets.
Midday came and went, the sun crossed over its zenith and the heat grew even more intense. The boat now was as soundless as it was lifeless and even Farnholme's and Miss Plender-leith's murmurings had ceased and they had dropped off into an uneasy sleep. And then, just after three o'clock in the afternoon, when even to the most resolute it must have seemed that they were lost in an endless purgatory, came the sudden change.
Little enough in itself, the change was as dramatic as it was abrupt, but a change so slight that at first it failed to register or have its significance encompassed by exhausted minds. It was McKinnon who noticed it first, noticed it and knew what it meant, and he sat bolt upright in the sternsheets, blinking at first in the sea-mirrored glare of the sun, then searching the horizon from north to east. Seconds later he dug his fingers into Nicolson's arm and shook him awake.
"What is it, Bo'sun?" Nicolson asked quickly. "What's happened?" But McKinnon said nothing, just sat there looking at him, cracked, painful lips drawn back in a grin of sheer happiness. For a moment Nicolson stared at him, blankly in-comprehending, thinking only that at last McKinnon, too, had gone over the edge, then all at once he had it.
"Wind!" His voice was only a faint, cracked whisper, but his face, a face that could feel the first tentative stirrings of a breeze degrees cooler than the suffocating heat of only minutes previously, showed how he felt. Almost at once, exactly as McKinnon had done, he too stared away to the north and east and then, for the first and only time in his life, he thumped the grinning bo'sun on the back. "Wind, McKinnon! And cloud! Can you see it?" His pointing arm stretched away to the north-east: away in the far distance a bluish purple bar of cloud was just beginning to lift over the horizon.
"I can see it, sir. No doubt about it at all. Coming our way, all right."
"And that wind's strengthening all the time. Feel it?" He shook the sleeping nurse by the shoulder. "Gudrun! Wake up! Wake up!"
She stirred, opened her eyes and looked up at him. "What is it, Johnny?"
"Mr. Nicolson to you." He spoke with mock severity, but he was grinning with delight. "Want to see the most wonderful sight anyone ever saw?" He saw the shadow of distress cross the clear blue of her eyes, knew what she must be thinking, and smiled again. "A raincloud, you chump! A wonderful, wonderful rain-cloud. Give the captain a shake, will you?"
The effect on the entire boat's company was astonishing, the transformation almost beyond belief. Within two 'minutes everybody was wide awake, twisted round and staring eagerly towards the north-east, chattering excitedly to one another. Or not quite everybody -- Sinclair, the young soldier, paid no heed at all, just sat staring down at the bottom of the boat, lost in a vast indifference. But he was the solitary exception. For the rest, they might have been condemned men granted the right to live again, and that was almost literally true. Findhorn had ordered an extra ration of water all round. The long bar of clouds was perceptibly nearer. The wind was stronger and cool on their faces. Hope was with them again and life once more worth the living. Nicolson was dimly aware that this excitement, this physical activity, was purely nervous and psychological in origin, that, unknown to them, it must be draining their last reserves of strength, and that any disappointment, any reversal of this sudden fortune, would be the equivalent of a death penalty. But it didn't seem likely.
"How long, do you think, my boy?" It was Farnholme talking.
"Hard to say." Nicolson stared off to the north-east. "Hour and a half, perhaps, maybe less if the wind freshens." He looked at the captain. "What do you think, sir?"
"Less," Findhorn nodded. "Wind's definitely strengthening, I think."
"'I bring fresh showers for thirsting flowers'," the second engineer quoted solemnly. He rubbed his hands together. "For flowers substitute Willoughby. Rain, rain, glorious rain!"
"A bit early to start counting your chickens yet, Willy," Nicolson said warningly.
"What do you mean?" It was Farnholme who replied, his voice sharp.
"Just that rain-clouds don't necessarily mean rain, that's all." Nicolson spoke as soothingly as he could. "Not at first, that is."
"Do you mean to tell me, young man, that we'll be no better of than we were before?" There was only one person on the boat who addressed Nicolson as 'young man.'
"Of course not, Miss Plenderleith. These clouds look thick and heavy, and it'll mean shelter from the sun, for one thing. But what the captain and I are really interested in is the wind. If it picks up and holds we can reach the Sunda Straits sometime during the night."
"Then why haven't you let the sails rip?" Farnholme demanded.