The Island Where Time Stands Still (2 page)

As he came gasping to the surface he thought for a second of the appalling swiftness with which calamity had overwhelmed them. When they had gone in to dinner at half-past eight the sea had been calm and the sky cloudless. Sir Pellinore's eight guests might then justifiably have counted themselves among the luckiest people on earth. Between them they had an unusual degree of charm, intelligence, wit and beauty; all of them had a sufficiency of money, and the leisure to accept the elderly Baronet's invitation to accompany him on a trip round the world. Despite his magnificent physique he had at last begun to feel his age, and his doctor had prescribed a year of sunshine. He was one of the few Englishmen left who could still afford to keep a two thousand ton yacht and delighted to entertain in it lavishly.

With a French chef in the galley, the cellar of a life-long connoisseur, and every comfort that money could provide, they had cruised in leisurely manner through the Mediterranean, the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. Every few days they had stopped for a night or two in one port after another, to go ashore, to meet old friends and make new ones, to entertain or be entertained by diplomats and celebrities. From Singapore they had gone down to Java, then up to Borneo and round the Celebes through the countless islands of the South Seas to Tahiti. Thence, they had turned north for the two thousand odd mile run to Hawaii. It was on the third night out that the typhoon had caught them.

All unsuspecting they had assembled in the lounge, the men wearing dinner jackets, the women with light furs over shoulders left bare by their evening dresses. Even half way through dinner, when it had suddenly become obvious that they were in for a stormy night, only little Zenobia Walshingham and the lovely golden-haired Barbara Harland-Woolf had elected to retire to their cabins. The others
had finished the meal and returned to the lounge for coffee and liqueurs. Arthur Walshingham had been setting up the backgammon board for his nightly game with Myra Blandish, when the ship struck. The shock sent every movable thing flying across the lounge, yet none of them had panicked. Who could, with Sir Pellinore calmly apologising to them for his yacht having behaved in such a ‘demned inconsiderate manner'? He had apologised to them again as she was going down, advising the women to wrap up warmly and the men to see that their flasks were full of brandy.

That had been half an hour—no, barely ten minutes—ago. And now, that grand old man, the pretty women and the battle-tested younger men he loved to have about him, his Captain, his faithful servants and his crew were all drowned or drowning.

Gregory closed his eyes, but not from fear of the next mountain of water that was rushing upon him. It was due to agony of spirit at the thought that somewhere not far off in the semi-darkness his beloved Erika must be choking out her life. His last glimpse of her had been as the raft turned over. She had been trying to calm the terrors of a young stewardess. Her arm had been round the girl's shoulders. Both of them were fair, and as the last distress rocket sent up from the yacht burst a hundred feet up its glare had lit their mingled hair as it streamed out behind them, like a yellow pennant in the tearing wind.

It was Pellinore who had been sending up the rockets. He had pretended that he was coming on the raft but at the last moment pushed it off; yelling that some of his ‘fellers' were still trying to launch a boat on the port side. Had there been time for thought they might have known that the instinct of a man who for fifty years had worn a V.C. on all ceremonial occasions would never permit him to abandon his own ship while there was a living soul aboard her. Gregory loved the old boy like a father, and groaned again at the thought that for him too there could be no escape.

The rockets were no more likely to bring help in that vast waste than the lighting of a tallow dip; neither were the S.O.S.s frantically tapped out up to the last on the wireless. The only shipping route to the north of Tahiti ran northeast to San Francisco, and their course to Hawaii being north-west had already carried them hundreds of miles away from it. The nearest land was the widely-scattered Manihiki Islands, but they were little more than coral atolls; many were uninhabited and even the largest were places at which ancient trading vessels called only once or twice a year.

Again Gregory was sucked down, down, down, until he felt as if his lungs must burst, and it was only after moments of excruciating agony that his life-jacket brought him back to the surface. Thrusting himself up, he gazed desperately round for the masts of the sinking yacht, but they had disappeared. While under water he had been so whirled about that he had lost all sense of direction and with it, now that the yacht was gone any hope of fighting his way back to the place where he had last seen Erika.

Realising the futility of battling further against the wind-whipped waves, he ceased his struggles, and soon found that it was now easier to keep his head above water. For a while, like a bobbing cork, he was rushed at express speed up steep dark slopes, temporarily smothered in the white surf at their summits, then tobogganed down glassy inclines into further great water valleys. Now and then he let out a shout, but no answer came from the surrounding gloom, and the only sign of the wreck he sighted was a floating oar.

It was soon after he had seized upon it that he became aware that the storm was easing. The fact brought home to him how accursedly unfortunate they had been. The yacht, well found and capably handled as she was, could easily have ridden out the cyclone; or, had she struck the rock while the sea was calm, it should have been possible to keep her afloat until her radio brought help. It was the combination of the two menaces occurring simultaneously
which had resulted in such swift and irretrievable disaster.

But the dying down of the wind brought him no comfort. He had lost the woman he loved, the old friend to whom he owed so much, and those other friends who had made such a gay and gallant company. He knew, too, that only the instinct of self-preservation had caused him to grab the oar. In those desolate waters the added support it gave him could only prolong the agony. It meant only the difference of an hour or so before he also must perish.

Although the wave crests were no longer breaking with their former fury, freshets of spray continued to dash themselves against his face, and he was still swallowing a lot of water. It made him feel sick and giddy. His eyes were sore, his body ached from the strain to which it had been put and he felt incredibly weary.

In an effort to keep his mind off Erika he tried to conjure up scenes from his life before he met her. Memories of other women drifted into his mental vision. Sabine, the beautiful Hungarian, as he had first seen her at the casino at Deauville; lovely, laughing Phyllis, with whom he had taken a stolen holiday up the Rhine; wicked little black-eyed Minnette, who had so nearly caused his death in China, during the first secret industrial investigation that he had carried out for Sir Pellinore. His thoughts turned to his closest men friends, then to other people—just faces, to many of which he could not put a name. Some were those of old enemies, others of girls with whom he had had only casual flirtations, a few of desperate idealistic loves which had tormented him in youth. One was sweet seventeen, with golden cork-screw curls, blue eyes and a big floppy hat bedecked with corn-flowers. He had adored her all one summer, living through the weeks only for Sundays to come again, when he would see her walking sedately with her parents after Church; but he had never even spoken to her. At that time he had been a Cadet in H.M.S.
Worcester
. The thought carried him back still further, to childhood days.

He was thinking of the wall-paper in his day-nursery
when the oar slipped from his grasp. The effort needed to recover it brought him back with a jerk to the grim present. It occurred to him then that to recall episodes from one's past life was said to be usual with people on the point of drowning—and that he was drowning.

In sudden revolt he began to kick out vigorously. He was still in the prime of life. It could hold many joys and interests for him yet. He did not want to die. Somehow he must win through, as he had so often won through before. If he could only keep afloat long enough, some unforseeable twist of fate would surely save him.

Moderating his movements in order to husband his strength, he kept his chin well up and endeavoured to breast each wave he met without taking in more water. It was not easy; and a fresh surge of despair at the thought that he would never again see Erika took the heart out of his new bid for survival. None the less, an inherent conviction that one should never surrender to an enemy or adverse circumstance kept him going until it seemed to him that he had spent a lifetime gliding up long watery slopes and sliding down their far sides.

The water was not cold, but its constant pressure had the effect of gradually numbing his limbs. His neck began to ache intolerably from the strain of keeping it rigid. From time to time he could no longer prevent his chin falling on his chest and, with his head rolling a little, his face slipping under water. Again his thoughts drifted to the past; the night he had drunk Stefan Kuporovitch under the table at Kandalaksk; the final bout in his year's-long duel with Gruppenführer Grauber; the beach at Dunkirk, from which he had watched the British Army taken off in little boats; his old henchman Rudd describing in graphic cockney how he had won a darts match at the local in Gloucester Road; his first assignment as a journalist. Then a succession of long-forgotten scenes from his youth floated before his mental vision.

He was thinking of the two great mulberry trees in his grandfather's garden when, unnoticed this time, the oar
again slipped from his grasp. Above him the Southern Cross and a myriad of other stars shone with serene indifference. All effort spent, and now buoyed up only by his life-jacket he lapsed into unconsciousness, becoming no more than an inert speck on the bosom of the mighty ocean.

It was some fishermen collecting the catch from their lobster pots who came upon Gregory's body the following morning. Had he remained conscious a little longer he might have seen against the star-spangled sky the dark bulk of the island towards which the aftermath of the hurricane had carried him, for its volcanic cliffs rose sheer and high from a narrow strip of beach. Luckily for him it was not upon the beach that he had been washed up, otherwise he might have remained there unnoticed until the birds had picked his carcass clean. A wave had thrown him into a shallow pool on the barrier reef, between which and the shore lay a half-mile-wide stretch of placid water. The lobster pots were on the lagoon side of the reef and could be reached only in a small boat which had to be manœuvred through a narrow channel from the sea. It was while the little boat was nosing its way through that one of the men in it caught sight of Gregory's head and shoulders protruding from the pool.

Scrambling across the rocks, they bent above him in a chattering group. At first they thought him dead, but after a brief examination the eldest among them declared that his spirit still inhabited his body; so they took him to the larger vessel which had brought them to the outer side of the reef, and set about endeavouring to revive him.

Their methods were primitive but effective. Having stripped him naked they threw him face down across the low gunwale with his head hanging over the side; then they proceeded to pummel and slap him all over. The treatment restored his circulation and caused him to spew up much of the water he had swallowed; but when his mind began
dimly to grope for its surroundings again, it was for a long time conscious only of his body as one universal ache. This was hardly surprising as, apart from the rawness of his internal membranes caused by the salt water, he had suffered severely from having been thrown up on the reef. Two of his ribs had been broken, the back of his skull fractured and in a score of places he had been terribly bruised.

When his rescuers heard his breath whistling regularly between his teeth, and saw his shoulder muscles twitching from his retching, they pulled him inboard, laid him on the bottom boards in the stern, threw his clothes over him in a heap to protect him from the sun, and went about their own business. Staring upwards. Gregory took in the fact that the one of their number they had left behind to tend the tiller looked like a Chinaman, then he again lapsed into unconsciousness.

When next he came to, he was lying on a mat bed with a light cotton covering over him. As he opened his eyes there was a slight stir beside him. Another Chinese face bent over his and he was given a few mouthfuls of a pleasant-tasting drink; but no sooner had he moved his head than an excruciating twinge shot through it and his senses once more ebbed away in a wave of pain.

For most of the four days that followed he was either in a drug-induced sleep or delirious; but during his few lucid intervals he gathered that he was in a small, clean, sparsely furnished room that had a vaguely oriental atmosphere.

When his thoughts at length became intermittently coherent, actual memories of his immediate past began to mingle with frightful nightmares, in which he was again upon the sinking yacht or struggling in turbulent seas. At first he could not bring himself to believe that these were anything other than appalling dreams. Yet as his mind became clearer it demanded to know how otherwise he could be where he was and physically in such a shocking state.

Eventually he rallied his strength enough to question the
man who was looking after him, but the oriental spoke no English. Having spent the best part of a year in China in the early nineteen-thirties, Gregory had learned to speak ‘pidgin' fairly fluently and picked up a smattering of ‘Mandarin'. With an effort he managed to recall a few words of the latter, but they proved insufficient to make himself understood.

The attempt had taken a lot out of him, so he abandoned it and drifted off to sleep. When he woke there was another Chinaman sitting on the chair beside his bed, whose face he recalled having seen several times while he was semi-delirious. This one was better dressed; his blouse was of blue silk and he wore a round silk skull-cap. He appeared to be about forty years of age and his grave face was that of an educated man. Hoping for better luck, Gregory addressed him.