Appleby on Ararat (22 page)

“Everybody who prefers that to being taken prisoner.” Appleby turned quickly at a warning shout from Hoppo. Quivering in the earth not far behind him was one of the familiar native spears. He ran to it and pulled it from the sand; there was a scrap of paper tied to the shaft. He tore it off and came back unfolding it. “Unconditional surrender within five minutes and we shall be accommodated as prisoners in a supply ship when it comes in.” He turned it over, fished out a pencil. “Dunchue has his cannons. What shall we say?”

“Rule, Britannia.”

He scribbled, paused. “Mudge,” he shouted, “pole her out to the end of the jetty; they know just where the boat house is. Diana, join the others.” He tied his message to the spear and waited with it poised.

Diana ran. The storm had cleared. Everybody was standing in tepid water, crouched against the solid concrete of the jetty. Mudge and Hoppo were shoving the launch towards them. And then Appleby came running and dropped down in the middle of them. “Listen,” he said. “This voyage is going to be at very great hazard. But here–”

He was interrupted by a flash of fire and the crash of an explosion. Another and another followed. They were deluged in sand and spray.

“But here behind the jetty anyone will be fairly safe. They’ll stop this as soon as they see us at sea. Then it will be just a matter of being a prisoner. Intending travellers into the boat, please.”

Another salvo of grenades rocked them. Everybody was scrambling in. Twenty yards away the boat house rose solidly into air, disintegrated, came down in a shower of dangerous rubble. Suddenly, as if an overmastering excitement had seized it, the launch throbbed and quivered. Mudge looked up triumphantly. “All correct, sir.”

A grenade exploded in air. There was blood on the deck. The jetty veered away. Behind the launch curved a little line of foam.

“The reef,” said Appleby.

It lay half a mile out. The channel through which they must pass was perhaps twenty yards wide. And leaping over the part-submerged rocks towards it was the figure of a man.

“Dunchue.” Appleby turned to Glover. “Our efficient friend. He decided on that stance just in case. You must judge how long to hold your fire, sir.”

Glover nodded. “I’m a fair shot…think I can beat a damned grenade…even on water. Mudge, whatever he does don’t swerve till I’ve fired.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

“Could do with a bullet – or a double-barrel. Best keep full speed ahead, Mudge.”

“Full speed ahead, sir.”

Glover lay down on deck. Dunchue had reached the tip of the reef and stood poised, waiting. It occurred to Appleby that he might have found a foothold deep in the water and lobbed his grenade from safety. But that would spoil his aim, and Dunchue didn’t intend that. Now he was waving to them – waving them back. Perhaps he felt that Unumunu and the two men called Heaven were one thing and a boat load of silly women another. But he would act, all the same.

Within the reef the sea was almost calm; the storm was now no more than a continued strange appearance in the sky. The light was fair, and it favoured neither side… The launch drove on, the open ocean before it and behind the Hermitage burning fiercely against a backcloth of jungle.

They were just short of the channel. Dunchue’s arm came up and Glover fired. Dunchue staggered, crumpled, slopped in water. He rose to his knees, steadied himself, his arm flashed. It was all in split seconds. And in a split second Diana had dived low across the deck, scooped something, flung. Appleby had an instant’s vision of white flannels, green turf, a crowd. The grenade exploded at Dunchue’s feet. There was a leap of water and then empty sea.

The reef was behind them. They were on the Pacific again.

“Only,” said Appleby, “he wasn’t quite efficient enough. Or rather, he had at times a power of imaginative improvisation which got in the way of his efficiency. It wasn’t really efficient to sham drunk before a trained observer; it was just a beguiling idea that came to him and that he had to keep up.” Appleby was talking quietly, dispassionately, his eye on Diana. “And so too in the matter of Unumunu. When I showed I doubted the savages he thought up something in an instant. Poulish had been in gaol and was therefore a suspicious character. So he told us Yes, that the name Unumunu vaguely meant something to him but he couldn’t remember what. And then a little later he spun you the yarn about remembering something about Unumunu and Kimberley on the radio, and about Poulish’s being upset. As Poulish was known to have done some deal in diamonds and Unumunu at least originally came from Africa it had all the superficial air of hanging together. But it wasn’t really efficient. It was a quite unnecessary false trail, and it would turn suspicion back upon himself if by any chance Poulish and I could strike up a relation of confidence. It was unnecessary, as the story of Jenner kicking George was unnecessary. Eh, George?”

George, slightly sea-sick, closed a solemnly affirmative eye. But Diana did not smile. She was pale. “I could just have thrown it into the sea,” she said. “There was no need to chuck it back at him. It was a sort of re—” She puckered her brows.

“Reflex.”

“Yes. It was just because at cricket you send the ball straight back to wicket… I killed him.”

“You killed him. But he had another grenade and might have got us with it.”

“Yes.”

“And for that matter Glover may really have got in before you. I doubt if Dunchue would ever have got back along the reef.”

“Yes.” She put up her chin and looked at the horizon. “Well, here we are again. Who do you think I shall have to take a bottle to this time? Rumsby?” She smiled faintly.

Miss Curricle looked up from cautious overtures to George. “Only in a sense,” she said. “Here we are
almost
again. But at least this launch may decently be described as a
craft
. I never felt that an inverted café was adapted to navigation. And I inherit from my dear father a distaste for improvisations. You may not have felt the same. I have been told that Australians have a fondness for what they call making do. But for my part I say: simplicity, yes – but the ramshackle, no.”

“We’re not ramshackle,” said Diana indignantly. “But if you had to live on the back-blocks–”

“Live on the
what
?” asked Mr Hoppo courteously.

Appleby sighed. The horizon was very empty. Only directly behind them the island showed like a smudge on the ocean. Good-bye to Ararat. They were running due west and he turned to stare out over the prow. There was only the path of the declining sun. Of that land which had once miraged up over the horizon there was no sign. But then it had been vaguely spoken of as a hundred miles away. There could be no landfall yet.

The sea was sullen, and working under a sky still faintly copper to the zenith; a haze was coming up from the north. Most of the guests had retired not too happily to the little cabin; fortunately their escape had been attended by no casualties worse than a gash or a scrape. And there was plenty of water and plenty of biscuit. Mudge had seen to that. Immediate anxiety must be concentrated on petrol and the weather. On that, and perhaps the possibility of something unwelcome appearing on the horizon. For concealed somewhere in the bungalow or about the island those people must have powerful wireless communication. Or would they? Could one have wireless without giving such a secret depot away? Appleby moved aft to where Mudge stood at the wheel.

“Say something over a hundred miles,” he said. “And then perhaps fifty miles circling round until we actually spot land. Have we anything like that range?”

Mudge shook his head. “Nothing like it, Mr Appleby; it would be a picnic if we had. She’s going at the economic speed now. But the swell takes it out of her. Eighty miles out of port all told. After that we might rig something to do about a couple of knots.” Mudge’s meditative eye went over his right shoulder. “And there’s something coming up.”

“Storm again?”

“No, sir. A kind of fog not uncommon in these parts. May hang about for days and give us no chance to raise a bit of an island at all.”

“Awkward.”

“We’re well found, Mr Appleby.” Mudge was eminently placid. “Did you ever read Warton’s
The Pleasures of Melancholy
? Screech-owls, sir, and mouldering caverns dark and damp. The gloomy void and hollow charnel. The still globe’s awful solitude. Wan heaps. Atmosphere, Mr Appleby. The solemn noon of night. There’s expression, sir. The solemn noon of night. Elevated, Mr Appleby; elevated, indeed.”

Appleby thought it might more justly be termed depressed. But there was something soothing in Mudge’s sombre-liveried culture-talk. And Mudge was going on to speak – more appropriately but hardly more cheerfully – of Falconer’s
The Shipwreck
when there was a shout from Hoppo in the bows. “Whale!” Hoppo was shouting with vigour. “Whale!”

Miss Curricle, now on established conversational terms with George, looked up with justifiable alarm. Several people came out of the cabin. Appleby turned and followed Hoppo’s pointing finger. And this time it was certainly a whale. The creature was blowing not a mile away; and presently a second whale could be distinguished behind it. In the emptiness there was something companionable in their mammalian spoutings; the launch was heading for them as if pleased to pass the time of day. And now more whales could be seen; it must be a school of considerable size; it occurred to some of the guests to express alarm. But Mudge would not be deflected from the course he was steering due west, and the launch ran on unconcerned. It looked as if there would be a close-up view of the monsters as they puffed and vaguely shouldered the sea. And then, quite suddenly, the impending fog came down and they were travelling blind.

Mudge slackened speed. The guests retired again to the cabin. It had been broad daylight and soon it would be dark; meanwhile the fog produced an effect of untropical twilight upon the sea. It thickened until even the sound of the engine seemed muffled; over the bows the sun sank behind it in a dully diffused orange glow; from the cabin came a mumble and murmur of talk. And Appleby felt suddenly depressed. Perhaps it was Mudge on the pleasures of melancholy beginning to seep in; perhaps it was a sense that there lay something repetitive and dismally familiar in this wandering in cockle-shells about the Pacific. He was aroused by Miss Curricle’s voice issuing from the gloom before him. “Mr Appleby,” it said conspiratorially, “pray come here.”

He crossed the boat. Miss Curricle was pointing with a disapproving finger beneath a thwart. “I have no wish to cause needless alarm. But I have just distinguished an object which it is, I fear, impossible to contemplate without disquiet. In short, Mr Appleby, a bomb.”

Appleby peered. It was one of the enemy’s grenades without a doubt, and must have landed plumb in the launch during the bombardment. Appleby looked at it with all the disquiet which Miss Curricle could have required. With the movement of the boat the thing was rocking gently on its base. It had all the appearance of being about to topple over at the next big swell. Appleby steadied it gingerly with his foot and called Glover. That Glover was not of a pre-grenade era he was uncertain. Still, he must be appealed to in lethal matter of this sort.

And Glover eyed the unambiguous object with respect. “A dud,” he said. “There’s just one thing nastier than a live bomb, and that’s a bomb in a state of suspended animation. Better get it overboard.” He stooped to put his hands cautiously about it; then he stopped, peered, chuckled and picked it up. “We’re slandering it: little chap never had a chance.” He held it out before Appleby and a misdoubting Miss Curricle. “Like a Mills bomb – only bigger. You pull out a split pin before you throw. And an arm of the pin has broken off.”

“Safe?” asked Appleby.

“We can easily make it safe. You have only to find a bit of wire while I hold down the lever.”

“Then I think we’ll keep it.” He smiled. “And rank the launch as an armed auxiliary. A pity we haven’t got an ensign.”

Night and the sea fell together. The guests, grateful for an ocean of dim, dark-yellow glass, slumbered in the cabin. All around the fog was absolute, unstirred by any breath of wind.

The only sounds were a lap of water at the bow and a gurgle at the stern – this and the throb of the engine. Mudge looked at his instruments. “Best lay to, Mr Appleby,” he said. “By rights we should put out riding lights. But I doubt if whales and grampuses and the like would attend to them.”

“The whales! You don’t think they’re about still?”

“Bless you, sir, I can hear them now.”

Glover, crouched by the binnacle, grunted incredulously. “Hear them, my man – what d’you mean? Lowing? Growling?”

The sound of the engine died away, the lapping at the bows sank to a whisper. They listened. The night was utterly still. Oil might have been poured upon the water; there was only a long low swell which gently lifted the launch without breaking the sleeping surface about it. They strained their ears and heard nothing; relaxed and realised that there was something which they had been hearing all the time. It was low and vast, as if the ocean sighed, weary of its own ceaseless flux. It was like a multitude of moans blended – as if one were hearing the muted despair of some circle of souls among the damned. It was the lazy, deep, long-drawn breathing of the whales.

And it was all about them. The launch floated amid a vast slumbering archipelago of living creatures, invisible beneath the fog which was their chilly blanket. For those who go down to the sea in ships, Appleby reflected, the story of Jonah may be an impossibility plausible enough. Islanded in the fog among these vast respirations, one could almost imagine oneself in the belly of the monster now.

“They must be dashed near.” Glover, with an old campaigner’s caution, spoke in a low whisper. “What about turning about and making off? Awkward if one took a lunge at us. Or suppose they like rubbing noses and we got in between.”

Appleby laughed softly. “If only there were a tree.”

“Eh? How the devil could there be a tree?” Glover quite failed to catch the allusion.