Maddon's Rock (28 page)

Oh, plees, you will take me wiz you?”

“Of course,” I said.

And that hard, lined face creased into a quick smile. His Adam’s apple jerked up and down as he swallowed.

“But why are you here?” I asked.

“Why?” He frowned and then his brow cleared. “Ah, yes—why? I am the Pole, you know. At Murmansk they say this ship is to go to England. I wish to join General Anders’ Army. So—I go on this ship.”

“You mean you stowed away?” I asked.

“Plees?”

“Never mind,” I said.

“He must have been on this ship after every one but Halsey and his gang had abandoned it,” Jenny said.

“Yes,” I agreed. “We not only take back some silver as evidence, but an actual witness.”

The Pole was speaking again. “Plees,” he said. He was pointing to the
Eilean Mor
. “Plees—your ship. There is a big storm to come. It will be bad here. It is from the west and the water is all over the island. It will soon be dark and you must have many anchors, no?”

“Does the wind ever come from the east?” I asked.

He frowned, concentrating on his words. “No—only once. Then it was terrible. The bottom, she nearly break into this ship. The cabins all water. The waves come right up.” And then he pointed to the masts.

He was exaggerating, of course. But if the wind was easterly, it was obvious that the seas would pile in over the protecting reefs and this sheltered beach would become
a raging inferno of water. Thank God the prevailing wind was westerly. “Come on, then.” I said. “Let’s see that the
Eilean Mor
is securely anchored.”

“We go, yes?” Zelinski said. “You must not sleep on your little boat. You must come here, plees. It will be very bad.”

The
Eilean Mor
was lying bows-on to the beach, facing up into the wind that came roaring over the Rock. We found two small boats’ anchors in the
Trikkala’s
stores and with these and stout hawsers we moored the
Eilean Mor
securely—two anchors for’ard and two aft, with the long hawsers stretching seaword from the stern to hold her off the beach if the wind should change. Then we transferred to the
Trikkala
and hauled our dinghy up after us.

Zelinski insisted on cooking the meal. He had lost all his shyness. Words poured from him in an excited jumble as he hurried to and fro preparing our beds, getting us hot water, searching out the medical chest to see to our cuts. Nothing was too much trouble in his crazy delight at human companionship.

He was an excellent cook and the ship’s stores had been preserved by the cold. He was three hours preparing the meal. But when he served it I can’t remember a meal I enjoyed so much. When it was all on the table, he hurried out and returned with the tortoise-shell cat. “Excuse, plees,” he said. “I introduce. This is my little friend. I do not know his name. But I call him Jon.” He laughed nervously. “That is so that I shall not forget my own name.” He poured a saucer of tinned milk for the cat and then sat down with us.

By the time the meal was over the gale was upon us. We went up on deck. It was pitch dark. The wind howled through the superstructure throwing a curtain of spray across our faces. The sound of the surf thundering across the reefs was louder now. And yet through it came a sound like distant regular gun-fire. It was like the sound of a giant battering ram, a dreadful sound that seemed to echo through the frame of the ship. It was the waves thundering against the cliffs on the other side of
the island. “It will get more bad—much more bad,” Zelinski said.

We felt our way aft hoping to get a glimpse of the
Eilean Mor
. But when we stood by the rusty three-inch at the stem all we could see was the vague jostling white of broken waves.

“Do you think shell be all right?” Jenny asked me.

“I don’t know,” I said. “But there’s nothing we can do about it now. We’ve got four anchors out. She ought to hold. Thank God we don’t have to sleep on her though.”

“But oughtn’t we to take watches?” she suggested in a small voice.

“What could we do if she did drag her anchors?” I said. “Anyway, we can’t even see her.”

I had hold of her arm and I sensed her heaviness of heart. “No—you’re right. But it doesn’t seem right for us to sleep while she fights it out all alone.”

“I know, dear,” I said. “But we’ll just have to wait till morning. We’ll see what it’s like when it’s light.”

Before going to bed that night I searched for and found the sliding plate to which Rankin had referred. It was a neat affair operated from what had been Hendrik’s cabin—a large plate running in grooves fitted to the steel ribs of the ship. It ran down inside the for’ard part of Number Two hold. It had been held up by a chain fitted to a catch under Hendrik’s bunk. When this catch was released it had slid down with its own weight and had fairly effectually sealed the hole torn in the weak plate by the explosion. It had later been welded.

The next morning Bert and I were up early. At seven o’clock it was just beginning to get light. Even under the shelter of the island the wind was so strong we had to hold on to the rails as we struggled aft. It was near the top of the tide and the
Trikkala
was grinding her keel softly on the shingle beach. A perpetual curtain of spray covered the ship. Water poured down the smooth black flanks of the island. The air was full of wisps of scud driven like flocks of clumsy white birds before the wind. Aft, the turmoil was frightful. No sign of reefs now.
All around to the grey edge of visibility was a racing, roaring, cataracting welter of foam. The sea was a giant mill-race, all white—not white, yellow rather, and cold and grey and wicked-looking. And just aft of the
Trikkala
the little white-painted ship that had brought us to this dreadful place flung herself about like a mad thing in the broken water.

“Still there,” Bert yelled in my ear. “But she don’t like it. She looks like a ’orse tossin’ ’er mane and pawin’ the gra’nd wiv terror.”

No, she didn’t like it. But one thing was in her favour. The little beach was sheltered from the full force of the wind, and what wind there was just off the beach drove the water out towards the reefs. That, I realised, was why the
Trikkala
had not been broken up. The
Eilean Mor
was tossing about violently enough, but the waves weren’t smashing at her and so long as the anchor held she would weather it.

I looked back along the rusty deck of the
Trikkala
. Jenny was fighting her way towards us. She didn’t say anything as she joined us. She stood for a moment against the rail looking anxiously down at the
Eilean Mor
straining at her moorings. Then she turned quickly away.

The gale continued all that day. The sound of it was with us throughout the ship. It tore at our nerves, so that we became irritable. Only Zelinski kept cheerful. He talked incessantly in his limited English—of his farm in Poland before the war, of cavalry charges against the Germans in 1939—he had been a cavalry officer—of the life in Russian labour camps. It was as though words had been dammed up inside him so long that they just had to come out. And all the time our one hope of getting away from Maddon’s Rock lay fighting at her anchorage at the mercy of the elements.

I spent a lot of time that day rummaging through Captain Halsey’s cabin. I felt that it must contain something of his past. But I could find nothing. I searched through his beautifully bound copy of Shakespeare. The pages were well thumbed but there were no letters,
no notes even. I went through all his books, but he was apparently a man who was not in the habit of using old letters as page markers. His technical books on seamanship were copiously annotated in his neat, rather angular writing. But they were just notes—there was nothing, absolutely nothing of his past.

He had several privately bound volumes of the
Theatregoer
—there were three in all covering the years 1919, 1920 and 1921. Being interested in the stage I finally gave up my abortive search and took these three volumes into the warmth of the galley to look through them. And there I made a discovery—it was in the volume for 1921, the picture of a young actor named Leo Foulds. There was something about that up-thrust chin and wide-flung arm that worried me. I knew the actor and yet I could not remember the name Leo Foulds. And I certainly had not been going to plays in 1921. I showed it to Jenny and she had the same feeling that she had seen Foulds, though she did not remember the name.

And then with sudden excitement I showed it to Bert. And he, too, felt he knew the actor. And Bert had never seen a play in his life. I took a pencil and quickly sketched in a little pointed beard and a peaked cap. And there it was—Captain Halsey declaiming Shakespeare on the bridge of the
Trikkala.
Halsey in that cabin on the salvage tug. There was no doubt about it. I tore the page out and put it in my pocket book.

At dusk Bert and I went up to have another look at the
Eilean Mor
. Jenny didn’t come. She just couldn’t face the sight of it when she could do nothing to help. As soon as we came out on deck we knew something had changed. For a moment I couldn’t get what it was. It seemed quieter. Yet the roar of the breakers was as loud as ever and the terrible, steady booming from the other side of the island continued. Then I realised what it was. The wind—it had died away completely.

“Queer, ain’t it?” Bert said. “Not a bref.”

“Yes,” I said. “It is queer.” The sky had a strange, unholy light in it, that foggy yellow light that goes with
snow. I didn’t like the look of it. “It’s the sort of thing that happens when you’re at the very centre of a storm,” I said to Bert. “There’s a lull—blue sky sometimes—and then the wind starts blowing again from the opposite quarter.”

“The Polski said the wind ’ad only bin easterly once the ’ole time ’e’d bin ’ere,” he reminded me.

“It only needs to happen once,” I said.

We went below then. I said nothing to Jenny about it. But that night, as I lay in my bunk, I found myself listening for that change of wind.

At what time it actually started to blow again I don’t know. It was just after four-thirty that I woke. I rolled over in my bunk and wondered sleepily what had woken me. The roar of the seas out on the reefs was as loud as ever. Nothing seemed changed. Then I was suddenly wide awake. The bunk, the whole room seemed to be moving. The very framework of the ship quivered. There was a deep grating sound from deep down in the bowels of her. I lit the lamp. A little trickle of water was running under the door. The ship quivered again as though it had been given a terrific blow, it lifted slightly and then settled back with that horrible grinding sound.

I knew what had happened then. I got out of my bunk, put on sea boots and oilskins and went up on deck. Water was pouring down the open companionway. This companionway faced aft and the wind roared straight in as though into the mouth of a vacuum. I fought my way to the top of the ladder. It was pitch dark. But foam washed the decks with a pale luminous light. I could sense rather than see or hear the waves crashing against
Trikkala’s
stern. They must be piling in at a great height to lift the ship like that. I thought of the
Eilean Mor
lying out there on the break of them and my heart sank. The noise of the wind and sea combined was terrifying. But there was nothing I could do. That was the hell of it. There was nothing any of us could do.

I shut the door at the top of the companion ladder and went along to the galley. There I made myself
some tea. And it was there that Jenny found me half an hour later. Her eyes looked wild and desperate. I put my arm round her and we stood gazing into the red face of the stove. “I suppose there is nothing we can do?” she said at length.

“Nothing,” I told her.

Bert came in then. Mac and the Pole joined us before dawn. We sat there, drinking tea and staring hopelessly into the fire. Quite frankly, I didn’t think the boat had a chance. High tide was just about first light, between six and seven. Yet already the
Trikkala
was being lifted bodily up at each wave and flung down again on to the bed of the beach. If those waves could lift a 5,000 ton freighter like that, what would they do to the little
Eilean Mor
, built of wood and displacing no more than 25 tons.

Shortly after six we fought our way up on to the deck. A grey, pallid light was filtering through the storm. The sight that met our eyes was one of ghastly chaos. At regular intervals great waves would pile up out of the struggling dawn, pile up till they seemed to grin down at the
Trikkala
, then their tops would curl and they would fling themselves with a demoniac roar at the stern and break into a cascade of foam that rolled, boiling, along the deck, swirling round us till we were knee-deep in the hissing, tugging water.

There was no question of going aft to look at the
Eilean Mor
. We climbed up on to the bridge which shook like a bamboo hut in an earthquake each time the
Trikkala
settled on to the beach. The air was full of flying foam. The wind-driven spray stung our eyes. We could see nothing in that tormented half light.

Jenny had hold of my hand. “She’s gone, Jim,” she said. “She’s gone.”

I thought it likely and gripped her hand tight.

Then suddenly Bert shouted. I did not hear what he was saying. It was lost in the wind. But I followed the line of his outstretched arm and for an instant thought I saw something white rolling on the face of a towering wave. Then it was gone. A moment later I saw it again.

Then as the light strengthened we saw that it was the
Eilean Mor.
One of the long hawsers had parted. But the other three held her in their grip fore and aft. She’d ride stern first up the very face of a comber like a mountaineer scrambling over an avalanche. She’d almost make the top, buoyant as a cork, then suddenly all three hawsers would snap taut as bowstrings and the wave top would hurtle over her. She had no masts, her bowsprit was gone, so was the wheelhouse. She was stripped of all but her deck boarding.

“Jim,” Jenny screamed at me. “She’s being held down by her moorings.”