Алистер Маклин - South by Java Head

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 Plenderleith’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 incomprehending, 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 rain-cloud, 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!”