Island Gold/Chapter 11
CHAPTER XI
A VOICE IN THE FOREST
I saw him only for the fraction of a second, a young man, tall and slim and very blond, in a shirt open at the neck and riding-breeches, his head bared to the storm. The water streamed off his face and clothing; but he stood perfectly still in an attitude of reverence. In that wild setting of tempest-swept rocks the apparition seemed like some spectre of the Brocken. Or one might have thought that the storm had summoned forth the Unknown himself from his grave.
The vision fairly staggered me; for my mind was imbued with the idea that the island was uninhabited. But my brain, keyed up by the events of the day, did not dwell for an instant on any supernatural explanation of the apparition. I promptly asked myself whether, after all, there were people living on the island or whether the man I had seen had, like ourselves, landed from some passing ship.
But, then, without warning, there came an ear-shattering, metallic crash, as though a big shell had exploded beside us, the earth shook and a perfect tornado of wind and water descended upon the clearing, clawing and tearing at the hut until it seemed as though the beams of the flimsy structure to which we desperately clung would be wrenched from our grasp. The inky-black sky appeared to split across in a jagged band of light which again showed up the clearing as bright as day. But now the tall wooden cross stood aloft in solitary majesty once more. The figure at the graveside had vanished and the clearing was entirely deserted. I asked myself whether the apparition had not, after all, been the figment of my imagination. Garth had seemingly remarked nothing, so I resolved to say nothing about it unless he should ask me.
But now, amid the grumbling and rumbling of the thunder, receding into the distance, the storm was passing. The air reeked with the stench of sulphur, and I guessed that the appalling crash we had heard had marked the fall of a thunderbolt. Slowly the light was coming back, and, though the rain yet descended in torrents, the downpour was much less heavy.
We were in a sorry plight, the pair of us. Our thin garments clung to us like wet swimming-suits and our teeth chattered in our heads.
“We appear to have timed things very badly,” grumbled Garth, wringing the water out of a corner of his tussore jacket. “We had plenty of warning of this storm. I should have thought we might have managed to get back to the camp in time to escape it...”
I wiped the water out of my eyes and grinned.
“Oh,” I said lightly, “a ducking won't hurt us! Look, the rain's stopping already...”
“I'm not complaining about getting wet,” observed Garth, with an air of dignity which went ill with his bedraggled appearance—he was squatting on his hunkers squeezing out his hat—“I can, I believe, put up with the hardships of an expedition like this as well as any man. But I do think the—er—staff work this afternoon leaves something to be desired. To be wet to the skin an hour's tramp from camp may amuse you, Major Okewood, but the prospect of a heavy chill does not strike me as being funny in the least!”
In high dudgeon he placed upon his head the shapeless mass of soggy felt which had once been a hat.
“I vote we make a move for the camp,” he proposed. “That is, if anything is left of it. I should not be in the least surprised to find the cave under water, our stores ruined, and Carstairs drowned—or struck by lightning, as like as not. I don't wish to seem inquisitive, Major Okewood, but might I enquire what progress this afternoon's unfortunate jaunt has brought to your investigations?”
I was rather nettled by the line he was taking and the way he manhandled my name irritated me.
“You needn't worry,” I retorted curtly. “I'm perfectly satisfied so far!”
“Indeed,” replied the baronet—he was struggling to free himself from a giant creeper which had firmly fixed itself about his sodden clothes. “I'm sorry I cannot share your optimism. But then I'm wholly in the dark—maybe, it's just as well—about this infernal wild-goose chase. Damn it,” he cried suddenly, “can't you lend me a hand to get this blasted root off my legs?”
I hastened to release him, fuming and fretful.
“We shall be home in no time,” I said soothingly to humour him, for he was like a spoilt child, “and you'll see what marvels Carstairs has accomplished in the way of making us comfortable. And you needn't worry about the cave. It's splendidly sheltered. Not a drop of water will get in!”
Night was falling by the time we emerged from the steamy atmosphere of the sopping woods and made for the faint glow of light which shone from our cave. Carstairs met us at the entrance. He had fully justified my prophecy to Garth.
Our beds were made up, one on either side of the cave, and our washing and shaving kits laid out on toilet tables improvised out of boxes neatly covered with clean white paper.
Hot water smoked in our wash-basins and a dry change of clothing was laid out on the beds. In the centre of the cave, on packing cases covered by a white damask cloth, the table was set for dinner. A hurricane lamp, placed in the centre, was flanked by enamel cups from the picnic-basket filled with bright flowers, and on the ground a bottle of Garth's excellent champagne was cooling in a bucket of spring-water.
We lost no time in changing, and within a quarter of an hour were sitting down to what was, in the circumstances, an extraordinarily well-cooked meal. Garth's ill-temper melted perceptibly, and it was with the utmost cordiality that he raised his glass and pledged the success of the expedition. The ingenuity of the incomparable Carstairs had so completely reproduced the atmosphere of civilization that it was difficult to believe that we three were dining on a lonely islet in the middle of the Pacific.
After dinner, Garth yawned expansively and opined that he would turn in. The unwonted exercise of the afternoon, he declared, had fagged him out. But I had no mind for bed. My brain, stimulated by the unaccustomed environment, was active. The apparition at the graveside during the storm had profoundly disquieted me and I wanted to think. So I strolled outside for a solitary pipe beneath the stars.
On the shore I found Carstairs, pipe in mouth, contemplating the sea. I love the old-time Regular, such as was Carstairs, with his twelve years' service in the sappers, his loyalty, his quiet efficiency, his eminent common sense. And as between two professional soldiers a bond of silent sympathy had established itself between Carstairs and me. We had not even discussed the incident of the drink I had given him that night on board the yacht. Having ascertained that Carstairs was practically a total abstainer, I gave Mackay a hint to forget all about his nocturnal diagnosis. I had my own theory about that drink and perhaps Carstairs had his;—anyway, we did not discuss it.
“Grand night, sir!” said Carstairs, taking his pipe out of his mouth as I approached over the sand.
“Wonderful!” I commented. “Good spot this, Carstairs!”
The man did not reply. He was sucking on his pipe which did not seem to be drawing well.
“It's an uncanny kind o' place, as you might say, sir!” he remarked presently.
“Well,” I observed, “it's a bit lonesome, I suppose. But all desert islands are that!”
“Lonesome?” retorted the man. “I wouldn't have nothing to say agin it if it were lonesome. I'm partial to the moors and such-like places meself. I never was a one for the towns, sir. But I don't like all these tall rocks and all these quiet trees at the back of one. They give me the fair 'ump!”
I laughed.
“You want the desert, Carstairs,” I said. “Nothing but sand, and then some. No trees looking at you there!”
“It ain't altogether the trees and the cliffs!”
The man paused and scratched his head with the stem of his pipe.
“There's something sort of creepy about this place, sir!”
“How do you mean?”
“Well,” he said slowly, “it's a funny thing, but all the blessed evening I've had a kind o' feeling as I was being watched. You know how it was in the war, sir—w'en you was workin' out in No Man's Land on a pitch-black night, scared to death you was walkin' into Fritz's line, tellin' yerself all through, 'If you can't see him, he can't see you,' but feelin'—well, as though there was nothin' but eyes starin' at you all round!”
He shook himself.
“It fair gives me the creeps!” he finished.
Now Carstairs was a plain honest-to-God Englishman from the New Forest, the very incarnation of the soldier from the English shires whose sheer lack of imagination and consequent inability to accept defeat in any circumstances clear broke the German spirit in the war. There was no associating that good-humoured face, that big mouth and button nose, with the idle fears of an overheated imagination. There are some people—I am one—who, even though they see nothing, have the faculty of detecting the presence of human beings in their vicinity. I recalled the eerie sensation I myself had had on landing, but, of course, above all I thought of that bowed figure which the lightning had shown me standing by the grave in the clearing.
I was filled with the deepest forebodings. If there were people on the island, surely they must have remarked the arrival of the Naomi. Would they not have announced themselves to us? What object could they have, supposing Carstairs were not mistaken, in slinking round the camp?
Well, it was no part of my plans as yet to communicate my fears to Carstairs. So I rallied him gently. But Carstairs stuck to his guns.
“It come over me so strong w'en you and the Guv'nor was away this evening,” Carstairs said, “that no less than four times I left my cook-pots to have a look round...”
“Well, and did you see anybody?”
“Not a blessed soul!”
“Did you hear anything?”
“No, sir!”
Yet the man was not to be shaken.
“W'en I was serving dinner jes' now,” he persisted, “I was as sure as sure there was a chap watching me from just about there”—he turned and indicated the black shape of a palm on the fringe of the shore—“not doin' anything but jes' settin' there, spyin'!”
The man knocked out his pipe.
“I'm to call you gentlemen at four, sir. If you don't mind, I think I'll get down to it!”
This little bit of trench slang (which, being interpreted, means to retire for the night), uttered in our romantic surroundings, amused me not a little.
“Good night, Carstairs!”
“Good night, sir!”
He plodded up the beach, his feet making no sound on the soft sand, a white ghostly figure against the dark foliage. Then he was swallowed up in the mystery and silence of the night.
There was no moon, but in compensation such a prodigious display of stars as only the tropics can show, blazing and twinkling in their myriads till one could almost believe the heavens were in motion. On the open shore there was yet a kind of half-light, but beyond, where the woods began, the blackness of the night was Stygian.
Carstairs was right. This island was an eerie place. The absolute stillness of the night, marred only by the mournful rhythm of the waves, seemed to accentuate that air of expectancy about it which I had already remarked. I found myself thinking of the island as of a stage set for the performance of some play.
Here, perhaps, I reflected, the Unknown, destined for that nameless grave I had come to seek, had landed, carried ashore, maybe, by his native crew. I tried to picture him, with death in his face, painfully scrawling the message which had so strangely come into my hands. What manner of man was this Unknown? A German officer, a naval officer probably (as the reference to Kiel seemed to indicate). And for whom did he write? For Germans, for a German? Yet there were no Germans, as far as I knew, in the gang that had taken two men's lives to get the message now reposing in my pocket. Black Pablo, Neque, El Cojo ... these were Spanish names.
El Cojo? “He who goes with a limp.” Der Stelze, Clubfoot, had been the nickname of that other cripple, the man of might in that Imperial Germany which sank to destruction in the fire and smoke of the Hindenburg Line, whose ways lay in dark places, whom everybody feared, but whom so few had ever seen.... If he could rise from his grave and seek me out on the island, then, indeed, might my imagination, like poor old Carstairs', people these darkling woods with hidden spies!
Sunk in my thoughts I had wandered on heedlessly, going ever deeper into the tangle of the forest. But now the undergrowth, growing thicker, barred my further progress, and I came to an abrupt halt with the thick tendril of some creeping plant wound about my body. On it blossomed a gaudy flower with a heavy musky scent. The touch of the creeper on my bare arm made me shrink.
It was as dark as pitch in that jungle-like forest. A phrase I had read somewhere about “opaque blackness” flashed into my mind. I realized I stood an extremely good chance of being lost and cursed myself for a dreamy fool. Fortunately, I had the orientation of our camp—I had taken it that afternoon on the beach—and I knew that, by striking west, I should roughly hit Horseshoe Harbour where we had put ashore.
I took out my compass and, opening the lid, bent over the luminous needle. I stood absolutely still to allow the pointer to swing to rest. Then, from the black depths of the forest all about me, a gentle droning fell upon my ear.
I listened. No mistake was possible. It was undoubtedly a human voice. And it was softly humming, as a man might hum, quietly to himself, to pass away the time. I listened again. The voice rose and fell, with now and then a break, but always on a muted note. Suddenly, I caught the melody, a melancholy, haunting refrain with a phrase, as in a folk-song, that came again and again. And I felt the perspiration break out on my brow, my heart grow cold within me, as I recognized the air...
“Se murio, y sobre su cara
Un panuelito le heche ...”
It was the song of Black Pablo, the singer in the lane.