The Island Where Time Stands Still Page 2

  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.

  1

  The Cage

  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.

  He immediately stood up, bowed ceremoniously, and said with a lisp but in good English, ‘This person is Ho-Ping. He has the honour to be your doctor. It has been his difficult privilege to restrain your spirit from joining those of your distinguished ancestors. Informed by the menial who attends you that your excellent mind has regained its clarity, this one hastened to bring you reassurance regarding you condition. The danger of your honourable spirit leaving your admirably proportioned body is now passed; but the meagre talents of this unworthy practitioner will require the co-operation of your obviously sensible self if the numerous injuries inflicted on you by evil chance are to be quickly healed. It is deferentially prescribed that you should refrain from exerting your muscles for some time to come, and that for the present you should talk very little.’1

  Gregory thanked him, introduced himself, and, in a half-cracked, husky voice, asked the things he most urgently wanted to know.

  In reply Dr. Ping confirmed that his patient was on a Pacific island and had been rescued from its barrier reef when three parts drowned; but he had heard nothing of any recent wreck, and he was quite certain that no other survivors, or bodies, from it had been washed up.

  ‘What is the name of this island?’ Gregory inquired.

  Dr Ping hesitated a second, then he said. ‘It is not very large, and it is of no importance whatever. In fact, it is rightly considered unworthy of being named, except on large-scale nautical charts. On those it is referred to as Leper Settlement Number Six.’

  Refraining from comment on this depressing piece of information, Gregory croaked, ‘Is it one of a large group?’

  ‘Very large.’ Ho-Ping’s pleasant face broke into a placid smile. ‘The Manihikis are spread over an area greater than that of France and Germany together; but they are few in number, and so widely scattered that most of them are further from the
ir nearest neighbours than London is from the coast of France. To reach any other land from here it would be necessary to cross about one hundred and forty miles of ocean.’

  ‘In that case, as I was the only person to be washed up here, it seems certain that no one else could possibly have survived the wreck.’

  The smile left Dr. Ping’s face as though it had been wiped off with a towel. He bowed again. ‘It is to be feared that your discerning statement is unquestionably correct. And now, please, permit the observation that further talking may retard recovery.’

  Gregory replied with a slow nod, and as the doctor left him turned over with his face towards the wall. He knew the worst now. His nightmare fears were only too well founded. His beloved Erika was dead. So too were gallant old Pellinore and all the rest. He had other friends in England and scattered up and down the world, but weighed in the balance against this terrible double blow they hardly counted. He felt as if his heart had been ripped out of his body. Life could never be the same again. After prolonged and agonised thought he decided that he now had nothing worth living for, so he did not want to recover. He would rather die.

  But he did not die. His lack of the will to live slowed up his recovery, but his lean, sinewy body, deep lungs and strong heart mended him physically despite his mental wounds. For days on end he lay doing nothing, refusing to amuse himself with the puzzles and Chinese picture books that Ho-Ping brought him, and politely declining the doctor’s offers to teach him Ma-jong or play chess. Yet at length the time came when he had to face the fact that he was quite well enough to get up.

  Reluctantly, one afternoon, he allowed the doctor to lead him from his room and make him comfortable in a chair that the servant, whose name he now knew to be Chung, had placed just outside the door for him. His utter lack of interest had so far stifled any desire to find out about his surroundings; so he knew only from casual glances through his window that the building in which he lived must be high up on the side of a valley, as nothing could be seen from it except a steep, barren cliff topped with sun-scorched undergrowth, about half a mile away.

  Now he could see the whole panorama, and he was considerably surprised by it. Below him lay a land-locked harbour partly fringed with palms, but evidently deep enough to take an ocean-going tramp, as on one side of it there was a hundred-yard-long wharf, with cranes for unloading and a row of warehouses. Tied up to the wharf, there was a grey-painted vessel that looked like an obsolete destroyer from which the guns had been removed; while near-by were moored a number of Chinese junks, one of which had a dragon’s head prow and was elaborately painted and gilded. At first he could not make out how the shipping had got into the port, as from the angle at which he was looking down he could see no entrance to it, but the departure of a junk disclosed that it was through a narrow canyon between two towering cliffs, which concealed the basin from the sea.

  It occurred to Gregory at once what a perfect place it would be for a pirates’ lair; and it might well have been used for that purpose in the days when the buccaneers, having been driven from the Spanish Main, had taken to roving the South Seas.

  Turning his head he glanced at the building behind him, and saw that it was a long, one-storied, flat-roofed block, of which his own room made about one-twelfth part. It looked strictly utilitarian, being built of concrete slabs that had been whitewashed over, and it had been erected on a wide flat ledge of rock that jutted out from the cliff face. Twenty feet from where Gregory was sitting the cliff dropped sheer away, and a few yards behind the building it reared upwards with almost equal steepness; but higher up some trees had found enough earth to take root in, and as they grew outwards at an angle the foliage of the branches of the largest gave to the building some shade from the sun.

  After a moment he noticed that at each end of the terrace there was an eight-foot-high wire mesh fence, which gave the impression that the place was a prison compound; so he said to the doctor: ‘What is the idea of having your sanitorium in a cage? Don’t you allow your patients to go out?’

  The Chinaman shrugged. ‘This is not in the ordinary sense a sanitorium. It is more in the nature of an institution in which we can suitably entertain—er, immigrants.’

  ‘Really!’ Gregory raised his eyebrows. ‘Since you say the island is a small one, it seems rather surprising that you should have immigrants in sufficient numbers to need a special clearance station for them.’

  ‘Immigrants is, perhaps, hardly the right word. From time to time other vessels have been lost off our coast. This building was erected to accomodate their survivors.’

  ‘It doesn’t look as if it could hold very many.’

  ‘Because you were severely injured, alone and your clothes indicated that you were a person of quality, you were put in one of the cubicles; but the greater part of the building consists of a large dormitory-mess room with bunks for thirty, and it is most unusual for ships with crews exceeding that number to enter these waters. Happily, too, so little shipping of any kind comes into this vicinity that wrecks are very infrequent, but it is convenient to have a place like this in which to put up such castaways as are driven on to our shores.’

  ‘I still don’t see the reason for making it a prisoners’ cage,’ Gregory persisted.

  Dr. Ping made a deprecatory gesture. ‘As soon as we can, we ship those whom fate selects as its occupants to San Francisco; but the steamer that plies between here and there is at our disposal only once in every four or five months. Experience has taught us that our uninvited guests are apt to become restless should their departure be delayed for more than a few weeks, and we do not consider it desirable that they should roam the island at will. The electrified fence restrains any temptation they may feel to do so.’

  When the doctor had bowed himself away, Gregory suddenly realised that, after a lapse of weeks, his normally active brain had again begun to function. It was asking all sorts of questions, some of which had been simmering in his subconscious for days past and others resulting from his emergence on to the terrace that afternoon.

  Anyone washed up on a South Sea island would, on coming to, normally have expected to find themselves being cared for by natives in a palm-leaf hut, or, if particularly fortunate, in a white man’s missionary station. How did it come about that he was being looked after by Chinese?

  He knew of course, that on nearly every island of any size hard-working and thrifty Chinese traders had established themselves as store-keepers, but they did not run free hostels for ship-wrecked mariners, and had little in common with cultured Ho-Ping.

  And there was much more to it than that. The fact that all castaways were brought as a matter of routine to this hostel staffed by Chinese indicated that they controlled the whole island. The junks, and particularly the gorgeously decorated one, moored down in the intriguingly secret harbour could be taken as further evidence in support of such a supposition. Yet Gregory, who rather prided himself on his general knowledge, felt sure that China did not own any islands in the middle of the Pacific.

  Again, why these precautions against uninvited visitors getting to know anything about the place? He had made no comment on Dr. Pin’s statement that the wire fence was electrified, but it was that more than anything else which had galvanised his own brain out of its inertia. What was going on here that either the suave doctor, or some bigger shot who employed him, was taking such drastic precautions to hide?

  It occurred to him that as the place was a leper settlement their object might be to prevent rash and ignorant seamen going among the lepers and contracting their disease. But he knew that leprosy can be caught only through long and intimate association with the afflicted; so that did not seem a really adequate answer.

  During the days that followed he continued at odd intervals to puzzle over the matter while gazing down at the port. Often for hours at a stretch, particularly during the midday heat, it was deserted, and such activity as he did see there told him nothing. With one exception, it was limited to the occa
sional arrival or departure of some of the junks, which obviously constituted a fishing fleet and were entirely manned by Chinamen.

  The exception occurred on the third day after he had left his room, by which time he had recovered the use of his legs sufficiently to walk up and down the terrace. Down an avenue of palms that led inland from the harbour appeared a palanquin borne on the shoulders of eight trotting men. As it came closer he could see the sun shining on its brilliantly lacquered roof, and gaily embroidered silk curtains. When it was set down on the waterfront the curtains parted and three people got out. Two were small boys who appeared to be between eight and ten years of age. Both were richly dressed in traditional Chinese costumes and wore round hats with turned-up brims. The third was a woman in a plain blue blouse and black trousers, and evidently their amah.

  They were received most deferentially by an important-looking personage whom, from the fact that he directed all activities in the port, Gregory rightly assumed to be the Harbour-Master. He had been accompanied from the small building which was evidently his office by two men dressed in clothes of somewhat better quality than those worn by the ordinary coolies who manned the junks, and they also bowed deeply to the children.

  The bearers of the palanquin picked it up and set off at a trot, leaving the little group about the two boys the only people to be seen in the vicinity. With the Harbour-Master leading, and the amah bringing up the rear, they walked along the deserted wharf towards the beautiful dragon-prowed junk, which was moored at its far end.

  The hillside from which Gregory was watching was on the opposite side of the harbour and he was over a quarter of a mile away; but in the clear atmosphere he felt certain that his eyes could not have deceived him about what followed, although it happened very swiftly.