Читать книгу Three Go Back - J. Leslie Mitchell - Страница 4

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Now, what happened to Clair Stranlay in that dawn-wrecking of the Magellan’s Cloud was this:

The preliminary shock, when the nose of the airship drove into the mountain which had mysteriously arisen out of the spaces of the Atlantic, did not awaken her. She stirred uneasily, though still asleep, during the period that the Magellan hung, death-quivering, against her murderer. Then, abruptly, sight, hearing and a variety of other sensations were vouchsafed to her fortissimo, crescendo.

She heard the first explosion which shattered the hull of the airship, and leaped up in bed to see through the cabin window, phantasmagoric against a gray morning sky, the flare and belch of the flames. She sat stunned, uncomprehending, the while the floor of her cabin tilted and tilted and the metal-work creaked and warped. Then the cabin door, a groaning, flare-illumined panel, was torn open, a figure shot in, crossed to Clair’s bed and caught her with rough hands. It was Sinclair.

“Come on, hurry up! The ship’s a flaming wreck....”

He swept a pile into his arms from the locker. Clair jumped from bed, plucked something—she could not see what it was—from the floor, and groped across the cabin after Sinclair. He tugged at the door. It had jammed.

Now, out of the corridor, above the babel of sounds, one sound sharp-edged and clear came to them: a moan like that of trapped cattle. For a moment it rang in Clair’s ears in all its horror, and then—the floor of the cabin vanished from beneath the feet of Sinclair and herself.

Below, the Atlantic.

And Clair thought, “Oh God,” and fell and fell, with a flaming comet in wavering pursuit. Till something that seemed like a red-hot dagger was thrust to the hilt into her body.

Breakers, and breakers again—the cry of them and the splash of them, and their salt taste stale in her mouth. In and in, and out with a slobbering surge. Water in pounding hill-slopes, green and white-crested. Pounding tons of water whelming over into those breakers.... Clair Stranlay cried out and awoke.

“Better? I thought you’d gone.... My God, look at the Magellan!”

Her body seemed wrapped in a sheet of fire that was a sheet of ice. She could not open her eyes. She tried again. They seemed fast-gummed. Then, abruptly, they opened. She moaned at the prick of the salt-grime.

She and Keith Sinclair were lying in a wide sweep of mountain-surrounded bay, on a beach of pebbles. Beyond and below them the sea was thundering. And out in the bay, the Magellan’s Cloud was flaming against a dark-gray, rainy sky momentarily growing lighter, as if the Magellan were serving as tinder to its conflagration.

This was not what Clair saw immediately. It was what she realized as she looked around her. Sinclair lay at right angles to her.

Clair stared at him, sought for her voice, found it after an interval, manipulated it with stiff and very painful lips.

“How did we get here?”

“Swam.” The American swayed to his knees. His high-cheek-boned face looked as though the blood had been drained from it through a pipette. “We hit the water before the Magellan did, and sank together. Came up clear of the wreck and I pulled you ashore.... Oh, damn!”

He felt very sick indeed. There was an inshore-blowing wind, bitterly cold. With a shock Clair discovered she was dressed in her pajamas only. Through those garments the rain-laden wind drove piercingly. It was laden now with other things than rain—adrift with red-glowing fragments of fluff, portions of the Magellan’s fabric. The Magellan?

In that moment the airship blew up. A second later Clair saw its great girders, like the skeleton of a great sow, then they vanished.

The eastward sky was blinded to darkness in the flash, Clair and Sinclair momentarily stunned with the noise of the explosion. Then a great wave poured shoreward out of the stirred water of the bay, leaped up the beach, snarled, spat, soaked and splashed them anew, tore at them, retreated. Gasping, Clair saw Sinclair’s hand extended toward her. She caught it.

Unspeaking, now crawling, now gaining their feet and proceeding at a shambling run, they attained the upper beach. Fifty yards away, across the shingle, there towered in the dimness of the morning great cliffs of black basalt. Against their black wall Sinclair thought he discerned a fault and overhang. He pointed toward it and they stumbled together across sharp stones that lacerated their feet. Anything to get out of the wind and spray. Clair almost fell inside the crack in the rock-face. Sinclair crumpled to the ground beside her. Clair heard some one sobbing and realized it was herself.

“What’s wrong?”

She looked up at him, her teeth chattering, thinking, “I suppose we’ll both be dead in a minute.” She said, “I’m all right.”

Prone, he began to laugh crackedly at that. Clair stuffed her fingers in her ears and looked out to sea.

It was deserted. The Magellan’s Cloud had disappeared without leaving other trace than themselves. Green, tremendous, with tresses upraised and flying through the malachite comb of the wind, the Atlantic surged over the spot where the wreck had flamed. An urgent fear came upon Clair. She shook the American’s shoulder.

“Where are the others?”

“Dead.”

He had stopped laughing. He lay face downward, unmoving. Clair shook him again.

“You mustn’t! You must keep awake and....”

But she knew it was useless. Her own head nodded in exhaustion. She laid her face in the curve of her arm and presently was as silent as he was.

The morning wind died away and with its passing the sky began to clear. Lying exhausted and asleep in their inadequate shelter under the lee of the cliffs the two survivors of the airship’s wreck stirred at the coming of the sunlight. Sinclair awoke, sat up, looked around, remembered.

He was in pajamas. The suit clung to his skin in damp and shuddersome patches. He stood up. His feet were cut and bruised. The salt bit into them as he moved. Alternate waves of warmth and coldness flowed up and down his body.

Setting his teeth against giving way to the pull of the urgent pain in his feet, he began to knead and pound his throat and chest and abdomen and thighs, then took to massaging them, plucking out and releasing muscles like a violin-maker testing the strings of a bow. Suddenly something screamed at him, menacingly.

He glanced up, startled. It was a solitary gull. He thought, “And a peculiar one, too.” It swooped and hovered, its bright eyes on the occupants of the shelter. Man and bird looked at each other unfriendily. Then the gull, with a slow beating of wings, flapped out of sight. Sinclair resumed operations on his now tingling body.

Behind him, Clair Stranlay began to moan.

Her eyes opened at last. She sat up, remembering at once.

“Any of the others turned up?”

He shook his head. “The sunlight woke me,” he told her.

“I’m horribly thirsty.”

“So am I. I’ll go and look for water in a minute.”

“Where do you think we are?”

“Somewhere in the Bay of Biscay. Coast of Portugal, perhaps.”

“People inland must have seen the wreck of the Magellan. They’re bound to come down to the shore, aren’t they?”

“Bound to, I should think. Feel certain enough to rise now?”

She stood up with his arm supporting her. Instantly, in the full sunlight, she began to shiver. He nodded.

“Warm up with exercises. Know how? Right. I’ll go and look for water and see if any people are coming down the cliffs.”

He went, limping blood-heeled. Clair stared after him till his black poll vanished round a projection of rock, and then emerged slowly from her sleeping-suit.

Her feet, like Sinclair’s, she discovered bloody, though not so badly cut. Except its craving for water, her body in the next few strenuous minutes acquired comfort and familiarity again. The pajamas steamed in the sunlight; ceased to steam. In ten minutes they were dry.

“There’s water to the left—a cascade over the rocks. Can you walk?”

She essayed the adventure gingerly. “Easily.”

Out in the full sunlight she stopped to look round the bay. Desolate. The navigator, the commander, Miss Kemp—a fit of shuddering came on again. She covered her face with her hands.

But the horror lingered for a moment only, and then was gone. She turned to the American, a pace behind her, waiting for her, a grotesque figure in his shrunken pajamas, his blue-black hair untidily matted. He stood arms akimbo, scowling at the sea. A gull—there seemed but one gull in the bay—swooped over their heads.

She became aware that the silence around them was illusory. It was a thing girdled by unending sound, as the earth is girdled with ether. The tide was no longer in full flow, but the serene thunder of the breakers was unceasing.

The pebbles underfoot were slimily warm. From the sea a breath of fog was rising, like thin cigarette smoke. Not a ship or a boat was in sight, nothing upon or above the spaces of the Atlantic but a solitary cirrus low down in the northeastern sky.

They turned a corner in the winding wall of cliff and were in sight of the waterfall. In distance it seemed to hang bright, lucent, unmoving, a silver pillar in a dark pagan temple. Clair loved it for this beauty. She bent and scooped from it a double handful of water.

It was icily cold. Some drops splashed through her jacket. They stung like leaden pellets. She shivered and, squatting, rinsed her mouth and laved her face. Sinclair looked down at her; knelt down beside her. They scoured their faces in solemn unison. Standing up, Sinclair looked round about him, involuntarily, for a towel. Clair wiped her face with the sleeve of her pajamas. Sinclair followed suit. Wiping, he suddenly stayed operations.

“Here’s some one at last.”

He pointed toward the leftward tip of the bay. A black-clad figure was descending the inky, sun-laced escarpment, apparently less steep at that spot than elsewhere. It was descending in haste. It had descended. It stood hesitant, glancing upward, not toward them. Clair put her fingers to her mouth and startled the bay, Sinclair and the stranger with a piercing, moaning whistle which the rocks caught and echoed.

“Stop that!” said Sinclair angrily.

He was to see often enough in succeeding days that look of innocent, amused surprise on the lovely face turned toward him. The black-garmented figure had started violently, seen them, stood doubtful a moment, but now, with gesticulating arm, was coming toward them.

“I can’t speak a word of Portuguese,” said Clair. “Can you?”

There was a pause. Then: “It won’t be necessary. I don’t suppose he knows Portuguese himself.”

“No?” Puzzled, Clair examined the nearing stranger. He was finding the going punishing. He stumbled. His features changed from a blur to discernible outlines. “Who is he?”

“A fellow-passenger on the Magellan. Sir John Mullaghan.”

“I was washed ashore at the far peak of the bay when the Magellan’s Cloud struck the water. I imagined I was the only survivor.”

The gray-haired man with the gentle sensitive face was addressing Clair. She held out her hand to him.

“I’m Clair Stranlay. Doctor Sinclair rescued me.” She glanced from one to the other, thinking, “Don’t bite.”

Sir John Mullaghan began to unbutton his coat. Clair said, wide-eyed. “What’s wrong?”

“You must wear my coat, Miss Stranlay.”

“No, thanks. I’m quite comfy. How ever do you come to be wearing your clothes?”

“I found it too cold to go to bed, and was sitting up studying some documents when the wreck occurred.” His small neat form was clad in the shrunken caricature of a dress suit. Collar and tie were missing; the breast of the shirt was very limp and muddied. Sinclair glanced sidewise at his feet and scowled again. Shod in thin pumps that were at least some slight protection....

Clair said, “Let’s sit down. What did you see at the top of the cliff?”

“A lion. One of the largest brutes I have ever seen. It stalked me close to the cliff-head.”

Clair glanced at Sinclair, glanced back at Sir John, looked up at the cliffs. “A lion? But I thought we were in Portugal?”

“I don’t know where we are. But this is not the coast of Portugal. At the top of the cliff there is a further terrace-wall to be climbed. It is fringed with bushes and trees. I expected to get some view of the country there and went up about half an hour ago.”

“What happened?”

“I pushed through the fringe of bushes until I came to a fairly open space. I was certain that I would see some village near at hand, or at least houses and some marks of cultivation.” He paused. “There are no houses and the country is quite wild. It is natural open park-land, dotted with clumps of trees, stretching as far away as one can see. And on the horizon, five or six miles distant from here, are two volcanoes.”

“Volcanoes?” The American was startled into speech. “You must have been mistaken.”

“I have quite good eyesight.”

The American bit his lip. Clair said, “Where do you think we are, then?”

“Somewhere on the coast of Africa.”

“But it’s much too cold. And I never heard of volcanoes on the coast of Africa.”

“There are no volcanoes on the coast of Africa. Most likely the lion was some beast escaped from a menagerie.”

This was Sinclair. Sir John Mullaghan flushed. Clair, wondering bemusedly if there was ever an armaments manufacturer who looked less the part, wondered also if the beast of which he spoke had had any existence outside the reaches of a disaster-strained imagination. She looked again at the cliff-top, shining in the cool sunlight. “We’ll have to go up there and look for food, anyhow. I’m horribly hungry.”

All three of them were. It was nearing noon. They licked hungry lips. Sinclair, peering up at the cliffs in the breaker-hung silence, thought, “Hungry? As hell. But if this patriot warrior didn’t dream, there’s a lion up there. Still—without food we’ll never last another night.”

Clair thought, “Now if this were a good novel of wrecked mariners we’d toss up for it to see which was to eat t’other.” And she began to giggle, being very hungry and somewhat dizzy.

“Miss Stranlay!”

“It’s all right. I was thinking of a funny story.”

“Oh!”

“Yes.” She stood up, suddenly decided. “Wrecked people sometimes eat each other if they can’t get other food—at least, they always do in my profession. Let’s climb the cliff and see if the lion’s gone.”

“Come on, then,” said Sinclair shortly, striding over the shingle. They followed him, Sir John Mullaghan dubiously, Clair satisfiedly, and once surreptitiously trying to rub some feeling into her oddly-numbed stomach. Sinclair was making for the point ascended and descended by the armaments manufacturer. His survey of the cliffs had told him that no other spot was climbable.

They went on along the deserted beach. The tide was going out. Sinclair glanced back casually, halted in his stride, stared, abandoned the other two, strode past them.

“Wait.”

They looked after him. Ten yards away he bent over something at the wet verge of shingle. He picked it up. It glittered, wetly. He shook it vigorously. Clair called. “What is it?”

“An eider-down quilt.”

So it was. Brought nearer in Sinclair’s arms, Clair recognized it.

“It’s off my cabin-bed in the Magellan!... That was the thing I must have picked up when you came to get me.”

“Lucky that you did.”

“Why?” She regarded it without enthusiasm. “It’s very wet, isn’t it?”

“It’ll dry. And the nights are likely to be cold.”

“But—” Clair looked out to sea, looked round the deserted bay again. The possibility that this was not, after all, a few hours’ lark struck her. “We’ll be rescued before then.”

Neither of the men spoke. Sir John passed a gray hand over his gray hair. Sinclair’s comment was the usual impatient frown.... They resumed their progress cliffward, the barefoot refugees slipping on the moist pebbles, Sir John in slightly better case.

The bay’s solitary sea-gull was following them. Clair held out her hand to it. At that, as if frightened by the gesture, it turned in the air in a wide loop, and planed away steeply down toward the retreating tide. The American was speaking to Sir John.

“We’ve no shoes. Will you lead?”

The armaments manufacturer hesitated only a moment, nodded curtly and began the ascent. The silence but for his scrapings over the rock was more intense than ever.

Sinclair and Clair followed, the American in a short time beginning to swear violently under his breath because of his cut feet. Clair said, “Say something for me as well.”

He glanced at her—almost a puzzled glance—from below his dark unhappy brows. Then he went on. Clair, panting, poised to rest. She was more than a little frightened. Where were they? And what on earth was going to happen? And how long would her pajamas last?

Sinclair’s toiling back, quilt-laden, reproached her sloth. Sir John Mullaghan had almost disappeared.

From the shore the circling gull saw the three strange animals dwindle to spider-splayed shadows against the face of the cliffs, dwindle yet further to hesitant, foreshortened dots on the cliff-brow, and then vanish forever from its ken.