Uncharted Seas (4 page)

Next moment he stumbled into the Third Officer who was superintending the swinging out of the port boat and the party scheduled to go off in it.

Most of the boat’s complement was already aboard. In the coloured light which flickered momentarily from the falling stars of another rocket, turning white faces to a ghastly hue, De Brissac glimpsed Unity Carden sitting bolt upright in the stern, next to her father.

Synolda Ortello was between old Colonel Carden and Basil Sutherland. Her fair hair, caught in the violent wind, was whipping about in wild disorder; her blue eyes were wide and terrified. Some of her eyelash black had run where she had tried to wipe the flying spray from her chalk-white face. Vicente Vedras had attempted to force his way into the boat with her, but as he was listed for the port boat for’ard, which was taking off the Portuguese-speaking passengers, the Third Officer had refused to allow him to board.

As De Brissac came staggering into them the Venezuelan was still pleading with the Swede to be allowed to join the young widow for whom he had developed such a desperate passion.

‘Wait!’ shouted the officer. ‘I must check my crew—if there’s room I’ll take you.’

Juhani Luvia was standing in the bow of the boat. He and the young Third Officer yelled at each other, cupping their hands about their mouths like megaphones to make themselves heard above the screaming of the straining timbers and constant hiss of rushing water.

It was found that three sailors were missing from their posts. One was a Quartermaster who had been carried overboard earlier in the day; another lay dead in the fo’c’sle, killed an hour before by the snapping of a wire rope under tremendous strain which had flown back with such force that it had nearly severed his head from his body; the third was a young apprentice who had just disappeared—no one knew where.

The officer swung round on the Venezuelan. ‘All right—up you go!’

The siren blared incessantly; shouts and curses sounded faintly above the howling storm.

A lurch of the ship sent De Brissac reeling a dozen paces forward, so that he came just opposite the bow of the boat; it was above him, but only a few feet beyond the ship’s rail where he brought up. Peering down on to the deck, Luvia recognised him, and, leaning out, yelled at the top of his voice: ‘Why the hell aren’t you in your boat, man?’

‘Boat’s gone!’ De Brissac roared back. ‘I’d thought of waiting till she goes under and floating off on one of the rafts.’

‘You’re nuts!’

‘I’m not—the other boat was smashed to bits against the ship—everyone drowned. I doubt if you’ll be any luckier.’

‘We’re better off here—the list to port’ll help us drop clear—no alternative worth trying.’

‘You’re full up, aren’t you?’ De Brissac hesitated.

The tall Finn smiled, leaned further over, grabbed him and drew him up. ‘Even if we are, we’d take you—we can do with real men.
Vite, mon Capitaine
! We haven’t a chance in a hundred, but we’ll take it together.’ De Brissac scrambled on to the rail and was hauled over the gunwale by willing hands.

The Third Officer clambered into the stern at the same moment. ‘Lower away,’ he thundered in Swedish; and the sailors remaining on the ship’s deck paid out the falls.

A merciful, but all-too-short, silence ensued as they sank under the lee of the vessel, protected momentarily from the driving spray and cutting wind by its black bulk towering beside them. Entirely out of control, the
Gafelborg
had swung round a little and was wallowing beam-on to the tempest.

The sailors got out their long, heavy oars and those to starboard used them to fend off the boat from the ship’s side, which, with its portholes still brightly lit, now sloped above, seeming as if about to fall upon them. The others were holding their oars aloft awaiting the officer’s order to lower them to the tholes.

Suddenly a swell carried the boat up until it was almost level with the ship’s deck. It rocked violently, and, as without warning the sea sank again, almost turned over.

Several of the standing men stumbled; a stoker tripped over the after thwart, lost his grip on an oar he had been holding, and fell against the officer. The Swede staggered uncertainly,
clutched wildly at the empty air, and, with a piercing cry, pitched backwards overboard.

At the same second the oar came crashing down among the forward passengers of the boat. Its blade caught De Brissac on the head before he could twist aside. A thousand stars circled and vibrated before his eyes, a suffocating blackness smothered him, and he slid down like a pole-axed ox between the struggling seamen.

Juhani Luvia flung himself half out of the boat in an attempt to grasp the officer, but the Swede was swept past out of his reach and whirled away to death in the raging, foam-flecked torrent.

While Luvia was making his futile attempt at rescue, the sailors had begun to ply their oars; three to starboard, two to port. Colonel Carden grasped the tiller and turned the boat’s nose away from the ship’s side.

De Brissac was hauled to his feet, but he hung as a sack between those who held him, and blood trickled down his face—he was dead or unconscious. Luvia ordered the lifeless body to be passed along to the stern sheets and laid out there on the bottom boards. He followed it aft, plunging recklessly over the bent backs of the oarsmen. Now that the Third Officer was dead it fell to him, although an engineer, to take command of the boat. With a nod he relieved the Colonel of the tiller and sat down between him and Basil Sutherland.

Basil knew that he ought to be very, very drunk indeed. Convinced that there was not a shadow of a hope that any of them could live, once they were ordered to take to the boats in what seemed to be the very centre of the cyclone, he had snatched up a bottle of brandy and emptied its remaining contents down his throat before leaving the lounge. He was still gasping from the effects of the fiery liquor which burned in his chest and threatened him with the agonising pains of the most acute indigestion, but he was not drunk. Far from it, the stress of the crisis seemed instantly to have dissipated the fumes of the alcohol, or made his brain impervious to them. His senses had quickened so that he seemed to be reeling, seeing, and hearing every phase of the drama that was being played out around him, with abnormal clarity.

He found himself contemplating his own fate with astonishing detachment. Long since, he had ceased to have any illusions about his personal importance in the scheme of things. He was a failure, that’s all there was to it; although perhaps deep down he had always had a vague idea that somehow, somewhere, sometime, an
opportunity would be given to play a better role than that of an unwanted waster. He’d often regretted not having gone on the Everest trip when he’d had the chance. Expert mountaineers had considered his climbing showed exceptional promise as a young man, but more facile excitement had kept him at home. It was too late now to recall lost opportunities, and they would come no more. He was still only twenty-six, but life was ending—ending—the sands were running out while he sat there silent and acquiescent in the crowded boat.

The sky was black as ink; not a cloud’s edge silvered by moonlight nor the pinprick of a star broke the universal canopy of darkness above them. The only lights came from the
Gafelborg;
a line of yellow moons amidships, a few more about the bridge and the abandoned lounge, the navigation lights in the rigging and a brilliant flare that someone was holding on the after-deck.

Forward, on the side of the ship nearest to them, the other port boat was now being manned. Dark figures silhouetted for seconds only in the glare of torches moved swiftly about it. Suddenly it seemed to fall stern first towards the water.

Carried on the terrific wind which roared over them at a hundred miles an hour, they clearly heard the shrieks and imprecations of the wretched people who had been pitched out into the boiling sea.

With swift presence of mind some sailor, who had retained a precarious hold on the other boat, hacked through the bow falls with his knife. It flopped into the water sending up a great sheet of spray.

Luvia’s men were endeavouring to keep their boat steady and give it way. They were already fifty yards from the
Gafelborg
, although they could only dip their oars on alternate sides at one time owing to the constantly changing slope of the dark swell.

Rockets were still sailing upward and detonating with loud reports above the ship. Game to the last, the Swedish Captain was firing his whole stock before going over the side to take command of his own cutter.

‘
Dios! Dios
!’ cried Vicente Vedras, burying his head in his hand. He had seen the other boat, in which he should have been, now under-manned through its mishap in launching, picked up on a wave-crest and capsized. In the constantly shifting reflections from the ports they could see it floating upside down with one little figure clinging to it before it was swept away into the darkness.

The blaring of the siren ceased; a last rocket flung out its coloured stars in a graceful curve high overhead; the blue flashes from the signal lamp in the rigging suddenly stopped. The Captain and those remaining on the
Gafelborg
were now taking their lives in their hands as they attempted to get away in the forward boat to starboard. The little company in Luvia’s boat, who were watching, could not see if the attempt was successful because they were on the far side of the ship.

‘I’ll never see daylight again,’ thought Unity Carden, ‘never live to ride another horse. It’s no good fooling myself any more. We’ll be swamped inside ten minutes; the boat will sink and we’ll all be struggling in the sea. God! how I wish I’d let George make love to me when he wanted to so badly. Now I’ll die without ever having known what love is like.’

Basil’s mouth was set in a cynical grin. He was just thinking that there was not a single soul in the world who would be really hit by the news of his death, except perhaps Barbara, now a big noise in Hollywood. She might even sling back a few extra cocktails because she wouldn’t care to think of the young man she’d loved for a brief season floating bloated and swollen a few feet below the surface of the ocean with the fishes nibbling at his eyes.

As they drifted and paddled farther from the abandoned ship they left the shelter she had temporarily given them. Fierce drifts of spray, stinging as April sleet in the Highlands of Scotland, beat in their faces. The boat slid up a watery mountain until its occupants felt that it would take off like a seaplane and zoom up into the dark heaven. For a second it hovered, poised in the tempestuous breaking waters on the summit, then slithered down a natural watershoot to unseen depths.

Carried skyward once again to a mighty crest, they could see a score of other white-topped peaks separated by awful gulfs and the
Gafelborg
a hundred feet below, heaving slowly in a watery valley. They were high above her mastheads and still rising. The lights from her line of ports amidships showed by their slant that she was heavily down by the bow. A great sea broke over her, the wash gleaming dully with phosphorescent light. There was no sign of the Captain’s boat; nothing but the derelict ship was visible except for patches of angry foam on the surface of the storm-tossed waters.

Suddenly Luvia’s boat began to rush down the precipitous farther side of the mountainous wave that had caught them up.
As though catapulted forward by the unleashed force of a ten thousand horse-power engine, they were carried headlong into the black void. When they rose again on the ridge of another terrific sea the
Gafelborg
had disappeared behind them and they were utterly alone on the raging waters of the mighty ocean.

How they survived the remaining hours of the night none of them could afterwards have said. Many times they were within an ace of capsizing; often the boat reared up on end so that it seemed to be almost standing on its bow or stern. The weaker members of the party had to be tied down to prevent their being flung out; the stronger worked at the bailers, waging an unceasing battle with the incoming spray which washed ankle deep about the bottom boards, until they were blind and stupid with fatigue. Yet, by its buoyancy the lifeboat continued to ride the waves and miraculously weathered the storm. Dawn found them chilled to the marrow, drenched to the skin, and huddled in grotesque attitudes where they had fallen when too exhausted to carry on the struggle further, but still alive.

Alone among them, Juhani Luvia saw the coming of the dawn. He had not closed an eye all night. In the long hours of duty, while the hurricane raged, it had hardly occurred to him that things would go so badly they might have to abandon ship. Later, when the crisis came, his every thought was concerned with saving the passengers and crew allotted to his boat from the fresh perils which beset them every moment. It was only when the last of his men had given in that he began to think of the death he had fought off and another, more terrible, form of death which would soon be creeping on him.

He was not afraid to die, but he would have preferred drowning to the grim end he now foresaw he might have to face, adrift in an open boat, in the near future. He was glad now that he had never married; at least he had no wife and children to worry over.

Athletics had taken most of his spare time while he was studying to become an engineer, and, since he had been at sea, his affairs with women, apart from one long, drawn-out sentimental attachment to a German girl in Hamburg, who had married the
year before, had been limited to a few short-lived romances in various ports.

Juhani’s mother would be the only sufferer from his death. His father had owned a prosperous timber business until the collapse of the Swedish match combine had ruined him and subsequent worry had led to his early death. Since then the young engineer had contributed to his mother’s support. She lived now in a pleasant apartment overlooking the river and with a fine view of the old castle at Viipuri, a port near the head of the Gulf of Finland, where Juhani had been born. He was her only son and very devoted to her. It was a bitter thought to him that in addition to mourning his loss the poor old lady would have to move to less comfortable quarters if death robbed her of him.