The Golden Reef (1969)

by Pattinson, James

  ‘Thought I had a cast-iron stomach? Well, I haven’t. Who has? All right then, get on with it. Spew your guts up and let’s be moving.’

  Bristow moved to the rail and leaned over. Keeton did not wait for him; he walked to the starboard ladder and descended to the after-deck.

  Now he had leisure to take a really good look at the mid-castle and he saw the wreckage there. The funnel had disintegrated; there were a few pieces of twisted metal that might once have been part of it, but the tall stack that had so often belched black smoke was there no more; it had been brushed aside as though by a contemptuous sweep of a Titan’s hand. Without it the boat-deck looked strangely flat, its most distinctive feature having disappeared, and there was an unobstructed view of the bridge.

  Two boats had gone – both from the port side. One of the starboard boats had been sliced in halves, and these two halves were hanging from the davits, useless lumps of timber. The one other boat was still in its launching position, and from a distance it appeared to be in good order; but Keeton realized that there might be damage which would only be seen on closer examination. He did not place much hope in that craft.

  It was obvious that the Valparaiso had truly been abandoned; the blocks dangling from the port davits told only too eloquently of a hurried departure, of the panic of men who feared that their ship was sinking. It was not the first time that a vessel had been abandoned in the mistaken belief that it was doomed. And yet the ship was still afloat; it had a stouter heart than the men who had sailed in it.

  ‘It was Rains‚’ Keeton muttered. ‘It must have been. That scared bastard.’

  There could be no other explanation than that Rains had taken fright and had left the ship too hastily, concerned only with saving his own skin. Things would have been different if Captain Peterson had still been giving the orders; he surely would never have run from his ship while there remained the slightest hope of saving her. But Rains was of another calibre; Jones and Wall too. No doubt they had bundled the paralysed master into a boat and carried him away without consulting his wishes. Perhaps he had been in no condition to express any wish.

  Bristow, rid of his vomit, caught up with Keeton and together they crossed the after-deck.

  ‘So they’re all gone‚’ Bristow said. ‘May they rot in hell.’

  ‘More likely to rot in the Pacific. It was a bad sea for open boats.’

  ‘Serve them right if they have gone down. I knew something like this would happen with that useless swine Rains in charge. I said so. You heard me say so, didn’t you?’

  ‘What if I did?’ Keeton said wearily. He had no patience with Bristow. ‘Whether you said so or whether you didn’t makes no difference to us now. We’re on our own, Johnnie, and we’ve got to work out our own salvation.’

  A door on the port side of the mid-castle opened into an alleyway which gave access to the galley, and it was this that drew the two men, thirsty and hungry as they were.

  After the brilliance of the light outside it seemed gloomy in the alleyway, and there was a constant sound of water swilling back and forth as the ship rolled. It was not a cheering sound, and the water itself, some two or three inches deep, was thick and scummy, as though it had been washing into dark corners and finding all the dirt that was hidden there.

  Bristow shivered and his voice was hushed; he seemed to be overawed by this silent ship which so recently had been alive with men.

  ‘Listen‚’ he said, clutching at Keeton’s arm. ‘Listen.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I thought I heard somebody laughing. A kind of low chuckle. It’s gone now.’

  Keeton pulled his arm away. ‘You’re imagining things. Look, Johnnie, you won’t find anybody else alive on board this ship and you’d better make up your mind to that straight off.’

  ‘Maybe not alive.’ Bristow shivered again and glanced apprehensively over his shoulder. ‘Maybe the other kind.’

  Keeton swore at him, for his own nerves were sufficiently on edge without Bristow’s fancies. ‘Snap out of it, can’t you? You start that sort of thing and you’ll soon be ready for the looney bin. Let’s find that grub.’

  There was water in the galley also. It had collected at the lower end, where it was trapped in a filthy pool. A cork floated in it, two lemons, an empty beer can, all black with coal dust that had been washed out of the cold stove.

  And then Keeton saw the cat. It was standing on the stove and eating out of a saucepan that was prevented from sliding off the inclined surface only by the iron fiddles that were fitted to it. The cat looked up and mewed. It stretched itself, jumped off the stove, and avoiding the water with disdainful paws, walked up to Keeton and began rubbing itself against his leg. He reached down and stroked it. The cat began to purr.

  ‘Well, what do you think of that?’ Bristow said. ‘They even left the cat. Just shows, don’t it? Bastards!’

  He took an aluminium dipper from a hook and went to the fresh water pump over the sink. He filled the dipper and took a long drink.

  ‘I never knew water could taste so good. Ship’s water at that.’

  Keeton also took a drink and they began to hunt for food. There was no shortage. They ate slabs of corned beef and hunks of stale bread washed down with more water. They sat on boxes and the cat watched them and rubbed against their legs and purred, grateful for this human company. The ship rolled and the scummy tide came towards them and retreated again, slapping against the sides of the galley and washing under the dead stove.

  When they left the galley the cat followed them, as though unwilling to let the men out of its sight, stepping gingerly and shaking its paws whenever the water touched them.

  ‘We’ll have a look at the engine-room‚’ Keeton said. ‘That’s where she took the damage. Some of it anyway.’

  ‘You aren’t thinking of getting the engines started again, are you?’ Bristow was feeling better with the food inside him.

  ‘Funny man. You should go on the stage. You’d kill them – if they didn’t kill you first.’

  The engine-room was a wreck. Keeton wondered whether this was all the result of the shell that had demolished the funnel or whether another had also pierced the upper decks and spread its havoc here in the heart of the ship. Standing on one of the iron gantries that was still remaining he was able to look up and see the sky through a jagged hole, and then he could look down and see the tangle of metal that had been the engines.

  There was water at the bottom; it was like the dark, muddy pool in the depths of a pit. The body of a man lay there half-submerged, and his hair floated like a weed on the surface. Another body was caught between two iron rods, once handrails, that had been twisted round his chest so that they held the man suspended in mid-air as in a kind of rigid gibbet. His arms and legs hung free, and his head was flung back with the mouth wide open, so that Keeton, looking down upon it, could see the white teeth and the dark cavern of the throat.

  He knew this man; it was the third engineer, young, not more than twenty-five; a man who had loved life, now dead, crucified on his own machinery.

  ‘He died with his teeth clean‚’ Keeton said.

  ‘God, Charlie‚’ Bristow said. ‘How can you make a laugh of a thing like that?’

  ‘If I didn’t laugh I might cry. It’s better to laugh.’

  The cat jumped on Keeton’s shoulder and rubbed itself against his ear. He could hear its purring like an engine running inside the animal. The cat was happy even if the men were not.

  ‘We’ll see what the boat is like‚’ Keeton said. ‘We may need it.’

  The boat, as he had feared, was in no state to be used; it scarcely needed a close inspection to make that apparent. A hole had been ripped in one side as big as a cask, and the rest of it was perforated with smaller punctures. Some of the boards were splintered and their edges charred, as though a small fire had started but had gone out, perhaps extinguished by the rain. As it was, this boat was as useless as the one that had been cut in ha
lves.

  ‘Nice work‚’ Bristow said. ‘Mr Rains left us the best of everything.’

  All around were strewn the jagged pieces of the funnel, and in the boat-deck was the gaping hole that led down into the engine-room; but forward of this the ship appeared to have suffered less damage. The bridge was intact and the two Oerlikons pointed their naked barrels at the sky, thin and black, like the scrawny fingers of prophets giving warning of the wrath to come.

  They picked their way through the wreckage and came to the ladder up to the bridge, and climbed this and stood where the navigating officer might have been standing if there had been a navigating officer on board. The windows of the wheelhouse had been shattered by the blast and broken glass was scattered inside.

  ‘Mind your step‚’ Bristow said. ‘That stuff could give your feet a nasty gash.’

  The cat, still accompanying them, jumped on to the binnacle and began to wash itself.

  ‘There’s one boy that’s not worrying‚’ Bristow said. He sounded envious. ‘Wish I had his nerve. This ship gives me the willies.’

  It was the sense of desertion that frayed the nerves. The ship was at sea and there should have been men on the bridge, directing her course, keeping watch, steering. Instead, there was nothing – just the broken glass and the abandoned wheel, the cat perched on the binnacle and the silence.

  They went into the chart-room, and that too was deserted. A few charts lay on the table, some instruments, drawing pins, an india-rubber. On the bulkhead the brass chronometer was still going. The time was twenty minutes past eleven.

  ‘They’ll have taken the log‚’ Keeton said. ‘They’d have to take the ship’s papers. Even Mr Rains wouldn’t forget that.’

  Strewn about were the fragments of a broken coffee cup and a ham sandwich, one bite taken out of it, the bread curling back as it dried. The spilt coffee had painted a dark stain on the boards.

  They went next into the wireless cabin, driven by a kind of compulsion to see all. No one was there.

  Keeton looked at the transmitter. ‘Know anything about using one of these, Johnnie?’

  ‘Not me‚’ Bristow said. ‘Do you?’

  Keeton shook his head. ‘Not a thing. It’s a pity. We might have sent out an S.O.S.’

  ‘I wonder whether Sparks did that before he left?’

  ‘Could have. But we must have drifted a hell of a way in the night; we’ll be miles off the mark by now. Besides, if anybody is picked up from the boats they’re bound to say the ship was sunk. Couldn’t say anything else, could they? Nobody’s going to hunt for us, so you can put that idea out of your head for a start.’

  ‘I expect you’re right.’ Bristow’s shoulders drooped and he moved towards the door. Then suddenly he turned and gripped Keeton’s arm, shaking it in his excitement. ‘I just thought of something.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The gold. It’s all there and it’s all ours, yours and mine, Charlie. We’re rich, rich.’

  Keeton said roughly: ‘Don’t talk like a fool. What’s the use of gold to us? How do we make use of it? Put it in a leaky boat and row home with it? Or do we use it to buy a yacht? Talk sense.’

  The fire went out of Bristow. ‘You’re right again, Charlie. You’re always right. There’s a fortune down there for the taking and we can’t take it.’

  ‘Forget it‚’ Keeton said. ‘Let’s go over the rest of the ship.’

  They went out of the wireless cabin with the cat at their heels.

  Keeton felt like an intruder when he went into the captain’s cabin. It was a room he had never entered before, and the contrast between it and the gunners’ quarters was marked. Here there was a carpet underfoot, curtains over the scuttle, a mahogany book-case, pictures, comfortable chairs; in fact, all the marks of civilised living that were conspicuously absent from the improvised accommodation aft.

  ‘Did hisself well, didn’t he?’ Bristow said. ‘Lived like a lord while we was living like pigs. That’s equality for you. Is it any wonder there’s Communists?’

  ‘He had the responsibility.’

  ‘Give me a cabin like this and I’d take the responsibility.’

  ‘No you wouldn’t, Johnnie. You’d be scared.’

  ‘All right‚’ Bristow said. ‘Maybe that’s true enough. And maybe you wouldn’t be so keen on it either.’

  ‘I don’t say that I would.’

  There was a doorway leading into an adjoining room which Keeton guessed was the captain’s sleeping quarters. Feeling even more like a trespasser on private property, he pushed open this door and went inside.

  It was not a large room. Along one side of it was the bed and on the opposite side an open porthole. The room was hot and close; it had the confined, distasteful odour of sickness. A beam of sunlight slanted down from the porthole and fell upon the bed, throwing into sharp relief the face of the man lying there. The face was gaunt and grey, with a thin stubble of white beard. It was the face of the Valparaiso’s master, of Captain Peterson.

  As Keeton stared in amazement he saw Peterson’s eyes slowly open and gaze at him.

  Chapter Five

  In the Night

  With the approach of night the wind came again, softly at first, then growing ever stronger until it was blowing spray over the Valparaiso’s sloping decks. The ship staggered before the wind, sometimes turning her great blind starboard side to the attack, sometimes the stern and sometimes the bows.

  She was lower in the water now and often her port bulwarks dipped under. The tackle still hanging from the davits on that side trailed in the water like the tell-tale rope by which a man might have escaped from prison. The logline, drooping from the taffrail, was knotted and tangled; it no longer rotated, no longer registered the miles of the ship’s voyage. It was as though every yard that the Valparaiso moved forward now were an unofficial yard, made without authority and not entered in the records.

  Keeton and Bristow had given the dead men on the poop their burial. They had read no funeral service; they had said no prayer; but they had taken the bodies one by one and had rolled them over the side. Bristow had hung back, but Keeton had cursed and threatened him, and at last he had done his share of the work.

  As they dropped one man overboard Bristow said with a wretched attempt at bravado: ‘That blighter owed me a dollar. I’ll never get it now. I hope it don’t lay too heavy on his soul.’

  Hagan was the last to go. They lifted him over the taffrail and let him slide down head-first, holding his feet and releasing their grip together. Hagan might have been a diver taking the plunge; he went with scarcely a splash, and they turned away and never saw him again.

  They had to leave the dead men in the engine-room because there was no way of getting them out. When Keeton looked down into that jungle of wrecked machinery in the late afternoon he could see that the water had risen perceptibly. It was coming in somewhere and might, for all Keeton knew, be leaking into the holds also. There could be little doubt that the Valparaiso was slowly sinking and it was doubtful whether she would survive the night.

  ‘If it comes to the worst‚’ Keeton said, ‘and the old girl goes down, we shall have to take a raft.’

  Two of the rafts had been destroyed, but there were still two others resting on their cradles; it would be necessary only to knock out a pin to send one or other of these down the slides and into the water. They chose the one on the port side and lashed to it stocks of tinned foods, biscuits and condensed milk, of which there was an abundance in the ship’s stores. They filled water containers and fixed these to the raft also, and hoped they would not need to use it.

  ‘What hope on a raft?’ Bristow said. ‘All you can do is drift.’

  ‘Plenty of men have been picked up from rafts.’

  ‘And there’s a hell of a lot that haven’t.’

  ‘If the ship goes it’s our only chance. We’ll have to get the Old Man on it too.’

  Bristow stared unbelievingly. ‘Him! Where’s the sense in takin
g him? He’s as good as dead anyway.’

  Keeton said stubbornly: ‘We can’t leave him behind.’

  ‘The others left him, didn’t they? And they had boats.’

  ‘I don’t care a damn what the others did‚’ Keeton said. ‘If we go, the Old Man goes with us.’

  ‘You’re crazy‚’ Bristow said; but he did not press the argument.

  Keeton knew that Bristow was right in saying that Peterson was almost dead, but he also knew that if he were to leave the captain to drown Peterson’s eyes would haunt him for the rest of his life. Only the eyes moved in Peterson’s body; the rest of him lay like a corpse on the bed. But the eyes were alive and intelligent.

  Keeton felt that there was a brain working in this man, that he knew that he had been abandoned by his officers and crew, and would know also if he should be deserted by Keeton and Bristow.

  Bristow sneered. ‘Maybe you’re afraid his ghost will haunt you.’

  ‘Maybe I am‚’ Keeton said.

  He talked to Peterson; he told the captain just what had happened to the ship, and the way he and Bristow had been trapped in the magazine.

  ‘The others must have got away. Two boats are gone. They left us behind. They left you too, sir.’

  Peterson made no answer. Keeton could not tell whether he heard or understood. Only the faint sound of breathing and the eyes moving slowly in the gaunt head gave indication that he was still alive.

  ‘They must have scuttled away like rats. Though in fact, I suppose, the rats are still with us. I don’t know how much longer the ship will last. The engine-room’s flooded. If we get some more bad weather there’s no telling what will happen.’

  He wondered why he was talking like this to Peterson; there was no need to tell the captain how perilous was the situation of his ship; for if his brain was working he must know only too well how bad the prospect was. Yet somehow Keeton felt a compulsion to talk to and confide in this man to whom he had spoken scarcely half a dozen words in the course of his duty.