Sunset Over Soho (Mrs. Bradley)

by Gladys Mitchell

  “He expects all of a man, blood, bones, skin and guts. You don’t know who you’re working for, my lad.”

  “What happens if this chap refuses to play ball?”

  “Why, nothing. We can’t use pressure. Leave that sort of thing to the Huns. But he’ll see it’s no use kicking, if he’s a sensible fellow. After all, if he hasn’t got any money and doesn’t know where he is, what can he do?—Play pretty, like everybody else. After all, it’s a very good cause.”

  “He many not think so.”

  “That’s his funeral, then. Let’s see if we can get him to eat a bit of breakfast. He’s been out the best part of twelve hours.”

  Harben opened his eyes, sat up with difficulty; and put a hand to his head.

  “I’m not asleep,” he said. “I heard what you said. Where am I?”

  “Try guessing,” said the man in uniform, good-humouredly. “But don’t ask questions. It will only give you a worse headache than the one I think you’ve got already.”

  Harben, wincing with pain, put back the blankets and lowered his feet over the side. He tried to stand, but swayed and felt very sick indeed.

  “Here, open up! He’s going to cat!” said the man in mufti. “Can’t have a mess in here.”

  It was then, as the door was opened, and he was half-shoved, half-carried out, that Harben realized that he had been travelling in an aeroplane. His legs gave way. He sank down dizzily on to the ground. The outside air was grateful, however, his captors gave him some water, and almost immediately he began to feel better.

  The flat ground on which the aeroplane had landed was a small space artificially levelled, and all around were mountains. He had not the least idea where he was, and long before the “half-breed dagoes” referred to by his kidnappers had appeared, he was assisted into the plane and told, not at all unkindly, to “finish sleeping it off.”

  “Can you tell me,” he said, in a weak voice which he did not attempt to render stronger, “what happened to the girl I was with?”

  “Yes. She’s on board,” replied the man in uniform. He held a short, half-audible colloquy with his companion, then turned to Harben and added, “You can see her, if you like. But don’t make plans to escape, because you’ll only land her in the soup. We’re perfectly friendly, you know.”

  “The war,” began Harben. The man laughed; not unkindly.

  “We’ve got nothing to do with the war,” he said. “Not the one you’re concerned with, anyhow. You’d have laughed to see yourself being carried out of that house in an empty cistern, with the girl on top of you like a couple of rolled-up anchovies.”

  “But what’s the game?” asked Harben.

  “You’ll know by tomorrow,” said the man. “Here’s a sight for sore eyes! Look! Now you’ll soon feel all right.”

  The other man brought in, not Leda, but Sister Mary Dominic. She was as lovely as ever, but was, he noticed, extremely pale, and looked as though she had not slept.

  “You?” cried Harben. “You got me into this?”

  The two men looked at each other, raised their eyebrows, chuckled, and went out of the cabin, leaving the lovers together (for Harben realized clearly in his dream that he was in love with Sister Mary Dominic).

  She, lifting her eyes, made answer:

  “You don’t believe I got you into this trouble? David, I know nothing about it; only what you know—that these men came into the house, and I thought they’d killed you. This is nothing to do with my affairs. I swear to you I know nothing whatever about it!”

  He did not know whether to believe her. There was silence. Then some people came up to the aeroplane, and could be heard explaining, in poor English, that they would have to send for the petrol. The two men cursed them, arguing that they could not wait, and that the petrol should have been on the spot, or, at any rate, ready in the village. They were promised speedy service, but one of the men said to the other:

  “Better float down with them, and swim them rapidly along. We don’t want to spend the night in this filthy hole!” “What about them?” enquired the other. There was a slight pause, during which the first must have made some gesture—produced a revolver, probably, Harben thought—for the speaker went on. “Oh, yes. Well, all right, then. I’ll go. So long. Only hope they’ve got the quantity we want! We can’t do it on less than five million.”

  Harben looked at Sister Mary Dominic, and said angrily:

  “Well, whatever you say, you got us into this confounded mess, and you’d better hurry up and get us out. But nothing will persuade me that it wasn’t a put-up job!”

  She answered, in sulky tones:

  “Oh, suit yourself, but shut up!”

  At these words she picked up a jug of water and threw it over him, and he awoke. He found himself in an open boat. A wave, slapping over the stern in a following wind, had drenched him, and he was lying in the pool of water it had left. It was broad daylight, and he was out of sight of land. He was alone.

  He blinked away his dream and sat up. The boat had no oars, no sail, and no engine. He did not know how long he had been at sea. He found that he was dressed in someone else’s clothes, and that all the pockets were empty. There was a small cask in the nose of the boat. He supposed there was water in it. There seemed to be no food.

  Beyond a slight feeling of sickness and a bad headache, he felt fit enough, he decided, but he was extremely cold.

  The sea was heaving in great grey masses which threatened to engulf his little boat. He raised himself and took hold of the tiller to keep the boat’s head to the seas. He realized that he was extremely hungry, and tried very hard to remember when last he had had any food. He strove and strove with himself, but his mind was a blank. He could remember the tub, and the faces of Leda, Mrs. Lestrange Bradley, and the nuns flitted across his visual memory like lantern slides at a lecture; but who any of them were, and what they had ever meant to him he had not the slightest idea. Even their names meant nothing, although, as the boat tossed and heaved, and the mountainous seas came rolling terrifically towards him, he repeated them perhaps a hundred times.

  He touched the lump on his head, but that meant nothing, either. He supposed he must have got into a fight or met with an accident. He realized that (for the time, at any rate) he had lost his memory, and it seemed to him very odd that he should remember that he ought to have memories, and yet should have mislaid them in this way. But he took comfort, too.

  “I shall remember,” he thought. “I’m not so badly off as I might be over it all. I shall remember. It’s only a question of time.” Besides, he remembered his dream. He could repeat the conversations word for word.

  But very soon it also began to be a question of food. The problem of water could be solved, for a short while, by the cask in the nose of the boat. It contained, as nearly as he could judge, about a gallon.

  Then there was the question of sleep. He had no idea how long he had been unconscious. People with concussion were sometimes unconscious for two or three days, he believed. True, the boat had not foundered. There was also the argument that it must have been launched from somewhere, but whether from the shore or from a ship he could not tell.

  Being philosophical by temperament and by self-training, he decided to sleep when he had to, and trust to luck that the boat would not be swamped.

  “After all, I can’t do everything,” he said aloud. About an hour later, the wind dropped. He was afraid that by morning there would be a flat calm, a dreadful thought to one who had no possible means of propulsion.

  The sun set at last, dark came, and, with the knowledge that no vessel he might encounter would carry lights unless she happened to be a non-belligerent, he lay down at the bottom of the boat resigned to the fact that, at any moment of the darkness, he might be run down by a passing monster. It would be idle, he felt, to attempt to convince himself that he was not afraid.

  Fatigue and boredom overcame fear, and he slept. When he awoke it still was dark, and he saw a light in the
distance. He did not believe it could come from land because of the stringent regulations in force against all lights, especially those on the coast. It must, he argued, be a ship, and a neutral ship. He watched it anxiously. The light drew nearer. Then he could see red from the port-side lamp. The ship was coming towards him. Frantically he searched the pockets of the clothes he was wearing, but there was not so much as a match with which he could attempt to make a signal.

  He tried shouting, but the ship held on her course. He tried to estimate her speed, and wondered whether, by taking a chance, and making a long slant towards her, he could possibly swim to her side. But the plan was as wild at its conception, and he did not make the attempt. By morning the seascape was empty, except for himself and his boat. Then, at about the midday, he saw another ship, a squat little tramp with a couple of yellowish funnels and the Spanish flag painted large along her side.

  He stood up, rocking the boat, and waved his arms. The tramp altered course. He could see gesticulating figures. Then she shut off her engines but did not lower a boat. He supposed she had not one.

  “Badly found. I’ll have to swim for it,” he thought. He prepared to abandon his boat, but, as he drifted nearer, and the tramp, making use of the way she still had on her after her engines had ceased, came sucking and slapping towards him, he saw that the crew had grappling hooks on the ends of ropes, and meant to secure the boat.

  “Good! I can drive a bargain,” Harben thought. He stood up again, and cried:

  “Amigo! Amigo!”

  Out came the grappling irons, missing his head by inches. He fixed them into the thwarts. The boat was drawn in. Judging his distance, he reached for the rope ladder the tramp was dangling overside. Up he climbed, hand over hand.

  It took an hour, and a thousand Spanish oaths, to get his boat on to the deck, but the Spaniards were determined to have it. Harben, fed, washed, and his own clothes left to dry in the galley, was soon dressed in a pair of trousers and an oil-stained blouse belonging to a hybrid but friendly and good-natured gentleman known to his intimates as El Piojo, which is, by interpretation, “The Louse.”

  Harben had invented, and was able to tell the captain of the vessel, a well-substantiated story of having been on his way back to England from a Mediterranean cruise on his thirty-ton yacht when war was declared. He related his adventures. The captain, a square-jawed, black-a-vised man who chewed tobacco continuously, but had, in all other respects, the manners of a somewhat sardonic prince, listened without interruption except that at particularly impressive or incredible points in the narrative he spat overside in an admiring rather than a contemptuous or unbelieving manner, and ejaculated:

  “Hijo de Dios! San Salvador!” in polite, diplomatic and conciliatory tones. A man to beware of, thought Harben.

  “Lastly, there is, of course, my beautiful boat, which I offer you in lieu of passage money,” concluded Harben, in his sufficient but laboured Castilian. The Spaniard continued to smile.

  “That is better than nothing,” he agreed; but followed up this polite shrug, to Harben’s discomfiture, with the sardonic proverb, “It is the weak dog which always has fleas.”

  Harben was given a berth in the forecastle and went to sleep that night with the knowledge, gained from El Piojo, who seemed to have taken a fancy to him, that the ship was bound for Santander.

  “We shall get there in a month or so,” said El Piojo, on deck next morning. “He goes to Gran Canaria, this ship, to Tenerife, to all those places.” He waved a long, thin, dirty hand with grandeur towards the horizon.

  “And after Santander?” said Harben to the captain, later. The Spaniard smiled.

  “Quién sabe? A Dios rogando y con el mazo dando,”[*] he replied with magnificent philosophy.

  They made Las Palmas, chief port on the island of Grand Canary, in three days, but remained at the mole for less than twenty-four hours. Harben, who had no intention whatsoever of remaining on board for months whilst the little ship tramped for cargo, went ashore to see what Las Palmas had to offer, but came aboard again, as the ship was leaving so soon, after having bathed from the sands of Confital Bay, a pleasant stretch to the north of the city and on the west side of the Istmo de Guanarteme. He had hoped that there might be a chance of obtaining a passage on some ship bound direct for Spain, but the time-limit was too short for him to find out much about the sailings, and he did not intend to risk being left behind at Las Palmas without money or prospects. True, there was the British Consulate, but he concluded that it would be equally ineffective to apply there after he had played a lone hand. As the ship was bound next day for Tenerife, he could, at least, wait until then.

  They put off with the tide next morning, having unloaded an innocuous cargo of manufactured goods, and having taken on board a few cases of what the mate, a grim fellow, called Don Juan by the men, and Pico by the captain (to whom, it appeared, he was slightly related by marriage), termed fish manure. They looked to Harben remarkably like gun cases, and he dropped his end of one when they were loading, to see what happened. Don Juan swore at him, and his fellow-labourer, Gomez, a merry little fellow from Barcelona, giggled and said:

  “You have greased your palm, no? Or does your honour see mermaids over the side?”

  “Mermaids!” said Harben; and everything came back. The case had not burst open, and he was none the wiser from the sound it made striking the deck. There were fewer than a score of these cases. Even if they had contained rifles, they would not have constituted a dangerous armament, and the mate was either a man without nerves (which was credible enough) or one without a guilty conscience, and that was quite likely too. And there was, of course, the fact that the cases might contain exactly what they were said to contain, although, if this were so, they must have been deodorized by some secret process, thought Harben, sniffing a suspiciously untainted air.

  The ship, which could make ten knots without danger to her internal organization, came into the port of Santa Cruz at just about three o’clock. The mole was long, and something of the shape of a dog’s hind-leg, and behind it a range of mountains, which formed the backbone of the island and gave to it its shape, could be seen like steep black battlements against the splendid sky.

  It seemed that the ship was expected to stay three days. Some cargo was unloaded on the first of these, the second was declared a holiday, and on the third the intake cargo was to come aboard, brought by mule, said El Piojo, from the south. Harben paid little attention. He was fully occupied with his thoughts.

  The road northwards out of the town was along the coast. With his head full of boats and ways of escape by them to England, Harben followed this road on the second day, and came, in about an hour and a half, to the dirty little village of San Andres. Here the road ceased, and nothing but a rough path led onwards. It skirted a tiny headland and then a slightly larger one, dropped to the coast once more, and terminated, so far as a coastal course was concerned, at another little village called Igueste. At Igueste it turned sharply north to the pine forests on the mountains before leading to the lighthouse on the northern tip of the island.

  He had taken another hour to get from San Andres to Igueste. He had left the city at ten. He was hot and extremely hungry, but, beyond the sum of five pesetas, borrowed (without difficulty) from El Piojo—he had not liked to ask more from the good-natured half-breed—he had not a coin in his possession. There was no inn at Igueste, so he approached a man leading a mule, and asked him for something to eat.

  The man stopped, jerked his head round, and remarked that he must wait for his ladies. These proved to be two desiccated Englishwomen to whom Harben forthrightly (and, he hoped, ingenuously) addressed himself.

  The sight of a young, personable man of their own nationality impressed the Englishwomen favourably, in spite of the fact that he was ragged, although shaven and reasonably clean. They listened to what he had to say, and appeared to accept his story, which was the one he had told already to the captain.

  “You h
ad better come down into Tenerife and speak to the Consul,” said the older lady. “We can’t ask him to the hotel,” she added, in what was evidently intended to be a tactful murmur. “What is it you really want?” she demanded, turning to him again.

  “A passage to England,” he replied. “I intend to join the Navy. I am an amateur yachtsman. But I’m afraid I’ll never get back while the war’s on, and the Consul can’t help me, you see, and I don’t suppose you can, either. All I’m asking of you now is a meal. I think, if you gave permission, your man there—”

  “Oh, Luis!” said the elder lady. “I believe he’s really a villain. I shouldn’t trust him an inch. We never allow him to have anything to do with our food. Dirt, you know! Perfectly poisonous!”

  “I could eat what he eats,” argued Harben. He approached the muleteer and said pleasantly:

  “Las sẽnoritas están buenas. No tengo las viandas.”

  The man grinned amiably, showing broken teeth.

  “We men, sir, will eat,” said he, evidently accepting Harben’s first remark regarding the goodness of the ladies as permission to sit down and rest. He hitched his mule to a spined and fleshy-leaved plant, sat down, and took from his pocket a very large knife. The younger lady gave a slight scream at the sight of it. The muleteer rose leisurely, went to his mule, and took from one of the panniers a lump of the bread of the island, a kind of dough made from toasted grain and salt, and known as gofio. This, and a piece of salt fish resembling cod, proved to be his meal.

  He smiled sideways towards his employers. “They are mad,” he observed kindly. “They want to go to England to have a part in the war. Express to yourself the extreme idiocy of such a cranky idea!”

  Harben laughed, went over to the ladies to assist them from their mules, which, with a temperament inherited from patient forefathers or acquired from contact with their owner, had pulled up behind their tethered companion and were attempting to browse, and observed, with winning courtesy: