by Sapper
Copyright & Information
The Island of Terror
First published in 1931
© Trustees of the Estate of H.C. McNeile; House of Stratus 1931-2010
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The right of H.C. McNeile (Sapper) to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.
This edition published in 2010 by House of Stratus, an imprint of
Stratus Books Ltd., 21 Beeching Park, Kelly Bray,
Cornwall, PL17 8QS, UK.
Typeset by House of Stratus.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.
EAN ISBN Edition
1842325507 9781842325506 Print
075511678x 9780755116782 Print (Alt)
0755122925 9780755122929 Pdf
0755123107 9780755123100 Mobi
075512328x 9780755123285 Epub
This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.
Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.
www.houseofstratus.com
About the Author
Herman Cyril McNeile, who wrote under the pseudonym Sapper, was born in Bodmin, Cornwall, on 28 September 1888 to Captain Malcolm McNeile RN and his wife, Christiana Mary. He was educated at Cheltenham College, and then went on to the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, before joining the Royal Engineers in 1907, from which he derived his pseudonym – ‘sappers’ being the nickname of the Engineers.
During World War One he served first as a Captain, seeing action at both the First and the Second Battle of Ypres, and won the Military Cross before retiring from the army as a Lieutenant-Colonel in 1919. Prior to this, in 1914 he met and married Violet Baird, daughter of a Lieutenant-Colonel in the Cameron Highlanders. They eventually had two sons.
Somewhat remarkably, he managed to publish a number of books during the war and whilst still serving, (serving officers were not permitted to publish under their own names – hence the need for a pseudonym), commencing with The Lieutenant and Others and Sergeant Michael Cassidy, R.E. in 1915. Lord Northcliff, the owner of the Daily Mail, was so impressed by this writing that he attempted, but failed, to have McNeile released from the army so he could work as a war correspondent.
McNeile's first full length novel, Mufti, was published in 1919, but it was in 1920 that his greatest hit Bulldog Drummond, was published. This concerned the exploits of a demobilised officer, Captain Hugh ‘Bulldog’ Drummond, ‘who found peace dull’. This was an immediate and enduring success and has been filmed and performed on stage both in the UK and USA. Further Drummond adventures were to follow, along with other novels, notably those featuring the private detective Ronald Standish.
Much of his writing is based upon the atmosphere, rather than experiences, he absorbed from public school and London Gentleman’s Clubs. His heroes are most decidedly ‘English’ in character and ‘do the right thing’, whilst his villains are foreign and ‘do not play by the rules’. Ian Fleming once noted that his own hero James Bond was ‘Sapper’ from the waist up.
McNeile died in 1937 at his home in Sussex, having lived a relatively quiet and content life, in sharp contrast to the characters in his books. His friend Gerard Fairlie, thought to be the model for Drummond, went on to write seven more adventures. Many of his books are collections of short stories, with most having a twist in the tail, usually surprising the reader by totally flawing anticipations with regard to their ending within the last few sentences. They are as popular today as ever and eagerly adopted by succeeding generations as amongst the best of their genre.
House of Stratus was pleased to gain the right to publish from McNeile’s estate in 1999 and has since continually held his major works in print.
CHAPTER 1
Jim Maitland tilted his top hat a little farther back on his head, and lit a cigarette. In front of him twinkled the myriad lights of London; behind the door he had just closed twinkled the few candles that had not yet guttered out. The Bright Young Things liked candles stuck in empty bottles as their illuminations.
The hour was two of a summer’s morning; the scene – somewhere in Hampstead. And as he walked down the steps into the drive he pondered for the twentieth time on the asininity of man – himself in particular. Why on earth had he ever allowed that superlative idiot Percy to drag him to such a fool performance?
Percy was his cousin, a point he endeavoured unsuccessfully to forget. In fact the only thing to be said in favour of Percy’s continued existence was that since he embodied in his person every known form of fatuitousness, he might be regarded as doing duty for the rest of the family.
He had seen Percy afar off in the club before dinner, and with a strangled grunt of terror had fled into the cloak-room only to realise a moment later that he had delivered himself bound hand and foot into the enemy’s hands. For the cloak-room was a cul-de-sac, and already a strange bleating cry could be heard outside the entrance. Percy had spotted him, and relinquishing the idea of burying himself in the dirty towel basket he prepared to meet his fate.
“Jim, my dear old friend and relative, you are the very bird I want. When did you return to the village?”
He gazed dispassionately at his cousin through his eyeglass, and a slight shudder shook him.
“Hullo! Percy,” he remarked. “I hoped you hadn’t seen me. Are you still as impossibly awful as you were when I last met you?”
“Worse, far worse, old lad. We dine together – what?”
Another shudder shook him; short of physical violence all hope was gone. He was in the clutches of this throw back to the tail period.
“But for the fact that I adore your dear mother nothing would induce me to dine anywhere near you,” he answered. “As it is I happen to be free, so I will.”
“Splendid. And afterwards I shall take you to a gathering of the chaps.”
“What chaps?”
“You’ll love ’em, old fruit. We have one once a month. Starts about midnight. Just a rag, don’t you know. We’re meeting this time in a cellar up in Hampstead. Beer and bones. Or perhaps scrambled eggs. Or even kippers. Except that kippers whiff a bit in a cellar, don’t they?”
He suffered Percy to lead him to the dining-room, and as he looked round the familiar room it seemed impossible that it was more than five years since he had last been in it. A new face or two amongst the waiters – though not amongst the senior ones, they were all there; a few new faces, of course, amongst the members; otherwise it might have been yesterday that he was dining there with Terence Ogilvy and Teddy Burchaps prepar-atory to their departure for the interior of Brazil. And of the three of them only he had returned…
“You’re looking very fit, sir.”
He glanced up to find the wine steward standing by the table.
“Thank you, Soames, I am. And you?”
“Much the same, sir. There is still some of the Lafite vintage wine left.”
Good old Soames! Remembering that after five years. And yet – why not? That was life; to him a member’s taste in wine was a thing of paramount importance. Especially, though he did not add this mentally, when the member was Jim Maitland.
That he was a sort of legendary hero in the club, was a fact of which Jim was completely ignorant. And had anyone hinted at it be would either have been annoyed or else roared with laughter. To him a jo
urney to the interior of Turkestan came as naturally as one to Brighton comes to the ordinary man. He had been born with wanderlust in his bones; and being sufficiently endowed with this world’s goods to avoid the necessity of working for a living, he had followed his bent ever since he left Oxford.
And the result, had he known it, would have surprised him. For it was not only in the club that a glamour lay round his name, but in a hundred odd places fringing the seven seas. Anywhere, in fact, where the men who do things are gathered together, you will sooner or later hear his name mentioned. And if some of the stories grow in the telling it is hardly to be wondered at, though in all conscience the originals are good enough without any embroidery.
Talk to deep-sea sailors from Shanghai to Valparaiso; talk to cattlemen on the estancias of the Argentine and after a while, casually introduce his name. Then you will know what I mean.
“Jim Maitland! The guy with a pane of glass in his eye. But if you take my advice, stranger, you won’t mention it to him. Sight! his sight is better’n yourn or mine. I reckons he keeps that window there so that he can just find trouble when he’s bored. He’s got a left like a steam hammer, and he can shoot the pip out of the ace of diamonds at twenty yards. A dangerous man, son, to run up against, but I’d sooner have him on my side than any other three I’ve yet met.”
Thus do they speak of him in the lands that lie off the beaten track, the man with a taste for Château Lafite. And as he sat sipping his wine, warmed to the exact temperature by the paragon Soames, there came the glint of a smile into his eyes. Dimly he was aware that near at hand the impossible Percy was drivelling on, but it seemed as far removed from him as the buzzing of an insect outside a mosquito curtain. White tie, white waistcoat, boiled shirt – and six weeks ago… London: the solidity, the respectability of his club – and six weeks ago…
“Have you ever hit a man on the base of the skull with a full bottle of French vermouth, Percy?” he said suddenly. “I suppose you haven’t. You’d wait for an introduction, wouldn’t you, before taking such a liberty?”
“I don’t believe you’ve heard a word I’ve said, Jim,” answered his cousin plaintively.
“I haven’t, thank God! I heard a continuous droning noise somewhere: was that you?”
“Are you coming tonight?”
“Coming where?”
“I knew you hadn’t been listening. To this meeting of the chaps in Hampstead.”
“Nothing would induce me to. I don’t want to see them, and they don’t want to see me.”
“But they do, dear old lad. I’ve told ’em about you, and they’re all simply crazy to meet you.”
“What have you told ’em about me?”
“All sorts of things. You see, I sort of swore I’d bring you along the first possible chance I had, and what could be fairer than this?”
And in the end Jim Maitland had allowed himself to be persuaded. Though he ragged him unmercifully for the good of his soul, he was really quite fond of his cousin: moreover, he was possessed of a genuine curiosity to gaze upon the post-war young in bulk. Since 1918 he had spent exactly seven months in England, so that his knowledge of the genus was confined to what he had read in books.
Presumably they were much the same as the young have ever been au fond. Only conditions today afforded them so much more freedom. Certainly the lad Percy could drive a motorcar all right, he reflected. He had one of the big Bentleys. Providence in the shape of a defunct aunt of doubtful sanity endowed him with more money than he knew what to do with. But he drove it magnificently, and Jim Maitland was a man who loathed inefficiency.
The traffic was thinning as they spun across Oxford Street, and Percy who had been silent for nearly five minutes began to give tongue again. He rattled off a string of names – the blokes, as he called them, who would probably be there. And then he paused suddenly.
“By Jove! That reminds me. I wonder if she’ll roll up. The last of these shows I went to,” he explained, “a girl beetled in who was a new one on me. Came with Pamela Greystone and her bunch. And I happened to be talking about you at the time. Well, as soon as this wench heard that you knew something about South America she was all over it.”
“I should think there must be quite a number of people who know something about South America,” said Jim, mildly sarcastic.
“Yes, but I was telling ’em, you see, that you knew all about the interior.”
“All about the interior!” Jim laughed. “My dear old Percy, draw it mild.”
“Anyway, she’s damned keen to meet you. Got a brother out there or something.”
“As long as she doesn’t feel certain that I must have met him as we were both out there at the same time, I can bear it. What’s her name, by the way?”
“Haven’t an earthly, old lad. As far as I remember, Pamela called her Judy. But I’m not even certain about that. Here we are!”
They drew up in front of a largish house standing in its own grounds. Half a dozen other cars were already there, and two more were in the drive. A large notice board proclaimed that the place was for sale, and Jim remarked on it to his cousin.
“Been for sale for months, old lad. Belongs to the father of one of our push, and he lets us use it. Let’s get in: there’s most of ’em here already.”
He approached the front door and knocked twice, upon which the top of the letterbox was lifted.
“Pink Gin with guest,” said Percy.
“Pass Pink Gin and guest,” answered a voice, and the door opened.
“To prevent gate crashing,” explained Percy solemnly. “We have a different password each time, and it’s always the name of some drink.”
“I see,” said Jim gravely. “A most necessary precaution. What do we do now?”
“Go below to the cellar and drink beer.”
“Excellent,” remarked Jim. “But why the cellar?”
“My dear old lad, why not?”
With which unanswerable remark Percy led the way.
The cellar was a big room, and Jim looked round him curiously. Some thirty people were there, and every one of them seemed to be talking at the top of their voices. The air was blue with cigarette smoke, and a strong aroma of kipper smote the nostrils.
“That’s the filly I was telling you about, Jim,” said Percy in his ear. “The girl in grey over there in the corner.”
She was talking to two men, one of whom was evidently a licensed buffoon; and Jim glanced at her idly. Then once again his gaze travelled round the room. It all seemed very harmless, and very uncomfortable, and rather stupid. Why a large number of presumably wealthy young people should elect to sit in a cellar in Hampstead and drink beer, when they could have done so in comfort anywhere else they liked, defeated him.
He realised that Percy was introducing him to various girls, and he grinned amiably. Now that he had come he had better make the best of it. And then suddenly he found himself looking into a pair of level blue eyes – eyes with a faintly mocking challenge in them. The buffoon had drifted away: for the moment the girl in grey and he were alone.
“And what,” she remarked, “brings the celebrated Jim Maitland into this galaxy?”
“Curiosity,” he answered simply. “But why, in Heaven’s name, celebrated?”
“Our little Percy has insisted so long and so often that you are, that we’ve got to believe him in common politeness. Well – what do you think of it?”
“Frankly, I think it’s all rather childish,” he said. “Does it really amuse you?”
She shrugged her shoulders.
“It’s a change,” she answered. “Let’s go into that corner and sit down. I want to talk to you. Rescue some cushions from somewhere.”
He studied her thoughtfully as she sat down with legs tucked under her. A slightly tip-tilted nose; a complexion, unaided as far as he could see, that only the word perfect could do justice to: a slim, delicious figure. Her hands were capable but beautifully kept: her hair clung tightly to a boyish head
.
“Well,” she said calmly, “do you approve?”
He smiled: said as she said it the remark rang natural.
“Entirely,” he answered. “But before we go any further, has it occurred to you that the egregious Percy has omitted the small formality of telling me your name.”
“Draycott. Judy Draycott.”
She took a cigarette from her case, and Jim held a match for her.
“Tell me, Mr Maitland, are we very different to the pre-war vintage?”
“That’s rather a poser,” he said, sitting down beside her. “You see, I’ve been so little in England since the war that I’m not a very good judge.”
“But – this.” She waved her hand at the room.
“Good Lord!” he laughed, “what has this got to do with it? This is nothing: a tiny symptom in a tiny set.”
“You know you are of what I always call the lost generation,” she said. “What Daddy would call the senior subaltern brand.”
He stared at her in silence, a little nonplussed by her serious tone.
“You were our age just before the war,” she went on, “and you’re still young enough to play. But there are so few of you left.”
“True,” he said gravely. “I suppose my contemporaries took it worst.”
“There are the old people, and there are us. But the connecting link has gone – you and yours.”
“The lost generation,” he repeated slowly. “A nice idea – that.”
“And that’s why I asked you what you thought of us,” she said. “You are one of the few who are qualified to judge.”
He lit another cigarette before replying.
“Am I? I wonder. One can see changes – naturally, but who am I to say whether they are for the better or for the worse. This show, for instance. Frankly, I can’t quite see this happening twenty years ago. Nor did everyone call everyone else ‘darling’ on sight.”
