The Shadow and the Peak

by Richard Mason

  Title

  Richard Mason

  THE SHADOW

  AND THE PEAK

  Contents

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Dedication

  For

  FELICITY

  Author’s Note

  Author’s Note

  The site of the school in this book could be roughly identified; but Jamaicans will need no reassurance that the school itself does not exist—not at any rate in Jamaica. I have not heard of any “progressive” boarding-school on the island, nor of any attempt to start one, although there is a day-school in Kingston which is particularly notable for the advanced outlook of its headmaster—a young Jamaican-born Rhodes Scholar of great sensibility and imagination. I am happy to say that, unlike my fictitious school, it has had a splendid success.

  R.M.

  Chapter One

  You could always count on some exciting distraction during a class in the open air, and on Monday afternoon there was the crash. Until then nothing untoward had occurred—nothing untoward for a school that called itself progressive. There had been no tropical insects causing exaggerated screams of alarm, no open rebellion from Silvia, not even a new ship sailing round the end of the reef four thousand feet below—nothing until five minutes to four when the air-liner came into sight, drifting listlessly up the valley in the fierce Jamaican sun.

  “Mr. Lockwood—look!”

  Douglas was sitting with his back against the trunk of a juniper, reading a book to them. During the last class in the afternoon it was useless trying to do anything but play games or read: half the children were asleep, the other half wondering how to spend their free time after the bell went at four. He was used to interruptions, although aircraft generally went by unnoticed. They came over a dozen times a day, British and Dutch and American, flying up from the airport on the reef and heading north across the Blue Mountains to Nassau and Miami and Camaguey in Cuba. You could set your watch by them.

  He laid the book on his knee and said:

  “Sit down, Alan. I want to finish this chapter. I’m getting quite interested, even if you aren’t.”

  “You must look at this aircraft—there’s something wrong with it.”

  He had paid no attention to the aircraft while he was reading, but now he heard the uneven note of the engines. They were spluttering and shutting off and spluttering into life again. He closed the book.

  “We’ll go on with this tomorrow.”

  All the children were standing up. There were six in the class, four girls and two boys.

  “Quick, Mr. Lockwood!”

  He rose to his feet. They were out on the grass slope just below the Great House, which stood by itself, massive and grey, on the outer ridge of the Blue Mountains. On one side of them, far below, a thin line of surf like an edging of lace divided the rocky coast from the sea. On the other side, across a deep jungle-choked valley, rose the precipitous wall of another ridge.

  “I can’t see anything,” Douglas said.

  “Look there! You must be blind!” The boy was jumping up and down with excitement. Then he exclaimed all at once: “It’s on fire!”

  A moment later Douglas caught sight of it, lower than he had expected, drifting up the valley below them, close to the steep wall of the ridge. It was a huge machine with four engines. From the inside engine on the near wing a short flame fluttered stiffly back-wards like a flag.

  “It’s the Bahamas plane,” one of the boys said.

  “It isn’t,” a girl said. “It’s the one that takes off at a quarter to four. It goes to Cuba.”

  “It goes to the Bahamas after that.”

  “No it doesn’t; it goes to Florida.”

  Douglas said, “What a time to start quarrelling!”

  “We’re not quarrelling. I know it’s the Bahamas plane.” This was Alan—Alan always knew everything.

  A mile beyond the Great House the ridge fell gradually to a saddle and then rose again in a broad shoulder to join the higher mountains. The air-liner was nosing round the contours of the mountainside, trying to gain height. If it passed over the saddle it could probably glide back to the airport or come down in the sea. The fire was still isolated to one engine, and it looked for a minute as if it might succeed.

  Rosemary said in a small frightened voice, “Couldn’t they jump out with parachutes, Mr. Lockwood?” She had turned white. She was a nervous child, who always went into a trance of speechless terror during thunderstorms.

  “I don’t think they carry parachutes in civil air-liners.”

  “They’d be too low to use them, anyhow.” This was Alan again. One of the girls said with intense interest, I wonder if all the people on board know they might be killed at any minute.”

  “They probably won’t be killed,” Alan said. “They’ll probably get over the saddle all right.” He was afraid he might have sounded disappointed, and added, “I hope so, at any rate.”

  A moment later the air-liner went out of sight behind the curve of the slope. The two boys bolted off at once without asking permission, but one of the girls said:

  “Is it all right to go, Mr. Lockwood?”

  “Yes, if you want.”

  “I’m not going,” Rosemary said. “I shall wait here.” She was trembling. One of the other girls, Silvia, had sat down again and opened a book, pretending to take no interest. She was sulking.

  “I’ll wave to you if it gets over safely,” Douglas told Rosemary.

  He followed the others slowly up the grass slope. He could still hear the engines of the air-liner more distant now, choking fitfully. Two months ago he had come out from England in an air-liner of the same type; and he remembered thinking, in one moment of anguished depression on the journey, that he would have welcomed the quick extinction of a crash. Now, listening to the failing engines, he knew he wouldn’t have welcomed it at all . . .

  All at once he heard the explosion. It was a long boom that resounded in the valley like a distant bomb.

  He paused for a moment, and then hurried forward. The children were standing at the top of the slope quite motionless, looking along the ridge. As he reached them the saddle came into view, a little over a mile away. Flames were springing briskly out of the jungle just below it. The breeze blowing from the Caribbean carried the smoke over the valley and across the face of Blue Mountain Peak.

  They all stood watching in silence. Then a bell began to jangle unevenly in the Great House. It was four o’clock.

  It wasn’t until after Joe had found the tail of the air­craft that the disaster became real. At first Douglas had stood there, in the blackened circle of jungle, feeling guilty that he wasn’t more upset: that he should have found time to wonder, amongst the scattered and smouldering debris, if his own mail for England had been on board. His last letter to Caroline . . .

  It had taken him nearly an hour to reach the wreckage hacking his way through the undergrowth. He had brought along a first-aid kit and a couple of stretchers but his lingering hopes that they might be needed had vanished at once. The exploding pet
rol tanks had blown the machine to bits. There was nothing left to recognize except the engines. By that time the flames had died down and the smoke was rising quietly from amongst the charred and broken tree-trunks and the shrivelled leaves. He had the sense that the crash had occurred years ago: the sense of arriving at a dead city.

  Three or four Negro peasants, who had arrived before him, were poking about with sticks, walking on bare feet over the hot white ashes. They had made a pile of objects that had somehow escaped complete destruction: a small charred suitcase, a cup, a portable typewriter, the remnants of a mackintosh. They had also dragged out one body—the body of a woman. The fire had scorched off her hair and most of her clothing and blackened her skin. She looked like a Negress. Only one leg had been untouched by the flames. It was still perfectly white.

  After a time Douglas had found another body under a twisted mass of pipes and wires. There was no point in trying to drag it out. Then he saw a shrivelled, dismembered, surrealistic hand. Nothing else. He had retired from the heat again, wiping the greasy perspiration from his face with the sleeve of his shirt. Already the sense of reality had left him. The hand wasn’t real, and nor was the woman with the stark white leg. He couldn’t really grasp that two hours ago this wreckage had been an intricate assemblage of ten thousand delicately fashioned parts, an infinitely complex and beautiful monster shining silver in the sun. He was in the midst of death, and yet couldn’t feel it—couldn’t feel that around him only the ashes of thirty men and women who had climbed into the aircraft with handbags and novels and brief-cases, thirty separate minds, each with its own structure of memories and hopes. Now the ten thousand polished parts and the memories and hopes lay in this charred and smouldering confusion, and he stood there wondering about his letter to Caroline . . . If only there had been something he could have done—someone he could have saved.

  Just then he heard Joe shouting.

  “You come now, please, sir. I done find something.”

  Joe was the school handyman and chauffeur, who had accompanied Douglas to the crash. Now he was standing over on the other side of the wreckage grinning with excitement. Douglas went round to him.

  “I done find something, Mr. Lockwood, sir.”

  He led the way into the jungle. Twenty or thirty yards through the undergrowth they suddenly came upon the whole tail section of the aircraft. The tail-plane and fin were caught in the branches of a tree, and the fuselage rested vertically on the ground. The windows weren’t even cracked.

  Joe was down on his haunches by the lowest window.

  “Listen here now, please, sir.”

  Douglas went down beside him. It was too dark inside to see through the window, but when he put his ear against it he could hear someone moaning.

  Joe grinned. He was a strong, well-built Negro of twenty-five.

  “Please, him no duppy, sir.” Duppies were spirits of the dead. Most coloured people were scared of them, but not Joe.

  Douglas knocked on the glass and called out but the moaning continued in the same dull way. He told Joe to fetch the stretchers and call the peasants. Then he walked round the upturned fuselage, looking for the best place to break in. It was impossible to climb in from underneath because the broken jagged edges had crumpled against the ground. The windows were too small to climb through. The only way was to break a panel of the fuselage. He started hacking at the aluminium with Joe’s machete, close to the spot where he had heard the moaning. The aluminium was strengthened by metal ribs, and it took him ten minutes to open up a hole large enough for his head and shoulders. He looked through and saw that it was the toilet. At this angle the seat looked as if it was sticking out of one of the walls. A man was lying crumpled in the corner below, still moaning faintly. His face was badly cut and bleeding, and there was blood all over his white tropical suit.

  Douglas crawled into the compartment, straightened the man’s limbs, and began to manoeuvre him out through the hole. Joe and the others took hold of him and laid him on the ground. The door of the compartment was buckled and jammed, so Douglas climbed out of the hole again. He told Joe to make a second hole round the other side of the fuselage. Then he had a look at the man on the ground. He was about fifty. He had stopped moaning, and was now breathing rather stertorously. His pulse was thin but steady. There was one nasty gash on his cheek, but otherwise the cuts were clean and superficial. Douglas wiped them over with disinfectant from the first-aid kit and bandaged him up. By that time Joe had finished making his hole, and was already inside the fuselage. As Douglas went round to climb in, he heard his muffled voice from inside:

  “I done find somebody else, sir.”

  “Alive?”

  “I don’t know as yet, sir.” There was silence for a moment and then he said, “She got breath all right, sir.”

  Douglas crawled through the jagged hole in the aluminium. There wasn’t much light inside, and with the fuselage at this cockeyed angle it took him a moment or two to get his bearings. Then he realized that he was on his hands and knees on the partition that divided the rear and central compartments of the aircraft. The door of the partition was hanging open beneath him, with the ground a few feet below. There was a heap of stuff about the place: broken crockery, cardboard trays, thermos bottles, cutlery, packets of biscuits, sandwiches, and all the other contents of the canteen. Joe had climbed up somewhere above. Douglas followed him, finding footholds in the cupboards of the galley. Above the cupboard there was a recess, forming a broad level shelf, on which Joe was crouching. The body he had discovered had been flung into a contorted position in the corner. It was a girl of about twenty-five. He saw by her white uniform skirt and blouse that she was a stewardess. The red swallow symbol of the air-line was stitched on her shoulders. Her face was a dead white, giving her red lips the incongruous look of lips painted for a joke on a marble statue.

  Joe said, grinning, “She pretty for true, Mr. Lockwood, Sir.”

  “That won’t help her much unless we can bring her round,” Douglas said. “And, anyhow, don’t forget you’re a married man.”

  “You marry too, please, sir?”

  Douglas began to straighten out the girl’s arms, which were twisted under her body.

  “I used to be married,” he said.

  The trek back to the school just about finished him. He had sent Joe on ahead with a message to fetch the doctor up to the Great House, in case nobody had thought of doing so in anticipation. Two of the peasants were carrying the man on the stretcher, and the third was helping Douglas with the girl. The other peasant had mumbled some objection to coming along, and Douglas hadn’t stopped to argue. Probably he had his eye on the few bits of loot from the wreckage.

  After the first few hundred yards they lost the track that Douglas and Joe had made on the way down. They had to hack a new path through the undergrowth. Every time they stopped to use the machete, it was necessary to lay down the stretchers. They changed direction several times, trying to hit the path that ran somewhere near the top of the ridge. Even the peasants, the direct descendants of tough slave stock, began to weary perceptibly. Douglas’s hands were breaking out in blisters. The dull pain in his back sharpened to agony. Presently he told himself that if they didn’t hit the path in the next five minutes, he would leave the men with the stretchers and go ahead for reinforcements. When five minutes had expired, he gave himself another three. Then he added a further two to make a total of ten. He then thought he could see the line of the path through the trees, so he kept on. He was surprised to find it really was the path. As they broke through to it, Joe appeared with a party of three men who had come up from the air-port. One of them was a pilot. He said:

  “I say, by Jove, it’s honestly marvellous of you chaps to have organized all this. I hear it’s almost a complete burnout.”

  “Except for the tail,” Douglas said. “It looked as if it had been amputated with a razor-blade.” />
  “They do that. I saw one like it in the war. They’re converted bombers, you know.”

  “They’d better stop converting them if this is what happens.”

  “Too true they ought.” He was looking at the girl.

  “She’s only been with us three weeks. I forget her name. She’s a gay kid.” He suddenly gave a queer laugh. “There were two of them on board. I didn’t know which one it was when this chap told me you’d rescued a stewardess. I was engaged to the other one.”

  Douglas forgot about the pain in his back.

  “I’m awfully sorry,” he said.

  The pilot turned away. “That’s all right. I’d better get on down and have a look at it.”

  Douglas said, “I don’t think it’s worth your while. Couldn’t you leave it until tomorrow?”

  “Better not. You don’t mind your chap showing us the way, do you?”

  “Of course not.” They all went off. Douglas followed the path with the stretchers. After a while he had to call a halt for another rest. He gave the men cigarettes and lit one for himself, and sat down on the bank. Neither the man nor the girl had regained consciousness, although the girl had moved her hands and spoken a few incomprehensible words in a sleep-talking sort of way. She had received quite a nasty knock on the back of her head and was a mass of bruises, but otherwise there wasn’t much wrong with her. He wondered whether she’d retreated to the back of the aircraft out of wisdom, or whether it was one of those absurd little chances that afterwards take on such portentous significance, like the unaccustomed pause at a shop window that causes someone to miss an ill-starred train.

  He was just finishing his cigarette and thinking they’d soon have to move on again when he noticed the girl open her eyes. She looked at him in sleepy bewilderment, and then closed them again.

  “I know it sounds crazy,” she said presently in a drugged kind of voice, “but I can’t remember where I am.”

  “You’re in Jamaica,” he said. “You were in a smash. You’re all right now, though.”