“Holloa! Holloa! Is there anyone still down there? Make yourselves known! The ship is going over! Our last boat must cast off in five minutes! Are you there? Is anyone still there?”
Without waiting for a reply, the officer went back to the upper deck. Holmes had kept his forefinger to his lips to indicate silence. Now he lowered it.
“This is not over,” he said softly. “Have you your revolver with you?”
“Of course. Have you?”
“No. I should like to borrow yours, if you would be so kind.”
With a sense of exasperation, I gave it to him. We went slowly back towards the companionway steps, through the rush and swill of water on the tilted deck planking of the passageway. I guessed there would be no further warning before a sudden lurch and capsizing of the broken hull. We came up into the fog and the cold, between the funnels and the after-saloon. There was a haloed light here and there, but the vapour in the air seemed as thick as ever. No one remained in the first-class saloon. Plon Plon and his party were safe if anyone was. Two or three of the ship’s officers and a handful of passengers seemed to be making their way towards the boat.
What followed next was beyond anything I could have imagined. We were standing behind the funnels just aft of the remains of the navigation-bridge. Lifeboats from the Princesse Henriette had come alongside the stern and taken off the passengers. The forward deck of our vessel was thankfully deserted. At the moment of the impact, the bow of the Henriette had not quite cut us in two. Now, beneath my feet I felt the timbers of the Comtesse de Flandre pulling apart; then I heard them screech and rend. Without further warning, the intolerable weight of tons of water in the depths of the ship on its port side twisted the broken hull beyond endurance. There came a deep rumble, though not a loud one.
Through the last drifts of smoke and steam that overhung the deck, unreal as if in a dream, I saw the bows of the steamer rise slowly and ghostlike before us. There was nothing louder than the dripping of water. The forepart sank gently back into the waves as it split away. Rolling aside, a thirty-foot length of the ship turned over slowly and capsized without a further sound. It was no longer part of the ship. Water streamed down the riveted steel of its flanks, as the bows disappeared from our view beneath the quiet waves. There was no turbulence and no echo in the depths. We watched like mourners at a burial.
Looking back on this disaster, everything I have described took far less time to happen that it takes to tell. And how can a few bald sentences convey the drama of it, except to those who have lived through such a quiet catastrophe? But fortunately, ships do not always “sink like a stone,” especially if they are flat-bottomed steamers. Napoleon-Jerome was right about that. Also, thankfully, the sea was calm. Our heavy boilers had broken away and sunk with the bows. Lightened by this, the wreck of the Comtesse de Flandre floated, from the paddle-boxes and funnels back to the stern. The list to starboard was no longer quite so pronounced. In what time was left before the remainder of the wreck sank, the work of rescue might be concluded.
Not all of this rescue attempt had gone well. The second mate of the Comtesse de Flandre, an experienced sailor with a record of service in the Royal Navy, had knocked the starboard lifeboat off its chocks at the stern. It had then been swung out above the sea by its davits. By some miscalculation in handling it, the bow had abruptly dropped down with the stern drawn up high, and the mechanism had jammed. The boat had been left suspended from the side of the ship at an impossible angle. Fortunately the Princesse Henriette had by then lowered one of her after lifeboats into the waves on an even keel. Looking over the rail amidships, I could see that the sailors on both ships had also thrown into the sea anything that would float well enough to support passengers in the water until they could be picked up. There were several planks, a hen-coop, and even a small carpenter’s bench still drifting within a few yards of us.
Through the fog, the dim shape of the other steamer appeared briefly and intermittently in the distant sweep of the Ruytingen light vessel. The two ships had drifted apart immediately after the collision, but the Princesse Henriette was only a short distance away and appeared to be intact. We had heard the rattle of her chain and a heavy splash as her anchor went down. When the indistinct gleam from Ruytingen swept the surface again, it illuminated briefly the outline of two or three small fishing smacks and luggers, which hove to in case they could assist us. It seemed that we had not been as isolated as I had supposed.
11
In the fleeting phosphorescence from the light-ship, I made out a small boat that had come alongside our stern. The line of the Comtesse de Flandre dropped down at the after end to a small well-deck that accommodated the winch and its platform. The lower stern rail could also be opened at this point to give access for engineering maintenance. In the present state of the wreck, as the lower decks flooded, this had become the easiest point at which to disembark survivors into a small boat. Or, indeed, to embark from one.
We stood and listened behind the yellow funnels. The black “admiralty caps” round their tops were lost in the mist overhead. The scene around us was illuminated by the last glimmering oil-lights, two of them fitted just above the windows of the after-saloon. Their pale glow extended little more than a yard or two around us. Even here, the devastation was considerable. Not only was the navigation-bridge wrecked, but the wide ventilation skylight of the engine-room had been blown off by an explosion of steam from the boilers. Looking down at the flooded engine-room, I could just see that the rising water was now level with the blocks of the pistons that had driven the ship.
At that moment, my heart seemed to jump to my throat as the casing of an oil-light mounted above a square window of the saloon shattered without warning. There was no sound of a detonation as the frosted glass enclosing the wick burst apart, only the rattle of fragments scattering across the deck. A small pool of fire from the little oil reservoir of the lamp rippled, guttered, and expired on the planking no more than a foot or two away from us.
Then someone laughed in the darkness of the fog bank that lay on all sides.
Before I could ask Holmes what the devil was happening, another glass lamp-bowl disintegrated, high on a standard above the companionway opening. Specks of burning wick flew about like sparks from a forge. Then there was darkness except for a remaining glimmer above the starboard window of the saloon. But I knew who had laughed even before I heard the voice calling me.
“It won’t do, doctor! It won’t do at all! I have warned you more than once, have I not, that you had far better give it up?”
The launch alongside our stern had not come to rescue us. Without another sound, the square glass window of the saloon, by my right shoulder, cracked into three pieces and slithered inwards. Joshua Sellon had died without a sound, for I had examined the wound that killed him. I was now undergoing my first practical experience of Von Herder’s carbon dioxide cylinder-pistol. No percussion wave. No powder flash. No acrid drift of cordite. And in the darkness of the fog, the marksman remained an invisible assailant, his soft-nosed lead bullets travelling almost at the speed of sound. Powerful enough to smash a window with a shot whose discharge was silent and invisible. Powerful enough, as I had seen for myself, to drill through a man’s skull and blow the segments of his brain apart as though they had been no more than a cauliflower.
The voice came again, abruptly and from a different direction. I had not a hope of seeing him in such conditions. Stillness everywhere made it all the more difficult to guess the range.
“Doctor! I warned you that you would only hurt yourself! But you would have it so. You would not listen! And since you would have it so, it shall be so.”
After the first smooth irony, the last four words were spoken with a snarl. Then there was complete silence again. Where the devil could he be? The voice certainly came from astern of us, but that told me very little. There was nothing of the ship’s bows left. Forward of the funnels and the wrecked navigating bridge, the deck dropped to
a vast and empty sea. In the dripping fog, a gunman could take fresh aim with every bullet and we should never see him. He had a store of cartridges and all the time in the world. Sooner or later, if only by luck, he would bring down one or other of us. Then we should be finished. Small wonder that the skill of Von Herder, the blind mechanic, was a legend in the European underworld.
I could make out Sherlock Holmes, motionless as a statue. His unmistakable gaunt silhouette was just visible in the veil of mist beside me. He had not bothered to draw my revolver from his pocket. A single shot, a flash from its muzzle, the crack of the explosion, would pinpoint our position for a man who was probably not more than twenty feet away. A man who could put five shots in succession through the heart of the ace of spades at thirty-seven paces. The fog remained our friend. As long as it persisted, Rawdon Moran must fire blind.
In a voice no louder than a breath, Holmes whispered.
“He will hit us sooner or later. We must lead him on constantly, bring him forward from the shadows. He will not resist the temptation to follow. The man is a hunter, and it is his instinct to stalk the prey. But we must move. Now.”
As if to confirm this necessity, the glass pane in the other window of the saloon shattered. I had heard nothing of the bullet passing. But I remembered Holmes telling me that there would be no atmospheric crack until the velocity of the shot exceeded the speed of sound. All three targets had been within ten or twelve feet of where we stood. One question was uppermost in my mind. Why the devil had Holmes not got his useful little Laroux pistolet, as I had brought my Webley? Was it still in his table-drawer at Baker Street? Surely not. But if not, where was it?
He was moving away slowly ahead of me without a sound, gliding round the port side of the after-saloon, beckoning me on.
Then came that damned voice again! Was he such a fool as to believe he could torment our nerves until one of us shouted out or fired blind?
“Why could you not do as you were advised, doctor? Why could you not go back and heal the sick, as you were trained to do? Why could you not be content to marry your little sweetheart, Mary Morstan, or invest your little nest-egg in old Mr. Farquhar’s Paddington practice? Even now it is not too late. I could wish you well and dance at your wedding, but you have given me no chance.… Oh, doctor, doctor!”
In those few seconds, I became badly frightened by this buffoonery. How it was, I knew not—but he had watched every moment and knew every secret. Miss Morstan and I were dear friends. Who knows what the future might hold? How did Moran know of her—and what could he know? Her name was now on the lips of a man who would send her to her death without scruple. Had he not sent Emmeline Putney-Wilson and almost the maid Seraphina—and others, perhaps, by his own hands? The brute need only watch patiently until that one minute in a thousand days when a woman was not under the immediate protection of a lover or her family. However constant the guard, such a moment always comes to one who watches patiently enough. Holmes was right. There was no safety except in the destruction of Rawdon Moran.
“Oh, doctor, doctor!”
Now there was laughter in that voice again, laughing at itself, laughter that was unhinged. Of course he judged me to be weaker than Holmes, and so aimed at me. He would break my nerve, frighten me to answer back, pleading for a chance to bargain, giving away our position. Then he would have us both. But I felt a sudden anger and determination. I accepted his challenge. Where was he? A brief luminance from Ruytingen across the waves lay upon the fog without piercing it. The wide surface of that cold sea was still and calm, except for the occasional wash of a wave against the listing wreck of the Comtesse de Flandre.
I heard him again as I followed Holmes round the side of the after-saloon. Now it was my friend’s turn to be taunted.
“Have no fear, Mr. Holmes. As a man of honour, I do not take my opponent’s life by an act of murder. I would not treat a beast of the jungle so. Stand your ground, both of you, and you shall both have your chance. Run like cowards and you must accept the consequences. Even you, my dear Mr. Sherlock Holmes! Would you prefer the readers of the obituaries and the penny papers to learn that, at the last, you had been a ninny, shot in the back running away?”
Despite the worst I had heard of him, I never expected this gibbering of the madhouse cell, for that was what it had become. The voice now seemed to echo from the starboard side and we were moving like ghosts towards the stern, under the port shelter of the after-saloon, keeping our backs to its wall. Then a fragment of deck planking snapped and splintered just beside my right foot. It was the impact of a shot at random from his silent pistol. He had moved round and was behind us suddenly. We continued to edge sideways towards the stern, presenting the smallest possible target. But in a moment we must leave the shelter of the saloon and come into the view of Moran’s seamen by the winch. Holmes had instinctively drawn the Webley revolver, but it was useless to us now.
I had a mad idea that we could save ourselves by swimming for our lives. Without shoes and heavier outer clothing, we might dive from the rail and support ourselves if necessary on one of the floating planks. After a few strokes from the ship’s side, the fog would close round us again. It could not be more than two hundred yards to the ropes that hung down the sides of the Princesse Henriette for survivors to clutch at. Could we do it? I could swim further than that as a schoolboy or at Battersea baths as a medical student. But this dark sea held a bitter chill, and its unknown currents might carry us away from safety.
Holmes seemed intent upon his own plan. With long supple fingers that Paganini or Joachim might have envied, he was silently easing back the sliding door at this side of the saloon. There was no sound of our adversary, no derisive voice. Moran might be six feet away—or sixty. Had he come and gone? No. I felt sure he was still behind us. Keeping our heads down, we crossed the curtained saloon in darkness, its curtains still closed, and came out on the starboard side. Holmes was evidently making a circuit in order to follow our route again and then take him in the rear.
Coming out through that opposite door into the enveloping mist once more, we felt our way forward, our backs to the wall of the saloon again. We were coming to the point at which he had seemed to be standing when we first heard his voice. With luck, he was still following us towards the stern and we might track him unseen. Once in view, a single bullet would do the job. That, of course, was the moment when we might dive from the rails and save ourselves from the rest of his crew. But as I calculated our chances, my foot caught some object in the darkness and I almost overbalanced. It felt like a fallen log. I put my hand down and felt a human leg, then a jacket, and then the features of a face. The Ruytingen light touched the surface of the sea for an instant. In its brief reflection I saw the dead man’s face. It was Lieutenant Cabell.
If I felt fear of any kind, it was not for a dead body. I had seen far too many for that. Rather, it came from the knowledge that something had gone wrong with all our plans. We were in the trap. Holmes had counted on our adversaries watching us every minute, reading our messages, decoding our cipher. He had counted on them believing that he would be on board the ship, no matter what he said. Had his judgment failed him now in the matter of the young lieutenant?
A whisper came at my ear, so quiet that it might have been Holmes. It was amiable, intimate, and soothing, coming from behind me:
“You would have it so, doctor, would you not? And, you see, it has come to this. You stand between Mr. Holmes and myself. He cannot shoot me unless he shoots you first, which I think he will not do. And he knows that if he does not lay his weapon down upon the deck this minute, then I—with more regret than I can ever describe—must shoot you here and now. And then, with more reluctance than I have felt in killing the noblest beast, I must shoot him.”
I cried out at once, “Do as you must, Holmes!”
The moment the words were out of my mouth, I knew what a fool I had been. I meant him to understand that he must ignore me and take Moran to the land of shado
ws at all costs. Had I said, “Shoot him!” that would have done it. But it seemed as if “Do as you must” meant “Do as he tells you.” To my dismay, Holmes laid my revolver on the deck and addressed our adversary.
“My congratulations, colonel. Your reputation as a hunter goes before you. It was remiss of me not to foresee that you might use Lieutenant Cabell’s body as a bait to catch your prey. Sooner or later, even in this fog, we should stumble upon the poor fellow quite literally. The snare at which you waited would spring and you would have us.”
Moran ignored the compliment. He came into view now, almost bear-like in his heavy military coat. He motioned us on with the pistol in his hand.
“A little further forward, if you please, gentlemen. Under the light.”
In a situation so desperate and with the mind racing, there was nothing for it but to obey, moving an inch at a time and keeping one’s nerve. With the heavy-looking weapon of Von Herder in his hand, Moran followed us, scooping up my revolver from the deck before I could prevent him.
Someone had now drawn back the curtains of the after-saloon, where the broken windows faced the ship’s funnels, and a lamp had been lit. The space where we had first stood was hazily lit by the light from the interior. Holmes turned to face our enemy so that we stood with our backs to this illumination. Moran laughed, as if to assure us that such a position would not inconvenience him in the least.
Death on a Pale Horse: Sherlock Holmes on Her Majesty's Secret Service Page 31
