The 3rd Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories

NO SHIPS PASS Lady Eleanor Smith

“I am glad,” thought Patterson, “that I’ve always been a damned good swimmer . . .” and he continued to plough his way grimly through the rimming, tumbled argent of the breakers. It seemed hours, although it was actually moments, since the yacht had disappeared in one brief flash of huge and bluish flame; now the seas tossed, untroubled, as though the yacht had never been; and the boat containing his comrades had vanished, too, he noticed, glancing over his shoulder—had vanished with such swiftness as to make him think that it must have been smudged by some gigantic sponge from the flat, greenish expanse of the ocean. The strange part was that he was able, as he swam, to think with a complete, detached coherence; he was conscious of no panic; on the contrary, as he strove with all his might to gain the strip of land dancing before his eyes, his mind worked with a calm and resolute competence.

“I always thought we’d have a fire with all that petrol about . . . Curse all motor-yachts . . . I wonder if the others have been drowned? . . . Good job I gave the boat a miss . . .”

He was not even conscious of much regret as he thought of the probable fate of his comrades—his employer, his employer’s son, the members of the crew. Already, as he swam on and on through gently lapping waves, the yacht and those who belonged to it had become part of the past, remote and half-forgotten. The present and the future lay ahead, where a long line of sand shimmered like silver before his eyes. Yet it was funny, he mused; there had been no sign of land from aboard the yacht, and it was not until the actual panic of the fire that he had noticed the dim shape of this island, “near enough to swim to,” as he had cried to the others, but they swarmed into the boat, taking no notice of his cries. And so he had embarked alone upon this perilous adventure.

He was a strong swimmer, but he was growing tired. Were his limbs suddenly heavier, or had the sea become less buoyant? He clenched his teeth, striking out desperately, then floated for a while, lying on his back, the huge arch of the sky towering a million miles above him like some gigantic bowl, all fierce hydrangea-blue. When he turned to swim again, he was refreshed, but more sensible of the terrors of his situation. And yet, was it his fancy, or had the shores of the island loomed nearer during the moments of this brief rest? At first he believed himself to be suffering from hallucination, then, as he looked again, he realised that he was making remarkable progress . . . He was now so near that the beach glittered like snow in the tropical sunshine before his eyes, and the sands dazzled him, yet he could perceive, lapping against them, a line of softly creaming surf, and above the sands there blazed the vivid jewel-green of dense foliage. The gulls wheeled bright-winged against the brighter silver of sea and sand. Then he was prepared to swear that his ears distinguished, sounding from the shore, a harsh and murmurous cry that might have been—for he was very weary—something in the nature of a welcome for the creature trying so desperately to gain this sparkling and gaudy sanctuary.

And then exhaustion descended upon him like a numbing cloak, and his ears sang and his brain whirled. His limbs seemed weighted, and his heart pumped violently and he thought he must drown, and groaned, for at that moment life seemed sweet and vivid, since life was represented by the island, and the seas were death.

“Well, now for death,” he thought, and as he sank, his foot touched bottom.

He realised afterwards that he must have sobbed aloud as he staggered ashore. For a moment, as he stood, ankle-deep in warm, powdery sand, with the sun pouring fiercely upon his drenched body, the surf curdling at his feet and the cool greenness of a thickly matted forest cresting the slope above his head, he still thought that he must be drowning, and that this land was mirage. Then the silence was shattered by a shrill scream; and a glowing parrot, rainbow-bright, flew suddenly from amidst the blood-red shower of a tall hibiscus-bush, to wheel, gorgeous and discordant, above his head. Beating wings of ruby and emerald and sapphire. Dripping fire-coloured blossom. Loud, jangling, piercing cries. The island was real.

Patterson fainted, flopping like a heap of old clothes upon the smooth, hard silver of the sand . . .

When he came to himself, the sun was lower and the air fragrant with a scented coolness that seemed the very perfume of dusk itself. For a moment he lay motionless, his mind blank, then, as complete consciousness returned to him and he rolled over on his face, he became aware of a black, human shadow splashed across the sands within a few inches of where he lay. The island, then, must obviously be inhabited. He raised his eyes defiantly.

He could not have explained what he had expected to see—some grinning, paint-raddled savage, perhaps, or else the prim, concerned face of a missionary in white ducks, or, perhaps, a dark-skinned native girl in a wreath of flowers. He saw actually none of these, his gaze encountering a shorter, stranger form—that of an elderly, dwarfish man in what he at first supposed to be some sort of fancy dress. Comical clothes! He gaped at the short, jaunty jacket, the nankeen trousers, the hard, round hat, and, most singular of all, a thin and ratty pigtail protruding from beneath the brim of this same hat. The little man returned his scrutiny calmly, with an air of complete nonchalance; he revealed a turnip face blotched thick with freckles, a loose mouth that twitched mechanically from time to time, and little piggish, filmy blue eyes.

“Good God,” said Patterson at length, “who are you, and where did you appear from?”

The little man asked, in a rusty voice proceeding from deep in his throat:

“Have you tobacco?”

“If I had it’d be no use to you. Do you realise I swam here?”

“You swam? From where?”

There was silence for a moment, a silence broken only by the breaking of the surf and by the harsh cry of birds, as Patterson, more exhausted than he had first supposed, tried idiotically to remember to what strange port the yacht, Seagull, had been bound. He said at length:

“I—we were on our way to Madeira. The Southern Atlantic. The yacht—a petrol-boat—caught fire. And so I swam ashore.”

“Petrol?” the man replied, puzzled. “I know nothing of that. As for the Southern Atlantic, I myself was marooned on these shores deliberate, many and many a year ago, when bound for Kingston, Jamaica.”

“Rather out of your course, weren’t you?”

The little man was silent, staring reflectively out to sea. Patterson, naturally observant, was immediately struck by the look in those small, filmy blue eyes—a singular fixed immobility of regard, at once empty and menacing, a glassy, almost dead expression in which was reflected all the vast space of the ocean on which he gazed, and something else, too, more elusive, harder to define, some curious quality of concentration that, refusing to be classified, nevertheless repelled. He asked:

“What’s your name?”

“Heywood. And yours?”

“Patterson. Are you alone here?”

The narrow blue eyes shifted, slipped from the sea to Patterson’s face, and then dropped.

“Alone? No; there are four of us.”

“And were they also marooned?”

As he uttered this last word he was conscious that it reflected the twentieth century even less than did the costume of his companion. Perhaps he was still light-headed after his ordeal. He added quickly:

“Were they also bound for Jamaica?”

“No,” Heywood answered briefly.

“And how long,” Patterson pursued laboriously, “have you been on the island?”

“That,” said his companion, after a pause, “is a mighty big question. Best wait before you ask it. Or, better still, ask it, not of me, but of the Captain.”

“You’re damned uncivil. Who’s the Captain?”

“Another castaway, like ourselves. And yet not, perhaps, so much alike. Yonder, behind the palms on the cliff, is his hut.”

“I wouldn’t mind going there. Will you take me?”

“No,” said Heywood in a surly tone.

“Good God!” exclaimed Patterson. “I shall believe you if you tell me they marooned you for your ill-manners. I’ve swum about eight miles, and need rest and sleep. If you’ve a hut, then take me to it.”

“The Captain’ll bide no one in his hut but himself and one other person. That person is not myself.”

“Then where do you sleep? In the trees, like the baboons I hear chattering on the hill?”

“No,” Heywood answered, still looking out to sea. “I’ve a comrade in my hut, which is small, since I built it for myself. A comrade who was flung ashore here when a great ship struck an iceberg.”

“An iceberg?” Patterson’s attention was suddenly arrested. “An iceberg in these regions? Are you trying to make a fool of me, or have you been here so long that your wits are going? And, by the way, tell me this: how do you try to attract the attention of passing ships? Do you light bonfires, or wave flags?”

“No ships pass,” said Heywood.

There was another silence. It was almost dark; already the deep iris of the sky was pierced by stars, and it was as though a silver veil had been dragged across the glitter of the ocean. Behind them, on the cliffs, two lights winked steadily. Patterson judged these to proceed from the huts mentioned by his companion. Then came the sound of soft footsteps, and they were no longer two shadows there on the dusky sands, but three.

“Hallo, stranger!” said a casual voice.

Patterson turned abruptly to distinguish in the greyness a sharp, pale face with a shock of tousled hair. A young man, gaunt-looking and eager, clad normally enough in a dark sweater and trousers.

“And this is a hell of a nice island, I don’t think,” the stranger pursued, thrusting his hands into his pockets. He had a strong Cockney accent. Patterson was enchanted by the very prosaicness of his appearance; he brought with him sanity; walking as he did on faery, moon-drenched shores he was blessed, being the essence of the commonplace.

“Name of Judd. Dicky Judd. I suppose you’re all in. Been swimming, ain’t you?”

“Yes. And this fellow Heywood won’t take me to his hut. Says it’s full. Can you do anything about it?”

“You bet,” said Judd. “Follow me, and I’ll give you a bite of supper and a doss for the night. This way—the path up the cliff. We’ll leave Heywood to the moon. Come on.”

Ten minutes later, Patterson was eating fried fish and yams in a log-hut, with an open fireplace and two hammocks swung near the rude doorway. He had noticed, as they climbed the slope together, a grander, more commodious hut built a few hundred yards away amongst some shady palms. This, he surmised, must be the home of the elusive Captain. No sound came from it, but a light burned in the narrow window. As he ate his food he speedily forgot the existence of these fellow-castaways. He asked instead, gulping down water and wishing it were brandy:

“How did you come here, Judd? With the others?”

Judd eyed him swiftly. For one second Patterson imagined that he detected in the merry greenish eyes of his companion the fixed, almost petrified expression that had so much perplexed him in the gaze of Heywood. If he was right, this expression vanished in a flash, yet Judd seemed to withdraw himself, to become curiously remote, as he answered coolly:

“Not I. I came here after them—some time after.”

“Do you mean that, like me, you were the only survivor from your ship?”

“That’s about it,” Judd answered, with his mouth full.

“Tell me about it.”

“Oh . . . there’s nothing much to tell. She was a great liner—I had a berth aboard her—and she struck an iceberg in mid-Atlantic. There was not room for me in the boats, so I jumped . . . But she was a lovely ship, and big as a city. Titanic, they called her.”

“You’re pulling my leg. And for Heaven’s sake chuck it—I’ve had about enough for one day.”

“Strewth, I’m not!” Judd told him energetically. “But no matter. You don’t have to believe it.”

And he whistled, picking his teeth.

Patterson asked with a shiver:

“Look here, joking apart, do you mean to tell me that you honestly believe you were cast ashore here from the wreck of the Titanic?”

“On my oath,” said Judd. He added, jumping up: “Bugs is bad here to-night. Wait while I swat a few.”

“Just answer this,” Patterson interrupted. “Why in Heaven’s name, when you think you were wrecked in mid-Atlantic, should you have landed here on a tropical island off the African coast? Bit of a miracle that, wasn’t it?”

Judd was silent for a moment, flicking at the mosquitoes with a palm-leaf fan. He said at length, sucking his teeth:

“Not being a seafaring man, I take it, you don’t happen to have heard a fairy-story told among sailor-boys all the world over—story of a mirage island that floats about the seas near wrecks bent on collecting castaways?”

Patterson thought desperately.

“This man’s as mad as Heywood, and that’s saying a lot . . . And I’ve got to live with them . . .” Aloud he said: “No, I’ve never heard that one. But there’s one other thing I want to ask you . . . Who’s this Captain that Heywood was talking about? Has he been here for many years?”

“I’ll give you this goatskin for a blanket,” said Judd, “and you can doss near the doorway, where it’s cooler. So you know about the Captain?”

“I’ve only heard his name. I asked you, has he been here for very long?”

“Many years,” answered Judd, with a peculiar inflection.

“Tell me more about him.”

Judd laughed.

“You don’t want to know much, do you? You’ll clap eyes to-morrow on Captain Thunder, late of the barque, Black Joke, well known (he’s always boasting) from Barbados to Trinidad and back again. But you may whistle for the Captain to-night!”

Patterson was sleepy.

“Sounds like a buccaneer,” he muttered into the goatskin, and was soon unconscious, oblivious even of Heywood’s noisy entry into the hut.

By early morning the island’s beauty seemed more exotic even than the radiant plumage of the parakeets darting to and fro in the dim green light of airy tree-tops. Patterson was refreshed after a good night’s sleep, and consequently less depressed. He bathed with Judd, leaving Heywood snoring in his hammock. The beach was a shining snowdrift, the sea a vast tapestry of hyacinth veined and streaked with foam, glowing, glittering in the brilliant sunlight.

They swam for twenty minutes and then lay basking on the sands.

“Hungry?” Judd inquired.

So delicious was the morning that Patterson had quite forgotten the eccentricity manifested by his comrades the previous evening. Rolling over on his stomach, he was about to reply in an enthusiastic affirmative, when he surprised once more in his companion’s gaze that bleak, fey look that had already disconcerted him. He could not understand it, yet it was as though a sombre shadow fled across the beach, obscuring this gay and vivid world of amber sunshine, creaming surf, tossing sea and glowing, brilliant blossom. Beauty was blotted out when Judd, the commonplace, looked like that; he felt suddenly lonely, humble and scared.

“Judd,” he said suddenly, and Judd wrenched away his eyes from the horizon.

“Judd, listen and please tell me the truth. Just what are our chances of getting away from here?”

Judd eyed him thoughtfully.

“If you want the truth, we haven’t any. Sorry, and all that, but there it is.”

“Rubbish!” said Patterson. “A ship will surely pass one day. Just because you’ve had bad luck . . .”

“No ships pass,” Judd told him.

“Rubbish again! Look how close mine came yesterday. The trouble with you, Judd, is that you’ve been here too long, and got into a rut. I don’t believe you care much whether you’re rescued or not. Now, I do. And I’ll tell you my plans——”

“Listen a minute,” said Judd. He propped himself up on his elbow, avoided his companion’s eyes, and resumed: “You might as well hear it now. No sense in keeping it from you, although you’ll think I’m nutty. Listen, then, Patterson. We’re here for keeps. Get that? Look at the Captain and his friend; look at Heywood. If I told you how long they’d been here you wouldn’t swallow it, and I’d not blame you. But you’ve got to know some time—we’re here for ever. Now I feel better.”

Patterson shuddered in the blazing sunshine.

“Do you really think we’ve got to stick this until we die?”

Judd flung a pebble at a pearly cloud of seagulls.

“Worse than that, Patterson. Worse by a long chalk. I told you last night this island was mirage, magic. Stands to reason it is, floating round the world picking survivors from shipwrecks in all the Seven Seas. Well, there’s something worse than that—much worse—and I’m going to tell you what it is. There’s no death on this island. Death forgets us. We’re here for all eternity.”

Patterson laughed nervously.

“You should be in Bedlam, Judd. I suppose a few years’ desert-island does that to one. But look here, now I’ve come to join you, we’ll get away somehow, I promise you that.”

Judd slipped on his trousers.

“You don’t believe me, and small blame to you. I was like that once. But it’s true. I swear to God it is. There’s no death here. For the animals and birds, yes, or we should starve. But not for us. We’re here for all eternity, and you may as well make the best of it.”

Patterson, trying to dress himself, found that his hands were trembling. Yet he tried to be reasonable.

“Look here, Judd, what put this crazy idea into your head?”

“Do you know,” Judd replied, “how long Heywood’s been here? Of course you don’t; I’ll tell you. He was marooned in eighteen twenty-five. It’s nineteen thirty-two now, isn’t it? Add that up for yourself. As for the Captain, he’s had a long spell. He was a pirate, one of those Spanish Main fellows I read about when I was a kid. His crew mutinied in July, seventeen ninety-five. Another sum for you, if you’re quick at figures.”

“Very interesting,” Patterson commented idiotically.

“Don’t you imagine,” Judd continued, “that we haven’t all of us tried to escape in the past? We’ve built rafts and boats—they’ve always been chucked back here on the beach by mysterious tidal waves or tempests. Then we’ve tried to kill ourselves and one another—we’ve been wounded and lain sick for weeks with mosquitoes battening on our wounds, and our wounds have festered, but we’ve pulled through. Now we don’t do that any more. Too much pain for nothing. You always pull through in the end. We’ve tried to drown, and swallowed quarts of water, but always we’ve been flung back on the sands here. Death’s not for us—we’ve jolly well found that out. And so we make the best of it. It’s all right after a time. You live for eating and sleeping, and you blooming well don’t think. Sometimes you go mad, but in the long run you get sane again. And you kowtow to the Captain, who’s got twice the guts of anyone. And, oh, yes, your clothes last just as you last. Funny, isn’t it?”

“What about breakfast?” suggested Patterson.

“I knew you’d think me loopy,” said Judd. “All right, come on back to the hut.”

They scrambled to their feet, and there was an awkward constraint between them. Then Patterson pulled Judd’s arm.

“What’s that? Look, over there! Is that another confounded mirage?”

Judd screwed up his eyes. Beside the rocks, where seaweed flourished like green moss, a woman stood, skirts kilted in her hand. She was barefoot, and sprang from one rock to another, with the grace and agility of a deer. She was gathering mussels. As she worked she sang, and the drowsy, bell-like sweetness of her voice was wafted faintly to their ears all mingled with the cry of seagulls.

“Oh, that,” said Judd. “Well, you’d better remember to act respectful when she’s about. That’s Doña Inés, the Captain’s girl. She was his prisoner; he had her with him on his boat when the crew of the Black Joke mutinied, and they were cast up here together. At least, they both say so. First she hated him, then loved him for forty years or so, and since then, for about a hundred years, she’s been fed up, but he’s still keen on her. So keep away, that’s my advice. Once Heywood went snooping after her, and the Captain cut his throat. He’d have died elsewhere, of course, and he suffered the tortures of hell, he told me. He’ll show you the scar if you’re interested.”

“Wait,” said Patterson, “you’ve given me a turn with your crazy talk, and she’s coming towards us. There’s no harm, I suppose, in speaking to her?”

“None, as long as you’re respectful.”

They waited there on the beach while the woman approached them. She was young, about twenty, and extremely handsome. She wore a stiff, flowing skirt of burning crimson, and a little jacket of orange. Her dark, rippling hair hung like a black plume down her back, and her oval, vivid face was delicately modelled, with high cheek-bones, a mouth like red blossom, and immense velvety-brown eyes. She was Spanish, of course, and well bred; her wrists were fragile, exquisite, her bare feet slender and arched. Her body was lithe, graceful and voluptuous; she moved swiftly, as though she danced, and as she drew near to the two men, a sudden soft breeze blew a lock of floating ebony hair across the fire and sweetness of her mouth.

Patterson was dazed; he had encountered much superstition during the course of the morning, his stomach was empty, and he was but ill-prepared for such beauty.

Doña Inés said gaily, speaking fluent, attractive English:

“Good morning to you, señor. I heard last night of your arrival, but was not allowed to greet you, as I so much desired. Please forgive my execrable manners. We shall see so much of one another that it would be as well to start our acquaintance on friendly terms.”

Patterson pulled himself together and kissed her hand, a long delicate hand all dusky-tanned with the sun. A large diamond glared from the third finger.

“Morning, Inés,” said Judd casually. “Where’s the Captain?”

“Micah?” She became suddenly indifferent. “Waiting for his breakfast, I suppose. I must go to him. Shall we walk up the hill together?”

And so they went, and the Doña Inés moved lightly between them, all bright and flaming in her gaudy clothes, and told Patterson that he must accustom himself to this idea of eternity. After the first hundred years these things mattered little enough.

“As well be here, laughing and walking in the sunshine as in our graves. Don’t you think so, señor? And I, who am talking to you, have so much experience of these things. Why, haven’t I lived here with Micah Thunder for near on a hundred and forty years? And it might be yesterday that he sacked Santa Ana, he and his fleet, and took me prisoner when I was on my knees at Mass, and swore that I should be his woman. And so I was, both here and on his ship. But I have almost forgot the ship, and Santa Ana, too. Now there is only the island, and yet I am not a stricken woman, am I, nor yet a day older than when cast up on these shores?”

And so she prattled, her dark eyes flashing like jewels, until she and the two men came to the clearing where were the two huts, and there, in front of the smaller one, sat Heywood, surly as ever, eating.

“Good-bye, señor,” said Doña Inés. “We will meet later, when I have fed my Captain.”

Patterson sat down on the ground and said nothing.

“Here’s orange-juice,” said Judd, “and custard-apples, and some cornbread I baked myself. No butter—we don’t rise to that—but, all the same, we’ll dine on oysters.”

Patterson ate in silence. He supposed himself to be hungry. And he thought that he was in a nightmare, and would wake soon with the steward shaking him, and find himself once more in a gay, chintz-hung cabin of the Seagull, with bacon and eggs waiting in the dining-saloon. But he did not wake.

“I’ll help you rig up a tent after breakfast,” said Judd. “I’ve got some sailcloth. It’ll last you for a few days, and then you can build a hut for yourself.”

Heywood, eating ravenously, said nothing, but eyed him in silence.

“I wish,” he thought desperately, “they wouldn’t stare like that.”

And suddenly he knew of what their fixed eyes reminded him. They were like dead men in the way they gazed. Glassy and vacant, their eyes were as the eyes of corpses. Perhaps their fantastic stories were true, and he had in reality been cast for all eternity upon a mirage island.

“Oh, Lord,” he thought, “I’m getting as crazy as the rest of them. And yet the woman, the Spanish woman, seemed sane enough, and she believes their tales.”

After breakfast he worked at putting up his tent, sweating in the copper glare of the sun, while Heywood went fishing and Judd vanished into the woods with a bow and arrow. No sound came from the other hut. When he had finished erecting his tent, Patterson lay down in the shade inside it, and found himself craving for a cigarette with a passionate, abnormal longing. It was stuffy in the tent, and mosquitoes clustered round his hot face. He shut his eyes and tried to sleep, but sleep evaded him. And then, as he lay quietly in the oppressive darkness, his instincts, already sharpened by twenty-four hours’ adventure, warned him that someone was watching him. He opened his eyes.

Outside, regarding him impassively, stood a small, slim man in dainty, dandified clothes of green-blue shot taffeta. These garments, consisting of a full-skirted, mincing coat and close-fitting breeches, were smeared with dirt, and seemed to Patterson highly unsuited to desert-island life. The little man wore cascades of grubby lace dripping from his wrists, and rusty buckles on his pointed shoes. He bore himself like a dancing-master, and had no wig, which seemed odd to Patterson, who gaped at a gingery, close-shaven head revealing glimpses of bare skull like pinkish silk. The face of this man was long and narrow and candle-pale, with thin, dry lips and pointed ears. His flickering, expressionless eyes were green as flames; he blinked them constantly, showing whitish, sandy lashes. His hands were long, blanched, and delicate, more beautiful than a woman’s, and he wore on one finger a huge diamond ring, the twin to that other stone blazing upon the finger of Doña Inés. Patterson, disconcerted by the cold, unwavering eyes, scrambled to his feet and held out his hand. It was ignored, but the Captain bowed gracefully.

“Captain Micah Thunder, late of the Black Joke, and at your service.”

He spoke in a high, affected, mincing voice.

“I have already,” Patterson told him, “heard talk of you, Captain Thunder, and am, therefore, delighted to have this opportunity of meeting you.”

“You’re a damned liar,” replied Captain Thunder, with a giggle. “My fame, I understand, has not, through some absurd mischance, been handed down throughout the ages, or so Judd informs me. They talk, I hear, of Flint and Kidd—even of Blackboard, most clumsy bungler of all—but not of Thunder. And that, you know, is mighty odd, for without any desire to boast, I can only assure you, my young friend, that in the three years preceding the mutiny of my crew I was dreaded in all ports as the Avenger of the Main, and, indeed, I recollect taking during that period more than thirty merchantmen.”

He sighed, giggled once more, and shook out the lace ruffles of his cuffs.

“Indeed, sir?” said Patterson respectfully. To himself he thought, in a sudden panic: “I must humour this man; he’s worse than any of them.”

For the Captain, his conical, shaven head, his long, pale face, his deprecating giggle, his cold, greenish eyes and high, affected voice, seemed as he minced there in the sunshine most terribly like an animated corpse coquetting, grotesquely enough, in all the parrot-sheen of silken taffetas and frothing lace. This creature, this little strutting jackanapes, so bleached and frozen and emasculated, looked, indeed, as though a hundred and more years of living on the island had drained away his very life-blood, leaving a dummy, a vindictive posturing dummy, clad in fine raiment, staring perpetually out to sea with greenish, fishy eyes. And something, perhaps the very essence of evil itself, a breath of cold and effortless vice, emanated from him to stink in Patterson’s nostrils like a rank and putrid smell. The odour of decay, perhaps; the very spirit of decay, for surely, in spite of sanity and common sense, this man should long ago have rotted, not in a coffin, but rather from a gibbet on Execution Dock.

And Doña Inés, creeping up softly behind him, seemed brighter, gayer than a humming bird, in contrast to her pale pirate. Receiving a signal from her eye, he knew that he must make no mention of an earlier meeting.

“My mistress, Doña Inés Samaniegos, of Santa Ana,” announced the Captain, with a flourish.

And the lady, very grave and beautiful, ran her hand lightly over the Captain’s sleeve and swept a curtsy, deep and billowing. She was not merry now, neither was she barefoot; she seemed haughty, and had shod herself in high-heeled, red shoes.

“This flower,” said Captain Thunder casually, indicating his paramour with a flick of white finger, “springs from a proud and splendid Castilian family. Is it not so, my heart? I took her when my fleet sacked Santa Ana, finding her myself, when my hands were steeped in blood above the wrists, praying in terror before a waxen, tinselled image of the Virgin. She was sixteen, and very timid, being fresh from convent. Before I wooed I was forced to tame her. When I had tamed her, I was still enamoured, and for four years she sailed the Main as queen of my fleet. The Black Joke, my ship, and the Black Lady, as they called my woman (being accustomed to flaxen peasant maids from Devon), those were all I prized in life. My ship they took, my woman I have kept, and will continue to keep whilst we remain here.”

The drawling voice was icy now, and the light eyes had become green stones. Patterson realised that he was being warned. He answered lightly:

“And may I congratulate you, Captain, upon a lovely and most glorious prize?”

“Do you mind,” said the Captain to Doña Inés, “when that little ape, Heywood, tried to take you, and I slit his throat?”

She nodded, her eyes very dark and lustrous.

The Captain turned to Patterson.

“There is no death on this island, sir, as you will discover for yourself, but it is possible to fight, and fighting, to inflict wounds. A sorry business, very. I declare I regretted it, when I saw the poor creature gurgling in mortal agony. He was sick for many days. But, sooner or later, we all heal. However, I’m soft-hearted, once my rage is appeased. And now you will pray excuse me, while I seek the shade. I’ll leave madam here to entertain you for ten minutes. A change for her, a pleasant interlude for yourself. In ten minutes, then, my dove?”

Bowing, he retreated, walking away with pointed toes, more like a dancing-master than ever.

When he was out of earshot Patterson said impulsively:

“I’m not enamoured of your Captain!”

“And I,” she said thoughtfully, “was once enamoured of him for forty years.”

“And now?” Patterson wanted to know.

“Now?” She scooped up some sand and let it sift through her fingers. “Oh, my poor young man, does anyone remain in love for all eternity? Do you really believe that pretty legend?”

“Then you hate him?”

“Hate? No. You can neither hate nor love for a hundred years. I have suffered both, so I know, and tried to kill myself three times. Oh, yes, there is not much that I cannot tell you about love. One does not live as long as I have lived without learning wisdom.”

“And please tell me, Doña Inés,” begged Patterson, “what you have learned about life in a hundred and forty years.”

“A hundred and sixty,” she corrected. “I was twenty when cast up here. What have I learned? One thing above all—to live without emotion. Love, hate, tedium, those are all words, very unimportant words. They are nothing. I like to eat when I am hungry, sleep when I am tired, swim when the sun is hot. All that is good, because it is just enough. I used to think—I never think now. I was mad, you know, for a little time, five years or so, because I thought too much. But soon I was cured. That was when, having loved Micah and hated him, at last he sickened me. I imagined I could not bear that. But you see I was wrong.”

She laughed, shaking back a tress of hair, and he knew that, with death, she had also lost her soul and her humanity. She was, as she had said, empty, drained of all emotion; she was as sterile mentally, this lovely lady, as the parakeets chattering above her head. But she was very beautiful.

“And the Captain?” he inquired. “Is it rude to ask what are his feelings towards you?”

“Indeed, no!” And she laughed again. “The Captain is still a man, although he should have been dead long ago. Being a man, he has need of a woman sometimes. Being a man, he is determined that other men shall not take that woman. That is all. Apart from that, like us all, he is petrified.”

And then, although the ten minutes were not up, she heard Judd coming up the hill and slipped like a bright shadow to her own hut.

Days passed slowly on the island. One day was like another. Always the sun poured brilliantly upon sapphire seas, gleaming sands, jewelled foliage. Macaws flashed like darting rainbows through the dusky green of jungle arches, the fruit hung coral-bright from trees whose blossoms flung out trailing creepers gayer, more gaudy, than the patterns of vivid Spanish shawls. And yet it seemed to Patterson after two months that all this radiant beauty was evil and poisoned, like a sweet fruit rotten at the core. What should have been paradise was only a pretty hell. Slowly, reluctantly he had been forced to accept the island for what it was according to his comrades. He now believed, although shamefacedly, that Thunder and Doña Inés had lived there since the mutiny of the Black Joke, that Heywood had been marooned in the last century for insubordination, that Judd had emerged from the wreck of the Titanic. And yet, obstinately, he still clung to the idea of escape. One day he would escape. And then, once away from the island’s shores, he would regain mortality, he would wrap mortality about him like a cloak.

Meanwhile, he noticed one or two curious facts. His clothes, after eight weeks’ rough living, were almost as good as new. It was no longer necessary for him to shave more than once a week. And, once, Judd, climbing a palm in search of coco-nuts, had slipped, crashing on to his head to what seemed certain death fifty feet below and had been picked up suffering from nothing worse than slight concussion. This accident shook his faith more than anything else that he saw.

They lived comfortably enough on fish, home-baked bread, fruit, coco-nuts, and the flesh of young pigs found in the jungle. Patterson learned to shoot with a bow and arrow, and to tell the time by the sun and stars. He learned to be patient with Heywood, who was half-witted, and he learned to search for turtles’ eggs in a temperature of ninety-nine in the shade. He learned, too, to treat Captain Thunder with respect and Doña Inés with formality.

Sometimes, the Captain, a reserved, sour-tempered man, would unbend, and, fingering his cutlass, tell stories of his life as a buccaneer on the Spanish Main. Terrible stories, these, vile, filthy, sadistic stories of murder and vice, plunder and torture, and fiendish, cold-blooded, ferocious revenge. Told in his drawling, affected voice, they became nauseous, and yet Doña Inés listened peacefully enough, her dark eyes soft and velvety, her red, silken mouth calmer than an angel’s. Sometimes she would look up and nod, and say:

“Oh, yes, Micah; I remember that, don’t I? I was with you then, wasn’t I?”

“You were, my dove, my heart. If you remember, I burnt your hand in the flame of my candle until you swooned, because you affronted me by asking mercy for those dogs.”

And she would laugh.

“I was foolish, was I not, Micah? For what did it matter?”

Patterson, loathing these conversations, was, nevertheless, forced to listen because at night there was really nothing else to do. Always before in his life he had accepted books without question as being quite naturally part of his life; now that he had none, the lack of them appalled him. He tried to write, scratching a diary on strips of bark, but the effort was not successful. Nor did his companions do much to ameliorate the loneliness of his situation. He preferred Judd to the others because Judd was young and gay, and comparatively untouched by the sinister, dragging life of the island, yet there were times when even Judd seemed to withdraw himself, to become watchful, remote, secretive. Patterson learned to recognise these as the interludes when his friend, pitifully afraid, thought in a panic of the future that lay ahead for him.

Heywood was sulky and monosyllabic. The Captain, so cynical and depraved, with his vicious mind, his giggle, and his will of iron, had revolted Patterson from the first. Only Doña Inés, with her vivid face and her beautiful, empty, animal mind, seemed to him restful and gracious, like some handsome, well-behaved child, in this crazy world of sunshine and plenty and despair. For this reason she began to haunt him at night, so that he was unable to sleep, and he longed, not so much to make love to her as to rest his head against her and to feel her cool hand upon his forehead, soothing him, that he might forget for a few hours. But Doña Inés was watched so carefully that it seemed impossible to speak to her alone.

And then one day, when he had been on the island for more than three months and was in a mood of black depression, he encountered her in the woods. He had wandered there in search of shade, aimless, solitary, and discontented. She was gathering moss, on her knees, her bright skirts kilted. Stars of sunlight, dripping through the green and matted tent of foliage, cast flickering, dappled shadows upon the amber of her neck and arms. When she heard his footsteps, she turned to look at him, smiling very wisely, her head turned to one side.

“May I speak to you,” he asked her, “without being snarled at by the Captain?”

“But of course,” she said. “Micah and Heywood went out an hour ago to fish on the other side of the island.”

He sat down beside her on the green froth of the moss.

“Inés,” he began, and he had never called her by her name before. “I wonder if you will be patient and listen to me for a moment?”

She nodded, saying nothing; she was never very glib of words.

“It’s this,” he said, encouraged; “perhaps, being so much wiser, you can help me . . . It’s a bad day with me; I’ve got the horrors. To-day I believe all your crazy stories, and, try as I will, I can’t escape from them . . . To-day I feel the island shutting me in, and I want to run away from the island. What am I to do?”

“You must begin,” she told him, “by making yourself more stupid than you are. Oh, it was easy for Heywood, more easy even for Judd. For you it is very difficult. Can you not think only of to-day? Must you let your mind race on ahead?”

Her voice was murmurous and very soft. He said, after a pause:

“It would be easier, I think, if I might talk to yon more often. Time, the time of the island, has touched you scarcely at all. With you one almost ceases to feel the horror.”

“If it were not for Micah I would talk to you, yes, whenever you want. But you know how I am situated.”

“Oh, don’t think I’m trying to make love to you,” he told her impatiently, “it’s not that. It’s only that you bring me peace—you’re so beautiful, so restful.”

Doña Inés was silent. He said, after another pause:

“Perhaps that wasn’t very polite of me. In fact, it was clumsily expressed. Let me try once more—listen, Inés, you’re sanity, loveliness, a bright angel in a mad world. I respect you as I would respect a saint. But I want to be with you, I want to talk to you. I’m lonely when you’re not there—I need your protection.”

Doña Inés looked away from him towards the green twilight of the trees. His eyes devoured her dark clear-cut profile. She said at length, speaking very slowly in her grave, beautiful voice:

“Mi querido, I can’t grant your request. I am too afraid of Micah, and perhaps I am afraid of something else . . . Listen, if I saw much of you, I might forget that I should be a dead woman. I might forget that my heart is cold and my mind empty. I might wake up again, and I don’t want to wake up. I am afraid of life, after so many years. And already you are making my sleep a little restless.”

She turned her face towards him and he saw that the red flower of her mouth was trembling. A bright drop, that might have been a tear, save that she never wept, hung like a jewel upon the shadow of her lashes. Yet her face was radiant, transfigured, more sparkling than the sunshine.

Straightway, Patterson forgot about respect and saints and Captain Thunder, and kissed her on the lips.

For one enchanted moment she was acquiescent, then pushed him away, hiding her face in her hands. And he, realising the horror that lay ahead for both, felt more like weeping than rejoicing.

“Go away,” she whispered, “go away before you make me hate you for what you are doing. A moment ago you talked of peace: do you realise that you are stealing mine?”

He stammered, scarcely knowing what he said:

“There are better dreams.”

“Not here,” she told him; “here there are no dreams but bad ones, and so it is safer not to dream at all. Please, please, go away.”

“Inés,” he said eagerly, “I will go away—we’ll both go away. If I build a boat, or a raft, and provision her, will you trust yourself to me? We’ll escape—we may drown, but I promise you——”

He stopped. In her tired yet vivid eyes he had suddenly surprised, for the first time, the dead, haunted look that so much disconcerted him when he glimpsed it in the other’s gaze. It was as if she retreated very far away, drawing down a blind.

She said, patiently, as one speaking to a child:

“Oh, my friend, please don’t be so foolish . . . I have tried, we have all tried, so many times. And it hurts, to fail so often.”

“Then you won’t come?”

She climbed slowly to her feet, brushing moss from her bright skirts. Then she shook her black, silken head twice, very emphatically.

“No. I will not come with you.”

“Then,” said Patterson, “since I can’t stay here to watch you with the Captain, I shall escape alone. Won’t you change your mind?”

She came near to him and put her hand for one moment upon his shoulder.

“No. I’ll not change my mind.”

And with a swishing of silk, that sounded strange enough in that tropical, emerald glade, she left him to his thoughts, and his thoughts were agony.

For weeks he slaved in secret to build a great rakish-looking solid raft that grew slowly into shape as it lay concealed amid the dusky green of overhanging branches. He had told no one save Doña Inés of his resolution to escape. The reason was simple; in his heart of hearts he dreaded their bitter mockery, their cynical disbelief in any possible salvation from the trap of the island. Yet he still had faith; once aboard his raft and he would be for ever borne away from these perilous and beckoning shores; he might find death, but this he did not really mind, although he much preferred the thought of life, human life, life with Inés. And then he had to remind himself that the Spanish woman was a thing of dust, to crumble away at the first contact with normal humanity, and that he would, in any event, be better without her, since she meant another mouth to feed.

But he still desired her, and it was as though the Captain knew, for she was very seldom left alone. And so he toiled in secret, and in his spare time nursed Judd, who lay sick of a poisonous snake-bite that swelled his foot, and turned it black, and would have meant death in any other land.

Once, when his raft was nearly completed, he caught Inés alone on the beach, where, against a background of golden rock, she fed a swirling silver mass of seagulls. The birds wheeled, crying harshly, and Doña Inés smiled. She wore a knot of scarlet passion-flowers in the dark satin of her hair. Patterson, determined not to miss a second alone with her, advanced triumphantly across the sands. The seagulls scattered.

“Look, you’ve frightened my birds,” she complained indignantly.

“Never mind the birds—they can see you whenever they want. I can’t. Inés, haven’t you changed your mind about coming with me?”

She shook her head.

“Inés, please, please listen! Even if we drown out there together, wouldn’t it be better than this?”

“Oh, yes, if we drowned. But we should not drown. We should come back here—to Micah—and then our lives would not be worth living.”

“My life,” he said, “isn’t worth living now, not while I have to see you with that creature night and day.”

“Be quiet,” she warned in a low voice.

Patterson turned, followed her eyes. Behind, only just out of earshot, stood the Captain, watching them sardonically. The breeze lifted the skirts of his green taffeta coat, ballooning them about his slender body. The green, too, seemed reflected in his face, so pale was it; paler, more waxen, even, than a corpse-candle.

“Are you also feeding the birds, Patterson?” inquired the Captain softly.

“No. I am looking for turtles’ eggs.”

“How many have you found?” the Captain wanted to know.

Patterson felt rather foolish.

“None—yet.”

“Then you had better make haste, unless you wish to fast for dinner. Come, my rose.”

And Captain Thunder turned away indifferently, followed by Doña Inés, who walked behind him obediently, her head bent, with no backward look.

That night Patterson thought he heard weeping in the hut that lay only a few hundred yards from his own, and he crouched, perspiring, sleepless, for many hours, until it was dark no longer, and bars of rose and lemon streaked the sky. Then he got up and went form to the woods to complete his preparations for escape.

He had rigged up a sail upon his raft and had already floated her on a narrow lagoon that led towards the sea. He was taking with him three barrels of water, a barrel of bread, his fishing-tackle, a blanket, and a flint and tinder. He knew he would not starve, since fish were plentiful, but he was aware that he would, probably, unless he were fortunate enough to end in a shark’s belly, die of a thirst that must endure for many days of torment in a pitiless and scorching heat.

Yet he could not wait; he must start at once, before the sun was up, before the first signs of life from that hut nestling on the cliffs behind him. And so, at a moment’s notice, he took his departure, nervous and weary and taut with anxiety, drifting with his raft like some dark bird against the misty violet-blue of the lagoon at dawn.

Everything was silent; trees and cliff and sky, the limpid reflection of these in the glassy waters of the lagoon; even the monkeys and the chattering parakeets, all were frozen into a breathless silence that seemed to watch, aghast, the reckless departure of this creature determined at all costs to break away from their sorrowful eternity.

Soon it was daylight, and the sun beat gilded wings, and Patterson drew near to the sea. A curve in the lagoon showed him the tawny cliff, and above it the huts. From the Captain’s hut came a finger of blue smoke that climbed, very straight, into the bright clearness of the air.

“Good-bye, Inés.”

And he was surprised to find how little pain there was for him in this parting. He reminded himself once more that she was a ghost, a creature of dust.

He passed the rocks and was soon outside, away from the island, on the sea itself. The ripples danced, white-crested, as though laced with silver. Patterson fished with success. He tried to fry his breakfast and, failing, devoured it half-raw, with a hunch of bread. It was very appetising. After breakfast he lay watching, with ecstasy, a stiff breeze swell his sail.

Already the island seemed to have receded. Patterson gazed with exultation at the coral-whiteness of its strand, the radiant green foliage of its trees. An hour before, and these had been loathsome to him; now that they belonged to the past he grimaced at them and waved his hand. The raft drifted on.

The sea was kind to him that day, he thought, so innocent and gay and tinted like forget-me-nots. Despite himself, despite his almost certain death, he found his mind flitting towards England, and his life there, as though he were fated to be saved.

He turned towards the island, gleaming in the distance.

“Farewell!”

It was a cry of defiance.

And, then, in a moment, like thunder splintering from the sky, came sudden and shattering catastrophe. He was never very clear as to what actually occurred. All he knew was that from peace and beauty there emerged swift chaos. A wall of water, all towering solid green and ribbed with foam, reared suddenly from the tranquil seas to bar his path like some great ogre’s castle arisen by magic, huge, destructive, carven of emerald. Then there was darkness and a tremendous roaring sound, and the raft seemed to back like a frightened horse. He heard the ripping of his sail and then he was pitched through the air and something seemed to split his head and he knew no more.

When he awoke, the sun beat hot upon his temples. He felt sick, his limbs ached, and he groaned. He lay still, his eyes closed, and tried to remember what had happened. And then he heard a sound that might have been some dirge sighed by the breeze, a soft murmuring music that seemed to him familiar. He knew, then, that he was back upon the island. He had no need to open his eyes.

“Oh, God,” he sighed.

And the sweat trickled down his face.

And then, inevitably, sounding close in his ear, the sneering, hateful voice of Captain Thunder.

“Home so soon, my young friend? No, you would not believe, would you? You knew too much . . .”

Patterson made no sign of life. Back once more on the island. For all eternity . . . the island . . . and then the murmuring song swelled louder, louder, mocking him, laughing a little, as Inés had laughed when he had told her that he was going to escape. The song of the island! And he must hear it for ever! He opened his eyes to find the Captain looking at him cynically.

“Now that you understand there is no escape,” said the Captain, “perhaps you will not take it amiss if I venture to criticise your manner towards Madam Inés . . .”

But Patterson was not listening.