“He’s just waiting his chance, sir.” McKinnon was as worried as Nicolson. “A killer. You heard the Brigadier’s story.”
“That’s the trouble. I did hear his story.” Nicolson nodded heavily, looked at Farnholme, glanced at McKinnon and then stared down at his hands. “I didn’t believe a damn’ single Word he said. He was lying all the way.”
The sun wheeled like a great burning ball above the eastern horizon. Inside an hour nearly all talk was stopped and people were crawling back into their shells of remote indifference, each alone with his own private hell of thirst and pain. Hour succeeded interminable hour, the sun climbed higher and higher into the empty washed-out blue of the windless sky, and the lifeboat remained as she had been for days on end now, motionless on the water. That they had moved many miles south in those days Nicolson was well aware, for the current set due south from Straat Banka to the Sunda Strait eleven months out of twelve: but there was no movement relative to the water surrounding them, nothing that the human eye could see.
Nobody moved aboard the boat any more than the boat moved on the surface of the sea. With the sun swinging high towards the zenith, the slightest effort brought exhaustion in its wake, a panting of breath that whistled shrilly through a bone-dry mouth and cracked and blistered lips. Now and again the little boy moved about and talked to himself in his own private language, but as the day lengthened and the hot and humid air became more and more oppressive and suffocating, his activities and his talk lessened and lessened until finally he was content to lie still on Gudrun’s lap, gazing up thoughtfully into the clear blue eyes: but by and by his eyelids grew heavy and dropped, and he fell asleep. Arms outstretched in dumb show Nicolson offered to take him and give her a rest, but she just smiled and shook her head. It suddenly came home to Nicolson, with a sense of something like wonder, that she nearly always smiled when she spoke: not always, but he’d yet to hear his first complaint from her or see the first expression of discontent. He saw the girl looking at him, strangely, and he forced a smile on his face, then looked away.
Now and again a murmur of voices came from the side benches on the starboard side. What the brigadier and Miss Plenderleith found to talk about Nicolson couldn’t even begin to guess, but find it they did, and plenty of it. In the gaps in their conversation they just sat and looked into one another’s eyes, and the brigadier held her thin wasted hand in his all the time. Two or three days ago it had struck Nicolson as mildly humorous, and he had had visions of the brigadier in a bygone and gentler age, immaculately dressed in white tie and tails and carnation in his buttonhole, hair and moustache as jet black as they were now snowy white, his hansom cab ready while he himself stood at the stage door entrance, waiting. But he couldn’t see anything funny in it, not any longer. It was all rather quiet and pathetic, a Darby and Joan waiting patiently for the end, but not at all afraid.
Slowly Nicolson’s gaze travelled round the boat. There wasn’t much change from yesterday that he could see, except that everybody seemed just that much weaker, that much more exhausted than they had been, with hardly the strength left to move into the few solitary scraps of shade that remained. They were very low. It didn’t need any expert medical eye to see that the distance from listlessness to lifelessness was only a very short step indeed. Some were now so far through that it was only by a conscious effort that they could rouse themselves to accept their midday ration of water, and even then one or two found the greatest difficulty in swallowing. Forty-eight hours and most of them would be dead. Nicolson knew where they were, near enough, since he still had his sextant with him: in the vicinity of the Noordwachter light, perhaps fifty miles due east of the coast of Sumatra. If neither wind nor rain came within the next twenty-four hours, then it wouldn’t matter after that whether it came or not.
On the credit side, the only cheering item was that of the captain’s health. He had come out of his coma just after dawn and now, sitting on a cross seat and wedged between a thwart and bench, he seemed determined not to lose consciousness again. He could speak normally now — as normally as any of them could speak with thirst choking in their throats — and he no longer coughed blood, not at any time. He had lost a great deal of weight in the past week, but in spite of that looked stronger than he had done for days. For a man with a bullet lodged either in his lung or the chest wall to survive the rigours of the previous week, and at the same time be denied all medical attention or medicines was something Nicolson would have refused to believe unless he had seen it. Even now, he found Findhorn’s recuperative powers — Findhorn was almost at his retiring age — difficult to credit. He knew, too, that Findhorn had really nothing to live for, no wife, no family, just nothing, which made his courage and recovery all the more astonishing. And all the more bitter for, with all the guts in the world, he was still a very sick man, and the end could not be very far away. Maybe it was just his sense of responsibility, but perhaps not. It was difficult to say, impossible to say, Nicolson realised that he himself was too tired, too uncaring to worry about it longer. It didn’t matter, nothing mattered. He closed his eyes to rest them from the harsh, shimmering glare of the sea, and quietly dropped off to sleep in the noonday sun.
He awoke to the sound of someone drinking water, not the sound of a person drinking the tiny little rations of hot, brackish liquid that McKinnon doled out three times a day, but great, gasping mouthfuls at a time, gurgling and splashing as if he had a bucket to his head. At first Nicolson thought that someone must have broached the remaining supplies, but he saw immediately that it wasn’t that. Sitting on a thwart up near the mast, Sinclair, the young soldier, had the baler to his head. It was an eight-inch baler, and it held a lot of water. His head was tilted right back, and he was just draining the last few drops from it.
Nicolson rose stiffly to his feet, carefully picked his way for’ard through the bodies sprawled over seats and benches and took the can from the boy’s unresisting hand. He lifted the baler and let a couple of drops trickle slowly into his mouth. He grimaced at the prickly saltiness of the taste. Sea-water. Not that there had really been any doubt about it. The boy was staring up at him, his eyes wide and mad, pitiful defiance in his face. There were perhaps half a dozen men watching them, looking at them with a kind of listless indifference. They didn’t care. Some of them at least must have seen Sinclair dipping the baler in the sea and then drink from it, but they hadn’t bothered to stop him. They hadn’t even bothered to call out. Maybe they even thought it was a good idea. Nicolson shook his head and looked down at the soldier. “That was sea-water, wasn’t it, Sinclair?” The soldier said nothing. His mouth was twitching, as if he were forming words, but no sound came out. The insane eyes, wide and flat and empty, were fixed on Nicolson, and the lids didn’t blink, not once.
“Did you drink all of it?” Nicolson persisted, and this time the boy did answer, a long, monotonous string of oaths in a high, cracked voice. For a few seconds Nicolson stared down at him without speaking, then shrugged his shoulders tiredly and turned away. Sinclair half rose from his thwart, clawed fingers reaching for the baler, but Nicolson easily pushed him away, and he sank back heavily on his seat, bent forward, cradled his face in his hands and shook his head slowly from side to side. Nicolson hesitated for a moment, then made his way back to the sternsheets.
Midday came and went, the sun crossed over its zenith and the heat grew even more intense. The boat now was as soundless as it was lifeless and even Farnholme’s and Miss Plender-leith’s murmurings had ceased and they had dropped off into an uneasy sleep. And then, just after three o’clock in the afternoon, when even to the most resolute it must have seemed that they were lost in an endless purgatory, came the sudden change.