THE SURVIVOR
“ ... And regrets to report only one survivor.”--
_Admiralty Announcement._
The glass dropped another point, and the captain of the cruiser glanced
for the hundredth time from the lowering sky to the two destroyers
labouring stubbornly in the teeth of the gale on either beam. Then he
gave an order to the yeoman of signals, who barked its repetition to the
shelter-deck where the little group of signalmen stamped their feet and
blew on their numbed fingers in the lee of the flag-lockers. Two of the
group scuffled round the bright-coloured bunting: the clips of the
halliards snapped a hoist together, and vivid against the grey sky the
signal went bellying and fluttering to the masthead.
The figures on the bridges of the destroyers wiped the stinging spray
from their swollen eyelids and read the message of comfort.
“Return to base. Weather conditions threatening.”
They surveyed their battered bridges and forecastles, their stripped,
streaming decks and guns’ crews; they thought of hot food, warm bunks,
dry clothing, and all the sordid creature comforts for which soul and
body yearn so imperiously after three years of North Sea warfare. Their
answering pendants fluttered acknowledgment, and they swung round on the
path for home, praising Allah who had planted in the brain of the
cruiser captain a consideration for the welfare of his destroyer screen.
“If this is what they call ‘threatening,’” observed the senior officer
of the two boats, as his command clove shuddering through the jade-green
belly of a mountainous sea, flinging the white entrails broadcast, “if
this is merely threatening I reckon it’s about time someone said ‘Home,
James!’”
His first lieutenant said nothing. He had spent three winters in these
grey wastes, and he knew the significance of that unearthly clear
visibility and the inky clouds banked ahead to the westward. But
presently he looked up from the chart and nodded towards the menace in
the western sky. “That’s snow,” he said. “It ought to catch us about the
time we shall make Scaw Dhu light.”
“We’ll hear the fog buoy all right,” said the captain.
“If the pipes ain’t frozen,” was the reply. “It’s perishing cold.” He
ran a gauntletted hand along the rail and extended a handful of frozen
spray. “That’s salt--_and_ frozen....”
The snow came as he had predicted, but rather sooner. It started with
great whirling flakes like feathers about a gull’s nesting-place, a
soundless ethereal vanguard of the storm, growing momentarily denser.
The wind, from a temporary lull, reawakened with a roar. The air became
a vast witch’s cauldron of white and brown specks, seething before the
vision in a veritable Bacchanal of Atoms. Sight became a lost sense:
time, space, and feeling were overwhelmed by that shrieking fury of snow
and frozen spray thrashing pitilessly about the homing grey hulls and
the bowed heads of the men who clung to the reeling bridges.
The grey, white-crested seas raced hissing alongside and, as the
engine-room telegraphs rang again and again for reduced speed, overtook
and passed them. Out of the welter of snow and spray the voices of the
leadsmen chanting soundings reached the ears of those inboard as the
voice of a doctor reaches a patient in delirium, fruitlessly
reassuring....
Number Three of the midship gun on board the leading destroyer turned
for the comfort of his soul from the contemplation of the pursuing seas
to the forebridge, but snow-flakes blotted it from view. Providence, as
he was accustomed to visualise it in the guise of a red-cheeked
lieutenant-commander, had vanished from his ken. Number Three drew his
hands from his pockets, and raising them to his mouth leaned towards the
gunlayer. The gunlayer was also staring forward as if his vision had
pierced that whirling grey curtain and was contemplating something
beyond it, infinitely remote.... There was a concentrated intensity in
his expression not unlike that of a dog when he raises his head from his
paws and looks towards a closed door.
“’Ere,” bawled Number Three, seeking comradeship in an oppressive,
indefinable loneliness. “’Ow about it--eh?...” The wind snatched at the
meaningless words and beat them back between his chattering teeth.
The wind backed momentarily, sundering the veil of whirling obscurity.
Through this rent towered a wall of rock, streaked all about with driven
snow, at the foot of which breakers beat themselves into a smoking yeast
of fury. Gulls were wailing overhead. Beneath their feet the engine room
gongs clanged madly.
Then they struck.
The foremost destroyer checked on the shoulder of a great roller as if
incredulous: shuddered: struck again and lurched over. A mountainous sea
engulfed her stern and broke thundering against the after-funnel. Steam
began to pour in dense hissing clouds from the engine-room hatchways and
exhausts. Her consort swept past with screeching syren, helpless in the
grip of the backwash for all her thrashing propellers that strove to
check her headlong way. She too struck and recoiled: sagged in the
trough of two stupendous seas, and plunged forward again.... Number
Three, clinging to the greasy breech-block of his gun, clenched his
teeth at the sound of that pitiless grinding which seemed as if it would
never end....
Of the ensuing horror he missed nothing, yet saw it all with a wondering
detachment. A wave swept him off his feet against a funnel stay, and
receding, left him clinging to it like a twist of waterlogged straw.
Hand over hand he crawled higher, and finally hung dangling six feet
above the highest wave, legs and arms round about the wire stay. He saw
the forecastle break off like a stick of canteen chocolate and vanish
into the smother. The other destroyer had disappeared. Beneath him,
waist deep in boiling eddies, he saw men labouring about a raft, and had
a vision of their upturned faces as they were swept away. The thunder of
the surf on the beaches close at hand drowned the few shouts and cries
that sounded. The wire from which he dangled jarred and twanged like a
banjo-string, as the triumphant seas beat the soul out of the wreck
beneath him.
A funnel-stay parted, and amid clouds of smoke and steam the funnel
slowly began to list over the side. Number Three of the midship gun
clung swaying like a wind-tossed branch above the maelstrom of seething
water till a wave drove over the already-unrecognisable hull of the
destroyer, leaped hungrily at the dangling human figure and tore him
from his hold.
Bitterly cold water and a suffocating darkness engulfed him. Something
clawed at his face and fastened on to his shoulder; he wrenched himself
free from the nerveless clutch without ruth or understanding; his booted
heel struck a yielding object as he struggled surfaceward, kicking
wildly like a swimming frog ... the blackness became streaked with grey
light and pinpoints of fire. Number Three had a conviction that unless
the next few strokes brought him to the surface it would be too late.
Then abruptly the clamour of the wind and sea, and the shriek of the
circling gulls smote his ears again. He was back on the surface once
more, gulping greedy lungfuls of air.
A wave caught him and hurled him forward on its crest, spread-eagled,
feebly continuing the motions of a swimmer. It spent itself, and to
husband his strength the man turned on his back, moving his head from
side to side to take in his surroundings.
He was afloat (he found it surprisingly easy to keep afloat) inside a
narrow bay. On both sides the black cliffs rose, all streaked with snow,
out of a thunderous welter of foam. The tide sobbed and lamented in the
hollows of unseen caverns, or sluiced the length of a ledge to plash in
cascades down the face of the cliff.
The snow had abated, and in the gathering dusk the broken water showed
ghostly white. To seaward the gale drove the smoking rollers in
successive onslaughts against the reef where the battered remains of the
two destroyers lay. All about the distorted plating and tangle of
twisted stanchions the surf broke as if in a fury of rapine and
destruction....
Another wave gripped him and rushed him shoreward again. The thunder of
the surf redoubled. “Hi! hi! hi! hi!” screeched the storm-tossed gulls.
Number Three of the midship gun abandoned his efforts to swim and
covered his face with his soggy sleeve. It was well not to look ahead.
The wave seemed to be carrying him towards the cliffs at the speed of an
express train. He wondered if the rocks would hurt much, beating out his
life.... He tried desperately to remember a prayer, but all he could
recall was a sermon he had once listened to on the quarter-deck, one
drowsy summer morning at Malta.... About coming to Jesus on the face of
the waters.... “And Jesus said ‘come.’ ...” Fair whizzing along, he
was....
Again the wave spent itself, and the man was caught in the backwash,
drawn under, rolled over and over, spun round and round, gathered up in
the watery embrace of another roller and flung up on all fours on a
shelving beach. Furiously he clawed at the retreating pebbles, lurched
to his feet, staggered forward a couple of paces, and fell on hands and
knees on the fringe of a snow-drift. There he lay awhile, panting for
breath.
He was conscious of an immense amazement, and, mingled with it, an
inexplicable pride. He was still alive! It was an astounding
achievement, being the solitary survivor of all those officers and men.
But he had always considered himself a bit out of the ordinary.... Once
he had entered for a race at the annual sports at the Naval Barracks,
Devonport. He had never run a race before in his life, and he won. It
seemed absurdly easy. “Bang!” went the pistol: off they went,
helter-skelter, teeth clenched, fists clenched, hearts pounding,
spectators a blur, roaring encouragement....
He won, and experienced the identical astonished gratification that he
felt now.
“You runs like a adjective ’are, Bill,” his chum had admitted, plying
the hero with beer at the little pub halfway up the cobbled hill by the
dockyard.
Then he remembered other chums, shipmates, and one in particular called
Nobby. He rose into a sitting position, staring seaward. Through the
gloom the tumult of the seas, breaking over the reef on which they had
foundered, glimmered white. The man rose unsteadily to his feet; he was
alone on the beach of a tiny cove with his back to forbidding cliffs.
Save where his own footsteps showed black, the snow was unmarked,
stretching in an unbroken arc from one side of the cove to the other.
The solitary figure limped to the edge of the surf and peered through
the stinging scud. Then, raising his hands to his mouth, he began to
call for his lost mate.
“Nobby!” he shouted, and again and again, “Nobby! Nobby!... Nob-bee-e!”
...
“Nobby,” echoed the cliffs behind, disinterestedly.
“Hi! Hi! Hi!” mocked the gulls.
The survivor waded knee-deep into the froth of an incoming sea.
“Ahoy!” he bawled to the driving snow-flakes and spindrift. His voice
sounded cracked and feeble. He tried to shout again, but the thunder of
the waves beat the sound to nothing.
He retraced his steps and paused to look round at the implacable face of
the cliff, at the burden of snow that seemed to overhang the summit,
then stared again to seaward. A wave broke hissing about his feet: the
tide was coming in.
Up to that moment fear had passed him by. He had been in turn
bewildered, incredulous, cold, sick, bruised, but sustained throughout
by the furious animal energy which the body summons in a fight for life.
Now, however, with the realisation of his loneliness in the gathering
darkness, fear smote him. In fear he was as purely animal as he had been
in his moments of blind courage. He turned from the darkling sea that
had claimed chum and shipmates, and floundered through the snow-drifts
to the base of the cliff. Then, numbed with cold, and well-nigh spent,
he began frantically to scale the shelving surfaces of the rock.
Barnacles tore the flesh from his hands and the nails from his
finger-tips as he clawed desperately at the crevices for a hold. Inch by
inch, foot by foot he fought his way upwards from the threatening clutch
of the hungry tide, leaving a crimson stain at every niche where the
snow had gathered. Thrice he slipped and slithered downwards, bruised
and torn, to renew his frantic efforts afresh. Finally he reached a
broad shelf of rock, halfway up the surface of the cliff, and there
rested awhile, whimpering softly to himself at the pain of his flayed
hands.
Presently he rose again and continued the dizzy ascent. None but a
sailor or an experienced rock-climber would have dreamed of attempting
such a feat single-handed, well-nigh in the dark. Even had he reached
the top he could not have walked three yards in the dense snow-drifts
that had gathered all along the edge of the cliffs. But the climber knew
nothing about that; he was in search of _terra firma_, something that
was not slippery rock or shifting pebbles, somewhere out of reach of the
sea.
He was within six feet of the summit when he lost a foothold, slipped,
grabbed at a projecting knob of rock, slipped again, and so slipping and
bumping and fighting for every inch, he slid heavily down on to his
ledge again.
He lay bruised and breathless where he fell. That tumble came near to
finishing matters; it winded him--knocked the fight out of him. But a
wave, last and highest of the tide, sluiced over the ledge and immersed
his shivering body once more in icy water; the unreasoning terror of the
pursuing tide that had driven him up the face of the cliff whipped him
to his feet again.
He backed against the rock, staring out through the driving spindrift
into the menace of the darkness. There ought to be another wave any
moment: then there would be another: and after that perhaps another. The
next one then would get him. He was too weak to climb again....
The seconds passed and merged into minutes. The wind came at him out of
the darkness like invisible knives thrown to pin him to a wall. The cold
numbed his intelligence, numbed even his fear. He heard the waves
breaking all about him in a wild pandemonium of sound, but it was a long
time before he realised that no more had invaded his ledge, and a couple
of hours before it struck him that the tide had turned....
Towards midnight he crawled down from his ledge and followed the
retreating tide across the slippery shale, pausing every few minutes to
listen to the uproar of sea and wind. An illusion of hearing human
voices calling out of the gale mocked him with strange persistence. Once
or twice he stumbled over a dark mass of weed stranded by the retreating
tide, and each time bent down to finger it apprehensively.
Dawn found him back in the shelter of his cleft, scraping limpets from
their shells for a breakfast. The day came slowly over a grey sea,
streaked and smeared like the face of an old woman after a night of
weeping. Of the two destroyers nothing broke the surface. It was nearly
high water, and whatever remained of their battered hulls was covered by
a tumultuous sea. They were swallowed. The sea had taken them--them and
a hundred-odd officers and men, old shipmates, messmates, townies,
raggies--just swallowed the lot.... He still owed last month’s mess-bill
to the caterer of his mess.... He put his torn hands before his eyes and
strove to shut out the awful grey desolation of that hungry sea.
During the forenoon a flotilla of destroyers passed well out to seaward.
They were searching the coast for signs of the wrecks, and the spray
blotted them intermittently from sight as they wallowed at slow speed
through the grey seas.
The survivor watched them and waved his jumper tied to a piece of
drift-wood; but they were too far off to see him against the dark rocks.
They passed round a headland, and the wan figure, half frozen and
famished, crawled back into his cleft like a stricken animal, dumb with
cold and suffering. It was not until the succeeding low water, when the
twisted ironwork was showing black above the broken water on the reef,
that another destroyer hove in sight. She too was searching for her lost
sisters, and the castaway watched her alter course and nose cautiously
towards the cove. Then she stopped and went astern.
The survivor brandished his extemporised signal of distress and emitted
a dull croaking sound between his cracked lips. A puff of white steam
appeared above the destroyer’s bridge, and a second later the reassuring
hoot of a siren floated in from the offing. They had seen him.
A sudden reaction seized his faculties. Almost apathetically he watched
a sea-boat being lowered, saw it turn and come towards him, rising and
falling on the heavy seas, but always coming nearer ... he didn’t care
much whether they came or not--he was that cold. The very marrow of his
bones seemed to be frozen. They’d have to come and fetch him if they
wanted him. He was too cold to move out of his cleft.
The boat was very near. It was a whaler, and the bowman had boated his
oar, and was crouching in the bows with a heaving-line round his
forearm. The boat was plunging wildly, and spray was flying from under
her. The cliffs threw back the orders of the officer at the tiller as he
peered ahead from under his tarpaulin sou’wester with anxiety written
on every line of his weather-beaten face. He didn’t fancy the job, that
much was plain; and indeed, small blame to him. It was no light
undertaking, nursing a small boat close in to a dead lee shore, with the
aftermath of such a gale still running.
They came still closer, and the heaving line hissed through the air to
fall at the castaway’s feet.
“Tie it round your middle,” shouted the lieutenant. “You’ll have to jump
for it--we’ll pull you inboard all right.”
The survivor obeyed dully, reeled to the edge of his ledge and slid once
more into the bitterly cold water.
Half a dozen hands seemed to grasp him simultaneously, and he was hauled
over the gunwale of the boat almost before he realised he had left his
ledge. A flask was crammed between his chattering teeth; someone wound
fold upon fold of blanket round him.
“Any more of you, mate?” said a voice anxiously; and then, “Strike me
blind if it ain’t old Bill!”
The survivor opened his eyes and saw the face of the bowman
contemplating him above his cork life-belt. It was a vaguely familiar
face. They had been shipmates somewhere once. Barracks, Devonport,
p’raps it was. He blinked the tears out of his eyes and coughed as the
raw spirit ran down his throat.
“Any more of you, Bill, ole lad?”
The survivor shook his head.
“There’s no one,” he said, “’cept me. I’m the only one what’s lef’ outer
two ships’ companies.” Again the lost feeling of bewildered pride crept
back.
“You always was a one, Bill!” said the bowman in the old familiar accent
of hero-worship.
The survivor nodded confirmation. “Not ’arf I ain’t,” he said
appreciatively. “Sole survivor I am!” And held out his hand again for
the flask. “Christ! look at my ’ands!”
[Illustration]