In the Swim
To fall one hundred and sixty feet takes just a shade over three
seconds, but it seems a lot longer. Simon Templar knew this very
vividly, for he seemed to live through three æons between the instant
of sickening breathlessness when he felt the cut-away flooring give
way under his weight, through the four odd pulse-beats of hurtling
down and down into darkness, till he struck water with a stinging
splash.
He sank like a plummet, and struck out mightily for the surface. He
must have gone deep, for by the time his head came up his heart was
pounding furiously and his chest felt as if it was about to cave in
under the pressure. He drew a giant’s breath, and choked at the end of
it, for, unsuspecting, he had let himself be sucked under again. The
undertow was terrific. He kicked out with all his strength, and as he
rose again, gasping and spitting, his hand touched stone and got a
grip on it instinctively. In spite of his experience, he still
misjudged the power of the current: his hold was all but broken as
soon as he obtained it, and his arm was nearly jerked from its socket
with the strain. With an exertion of every bit of force he could rally
he drew himself up with his shoulder muscles, thrashing the water with
his legs, until he got the fingers of his other hand crooked over that
providential ledge. There he hung, panting, with the sinews of his
arms taut and creaking, while he shook the water out of his eyes and
tried to get his bearings.
Already he had been swept some distance from where he had fallen—it
must have been a longish way, reckoning by the force of the stream as
measured by the pull on his arms. The blackness was not complete,
fortunately. His eyes were already used to the darkness, and so he was
able to take in the surroundings comparatively well by the faint
phosphorescent light which filtered up, apparently, from the surface
of the water.
He had been dropped into some sort of subterranean river. His handhold
was a rough projection in the rock wall of the cavern through which
the stream ran. The cave was no more than a dozen feet wide, but the
vaulted roof arched over a good twenty-five feet from the surface:
during the centuries of its mill-race career the river must have worn
itself deeper and deeper into its bed. “Mill-race” was a good
description. The superficial smoothness of the water was no guide to
the murderous speed and power of the current. The Saint wondered what
beneficent deity had placed that shelf of rock directly under his
flailing hand, for without it he would undoubtedly have been dragged
down and drowned in a few minutes. Even now he wasn’t out of the wood:
the agonising twinges of over-worked muscle were throbbing up and down
his arms, and though he had fingers of steel they wouldn’t stand up to
that gruelling tension indefinitely.
Clearly the great thing was to slip the clutch of the torrent which
was patiently struggling to pluck him away and haul him down to the
death which had been arranged for him. The Saint pulled himself up a
few inches to test his muscles, and groaned, for he had been weakening
faster than he realised. He let himself down again for a second’s rest
and set his teeth. Perhaps he prayed. . . . Then he took and held a
deep breath, and heaved again. He edged up six inches . . .
seven . . . eight. . . . There he stopped to breathe again. Even that
slight drawing of his body from the clasp of the rushing water
lessened the stress, and he tackled the next effort with a better
heart. This time he brought his chin over the ledge, and one of his
feet, scrabbling for help against the submerged face of the rock,
lodged in a cranny and enabled him to get enough support from his legs
partially to relax his arms and hands while he gathered strength for a
final spurt.
He looked up, wondering now whether this strenuous climbing was only
going to lead to a postponement of the end—to a cramped and painful
clinging to the stone until his endurance petered out and he slipped
and fell again into those evil waters. And then he had difficulty in
stopping himself wasting precious energy in a resounding cheer, for he
saw a wide black opening in the rock some ten feet over his head. That
was certainly a recess where he could lie down and rest almost
indefinitely. It seemed as if the kind gods were giving him all the
breaks that afternoon.
“Not yet, my Tiger, not yet,” muttered the Saint, with all his old
indomitable jauntiness flooding back. “Shoals of people have sweated
like Harry to bump me off, but I’m beginning to think it can’t be
done!”
The sight of that prospective refuge was enormously encouraging, and
he felt new reserves of strength tingle into his body. He shifted his
grip to another narrow angle of rock at arm’s length overhead, and
with a long pull he managed to hitch himself right out of the water
and get his toes on to the ledge which had saved his life, while his
hands moved up from crevice to crevice in the stone; so that when he
paused again he was standing straight up, flattened out against the
rock, with the river slinking past clear beneath him.
The opening he had seen was temptingly near now, and in his eagerness
he nearly over-reached himself. He flung his weight on to a jutting
bit of rock without first testing it, and it broke away in his hand.
He was left swinging by three fingers of his left hand in a hold
barely an inch deep, and it was several nerve- and muscle-wracking
seconds before he found fresh holds. Thereafter he proceeded with more
circumspection, and eventually scrambled over the rim of the ledge he
had marked down with no further mishap.
He stretched himself out on his back and closed his eyes. Now that the
immediate peril was past, reaction came. In the ordinary way his
nerves were faultless, but perhaps the prefatory shock of the fall,
followed by the awful sensation of being swirled helplessly down into
the depths of the underground river, had between them succeeded in
undermining some of his confidence. He felt utterly weary, and he was
shaking in every limb—though this could have been largely due to the
reaction of relaxing muscles and tendons. It was some time before he
was able to roll over on his side and peer down at the treacherous,
glimmering sheen of smooth water a dozen feet below. Unenviable as his
position still was, the Saint contrived a twisted grin.
“Rotten luck, son,” he croaked. “Sorry to disappoint you, but I don’t
want to die to-day.”
Then, in the nebulous light which permeated the clammy atmosphere, he
turned to examine the possibilities of further progress. He had heard
of such caverns as this, and knew that parts of the country were
honeycombed with a vast network of such subterranean natural
excavations. Some of these caves went further than even the most
intrepid had ever dared to explore them: he remembered a story he had
heard about Cheddar Caves, of a party which had set out to investigate
a certain tunnel and had never returned, and he recalled how his
fertile imagination had been fired with visionings of strange
prehistoric beasts surviving in the bowels of the earth, and perhaps a
race of semi-human beings similarly entombed, and how he had resolved
one day to go in search of the lost explorers. But that would have
been with all the armoury he wanted, suitable companions, ropes, and
torches. . . . This, however, was not Cheddar, and he had nothing but
his soaking clothes and the few things in his pockets. Yet, since
there was no retreat towards the water, he must go the other way. He
was certain that he had been carried too far down the stream for there
to be any hope of a search party getting in touch with him.
Behind him what he had thought was simply the ledge proved to be a low
gap in the face of the rock. He crawled a little way in, and felt
again the helplessness of being without the flashlight which he ought
to have had with him in any case. Still, it wasn’t any use crying
about it—you couldn’t weep luminous tears—so the only thing to do was
to carry on and hope for the best.
A distinct draught chilled his face as he wriggled along in the pitchy
blackness, and his hopes began to rise again, tentatively. If the air
circulated freely, it meant that somewhere there must be an outlet,
and the grim doubt was whether, when he found it, it would prove to be
an outlet he could use.
It was a vague sort of consolation to find that his wrist watch, which
was guaranteed to stand any amount of tough handling on land or sea or
air, had stood up to this last test. It was still ticking smoothly
over, and he could time his laborious progress by the luminous dial.
The floor of the tunnel seemed to be practically level, and
long-forgotten eroding waters had worn it flat and eaten the
jaggedness off the irregularities which had survived, so that worming
along on his stomach was not so arduous as it might have been. Once he
cracked his head against a wall of rock right in his path, and so
found that the passage took a twist to the right. After that, he felt
his way gingerly, and thus circumnavigated the subsequent windings
uninjured. Always he made sure that the air blew on his face, and by
that means he saved himself the expenditure of much time and energy on
following up a side branch which must have been a blind alley. He went
on like this for over an hour, and at the end of that time, raising
himself slowly to his feet, he found that the roof had receded far
enough to allow him to proceed upright, which was an improvement.
Still he felt his way forward very carefully with feet and hands, for
he had no desire to step over the edge of a small precipice or run his
head against a sudden dip of the rock above. He kept one hand on the
wall to steer by and worked patiently on.
The darkness had that pitchy intensity which torments the eyes and
rasps the nerves to a shrieking rawness. He understood then as never
before the full agony of blindness. Queer flashes of crimson rocketed
across his sight, and the strain of transferring all his reliance to
his sense of touch was working him up into a quivering torment of
fraying ganglions. There was a terrible desire to sink down on the
stone and crawl aimlessly about till sleep and forgetfulness came.
Then this was replaced by the struggling of a childish terror to
unthrone his reason and set him pounding helpless fists against the
rock—to rush madly into the blackness till he crashed against another
wall and was flung broken and screaming to the ground—to give up the
attempt altogether and stand raving and cursing this false blindness,
praying recklessly for the relief of death. For all the darkness that
cloaks the world under the sky is as dazzling sunshine to the awful
numbing terror of the darkness in the places under the earth where
there had never been light since the beginning.
But the Saint slogged on, though towards the end he scarcely knew what
he was doing, and his pace grew slower and slower, jerky and
automatic, till it stopped altogether. Then he would drive himself
forward again. Then he would find that he had come to a standstill
again, and the routine would be repeated. Wild snatches of all the
songs he had ever heard burst from his dry lips and boomed and
re-echoed crazily about his ears. Once he was deafened with a harsh
roar of eerie, discordant laughter, and was only half-conscious that
it cackled from his own throat. He found that he chattered and babbled
foolish, meaningless strings of words, and here and there in his
madness sentences from widely separated conversations stood out with
ridiculous clarity in the senseless jumble. And each time he caught
himself giving way to these forerunners of insanity he stopped and
lashed himself back to trembling silence. He grew careless of his
safety. Sometimes he ran as though fiends pursued him; then he would
crash against an obstacle and fall headlong, and there he would lie
and wrestle with himself till he could rise and go on again. He reeled
and thudded against the wall, and went on—he stumbled and tripped and
fell, and went on—he was aching with a hundred bruises, but still he
went on . . . on . . . on. . . . Sometimes he blasphemed, sometimes he
prayed. But yard by yard he advanced; and always, high and safe above
the maelstrom of breaking nerves, he had before him the one guiding
beacon which could possibly bring him out of that hell alive—to fight
on and on and keep that draught of clean, fresh air blowing squarely
in his face.
The strength of an unfaltering will to live drove him on when tearing
muscles cried for rest. He could no longer see his watch: when he
tried to look at it, the figures and the hands whirled and jazzed
before his eyes in a dizzy tangle which he had lost the power to
control. But hours had ceased to mean anything—in that Stygian
emptiness there was no time, no anything but pain and madness. Always
there was that impenetrable darkness, clinging, pulsating, palpable.
It wound sinuously about his limbs and tried to hold them—it looped a
noose round his chest and tightened it—it thudded on his temples and
seared his eyes—swelled in upon him till he seemed to be ploughing
through a tenuous liquid, and yet when he hit out and strove to break
away from its grip it thinned away and let him go, only to swathe him
round again in an instant. It stuck in his throat like a fog, curling
ghostly, evil fingers caressingly round his face. He thought of Light,
Light, Light—of glowing coals and the leaping flicker of camp fires,
of the pale, mystical light of the moon and the dim, dusty light of
stars, of search-light beams and the head-lights of cars, of the
sizzling white glare of arc lamps. He thought of all great lights—of
the merciless blaze of eye-aching tropical suns flaming over amethyst
desert skies. But there was only the darkness. . . . And he toiled
on. . . .
And then ahead of him was no longer darkness.
He had turned a corner of the passage, staggering round a buttress and
falling heavily over a boulder which he saw but had not the strength
to avoid. And as he lay on the ground, sore and weary to death, he saw
that the rock about him was picked out with the faintest of faint
silver lights. He wondered if this was madness at last—if his eyes had
been won over to the Enemy and were joining in the derision of his
defeat—if his vision had been seduced to refining his torture with
hallucinations of victory. Slowly, fearfully, he raised his head.
He could see all the cave in which he lay—the height and the length
and the breadth of it. The light was so dim that it hardly amounted to
more than normal darkness, but after the appalling blind blackness in
which he had wandered for so many hours it was as startling a contrast
as the rising of the sun after night. Almost sobbing with
thankfulness, he dragged himself to his feet and went reeling on.
There was another bend about fifty yards ahead, and at that corner it
seemed as if the light was a little stronger. He reached the angle of
rock and stumbled round it in a torment of apprehension lest after all
he should have been deceived. But before him lay a short stretch of
widening cave, and at the end of that showed a great rough-hewn
opening. And through that opening he saw the blessed sky—an infinitely
deep and clean blue evening sky sprinkled with merry, winking stars.
Somehow he reached the opening and saw all the glory of the radiant
night, the jewelled heavens above and the quiet sea below. He stood
and gazed, supremely happy, marvelling at all these things as a man
might do who had seen none of them before and would see none of them
again.
“Oh, God!” said the Saint in a breathless whisper.
Then he sagged limply against the wall and slid down to the ground in
a dead faint.
It was three hours before he opened his eyes again, though this the
Saint did not know. He had fallen in the entrance of the cave, and he
was awakened by the light of the rising moon shining across his face.
Slowly he opened his eyes and gazed unwinkingly into the round white
luminous disc that was heaving itself out of the sea. A memory of the
nightmare of blindness through which he had passed seethed horribly
across his half-consciousness, and he sprang up with a cry. The
movement roused him completely, and he found himself leaning against
the wall with his heart thudding like a trip-hammer and his breath
coming in short gasps. He smiled crookedly, collecting himself. He
must have had it badly! Never before had he passed out like that.
He waited, gathering his wits and trampling the aftermath of the
nightmare. It was then that he looked at his watch and found that it
was half-past eleven. The rest had revived him—the crazy muzziness had
gone from his head, and he felt his strength welling back in great
refreshing waves. Elbows and knees were grazed and sore, his knuckles
were skinned, tender bumps were coming up all over his skull, and his
entire body throbbed like one big bruise, but this was where his
strenuous training stood him in good stead: so great were the
recuperative powers of his matchless constitution that already he was
stretching his limbs experimentally to see whether he could honestly
certify himself fit and tuned up for the next round.
And gradually the awareness of a singular noise began to percolate his
brain, and that noise was the faint, clanking, chugging noise of
machinery. He stiffened, and turned his head. The sound faded away
into silence, and he wondered if his ears were playing him tricks and
he was hearing nothing but the singing of his own battered cranium.
Then that gentle rattling started up again—only the muffled phantom of
a bated whisper of a noise, but quite unmistakable to the Saint.
He looked out, and blinked incredulously.
The island called the Old House lay in the quiet sea below. A little
further out a long, lean, black shape rode at anchor, picked out in
delicately stippled high-lights where the moon touched it—a picture to
rejoice the heart of an artist or a seaman. And presently, while Simon
watched, the tinkle of the engine stopped again. In a moment a small
boat shot out from under the shadow of the ship’s hull and began to
pull swiftly over to the island; and at the same time another boat
emerged from behind the Old House and worked over towards the motor
ship. The boat which came from the island wallowed low in the water
and moved sluggishly; the Saint could see a squat pile of crates
loaded amidships. The night was so still that his keen hearing could
even detect the faint jar of the rowlocks.
“God bless my soul!” ejaculated the Saint mildly.
The inconceivable good luck which had stood by him throughout his
lawless career, and which had been prodigiously attentive to him in
this adventure, was still working overtime. There he was, alive and
more or less well, when he ought by rights to have been drowned in the
underground stream or lost in the interminable blackness of the
caves—and no sooner had his little guiding star picked him out of that
mess, and given him a few minutes to get his wind, than he was handed
out this incredible gift! It seemed to him that he was streets ahead
of the mortal for whom manna falls from Heaven: to the Saint, for no
reason that he could cudgel out of his brains, Heaven seemed to spend
all its spare time despatching perfectly cooked eight-course dinners
with a selection of appropriate wines complete, what time he did
nothing more than providing the silver and cutlery. His gods had
landed him up in pretty good order at exactly the place where he
wanted to be, at exactly the hour he wanted to arrive, and had
thoughtfully thrown in the fact that by then the Tiger would be
working his gang overtime patting himself on the back for having so
slickly annihilated the thorn which for so long had been playing the
devil with their ugly hides!
That was certainly an unhoped-for blessing. The Tiger thought Mr.
Templar was dead. Well, Mr. Templar decided to let the Tiger cherish
that harmless little delusion for a space. Being theoretically dead,
the Saint was going to stay dead till it suited his book to stage a
resurrection.
There were, of course, contrary considerations. By that time Orace and
Pat and Carn would have turned Baycombe inside out, and they would
have found only that gaping hole in the floor of the inn. Wherefore at
least two of that party, and one of them especially, would be—— But
that had got to stand aside. They’d have presumed him dead for some
hours now, and it would only mean delaying the homecoming a few more
hours. Against that he could set the help it gave him to know that
Patricia would be safely out of the fireworks, though he would feel
the absence of Orace. All the same, taking it by and large, he
reckoned that debit and credit weren’t so far off balancing. With a
continuance of his miraculous luck, the curtain could be rung down a
lot sooner, now that everything was arranged for him to catch the
Tiger on the hop. . . .
“The Saint _versus_ the Tiger,” murmured Simon. “This is where all the
early Christian martyrs will look down from Heaven and see the old
game played under rules they’d never heard of in Rome—and, we hope,
with a surprise ending that Nero never saw.”
It was the Saint himself who spoke. All his bubbling optimism was
sparkling up through his system again. He was tired, naturally, but he
still felt fit enough to tackle anything the Tiger Cubs were prepared
to hand out to him, and he had never reviewed an impending struggle
more eagerly, for by all the omens it was going to be the last of his
exploits, and his sense of theatre demanded that he should finish up
in a blaze of glory.
He searched for his weapons, and found them securely in their places.
The cigarettes in his case, which might have been useful, had been
ruined by the wet; but the case itself, with the fine steel blade
running along one edge of it, was a tried asset in emergencies, and
this went into the hip pocket of his trousers. His coat he left in the
cave.
Looking down, he saw that there were only a dozen yards to climb down
to the beach. With the moon to help him, this was no difficult task.
He swung over the edge at once, and in a few minutes he stood on the
crunching shingle with the water lapping round his ankles. There was a
longish swim yet to get through, but by now he felt capable of all
that and more. He waded out up to his waist and then slithered forward
into the ripples without a splash, like an otter, and struck out for
the Tiger’s ship with clean, powerful strokes.
His arms rose and fell rhythmically, making not the least sound as
they cleared the water and then dived back at full stretch. The Saint
could keep up that graceful over-arm for hours, but on this occasion
he had no need for such a display of stamina. His trained muscles
drove him forward tirelessly at a pace that ate up distance. He
steered a wide circling course to keep well out of the danger zone
between the Old House and the ship, where he might have been spotted
by a pair of keen eyes in one of the rowboats or by anyone who
happened to be looking across that reach of water from either side,
for the moonlight was strengthening with every minute—an act of
cussedness on the part of Nature which made the job in hand a more
ticklish proposition for both Saint and Tiger alike. Even so, it was
not very long before he came up under the motor ship’s cruiser stern,
after covering the last hundred yards under water with only three
cautious floatings-up for breath.
He clung there for a moment’s rest, and then worked his way along the
seaward side, where would be safest, forward to the bows, hugging
close in to the hull. It then occurred to him that the climb up the
anchor chain, in full view of the island and the ship’s bridge, would
be a very chancey method. Yet the vessel’s sides rose sheer and
unbroken for six feet before they were cut by the lowest row of
portholes.
But once more his luck held. As he swam slowly along, pondering this
problem, he ran right into a rope ladder which hung down from the
deck. It couldn’t have been more conveniently provided if he had asked
for it to be lowered against his arrival, but a little thought gave
him the reason for its presence. It must have been dropped for the
Tiger and his principals to come aboard, and since then the tide must
have swung the ship right round on her moorings. And there it was,
temporarily forgotten, and just the very thing he wanted.
The noise of the donkey-engine, throttled down though it was, and the
creaking of the derricks which were taking the gold on board, was
louder now, and he could hear the sound of sea-boots grating on the
deck, and the subdued voices of men. As far as he could gather on his
way up they were working on the after hold, for he heard nothing from
directly above him.
The Saint came level with the deck and peeped over. All was clear at
that point and forrard of it, but he could see a few figures clustered
round the small hatch aft, and an arm of timber stood out against the
sky with a square case dangling at the end of it. Fortunately, they
were all intent on their task, and already he had banked on the ship
being short-handed, so that all the crew there was would be occupied
with other things than loafing about getting in his way. With a quick
heave the Saint gained the rail, went over, and landed on the deck
without sound. Facing him was an open door and a companion-way. He
jumped for it.
On the first step he paused and listened, but the work was going
steadily on, and clearly nobody had noticed the dripping dark shape
that had slipped over the rail and leapt across the exposed bit of
deck.
“So far, so very good!” said the Saint, and a smile of joyous
anticipation flitted across his lips. “Once aboard the lugger and the
gold is mine!”
The companion ran down into a dimly lighted alleyway, and there the
Saint hesitated. That was a risky place to loiter in. Cabins were also
risky—they needed only the turning of a key to turn them into prisons.
But he wanted a few seconds to rest and plan the next move, and had to
take his chance.
There was a promising-looking door right opposite him, and he tiptoed
across the alley and turned the handle very softly. But the door must
have been locked, for his gently increasing pressure failed to make it
budge. The Saint was promptly intrigued by that locked door. It
immediately drove all thoughts of safety and rest and scheming out of
his head, and in his reckless fashion he resolved to have a look
inside that cabin with the least possible delay, whether it was
occupied or not—and, listening with his ear to a panel, he came to the
conclusion that the unbroken silence within laid more than a shade of
odds on its being empty. But to open a locked door required more
implements than he had on him, and he was about to go in search of the
engine-room workshop to collect suitable apparatus when he heard the
sound of approaching footsteps.
In a flash he located their origin—round the nearest corner of the
passage. The Saint retreated a little way up his companion-ladder—an
unwise move, since it left him with a very groggy line of withdrawal
if the man glimpsed him and raised the alarm; but Simon, ever an
opportunist, was curious to see who it was had time to spend below
when all hands were toiling to get the cargo loaded in the shortest
practicable time.
He peeped one eye round the angle of the bulkhead, and then drew back
sharply.
It was Bloem, carrying a tray on which was a plate with a pile of
sandwiches and a siphon. The Saint glanced back over his shoulder, but
behind him the deck was still deserted, though he was in imminent
danger of discovery by anyone who happened to pass and glance down.
For an instant he meditated flight—but only for an instant. The deck
would be an unhealthy place for Simon Templar to wander around just
then, and, besides, there was the door to open and Bloem to tail up in
case the Boer were bringing the Tiger a little supper.
The Saint flattened himself against the bulkhead; and, as the
footsteps drew level with him, he tensed up ready to take instant
action if Bloem noticed him. But the Boer was already turning away
when he came into view, and Simon’s eyes fired up as he saw that Bloem
was making for the locked door.
Bloem set the tray down on the floor, fumbled for a key, and turned it
in the lock. He pushed the door half-open, and the Saint could see one
corner of the cabin, for the lights were on inside. Then Bloem bent
down to pick up the tray, and as he did so Simon dived from the eighth
stair.
The Saint landed on one hunched shoulder, and that shoulder impinged
accurately over Bloem’s kidneys. The man gave a grunt of agony. All
the weight of Simon’s leaping, falling body was hurtling on behind
that muscular shoulder, and Bloem was caught off his equilibrium. The
impact sent the Boer toppling over, and his head was bumped forcefully
against the floor as Simon crashed on top of him.
Bloem was absolutely out, but the sound of the scuffle might possibly
have been heard. The Saint was on his feet again with the speed of a
fighting panther. He grabbed Bloem by the collar and yanked him into
the cabin; then he snatched in the tray. In a moment he had the door
shut and had turned with his back to it to see what his impulse had
let him in for.
It was not till then that he saw someone sitting quietly on the bunk.
“Oh, how d’you do, Auntie?” said the Saint, who was always polite, and
Agatha Girton’s lips curved ironically.
“You’re really rather a wonderful man, Mr. Templar,” she remarked.