Soldier, Sail North (1987)

by Pattinson, James

  And Ben Cowdrey sat upon his bunk with his back against the bulkhead playing his mouth-organ, and the reedy notes shook themselves out of it and beat against the dripping iron above his head. The gunners sang and made poor jokes and laughed and sang again, and were suddenly, briefly happy. And Ben Cowdrey, playing his mouth-organ and beating time with his swinging feet, wondered what his old woman would think if she could see him now; his old woman far away in Stepney. And his workmates and his neighbours, the fellows at the local. They would never believe it was he; somebody like him, perhaps, but not really he, not Ben Cowdrey, the little tailor.

  Certainly they would never believe that he was happier in this life than he had ever been. Yet he was—in many ways. Some of it was bad, of course; some of it was hellish. But on the whole he enjoyed this life; he liked the companionship of men; he liked the changing horizons, the boyish feeling of adventure, the excitement; he loved the smell of the sea and the kaleidoscope of life in foreign ports. The War was incidental, but it was the War that had given him these new horizons, that had dragged him out of the Savile Row work-room where he had for years plied his busy needle, living in a world of cloths and cottons, pins and chalk and scissors. There, in that basement work-room, his vision of the outside world had been limited to a small amount of area railing glimpsed through the window, and the legs of passers-by. Glancing up from his work, he would see the striped black trousers of City men, the silk stockings of Society women, the corduroys of artists, the tatters of out-of-works. There he would labour on suits for the wealthy that might cost twenty-five guineas, and when his own suit needed replacing he would buy one off the peg for fifty shillings or maybe less.

  Gladys and he had been happy, he supposed—in an undemonstrative way. There had never been any great passion between them; neither had been built for that. There had been no children either. Both of them would have liked a child, but they had not been unhappy. Really, it would have been hard to find anyone more suited to his temperament than Gladys; but there had always been one side of his character that she could not understand, because it had no reflection in her own. There was nothing adventurous about Gladys; Cowdrey smiled at the thought. A home-lover, that was what she was—all for safety first and staying in that state of life in which it had pleased God to place her.

  But to Ben the world had called; the wide world, the far places, the strange, beautiful names: Pago Pago, Buenos Aires, Shanghai, Vladivostock, Takoradi, Tierra del Fuego, Madagascar, Zanzibar, Samarkand, Katmandu, Lhasa. How often he would search through his old, dog-eared atlas, muttering those names softly to himself and yearning for the chance to travel! Often he would visit the offices of shipping agents and go home with pockets stuffed full of brochures. Sometimes he would buy a Geographical Magazine and turn the pages again and again until they almost fell to pieces under his touch.

  But it all led nowhere; he stayed in his old job, sewing tweeds and worsteds and flannels; yet dreaming always of coral beaches, of snow-capped mountains, of tropical forests, of ox-carts and the babel of foreign tongues. Then, when he had thought that these things could never be more than a dream, the War had drawn him forth from his shell and shown him the reality. He had been to Rio, to Buenos Aires, to Jamaica, to New York; now he was up on the northern rim of the world, and who knew where he would be six months hence?

  So Ben played his mouth-organ, and his bald head gleamed and his eyes sparkled as he thought: This is the life; this is the life for me. God! I never want to go back to sewing suits; I never want to go back to that.

  “Tomorrow,” said Vernon, “I shall wash myself all over. Tomorrow night will be bath-night. It’s about time; I begin to itch.”

  “You’ll freeze,” said Payne. “Maybe you’ll catch cold and die.”

  “Then it will be in a good cause, and my lily-white soul will be wafted straight aloft.”

  “Other place more likely. Anyway, you’d better borrow a scraper off the bosun.”

  Andrews said, “I wonder how long we shall be anchored here.”

  “That,” said Petty Officer Donker, who was paring his nails with a clasp-knife fully six inches long and an inch wide, “that, my son, depends on how many ships there are waiting to use the docks. We may be here a week.”

  “Shall we be able to go ashore in Murmansk?”

  “Sure you will; why not? That’s if you think it’s worth your while.”

  “What sort of a place is it?” asked Payne.

  Donker sucked in his breath with a loud, whistling noise. “It’s bloody terrible,” he said.

  “What about the women?”

  Petty Officer Donker stopped paring his nails and stared at Payne. “Women!” he said. “Women! I never see none —not to call women. ’Course,” he went on, “there’s some made in that shape, I don’t deny. But you take my tip; you let that sort of thing alone till you get home. These lot are poxed up to the eyebrows.”

  “Ah, come off it,” said Payne. “You hear that everywhere you go. ‘Keep off the tarts in Cape Town,’ they tell you; ‘seventy per cent, have got V.D.’ Then you go to Jamaica, and it’s eighty per cent., and in B.A. it’s ninety. Hell! you can’t believe all that.”

  “You can believe what you like,” said Donker. “I’m just giving you a friendly word of advice, that’s all. And I’ll tell you what happened last time we was here: the bombardier—the bombardier, mind you!—fell in with a prozzy and was out all one night. He came back covered with fleas—bastard great fleas all over him. We had a rare time, I can tell you; had to smother everything with flea-powder. But that wasn’t the end of it; when we got back to Scotland they took him ashore with siff.”

  Miller broke in: “That’s a rotten lie.”

  Donker waggled his knife at Miller. “Here, here! That’s no way to talk. Why should I trouble to make up a tale like that? Anyway, you can check up if you want to; you don’t have to take my word for it.”

  “It can’t be true,” said Miller. “Prostitution has been abolished in Russia. V.D.’s been wiped out.”

  Donker laughed. “Oh, my, my! You bin reading too much propaganda. It don’t do to believe all that twaddle. You want to go ashore and take a look round; you may learn something. Personally, I mean to stay on board; I’ve had a bellyful of Murmansk, and I don’t want no more.”

  Warby was the last to climb into his bunk, and, being the last, it fell to him to switch off the electric light. While at sea that light had never been put out; it had been dimmed with the aid of a piece of cloth, but it had always been left burning, night and day. Warby snapped it off, and only the glow of the stove showed through the darkness. Warby groped his way to his bunk, stubbed his toe, swore, and clambered in, thrusting his woollen-clad legs down between the rough blankets and drawing the fleece bed-cover up over his chin.

  Already half the gunners were asleep; already a variety of snores and whistles came from the bunks—from Payne’s especially, for it seemed that his soft bulk formed a natural reserve of wind to play upon the organ of his nose. Warby listened to these noises for a moment or two; then they faded out of his consciousness and he was asleep.

  Only Miller and Randall were still awake, still awake and thinking. In Randall’s mind the ghost of Lily danced on and on; always before sleeping he would think of her, and the sense of being an outcast, a man not as other men, would fall heavily upon him. Again and again he wondered: Have they found the body yet? Is there a warrant out for my arrest? Well, if they did not take him in Murmansk they would never have him; for his mind was made up: he was not going to survive the homeward journey. It would be so easy to end things; all he had to do was to step overboard one dark night; no one need see him go, there would be no alarm; he would just disappear. For a while he allowed himself the childish pleasure of imagining the sorrow of his shipmates when they realized that he was dead; but soon, in his weariness, he slept, as all the others were sleeping—all the others save only Miller.

  Miller was twisting the words of Petty Office
r Donker round his brain and tormenting himself. What did Donker know of Russia? Why did he tell those lies about prostitution? For they were lies; there was no prostitution in Russia. Why should there be? In a country with equal shares for all, where there were no rich and no poor, there was no need for it. Then why should Donker make up such lies?

  Miller felt bitter against Donker; and, because the petty officer was so much senior to himself and there was no way in which Miller could hurt him, Miller had to bottle up his resentment; and that was something he did not like doing. These thoughts kept him awake for quite a time; but in the end weariness overcame him also, and with the others he slept.

  Vernon waited until after tea before having his bath; and since the bath itself was to be a somewhat speedy operation—speed being necessitated by the far from temperate conditions—he made his preparations in leisurely fashion, dragging clean underclothing from the recesses of his kitbag and warming it in front of the stove. He had fetched a bucket of water from the galley pump and had filled the kettle. Now it only remained for the kettle to boil, and all would be ready. He had the drill planned, and reckoned that, provided no unforeseen snags arose, he ought to be able to run through the whole business in little more than five minutes. With the temperature in the wash-place as usual below freezing, that would be quite long enough.

  Vernon poured the hot water into a bucket, refilled the kettle, and put it back on the stove. Then, taking soap, flannel, and towel, he went into the wash-place and rapidly stripped himself. It was cold, damned cold; but with great energy and much puffing and blowing he began his bath, standing on the duck-boards and swilling water from the bucket over his body, soaping himself, and rubbing vigorously with the flannel. He could feel an icy draught blowing down from the deck-opening, but he consoled himself with the thought that he would soon be back in warm clothes, in those wonderful long and hairy underpants, the qualities of which he had so much underrated in the old days.

  He was working on his legs when the alarm-bells began ringing, and almost simultaneously a wave of humanity burst from the cabin and clattered past him, flinging him on one side as though he had been straw, kicking his bucket of water over, treading on his bare toes, and sending the air eddying round his wet and shivering body in frosty whirlwinds.

  “Come on!” said Padgett, rushing past him. “Air-raid!”

  As the gun-crews clambered up the iron ladder and disappeared on deck Vernon cursed them, and his curses were the only warm part of him. He cursed all air-raids also; he cursed the Germans who made them and the Russians who failed to prevent them. Most of all he cursed the alarm-bells, which were still ringing. And while he cursed he found time to pick up his towel and move himself into the deserted cabin. There, standing in the ashes by the red-hot stove, he began fiercely drying himself. Still only half-dry, he dragged on his clean pants and vest, thrust himself into shirt, trousers, socks, and boots, flung a coat over the lot, a steel helmet on his head, gloves on hands, and with teeth chattering like castanets followed the others.

  He had just reached the top of the gun-ladder when the order to stand down was given.

  One by one the other gunners followed Vernon’s example and bathed as well as they could. Beards disappeared, and the sound of scrubbing-brushes could be heard in the wash-place as men laundered their underclothing. Lines strung across the wash-place carried shirts, pants, and vests frozen into rigid shapes, as though occupied by invisible men. Randall went so far as to polish his greatcoat buttons. Time dragged.

  Once a Russian soldier came down into the gunners’ quarters, conducted by a sailor. He wore a long sheepskin coat, belted about the waist, and leather jack-boots; on his head he wore a peaked cap that narrowed to a point at the crown and bore on its front a red star. He had come aboard from one of the launches that were continually visiting the ship. He had a square, heavy face, with rather high cheek-bones—a melancholy, badly shaved face.

  Miller felt excitement throbbing in his brain when he saw the Russian. Here, for the first time, he was seeing a son of the Revolution, a Communist from the mother state of Communism. Miller wanted to shake the man’s hand, to pat him on the shoulder and call him brother, comrade. But with the other fellows looking on he hesitated to do so; they would not have understood.

  “He wants cigarettes,” said the sailor.

  The Russian soldier nodded his head. “Seegret,” he said; “seegret.” And he made the motions of putting a cigarette to his lips and blowing out a cloud of smoke, as though he were not sure that they would understand.

  Miller dragged a packet from his pocket and offered it to the Russian; but the man shook his head, making negative motions with his hands.

  The sailor laughed. “He wants to buy some,” he explained. He turned to the Russian. “Fifty cigarette,” he said slowly. “How many rouble?”

  The Russian did not understand. “Seegret,” he said.

  The sailor asked, “Anybody got fifty fags he wants to sell?”

  Payne took a tin out of his kitbag, and the sailor showed it to the Russian.

  “Rouble,” he said. “Rouble. How much rouble?”

  The Russian held up both his hands, spreading the fingers.

  The sailor looked disgusted. “No, no, no! That’s no good. What, only ten roubles for fifty cigarettes? We can get one hundred roubles ashore; that’s the proper price.”

  The Russian looked blank. Of this speech he understood just two words—rouble and cigarette.

  “What do you mean?” asked Miller. “What do you mean by the proper price?”

  The sailor answered condescendingly, as one who was in Russia for the second time and knew it all.

  “Black-market price. English and Yankee cigarettes sell like hot cakes; you’ll know why if you try some Russki ones. Any of the kids will give you a hundred roubles for fifty. This feller’s trying to pull a fast one. But he isn’t going to get away with that.”

  He began haggling with the Russian, trying to make him understand by means of a kind of pidgin-English spoken very loudly and slowly. The man had a wad of notes in his hand; he offered one, but the sailor pushed it away. “Not enough. Niet dobra. Not nearly enough.”

  Miller drew away. He was bewildered. What did it mean? Black market? In Russia? What could it mean?

  On the fourth day in the anchorage two Messerschmitt Jaguars came without warning over the hills and dropped two sticks of bombs. Not a gun answered them; they were in and away almost before anyone could realize what was happening—away over the hills and streaking for Petsamo and the Finnish airfield from which they had come. Within a few minutes the pilots would be making their reports.

  Randall and Vernon and Cowdrey were cleaning the Bofors gun when the attack came. They had the gun unloaded and the cleaning-rod rammed half-way down the barrel. They heard no sound at all until the planes skimmed over the hills; then it was too late to do anything. They saw the bombs dropping in the bay, raising great spouts of water; then the ship seemed to give a leap and shake itself like a dog, and that was all. After a little while they continued cleaning the gun, and the ripples died gradually away.

  For seven days the Golden Ray lay at anchor; then she pulled in her hook and moved up-river to Murmansk docks, where, for the first time since she had left Immingham, she made fast to the land.

  “So this,” said Sergeant Willis, leaning over the rail on the shoreward side, “is Russia.” After a minute or two he dropped his cigarette-end into the narrow strip of water lying between ship and quay, and added, “What a shambles!”

  The quay was a picture of disorder: packing-cases stood piled one on top of another; pieces of machinery lay rusting in the open; a stack of motor-tyres reached to a height of fifteen feet, left just where they had been unloaded; behind them were bales of hay; and on all these, on cranes, railway-trucks, ships, barrels, hawsers, bollards, gangways, on the peaked caps of sentries, the fur hats of stevedores, and the astrakhan hats of Government officials, on men and women, Engli
sh, Russian, and American, even on the miserable hound searching without apparent hope for something to keep body and soul together, the interminable, silent snow drifted down out of an opaque sky.

  “So this,” said Sergeant Willis again, “is Russia.”

  And Petty Officer Donker spat into that same strip of water into which the sergeant’s cigarette had fallen, and answered, “Russia!”

  On Miller the snow fell also, and he scarcely noticed it. He too was gazing at the cluttered quay, at the trucks with their strange, outlandish lettering, at the men and women with their quilted clothing and felt boots. He too was breathing the word “Russia,” but in how different a fashion! In Miller’s mouth it became a word of magic; even as a man might murmur in wonder and only half-belief, “Eldorado!” so Miller breathed “Russia!”

  Yet, in a way, he felt as though something were missing; there should have been some visible, outward sign that this was truly the land of Communism, the genuine Utopia. Miller did not know quite what he had expected to find—certainly not banners of welcome; yet surely something different from this, something different from these silent people moving in the enveloping snow. He had expected some impact, something that he could no more define than a child can define the hoped-for joys of tomorrow. But here there was no electric surge of fulfilment; nothing but the silent people and the silent snow. Suddenly Miller was afraid, and what made it worse was that he could not tell whence his fear had sprung.

  “Murmansk,” said Vernon to Cowdrey and Payne, who were standing beside him, “is within the Arctic Circle—in Lapland, as a matter of fact. You will notice that many of these people have flat, Mongoloid features; that is because—”

  “All right,” said Payne; “we don’t want a lecture. This is Russia.”