The Golden Reef (1969)

by Pattinson, James

  When the men had carried Peterson away Keeton returned to his drowsy watching of the sea. He wondered whether Rains had been right in suggesting that the captain was a goner. Peterson certainly looked bad; and if he died then Rains would take over command of the ship. Somehow Keeton found it impossible to view that prospect with any feeling of pleasure.

  Bristow, that evening in the gunners’ messroom, seemed to be of the same opinion. ‘If the Old Man snuffs it there’ll be a right bastard to fill his shoes.’

  ‘What makes you think he’ll snuff it?’ Hagan asked. The petty officer had a tiny cabin of his own but for the sake of company he spent a lot of time in the gunners’ mess.

  ‘I heard he was bad.’

  Hagan sniffed. He was nearly twice Bristow’s age and he had a craggy, weather beaten face that was almost exactly as wide as it was long. ‘You heard! Galley rumours. If you believe half of what you hear on board this ship that’s ten times too much.’

  ‘This wasn’t a galley rumour. I had it from that little runt of a steward, Smith.’

  ‘What’s he know about it?’

  ‘He’s seeing after the Old Man. According to Smith the trouble’s a dicky heart. He thinks we ought to go back to Sydney and put him in hospital.’

  ‘That’s not likely. The cargo’s too important.’

  ‘You mean that gold?’ Keeton said.

  Hagan stabbed the air with his pipe. ‘You and your gold. That’s another rumour. Nobody saw any gold, did they? No, and if you ask me, nobody ever will, because there ain’t none.’

  ‘So why did they put an armed guard on that storeroom?’

  ‘Secret machinery, like I told you.’

  ‘Did you see the secret machinery?’ Bristow asked.

  Hagan sucked at his pipe and dropped the subject.

  The Valparaiso steamed serenely over a calm sea and the days passed like milestones on a journey. They were blue days – blue sky, blue water, and only the flash and stutter of foam at the bows and the churned-up wake astern to indicate that the ship was indeed moving onward and was not the motionless hub of a wide revolving wheel. Watches came and went. Keeton dozed in the Oerlikon box on the wing of the bridge for four hours at a stretch, dazed by the sun by day, unmoved by the brilliant display of stars by night; thinking only that here was another four hours of tedium to be endured and pushed away into the great unfillable store-cupboard of wasted time.

  He had seen Peterson only once since the captain’s collapse on the bridge. This was two days later and well after midnight. Keeton was half-asleep. He heard a cough and, turning, caught sight of a small figure outlined palely against the dark background of the wheelhouse. A second glance convinced him that this was no phantom but Captain Peterson, bare-headed and dressed in pyjamas.

  Keeton stared in amazement. Peterson was wearing felt slippers and the legs of the pyjamas flopped over them in loose folds.

  ‘Sir,’ Keeton said.

  Peterson turned his head and peered at the gunner. ‘Well?’

  ‘It’s chilly out here, sir. Should you be out? You’re not dressed. I mean—’

  ‘I am aware of the state of my dress,’ Peterson said acidly. ‘I am also aware of the temperature of the air. If I require advice on such matters from you or anyone else I shall ask for it. Until then perhaps you will be good enough to keep your observations to yourself and attend to your duty, which I believe is to keep watch.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Keeton said. He turned away, angry with himself as well as with Peterson. He had left himself open to the snub and he had got it. He would take care that it did not happen again. If Peterson liked to kill himself, let him.

  He heard the old man shuffling into the wheelhouse where the second mate was on duty, but he did not look round again.

  It was Bristow who, a few days later, brought the news to the gunners’ mess. Bristow was gasping with excitement.

  ‘He’s had a stroke. Captain Peterson’s had a stroke. He’s paralysed.’

  Keeton had been lying on his bunk reading a book. He sat up sharply and struck his head on the alarm-bell that was fixed to the bulkhead just above him. The bell emitted a faint note of protest like the tiny ghost of a call to action.

  ‘A stroke! Are you sure?’

  ‘That’s what Smith says. And he should know. He found him.’

  The gunners were all crowding round Bristow, who was obviously enjoying his role as the bearer of ill tidings.

  ‘What did Smith do?’

  Bristow grinned. ‘Yelled bloody murder, I’d say. He thought the Old Man had kicked the bucket.’

  ‘He might as well have kicked it if he’s paralysed,’ Keeton said. ‘He’s not going to be a lot more use to this ship.’

  ‘You’re right there. Mr Rains will have to take over, and we all know what he’s like.’

  A youth with a fiery crop of pimples wanted to know what exactly a stroke was.

  ‘It’s a rush of blood to the head,’ Bristow said.

  ‘You’ll get a rush of blood to your head. I want a straight answer.’

  ‘And you shall have it, sonny boy. Now, say you burst a blood vessel in the brain, what happens? It bitches up the nervous system and things don’t work right any more. That’s a stroke.’

  ‘Is that the truth?’

  ‘It’s what the steward told me, and he looked it up in a book. That’s about all they know of medical treatment in a ship like this here – what they read in a book. If you need an operation the cook does it with his saw and his carving knife while the mate reads out the instructions.’

  Petty Officer Hagan came into the messroom with a worried expression on his square face. They all turned and looked at him.

  ‘You heard the news, P.O.?’

  ‘I’ve heard it,’ Hagan said. ‘It’s all over the ship.’ He slumped down on a chair. ‘Here’s a fine how-do-you-do. Mr Rains in command and Mr Jones and Mr Wall to help him.’

  ‘As useless a set of bastards as ever you saw,’ Bristow said.

  ‘You can cut that out,’ Hagan said sharply. ‘They’re ship’s officers, whether or no.’

  Bristow shrugged. ‘Well, all I’m saying is I hope we don’t get into any trouble with that shower in charge, that’s all.’

  ‘We’re not going to get into any trouble.’

  ‘I hope not. But you never know. At sea anything can happen.’

  Keeton got down from his bunk and went to the porthole. He stared out at an expanse of water over which night was beginning to cast its mantle. Bristow was right. What could you know of the events of the coming day, even of the next hour? At sea anything could happen. Anything.

  Chapter Two

  Encounter

  There was a ring of haze round the sun. The air was heavy and oppressive. The metal of the ship dripped with moisture like the sweating skin of a sick man. The sea looked dull and leaden, and there was no wind to ruffle its surface, no breath of air to cool the gunners as they toiled on the 4-inch under the watchful eye of Petty Officer Hagan.

  Stripped to the waist, Keeton added his weight to the cleaning-rod. The rod was stuck, the brush half-way up the barrel like a sweep’s brush that had encountered some obstacle in a chimney.

  ‘Come along there,’ Hagan said peevishly. ‘What’s holding you? Come on you lousy weaklings. Push it through, can’t you?’

  Keeton could feel Bristow’s breath fanning the back of his neck. Bristow was making sweat by the gallon, and his freckled skin was glowing so brightly that it looked as though it would certainly have caught fire if there had not been so much moisture quenching it.

  ‘Damn him!’ Bristow muttered. ‘He wants to kill us, that’s what. Damn his eyes!’

  Hagan had good hearing. ‘It’ll take more than a bit of honest work to kill you, my son. It won’t do you no harm to sweat some of that fat off.’

  ‘I’d like to make him sweat,’ Bristow panted. ‘Why don’t he lend a hand hisself, the lazy—’

  Hagan tapped Bristow on
the shoulder, and it was no light touch. ‘If you was in the real navy you’d know the answer to that one. And you’d realize what a soft number you’ve got on board this ship. But I doubt they wouldn’t take an article like you in the real navy. They’re particular. In the real navy they want real men.’

  ‘Here we go again,’ Bristow said. ‘It’s a flaming pity he didn’t stay in the real navy; then we wouldn’t have had to put up with him.’

  Hagan had moved to the muzzle of the gun and was out of earshot.

  ‘Now‚’ Bristow grunted. ‘Heave!’

  The brush emerged suddenly from the muzzle and struck Petty Officer Hagan full on the chest. He was caught off balance and sat down heavily, a black smudge of oil staining his white shirt.

  ‘Sorry, P.O.‚’ Bristow said. ‘Didn’t see you was standing there. It sort of slipped.’

  Hagan got up slowly and deliberately. He looked at the oil stain on his shirt and he looked at Bristow. He seemed to be having difficulty with his breathing.

  ‘So it slipped, did it? Well, by heaven I’ll make sure it don’t slip like that again. You think you can play tricks with me, do you? OK, so we’ll see about that. Now I really will make you sweat; I’ll make you sweat blood, d’you hear? We’ll have gun-drill and gun-drill and then more gun-drill. I’ll make sailors of you yet, so help me.’

  Hagan meant what he said. He kept them at it for an hour without respite, and by the time he had finished with them the sun had disappeared completely; clouds had banked up in the sky and the sea had turned darker. Nor was the ocean any longer still; although there was yet no wind, the waters had begun to stir like a sleeping man troubled by evil dreams. There was a long, oily swell, and the Valparaiso, catching the uneasy feeling that was in the air, began to lose her steady, even motion and to roll first one way and then the other. Beyond the stern, where the dull grey barrel of the gun was pointing, the flailing propeller churned up foam and a thousand eddies streamed away from the rudder along the white path of the wake to be lost in the distance and the immensity of the ocean.

  ‘Weather coming‚’ Bristow said.

  Hagan looked up at the sky and down at the sea, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. ‘Bad weather. I heard the glass was falling. If we get a typhoon it won’t be pleasant, not pleasant at all.’

  ‘It’s not the season for typhoons‚ is it?’ Keeton said.

  Memories of geography lessons came back into his mind, of diagrams drawn on a blackboard. For him geography had always been associated with the smell of chalk, with coloured maps and line shading. The oceans had been wide areas of different shades of blue according to the depth; but when you really came to them they were not like that at all; there was nothing in an atlas to indicate the true character of the sea, its moods, its storms, its misleading calms, its treachery. Now to Keeton the sea would always mean such things as night watches in the dark misery of driving rain, the sound of wind in a ship’s rigging that was the most mournful song in the world and the cold grey of the dawn creeping over the horizon. And these things you could not learn from an atlas.

  ‘It’s the wrong area too‚’ he said.

  Hagan looked at Keeton with a certain distaste. ‘So you know it all then? Maybe you’ve been in these waters before?’

  Keeton shook his head and told himself that he should have had the sense not to speak out of turn. A man like Hagan, a man with goodness knows how many years of service in the Royal Navy, could not be expected to take kindly to correction from a seaman-gunner.

  ‘No. It’s only what I was taught.’

  ‘School learning!’ Hagan sounded contemptuous. He looked as though he would have liked to spit but hesitated to foul the deck. ‘They’ll teach you anything at school; but what do they know? Wrong time, wrong area – it don’t make that much difference.’ He snapped his fingers. ‘If the glass goes down far enough and the wind blows strong enough, that’s a typhoon. Get me?’

  ‘I get you‚’ Keeton said. Perhaps the petty officer was right anyway. You had book learning and you had experience; but it was the experience that really counted.

  ‘All right then‚’ Hagan said. ‘You lot can knock off now.’

  They went away from the gun-deck, leaving only the duty watch. The sky was overcast and the sea was troubled; but there was no wind – yet.

  *

  It began to rain late in the afternoon. At first it was a light rain that merely damped the metal of the 4-inch and dulled the polished mechanism of the breech. The two sailors on watch pulled a canvas cover over the breech and another over the muzzle.

  The rain fell faster, pitting the surface of the ocean and pattering on the ship’s decks. A wind began to blow, pushing the rain before it, and the sailors huddled for shelter in the lee of the gun. The sky was darker; black clouds covered it and visibility contracted to a smaller circle round the ship; to two thousand yards, perhaps no more than a thousand.

  The sailors, huddled in oilskins in the meagre shelter of the gun, were making no real attempt at keeping a lookout; they were waiting with a damp, lugubrious resignation for the remaining hours of the watch to drift away.

  No one saw the submarine break surface; perhaps it had not been submerged. It was noticed first from the bridge as a darker outline in the enveloping murk, a shape that appeared and vanished and appeared again as the rain swept across like a curtain ruffled by the wind. It was a long, low silhouette on the starboard quarter, a kind of blemish on the surface, an eruption that the rain should have washed away and did not. There was no apparent movement in it; it might have been a rock or a derelict or something that the imagination had conjured out of nothing.

  And then a stab of flame spurted from it, and the screech of the shell passing over the ship was proof that here was no imagined shape but something real and deadly, something that could hit hard and often, and perhaps send the Valparaiso down into the deep waters from which there was no returning.

  Keeton was lying on his bunk when the alarm-bell a few inches above his head began to ring. It jerked him as a wire jerks a puppet. It was so unexpected; a harsh breaking-in upon the dreaming privacy of his mind. It was at once a threat and a summons: a threat that could not be ignored, a summons that must be obeyed.

  Keeton was out of his bunk in one convulsive leap. He heard Bristow’s complaining voice. ‘What’s up now? For Pete’s sake, what’s to do?’

  Keeton grabbed his life-jacket and his steel helmet, and ran out into the washplace from which the long iron ladder with its slippery rungs led up to the poop. With the ship rolling, the ladder was a swaying perch that leaned first one way and then the other. Keeton, hindered by the life-jacket and the helmet, went up like a crab, awkwardly, the helmet clanging against the ladder.

  There was one electric bulb lighting the washplace, and it shone on the steel bulkheads that were dripping with condensation. The metal of the ladder felt wet under Keeton’s hands; he was wearing rubber-soled shoes, and once his right foot slipped and hit the man below him. It was Bristow.

  ‘Mind what you’re doing‚’ Bristow shouted. ‘You nearly had me off, you clumsy bastard.’

  The voices of the men and the clanging of metal on metal echoed hollowly in the iron chamber; and then something appeared to strike the side of the ship and reverberate like thunder in that confined space. The whole vessel shuddered as though with fear.

  ‘Oh, God!’ Bristow yelled. ‘We’ve been hit.’

  Keeton hesitated for a moment near the top of the ladder and heard Petty Officer Hagan snarling savagely at him from the deck above. ‘Come on, come on. Let’s have you. Come on, damn you!’

  Keeton emerged from the companion hatch into the driving rain and the grey afternoon that was gradually drifting into the complete and impenetrable darkness of night. Away to his left he glimpsed a sudden stab of red fire, as though someone had struck a match which had flared up for an instant and then had died. He heard the scream of the shell, and he thought: So this is how it comes; and the war isn
’t finished yet after all.

  And then he was clawing up the short ladder to the gun platform, dragging on his helmet and life-jacket, stooping to lift a shell from its rack and carrying it to the breech of the gun, all in a kind of daze, not thinking about it but simply going through the drill that had been hammered into him so many times.

  Certain impressions forced their way into his mind: he saw that the barrel of the 4-inch had been trained round until it was pointing over the starboard quarter, and he could hear Hagan shouting incomprehensible orders. The faces of the men who were working the gun - the layer, the trainer, the breech-worker, the sight-setter - these were no more than a blur, not recognizable as the messmates who shared his meals, his cabin, his watches, his boredom. All was now a kind of dream, a hazy consciousness of action, of the fact that this was an engagement between a surfaced submarine and a defensively armed merchant ship, a gun duel which might end in the sinking of one or the other.

  He did not feel afraid; the question of fear did not seem to enter into the reckoning; for there seemed to be no hard reality about this grey, rain-shrouded picture. It was no more than a blurred wash of sound and movement, through which the bright red streaks of flame intermittently stabbed their way with no greater effect than that of a man stabbing at a wall of cotton-wool.

  Keeton stood with a shell resting in the crook of his left arm, his right hand steadying it. He stood with his feet wide apart, leaning his body against the rolling of the ship. The rain beat upon his face and ran down his cheeks, blinding him; he could feel water on his skin, and his shirt stuck to him clammily.

  ‘Fire!’

  He heard the order, and he was able to count three before the gunlayer brought his sights on target and the gun spouted flame and smoke. Then the breech swung open, the dripping swab went in to quench the remnants of the fire, and the acrid stench of burnt cordite stung Keeton’s nostrils. He moved forward and thrust his shell into the breech, and then Bristow was unbuttoning the lid of a Clarkson’s case and tipping the fresh cordite charge into his hands, and he was pushing the charge into the gun and turning away to grab another shell from the rack.