by H. E. Bates
My attitude on the dinghy that night became like that. Before the moment we had taken off, now more than a day ago, and had flown out towards the snows of Europe, there was little of my life that seemed to matter. You hear of people cast away in open boats who dream sadly of their loved ones at home. But I didn’t dream of any one. I felt detached and in a way free. The trouble with my wife—whether we could make a go of it or whether we really hated each other or whether it was simply the strain of the war—no longer mattered. All my life was centred into a yellow circle floating without a direction on a dark sea.
It must have been about midnight when we saw, in what we thought was the east, light fires breaking the sky in horizon level. They were orange in colour and intermittent, like stabs of morse. We knew that it was light flak somewhere on a coast, but which coast didn’t really trouble us. The light of that fire, too far away to be heard or reflected in the dark sea, comforted us enormously.
We watched it for more than two hours before it died away. Looking up from the place where the fire had been and into the sky itself, I realised that the stars had gone. I remember how the sudden absence of all light, first the far-off flak, then the stars, produced an effect of awful loneliness. It must then have been about three o’clock. During the time we were watching the flak we had talked a little, talking of where we thought it was. Now, one by one, we gave up talking. Even Ossy gave up talking, and once again there was no sound except the slapping of the sea against the dinghy.
But about an hour later there was a new sound. It was the sound of the wind rising and skimming viciously off the face of the sea, slicing up glassy splinters of spray. And there was now a new feeling in the air with the rising of the wind.
It was the feeling of ice in the air.
VII
When day broke, about eight o’clock, we were all very cold. Our beards stood out from our faces and under the bristles the skin was shrunk. Mac, who was very big, looked least cold of all; but the face of Allison, thin and quite bloodless, had something of the grey-whiteness of broken edges of foam that split into parallel bars the whole face of the sea. This grey-whiteness made Allison’s eyes almost black and they sank deep into his head. In the same way the sea between the bars of foam had a glassy blackness too.
The wind was blowing at about forty miles an hour and driving us fairly fast before it. The sky was a grey mass of ten-tenths cloud, so thick that it never seemed to move in the wind. Because there was no sun I could not tell if the wind had changed. I knew only that it drove at your face with an edge of raw ice that seemed to split the skin away.
Because of this coldness Ellis changed his plans. “It’s rum now and something to eat at mid-day. Instead of the other way round.”
As we each took a tot of rum Ellis went on talking.
“We’ll paddle as we did yesterday. But it’s too bloody cold to sit still when you’re not paddling. So you’ll all do exercises to keep warm. Chest-slapping and knee-slapping and any other damn thing. It’s going to get colder and you’ve got to keep your circulation.”
He now gave us, after the rum, a Horlick’s tablet each.
“And now any suggestions?”
“It’s sure bloody thing we won’t get to Newcastle at this rate,” Ossy said.
“You’re a genius,” Ellis said.
“Couldn’t we fix a sail, Skip?” Ossy said.
“Rip up a parachute, or even use a whole chute?”
“How are you going to hold your sail?” Ellis said. “With hay-rakes or something?”
All of us except Allison made suggestions, but they were not very good. Allison alone did not speak. He was always quiet, but now he seemed inwardly quiet. He had scarcely any flesh on his face and his lips were blue as if bruised with cold.
“O.K., then,” Ellis said. “We carry on as we did yesterday. Ossy and Ed start paddling. The rest do exercises. How are your hands?” he said to me.
“O.K.,” I said. I could not feel them except in moments when they seemed to burn again with far-off pain.
“All right,” he said. “Time us again. A quarter of an hour paddling. And if the sea gets worse there’ll have to be relays of bailing too.”
When Ossy and Ed started paddling I saw why Ellis had talked of bailing. The dinghy moved fast and irregularly; it was hard to synchronise the motions of the two paddles when the sea was rough. We were very buoyant on the sharp waves and sometimes the crests hit us sideways, rocking us violently. We began to ship water. It slapped about in the well of the dinghy among our seven pairs of feet. It hit us in the more violent moments on the thighs and even as far up as our waists. We were so cold that the waves of spray did not shock us and except when they hit our faces we did not feel them. Nevertheless I began to be very glad of the covers Ellis had put on my hands.
Soon all of us were doing something: Ossy and Ed paddling; Thompson and Ellis bailing out the water, Thompson with a biscuit tin, Ellis with a small tobacco tin. They threw the water forward with the wind. While these four were working Mac and Allison did exercises, beating their knees and chests with their hands. Mac still looked very like the Michelin tyre advertisement, huge, clumsy, unsinkable. To him the exercises were a great joke. He beat his knees in dance time, drumming his hands on them. It kept all of us except Allison in good spirits. But I began to feel more and more that Allison was not there with us. He slapped his knees and chest with his hands, trying to keep time with Mac, but there was no change in his face. It remained vacant and deathly; the dark eyes seemed driven even deeper into the head. It began to look more and more like a face in which something had killed the capacity for, feeling.
We went on like this all morning, changing about, two exercising, two paddling, two bailing out. The wind did not rise much and sometimes there were moments when it combed the sea flat and dark. The waves, short and unbroken for a few moments, then looked even more ominous. Then with a frisk of the wind they rose into fresh bars of foam.
It was about midday when I saw the face of the sea combed down into that level darkness for a longer time than usual. The darkness travelled across it from the east, thickening as it came. Then as I watched, it became lighter. It became grey and vaporous, and then for a time grey and solid. This greyness stood for a moment a mile or two away from us, on the sea, and then the wind seemed to fan it to pieces. These millions of little pieces became white and skimmed rapidly over the dark water, and in a moment we could not see for snow.
The first thing the snow did was to shut out the vastness of the empty sea. It closed round us, and we were blinded. The area of visible sea was so small that we might have been on a pond. In a way it was comforting.
Those who were paddling went on paddling and those who were bailing went on bailing the now snow-thickened water. We did not speak much. The snow came flat across the sea and when you opened your mouth it drove into it. I bent my head against it and watched the snow covering my hands. For the last hour they had begun to feel jumpy and swollen and God knew what state they were in.
It went on snowing like that for more than an hour, the flakes, big and wet and transparent as they fell. They covered the outer curve of the dinghy, on the windward side, with a thick wet crust of white. They covered our bent backs in the same way, so that we looked as if we were wearing white furs down to our waists, and they thickened to a yellow colour the sloppy water in the dinghy.
All the time Allison was the only one who sat upright. At first I thought he was being clever; because he did not bend his back the snow collected only on his shoulders. That seemed a good idea. Then, whenever I looked up at him, I was struck by the fact that whether he was paddling or bailing, his attitude was the same. He sat stiff, bolt upright, staring through the snow. His hands plunged down at his side automatically, digging a paddle into the water, or scooping the water out of the dinghy and bailing it away. His eyes, reflecting the snow, were not dark. They were cold and colourless. He looked terribly thin and terribly tired, and yet not aware
of being tired. I felt he had simply got into an automatic state, working against the sea and the snow, and that he did not really know what he was doing. Still more I felt that he did not care.
I knew the rest of us cared very much. After the first comfortable shut-in feeling of the snow had passed we felt desperate. I hated the snow now more than the sea. It shut out all hope that Air-Sea Rescue would ever see us now. I knew that it might snow all day and I knew that after it, towards sunset, it would freeze. If it snowed all day, killing all chances of rescue, and then froze all night, we should be in a terrible state the next morning, our third day.
The thought of this depressed me, for a time, very much. It was now about half-past twelve. The time seemed crucial. Unless it stopped snowing very soon, so that coastal stations could send out patrols in the early afternoon, we must face another night on the dinghy. I knew that all of us, with the exception of Allison, felt this. We were very tired and cold and stiff from not stretching our bodies, and the snow, whirling and thick and wet, seemed to tangle us up into a circle from which we were never going to get out.
In such moments as this Ellis did the right thing. He had driven us rather hard all morning, getting us out of small depressed moments by saying: “Come on, we’ve got to keep going: Come on,” or with a dry joke, “No fish and chips for Ossy if’ we don’t keep going. It’s tough tit for Ossy if he doesn’t get his fish and chips.” He knew just when he could drive us no longer. Now he let up.
“O.K.,” he said. “Give it a rest.”
“Holy Moses,” Mac said “I used to love snow. Honest, I used to love the bloody stuff.”
Even Mac looked tired. The snow had collected, on his big head, giving him the look of an old man with white hair.
“Jesus,” he said. “I’ll never feel the same way about snow again.”
“What time do you make it?” Ellis said to me.
“Twelve forty-five coming up to six—now,” I said.
“O.K.,” he said. “Set your watches.”
While we set our watches, synchronising them, calling out the figures, Ellis got out the rum, the chocolate and the biscuits. Afterwards I looked back and knew it was not so much the food, as Ellis’s order to synchronise the watches, that made me feel better at that moment. Time was our link with the outside world. From setting our watches together we got a sense of unity.
Ellis gave out the chocolate and the biscuits, in the same ration as before.
“Everybody all right? Ossy?”
“I’m a bloody snowball, if that’s anything,” Ossy said.
“Good old Ossy.”
Ellis looked at each of us in turn. “All right, Ally?” he said.
Allison nodded. He still sat bolt upright and he still did not speak.
Ellis did not speak either until it was time to tot out the rum. He used the silver bottom of an ordinary pocket-flask for the rum and this, about a third full, was our ration. He always left himself till last, but this time he did not drink. “God, I always hate the stuff. It tastes like warm rubber,” he said.
“Drink it, Ally,” he said.
Allison held out his hand. I could see that the fingers were so cold that, like my own after the burning, they would not flex. I saw Ellis bend them and fold them, like a baby’s, over the tot. I saw the hand remained outstretched, stiff in the falling snow, until finally Allison raised it slowly to his lips. I think we all expected to see that cup fall out of Allison’s hands, and we were all relieved and glad when at last Ellis reached over and took it away.
As we sat there, rocking up and down, there was a slight lessening of the snow. Through the thinning flakes we could see, soon, a little more of the sea. No sooner could I see more of it than I hated it more. I hated the long troughs and the barbarous slits of foam between them and the snow driving, curling and then flat, like white tracer above. I hated the ugliness and emptiness of it and above all the fact of its being there.
VIII
That afternoon a strange thing happened. By two o’clock the snow grew thinner and drew back into a grey mist that receded over the face of the sea. As it cleared away altogether the sky cleared too, breaking in a southerly direction to light patches of watery yellow which spread under the wind and became spaces of bright blue. Across these, spaces the sun poured in misty shafts and the inner edges of cloud were whiter than the snow had been. Far off, below them, we saw pools of light on the sea.
We were now paddling roughly in a straight line away from the sun. We were all, with the exception of Allison, quite cheerful. There was something tremendously hopeful about this breaking up of the sky after snow.
Allison alone sat there as if nothing had happened. He had not spoken since morning. He still looked terribly cold and tired and yet as if he did not know he was tired.
Suddenly he spoke.
“Very lights,” he said.
“Hell!” Mac said. “Where?”
“Look,” Allison said.
He was pointing straight before us. The sky had not broken much to the north and the cloud there was very low.
“I don’t see a bloody thing,” Mac said.
“Christ, if it is,” Ossy said. “Christ, if it is.”
We were all very excited. The paddling and bailing stopped, and we rocked in the water.
“Where did you see this? “Ellis said,
“There,” Allison said. He was still pointing, but his eyes were as empty as they had always been.
“You’re sure they were Very lights?”
“I saw them.”
“How long were they burning?”
“They just lit up and went out.”
“But where? Where exactly?”
“You see the dark bit of cloud under there? They came out of that.”
We all looked at that point for a long time. I stared until my eyeballs seemed to smart with hot smoke again.
“Ally, boy,” Mac said. “You must have awful good eyesight.”
“What would Very lights be doing at this time of day? “Ed said.
“I can’t think,” Ellis said. “Probably Air-Sea Rescue. It’s possible. They’d always be looking.”
“A kite wouldn’t be dropping them unless it saw something.”
“It might. Funny things happen.”
“Hell they do,” Mac said.
“You couldn’t expect even Air-Sea Rescue to see us in this muck,” I said.
Ossy and Ed began to paddle again. As we went forward we still kept our eyes on the dark patch of cloud, but nothing happened. Nor did Allison speak again; nor had any of us the heart to say we thought him mistaken.
For a time we hadn’t the heart for much at all. The situation in the dinghy now looked messy and discouraging. The melting snow was sloppy in the bottom, a dirty yellow colour; there were too many feet. It was still very cold and when we tried to do exercises—I could only beat my elbows against my sides—we knocked clumsily against each other. We had done that before, in the morning, and once or twice it had seemed mildly funny. Now it was more irritating than the snow, the cold and the disappointment of Allison’s false alarm.
All this time the sky was breaking up. In the west and south, through wide blue lakes of cloud, white shafts of sun fell as bright and cold as chromium on the sea. These shiny edges of sunlight sometimes produced an hallucination. They looked in the distance like very white cliffs, jagged and unbelievably real. Staring at them, it was easy to understand why Allison had seen a Very light in a cloud.
So we paddled until three o’clock; and I knew it was hopeless. We had another hour of daylight: the worst of the day. The sea, with the sun breaking on it, looked terribly empty; but with the darkness on it we should at least have nothing to look for. Ellis, as always, was very good at this moment. His face was red and fresh and his eyes, bright blue, did not look very tired. He had managed somehow to keep neater than the rest of us. You felt he had kept back enormous reserves of energy and hope and that he hadn’t even begun to think of th
e worst. And now he suddenly urged us to sing. “Come on, a sing-song before tea, chaps,” he said. “Come on.”
So we began singing. We first sang Shenandoah and Billy Boy. Then we sang other songs, bits of jazz, and Daisy, Daisy, then we came back to Shenandoah. We sang low and easy and there was no resonance about it because of the wind. But it was a good thing to sing because you could sing the disappointment out of yourself and it kept you from thinking. We must have gone on singing for nearly an hour and the only one of us who didn’t sing much was Allison. From time to time I saw his mouth moving. It simply moved up and down, rather slowly, erratically, out of tune. Whatever he was singing did not belong to us. He was very pale and the cavity of his mouth looked blue and his eyes were distant and dark as if they were still staring at those Very lights in the distant cloud.
It must have been about four o’clock when he fell into the dinghy. The sea pitched us upward and Allison fell forward on his face. He fell loosely and his head struck the feet crowded in the bottom of the dinghy, which rocked violently with the fall.
Ellis and Mac pulled him upright again. His face was dirty with snow water and his eyes were wide open. Ellis began to rub his hands. The veins on the back of them were big and blue, the colour of his lips, and he began to make a choking noise in his throat. His body was awkward and heavy in the well of the dinghy and it was hard to prevent him from slipping down again. The dinghy rocked badly and I thought we might capsize.
“Put him between my knees,” I said. “I can hold him like that.”
They propped him up and I locked his body with my knees, keeping it from falling. I held my bandaged hands against his face and he made a little bubbling noise with his mouth, not loud, but as if he was going to be gently sick.
As I held him like that and as we bumped about in the dinghy, badly balanced, swinging and rocking like one of those crazy boats at a fun fair, I looked at the sky.