‘’Old on!’ shouted the bridge. ‘It ain’t easy, yer know!’
The engine-room telegraph rang. The wash from the propeller slid up the mudbank, as the ship was held steady in the tide. A beam of light glared into their faces.
The captain certainly knew his channel well. Going gently astern, he edged into the bank until the bows towered above them. Prettily riding the crest of a wavelet, right under the forefoot of the ship, was the bowl.
‘Look out,’ Bill shouted. ‘You’ll run her down.’
‘Never saw there was another of you!’ bawled the captain.
The telegraph rang violently. White water swirled at the stern. Their rescuer withdrew, edging out a little into the current, and the tide promptly swung the ship in a quarter circle with the bows as centre. The captain went ahead in a desperate effort to regain steerage way, and there she was, aground fore and aft across the channel.
‘Knew that would ’appen,’ said the captain, addressing them conversationally from the forecastle. ‘Now where’s the lady?’
‘No lady,’ the colonel replied. ‘She walked home.’
‘What? And left you there?’
‘Must have forgotten.’
‘Cor! What I’d ’ave said if I’d known there was no lady! Well, catch ’old!’
The rope fell by Wagstaff. The captain, the mate and the one deck-hand dragged him, wallowing, through the mud and up the side of the ship.
Sergeant Torbin followed, but left the rope in order to plunge sideways and recover the bowl. By the time the mate had recoiled the line and flung it back, very little sergeant was visible beyond his cap and an outstretched arm.
‘What d’yer do that for?’ asked the captain, when Bill too was safe on board. ‘Balmy?’
‘It’s two thousand years old,’ Bill explained.
‘Like me frying pan,’ said the mate. ‘Went up to me waist for that one, I did. Fifty-year-old it might be, and they don’t make ’em like that no more.’
The captain led the way to a small saloon under the bridge. It reeked of fug and decayed vegetables but was gloriously warm.
‘You take them things off, and Bert will ’ang ’em in the engine-room,’ he said.
‘Any old clothes will do,’ the colonel invited, dropping coat and trousers in a solid lump on the floor.
‘Ain’t got none. Don’t keep a change on board, not none of us.’
‘Blanket will do.’
‘Don’t sleep on board neither.’
‘What are you?’ the colonel asked.
‘Chesterford garbage scow. Takes it from the trucks and dumps it overboard at forty fathom, see? Never out at night, we aren’t, unless we misses a tide like we done yesterday. Bert, give ’em a couple of towels and shovel up them clothes!’
Bill managed to make the towel meet round his waist. The colonel found his wholly inadequate.
‘I’ll try this,’ said Wagstaff cheerfully, lifting the bowl from the cabin table and removing the tablecloth. ‘Show you how they wear ’em in India!’
The cloth had once been red plush, but the pile was smooth with age and grease-stains. The colonel folded it diagonally, passed two corners through his legs, knotted the tassels and beamed on the captain.
‘Well, I suppose,’ said the captain grudgingly, ‘that you’d both better ’ave a drop of rum, though it don’t look to me as if it was so long since the last one.’
He unlocked a First Aid cabinet and produced a bottle.
‘I admit with pride that we have been celebrating the acquisition of a priceless antique,’ the colonel answered.
‘This ’ere?’
‘That there.’
‘Sort of basin, like?’
‘An old Greek drinking bowl, captain.’
‘How’s it used?’
‘It was not used,’ the sergeant shouted. ‘They kept it to look at. On the mantelpiece.’
‘Nonsense, Bill! They didn’t have mantelpieces. I’ll show you, captain. A slave took the jug, so!’—the colonel seized the bottle of rum—‘and emptied it into the bowl, so!’
‘Hey!’ the skipper protested.
‘And then it went round like a loving cup.’
Wagstaff took a sip and with both hands passed the bowl courteously to the captain, who could only drink and pass it on to Bill. Bill despairingly lowered the level by a quarter of an inch, gasped and passed it to the mate—the mate to Bert.
‘Good navy rum, that!’ said the colonel, starting the bowl on its round again.
‘Got to stay where we are for the time being,’ the mate agreed. ‘Bert, you take them clothes away like the skipper ordered, and then you can ’ave a he-down.’
With the memory of the rising tide safely behind him, Bill felt that there was some excuse for the theory that an object should be used as its maker intended. Half an hour later, inspired by his towel, he was showing them a dance he had learned in the South Pacific when he began to think the saloon was going round.
It was. The stern of the garbage scow, gently lifted from the mud, swung across river with increasing speed and thudded into the opposite bank. Bill made a dive for the bowl as it slid across the table and landed in the captain’s lap.
‘Knew it would ’appen!’ the skipper yelled. ‘That’s the last time I picks a Yank out of the mud!’
He jammed in the doorway with the mate. The bows came off the mud and described the same semicircle as the stern. The engine-room telegraph rang like a fire engine. Wagstaff, flung off the settee on to the floor, sat there cross-legged shaking with laughter. Bill cradled the bowl grimly on his knees.
‘Allies, Bill, allies! What did I tell you? It’s all your fault, and your towel has come off!’
‘Colonel,’ said Bill, reknotting it round his waist, ‘how come all the guys that tried to shoot you missed?’
He dropped his head on the table, and instantly fell asleep.
They were awakened by Bert, flinging down two still soggy bundles of clothes.
‘Skipper says ’e don’t want no more to do with either of you,’ he announced, ‘and if you ain’t off this scow as soon as we ties up ’e’ll send for the police.’
It was light. Up the reach the town, the castle and the municipal rubbish dump of Chesterford were in sight. The clock on the church tower made the time eight-thirty.
‘Bill,’ said Wagstaff, breaking the silence, ‘that piece of linen in which you have wrapped the bowl was once my shirt.’
‘Say, colonel, I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking.’
‘Not a word. It will dry there. And I can do up my coat collar. Thank heaven I am known in Chesterford!’
Bill took the remark on trust, though it seemed to him when he was escorted by the mate through the corrugated iron door of the garbage wharf, before breakfast and looking as if he had been dug out of the tip, that personally he would prefer a town where he was not known.
Striding up the main street of Chesterford, however, alongside the colonel, he understood. Wagstaff’s air was guiltless, so full indeed of a casual manliness as he greeted an occasional acquaintance that only one of them thought it proper to comment on his appearance.
‘Showing our friend here some sport,’ said the colonel. ‘Mallard right. Teal left. Got ’em both. Lost me balance. And this gallant fellow hauled me out.’
As they resumed their squelching progress up the High Street, Bill remarked that he sounded exactly like a British colonel on the movies.
‘A very useful accomplishment,’ Wagstaff agreed, ‘which has enabled me before now to rescue allies from well-deserved court martial. Later in the day which is now upon us, Bill, or even tomorrow or whenever that damned bowl permits us both a reasonably sober countenance, I shall accompany you to your commanding officer and obtain for you a mention in your home town paper and probably a medal from the Royal Humane Society.’
‘What’s that?’
‘It gives medals. Did you not leap into mud of unknown bottom to rescue me?’
‘Don’t mention it, colonel. It was the least I could do,’ said Bill, and paused. ‘Say, wasn’t it the bowl?’
‘The values are quite irrelevant, Bill. Me or the bowl? The bowl or me? We will now go into the Red Lion here for a bath and breakfast.’
‘Will the bar be open yet, colonel?’
‘Oh, that’ll be all right. They know me there.’
‘Then I’m not going in with this bowl,’ Bill said firmly. ‘Not to the Red Lion or any other of your animal friends.’
‘Fresh herrings, Bill. I can smell ’em. And bacon and eggs to follow.’
‘We can have breakfast at a tea shop.’
‘Too respectable. They wouldn’t let us in.’
Sergeant Torbin, desperately searching the market square for safety, was inspired by the opening of the double doors of the Chesterford Museum. He ran, vaulted the turnstile in the vestibule where the doorkeeper was just changing into his uniform coat, and charged down an alley of Roman tombstones into a collection of stuffed foxes and weasels marked ‘Natural History.’ Hesitating wildly between ‘Neolithic,’ ‘Iron Age’ and ‘Gentlemen’ he saw a door to his left with CURATOR on it. He leaped through it, and found himself facing a desk where a very tall wisp of a man in his seventies was quietly cataloguing.
‘You take this,’ he said. ‘Lock it up in your safe, quick!’
Before the Curator could get over the shock of an American sergeant, covered with mud from head to foot and offering with outstretched arms an unknown object wrapped in dirty linen, Wagstaff also was upon him.
‘Is it—is it a baby?’ the curator asked.
‘It is, sir, a fifth-century Attic cylix,’ the colonel replied with dignity.
The curator tremblingly extracted the bowl, and at the sight of it instantly recovered an almost ecclesiastical self-possession.
‘But this is an article of great value,’ he intoned.
‘I know it is. You’ve no idea of the trouble I’ve had preserving it from destruction.’
‘This—um—er—has dispossessed you of it?’
‘Lord, no! It’s his.’
‘Colonel, it is yours,’ said Bill with what he hoped was finality.
The colonel took the bowl with both hands, pledged an imaginary draught to the gods and held it high above the stone floor of the curator’s office.
‘I’ve nowhere to keep it,’ Bill screamed.
‘Oh, that’s all that is bothering you, is it?’ the colonel exclaimed. ‘Well, what’s that damned owl doing?’
A stuffed barn owl in a Victorian show case stood on the curator’s work-bench. Wagstaff lifted the glass dome from the ebony base, and removed the owl which immediately disintegrated into dust and feathers.
‘Mouldy,’ said the colonel. ‘Disgrace to the museum. That reminds me I believe I’m on the committee. Give you a new one and stuff it myself.’
‘I was indeed considering—’ the curator began.
‘Of course you were. Quite right! Mind if I sit down at your desk a minute?’
The colonel printed a neat card:
LENT TO THE MUSEUM BY COURTESY OF SERGEANT WILLIAM TORBIN, U.S.A.F.
He laid the bowl upon the ebony stand and propped the card up against it.
‘That will keep you quiet,’ he said, replacing the glass dome, ‘until Bill has a mantelpiece for you again. The sergeant has only to write to you to get it, I suppose?’ he added fiercely to the curator.
‘Yes, yes, but—’
‘Any objection to the Red Lion now, Bill? It will be a pleasant change to drink out of glasses once more.’
Drug for the Major
HE was a severe creature, the Major, seldom smiling, always aloof. How he amused himself—if he ever did—when there was no war, one couldn’t imagine. He was a most unlikely person to be a successful leader of partisans in enemy country, for he lacked all the lighter human interests. His men did not love him, but they had to respect him. His patience was as coldly Napoleonic as his manner. Every operation he undertook had been a deliberate, foolproof success.
Brigadier Callender could only hope that this brilliant managing of luck would continue. He wished he were anywhere else in the world but that naked Greek hillside. At the same time there was no denying that this was the very glory and height of boy’s book soldiering. His own job was purely administration, but what he administered were all the little British forces operating behind the enemy lines in Greece, Italy and Jugoslavia; and, since he was not the sort of soldier who preferred his facts on paper, he did at times appear in person to those of his charges who could be reached at all. He could do a lot to comfort such individualists, each of them forced by isolation to exaggerate his own private and military problems. He was double the age of most of them.
Sixteen men were waiting in a very slight fold of a hillside so open that anyone could see its emptiness at a glance. They were more or less dressed in British uniform; if captured, they could only hope that the Germans would consider it more, not less. Their presence—since they had taken up their position before dawn—could not possibly be imagined by the enemy post guarding the bridge three hundred feet below, where the rock-cut road leaped from one bank of the gorge to the other. They had waited all day. They were waiting now for the road patrol to pass. They would then blow the bridge and wait again till nightfall to get away.
The Major seemed to have a genius for waiting. There he sat, apart as usual, his back against a rock, drafting what looked like a particularly difficult letter with his leather brief-case open on his knees. Ever since Callender had dropped into this little command—descending god-like upon Mount Olympus—and found himself helplessly committed to an operation for which it was already on the move, he had never seen the Major without his brief-case. It was slung on his hip together with his maps, inseparable from his person as if it contained the most secret documents in the whole Middle East.
Tactful questioning had not produced the slightest evidence of what it did contain. His own very personal bottle of tablets perhaps? Well, provided he knew how to use them, there was no great harm in that. They could all have done with any secret stimulant or bromide—according to temperament—which was going. The brief-case seemed at any rate to supply for the Major that escape from unpleasantly real reality which men less self-sufficient might have found in a book or a game of chess.
Callender looked over his companions in the hollow. All but the Major were on edge, some fidgety, some unnaturally tense. Three were silently playing cards, with olive stones for chips. The second-in-command was trying to write home and making a poor job of it. The simpler and more blessed were asleep, but twitching. One or two were trying to read what they already knew by heart. The sergeant-major was carving a recognisable donkey out of a mandrake root.
The silence of autumn afternoon sang through the mountains and resolved itself into the rattle of a tracked vehicle and the whine of trucks in bottom gear. That, presumably, was the road patrol. No one moved. Only the Major rolled over to the skyline and had a look at the enemy. The patrol halted, then rumbled on over the bridge and up the pass. The Major returned impassively to his correspondence.
After half an hour he put his papers back in the brief-case and locked it. This simple action, methodical as that of any business man arriving at his suburban station, seemed to be a recognised signal. Books were pocketed. The sleepers awoke. Cards were returned to a haversack; olive stones swept into a cigarette tin.
In single file the commando crawled down the sheltering fold until they were within seventy yards of the enemy post, and cover was no more than the foot-high brush of the hillside. The operation was astonishingly swift and efficient—almost, Callender thought, humane. Not one of the eight Germans guarding the bridge was wounded. Their post was scientifically planned. Their defence was tactically correct and predictable. Consequently they were all dead.
The charges took eighteen and a half minutes to lay. Then there was no bridge, and the road itself was only s
afe for foot passengers. The Major’s faith in his sources of information was justified, for such traffic as interrupted the operation—and hastily cleared off—was civilian and apologetic.
Before the dust wholly settled, the commando had vanished into that inadequate hollow and resumed its former occupations. Callender found the second period of waiting intolerable. The road below, on both sides of the gorge, began to hum with enemy activity; and what was happening in the valleys across which they had to withdraw he could, as a soldier, imagine. Only the Major knew if the chance of the sixteen to return to the mountain cave which they called headquarters was really as good as he insisted it was.
The Brigadier reminded himself that patience had been the essence of soldiering since the Siege of Troy. Looking back through his memories of an infantry subaltern in 1916, he found them dominated by the periods of waiting. Action was a mere flash of blinding light dividing the endless mists of doing nothing. But at least, in those days, they had known what was in front of them and what behind. These chaps didn’t. Yet they waited till their plan was perfected; waited, at the mercy of a cough, for the moment of action; waited again for the chance to escape. And all this behind the enemy lines.
He longed as never in his life for a cigarette, which of course was forbidden. The readers of books could not keep their attention fixed. The card-players went through the motions of enthusiasm, but the deals grew slower until they were finally abandoned. Only the Major was imperturbable. Out came the brief-case, now white with stone dust from the bridge, and to work he went. He tore up what he had written before the action and started again.
Surely the man, unapproachable as he was, would permit the congratulations of a senior officer? Callender crawled over to him, stopped tactfully, and was beckoned on.
‘If only,’ said the Major in a savage whisper, ‘I could do that to G.H.Q.!’
He jerked a thumb in the direction of the bridgeless gorge.
‘Your wish is shared by quite half the Army,’ the Brigadier answered mildly, ‘generally for the wrong reasons.’
The Brides of Solomon Page 11