by H. E. Bates
The boy stood fascinated. Every now and then Gregson, huge and majestic, pushed his body a foot or two along the boatside, moving in time with the swimming pilot and at the same time pushing the boy along with him too. The boy was sometimes half-obliterated by the bulk of Gregson, and Gregson in turn was impeded by the boy. Neither of them seemed to notice it.
The curiosity of the boy was so intense that it almost blinded him. The blob of yellow and blue coming in towards the boat sometimes receded and was lost for a second or two like an illusion. When it reappeared it seemed gigantic. The boy could then see clearly the water-flattened moustache of the pilot every time the head was thrown back, and he could see the upper half of the body of the rescued man. It seemed quite lifeless. But suddenly as it came nearer the boy could see lying across the chest of it a leather strap. It was attached to a leather case that appeared every second or so from below the sea and then was lost again. The boy in a moment of painful and speechless joy knew what it was.
At that same moment Gregson, excited too, flattened him against the boatside so that he could not move. And since he could not move Gregson could not move either, and Gregson in that moment became aware of him again.
“What the pipe, Snowy! Git out on it!” Gregson bawled. “Git down and git some tea! They’ll want it. Go on. Git crackin’! Git that tea.”
With a curve of his hand Gregson hooked the boy from the boatside. It was a sort of friendly blow and it took the boy across the deck and down the narrow hatchway and into the cabin below before he was aware of it.
He stood there for some moments in an excited stupor before realizing that he still had in his hands a half-peeled potato. It had on it the oily imprint of his fingers where he had clenched it. As he stood holding it he heard Gregson bawling on deck. He tried to hear what Gregson was saying, but the words were confused and he got the impression only of mighty, exciting events overhead.
This impression exploded his stupor. He was filled with violent energy. His head rocked with the astonishing possibilities of the leather case slung across the body of the German, and he ached to be part of the world of men.
He put fresh tea into the teapot with his hands and then poured water on it and found two extra cups in the locker by the stove. Nothing like this had ever happened before: no pilot, no rescue, no Jerry, no binoculars. He heard Gregson shouting again: this time much louder, something about a gun. The boy, standing with head upraised, listening, was swept by a torrent of new possibilities. Back in the pub, at home, there were boys with the luck of the gods. They owned sections of air cannon-guns, belts of unfired cartridges. He suddenly saw before him the wonder of incredible chances. He did not know what happened to the guns and binoculars of dead pilots or even captured pilots, but now, at last, he was going to know.
He poured tea into the two cups and was in the act of stirring sugar into them when he heard, from overhead, two new sounds. Somebody was running across the deck, and from a south-easterly direction, faint but to him clear enough, came the sound of a plane. He did not connect these sounds. He had momentarily lost interest in the sound of aircraft. Something much more exciting was happening on deck. Gregson was shouting again, and again there was the sound of feet running across the deck. They were so heavy that he thought perhaps they were Gregson’s feet. But it was all very confused and exciting, and he had no time to disentangle the sound of voices from the sound of feet and the rising sound of the now not so distant plane. Nor did it matter very much. He had in that moment reached the fine and rapid conclusion that war was wonderful.
He picked up a cup of tea in each hand. He turned to walk out of the galley when he was arrested suddenly by the near violence of the plane. It was coming towards The Breadwinner very fast and very low. The roar of it obliterated the last of the voices on deck. It turned the sound of feet into an echo. He ran out of the galley with the tea in his hands and had reached the bottom step of the gangway when he heard the strangest sound of all. It was the sound of the Lewis gun being fired.
It fired for perhaps half a second and then stopped. He did not know how he knew the difference between this sound and the sound of cannon firing directly afterwards and for about two seconds from overhead, but he sprawled down the steps on his face. The scalding tea poured down his arms, up the sleeve of his jacket and down his chest, but it did not seem hot and there was no pain. He did not look upward, but he felt the square of light at the head of the gangway darkened out for the space of a second as the plane went overhead. He was sure for one moment that the plane would hit the deck but the moment passed, and then the plane itself passed, and there was no more firing, either from the deck or overhead. And at last, when the plane had gone, there was no more sound.
He waited for what seemed a long time before crawling up the gangway. He pulled himself up by his hands because his legs did not seem part of him. The small auxiliary of The Breadwinner had stopped and now it was dead silent everywhere.
Chapter 3
The boy brought to the scene on deck a kind of ghastly unbelief. For a moment or two he could not stand up. He lay with his head resting on the top step of the gangway, and became for some seconds quite sightless, as if he had stared at the sun. Shadowy and crimson lumps of something floated in front of him like bits of coloured cloud and then solidified, gradually, into a single object across the deck. The boy lay there staring infinitely at this thing. It had about it something he distantly recognised. It was like a shapeless bundle of sea-blue cloth tied about the middle with lengths of slate-crimson rubber hose. It was some time before the boy brought himself to understand that this bundle had once been Jimmy, and that the tangle of hose was all that remained of the guts of the gunner-engineer.
He got up at last and walked away, forward, up the deck. All the forward part of the boat was hidden from him by the deck-house. He suddenly felt alone on the ship. And now as he walked he also got the impression of being very large but that the ship was also very large and that consequently he could never reach the end of it. He wanted to shout for Gregson. He felt the air very cold on his face and colder still on his chest and arms, where the tea had spilled, and then still colder on his eyes, shocked stiff by what he had seen of the engineer. This coldness became suddenly the frantic substance of a new terror. It was as if he had something alive and deadly in his hands and wanted to drop it.
He began to run. He ran like a blind man, away from something, careless completely of all that lay before him. As he ran past the deck-house he began jabbering incoherent and violent words that were partly his fear and partly something to do with the need for telling someone of his fantastic discoveries. For the first time he had seen the dead.
He ran in reality about two yards beyond the deck-house. The fear that had driven him forward from behind seemed to have got round in front of him, and now slapped him in the face. It stopped him abruptly. And as he stopped the coherence of his speech came back with perfect shrillness. He was shouting “Jimmy! Jimmy! Jimmy! Jimmy!” in a cry that was somewhere between anguish and a refusal to believe.
When this was over he looked down on the deck. It seemed very overcrowded with the figures that lay there. They were the figures of the young pilot and the German, who lay side by side, together, and then of Gregson, who was lying half across them.
The boy gazed for some seconds at the bodies of the three men. They lay in the attitudes of men who had been playfully wrestling. There was something quiet and merciful in the tangle of limbs and there was no blood and he could see the moustache of the young pilot plastered down by sea-water on his face like the moustache of a comedian. He was very convinced of their being dead.
Out of all this there emerged, suddenly, something very wonderful. He saw the enormous body of Gregson, on its hands and knees, heaving itself slowly upward, and then he realised several things. He realised that he was fantastically fond of the living Gregson, and he realised too that he must have run up from the galley and across the deck, in the silence af
ter the shots were fired, in the space of a second or two. He caught for the first time the sound of the plane, quite loud still, receding across the sea.
“Mr. Gregson, Mr. Gregson, Captain, Captain, Captain, Captain, Skipper!” he said. “Skipper!”
“Snowy,” Gregson said. He swung himself slowly round in the attitude of an elephant kneeling and looked up at the boy blinking. “Rum ’un,” he said. “Where was you?”
The boy found that he could not speak. He wanted to tell of Jimmy. He made small, frantic and almost idiotic gestures with his mouth and hands.
“Hadn’ half got some cheek, hadn’ he?” Gregson said. “The sod.”
It seemed to the boy that Gregson was concerned with frivolous commentaries. He still had the weight of impalpable terrors on his mind. Gregson, still on his hands and knees, groped forward like a man blinded by daylight. “You all right, kid?” he said. “All right y’self, eh?”
“Jimmy,” the boy said. “Jimmy!”
“I heard him firing that bleedin’ thing. Wonder as it fired, first time. Like the bleedin’ injun.”
On the deck the young pilot began suddenly to mutter repeated groans of agony, trying to turn himself over.
The sound and the movement woke Gregson out of himself. He crawled between the two pilots and leaned over the English one. “All right,” he said. “All right? Where’d it git y’?” The young man was trying to push his heels through the deck, lifting his body with recurrent convulsions of pain. “The bastards, the bastards!” Gregson said. He turned and spoke to the German pilot, lying half on his side with his knees against his chest. “Bleedin’ low flying. Is that the sort a bleedin’ orders you git?” There was no reply except a violent convulsive jerk that threw the German down on his face.
“Christ,” the English boy said. “Christ.”
He turned and looked up at the sky, rolling his head quietly from side to side. His face in colour was something like the sea, blue-grey and lightless and very cold. Flecks of sea-water, like sweat, were still gathered on the grey skin of the forehead, and his body was still soaked from swimming so that the clothes were shrivelled on it.
“I’ll git you down below,” Gregson said.
“Don’t move me,” the pilot said. “Don’t move me.”
“Better down below. Git you warm. Git y’ in a bunk. I can carry you.”
“No,” the pilot said. “Don’t move me. It’s wrong. Cover me over. Cover me over, that’s all.”
He rolled his head in spasms of recurrent agony from side to side as he spoke. “Git them blankets, Snowy,” Gregson said. “All on ’em. And the first-aid box. And tell Jimmy to come for-ard. Soon’s he can.”
The boy went down to the cabin in cold daze of fright made worse by a determination not to look at Jimmy. He was hypnotised by the bloody tangle of flesh, crushed to the livid shapelessness of rejected offal, that lay on the deck, and he could not pass it without looking that way. The sight of it drove him below with wild energy. When he came up again, carrying the grey bundle of blankets, in a trembling terror of fresh sickness, he determined this time not to look. But now as he passed he saw that Jimmy held something in his hands. It was the handle of the Lewis gun, severed from the rest of the frying-pan apparatus by the same curious miracle that had kept it in Jimmy’s hands. It was painted harshly with coagulations of new blood.
It was the thought of Jimmy that kept him standing for some seconds by the side of Gregson, holding the blankets and not speaking. Gregson was kneeling between the two pilots. The German was now turned over, on his back, and was revealed also to be very young, drained of colour and in pain. He was moaning slightly, as if talking to himself, weakly throwing back his fair head. He was perhaps nineteen; he looked to the boy to be like the Englishman, wonderfully and terribly worn by the experience of battles. Pain had beaten deep hollows in his cheeks, so that the facial bone everywhere stood out, the skin white and polished where it had tightened.
But it was not this that fascinated the boy. He now found himself staring at the binoculars Gregson had unlooped and laid on the deck. It was clear now that they were binoculars; he had never seen anything that seemed so magnificent. They lay on the deck just above the German’s head, the light-brown leather dark and salty with sea-water, the initials K.M. in black on the side. Gazing at them, the boy forgot the figure of the engineer lying in the attitude of discarded offal in the stern.
Gregson took the blankets out of his arms as he stood there staring down at the leather case. He said something about “Ah, thassa boy, Snowy,” but the boy did not really hear. He stood watching Gregson cover over first the English pilot and then the German, giving them three blankets each. A little wind had sprung up from the south-west and caught one of the blankets and blew it away from the German’s feet. The boy bent down and pushed the feet back under the blanket and the German screamed with pain.
The boy stood back in fear and guilt, as if he had really done something to cause this agony. He could not speak. Gregson comforted the German with words that were simply neutral whispers that even the boy did not understand.
It astonished both Gregson and the boy to hear the German break the silence after the scream and say, quite quietly: “I think it is my leg. I think it is both my legs perhaps.”
“Speaks English!” Gregson said. It was less a comment than a statement of wonder: as if it were very remarkable that somebody of another nation should know Gregson’s language. “English! Speaks English!”
“I think it is my leg,” the German said.
“I ain’t much at fust aid,” Gregson said. “But we’ll keep you warm. Git you back ashore. Quick. See? Hospital. See?”
“I didn’t bring the first-aid box up,” Snowy said. “I forgot.”
No one seemed to notice this remark, and the English boy said, “How long before we can get in?”
“Depends,” Gregson said. “Hour or more. Depends if the engineer can hot it up.”
The boy stood rigid. His mind was in an anxiety of explosive intentions. It was his duty to tell Gregson that Jimmy would never hot it up again.
“Git some tea, Snowy,” Gregson said. “Some brandy ain’t they, too? Put some o’ that in. Four mugs. You have some brandy too. No, five. You’ll want one for Jimmy too.”
“Jimmy——”
“Go on, bring it up smart. Five mugs, Snowy boy.” He looked with powerful expansiveness and anger at the sky. “I wonder where that sod went? I thought Jimmy’d got him,” so that for a moment the boy thought he was threatening him.
“He certainly made mincemeat of us,” the English boy said.
“I’d mincemeat the bastard,” Gregson said. “Next time I’ll have that gun. Jimmy!”
The violence of this shout drove the boy in fear from the deck and haunted him with constant terror as he made tea in the galley below. His movements were automatic and thoughtless in the little cabin between the bunks. He did not need any processes of deduction to know what he might expect when he went on deck again.
This time he put the mugs of tea on an iron tray, so that he could carry them in a single journey. He had filled them up with brandy. And for some reason he could not bear to go with four mugs only and not five, and so there were five, as if he thought the presence of the fifth would have some effect on the fact of death.
He carried the tray on deck and became aware, for the first time since the shooting, what change had come over the day. Low cloud had begun to come up from the west, in misty waves that had already in them a light spray of grey rain, and there was no light, except far eastward, on the face of the sea.
The position of Gregson on the deck had something at once awful and inevitable about it. It did not surprise the boy. It appeared fantastically exact. He stood a yard or two from where the gun had once been, legs apart, arms stiff and outwardly stretched down. It was only the colour of these arms that shocked the boy; they were bright with blood. But where the body of Jimmy had been lying like a brutally rejected
heap of smashed flesh there was now only a brown tarpaulin. It had not even the remembered shape of the dead man.
Gregson looked at the boy as he came up with the tea. He was wiping the blood from his hands with a piece of engine rag. It seemed to the boy that his enormity had about it a shocked kindliness.
“Won’t want five cups, Snowy,” he said.
“I know,” the boy said. He wanted to cry. “I saw it.” He spoke of the engineer impersonally, in fear and respect.
“Got three kids,” Gregson said. He stood with his vast body broken and deflated by thoughts of Jimmy. “Nice job. Nice thing.” He wiped his hands with the oily rag, until the fingers were a dull brown from the mixing of blood and oil. “He allus wanted to fire that gun. Allus wanted to fire it. Well, he fired it,” he said, as if, perhaps, this thought would atone for all that was done.
“Better take the tea along,” he said, “while it’s hot. Looks like rain.”
The boy went forward with the tea, past the deck-house, to where the two pilots were lying together. He heard Gregson behind him swirling his hands in a bucket of water. The two pilots were talking to each other and the binoculars lay on the deck.
“Damn funny thing,” the English boy was saying. “All the time I had an idea it was you.”
“I don’t think it was so funny.”
“Teach you not to come fooling over on these low-level jobs, anyway,” the Englishman said. “There’s no future in that.”
They were both smiling.
“I got some tea,” Snowy said.
“Good show.” The English boy tried to lift his head, and relapsed in a paroxysm of pain that seemed to twist his entire spine. “God!” he said. “God!” He lay breathing deeply, his lips trembling. “God, oh God.”