The Cruise of The Breadwinner

by H. E. Bates

  He bawled and raged up the companionway into the beating rain.

  Chapter 5

  The english pilot opened his eyes with a sharp blink, as if he had been lost in a dream and the boy had startled him out of it into the cramped and gloomy world of the little cabin. Messner still lay with eyes closed, his face turned away. The only light in the cabin was from a single skylight, about a yard square, of opaque glass, over which rain had already thrown a deeper film. In this iron-grey light the pilot looked on the boy as he might have looked on a shape moulded vaguely out of the shadows: as something that moved and had the tangibility of a face, but as otherwise without identity. He regarded the boy also as if there was nothing he could do or wanted to do to change or sharpen his shadowiness. His eyes had dropped deeper into the bruised sockets of his face. As they gazed upwards and followed with reactions that were never quite swift enough the movements of the boy they had on them the same lightless film as the skylight above.

  It was some time before he could see clearly enough through the stupor of weakness to grasp that the boy was busy with an object that looked like a torch. This torch, though the boy held it upwards, towards the skylight, and downwards and sideways, towards himself and Messner, never seemed to light. He expected it to flash into his face, but after the boy had swivelled it round two or three times he found himself dazed by angry irritation against it. It became part of the pain buried centrally, like a deep hammer blow, just above his eyes and extending, in a savage cord, to the base of his spine.

  “What the hell are you doing?” he said.

  The boy was surprised not by the abruptness of the voice but by its softness. It seemed like a voice from a long way off. It made him feel slightly guilty.

  “Not much,” he said.

  “Put that torch down,” the pilot said. “Don’t wave it about.”

  “Not a torch,” the boy said. “Pair of glasses.”

  “Glasses?”

  “Binoculars. The German’s. I found them on deck.”

  “Oh,” the pilot said.

  “Can’t make them work,” the boy said. “Everything looks wrong.”

  “Let me look at them,” the pilot said. “They ought to be good, German binoculars.”

  He held his hands upward, weakly, without extending his arms, and the boy bent down and gave him the glasses. He let them lie on his chest for some moments and the boy saw it heaving deeply, as if the movement of reaching for the glasses had exhausted him. It seemed quite a long time before he slowly lifted them to his face. Then when he held them there it was without doing anything with them. His hands did not move on the adjustment screws. He rested the eyepieces lightly against the deep sockets of his eyes and simply held them there without a word, in what seemed a dream of tiredness or forgetfulness or pain. It did not occur to the boy that there might be in this long and silent inertia a savage struggle to behave with decent normality, without fuss, to accomplish the simple task of revolving the screws and say something about it without the shadow of even a small agony.

  After some longer interval the pilot let the glasses rest slowly back on his chest. To the boy it seemed that he grasped them with extraordinary tightness. He gave a worried sort of smile. It was very quiet and strengthless, but quite calm, and seemed as if it were intended to be reassuring.

  “Needs adjustment, that’s all,” he said. His words were hard, gasped out quickly. “I can do it. Quite easy. Nice pair.”

  He held the glasses hard against his chest and stared straight beyond the boy with a sort of lost vehemence. His eyes seemed to have difficulty in focussing on some point in very obscure and difficult distance far beyond the varnished pitch-pine walls of the cabin. They were terribly desperate.

  But what worried the boy was that the glasses were held also with this same rigid desperation. He waited for some moments for the pilot to give them back to him. Then it became clear that they were not coming back. The pilot grasped them still harder against the blankets which covered him and then shut his eyes.

  The boy stood gazing down for some moments, troubled and waiting for something to happen. Suddenly he knew that he was forgotten. It was no use. He remembered the tea. He took a last look at the figure of the pilot lying absolutely still and rigid, grasping the binoculars as he had sometimes seen dying men in pictures grasping a cross, and then pushed the kettle on to the galley fire. He poured the stale cold tea out of the dirty cups into the slop bucket by the galley. He was sick of tea; he was sick of a succession of daily crises in all of which Gregson demanded tea, only to let it get cold without drinking it, and then demanded still more tea as another crisis created itself, letting it get cold again. He jangled the half-dirty cups together on the table, banging them against the pan of peeled potatoes.

  About this time Messner turned on his back and began to moan. His lips were very blue and dry but his eyes were not open, so that it seemed as though he were turning and crying in his sleep. The boy heard him with something between sickness and indifference, and ignored him for some moments with callousness. He had made up his mind that the only virtue in Messner was that he owned the binoculars. He regarded him at the same time with a certain distant awe. Messner was an enemy; so that even though you had never seen him before in your life he was a wrong, criminal, despicably cruel, dynamically dangerous person. It was men like Messner who came in low over the sand-dunes, the sea-marshes and the little towns of the coast, using cannon-shell at low range on whatever living thing they could find. There was no doubt about that; the boy had seen it happen. It was perfectly acceptable that Messner was no different from the rest of them; but when after a time Messner ceased moaning for an interval and lay rigid on his back and staring upward with quiet lips there did not seem very much difference in the appearance of the two men lying on the floor.

  Reluctantly making fresh tea at last, the boy remembered that he ought to call Gregson. He went to the bottom of the companionway and shouted, “Mr. Gregson, skipper, tea!” But there was no movement and no answering shout above the sound of rain. Also, as he looked upward and saw the rain flicking in steady white drizzle across the section of dark sky, he felt there was something odd about The Breadwinner, and when he had taken two or three steps up the companionway he saw what it was. He saw that Gregson had rigged a sail. The boy went slowly on deck and marvelled at this strange copper-brown triangle with a sort of reluctant wonder. He had never seen it before. It gave to the dumpy, war-painted Breadwinner an exciting loftiness; it made her seem a larger ship. It even seemed to dwarf the enormous figure of Gregson, pressing his belly rather harder than usual against the wheel, the peak of his cap rather harder down on his head.

  “Tea, Mr. Gregson,” the boy said. “Just made.”

  “Ain’t got time!” Gregson roared at him.

  The boy stood in the attitude of someone stunned on his feet; he was more shocked than he had been by the sight of the dead engineer. He stared at the face of Gregson pressing itself forward with a sort of pouted savagery against the driving rain, eyes popped forward, chin sunk hard into doubled and redoubled folds of inflamed flesh on the collar of his jersey. It was some moments before he could think of anything to say.

  “Just ready,” he said at last. It did not seem remotely credible that Gregson could reject tea. “I can bring it up.”

  “Ain’t got time I tell yer!” Gregson said. “Ain’t got time for nothing. That wind’s gittin’ up. Look at that sea too! Look at it! We gotta git them chaps in.”

  The boy turned and saw, for the first time since the shooting, what had happened to the weather. Rain and wind beating up the Channel had already ploughed the sea into shallow and ugly troughs of foam. The distances had narrowed in, so that the skyline was no longer divisible from the smoky and shortened space of sea. Overhead he saw lumpy masses of rain-cloud skidding north-eastward. “Another hour and it’ll blow your guts out!” Gregson said. “We went too far west. I knowed it.” He had nursed the old superstitions in his mind,
placing them against events. The boy remembered the desperate sarcasms of the dead Jimmy, appealing for a second auxiliary, but he said nothing. It was too late now.

  “You git below,” Gregson said, “and look after them two.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, don’t stand there!”

  The boy was startled by the fury of Gregson’s words and turned instantly and went back to the companionway. As he did so he saw the covered heap of the dead engineer’s body, blackened now with rain, the blood washed into diluted and glistening blotches of crimson on the wet deck, and this forlorn heap of deathliness that somehow still did not seem dead brought back suddenly all the chaos and terror of the thing, all the nearness and all the pain. He went below in a cold black sweat and stood at the table and poured himself tea and drank it in hot violent gulps of relief. The boat had begun to sway a little, in short brisk lurches, still shallow. Already they were increasing and he knew they would not stop now. Soon she would pitch forward too, and if the wind rose enough she would fall into the regular violence of double pitch and roll that would not cease until she was within half a mile of shore.

  The tea did something to dispel the horror of memory. He drained the cup before becoming aware that other things were happening in the cabin.

  The English pilot had stretched out one hand until he could reach the table leg. By grasping the leg he had pulled himself, on the stretcher, a foot or two across the cabin floor. Now he could touch the German on the shoulder.

  “Messner,” he was saying. “Messner. I’m talking to you, Messner.”

  He looked up at the boy.

  “He doesn’t answer me,” he said. “He’s been coughing and groaning like hell, and now he doesn’t answer.” He pulled at the German’s jacket. “Messner,” he said. “Messner.”

  The boy bent down by the German, who had turned his face away from the English boy. The blood he had been coughing up had now an amazing and frightening brightness on his jacket, the cabin floor and his white face. It was still fresh, and a new stream of it poured out of his mouth with sudden gentleness as the boy moved his head.

  With the movement of his head the German let his eyes remain in the direction of the boy. It was clear that he did not see him with his strange and pale unfocussed eyes. “Blood coming out of his mouth,” the boy whispered. “All over him. What shall I do?”

  “Got your first-aid pack?”

  “A box. Yes.”

  “Let’s see what it’s got.”

  While the boy found the first-aid box in Gregson’s locker the English boy lay rigid, eyes half closed, as if very tired. The German had begun to moan quietly again now, his head lolling slowly and regularly from side to side, like a mechanical doll, each movement releasing from each corner of his lips a new spit of blood.

  The boy opened the first-aid box and laid it by the side of the English pilot, on the floor. But the English boy ignored it, as if he had thought of something else.

  “Look under his blanket,” he said. “Loosen his clothes a bit. See if you can make him easy. Loosen his jacket and trousers.”

  The first-aid box lay untouched on the floor. The boy crawled over on his hands and knees to the German, who had never seemed to him quite a human person and now seemed less human, with the doll-like motions of his head, than ever before.

  As he drew back the blankets and folded them down to just below the German’s waist he saw that a fantastic dark patch had spread itself all across the upper part of his legs and upwards over the left groin. The boy stared at it with the blunted shock of weariness. It was something that did not ask for speculation. The fullness of its violent meaning swept over him for a few slow moments and then engulfed him with the terror of sickness. He felt his teeth crying against each other as he folded the blankets hurriedly back over the body that now and then swayed slightly, helpless and a fraction disturbed, with the motions of the boat and the sea.

  He sat on the floor between the two pilots and could not speak for fear of the vast wave of sickness rising up in his throat.

  “What is it?” the pilot said.

  “Blood,” the boy said. “Blood all over him. Legs and stomach.”

  “Keep him covered,” the pilot said.

  He spoke with brief finality, checked by his own weariness. He still had his hands on the binoculars, holding them tightly to his chest. He grinned at the boy with flickering, unexpected life.

  “Bit bumpy.”

  “Freshening a bit,” the boy said.

  “Rain by midday they said. Just time for one patrol. Quite a patrol too.”

  “Like some tea?” the boy said, and moved as if to get up, but the pilot grinned quietly again and said, “No. No more thanks. Sit and talk to me.”

  The boy did not know what to say. It seemed to him it would be better if the pilot talked. He had so much more to tell. As a man flying fighters, he had in the eyes of the boy a kind of divinity. Ever since he had first come aboard, with his absurd moustache plastered down on his face, he had seemed not quite real. He had not seemed like other men. He had brought to the boat a casual and magnificent gallantry. The boy longed for him to speak of flying, of aircraft, of speeds: of battles especially. How did it feel up there? He supposed he must often have watched him come over the dunes and the marshes, going out to sea: this same man, and yet not thinking of him as a man but only as something flying, terrific and untouchable, across the sky. He still could not grasp that that furious splendour had a reality now.

  All the pilot said was: “It’s getting hellish dark in here. Think so?”

  “No,” the boy said. “It’s all right. It’s not dark.”

  “Best of having white hair,” the pilot said, and grinned in a very tired, old way at this joke of his.

  “I could light the lamp,” the boy said.

  “Lamp?”

  The pilot said the word slowly; he seemed to want to keep it on his lips, for comfort. He looked vaguely upward, desperately trying to see the boy in the small dark cabin. The boy got up. A pair of oil lamps were fastened into the bulkhead between the side lockers, and he now struck a match, to light the one nearer the pilot, on the starboard side. The wind blowing down the companionway through the open door blew out the match, and at the same time the boat lurched and then pitched, so that when he tried to light the second match it wavered in his fingers and went out too. After this he went over and shut the cabin door, and for the first time, with the little light of the doorway shut out, the cabin seemed dark to him also. It seemed dark and small and overcrowded as he stepped back across the bodies of the two men to try to light the lamp for the third time.

  And this time he succeeded. The dull orange flame hardly had any light at first. He turned it up. And then when he moved away from it his own shadow fell vast and sombre across the body of the pilot, throwing into tawny edges of relief the yellow varnished panelling and the yellow face of the German beyond.

  That shadow in some way discomforted him, and he crouched down. The face of the English boy came full into the oily glow; calm now, moulded by the downward cast of light into a smoother, flatter shape of almost shadowless bone. The boy saw on it as he crouched down the first glimpse of death. It was so unagonised and silent that for a moment or two he almost believed in it. The eyes of the pilot were closed and his lips slightly open, as if the word lamp still remained only partly spoken from them.

  Out of this deathly attitude the pilot suddenly opened a pair of eyes that seemed blackened and not awakened by the light of the lamp. They were distorted by a dark and sickly brilliance and the boy was startled. “Better,” he heard the pilot say. “Better.”

  The boy sat hugging his knees with relief.

  “How’s old Messner?”

  “Quiet,” the boy said.

  “Messner,” the pilot said. “How’s things? How are you?”

  Messner did not answer. He was not groaning now. He had turned his face away from the light of the lamp.

  “Hell of a bra
ve sod,” the pilot said.

  “Might not be him,” the boy said. He was not handing out free bravery to any enemy yet.

  “I think so,” the pilot said. “He knows it was me too.”

  “You think so?”

  “Certain.”

  “But you were faster, wasn’t you?” the boy said. “You could catch him easy, couldn’t you? The English are faster, aren’t they?”

  At last, in a rush, he had spoken his feelings.

  “Being fast isn’t everything,” the pilot said.

  “No?”

  “Anyway, I wouldn’t be as fast. He had a 109. It was just luck.”

  He grinned, tired, his eyes deadened again.

  “Smooth do, though, all the same.”

  A great quiver of pain suddenly came upward from his body as he finished these words, shaking his whole face with a great vibration of agony, and his eyes lightened bitterly with an awful flash of terror. They did a sudden vivid swirl in the lamplight, like the eyes of someone falling suddenly into space and looking in final horror at something to cling to.

  “Snowy,” he said. “Snowy,” and instinctively the boy caught hold of his hands. They were frantically fixed to the binoculars, glued by awful sweat, and yet cold, and the boy could feel the transmission of pain and coldness flowing out of them into his own.

  “God!” the pilot said. “God, good God, good God!”

  The agony turned his finger-tips to tangles of frenzied wire, which locked themselves about the boy’s hands and could not release them. The Breadwinner lurched again, and the boy went hard down on one elbow, unable to save himself and still, even in falling, unable to release himself from the frantic wires of the pilot’s hands.

  When he managed to kneel upright again he was in a panic at the English boy’s sudden silence. It was as if they had both been struggling for possession of the binoculars, and the pilot, tiring suddenly, had lost them.

  “I’ll get the skipper,” the boy said. “I’ll fetch Mr. Gregson.”