The Cruise of The Breadwinner

by H. E. Bates

  He tried to get up on his feet, but discovered his hands still locked in the pilot’s own.

  “All right, Snowy. Don’t go. All right now. Don’t go.”

  “Sure?” the boy said. “I’d better.”

  “No. Don’t go. Don’t. How’s old Messner? Have a look at old Messner.”

  Messner was quiet. The boy, still held by the pilot’s hands, could not move. He told the pilot how Messner was quiet, and again that he ought to call Mr. Gregson. The pilot did not answer. The boy had long since lost count of time, and now the half darkness, the lamplight and the silence gave the impression that the day was nearly over.

  He crouched there for a long time, imprisoned by the pilot’s hands, waiting for him to speak again. He sometimes thought of the binoculars as he sat there. The strap of them and the two sets of fingers seemed inextricably locked together; he felt they would never come apart. And all he could hear was the sound of the pilot’s breath, drawn with irregular congested harshness, like the pained echo of rain and sea washing against the timbers of the small ship outside. He shut his own eyes once, and let himself be swung deeply to and fro by the motions of the ship. He could almost guess by these motions how far they were from shore. At a point about five miles out they struck the current from the river-mouth, faintly at first, but heavier close to land, and on days of westward wind, like this, there was always a cross swell and a pull that would take them up the coast. They still had some way to go.

  “Messner all right?”

  The voice of the English boy, coming at last, was only a whisper. It seemed to the boy fantastic that there should be this constant question about Messner. He could not conjure any concern for Messner at all, beyond the concern for the binoculars, and he did not speak.

  “Valuable bloke, Messner,” the pilot said. “Might talk. If we get back.”

  He tried to grin but the movement of his lips was strengthless, quivering and not very amusing.

  “If we get back. That’s the big laugh,” he said. “Always is.” He spoke very slowly now. “When you get back.” He tried again with the same dark ineffectiveness to smile. “If you get back.”

  These ironies were beyond the boy. They served only to accentuate the silence with which the pilot lay looking at him, lips partly open, the continuity of his thought broken down.

  And when he spoke again it was of quite different things.

  “The lamp’s very bright,” he said.

  “I’ll turn it down,” the boy said.

  “No.” His voice had the distance of a whisper gently released in a great hollow. “Rather like it. Lean over a bit.”

  The shadow of the boy moved across and remained large and protective over the face of the young man. They still gripped each other’s fingers tightly, the binocular case between. It seemed very cold, and there was no sound from Messner. The lamp had now and then violent and bright-edged convulsions caused by the plunging of the ship, and the shadow swayed.

  It seemed to the boy late in the afternoon when the pilot began to mutter and babble of things he did not understand. Once he opened his eyes with a bright blaze of fantastic vigour, and talked of a girl. The next moment he was saying, “Tell old Messner he put up a good show. Tell him he’s a bastard.”

  He did not speak again. The boy watched him dying in the vastness of his own shadow without knowing he was dying. It was only when he moved to get a better look at his face that he saw it without even the convulsion of breath. The sound of breathing had stopped, and the moustache, still wet and flat on the face, had now more than ever the look of something mockingly plastered there. The lamp seemed astonishingly bright in its odd distortion, terrifyingly bright in the young immobile eyes that still seemed to be staring straight at the boy.

  After some moments he succeeded in getting his fingers out of the dead fingers, at the same time releasing the binoculars. He was cold and he moved quietly, crawling on the cabin floor. When he went over to Messner he found that Messner had died too, and now the lamplight was full on both of them, with equal brightness, as they lay side by side.

  Chapter 6

  The Breadwinner came in under the shelter of rain-brown dunes and the western peninsula of the bay in the late afternoon and drove in towards the estuary, with the boy and Gregson on deck. Rain trembling across the darkening sky in grey cascades like spray hid all the further cliffs from sight, and in the distance the hills were lost in cloud. The boy grasped the binoculars in his hands, pressing them against his stomach rather as Gregson pressed the wheel against his own, in the attitude of a man who is about to raise them to his eyes and see what the distances reveal.

  “Just turned,” Gregson said. “Bleedin’ good job for us too. That tide’ll come in as high as a church steeple with this wind.”

  As she came in full across the wind, lumping on the waves as if they had been crests of solid steel, The Breadwinner had more than ever the look of a discarded and battered toy. She bumped in a series of jolting short dives that were like the ridiculous mockery of a dance. Her deck as it ran with spray and rain gleamed like dirty yellow ice, so that sometimes when she heeled over and the boy was caught unawares he hung on to the deck-house with one hand, his feet skating outwards. With the other hand he held on to the binoculars. He gripped them with the aggressive tightness of a man who has won a conquest. Nothing, if he could help it, was going to happen to them now.

  At times he looked up at the face of Gregson. It was thrust outward into the rain with its own enormous and profound aggression. The boy sometimes could not tell from its muteness whether it was angry or simply shocked into the silences it held for half an hour or more. He wanted to talk to it. There rose up constantly in his mind, tired now and dazed by shock, images of the cabin below. They troubled him more each time he thought of them. Their physical reality began to haunt him much more than the reality of the dead engineer, who lay not ten feet before him, like a piece of sodden and battered merchandise, his blood washed away now by constant rain. He thought often of the conversation of the dead pilot. He thought less often of Messner. There were to him very subtle differences between the men, and death had not destroyed them. When he thought of Messner it was with dry anger. He conceived Messner as the cause of it all. It was something of a low trick. Then he remembered Messner as the man who also carried the binoculars, and he remembered that the binoculars were the only things that had come out of the day that were not sick with the ghastliness of foul and indelible dreams.

  He was very tired. The way the sea hit The Breadwinner also hit him in the stomach, a dozen times or more a minute, kicking him sore. He had not eaten anything since coming up from the cabin. There had been no more shouts from Gregson, no more cups of tea. Gregson remained for the most part vastly mute, the light beaten out of his face.

  When the boy had to talk to him again, he said:

  “When will we be in, Mr. Gregson, skipper?”

  Gregson did not answer. He kept his face thrust forward into a gigantic pout, angered into a new and tragic sullenness. The boy had not known this face before. There were times when he had been afraid of Gregson; they were separated by what seemed to him vast stretches of years by the terrifying vastness of the man. Now he was comforted by the gigantic adultness of Gregson. It shut him away, for a time, from the things he had seen.

  They were coming in towards the estuary now, Gregson giving the wheel a hard point or two to port, and then another, and then holding The Breadwinner hard down, her head a point or two west from north. The face of the sea was cresting down a fraction; the wind gave a suck or two at the sail as the boat turned and lay over, loosing it back as she straightened. The boy could see the shore clearly now, misty with rain, the dunes in long wet brown stripes, the only colour against the winter land beyond. And suddenly, looking up at Gregson, he thought for a moment he detected there a slight relaxation on the enormous bulging face. He saw Gregson lick the rain from his tired lips. It gave him courage to think that at last Gregson w
as going to speak again.

  “Almost in, Mr. Gregson, skipper,” he said.

  The violence of Gregson’s voice was so sudden that it was like the clamour of a man frightened by his own anger.

  “God damn them!” he roared. “God damn them! All of them, God damn them! Why don’t they let us alone? Why don’t they let us alone! Why don’t they let us alone! How much longer? Why don’t they let our lives alone? God damn and blast them—all of them, all of them, all the bastards, all over the world!”

  Gregson finished shouting and gave an enormous fluttering sigh. It seemed to exhaust him. He stood heavy and brooding across the wheel, his body without savagery, his face all at once dead and old and colourless, the rain streaming down it like a flood of tears.

  He put his hand on the boy’s shoulder, as if he now suddenly remembered he was there. The sea was calming down at the mouth of the estuary, and The Breadwinner was beginning to run lumpily in towards the narrow gap in the steel defences, rusty for miles along the wild and empty shore. There were no lights in the dark afternoon, and the rain darkened a little more each moment the farther hills, the cliffs and the low sky. The boy did not move again. All the time he had wanted, at this last moment, to raise the binoculars to his eyes. For some reason he did not want to raise them now. There did not seem much use in raising them. He was not even sure that there seemed much use in possessing them. As he stood there with Gregson’s arm on his shoulder he remembered the dead engineer; he remembered Gregson’s violent outburst of words; and he remembered the dead pilots, lying in the orange lamplight in the small cabin darkened by his own shadow with their dead fair faces, side by side. And they became for him, at that moment, all the pilots, all the dead pilots, all over the world.

  At that moment they ran into the mouth of the estuary. Gregson continued tenderly to hold him by the shoulder, not speaking, and the boy once more looked up at him, seeing the old tired face again as if bathed in tears. He did not speak, and there rose up in him a grave exultation.

  He had been out with men to War and had seen the dead. He was alive and The Breadwinner had come home.

  A Note on the Author

  H. E. Bates was born in 1905 in the shoe-making town of Rushden, Northamptonshire, and educated at Kettering Grammar School. After leaving school, he worked as a reporter and as a clerk in a leather warehouse.

  Many of his stories depict life in the rural Midlands, particularly his native Northamptonshire, where he spent many hours wandering the countryside.

  His first novel, The Two Sisters (1926) was published by Jonathan Cape when he was just twenty. Many critically acclaimed novels and collections of short stories followed.

  During WWII he was commissioned into the RAF solely to write short stories, which were published under the pseudonym “Flying Officer X”. His first financial success was Fair Stood the Wind for France (1944), followed by two novels about Burma, The Purple Plain (1947) and The Jacaranda Tree (1949) and one set in India, The Scarlet Sword (1950). Other well-known novels include Love for Lydia (1952) and The Feast of July (1954).

  His most popular creation was the Larkin family which featured in five novels beginning with The Darling Buds of May in 1958. The later television adaptation was a huge success.

  Many other stories were adapted for the screen, the most renowned being The Purple Plain (1947) starring Gregory Peck, and The Triple Echo (1970) with Glenda Jackson and Oliver Reed.

  H. E. Bates married in 1931, had four children and lived most of his life in a converted granary near Charing in Kent. He was awarded the CBE in 1973, shortly before his death in 1974.

  Discover other books by H. E. Bates published by Bloomsbury Reader at

  www.bloomsbury.com/HEBates.

  Share your reviews and comments with us via info@bloomsburyreader.com.

  For copyright reasons, any images not belonging to the original author have been removed from this book. The text has not been changed, and may still contain references to missing images.

  First published in Great Britain in 1946 by Michael Joseph Ltd

  This electronic edition published in 2015 by Bloomsbury Reader

  Copyright © 1946 Evensford Productions Limited

  The moral right of the author is asserted.

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  eISBN: 9781448215393

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