Two men laced the stoker's gloves on and Bentley said:
"Come on. We've seen enough."
The faces of both men were worried as they walked aft towards the gangway.
In the motorboat, the great ship drawing astern, Randall said:
"What do you think?"
Bentley's reply was unequivocal.
"Gellatly hasn't a chance. Lighter, less experience." He rubbed at his chin. "Unless..."
"Eh?"
"That Floss is a dirty fighter. Probably learned it in the slums of Liverpool somewhere. Gellatly's only hope would be to stay out of his reach and wear him down with jabs and straight lefts. But then Floss is cunning enough to lure him in to close quarters. And even if Gellatly did wear him down I doubt if he has the power and the weight to knock him out. The fellow's an ape."
"No argument there," Randall grimaced. "But are you sure? About Floss's ability, I mean? We only watched him for a few minutes."
Bentley looked at him.
"All right, all right," the big lieutenant grunted, "so you know fighters like I know beer. What happens now? Do we pull Gellatly out?"
There it was, the question which had been worrying Bentley's mind since they had walked away from the battleship's ring. They had travelled down the length of a cruiser before he spoke again.
"No. I haven't seen Gellatly in proper action yet. I don't give him a chance of winning, but that doesn't mean to say he won't be able to take care of himself. And in any case, we can always stop the fight."
"I hope to hell it doesn't get to that stage," Randall muttered.
He tugged worriedly at the lobe of his left ear. Then he glanced up sideways into Bentley's set face.
"Peter?"
"Yes."
"I hear the admiral's pretty set on this tournament? Keen on fitness, that sort of thing."
"That's right, yes."
"Then it seems to me that having entered a man, we can't very well withdraw."
Bentley nodded; that reason lay partly behind his decision to let Gellatly fight.
"Gellatly hasn't a hope-you said so yourself," Randall went on.
"No," Bentley said flatly.
"Eh? But a moment ago..."
"I mean `No' to what you're thinking. You want me to take on our Fairy friend."
"At least he'd be up against someone more his own weight and ability."
Bentley was silent, and for a second Randall thought he had swayed him. Then the captain spoke, and Randall knew he was wrong:
"I wanted to get into that ring back there more than I've wanted anything for a long time," Bentley said quietly. "I saw the look on the face of the seaman I spoke to-there's no doubt in my mind that Floss is the horrible example of the messdeck bully. What he needs is the hiding of his life. But..." he shook his head, short definite movements, "I'm in no place to try and give it to him. Damn it all, you know that!"
"But there's a couple of weeks yet to the fight," Randall protested; "you know you're in tip-top shape. All you need is ten days of training. You could take that boy," he nodded. "I've seen how you can go." Bentley looked at him, and his smile was a small and affectionate offering.
"Do I have to hit you over the head with it?" he asked patiently. "Maybe I could take him-though I doubt it I haven't had the gloves on for a long, long time. But that's not the point. I'm not only an officer, I'm a commanding-officer. I doubt very much if the admiral would consent, even if I were silly enough to approach him. No, Peter, Floss is a rating and one of his own has to take him."
Randall opened his mouth and his friend raised his hand.
"You're wasting your time, Bob. It's impossible." The boat pulled in alongside the gangway and Bentley turned back as he made to jump out. "Nothing to Gellatly about this afternoon," he warned, and Randall nodded.
Half an hour later Bentley walked along the iron-deck towards the group of men clustered about the tubes. They saw him coming and made way readily. Gellatly was waiting, his gloves on. Bentley called him over while the gunners mate laced on his own gloves.
"I saw your opponent this afternoon," he said to the petty-officer.
"I thought you might, sir," Gellatly grinned.
"Talk about a grape-vine!" Bentley grunted. "Well, here it is. He's heavier than you, but from what I saw he might not be as fast. My opinion is it should be a short fast stoush. You've got to get in there and keep at him. He's too strong to be worn down."
If Gellatly felt any concern at this information he did not show it.
"I see, sir."
"We'll go five rounds this afternoon. I want you to come at me all the time. Give it all you've got for five rounds. As hard as you like. Then tomorrow well increase to six rounds, and so on. All right?"
"Have got, sir."
"Remember now-everything in this five rounds. The whole gubbins."
The gunner's mate stepped back and they shaped up. Randall noticed again the greater weight and strength of Bentley, but remembered the bulk of Floss, and he wondered if Bentley was right in allowing Gellatly to go on with the fight.
Then Gellatly moved in and Randall forgot his wonderings,
To the eager watchers it was fast, exciting boxing. To Bentley, blocking and weaving and ducking Gellatly's attack, it brought the conviction that this would not do, that Gellatly was not nearly clever enough; and the doubt that he could coach him to the required standard in two short weeks.
The fifth round came up and Randall called "Time." Gellatly stepped back, his hands lowering and his mouth widely open. Bentley started to speak and Randall thought: "In first-class shape? You could take that ape this afternoon!"
"That's the stuff," Bentley was saying, his chest lifting evenly, "bore in all the time. Now tomorrow-the admiral and the Japs willing-we'll go to six rounds. All right?"
"Yes... sir," Gellatly panted, and shook the sweat from his eyes. Bentley held out his hands to the gunner's mate.
Two hours later, with long shadows streaking the calm waters of the anchorage, Bentley was smoking a cigarette with Randall on the cool of the upper-deck outside his sea-cabin. Normally he would not have noticed him, but for this last liberty-boat ashore there were only a handful of men, and Gellatly in his petty-officer's uniform was conspicuous, Bentley saw the gunner's mate was with him.
"They're going ashore?" His tone was surprised.
"I don't know why not?" Randall smiled, "leave's been piped."
"You know what I mean! No self-respecting sailor would be seen dead in a dump like this."
"Oh, I don't know. There's been an Infusion of about fifty females."
Bentley watched the boat carve a white furrow towards the shore.
"A drop in the ocean with a crowd like this."
"Agreed. But if one of those choice little drops happens to fall on-or for-you... ?"
The qualities of a successful destroyer-driver are many. High on the list is the ability to think fast, added to a shrewd knowledge of your crew. And a retentive memory, a photographic plate on which the smallest happening is indelibly etched. Bentley was a very successful destroyer-driver."
"So that's it!" he murmured.
Randall looked at him, and there was a shade of disappointment in his rugged face.
"You know?" he asked, the patronising tone subdued in reluctant wonder. "I thought I was one up on you in this."
"I know now," Bentley nodded, his mind recalling two figures outside his sea-cabin after the submarine hunt had been called off. "What's she like?"
How the hell do you know about it if you don't know what she looks like? Randall wondered. But his respect for his captain's prescience and intelligence was deeply rooted. He accepted Bentley's knowledge, from an experienced recognition of the fact that he saved himself a lot of mental exercise by acceptance without question.
"A peach," he answered. "What Gellatly's got I'm damned if I know, but they were together a hell of a lot on the way down. He showed her all over the ship. But then you must have seen that?"
Bentley had no intention of destroying the illusion of his omnipresent perspicacity by revealing the real and meagre source of his knowledge.
"Even so," he evaded, "he must have worked fast. You think he's meeting her ashore tonight?"
"He's not going to the races, or the Trocadero," Randall pointed out.
"Brilliant!" Bentley sneered. "I hope he's got enough sense to lay off the jungle-juice ashore." He smiled. "But what's he going to do with the gunner's mate?"
"It can't be that long ago," Randall mused, shaking his head.
"Eh? What's not long ago?"
"The times when we used to do the town over. When we used to have a pair of popsies in tow."
Again Bentley justified his selection for command.
"You mean that once you're in, you're in? Get one girl, even in a hole like this, and she'll bring along a friend?"
"Move," said Randall, "to the top of the class."
"I'm moving," Bentley told him, "down for a pre-dinner snort. And," gazing after the distant boat, "if he's bleary-eyed in the morning I'll stop his leave."
CHAPTER FIVE
THERE IS NOTHING LIKE putting on a bold front. Or so the proprietor of the Starlight club believed.
His establishment was afforded an attractive front by virtue of its romantic name, and he could the added justification of honesty by virtue of the astronomical fact that customers could see the stars through the roof. This bringing indoors the tropical outdoors was achieved simply through the materials used in the roof's construction. They were ragged and rotting palm leaves, and though undeniably they let the starlight in, they also offered unobstructed ingress to rain.
But there again the Goanese proprietor had been cunning. A European owner of something named the Starlight Club might have felt constrained to provide in the plans for a wooden floor. But the base on which Petty-Officer Gellatly's feet were now resting was a more natural one-beaten earth. The fiercest deluge could not harm it, nor did the tables have anything to worry about-they were wooden, and patina'd with such a coating of grease and impregnated with such a dyeing of stale beer that they could laugh at the best rainstorm Ceylon could produce.
But sailors are an adaptable breed; and everything is relative. Gellatly and the gunner's mate had been in much worse dives than this one, and in any case with what they had in front of them their attention was not on questions of decor.
"Have another?" Gellatly asked, smiling happily. He was not at all averse of being the target for a hundred pairs of envious eyes in that crowded room.
The nurse, prettier than a picture, looked down at her half-full glass and tried not to grimace.
"Not at the moment, thank you," she managed to smile.
Privately, Gellatly did not blame her. They were drinking what tasted like a combination of liquid floor polish and fermented coconut juice-a recipe not so far off the mark. "What about you, Liz?" asked the gunner's mate gallantly.
"I'll stick with Beryl, thanks," a pert voice answered him.
Around them the sound-waves of men determinedly drinking and enjoying themselves eddied and flowed. Words and shouts and catcalls reached them, and ebbed away making no impression. Then a man at the next table, in one of those odd currents of silence in the most crowded room, mentioned something about the "boxing tournament." They heard the words clearly.
"You shouldn't have much more of that muck, Clive," Beryl advised him. "It's rot-gut, and it certainly won't help your training."
"Frankly," grinned the boxer, "I've had training. At the moment, anyhow. How about we leave the ship where she is?"
He raised his glass and the gunner's mate growled: "You don't wanta let the Old Man hear you say that. Not after he's sweated every afternoon for a week lickin' you into shape."
Liz leaned forward, her gamin face alert with interest.
"You mean your captain also is a boxer?"
"One of the best," the gunner's mate claimed stoutly; "used to be Fleet heavyweight champion."
"Then why," Beryl asked, also interested in this unexpected facet to their rescuer, "doesn't he enter the tournament?"
"Oh, I dunno," Gellatly answered her. "Maybe it's got something to do with his being skipper."
"But if he's the captain now, then he must have been an officer when he won the championship?"
"Sure he was. But not a commanding officer. There's a hell of a difference." Beryl, used herself to a discipline as strict as her companion's, nodded.
"Yes, I see what you mean. Though it's a pity that..."
She stopped, suddenly aware that her voice was raised. Then she realised that her tone had been normal for the noise about them, and that it was the noise which had subsided. The four of them turned to face the door.
Gellatly saw a large seaman standing just inside the door, two cronies behind him. Plainly the newcomer-the apparent cause of the sudden silence-was well-known to this British crowd, but to the Australian he was a stranger.
Beryl said, quietly and with emphasis:
"What a repulsive-looking man!"
That seemed to sum it up for all of them. They laughed, and turned back to their own business.
In all that packed room there were no more than half a dozen women, and the other four were seated further back near the walls. Beryl and Liz, in the middle of the floor, were thus conspicuous. Beryl in any case would have been that-as the gunner's mate had mentioned on board that afternoon: "You'd even give her a second look on Bondi Beach of a Saturday afternoon."
It was natural that Floss's ugly eyes should come to rest on her. He had noticed, pleasurably, the cessation of talk as he had made his entrance, and what he now proposed to do should make him even more conspicuous. That was only part of his reason-he was a man used to getting his own way amongst his fellows, and he could see nothing which might constitute an obstruction to his present plans. And they included-in his present state of highly-fit virility-the companionship and comfort of that pretty nurse seated at the table in front of him. The first Gellatly knew of an alien presence was a large and hairy hand which appeared over Beryl's shoulder and took her glass. A gravelly voice suggested, in a mockery of attempted gallantry:
"You don't wanna drink that muck, gorgeous. I can put you on to some real grog. How about it?"
The contempt of the man for the girl's companions was complete and sincere. He was so sure of himself that his hands were already on the back of her chair, waiting to pull it back when she rose to his invitation. Beryl glanced up at him over her shoulder. That shoulder was bare, revealed in a low-cut cotton frock, and the eyes of Floss hungrily gazed their fill from his position of advantage. Gellatly felt the hot blood warming up into his face.
"Are you blind?" Beryl asked coldly. "I already have a friend."
Floss leered down at her.
"You gotta friend, sure. But now you gotta man."
The room was silent, tense with the foreknowledge and anticipation of sailors witnessing a familiar prelude in a foreign port. Into the silence Liz's voice dropped clearly:
"You better be careful, you great lug! Her friend happens to be a fighter, and he's in the boxing tournament."
The piggish eyes of the big man flicked over the gunner's mate and came to rest on Gellatly. They saw the petty-officer's tenseness, his hands on the table ready for the push upwards. They saw, but
Floss was unimpressed. His lips twisted.
"Your name Gellatly?"
"That's right," Gellatly said crisply. "Now clear out!"
"Well, well," Floss grinned, "here he is in a sailors' hang-out and he pulls the old rank. That how you're gonna win your fight, big boy? `Don't dare hit me hard, Fairy, or I'll have you up before the Bloke!'"
The two cronies laughed sycophantically behind him. Gellatly's face reddened. He felt his self-control slipping, and this was so novel an experience, especially when faced by a junior rating, that for a moment he deliberately analysed it-and realised that it was the man's repulsiveness which had surfaced the red an
ger in his brain.
He said, his voice thick with the control he put on it:
"I don't know who you are, but if you don't leave this table at once you will be up before the Bloke!"
Floss looked back at him, the same sneering twist on his mouth. Then he stared round the watching room. He raised his hand and its sweep took in the taut form of Gellatly.
"Y'see, mates? Y'see what we're up against? What hope's poor old Fairy got against a back-scratching senior rate like this?"
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