by H. E. Bates
It was impossible for him to know how long the black wind beat at them. The squat flatness of the boat kept her riding down long troughs that, just as she seemed to be free, curled like vast conical hooks and clawed her back again. At each end of these raging troughs she was so low in the water, leaking at the seams, that he lay half-drowned.
When the wind began to lessen with a sinister abruptness that startled him far more than his first sight of the storm-cloud had done, he became gradually aware of an ominous situation. He could not hear the engine beating. All he could hear above the dying wind were the elephantine hands of Fat Uncle, clawing their way, ape-like, up the totally dark steps of the hatchway.
An astonishing shaft of metallic sunlight seemed to dart down through the opening hatch and scooped Fat Uncle up to the deck. The boy heard Edison yelling. In a sudden list of the schooner water from the deck poured down the steps and it was as if Fat Uncle had turned and spewed.
Edison yelled again. In stumbling response Fat Uncle reappeared at the top of the hatchway and a moment later slithered down it. He began to make frantic and misdirected attacks on the engine, banging pointlessly with spanners. Water sloshed about the hold, drenching the boy as it climbed up the bulwarks and bounced back again.
He stared at the fumbling figure of Fat Uncle with a mixture of brooding hope and pity. The huge hands, convulsively picking up tools and groping about the engine cradle, were pathetic in their obstinate impression of doing something useful. Now and then they hovered, jelly-like, above the puzzle of plugs and mechanism, fingering objects with timidity, as if they were monsters that would sting.
Suddenly an enraged, half-drunk Edison threw himself down the hatchway. He yelled incomprehensible threats at Fat Uncle and struck him flat-handed about the face. The great yellow ape dived sideways as the boy so often dived in retreat from him and then fell, deflated, into the sloppy water of the hold.
‘Get up on deck, you fat bastard!’ Edison yelled. ‘Get hold of the wheel and try to keep her steady when she goes!’
Watching the drenched and yellow figure heaving itself up the hatchway the boy suddenly felt infinitely sorry for Fat Uncle. A moment later he saw Edison pounding the gross flopping back with his knee.
‘Get up there! Go on, you bastard! Out of the way – I want to get on deck. Move yourself! – God, you got us into this thing, didn’t you, but you’ve got about as much bloody idea how to get us out as a sea-egg.’
The two men disappeared on deck. A rush of wind blew away the last of Edison’s disturbed threats. A minute later it seemed to blow the man himself back again. He had armed himself with two bottles. He was actually performing, as he came down the hatchway, his trick of drinking as he walked.
He too made attacks on the engine. A thin enraged strength gave the white unmuscular arms a wiry, clockwork activity. It was unbrutal but sinister. At intervals he slapped his mouth against the bottle. With the return of sunlight the air had become cinderous again and presently Edison ripped off his shirt. The prominent white ribs, curiously hairless, were bathed in sweat, and the boy suddenly saw him as a living, clawing, mechanical skeleton.
An hour later the engine was still not working and periodically Edison stormed at it with disjointed shouts. In a lurch of the boat an oil drum freed itself from somewhere and rolled against his shins, setting him yelling in a venomous tirade against Fat Uncle, the French doctor and above all the monstrous stupidity of ever having come on the boat. Fat Uncle was mad. The boat was a death-trap. Longuemart was mad. Who ever had the damn crazy idea of taking her out in the first place?
‘You did, you fat bastard, didn’t you? You did!’
Time measured itself in the emptying of a bottle. He uncorked another. As the level of this second one lowered itself the skeleton-like figure of Edison seemed to disappear. A trapped, blasphemous prisoner took its place: a prisoner of an engine that would not work and of a vision so disturbed that he actually started to aim misplaced blows at the bulwarks as if hammering to be free.
In a final abusing storm of threats he lurched wildly up the companionway, swinging the spanner. The boy heard him scream hoarsely on a harsh upward scale of abuse, incoherent to him except in a final repeated phrase:
‘I’m coming for you, you fat bastard! I’m coming for you!’
At the moment of Edison’s disappearance the boy saw the girl emerge from the darkness behind the engine cradle. Her pereu, like her arms and legs, was drenched in oil and water.
She picked up a hammer left by Edison on the engine cover. She stood for a moment at the foot of the steps. The boy scrambled across the partly flooded hold, stumbling in water. She seemed to take pity on the anxious brooding eyes and put one hand on his shoulder.
He heard running feet on the deck.
‘Stay here,’ she said. ‘Don’t come up. Keep away.’
She started up the steps. A gust of wind shuddering down the companionway blew away the complete coherence of whatever she said next but he thought it sounded like:
‘He gets filled with madness. The whisky blinds him. He doesn’t see—’
In three or four leaps she was up the steps. Sheer curiosity could not keep him back and less than half a minute later he was crawling after her.
He emerged on to what seemed to him a steaming, deserted deck. Heat was burning up the last of the flood of spray and rain. The deck planks were giving off grey rising vapour.
He found himself suspended in fear and excitement at the head of the companionway. His hands and knees felt locked. When he did move at last it was to retreat a step or two as Edison tore blindly past him, yelling, with Fat Uncle a yard or two ahead.
He heard Fat Uncle fall, screaming, against the wheel. He knelt cold and transfixed as Edison beat at the yellow mass of flesh with the spanner.
The girl came running too. She aimed a single blow at Edison’s shoulder with the hammer. A second before the impact Edison turned his head sharply as if to shout to her to keep away and the blow crushed into the smooth white top of the balding skull.
Edison fell sightlessly. A moment of awful surprise seemed to click his mouth open. A gust of sea-wind seemed to blow a thin feather of blood from his lips. A second gust of wind caught the entire body as it fell, pitching it suddenly, frail and more than ever skeleton-like, against the wheel, where Fat Uncle lay.
The boy stood for what seemed to him a long time surveying the dead. It would not have surprised him very much if the girl had been dead too. She sat stiffly against the side of the deck, head bowed, face completely hidden in the mass of her hair.
He was disturbed at last by a vague notion that the dead ought to be covered. He walked back towards the stern of the schooner and presently found a tarpaulin in a locker. He dragged it back along the deck, spread it out and threw it at last over the bodies of Edison and Fat Uncle.
Turning away, he felt his veins run white again. The wind was white on the water. The heat of the afternoon was incredibly, cruelly white as it beat up from the drying decks and the sea.
He turned at last to the girl. With relief he saw her lift her face, as if she had actually been watching him from the cavernous shadow of her hair. The most mysterious thing about her face, he thought, was that she seemed now to be in one respect like Edison. She could not see.
He was prepared for her to start screaming. She did not scream. Instead she turned her face slowly in the direction of the wheel and held it there, transfixed by the sight of the tarpaulin.
He also stared at the tarpaulin. The flaring realisation that it covered the body of the man of legends, the great, long voyager, filled him with sudden waves of sorrow for Fat Uncle.
He turned and saw this sorrow of his reflected in her face. Somehow he grasped, incredibly, that it might be sorrow for Edison. He could not understand this. He could remember nothing good of Edison. His abiding impressions of Edison were of a man repellent, sneering, drunken, wasteful, odiously sinister. Edison was of the breed for whom he played o
n Saturday evenings at the screaming dances: a dirty man.
It even occurred to him, as he stood there for a few moments longer, that sorrow for Edison was a mistaken thing. It even seemed to him possible to be glad that Edison was dead. He even thought the girl might be glad.
When he spoke for the first time it was with an odd detachment, about something he felt to be far removed from these realities.
‘That was a great storm,’ he said. ‘I’ve never known a storm like that.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘It was a great storm.’
As she spoke she turned to look at him, for the first time directly, with large black eyes. A sudden burst of wind blew her hair free of her face, leaving it fully exposed. Its sightless lack of expression seemed to imprison her in a terrible bond.
In this same imprisoned, expressionless way she spoke monotonously of the engine:
‘Does the engine work?’ she said. ‘What about the engine?’
He was glad to follow her down the steps of the companion way. In the hold it was easier, now more secure; the sea was calming down. In the partial gloom he could not see her face so well and he was glad of this. He was glad too to be out of sight of the humped black mound that was Fat Uncle and Edison.
‘When did you hide?’ she said.
‘In the morning. Early. After everyone had gone.’
‘I think I was asleep when you came,’ she said. ‘Do you remember they went back to the hotel and then came back again? That was when I hid. I heard the doctor working on the engine for an hour.’
As she spoke she seemed to be searching for something and a second later he knew what it was.
‘We must have the spanner,’ she said.
With nausea and fear he remembered where the spanner was. As she realised it too she stood imprisoned more terribly than ever, unable to move or speak to him.
He went up the companionway. Once more, on deck, his veins ran with whiteness. The sea, running with whiteness too, blazed at his eyeballs.
For a few seconds longer, standing over the tarpaulin, he played a game of hideous guess-work. He guessed that the larger, humpier mound underneath the tarpaulin was the body of Fat Uncle. He guessed that Edison had the spanner.
He snatched at the tarpaulin with sudden desperation and the empty hands of Edison were revealed underneath it. He flung it back again and turned to find himself mocked in the glitter of whiteness prancing up from the sea.
The spanner lay all the time on the deck, six feet away.
‘Here it is,’ he said to her.
It was the instinctive thing to give her the spanner as he reached the foot of the hatchway and she promptly dropped it.
He picked it up. Something about the feel of the spanner made him suddenly recall Fat Uncle. He was abruptly glad of Fat Uncle. Sometimes when the soda-bottling machine jammed it was a favourite theme of Fat Uncle’s to bludgeon him into the business of mending it again. His hands, in consequence, had grown quite agile with spanners.
He began to tinker with the engine. The girl brooded beside him, sombrely, terribly quiet. By contrast he began to feel less and less of his nausea, his fear and his horror at the bloody secrets of the tarpaulin up on deck. The spanner gave him the means of grasping at tangible things and he began now to try to cheer the girl up with recollections:
‘Fat Uncle went on long voyages in this boat,’ he said. ‘Once he was blown by a big wind like that.’
‘Yes?’
‘To Australia. All the way to Australia the wind blew him.’
‘I never heard him talk of that.’
‘A million miles,’ he said.
‘There is no such thing as a million miles.’
‘There must be,’ he said. ‘Fat Uncle told me so.’
He felt himself become buoyant at these recollections.
‘Long, long voyages he went. To Noumea. Across the world. Everywhere.’
‘Long ago?’
‘Oh! long ago.’
‘I never heard him talk of it.’
Two hours later he could no longer see to work on the engine. In his own mind he had long since given up the idea that anything he could do would make it work again. His pretence of solving its mysteries was merely part of his pride.
He followed the girl up the hatchway. With averted eyes the pair of them went aft along the deck.
‘There is a little food left,’ she said, ‘if you feel like it.’
He could only shake his head. A spurt of sickness squeezed itself acidly up his throat. He managed to say:
‘Do you feel like it?’
‘Some water, perhaps. Could you drink some water?’
He could not speak this time. He simply nodded his head.
‘The sun has gone,’ she said.
Holding the water cask in readiness to fill the mug with water, she paused and stood for some time staring at the horizon. The sun had gone down in a startling agony of carmine, purple-black and flame. A few pinkish clouds, like high birds, were flying far overhead, delicate, broken-feathered. The sea, calm now except for the faintest ripples, collected these colours and cast the mingled glow of them back in her face. The features of the face were set and grim, as if carved, their proudness undissolved.
Ten minutes later it was utterly dark except for a slowly expiring gap of rosy copper low down and far away, against the face of the dead calm sea. Something about this calmness, on which the schooner now rode as if locked to an invisible anchor, filled the air with a sense of foreboding so ominous that when the boy finally lay down on the deck, side by side with the girl, it was with his face downwards but slightly averted, listening.
It struck him suddenly that they were there for ever. The schooner was locked against a sea permanently held in deathly silence. Its searing flare of daylight whiteness had given place to a darkness that imprisoned every scrap of motion. He could not detect the slightest drift of the boat one way or another or the faintest rise of it up and down.
He lay there for a long time in this motionless attitude, completely locked in silence. The girl too was lying face downwards, head buried in her hair. Her hands in turn clutched the side of her hair, as if in a nightmare of remorse and terror she was suspended in the act of tearing it out by the roots.
The horror of what she must be thinking broke on him very gradually. After a long time he turned and lay face upwards, staring at the stars. The sky, like the sea, seemed to be held in a formidable, dark paralysis.
Staring upward, he wondered what he himself could possibly feel like if he had killed a man. Through a horror of his own he passed into a stage of sheer fright at the mere recollection of what lay under the tarpaulin along the deck. When the horror finally lessened and passed it gave way to an enormous sense of wonder: a thankful wonder that he had not, after all, killed a man, and then a terrible wonder that he had actually seen the act, survived it and was alive to remember it all.
He lay for a little longer in a senseless vacuum, no longer even thinking. A dozen times before this he had expected her to cry. The fact that she did not once show the faintest sign of tears had helped to keep him from weeping too. Suddenly he could not bear any longer her tearless agonised attitude of seeming to tear her hair out by the roots as she lay there in the darkness. It filled him with a boyish rush of compassion in which he could no longer refrain from touching her. He moved towards her and put his hands on her shoulders and her hair.
She at once interpreted this groping touch of his as a sign of fear. She turned instinctively and with big naked arms held him against her. She rocked him backwards and forwards, mother-wise, murmuring quietly at the same time.
He found something more than comfort in the touch of her body. It did for him what the sky and the sea had failed to do. It drove away the last impression of ominous foreboding, his feeling that the two of them were locked there for ever. It coaxed him out of his senseless vacuum.
The girl too began to come alive. She actually pressed her mouth against the s
ide of his face. Then he heard her voice framing words for the first time since darkness had come down.
‘Don’t be afraid.’
‘I’m not afraid.’ As he said this she enveloped him still more closely with her body. ‘Are you afraid?’
‘It is not a question of being afraid.’
He did not understand this remark and for some moments she did not explain it. Instead she held him still more closely to her, arms completely round him now.
‘There is something more than being afraid.’
For a second time he did not understand her. He was bewildered by a growing sense of mystery about her. Her flesh quivered as she held him. An impression that all the pores of her skin were about to shed their own terrible fears gave him an overwhelming sense of sorrow that he could not bear.
‘What is it?’ he said. ‘What is more than being afraid?’
She spoke with distant calmness in answer.
‘I have a child inside me.’
He did not speak. The gravity of his pride that she had decided to tell him this was so great that he felt suddenly, inside himself, a new stature. He was also old. He also felt he had become, in some strange way, part of her.
‘Shall we try to sleep now?’ she said.
Her voice had taken on a further spell of calmness. The infinite sense of brooding sorrow was at last dispelled.
‘Come closer to me,’ she said. ‘Lie close to me.’
He had already closed his eyes. He started, a little later, to sleep peacefully in the warmth of her arms. In the uncanny silence of the completely motionless boat she slept too, holding him like a mother.
He awoke, some time after dawn, to strange noises. He thought at first that the sea had risen and was beating against the sides of the vessel. He opened his eyes and stared upward at a repetition of the flocks of clouds travelling, like pink birds, high across the morning sky.
