Sailors on the Inward Sea

by Lawrence Thornton

  Half an hour later it did. Fox-Bourne had just informed his officers that they would very likely have to abandon the search when the gray wall suddenly lightened. A patch of blue appeared directly overhead. Conrad could now see the whole length of the deck, make out the forward gun, capstans, hatch covers, Whelan and another sailor near the bow, a portion of the sea, almost black in contrast, off the starboard side. He said they proceeded through the milky whiteness for five minutes or so when a huge yellow cylinder appeared, one of those freakish phenomena encountered at sea from time to time, odd as waterspouts or the northern lights, things ancient sailors took as signs and wonders and brought back to tell of round the communal fire.

  Revolving slowly, the cylinder expanded in width and height, looking rather like a door or a portal, and when the Brigadier entered it the glow lit her bow with a golden radiance. A moment later Whelan took hold of the rail with both hands and leaned out as if he were a gymnast on the parallel bars.

  “I think he’s seen a mine,” Chambers said.

  “Well, damn it,” Fox-Bourne replied, “he’ll go over if he isn’t careful.”

  The prospect appeared distinctly more likely when Whelan stood on the lower rung and leaned out farther, hanging there as if he were suspended in space before he jumped down and looked toward the bridge, shouting unintelligibly while he pointed at the wall of fog, jabbing his finger at it repeatedly in an indecipherable comic pantomime. The yellow light consumed the fog as the cylinder broadened. Conrad saw a long black object on the surface, which he thought was a shoal before remembering that the chart had showed nothing but open sea. You probably know, Ford, that the oceans are strewn with every imaginable object, hazards a sailor can’t prepare for and sometimes doesn’t even see until it is too late. Conrad certainly knew this. In the course of his career he had half a dozen narrow escapes, the most remarkable from a large section of a pier off some Asian coast that passed so close he could see the barnacles on its pilings. Such experiences had impressed him sufficiently for him to have chosen a similar event as the malignant cause of misfortune in Lord Jim. That was his second guess, probably shared by the others, and they were all wrong. The cylinder shifted and within seconds the rectangular shape of a submarine’s conning tower glided magisterially into view. The vessel lay at right angles to the Brigadier, directly in its path at a distance of less than two hundred meters.

  Fox-Bourne called for full reverse and in the same breath ordered the helmsman to make a hard right. No sooner did the telegraph chime than the sailor swung the wheel violently, an extraordinary performance, though in vain since there was not enough distance between the ships to avoid a collision. Any chance of doing so was nullified when he realized that the U-boat was dead in the water. The yellow light bathing the entire length of the submarine illuminated its name, Die Valkerie, and its designation, U-21, in crimson Gothic script below the fluted tip of the observation platform. Farther down what looked incongruously like a row of white flowers baffled him every bit as much as Marlow had been on his approach to Kurtz’s compound, where he thought he saw decorative knobs on all the fenceposts. When they were a little closer he saw that they were the outlines of ships.

  “Kill signs,” Higgins mumbled.

  “The swine,” Fox-Bourne said furiously, “the bloody cowards.”

  Fox-Bourne did not speak especially loud. What distinguished his words and forced Conrad to look at him was their intensity, the guttural sound that was matched by his face, distorted by rage and what seemed the worst kind of sorrow, a stunning transformation.

  “He was no longer with us,” Conrad said as he sipped his coffee, “and I mean literally. Oh, his body was there, but his mind had taken leave for somewhere I wouldn’t have cared to visit. It made no sense, Malone. Yet everything that happened during the next hour was foretold in his features and his voice. I wonder to this day whether I was derelict, whether I should have intuited what was coming. I tell myself it wouldn’t have mattered since I had no power to prevent it, but still. . . .”

  His fascination with the changes in Fox-Bourne was such that he continued looking at him awhile longer, and when he managed to tear his eyes away there was no more ocean between the Brigadier and the Valkerie. The U-boat disappeared beneath the minesweeper’s bow, first her hull, then the kill signs, the designation, her name. “Brace!” cried Higgins, the word caroming around the bridge and echoing off the walls, freezing everyone in place while the engines strained to slow the ship. A tremendous blow sent a quiver through the Brigadier and knocked them off their feet. The helmsman slammed into the hub of the wheel, his cry lost in the unholy screech of metal grinding against metal. Teapots and cups brought in minutes earlier by a steward flew off the table and sent sprays of tea in the shape of overlapping fans across one wall.

  He could hear the engines again. The collision had slowed the Brigadier but her momentum still carried her forward into the pool of brilliant sunlight pouring into the cylinder. When she finally came to a halt Fox-Bourne shifted the indicator handle to neutral, Chambers broke out a first-aid kit and had just gone down on his knees to tend the helmsman when a terrible scream rent the air, the Valkerie’s diving siren, which must have been activated by the force of the collision.

  “It was ear-splitting,” Conrad said, “absolutely ear-splitting. The sound went straight into the brain like a knife.”

  I could hear it too, Ford, and I’ll wager you can, too. Though I had never heard a submarine’s siren, the Valkerie’s was as clear as if I had been standing at Conrad’s side on the bridge of the Brigadier. It wasn’t the result of my imagination, not in the least, but the way he told the story. From the moment he described the minesweeper leaving port he had spoken with the same intensity you find in his writing, the same attention to detail and pacing and cadence. Just as he re-created sound on the page, he also did it with his voice, bringing to life a siren scream that set my teeth on edge. He paused to let the sound sink into my brain.

  For a few seconds everyone on the bridge was immobilized by the sound. Then Fox-Bourne shouted furiously at Higgins and Scorsby, ordering them below to check for damage and demanding that they return within ten minutes. While Chambers attended to the helmsman—there was blood all over the floor and on his hands and arms—Fox-Bourne announced his plans if they were taking on water. He was very clear-minded, sharp and efficient and in command, a model officer, yet not for a moment did his rage lessen and from the look of him his sorrow was rising faster than the water that might be pouring into the ship.

  Chambers had just gotten the helmsman to sit up and was finishing with the bandage on his head when Higgins and Scorsby burst in with the news that the bow had been damaged but flooding appeared to be confined to the forward compartment. All things considered, Scorsby thought the bulkhead would hold, but there are no guarantees about such things, Ford, no promises that the pressure of tons of water won’t contradict the shipbuilder’s claims and they all knew it.

  To hide his concern, Higgins made derogatory comments about the Huns, saying they must not have thought the U-boat would sing so loud when they chose her name. Everyone laughed. He was going on about the pomposity of German opera, which he seemed to know quite well, when the Brigadier shuddered violently and swung a few degrees to the port. She had disengaged from the U-boat. Moments later the Valkerie drifted into view, swinging round till she lay parallel to the minesweeper, profiled in the yellow light. Aft of her conning tower a gash several meters wide ran to the waterline where the sea was pouring in, frothing at the jagged edges of torn metal. Conrad imagined the panic inside, Germans scared out of their wits, driven half-mad by the banshee wail from the speakers, sloshing through frigid water toward the conning tower ladder. His vision was broken by the appearance on the observation platform of a man wearing a black, high-necked sweater and visored cap trimmed with gold braid, the Valkerie’s captain come up to inspect the damage. After glancing at the rent in the hull the German captain shifted his eyes to
the minesweeper standing no more than twenty meters off his starboard bow, gaping at it like a tourist at the foot of some grand sight, say the pyramids, something too big to absorb, when the siren stopped.

  It was a low-tide quiet, an evening quiet, wonderfully peaceful. The siren had rubbed Conrad’s nerves raw along with everyone else’s. He felt the tension easing out of his body, draining away, and was beginning to relax when he heard Whelan shouting at the top of his lungs. The ensign was leaning over the rail yelling at the captain in German while the captain gazed at him in astonishment, as if he had just been slapped in the face by a stranger on the street. It was the stuff of low comedy, vaudeville, bizarre but familiar. Not two weeks earlier Conrad had received a letter from Borys in which he described a similar encounter on the battlefield. In certain spots along the front the trenches were so close together that the sentries knew the faces of their opponents and learned their habits. For upward of a week a man in Borys’s company had been exchanging potshots with a German to no effect. One evening, for reasons Borys was not clear about, they began yelling at each other, peppering the wasteland between them with obscenities. It had been very droll, Borys wrote, rather like a grown-up Punch and Judy show.

  As all eyes were fixed on Whelan, Conrad told Borys’s story and everyone was amused. Even Fox-Bourne managed a grin, though it seemed forced and in any case did nothing to change his demeanor. Conrad was translating Whelan’s barbs for the others when the siren came to life again and the German straightened up as if he had touched a live wire. They could not hear Whelan over the infernal shrieking, which was, of course, worse for the U-boat’s captain. The hollow core of the conning tower would conduct the sound to him, surround him with it. He was clearly unnerved, standing there bolt-upright, his face crimson, staring at Whelan with a glare that seemed to say he had decided the young officer was the sole, malignant cause of the disaster that had befallen him. For his part, Whelan was still yelling, obviously encouraged by the German’s distress and probably aware that the man no longer actually had to hear what he said to know what he meant. Neither moved. Whelan would not stop, the German would not look away, the tension between them building so that when the German unholstered his pistol, slipping it quickly out of the black leather holster at his hip, the act seemed inevitable, even foreordained. Because of the siren, Conrad did not know if anyone on the bridge gasped as he did, but their apprehension was palpable, a physical thing in the air, and it increased when the German extended his right arm and cocked his left at the elbow, resting his hand on his hip as if he were taking target practice at a range.

  “It happened very fast,” Conrad told me, “the whole thing, from drawing the pistol to assuming that absurd stance taking less time than it has for me to describe it. The fact is, I don’t remember it taking any time at all. One moment they were staring at each other, the next the German was aiming from what I now realized was some version of a dueling pose but which reminded me most of a toy soldier Borys played with when he was a boy.”

  Yet there was duration enough for Fox-Bourne’s bellow to be heard over the siren, a thunderous sound that might have been “No!” or only a soul-deep cry of anguish. A vein bulged in his forehead, which was as colorless as a geisha’s. At the instant he heard the shot Fox-Bourne’s eyes welled. He bellowed again and balled his hands into fists as Conrad turned and saw Whelan standing straight and tall, as if he had been ordered to assume the position of attention. For a few seconds he was motionless and then he brought his hands up and placed them tenderly on his chest in a perfect pantomime of an operatic gesture, as if he were a lover protesting some slight or offering his heart to his beloved. The captain extended his arm again and aimed just as Whelan staggered, recovered, swayed, toppled forward against the rail, which caught him just below his chest so that his arms went over and dangled, swaying with the gentle rise and fall of the Brigadier.

  Everything stopped then including the siren. Conrad and the officers did not move. The German captain did not move, his arm still raised, the weapon still pointed, men, ocean, ships arrested by what had happened. And then Fox-Bourne shouted an oath. The sound shattered the stillness, echoing on the bridge. He shouted again, ordering Scorsby to find the doctor and Higgins to take a crew to the forward gun and fire as soon as possible as he rushed to the doorway and disappeared down the ladder in a flurry of staccato steps, intent on saving Whelan though it was obvious to Conrad as it must have been to the others that the ensign was dead. What reserves of faith or denial drove the man, Conrad could not guess.

  The siren started up again as Higgins and three sailors were pulling the tarpaulin off the gun. Fox-Bourne raced by them, fairly flying over the deck with neither grace nor agility, his awkwardness adding to the sorrow, the patent uselessness of his desire. Conrad’s heart went out to him when he reached Whelan. Standing beside the ensign, touching him on the shoulder, he lifted him from the rail and carried him with one arm under his back, the other under his knees, to the center of the deck, where he put him down and cradled his head. With his free hand he unbuttoned Whelan’s shirt from neck to waist. As he did so, Conrad saw Scorsby and another officer he presumed was the doctor running up the deck. Somehow their presence seemed to increase Fox-Bourne’s isolation. With the doctor and Scorsby kneeling beside him, Fox-Bourne reluctantly laid Whelan’s head down and moved aside so that the doctor could put his hand on Whelan’s neck, his ear to Whelan’s chest, an attitude he maintained for a few seconds before he sat back on his heels and looked at Fox-Bourne, speaking to him, telling him what Conrad and everyone else on the bridge already knew.

  Fox-Bourne’s head went back so that he appeared to be staring at the sky. Higgins’s crew fired, the round striking at the waterline forward of the Valkerie’s engine compartment. Within seconds she settled several feet, the angle exposing the gash in the hull to the warm yellow light. The damage was more extensive than it had first appeared, a huge, pyramid-shaped hole whose jagged edges gleamed like teeth, a black hole with no bottom to it which suddenly filled with faces and hands, the men standing on pipes or scaffolding as they grasped the sharp metal that slashed their hands, the force of the rushing water pushing back the weaker ones, the ones with less determination whose places were taken by the more desperate or strong, and though he thought it was impossible for anyone to escape, one man rose up on straightened arms and toppled headlong into the water.

  By then the conning tower platform was crowded with sailors waiting to climb down, descending the handholds as if they were in some mad race, dropping to the deck whose pitch was so acute they had trouble standing. They moved in unison, like a herd of animals, farther up the incline whenever another man came down, holding on to each other, gazing fearfully at the water. A few sought safety on the bow. Bent over, they grasped the sides of the catwalk and shinnied crabwise ten or fifteen feet before they slipped and went over the side. One tumbled back to the crowd, grabbing at outstretched hands and knocking his saviors into the sea. A heavyset chap, an engineer from the look of his tattered, oil-stained shirt, stepped away from the group to the edge of the catwalk, pinched his nose, and jumped, coming up a few yards away sputtering, gesturing to the others. Another leapt with his arms extended in a swan dive, tattoos snaking up them and over his chest before he entered the water with hardly a splash, his dive emboldening others, who went over singly, in pairs, in a troika, one after the other like penguins leaving an ice floe.

  Only two Germans remained on the catwalk and Conrad was wondering what they were going to do when he saw the captain reemerge on the conning tower, sans hat this time, soaking wet but still armed, staring at his men in the water. Suddenly he looked up at the minesweeper’s bridge and raised his pistol. A bullet hole appeared in the window not six inches above Fox-Bourne’s head, the bullet ricocheting off a steel plate behind Conrad before it smashed through the window on the far side. The glass was still falling when he heard the report of the forward gun and the top portion of the conning tower disap
peared. That was enough for the dawdlers to join hands like schoolboys and plunge into the water. Higgins fired another round and a muffled roar came from the Valkerie’s engine room. The sea roiled, turned white, exploding in a plume of water while her bow rose to an impossibly steep pitch, sixty percent, perhaps more, the gash and the faces it framed disappearing, and Conrad imagined the Germans floating inside the boat like a school of fish as the Valkerie’s bow went higher, her torpedo ports glistening like some strange animal’s snout, the harsh, discordant scream of the diving siren persisting till she went down.

  The Germans who could swim scattered in all directions to avoid the suction. Those who could not flailed about in the oil slick. They looked like seals, their heads black, viscous diesel oil dripping from their arms. One man after another went under. A few orange life vests flecked the water, not many, not nearly enough, there having been no time to prepare for anything but a headlong dash. The engineer was treading water, as were the two who jumped holding hands, one pulling the other by the straps of his life vest, stroking frantically with his free arm, the others swimming and flailing and dog-paddling toward the Brigadier, the nearest maybe twenty meters away, the farthest a hundred or more, all those blackened heads bobbing in the sea, the blackened arms either slicing gracefully through the oily water or beating it as if they were threshing, separating wheat from chaff. The frantic efforts of the Germans to save themselves, the senseless yet understandable last act of the German captain firing at the minesweeper’s bridge had suppressed the terrible scene of Whelan’s murder. Now it came back full force. Conrad saw again the two men shouting at each other, the captain firing, Whelan’s operatic tumble. The captain had been blown to bits and there was a satisfaction in that, a sense of justice. By all rights Whelan’s murder should have hardened his heart against all the men in the water. Not for a moment had they ceased being the enemy, brothers of men trying to kill his son at the very moment. The death of their ship did not absolve them. The oily water through which they swam toward the Brigadier did not wash away the crimes memorialized in the white ships on the conning tower. They were still Germans, still the enemy, and yet their helplessness erased the difference between them and every sailor who had ever lost his ship. In the absence of that distinction, he could not find it in himself to damn them.