Sailors on the Inward Sea

by Lawrence Thornton

  At this point, Conrad had been so engrossed that he was not certain when Fox-Bourne and Scorsby had returned to the bridge. He remembered seeing them out of the corner of his eye heading back from the bow, the doctor remaining with Whelan, but the death of the U-boat and the frantic, terrified sailors had seized his attention so completely that all of this hardly registered. Now, Fox-Bourne was at the window, eyes red, swollen, the vein in his forehead standing out, looking as if he were on the verge of collapse. Conrad would not have been surprised if he had. There is a sorrow so deep no one can touch it but the man or woman it affects, he told me somberly, and in all his years he had never seen anyone so alone in his grief as Fox-Bourne. The warmth he had remarked on between the captain and Whelan, deep as it was, hardly seemed enough to have affected Fox-Bourne so profoundly. In any case, the man’s sorrow dominated the bridge from wall to wall and floor to roof. It seemed to have driven out the possibility of speech until Scorsby took a few steps toward him and quietly said that he would check on the lifeboats. Fox-Bourne heard him, there was no question of that, but he neither acknowledged Scorsby’s words nor looked at him before he left.

  The yellow cylinder of light had narrowed at the top and was now collapsing, its transparent walls of light breached by billowy fog that was blowing over the Germans, erasing them one after the other. The sun came in and out of the rifts, disappeared for longer and longer periods until it was gone. Now the fog obscured the deck from bow to midships. Conrad turned to watch it take the gallows of the sweeping gear. Minutes later a cry for help in German rang out, the words perfectly articulated even at that distance. Fox-Bourne blinked but did not move. Someone else shouted and his call was followed by several more, as if they were singing a round. A man shouted, “Help! Stop!” in English. Waiting for more voices to swell the chorus, appalled but fascinated, Conrad heard instead the chime of the engine telegraph, its sound a universal code to sailors, immediately readable, the duration of chimes and pauses in this case signaling a change from neutral to slow reverse.

  Fox-Bourne’s left hand was on the telegraph lever, his right on the wheel.

  “There may be debris,” he said. “Shouldn’t want to foul our screws.”

  It seemed reasonable, even prudent, though the rescue crews would have to row blindly in the fog. Conrad expected Fox-Bourne to ring the engines back to neutral at any moment. They had retreated at least a hundred meters when Scorsby came up the ladder, his voice uneasy and tentative when he said the lifeboats could be lowered.

  “Put Whelan in the wardroom,” the captain told him. “I want his personal effects taken to my cabin.”

  Scorsby stood there flatfooted.

  “Sir,” he said, “shouldn’t we launch the lifeboats first?”

  “No, William, we should not.”

  “But, sir—”

  “Damn you!” Fox-Bourne said, turning, glaring. “Do it now or I’ll have you up on charges. Do you understand?”

  He did not. No one did. The issues had nothing to do with each other. Lowering the boats was a matter of universal protocol, transferring Whelan belowdecks purely personal. What Scorsby did understand was that the sequence was fixed in the captain’s mind. As he went to the door Fox-Bourne ordered Higgins and Chambers to take the wounded helmsman below and find a replacement.

  “When you have done so, take another look at the bulkhead.”

  The ship was still backing away. The engines sounded louder with only the two of them on the bridge. The rhythmic beat of huge cam lobes turning on their shafts, driving pistols into cylinders lubricated with amber sheens of oil, seemed to count out the meters between the Germans and the ship while Fox-Bourne stood at the wheel like something made of stone, some ancient, cracked, and weathered monolith.

  “Captain,” Conrad said, “those men will drown.”

  “I must mind the ship.”

  “We’re well away from the debris field.”

  “Yes? Well, you have a point, Conrad. Perhaps we’ve gone a bit too far. Hard to tell, you know. Worst fog I’ve seen in years. We will go back a ways. How’s that?”

  He rang “slow ahead.” During the drift, before the screws stopped, Conrad was inclined to blame the lapse in judgment on the strain of Whelan’s death. Why he should be so bereft, why his eyes reminded Conrad of a statue’s, set, strong, impenetrable, was beyond his knowledge, but the emotions were real and he wanted to believe that was the cause. Insisting that Whelan’s body be transferred, sending Higgins and Chambers on another inspection were understandable in that context, just the sort of thing that follows a terrible shock. But his conviction would not hold up in the face of another interpretation. Ordering the officers off the bridge clearly served another purpose, which was to put even more distance between the Brigadier and the survivors. The moment the idea came to him he said he remembered looking down from the peak in the Carpathian Mountains at the soldiers looting the fields. There it had been silent. No wind. No birds. Not even a chattering squirrel. Here the steady beat of the engines was like a chorus. Just then Higgins and Chambers and Scorsby reappeared one after the other, all troubled, especially Chambers, who refused to meet Fox-Bourne’s gaze. Conrad was glad for their company. Being alone with Fox-Bourne was now unbearable. The officers seemed to be aware of his distress, glancing at him quickly.

  “Now,” Fox-Bourne said, “I want each of you to command a lifeboat.” He looked at the compass and told them to follow a course that should put them in the midst of the survivors. “And make sure they aren’t armed before you haul them in.”

  MERCIFULLY, CONRAD took another breather in telling me of the Valkerie. He had to, you understand, for both our sakes. We also needed to pay our respects to those voices coming out of the fog whose more piteous modulations Conrad thankfully kept to himself. I understand now that Conrad knew he needn’t quote one of the poor devils. Those cries have stayed with me, Ford. I expect they will haunt you as well.

  And yet a gesture haunts me even more: Fox-Bourne’s blink. When Conrad described it, my first thought was that it was the act of a man struggling with the consequences of what he had done and was still doing. And then I realized it was much more than that, more and darker, black. He was ignoring the meaning of those cries, batting away the fear and agony they represented like a man waving away flies that are pestering him. I was about to say that it would have been bad enough in a story of Conrad’s but even worse in fiction, but real or imagined the effect is the same, isn’t it?

  There was enough time while Conrad was pulling himself together for me to begin to understand his experience in a new way, adjusting some half-perceived signals I’d given myself to these new revelations. I remembered his sorrowful expression when he had paused before launching into the Brigadier’s story, his eyes like an overture hinting at what was to come. When he had described Whelan’s murder an hour or so later, I thought that I understood why he had appeared so mournful. He had obviously been taken by the young chap, too. But the business with the telegraph—I can still hear the chiming, Ford, clear as a bell—the backing away of the minesweeper, those piteous cries, most of all Fox-Bourne’s blinking disabused me of a naive and sentimental notion. Whelan’s death was merely the beginning, the first consequence of that malicious act by the German captain, which had spread like the spilled oil from the U-boat, coating not only the men floundering in the water but also Fox-Bourne and Conrad. Even I, a mere listener, was not immune. I had the feeling that if I were to look down at my boots I would see traces of that green and violet oil.

  Conrad’s dilemma was something I could understand, a situation not every sailor has actually faced but all have pondered: wondering what would we do if we were faced with a captain’s decision that went against the grain of common decency. How far had Conrad let himself go? That a guest does not lightly question the actions of a captain may sound anachronistic to those who haven’t made a career of the sea. For those of us who have, it is a dictum you learn from the start, encrusted wit
h tradition, part of the code you agree to honor no matter what that carries over to situations in which you are not legally bound. It shouldn’t surprise you to learn that as soon as he caught his breath I asked how things had played out between them.

  “Unexpectedly,” Conrad answered. “There was another current running beneath the surface I wasn’t aware of.”

  At the time, on the Brigadier, he was fairly seething. Unable to keep his thoughts to himself, he blurted out to Fox-Bourne, “This is unconscionable!”

  “We’re at war!” Fox-Bourne thundered.

  “This isn’t war,” Conrad said. “It’s slaughter. My God, man, they’re helpless.”

  “What about yesterday?” asked the captain. “What about today if we hadn’t rammed them? What about tomorrow?”

  “They’re out of it,” Conrad said. “Out of the war, damned near out of life even before you backed away.”

  “Which makes them innocent in your eyes?”

  “It makes them not count as a threat.”

  “Yesterday doesn’t count, is that it? And all the other days they’ve been at sea, they don’t count either? What about the ships they sank, the men who died? You saw the kill signs on the tower. They’ve been in it up to their necks—naval vessels, merchantmen, ocean liners. Aside from that, they were laying mines.”

  “That doesn’t change anything,” Conrad told him. “We had a moral duty to pick them up as soon as possible.”

  “A moral duty?”

  “You know it.”

  “They don’t.”

  “What they do or don’t do makes no difference.”

  Fox-Bourne gave him an incredulous look.

  “It makes all the difference in the world,” he said. His face had gone slack and he stared at Conrad out of the blankness. “All the difference,” he repeated. “Do you have children?”

  Before Conrad could answer, Fox-Bourne let go a nerve-jangling blast of the foghorn.

  “A son.”

  “So did I. His name was Edward. He was a rating on a frigate that was sunk three months ago next Wednesday. A torpedo. It could have come from the Valkerie.”

  “I’m sorry,” Conrad said.

  “Yes, I suppose you are. But that’s not all of it, not nearly all of it. Edward and Whelan had a good deal in common. The fact is, whenever I looked at Whelan I thought of my boy.”

  Fox-Bourne challenged Conrad with a bright-eyed stare, silently asking what he would have done. What only minutes earlier had seemed utterly senseless now fell into place. The loss of the son and the shadow son, the replacement son, had doomed the Germans. The whole tragic episode seemed clearly plotted, about as perfect an example of cause and effect as Conrad knew. He used the word inevitable, as I recall. For Fox-Bourne’s sake, he tried to find some justification. There was none, just the overwhelming need for revenge.

  Edward, Fox-Bourne went on, had objected to the war on moral grounds. He was willing to go to prison for his beliefs and would have done so except that he knew he would have brought disgrace on his father and likely hobbled his career. Fox-Bourne then asked Conrad if he had any idea how he had felt when he learned of Edward’s death. Conrad imagined a thunderous crack inside his head like a huge tree makes when its trunk splits.

  “I should think it was unspeakable,” he said.

  A good half hour had passed since the lifeboats were lowered. Throughout their conversation Fox-Bourne had sounded the foghorn at one-minute intervals, precise intervals, his eyes darting toward the large, round-faced clock mounted between the windows, the heated words of one or the other of them momentarily obscured by the sorrowful baying. He had just let off another blast and begun a halting description of his state of mind that seemed less for Conrad’s benefit than his own, as if he were trying to recapture the moment the news came to him—he had been at home with his wife—when one of the lifeboats appeared off the bow, or rather a gray, impressionistic version of a boat that slowly came into focus. Scorsby stood at the tiller. Ahead of him, on the plank seat, sat two Germans like glistening black cameos. As the boat came alongside, a sailor on deck threw a rope ladder over the port rail that unfurled like a fern. The second lifeboat came out of the fog, three black apparitions huddled side by side. When it was closer Conrad could see another man stretched out on the bottom, his orange life vest bright against his blackness. The third boat, commanded by Higgins, was empty.

  Once the boats were up against the minesweeper’s hull Scorsby sent his prisoners up the ladder. As each went over the rail and stepped on board he was handed a blanket by one of the Brigadier’s crew. The man in the bottom of the second boat was lifted by two sailors while a third tied a rope beneath his arms and signaled to the men on deck, who hauled the German up, his body spinning and banging several times against the hull.

  As soon as the lifeboats were brought aboard, Fox-Bourne gave the helmsman a heading and ordered him to proceed at “slow ahead.” The debate with Conrad, the argument was over, neither of them having made a dent in the other’s position. Fox-Bourne wandered over to the chart table and picked up a compass, which he twirled absently, his double loss evident in his wide, searching eyes. The dead Germans must have had a place in his thoughts, but Conrad could not guess what it might be. He did not want to. He felt an urgent need to get away from the man and announced that he was going down for a walk.

  “We should reach Lowestoft in two hours,” said Fox-Bourne. “You’re welcome to use my cabin.”

  Given their feelings about each other it was a bizarre offer, but Conrad accepted. Neither looked at the other as he went out. On deck the men were quiet, the officers having wisely put them to work cleaning and swabbing. On the way out there had been the usual banter, the kind of thing you hear on any ship when things are going well. Now they spoke in whispers and fell silent altogether when he approached. If he had been in their shoes he would have felt the same way. He respected those men, Ford. They had not drifted onto the ship looking for an easy berth. They were not conscripts. They were sailors in the Royal Navy representing a hoary tradition that dictated the decent treatment of the vanquished enemy. He was a guest of their captain, who had dishonored them and the name of their ship. That they hated the German captain and the bedraggled survivors made their respect for tradition all the more impressive.

  THE WEAK, WATERY gray light falling through the cabin’s porthole left the objects and furnishings indistinct. There was a switchbox on the wall next to the door fed by a cable coming down from the ceiling. When Conrad turned it on, two large bulbs threw light onto a narrow bunk, a metal table, a cabinet whose partially open doors revealed two or three uniforms, a bookshelf next to the table crammed with navy manuals, the only hint of the personal, two framed photographs screwed into the wall between the door and the table. One showed a woman in a flower-print dress standing in front of a country cottage, the other a young man wearing a tweed suit, his hands in his pockets. Edward, who appeared to be about the same age as Borys, gazed straight into the camera, his somber eyes and set mouth telling of unhappiness, which Conrad guessed was occasioned by a run-in with his father over his beliefs. It struck Conrad as an odd choice since Fox-Bourne must have possessed other, happier pictures of his son. Then he realized it was there as a goad and a flail.

  Stepping closer, he saw that the frame was surrounded by a half inch of whiter paint. He was almost certain that it was no accident that this frame was smaller than the one it had replaced, chosen to remind Fox-Bourne of what had been there, a memento of the boy’s death. He was impressed by the courage it took to make a shrine of the cabin wall. Fox-Bourne would see those pictures whenever he was there, which spoke to his character, though it did nothing to alter the unambiguous, sickening facts of the drowned sailors. Fox-Bourne could have offered him the use of any number of cabins and cubbyholes. Why had he made his own available unless he wanted him to see the pictures, hoping to play on his sympathy?

  Conrad poured a glass of brandy from the decanter fitted
neatly into a rack beside the table and looked again at Edward. The photograph was slightly out of focus, his eyes blurred, perhaps in shadow. He could be looking straight ahead at his father or averting his gaze, and those possibilities brought Conrad back to Fox-Bourne’s motive. He preferred to think it was innocent, free of calculation, but there was no way to ignore the other interpretation. He remembered Fox-Bourne twirling the compass leg between his thumb and forefinger, grief-stricken, Edward’s death as fresh as Whelan’s. He understood how the man felt, how all-consuming the double loss was, how the deaths of those Germans would have lost the initial grim pleasure of revenge, his thoughts spinning this way and that like the compass. Fox-Bourne had reached that volatile time following his action when he could think again. It was a time, Conrad reminded me, that he himself had written about over the years, drawn to its complexity, especially the point at which a character began, however dimly, to see the consequences of his act. For Fox-Bourne they must have seemed horrific and it was natural to do what he could to soften Conrad’s view of him.

  He had been looking at Edward all that time, and out of that young man’s stillness rose Whelan grasping his chest, toppling forward. He would be alive if they had stayed clear of the yellow cylinder of light, the Brigadier most likely gliding past the unseen submarine, the sound of her engines terrifying the Germans. The light was a mystery and so was the U-boat’s presence. Why had its engines quit, its batteries gone out in that place? She could have been there for hours. It was equally probable that she had surfaced only moments before the minesweeper entered the yellowish patch of light.