J. E. MacDonnell - 030

by The Lesson(lit)

  J E MacDonnell - 030 - The Lesson

  CHAPTER ONE

  H.M.A. DESTROYER WIND RODE was the subject of a venomous violence. It had been in progress for more than three hours, and her motion was still the same. The gale and the driven rain were on her port bow, originating somewhere out in the Tasman Sea and slewing across that watery world and meeting nothing to obstruct them until they reached the slim steel hull sixty miles off the New South Wales coast.

  The direction of the attack was unfortunate for a destroyer. It caused her to screw as well as pitch, to arc her mast trucks across the weeping sky at the same time as she dug her nose deep down into the side of each advancing ridge.

  So that as a wave exploded up over her stem as she dipped, another surged inboard over the lee gunnels as she rolled. She was a thing tormented, her foredeck a flinging mass of green and white, her waist covered by the same ominous carpet. Her bow lifted and she streamed pouring white scarves from the scuppers and the water in her waist tumbled aft and threshed round the depth-charges on the quarter-deck before emptying itself back over the stern.

  She was iced with salt from her foremast truck to her funnels and the derricks on her stern, and as gleams of filtered afternoon sunlight struck her, she shone and glittered as though a giant's playful hand had showered her with tinsel.

  A seaman came cautiously forward from the quarter-master's lobby, facing the gale's onslaught. He moved in rushes, from handhold to handhold, and he had both hands for himself. His legs were soaked above his knees and his body was wet with spray all over. Yet as he approached the bridge structure you could see that his mouth was moving. He seemed to be singing. Mr. Lasenby, Gunner, was halfway up the bridge ladder on his way to take over his watch. She reared, and he hung there, his whole body straining to prevent his being hurled backwards off the ladder. High in the air her bow paused, while the water cascaded in great volume back from the cunning camber of her decks. Then she dropped. Lasenby surged forward the rest of the rungs to the bridge, his body feeling leaden as its weight forced down on his feet. Then he was on the compass platform, and moving swiftly to the binnacle before her tortured twisting began again.

  He hung on to the binnacle beside Pilot, the officer of the watch. Both men's faces were wet with spray, their eyes squinted to slits against the forceful slap of the wind. And each face smiled at the other.

  A hundred feet off the port bow the crested top of a wave was whipped off, blown into white smoke. The hard gust of wind reached them, brutal like the blow of a fist. She reeled, and they reeled with her, and above them to windward the wave towered, like a wall of green glass topped with snow.

  For breathless moments it hung there, huge, menacing, a crested cap of doom. Then Wind Rode came upright with a stately and valiant motion and she soared up over the wave like a seagull. Its enormous weight ran beneath her keel and passed the point of balance and then her bow dipped down again, and again the foc's'le was smothered. And again it rose.

  "All well?"

  The gunner's voice was not so much raised, as penetrating. There was some protection directly behind the wind-break. Pilot nodded, his eyes not leaving the ridged immensity ahead of them.

  "All well. Course 190, one-two-oh revs on the clock and doing about ten knots up top. Old Man in his sea-cabin. B-gun closed-up, nothing else. She's all yours."

  He made no comment on the weather - it was stridently apparent all about them. He turned from the binnacle and slapped the Gunner on his wet oilskinned back, and the gunner grinned companionably back. A bucketful of spray lashed into Lasenby's face, but the grin still lingered. Pilot disappeared down the ladder, and the gunner splayed his legs widely apart. He had the ship.

  The ship was in torment. She was soaked overall. Below decks there was no comfort. It had been like that for more than three hours, and looked like continuing. Yet a seaman sang into the teeth of the great wind and the gunner grinned into its spray. Wind Rode was steaming home.

  The tail-end of the storm chased her in through Sydney Heads at ten o'clock the next morning, streaming her funnel haze far ahead of her encrusted bow. She had already been given a berth, and Bentley eased her up to Cruiser Wharf at Garden Island. The long pier was empty of cruisers, but two destroyers lay ahead of Wind Rode's position.

  She came in as destroyers usually do, neatly and economically. The heaving lines flung out, then the berthing wires, and within a few minutes she was snugly secured fore and aft.

  She had come halfway round the world to this resting place, from Gibraltar, and she was tired. Bentley savoured for a second his next order. Then, crisply, he gave it:

  "Finished main engines."

  Far down in the fumy boiler-room the stoker petty-officer got the order. "Thank Gawd for that," he muttered, and set to work reducing her strength from 40,000 horsepower to nil. She would be fed her electricity now through shore lines.

  "I think," Commander Bentley said on the bridge to his first-lieutenant, "we can pipe leave."

  Randall did not hide his face-dissecting grin. He spoke to the bosun's mate, and that young seaman performed his duty with despatch. Bentley had a few minutes before his official shoreside work began, and he - took off his binoculars and made for the ladder. Randall followed him.

  They did not speak as they walked aft along the iron deck. The subject of leave in Sydney had been so thoroughly thrashed on the long way home that now there was nothing to add. Nothing to do but to stare at the remembered sights, listen to the clatter of the dockyard and the hooting of the ferries, and gloatingly anticipate your own leave.

  They reached the quarter-deck, and stopped clear of the bustle. Hooky Walker was busy there, and the men under him worked cheerfully with no inducement other than what their eyes could see. No shells and boxes of pom-pom ammunition coming inboard now, but boxes of butter, cans of fresh milk, crates of apples and oranges, sacks of potatoes, bundle after bundle of newly-baked bread. And, in the dark canvas bag, the accumulated mail of almost a month.

  Captain and first-lieutenant watched, the summer sun pleasantly warm on their backs, their faces pleasant. For the first time for many months both men were completely relaxed, and at peace.

  The quartermaster, who could not afford to let his attention wander in this peaceful and busy naval port, came up to Bentley, saluting.

  "Yes, Leading-seaman Billson?"

  "Captain comin' along the pier, sir," Billson said crisply, "looks like he's headin' for us, sir."

  Bentley and Randall looked up, their eyes sighting along the cluttered wharf. And the most pleasant feeling of that pleasant morning warmed itself inside Bentley.

  It had been a long, long time, but the officer walking towards the gangway would be recognised instantly after a much greater time than that. Especially by Bentley. His frame was thin, skinny almost, the knees showing knobbly above the khaki stockings. He walked with a deliberate, almost mincing step, carefully lifting his feet over wires and cable, and keeping his head held high, moving it neither to right nor left. It was a sharp axe of a face beneath the peaked cap pinched-in, bony, the mouth primly pursed.

  A parson's face, you would have decided, or a maiden aunt's. Except for some indefinable aura of authority about the tight face and the steady eyes -and the four tarnished gold rings of his captain's rank on his shoulders. The dullness overlaid on that gold spoke of salt, and salt denoted experience. No dock-yard captain, this one...

  "Man the side!" Randall ordered curtly, and cursed the storm which had made of his ship a Chinese scow. Bentley said, a low smiling tone:

  "Well, well. Just like him to visit us instead of waiting for the official call to him."

  "He is Captain (Destroyers) now?" Randall queried quickly.

>   "He is."

  Then Captain (D), senior officer in command of the Ninth Destroyer Flotilla, set his deliberate foot on the gangway and walked his skinny frame and pinched face up towards the quarter-deck.

  The pipes shrilled, hands whipped up in salute, and Captain Sainsbury said, in a prim, unsmiling voice: "Good morning, Bentley. It has been a long time."

  "Morning, sir," trying to keep the delighted and idiotic grin off his quarter-deck face, "it certainly has been! You remember Randall?"

  It was a stupid thing to say - Sainsbury had sent Randall to Wind Rode to help Bentley with his new ship. But he had to say something, instead of continuing to pump the bony hand of the man he loved and respected most in the world.

  "I think I do, yes. How are you, Randall'? Nice to see you back."

  Randall, Bentley noticed, was unashamedly outdoing the legendary Cheshire feline. And then he noticed something else. It riveted his attention. He knew, of course, the feeling that had prompted Captain (D) to make this call to his junior ship, and it was that recognition that had sent the warmth flooding through him. But never in all the years he had served under and learned from this prim officer, had he seen him smile more than once, possibly twice.

  Bentley stared. It was not a smile. A pleading photographer would have been disgustedly frustrated. Yet... The pursed mouth was moving. The lips had parted, if only sufficient to show a gleam of white. Now the lips were quivering, extending the merest fraction, actually twitching in a gesture which in Captain Sainsbury, V.C., was a positive guffaw of delight.

  "Lord..." Bentley breathed to himself, and then his own facial muscles let go in a stretch to outdo Randall's. And at once, as though his own muscles had received a contractual order from the expansion of Bentley's, the visitor's face returned to its habitual primness. He looked about him.

  "The storm caught you," he said, matter-of-factly. It was not a meteorological judgment, it was directed at the state of the ship. Randall, responsible for that state, answered:

  "Yes, sir. We were still shipping them just outside. The ship will be washed down by this afternoon." Sainsbury nodded, and once again Bentley marvelled at the manner in which a master could get his wishes interpreted and carried out without even mentioning them.

  "Would you like to come to my cabin, sir? Some Bols gin - from a Dutchman in the Med...."

  "Thank you, Bentley. I see you remember my preference. Perhaps you would bring it down to the wardroom?"

  Bentley had learned everything he knew from this un-tigerishlooking little man. And he knew now that Sainsbury's preference for the wardroom was not in the least accidental. There were some new faces in Wind Rode's officers' mess, they belonged to men who would be serving under Captain (D) in the future, and that captain wished to meet them. He himself had done precisely that when he had taken command of the old Wind Rode, his first command.

  "Certainly, sir. Bosun's mate?"

  They walked towards the wardroom hatch and Bentley glanced at his watch. Ten minutes past eleven. He grinned, faintly. Even the time had been planned. The sun's over the yardarm at eleven a.m. in British warships in harbour, and, especially on this first shore-based morning, every officer in Wind Rode would be in the wardroom. Some of them, he thought - the surgeon, the torpedo-officer, the engineer - were in for a shock. Pilot and Lasenby knew of him, they had sailed under his command. The others? They would believe they were now sailing under a pedantic school-teacher. Until they learned of the two letters their new captain was entitled to wear after his name; or saw the plain maroon medal ribbon on his bony chest...

  Sainsbury stepped into the wardroom first and the officers laughing and drinking there saw the four rings on his shoulders and rose at once. Bentley said:

  "This is Captain Sainsbury, gentlemen - Captain (D). As you know, we're now attached to the Ninth Flotilla. You remember Pilot, Guns, sir?"

  "How are you?" Sainsbury nodded, his mouth tight and his eyes keen. "Nice to have you back with us." His eyes trained on.

  "Lieutenant Baxter, the torpedo-officer, sir."

  "Baxter." The bird-like nod again, and Torp's face formally polite, unimpressed. "I hear you did a good job against a raider not so long ago."

  The younger face pleased now. "Thank you, sir. It was a sitting shot."

  "M'mm. And this, of course, is the engineer-officer."

  "Yes, sir," the heavily-built, bald-headed officer leaned forward in what looked like an oddly old-fashioned bow, "McGuire, sir."

  "Glad to meet you, Mr. McGuire. You would know Mr. Piggott, no doubt? I thought you would. A pity he went. Good man."

  "He was that, sir."

  Monty McGuire, Bentley noticed, had seen the ribbon of the captain's Cross. But then Monty had been judging men for longer than he had. His shrewd eyes were still on Sainsbury's face, and Bentley knew that it would go hard for any boiler-room gang which from now on allowed more than a haze of heat to escape from Wind Rode's funnels.

  "And you are the surgeon," Sainsbury said.

  Dandis nodded. He was thin also, but his earlier redness of face had been overlaid with a weathered patina of brown. There was nothing clairvoyant about the captain's knowledge of his profession - Landis wore between his two rings the red cloth of the surgeon. "Yes, sir. "You have been in the ship...?" One year and two months, sir." Sainsbury's eyes closed a fraction. Bentley knew he had liked the precision of that answer.

  "I see. Well now, Peter, you mentioned something of Dutch Bols..."

  Bentley smiled and spoke to a steward and he and Sainsbury sat down in chairs a little clear of the other officers. He was thinking as he lit a cigarette that a commanding-officer is on deck all the time-that "Peter" of Sainsbury's was deliberate. There was no need of the inference of "old ships" and friendliness with the flotilla-leader in this mess, but Sainsbury, like himself, could not have helped offering that assistance any more than he could have stopped breathing.

  The gin came quickly and Sainsbury sipped and smacked his lips appreciatively.

  "I don't suppose you thought of an old shipmate and brought a spare bottle of this?"

  "Didn't know at the time that I'd be meeting up with you," Bentley answered easily. "But to save you pulling your senior weight I'll arrange for a bottle to be sent over."

  "I'm quite sure," the older man said, finishing his drink, "there's an admiral's flag in your kit-locker. Now... I think we've kept those young fellows repressed long enough. I want to talk to you."

  They got up and the mess rose with them. "Cabin," Bentley said to Randall, and the large and the thin figures passed out through the curtain. The mess sank back. Randall waited. Torps began it.

  "What an odd fellow," he said, his eyes squinted in puzzlement. "Has he had the flotilla long? The flotilla...? He looks the last bloke in the world to drive a destroyer, let alone a dozen of `em!"

  Randall waited. He guessed where the defence would come from, and he was not mistaken.

  "A book," Monty McGuire said portentously and unoriginally, "is not known by its cover. Didn't you look at anything except his face? His chest, f'rinstance?"

  "Chest? What the hell has that to do with it? I noticed it was one of the skinniest I've seen, if that's what you mean."

  "Trouble with you young whippersnappers," the head of Wind Rode's engineering department pronounced from the eminence of his position and experience, "you only see what's on the end of your ruddy guns or torpedoes. On that skinny chest you mentioned was pinned a maroon ribbon. And entitled to hang from that ribbon is a bit `o brass called the Victoria Cross."

  "What!" said Torps, and "Steward," said Randall, hiding his secret and satisfied grin.

  Happily unaware of this assessment of his character and ability, Captain Sainsbury preceded his pupil and friend into the cabin under the bridge. They sat down they drank, they talked of ships and men they knew, and of the strategical position in the Pacific. Bentley learned that Sainsbury's flotilla had been split up between various American units, for experi
ence and while Sainsbury's ownScimitar was in Sydney for refit. So that now, for practical purposes, his command consisted of Scimitar and Wind Rode. Both ships would sail north together.

  "When?" Bentley asked.

  "You can grant seven days' leave to each watch," Sainsbury told him. "After that..."

  After that, Bentley knew, he had better keep steam in his boilers. Seven days was not much to men who had been in the Mediterranean for nine months, but fourteen days was a long time to keep a Fleet destroyer out of action. He hoped his men would understand that. They would understand, all right, but they would certainly not agree...

  "Now," said Sainsbury, and leaned back in his chair. "What've you been up to? That German raider I heard about. From a little I know it seemed a sharp and nasty affair."

  "Whatever happened," Bentley grinned, "I learned it from you."

  "The devil you did! I never taught you to tear into a neutral harbour with guns blasting. You were damned lucky you didn't blast your own Service head off! Not to mention the ship. That fellow must have had you lined up the moment you poked your nose round the point!"