J. E. MacDonnell - 030

by The Lesson(lit)

  They whinged. They whinged with the most expert facility, and the objects of their complaints were wide and varied. The Navy, the captain, the weather, the Japs, the war, the Navy. Manus, the food, the absence of suitable drink, the Navy, the lack of women, of entertainment, of dance-halls, of excitement, the Navy...

  The Navy. This bloody forsaken outfit! A man should have his flamin' head read! Should've joined the Blue Orchids in the Air Force. Where were those bastards? In London, in Cairo, in Canada, grog galore, doin' all right for themselves in the blackouts with patriotic popsies.

  The Blue Orchids were also over Alamein and Berlin and Bremerhaven, but geographical exactitude was of no significance in these messdecks sweltering in remote Manus harbour.

  The Navy, the Air Force. But not the Army. Only puzzled pity for the Army. They would never understand how a man could volunteer to hawk on his back his gun and ammunition and tucker through the Desert or over the Kokoda Trail; not when their own gear was carried for them by a ruddy great ship. They never understood, either, the Army man's preference for falling on solid ground if he caught a packet...

  So the two days of Bentley's reprieve and Sainsbury's rehabilitation passed. The men were looking forward to getting to sea again, but Bentley was dreading his trip in the motorboat.

  His work in harbour was not extensive or irksome - Randall was in charge of storing and upper-deck work - and he'd had little to do but think about his mission and what he would say to the man who had taught him everything he knew.

  He thought about this almost constantly, and always he returned to the same conclusion - he would need to be wary, but he would have to state his case simply. You did not adopt subterfuge with a man like Sainsbury. Those squinted eyes could see into a man's mind as easily as though his forehead were composed of glass. Or once they could...

  There, he finally decided as he was dressing on the fateful morning, might be his winning card. Sainsbury was not the man he had been. He knew that well enough! It was quite possible that the old chap was aware of his condition, that he would welcome another opinion to help him decide that he should give up. There was, Bentley recognised without false modesty, not another man in the Fleet more suitable than himself to help Sainsbury in his decision. The old fighter would respect his advice; he would know it was completely without malice and wholly altruistic.

  Bentley combed his hair and put on his cap. He felt much better, confident almost. He pulled open the cabin door and stepped out into the passage.

  Randall was waiting at the gangway, even more anxious than he had been that other time two days before when the captain left the ship. But none of the quarter-deck staff gave any significance to his harassed look - the expression was a natural one with first-lieutenants while their ships were cluttered up with shoreside workmen and their gear.

  The pipes shrilled, hands whipped up in salute. Bentley stepped on to the gangway platform and Randall, ostensibly to ensure that the motorboat was ready below, leaned over the guard-rail.

  "Good luck," he muttered.

  Bentley did not answer. His face unsmiling, he ran down the ladder.

  The torpedoed cruiser was in worse shape than Scimitar, but she could be kept afloat with pumping. And in any case the destroyer could not be shifted from the dock - the damaged plates had been ripped off her and the hole only partly covered. Scimitar retained her priority for the dock's use.

  Bentley landed where he had before, but now there was no time wasted in reflection on screws or rudders. He made his way quickly up the stairway in the dock's side and over the gangway.

  His walk along the deck was almost a stride. It was characteristic of the man that he should want to put his decision into force in the briefest time. It did not occur to him that in striding towards the captain's cabin he was acting precisely in the manner for which Sainsbury had rebuked him.

  He knocked on the door and the thin voice bade him enter.

  Bentley barely acknowledged Sainsbury's pleased greeting. His gaze was fastened on the older man's face, and he saw with relief that the greyness had diluted down to an almost unnoticeable pallor. He conceded that the officer rising from his chair had shrewdness in his eyes, but certainly no suggestion of tears.

  "And to what," asked Sainsbury, his bony hand waving to a chair, "do I owe the pleasure of this visit?"

  Under normal circumstances Bentley would have grinned at the words. Sainsbury was not being light hearted; in his stilted fashion he was asking an actual question, and he wanted an answer.

  "I wanted to talk to you, sir," Bentley said.

  "I see. It's a little early for liquid refreshment... A cigarette, perhaps?"

  "Thank you." He reached forward. "The bow's coming along all right?"

  "Very nicely. I should say not more than a couple of days. Then we can resume our scouting for Red Indians - or yellow Japs. I must say I shall not be averse to getting to sea again. It is really quite stifling boxed up between these dock walls. A fresh sea breeze will do us all a power of good, don't you think?"

  "I suppose it will, yes."

  You've certainly recovered, Bentley thought. Almost - for you sprightly. Too sprightly. It's an act, it must be an act. You remember how I saw you last. It's as though you're drugged. Now the act's making you seem bright Falsely bright.

  "Well, my boy, what did you want to talk to me about? You look troubled. Anything wrong on board?"

  There it is. The cunning of experience. Making me feel like a schoolboy - coming for help instead of offering it. But you always affected me like that. You couldn't help it. You can't help it now. No, not now.

  He looked into the pinched, austere face and he tried to project his own understanding in his look. His voice was quiet, sympathetic.

  "No trouble on board. I've come to talk about you, sir.

  The cigarette halted an inch from Sainsbury's mouth. That arrested movement was the only visible measure of his astonishment.

  "About me, eh? Then I suppose I had better let you get on with it."

  Bentley drew on his cigarette. It was a subconscious wish for delay. Then he blew the smoke out. He was finished with procrastination.

  "I want you to understand, sir, that in what I have to say I'm actuated only by my... regard for you. There is no other consideration. I must make that quite plain."

  Sainsbury twisted in his chair. The movement made him grimace a little, but Bentley placed no significance on that. He heard the voice, acid and exasperated:

  "For heaven's sake, boy, get on with it! What the devil are you trying to say? This is the first time I've noticed you beating around the bush! Well?"

  "Very well, sir." His own tone was firm. He should have known better than to muck about. "It's your condition, sir. I...

  Sainsbury's look stopped him. The captain's head was a little on one side, and his squinted eyes mirrored an expression of acute puzzlement.

  "How the devil did you know?" Sainsbury asked slowly.

  "I'm afraid it was obvious, sir. You looked - well - bloody awful. Absolutely done in. I admit I was shocked, but I should have expected it. You've been through a hell of a lot. Too much, in fact. And this last business..."

  Sainsbury's bony hand stopped him.

  "It's very kind of you, my boy, to feel like this. But I assure you I feel perfectly all right now."

  "No, sir. That's the trouble. You only think you do."

  "What the blazes do you mean? I only think I do?"

  "It could happen again. It will happen, just as soon as you're under strain. It's happening all the time, sir. This is a hard war, and you've fought more than your share of it. It would be quite terrible if you... let go while at sea."

  He paused, and looked up. But on that thin face with its penetrating eyes and pursed mouth there was no indication of the astonishment jolting Sainsbury's mind. He did not speak. Bentley went on:

  "I'll never forget the way you looked when I came in here the other day. That's why I'm here now."
/>   This was it, this was the point of no return. He drew in his breath.

  "Precisely why," Sainsbury asked, his eyes glinting with the loom of ice, "are you here now?"

  "To ask you," Bentley replied steadily, "to ask for a relief. To ask you to go down south for a spell. Your experience will be invaluable down there." He leaned forward, even in the face of that glacial stare. "Please sir - before it's too late."

  His voice ceased. Silence hung heavy, almost palpable, between them. Sainsbury's face was pinched into a mask of tight anger. Bentley had never seen him like that. This was the real Sainsbury, V.C. Not prim, not maiden-auntish. Tigerish.

  "Am I to understand," the steel-hard voice broke into the silence, "that you consider me too old for command? That my usefulness as a captain is finished?" The short fierce gesture of his hand sliced across Bentley's voice. "You... you bloodly little whippersnapper! I taught you all you know! The one thing you've learned outside my teaching is cockiness. Yes, damn you, cockiness! And now you come into my cabin and..." He broke off, and he leaned forward so that his eyes bored into Bentley's. "Who else knows of this idiot notion of yours? Eh? Where else have you aired it?"

  Bentley held on to his anger with both hands. He forced himself to remember that he was faced by a sick, exhausted old man. A man whom he still loved with a manly, inarticulate strength of feeling. He answered the fierce question directly - he was incapable of lying to this man.

  "Randall is the only one who knows, sir."

  "And that paragon of first-lieutenants agrees with you?"

  "Yes, sir, he does. We both think it's in your own interest to..."

  "I will be obliged, sir," the icy voice lashed at him, "if you will be good enough to leave my ship!"

  "But..."

  Sainsbury pushed himself up. He stood behind the desk, his knuckles white upon it and his face granite. Bentley had once outfaced a full Admiral, his normal courage reinforced by the confidence of his cause. Yet now, even apart from the direct order he had been given by his flotilla leader, he could have stayed and protested no more than as a boy he could have against the edict of his schoolmaster.

  "Aye, aye, sir," he said, his voice low. He took up his cap and stepped through the door.

  Sainsbury stood unmoving, his eyes unseeing on the door. Anger moved hotly in him. They thought him too old, finished. Too old at forty-three! Bentley knew what he was doing, he was no fool. To come here and face him with that monstrous charge he must believe in it utterly. He... and Randall. Both of them discussing his uselessness.

  He moved angrily from the desk, kicking his chair aside. The sudden movement brought his hand to his chest. He remembered, irrelevantly, that he had not mentioned his wound. The thought slipped from his mind - it was of no significance. They thought him finished...

  He moved slowly round the desk. One of his own flotilla captains. It would have taken a good deal of guts for Bentley to come here. The boy... Yes, a great deal of courage. And conviction in his own judgment. He had taught him that, too... Young Bentley would be feeling very badly now.

  Sainsbury paced slowly back to the desk. The charge of age, of inability to perform his captainly function, he would have normally laughed at. But what bit at him, and kept his anger simmering, was the recognition that the protege he had trained to be one of the most brilliant destroyer-drivers in the Fleet believed completely in that inability.

  Why? he thought, his face still hard and troubled. The one destroyer of that foursome which he had engaged he had sunk; the aircraft had been beaten off.

  Certainly Scimitar had been damaged, but what the devil could you expect from hours of fighting against a dozen bombers and fighters? Why did Bentley - and Randall - feel this way about him?

  Sainsbury in his search for the answer to that question came nowhere close to the final reason. He did not know how badly he had looked when Bentley had seen him in the cabin two days before. He had made no mention of his wound because he was not the sort of man to look for sympathy, especially in an environment where every day men were being hurt much more seriously than he had been. Neither did he remember that he'd had tears in his eyes from the effort of bending to retrieve Bentley's cap. He was now well on the way to recovery from the slice which a bomb splinter had carved across his chest. It simply did not occur to him that his wound had anything to do with Bentley's judgment on him.

  Nor, in fact, was the wound really significant. It was Sainsbury's assumed caution and wariness in action which had first made Bentley suspect that his old friend and mentor was a spent force. Sainsbury's appearance because of his injury had served merely to crystallise Bentley's opinion.

  Quietly Sainsbury's thin fingers tapped at the top of the desk. Why? He had engaged that destroyer with complete competence. She was sunk, wasn't she? They'd beaten off... Abruptly, the reiteration of his thoughts brought him up with a round turn. What the hell was he doing, trying to justify his fighting ability and ship-handling? There was not a man in the world to whom he owed that hard payment. He owned the highest decoration his country could bestow, he had been given command of a flotilla.

  That's enough of that! He was not at fault. Where was his judgment? The answer to his question was simple, and troubling. Bentley had presumed to judge him from an assumed Olympian height of infallibility and experience. The boy was cocky. He had grown too big for his boots.

  Lonely, looking more than his age, Captain Sainsbury lowered himself slowly into his chair.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  "YOU LOOK AS THOUGH your mother-in-law had died," Randall said. He spoke carefully as well as curiously, for he had not seen Bentley looking like this before. The thunder in his face when he had stepped over the gangway on his return had eased down to puzzled worry.

  Something's died, Bentley thought. He sat on the corner of the desk, staring down at his shoe as his foot swung slowly.

  "He ordered me off the ship," he said.

  The quietly-spoken sentence was to Randall not so much unexpected, as so incredible in its implications, that for a moment he simply stared at Bentley. Then he repeated, stupidly:

  "He ordered you off the ship!"

  "He called me `sir,"' Bentley said, and pushed himself up and began pacing the cabin. "I should have had more blasted sense than to try and bulldoze him into doing anything like that," he ended, angry with himself.

  "Bulldoze...? You didn't rush him?"

  "Of course not. I tried to be as diplomatic as I knew how. His face... I felt couple of sword blades pass through my guts! Never again. D'you hear? Never again!"

  "Now just a moment," Randall remonstrated, his bull of a voice meant to be soothing - it was an unaccustomed role. "Take it easy. No matter what he said - and remember, we expected something like this - he's still a sick man."

  "My God, don't you think I kept on remembering that!" He swung on his friend, his face tight. "You're a good hand in my cabin. But what would you've done over there? Eh? Kicked off another man's ship!"

  "I'd have left," Randall answered simply. Through the worry in his mind he was oddly pleased - it was the first time in his experience that he had felt superior to Bentley's normally cold certainty of action, his self-possession and command of himself. Then he remembered the reason for his captain's present attitude, and there was left to him only the worry.

  "Well, there's nothing we can do now," he decided glumly. "You'll have to keep your nose clean, that's for certain. He could have it in for you from now on. Although," shaking his rugged head, "Sainsbury's not like that. Not like that."

  "You worry about yourself," Bentley told him callously, "he knows you feel as I do."

  "What!"

  "He asked me who else knew about it. I told him." There had to be some lighter side to the grim business, and he enjoyed the consternation in Randall's burned face. "What was it, now? Oh, yes. That `paragon of first-lieutenants' he called you. His tone was not flattering."

  "My God!"

  "You would never have made
a good captain," said Bentley, "now I know you never will make a captain - good or bad."

  "We're in this bloody mess together," Randall said miserably.

  As we've always, been, in every mess, Bentley thought and the memory wiped the malice from his expression. He sat down on the desk.

  "Forget it," he said, gruffly kind. "As you say, he's not a man like that. What worries me now is that he might feel he has to prove himself. He might get out there and do something damned stupid against his better judgment."

  Randall nodded. The face which could put fear into the hearts of ungodly sailors was now miserable. "On the other hand," Bentley said slowly, "what I said might make him think. Maybe not right away, but perhaps in a few weeks he might put in for a relief."