by H. E. Bates
Gregson came up and leaned over him. To the boy his hands were white as paper. He had never seen them so clean. Gregson laid them quietly on the English boy’s shoulders.
“You take it easy. I may have to get you below after all. Looks like rain. Smoke?”
“I don’t,” the boy said. “Perhaps Jerry does. His name’s Karl Messner. Flies Messerschmitts. Should say flew Messerschmitts.”
“I don’t care if he flew bloody archangels,” Gregson said. “He’s gittin’ no fags o’ mine.”
“He understands English.”
“He does, does he? Well, bloody good job too. That makes it clear. He knows what I’m thinking.”
“Ah, go on. He’s the sod I shot down. The one I told you about.”
“Is he? Pity his guts wasn’t shot out. Like Jimmy’s. The engineer. You saw him. Him with the gun.”
Gregson looked from one of the pilots to the other, and then to the boy, in a single fierce glance of challenge to all of them. They did not speak. The German lay with eyes fixed upward, as if he were trying not to hear it all.
“Yeh, Jimmy’s dead,” Gregson said. “They bust him up all right.”
The English pilot looked as if he were going to shake his head, and then, remembering the earlier pain, thought better of it, simply opening his eyes and shutting them again.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “But he didn’t do it. He’s not the type. You give him tea, anyway. What’s the odds?”
“Ah, all right,” Gregson said. “Go on. What’s the odds? That’s right. What’s the odds? What’s it matter? What’s it matter now?” He furiously threw his cigarette packet and matches across to the German. They lay on the German’s chest. He did not pick them up.
Gregson seized bitterly on this significant fact, making much of it. “Too proud to take ’em, anyway. Lower your bloody self to give ’em all you got and then they bleedin’ insult you. Makes me sick.” He threw about him fresh challenges, now doubly embittered.
“Pull your finger out, Jerry,” the English boy said. “No sulking. Take the captain’s cigarettes when he offers them.”
The German did not move.
“The Captain wants to throw you overboard. He hates Germans. There’s nobody to stop him either if he wants to.”
The English boy was having fun; his face had a kind of sad sideways grin on it as he spoke. But the German did not move.
“Throw him overboard, Captain,” the English boy said. “I shan’t tell.”
“All right,” the German said. He moved his hands to the cigarettes. “Thank you very much. Very kind of you. Thank you very much.”
“All that bleedin’ fuss for nothing,” Gregson said.
“Behave yourself, Messner old boy,” the Englishman said. “You’re just a P.O.W. now.”
The boy, listening to all this, felt the tremendous impact of the more serious, more curious, more important world of men. He set cups of tea down on the deck, one each by the pilots and one for Gregson. He took one for himself and left the odd one on the tray. This odd cup did not now impress him by its forlorn significance, nor any longer as being part of the dead engineer. He saw that there were attitudes in which it was possible to make light of pain, to be jocular about the impact of death. And part of the terror about Jimmy now receded in his mind.
“I don’t think I can sit up,” the English boy said. “Bad show.”
“I’ll hold you,” Gregson said.
“No,” the boy said. “Better give it to me in the spoon.”
While Gregson cautiously lifted the English boy’s head and held it slightly upward with one hand and then spoonfed tea to him with the other, the German raised himself on one elbow. He held cigarette and tea-cup in the same hand, turning his face away and looking westward over the sea. He appeared to the boy as a person of sinister and defiant quality. The boy read into his silence, his gaze over the sea, and the way he let his cigarette burn away without smoking it, a meditation on escape. He hoped that he would escape. If he escaped, Gregson would kill him. That would be a wonderful thing. If he were killed the boy would take the binoculars. That would be another wonderful thing. And when at last he reached home he would wear them slung on his shoulder, taking with him some of that same defiant quality of the man who returns with the trophies of war.
It began to rain as he stood there watching the German, the spits fine and dark and quite fast, wetting the deck. Gregson lifted his face to the sky. “All appearance on it,” he said. “Better git you below.”
On the face of the English boy there was a curious sort of pain. It crumpled the youthful texture of his face, making it very old. It did not occur to the boy Snowy that it might be a look of fear. He did not even remotely connect fear with men.
“Get Messner down,” the English boy said, grinning suddenly. “Guests first.”
“You’re a caution you are,” Gregson said.
“Get him down.”
“I’ll have you both down in two shakes.”
“Well, get him down first. If you drop him I’ll know what to do.”
Very gently Gregson let the English boy’s head lie back on the deck. “Snowy’ll stay with you,” he said. Grinning, he seemed suddenly moved, for some reason, to extravagant praises of the boy. “Masterpiece of a kid for aircraft. Knows ’em all.”
“Good show,” the pilot said. “Good old Snowy.” He smiled at the boy.
Gregson went over to the German, put both arms under his back and began to lift him. There was something cruelly odd about the German’s legs. They seemed to have an existence independent of the rest of his body. Gregson became aware that if he lifted him the legs would simply hang down, powerless, like lumps of loose rubber. He heard the German gasping deeply for breath.
Gregson laid him back on the deck. “Easy,” he said. “Easy. We’ll git the stretcher.”
It was raining quite fast now, but the German, lying rigidly back, staring upward and swallowing his breath in rain and heavy gasps of pain, seemed glad to receive it on his face. He opened his lips, and as the drops fell into his mouth he licked them in relief with his tongue.
The stretcher was kept lashed to one side of the narrow skylight lying aft of the hatchway. Gregson unfastened it and carried it along the deck under one arm. “Job for you, Snowy,” he said, “mind your backside.” The space on deck seemed more than ever confined; the stretcher had something of the effect of a ladder brought into a tiny room. Gregson laid the stretcher on deck, parallel with the German, and in a moment the boy was on his knees, undoing the straps.
The boy stood by while Gregson lifted the shoulders of the German on to the stretcher. He saw the German clenching his hands. “Please,” he said. “Please. My legs.” Gregson did not speak, but slowly slid the legs across to the stretcher too. In this moment the German threw his hands violently upward and brought them down with a savage double slap on his own face, keeping them tightly there in frantic self-created pain, sobbing with quiet terror underneath his white fingers. The boy was less affected by this, an outburst of crying from the adult enemy, than by the mess of blood that smeared the deck where the German’s legs had been.
The German kept his hands crushed down on his face while Gregson and the boy carried him below on the stretcher, Gregson taking the weight of the stretcher by going first, the boy struggling slowly behind down the narrow steps. They laid him on the cabin floor between the bunks. The boy set down his end of the stretcher with a certain air of expansive and careless pride; it was the first time he had taken part in such things. He stood erect and regarded Gregson and the German with tired gravity, languidly rubbing his hands together. He was no longer aware of the shock of seeing blood for the second time. He was elevated into a world of catastrophe and pain, bringing to it a taut and suppressed excitement.
The German still had his hands pressed over his face as Gregson and the boy went back on deck, Gregson carrying the stretcher. Not even the pain of being moved from the stretcher to the floor of
the cabin had had any effect on them. He used them all the time to contain and conceal the agony of his face.
On deck it was raining quite fast. The English boy had covered his face with the blankets, and lay rigid and entirely hidden by them, like a corpse. As Gregson and the boy arrived with the stretcher he sharply uncovered his face, grinned stiffly up at them with a face of pale bone-shadows that did nothing to lessen that effect. “Collect up my things,” he said to the boy, “the things I took off. Before they get soaked,” and the boy went forward with proud obedience to where the pilot had kicked off his boots and socks on the deck.
When he had gone Gregson leaned over the pilot. “Can you move?” he said. “A little bit. Just slide over while I take the weight?”
“How’s old Messner?” the boy said. “Did you drop him?”
“Now,” Gregson said. “Just gently. While I hold you.”
“God!” the boy said. “God. Oh! Jesus, Jesus.” He cried gently through his lips while he held them clenched with his teeth, and the rain poured fast and heavy on his face and on the light hair already wet with sea, so that his whole appearance was strangely wild and battered. Suddenly Gregson threw the blanket over his face, and then, just as the boy came back with the flying boots and socks, lifted him bodily, in a single smooth but desperate movement, on to the stretcher. In that attitude, covered over and silent and never moving, the pilot lay on the stretcher while Gregson and the boy carried him below, the rain quickening heavily on the south-west wind and turning already to lighter and thinner crimson the lumps of blood about the deck.
It was about five minutes before the boy reappeared on deck, coming to collect the tray and the five cups still half-filled with tea. This time he did not look at the covered heap that had once been the engineer, and the blood where the two pilots had lain did not have on him any more effect than the blood he often saw on the floor of the fish-market behind the quay.
He was thinking only of the binoculars. The case was very wet from sea-water, and he had some difficulty in getting them out. He pulled at them until the suction of water in the case was released, and then when he had them out he stood up on deck and looked through them, across the sea and through the grey and driving mass of rain.
For some reason or other, either because the sea-water had reached the lenses or because the lenses themselves were not adjusted for his sight, what he saw through the glasses was only a grey and misty mass of unproportioned light. It had no relation to the things he had expected.
Trembling, he hastily put the glasses back into the case and gathered up the cups and hurried below, lowering his head against the darting rain.
Chapter 4
Down below a new problem had arisen. He was startled by Gregson’s voice muttering crustily from the box where Jimmy had so often been lost among the miseries of the auxiliary:
“Know anything about injuns, Snowy?”
The boy put the tea-tray and the binoculars on the cabin table, on either side of which the two pilots lay rigidly on the floor. The English boy had closed his eyes and the German did not look at the binoculars.
He went back to Gregson. Gregson, unable to squeeze himself into the hole containing the engine, was squatting half in and half out of it, regarding the engine with melancholy helplessness and slowly wiping it with an oil rag, as if in some way this would make it go.
“I know you turn the bleedin’ handle, and that’s all I do know.”
“Ought to be simple,” the boy said, “if I can get it set.”
“Wouldn’t let nobody look at it,” Gregson said. His grievances against Jimmy were not yet quite extinguished. “Wouldn’t let nobody touch it. Kept it to ’isself. Wust on it.” He stopped wiping the engine and let the oily rag rest heavily on it, shaking his head. “Wust on it. Allus knew best. You couldn’t talk to him!”
There flashed across the boy’s mind an image of Jimmy lying redly disembowelled on the deck, unrecognisable and shapeless, and he said quickly:
“You switch her on down here, I know that.”
“Ah, go on then. You do it.”
Gregson moved his huge body a foot or two backwards. This action gave the boy a sudden sense of space. He could move with astonishing freedom in the dark space among the gears. He became aware also of carrying a sense of responsibility arising from a succession of terrific events: the presence and sight of death, the fact of the binoculars, the business of carrying the wounded pilots below, and now the engine. He had come to think of the engine as sacred. It was not to be touched; it belonged to Jimmy; its faults and secrets were part of the man.
He squeezed himself in alongside the cradle and pressed the needle of the carburettor up and down, flooding it. He had watched Jimmy do these things. The engine was a mass of odd lengths of wire, strange extra gadgets devised by Jimmy, so that it had the look of an unfinished invention. One of these wires held the choke. It was necessary to pull it out, hook it back into fixed position by means of a piece of cord that slipped over a nail in the cradle, and only release it when the engine was running too fast. You turned her over twice before switching on.
Gregson, watching the boy do these things, said in a curious whisper:
“We gotta git back fast. You know that, don’t you?”
The boy nodded. It occurred to him suddenly that he had no idea of what had happened on deck.
“He was so bleedin’ low,” Gregson said, “you could have touched his wings. I thought he was goin’ to cut me head off. Firing like blazes all the time too. Mowed us down. We was like heap o’ bloody dogs on a bone when he’d gone.” He looked over his shoulder for a second. “Know they’re both hit bad, don’t ye’? You know that?”
The boy nodded and said he thought he could get her started now. Gregson stood back a little and the boy, with a sort of careless strength, pressed his weight down on the starting handle with his right hand. “Think you can match it?” Gregson said. The boy answered with something that was very near to tired contempt. “Can’t start first time. You gotta get her swung over.”
“Oh! that’s it, is it?” Gregson said. He was fond of telling the boy that he had been brought up in sail. In fact, he had never been brought up in sail. He had always known engines of some sort, mostly old and mostly small and mostly, if he looked back, nothing but trouble. He had never trusted them. And he had suddenly the conviction that he trusted them less than ever now. He stood with his hands spread with large uneasiness over his belly. It was very quiet everywhere except for the sound of rain beating with a hard murmur on the deck; a sound for some reason irritating and unfriendly, so that suddenly he wondered what time it was.
He had not time to pull his watch out of his trousers pocket before the boy had swung the handle of the engine over, and he forgot the watch in his surprise. It did not surprise him that the engine did not fire; he was used to that; but only that the boy had succeeded in swinging it with exactly the knack of the dead engineer. The boy had learnt by heart the ways of the dead man, and the sudden repetition of them seemed to bring him in a curious way back to life, so that he seemed to be there with them in the absurd and dirty little engine-hole, his face dark with pessimism and long-suffering with pain.
By the time the boy had swung the engine the fourth time Gregson was sour with the conviction that it was never going to fire. The boy leaned his weight on the cylinder head, panting: “No spark in her,” he said. He desired passionately to make the engine go, feeling that in doing so he would become in Gregson’s eyes a sort of adult hero. But there was something queer about the engine. “No compression there,” he said.
“Compression, compression!” Gregson said. “Let me have a go.” He had not the faintest idea what compression was. He seized the engine-handle rather as if it had been the key of a clock. When he swung it finally it swirled round, under his immense strength, two or three complete revolutions, swinging him off his balance against the bulkhead.
“Bloody thing never was no good!” he said. “All
us said so. Told him. Miracle it ever went.” He leaned against the bulkhead panting in savage and heavy despair.
The boy did not answer. He was crawling back into the dark recesses behind the engine-cradle, where there was just room enough for him to kneel. He did not know quite what he was looking for. Underneath the engine block lay pools of spent oil in which he knelt as he crawled. It suddenly occurred to him that these pools were too large. He put down his right hand and knew that they were pools of oil and water. Then he stopped crawling and began to run his hands over the engine-block until he found the place where cannon shell had ripped it open in a single jagged hole. A little oil still clogged it there. The force of the shell had lifted up the head, warping it as it blew.
The boy called back to Gregson. From the dark interior Gregson seemed to fill the entire space below the gangway, and it suddenly struck the boy that it was a miracle that he, so large a thing in a little ship, had not been hit.
“We’ve had it,” he said.
“Had what?” Gregson said. “Whadya mean? What’s up?”
The boy crawled out of the hole, suddenly tired, his knees and hands black with oil which he wiped thoughtlessly over his face and in streaks across his almost white hair.
“We’ve had the engine,” the boy said. “That’s what. Cannon shell.”
Gregson lifted his enormous face, swelling the creases of his great neck until they were blown with anger.
“Why’n’t they bleedin’ well sink us? Why’n’t they bleedin’ well sink us and have done?”
The boy, hearing the wind rising now with the sound of rain on deck, was sharply aware of a new crisis.
“What do we do now?” he said. He was aware that things might, without the engine, be very tough, very desperate. He licked his lips and tasted the sickliness of oil on them. “What do we do now?”
“Gitta us a cuppa tea,” Gregson roared. “Gitta us a cuppa tea!”
