The Americans looked at him. “What don’t what?” McGinnis said. “The bomb. It was magnificent; I say, I shan’t forget it. Oh, I say, you know! It was splendid!”
After a while McGinnis said, “The bomb?” in a fainting voice. Then the two pilots glared at each other; they said in unison: “That right wing!” Then as one they clawed down through the trap and, with the guest at their heels, they ran around the machine and looked beneath the right wing. The bomb, suspended by its tail, hung straight down like a plumb bob beside the right wheel, its tip just touching the sand. And parallel with the wheel track was the long delicate line in the sand where its ultimate tip had dragged. Behind them the English boy’s voice was high, clear, childlike:
“Frightened, myself. Tried to tell you. But realized you knew your business better than I. Skill. Marvelous. Oh, I say, I shan’t forget it.”
VI
A Marine with a bayoneted rifle passed Bogard onto the wharf and directed him to the boat. The wharf was empty, and he didn’t even see the boat until he approached the edge of the wharf and looked directly down into it and upon the backs of two stooping men in greasy dungarees, who rose and glanced briefly at him and stooped again.
It was about thirty feet long and about three feet wide. It was painted with gray-green camouflage. It was quarter-decked forward, with two blunt, raked exhaust stacks. “Good Lord,” Bogard thought, “if all that deck is engine—” Just aft the deck was the control seat; he saw a big wheel, an instrument panel. Rising to a height of about a foot above the free-board, and running from the stern forward to where the deck began, and continuing on across the after edge of the deck and thence back down the other gunwale to the stern, was a solid screen, also camouflaged, which inclosed the boat save for the width of the stern, which was open. Facing the steersman’s seat like an eye was a hole in the screen about eight inches in diameter. And looking down into the long, narrow, still, vicious shape, he saw a machine gun swiveled at the stern, and he looked at the low screen — including which the whole vessel did not sit much more than a yard above water level — with its single empty forward-staring eye, and he thought quietly: “It’s steel. It’s made of steel.” And his face was quite sober, quite thoughtful, and he drew his trench coat about him and buttoned it, as though he were getting cold.
He heard steps behind him and turned. But it was only an orderly from the aerodrome, accompanied by the marine with the rifle. The orderly was carrying a largish bundle wrapped in paper.
“From Lieutenant McGinnis to the captain,” the orderly said.
Bogard took the bundle. The orderly and the marine retreated. He opened the bundle. It contained some objects and a scrawled note. The objects were a new yellow silk sofa cushion and a Japanese parasol, obviously borrowed, and a comb and a roll of toilet paper. The note said:
Couldn’t find a camera anywhere and Collier wouldn’t let me have his mandolin. But maybe Ronnie can play on the comb.
MAC.
Bogard looked at the objects. But his face was still quite thoughtful, quite grave. He rewrapped the things and carried the bundle on up the wharf and dropped it quietly into the water.
As he returned toward the invisible boat he saw two men approaching. He recognized the boy at once — tall, slender, already talking, voluble, his head bent a little toward his shorter companion, who plodded along beside him, hands in pockets, smoking a pipe. The boy still wore the pea-coat beneath a flapping oilskin, but in place of the rakish and casual cap he now wore an infantryman’s soiled Balaclava helmet, with, floating behind him as though upon the sound of his voice, a curtainlike piece of cloth almost as long as a burnous.
“Hullo, there!” he cried, still a hundred yards away.
But it was the second man that Bogard was watching, thinking to himself that he had never in his life seen a more curious figure. There was something stolid about the very shape of his hunched shoulders, his slightly down-looking face. He was a head shorter than the other. His face was ruddy, too, but its mold was of a profound gravity that was almost dour. It was the face of a man of twenty who has been for a year trying, even while asleep, to look twenty-one. He wore a high-necked sweater and dungaree slacks; above this a leather jacket; and above this a soiled naval officer’s warmer that reached almost to his heels and which had one shoulder strap missing and not one remaining button at all. On his head was a plaid fore-and-aft deer stalker’s cap, tied on by a narrow scarf brought across and down, hiding his ears, and then wrapped once about his throat and knotted with a hangman’s noose beneath his left ear. It was unbelievably soiled, and with his hands elbow-deep in his pockets and his hunched shoulders and his bent head, he looked like someone’s grandmother hung, say, for a witch. Clamped upside down between his teeth was a short brier pipe.
“Here he is!” the boy cried. “This is Ronnie. Captain Bogard.”
“How are you?” Bogard said. He extended his hand. The other said no word, but his hand came forth, limp. It was quite cold, but it was hard, calloused. But he said no word; he just glanced briefly at Bogard and then away. But in that instant Bogard caught something in the look, something strange — a flicker; a kind of covert and curious respect, something like a boy of fifteen looking at a circus trapezist.
But he said no word. He ducked on; Bogard watched him drop from sight over the wharf edge as though he had jumped feet first into the sea. He remarked now that the engines in the invisible boat were running.
“We might get aboard too,” the boy said. He started toward the boat, then he stopped. He touched Bogard’s arm. “Yonder!” he hissed. “See?” His voice was thin with excitement.
“What?” Bogard also whispered; automatically he looked backward and upward, after old habit. The other was gripping his arm and pointing across the harbor.
“There! Over there. The Ergenstrasse. They have shifted her again.” Across the harbor lay an ancient, rusting, swaybacked hulk. It was small and nondescript, and, remembering, Bogard saw that the foremast was a strange mess of cables and booms, resembling — allowing for a great deal of license or looseness of imagery — a basket mast. Beside him the boy was almost chortling. “Do you think that Ronnie noticed?” he hissed. “Do you?”
“I don’t know,” Bogard said.
“Oh, good gad! If he should glance up and call her before he notices, we’ll be even. Oh, good gad! But come along.” He went on; he was still chortling. “Careful,” he said. “Frightful ladder.”
He descended first, the two men in the boat rising and saluting. Ronnie had disappeared, save for his backside, which now filled a small hatch leading forward beneath the deck. Bogard descended gingerly.
“Good Lord,” he said. “Do you have to climb up and down this every day?”
“Frightful, isn’t it?” the other said, in his happy voice. “But you know yourself. Try to run a war with makeshifts, then wonder why it takes so long.” The narrow hull slid and surged, even with Bogard’s added weight. “Sits right on top, you see,” the boy said. “Would float on a lawn, in a heavy dew. Goes right over them like a bit of paper.”
“It does?” Bogard said.
“Oh, absolutely. That’s why, you see.” Bogard didn’t see, but he was too busy letting himself gingerly down to a sitting posture. There were no thwarts; no seats save a long, thick, cylindrical ridge which ran along the bottom of the boat from the driver’s seat to the stern. Ronnie had backed into sight. He now sat behind the wheel, bent over the instrument panel. But when he glanced back over his shoulder he did not speak. His face was merely interrogatory. Across his face there was now a long smudge of grease. The boy’s face was empty, too, now.
“Right,” he said. He looked forward, where one of the seamen had gone. “Ready forward?” he said.
“Aye, sir,” the seaman said.
The other seaman was at the stern line. “Ready aft?”
“Aye, sir.”
“Cast off.” The boat sheered away, purring, a boiling of water under the stern.
The boy looked down at Bogard. “Silly business. Do it shipshape, though. Can’t tell when silly fourstriper—” His face changed again, immediate, solicitous. “I say. Will you be warm? I never thought to fetch—”
“I’ll be all right,” Bogard said. But the other was already taking off his oilskin. “No, no,” Bogard said. “I won’t take it.”
“You’ll tell me if you get cold?”
“Yes. Sure.” He was looking down at the cylinder on which he sat. It was a half cylinder — that is, like the hotwater tank to some Gargantuan stove, sliced down the middle and bolted, open side down, to the floor plates. It was twenty feet long and more than two feet thick. Its top rose as high as the gunwales and between it and the hull on either side was just room enough for a man to place his feet to walk.
“That’s Muriel,” the boy said.
“Muriel?”
“Yes. The one before that was Agatha. After my aunt. The first one Ronnie and I had was Alice in Wonderland. Ronnie and I were the White Rabbit. Jolly, eh?”
“Oh, you and Ronnie have had three, have you?”
“Oh, yes,” the boy said. He leaned down. “He didn’t notice,” he whispered. His face was again bright, gleeful. “When we come back,” he said. “You watch.”
“Oh,” Bogard said. “The Ergenstrasse.” He looked astern, and then he thought: “Good Lord! We must be going — traveling.” He looked out now, broadside, and saw the harbor line fleeing past, and he thought to himself that the boat was well-nigh moving at the speed at which the Handley-Page flew, left the ground. They were beginning to bound now, even in the sheltered water, from one wave crest to the next with a distinct shock. His hand still rested on the cylinder on which he sat. He looked down at it again, following it from where it seemed to emerge beneath Ronnie’s seat, to where it beveled into the stern. “It’s the air in her, I suppose,” he said.
“The what?” the boy said.
“The air. Stored up in her. That makes the boat ride high.”
“Oh, yes. I dare say. Very likely. I hadn’t thought about it.” He came forward, his burnous whipping in the wind, and sat down beside Bogard. Their heads were below the top of the screen.
Astern the harbor fled, diminishing, sinking into the sea. The boat had begun to lift now, swooping forward and down, shocking almost stationary for a moment, then lifting and swooping again; a gout of spray came aboard over the bows like a flung shovelful of shot. “I wish you’d take this coat,” the boy said.
Bogard didn’t answer. He looked around at the bright face. “We’re outside, aren’t we?” he said quietly.
“Yes. . . . Do take it, won’t you?”
“Thanks, no. I’ll be all right. We won’t be long, anyway, I guess.”
“No. We’ll turn soon. It won’t be so bad then.”
“Yes. I’ll be all right when we turn.” Then they did turn. The motion became easier. That is, the boat didn’t bang head-on, shuddering, into the swells. They came up beneath now, and the boat fled with increased speed, with a long, sickening, yawing motion, first to one side and then the other. But it fled on, and Bogard looked astern with that same soberness with which he had first looked down into the boat. “We’re going east now,” he said.
“With just a spot of north,” the boy said. “Makes her ride a bit better, what?”
“Yes,” Bogard said. Astern there was nothing now save empty sea and the delicate needlelike cant of the machine gun against the boiling and slewing wake, and the two seamen crouching quietly in the stern. “Yes. It’s easier.” Then he said: “How far do we go?”
The boy leaned closer. He moved closer. His voice was happy, confidential, proud, though lowered a little: “It’s Ronnie’s show. He thought of it. Not that I wouldn’t have, in time. Gratitude and all that. But he’s the older, you see. Thinks fast. Courtesy, noblesse oblige — all that. Thought of it soon as I told him this morning. I said, ‘Oh, I say. I’ve been there. I’ve seen it’; and he said, ‘Not flying’; and I said, ‘Strewth’; and he said ‘How far? No lying now’; and I said, ‘Oh, far. Tremendous. Gone all night’; and he said, ‘Flying all night. That must have been to Berlin’; and I said, ‘I don’t know. I dare say’; and he thought. I could see him thinking. Because he is the older, you see. More experience in courtesy, right thing. And he said, ‘Berlin. No fun to that chap, dashing out and back with us.’ And he thought and I waited, and I said, ‘But we can’t take him to Berlin. Too far. Don’t know the way, either’; and he said — fast, like a shot — said, ‘But there’s Kiel’; and I knew—”
“What?” Bogard said. Without moving, his whole body sprang. “Kiel? In this?”
“Absolutely. Ronnie thought of it. Smart, even if he is a stickler. Said at once, ‘Zeebrugge no show at all for that chap. Must do best we can for him. Berlin,’ Ronnie said. ‘My Gad! Berlin.’”
“Listen,” Bogard said. He had turned now, facing the other, his face quite grave. “What is this boat for?”
“For?”
“What does it do?” Then, knowing beforehand the answer to his own question, he said, putting his hand on the cylinder: “What is this in here? A torpedo, isn’t it?”
“I thought you knew,” the boy said.
“No,” Bogard said. “I didn’t know.” His voice seemed to reach him from a distance, dry, cricketlike: “How do you fire it?”
“Fire it?”
“How do you get it out of the boat? When that hatch was open a while ago I could see the engines. They were right in front of the end of this tube.”
“Oh,” the boy said. “You pull a gadget there and the torpedo drops out astern. As soon as the screw touches the water it begins to turn, and then the torpedo is ready, loaded. Then all you have to do is turn the boat quickly and the torpedo goes on.”
“You mean—” Bogard said. After a moment his voice obeyed him again. “You mean you aim the torpedo with the boat and release it and it starts moving, and you turn the boat out of the way and the torpedo passes through the same water that the boat just vacated?”
“Knew you’d catch on,” the boy said. “Told Ronnie so. Airman. Tamer than yours, though. But can’t be helped. Best we can do, just on water. But knew you’d catch on.”
“Listen,’ Bogard said. His voice sounded to him quite calm. The boat fled on, yawing over the swells. He sat quite motionless. It seemed to him that he could hear himself talking to himself: “Go on. Ask him. Ask him what? Ask him how close to the ship do you have to be before you fire. . . . Listen,” he said, in that calm voice. “Now, you tell Ronnie, you see. You just tell him — just say—” He could feel his voice ratting off on him again, so he stopped it. He sat quite motionless, waiting for it to come back; the boy leaning now, looking at his face. Again the boy’s voice was solicitous:
“I say. You’re not feeling well. These confounded shallow boats.”
“It’s not that,” Bogard said. “I just — Do your orders say Kiel?”
“Oh, no. They let Ronnie say. Just so we bring the boat back. This is for you. Gratitude. Ronnie’s idea. Tame, after flying. But if you’d rather, eh?”
“Yes, some place closer. You see, I—”
“Quite. I see. No vacations in wartime. I’ll tell Ronnie.” He went forward. Bogard did not move. The boat fled in long, slewing swoops. Bogard looked quietly astern, at the scudding sea, the sky.
“My God!” he thought. “Can you beat it? Can you beat it?”
The boy came back; Bogard turned to him a face the color of dirty paper. “All right now,” the boy said. “Not Kiel. Nearer place, hunting probably just as good. Ronnie says he knows you will understand.” He was tugging at his pocket. He brought out a bottle. “Here. Haven’t forgot last night. Do the same for you. Good for the stomach, eh?”
Bogard drank, gulping — a big one. He extended the bottle, but the boy refused. “Never touch it on duty,” he said. “Not like you chaps. Tame here.”
The boat fled on. The sun was already down the west. But Boga
rd had lost all count of time, of distance. Ahead he could see white seas through the round eye opposite Ronnie’s face, and Ronnie’s hand on the wheel and the granitelike jut of his profiled jaw and the dead upside-down pipe. The boat fled on.
Then the boy leaned and touched his shoulder. He half rose. The boy was pointing. The sun was reddish; against it, outside them and about two miles away, a vessel — a trawler, it looked like — at anchor swung a tall mast.
“Lightship!” the boy shouted. “Theirs.” Ahead Bogard could see a low, flat mole — the entrance to a harbor. “Channel!” the boy shouted. He swept his arm in both directions. “Mines!” His voice swept back on the wind. “Place filthy with them. All sides. Beneath us too. Lark, eh?”
VII
Against the mole a fair surf was beating. Running before the seas now, the boat seemed to leap from one roller to the next; in the intervals while the screw was in the air the engine seemed to be trying to tear itself out by the roots. But it did not slow; when it passed the end of the mole the boat seemed to be standing almost erect on its rudder, like a sailfish. The mole was a mile away. From the end of it little faint lights began to flicker like fireflies. The boy leaned. “Down,” he said. “Machine guns. Might stop a stray.”
“What do I do?” Bogard shouted. “What can I do?”
“Stout fellow! Give them hell, what? Knew you’d like it!”
Crouching, Bogard looked up at the boy, his face wild. “I can handle the machine gun!”
“No need,” the boy shouted back. “Give them first innings. Sporting. Visitors, eh?” He was looking forward. “There she is. See?” They were in the harbor now, the basin opening before them. Anchored in the channel was a big freighter. Painted midships of the hull was a huge Argentine flag. “Must get back to stations!” the boy shouted down to him. Then at that moment Ronnie spoke for the first time. The boat was hurtling along now in smoother water. Its speed did not slacken and Ronnie did not turn his head when he spoke. He just swung his jutting jaw and the clamped cold pipe a little, and said from the side of his mouth a single word:
Complete Works of William Faulkner Page 638
