by Nevil Shute
His days on shore were much less satisfactory. He was awkward and lonely, and he never settled down to his new life. He was unable to adjust himself. For many years he had looked only to Marjorie in his times of leisure; he could not now take any pleasure in dances, and even cinemas now seemed to him artificial, tinsel things, and rather painful. He liked the company of men of his own sort in hotel bars as much as he liked anything, but he did not care to spend an evening upon beer and cigarettes. In short, nothing that in his loneliness he found to do on shore pleased him so much as his work. Killing the Germans was the greatest fun of all, chasing them, listening for the ping, making fierce detonations all around them in their narrow steel hulls. He lay night after night in his narrow bunk, picturing how the hull would split, the lights go out, and the air pressure rise intolerably round trapped and drowning men. That was the line of thought that gave him most real pleasure at that time.
Presently the problem of his off days on shore became acute. As the days grew longer it became imperative to him to find some outlet for his restlessness on shore, something to do. Once in April, casting around to try something different, he took a little sailing-boat and set off up the Dart upon a voyage of discovery.
It was a warm afternoon of late spring, with a gentle southerly breeze. He went up-river on the flood from the trawler anchorage off Kingswear, in between the wooded hills beyond the town. The quiet, easy progress of the boat rested and contented him; in spite of all his painful sailing memories, it was good to be sailing again. He went up past the Naval College, past Mill Creek. He skirted by the Anchor Stone, and so came to Dittisham, with its whitewashed and thatched cottages straggling down to the creek.
Just below Dittisham his eye caught a ship, and his interest was aroused. She was a very large, black fishing-boat, perhaps seventy feet in length. She had an enormously high, straight bow and a great sweeping sheer down to the stern; forward there was one short, thick mast in a tabernacle, now struck down and lying with the truck down aft. The mast and some of the upper works were painted light blue, and there was a little white moulding running down her sheer. On her transom, picked out in white, was her name and port, Geneviève — D’Nez.
She was lying at a mooring in the river, and there was an ancient rowing-boat streaming behind her on a length of painter. That meant that there was somebody on board. Boden eyed her appreciatively as he swept past; she had something of the lines and figure of a drifter, but without the funnel or the upper works. Above the sheer-line there was little of her showing. Probably, he thought, she had a great big engine in her; indeed, he noticed an exhaust-pipe like the town drain sticking through her side. She must, he thought, be a fine sea boat with those lines.
He tacked upon an impulse, and stemmed the tide up towards her from the stern to have another look at her. The little bow wave of his boat made a small noise, and a man stood up on deck and looked towards him. It was a naval officer, an R.N.V.R. sub-lieutenant.
Boden knew the man by sight, but did not know his name. He was a dark-haired young special branch officer; that meant that for some reason he was classed unfit for watch-keeping at sea, and that he wore a green stripe below the wavy golden ring upon his arm. He worked in some shore job in the N.O.I.C.’s office. Boden was a little bit surprised to see him in a ship.
He sailed up very close to the black topsides, slowly creeping past her up against the tide. “Just having a look at your ship,” he said. “There’s plenty of her.”
The other said: “She’s not my ship. I’m just having a look at her myself.”
“Whose ship is she?”
“I don’t think she belongs to anyone. She’s French.”
“Has she got any accommodation?”
“Not so as you’d notice. Come on board and have a look.”
Boden hesitated. Then he said: “All right. Take my painter and I’ll drop astern.”
He eased his sheet and threw the painter over the black bulwarks; the special officer took it and made it fast. Boden lowered and stowed his sail; the other pulled his boat alongside again, and he stepped aboard the Frenchman.
He looked around her as he stepped on deck, and liked what he saw. There was a small forecastle hatch forward of the tabernacle, probably for gear. The well of the ship was split into two holds, covered by hatches. Aft there was a companion, and a tiny skylight indicated some sort of cabin or bunk-room.
“What sort of motor has she got in her?” he asked.
“Ruddy great Sulzer Diesel.” The other paused. “They say that these boats go like hell. They do about twelve knots.”
They walked around the deck together, and looked down at the engine in its section of the boat. “What’s her history?” Boden asked. “What’s she doing here?”
“She came over with a lot of refugees last summer, I believe,” the other said. “They all left her, and the Harbour Master had her moved up here. We want a launch down in the Boom Defence, and I knew that she was up here, and I thought I’d come and look at her, and see if we could snaffle her. But I’m afraid she’s much too big for what we want.”
They stared around them. “Yes,” said Boden. “She’s a real sea-going boat. Pity she can’t be used.”
The special officer said slowly: “I believe she could be used, if people only had the guts.”
Boden glanced at the man beside him curiously. He noticed that he had dark, smooth hair and keen, thin features; he looked rather a delicate man. He was about twenty-four or twenty-five; they were much of an age.
“How do you mean?” asked Boden. “How do you think she could be used?” He lit a cigarette with the quick, nervous motion that had become customary with him in the last few months. The other filled a pipe.
The special officer said diffidently: “Oh, I don’t really know. But I did think something could be done with her. She’s French-built. I believe you could go anywhere in her and never be questioned. Over on the other side, I mean.”
“What’d you do when you got there?”
The other shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know. It’s only a crack-pot idea I had.” He laughed awkwardly. “We chaps who stay on shore get frightfully brave.”
“I suppose you’re some kind of a scientist,” said Boden.
The other nodded. “I couldn’t get into the Executive — I’m colour-blind.” He hesitated, and then said: “You’re in a trawler, aren’t you? I think I’ve seen you in the pub.”
“That’s right. My name is Boden.”
The dark-haired special officer said: “Mine is Rhodes.”
4
MICHAEL SEYMOUR RHODES was the son of a doctor in Derby, who died when he was fifteen. His mother was left in rather difficult circumstances, but she sold capital to finish the boy’s education. He went to Birmingham University at a younger age than usual, and passed out when he was nineteen with a degree in chemistry.
He got a job with the great chemical combine, British Toilet Products Ltd., at their works at Bristol. The concern employed nine thousand hands at Bristol and about twice that number at the Preston works. They demanded about fifty young industrial chemists from the universities each year to feed the great machine with new ideas. Most of the young men left them six or seven years later, finding promotion to the higher grades completely blocked, but there were always new ones coming on to fill the gaps.
Rhodes was one of these, and as one of the team he left a little mark upon the country’s modes and manners. It was his idea to put the stuff into Titania foot tablets that gave a faint brown tinge of tan to tired feet, making them more becoming and toning down the angry redness of the aching corn upon a dead white foot. The slow effervescence of Blue Grotto bath-cubes, protracted over half an hour, was one of his. In the field of basic research he did good work upon the solubility of solid organic perfumes in soya oil which influenced both soaps and face creams considerably in 1938 and 1939. He was, in fact, a very competent if rather inexperienced young industrial chemist.
He lived in a bed-sitting-room in a little house in a suburb of Bristol, and he lived quite alone. His landlady was a widow who looked after him quite well; on his part, he made very little trouble for her. He was a very shy young man. He was good company in the office and quite popular with the staff, but outside office hours he had little contact with his fellowmen. He joined no sports clubs because he was not interested in sports. He did not go to dances because he felt himself to be shy and awkward with young women, and consequently he had an idea that they were laughing at him. He did not drink at all before he joined the navy, and he smoked very moderately. In consequence of these ascetic habits he was rather a lonely young man, and that loneliness made him more shy and more awkward still. He spent most of his evenings and week-ends in long, solitary walks, or brooding on the solubility of substances in soya oil. Occasionally he went to the pictures.
In the autumn of 1937, when he had been at Bristol for about a year, a great interest came into his life. He had been to Derby for the week-end to see his mother, and returning late to the little house outside Bristol on Sunday night, he was surprised to find a very large black dog upon the doorstep. It slunk away into the front garden as he entered the front gate. He looked over his shoulder at it, curiously and uneasily, as he let himself in with his latchkey. It was a very big dog indeed, and very black and fierce-looking.
His landlady met him in the hall, fussed and a little frightened. It seemed that the dog had been standing up against the front door for the last two hours and blowing through the letter-box; in that position he could look in through the little windows of the door like the Hound of the Baskervilles. The snuffling snorts in at the letter-box, the blood-curdling whines, and the fierce glaring eyes had troubled her considerably.
Rhodes went to the door, opened it, and looked out. The dog pushed past him and stalked into the sitting-room, wagging his stern. He saw the gas fire and sat down in front of it, beaming up at them. He took up most of the hearth-rug.
“Coo, look at that!” said the woman. “Makes himself at home, don’t he?”
They stood and marvelled at the dog. It was a very large black Labrador perhaps three years old, short-haired, with a great dripping jowl, brown eyes, and a permanent expression of perplexity. It weighed a good six stone. They very soon became accustomed to it; indeed they had to, for it obviously meant to spend the night with them. They tried it with a bit of bread and it ate that ravenously; it ate the rest of the loaf and the rest of the cold lamb and a lump of suet pudding and a good many biscuits, and asked for more. It made no objection when Rhodes scrutinized its collar, but there was no name on it.
In the end, of course, it stayed for good and Rhodes paid his landlady another five shillings a week for its food. He took it next day to the police, who offered to destroy it for him. He took it to the local veterinary surgeon, who told him that it was a Labrador but much too big, and did not recognize it. He kept it for a few days in constant trepidation that an owner would turn up and take it from him, but no owner came.
After a fortnight he gave the dog a name. He called it Ernest, after its expression; he bought it a new collar with his own name on it, and paid seven and sixpence for a licence. The police saw to that.
From the first it slept in his bedroom, curled up on a rug in the corner at the foot of his bed. Out of the office it became his constant companion. His walks grew longer and more regular; each evening after tea he started out for his three miles with Ernest ranging on ahead of him. There was frequent trouble. Ernest, too old to learn new ways, chased everything that ran, from sheep to partridges, with gleeful abandon. Rhodes used to thrash him for it without any noticeable effect; his hide was thick. Grieved words of reproach could reduce him to abject misery, but only for five minutes. He needed constant watching, and this in itself was an occupation and an interest for the young man.
The dog, in fact, became Rhodes’s principal spare-time interest. The regulation of his diet and his exercise, and the tending of cut paws and cat scratches, the daily grooming and the occasional major operation of a bath took an appreciable proportion of his leisure after the daily work. On his part the dog became dependent on his master, as dogs will. He developed an engaging trick of sitting in the sitting-room window in the late afternoon, watching the road. As the first men came streaming past from the factory soon after half-past five Ernest would go scratching at the door to be let out; released, he would bound up the road till he found Rhodes among the crowd, snuffle his hand, and come back at his heels.
Rhodes took the dog everywhere with him. At week-ends when he went back to Derby to see his mother he took Ernest with him sitting beside him in his Austin Seven; with some difficulty he took Ernest on a fortnight’s summer holiday in Cornwall. He liked summer holidays in Cornwall, poking about among the fishing-boats in the little harbours, from Helford to Port Isaac, from Padstow to Polperro. Like most young men in England, he had a genuine affection for the sea, though when he was out upon it he was frequently sick. He could manage a harbour rowing-boat and he knew something of the rudiments of sailing, but till he joined the navy he had never been more than a mile from shore.
Rhodes had had Ernest for the best part of two years when war broke out. He was settled deeply in his Bristol groove. His salary was increasing much more slowly than he once had hoped; still, there was a perceptible increment every year, and it was sufficient for him in his modest style of life. He calculated that if the rate of promotion were maintained, after forty years’ service with British Toilet Products Ltd., he would be getting nearly seven hundred a year, and that, he thought, was quite a decent salary. War, when it came, was not a bad thing for Rhodes.
At first, the war did not affect him; indeed as a scientific worker in industry he was classified at first as in a reserved occupation. The Company had a very considerable export trade throughout the world, and in the autumn months of 1939 it was common ground that the war could not be paid for unless export trade were maintained. On the outbreak of war those of the Company who were territorials were called up at once, but they were not numerous. A few of Rhodes’s fellow-scientists sneaked off and joined the Royal Air Force. Everybody admired them for their disregard of danger, but there was a feeling at the luncheon-table that they had taken the easy path regardless of the real interests of the country. The hard path was to go on with the humdrum task that lay to hand, devising cheaper and more fragrant bath-salts, foamier shampoo-powders and shaving soaps.
This attitude of mind lasted for nine months or so. Then in May, 1940, the Germans invaded Holland, Belgium, and France; in June the British Army evacuated from Dunkirk.
In those weeks of troubled humiliation Rhodes went through the spiritual changes that were common to most people in the country. It seemed to him that all this talk of export trade to pay for armaments was bunk. If things went on the way that they were going there would be no need for further armaments, for the country would be beaten by the Germans. Not all the toilet soap in Bristol, Rhodes concluded, would prevent the Germans landing on the coast of England in the next few weeks. The only things to stop them were young men with guns, and he himself was young.
It became clear to him that whatever the pundits of the luncheon-table in the Middle Staff Room might declare — and they were not now giving tongue so readily — his study of the solubility of substances in soya oil was drawing to a close. He could not bring himself to concentrate upon it, and he did not want to. When Rotterdam was bombed he knew in his own mind that he would have to go and fight, but it was three weeks more before he actually handed in his notice to the Company.
For that three weeks he hung on, miserable, irresolute, desperately hoping that in some way the cup might pass from him. And the reason for his trouble was simply this: that he had nobody with whom he could leave Ernest.
Rhodes was a sensible young man, and he could face up to the fact that Ernest was not everybody’s cup of tea. He was now about six years old, growing a little grey about the muzzle
and a little more portly, as a Labrador will in middle age. He was a very large dog indeed, and though for Rhodes he had the imperishable affection of a dog, there was no denying that he was sometimes a little short with the neighbours. There were complaints about Ernest growling and frightening people from time to time, which had to be smoothed over. He now ate over a pound of meat a day, which took some finding in a time of growing scarcity, and if he had less he got eczema. He was also subject to a more indelicate internal trouble.
In those weeks Rhodes searched desperately for a solution to this problem, while at the same time he found out particulars of entry into the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. If he had to go and serve he wanted most of all to be a naval officer; his holidays in Cornwall had done that for him. But Ernest was an obstacle that seemed insuperable. He could not leave Ernest with his mother; it would not be fair on the old lady. His landlady, although she tolerated the dog and liked him well enough, could never cope with an ageing dog of that size in the difficulties of war-time rationing. That, as Rhodes realized in sick despair, would not be fair to Ernest.
A lonely man who has a dog grows almost as dependent upon him as does the dog upon his master. In the end, in the tension that came after Dunkirk and nerved by the words of the Prime Minister, Rhodes did what many people had to do. He took Ernest on his last walk to the People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals and paid ten shillings to a sympathetic veterinary surgeon, with a muttered request that he would make it snappy.
He walked home alone. Ten days later he was a sub-lieutenant in the R.N.V.R. at H.M.S. King Alfred undergoing training.
