Lonely Road (3 page)

I took it from him and drank. “How many of us are there now?” I asked.

“There’s only us,” he said.

The vessel was on fire aft and it seemed to me that she was settling by the stern; the whole stern must have been blown out when the magazine went up.

“They stopped the shelling ten minutes ago,” he said. “They’re practically dead ahead, sir. A little
on
the port bow.”

“Where’s the panic party?”

Wallis swore. “The dirty b——rs,” he said. The snotty said: “They shelled the boat, sir. I don’t think there’s anybody left.” And then he said: “It wasn’t playing the game, sir.”

I retched violently. And when that was over I asked: “Is there any armament left?”

“Aye, sir,” said Wallis, “there’s the port six-pounder and eight rounds. She’ll want to be broad on the beam for it, but the gun’s all right.”

I saw it lying on the deck upon its swinging mounting, behind the bulwarks. It had not been touched. The vessel lay upon the water like a log; she lay heavily and each time she sank into the trough the coming swell sluiced down the bulwarks burying the hull, so that I thought that she was never going to rise. Astern she was awash, so that there was a hissing and crackling, and a great cloud of smoke where fire
and water met. I thought of Jardine, dead in the Dardanelles, and of Fordyce.

“This is the end of us,” I said. I knew that there would be no relief from the outside; we had sent no wireless for assistance before the action had begun, and that had been the first to go. “It’s no good surrendering.” I could see the wreckage of the boat astern.

The snotty had wriggled on his stomach to the hawse-hole. “She’s running slow ahead,” he whispered. “She’s coming round on to the beam.”

I wriggled up beside him. The submarine was running slowly across our bows, submerged but for a portion of the conning-tower, and the twin periscopes; occasionally, as the waves swept over her, we could see the gun. Then she went down entirely but for the periscopes, and began to travel slowly down the port beam, distant perhaps five hundred yards from us. She was examining her handiwork. Then she got on to the quarter and the smoke hid her from our gaze. We lay motionless upon the deck.

Ten minutes later we saw her again on the starboard quarter, approaching us from the direction of the boat. She came close up to us this time, the periscope passing up the vessel’s side not fifty yards away. If we had had a depth-charge thrower left we might have got her then, but all that stuff had gone.

She turned slowly across our bows, and broke surface dead ahead. I couldn’t see her from my position; I had to depend on whispers from the snotty. And then I saw her. She was running on the surface very slowly, perhaps two hundred yards away, and turning to pass down our port side again.

“Come up to finish us off, I reckon,” whispered Wallis.

“Be ready for it,” I replied.

Her speed slowed to a crawl, and a man appeared in the conning-tower, and then an officer. And then in a moment there were men on her deck and about the gun; there was nothing now to wait for. And I said:

“Right. Get on with it.” Then we were on our feet and racing for the gun. It swung up smoothly; the shell slid into
the chamber and the breech clanged home, and I swung her by the rubber at my shoulder and laid her to the water-line below their gun. We got our first shot off before they did and that was a pretty good show, but the vessel lurched as I fired and it went over their heads. They hit us with a burster forward while we were loading, and I laid and fired again. And this time it went well, because I holed her on the water-line between the gun and the conning-tower, and our third shot burst beside the gun, so that when the smoke cleared there was nobody standing up on deck to serve that gun. The fourth shot I laid more slowly and more carefully, and holed her again at the base of the conning-tower and a little aft.

She began to blow her tanks, and the water came foaming up around her all white and creamy and mingled with a little oil. She took a list to port, and then the hatches opened both forward and aft. Men began to stream up on deck out of the forward hatch; they held up their hands and one or two of them waved to us.

There were three of us, and thirty odd of them.

I snapped the breech open and the case clanged out, but the next shell was not there. The snotty was holding it and staring at the submarine crimson with excitement. He was yelling:

“Oh, damn good, sir. Bloody good.”

“Stop that row,” I snarled. “Get on with it.”

He stared at me. “Aren’t they surrendering?”

I ripped out an oath, and the shell slid into the bore. I clanged the breech to, and swung the gun till it bore upon the fore hatch with the men still coming up. And then I glanced aside, and that damn boy was staring at me in a sort of horror, and I cursed at him again.…

And then began my struggle towards consciousness. This was no real scene; it was a dream that I had will and power to prevent. This was no new experience to me; it was my fever dream, the recurring nightmare that has been with me for the last twelve years. But I still had my will; still power to prevent this frightful thing. And with a stern effort I awoke, and
opened my eyes to an unfamiliar room, white paint and green distemper.

Nurse Malone was there, bending over me. I could not move in bed, but I was damp with sweat and quivering with fright and with the horror of the thing that I had done. I knew that I was awake and safe, and I burst out to her:

“I don’t want to do it again.”

She smiled a little, bending over me. “It’s quite all right,” she said. “I’ll see that you don’t do it again. But now I want you to lie quite quiet and not try to move about. Just see if you can have a real rest. You know, you’ve had a motor accident.”

T
HE
next point of significance in my story is a conversation that I had with Dixon in the nursing home after my accident, a few days before I was taken back to my own house.

He came and sat beside my bed one morning when he had examined me and the nurse had gone away; he must have had an easy round that day. “I’m going to move you back into your own house next week, I think,” he said. “Would you like that?”

I was as weak as a kitten. I had a continuous headache, and I was pretty miserable at night. I told him this, and said that I didn’t think that I was fit to go.

He eyed me seriously. “You don’t get over an accident like this in a day, or in two days, you know,” he said. “For one thing, you evidently lost a great deal of blood from the wound in your head. Quite apart from the concussion.”

Irrelevantly I cut him short and asked what I had wanted to know for some days now. “What’s happened to my car?”

“It’s been taken down to Walker’s garage and they’re waiting for your instructions before beginning on it. I saw it the day after the accident, and I was very much interested.”

I asked: “Is she very much knocked about?”

“The radiator and the wings were very badly damaged,” he replied, “and there was a lot of glass broken. But I found the most interesting part to be the hole in the fabric of the roof over the driver’s seat, where your head had hit. Your head must have gone very nearly through the roof—I never saw such a thing. You must consider yourself very fortunate that it was not a coach-built body.”

I was quiet for a time. “It’s a hundred-and-fifty-pound job, I suppose,” I said at last, a little painfully. “She must need re-upholstering with all that blood and muck.”

He wrinkled up his brows a little. “I doubt if she does,” he said. “There was a little mess on the roof, but the inside of the car was quite clean. I think you must have done your bleeding out of the window. She was lying on her side, you see.”

I asked: “How long was I there?”

“A labourer found you on his way to work—one of the men on Halls Farm at Stoke Fleming. He must have found you at about half-past six. When did you leave Plymouth?”

I tried to recollect. “I think it must have been about half-past twelve.”

He nodded. “You must have been lying there for about five hours. You know, seriously, you’re extremely lucky to have come out of it so well. You might very well have died in that five hours.”

I said: “Providence looks after fools and drunken men.”

He stared at me, and nodded again. “Yes. You may have been a fool—I don’t know about that. But I do know that you were drunk.”

“So do I,” I said, a little shortly.

There was a little silence then. He sat tapping his pince-nez on the palm of his hand and eyeing me, till at last he said: “You know, you’re simply knocking yourself to bits. It’s time you pulled up and lived like everybody else.”

“Damn it, man,” I said. “You talk as if I was a bloody dipsomaniac.”

He was patient. “I didn’t mean your drinking. I mean just this—that you’re knocking yourself to bits. You don’t take care of yourself. Do you, now?”

I lay and stared at him, half expecting to see him furtively consult his notes. He was not at all at his ease, and suddenly it seemed to me that he’d set himself a job that he didn’t like doing. “You’d better tell me what you mean,” I said.

He cleared his throat, and considered for a moment. “I don’t know that I’ve ever had a case quite like you. I’ve never had a patient of your general physique through my hands so often as you, and with such a variety of ailments. Just look at them.
You broke your arm in two places last summer in the races, and very nearly lost it, I may say.”

“Gybing in the devil of a sea,” I put in. “You can’t always rely on a vessel when she’s like that—especially if she’s over-canvassed for racing. You know that.”

He nodded. “That’s why every other boat but you made a wheelbarrow tack at the buoy. Then, the winter before, you managed to turn a simple touch of flu into a pleurisy, simply because you wouldn’t lie up.”

“I had some work to do,” I said. “That might have happened to anyone.”

“The point is, that it doesn’t. Then, before that, you got water on the knee—not very serious, but you neglected it, and it’s only the mercy of Providence that you’re not lame yet. Frankly, at the time, I thought that it was becoming chronic.”

He paused. “Do you know that you’ve been in my hands six times in the last two years? And it’s only for want of a little care.”

I hadn’t much to say that was worth saying. “I’ve been a pretty good source of income to you, taking it by and large,” I said. “As good as half a dozen old ladies. You don’t want me to mend my ways?”

I must have stung him up, somehow. “Well,” he said drily, “I want you to go on being a source of income to me, anyway.”

There was a little silence.

“I see,” I said. “You think I’m a bad life.”

He thought about it for a moment. “No, I don’t. I didn’t like that pleurisy at all. You’ve not got the resistance that you ought to have, but that’s the infection you picked up in the war. But if you take care of yourself, I see no reason at all why you shouldn’t live to be seventy or eighty.”

“God forbid,” I muttered.

He was annoyed. “On the other hand, if you carry on as you’re doing now, you’ll probably be dead within the next five years. You’ll gybe in a squall when there isn’t a motor-boat to pick you up, or you’ll get a pleurisy when I’m not there,
or you’ll crash your car where labourers don’t come. And then you’ll die.”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s very likely what will happen.”

He was a little disconcerted and lost the thread of his argument. I lay there staring out of the window while he was marshalling his fancies into order again and I heard a steamer’s siren from the river, a sharp double blast. “You might have a look and see what vessel that is,” I said.

He stood up. “A little collier. About five hundred tons.”

I was interested. “The
Black Prince?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know them. She’s got one black funnel with a double blue band.” And then he turned from the window and stood looking down on me, his back to the light, his hands in his pockets. “You know,” he said, “speaking as your medical man, I should advise you to get married.”

I was hardly listening. It was the bi-weekly collier from Barry, but she must have had a good passage, because she had saved a tide. Old Penrose, who had had her since the war, had retired a month or so before and the owners had given the command to his nephew, who used to be her mate; a smart young chap who wore a brown bowler hat with his reefer jacket when he came ashore. I wondered if he had taken to forcing her in good weather, and whether she would stand it. Then I came back to earth and Dixon was talking at me still.

He was very earnest. “I don’t know that I’ve ever recommended this before—to anyone. But it’s what you need.”

I eyed him for a minute, and he didn’t like it. “You think so?”

He said: “I do think so. Living alone as you do, you’re simply knocking yourself to bits. And you don’t care a damn about it—do you?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t know that I do.”

He came and sat down beside my bed again. “Look here, Stevenson,” he said. “I want you to realise that you’re a case to me, and nothing more. This is a matter of business to me. I’m not trying to ferret round among your private affairs; I
don’t know anything about them, and I don’t want to. I’m not trying to get at you. All I want to tell you is that, as your medical adviser, I should advise you to get married. I think if you did that, you wouldn’t find yourself in my hands quite so often.”

I nodded. “You mean that I ought to get someone to look after me,” I said. “I expect you’re right.”

He was relieved. “I’m glad you see it like that,” he said frankly, “because I don’t like giving this sort of advice at all. I was afraid that you might think it a considerable impertinence.”

“Not at all,” I murmured. “Who do you suggest that I should get?”

He smiled. “Anyone you like. There are any number of nice girls about who’d be only too glad to get married to a man of your position and your means. You won’t have any difficulty in that way.”

“Yes,” I said quietly. “I’ve got the money. And that’s all that really matters, isn’t it?”