The Cruise of The Breadwinner (7 page)

The tea did something to dispel the horror of memory. He drained the cup before becoming aware that other things were happening in the cabin.

The English pilot had stretched out one hand until he could reach the table leg. By grasping the leg he had pulled himself, on the stretcher, a foot or two across the cabin floor. Now he could touch the German on the shoulder.

“Messner,” he was saying. “Messner. I'm talking to you, Messner.”

He looked up at the boy.

“He doesn't answer me,” he said. “He's been coughing and groaning like hell, and now he doesn't answer.” He pulled at the German's jacket. “Messner,” he said. “Messner.”

The boy bent down by the German, who had turned his face away from the English boy. The blood he had been coughing up had now an amazing and frightening brightness on his jacket, the cabin floor and his white face. It was still fresh, and a new stream of it poured out of his mouth with sudden gentleness as the boy moved his head.

With the movement of his head the German let his eyes remain in the direction of the boy. It was clear that he did
not see him with his strange and pale unfocussed eyes. “Blood coming out of his mouth,” the boy whispered. “All over him. What shall I do?”

“Got your first-aid pack?”

“A box. Yes.”

“Let's see what it's got.”

While the boy found the first-aid box in Gregson's locker the English boy lay rigid, eyes half closed, as if very tired. The German had begun to moan quietly again now, his head lolling slowly and regularly from side to side, like a mechanical doll, each movement releasing from each corner of his lips a new spit of blood.

The boy opened the first-aid box and laid it by the side of the English pilot, on the floor. But the English boy ignored it, as if he had thought of something else.

“Look under his blanket,” he said. “Loosen his clothes a bit. See if you can make him easy. Loosen his jacket and trousers.”

The first-aid box lay untouched on the floor. The boy crawled over on his hands and knees to the German, who had never seemed to him quite a human person and now seemed less human, with the doll-like motions of his head, than ever before.

As he drew back the blankets and folded them down to just below the German's waist he saw that a fantastic dark patch had spread itself all across the upper part of his legs and upwards over the left groin. The boy stared at it with the blunted shock of weariness. It was something that did not ask for speculation. The fullness of its violent meaning swept over him for a few slow moments and then engulfed him with the terror of sickness. He felt his teeth crying against each other as he folded the blankets hurriedly back over the body that now and then swayed slightly, helpless
and a fraction disturbed, with the motions of the boat and the sea.

He sat on the floor between the two pilots and could not speak for fear of the vast wave of sickness rising up in his throat.

“What is it?” the pilot said.

“Blood,” the boy said. “Blood all over him. Legs and stomach.”

“Keep him covered,” the pilot said.

He spoke with brief finality, checked by his own weariness. He still had his hands on the binoculars, holding them tightly to his chest. He grinned at the boy with flickering, unexpected life.

“Bit bumpy.”

“Freshening a bit,” the boy said.

“Rain by midday they said. Just time for one patrol. Quite a patrol too.”

“Like some tea?” the boy said, and moved as if to get up, but the pilot grinned quietly again and said, “No. No more thanks. Sit and talk to me.”

The boy did not know what to say. It seemed to him it would be better if the pilot talked. He had so much more to tell. As a man flying fighters, he had in the eyes of the boy a kind of divinity. Ever since he had first come aboard, with his absurd moustache plastered down on his face, he had seemed not quite real. He had not seemed like other men. He had brought to the boat a casual and magnificent gallantry. The boy longed for him to speak of flying, of aircraft, of speeds: of battles especially. How did it feel up there? He supposed he must often have watched him come over the dunes and the marshes, going out to sea: this same man, and yet not thinking of him as a man but only as something flying, terrific and untouchable, across the sky.
He still could not grasp that that furious splendour had a reality now.

All the pilot said was: “It's getting hellish dark in here. Think so?”

“No,” the boy said. “It's all right. It's not dark.”

“Best of having white hair,” the pilot said, and grinned in a very tired, old way at this joke of his.

“I could light the lamp,” the boy said.

“Lamp?”

The pilot said the word slowly; he seemed to want to keep it on his lips, for comfort. He looked vaguely upward, desperately trying to see the boy in the small dark cabin. The boy got up. A pair of oil lamps were fastened into the bulkhead between the side lockers, and he now struck a match, to light the one nearer the pilot, on the starboard side. The wind blowing down the companionway through the open door blew out the match, and at the same time the boat lurched and then pitched, so that when he tried to light the second match it wavered in his fingers and went out too. After this he went over and shut the cabin door, and for the first time, with the little light of the doorway shut out, the cabin seemed dark to him also. It seemed dark and small and overcrowded as he stepped back across the bodies of the two men to try to light the lamp for the third time.

And this time he succeeded. The dull orange flame hardly had any light at first. He turned it up. And then when he moved away from it his own shadow fell vast and sombre across the body of the pilot, throwing into tawny edges of relief the yellow varnished panelling and the yellow face of the German beyond.

That shadow in some way discomforted him, and he crouched down. The face of the English boy came full into
the oily glow; calm now, moulded by the downward cast of light into a smoother, flatter shape of almost shadowless bone. The boy saw on it as he crouched down the first glimpse of death. It was so unagonised and silent that for a moment or two he almost believed in it. The eyes of the pilot were closed and his lips slightly open, as if the word lamp still remained only partly spoken from them.

Out of this deathly attitude the pilot suddenly opened a pair of eyes that seemed blackened and not awakened by the light of the lamp. They were distorted by a dark and sickly brilliance and the boy was startled. “Better,” he heard the pilot say. “Better.”

The boy sat hugging his knees with relief.

“How's old Messner?”

“Quiet,” the boy said.

“Messner,” the pilot said. “How's things? How are you?”

Messner did not answer. He was not groaning now. He had turned his face away from the light of the lamp.

“Hell of a brave sod,” the pilot said.

“Might not be him,” the boy said. He was not handing out free bravery to any enemy yet.

“I think so,” the pilot said. “He knows it was me too.”

“You think so?”

“Certain.”

“But you were faster, wasn't you?” the boy said. “You could catch him easy, couldn't you? The English are faster, aren't they?”

At last, in a rush, he had spoken his feelings.

“Being fast isn't everything,” the pilot said.

“No?”

“Anyway, I wouldn't be as fast. He had a 109. It was just luck.”

He grinned, tired, his eyes deadened again.

“Smooth do, though, all the same.”

A great quiver of pain suddenly came upward from his body as he finished these words, shaking his whole face with a great vibration of agony, and his eyes lightened bitterly with an awful flash of terror. They did a sudden vivid swirl in the lamplight, like the eyes of someone falling suddenly into space and looking in final horror at something to cling to.

“Snowy,” he said. “Snowy,” and instinctively the boy caught hold of his hands. They were frantically fixed to the binoculars, glued by awful sweat, and yet cold, and the boy could feel the transmission of pain and coldness flowing out of them into his own.

“God!” the pilot said. “God, good God, good God!”

The agony turned his finger-tips to tangles of frenzied wire, which locked themselves about the boy's hands and could not release them.
The Breadwinner
lurched again, and the boy went hard down on one elbow, unable to save himself and still, even in falling, unable to release himself from the frantic wires of the pilot's hands.

When he managed to kneel upright again he was in a panic at the English boy's sudden silence. It was as if they had both been struggling for possession of the binoculars, and the pilot, tiring suddenly, had lost them.

“I'll get the skipper,” the boy said. “I'll fetch Mr. Gregson.”

He tried to get up on his feet, but discovered his hands still locked in the pilot's own.

“All right, Snowy. Don't go. All right now. Don't go.”

“Sure?” the boy said. “I'd better.”

“No. Don't go. Don't. How's old Messner? Have a look at old Messner.”

Messner was quiet. The boy, still held by the pilot's hands,
could not move. He told the pilot how Messner was quiet, and again that he ought to call Mr. Gregson. The pilot did not answer. The boy had long since lost count of time, and now the half darkness, the lamplight and the silence gave the impression that the day was nearly over.

He crouched there for a long time, imprisoned by the pilot's hands, waiting for him to speak again. He sometimes thought of the binoculars as he sat there. The strap of them and the two sets of fingers seemed inextricably locked together; he felt they would never come apart. And all he could hear was the sound of the pilot's breath, drawn with irregular congested harshness, like the pained echo of rain and sea washing against the timbers of the small ship outside. He shut his own eyes once, and let himself be swung deeply to and fro by the motions of the ship. He could almost guess by these motions how far they were from shore. At a point about five miles out they struck the current from the river-mouth, faintly at first, but heavier close to land, and on days of westward wind, like this, there was always a cross swell and a pull that would take them up the coast. They still had some way to go.

“Messner all right?”

The voice of the English boy, coming at last, was only a whisper. It seemed to the boy fantastic that there should be this constant question about Messner. He could not conjure any concern for Messner at all, beyond the concern for the binoculars, and he did not speak.

“Valuable bloke, Messner,” the pilot said. “Might talk. If we get back.”

He tried to grin but the movement of his lips was strengthless, quivering and not very amusing.

“If we get back. That's the big laugh,” he said. “Always is.” He spoke very slowly now. “When you get back.” He
tried again with the same dark ineffectiveness to smile. “If you get back.”

These ironies were beyond the boy. They served only to accentuate the silence with which the pilot lay looking at him, lips partly open, the continuity of his thought broken down.

And when he spoke again it was of quite different things.

“The lamp's very bright,” he said.

“I'll turn it down,” the boy said.

“No.” His voice had the distance of a whisper gently released in a great hollow. “Rather like it. Lean over a bit.”

The shadow of the boy moved across and remained large and protective over the face of the young man. They still gripped each other's fingers tightly, the binocular case between. It seemed very cold, and there was no sound from Messner. The lamp had now and then violent and bright-edged convulsions caused by the plunging of the ship, and the shadow swayed.

It seemed to the boy late in the afternoon when the pilot began to mutter and babble of things he did not understand. Once he opened his eyes with a bright blaze of fantastic vigour, and talked of a girl. The next moment he was saying, “Tell old Messner he put up a good show. Tell him he's a bastard.”

He did not speak again. The boy watched him dying in the vastness of his own shadow without knowing he was dying. It was only when he moved to get a better look at his face that he saw it without even the convulsion of breath. The sound of breathing had stopped, and the moustache, still wet and flat on the face, had now more than ever the look of something mockingly plastered there. The lamp seemed astonishingly bright in its odd distortion,
terrifyingly bright in the young immobile eyes that still seemed to be staring straight at the boy.

After some moments he succeeded in getting his fingers out of the dead fingers, at the same time releasing the binoculars. He was cold and he moved quietly, crawling on the cabin floor. When he went over to Messner he found that Messner had died too, and now the lamplight was full on both of them, with equal brightness, as they lay side by side.

The Breadwinner
came in under the shelter of rain-brown dunes and the western peninsula of the bay in the late afternoon and drove in towards the estuary, with the boy and Gregson on deck. Rain trembling across the darkening sky in grey cascades like spray hid all the further cliffs from sight, and in the distance the hills were lost in cloud. The boy grasped the binoculars in his hands, pressing them against his stomach rather as Gregson pressed the wheel against his own, in the attitude of a man who is about to raise them to his eyes and see what the distances reveal.

“Just turned,” Gregson said. “Bleedin' good job for us too. That tide'll come in as high as a church steeple with this wind.”

As she came in full across the wind, lumping on the waves as if they had been crests of solid steel,
The Breadwinner
had more than ever the look of a discarded and battered toy. She bumped in a series of jolting short dives that were like the ridiculous mockery of a dance. Her deck as it ran with spray and rain gleamed like dirty yellow ice, so that sometimes when she heeled over and the boy was caught
unawares he hung on to the deck-house with one hand, his feet skating outwards. With the other hand he held on to the binoculars. He gripped them with the aggressive tightness of a man who has won a conquest. Nothing, if he could help it, was going to happen to them now.