Stage Door Canteen (40 page)

The third mate clawed his way into the wheelhouse, eyes still sleep-swollen. “We’ve lost steering?”

No one had time to answer. Below, the chief was reporting that the second engineer had taken all available crew to search for the break in the hydraulic lines. Hogarth called for a seaman to come to the wheelhouse and stand by to run messages. Beyond the window two figures in oilskins struggled along the hand lines at the side of the bulkheads. A surge of water over the rails knocked the helmsman down. When it cleared he was still there, the second mate still holding onto him.

“I’m going outside,” the captain said, and opened the door and went out onto the lee wing of the bridge where he could look aft and see the poop deck. It was still snowing. The second mate and the helmsman had reached the steering flat. The Second struggled in the wind to get the coverings off the wheel and the binnacle, only to see the canvas carried away by another knee-deep surge over the deck.

The telephone rang in the wheelhouse. The seaman, Ellis, came outside to report that the navy gun crew doing lookout duty from the midships gun platform had spotted an object ten degrees to starboard. David Griffiths, binoculars to his eyes, swung in that direction.

At first they could only make out the boiling sea through a haze of snow. Then a gray-black oblong materialized like an upright metal crate floating among the whitecaps. It was followed by a black nose, foaming water curling under it, and the shadow of a hull.

There was a moment’s stunned silence. But no more than that. The wheelhouse door flew open again and Hogarth shouted, “Submarine off our starboard bow!”

On the Esher’s poop deck the Royal Navy gun crew scrambled to their positions at the antique gun. On the far end of the bridge the anti-aircraft gunners were vainly trying to lower their Oelikon enough to fire.

In the wheelhouse the third mate cried. “It’s a U-boat! She’s going to torpedo us!”

David Griffith stared through the binoculars with the feeling that the U-boat had already fired and had now surfaced to try again. All they had to respond with, outside the ineffectual aircraft gun, was the Boer War four-incher on the stern. And he was convinced it would blow a hole in the hull if the gun crew fired the damned thing.

“Tell the Second to order the gunners to hold fire,” he told Ellis. The Third already had a bellowing Chief on the telephone. “No, dammit, I said hold fire!”

The U-boat was closing, obviously not going to let a wonderfully crippled target like the Esher wallow away. The U-boat commander had brass; he was going to get close enough to shoot the next torpedo down their throats. Black clad figures swarmed out of the conning tower, headed for the submarine’s four inch deck gun.

The U-boat lifted, riding a swelling sea. Down in the steering flat the Second picked up the telephone. The helmsman hung onto the wheel beside him. Hand signals. We are connecting. Talking to the bridge at the same time, shouting into the telephone. We have—

The second officer didn’t finish. The Esher responded to the sudden grip on her rudder with a violent lurch. David Griffiths grabbed the rail. He could see the helmsman on the steering flat struggling to turn the Esher’s bow into the swell. He ducked back into the wheelhouse.

At that very moment there was a flash of light. The coaming of Number Two hatch just forward of the bridge exploded. Wooden hatch covers rose, shredding into splinters in the snowy air. Steel beams and wooden wedges ripped down the deck. A hole appeared where the hatches had been, edges slowly collapsing. At the anti-aircraft gun the gunners fell to the deck and lay still.

A split second later the cannon shell’s blast hit the wheelhouse windows. Missiles of glass flew everywhere. The Third staggered away from the binnacle, crying out, covering his bloody face. The gunner chief at the Boer War gun was howling for permission to return fire. On the other telephone Hogarth shouted orders to report the extent of the damage. The Esher rolled, taking another sea.

Suddenly there was a loud BANG! Followed by a quantity of black smoke which drifted away from the Royal Navy four-inch gun emplacement on the poop deck.

“Damn them!” The idiot gun crew with their Boer War antique had fired back. “God damn them to hell!” Blood pounding in his head, David reached for the telegraph, slamming it into position FULL SPEED AHEAD. Then he grabbed the telephone from the third mate and shouted down to the steering flat, “Hard to starboard! Hard to starboard!”

The helmsman obeyed the order. The Esher shuddered, gathering her ponderous tonnage, then heaved into the swell and the U-boat.

For a moment there was the sensation of all time, all motion, suspended. Followed by a dull, crunching noise that rose above the wind and the waves. The impact bounced them around the wheelhouse. Seaman Ellis fell on the broken glass-covered deck. On the bow the starboard anchor gave way and ripped from its base, the steam winch disintegrating and the chain running out with a screeching roar that shook the ship.

Through the wheelhouse window they could see the U-boat crewmen at their gun, others scrambling out of the conning tower. The Esher’s anchor hung crookedly from the rail around the U-boat’s deck gun.

The engine room rang. ‘We’re taking water in the forepeak.” The chief’s voice was loud with surprise. “Forward bulkhead may be ruptured. What did we hit?”

David Griffiths told the first officer, “Mr. Hogarth, order the aft gun crew to hold fire. If they fire again I will put them all in handcuffs!” He took the telephone. “Can you seal off the forepeak, chief? We’ve just rammed a damned U-boat.”

The chief’s voice rose several decibels. “Rammed a what?”

In front of them the U-boat hung poised in the receding swell. Hogarth left the wheelhouse at a run to take charge of the shattered hatches, shouting for the steward and the cook to bring the first aid kit for the felled gun crew.

“How is your face, Third?” His own face and hands were covered with splinters.

“It’s the glass, sir.” Blood dripping from his fingers, the Third seemed to be holding back a flap of his cheek. “I don’t know how badly I’ve been cut. If you don’t mind,” he said stoically, “I’ll attend to it later.”

They could see a signal light flickering on the U-boat conning tower. The AB cried, “They are signalling, sir. ‘We are sunking.’ That is the message. ‘We are sunking.’”

“We snagged her hydroplane,” the Third burst out, “when we rammed her. Sir, the U-boat ripped a hole in us with her hydroplane, I’ll bet ten pounds on it!”

David Griffiths leaned against the binnacle. “‘Sunking?’” The Esher’s damaged bow was slowly turning into the wind. He discovered his hands were shaking. He gripped the binnacle to make them stop. “Mr. Johnson, order nets over her sides and let go port rafts. Prepare to take aboard survivors.”

Below, the chief engineer was reporting the plates had opened along the port side. The pumps had been started, but there was no report on the search for the break in the hydraulic lines. Hogarth sent a seaman back to report Number Two hatch was not critical, only taking water from waves breaking over the deck. Two of the anti-aircraft gunners were badly wounded.

The dark form of the U-boat drifted off to the port side, nose down, stern elevated, her hull still bearing the Esher’s anchor. The frantic figures of the crew began jumping into the icy water to swim to the freighter. Life rafts from the Esher were already bobbing in the sea. Amidships, the Esher’s crew picked their way through the mess the U-boat’s shell had made, the bosun shouting orders to get cargo nets over the side.

“Ellis,” Captain Griffiths said, “tell the galley boy to prepare hot cocoa. Break out tarps for survivors. And blankets, if there are any.”

The Second had left the steering flat long enough to get the report of the chief petty officer of the four-inch gun crew. Their chief wished to report to the bridge. The Second shouted into the telephone, “He says the gun went off by pure accident, sir.”

If he saw the damned RN gun crew chief at that moment he would seize him around the neck with both hands and throttle him. “Order all Royal Navy gun personnel to remain at station and alert. I’ll speak to the chief later.” The engine room had reported the break in the steering lines located. Estimated time for repair: thirty minutes. He was about to tell the Third to go below and get his face attended to when the seaman said, “Captain, lookout reporting a ship approaching, twenty degrees to port.”

He spun in that direction. “Good God,” the Third exclaimed.

Slowly emerging from the snowy mists, a United States Coast Guard cutter moved toward them, a streamline three hundred and twenty seven-foot Secretary-class gray-painted presence of steel and lethal weapons. A column mounted high above her bridge supported a rotating coiled-wire doughnut with a horizontal six foot steel rod below.

Sparks, the radio officer, appeared at the wheelhouse door. “Captain, a message by Aldis lamp from the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Jacksonville. They say, ‘Do you need assist? What your situation?’”

The Third had found a handkerchief to hold to his face. He was grinning. So was Seaman Ellis.

“Reply to the Jacksonville with this message,” he told the radio operator. “We rammed U-boat. Now picking up survivors. Can you pick up remainder?”

The first of the U-boat crew were already scrambling up the cargo net and being pulled over the Esher’s rails by the bosun and his men. Among them a figure in an officer’s cap resplendent with gold braid, a pair of expensive-looking binoculars hanging around his neck, undoubtedly the U-boat captain. They saw him turn toward the bridge and salute.

“That’s for you, Captain,” the Third told him. “By God, the cheeky bastard is saluting the bridge!”

He grunted.

“They’ve got a kind of radar,” Sparks was explaining. “That’s how the Jacksonville popped up here so fast. They call it Huff-Duff. HF/DF, high frequency-direction finding. As soon as our friend the U-boat—”

He cut him off, impatient. “Continue message to Jacksonville: “We are taking on water and could sink. Can you give us tow?”

Under their feet they felt the pumps working. With a helping of luck and a tow from a sea-going tug, if one was available, they could possibly make Boston by the next day.

The Jacksonville’s signal lamp was transmitting. “Will pick up survivors. Congratulations on U-boat. Will fire line across your foredeck. Pull in tow line and secure. Have requested tug.”

David Griffiths took a cigar from his jacket pocket and jammed it in his mouth. He did not bother to light it. The Esher, that plodding, humble merchant ship, servant of a battered, war-torn nation, had done what the Jacksonville would no doubt give one of her expensive radio-wave gadgets to do. The old girl had picked up her skirts and rammed a U-boat and sunk her.

By God, it was something, at last, to go home on.

TWENTY TWO

“I don’t want to tell you any of this if it makes you unhappy,” Lee Dixon said. “We were all with you, Jen, the whole cast, you just don’t know how upset everybody was when Rodgers and Hammerstein double-crossed you. There was—well, you know, some of us were pretty outraged. There was talk of forming a committee, and going to face—”

Jenny interrupted him, saying, “They didn’t doublecross me,”

She had taken the telephone on a long cord into the living room and settled in the window seat there, her legs folded under her, as she watched the rain falling on the winter-bare trees in Riverside Park.

“Lee, I hope people aren’t thinking of it that way. You know I don’t want any bad feelings. All that is water under the bridge. Besides, Ockie Hammerstein was perfectly aboveboard. He told me he and Dick and Reuben weren’t certain, but they felt they wanted to audition someone else for Ado Annie. It was Dick’s idea to use the excuse that they still didn’t have an understudy. I love,” she said quickly, “hearing all the good news from you. Marty kept me posted on what happened when the show opened in Boston, it was though I was right there. And I agonized through the New Haven tryouts.”

New Haven was a notoriously tough town for new shows. It wasn’t necessary to discuss the opening, or the comments of the New York newspaper people who had followed it there. If ever a production had the theater critics gunning for it, it was Rodgers’ and Hammerstein’s musical. Even Variety dismissed Oklahoma! with the lukewarm statement that the show’s liveliness “was built on an old-fashioned foundation that seemed to ring a bell with first nighters.” Ockie Hammerstein, who called the smart theater crowd from New York “gravediggers,” watched them rush off to take the train back to the city to spread the word that the show would never make it. Their verdict: “Too clean.” Somebody in the cast joked, was “too clean” better or worse than Variety’s “old-fashioned?”

Mike Todd left after the first act in New Haven. That was a real blow, as everything Mike Todd did was in the white glare of the spotlight of publicity. Producer Max Gordon complained to Oscar Hammerstein that he had certainly warned him he’d have to bring on the girls sooner, in Act One.

Unfortunately, things got worse, not better, when the musical moved on to Boston. Marty Levin had called Jenny late one night in the depths of despair. Boston might well be the end of the show. Oklahoma could come to a stop and never make it to New York. Since the disappointing New Haven opening, work on the production had been frantic. Ockie and Dick Rodgers had made even more changes, dropping the song, Boys And Girls Like You And Me, and substituting a repeat of People Will Say We’re In Love, even though Ockie, particularly, hated reprises. It was during a discussion about the song’s title that Hammerstein, tired of having it picked on, said, “Why don’t we add an exclamation point to ‘Oklahoma’ and be done with it?” Suddenly Oklahoma! sounded a lot better.