The Cruise of The Breadwinner (2 page)

“Just as well,” Jimmy said.

Gregson turned to look hard at the engineer, but Jimmy had even in that moment disappeared down the hatchway. On deck the boy followed the course of the Hurricanes over against the thin line of shore with eyes that were lightly fixed in a dream. He was lost in the wonder of contemplation, even when Gregson spoke again.

“Tea ready yit?”

“Just made,” the boy said.

“Ah, that's me old beauty. That's a boy. Bring us a cup up, Snowy. I got a throat like a star-fish.”

The boy was already going below.

“And you better stop on deck then and do your look-out. Looks like a flying day, don't it?”

The boy said yes, it was a flying day all right, and went down into the galley below and then came back, after a moment or two, with the tea. The cup was a double-size moustache cup that Gregson took and held in one hand like an egg. He began to drink where he stood, plunging his face into the cup and then holding cup and face pressed close together with the palm of his hand. As Gregson drank the boy went forward and stood in the place where he stood on every patrol, in the bows, leaning forward and slightly over
the boat's side, like a light figurehead. He went there every morning irritated by the slightest recurrent grievance against Gregson. Long ago, soon after the war had begun, when he had first become boy on
The Breadwinner
, Gregson had promised him a pair of binoculars. Once a week, ever since, the boy had asked Gregson about the glasses, but there was never any sign of them. It appeared to the boy as if Gregson forgot all about them, not deliberately but sometimes out of sheer ineptitude. And then sometimes it seemed as if he forgot them purely by reason of belonging to the larger, more preoccupied, more adult world. Then sometimes he found himself slightly afraid of Gregson; but it was a fear purely of size, of the enormity and noisiness of Gregson's flesh. It never matched the enormity of his disappointment at Gregson's constantly unfulfilled promise about the binoculars. To have had the binoculars would have been the most exciting thing on earth: a greater thing than the sea-rescue of a pilot, the wreck of a plane, or even the firing of the Lewis gun. He had longed for all these things to happen on all the patrols of
The Breadwinner
with a bright and narrow desire that kept him awake at night and brought him down to the jetty in the mornings running and with bits of his breakfast still in his hands. But the realization of them would have been nothing beside the sight of Gregson coming down the street between the black fish warehouses carrying a brown leather case over his oilskins.

As he took up his place in the bows he could feel the wind light and smooth on his face as it came out of the west. It had in it that curious winter sea-warmth that was like human breath. It barely broke the face of the sea, which had across it everywhere to the east long quivering drifts of leaf-broken silver light. The sky was smooth too,
without any but slightest golden cloud about the sun, the air so clear that he could begin to see the white relief of Northern France before the coast of England had begun to fade, with its dark bird patrol of Hurricanes, behind him.

He leaned on the bows and took in the whole of the smooth winter sea and sky for miles and miles about him, and noted it, more or less unconsciously, as empty. It was empty of sound too. For some time he had been practising spotting by ear, so that now he could tell a Dornier, if ever one came, from a Heinkel, or a Spit from a Hurricane, even though he never saw them. Sometimes it was hard to disentangle these sounds from the sounds of wind and water and give them a name, but on a calm day or even a calm night it was easy, and he was becoming sure and proud of these distinctions.

The Breadwinner
had been cruising for a little more than an hour when he suddenly heard firing far across from the south-west. It split the very calm air for about a second, startling first himself and then Gregson into shouting.

“Machine-gunning!” Gregson yelled.

“Yeh! May be testing his guns,” the boy said.

“Too far out, ain't it?”

“Listen again!” the boy called.

They listened again, and then as Jimmy came up the hatchway to listen too, carrying his cup of tea in his hands, the burst came over the sea again. It came in a muffled and violent rattle, slightly longer this time. It seemed to come from beyond mid-Channel, a long way from shore.

“That ain't no gun-testing,” Gregson said. “Somebody's having a go.”

The boy stood intently listening, both hands clasping the boat side, his yellow head far forward, in a sort of contemplated dive.

“I can hear something out there!” the boy said.

“So can we. It ain't sea-gulls either.”

“I mean there's a plane out there. Two planes.”

“Go on,” Jimmy said. “Three planes.”

“Ah, shut up,” Gregson said. “You allus got your ears bunged up with injun oil.”

“I tell y' it's gun-testing,” Jimmy said. “They were at it yesterday.”

The boy had taken up an attitude of fierce excitement, balanced on the extreme forward edge of the bows, shading his face with his hands.

“There's only two planes,” he said. “If Jimmy could shut the engine off I could hear what they were!”

“Go on, Jim,” Gregson said, “shut her off.”

“Shut off? You want some trouble, don't you?”

“All right, all right, put her in neutral and keep her running.”

In the half-silence that came a minute later, with
The Breadwinner
stopped and the engine turning over only with coughs of low and regular vibration, the boy yelled frantically that he heard a Messerschmitt.

“Yeh! but can you see it?” Gregson said.

“No! I can hear it, I can hear it! I tell you I can hear it!” he said.

“What was the other?”

“I dunno. They both gone now. I can't see.” It occurred to him suddenly that this was the moment in which he could throw at Gregson the subject of the binoculars, but his excitement soared up inside him in a flame that burnt out and obliterated in a moment all other thought. “We ought to have a look!” he shouted.

Gregson became excited too. “All right, why don't we?” The rolls of flesh on his throat were suddenly tautened in
an amazing way as he lifted his head and strained to look westward, bawling at the same time, “What in bleedin' hell are we supposed to be for?”

“There's more firing!” the boy shouted.

“I'm turning her round, Jimmy,” Gregson said, “as soon as you can git her away.”

“Waste o' bloody time, I tell y' it's practice firing,” Jimmy said, and went below.

The boy, jumping back on deck and turning to see the gigantic face of Gregson still so tautly uplifted that it was like the face of a great bronze-red sea-lion straining to catch something, felt in that moment the beginnings of a new emotion about Gregson. He felt that he loved him. And he felt also that he came very near to despising the engineer.

Gregson cruised
The Breadwinner
at three-quarter speed for about half an hour in a direction roughly opposite to the path of light made by the sun on the sea. It was Gregson's impression as they went farther west that a haze was gathering low down against the horizon but far beyond the possible limit of patrol. It was nowhere thick enough to have any colour or any effect on the light of the sea. All the time the boy stood in the bows of the boat, shading his eyes. He had a sort of fierce and transfixed uneasiness about him. Jimmy had come on deck.

“I don't see much,” he said. “I don't hear much either.”

They were far enough westward now to be out of sight of land.

“You want so much for your bleedin' money,” Gregson said, and left his mouth open to emit a belch like a wet
explosion. “Ah, belch-guts,” he said. “Tea coming up,” and heaved his belly forward to give a second belch that was like a wetter, deeper echo of the first.

“What's ahead, Snowy boy?”

“Keep quiet! Keep quiet!” the boy said.

“No wonder the kid can't hear,” Jimmy said, and actually smiled.

“What is it?” Gregson roared.

“Can Jimmy shut off?” the boy said.

“No wonder he can't,” Gregson said. “What d'ye want shut off for?” he yelled.

“I can hear something—a whistle or something—something like a whistle——”

“A whistle be God!” Gregson said. “Shut her off, Jimmy! A whistle!”

In the interval of Jimmy going below and the engine being shut off in a series of choked bursts of the exhaust,
The Breadwinner
travelled about a quarter of a mile. It was far enough to bring within the boy's vision a new space of sea and within his hearing the faint but madly repeated note of the whistle he had already heard. He stood waving his arms as Gregson came blundering forward up the narrow deck like a groping and excited bullock. “Hey, what is it, Snowy, what is it? What ye twigged, Snowy boy?” His wind came belching up with his words in a wet gollop for which he was this time too surprised to have any comment.

“Can you hear it?” the boy said. “Can you hear it? The whistle!”

They listened together, Gregson leaning forward across the bows of the boat, his face almost instantly lit up. “Be God, Snowy, that ain't fur off!” he said. “It ain't fur off, Snowy!”

By now the boy was not listening. He was mutely
arrested by the conviction that far across to westward he could see something that might have been a floating cockle-shell. It had sometimes the appearance of a ring of transfixed sunlight, caught just below the short horizon visible from a boat that was herself only a few feet above the sea. He held his silence a little longer to himself before he was quite sure. Then he began shouting: “It's a dinghy!” he shouted. “It's a dinghy! I can see it. I can see it! A dinghy!”

“Wheer?” Gregson said. “Wheer, Snowy boy?” He made a sort of mock effort to fling one leg over the side of the boat, and instead lurched fatly forward, breathing heavily under the pressure of his colossal belly.

“Full ahead!” the boy said. “Full ahead!”

He heard his words go aft like a bellowed echo, so loud that in about twenty seconds an answer came in the noise of the engine. Gregson marvelled acidly. “We got going fust bang! Don't say nothing, Snowy. Don't bleedin' well breathe, boy. We got going fust bang!”

Two minutes later the boy was shouting: “Now can you see it? Now, Mister Gregson, if you can't see it now you're as—— Oh! if we had the binoculars we would have seen it sooner.”

Gregson, seeing the yellow rubber dinghy at the moment, made no comment on the binoculars, and the subject even for the boy was instantly blown away by gusts of fresh excitement. He could see the man in the dinghy quite clearly now, and from that moment onward began to see him more and more sharply defined in the sunlight until even Gregson, straining forward over the bows more than ever like a raw-necked seal, could see him too. The sight broke on Gregson with the effect of sublime discovery. “I see the bloke!” he roared. “I see the bloke, Snowy. Clear as bleedin' hell! I can see his head plain!”

“He's wearing his flying jacket,” the boy said. “And a red muffler with white spots.”

To that Gregson had nothing to say, and three or four minutes later they came up with the dinghy and the figure which for the boy had long been so clearly defined. Gregson lumbered aft to yell down to Jimmy the order to stop, and then lumbered forward again in time to see the dinghy drifting close alongside. The young man in the dinghy had never stopped blowing his whistle. He was blowing it now, only taking it from his mouth at last to wave it at Gregson and the boy with a sort of mocking salutation.

“Bloody good whistle!”

“All right?” Gregson yelled over the side. “Ain't hurt or nothing?”

“Right as a pip. Wizard.”

“Glad we seed you,” Gregson said. “A coupla feet closer, and we'll git y' in.”

“Bloody good show,” the young man said.

As the dinghy came nearer, finally bumping softly against the boatside, the boy remained motionless, held in speechless fascination by the figure in the flying jacket. It grinned up at him with a sublime youthfulness that to the boy seemed heroically mature. The young man had a mass of thick light-brown hair that curled in heavy waves, and a light, almost corn-brown moustache that flowed stiffly outward until it was dead level with the boundaries of his face. He seemed to have decided to check it there. It gave to his entire appearance and to whatever he did and said an air of light fancy. It proclaimed him as serious about nothing; not even about wars or dinghies or the menace of the sea; least of all about himself.

Gregson and the boy helped to pull him on deck. The boy, looking down, brought to the large muffling
flying-boots a little more of the wonder he had brought to the face.

“Sure you're all right? Cold?” Gregson said. “Cuppa tea?”

“Thanks,” the youth said. “I'm fine.”

Jimmy came up from below and walked forward: so that suddenly the small narrow deck of
The Breadwinner
seemed to become vastly overcrowded.

“Sort o' thing you don't wanna do too often,” Gregson said; “ain't it?”

“Third time,” the young man said. “Getting used to it now.”

“Spit pilot?”

“Typhoon,” the pilot said.

“There y'are, Snowy. Typhoons. What was you gittin' up to?” he said to the young man. “Summat go wrong?”

“One of those low-level sods,” the young man said. “Chased him all across the Marshes at nought feet. Gave him two squirts and then he started playing tricks. Glycol and muck, pouring out everywhere. Never had a bloody clue and yet kept on, right down on the deck, bouncing up and down, foxing like hell. He must have known he'd had it.” The young man paused to look round at the sea. “He was a brave sod. The bravest sod I ever saw.”