On Desperate Seas Page 2

  Chapter Two – THE HIGH SEAS

  The Rosa Dartle came out of the dock stern first with the tugs fussing. She swung her length out into the stream and went down-river with a Philadelphian pilot on the bridge, a little leathery strip of a man with the wisdom of centuries in his eyes. She went with her keel deep and the water coming up towards the Plimsoll line marked on the hull. A wisp of smoke trailed from a squat, thick funnel, and a line of foam rippled at the bows. The Red Ensign was fluttering from her staff, and her signal halyards hummed in the breeze. Her cargo consisted of raw alcohol and a bunker of diesel oil, with six guns and some twenty thousand rounds of ammunition, with paravanes and smoke floats and a rocket projector that the gunners called a pig-trough. There was grey paint on her superstructure, and the name was obliterated from her stern. She went with a steady, ceaseless vibration, and the smell of the river drifting across her decks, the smell of mud and weed and rotting timber, of fish and smoke and tar. She went with the diesel driving her and the water dragging at the sides. She sailed with the hopes and fears and hates and ambitions of fifty-seven men, and from the safety in which she had lain for fourteen days into the deadly danger she would have to face for many weeks to come.

  And the leathery pilot, as he stood with his legs braced on the scrubbed timber of the bridge, was thinking of nothing but the hazards of the Delaware that he knew as thoroughly as the contours of his own face.

  ‘All right for him,’ Bowie said. ‘He’ll be taken off and away home before we stick our nose into U-boat waters. Wouldn’t I just like his job.’

  ‘You couldn’t do it,’ Brennan said. ‘You’d pile us up on a sandbank.’

  ‘If we was piled up on a sandbank for the rest of the war that’d suit me fine. I’ve had enough fighting for one lifetime.’

  ‘You never did any yet.’

  ‘I never did any!’ Bowie was indignant. ‘What you think that is?’ He exhibited a scar on the back of his right hand, which Brennan had been told about at least a score of times before. According to Bowie, it had been inflicted by a shell splinter, but nobody ever believed that it was anything worse than a gash resulting from the slip of a knife, or perhaps a cut from a broken bottle in a pub brawl. Nobody gave Bowie any credit for heroism, and it was noteworthy that he wore no wound stripe on his sleeve.

  ‘Birthmark,’ Brennan said. ‘Cover it up before anybody sees it. And give a haul on this rope, can’t you?’

  They were swinging the boats out. There was a lifeboat on each side of the bridge-deck, and one on each side of the poop. Jaggers had collected a party of seamen and gunners and had got down to the regular shore-leaving job of making the boats ready for instant use.

  ‘But don’t let’s be wanting you,’ Brennan said. ‘Sure, a lifeboat’s an awful small craft in an awful big lot of water.’ Surreptitiously he spat on his boat and rubbed his finger along its gunwale. He had no great faith in lifeboats. In a heavy sea he was afraid they would too easily capsize, even supposing you were able to get them away at all. It might be better to put your trust in one of the slatted rafts that were poised here and there about the ship, ready to slip into the water at the striking out of a pin. But it would be cold on a raft. ‘No, no,’ Brennan muttered. ‘Let’s be keeping the old ship afloat. Let’s be doing that.’

  Mr Thouless, that untiring man who believed in leaving nothing to chance, had inspected each lifeboat before sailing. He had made sure that they were fully equipped with everything that the regulations prescribed: compasses, first-aid kits, sails, oars, bailers, hatchets. . . .

  They dropped the pilot and came out of Delaware Bay, out on to the high seas, heading northward unescorted. They would join a convoy that was gathering in New York roads, and then turn eastward on the long crossing; three thousand miles of ocean, with never any relaxation of vigilance, never any moment when a torpedo might not strike home. But at present the sea was calm, the sky was clean and blue, and away on the port side was the coast-line of the American continent that had never yet felt the weight of high explosive or incendiary bombs.

  In Mr Thouless, striding with a springy rhythm back and forth on the wing of the navigating bridge, the day seemed to have injected an especial vigour. Though he would not have admitted the fact, Thouless was as near to happiness as a man of his sombre temperament could ever get. He peered down upon the long grey fore-deck of the ship, and his gaze moved on to the forecastle, and beyond that to the smooth, scarcely rippled expanse of sea that gradually merged in a curving line with the sky on the distant horizon. No other ship was visible, nothing upon the surface of the water but the glittering refraction of the frosty sun.

  In the gun-box on the wing of the bridge Seaman-gunner Brennan was standing by the Oerlikon, not moving, just gazing straight ahead of him. The Oerlikon, uncovered, but not cocked in these waters where no hostile aircraft were to be expected, was pointing almost vertically at the sky, its black metalwork gleaming dully with the sheen of oil. A steel locker just outside the gun enclosure contained a supply of ready-filled magazines, but the clamps on the locker had not been loosened. Brennan was humming softly to himself and thinking of the next meal. Behind him he could hear the mate striding to and fro, but he kept his back turned. Mr Thouless was a stickler for discipline. If a gunner was on watch he expected him to keep watch, not to go to sleep or let his gaze wander inboard.

  Brennan was surprised therefore to hear Mr Thouless apparently addressing him.

  ‘What a day! Good to be alive, eh?’

  Brennan turned cautiously and answered cautiously. ‘Yes, sir; indeed it is.’ It had never occurred to him that a man like Thouless would find any delight in being alive at all. To Brennan’s eyes the mate appeared scarcely human, a kind of machine, a fault-finding machine devoid of all human emotion. Yet here he was making the kind of remark that any ordinary person might have made, a person sensitive to such natural phenomena as rain and sunshine, ugliness and beauty, things which Brennan would have supposed made no impression on the mate’s steel-bright and efficient mind.

  Thouless also had immediately been struck by the banality of the remark, and was impatient with himself for having made it. Moreover, he had again glanced down upon the fore-deck and had seen Kline and Muller making their way towards the forecastle. The sight of the two Americans, and especially of Kline, had brought back that feeling of annoyance that he had experienced on first learning that the Rosa Dartle was to carry passengers.

  His sudden change of mood made him growl at Brennan: ‘Keep a sharp look-out, gunner. Ships have been sunk in these waters. Too many of them.’

  Brennan noticed the change of tone and grinned to himself. This was more like the real Mr Thouless. He was back to normal. Brennan felt relieved, like one who notes the passing of a brief but worrying illness in a friend.

  Kline, unaware of the resentment he was causing in the breast of Mr Thouless, was talking to Muller in his thick, snuffling, ex-pug’s voice.

  ‘That big son-of-a-bitch. There’ll be real trouble between him and me if he don’t watch out.’

  Kline had mentioned no name, but Muller was uncomfortably aware who the ‘big son-of-a-bitch’ was: Gabriel Toresen, the ship’s carpenter. Toresen was a solid, fair-haired young man, well over six feet tall, and of Anglo–Norwegian origin. Kline disliked all big men as a matter of principle, and he had soon clashed with Toresen.

  It had occurred after a session of drill on the four-inch low-angle gun under the guidance of Petty Officer Rankin. Carson had agreed that his men should help to make up a crew on the gun, and though Kline had muttered and grumbled, he had obeyed Carson’s orders to get down aft and stop belly-aching.

  ‘Belly-ache, belly-ache, belly-ache,’ Carson said. ‘What you think this is – a pleasure cruise? Get moving.’

  Kline breathed heavily through his flattened nose, but he got moving.

  The four-inch-gun deck was a raised steel platform above the poop, with a low wire fence surrounding it, and there were metal stan
ds fixed to the deck into which the shells could be pushed, nose downward, like coconuts in a coconut-shy. The gun was old, so old in fact that Brennan, while dismantling the breech mechanism, had discovered on one of the components the date 1897. Rankin said the gun was not as old as that, and that this was only a serial number, but Brennan was unconvinced. Certainly there was enough backlash in the traversing gear to make half a degree of difference to the laying; and scratched on the mounting in rather scrawling letters, painted over but still legible, was the inscription: ‘To hell with Kaiser Bill – and Little Willie.’

  When Kline looked at the gun he gave a throaty laugh. ‘Holy Santa Maria! There’s a chunk of old iron. What you do with this – throw it at a U-boat?’

  ‘All right,’ Rankin said, a little snappishly, ‘have your laugh. Then we’ll get down to it.’

  ‘Okay,’ Kline said. ‘Let’s get the fool stuff over with.’

  He fell in with the others in a single line to the rear of the gun, and Rankin began to go through the drill as it was laid down in naval orders.

  ‘Number!’

  At the third attempt they numbered correctly. They scared Rankin; he had not supposed anybody could be so dense. He wondered whether they were being deliberately uncooperative. He began to detail duties. The drill dragged on, awkward, slow, the way all drill is at first. Rankin was patient, going through it again and again, picking out the best men, the ones who might make up a crew with a leavening of his own gunners.

  He dismissed them at last. ‘All right. That’s the lot for now. We’ll have another go tomorrow.’

  ‘Damn waste of time with that iron,’ Kline muttered. He went down the ladder from the gun-deck and saw Toresen grinning at him. Kline’s head jerked up. ‘What’s so almighty funny?’

  ‘You wouldn’t know,’ Toresen said. ‘You couldn’t see that drill. I just hope we don’t have to shoot it out with a U-boat. Not with you boys on the job. I thought you Yanks were the lads for guns, but maybe this one’s too big.’

  ‘Listen, wise guy,’ Kline said viciously. ‘You’re lookin’ to get yourself hurt. Stow it. Stow it.’

  Toresen still grinned. It amused him to bait this fiery, chunky American. It was like prodding a bear with a stick. Kline would have made a good bear – a small, rugged, badtempered bear, with wide shoulders and a flattened nose.

  ‘Drill,’ Toresen said. ‘That sort of drill wouldn’t get you into the Home Guard.’

  Kline took a step towards the carpenter, threatening. Muller tugged at his arm. ‘Come away, Joe. Don’t take any notice. He’s only kidding.’

  Muller was thinking that he might have to do a lot of peacemaking before the voyage was over. Or would the trouble come to a head and finish in one fierce explosion? Muller did not like explosions of any kind.

  ‘He’d better watch that kidding,’ Kline said. But he dropped his hands to his sides. This was not the place for a showdown, not with Carson hanging around. The showdown would come, but later, later. ‘OK, son. Let’s go.’

  He went away with Muller, who, by reason of the chance that had made them cabin-mates, had become the unwilling companion of Joe Kline, ex-pug, killer, man with a fire burning in his chest.

  Toresen watched them go, grinning. Kline amused him. You touched him with your finger and he snapped at it as if he would have bitten it off. Well, let him snap. It relieved the monotony.

  ‘One of these days,’ Kline said to Muller, ‘I’ll make that big dumb-bell eat some of his own sawdust. I’ll ram it down his goddam throat. Carpenters! I never came across a carpenter yet that wasn’t wooden from the neck up – and maybe down too. No exception on this hooker.’

  *

  The sun went down in the landward sky, and night came with a cold wind from the north driving the sea against the cleaving stem of the tanker and sending little spurts of spray to damp and chill the look-out in the bows.

  By the port-bridge Oerlikon Bowie stood with hunched shoulders, the hood of his duffle-coat giving him a gnomelike appearance. He stared gloomily towards the invisible coast-line, and saw the stars glittering, but they had no beauty in Bowie’s eyes. He leaned against the covered Oerlikon and waited for the four slow hours of his watch to drag wearily away.

  *

  Captain Henderson was in his cabin, relaxing. He was sitting in an easy chair, his chewed-down pipe between his teeth, and a drawing-board resting across the arms of the chair. He was drawing a sailing-ship from memory, a square-rigger. Henderson was not sentimental about the passing of sail. He admitted that a full-rigged ship, a tea-clipper, or a schooner, was one of the most beautiful of man’s creations, and he regretted that that kind of beauty was vanishing from the sea. But Henderson had served his apprenticeship in sail, and it had been a hard and bitter apprenticeship, and he for one had not been sorry to ‘leave the sea and go into steam’. As a thing of beauty, he still loved the sailing-ship, but he had no wish to go back to it.

  He was putting the finishing touches to the bowsprit when there was a knock at the cabin door.

  ‘Come in,’ Henderson called, and Mr Thouless, cap under arm, came smartly in.

  Thouless glanced at the drawing and tightened his lips, as though he had discovered Captain Henderson pursuing some secret and reprehensible occupation.

  Henderson raised his big head with its thick mass of white hair, and saw that the mate was in one of his tense moods. There was far too much tension about Thouless altogether. The poor devil never seemed able to relax. Did he have no interests in life other than ships and the sea? It was not good for a man to be so bound up in his work.

  ‘Well, Tom,’ Henderson said. ‘What’s the trouble now? It is trouble, I suppose?’

  Mr Thouless said fiercely, bitterly, as if this were something that had been sent especially to annoy him:

  ‘One of those damned Yanks has slit his throat with a carving-knife.’

  *

  Muller could never make up his mind as to whether Able Seaman Francini had done it on purpose. He knew only that Francini had been scared, that he had had no wish to go to Russia with Carson’s draft, but had wanted to stay at home in New York, the city in which he had been born and in which he would have liked eventually to die.

  ‘I been torpedoed once,’ Francini said. ‘That’s one time too many for Tony.’ He rolled his eyes, showing the whites. ‘And now it’s going to be bad again, huh? It’s going to be a big flame maybe. Tony don’t like that, not one bit, he don’t.’

  Francini was scared, sure enough. Muller was scared too, but with him there was no thought of trying to back out. This was the path he had chosen and he would tread it to the end, into whatever horror it might lead him. But Francini was different, and that was why Muller could never be sure that it had really been an accident. Kline said there was no accident about it, that Francini had worked the whole thing out; but still Muller was not sure. Would a man, any man, take that way out? Muller did not know. He knew only what he had seen: the knife and the blood and Francini screaming, and soon not screaming any more.

  They were in the crew’s mess-room – he and Kline and Carson and Francini. They fed in there with the Rosa Dartle’s crew, and it was there that Francini boasted that he could swallow a sword.

  ‘I do it all the time, one time. In a circus. Antonio Francini – sword-swallower. Me.’

  ‘Damn liar,’ Kline said. ‘You’re one big Wop liar. You couldn’t swallow a carving-knife.’

  The term ‘Wop’ did not please Francini. If Kline had been less tough he might have made something of it. But all he said was: ‘I can swallow any carving-knife ever was made.’

  It was Jaggers who went to fetch the knife from the galley. Muller thought Francini would climb down then. It was a big knife, long and sharp – razor-sharp.

  ‘Here you are,’ Jaggers said. ‘Here’s a nice tasty mouthful of cold steel for you. Make a meal out of that.’ And Jaggers laughed nastily and threw the knife down on the table, where it lay under the electric light,
shining with the bright sheen of honed steel. Jaggers sat down, nursing his belly. ‘Best-quality Sheffield blade. None better. Taste it.’ And he laughed again.

  It was warm in the mess-room, stinking, smoky, with the black-out fug, deadlights clamped down over the portholes. There was silence, only the creak of timbers audible; that, and the engine thump and the rattle of a tin mug as the ship rolled. The other men stared at Francini and waited. And Francini moistened his lips with his tongue and looked at the knife, and a bead of sweat formed on his forehead, and he knew what he had to do.

  He picked up the knife and stood up, balancing it in his hand as if testing its weight. He put his head back, right back as far as it would go, and opened his mouth. The blade of the knife went down into his throat.

  ‘By God, he’s doing it,’ Jaggers said.

  And then only the handle was visible, the bone handle, mottled, with a burn mark that it had acquired in falling on the galley stove.

  There was Francini with his head back and the knife handle sticking up out of his mouth. Muller felt sick. He wanted Francini to take the knife out. Enough was enough. He had made his point.

  And then the ship rolled, and Francini lurched against the bulkhead, and the knife came out with blood on the blade. And Francini began to scream. And the blood bubbled up out of his mouth, the scarlet blood. And he stopped screaming suddenly. He stopped screaming, and stared at the carving-knife with the red blood staining it.

  Chapter Three – THE WESTERN OCEAN

  They weighed anchor and left New York in convoy with another seaman in place of Francini, a stolid, soft-spoken Cape Codder.

  ‘That Francini,’ Kline said to Muller, ‘he slipped out of it pretty smart. Smart guy all right. He’ll have a sore throat, but he don’t have to sail in no Limey tanker. Oh, sure, he was smart.’

  ‘You think he really did it on purpose?’ Muller said. It was hard to believe that any man would thrust a knife down his throat to avoid unpleasant service. Surely the cure was worse than the disease. But Kline apparently had no doubts about the matter.