Читать книгу The Ship - Cecil Louis Troughton Smith - Страница 10
ОглавлениеFrom the Captain’s Report:
... an Italian force of two heavy cruisers of the Bolzano type and four light cruisers of the Cadorna type and the Bande Nere type ...
ANOTHER signal ran to the masthead of the flagship, fluttered to await acknowledgment, and then descended.
“Starboard ten,” said the Captain, with the Navigating Lieutenant repeating the order. “Midships.”
The squadron now was far ahead of the convoy, and lying a little way distant from a straight line drawn from the convoy astern to the telltale smoke ahead, ready at a moment’s notice, that was to say, to interpose as might be necessary either with a smoke screen or with gunfire. Italians and British were heading directly for each other now at a combined speed of more than fifty miles an hour. It could not be long before they would sight each other—already the smoke was as thick and dense as ever it would be.
The masthead voice tube buzzed.
“Forebridge,” said Jerningham, answering it, and then he turned to yell the message to the Captain. “Ships in sight!”
As Ordinary Seaman Quimsby’s binoculars picked out more details he elaborated his reports with Jerningham relaying them.
“Six big ships!” yelled Jerningham. “Six destroyers. Two leading ships look like battleships. Might be heavy cruisers. Others are light cruisers.”
The crow’s nest where Quimsby swayed and circled above the bridge was twenty feet higher than the bridge itself. It was an easy calculation that Quimsby’s horizon lay four miles beyond the Captain’s, and that in four minutes or a little more the Italians would be in sight from the bridge. In four minutes they shot up suddenly over the curve of the world, climbing over it with astonishing rapidity. Visibility was at its maximum; they made hard, sharp silhouettes against the blue and grey background, not quite bows on to the British squadron, the ships ahead not quite masking the ships astern. Jerningham heard the voice of the rangetaker begin its chant, like a priest of some strange religion reciting a strange liturgy.
“Range two-one-O. Range two-O-five—Range two-double-O.”
There were other voices, other sounds, simultaneously. The ship was rushing towards a great moment; every cell in her was functioning at full capacity.
“Port fifteen,” said the Captain, and Artemis heeled over as she executed the sudden turn. “Revolutions for twenty-seven knots.”
The squadron had turned into line ahead, and was working up to full speed to head off the Italians should it become necessary. As Jerningham watched the Italian ships he saw the leader turn sharply to starboard, revealing her profile; some seconds later the next ship turned to follow her, and then the next, and the next. Jerningham was reminded of some advertising display or other in a shop window. The vicious bad temper which Dora Darby’s letter had aroused still endured within him, keying him up. The gap between imaginative fear and sublime courage, in a highly strung person, is only a small one; the residuum of bad temper sufficed to push Jerningham into boldness. He saw those six sharp profiles; the wind, blowing from the British to the Italians, kept them clear of smoke, unsoftened and undisguised. Jerningham went back through his memory, to those hours spent in his cabin of careful study of the pictured profiles of hostile ships, study carried out in a mood of desperate despair, when he knew himself to be a coward but was determined to be a coward deficient in nothing. He had the splendid memory which goes with a vivid pictorial imagination, and he could recall the very pages on which he had seen those profiles, the very print beneath them. He stepped forward to the Captain’s side.
“The two leading ships are Bolzanos, sir,” he said. “Nine thousand tons, eight eight-inch, thirty-two knots.”
“You’re sure?” asked the Captain mildly. “Aren’t they—”
“No, sir,” said Jerningham with un-self-conscious certainty. “And the last three light cruisers look like Bande Neres. I don’t know about the first one, though, sir. She’s like nothing we’ve been told about. I suppose she’s the new one, Cadorna, and the Intelligence people didn’t get her profile right.”
“I expect you’re right,” said the Captain. He had turned a little on his stool to look at Jerningham; he was surprised to see his secretary thus self-assured and well poised, for the Captain had seen his secretary in action before and had struggled against the suspicion that Jerningham had not all the control over his emotions which was desirable in the British Navy. But the Captain had learned to control his own emotions, and not the slightest hint of his surprise appeared in his expression or his voice.
“I think I am, sir,” said Jerningham, dropping back again.
In the Long Acre office he had had the ideal secretary, Miss Horniman, always at hand, always acquainted with the latest development, ready to remind him of the appointment he had forgotten or the copy he had to deliver, sympathetic when his head ached in the morning, and wooden-faced and unassuming when she put forward to him an idea which he had not been able to produce, content that her boss should receive the credit that was rightfully hers. Jerningham always modelled his behaviour towards the Captain on Miss Horniman’s behaviour towards him. The Captain might possibly have been wrong in his report of what he had seen if his secretary had not put him right, and the Captain would have the credit and the secretary would not, but that was the destiny, the proper fate of captains’ secretaries. He could grin to himself about that; the irony and incongruity of it all appealed to his particular sense of humour.
The Captain was a Captain R.N., thought Jerningham, only a few grades lower than God; out of five hundred who started as naval cadets only one man on the average ever reached that lofty rank—he was a man picked out of five hundred, with War College training and the Senior Officers’ course behind him, but here was something his secretary could do better than he. It was a very considerable help to think about that; it saved Jerningham from some of the feeling of intense inferiority which plagued him.
But he respected the Captain none the less, admired him none the less. Jerningham looked at him in profile, with his glasses trained out to starboard on the Italian squadron. Those black eyebrows were turned up the tiniest trifle at the corners, giving him a faintly Mephistophelean appearance. It was a slightly fleshy face; the big mouth with its thick lips might well have been coarse if it had not been firmly compressed and helped out by the fine big chin. There was something of the artist about the long fingers which held the glasses, and the wrists were slender although muscular. Jerningham suddenly realized that the Captain was a slender man—he had always thought of him as big, powerful, and muscular. It was a surprise to him; the explanation must be that the Captain must have so much personality and force of character that anyone talking to him automatically credited him with physical strength.
It made more piquant still the sensation of discovering that the Captain had been in doubt of the identification of those Italian cruisers. Otherwise it would have been almost insufferable to see the steady matter-of-fact way in which the Captain looked across at the heavy odds opposed to him, the inhuman coolness with which he treated the situation, as if he were a spectator and not a participant, as if—what was certainly the case, for that matter—as if his professional interest in the tactics of the forthcoming battle, and his curiosity regarding what was going to happen, left him without a thought regarding his own personal danger.
Jerningham felt intense envy of the Captain’s natural gifts. It was an envy which blended with, and fed, the fires of the jealousy which Dora Darby’s letter had roused in him.
