Читать книгу The Ship - Cecil Louis Troughton Smith - Страница 13

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The enemy withdrew ...

ALL down the line of Italian cruisers ran a sparkle of light, bright yellow flashes competing with faint success against the sunlight. Leading Seaman Alfred Lightfoot saw the flashes in the cruiser upon which he was training his rangefinder; he saw them double, because the rangefinder presented two images of the cruiser, just overlapping. That double image was something like what he had seen once or twice halfway through a binge, after the seventh drink or so. For a few minutes then the lights behind the bar, and the barmaid’s face, duplicated themselves in just the same fashion, just as substantially, so that one could swear that the girl had two faces, one overlapping the other by half, and that each electric bulb had another hung beside it.

Lightfoot twirled the controlling screws of the rangefinder, and the two images moved into each other; in the same way, when Lightfoot was getting drunk, he could by an effort make the two images of the barmaid’s face run together again, so that they would click into sharp unity instead of being hazy and aureoled with light. He read off the scale of the rangefinder.

“Ringe one-seven-double-Ho,” he announced, his Cockney twang flavouring the dry tone in which he had been trained to make his statements; the vowel sound of the word “range” was exactly the same as he would have used in the word “rind.”

The sharp image at which he was peering was obscure again at once; two shadowy cruisers were replacing the single one—there were two red-white-and-green flags flying aft, a muddled double mass of funnels. With his Cockney quickness of thought Lightfoot could, if he had wanted to, have drawn the obvious conclusion that the two squadrons were approaching each other rapidly, and he could from there have gone on to the next deduction, which was that in a very few seconds they would be pounding each other to pieces. But Lightfoot did not trouble to think in that fashion. Long ago he had told himself fatalistically that if a shell had his name on it he would cop it, and from no other shell. His job was to take ranges quickly and exactly; that was to be his contribution to the perfect whole which was the fighting ship, and he was set upon doing that without distraction. Just once or twice when he had strayed into self-analysis Lightfoot had felt a little pleased with himself at having attained this fatalistic Nirvana, but it is hard to apportion the credit for it—some of it was undoubtedly due to Lightfoot himself, but some also to the system under which he had been trained; some to the Captain for his particular application of that system; and possibly some to Mussolini himself, who had given Lightfoot a cause in which to fight whose justice was so clearly apparent.

Lightfoot twisted the regulating screws again to bring the images together. It was twenty-one seconds since he had seen the flashes of the guns of the cruiser at which he was pointing, and Lightfoot had already forgotten them, so little impression had they made upon him. And during those twenty-one seconds the eight-inch shells had been hurtling towards Artemis, at a speed through the air of more than a mile in two seconds because their path was curved, reaching far up into the upper atmosphere, higher than the highest Alps into the freezing stratosphere before plunging down again towards their target. Lightfoot heard a sudden noise as of rushing water and of tearing of sheets, and then the field of his rangefinder was blotted out in an immense upheaval of water as the nearest shell of the broadside pitched close beside starboard bow of Artemis. Twenty tons of water, yellowed slightly by the high explosive, came tumbling on board, deluging the upper works, flooding over Lightfoot’s rangefinder.

“Ringe hobscured,” said Lightfoot.

He reached to sweep the lenses clear, and darkness gave way to light again as he stared into the instrument. For a moment he was still nonplussed, so different was the picture he saw in it from what he had seen just before. The images were double, but the silhouettes were entirely changed, narrow instead of broad, and the two flecks of colour, the double images of the Italian flag, were right in the middle of each silhouette instead of aft of them. Lightfoot’s trained reactions were as quick as his mind; his fingers were spinning the screws round in the opposite direction at the same moment as he realized that the Eyeties had turned their sterns towards the British and were heading for the horizon as fast as they could go.

The spectacle astonished him; the surprise of it broke through his professional calm in a way in which the prospect of danger quite failed to do.

“Coo!” said Lightfoot; the exclamation (although Lightfoot did not know it) was a shortening of “Coo blimey,” itself a corruption of “God blind me.”

“Coo!” And then instantly training and professional pride mastered him again, and he brought the images together with a deft twirl of the screws: “Ringe one-nine-double-Ho.”

Paymaster Sub-lieutenant James Jerningham saw the Italian ships turn away, and he gravely noted the time upon his pad. One of his duties was to keep a record of any action in which the ship was engaged, because experience had proved that after an action, even with the help of the ship’s plot, which was kept up to date in the chartroom, and with the help of the various logs kept in different parts of the ship—signal logs, engine-room logs, and so on—it was difficult for anyone to remember the exact order of events as they had occurred. And reports had to be written, and the lessons of the action digested, if only for the benefit of the vast fleet in all the oceans of the world anxious to improve its professional knowledge.

The Captain slid down from his stool and stretched himself; Jerningham could tell just from his actions that he was relieved at not having to sit for a while—the lucky devil did not know that he was well off. Jerningham’s feet ached with standing, and he would have given something substantial in exchange for the chance to sit down. The Captain walked briskly up and down for a while, five paces aft and five paces forward; the bridge was too small and too crowded with officers and instruments to allow of a longer walk. And even during that five-pace walk the Captain kept shooting glances round him, at signallers and flagship and lookouts, so as to maintain himself in instant readiness for action.

It might be said that while the ship was at sea the Captain never went more than five paces from his stool; at night he lay on an air mattress laid on the steel deck with a blanket over him, or a tarpaulin when it rained. Jerningham had known him to sleep for as much as four hours at a stretch like that, with the rain rattling down upon him, a fold of the stiff tarpaulin keeping the rain from actually falling on his face. It was marvellous that any man could sleep in those conditions; it was marvellous that any man bearing that load of responsibility could sleep at all; but, that being granted, it was also marvellous that a man once asleep could rouse himself so instantly to action. At a touch on his shoulder the Captain would raise his head to hear a report and would issue his orders without a moment in which to recover himself.

The Captain was tough both mentally and physically; hard, like steel—the pick of five hundred picked men, Jerningham reminded himself. And no man could last long in command of a light cruiser in the Mediterranean if he were not tough. Yet toughness was only one essential requisite in the make-up of a cruiser captain. He had to be a man of the most sensitive and delicate reflexes, too, ready to react instantly to any stimulus. Mere vulgar physical courage was common enough, thought Jerningham regretfully, even if he did not possess it himself; but in the Captain’s case it had to be combined with everything else, with moral courage, with the widest technical knowledge, with flexibility of mind and rapidity of thought and physical endurance—all this merely to command the ship in action, and that was only part of it. Before the ship could be brought into action it had to be made into an efficient fighting unit. Six hundred officers and men had to be trained to their work, and fitted into the intricate scheme of organization as complex as any jigsaw puzzle, and, once trained and organized, had to be maintained at fighting pitch. There were plenty of men who made reputations by successfully managing a big department store; managing a big ship-of-war was as great an achievement, even if not greater.

Jerningham, with nearly three years of experience, knew a great deal about the Navy now, and yet his temperament and his early life and his duties in the ship still enabled him to look on the service dispassionately as a disinterested observer. He knew better than anyone else in the ship’s company how little work the Captain seemed to do when it came to routine business, how freely he delegated his power, and having delegated it, how cheerfully he trusted his subordinates, with none of those afterthoughts and fussinesses which Jerningham had seen in city offices. That was partly moral courage, of course, again—the ability to abide by a decision once having made it. But partly it was the result of the man’s own ability. His judgment was so sound, his sense of justice so exact, his foresight so keen, that everyone could rely on him. Jerningham suspected that there might be ships whose captains had not these advantages and who yet were not plagued with detail because officers and men united in keeping detail from them, knowing that the decisions uttered would not be of help. Those would be unhappy ships. But the kind of captain under which he served was also not plagued with detail, because officers and men knew that when they should appeal to him the decisions that would be handed down to them would be correct, human, intelligent. In that case officers and men went on cheerfully working out their own destiny, secure in the knowledge that there was an ability greater than their own ready to help them should it become necessary. That would mean a happy, efficient ship like Artemis.

Jerningham’s envy of the Captain’s capacity flared out anew as he thought about all this. It was a most remarkable sensation for Jerningham to feel that someone was a better man than he—Jerningham’s sublime egoism of pre-war days had survived uncounted set-backs. Lost games of tennis or golf, failure to convince an advertising manager that the copy laid before him was ideal for its purpose, could be discounted on the grounds of their relative unimportance, or because of bad luck, or the mental blindness of the advertising manager. In this case there was no excuse of that sort to be found. Jerningham had never yet met an advertising manager whose work he did not think he could do better himself; the same applied to office heads—and to husbands. But Jerningham had to admit to himself that the Captain was better fitted than he was to command a light cruiser, and it was no mitigation that he did not want to command a light cruiser.

To recover his self-respect he called back into his mind again the fact that he had been quicker than the Captain in the identification of the Italian cruisers, and he went on to tell himself that the Captain would not stand a chance in competition with him for the affections of the young women of his set, with—not Dora Darby (Jerningham’s mind shied away from that subject hastily)—but with Dorothy Clough or Cicely French, say. That was a comforting line of thought. The Captain might be the finest light cruiser captain, actual or potential, on the Seven Seas—Jerningham thought he was—but he was not to compare with Jerningham in anything else, in the social graces, or in appreciation of art or literature. The man had probably never seen beauty in anything. And it was quite laughable to think of him trying to woo Cicely French the way Jerningham had, finding her in a tantrum of temper, and subtly coaxing her out of it with womanish sympathy, and playing deftly on her reaction to win her regard, and telepathically noting the play of her mood so as to seize the right moment for the final advance. The very thought of the Captain trying to do anything like that made Jerningham smile through all his misery as he met the Captain’s eye.

The Captain smiled back, and stopped in his walk at Jerningham’s side.

“Was it a surprise to you, their running away like that?” asked the Captain.

Jerningham had to think swiftly to get himself back on board Artemis today from a Paddington flat three years ago.

“No, sir,” he said. “Not very much.”

That was the truth, inasmuch as he had had no preconceived tactical theories so as to be surprised at all.

“It may be just a trick to get us away from the convoy,” said the Captain. “Then their planes would have a chance. But I don’t think so.”

“No, sir?” said Jerningham.

“There’s something bigger than cruisers out today, I fancy. They may be trying to lead us into a trap.”

The Captain’s eye was still everywhere. He saw at that moment, and Jerningham’s glance following him saw too, the flagship leading round in a sixteen-point turn.

“Starboard fifteen,” said the Navigating Lieutenant, and the deck canted hugely as Artemis followed her next ahead round. She plunged deeply half a dozen times as she crashed across the stern waves thrown up first by her predecessors and then by herself, and white water foamed across her forecastle.

“Flagship’s signalling to convoy, sir,” said the Chief Yeoman of Signals, “ ‘Resume previous course.’ ”

“We’re staying between the Eyeties and the convoy,” remarked the Captain. “And every minute brings us nearer to Malta.”

“Yes, sir,” said Jerningham. He cast frantically about in his mind for some contribution to make to this conversation other than “Yes, sir,” and “No, sir.” He wanted to appear bright.

“And night is coming,” said Jerningham, grasping desperately at inspiration.

“Yes,” said the Captain. “The Eyeties are losing time. The most valuable asset they have, and they’re squandering it.”

Jerningham looked at the satanic eyebrows drawing together over the curved nose, the full lips compressed into a gash, and his telepathic mind told him how the Captain was thinking to himself what he would do if he commanded the Italian squadron, the resolution with which he would come plunging down into battle. And then the eyebrows separated again, and the lips softened into a smile.

“The commonest mistake to make in war,” said the Captain, “is to think that because a certain course seems to you to be the best for the enemy, that is the course he will take. He may not think it the best, or there may be some reason against it which you don’t know about.”

“That’s true, sir,” said Jerningham. It was not an aspect of war he had ever thought about before; most of his thoughts in action were usually taken up by wondering what his own personal fate would be.

Ordinary Seaman Whipple was climbing the difficult ladder to the crow’s nest to relieve the lookout there. The Captain allowed himself to watch the change-over being effected, and Jerningham saw him put back his head and inflate his chest to hail the masthead, and then he relaxed again with the words unspoken.

“And the next commonest mistake,” grinned the Captain, “is to give unnecessary orders. Whipple up there will keep a sharp lookout without my telling him. He knows that’s what he’s there for.”

Jerningham gaped at him, wordless now despite his efforts to appear bright. This was an aspect of the Captain’s character which he had never seen before, this courteous gentleman with his smiling common sense and insight into character. It crossed Jerningham’s mind, insanely at that moment, that perhaps the Captain after all might be able to make some progress with Cicely French if he wanted to.