Surgeon at Sea

I spotted her handbag wedged down the side of the bunk, opened it, and found one of her visiting cards. It bore an address in the Palermo district, which I thought was somewhere on the other side of Buenos Aires.

'All right,' I said, slipping my arm under her shoulders. 'We're going for a walk.'

The gangway quartermaster gave me a grin.

'Lovely grub, eh, Doctor?' he said. He winked and smacked his lips, in case I had missed the point of his remark.

'Benson,' I said sternly. 'I need about two hundred pesos. I should be obliged if you would lend it to me, if you have it. I see no prospect of repaying you until we return home, but if you refuse I shall give you hell should you happen to fall sick on the voyage back. Thank you.'

We stumbled down the gangway together, Ella grasping my collar and groaning. After picking our way over the railway lines and bollards on the quay we reached the little office of the dock police by the gate. I gave the policeman ten pesos and asked him to call a taxi; twenty minutes later we were bumping along the dirty road beside the Frigorifico, Ella already asleep and snoring on my shoulder.

The cab stopped outside a tall block of flats several miles from the ship. I gave Ella a shake, and she woke up with a start.

'You're home,' I said. 'End of the line.'

'Oh God, I feel horrible.'

'So do I.'

'Take me in…Please!'

'Can't you make it yourself?'

She shook her head.

'Oh, all right then.'

I helped her out of the cab, making signs to the driver to wait. We went into a small hall, which contained a staircase and an automatic lift. As I opened the lift doors Ella leant heavily on my shoulder and burst into tears.

She told me, through sobs, she lived in number seventeen, on the third floor; the key was in her handbag. I took her up to her own door and opened it. At that moment her knees gave way. She began to slide slowly down the doorpost.

'The room opposite,' she muttered. 'For God's sake help me in.'

I supported her across the hallway and into the room opposite the flat door. I turned on the light with my free hand, and found I was in her bedroom.

'Put your arm round my neck,' I commanded. She obeyed, and I lifted her up, laying her on the bed heavily.

'All right,' I said. 'You can unclasp my neck now.'

I heard a noise behind me and turned. Standing in the doorway was a tall, stern, greying gentleman with a stiff moustache and a military eye, dressed in a yellow silk dressing-gown. Behind him was a timid, sandy, becrackered woman in a faded housecoat.

'I've a damn good mind to horsewhip you,' the grey gentleman said decisively.

Now look here, I say…' I began.

'I might tell you I consider you an unmitigated cad. I've no idea what your upbringing is, but I don't imagine it's very savoury. If I were a few years younger I'd give you a good hiding with my bare fists. A young puppy like you needs teaching a good lesson.'

'Be careful, Charles,' the woman said nervously. 'You know what you did to the Rolleston boy.'

Charles twitched his muscles under his dressing-gown. Ella seemed to have Bulldog Drummond for a father.

'I should never have let her go on that damn ship,' he said bitterly. 'I believed at least the officers would be gentlemen. I was mistaken.'

'Mind your temper, Charles,' the woman added timidly, covering her eyes with her hands.

Now, look here,' I said angrily. 'I assure you I have had nothing to do with your daughter…'

Charles snorted. 'Pray, how do you explain that lipstick all over your shirt? A disgusting exhibition! By God, I'm not at all certain I shan't horsewhip you after all…'

'Charles, Charles!'

'You have got quite the wrong end of the stick..

Charles by now had time to look at me carefully and find I was much smaller than he was. He advanced, going red in the face.

'Put them up, you young hound!' he growled.

There was nothing for it. I threw one of Ella's pillows at him, sidestepped quickly, and dashed for the door. I shot into the lift, leaped for the taxi like a survivor grasping for a lifeboat, and drove back to the ship, looking nervously through the back window at every turn for cars bearing greying gentlemen in silk dressing-gowns, who were anxious to relieve the strangling monotony of Buenos Aires' social life by avenging the honour of their daughters. And when I got back I found Trail had recovered sufficiently to climb into my bunk.

Chapter Sixteen

I spent the rest of our time in Buenos Aires walking the broad, criss-crossed, sun-drenched streets looking for a cheap watch. I kept out of the bars, and if I thought a woman looked at me I jumped.

The momentum that had carried us headlong into the pleasures of South America had expended itself by the end of the dance; afterwards our lives settled into the unexciting routine of a ship in port. Every morning I read carefully through the English _Buenos Aires Standard,_ had a cup of tea with Hornbeam, and strolled round the active decks; in the afternoon I filled my cabin with the last squirts of our D.D.T. spray and slept soundly until tea, in defiance of the rattling winch just beyond my head. Now and then I picked up _War and Peace,_ but the freezing plains of Russia seemed so fantastic I killed a few cockroaches with it and finally put the books away for the voyage home.

In the evening, when the sun had gone down and a breeze sometimes blew off the River Plate to refresh our decks, we sat in Hornbeam's cabin with a case of tinned beer flaying sober games of bridge or liar-dice. I felt that I had been living alongside the wharf in Buenos Aires for a lifetime, and I sometimes stared at the familiar angles of my cabin in disbelief that they had ever been softened with the shadows of an English winter's day. When I told the others this one evening Hornbeam said: 'You'd get used to living in Hell, Doc, if we sailed there. All these places are the same, anyway.' He lay on his bunk half-naked, fanning himself with a copy of the _Shipping World._ 'They're hot and sweaty, and full of blokes ready to cut your throat for tuppence. It's the same out East and on the African coast. There's no more romance at sea than there is round Aldgate tube station.'

'When are we leaving for home?' I asked.

He shrugged his shoulders. 'I couldn't say. Maybe a week, maybe two. It depends how the cargo goes in. Once you're in port the wharfies have got you, whether it's in Cardiff or Calcutta. I heard from the agent to-day the boys might be cooking up a strike. That would fix us, right enough.'

'I wouldn't mind a pint of old English wallop out of the barrel just now,' Archer said seriously. 'Or a bit of backchat with a Liverpool barmaid. You can have too much of these high-pressure floozies out here.'

We sat looking miserably into our beer glasses, all suddenly homesick.

'I reckon I ought to have married and settled down,' Hornbeam continued. 'I nearly did once. I'm still engaged to her, if it comes to that. She's in Sydney. Sends me letters and sweets and things. I see her about once every two years.'

'I should have stuck to selling refrigerators,' Archer said to me. 'I did it for a bit after the war, but I had to give it up. Your money doesn't go anywhere ashore these days.'

'You fellows don't know how well off you are in the Merchant Navy,' I told him.

'The Merchant Navy!' Hornbeam said, folding his hands on his bare stomach reflectively. 'It's a queer institution. A cross between Fred Karno's army and a crowd of blokes trying to do a job of work.'

'There's no security at sea,' Archer added gloomily.

'Maybe it's better than sitting on your fanny in an office till you drop dead,' Hornbeam said. 'Pictures every Saturday night and Margate for a fortnight in summer. Drive me up the pole, that would.'

'Margate's all right,' Trail remarked, joining the conversation. 'I knew a girl who lived there once. Her father ran a shooting-alley in Dreamland.'

Chapter Seventeen

It was a fortnight before we sailed. A quiver of excitement ran through the ship with the fresh vibrations of the engines. The deckhands ambled about their work singing-not sea-shanties, because they heard those only occasionally, on the pictures, but anything they knew from 'She'll Be Coming Round the Mountain,' to 'Rock of Ages.'