He heard the old man shuffling into the wheelhouse where the second mate was on duty, but he did not look round again.
It was Bristow who, a few days later, brought the news to the gunners’ mess. Bristow was gasping with excitement.
‘He’s had a stroke. Captain Peterson’s had a stroke. He’s paralysed.’
Keeton had been lying on his bunk reading a book. He sat up sharply and struck his head on the alarm-bell that was fixed to the bulkhead just above him. The bell emitted a faint note of protest like the tiny ghost of a call to action.
‘A stroke! Are you sure?’
‘That’s what Smith says. And he should know. He found him.’
The gunners were all crowding round Bristow, who was obviously enjoying his role as the bearer of ill tidings.
‘What did Smith do?’
Bristow grinned. ‘Yelled bloody murder, I’d say. He thought the Old Man had kicked the bucket.’
‘He might as well have kicked it if he’s paralysed,’ Keeton said. ‘He’s not going to be a lot more use to this ship.’
‘You’re right there. Mr Rains will have to take over, and we all know what he’s like.’
A youth with a fiery crop of pimples wanted to know what exactly a stroke was.
‘It’s a rush of blood to the head,’ Bristow said.
‘You’ll get a rush of blood to your head. I want a straight answer.’
‘And you shall have it, sonny boy. Now, say you burst a blood vessel in the brain, what happens? It bitches up the nervous system and things don’t work right any more. That’s a stroke.’
‘Is that the truth?’
‘It’s what the steward told me, and he looked it up in a book. That’s about all they know of medical treatment in a ship like this here — what they read in a book. If you need an operation the cook does it with his saw and his carving knife while the mate reads out the instructions.’
Petty Officer Hagan came into the messroom with a worried expression on his square face. They all turned and looked at him.
‘You heard the news, P.O.?’
‘I’ve heard it,’ Hagan said. ‘It’s all over the ship.’ He slumped down on a chair. ‘Here’s a fine how-do-you-do. Mr Rains in command and Mr Jones and Mr Wall to help him.’
‘As useless a set of bastards as ever you saw,’ Bristow said.
‘You can cut that out,’ Hagan said sharply. ‘They’re ship’s officers, whether or no.’
Bristow shrugged. ‘Well, all I’m saying is I hope we don’t get into any trouble with that shower in charge, that’s all.’
‘We’re not going to get into any trouble.’
‘I hope not. But you never know. At sea anything can happen.’
Keeton got down from his bunk and went to the porthole. He stared out at an expanse of water over which night was beginning to cast its mantle. Bristow was right. What could you know of the events of the coming day, even of the next hour? At sea anything could happen. Anything.
Chapter Two
Encounter
There was a ring of haze round the sun. The air was heavy and oppressive. The metal of the ship dripped with moisture like the sweating skin of a sick man. The sea looked dull and leaden, and there was no wind to ruffle its surface, no breath of air to cool the gunners as they toiled on the 4-inch under the watchful eye of Petty Officer Hagan.
Stripped to the waist, Keeton added his weight to the cleaning-rod. The rod was stuck, the brush half-way up the barrel like a sweep’s brush that had encountered some obstacle in a chimney.
‘Come along there,’ Hagan said peevishly. ‘What’s holding you? Come on you lousy weaklings. Push it through, can’t you?’
Keeton could feel Bristow’s breath fanning the back of his neck. Bristow was making sweat by the gallon, and his freckled skin was glowing so brightly that it looked as though it would certainly have caught fire if there had not been so much moisture quenching it.
‘Damn him!’ Bristow muttered. ‘He wants to kill us, that’s what. Damn his eyes!’
Hagan had good hearing. ‘It’ll take more than a bit of honest work to kill you, my son. It won’t do you no harm to sweat some of that fat off.’
‘I’d like to make him sweat,’ Bristow panted. ‘Why don’t he lend a hand hisself, the lazy—’
Hagan tapped Bristow on the shoulder, and it was no light touch. ‘If you was in the real navy you’d know the answer to that one. And you’d realize what a soft number you’ve got on board this ship. But I doubt they wouldn’t take an article like you in the real navy. They’re particular. In the real navy they want real men.’
‘Here we go again,’ Bristow said. ‘It’s a flaming pity he didn’t stay in the real navy; then we wouldn’t have had to put up with him.’
Hagan had moved to the muzzle of the gun and was out of earshot.
‘Now‚’ Bristow grunted. ‘Heave!’
The brush emerged suddenly from the muzzle and struck Petty Officer Hagan full on the chest. He was caught off balance and sat down heavily, a black smudge of oil staining his white shirt.
‘Sorry, P.O.‚’ Bristow said. ‘Didn’t see you was standing there. It sort of slipped.’
Hagan got up slowly and deliberately. He looked at the oil stain on his shirt and he looked at Bristow. He seemed to be having difficulty with his breathing.
‘So it slipped, did it? Well, by heaven I’ll make sure it don’t slip like that again. You think you can play tricks with me, do you? OK, so we’ll see about that. Now I really will make you sweat; I’ll make you sweat blood, d’you hear? We’ll have gun-drill and gun-drill and then more gun-drill. I’ll make sailors of you yet, so help me.’
Hagan meant what he said. He kept them at it for an hour without respite, and by the time he had finished with them the sun had disappeared completely; clouds had banked up in the sky and the sea had turned darker. Nor was the ocean any longer still; although there was yet no wind, the waters had begun to stir like a sleeping man troubled by evil dreams. There was a long, oily swell, and the Valparaiso, catching the uneasy feeling that was in the air, began to lose her steady, even motion and to roll first one way and then the other. Beyond the stern, where the dull grey barrel of the gun was pointing, the flailing propeller churned up foam and a thousand eddies streamed away from the rudder along the white path of the wake to be lost in the distance and the immensity of the ocean.
‘Weather coming‚’ Bristow said.
Hagan looked up at the sky and down at the sea, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. ‘Bad weather. I heard the glass was falling. If we get a typhoon it won’t be pleasant, not pleasant at all.’
‘It’s not the season for typhoons‚ is it?’ Keeton said.
Memories of geography lessons came back into his mind, of diagrams drawn on a blackboard. For him geography had always been associated with the smell of chalk, with coloured maps and line shading. The oceans had been wide areas of different shades of blue according to the depth; but when you really came to them they were not like that at all; there was nothing in an atlas to indicate the true character of the sea, its moods, its storms, its misleading calms, its treachery. Now to Keeton the sea would always mean such things as night watches in the dark misery of driving rain, the sound of wind in a ship’s rigging that was the most mournful song in the world and the cold grey of the dawn creeping over the horizon. And these things you could not learn from an atlas.
‘It’s the wrong area too‚’ he said.
Hagan looked at Keeton with a certain distaste. ‘So you know it all then? Maybe you’ve been in these waters before?’
Keeton shook his head and told himself that he should have had the sense not to speak out of turn. A man like Hagan, a man with goodness knows how many years of service in the Royal Navy, could not be expected to take kindly to correction from a seaman-gunner.
‘No. It’s only what I was taught.’
‘School learning!’ Hagan sounded contemptuous. He looked as though he would have liked to spit but hesitated to foul the deck. ‘They’ll teach you anything at school; but what do they know? Wrong time, wrong area — it don’t make that much difference.’ He snapped his fingers. ‘If the glass goes down far enough and the wind blows strong enough, that’s a typhoon. Get me?’
‘I get you‚’ Keeton said. Perhaps the petty officer was right anyway. You had book learning and you had experience; but it was the experience that really counted.
‘All right then‚’ Hagan said. ‘You lot can knock off now.’
They went away from the gun-deck, leaving only the duty watch. The sky was overcast and the sea was troubled; but there was no wind — yet.