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.
It began to rain late in the afternoon. At first it was a light rain that merely damped the metal of the 4-inch and dulled the polished mechanism of the breech. The two sailors on watch pulled a canvas cover over the breech and another over the muzzle.
The rain fell faster, pitting the surface of the ocean and pattering on the ship’s decks. A wind began to blow, pushing the rain before it, and the sailors huddled for shelter in the lee of the gun. The sky was darker; black clouds covered it and visibility contracted to a smaller circle round the ship; to two thousand yards, perhaps no more than a thousand.
The sailors, huddled in oilskins in the meagre shelter of the gun, were making no real attempt at keeping a lookout; they were waiting with a damp, lugubrious resignation for the remaining hours of the watch to drift away.
No one saw the submarine break surface; perhaps it had not been submerged. It was noticed first from the bridge as a darker outline in the enveloping murk, a shape that appeared and vanished and appeared again as the rain swept across like a curtain ruffled by the wind. It was a long, low silhouette on the starboard quarter, a kind of blemish on the surface, an eruption that the rain should have washed away and did not. There was no apparent movement in it; it might have been a rock or a derelict or something that the imagination had conjured out of nothing.
And then a stab of flame spurted from it, and the screech of the shell passing over the ship was proof that here was no imagined shape but something real and deadly, something that could hit hard and often, and perhaps send the Valparaiso down into the deep waters from which there was no returning.
Keeton was lying on his bunk when the alarm-bell a few inches above his head began to ring. It jerked him as a wire jerks a puppet. It was so unexpected; a harsh breaking-in upon the dreaming privacy of his mind. It was at once a threat and a summons: a threat that could not be ignored, a summons that must be obeyed.
Keeton was out of his bunk in one convulsive leap. He heard Bristow’s complaining voice. ‘What’s up now? For Pete’s sake, what’s to do?’
Keeton grabbed his life-jacket and his steel helmet, and ran out into the washplace from which the long iron ladder with its slippery rungs led up to the poop. With the ship rolling, the ladder was a swaying perch that leaned first one way and then the other. Keeton, hindered by the life-jacket and the helmet, went up like a crab, awkwardly, the helmet clanging against the ladder.
There was one electric bulb lighting the washplace, and it shone on the steel bulkheads that were dripping with condensation. The metal of the ladder felt wet under Keeton’s hands; he was wearing rubber-soled shoes, and once his right foot slipped and hit the man below him. It was Bristow.
‘Mind what you’re doing‚’ Bristow shouted. ‘You nearly had me off, you clumsy bastard.’
The voices of the men and the clanging of metal on metal echoed hollowly in the iron chamber; and then something appeared to strike the side of the ship and reverberate like thunder in that confined space. The whole vessel shuddered as though with fear.
‘Oh, God!’ Bristow yelled. ‘We’ve been hit.’
Keeton hesitated for a moment near the top of the ladder and heard Petty Officer Hagan snarling savagely at him from the deck above. ‘Come on, come on. Let’s have you. Come on, damn you!’
Keeton emerged from the companion hatch into the driving rain and the grey afternoon that was gradually drifting into the complete and impenetrable darkness of night. Away to his left he glimpsed a sudden stab of red fire, as though someone had struck a match which had flared up for an instant and then had died. He heard the scream of the shell, and he thought: So this is how it comes; and the war isn’t finished yet after all.
And then he was clawing up the short ladder to the gun platform, dragging on his helmet and life-jacket, stooping to lift a shell from its rack and carrying it to the breech of the gun, all in a kind of daze, not thinking about it but simply going through the drill that had been hammered into him so many times.
Certain impressions forced their way into his mind: he saw that the barrel of the 4-inch had been trained round until it was pointing over the starboard quarter, and he could hear Hagan shouting incomprehensible orders. The faces of the men who were working the gun — the layer, the trainer, the breech-worker, the sight-setter — these were no more than a blur, not recognizable as the messmates who shared his meals, his cabin, his watches, his boredom. All was now a kind of dream, a hazy consciousness of action, of the fact that this was an engagement between a surfaced submarine and a defensively armed merchant ship, a gun duel which might end in the sinking of one or the other.
He did not feel afraid; the question of fear did not seem to enter into the reckoning; for there seemed to be no hard reality about this grey, rain-shrouded picture. It was no more than a blurred wash of sound and movement, through which the bright red streaks of flame intermittently stabbed their way with no greater effect than that of a man stabbing at a wall of cotton-wool.
Keeton stood with a shell resting in the crook of his left arm, his right hand steadying it. He stood with his feet wide apart, leaning his body against the rolling of the ship. The rain beat upon his face and ran down his cheeks, blinding him; he could feel water on his skin, and his shirt stuck to him clammily.
‘Fire!’
He heard the order, and he was able to count three before the gunlayer brought his sights on target and the gun spouted flame and smoke. Then the breech swung open, the dripping swab went in to quench the remnants of the fire, and the acrid stench of burnt cordite stung Keeton’s nostrils. He moved forward and thrust his shell into the breech, and then Bristow was unbuttoning the lid of a Clarkson’s case and tipping the fresh cordite charge into his hands, and he was pushing the charge into the gun and turning away to grab another shell from the rack.
The blast struck him like a fist. He was thrown face downward on the iron platform. He was dazed by the blow and he could taste blood in his mouth. He felt sick.
With the blast had come a deafening crack as of thunder very close, and with this thunder the ship had lurched drunkenly to port, heeling over and then slowly recovering. A fragment of metal fell out of the sky and dropped with a clang on the gun-deck; and then for a moment there was a strange hush, as though in this brief instant after the impact of the shell the whole ship and her company had been struck dumb. But it was no more than an instant, a flicker of time that came and was lost in the ensuing welter of sound, of shouted orders, of a chattering Oerlikon, fired perhaps in a kind of reflex action, uselessly, by someone who felt compelled to press the firing lever, futile though it might be; and somewhere a man screaming.