The Cruise of The Breadwinner by H.E. Bates Read Free Book Online

was raining quite fast now, but the German, lying rigidly back, staring upward and swallowing his breath in rain and heavy gasps of pain, seemed glad to receive it on his face. He opened his lips, and as the drops fell into his mouth he licked them in relief with his tongue.
    The stretcher was kept lashed to one side of the narrow skylight lying aft of the hatchway. Gregson unfastened it and carried it along the deck under one arm. “Job for you, Snowy,” he said, “mind your backside.” The space on deck seemed more than ever confined; the stretcher had something of the effect of a ladder brought into a tiny room. Gregson laid the stretcher on deck, parallel with the German, and in a moment the boy was on his knees, undoing the straps.
    The boy stood by while Gregson lifted the shoulders of the German on to the stretcher. He saw the German clenching his hands. “Please,” he said. “Please. My legs.” Gregson did not speak, but slowly slid the legs across to the stretcher too. In this moment the German threw his hands violentlyupward and brought them down with a savage double slap on his own face, keeping them tightly there in frantic self-created pain, sobbing with quiet terror underneath his white fingers. The boy was less affected by this, an outburst of crying from the adult enemy, than by the mess of blood that smeared the deck where the German’s legs had been.
    The German kept his hands crushed down on his face while Gregson and the boy carried him below on the stretcher, Gregson taking the weight of the stretcher by going first, the boy struggling slowly behind down the narrow steps. They laid him on the cabin floor between the bunks. The boy set down his end of the stretcher with a certain air of expansive and careless pride; it was the first time he had taken part in such things. He stood erect and regarded Gregson and the German with tired gravity, languidly rubbing his hands together. He was no longer aware of the shock of seeing blood for the second time. He was elevated into a world of catastrophe and pain, bringing to it a taut and suppressed excitement.
    The German still had his hands pressed over his face as Gregson and the boy went back on deck, Gregson carrying the stretcher. Not even the pain of being moved from the stretcher to the floor of the cabin had had any effect on them. He used them all the time to contain and conceal the agony of his face.
    On deck it was raining quite fast. The English boy had covered his face with the blankets, and lay rigid and entirely hidden by them, like a corpse. As Gregson and the boy arrived with the stretcher he sharply uncovered his face, grinned stiffly up at them with a face of pale bone-shadows that did nothing to lessen that effect. “Collect up my things,” he said to the boy, “the things I took off. Before they get soaked,” and the boy went forward with proudobedience to where the pilot had kicked off his boots and socks on the deck.
    When he had gone Gregson leaned over the pilot. “Can you move?” he said. “A little bit. Just slide over while I take the weight?”
    â€œHow’s old Messner?” the boy said. “Did you drop him?”
    â€œNow,” Gregson said. “Just gently. While I hold you.”
    â€œGod!” the boy said. “God. Oh! Jesus, Jesus.” He cried gently through his lips while he held them clenched with his teeth, and the rain poured fast and heavy on his face and on the light hair already wet with sea, so that his whole appearance was strangely wild and battered. Suddenly Gregson threw the blanket over his face, and then, just as the boy came back with the flying boots and socks, lifted him bodily, in a single smooth but desperate movement, on to the stretcher. In that attitude, covered over and silent and never moving, the pilot lay on the stretcher while Gregson and the boy carried him below, the rain quickening heavily on the south-west wind