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

and turning already to lighter and thinner crimson the lumps of blood about the deck.
    It was about five minutes before the boy reappeared on deck, coming to collect the tray and the five cups still half-filled with tea. This time he did not look at the covered heap that had once been the engineer, and the blood where the two pilots had lain did not have on him any more effect than the blood he often saw on the floor of the fish-market behind the quay.
    He was thinking only of the binoculars. The case was very wet from sea-water, and he had some difficulty in getting them out. He pulled at them until the suction of water in the case was released, and then when he had themout he stood up on deck and looked through them, across the sea and through the grey and driving mass of rain.
    For some reason or other, either because the sea-water had reached the lenses or because the lenses themselves were not adjusted for his sight, what he saw through the glasses was only a grey and misty mass of unproportioned light. It had no relation to the things he had expected.
    Trembling, he hastily put the glasses back into the case and gathered up the cups and hurried below, lowering his head against the darting rain.

Chapter 4
    Down below a new problem had arisen. He was startled by Gregson’s voice muttering crustily from the box where Jimmy had so often been lost among the miseries of the auxiliary:
    â€œKnow anything about injuns, Snowy?”
    The boy put the tea-tray and the binoculars on the cabin table, on either side of which the two pilots lay rigidly on the floor. The English boy had closed his eyes and the German did not look at the binoculars.
    He went back to Gregson. Gregson, unable to squeeze himself into the hole containing the engine, was squatting half in and half out of it, regarding the engine with melancholy helplessness and slowly wiping it with an oil rag, as if in some way this would make it go.
    â€œI know you turn the bleedin’ handle, and that’s all I do know.”
    â€œOught to be simple,” the boy said, “if I can get it set.”
    â€œWouldn’t let nobody look at it,” Gregson said. His grievances against Jimmy were not yet quite extinguished. “Wouldn’t let nobody touch it. Kept it to ’isself. Wust onit.” He stopped wiping the engine and let the oily rag rest heavily on it, shaking his head. “Wust on it. Allus knew best. You couldn’t talk to him!”
    There flashed across the boy’s mind an image of Jimmy lying redly disembowelled on the deck, unrecognisable and shapeless, and he said quickly:
    â€œYou switch her on down here, I know that.”
    â€œAh, go on then. You do it.”
    Gregson moved his huge body a foot or two backwards. This action gave the boy a sudden sense of space. He could move with astonishing freedom in the dark space among the gears. He became aware also of carrying a sense of responsibility arising from a succession of terrific events: the presence and sight of death, the fact of the binoculars, the business of carrying the wounded pilots below, and now the engine. He had come to think of the engine as sacred. It was not to be touched; it belonged to Jimmy; its faults and secrets were part of the man.
    He squeezed himself in alongside the cradle and pressed the needle of the carburettor up and down, flooding it. He had watched Jimmy do these things. The engine was a mass of odd lengths of wire, strange extra gadgets devised by Jimmy, so that it had the look of an unfinished invention. One of these wires held the choke. It was necessary to pull it out, hook it back into fixed position by means of a piece of cord that slipped over a nail in the cradle, and only release it when the engine was running too fast. You turned her over twice before switching on.
    Gregson, watching the boy do these things, said in a curious whisper:
    â€œWe gotta git back fast. You know that, don’t you?”
    The boy nodded. It