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

occurred to him suddenly that he had no idea of what had happened on deck.
    â€œHe was so bleedin’ low,” Gregson said, “you could have touched his wings. I thought he was goin’ to cut me head off. Firing like blazes all the time too. Mowed us down. We was like heap o’ bloody dogs on a bone when he’d gone.” He looked over his shoulder for a second. “Know they’re both hit bad, don’t ye’? You know that?”
    The boy nodded and said he thought he could get her started now. Gregson stood back a little and the boy, with a sort of careless strength, pressed his weight down on the starting handle with his right hand. “Think you can match it?” Gregson said. The boy answered with something that was very near to tired contempt. “Can’t start first time. You gotta get her swung over.”
    â€œOh! that’s it, is it?” Gregson said. He was fond of telling the boy that he had been brought up in sail. In fact, he had never been brought up in sail. He had always known engines of some sort, mostly old and mostly small and mostly, if he looked back, nothing but trouble. He had never trusted them. And he had suddenly the conviction that he trusted them less than ever now. He stood with his hands spread with large uneasiness over his belly. It was very quiet everywhere except for the sound of rain beating with a hard murmur on the deck; a sound for some reason irritating and unfriendly, so that suddenly he wondered what time it was.
    He had not time to pull his watch out of his trousers pocket before the boy had swung the handle of the engine over, and he forgot the watch in his surprise. It did not surprise him that the engine did not fire; he was used to that; but only that the boy had succeeded in swinging it with exactly the knack of the dead engineer. The boy had learnt by heart the ways of the dead man, and the sudden repetition of them seemed to bring him in a curious wayback to life, so that he seemed to be there with them in the absurd and dirty little engine-hole, his face dark with pessimism and long-suffering with pain.
    By the time the boy had swung the engine the fourth time Gregson was sour with the conviction that it was never going to fire. The boy leaned his weight on the cylinder head, panting: “No spark in her,” he said. He desired passionately to make the engine go, feeling that in doing so he would become in Gregson’s eyes a sort of adult hero. But there was something queer about the engine. “No compression there,” he said.
    â€œCompression, compression!” Gregson said. “Let me have a go.” He had not the faintest idea what compression was. He seized the engine-handle rather as if it had been the key of a clock. When he swung it finally it swirled round, under his immense strength, two or three complete revolutions, swinging him off his balance against the bulkhead.
    â€œBloody thing never was no good!” he said. “Allus said so. Told him. Miracle it ever went.” He leaned against the bulkhead panting in savage and heavy despair.
    The boy did not answer. He was crawling back into the dark recesses behind the engine-cradle, where there was just room enough for him to kneel. He did not know quite what he was looking for. Underneath the engine block lay pools of spent oil in which he knelt as he crawled. It suddenly occurred to him that these pools were too large. He put down his right hand and knew that they were pools of oil and water. Then he stopped crawling and began to run his hands over the engine-block until he found the place where cannon shell had ripped it open in a single jagged hole. A little oil still clogged it there. The force of the shell had lifted up the head, warping it as it blew.
    The boy called back to Gregson. From the dark interior Gregson seemed to fill the entire space below the gangway, and it suddenly struck the boy that it was a miracle that he, so large a