Chapter 6

Those two nights on the run to Tulagi: black sea, cloudy sky, heat that hung over the ship like an oily blanket. It was impossible to sleep in the cabins and I got a canvas cot and set it up on the fantail, at the very stem of the ship where the deck was cluttered with bollards and winches. The cot shook there with the bumping and grinding of the propeller shaft but at least there was a breath of air once in a while. The rest of the crew was sleeping out on deck on mattresses thrown around on the hatches. That first night when I came off watch I got an hour or two of sleep this way, and woke up with a taste of fuel oil in my mouth. It was dawn and there was a fitful breeze from astern; the smoke from the funnel rose straight up and hung over the ship. All that day we ran north under a smudgy private cloud that rained fine particles of soot. Sometimes the cloud would drift ahead a little and wait for us, then the ship would catch up and nose into it again. The odor of fuel oil and soot hung over everything: in the food, in the tepid drinking water, in the bedding.

The Australian lieutenant never left the bridge now. He hadn’t shaved for two or three days but his white shirt and shorts were still immaculate. The second day the overcast broke a little and twice we saw planes: an Australian seaplane that circled around us four or five miles away and in the afternoon, flying very high, a formation of bombers from Espiritu Santo going north to Rabaul through the broken clouds. It struck me for the first time how conspicuous the ship must be from the air, gray against the bright green sea and leaving a dirty track of foam behind it for miles.

At sundown it was overcast again and we went on to the north through small rainsqualls. The Solomons were only a hundred miles ahead. At ten o’clock that night a destroyer was supposed to meet us off San Cristobal and take us through the islands to Tulagi. The Australian lieutenant went around the ship dogging down doors where lights were showing and putting out people’s cigarettes. Around nine o’clock I was lying on my cot on the fantail and they sent for me to come to the bridge again. This time all the fuses were blown and there was no light for the compass or the chart table. A sailor was holding a flashlight on the compass so the helmsman could see, and the lieutenant had another flashlight to look at the chart. He glanced up at me and said, “Oh, there you are. There’s no light,” and immediately looked back at the chart.

“The mates are supposed to take care of the electricity on deck.” “The mates don’t know bloody beans about it. I’m not in the mood for a trade union dispute. Now get to work and fix it.”

“All right, Nelly, don’t get emotional.”

I got a flashlight and started checking outlets. When I took off the first cover plate I saw that the wiring was completely rotten. The insulation was hanging down in tatters and through the hole I could see bare copper wire running inside the bulkhead. I worked for an hour winding friction tape around the wiring as far as I could reach with my fingers. Then I would bend each wire and adjust it carefully so the bare copper wouldn’t touch steel. Finally I got the light on in the compass again. By this time the lieutenant was out on the wing of the bridge with his binoculars, trying to find the destroyer in the darkness ahead. The third mate had nothing to do when the lieutenant was on the bridge and he was pulling a hangnail off his finger. Down in the boiler room the fireman chose this moment to change burners, and there was a shower of sparks from the funnel. The lieutenant yelled for somebody to call the engineers and tell them to watch their bloody fires. “Boiler room, yer makin’ sparks!” bawled the relief helmsman into the phone. And then in a disgusted voice, “Gawd, that Limey is worse’n Kammerath, at least he slep once in a while.”

At ten o’clock I was still fooling with the wiring and there was no sign of the destroyer. Evidently they had something more important to do than play nursemaid to a merchant ship. The lieutenant rang down stop engines, and the ship lost way and drifted while he and Firmín argued about what to do.

“I dunno, I think the best thing to do is anchor and wait for morning. In this dark you can’t see what you’re doing.”

“And how in blazes are you going to anchor, may I ask, on a lee shore and no bloody bottom?”

They went on like this for ten minutes until the ship was dead in the water. She wouldn’t answer her helm and her head was drifting around to the south. It was impossible to stay there and there was nothing to do but go on.

“Half ahead,” said the lieutenant, ignoring Firmín.

In the darkness someone swung the handle of the telegraph, and the ship stirred, began to move, and wallowed on to the northwest through the islands. Indistinct black lumps of land slipped by to port. At midnight I gave up on the wiring and went below to go on watch. The air in the engine room was unbreathable, so hot it irritated your eyes and mouth. We stripped to our underwear and ate salt tablets, drinking water and watching it ooze out white and salty onto our skins. Welsh was working in the shorts he hadn’t changed for two weeks, a yellow streak of urine down the front, and the Mexican wiper was stark naked with his lean brown flanks wet with sweat. I could hear the water underneath surging back and forth in the bilge, and I told Welsh to get the pump going. Then I stood dully watching the gauges and waiting for the four hours to be over. Outside in the water the propeller blades boomed monotonously: pough, pough, pough until the sound seemed to be inside my head; by my ear the revolution counter clicked like an insect. The steel plates under my feet radiated an acrid and oily heat. At last I lost track of the time. When my relief came I grunted something unintelligible to him and left without bothering to put on my clothes.

Out on deck it was absolutely dark. The ship was rolling evenly and almost imperceptibly in a slight swell. The foam slipping by under the rail was faintly phosphorescent against the water, and astern the milky gleam of the wake tapered away and dissolved in the dark. A kind of luminescence seemed to hang over the whole ship, outlining the black shapes of the bridge, the funnel, the curve of the bow. I groped my way back aft to my cot and lay down. My shorts were soaking wet and in sudden disgust I took them off and threw them over the rail. Then I stretched out again on the bare canvas. It was the third night I hadn’t slept more than an hour or two and my eyes were swollen and heavy, but I couldn’t go to sleep and instead I lay thinking. I thought what a rotten ship it was and how I could never sail on a good ship again because of my record, and I knew I would spend my life standing watches in an engine room full of shoddy machinery, eating bad food, trying to sleep on a hard mattress that smelled of fuel oil and sweat. Four on and eight off: your life slipped away from you and after you were gone it would be the same as if you never had been. It would go on this way and I didn’t know how to change it. To change you have to have a new point to start from, and I didn’t know how to find this or what it would be. The war would go on, I would be killed in it or go on living but it wouldn’t make any difference. I wondered if the others felt it too, the pointlessness of everything and the impossibility of changing the way you were, or whether they had somehow managed to come to terms with it in their own way. Kammerath, Kouralis, Welsh, Cheeney: we all lived together and were each other’s enemies in this private hell we had made. I thought of Kammerath with his milky face clutching his billfold as he sank through the air in a litter, of Kouralis left to bleed in an alley. It was stupid to lie awake thinking of these things but Kammerath’s large pale moist face would not go away, it hung in my thoughts as though it had something to say to me, something about the human heart perhaps, in a voice that smelled of sour milk and money. He was the one who had it made, the one the others hated because they envied him and wanted to be as he was, but in the end the fat he had sucked from us had crushed his heart and now he lay at the bottom of a muddy hole or in a hospital bed in Noumea with an oxygen mask over his face. I knew that the people I had chosen to spend my life among would watch me die as callously as they had watched Kammerath lowered into the launch: without sympathy, without curiosity, simply indifferent. But where had I chosen, how could I have made things happen any other way? I didn’t know, and in the end I forced myself to stop thinking about it. But when I finally went to sleep it was hearing the poplars rattling at dawn outside my bedroom window and the familiar creaking of the old house in the wind and knowing I was not there, forever, and that my bed was empty.

When I woke up it was to find myself lying on the steel deck beside the cot where it had fallen over sideways. It was still dark and there were confused sounds I couldn’t identify, thumps and hissings. I was lying with my arm bent under me and a violent pain in my elbow, and at first all I felt was a muddled anger at whatever it was that had awakened me and banged against my arm. For a few seconds my main impulse was to forget about the whole thing and go back to sleep again as quickly as possible; I pictured myself setting the cot upright and climbing gingerly back onto it in order not to disturb that last morsel of sleep I still clung to inside. But then I began to realize that this was impossible because there was something terribly wrong with the ship. It was acting exactly like a trash can into which a kid has dropped a lighted string of firecrackers; not very good firecrackers, the fuse was damp and they exploded only sporadically and half-heartedly. Every now and then there was a small muffled bang, and with each pop the ship seemed to stagger a little in the water and clanged like a garbage can. Forward there was something strange about the silhouette of the deckhouse against the night sky, and I finally grasped what it was: the funnel had collapsed and was lying across the bridge like a broken arm. I remember thinking that it was going to be impossible to get a draft in the boiler room with the funnel fallen down. Then lower under the deckhouse I saw something brighten and spread, the first orange tongue of flame.

I got up and groped my way forward through the dark, holding my elbow in my hand. There was an odd silence; the only sound was a metallic belch now and then from inside the ship. I passed a sailor carrying a radio in one hand and a cheap suitcase in the other, and somebody else in white pants, perhaps a cook, with what looked like a portable phonograph. The old chief went by clad only in an undershirt, his genitals dangling ludicrously. In the pink light forward by the deckhouse I saw Victor untangling a fire hose. He had hold of one end of the hose and the bosun had the other, and they were patiently pulling the kinks out of it. I went down the ladder to the well deck, pushing past two or three people who were bumping confusedly up, and as I reached the bottom of the ladder there was a deeper explosion from inside the ship, a dull gassy oof! like a man struck in the stomach.

Victor dropped his end of the hose and vanished from the pink light. A moment later he materialized out of the darkness and seized my arm. “It’s you. There’s no water on deck, get below and see what’s wrong with the pumps.”

He disappeared into the darkness.

“Victor!” I yelled after him. “What are you talking about, the boiler room’s flooded, there’s no steam!” He was gone. For a second I hesitated. Somebody else bumped into me; it was a messboy with a cardboard carton, evidently full of canned goods, which he was trying to cram into a lifeboat. It seemed to me that everybody around me had lost their senses, Victor included. Half of them seemed to think they were going on a picnic, and the others were dribbling little streams of water on a ship that was going to blow up any second.

There was another dull lurch from inside the ship. “Victor!” I yelled into the darkness. “It’s no good! She’s going, can’t you see?”

There was no answer. From up forward I heard a falsetto voice, not Victor’s, squealing, “I got the goddam thing turned on.”

I turned and began running back toward the stem. This time I passed Squires sitting on the well-deck ladder holding his head in his hands. When I squeezed past him he looked up at me without recognition, and then went back to staring at the flames. He seemed to have lost his wits. The after deck was almost deserted. When I reached the fantail I stumbled over my overturned cot and groped past it until I felt the round bar of the rail under my hand. I climbed up on it and balanced for an instant with the bar pressing against my naked feet, and then I pushed outward and fell into the darkness. The fall through the air seemed to last for an extraordinary time, then the back of my neck hit the water with an unexpected violence. The water was neither hot nor cold but incredibly solid; it struck me a crushing blow under the ear and for a while it stunned me. I went deeper than I expected and stayed down for a long time. While I was still groping toward the surface there was an enormous bump and a painful stab of pressure in my ears: it was as though from all sides an enormous blow had been applied with some plastic substance, hard and unyielding but exactly fitting the contours of my body, even to the openings of the ears and nostrils. The shock staggered me and my sense of up and down vanished; I had no idea which way it was to the surface. My body turned slowly under water while something rang in my head, a metallic buzz.

At last I broke through to the surface and swallowed enormous gulps of air. It was absolutely quiet; the long swell lifted slowly under me and settled again, a few stars were visible through the broken clouds. There was no sign of the ship. My ears still rang with the crushing blow I had felt under water; it seemed impossible that such an explosion could leave nothing behind it, no debris, not even a flicker of light on the sea.

There was no sound but the washing of the water around my body and the faint buzzing in my ears. I reached out and paddled with my arms a little, but immediately I went under and swallowed salt water. After that I floated and saved my strength; there was not much point in swimming because I didn’t know which direction to swim anyhow, and if I had known it would probably be too far. The water that had been so hard when I struck it now seemed light, ethereal, fragile; it seemed impossible that such a thin fluid could support a solid body for long. The sea was invisible, the few stars overhead were indifferent in the black sky, there was nothing. I had the odd sensation that the nothingness began at the surface of my skin and went on forever, in every direction, to infinity. Well, I finally had what I wanted, I was alone! As I floated the water rippled gently a half inch from my mouth. Whenever I tried to swim it rose over my face.

For what seemed like a long time I floated like this, moving my hands weakly to keep my face above water. Perhaps it was only a half an hour. Then it began to get light, and on both sides I began to make out dim outlines on the horizon, low clouds or islands, I couldn’t tell which. Nearer on the water I saw darker lumps which at first I took for debris from the ship. Then as daylight came I saw they were floating clumps of vegetation washed down the rivers by the monsoon, pieces of trees and bushes clotted with dead leaves. They were scattered over the water as far as I could see, some only as large as a man’s hand, others the size of small haystacks. I began working toward one of the larger clumps, but it was farther away than it looked. Whenever I stopped to rest for a moment my feet would sink under me, and it was only with a tiring effort that I could bring them back to the surface again. For a long time I swam this way, groping in the water clumsily and kicking with my feet, while the clump of vegetation seemed to stay as far away as ever. At last I came up to it and sank my fingers in the mass of twigs and vines. I had expected it to be fragile but it was unexpectedly solid, smelling of mud and sodden leaves. Hanging on gingerly, I floated and rested until my breath slowed.

For the first time I realized how tired I was. I had lost my whole grasp of time; I had swum or drifted for what seemed like several hours, and yet I had come off watch at four and now it was barely daylight. A crazy idea struck me that I had been in the water for twenty-four hours but I had been delirious or asleep or something and forgotten it. I realized that I was losing my grip on reality and no longer thinking logically. Everything seemed strange, and above all the silence. The sea that had seemed so flat from the deck of the ship was undulating, crossed with long low swells that lifted me slowly and settled away again as they passed. As the light came up I could make out a long line of shore to the south, an uneven dull green with a white fringe of surf at the bottom. In the opposite direction there was another grayish-green island, but farther away. The light wind was coming from the east and the clump of vegetation was drifting with it slowly, carrying me to the west where it was still dark and I could see nothing.

Then I realized that for some time I had been listening to something, the sound not of surf but of water washing gently on rocks. There was a gurgle as it came in, a moment of silence, then a retreating hiss as it drained away. It seemed to be coming from ahead and to the right, where I could make out a faintly darker loom on the surface of the water. When I stared hard I saw nothing; it was only when I looked slightly away that I sensed something was there. It was mainly the sound that convinced me it was real and not something I had imagined. Whatever it was, it was too far to the right and probably the current would carry me past it. As the sun came up I could make it out more clearly: a line of black rock in the sea with a little jungle growing out of it, perhaps a half a mile away.

As I watched it I became aware that it was changing direction and imperceptibly moving around to my right. If I went on drifting I would pass it probably a quarter of a mile away. Dimly I realized that I was going to have to make a decision: whether to abandon the temporary security of my clump of rotten leaves, or hang on and continue drifting. If I let go I would have to swim a quarter of a mile across the current, and I didn’t think I could make it. I lacked the will to swim ten yards, let alone that immense distance to the line of black rocks. And yet if I hung on, probably, I would drift past it out to sea. I couldn’t decide. My fingers were locked into the branches and in my exhaustion and apathy, in the familiar smell of mud and leaves, I was almost comfortable. I didn’t want to let go. A kind of resentment rose in me against that scrubby black rock that had come drifting by and forced me to think.

It was more than a rock; I could see now that there were good-sized trees on it, and here and there a tiny beach of black sand. It moved so slowly that the eye hardly noticed the motion, but in a few minutes it would be past and I would never reach it against the current. With a convulsive wrench I pulled my hands out of the tangle of branches and fell backwards into the water. Immediately my face and mouth went under; I flailed my way back to the surface. When I came up I had lost my bearings and the islet was nowhere in sight. In a momentary panic I looked around for the clump of vegetation; if I had found it I would probably have swum back to it and hung on for good. In the last instant before I lost my head I saw the islet again, around to one side where I hadn’t expected it. Methodically, my hands working like weak fins, I began working my way toward it. Now and then I stopped to rest, floating with only my eyes and nose above the surface, In a surprisingly short time I felt the bottom under my feet, sharp coral covered with seaweed. I stood up waist-deep with the water streaming off me and lurched across the reef, but beyond it was another pool of deep water. I had thought I was at the end of my strength, but now it seemed I had to make another effort. I fell forward into the water and somehow floundered on, with convulsive motions of my hands and feet. At last my knees struck sand. I put down my hands and crawled on all fours up a coarse beach littered with stones. My head hung down and mechanically I watched the smooth water-polished stones going by under me, six inches from my eyes. My crawling was awkward and ungainly and several times I almost fell, but I positively did not want to lie naked on the open beach with the sky watching me. I went on lurching across the sand until I reached the green line of vegetation beyond, and there I fell on my side and went to sleep, the rotten smell of leaves and comfortable shadows enveloping me.