AT PRECISELY the moment Conrad’s voice trailed off it seemed that every ship in the estuary, whether sailing for distant ports or coming home, holds bursting with cargo, sounded their foghorns. The slight differences in tone were absorbed by the shifting whiteness so that you might have thought they came from a single ship or some beast of the deep wailing in pain or loneliness. Conrad turned in his chair and gazed south over the hidden river and juts of land, lost in some reverie. That sort of thing was not at all unusual with him, as you know. I have no idea how many times during our years together that he had suddenly broken off in the middle of a conversation only to return to exactly the place he had left minutes later as if nothing had happened. At first I thought he might simply be indulging in nostalgia, a habit I know something about, having fallen into it out here. It’s a harmless thing so long as one doesn’t gaze too long on les neiges d’antan. Then he shifted his position and I was able to see his face in profile, eyes half-closed, the angular lines as striking as the head of a caesar on a Roman coin, and I understood that whatever had drawn his attention away was very serious. He was obviously steeling himself, Ford. Those dark expressive eyes had the heavy, burdened look of a man confronting something he would rather not deal with but had to. Whatever it was had robbed him of the serenity I remarked on earlier. What puzzled me was that nothing he had said so far remotely hinted at anything that could cause such an onslaught of emotion. And it was that—a concentration of feelings that must have seemed to me all the more intense because I had no idea where it came from.
Since I felt awkward sitting there, I decided to go below and brew some coffee. When it was ready I carried the pot and cups on a tray and put it down on the table, calling his attention to a passing freighter with an oddly shaped poop deck that had emerged from the fog. While he agreed it was unusual, he added none of his customary observations about design. I set to work mending a rope, an old pleasure for men of my ilk, as knitting is for women. I had just finished trimming the fray when he relit his pipe and went on with the story from behind a veil of sweet-smelling smoke.
WITH FOX-BOURNE occupied maneuvering his ship out of the harbor, Conrad descended the bridge ladder, noticing on his way aft that the portion of Lowestoft’s buildings and dock he could still see were framed by parallel fog banks that lay close to the water and moved erratically, one spreading out behind the ship like a smoky wake, the other sealing off the coast. From behind him fog blew in overhead, a thick gray mass that effaced all but the shadowy forms of the gallows of the sweeping gear. He went up to the bow and could scarcely see the water directly below. Whelan was standing lookout on the starboard side, and Conrad was glad of it. He was not about to go soft over a little fog, he said, but it had been a long time since he had seen anything so bad.
“Like hunter’s soup,” came Fox-Bourne’s voice from behind him, “nothing to worry about.”
Conrad turned and saw Fox-Bourne wreathed with haze as if he were coming out of a steam bath.
“Quite common this time of year,” the captain went on. “We proceed slowly. You’ve no doubt noticed. A bit farther west the fog generally breaks into patches. We should come out of it soon. If not, we shall return home, not worth the risk. Wouldn’t want to damage the king’s property, would we? If you’ll excuse me, I’ll just have a word with Whelan.”
The ensign grasped the rail, unaware that the captain was approaching until Fox-Bourne put his hand on his shoulder, an affectionate gesture that did not surprise Conrad, who had sensed that their relationship went beyond official ties. They could have been father and son from the easy way they talked. He remembered a photograph Jessie had taken of him and Borys on a quay that showed them with their arms around each other, Borys resplendent in his army uniform, in the background two or three pleasure craft and beyond them the low skyline of suburban London, a wonderful picture, though deceptive as all photographs are since it suggested that the captured moment was still going on, defying duration, whereas in fact Borys was at the front. Another vision emerged, a vision of battlefields with soldiers streaming out of trenches, climbing over the earthen berms that had protected them from the Huns, the sky darkening with smoke, shells bursting.
“Father-feeling,” he said to me, “the father’s fear for his son made worse by the fact there wasn’t a damned thing I could do.”
That image of young men climbing out of the safety of the earth into fusillades of bullets had plagued him over and over after he received Borys’s first letter from the front. To break its hold, he strode across the deck and interrupted Fox-Bourne and Whelan with a question about the young man’s writing. Whelan was delighted. He said he was working on a coming-of-age novel based on his grandfather’s life that was set in nineteenth-century Yorkshire. The section he was going to show Conrad focused on a horse race at a county fair, quite the best thing in the book, he thought, a tribute to Hardy but with a definite modern tone. The battlefield receded, giving way to an impressionistic rush of horseflesh. He told Whelan that he was eager to see how he handled the movement since that kind of thing was always difficult for him. They discussed the problem of dealing with simultaneous actions, Conrad deferring to the young man, letting him show what he knew and complimenting him on his idea. Whelan had the love of words, Conrad told me, there was no question about it. Fox-Bourne listened appreciatively with a smile on his lips, clearly proud of the show Whelan was putting on. Eventually he asked the ensign if he thought it was possible to write and pursue a career in the navy at the same time.
“Sir,” said Whelan, “we’re standing here with a man who’s done both.”
Conrad did not have the heart to remind him that he had abandoned the sea.
“Well, in any case,” Fox-Bourne said, “there’s no time for writing today. Keep a sharp eye out, lad. This is quite nasty.”
He then invited Conrad back to the bridge, saying that once the fog cleared he could see the operation much better from that vantage point.
But the fog did not clear. It grew thicker than ever. The whole apparatus of the sweeping gear had gone missing, the deck was barely invisible, sailors appeared and disappeared like ghosts. On the bridge, Conrad gathered around the chart table with three other officers, Chambers, Higgins, and Scorsby, the tip of Fox-Bourne’s pointer inching across the lines of latitude and longitude, numbers indicating depth, names of shoals, its black rubber tip describing a shallow arc from their present location to the shipping lanes where Fritz enjoyed laying his eggs. It seemed like a schoolroom exercise, the journey traced by the pointer accompanied by Fox-Bourne’s commentary and observations by the other officers being purely academic unless the fog lifted.
Half an hour later it did. Fox-Bourne had just informed his officers that they would very likely have to abandon the search when the gray wall suddenly lightened. A patch of blue appeared directly overhead. Conrad could now see the whole length of the deck, make out the forward gun, capstans, hatch covers, Whelan and another sailor near the bow, a portion of the sea, almost black in contrast, off the starboard side. He said they proceeded through the milky whiteness for five minutes or so when a huge yellow cylinder appeared, one of those freakish phenomena encountered at sea from time to time, odd as waterspouts or the northern lights, things ancient sailors took as signs and wonders and brought back to tell of round the communal fire.
Revolving slowly, the cylinder expanded in width and height, looking rather like a door or a portal, and when the Brigadier entered it the glow lit her bow with a golden radiance. A moment later Whelan took hold of the rail with both hands and leaned out as if he were a gymnast on the parallel bars.
“I think he’s seen a mine,” Chambers said.
“Well, damn it,” Fox-Bourne replied, “he’ll go over if he isn’t careful.”
The prospect appeared distinctly more likely when Whelan stood on the lower rung and leaned out farther, hanging there as if he were suspended in space before he jumped down and looked toward the bridge, shouting unintelligibly while he pointed at the wall of fog, jabbing his finger at it repeatedly in an indecipherable comic pantomime. The yellow light consumed the fog as the cylinder broadened. Conrad saw a long black object on the surface, which he thought was a shoal before remembering that the chart had showed nothing but open sea. You probably know, Ford, that the oceans are strewn with every imaginable object, hazards a sailor can’t prepare for and sometimes doesn’t even see until it is too late. Conrad certainly knew this. In the course of his career he had half a dozen narrow escapes, the most remarkable from a large section of a pier off some Asian coast that passed so close he could see the barnacles on its pilings. Such experiences had impressed him sufficiently for him to have chosen a similar event as the malignant cause of misfortune in Lord Jim. That was his second guess, probably shared by the others, and they were all wrong. The cylinder shifted and within seconds the rectangular shape of a submarine’s conning tower glided magisterially into view. The vessel lay at right angles to the Brigadier, directly in its path at a distance of less than two hundred meters.
Fox-Bourne called for full reverse and in the same breath ordered the helmsman to make a hard right. No sooner did the telegraph chime than the sailor swung the wheel violently, an extraordinary performance, though in vain since there was not enough distance between the ships to avoid a collision. Any chance of doing so was nullified when he realized that the U-boat was dead in the water. The yellow light bathing the entire length of the submarine illuminated its name, Die Valkerie, and its designation, U-21, in crimson Gothic script below the fluted tip of the observation platform. Farther down what looked incongruously like a row of white flowers baffled him every bit as much as Marlow had been on his approach to Kurtz’s compound, where he thought he saw decorative knobs on all the fenceposts. When they were a little closer he saw that they were the outlines of ships.
“Kill signs,” Higgins mumbled.
“The swine,” Fox-Bourne said furiously, “the bloody cowards.”
Fox-Bourne did not speak especially loud. What distinguished his words and forced Conrad to look at him was their intensity, the guttural sound that was matched by his face, distorted by rage and what seemed the worst kind of sorrow, a stunning transformation.
“He was no longer with us,” Conrad said as he sipped his coffee, “and I mean literally. Oh, his body was there, but his mind had taken leave for somewhere I wouldn’t have cared to visit. It made no sense, Malone. Yet everything that happened during the next hour was foretold in his features and his voice. I wonder to this day whether I was derelict, whether I should have intuited what was coming. I tell myself it wouldn’t have mattered since I had no power to prevent it, but still. . . .”
His fascination with the changes in Fox-Bourne was such that he continued looking at him awhile longer, and when he managed to tear his eyes away there was no more ocean between the Brigadier and the Valkerie. The U-boat disappeared beneath the minesweeper’s bow, first her hull, then the kill signs, the designation, her name. “Brace!” cried Higgins, the word caroming around the bridge and echoing off the walls, freezing everyone in place while the engines strained to slow the ship. A tremendous blow sent a quiver through the Brigadier and knocked them off their feet. The helmsman slammed into the hub of the wheel, his cry lost in the unholy screech of metal grinding against metal. Teapots and cups brought in minutes earlier by a steward flew off the table and sent sprays of tea in the shape of overlapping fans across one wall.
He could hear the engines again. The collision had slowed the Brigadier but her momentum still carried her forward into the pool of brilliant sunlight pouring into the cylinder. When she finally came to a halt Fox-Bourne shifted the indicator handle to neutral, Chambers broke out a first-aid kit and had just gone down on his knees to tend the helmsman when a terrible scream rent the air, the Valkerie’s diving siren, which must have been activated by the force of the collision.
“It was ear-splitting,” Conrad said, “absolutely ear-splitting. The sound went straight into the brain like a knife.”
I could hear it too, Ford, and I’ll wager you can, too. Though I had never heard a submarine’s siren, the Valkerie’s was as clear as if I had been standing at Conrad’s side on the bridge of the Brigadier. It wasn’t the result of my imagination, not in the least, but the way he told the story. From the moment he described the minesweeper leaving port he had spoken with the same intensity you find in his writing, the same attention to detail and pacing and cadence. Just as he re-created sound on the page, he also did it with his voice, bringing to life a siren scream that set my teeth on edge. He paused to let the sound sink into my brain.
For a few seconds everyone on the bridge was immobilized by the sound. Then Fox-Bourne shouted furiously at Higgins and Scorsby, ordering them below to check for damage and demanding that they return within ten minutes. While Chambers attended to the helmsman—there was blood all over the floor and on his hands and arms—Fox-Bourne announced his plans if they were taking on water. He was very clear-minded, sharp and efficient and in command, a model officer, yet not for a moment did his rage lessen and from the look of him his sorrow was rising faster than the water that might be pouring into the ship.
Chambers had just gotten the helmsman to sit up and was finishing with the bandage on his head when Higgins and Scorsby burst in with the news that the bow had been damaged but flooding appeared to be confined to the forward compartment. All things considered, Scorsby thought the bulkhead would hold, but there are no guarantees about such things, Ford, no promises that the pressure of tons of water won’t contradict the shipbuilder’s claims and they all knew it.
To hide his concern, Higgins made derogatory comments about the Huns, saying they must not have thought the U-boat would sing so loud when they chose her name. Everyone laughed. He was going on about the pomposity of German opera, which he seemed to know quite well, when the Brigadier shuddered violently and swung a few degrees to the port. She had disengaged from the U-boat. Moments later the Valkerie drifted into view, swinging round till she lay parallel to the minesweeper, profiled in the yellow light. Aft of her conning tower a gash several meters wide ran to the waterline where the sea was pouring in, frothing at the jagged edges of torn metal. Conrad imagined the panic inside, Germans scared out of their wits, driven half-mad by the banshee wail from the speakers, sloshing through frigid water toward the conning tower ladder. His vision was broken by the appearance on the observation platform of a man wearing a black, high-necked sweater and visored cap trimmed with gold braid, the Valkerie’s captain come up to inspect the damage. After glancing at the rent in the hull the German captain shifted his eyes to the minesweeper standing no more than twenty meters off his starboard bow, gaping at it like a tourist at the foot of some grand sight, say the pyramids, something too big to absorb, when the siren stopped.
It was a low-tide quiet, an evening quiet, wonderfully peaceful. The siren had rubbed Conrad’s nerves raw along with everyone else’s. He felt the tension easing out of his body, draining away, and was beginning to relax when he heard Whelan shouting at the top of his lungs. The ensign was leaning over the rail yelling at the captain in German while the captain gazed at him in astonishment, as if he had just been slapped in the face by a stranger on the street. It was the stuff of low comedy, vaudeville, bizarre but familiar. Not two weeks earlier Conrad had received a letter from Borys in which he described a similar encounter on the battlefield. In certain spots along the front the trenches were so close together that the sentries knew the faces of their opponents and learned their habits. For upward of a week a man in Borys’s company had been exchanging potshots with a German to no effect. One evening, for reasons Borys was not clear about, they began yelling at each other, peppering the wasteland between them with obscenities. It had been very droll, Borys wrote, rather like a grown-up Punch and Judy show.
As all eyes were fixed on Whelan, Conrad told Borys’s story and everyone was amused. Even Fox-Bourne managed a grin, though it seemed forced and in any case did nothing to change his demeanor. Conrad was translating Whelan’s barbs for the others when the siren came to life again and the German straightened up as if he had touched a live wire. They could not hear Whelan over the infernal shrieking, which was, of course, worse for the U-boat’s captain. The hollow core of the conning tower would conduct the sound to him, surround him with it. He was clearly unnerved, standing there bolt-upright, his face crimson, staring at Whelan with a glare that seemed to say he had decided the young officer was the sole, malignant cause of the disaster that had befallen him. For his part, Whelan was still yelling, obviously encouraged by the German’s distress and probably aware that the man no longer actually had to hear what he said to know what he meant. Neither moved. Whelan would not stop, the German would not look away, the tension between them building so that when the German unholstered his pistol, slipping it quickly out of the black leather holster at his hip, the act seemed inevitable, even foreordained. Because of the siren, Conrad did not know if anyone on the bridge gasped as he did, but their apprehension was palpable, a physical thing in the air, and it increased when the German extended his right arm and cocked his left at the elbow, resting his hand on his hip as if he were taking target practice at a range.
“It happened very fast,” Conrad told me, “the whole thing, from drawing the pistol to assuming that absurd stance taking less time than it has for me to describe it. The fact is, I don’t remember it taking any time at all. One moment they were staring at each other, the next the German was aiming from what I now realized was some version of a dueling pose but which reminded me most of a toy soldier Borys played with when he was a boy.”
Yet there was duration enough for Fox-Bourne’s bellow to be heard over the siren, a thunderous sound that might have been “No!” or only a soul-deep cry of anguish. A vein bulged in his forehead, which was as colorless as a geisha’s. At the instant he heard the shot Fox-Bourne’s eyes welled. He bellowed again and balled his hands into fists as Conrad turned and saw Whelan standing straight and tall, as if he had been ordered to assume the position of attention. For a few seconds he was motionless and then he brought his hands up and placed them tenderly on his chest in a perfect pantomime of an operatic gesture, as if he were a lover protesting some slight or offering his heart to his beloved. The captain extended his arm again and aimed just as Whelan staggered, recovered, swayed, toppled forward against the rail, which caught him just below his chest so that his arms went over and dangled, swaying with the gentle rise and fall of the Brigadier.
Everything stopped then including the siren. Conrad and the officers did not move. The German captain did not move, his arm still raised, the weapon still pointed, men, ocean, ships arrested by what had happened. And then Fox-Bourne shouted an oath. The sound shattered the stillness, echoing on the bridge. He shouted again, ordering Scorsby to find the doctor and Higgins to take a crew to the forward gun and fire as soon as possible as he rushed to the doorway and disappeared down the ladder in a flurry of staccato steps, intent on saving Whelan though it was obvious to Conrad as it must have been to the others that the ensign was dead. What reserves of faith or denial drove the man, Conrad could not guess.
The siren started up again as Higgins and three sailors were pulling the tarpaulin off the gun. Fox-Bourne raced by them, fairly flying over the deck with neither grace nor agility, his awkwardness adding to the sorrow, the patent uselessness of his desire. Conrad’s heart went out to him when he reached Whelan. Standing beside the ensign, touching him on the shoulder, he lifted him from the rail and carried him with one arm under his back, the other under his knees, to the center of the deck, where he put him down and cradled his head. With his free hand he unbuttoned Whelan’s shirt from neck to waist. As he did so, Conrad saw Scorsby and another officer he presumed was the doctor running up the deck. Somehow their presence seemed to increase Fox-Bourne’s isolation. With the doctor and Scorsby kneeling beside him, Fox-Bourne reluctantly laid Whelan’s head down and moved aside so that the doctor could put his hand on Whelan’s neck, his ear to Whelan’s chest, an attitude he maintained for a few seconds before he sat back on his heels and looked at Fox-Bourne, speaking to him, telling him what Conrad and everyone else on the bridge already knew.
Fox-Bourne’s head went back so that he appeared to be staring at the sky. Higgins’s crew fired, the round striking at the waterline forward of the Valkerie’s engine compartment. Within seconds she settled several feet, the angle exposing the gash in the hull to the warm yellow light. The damage was more extensive than it had first appeared, a huge, pyramid-shaped hole whose jagged edges gleamed like teeth, a black hole with no bottom to it which suddenly filled with faces and hands, the men standing on pipes or scaffolding as they grasped the sharp metal that slashed their hands, the force of the rushing water pushing back the weaker ones, the ones with less determination whose places were taken by the more desperate or strong, and though he thought it was impossible for anyone to escape, one man rose up on straightened arms and toppled headlong into the water.
By then the conning tower platform was crowded with sailors waiting to climb down, descending the handholds as if they were in some mad race, dropping to the deck whose pitch was so acute they had trouble standing. They moved in unison, like a herd of animals, farther up the incline whenever another man came down, holding on to each other, gazing fearfully at the water. A few sought safety on the bow. Bent over, they grasped the sides of the catwalk and shinnied crabwise ten or fifteen feet before they slipped and went over the side. One tumbled back to the crowd, grabbing at outstretched hands and knocking his saviors into the sea. A heavyset chap, an engineer from the look of his tattered, oil-stained shirt, stepped away from the group to the edge of the catwalk, pinched his nose, and jumped, coming up a few yards away sputtering, gesturing to the others. Another leapt with his arms extended in a swan dive, tattoos snaking up them and over his chest before he entered the water with hardly a splash, his dive emboldening others, who went over singly, in pairs, in a troika, one after the other like penguins leaving an ice floe.
Only two Germans remained on the catwalk and Conrad was wondering what they were going to do when he saw the captain reemerge on the conning tower, sans hat this time, soaking wet but still armed, staring at his men in the water. Suddenly he looked up at the minesweeper’s bridge and raised his pistol. A bullet hole appeared in the window not six inches above Fox-Bourne’s head, the bullet ricocheting off a steel plate behind Conrad before it smashed through the window on the far side. The glass was still falling when he heard the report of the forward gun and the top portion of the conning tower disappeared. That was enough for the dawdlers to join hands like schoolboys and plunge into the water. Higgins fired another round and a muffled roar came from the Valkerie’s engine room. The sea roiled, turned white, exploding in a plume of water while her bow rose to an impossibly steep pitch, sixty percent, perhaps more, the gash and the faces it framed disappearing, and Conrad imagined the Germans floating inside the boat like a school of fish as the Valkerie’s bow went higher, her torpedo ports glistening like some strange animal’s snout, the harsh, discordant scream of the diving siren persisting till she went down.
The Germans who could swim scattered in all directions to avoid the suction. Those who could not flailed about in the oil slick. They looked like seals, their heads black, viscous diesel oil dripping from their arms. One man after another went under. A few orange life vests flecked the water, not many, not nearly enough, there having been no time to prepare for anything but a headlong dash. The engineer was treading water, as were the two who jumped holding hands, one pulling the other by the straps of his life vest, stroking frantically with his free arm, the others swimming and flailing and dog-paddling toward the Brigadier, the nearest maybe twenty meters away, the farthest a hundred or more, all those blackened heads bobbing in the sea, the blackened arms either slicing gracefully through the oily water or beating it as if they were threshing, separating wheat from chaff. The frantic efforts of the Germans to save themselves, the senseless yet understandable last act of the German captain firing at the minesweeper’s bridge had suppressed the terrible scene of Whelan’s murder. Now it came back full force. Conrad saw again the two men shouting at each other, the captain firing, Whelan’s operatic tumble. The captain had been blown to bits and there was a satisfaction in that, a sense of justice. By all rights Whelan’s murder should have hardened his heart against all the men in the water. Not for a moment had they ceased being the enemy, brothers of men trying to kill his son at the very moment. The death of their ship did not absolve them. The oily water through which they swam toward the Brigadier did not wash away the crimes memorialized in the white ships on the conning tower. They were still Germans, still the enemy, and yet their helplessness erased the difference between them and every sailor who had ever lost his ship. In the absence of that distinction, he could not find it in himself to damn them.
At this point, Conrad had been so engrossed that he was not certain when Fox-Bourne and Scorsby had returned to the bridge. He remembered seeing them out of the corner of his eye heading back from the bow, the doctor remaining with Whelan, but the death of the U-boat and the frantic, terrified sailors had seized his attention so completely that all of this hardly registered. Now, Fox-Bourne was at the window, eyes red, swollen, the vein in his forehead standing out, looking as if he were on the verge of collapse. Conrad would not have been surprised if he had. There is a sorrow so deep no one can touch it but the man or woman it affects, he told me somberly, and in all his years he had never seen anyone so alone in his grief as Fox-Bourne. The warmth he had remarked on between the captain and Whelan, deep as it was, hardly seemed enough to have affected Fox-Bourne so profoundly. In any case, the man’s sorrow dominated the bridge from wall to wall and floor to roof. It seemed to have driven out the possibility of speech until Scorsby took a few steps toward him and quietly said that he would check on the lifeboats. Fox-Bourne heard him, there was no question of that, but he neither acknowledged Scorsby’s words nor looked at him before he left.
The yellow cylinder of light had narrowed at the top and was now collapsing, its transparent walls of light breached by billowy fog that was blowing over the Germans, erasing them one after the other. The sun came in and out of the rifts, disappeared for longer and longer periods until it was gone. Now the fog obscured the deck from bow to midships. Conrad turned to watch it take the gallows of the sweeping gear. Minutes later a cry for help in German rang out, the words perfectly articulated even at that distance. Fox-Bourne blinked but did not move. Someone else shouted and his call was followed by several more, as if they were singing a round. A man shouted, “Help! Stop!” in English. Waiting for more voices to swell the chorus, appalled but fascinated, Conrad heard instead the chime of the engine telegraph, its sound a universal code to sailors, immediately readable, the duration of chimes and pauses in this case signaling a change from neutral to slow reverse.
Fox-Bourne’s left hand was on the telegraph lever, his right on the wheel.
“There may be debris,” he said. “Shouldn’t want to foul our screws.”
It seemed reasonable, even prudent, though the rescue crews would have to row blindly in the fog. Conrad expected Fox-Bourne to ring the engines back to neutral at any moment. They had retreated at least a hundred meters when Scorsby came up the ladder, his voice uneasy and tentative when he said the lifeboats could be lowered.
“Put Whelan in the wardroom,” the captain told him. “I want his personal effects taken to my cabin.”
Scorsby stood there flatfooted.
“Sir,” he said, “shouldn’t we launch the lifeboats first?”
“No, William, we should not.”
“But, sir—”
“Damn you!” Fox-Bourne said, turning, glaring. “Do it now or I’ll have you up on charges. Do you understand?”
He did not. No one did. The issues had nothing to do with each other. Lowering the boats was a matter of universal protocol, transferring Whelan belowdecks purely personal. What Scorsby did understand was that the sequence was fixed in the captain’s mind. As he went to the door Fox-Bourne ordered Higgins and Chambers to take the wounded helmsman below and find a replacement.
“When you have done so, take another look at the bulkhead.”
The ship was still backing away. The engines sounded louder with only the two of them on the bridge. The rhythmic beat of huge cam lobes turning on their shafts, driving pistols into cylinders lubricated with amber sheens of oil, seemed to count out the meters between the Germans and the ship while Fox-Bourne stood at the wheel like something made of stone, some ancient, cracked, and weathered monolith.
“Captain,” Conrad said, “those men will drown.”
“I must mind the ship.”
“We’re well away from the debris field.”
“Yes? Well, you have a point, Conrad. Perhaps we’ve gone a bit too far. Hard to tell, you know. Worst fog I’ve seen in years. We will go back a ways. How’s that?”
He rang “slow ahead.” During the drift, before the screws stopped, Conrad was inclined to blame the lapse in judgment on the strain of Whelan’s death. Why he should be so bereft, why his eyes reminded Conrad of a statue’s, set, strong, impenetrable, was beyond his knowledge, but the emotions were real and he wanted to believe that was the cause. Insisting that Whelan’s body be transferred, sending Higgins and Chambers on another inspection were understandable in that context, just the sort of thing that follows a terrible shock. But his conviction would not hold up in the face of another interpretation. Ordering the officers off the bridge clearly served another purpose, which was to put even more distance between the Brigadier and the survivors. The moment the idea came to him he said he remembered looking down from the peak in the Carpathian Mountains at the soldiers looting the fields. There it had been silent. No wind. No birds. Not even a chattering squirrel. Here the steady beat of the engines was like a chorus. Just then Higgins and Chambers and Scorsby reappeared one after the other, all troubled, especially Chambers, who refused to meet Fox-Bourne’s gaze. Conrad was glad for their company. Being alone with Fox-Bourne was now unbearable. The officers seemed to be aware of his distress, glancing at him quickly.
“Now,” Fox-Bourne said, “I want each of you to command a lifeboat.” He looked at the compass and told them to follow a course that should put them in the midst of the survivors. “And make sure they aren’t armed before you haul them in.”