The cox’n nodded towards the doorway. Through a couple of fixed ports one could see the lighted cabin.
‘If you don’t mind I’d sooner…’
‘Just suit yourself, of course. But if you want to be sick, anchor your toes under this rail.’
They were striking the seas at an angle and the boat soon took on a roll. Every so often one hammered her and flushed the cockpit with uncomfortable gallons. The shore disappeared as if by magic. One saw it only in the blazes of lightning. For all practical purposes their world was a few acres, capped in by murk and pummelled by the screaming rain squalls.
‘Further out they’ll come bigger.’
The cox’n seemed to relish the prospect. His eyes rarely strayed from the illuminated compass card. The wheel kicked visibly in his tanned, hairy hands, but each time it was met with a sort of mechanical reflexion.
‘And if you want to be sick…’
Why did he have to harp on that? Gently hunched himself uneasily against the white-painted coaming. In the usual way he was quite a good sailor, in his youth he had done the trip to Stockholm in a cargo boat.
Some distance out they changed course, which brought the seas almost astern of them. The lifeboat now had a pitching motion which was very far from happy. Twice she was pooped by curling rollers, rather heavily the second time. Gently, caught on the hop, was partially choked by the torrent of salt water.
‘You can always go below.’
But he clung to his post in the cockpit. His experience of past trips had taught him that this was the safest way. The pity of it was that he’d had no food — it always helped, a well-filled stomach. At lunch he’d had nothing but salad, followed by a sickly tasting trifle.
He tried to concentrate on the boat and its thrashing, ponderous motion: but then, almost at the same time, he knew that he would have to be sick. His stomach and bowels were staging a sudden rebellion, they were snapping away his efforts at conscious control.
‘Toes under the rail!’
The rest was unrelieved misery. Before long he had ceased caring about the storm or anything else. After retching he succumbed and tumbled down into the cabin, and there, on a heaving bunk, had wanted nothing but to die.
Later on, it seemed to him that he had been below for hours. He could remember every minute of that pitching inferno. Two of the crew were actually playing cards — they used the engine-casing for a table: a third, cigarette in mouth, was holding down the pile of discards.
‘Twist!’
‘I’ll go a bundle.’
He never found out what it was they were playing. Their absorption in the game lent a crazy touch to the scene. At the end of every hand a copper or two was passed between them. He could have sworn it went on for a week, although his watch said forty minutes.
‘Try to drink some of this, old partner.’
They had slopped him out some coffee. A thermos-flask, as big as a barrel, was being tilted over the cup.
‘We all get a touch of it, now and then.’
How could the fellow lie to him like that? Gently knew that they’d never been seasick: they were a different style in humanity.
Then finally, to end the nightmare, had loomed a dripping figure from the cockpit:
‘We’ve sighted a vessel ahead, sir… cox’n would like to have you on deck.’
Really, he couldn’t have cared less, but he dragged himself up the steps again. Fortunately the tumult he stumbled into had the effect of clearing his brain. It was a good deal lighter, now, and one could see for considerable distances. Behind them, which was southerly, there was a horizon of watery yellow.
‘That’ll be her, I reckon.’
The cox’n pointed briefly over the fairing. At first Gently could make out nothing except the rolling bulks of waves. Then, as they lifted, he glimpsed it, only a few hundred yards away: it was sliding down a greyback, its varnished counter pointed towards them.
‘We’ll be up with him very shortly.’
Gently caught a quizzical side glance.
‘I know all about old Esau… what do you think you’re going to do?’
There wasn’t any answer to that one. Gently crouched miserably under the bulkhead. He felt abjectly at the mercy of these men of the sea. In his pursuit of the Sea-King he had been lured out of his element, and now, as he closed with him, he was being made to feel the folly of it.
‘We can beat him for speed in a seaway like this, but there’ll be no going aboard him, if that’s the idea.’
‘Will I be able to speak to him?’
‘You can use the loud hailer.’
‘In this… could she last?’
‘He’s rode out the worst of it.’
They bullocked closer and closer, rolled on waves like small mountains. Ahead of them the Keep Going switchbacked easily over the crests. Esau still stood to his helm, his feet planted a little apart; he swayed to the boat’s motion as a circus rider to his horse.
For the cox’n the seas held a clinical interest:
‘Up here, we don’t often get them this size.’
One of the crew drew attention to the Keep Going’s buoyancy:
‘He must have a power pump — there’s everything on that boat!’
At last they had closed to within fifty or sixty yards of him: they were near enough to read the gilded lettering on the name board. The cox’n nudged Gently and motioned towards the loud hailer.
‘You can call him up now, but we shall have to keep a distance.’
Gently unclipped the instrument, which resembled a clumsy megaphone. Never before had he felt so strongly the futility of what he was going to do. Sick, and feeling weak as a child, he balanced the hailer on the fairing. His knees were cockling under him each time they smacked into a trough.
‘Ahoy there, Keep Going!’
The wailing voice was not his own: a mournful sea thing, it went protesting through the chaos.
‘Esau… ahoy! Can you hear me… Esau!’
Only a few hours before he’d been making the same appeal to Simmonds.
‘Esau… listen!’
But why should he bother to listen? What was this mewling landsman’s voice to the storm-riding Sea-King?
‘Esau, as a police officer…’
That was the biggest joke of the lot! He could feel the cox’n’s eye running over him, half in irony, half in pity.
‘Esau, you have a duty-’
Mercifully, he was spared the rest. The Sea-King, till now unmoved, suddenly stirred and reached down beside him: when he straightened up he had something in his hand, and it was something that drew a shout from the cox’n.
‘Watch out — he’s got his signalling pistol!’
The wheel was twisted through several turns. The result, from Gently’s view point, was catastrophic to a degree. From pitching on an even keel the lifeboat staggered into a roll: the man from the Central Office went immediately spinning across the cockpit.
‘Everyone… heads down!’
A roar and a flash accelerated the panic. A scorching blast swept over the cockpit and something hammered against the fairing. The boat seemed trying to bury her side, she was literally on her beam ends. A mountainous wall of sea swept up to obliterate the watery sky.
‘My God… he blew his tank!’
The cox’n heaved at the wheel with all his might. Slowly, like a drunken whale, the lifeboat payed up and righted itself. A sea crashed stunningly over the bows, pouring havoc through the cockpit. A shower of glowing
