'As you were, as you were,' Vallery said quickly. 'Who's in charge here?'
'I am, sir.' A stocky, overalled figure walked slowly forward, halted in front of Vallery.
'Ah, yes. Gardiner, isn't it?' He gestured to the men circling the hoist.' What in the world is all this for, Gardiner?'
'Ice,' said Gardiner succinctly. 'We have to keep the water moving or it'll freeze in a couple of minutes. We can't have ice on the magazine floor, sir.'
'No, no, of course not! But-but the pumps, the drain-cocks?'
'Solid!'
'But surely-this doesn't go on all the time?'
'In flat weather-all the time, sir.'
'Good God!' Vallery shook his head incredulously, splashed his way to the centre of the group, where a slight, boyish figure was coughing cruelly into a corner of an enormous green and white muffler. Vallery placed a concerned arm across the shaking shoulders.
'Are you all right, boy?'
'Yes, sir. 'Course Ah am!' He lifted a thin white face racked with pain.
'Ah'm fine,' he said indignantly.
'What's your name?'
'McQuater, sir.'
'And what's your job, McQuater?'
'Assistant cook, sir.'
'How old are you?'
'Eighteen, sir.' Merciful heavens, Vallery thought, this isn't a cruiser I'm running-it's a nursery!
'From Glasgow, eh?' He smiled.
'Yes, sir.' Defensively.
'I see.' He looked down at the deck, at McQuater's boots half-covered in water. 'Why aren't you wearing your sea-boots?' he asked abruptly.
'We don't get issued with them, sir.'
'But your feet, man! They must be soaking!'
'Ah don't know, sir. Ah think so. Anyway,' McQuater said simply, 'it doesna matter. Ah canna feel them.'
Vallery winced. Nicholls, looking at the Captain, wondered if he realised the distressing, pathetic picture he himself presented with his sunken, bloodless face, red, inflamed eyes, his mouth and nose daubed with crimson, the inevitable dark and sodden hand-towel clutched in his left glove. Suddenly unaccountably, Nicholls felt ashamed of himself: that thought, he knew, could never occur to this man.
Vallery smiled down at McQuater.
'Tell me son, honestly-are you tired?'
'Ah am that-Ah mean, aye, aye, sir.'
'Me too,' Vallery confessed. 'But, you can carry on a bit longer?'
He felt the frail shoulders straighten under his arm.
''Course Ah can, sir!' The tone was injured, almost truculent.
''Course Ah can!'
Vallery's gaze travelled slowly over the group, his dark eyes glowing as he heard a murmured chorus of assent. He made to speak, broke off in a harsh coughing and bent his head. He looked up again, his eyes wandering once more over the circle of now-anxious faces, then turned abruptly away.
'We won't forget you,' he murmured indistinctly. 'I promise you, we won't forget you.' He splashed quickly away, out of the pool of water, out of the pool of light, into the darkness at the foot of the ladder.
Ten minutes later, they emerged from 'Y' turret. The night sky was cloudless now, brilliant with diamantine stars, little chips of frozen fire in the dark velvet of that fathomless floor. The cold was intense.
Captain Vallery shivered involuntarily as the turret door slammed behind them.
'Hartley?'
'Sir?'
'I smelt rum in there!'
'Yes, sir. So did I.' The Chief was cheerful, unperturbed. 'Proper stinking with it. Don't worry about it though, sir. Half the men in the ship bottle their rum ration, keep it for action stations.'
'Completely forbidden in regulations, Chief. You know that as well as I do!'
'I know. But there's no harm, sir. Warms 'em up-and if it gives them Dutch courage, all the better. Remember that night the for'ard pom-pom got two Stukas?'
'Of course.'
'Canned to the wide. Never have done it otherwise... And now, sir, they need it.'
'Suppose you're right, Chief. They do and I don't blame them.' He chuckled. 'And don't worry about my knowing, I've always known. But it smelled like a saloon bar in there...'
They climbed up to 'X' turret-the marine turret, then down to the magazine. Wherever he went, as in 'Y' magazine, Vallery left the men the better for his coming. In personal contact, he had some strange indefinable power that lifted men above themselves, that brought out in them something they had never known to exist. To see dull apathy and hopelessness slowly give way to resolution, albeit a kind of numbed and desperate resolve, was to see something that baffled the understanding.
Physically and mentally, Nicholls knew, these men had long since passed the point of no return.
Vaguely, he tried to figure it out, to study the approach and technique.
But the approach varied every time, he saw, was no more than a natural reaction to different sets of cirr cumstances as they presented themselves, a reaction utterly lacking in calculation or finesse. There was no technique. Was pity, then, the activating force, pity for the neart-6reaњ-ing gallantry of a man so clearly dying? Or was it shame, if he can do it, if he can still drive that wasted mockery of a body, if he can kill himself just to come to see if we're all right-if he can do that and smile-then, by God, we can stick it out, too? That's it, Nicholls said to himself, that's what it is, pity and shame, and he hated himself for thinking it, and not because of the thought, but because he knew he lied... He was too tired to think anyway. His mind was woolly, fuzzy round the edges, his thoughts disjointed, uncontrolled. Like everyone else's. Even Andy Carpenter, the last man you would suspect of it-he felt that way, too, and admitted it.... He wondered what the Kapok Kid would have to say to this... The Kid was probably wandering too, but wandering in his own way, back as always on the banks of the Thames. He wondered what the girl in Henley was like. Her name started with 'J', Joan, Jean, he didn't know: the Kapok Kid had a big golden 'J' on the right breast of his kapok suit, she had put it there. But what was she like? Blonde and gay, like the Kid himself? Or dark and kind and gentle, like St. Francis of Assisi? St. Francis of Assisi? Why in the world did he-ah, yes, old Socrates had been talking about him. Wasn't he the man of whom Axel Munthe...
'Nicholls! Are you all right?' Vallery's voice was sharp with anxiety.
'Yes, of course, sir.' Nicholls shook his head, as if to clear it.
'Just gathering wool. Where to now, sir?'
'Engineers' Flat, Damage Control parties, Switchboard, Number 3 Low Power room-no, of course, that's gone, Noyes was killed there, wasn't he?... Hartley, I'd appreciate it if you'd let my feet touch the deck occasionally...'
All these places they visited in turn and a dozen others besides-not even the remotest corner, the most impossible of access, did Vallery pass by, if he knew a man was there, closed up to his action station.
They came at last to the engine and boiler-rooms, to the gulping pressure changes on unaccustomed eardrums as they went through the airlocks, to the antithetically breath-taking blast of heat as they passed inside. In 'A'boiler-room, Nicholls insisted on Vallery's resting for some minutes. He was grey with pain and weakness, his breathing very disH.U. 161 F tressed. Nicholls noticed Hartley talking in a corner, was dimly aware of someone leaving the boiler-room.
Then his eyes caught sight of a burly, swarthy stoker, with bruised cheeks and the remnants of a gorgeous black eye, stalking across the floor. He carried a canvas chair, set it down with a thump behind Vallery.
'A seat, sir,' he growled.
'Thank you, thank you.' Vallery lowered himself gratefully, then looked up in surprise. 'Riley?' he
