The Cruise of The Breadwinner Read Online Free PDF

the gangway, and became for some seconds quite sightless, as if he had stared at the sun. Shadowy and crimson lumps of something floated in front of him like bits of coloured cloud and then solidified, gradually, into a single object across the deck. The boy lay there staring infinitely at this thing. It had about it something he distantly recognised. It was like a shapeless bundle of sea-blue cloth tied about the middle with lengths of slate-crimson rubber hose. It was some time before the boy brought himself to understand that this bundle had once been Jimmy, and that the tangle of hose was all that remained of the guts of the gunner-engineer.
    He got up at last and walked away, forward, up the deck. All the forward part of the boat was hidden from him by the deck-house. He suddenly felt alone on the ship. And now as he walked he also got the impression of being very large but that the ship was also very large and that consequently he could never reach the end of it. He wanted to shout for Gregson. He felt the air very cold on his face and colder still on his chest and arms, where the tea had spilled, and then still colder on his eyes, shocked stiff by what he had seen of the engineer. This coldness became suddenly the frantic substance of a new terror. It was as if he had something alive and deadly in his hands and wanted to drop it.
    He began to run. He ran like a blind man, away from something, careless completely of all that lay before him. As he ran past the deck-house he began jabbering incoherent and violent words that were partly his fear and partly something to do with the need for telling someone of his fantastic discoveries. For the first time he had seen the dead.
    He ran in reality about two yards beyond the deck-house. The fear that had driven him forward from behind seemed to have got round in front of him, and now slapped him in the face. It stopped him abruptly. And as he stopped the coherence of his speech came back with perfect shrillness. He was shouting “Jimmy! Jimmy! Jimmy! Jimmy!” in a cry that was somewhere between anguish and a refusal to believe.
    When this was over he looked down on the deck. It seemed very overcrowded with the figures that lay there. They were the figures of the young pilot and the German, who lay side by side, together, and then of Gregson, who was lying half across them.
    The boy gazed for some seconds at the bodies of the three men. They lay in the attitudes of men who had been playfully wrestling. There was something quiet and merciful in the tangle of limbs and there was no blood and he could see the moustache of the young pilot plastered down by sea-water on his face like the moustache of a comedian. He was very convinced of their being dead.
    Out of all this there emerged, suddenly, something very wonderful. He saw the enormous body of Gregson, on its hands and knees, heaving itself slowly upward, and then he realised several things. He realised that he was fantastically fond of the living Gregson, and he realised too that he must have run up from the galley and across the deck, in the silence after the shots were fired, in the space of a secondor two. He caught for the first time the sound of the plane, quite loud still, receding across the sea.
    â€œMr. Gregson, Mr. Gregson, Captain, Captain, Captain, Captain, Skipper!” he said. “Skipper!”
    â€œSnowy,” Gregson said. He swung himself slowly round in the attitude of an elephant kneeling and looked up at the boy blinking. “Rum ’un,” he said. “Where was you?”
    The boy found that he could not speak. He wanted to tell of Jimmy. He made small, frantic and almost idiotic gestures with his mouth and hands.
    â€œHadn’ half got some cheek, hadn’ he?” Gregson said. “The sod.”
    It seemed to the boy that Gregson was concerned with frivolous commentaries. He still had the weight of impalpable terrors on his mind. Gregson, still on his hands and knees,