The Cruise of The Breadwinner Read Online Free PDF Page B

groped forward like a man blinded by daylight. “You all right, kid?” he said. “All right y’self, eh?”
    â€œJimmy,” the boy said. “Jimmy!”
    â€œI heard him firing that bleedin’ thing. Wonder as it fired, first time. Like the bleedin’ injun.”
    On the deck the young pilot began suddenly to mutter repeated groans of agony, trying to turn himself over.
    The sound and the movement woke Gregson out of himself. He crawled between the two pilots and leaned over the English one. “All right,” he said. “All right? Where’d it git y’?” The young man was trying to push his heels through the deck, lifting his body with recurrent convulsions of pain. “The bastards, the bastards!” Gregson said. He turned and spoke to the German pilot, lying half on his side with his knees against his chest. “Bleedin’ low flying. Is that the sort a bleedin’ orders you git?” There was no reply except a violent convulsive jerk that threw the German down on his face.
    â€œChrist,” the English boy said. “Christ.”
    He turned and looked up at the sky, rolling his head quietly from side to side. His face in colour was something like the sea, blue-grey and lightless and very cold. Flecks of sea-water, like sweat, were still gathered on the grey skin of the forehead, and his body was still soaked from swimming so that the clothes were shrivelled on it.
    â€œI’ll git you down below,” Gregson said.
    â€œDon’t move me,” the pilot said. “Don’t move me.”
    â€œBetter down below. Git you warm. Git y’ in a bunk. I can carry you.”
    â€œNo,” the pilot said. “Don’t move me. It’s wrong. Cover me over. Cover me over, that’s all.”
    He rolled his head in spasms of recurrent agony from side to side as he spoke. “Git them blankets, Snowy,” Gregson said. “All on ’em. And the first-aid box. And tell Jimmy to come for-ard. Soon’s he can.”
    The boy went down to the cabin in cold daze of fright made worse by a determination not to look at Jimmy. He was hypnotised by the bloody tangle of flesh, crushed to the livid shapelessness of rejected offal, that lay on the deck, and he could not pass it without looking that way. The sight of it drove him below with wild energy. When he came up again, carrying the grey bundle of blankets, in a trembling terror of fresh sickness, he determined this time not to look. But now as he passed he saw that Jimmy held something in his hands. It was the handle of the Lewis gun, severed from the rest of the frying-pan apparatus by the same curious miracle that had kept it in Jimmy’s hands. It was painted harshly with coagulations of new blood.
    It was the thought of Jimmy that kept him standing for some seconds by the side of Gregson, holding the blankets and not speaking. Gregson was kneeling between the twopilots. The German was now turned over, on his back, and was revealed also to be very young, drained of colour and in pain. He was moaning slightly, as if talking to himself, weakly throwing back his fair head. He was perhaps nineteen; he looked to the boy to be like the Englishman, wonderfully and terribly worn by the experience of battles. Pain had beaten deep hollows in his cheeks, so that the facial bone everywhere stood out, the skin white and polished where it had tightened.
    But it was not this that fascinated the boy. He now found himself staring at the binoculars Gregson had unlooped and laid on the deck. It was clear now that they were binoculars; he had never seen anything that seemed so magnificent. They lay on the deck just above the German’s head, the light-brown leather dark and salty with sea-water, the initials K.M. in black on the side. Gazing at them, the boy forgot the figure of the engineer lying in the attitude of discarded offal in the stern.
    Gregson took the blankets out of his arms