It was unbelievably soiled, and with his hands elbow-deep in his pockets and his hunched shoulders and his bent head, he looked like someone’s grandmother hung, say, for a witch. Clamped upside down between his teeth was a short brier pipe.
“Here he is!” the boy cried. “This is Ronnie. Captain Bogard.”
“How are you?” Bogard said. He extended his hand. The other said no word, but his hand came forth, limp. It was quite cold, but it was hard, calloused. But he said no word; he just glanced briefly at Bogard and then away. But in that instant Bogard caught something in the look, something strange — a flicker; a kind of covert and curious respect, something like a boy of fifteen looking at a circus trapezist.
But he said no word. He ducked on; Bogard watched him drop from sight over the wharf edge as though he had jumped feet first into the sea. He remarked now that the engines in the invisible boat were running.
“We might get aboard too,” the boy said. He started toward the boat, then he stopped. He touched Bogard’s arm. “Yonder!” he hissed. “See?” His voice was thin with excitement.
“What?” Bogard also whispered; automatically he looked backward and upward, after old habit. The other was gripping his arm and pointing across the harbor.
“There! Over there. The Ergenstrasse. They have shifted her again.” Across the harbor lay an ancient, rusting, swaybacked hulk. It was small and nondescript, and, remembering, Bogard saw that the foremast was a strange mess of cables and booms, resembling — allowing for a great deal of license or looseness of imagery — a basket mast. Beside him the boy was almost chortling. “Do you think that Ronnie noticed?” he hissed. “Do you?”
“I don’t know,” Bogard said.
“Oh, good gad! If he should glance up and call her before he notices, we’ll be even. Oh, good gad! But come along.” He went on; he was still chortling. “Careful,” he said. “Frightful ladder.”
He descended first, the two men in the boat rising and saluting. Ronnie had disappeared, save for his backside, which now filled a small hatch leading forward beneath the deck. Bogard descended gingerly.
“Good Lord,” he said. “Do you have to climb up and down this every day?”
“Frightful, isn’t it?” the other said, in his happy voice. “But you know yourself. Try to run a war with makeshifts, then wonder why it takes so long.” The narrow hull slid and surged, even with Bogard’s added weight. “Sits right on top, you see,” the boy said. “Would float on a lawn, in a heavy dew. Goes right over them like a bit of paper.”
“It does?” Bogard said.
“Oh, absolutely. That’s why, you see.” Bogard didn’t see, but he was too busy letting himself gingerly down to a sitting posture. There were no thwarts; no seats save a long, thick, cylindrical ridge which ran along the bottom of the boat from the driver’s seat to the stern. Ronnie had backed into sight. He now sat behind the wheel, bent over the instrument panel.
But when he glanced back over his shoulder he did not speak. His face was merely interrogatory. Across his face there was now a long smudge of grease. The boy’s face was empty, too, now.
“Right,” he said. He looked forward, where one of the seamen had gone. “Ready forward?” he said.
“Aye, sir,” the seaman said.
The other seaman was at the stern line. “Ready aft?”
“Aye, sir.”
“Cast off.” The boat sheered away, purring, a boiling of water under the stern. The boy looked down at Bogard. “Silly business. Do it shipshape, though. Can’t tell when silly fourstriper—” His face changed again, immediate, solicitous. “I say. Will you be warm? I never thought to fetch—”
“I’ll be all right,” Bogard said. But the other was already taking off his oilskin. “No, no,” Bogard said. “I won’t take it.”
“You’ll tell me if you get cold?”
“Yes. Sure.” He was looking down at the cylinder on which he sat. It was a half cylinder — that is, like the hotwater tank to some Gargantuan stove, sliced down the middle and bolted, open side down, to the floor plates. It was twenty feet long and more than two feet thick. Its top rose as high as the gunwales and between it and the hull on either side was just room enough for a man to place his feet to walk.
“That’s Muriel,” the boy said.
“Muriel?”
“Yes. The one before that was Agatha. After my aunt. The first one Ronnie and I had was Alice in Wonderland. Ronnie and I were the White Rabbit. Jolly, eh?”
“Oh, you and Ronnie have had three, have you?”
“Oh, yes,” the boy said. He leaned down. “He didn’t notice,” he whispered. His face was again bright, gleeful. “When we come back,” he said. “You watch.”
“Oh,” Bogard said. “The Ergenstrasse.” He looked astern, and then he thought: “Good Lord! We must be going — traveling.” He looked out now, broadside, and saw the harbor line fleeing past, and he thought to himself that the boat was well-nigh moving at the speed at which the Handley-Page flew, left the ground.
They were beginning to bound now, even in the sheltered water, from one wave crest to the next with a distinct shock. His hand still rested on the cylinder on which he sat. He looked down at it again, following it from where it seemed to emerge beneath Ronnie’s seat, to where it beveled into the stern. “It’s the air in her, I suppose,” he said.
“The what?” the boy said.
“The air. Stored up in her. That makes the boat ride high.”
“Oh, yes. I dare say. Very likely. I hadn’t thought about it.” He came forward, his burnous whipping in the wind, and sat down beside Bogard. Their heads were below the top of the screen.
Astern the harbor fled, diminishing, sinking into the sea.
The boat had begun to lift now, swooping forward and down, shocking almost stationary for a moment, then lifting and swooping again; a gout of spray came aboard over the bows like a flung shovelful of shot. “I wish you’d take this coat,” the boy said.
Bogard didn’t answer. He looked around at the bright face. “We’re outside, aren’t we?” he said quietly.
“Yes. . . . Do take it, won’t you?”
“Thanks, no. I’ll be all right. We won’t be long, anyway, I guess.”
“No. We’ll turn soon. It won’t be so bad then.”
“Yes. I’ll be all right when we turn.” Then they did turn. The motion became easier. That is, the boat didn’t bang head-on, shuddering, into the swells. They came up beneath now, and the boat fled with increased speed, with a long, sickening, yawing motion, first to one side and then the other. But it fled on, and Bogard looked astern with that same soberness with which he had first looked down into the boat. “We’re going east now,” he said.
“With just a spot of north,” the boy said. “Makes her ride a bit better, what?”
“Yes,” Bogard said. Astern there was nothing now save empty sea and the delicate needlelike cant of the machine gun against the boiling and slewing wake, and the two seamen crouching quietly in the stern. “Yes. It’s easier.” Then he said: “How far do we go?”
The boy leaned closer. He moved closer. His voice was happy, confidential, proud, though lowered a little: “It’s Ronnie’s show. He thought of it. Not that I wouldn’t have, in time. Gratitude and all that. But he’s the older, you see. Thinks fast. Courtesy, noblesse oblige — all that. Thought of it soon as I told him this morning. I said, ‘Oh, I say. I’ve been there.
I’ve seen it’; and he said, ‘Not flying’; and I said, ‘Strewth’; and he said ‘How far? No lying now’; and I said, ‘Oh, far. Tremendous. Gone all night’; and he said, ‘Flying all night. That must have been to Berlin’; and I said, ‘I don’t know. I dare say’; and he thought.
I could see him thinking. Because he is the older, you see. More experience in courtesy, right thing. And he said, ‘Berlin. No fun to that chap, dashing out and back with us.’ And he thought and I waited, and I said, ‘But we can’t take him to Berlin. Too far. Don’t know the way, either’; and he said — fast, like a shot — said, ‘But there’s Kiel’; and I knew—”
“What?” Bogard said. Without moving, his whole body sprang. “Kiel? In this?”
“Absolutely. Ronnie thought of it. Smart, even if he is a stickler. Said at once, ‘Zeebrugge no show at all for that chap. Must do best we can for him. Berlin,’ Ronnie said. ‘My Gad! Berlin.’”
“Listen,” Bogard said. He had turned now, facing the other, his face quite grave. “What is this boat for?”
“For?”
“What does it do?” Then, knowing beforehand the answer to his own question, he said, putting his hand on the cylinder: “What is this in here? A torpedo, isn’t it?”
“I thought you knew,” the boy said.
“No,” Bogard said. “I didn’t know.” His voice seemed to reach him from a distance, dry, cricketlike: “How do you fire it?”
“Fire it?”
“How do you get it out of the boat? When that hatch was open a while ago I could see the engines. They were right in front of the end of this tube.”
“Oh,” the boy said. “You pull a gadget there and the torpedo drops out astern. As soon as the screw touches the water it begins to turn, and then the torpedo is ready, loaded. Then all you have to
