The Sword and the Net полностью

“. . . and there it was—a German sub!” it said with sudden definition. “Golly! . . .”

Then the next hill swooped down upon them and toyed with them and failed to crush them and swooped them up to its crest, as Otto fought with it, and slid them down into yet another valley which was a dreadful counterpart of all the others.

And the weight upon Otto’s right arm was suddenly heavier.

The wind lessened and the sky grew less black and the swell subsided, gradually, to a near-flat calm. But it was a cold grey dawn—and the look-out man in the crow’s nest of the Admiral Farragut shivered beneath his layers of clothing.

The Admiral Farragut was a tanker, and she flew the U.S. Ensign and also had the flag painted large upon both beams. But in these days one never knew: hence the lookout duty, shared in turn by every one of the crew throughout every hour of every voyage.

The man shivered again, and thrust his hands deeper into his pockets. His gaze swept the level dead-grey surface of the Atlantic in a wide sweeping arc. . . .

His hands came out of his pockets. He stiffened. His eye had been caught by something at the outermost edge of the arc. He stared, first with his naked eye, then through a glass—and after that he shouted. . . .

They could not separate the three until a boat had picked them up and they had been hauled aboard. Otto, as willing hands had caught at him and his burdens, had lost his last, slipping grip upon consciousness, and they had been forced to pry his fingers loose from the life-belt of the child. Also, the Second Officer, who was in charge of the boat, had to cut the woman’s long hair with his sheath-knife. The hair had been divided into two main strands, and these, roughly twisted, had been tied around Otto’s neck so that the unconscious head of the woman had been immovably lashed to him, its chin resting upon his shoulder.

Something forced Otto’s teeth apart and there was a trickling of liquid flame down his throat. He choked and opened his eyes and looked up at the faces of unfamiliar men and shut off sight again. . . .

He waked three hours later and rolled over on his back and thought, ‘Where am I?’

He thought it in German—but before the words came out of his mouth he had regained sufficient control of himself to turn them into inarticulate sound: he did not know why he did this, but merely that he must.

A lean, unshaven face swam into his vision and looked down at him and grinned with a flash of improbably white teeth.

“How’s it goin’, pal?” said a deep, metallic voice.

Memory, though battered and hole-pocked, flooded Otto’s mind. He said, carefully:

“All right. . . . What ship?”

The stubbled face leaned closer. “A’miral Farragut. Tanker—U.S. Merchant Marine.” Then, painstakingly: “United States.”

“Oh . . .” said Otto—and then:

“The . . . the . . .” He was groping for a word. “The child—the boy?”

The long unshaven face moved from side to side as the head was shaken.

“No use t’ fool ya, Bud. . . . The kid didn’t make it.” Idiom was clarified again. “Too bad—but he was dead when we hauled you in.”

The word dead came clearly through the mists. Otto stared up into small eyes which were nearly the same colour as his own. He did not speak.

“Girl’s O.K., though,” said the voice. “All right! . . . She’s sleepin’. . . .”

“Oh . . .” said Otto—and closed his eyes once more. He said, when he opened them again:

“Where is the ship going?”

“The good old U.S., son.” The face had gone, but the voice was still there. “Noo York!”

The sky was light, clear blue and very high up, and a bright sun shone out of it and the air was extraordinarily clear; so clear that a man could see not only a great distance but so sharply as to lend everything a most disturbing unreality. And with this clarity of atmosphere and vision there went an accompanying clarity of sound which enhanced the feeling of fantasy. The steely water of the harbour was illusion, and the faint movement of the Admiral Farragut must be caused by men behind the scenes. Across the celluloid water, and behind the grey quays (which must be of lath and canvas), huge sharp-edged castles of cardboard reared up to impossible heights, and from the direction of their hidden feet came a vast humming, more palpable perhaps than audible, which must be some ingenious device for producing the illusion that the unbelievable backcloth was indeed a great and busy city.