The Cruise of The Breadwinner by H.E. Bates Page A

carried a Lewis gun that had never been fired in the twenty years between the wars, and that had now something of the appearance of a patent frying-pan. She looked very old and very slow. Yet in ten minutes she had cleared the estuary and the long sandy point beyond and was well to seaward, heading due east up the Channel, rolling slightly on the light westward cross-wind of the early day.
    Gregson stood at the wheel in the thirty-eight inches of space that separated it from the hatchway. He could just squeeze himself in. The curve of his belly caught the spokes of the wheel where they met the hub. In the course of months this friction would rub a neat oblong hole in the three layers of his jerseys, going finally down to the seam ofhis shirt. When this happened Gregson would turn the three jerseys round and wear them back to front. He had once been a man of six feet three, but now he had the slight downward curve of a man who is constantly about to stoop to pick something up but sees only the eighteen-stone mass of his own flesh hiding whatever it was he was trying to find below. Sometimes when he held the wheel in one hand and turned his massive grey head first skyward, to look at the weather, and then downward, to bawl at the crew of two below, he was so enormous and he held the wheel so casually that it might have been a watch.
    All day he bawled blasting conversation into the hatch below.
    â€œGittin’ that tea ready, Snowy?”
    â€œYeh!” The boy’s voice from below was drawled out, and sometimes, when surprised, squeaky because it had not fully broken.
    â€œWell then, git it ready!”
    â€œYeh!”
    â€œYeh what? What did I tell you?”
    â€œI dunno.”
    â€œYou dunno eh? Well, I’ll bleedin’ make you know. Ain’t I allus told you call the skipper mister? Ain’t that what I told ye’? Ain’t it?”
    â€œYeh.”
    â€œYeh what?”
    â€œYeh, mister——”
    â€œIt don’t matter now! Too late! Git that tea!”
    If there was ever a smile on the face of Gregson as he yelled all this, the boy, down below, warming the enamel teapot on the stove of a galley three feet by four, never saw it. It appeared to him always as if Gregson were a man of unappeasable frenzy.
    â€œHow’s that injun going, Jimmy?”
    Gregson never succeeded in getting an answer to that question first time. It was Jimmy’s excuse that the noise of the eighteen-horse auxiliary drowned even what Gregson could say.
    â€œJimmy!”
    â€œHullo.”
    Jimmy came and stood at the foot of the gangway, dark and pessimistic, looking up, mouth awry, as if the left side of his face were paralytic with pain. He was a man given to violent depressions and upliftings of temper for no reason at all. “Hullo?” he said again. The word had in it the slow challenge of a man full of all sorts of unknown and incalculable trouble. It was partly inspired by habitual dislike of everything aboard and about and belonging to
The Breadwinner
. It was partly the voice of a man weary of the nuisances of a lousy small boat that should have been on the scrap-heap, with a rotten engine in need of a re-bore that was for ever breaking down. It was an exceedingly long-suffering voice, and the fact that Gregson never noticed it, or seemed to ignore it if he did, made it more long-suffering still. But it was also partly the voice of a man whose larger pleasure in life is the pleasure of grievance. It was inversely happy among the miseries of
The Breadwinner
. At home Jimmy had a wife and three small children, and it was he who would fire the Lewis gun if ever it were fired.
    â€œI said how’s that injun?”
    â€œI told you last time. And the time afore that. And the time afore that.”
    â€œDon’t tell me it ain’t no good, because I know different.”
    â€œIt ain’t so much it ain’t no good. What I keep tellin’ on yer is we oughta