Vallery smiled.
‘Not bad at all, Marshall. I think you’ve got the answer there. What do you think, sir?’
‘Worth trying anyway,’ Tyndall agreed. ‘Better than waiting around like a sitting duck.’
‘Go ahead then, Torps.’ Vallery looked at him quizzically. ‘Who are your explosives experts?’
‘I figured on taking Ralston—’
‘Just what I thought. You’re taking nobody, laddie,’ said Vallery firmly. ‘Can’t afford to lose my torpedo officer.’
Marshall looked pained, then shrugged resignedly.
‘The chief TGM and Ralston—he’s the senior LTO. Good men both.’
‘Right. Bentley—detail a man to accompany them in the boat. We’ll signal Asdic bearings from here. Have him take a portable Aldis with him.’ He dropped his voice. ‘Marshall?’
‘Sir?’
‘Ralston’s young brother died in hospital this afternoon.’ He looked across at the Leading Torpedo Operator, a tall, blond, unsmiling figure dressed in faded blue overalls beneath his duffel. ‘Does he know yet?’
The Torpedo Officer stared at Vallery, then looked round slowly at the LTO. He swore, softly, bitterly, fluently.
‘Marshall!’ Vallery’s voice was sharp, imperative, but Marshall ignored him, his face a mask, oblivious alike to the reprimand in the Captain’s voice and the lashing bite of the sleet.
‘No, sir,’ he stated at length, ‘he doesn’t know. But he did receive some news this morning. Croydon was pasted last week. His mother and three sisters live there—lived there. It was a land-mine, sir—there was nothing left.’ He turned abruptly and left the bridge.
Fifteen minutes later it was all over. The starboard whaler and the motor-boat on the port side hit the water with the Ulysses still moving up to the mooring. The whaler, buoy-jumper aboard, made for the buoy, while the motor-boat slid off at a tangent.
Four hundred yards away from the ship, in obedience to the flickering instructions from the bridge, Ralston fished out a pair of pliers from his overalls and crimped the chemical fuse. The Gunner’s Mate stared fixedly at his stop-watch. On the count of twelve the scuttling charge went over the side.
Three more, at different settings, followed it in close succession, while the motor-boat cruised in a tight circle. The first three explosions lifted the stern and jarred the entire length of the boat, viciously—and that was all. But with the fourth, a great gout of air came gushing to the surface, followed by a long stream of viscous bubbles. As the turbulence subsided, a thin slick of oil spread over a hundred square yards of sea…
Men, fallen out from Action Stations, watched with expressionless faces as the motor-boat made it back to the Ulysses and hooked on to the falls just in time: the Hotchkiss steering-gear was badly twisted and she was taking in water fast under the counter.
The Duke of Cumberland was a smudge of smoke over a far headland.
Cap in hand, Ralston sat down opposite the Captain. Vallery looked at him for a long time in silence. He wondered what to say, how best to say it. He hated to have to do this.
Richard Vallery also hated war. He always had hated it and he cursed the day it had dragged him out of his comfortable retirement. At least, ‘dragged’ was how he put it; only Tyndall knew that he had volunteered his services to the Admiralty on 1st September, 1939, and had had them gladly accepted.
But he hated war. Not because it interfered with his lifelong passion for music and literature, on both of which he was a considerable authority, not even because it was a perpetual affront to his aestheticism, to his sense of rightness and fitness. He hated it because he was a deeply religious man, because it grieved him to see in mankind the wild beasts of the primeval jungle, because he thought the cross of life was already burden enough without the gratuitous infliction of the mental and physical agony of war, and, above all, because he saw war all too clearly as the wild and insensate folly it was, as a madness of the mind that settled nothing, proved nothing—except the old, old truth that God was on the side of the big battalions.
But some things he had to do, and Vallery had clearly seen that this war had to be his also. And so he had come back to the service, and had grown older as the bitter years passed, older and frailer, and more kindly and tolerant and understanding. Among Naval Captains, indeed among men, he was unique. In his charity, in his humility, Captain Richard Vallery walked alone. It was a measure of the man’s greatness that this thought never occurred to him.
He sighed. All that troubled him just now was what he ought to say to Ralston. But it was Ralston who spoke first.
‘It’s all right, sir.’ The voice was a level monotone, the face very still. ‘I know. The Torpedo Officer told me.’
Vallery cleared his throat.
‘Words are useless, Ralston, quite useless. Your young brother—and your family at home. All gone. I’m sorry, my boy, terribly sorry about it all.’ He looked up into the expressionless face and smiled wryly. ‘Or maybe you think that these are all words—you know, something formal, just a meaningless formula.’
Suddenly, surprisingly, Ralston smiled briefly.
‘No, sir, I don’t. I can appreciate how you feel, sir. You see, my father—well, he’s a captain too. He tells me he feels the same way.’
Vallery looked at him in astonishment.
‘Your father, Ralston? Did you say—’
‘Yes, sir.’ Vallery could have sworn to a flicker of amusement in the blue eyes, so quiet, so self possessed, across the table. ‘In the Merchant Navy, sir—a tanker captain—16,000 tons.’
Vallery said nothing. Ralston went on quietly:
‘And about Billy, sir—my young brother. It’s—it’s just one of these things. It’s nobody’s fault but mine—I asked to have him aboard here. I’m to blame, sir—only me.’ His lean brown hands were round the brim of his hat, twisting it, crushing it. How much worse will it be when the shattering impact of the double blow wears off, Vallery wondered, when the poor kid begins to think straight again?
‘Look, my boy, I think you need a few days’ rest, time to think things over.’ God, Vallery thought, what an inadequate, what a futile thing to say. ‘PRO is making out your travelling warrant just now. You will start fourteen days’ leave as from tonight.’
‘Where is the warrant made out for, sir?’ The hat was crushed now, crumpled between the hands. ‘Croydon?’
‘Of course. Where else—’ Vallery stopped dead; the enormity of the blunder had just hit him.
‘Forgive me, my boy. What a damnably stupid thing to say!’
‘Don’t send me away, sir,’ Ralston pleaded quietly. ‘I know it sounds—well, it sounds corny, self-pitying, but the truth is I’ve nowhere to go, I belong here—on the Ulysses. I can do things all the time—I’m busy—working, sleeping—I don’t have to talk about things—I can do things…’ The self-possession was only the thinnest veneer, taut and frangible, with the quiet desperation immediately below.
‘I can get a chance to help pay ‘em back,’ Ralston hurried on. ‘Like crimping these fuses today—it—well, it was a privilege. It was more than that—it was—oh, I don’t know. I can’t find the words, sir.’
Vallery knew. He felt