Storm Below. Hugh Garner

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СКАЧАТЬ of a pair of wooden cupboards containing some enamel dinnerware, three salt shakers and a pepper shaker, an inadequate amount of cutlery, the remains of a soggy pound of butter, two opened tins of evaporated milk, and a canister of tea-stained sugar. Against the after-bulkhead, between the port and starboard doors, was a heavy, wooden, cattle-stall affair which served while in port as a receptacle for the rolled-up hammocks of the seamen. At the moment it was doing duty as the sleeping place for two men who had been unable to find room to sling their hammocks above. There were three tables bolted to the deck, which served as the eating places for the thirty men who lived there, and along their sides were three narrow benches, also bolted down. Around the sides of the chamber were a tight-packed series of wooden lockers, the tops of which formed a wide shelf upon which was stored accumulated duffle such as bags, boxes, headgear, mitts, photographs in frames, good shoes, dirty socks, and such miscellaneous possessions as could not be safely stored elsewhere. Beneath this shelf, but jutting out from it, were the tops of the clothes lockers which formed a long seat continuing down both sides of the mess. This was covered by a number of long leather cushions used by other members of the crew for sleeping accommodation due to the overcrowding.

      The sick berth attendant pushed his way through the small knot of seamen and stokers to where Ordinary Seaman “Knobby” Clark lay upon a table, still attired in boots and duffle coat, his face white and strained under its tan. One of his arms was folded on his chest, while the other lay loose and twisted beside him.

      “Clear a gangway there!” shouted the young sub-lieutenant, whom Bodley now noticed for the first time standing at the head of the table. He placed his first-aid bag on the deck, and said, “Let’s get his boots and coat off, fellows.” Two of the seamen pulled at the injured man’s boots which they threw on one of the lockers. The sub-lieutenant and another eased Knobby out of his coat.

      Bodley leaned over the table and began feeling the arm which lay along the injured boy’s side. As his fingers followed the bones he was conscious that the others were watching him in silence, showing the respect and awe for medical knowledge which the layman usually does. When his fingers felt the rough, gritty fracture below the elbow he took his hand away and said, “There it is.”

      He looked up to find them staring at him, and he thought, what the hell, any of them could have done the same! But the fact that none of them were aware of it gave him a feeling of power; and for the first time in his life he basked in the importance which comes with the respect of one’s fellows.

      He was about to open his bag and take out the bandages and splints it contained, when suddenly the surgeon’s instructions during his course returned to him. “Never believe that a patient’s only injuries are the obvious ones.” Trying not to show his indecision, he straightened up again and felt the pulse of the injured man’s good arm. Then he passed his hand over the patient’s forehead. “Take everything off him,” he said to those standing around. It was good to be able to give orders which the sub-lieutenant could not countermand. “Get his blankets out of his hammock and cover him well.” As they began doing this he ran down below to the small medicine cabinet over his locker and returned with a bottle of aromatic spirits of ammonia.

      When the patient was undressed and under the blankets he passed the bottle of ammonia under Knobby’s nose. There was no response. He pulled the blankets down and looked the man over for other injuries, but none were apparent. The crowd in the mess, reinforced now as the next watchkeepers were awakened, were beginning to grumble impatiently. To show them that he knew his job he took out the wooden splints and bandage and with a dexterity he had not known he possessed he pulled the arm into position and applied them. Taking a piece of unbleached cotton from the bag he fashioned a sling and tied it behind the patient’s neck.

      “How do you think he is, Bodley?” asked the sub-lieutenant. “I can’t say, sir. His arm is okay for now, but there may be internal injuries.” It elated him to mention such things, although he was ashamed of his elation as soon as he had felt it. Knobby was his first real patient in a year with the exception of several gonorrhea cases, a stoker who almost severed a finger in the heavy washroom door, and ten survivors whom they had picked up off Iceland the previous summer.

      The survivors had been a disappointment. They had been floating high and dry in a sea boat for only a few hours, and they had drunk the rum from the first-aid kit, so that they came aboard in a happy state singing “Roll Out the Barrel.” The only medication they had required was a spoonful of bicarbonate the morning after their rescue.

      It seemed that sailors only became gravely ill in port, and except for mal de mer, of which there was plenty on a corvette — especially among the new men the first day out — there was not enough sickness among his charges to let him earn his passage.

      The voice of the sub-lieutenant interrupted his thoughts.

      “Can you find out whether he has any internal injuries?”

      “No, sir. We should get a surgeon to look at him.”

      “Will you leave him here?”

      “There’s nowhere else, except in one of the officer’s cabins.” Sub-Lieutenant Smith-Rawleigh blanched as he suddenly remembered that he, as junior officer, would be the one who would be asked to give up his berth and sleep on the wardroom settee. (This had happened when they took aboard the newspaper correspondent for the trip from Gibraltar to Londonderry before Christmas.)

      Several of the bystanders snickered when they realized that it would be the subby’s cabin which would become the sickroom. To cover his retreat from such insubordination Smith-Rawleigh barked, “You fellows see that he doesn’t fall off the table,” pointing to the injured man. Then he said to Bodley, “The captain wants you to report to him immediately.”

      Bodley followed the officer under the blackout curtains and along the deck to the ladder leading to the bridge.

      The sky which now stretched overhead was a deep blue, and the clouds which had scudded across the sun following the dawn had melted into the horizon where they lay like a low pile of slate-grey dough. The wind had dropped, and with it the sea had ceased to run so wildly as during the night. The waves were longer and greasier, and their white tops no longer blew from crest to crest, but melted into the green with every falling motion.

      The Riverford was passing close to the convoy as it made a bow sweep. The first file of merchantmen lay to starboard a quarter of a mile away. Members of the closest ship, an empty British tanker, were standing alongside the forward structure watching the movements of the little corvette, while on its poop the gun’s crew were cleaning the gun, stopping now and again in their labours to point at the smaller ship.

      As the sub-lieutenant and the sick bay tiffy reached the bridge they found the captain working on a chart in the asdic cabin. He motioned them inside. “How is the lad?” he asked, addressing Bodley.

      Smith-Rawleigh began, “He’s got a broken —”

      “That’s all for now,” said the captain crisply, dismissing the officer with a nod. Then he turned to the other.

      “Well, sir, his right arm is broken below the elbow, but I’m afraid that there is more wrong with him than that. I don’t like his pulse, and he’s unconscious.”

      “Traumatic shock?”

      “Beg pardon? — oh, yes, probably, sir.” It was remarkable how much a ship’s captain could know about another’s job.

      “Is he warm and fairly comfortable?”

      “Yes, sir,” Bodley answered. He looked around him at the asdic operator, who СКАЧАТЬ