Free The Cruise of The Breadwinner by H.E. Bates

without even the convulsion of breath. The sound of breathing had stopped, and the moustache, still wet and flat on the face, had now more than ever the look of something mockingly plastered there. The lamp seemed astonishingly bright in its odd distortion,terrifyingly bright in the young immobile eyes that still seemed to be staring straight at the boy.
    After some moments he succeeded in getting his fingers out of the dead fingers, at the same time releasing the binoculars. He was cold and he moved quietly, crawling on the cabin floor. When he went over to Messner he found that Messner had died too, and now the lamplight was full on both of them, with equal brightness, as they lay side by side.

Chapter 6
    The Breadwinner
came in under the shelter of rain-brown dunes and the western peninsula of the bay in the late afternoon and drove in towards the estuary, with the boy and Gregson on deck. Rain trembling across the darkening sky in grey cascades like spray hid all the further cliffs from sight, and in the distance the hills were lost in cloud. The boy grasped the binoculars in his hands, pressing them against his stomach rather as Gregson pressed the wheel against his own, in the attitude of a man who is about to raise them to his eyes and see what the distances reveal.
    â€œJust turned,” Gregson said. “Bleedin’ good job for us too. That tide’ll come in as high as a church steeple with this wind.”
    As she came in full across the wind, lumping on the waves as if they had been crests of solid steel,
The Breadwinner
had more than ever the look of a discarded and battered toy. She bumped in a series of jolting short dives that were like the ridiculous mockery of a dance. Her deck as it ran with spray and rain gleamed like dirty yellow ice, so that sometimes when she heeled over and the boy was caughtunawares he hung on to the deck-house with one hand, his feet skating outwards. With the other hand he held on to the binoculars. He gripped them with the aggressive tightness of a man who has won a conquest. Nothing, if he could help it, was going to happen to them now.
    At times he looked up at the face of Gregson. It was thrust outward into the rain with its own enormous and profound aggression. The boy sometimes could not tell from its muteness whether it was angry or simply shocked into the silences it held for half an hour or more. He wanted to talk to it. There rose up constantly in his mind, tired now and dazed by shock, images of the cabin below. They troubled him more each time he thought of them. Their physical reality began to haunt him much more than the reality of the dead engineer, who lay not ten feet before him, like a piece of sodden and battered merchandise, his blood washed away now by constant rain. He thought often of the conversation of the dead pilot. He thought less often of Messner. There were to him very subtle differences between the men, and death had not destroyed them. When he thought of Messner it was with dry anger. He conceived Messner as the cause of it all. It was something of a low trick. Then he remembered Messner as the man who also carried the binoculars, and he remembered that the binoculars were the only things that had come out of the day that were not sick with the ghastliness of foul and indelible dreams.
    He was very tired. The way the sea hit
The Breadwinner
also hit him in the stomach, a dozen times or more a minute, kicking him sore. He had not eaten anything since coming up from the cabin. There had been no more shouts from Gregson, no more cups of tea. Gregson remained for the most part vastly mute, the light beaten out of his face.
    When the boy had to talk to him again, he said:
    â€œWhen will we be in, Mr. Gregson, skipper?”
    Gregson did not answer. He kept his face thrust forward into a gigantic pout, angered into a new and tragic sullenness. The boy had not known this face before. There were times when he had been afraid of Gregson; they were