"Yes, sir." Defensively.
"I see." He looked down at the deck, at McQuater's boots half-covered in water.
"Why aren't you wearing your sea-boots?" he asked abruptly.
"We don't get issued with them, sir."
"But your feet, man! They must be soaking!"
"Ah don't know, sir.
Ah think so.
Anyway," McQuater said simply, "it doesna matter. Ah canna feel them."
Vallery winced.
Nicholls, looking at the Captain, wondered if he realised the distressing, pathetic picture he himself presented with his sunken, bloodless face, red, inflamed eyes, his mouth and nose daubed with crimson, the inevitable dark and sodden hand-towel clutched in his left glove.
Suddenly unaccountably, Nicholls felt ashamed of himself: that thought, he knew, could never occur to this man.
Vallery smiled down at McQuater. "Tell me son, honestly-are you tired?"
"Ah am that-Ah mean, aye, aye, sir."
"Me too," Vallery confessed. "But, you can carry on a bit longer?" He felt the frail shoulders straighten under his arm.
"'Course Ah can, sir!" The tone was injured, almost truculent. "'Course Ah can!"
Vallery's gaze travelled slowly over the group, his dark eyes glowing as he heard a murmured chorus of assent.
He made to speak, broke off in a harsh coughing and bent his head.
He looked up again, his eyes wandering once more over the circle of now-anxious faces, then turned abruptly away.
"We won't forget you," he murmured indistinctly. "I promise you, we won't forget you."
He splashed quickly away, out of the pool of water, out of the pool of light, into the darkness at the foot of the ladder.
Ten minutes later, they emerged from "Y" turret.
The night sky was cloudless now, brilliant with diamantine stars, little chips of frozen fire in the dark velvet of that fathomless floor.
The cold was intense.
Captain Vallery shivered involuntarily as the turret door slammed behind them.
"Hartley?"
"Sir?"
"I smelt rum in there!"
"Yes, sir.
So did I." The Chief was cheerful, unperturbed. "Proper stinking with it.
Don't worry about it though, sir.
Half the men in the ship bottle their rum ration, keep it for action stations."
"Completely forbidden in regulations, Chief.
You know that as well as I do!"
"I know.
But there's no harm, sir.
Warms 'em up-and if it gives them Dutch courage, all the better.
Remember that night the for'ard pom-pom got two Stukas?"
"Of course."
"Canned to the wide.
Never have done it otherwise... And now, sir, they need it."
"Suppose you're right, Chief.
They do and I don't blame them." He chuckled. "And don't worry about my knowing, I've always known.
But it smelled like a saloon bar in there..."
They climbed up to 'X' turret-the marine turret, then down to the magazine.
Wherever he went, as in 'Y' magazine, Vallery left the men the better for his coming.
In personal contact, he had some strange indefinable power that lifted men above themselves, that brought out in them something they had never known to exist.
To see dull apathy and hopelessness slowly give way to resolution, albeit a kind of numbed and desperate resolve, was to see something that baffled the understanding.
Physically and mentally, Nicholls knew, these men had long since passed the point of no return.
Vaguely, he tried to figure it out, to study the approach and technique.
But the approach varied every time, he saw, was no more than a natural reaction to different sets of cirr cumstances as they presented themselves, a reaction utterly lacking in calculation or finesse.