Read Online Sea Fury (1971) by James Pattinson - Free Book Online

threw it away. If only he could as easily have thrown away the memory!
    That night he went out and got drunk. Whisky was hard to find but he managed to buy a bottle. He drank it all and woke up next morning with a mouth like sand, a throbbing head and the agony of his loneliness. He had been hitting the bottle ever since, trying to forget and yet knowing that he could never do so; indeed not truly desiring forgetfulness.
    His attitude to the woman who had been his wife was a strange mixture of love and hate; it was something that affected his whole life. Some men would have been able to get the sickness out of their systems and start afresh. But not Leach; just as he had kept her picture, so he had kept the memory like a brand burned in his flesh, and no day passed without bringing the bitter thought of that betrayal back into his twisted mind.
     
    Leach raised the glass to his lips and poured the whisky down his throat. He felt the liquid fire of the spirit flaming through his blood and it roused him to sudden fury. With a jerk of his arm he flung the empty glass at the photograph of the smiling girl on his desk. The glass missed the target, broke against the back of the desk and fell in fragments. He seized the whisky bottle and flung that also. It, too, missed the photograph, broke on the desk and fell among the papers in a shower of glass and liquor.
    Goaded to even blinder fury by the failure of his aim, Leach pushed himself up from the chair, lurched to the desk and grabbed the photograph-frame with his right hand. He threw it to the floor and jumped on it, dancing up and down, grinding it underfoot.
    “Bitch! Whore! Jezebel!”
    His face was contorted, his eyes staring; saliva dribbled from his mouth as he spat out the words.
    It was thus that Maggs, the radio officer, had the ill fortuneto surprise him. The moment could not have been more badly chosen.
    Maggs had knocked twice before entering and then had misconstrued the muffled words coming through the door as an invitation to walk in. Maggs walked in to find Leach in the middle of his dance of hate. He stopped dead just inside the cabin and stared in amazement at the spectacle of the master of the Chetwynd behaving as though demented. His immediate impulse was to retire at once, but a kind of awed fascination held him there, gazing in wonder at this remarkable exhibition.
    Leach continued with his leaping and stamping, his mouthing of words of hatred, for perhaps half a minute before he noticed Maggs. When his eyes did light on the radio officer he stopped immediately. He was not so demented that he failed to realise how ridiculous he was making himself. And in front of this wretched apology for a man of all people. His fury, deflected from the photograph, vented itself instead on the unfortunate Maggs.
    “Damn you, Sparks! What in hell d’you mean by bursting in here like that? Where are your manners, man? Or is it too much to expect manners in a product of the back streets and the gutter?”
    Maggs turned white. He was not to know that any other man standing in that particular place at that particular time would have received exactly the same kind of greeting. Sensitive as he was in the matter of his birth and upbringing, the remark cut deeply. He began to tremble. He trembled because he had an almost irresistible impulse to hit Captain Leach right in his filthy, insulting, saliva-dripping mouth. And he knew that if he did that the consequences for him might be very unpleasant indeed.
    “Well?” Leach demanded. “What do you want? Whydon’t you say something? Why are you standing there like a dumb bloody bastard?”
    Again, by mischance, he had found just the word most nicely calculated to touch on Maggs’s sensitive spot. Knowing himself to be illegitimate, he took the word in its literal meaning and resented it all the more bitterly for the fact that it happened to be an accurate description. Maggs would never have told a man to smile when he called him