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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, A Tall Ship, by Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa
+Ritchie
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: A Tall Ship
+       On Other Naval Occasions
+
+
+Author: Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
+
+
+
+Release Date: June 10, 2008  [eBook #25749]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A TALL SHIP***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Al Haines
+
+
+
+Transcriber's note:
+
+   "Bartimeus" is the pseudonym of Captain Lewis Ritchie, R.N.
+
+
+
+
+
+A TALL SHIP
+
+On Other Naval Occasions
+
+by
+
+"BARTIMEUS"
+
+Author of "Naval Occasions"
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+  . . . "All I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
+        *      *      *
+  And a laughing yarn from a merry fellow rover,
+  And a quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick's over."
+        JOHN MASEFIELD
+
+
+
+
+Cassell and Company, Ltd
+London, New York, Toronto and Melbourne
+
+First published September 1915.
+Reprinted September and October 1915.
+
+
+
+
+To
+
+H. M. S.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+It is almost superfluous to observe that the following sketches contain
+no attempt at the portrait of an individual.  The majority are etched
+in with the ink of pure imagination.  A few are "composite" sketches of
+a large number of originals with whom the Author has been shipmates in
+the past and whose friendship he is grateful to remember.
+
+Of these, some, alas! have finished "the long trick."  To them, at no
+risk of breaking their quiet sleep--_Ave atque vale_.
+
+"Crab-Pots," "The Day," and "Chummy-Ships" appeared originally in
+_Blackwood's Magazine_, and are reproduced here by kind permission of
+the Editor.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+  1. CRAB-POTS
+  2. THE DRUM
+  3. A CAPTAIN'S FORENOON
+  4. THE SEVEN-BELL BOAT
+  5. THE KING'S PARDON
+  6. AN OFF-SHORE WIND
+  7. THE DAY
+  8. THE MUMMERS
+  9. CHUMMY-SHIPS
+ 10. THE HIGHER CLAIM
+
+
+
+
+A TALL SHIP
+
+
+I
+
+CRAB-POTS
+
+1
+
+In moments of crisis the disciplined human mind works as a thing
+detached, refusing to be hurried or flustered by outward circumstance.
+Time and its artificial divisions it does not acknowledge.  It is
+concerned with preposterous details and with the ludicrous, and it is
+acutely solicitous of other people's welfare, whilst working at a speed
+mere electricity could never attain.
+
+Thus with James Thorogood, Lieutenant, Royal Navy, when he--together
+with his bath, bedding, clothes, and scanty cabin furniture, revolver,
+first-aid outfit, and all the things that were his--was precipitated
+through his cabin door across the aft-deck.  The ship heeled violently,
+and the stunning sound of the explosion died away amid the uproar of
+men's voices along the mess-deck and the tinkle and clatter of broken
+crockery in the wardroom pantry.
+
+"Torpedoed!" said James, and was in his conjecture entirely correct.
+He emerged from beneath the debris of his possessions, shaken and
+bruised, and was aware that the aft-deck (that spacious vestibule
+giving admittance on either side to officers' cabins, and normally
+occupied by a solitary Marine sentry) was filled with figures rushing
+past him towards the hatchway.
+
+It was half-past seven in the morning.  The Morning-watch had been
+relieved and were dressing.  The Middle-watch, of which James had been
+one, were turning out after a brief three-hours' spell of sleep.
+Officers from the bathroom, girt in towels, wardroom servants who had
+been laying the table for breakfast, one or two Warrant-officers in sea
+boots and monkey jackets--the Watch-below, in short--appeared and
+vanished from his field of vision like figures on a screen.  In no
+sense of the word, however, did the rush resemble a panic.  The
+aft-deck had seen greater haste on all sides in a scramble on deck to
+cheer a troopship passing the cruiser's escort.  But the variety of
+dress and undress, the expressions of grim anticipation in each man's
+face as he stumbled over the uneven deck, set Thorogood's reeling mind,
+as it were, upon its feet.
+
+The Surgeon, pyjama clad, a crimson streak running diagonally across
+the lather on his cheek, suddenly appeared crawling on all-fours
+through the doorway of his shattered cabin.  "I always said those
+safety-razors were rotten things," he observed ruefully.  "I've just
+carved my initials on my face.  And my ankle's broken.  Have we been
+torpedoed, or what, at all?  An' what game is it you're playing under
+that bath, James?  Are you pretending to be an oyster?"
+
+Thorogood pulled himself together and stood up.  "I think one of their
+submarines must have bagged us."  He nodded across the flat to where,
+beyond the wrecked debris of three cabins, the cruiser's side gaped
+open to a clear sky and a line of splashing waves.  Overhead on deck
+the twelve-pounders were barking out a series of ear-splitting
+reports--much as a terrier might yap defiance at a cobra over the
+stricken body of its master.
+
+"I think our number's up, old thing."  Thorogood bent and slipped his
+arms under the surgeon's body.  "Shove your arms round my neck. . . .
+Steady!--hurt you?  Heave!  Up we go!"  A Midshipman, ascending the
+hatchway, paused and turned back.  Then he ran towards them, spattering
+through the water that had already invaded the flat.
+
+"Still!" sang a bugle on deck.  There was an instant's lull in the
+stampede of feet overhead.  The voices of the officers calling orders
+were silent.  The only sounds were the lapping of the waves along the
+riven hull and the intermittent reports of the quick-firers.  Then came
+the shrill squeal of the pipes.
+
+"Fall in!" roared a voice down the hatchway.  "Clear lower deck!  Every
+soul on deck!"  The bugle rang out again.
+
+Thorogood staggered with his burden across the buckled plating of the
+flat, and reached the hatchway.  The Midshipman who had turned back
+passed him, his face white and set.  "Here!" called the Lieutenant from
+the bottom of the ladder.  "This way, my son!  Fall in's the order!"
+For a moment the boy glanced back irresolute across the flat, now ankle
+deep in water.  The electric light had been extinguished, and in the
+greenish gloom between decks he looked a small and very forlorn figure.
+He pointed towards the wreckage of the after-cabin, called something
+inaudible, and, turning, was lost to view aft.
+
+"That's the 'Pay's' cabin," said the Doctor between his teeth.  "He was
+a good friend to that little lad.  I suppose the boy's gone to look for
+him, and the 'Pay' as dead as a haddock, likely as not."
+
+Thorogood deposited the Surgeon on the upper deck, fetched a lifebuoy,
+and rammed it over the injured man's shoulders.  "God forgive me for
+taking it," said the latter gratefully, "but my fibula's cracked to
+blazes, an' I love my wife . . ."
+
+All round them men were working furiously with knives and crowbars,
+casting off lashings from boats and baulks of timber on the booms,
+wrenching doors and woodwork from their fastenings--anything capable of
+floating and supporting a swimmer.  The officers were encouraging the
+men with words and example, steadying them with cheery catch-words of
+their Service, ever with an eye on the forebridge, at the extreme end
+of which the Captain was standing.
+
+On the after shelter-deck the Gunner, bare-headed and clad only in a
+shirt and trousers, was, single-handed, loading and firing a
+twelve-pounder as fast as he could snap the breech to and lay the gun.
+His face was distorted with rage, and his black brows met across his
+nose in a scowl that at any other time would have suggested acute
+melodrama.  Half a mile away the shots were striking the water with
+little pillars of white spray.
+
+The figure on the forebridge made a gesture with his arm.  "Fall in!"
+shouted the Commander.  "Fall in, facing outboard, and strip!  Stand by
+to swim for it!"  Seven hundred men--bluejackets, stokers, and
+marines--hurriedly formed up and began to divest themselves of their
+clothes.  They were drawn up regardless of class or rating, and a burly
+Marine Artilleryman, wriggling out of his cholera belt, laughed in the
+blackened face of a stoker fresh from the furnace door.
+
+"Cheer up, mate!" he said encouragingly.  "You'll soon 'ave a chance to
+wash your bloomin' face!"
+
+The ship gave a sudden lurch, settled deeper in the water, and began to
+heel slowly over.  The Captain, clinging to the bridge rail to maintain
+his balance, raised the megaphone to his mouth:
+
+"Carry on!" he shouted.  "Every man for himself!"--he lowered the
+megaphone and added between his teeth--"and God for us all!"
+
+The ship was lying over at an angle of sixty degrees, and the men were
+clustered along the bulwarks and nettings as if loath to leave their
+stricken home even at the eleventh hour.  A muscular Leading Seaman was
+the first to go--a nude, pink figure, wading reluctantly down the
+sloping side of the cruiser, for all the world like a child paddling.
+He stopped when waist deep and looked back.  "'Ere!" he shouted, "'ow
+far is it to Yarmouth?  No more'n a 'undred an' fifty miles, is it?  I
+gotter aunt livin' there. . . ."
+
+Then came the rush, together with a roar of voices, shouts and cheers,
+cries for help, valiant, quickly stifled snatches of "Tipperary," and,
+over all, the hiss of escaping steam.
+
+"She wouldn't be 'arf pleased to see yer, Nobby!" shouted a voice above
+the hubbub.  "Not 'arf she wouldn't!  Nah then, 'oo's for compulsory
+bathin'. . . .  Gawd! ain't it cold! . . ."
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+How he found himself in the water, Thorogood had no very clear
+recollection; but by instinct he struck out through the welter of
+gasping, bobbing heads till he was clear of the clutching menace of the
+drowning.  The Commander, clad simply in his wrist-watch and uniform
+cap, was standing on the balsa raft, with scores of men hanging to its
+support.  "Get away from the ship!" he was bawling at the full strength
+of his lungs.  "Get clear before she goes----!"
+
+The stern of the cruiser rose high in the air, and she dived with
+sickening suddenness into the grey vortex of waters.  Pitiful cries for
+help sounded on all sides.  Two cutters and a few hastily constructed
+rafts were piled with survivors; others swam to and fro, looking for
+floating debris, or floated, reserving their strength.
+
+The cries and shouts grew fewer.
+
+Thorogood had long parted with his support--the broken loom of an
+oar--and was floating on his back, when he found himself in close
+proximity to two figures clinging to an empty breaker.  One he
+recognised as a Midshipman, the other was a bearded Chief Stoker.  The
+boy's teeth were chattering and his face was blue with cold.
+
+"W-w-what were you g-g-g-oing to have for b-b-b-breakfast in your
+m-m-mess?" he was asking his companion in misfortune.
+
+Hang it all, a fellow of fifteen had to show somehow he wasn't afraid
+of dying.
+
+"Kippers," replied the Chief Stoker, recognising his part and playing
+up to it manfully.  "I'm partial to a kipper, meself--an' fat
+'am. . . ."
+
+The Midshipman caught sight of Thorogood, and raised an arm in
+greeting.  As he did so a sudden spasm of cramp twisted his face like a
+mask.  He relaxed his grasp of the breaker and sank instantly.
+
+The two men reappeared half a minute later empty handed, and clung to
+the barrel exhausted.
+
+"It's all chalked up somewhere, I suppose," spluttered James, gasping
+for his breath.
+
+"Child murder, sir, I reckon that is," was the tense reply.  "That's on
+their slop ticket all right. . . .  'Kippers,' I sez, skylarkin'
+like . . . an' 'e sinks like a stone. . . ."
+
+Among the wavetops six hundred yards away a slender, upright object
+turned in a wide circle and moved slowly northward.  To the south a
+cluster of smoke spirals appeared above the horizon, growing gradually
+more distinct.  The party in one of the cutters raised a wavering cheer.
+
+"Cheer up for Chatham!" shouted a clear voice across the grey waste of
+water.  "Here come the destroyers!  . . .  Stick it, my hearties!"
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+After a month's leave James consulted a specialist.  He was a very wise
+man, and his jerky discourse concerned shocked nerve-centres and reflex
+actions.  "That's all right," interrupted the thoroughly startled James
+(sometime wing three-quarter for the United Services XV.), "but what
+defeats me is not being able to cross a London street without 'coming
+over all of a tremble'!  An' when I try to light a cigarette"--he
+extended an unsteady hand--"look! . . .  I'm as fit as a fiddle,
+really.  Only the Medical Department won't pass me for service afloat.
+An' I want to get back, d'you see?  There's a super-Dreadnought
+commissioning soon----"
+
+The specialist wrote cabalistic signs on a piece of paper.  "Bracing
+climate--East Coast for preference. . . .  Plenty of exercise.  Walk.
+Fresh air.  Early hours.  Come and see me again in a fortnight, and get
+this made up.  That's all right"--he waved aside James's proffered
+guineas.  "Don't accept fees from naval or military. . . .  Least we
+can do is to mend you quickly.  'Morning. . . ."
+
+James descended the staircase, and passed a tall, lean figure in soiled
+khaki ascending, whom the public (together with his wife and family)
+had every reason to suppose was at that moment in the neighbourhood of
+Ypres.
+
+"If it weren't for those fellows I couldn't be here," was his greeting
+to the specialist.  He jerked his grey, close-cropped head towards the
+door through which Thorogood had just passed.
+
+
+
+2
+
+A ramshackle covered cart laden with an assortment of tinware had
+stopped on the outskirts of the village.  The owner, a bent scarecrow
+of a fellow, was effecting repairs to his nag's harness with a piece of
+string.  Evening was setting in, and the south-east wind swept a grey
+haze across the coast road and sombre marshes.  The tinker completed
+first-aid to the harness, and stood at the front of the cart to light
+his lamps.  The first match blew out, and he came closer to the body of
+the vehicle for shelter from the wind.
+
+At that moment a pedestrian passed, humming a little tune to himself,
+striding along through the November murk with swinging gait.  It may
+have been that his voice, coming suddenly within range of the mare's
+ears, conveyed a sound of encouragement.  Perhaps the lights of the
+village, twinkling out one by one along the street, suggested stables
+and a nosebag.  Anyhow, the tinker's nag threw her weight suddenly into
+the collar, the wheel of the cart passed over the tinker's toe, and the
+tinker uttered a sudden exclamation.
+
+In the circumstances it was a pardonable enough ebullition of feeling
+and ought not to have caused the passing pedestrian to spin round on
+his heel, astonishment on every line of his face.  The next moment,
+however, he recovered himself.  "Did you call out to me?" he shouted.
+
+The tinker was nursing his toe, apparently unconscious of having given
+anyone more food for thought than usual.  "No," he replied gruffly.  "I
+'urt myself."
+
+The passer-by turned and pursued his way to the village.  The tinker
+lit his lamps and followed.  He was a retiring sort of tinker, and
+employed no flamboyant methods to advertise his wares.  He jingled
+through the village without attracting any customers--or apparently
+desiring to attract any--and followed the sandy coast road for some
+miles.
+
+At length he pulled up, and from his seat on the off-shaft sat
+motionless for a minute, listening.  The horse, as if realising that
+its dreams of a warm stable were dreams indeed, hung its head
+dejectedly, and in the faint gleam, of the lamp its breath rose in thin
+vapour.  The man descended from his perch on the shaft and, going to
+his nag's head, turned the cart off the road.
+
+For some minutes the man and horse stumbled through the darkness; the
+cart jolted, and the tin merchandise rattled dolefully.  The tinker,
+true to the traditions of his calling, swore again.  Then he found what
+he had been looking for, an uneven track that wound among the
+sand-dunes towards the shore.  The murmur of the sea became suddenly
+loud and distinct.
+
+With a jerk the horse and cart came to a standstill.  In a leisurely
+fashion the tinker unharnessed his mare, tied a nosebag on her, and
+tethered her to the tail of the cart.  In the same deliberate manner he
+rummaged about among his wares till he produced a bundle of sticks and
+some pieces of turf.  With these under his arm, he scrambled off across
+the sand-hills to the sea.
+
+The incoming tide sobbed and gurgled along miniature headlands of rock
+that stretched out on either side of a little bay.  The sand-hills
+straggled down almost to high-water mark, where the winter storms had
+piled a barrier of kelp and debris.  At one place a rough track down to
+the shingle had been worn in the sand by the feet of fishermen using
+the cove in fine weather during the summer.
+
+The tinker selected a site for his fire in a hollow that opened to the
+sea.  He built a hearth with flat stones, fetched a kettle from the
+cart, kindled the fire, and busied himself with preparations for his
+evening meal.  This concluded, he laid a fresh turf of peat upon the
+embers, banked the sand up all round till the faint glow was invisible
+a few yards distant, and lit a pipe.
+
+The night wore on.  Every now and again the man rose, climbed a
+sand-hill, and stood listening, returning each time to his vigil by the
+fire.  At length he leaned forward and held the face of his watch near
+the fire-glow.  Apparently the time had come for action of some sort,
+for he rose and made off into the darkness.  When he reappeared he
+carried a tin pannikin in his hand, and stood motionless by the fire,
+staring out to sea.
+
+Ten minutes he waited; then, suddenly, he made an inaudible
+observation.  A light appeared out of the darkness beyond the headland,
+winked twice, and vanished.  The tinker approached his fire and swilled
+something from his pannikin on to the glowing embers.  A flame shot up
+about three feet, and died down, flickering.  The tin contained
+paraffin, and three times the tinker repeated the strange rite.  Then
+he sat down and waited.
+
+A quarter of an hour passed before something grated on the shingle of
+the beach, scarcely perceptible above the lap of the waves.  The tinker
+rose to his feet, shovelled the sand over the embers of his fire, and
+descended the little path to the beach.  The night was inky dark, and
+for a moment he paused irresolute.  Then a dark form appeared against
+the faintly luminous foam, wading knee deep and dragging the bows of a
+small skiff towards the shore.  The tinker gave a low whistle, and the
+wader paused.
+
+"_Fritz!_" he said guardedly.
+
+"_Ja!  Hier!_" replied the tinker, advancing.
+
+"_Gott sei dank!_" said the other.  He left the boat and waded ashore.
+The two men shook hands.  "Where's the cart?" asked the low voice in
+German.
+
+"Among the sand-hills.  You will want assistance.  Have you more than
+one with you in the boat?"
+
+"Yes."  The new-comer turned and gave a brusque order.  Another figure
+waded ashore and joined the two men, a tall, bearded fellow in duffel
+overalls.  As his feet reached the sand he spat ostentatiously.  The
+tinker led the way to the cart.
+
+"It is dark," said the first man from the sea.  "How many cans have you
+got?"
+
+"Forty-eight.  I could get no more without exciting suspicion.  They
+have requisitioned one of my cars as it is."
+
+The other gave a low laugh.  "What irony!  Well, that will last till
+Friday.  But you must try and get more then.  I will be here at the
+same time; no, the tide will not suit--at 8 a.m.  We can come inside
+then.  Did you remember the cigarettes?"
+
+"Yes."  The tinker climbed into the cart and handed a petrol tin down
+to the speaker.  "_Ein!_" he said.  "Count them," and lifted out
+another.  "_Zwei!_"  The third man, who had not hitherto spoken,
+received them with a grunt, and set off down to the boat with his
+burden.
+
+Eight times the trio made the journey to and from the beach.  Three
+times they waited while the tiny collapsible boat ferried its cargo out
+to where, in the darkness, a long, black shadow lay, with the water
+lapping round it, like a partly submerged whale.  The last time the
+tinker remained alone on the beach.
+
+He stood awhile staring out into the darkness, and at length turned to
+retrace his steps.  As he reached the shelter of the sand-dunes a tall
+shadow rose out of the ground at his feet, and the next instant he was
+writhing on his face in the grip of an exceedingly effective
+neck-and-arm lock.
+
+"If you try to kick, my pippin," said the excited voice of James
+Thorogood, "I shall simply break your arm--so!"
+
+The face in the sand emitted a muffled squark.
+
+"Keep still, then."
+
+The two men breathed heavily for a minute.
+
+"Don't swear, either.  That's what got you into this trouble, that
+deplorable habit of swearing aloud in German.  But I will say, for a
+tinker, you put a very neat West Country whipping on that bit of broken
+harness.  I've been admiring it.  Didn't know they taught you that in
+the German navy--_don't_ wriggle."
+
+
+
+3
+
+James Thorogood, retaining a firm hold on his companion's arm, bent
+down and gathered a handful of loose earth from a flower-bed at his
+feet.  The moonlight, shining fitfully through flying clouds, illumined
+the face of the old house and the two road-stained figures standing
+under its walls.  It was a lonely, rambling building, partly sheltered
+from the prevailing wind by a clump of poplars, and looking out down an
+avenue bordered by untidy rhododendrons.
+
+"Won't Uncle Bill be pleased!" said James, and flung his handful of
+earth with relish against one of the window-panes on the first floor.
+He and his captive waited in silence for some minutes; then he repeated
+the assault.  Soon a light wavered behind the curtains, the sash
+lifted, and a head and shoulders appeared.
+
+"Hallo!" said a man's voice.
+
+"Uncle Bill!" called James.  There was a moment's silence.
+
+"Well?" said the voice again, patiently.
+
+"Uncle Bill!  It's me--Jim.  Will you come down and open the door?  And
+don't wake Janet, whatever you do."  Janet was the housekeeper, stone
+deaf these fifteen years.
+
+The head and shoulders disappeared.  Again the light flickered, grew
+dim, and vanished.  "This way," said James, and led his companion round
+an angle of the house into the shadow of the square Georgian porch.
+The bolts were being withdrawn as they reached the steps, and a tall,
+grey-haired man in a dressing-gown opened the door.  He held a candle
+above his head and surveyed the wayfarers through a rimless monocle.
+
+"Didn't expect you till to-morrow," was his laconic greeting.  "Brought
+a friend?"
+
+"He's not a friend exactly," said James, pushing his companion in
+through the door, and examining him curiously by the light of the
+candle.  "But I'll tell you all about him later on.  His name's Fritz.
+D'you mind if I lock him in the cellar?"
+
+"Do," replied Uncle Bill dryly.  He produced a bunch of keys from the
+pocket of his dressing-gown.  "It's the thin brass key.  There's some
+quite decent brandy in the farthest bin on the right-hand side, if
+you're thinking of making a night of it down there.  Take the candle;
+I'm going back to bed."
+
+"Don't go to bed," called James from the head of the stairs.  "I want
+to have a yarn with you in a minute.  Light the gas in the dining-room."
+
+Five minutes later he reappeared carrying a tray with cold beef, bread,
+and a jug of beer upon it.  Uncle Bill stood in front of the dead ashes
+of his hearth considering his nephew through his eyeglass.  "I hope you
+made--er--Fritz comfortable?  You look as if you had been doing a
+forced march.  Nerves better?"
+
+James set down his empty glass with a sigh and wiped his mouth.  "As
+comfortable as he deserves to be.  He's a spy, Uncle Bill.  I caught
+him supplying petrol to a German submarine."
+
+"Really?" said Uncle Bill, without enthusiasm.  "That brandy cost me
+180s. a dozen.  Wouldn't he be better in a police station?  Have you
+informed the Admiralty?"
+
+"I venerate the police," replied James flippantly, "and the Admiralty
+are as a father and mother to me; but I want to keep this absolutely
+quiet for a few days--anyhow, till after Friday.  I couldn't turn Fritz
+over to a policeman without attracting a certain amount of attention.
+Anyhow, it would leak out if I did.  I've walked eighteen miles already
+since midnight, and it's another fifty-nine to the Admiralty from here.
+Besides, unless I disguise Fritz as a performing bear, people would
+want to know why I was leading him about on a rope's end----"
+
+"Start at the beginning," interrupted Uncle Bill wearily, "and explain,
+avoiding all unnecessary detail."
+
+So James, between mouthfuls, gave a brief resume of the night's
+adventure, while Sir William Thorogood, Professor of Chemistry and
+Adviser to the Admiralty on Submarine Explosives, stood and shivered on
+the hearthrug.
+
+"And it just shows," concluded his nephew, "what a three-hours' swim in
+the North Sea does for a chap's morals."  He eyed his Uncle Bill
+solemnly.  "I even chucked the fellow's seamanship in his teeth!"
+
+Sir William polished his eyeglass with a silk handkerchief and replaced
+it with care.
+
+"_Did_ you!" he said.
+
+
+
+4
+
+A squat tub of a boat, her stern piled high with wicker crab-pots, came
+round the northern headland and entered the little bay.  The elderly
+fisherman who was rowing rested on his oars and sat contemplating the
+crab-pots in the stem.  A younger man, clad in a jersey and sea boots,
+was busy coiling down something in the bows.  "How about this spot," he
+said presently, looking up over his shoulder, "for the first one?"  The
+rower fumbled about inside his tattered jacket, produced something that
+glistened in the sunlight, and screwed it into his eye.
+
+"Uncle Bill!" protested the younger fisherman, "do unship that thing.
+If there _is_ anyone watching us, it will give the whole show away."
+
+Sir William Thorogood surveyed the harbour with an expressionless
+countenance.  "I consider that having donned these unsavoury
+garments--did Janet bake them thoroughly, by the way?--I have already
+forfeited my self-respect quite sufficiently.  How much of the circuit
+have you got off the drum?"
+
+"Six fathoms."
+
+"That's enough for the first, then."  The speaker rose, lifted a
+crab-pot with an effort, and tipped it over the side of the boat.  The
+cable whizzed out over the gunwale for a few seconds and stopped.
+Uncle Bill resumed paddling for a little distance, and repeated the
+manoeuvre eight times in a semi-circle round the inside of the bay,
+across the entrance.  "That's enough," he observed at length, as the
+last crab-pot sank with a splash.  "Don't want to break all their
+windows ashore.  These will do all they're intended to."  He propelled
+the boat towards the shore, while James paid out the weighted cable.
+The bows of the boat grated on the shingle, and the elder man climbed
+out.  "Hand me the battery and the firing key--in that box under the
+thwart there.  Now bring the end of the cable along."
+
+As they toiled up the shifting flank of a sand-dune, James indicated a
+charred spot in the sand.  "That's where he showed the flare, Uncle
+Bill."
+
+Uncle Bill nodded disinterestedly.  Side by side they topped the tufted
+crest of the dune and vanished among the sand-hills.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+Somewhere across the marshes a church clock was striking midnight when
+a big covered car pulled up at the roadside in the spot where, a few
+nights before, the tinker's cart had turned off among the sand-hills.
+The driver switched the engine off and extinguished the lights.  Two
+men emerged from the body of the car; one, a short, thick-set figure
+muffled in a Naval overcoat, stamped up and down to restore his
+circulation.  "Is this the place?" he asked.
+
+"Part of it," replied the voice of Uncle Bill from the driving seat.
+"My nephew will show you the rest.  I shall stay here, if Jim doesn't
+mind handing me the Thermos flask and my cigar-case--thanks."
+
+James walked round the rear of the car and began groping about in the
+dry ditch at the roadside.
+
+"Don't say you can't find it, Jim," said Sir William.  He bent forward
+to light his cigar, and the flare of the match shone on his dress
+shirt-front and immaculate white tie.  He refastened his motoring coat,
+and leaned back puffing serenely.
+
+"Got it!" said a voice from the ditch, and James reappeared, carrying a
+small box and trailing something behind him.  He held it out to the
+short man with gold oak leaves round his cap-peak.  His hand trembled
+slightly.
+
+"Here's the firing key, sir!"
+
+"Oh, thanks.  Let's put it in the sternsheets of the car till I come
+back.  I'd like to have a look at the spot."
+
+"You'll get your boots full of sand," said Uncle Bill's voice under the
+hood.
+
+James lifted a small sack and an oil-can out of the motor, and the two
+figures vanished side by side into the night.
+
+Half an hour later the elder man reappeared.  "He's going to blow a
+whistle," he observed, and climbed into the body of the car, where Sir
+William was now sitting under a pile of rugs.  He made room for the
+new-comer.
+
+"Have some rug . . . and here's the foot-warmer. . . .  I see.  And
+then you--er--do the rest?  The box is on the seat beside you."
+
+The other settled down into his seat and tucked the rug round himself.
+"Thanks," was the grim reply.  "Yes, I'll do the rest!"  He lit a pipe,
+and smoked in silence, as if following a train of thought.  "My boy
+would have been sixteen to-morrow. . . ."
+
+"Ah!" said Uncle Bill.
+
+An hour passed.  The Naval man refilled and lit another pipe.  By the
+light of the match he examined his watch.  "I suppose you tested the
+contacts?" he asked at length in a low voice.
+
+"Yes," was the reply, and they lapsed into silence again.  The other
+shifted his position slightly and raised his head, staring into the
+darkness beyond the road whence came the faint, continuous murmur of
+the sea.
+
+Seaward a faint gleam of light threw into relief for an instant the
+dark outline of a sand-dune, and sank into obscurity again.
+
+Uncle Bill's eyeglass dropped against the buttons of his coat with a
+tinkle.  The grim, silent man beside him lifted something on to his
+knees, and there was a faint click like the safety-catch of a gun being
+released.
+
+A frog in the ditch near by set up a low, meditative croaking.  Uncle
+Bill raised his head abruptly.  Their straining ears caught the sound
+of someone running, stumbling along the uneven track that wound in from
+the shore.  A whistle cut the stillness like a knife.
+
+There was a hoarse rumble seaward that broke into a deafening roar, and
+was succeeded by a sound like the bursting of a dam.  The car rocked
+with the concussion, and the fragments of the shattered wind-screen
+tinkled down over the bonnet and footboard.
+
+Then utter, absolute silence.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+THE DRUM
+
+1
+
+Ole Jarge put down the baler and wiped the perspiration from his
+forehead.  A few fish scales transferred themselves from the back of
+his oakum-coloured hand to his venerable brow.
+
+"'Tain't no use," he murmured.  "'Er's nigh twenty year' ole--come nex'
+month.  Tar ain't no use neither.  'Tis new strakes 'ers wantin'."  He
+thumbed the seams of the old boat that lay on the shingle, with the
+outgoing tide still lapping round her stern.  "An' new strakes do cost
+tarrible lot."  He sat puffing his clay pipe, and transferred his gaze
+from the bottom of the boat to the whitewashed cottages huddled under
+the lee of the cliffs.  A tall figure was moving about the nets that
+festooned the low wall in front of the cottages.
+
+Ole Jarge removed his pipe from his mouth, substituted two fingers of
+his right hand, and gave a long, shrill whistle.  It was a
+disconcerting performance.  For one thing, you associated the trick
+with irrepressible boyhood, and, for another, the old man squinted
+slightly as he did it.  As a matter of fact, he had learned it on the
+Dogger Bank fifty years before; fog-bound in a dory, it was a useful
+accomplishment.
+
+Young Jarge straightened up, raised one hand in acknowledgment of the
+summons, and came crunching slowly across the shingle towards the boat.
+Ole Jarge sat smoking in philosophical silence till his son was beside
+him.  Then he removed his pipe and spat over the listed gunwale.
+
+"'Er's daid," he observed laconically.
+
+Young Jarge bent stiffly and tapped the seams, inside and out, much as
+a veterinary surgeon runs his hand over a horse's legs.
+
+"Ya-a-is," he confirmed, and sat down on the stem of the old boat.
+"'Er's very nigh's ole 's what us be," he added, after a pause, and
+began shredding some tobacco into the palm of his hand.
+
+Ole Jarge nodded.  Then he lifted his head quickly.  "'Er's bound to
+last 'nother year."  For the first time there was concern in his voice.
+Adversity does not grip the mind of the Cornish fisherfolk suddenly.
+It filters slowly through the chinks of the armour God has given them.
+Cornish men (and surely Cornish maids) were kind to the survivors of
+the wrecked Armada.  It may be that they, in their turn, bequeathed a
+strain of Southern fatalism to many of their benefactors.
+
+"'Er's bound to," repeated Ole Jarge.  He got ponderously out of the
+boat and removed a tattered sou'wester to scratch his head with his
+thumbnail--another trick that had survived the adventurous days of the
+Dogger Bank.
+
+The unfamiliar note of anxiety in his father's voice stirred Young
+Jarge.  He rose to his feet with perplexity in his dark eyes,
+mechanically pulling up the bleached leather thigh-boots he wore afloat
+and ashore, "rainy-come-fine."
+
+Inspiration had come, as it does to men of the West once the need is
+realised to the full.
+
+"Du 'ee mind that there li'l' ole copper boiler--what come out o'
+granfer's house when 'er blawed down--back tu '98?" asked Young Jarge
+slowly.
+
+Ole Jarge nodded.
+
+"S'pose us was to hammer 'n out flat like an' nail un down to bottom,
+'long wi' oakum an' drop o' white lead--what du 'ee say?"
+
+Ole Jarge silently measured the area of the sprunk strakes with the
+stumpy thumb and little finger of an outstretched hand.  Then he
+puckered his forehead and stared out to sea, apparently making mental
+calculations connected with the "li'l' ole copper boiler."
+
+"Ya-a-ais."  He replaced the piece of perished tarpaulin that had once
+been a sou'-wester on his head, and set off slowly across the shingle
+towards the village.  Young Jarge followed, staring at his boots as he
+walked.
+
+"Us 'll hammer 'n out after tea," said Ole Jarge over his shoulder.
+His great, great, very great grandfather would have said "_Manana!_"
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+The setting sun had tipped the dancing wavelets with fire and was
+glowing red in each pool left by the receding tide when Ole Jarge
+emerged from his cottage door.  In one hand he carried a hammer, and in
+the other a tin of white lead.  Young Jarge joined him with a small,
+square copper boiler in his arms.
+
+"Where'll us put un tu, feyther?"
+
+Ole Jarge set off across the beach in the direction of the boat.
+"Bring un along!" he commanded in a manner dimly suggestive of a lord
+high executioner.
+
+Young Jarge followed, and dumped his burden down alongside the boat.
+
+"Now!" said Ole Jarge grimly.  He spat on his hands and prepared to
+enjoy himself.  Bang! bang! bang-a-bang! bang! went the hammer.  Young
+Jarge sat down on the gunwale of the boat and contemplated his parent's
+exertions.
+
+"It du put Oi in mind of a drum," he said appreciatively.
+
+
+
+2
+
+"Now we can talk!"  Margaret settled her back comfortably against a
+ridge of turf and closed her eyes for a moment.
+
+"Isn't it heavenly up here?  The wind smells of seaweed, and there must
+be some shrub or flower----"  She opened her eyes and looked along the
+cliffs, "There's something smelling divinely.  Wild broom, is it?"
+
+Her gaze travelled along the succession of ragged headlands and
+crescents of sand formed by each little bay of the indented coast.  The
+coastguard track, a brown thread winding adventurously among the clumps
+of gorse at the very edge of the cliffs, drew her eyes farther and
+farther to the west.  In the far distance the track dipped sharply over
+a headland where the whitewashed coastguard station stood, and was lost
+to view.  She turned and smiled at her companion.  "Now we can talk,"
+she repeated.
+
+Torps, sitting beside her, met her eyes with his grave, gentle smile.
+"I'm so glad to see you again," he said, "that I can't think of
+anything else to say.  It was nice of you to write and tell me you were
+here."
+
+As if by common consent, they had discussed nothing but generalities
+during the half-hour's walk that brought them to this sheltered hollow
+in the cliffs.  The woman was, of the two, the more reluctant to bridge
+the years that lay between to-day and their last meeting.  Yet,
+womanlike, it was she that spoke first.
+
+"I knew your ship was quite close.  I wanted to see you again, Trevor,
+after all these years.  Tell me about yourself.  Your letters--yes, I
+know; but you never talked much about yourself in your letters."
+
+He shook his head quietly.  "No, you tell first."
+
+"There isn't much to tell."  She interlaced her fingers round her
+updrawn knees.  Her grey eyes were turned to the sea, and Torps watched
+her profile against the sky wistfully, studying the pure brow, the
+threads of silver appearing here and there in her soft brown hair, the
+strong, almost boyish lines of mouth and chin.  _En profile_, thus, she
+looked very like a handsome boy.
+
+"I've been teaching at one of those training institutes for girls on
+the East Coast.  The principal, Miss Dacre is her name"--Margaret
+paused as if expecting some comment from her companion: none
+came--"Pauline Dacre; she was at school with mother: they were great
+friends; and when mother died she offered me a home. . . .  I had a
+little money--enough to go through a course of training.  I learned
+things----"
+
+"What sort of things?"
+
+"Oh, cooking and laundry, and hygiene--domestic science it's called."
+Torps nodded.  "And then, when I knew enough to teach others, I went
+to--to this place; I've been there ever since.  And that's all.  Now
+it's your turn."
+
+Torps studied the traces of overwork and strain which showed in the
+faintly accentuated cheekbones and which painted little tired shadows
+about her eyelids.
+
+"No, it's not all.  Why have you come down here?"
+
+"I--I----"  She coloured as if accused.  "I got a little run down . . .
+that was all.  But I've saved some money; I can afford a rest.  I'm
+what is called 'an independent gentlewoman of leisure' for a while."
+She laughed, a gay little laugh.
+
+"Do you mean you are going back there again?"
+
+She looked at him with frank surprise.  "Of course I am, silly!"
+
+"Don't go back . . . not to that life again.  How can you?  Shut up in
+a sort of convent. . . .  You can't be a school-marm all your life; you
+were meant for other things. . . .  I suppose you have to sleep on a
+hard bed, and get up in the dark when a bell rings.  There aren't any
+carpets, and they don't give you enough to eat, as likely as not.
+Margaret, why should you?  It's the sort of work anyone can do-teaching
+kids to mangle."
+
+"But . . . what do you think I am going to do with the remainder of my
+days--crochet? embroider slippers for the curate?  Trevor, you wouldn't
+like me to come to that in my old age, would you?"  She spoke with
+gentle banter, as if to fend off something she feared.  Had Torps known
+it, she was fencing for the happiness of them both.
+
+He shook his head gravely.
+
+"I hoped--because you had written to me--that you weren't going
+back. . . ."  His thin, strong hand closed over hers, resting on the
+turf between them.  He bent his head as if considering their fingers.
+"Margaret, dear----"
+
+"Ah, Trevor, don't--please don't. . . .  Not again.  I thought all that
+was dead and buried years ago.  And do you really think"--she smiled a
+little sadly--"if I--if things were different--that I should have
+written to ask you to meet me to-day?  Have you learned so little of
+women in all these years?"  There was something besides sadness in her
+eyes now: a wistful, half-maternal tenderness.  He raised his head.
+
+"I've learned nothing about women, Margaret, but what I learned from
+you."
+
+She gently withdrew her hand.  "Trevor, we're not children any longer.
+We're older and wiser.  We----"
+
+"We're older--yes.  But I don't see what that has to do with it, except
+that my need is greater. . . .  I'm a little lonelier.  There's never
+been anyone but you.  I've never looked across the road at a woman in
+my life--except you.  I know we're not children, and for that reason we
+ought to know our own minds.  Do you know yours, Margaret?"
+
+Margaret bowed her head, collecting her thoughts and setting them in
+order, before she answered:
+
+"It isn't easy to say what I have to say.  You must be
+patient--generous, as you can be, Trevor, of all the men I know."  She
+hesitated and coloured again a little.  "You say you want me.  If there
+were no one else who I thought had a greater claim, you should--no,
+hush! listen, dear--I would give you--what you want . . . gladly--oh,
+gladly!  But the children need me--my influence. . . .  Miss Dacre said
+it is doing the highest service one could for the Empire . . . theirs
+is the higher claim.  Can you understand?  Oh, can you?"
+
+Torps made no reply, staring out to sea with sombre eyes.
+
+Gaining confidence with his silence, she continued the shy unfolding of
+her ideals.  "Nothing is too good for boys; no training is high enough,
+because they are to be the builders and upholders of our Empire.  Don't
+you think that little girls, who are destined some day to be the mates
+of these boys, should be prepared in a way that will make them worthy
+of their share of the inheritance?  They have to be taught ideals of
+honour and courage and intelligent patriotism, so that they can help
+and encourage their men in years to come.  They must learn to cook and
+sew, learn the laws of Nature and hygiene, so that they can make the
+home not 'an habitation enforced'--as it is for so many women--but a
+place where they may with all honour bring into the world other little
+girls and boys. . . ."  She drew her breath quickly.  "Ah, that is not
+a thing anyone can do, teaching all that!  It must be someone who gives
+all--and who gives herself gladly . . . as I have."
+
+Torps turned his head as if to speak, but checked himself.
+
+"Don't think I am setting myself upon a pedestal.  Don't think my heart
+is too anaemic to--to care for you, and that I am trying to shelter
+myself behind talk of a life's mission.  Oh!" she cried, "be generous.
+Don't try to make it harder."
+
+She leaned towards him a little as he sat with lowered eyes.  "This is
+a time of grave anxiety, isn't it?" she continued gently, as if
+explaining something to an impatient child.  "You naval men ought to
+know.  There is talk of war everywhere--of war with Germany.  They say
+we are on the brink of it to-day."  Torps nodded.  "Supposing it came
+now . . . and you were recalled.  How do they recall you?  Sound a
+bugle--beat a drum?"
+
+Torps smiled faintly.  "Something of the sort--no, not a drum; a bugle,
+perhaps."
+
+"Well, we'll suppose it is a drum.  One somehow associates it with war
+and alarms.  Would you hesitate to obey?"  Torps refrained from the
+obvious answer and plucked a grass-stem to put between his teeth.  "You
+would obey, wouldn't you, because it is your duty--however much you'd
+like to sit here with me?  Will you try to realise that I shall be only
+answering the drum, too, when--I go back."
+
+The breeze that strayed about the floor of the Channel fanned their
+faces and set the bright sea-poppies nodding all along the edge of the
+cliffs.  The sun was low in the west, and a snake-like flotilla of
+destroyers crept out across the quiet sea from the harbour hidden by a
+fold in the hills.  Torps watched them with absent eyes, and there was
+a long silence.  The wind had loosened a strand of his companion's
+hair, and she was busy replacing it with deft fingers.
+
+"Margaret," he replied at last, "you said just now that I understood
+very little about women.  I think you are right.  Perhaps if I
+understood more I might know how to muffle the drum so that you
+wouldn't hear it.  I might have learned to pipe a tune that would make
+you not want to hear it. . . .  I don't know. . . .  But I accept all
+you say--although deep down in my heart I know you are wrong.  There
+will come a day when you, too, will know you are wrong.  I shall come
+back then.  And till then, since I must"--he smiled in a whimsical, sad
+way that somehow relaxed the tension--"I lend you to the children."
+
+She returned his smile quite naturally, with relief in her eyes.  "Dear
+Trevor, yes . . . because they need me so. . . .  Believe me, I am not
+wrong: and we keep our friendship still, sweet and sane----"  She broke
+off suddenly and raised a slim forefinger, holding her head sideways to
+listen, the way women and birds and children seem to hear better.
+"Hark!  Did you hear?  How odd!  Listen, Trevor!"
+
+Torps brought himself back with an effort.  "Hear what?"
+
+"Listen!"
+
+He listened.
+
+"I can hear the waves along the shingle."
+
+"No, no. . . .  There--now!"
+
+"Oh! . . .  Yes, I can hear. . . .  It sounds like a drum."
+
+"Trevor, it _is_ a drum, somewhere out at sea!  How odd when we were
+just talking about drums--hush!  Oh, do listen. . . ."
+
+The sound, borne to them on the light wind, seemed to grow nearer; then
+it waned till they could scarcely catch the beats.  Anon it swelled
+louder: the unmistakable "Dub! dub! rub-a-dub! dub! . . .  Dub! dub!
+dub!" of a far-off drum.
+
+Margaret shook his sleeve.  "Of course it's a drum.  It can't be
+anything else, can it?"
+
+"It's Drake's Drum!" he replied, with mock solemnity.  "There's a
+legend in the West Country, you know----"
+
+"I know!"  She nodded, bright eyed with interest, and rose to a
+kneeling position to gaze beneath her palms out towards the west.  The
+sun had set, and a thin grey haze slowly veiled the horizon.  Already
+the warm afterglow was dying out of the sky.
+
+"He has 'quit the Port of Heaven,'" she quoted half-seriously, playing
+with superstition as only women can, "and he's 'drumming up the
+Channel'!  They say it foretells war . . . that noise. . . ."  Margaret
+gave a little shiver and rose to her graceful height, extending both
+her ringless hands to him.  "It's getting chilly--come!"
+
+Torps rose to his feet, too, and for a moment faced her, with his
+grave, patient eyes on hers.  For the first time she noticed that his
+hair was going grey about the temples, and, had he known it, Margaret
+came very near to wavering in that moment.  Perhaps he did realise, and
+with quick, characteristic generosity helped her.
+
+"I think I understand," he said, "something of their need--the need of
+the children for such as you.  It--it----"  He turned abruptly towards
+the sea.  The noise that resembled a distant drum had ceased, and there
+was only the faint surge of the waves on the beaches far below.
+
+It was the only sound in all the land and sea.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+In the whitewashed coastguard station a mile away the bearded occupant
+on duty was finishing his tea.  The skeleton of a herring lay on the
+side of his plate, the centre of which the boatman was scouring with a
+piece of bread (preparatory to occupying it with damson jam), when the
+telephone bell rang.  A man of economical habits, he put the bread in
+his mouth, and, rising from the table, picked up the receiver.
+
+"_. . . Portree Signal Station--Yes._"
+
+"_. . . 'Oo?  Yes._"
+
+He stood motionless with the receiver to his ear, his jaws moving
+mechanically about the last of the piece of bread.  Outside the little
+room the wind thrummed in the halliards of the signal-mast.  The clock
+over the desk ticked out the deliberate seconds.  A cat, curled up by
+the window, rose, stretching itself, and yawned.
+
+"_. . .  Prepare to mobilise.  All officers and men are recalled from
+leave.  Detailed orders will follow.  Right.  Good-bye._"
+
+He replaced the receiver and rang off.  Then, still masticating, he
+executed a species of solemn war-dance in the middle of the floor.
+
+"Crikey!" he said aloud.  "That means war, that do!  Bloody war!"
+
+He snatched up a telescope and ran outside, still talking aloud to
+himself after the manner of men who live much alone.  "I see a bloke
+an' 'is young woman along there this afternoon.  I'd ha' said he was a
+naval orficer if anyone was to ask me."  He scanned the hills through
+his glass for a moment, and then set off along the track that skirted
+the edge of the cliffs.
+
+Margaret saw him first, a broad, blue-clad figure, threading his way
+among the furze bushes.  "And you won't be unhappy, will you, Trevor?"
+she was saying.  "You will understand, you----"  She broke off to watch
+the coastguard hurrying towards them.  "Does that sailor want to speak
+to us, do you think?  He seems in a great hurry."
+
+Torps stood at her side staring.
+
+The coastguard drew near, wiping his face with a vast blue and white
+spotted handkerchief, for he had been running.  "Beg pardon, sir," he
+called as he came within earshot, "but would you be a naval officer?"
+
+"I am," replied Torps.  "Why?"
+
+The man saluted.  "There's a telephone message just come through, sir,
+'Prepare to mobilise.  All officers and men are recalled from leave.'"
+
+Torps stared at him.  "Where did it come from--the message?"
+
+"From the port, sir.  I was to warn anyone I saw out this way . . ."
+
+"Right; thank you.  I'm going back now."  He turned towards Margaret.
+"Did you hear that?"  There was a queer note of relief in his voice.
+
+"Yes," she replied quietly.  "The Drum."
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+A CAPTAIN'S FORENOON
+
+The Captain came out of his sleeping-cabin as the last chord of the
+National Anthem died away on the quarter-deck overhead with the roll of
+kettledrums.
+
+"Carry on!" sang the bugle; and the ship's company, their animation
+suspended while the colours crept up the jackstaff, proceeded to
+"breakfast and clean."  The signalman whose duty it was to hoist the
+Ensign at 8 a.m. turned up the halliards to his satisfaction, and
+departed forward in the wake of the band.
+
+The Captain had "cleaned" already, and his breakfast was on the table
+in his fore-cabin.  He sat down, glanced at the pile of letters beside
+his plate, propped the morning paper against the teapot, and commenced
+his meal.  He ate with the deliberate slowness of a man accustomed to
+having meals in solitude, who has schooled himself not to abuse his
+digestion.
+
+As he ate his quick eye travelled over the headlines of the paper,
+occasionally concentrating on a paragraph here and there.  Ten minutes
+sufficed to give him a complete grasp of the day's affairs.  The naval
+appointments he read carefully.  His memory for names and individuals
+was unfailing; he never forgot anyone who had served under his command,
+and followed the careers of most with interest.  His daily private
+correspondence, which was large, testified to the fact that not many
+forgot him.
+
+Breakfast over, he laid aside the paper, lit a cigarette, and turned
+over the little pile of letters, identifying the writers with a glance
+at the handwriting on each envelope.  Only one was unknown to him: that
+he placed last, and carried them into the after-cabin to read, leaning
+his shoulder against the mantel of the tiled and brass-bound fireplace.
+
+The first letter he opened was from his wife, and, in consequence, its
+contents were nobody's affair but his own.  He read it twice, and
+smiled as he returned it to the envelope.
+
+The next, written on thick notepaper stamped with the Admiralty crest,
+he also read twice, and mused awhile.  Apparently this also was
+nobody's concern but his, for, still deep in thought, he tore it up and
+put the pieces in the fire before taking up the third.  This was an
+appeal for assistance from a former watch-keeper who aspired to the
+Flying Corps.  The next was also a request for assistance from a young
+officer, who, having recently taken a wife to his bosom, apparently
+considered the achievement a qualification for the command of one of
+H.M. torpedo-boat destroyers.
+
+The Captain rubbed his chin thoughtfully.  "I sent him a silver
+photograph frame. . . .  He'll want me to be godfather next."  He
+occasionally spoke aloud when alone.
+
+An appeal for funds for a memorial to someone or another followed.
+Then two advertisements from wine merchants and a statement of his
+account with his outfitter were consigned in turns into the fire.  The
+last envelope, in the unknown hand, he scrutinised for a moment before
+opening.  The postmark was local, the caligraphy illiterate.  He opened
+the letter and read it with an inscrutable face.  Then, with a quick
+movement as of disgust, he crumpled it up and threw it into the flames.
+It was anonymous, and was a threat, couched in lurid and ensanguined
+terms, to murder him.
+
+Judges, and post-captains of the Royal Navy, perhaps as a reminder of
+their great responsibilities, occasionally receive communications of
+this nature.  Their life insurance policies, however, appear to remain
+much the same as those of other people.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+The after-cabin, where the Captain perused his correspondence, was an
+airy, chintz-upholstered apartment leading aft through two heavy steel
+doors on to the stern-walk.  The doors were open on that particular
+morning, and the high, thin cries of seagulls quarrelling under the
+stern drifted through almost unceasingly.
+
+Forward, the white-enamelled bulkhead was pierced by two entrances.
+One led from a diminutive sleeping-cabin and bathroom, the other from
+the fore-cabin, which the Captain had just quitted, and which in turn
+communicated with a lobby where a marine sentry paced day and night.
+
+The after-cabin was lit by a skylight overhead and scuttles in the
+ship's side.  The sunlight, streaming in through the starboard ones,
+winked on the butterfly clamps of burnished brass and small rods from
+which the little chintz curtains hung.  A roll-topped desk occupied a
+corner near the fireplace, and round the bulkheads, affixed to white
+enamelled battens, hung water-colour paintings of his ships.  A sloop
+of war under full sail; a brig, close-hauled, beating out of Plymouth
+Sound; a tiny gunboat at anchor in a backwater of the Upper Yangtse.
+There were spick-and-span cruisers; a quaint, top-heavy looking
+battleship that in her day had been considered the last word in naval
+construction, and whose name to-day provokes reminiscences from the
+older generation and from the younger half-dubious smiles; then, near
+the door, came modern men-of-war of familiar aspect.  They represented
+the milestones of a long career.
+
+A chart lay folded on a table in the centre of the cabin, with a pair
+of dividers and a parallel ruler lying on it.  Another table stood in a
+corner near the door--a small, glass-topped table such as collectors of
+curios gather their treasures in.  The contents of this table, however,
+were not curios in the strict sense of the word.  A number of them were
+very commonplace objects, but each one held its particular associations.
+
+You will find just such a collection of insignificant mysteries in a
+boy's pocket or a jackdaw's nest.  Bits of string, a marble polished by
+friction, a piece of coloured glass, an old nail--in themselves
+rubbish, but doubtless linking the possessor to some amiable memory,
+and cherished for no better reason.
+
+Some men retain this instinct of boyhood.  But whereas the boy is
+secretive and reticent about the particular associations his pocket
+holds, the man will talk about his hoard.
+
+In the glass-topped table in that corner of the after-cabin were ties
+with all the seven seas and the shores they wash.  Mementoes of folly
+or friendship, sport or achievement; fragments of the mosaic that is
+life.
+
+A bit of brick from the Great Wall of China recalled a bag of geese in
+the clear cold dusk of Northern Asia.  Memories, too, of the whaler's
+beat back to the fleet in the teeth of a rising gale that swept in from
+the Pacific, when the bravest unlaced his boots and they baled with the
+empty guncase.
+
+There was a piece of the sacred pavement of Mecca, brought back in the
+days when few Europeans had brought anything back from there--even
+their lives.  A gold medal in a morocco-leather case, won by an essay
+that had called for months of unrelaxed study.  A copper bangle from
+the wrist of a Korean dancing-girl (it was somebody else's story,
+though).  A wooden ju-ju from Benin, dark-stained and repulsive; a tiny
+clay godling that had guarded the mummied heart of an Egyptian queen.
+A flint arrow-head picked up on Dartmoor during a long summer tramp
+after the speckled trout.  A jewelled cigarette-case, gift of an
+empress who could give no more than that, however much she may have
+wanted to.
+
+Rubbish, all rubbish.  Yet occasionally, when two or three
+post-captains, contemporaries and fleet-mates, gathered here to smoke
+after-dinner cigars, the host would unlock the glass-topped table,
+select some object from his miscellany, and hold it up with a "D'you
+remember----?"  And one or other of his guests--sometimes all of
+them--would laugh and nod and blow great clouds of smoke and slide into
+eager reminiscence.  Yesterday is the playground of all men's hearts,
+but more especially those of sailor men.  These odds and ends were only
+keys that unlocked the gate.
+
+A few photographs stood on the shelf above the hearth.  Some books
+occupied a revolving bookcase within reach of anyone sitting at the
+desk; not very interesting books: old Navy Lists, a "King's
+Regulations," a "Manual of Court Martial Procedure," one or two volumes
+on International Law, and a treatise on so-called 'modern'
+seamanship--which, by the way, is a misnomer, seamanship, like love,
+being of all time.
+
+The revolving bookcase supported a bowl of flowers.  The Captain's
+Coxswain had personally arranged them that morning; had, in fact, had a
+slight difference of opinion with the Captain's valet (conducted _sotto
+voce_) over the method of their arrangement.  The Coxswain won on the
+claim of being a married man and understanding mysteries beyond the ken
+of bachelors.  The result in either case would have brought tears to
+the eyes of any woman.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+The Captain finished his cigarette and opened the roll-topped desk,
+slipped his letters into a pigeon-hole, and closed the desk again.  As
+he did so the Commander entered the cabin, tucking his cap under his
+arm.
+
+"Nine o'clock, sir; all ready for divisions.  The Chaplain is
+sick--will you read prayers?"
+
+"Sick, is he?  What's the matter?"
+
+"He twisted his knee yesterday playing football.  The Fleet Surgeon has
+made him lie up."
+
+The Captain nodded.  "All right; I'll read them."  As the Commander
+turned to go he spoke again: "By the way, that fellow I gave ninety
+days to yesterday--was there a woman in the case, d'you happen to know?
+There was nothing in the evidence, of course, but I wondered----"
+
+The Commander paused while the busy brain searched among its dockets.
+The man whose business it is as Executive Officer to control the
+affairs of close on a thousand of his fellow men must of necessity
+sometimes learn curiously intimate details of their lives.
+
+"Yes; the Master-at-Arms mentioned to me that a woman was at the bottom
+of it.  She's a wrong 'un, I understand."
+
+"Thank you."
+
+The Commander went out, and a moment later the bugle overhead blazed
+forth "Divisions."
+
+"I thought it was a woman's writing," added the Captain musingly.
+
+"Divisions correct, sir!"  The Commander saluted and made his report.
+
+The Captain returned the salute briskly.  "Sound the 'Close.'"
+
+The bugle sounded again, the bell began to toll for prayers, and the
+band on the after shelter-deck struck up a lively march as the men came
+aft.
+
+Anyone interested in the study called physiognomy might with advantage
+have taken his stand at this moment on the after part of the
+quarter-deck, where the shadow of the White Ensign curved and flickered
+across the planking.  Perhaps the Captain, who stood there, was himself
+a student of the art.  At any rate, as the men marched aft through the
+screen doors his level eyes passed from face to face, reflective,
+observant, intensely alert.
+
+The last division reached its allotted position on the quarter-deck,
+turned inboard, and stood easy.  The band stopped abruptly.  The bell
+ceased tolling.  In the brief ensuing silence the Commander's voice was
+clearly audible as he made his report.
+
+"Everybody aft, sir."
+
+The Captain slipped a small prayer-book out of a side pocket.  The
+Commander gave a curt order, and five hundred heads bared to the
+sunlight.
+
+"Stand easy!"
+
+There is much beauty in the sonorous periods of the English Rubric.
+Read in the strong, clear voice of a man who for thirty years had known
+calm and tempest, sunset and dawn at sea, the familiar words--of appeal
+and praise alike--assumed somehow an unwonted significance; and when he
+closed the book, slipped it back into his pocket, and looked up, the
+face he raised was the face of one who, whatever else his creed had
+taught him, found in all success the answer to some prayer, in every
+disaster a call to courage and high endeavour.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+Down in the after-cabin, five minutes later, the Fleet Surgeon handed
+the sick-list to the Captain, who read it with care.  For the first
+time that day his brow clouded.  The two men looked at one another.
+
+"It is heavy," said the Fleet Surgeon; "but----"  He made an
+imperceptible upward movement of the shoulders, for his mother had been
+French.
+
+For some moments after he had gone the Captain stood staring out
+through the after doorway.  A barge, heavily freighted, was passing
+slowly down-stream.  His eyes followed the brown sail absently as long
+as it was within his field of vision.  The anger had gone from his brow
+and left a shadow of sadness.
+
+"'_Si j'etais Dieu_,'" he murmured, following some train of thought and
+musing aloud as was his habit.  Then, still in a brown study, he opened
+the roll-topped desk and pressed a bell.
+
+"Tell Mr. Gerrard I'll sign papers," he said to the marine sentry who
+appeared in the doorway.
+
+"Double-O" Gerrard (so called because he wore glasses with circular
+lenses and his name made you think of telephones) answered the summons,
+carrying a sheaf of papers.  He was the Captain's Clerk: that is to
+say, the junior accountant officer, detailed by the Captain to conduct
+his official correspondence and perform secretarial work generally.
+The position is not one commonly sought after, but Double-O Gerrard
+appeared to enjoy his duties, and as a badge of office carried a
+perpetual inkstain on the forefinger-tip of his right hand.
+
+The Captain sat down at his desk with a little sigh.  If the truth be
+known, he had small relish for this business of "papers."  He picked up
+his pen and examined the nib.
+
+"Do you ever use your pen to clean a pipe out?" he asked his Clerk.
+
+"Oh no, sir."
+
+"I suppose it depends on the nib one uses whether it suffers much."
+With a piece of blotting paper the Captain removed fragments of tobacco
+ash and nicotine from the nib, and dipped it in the ink.  "It doesn't
+seem to hurt mine.  Now then, what have we got here?"
+
+A quarter of an hour later he pushed aside the last of the pile of
+documents and lit a cigarette with the air of a man who had earned a
+smoke.
+
+"Any defaulters?"
+
+"No, sir, none for you to-day."
+
+"Humph!  Tell the Commander I'll buy him a pair of white kid gloves
+when I go ashore.  Request-men?"
+
+His Clerk placed a book upon the desk open at a list of names.  The
+Captain ran down them with a pencil.
+
+"Badges, all entitled? . . .  Stop allotment--who does he allot to?
+Mother? . . .  Restoration to first class for leave. . . .  To be rated
+Leading Seaman--Jones.  Jones?  Oh, yes, I know: youngster in the
+quarter-deck division with a broken nose.  The Commander spoke to me
+about him."  The pencil slowly descended to the bottom of the page,
+ticking off each man's request as it was gone into and explained.  He
+stopped at the last one.  "'To see Captain about private affairs.'
+What's his trouble?"
+
+"I don't know, sir.  He put in his request to see you through the
+Master-at-Arms.  He didn't say what it was about."
+
+The Captain closed the book.  "All seamen, eh?  No Marine request-men?"
+
+"No, sir."
+
+"Right.  I'll see 'em at eleven."  The Clerk gathered the papers
+together and departed.  As he went out there was a tap at the door.
+The Captain frowned.  The tap was repeated.
+
+"Don't knock," he called out.  "If you've got anything to report, come
+in and report it."
+
+The Chief Yeoman of Signals entered with an embarrassed air.  He was
+new to the ship, and, as everyone knows, all captains have their little
+peculiarities.  Here he was up against one right away.  He'd never had
+much luck.
+
+"I don't want anyone to knock when they come into my cabin on duty.
+I'm not a young woman in her boudoir."
+
+"Aye, aye, sir," said the Chief Yeoman.  "Signal log, sir."
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+"Don't forget now," counselled the Master-at-Arms to the request-men
+fallen in on the starboard side of the quarter-deck.  "When your names
+is called out, step smartly up to the table, an' keep your caps on.
+You salutes when you steps up to the table an' when you leaves it."
+
+The request-men, who had heard all this a good many times before,
+sucked their teeth in acquiescence.
+
+The Captain was walking up and down the other side of the deck talking
+to the Commander.  They turned together and came towards the table.
+The Captain's Clerk opened the request-book and laid it before the
+Captain.
+
+"'Erbert Reynolds," intoned the Master-at-Arms in a stentorian voice.
+"Able seaman.  Requests award of first Good Conduct Badge."
+
+The Captain put his finger on the first name at the top of the page,
+glanced keenly at the applicant, and nodded.  "Granted."
+
+"Granted," echoed the Chief of Police, and Able Seaman Reynolds
+departed with authority to wear on his left arm the triangular red
+badge that vouched to his exemplary behaviour for the last three years.
+
+Five others followed in quick succession with similar requests, and
+trotted forward again at a dignified and amiable gait through the
+screen door.
+
+"To stop allotment."  The Captain raised his head.
+
+"Who do you allot to?"
+
+"Me mother, sir."
+
+"Doesn't she want it?"
+
+The request-man was a young stoker, little more than a boy, and his
+eyes were troubled.
+
+"She don't deserve it," he replied; "she drinks, sir.  I got letters
+from fr'en's----"  He thrust his hand inside the breast of his jumper
+and produced his sad evidence--a letter from a clergyman, one or two
+from lay-workers in some north-country slum, and one from his mother
+herself, an incoherent, abusive scrawl, with liquor stains still upon
+the creased paper.
+
+"I send 'er my 'arf-pay reg'lar ever since I were in the Navy, sir.
+But she ain't goin' ter 'ave no more."  He made the statement without
+heat or sorrow.
+
+"Stopped," said the Captain, with a nod.
+
+"Allotment stopped," repeated the Master-at-Arms, and the allotter
+passed forward out of sight to whatever destiny awaited him.
+
+"To be rated Leading Seaman, sir."
+
+A tall, young Able Seaman stepped forward and fixed eyes of a clear
+blue on the Captain's face.
+
+The Captain met his gaze, and for a moment threw all the weight of
+thirty years' experience of men into the scales of judgment.  "There is
+a vacancy for a Leading Seaman's rate in the ship," he said.  "The
+Commander has recommended you for it.  You're young.  Keep it."
+
+"Rated Leading Seaman.  'Bout turn."
+
+The newly created Leading Seaman, whose nose was a reminder of the
+vagaries of the main sheet block of a cutter when going about, flushed
+with pleasure and turned smartly on his heel.  The vacant rate was due
+to a lapse from rectitude on the part of one Biggers, leading hand of
+the quarter-deck, who had returned from leave with a small flat flask
+tucked inside his cholera belt.  The flask contained whisky, and had
+been thrust there by a friend ashore in an access of maudlin
+good-fellowship on parting.  The night had been a convivial one, and
+Leading Seaman Biggers overlooked the gift until, coming on board, the
+keen-eyed officer of the watch drew his attention to it.  He paid for
+the misplaced generosity of his well-wisher with his "Killick."[1]
+
+He happened, moreover, to be employed in coiling down a rope--in the
+capacity he had reverted to--while his supplanter received the rating;
+but he eyed the ceremony stoically and without resentment.  He had
+failed, and, of his less frail brethren, another was raised up in his
+stead.  It was the immutable law.
+
+"To be restored to the first class for leave."
+
+A stout Able Seaman stepped forward, and, from force of a habit
+engendered by long familiarity with the etiquette of the defaulters'
+table, removed his cap.
+
+"_Put_ yer cap on," added the Master-at-Arms in a fierce undertone.
+
+The suppliant deftly replaced his cap.  As he did so a packet of
+cigarettes, a skein of darning worsted and a picture postcard
+(depicting a stout lady in a pink costume surf bathing) fell out on to
+the deck in the manner of an unexpected conjuring trick.  An attendant
+ship's corporal retrieved them, while the conjurer affected an air of
+complete detachment.
+
+The Captain glanced at the conduct book.  "Clean sheet?
+Right--restored to the first class.  And see if you can't stop in it
+this time."
+
+The stout one made guttural noises in his throat intended to convey
+assurances of future piety, and departed with an expression that
+suggested a halo had not only descended upon his head, but had been
+crammed inextricably over his ears.
+
+The last request-man--the man with "private affairs"--was a small
+leading stoker with a face seamed by innumerable tiny wrinkles.  His
+skin resembled a piece of parchment that somebody had crumpled in a fit
+of petulance and made a half-hearted attempt to smooth out again; even
+his ears were crumpled.  His brown eyes, big and sad, were like the
+eyes of a suffering monkey.
+
+The Commander interposed with an explanation: "This man wishes to see
+you about a private matter, sir."
+
+The Captain made a little gesture with his hand, and the small group of
+officers and ship's police near the table stepped back a few paces out
+of earshot.  The Commander, perhaps the busiest man on board, snatched
+the moment's respite to confer with the Carpenter, who had been
+hovering round waiting for his opportunity.  The Master-at-Arms was
+standing by the bollards alternately sucking a stump of pencil and
+making cryptic notations in his request-book.  The two ship's corporals
+had removed themselves with great delicacy of feeling to the screen
+door, where in an undertone they settled an argument as to whose turn
+it was to make out the leave tickets.  The Captain's Clerk became
+interested in the progress of work in an ammunition lighter alongside.
+
+The Captain, with knitted brows, was reading a letter that had been
+handed to him across the table.  He folded it up when read, and handed
+it back to the recipient; then, holding his chin in his fist and
+supporting the elbow with the other hand, he listened to the tale the
+small man with the crumpled ears had to unfold.  It was an old
+tale--old when Helen first met the eyes of Paris.  But there was no
+veil of romance to soften the outline of its crude tragedy.  It was
+just sordid and pitiful.
+
+For five minutes, perhaps, the two men faced each other.  At the end of
+that time the Captain was leaning forward resting both hands on the
+table, talking in grave, kindly tones.  He talked, not as Captains
+commonly talk to Leading Stokers, but as one man might talk to another
+who turned to him for advice in the bitter hour of need, drawing on the
+deep well of his experience, education, and kindly judgment.
+
+"Troubles shared are troubles halved."  The Captain had said so, and
+the tot of rum served out at one-bell to the little man with the
+crumpled ears went some way to complete the conviction.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+Jeremiah Casey, Petty Officer and Captain's Coxswain, hauled himself
+nimbly up the Jacob's ladder to the quarter-boom and came inboard.  The
+Captain was walking up and down, deep in thought, with his hands linked
+behind his back.  Casey pattered up and saluted.
+
+"I've bent on that noo mainsail, sir. . . .  There's a nice li'l
+sailin' breeze, sir."  Casey, hinting at a spin in the galley, somehow
+reminded one of a spaniel when he sees the gun-case opened.  Had he
+been blessed with a tail, he would most certainly have wagged it.
+
+The Captain walked slowly aft and looked down into the galley lying at
+the quarter-boom.  Few men could have resisted the appeal of that long
+slim boat with the water lapping invitingly against her clinker-built
+sides.  The brasswork in her gleamed in the sun like jewels set in
+ivory, for the woodwork was as near the whiteness of ivory as holystone
+and sharkskin could make it.  She had little white mats with blue
+borders on the thwarts and in the sternsheets, and her yoke, of curious
+Chinese design, had a history as mysterious and legendary as the
+diamonds of Marie Antoinette.
+
+"Get her alongside," said the Captain.  "I want to try that mainsail."
+
+Five minutes later the galley was spinning across the sparkling waters
+of the harbour.
+
+Once the Captain spoke, and the bowman moved his weight six inches
+forward.  Then she sailed to his light touch on the helm as a violin
+gives out sound under the bow of a master.
+
+Casey, sitting motionless on the bottom boards with the mainsheet in
+his hands, gazed rapturously at the new mainsail, and thence into the
+stolid countenance of the second stroke.
+
+"Ain't she a _witch_?" he whispered.
+
+For half an hour the galley skimmed to and fro among the anchored
+fleet, now running free like a white-winged gull, anon close-hauled,
+the razor bows cleaving a path through the dancing water in a little
+sickle of creaming foam.
+
+The Captain brought her alongside the gangway with faultless judgment
+and stood up.  Like Saul, he had taken the cares of high command to a
+witch, and lo! his brow was clear and his eyes twinkled.
+
+"Yes," he said in even tones as he stepped out of the boat, "that
+mainsail sets all right," and ran briskly up the ladder two steps at a
+time.
+
+Casey thumbed the lacing on the yard.  "Perfection is finality, and
+finality is death."
+
+"I don't know but what I wouldn't shift the strop '_arf_ an inch
+aft--mebbe a quarter . . ."
+
+Inboard the ship's bell struck eight times, and the boatswain's mate
+began shrilly piping the hands to dinner.
+
+
+
+[1] Anchor.  The distinctive badge of a leading rating.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+THE SEVEN-BELL BOAT
+
+The last answering pendant from the Fleet shot up above the bridge
+rails, and the impatient semaphore on the Flagship's bridge commenced
+waving its arms.
+
+The Yeoman of the Watch in the second ship of the line steadied his
+glass against an angle of the chart house.  "'Ere y'are!  Write down,
+one 'and."  A Signal-boy stepped to his elbow with a pad and pencil in
+readiness.
+
+"Flag--general: Leave may be granted to officers from 8.30 to 7 p.m.
+Officers are not to leave the vicinity of the town, and are to be
+prepared for immediate recall."  He lowered the glass sharply.
+"Finish.  Down Answer!"
+
+Obedient to the order, a Signal-man brought the long tail of bunting
+down hand over hand.  He hitched the slack of the halliard to the
+bridge rail and puckered his eyes, staring across the waters of the
+harbour to where the roofs of houses showed among the trees.  "'Ow I
+pities orficers!" he observed under his breath, and walked to the end
+of the bridge.
+
+The advertisement of a cinema theatre occupied a hoarding near the
+landing place; away to the left the sloping roof of what was
+unmistakably a brewery bore in huge block letters the exhortation:
+
+    DRINK PALE ALE
+
+"Not 'arf," murmured the cynic at the end of the battleship's bridge.
+He mused darkly and added, "I don't think."
+
+The Yeoman of the Watch took the pad from the boy's hand, scribbled a
+notation on it, and handed it back: "Commander an' Officer of the
+Watch, Wardroom, Gunroom, an' Warrant Officers' Mess.  Smart!"
+
+The boy flung himself down the ladder, sped aft along the fore-and-aft
+bridge, turned at the shelter-deck, descended another ladder, and
+brought up in the battery.  Here the Commander came in view, conferring
+mysteriously with the Boatswain over a length of six-inch wire hawser
+that lay along the upper deck.  The Boatswain, with gloom in his
+countenance, was indicating a section where the strands were flattened
+and the hemp "heart" protruded in a manner indicating that all was not
+well with the six-inch wire hawser.  In fact, it rather resembled a
+snake that had been run over.  The Commander was rubbing his chin
+thoughtfully.
+
+The Signal-boy hovered on the outskirts of the conference.  Bitter
+experience in the past had taught him not to obtrude when deep called
+thus to deep.
+
+"We must cut it where it's nipped, and put a splice in it, Mr.
+Cassidy," the Commander was saying, and turned his head.
+
+The boy seized the opportunity to thrust the pad within range of the
+Commander's vision, one eye cocked on his face to note the effect of
+this momentous communication.  He half expected that the Commander
+would throw his cap in the air and shout "Hurrah!"
+
+The Commander read it unmoved.  "Show it to the Officer of the Watch,"
+he said, and turned again to the wire hawser.  Truly a man of iron,
+reflected the Signal-boy as he saluted and ran aft in search of the
+Officer of the Watch.
+
+The Officer of the Watch received the intelligence with almost equal
+unconcern, but when the boy had departed out of earshot he said
+something in an undertone and added: "Just my blooming luck."  Then,
+raising his voice, he shouted: "Quartermaster!  Picket-boat alongside
+at three-thirty for officers."
+
+A head emerged from the hood of the after turret.  The Gunnery
+Lieutenant, wearing over-alls, a streak of dirt running diagonally down
+one cheek, emerged and drew off a greasy glove to wipe his face.
+
+"Did I hear you say anything about a seven-bell boat?"
+
+The Officer of the Watch nodded.  "There's leave from three-thirty to
+seven p.m.  It's three o'clock now, so I advise you to smack it about
+and clean if you're going ashore."
+
+The Gunnery Lieutenant slid gracefully down the sloping shield of the
+turret.  Fortunately, the consideration of paint-work vanished with the
+red dawn of August 5th, 1914.
+
+"My word!" he said, staring towards the distant town.  "My missus----"
+and vanished down the hatchway.
+
+In the meanwhile the Signal-boy had descended to the wardroom, where he
+swiftly pinned the signal on to the notice board.  The occupants of the
+arm-chairs and settee followed his movements with drowsy interest.
+
+The Young Doctor rose and walked to the notice board.
+
+"Snooks!" he ejaculated.  "Leave!"  And, with a glance at the clock,
+hurried out of the mess.
+
+The remainder of his messmates sat up with excitement.
+
+"What time?"
+
+"When till?"
+
+"What about a boat?"
+
+The head of the Officer of the Watch appeared through the open skylight
+overhead.  "Wake up, you Weary Willies.  There's a boat to the beach at
+seven-bells."
+
+"Come along, chaps," snorted the Major of Marines.  "_Allons nous
+shifter_--let us shift."  And he, too, made tracks for his cabin,
+followed by everybody who could be spared by "the exigencies of the
+service" to experience for three blessed hours the joys of the land.
+
+The shrill voices of the Midshipmen at their toilet in the after flat
+proclaimed that the precious moments were flying.  Three were
+simultaneously performing their ablutions in one basin, the supply of
+water to the bathroom having failed with a suddenness that could only
+be attributed to the malignant agency of the Captain of the Hold.
+
+Another burrowed feverishly in the depths of his sea-chest, presenting
+to the flat much the same appearance as a terrier does when busy at a
+rabbit-hole.  He emerged flushed but triumphant with a limp garment in
+his grasp.  "I knew I had a clean shirt," he confided to his neighbour.
+"I told my servant so a fortnight ago.  He swore that every one I
+possessed had been left behind in the wash at Malta."
+
+His neighbour made no reply, being in the throes of buttoning a collar
+which fitted him admirably at Osborne College, but which somehow had
+lately exhibited an obstinate determination to meet no more round his
+neck.  However, physical strength achieved the miracle, and he breathed
+deeply.  "I shouldn't sweat to shift your shirt," he consoled.  "It
+looks all right.  Turn the cuffs up."
+
+"I've turned them up three times already," replied the excavator,
+donning his find.  "There are limits."
+
+Another Midshipman came across the crowded flat and calmly rummaged in
+the open till of the speaker's sea-chest.  "Where's your hair juice?
+All right, I've got it."  He anointed himself generously with a
+mysterious green fluid out of a bottle.  "My people are staying at a
+pub ashore here.  Will you come and have tea, Jaggers?  Kedgeree's
+coming, too."
+
+The owner of the green unguent, who was feverishly dusting his boots
+with a pyjama jacket, signified his pleasure in accepting the
+invitation.
+
+The sentry on the aft-deck stepped to the head of the ladder with a
+bellows, on the mouth of which a small fog-horn was fitted, and gave a
+loud blast.  It was the customary warning that the officers' boat would
+be alongside in five minutes.
+
+The Assistant Clerk ran distractedly for the ladder.
+
+"There's one 'G'!  Have I got time to borrow five bob from the messman
+before the boat shoves off?"
+
+"You might borrow five bob for me while you're about it," shouted a
+belated Engineroom Watchkeeper, struggling into his clothes.
+
+"And me, too," called another.  "Buck up, for the Lord's sake, and
+we'll have poached eggs for tea."
+
+"And cherry jam," supplemented another visionary voluptuously, "and
+radishes."
+
+Here a figure, who had been sitting on the lid of his chest swinging
+his legs, tilted his cap on to the back of his head with a snort that
+suggested outlawry and defiance to the world at large.
+
+"Hallo!" exclaimed a neighbour, wielding a clothes-brush with energy.
+"What's up?  Aren't you coming ashore?  It isn't your First Dog, is it?"
+
+The outlaw shook his head.  "No; my leave's jambed.  You know that
+beastly six-inch wire hawser?  We were bringing it to the after capstan
+yesterday, and the Commander----"
+
+The aft-deck sentry gave two blasts on his fog-horn.  Chest lids
+banged, keys rattled.
+
+"Jolly rough luck!" commiserated his friend, and joined the stampede
+for the quarterdeck.
+
+In thirty seconds the flat was deserted save for the disconsolate
+figure swinging his legs.  Presently he climbed down from his chest and
+wended his way by devious and stealthy routes to the after
+conning-tower, where he smoked a surreptitious cigarette in defiance of
+the King's Regulations and Admiralty Instructions (his age being
+sixteen) and felt better.
+
+In the meanwhile the picket-boat was driving her way shoreward with the
+emancipated members of Wardroom and Gunroom clustered on top of the
+cabin and in the stern sheets.
+
+"Bunje," said the First Lieutenant, "come to the club and have tea and
+play 'pills' afterwards?"
+
+The Indiarubber Man shook his head.  "No, thanks; I'm afraid I--I've
+got something else to do."
+
+The Paymaster contemplated him thoughtfully.  "Bunje, my lad, the
+darkest suspicions fill my breast.  Wherefore these carefully creased
+trousers, this liberal display of fine linen and flashing cuff-links
+withal?  Our Sunday monkey-jacket, too.  Can it be----?  No."  He
+appealed to the occupants of the stern sheets: "Don't tell me the lad
+is going poodle-faking!"[1]
+
+"His hands are warm and moist," confirmed one of the Watchkeepers.  "He
+wipes them furtively on the slack of his trousers in frightened
+anticipation."
+
+The Indiarubber Man reddened.  "You silly asses!"
+
+The Junior Watchkeeper squirmed with delight.  "He is--he _is_! He's
+going poodle-faking.  And in war time, too!  You dog, Bunje!"
+
+"Can't a fellow know people ashore without a lot of untutored clowns
+trying to be funny about it?" demanded the victim.
+
+"It's the spring," said the Young Doctor.  "Bunje's young fancy is
+lightly turning--yes, it is."  The Surgeon sniffed the air judicially.
+"The bay rum upon your hair proclaims it.  Ah, me!  The heyday of
+youth!"  He sighed.  "'Time was when love and I were well acquainted.'"
+
+"That's a fact," retorted the Indiarubber Man bitterly.  "But you
+needn't brag about it.  I haven't been shipmates with you for four
+years for nothing.  There's nothing you can tell me about your hideous
+past that I don't know already."
+
+The picket-boat slid alongside the landing place and went astern.
+
+The Engineer Commander made his way towards the little cabin.  As the
+senior officer of the party, his was the privilege of embarking last
+and disembarking first.  "Don't wait for me," he said.  "Unstow!  I've
+got to get my golf-clubs."
+
+The Indiarubber Man took him at his word.  "Right.  I'll carry on, if I
+may."  He leaped ashore, and set off with long strides in the direction
+of the town.
+
+The First Lieutenant gazed after him.  There was a general feeling that
+the Indiarubber Man had suddenly assumed an unfamiliar and inexplicable
+role.  "Now, what the devil is he up to, I wonder?"
+
+The others, mystified, shook their heads.
+
+
+
+2
+
+The mothers of Midshipmen have a means of scenting the whereabouts of a
+fleet that mere censorship of letters cannot balk.  There were at least
+half a dozen mothers in the _foyer_ of the big, garish hotel on the
+sea-front.  Some were tete-a-tete with their sons in snug, upholstered
+corners, learning aspects of naval warfare that no historian will ever
+record.  Others presided over heavily laden tea-tables at which their
+sons and their sons' more intimate friends were dealing with eggs and
+buttered toast, marmalade, watercress, plum-cake, and toasted scones in
+a manner which convinced their half-alarmed relatives that famine must
+have stalked the British Navy ever since the War started.
+
+"We shall never have time," said one mother, "to hear all you have to
+tell, dear."
+
+"There's really nothing very much to tell you about, mother.  Can I
+order some more jam?  And Jaggers could scoff some more eggs, couldn't
+you, Jag?  Waiter, two more poached eggs and some more strawberry jam.
+You see, dear, we haven't done anything exciting yet.  That's all been
+the luck of the battle-cruisers and destroyers.  They've had a topping
+rag--three of our term have been wounded already.  But we aren't
+allowed to gas about what we're going to do--why, that waiter might be
+a German spy, for all we know."
+
+"Didn't know the Admiral confided his plans for the future to
+Midshipmen," commented an amused father, who had run down from the War
+Office for the day.
+
+"He doesn't _confide_ them," admitted another, "but my chest is in the
+flat outside his steward's cabin, and, of course, _he_ hears an awful
+lot."
+
+"But, Georgie, tell us about your life.  Do you get enough sleep?"
+queried his mother.
+
+"Rather," replied her son, whose horizon three months before had been
+bounded by the playing fields of Dartmouth College, where the
+dormitories are maintained at an even temperature by costly and
+hygienic methods.  "We're in four watches, you know--we get one night
+in in four.  At sea we sleep at our guns.  I've got one of the
+six-inch, and we get up quite a good fug in our casemate at night.
+Jaggers dosses in the after-control.  It's a bit breezy up there, isn't
+it, Old Bird?"
+
+The Old Bird signified that the rigours of Arctic exploration were as
+nothing to what he had undergone.
+
+"And your swimming-jacket--the one Aunt Jessie sent you?  The outfitter
+said it was quite comfortable to wear.  I hope you always do wear it at
+sea, in case--in case you should ever need it."
+
+Her son chuckled.  "The pneumatic one?  Well, we liked it awfully when
+it came, and we blew it up; and then we thought we'd have a bit of
+scrum practice one night after dinner, and we rolled it up for a ball,
+and--and the half wasn't nippy enough in getting it away to the
+three-quarters, and somehow or another it got punctured.  But I wear it
+all right, mother.  It's jolly warm at nights."
+
+"And do you like your officers--is the Captain kind to you all?"
+
+The boy stirred his tea thoughtfully.
+
+"They're a topping lot.  One has got the Humane Society's gold medal
+for jumping on top of a shark at Perim when it was just going to collar
+a fellow bathing--you'd never think it to look at him.  There's another
+we call the Indiarubber Man, who takes us at physical drill every
+morning.  He's frightfully strong, and they say he licked the Japanese
+ju-jitsu man they had at the School of Physical Training.  And, of
+course, there's old Beggs.  You know, he was captain of
+England--Rugger--some years ago.  He's broken his nose three
+times. . . ."
+
+"We all skylark together in the dog-watches," added another.  "We put a
+seining-net round the quarter-deck, and play cricket or deck hockey
+every evening after tea to keep fit."
+
+"And they come into the gun-room when we have a sing-song on guest
+nights, and kick up a frightful shine.  Oh, they're an awful fine lot."
+
+"The Captain is a topper, too.  He has us to breakfast in turns."
+
+A third took up the epic.  If you have ever heard schoolboys vie with
+each other to laud and honour the glory of their own particular House
+among strangers in a strange land, you can imagine much that cannot be
+conveyed with the pen.  There were similar tea parties in various
+corners of the hotel and in lodgings along the sea-front, but the
+conversation at all of them ran on much the same lines, and this may be
+considered a fair sample of the majority.
+
+"He gives a lecture every few days showing what is going on at the
+front.  His brother's a General, and, of course, he gets any amount of
+tips from him.  The brother of one of our Snotties--Karrard--was killed
+at Mons, and the Captain sent for Karrard (who's rather a kid and felt
+it awfully) and showed him a letter from the General about Karrard's
+brother--he had seen him killed--which bucked Karrard up tremendously.
+In fact, he rather puts on side now, because he's the only one in the
+gun-room who has lost a brother."
+
+"And you don't wish you were back at Dartmouth again?"
+
+"Dartmouth!"  The speaker's voice was almost scornful.  "Why, mother.
+Kedgeree here would have got his First Eleven cap this term if we'd
+stayed, and even he----"
+
+A small midshipman with remarkable steel-grey eyes, who had not
+hitherto spoken much, shook his head emphatically and flushed at
+hearing his nickname pronounced in open conversation ashore.  "We were
+treated like kids there," he explained.  "But now----"  He jerked his
+head towards the north with that unfailing sense of the cardinal points
+of the compass which a seaman acquires in earliest youth, or not at
+all.  Somewhere in that direction the German fleet was presumed to be
+skulking.  "It's different," he ended a little lamely.
+
+Suddenly the son leaned forward and pressed his mother's knee under the
+table.  A tall, sinewy Engineer Commander was walking across the
+_foyer_ on his way to the billiard room.
+
+"There, mother, that's old Beggs.  He had our term at Osborne.  Did you
+see his nose? . . .  Captain of England!" . . .  The speaker broke off
+and lifted his head, listening.
+
+Through the doorway opening on to the sea-front there drifted a faint
+sound, the silvery note of a distant bugle.
+
+"Hush!" said one of the others, raising a warning hand.  "Listen!"
+
+
+
+3
+
+At the window of one of the detached houses in the residential part of
+the town a small Naval Cadet stood with his nose flattened against the
+window-pane.
+
+"I say, Betty," he ejaculated presently, "they're giving leave to the
+Fleet.  I can see crowds of officers coming ashore."
+
+His sister continued to knit industriously.  "Well, I don't suppose any
+of them are coming here.  You needn't get so excited."
+
+Her brother watched the uniformed figures filing along the distant road
+from the landing place.  "I hope this war goes on for another couple of
+years," he sighed.
+
+"Joe!  You mustn't say such dreadful things.  You don't know what
+you're talking about."
+
+"That's all jolly fine, but you haven't got to do another year at
+Osborne----  I say, Betty, one of them _is_ coming here!  How jolly
+exciting!  He's coming up the avenue now.  He's got red hair. . . .  I
+believe--yes, it's--what was the name of that Lieutenant at Jack's
+wedding, d'you remember?  The funny man.  He made you giggle all the
+time."
+
+For a moment the knitting appeared to demand his sister's undivided
+attention; she bent her head over it.  "That was a long time
+ago--before I put my hair up.  I'm sure I didn't giggle either.  Oh,
+yes, I think I remember who you mean.  Is he coming here?  I
+wonder--come away from the window, Joe!"
+
+The front door bell rang in a distant part of the house; she dropped
+her knitting on a small side table and walked quietly out of the room.
+"I'll tell mother," she said as she went out.
+
+"You needn't trouble to do that," said Joe.  "She's out--I thought you
+knew."  But the door had closed.
+
+A moment later the Indiarubber Man was ushered in.  The two
+representatives of His Majesty's Navy shook hands.  "I recognised you
+from your photograph," said the host.  "D'you remember the wedding
+group?  You were a groomsman when Jack and Milly were married, weren't
+you?"
+
+"I was," replied the Indiarubber Man.  "I performed a number of menial
+offices that day.  But were you there?  I don't seem to remember you."
+
+Joe shook his head.  "No, I had mumps.  Wasn't it rot?  It must have
+been an awful good rag.  But I remember about you because Betty told me
+afterwards--she's my sister, you know.  She said you were--oh, here she
+is."
+
+Betty entered.  She cast one swift glance at her brother that might
+have been intended to convey interrogation or admonition, or both, and
+then greeted the Indiarubber Man with friendly composure.  "How nice of
+you to come and see us!  Mother is out, I'm afraid, but she will
+probably be in presently.  Do sit down.  Yes, of course I remember
+you--Joe, ring the bell, and we'll have tea."
+
+"We were 'opposite numbers' at your brother's wedding," said the
+Indiarubber Man, taking a seat, and nervously hitching up the legs of
+his trousers to an unnecessary extent.
+
+"Yes, I remember restraining you with difficulty from going into the
+garden to eat worms!  Nobody----" she broke off abruptly.  "What a long
+time ago that seems!"  She laughed quietly and considered him with
+merriment in her pretty eyes.  The Indiarubber Man made a swift mental
+comparison between the schoolgirl bridesmaid who vied with midshipmen
+in devouring ices, and his hostess of three years or so later.
+
+"Doesn't it?" he said.  For one instant their eyes met, shyly
+questioning, a little curious.  The laughter died out of hers.
+
+"My eldest brother's in the North Sea now.  We haven't seen him since
+the War started."
+
+The Indiarubber Man nodded.  "Yes, he's in a battle-cruiser, isn't he?
+We don't get ashore much either, as a matter of fact.  But to-day----"
+He entered into a lengthy statement of naval policy that led up to his
+visit and the circumstances connected with it.  It was a rather tedious
+explanation, but it filled in the time till tea arrived, when Betty
+busied herself among the tea-cups; her brother drew his chair close to
+their guest, and sat regarding him with breathless expectancy.  Was
+this the side-splitting humorist Betty had talked so much about for
+months after the wedding--and then abruptly refused to mention again?
+
+Joe experienced a growing sense of disillusionment.  There was nothing
+about the Indiarubber Man's conversation to justify high hopes of
+laughter-provoking humour.  In fact, the guest's general demeanour
+compared unfavourably with that of the curate--a shy young man, victim
+(had Joe but known it) of a hopeless and unrequited passion.
+
+Joe handed the Indiarubber Man his cup with the air of one prepared to
+enjoy at all events the spectacle of a juggling trick with the teaspoon
+or saucer.  The guest's chief concern, however, appeared to be in
+finding a more secure resting-place for it than his knee, coupled with
+anxiety not to drop crumbs on the carpet.
+
+Betty, presiding behind the silver tea-tray, had adopted her most
+grown-up manner.  Decidedly it was all Betty's fault, therefore.  The
+most confirmed humorist could hardly be expected to indulge in
+drolleries in the presence of a girl who stuck her nose in the air and
+put on enough side for six.  It became increasingly obvious that the
+depressed jester must straightway be removed from this blighting
+influence or ever the cap and bells would jingle.
+
+No sooner was tea over, therefore, than Joe sprang to his feet.  "I
+say, would you like to go for a walk?"  Once outside, the flower of wit
+would expand without a doubt.
+
+The Indiarubber Man appeared nonplussed at the proposal.  "I--it's very
+kind of you----"  Then he turned to Betty.  "Shall we all three go for
+a walk?"
+
+"Oh, it's no use asking her to go for a proper walk," interposed the
+alarmed Joe.  "Her skirts are too narrow; she can't keep step, or jump
+ditches, or anything."
+
+Betty laughed.  "Are you anxious to jump ditches, Mr. Standish?
+Because, if not, I think I might be able to keep up with you both."
+She rose to her feet, a slim, gracefully modelled young woman who
+looked perfectly capable of keeping up with anyone--or of jumping
+ditches, too, for that matter.  "I'll get my things if you will wait a
+second."  Joe, unseen by their guest, made a face at her of unfeigned
+brotherly disgust.
+
+In the open air, however, the guest's spirits gave no more evidence of
+an upward tendency than they had indoors.  The trio walked, via the sea
+front, to the gardens on top of the cliffs that overlooked the harbour.
+Joe directed the conversation; it was largely concerned with battle and
+bloodshed.
+
+"Mr. Standish, what do you do in action?" he asked presently.
+
+"Nothing," was the reply.  "I just put my fingers in my ears and shut
+my eyes--I'm the officer of the after turret.  But when it's all over I
+put on overalls and crawl about the works on my stomach and get a dirty
+face with the best of them.  A wit once defined a turret as a bundle of
+tricks done up in armour."
+
+"Is it thick armour?" asked Betty.
+
+"They tell me it is--fellows on board who pretend to know everything.
+But I suspect that to be a mere ruse to get me to stay inside it."
+
+Joe sighed.  "I _do_ envy you," he said.  "Everyone seems to have
+something to do, 'cept me.  Even Betty here----"
+
+The Indiarubber Man turned his head sharply.  "Why, what----"
+
+Betty turned pink.  "I'm going to nurse--on the East Coast.  My old
+school has been turned into a hospital.  And the other day Miss
+Dacre--she was the principal, you know, and she is nursing there
+now--wrote to mother and said they would take me."
+
+"But," said the Indiarubber Man, "d'you think you could stick
+it--hacking off fellows' legs, and that sort of thing?  Blessed if I
+could do it."
+
+"Oh, yes," was the calm reply.  "I passed all my exams, a long time
+ago--in fact, I've been working down here at this hospital for the last
+six months.  We learned a good deal at school, you see.  Home nursing,
+and so on."
+
+"Did you, by Jove!  Simple dishes for the sick-room and spica bandages,
+and all the rest of it?"
+
+Betty laughed.  "Oh, yes, all that."
+
+The Indiarubber Man glanced at her small, capable hands, and from them
+to the dainty profile beside him.  "Well," he said, "if I get bent by
+an eight-inch shell I shall know where to come."
+
+Betty laughed again; "I should have to look that up in a book, then,
+before I nursed you.  It might mean complications!"
+
+"It might," replied the Indiarubber Man.
+
+From the town below, where here and there a window went suddenly aflare
+with the reflection of the sunset-light, there drifted up to them the
+faint, clear call of a bugle.  Another took it up along the front, and
+yet another.  The Indiarubber Man raised his head abruptly.
+
+"That's the recall!" he said, and turned towards the ships.  "Yes,
+they've hoisted the Blue Peter.  I wonder--the boats are coming in,
+too."
+
+"Does that mean you must go at once?"
+
+He nodded soberly.  "I'm afraid so," and held out his hand.  "Good-bye."
+
+"Hallo!" said Joe.  "I say, you're not off, are you?  What's up?"
+
+"That's what I'm going to find out," was the reply.  "I believe it's
+another of their dodges to lure me inside my turret.  Good-bye, Miss
+Betty.  Don't forget to read up the book of the words--in case of
+complications. . . .  Good-bye!"  The Indiarubber Man departed down one
+of the steep paths that led to the lower road and the landing-place.
+The brother and sister turned and walked slowly back to the house.
+
+Their conversation on the way was confined to speculation on the part
+of Joe as to the reason for this sudden recall.  His theories covered a
+wide range of possibilities.  Only when they reached the house did
+Betty volunteer a remark, and then in the privacy of her own room,
+whose window looked out across the harbour and the sea.
+
+"Oh, I hate the War," she said.  "I hate it, I _hate_ it. . . ."
+
+
+
+[1] Paying calls.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+THE KING'S PARDON
+
+Ask the first thousand bluejackets you meet ashore, any afternoon the
+Fleet is giving leave, why they joined the navy.  Nine hundred and
+ninety-nine will eye you suspiciously, awaiting the inevitable tract.  If
+none is forthcoming they will give a short, grim laugh, shake their
+heads, and, as likely as not, expectorate.  These portents may be taken
+to imply that they really do not know themselves, or are too shy to say
+so, if they do.
+
+The thousandth does not laugh.  He may shake his head; spit he certainly
+will.  And then, scenting silent sympathy, he guides you to a quiet
+bar-parlour where you can pay for his beer while he talks.
+
+This is the man with a past and a grievance.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+Nosey Baines, Stoker Second-class, was a man with a past.  He also owned
+a grievance when he presented himself for entry into His Majesty's Navy.
+They were about his only possessions.
+
+"Nosey" was not, of course, his strict baptismal name.  That was
+Orson--no less.  Therein lay the past.  "Nosey" was the result of facial
+peculiarities quite beyond his control.  His nose was out of proportion
+to the remainder of his features.  This system of nomenclature survives
+from the Stone Age, and, sailors being conservative folk, still finds
+favour on the lower-decks of H.M. Ships and Vessels.
+
+The Writer in the Certificate Office at the Naval Depot, where Nosey
+Baines was entered for service as a Second-class Stoker under training,
+had had a busy morning.  There had been a rush of new entries owing to
+the conclusion of the hop-picking season, the insolvency of a local
+ginger-beer bottling factory, and other mysterious influences.  Nosey's
+parchment certificate (that document which accompanies a man from ship to
+ship, and, containing all particulars relating to him, is said to be a
+man's passport through life) was the nineteenth he had made out that
+morning.
+
+"Name?"
+
+Nosey spelt it patiently.
+
+"Religion?"
+
+Nosey looked sheepish and rather flattered--as a Hottentot might if you
+asked him for the address of his tailor.  The Writer gave the surface of
+the parchment a preparatory rub with a piece of indiarubber.  "Well, come
+on--R. C., Church of England, Methodist . . . ?"
+
+Nosey selected the second alternative.  It sounded patriotic at all
+events.
+
+"Next o' kin?  Nearest relative?"
+
+"Never 'ad none," replied Nosey haughtily.  "I'm a norfun."
+
+"Ain't you got _no_ one?" asked the weary Writer.  He had been doing this
+sort of thing for the last eighteen months, and it rather bored him.
+"S'pose you was to die--wouldn't you like no one to be told?"
+
+Nosey brought his black brows together with a scowl and shook his head.
+This was what he wanted, an opportunity to declare his antagonism to all
+the gentler influences of the land. . . .  If he were to die, even . . .
+
+The Ship's Corporal, waiting to guide him to the New Entry Mess, touched
+him on the elbow.  The Writer was gathering his papers together.  A
+sudden wave of forlornness swept over Nosey.  He wanted his dinner, and
+was filled with emptiness and self-pity.  The world was vast and
+disinterested in him.  There were evidences on all sides of an unfamiliar
+and terrifying discipline. . . .
+
+"You come allonger me," said the voice of the Ship's Corporal, a deep,
+alarming voice, calculated to inspire awe and reverence in the breast of
+a new entry.  Nosey turned, and then stopped irresolutely.  If he were to
+die----
+
+"'Ere," he said, relenting.  "Nex' o' kin--I ain't got none.  But I
+gotter fren'."  He coloured hotly.  "Miss Abel's 'er name; 14 Golder's
+Square, Bloomsbury, London.  Miss J. Abel."
+
+This was Janie--the Grievance.  It was to punish Janie that Nosey had
+flung in his lot with those who go down to the sea in ships.
+
+Prior to this drastic step Nosey had been an errand-boy, a rather
+superior kind of errandboy, who went his rounds on a ramshackle bicycle
+with a carrier fixed in front.  Painted in large letters on the carrier
+was the legend:
+
+    J. HOLMES & SON,
+    FISHMONGER ICE, ETC.,
+
+and below, in much smaller letters, "Cash on delivery."
+
+Janie was a general servant in a Bloomsbury boarding-house.  She it was
+who answered the area door when Nosey called to deliver such kippers and
+smoked haddock as were destined by the gods and Mr. Holmes for the
+boarding-house breakfast table.
+
+It is hard to say in what respect Janie lit the flame of love within
+Nosey's breast.  She was diminutive and flat-chested; her skin was sallow
+from life-long confinement in basement sculleries and the atmosphere of
+the Bloomsbury boarding-house.  She had little beady black eyes, and a
+print dress that didn't fit her at all well.  One stocking was generally
+coming down in folds over her ankle.  Her hands were chapped and
+nubbly--pathetic as the toil-worn hands of a woman alone can be.
+Altogether she was just the little unlovely slavey of fiction and the
+drama and everyday life in boarding-house-land.
+
+Yet the fishmonger's errand-boy--Orson Baines, by your leave, and captain
+of his soul--loved her as not even Antony loved Cleopatra.
+
+Janie met him every other Sunday as near three o'clock as she could get
+away.  The Sunday boarding-house luncheon included soup on its menu,
+which meant more plates to wash up than usual.  They met under the third
+lamp-post on the left-hand side going towards the British Museum.
+
+Once a fortnight, from 8 p.m. till 10 p.m., Janie tasted the penultimate
+triumph of womanhood.  She was courted.  Poor Janie!
+
+No daughter of Eve had less of the coquette in her composition.  Not for
+a moment did she realise the furrows that she was ploughing in Nosey's
+amiable soul.  Other girls walked out on their Sundays.  The possession
+of a young man--even a fishmonger's errand-boy on twelve bob a week--was
+a necessary adjunct to life itself.  Of all that "walking out" implied:
+of love, even as it was understood in Bloomsbury basements, Janie's
+anaemic little heart suspected very little; but romance was there,
+fluttering tattered ribbons, luring her on through the drab fog of her
+workaday existence.
+
+It was otherwise with Nosey.  His love for Janie was a very real affair,
+although what sowed the seeds was not apparent, and although the soil in
+which they took root and thrived--the daily interviews at the area door
+and these fortnightly strolls--seemed, on the face of it, inadequate.
+Perhaps he owed his queer gift of constancy to the mysterious past that
+gave him his baptismal name.  They were both unusual.
+
+A certain Sunday afternoon in early autumn found them sitting side by
+side on a seat in a grubby London square.  Janie, gripping the handle of
+cook's borrowed umbrella, which she held perpendicularly before her, the
+toes of her large boots turned a little inwards, was sucking a peppermint
+bull's-eye.
+
+To Nosey the hour and the place seemed propitious, and he proposed heroic
+marriage.
+
+"Lor!" gasped Janie, staring before her at the autumn tints that were
+powdering the dingy elms with gold-dust.  There was mingled pride and
+perplexity in her tones; slowly she savoured the romantic moment to the
+full, turning it over in her mind as the bull's-eye revolved in her
+cheek, before finally putting it from her.  Then:
+
+"I couldn't marry you," she said gently.  "You ain't got no prospecks."
+Walking out with twelve bob a week was one thing; marriage quite a
+different matter.
+
+In the Orphanage where she had been reared from infancy the far-seeing
+Sisters had, perhaps, not been unmindful of the possibility of this
+moment.  A single life of drudgery and hardship, even as a boarding-house
+slavey, meant, if nothing more, meals and a roof over her head.
+Improvident marriage demanded, sooner or later, starvation.  This one
+star remained to guide her when all else of the good Sisters' teaching
+grew dim in her memory.
+
+Prospecks--marry without and you were done.  So ran Janie's philosophy.
+The remains of the bull's-eye faded into dissolution.
+
+Nosey was aghast.  The perfidy of women!  "You led me on!" he cried.
+"You bin carry in' on wiv me. . . .  'Ow could you?  Pictur' palaces an'
+fried fish suppers an' all."  He referred to the sweets of their
+courtship.  "'Ow, Janie!"
+
+Janie wept.
+
+After that the daily meetings at the area door were not to be thought of.
+Nosey flung himself off in a rage, and for two successive nights
+contemplated suicide from the parapet of Westminster Bridge.  The irksome
+round of duties on the ramshackle bicycle became impossible.  The very
+traffic murmured the name of Janie in his ears.  London stifled him; he
+wanted to get away and bury himself and his grief in new surroundings.
+Then his eye was caught by one of the Admiralty recruiting posters in the
+window of a Whitehall post office.  It conjured up a vision of a roving,
+care-free life . . . of illimitable spaces and great healing winds. . . .
+A life of hard living and hard drinking, when a man could forget.
+
+But somehow Nosey didn't forget.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+The Navy received him without emotion.  They cut his hair and pulled out
+his teeth.  They washed and clothed and fed him generously.  He was
+taught in a vast echoing drill-shed to recognise and respect authority,
+and after six months' preliminary training informed that he was a
+Second-class Stoker, and as such drafted to sea in the Battle-Cruiser
+Squadron.
+
+Here Nosey found himself an insignificant unit among nearly a thousand
+barefooted, free-fisted, cursing, clean-shaven men, who smelt perpetually
+of soap and damp serge, and comprised the lower-deck complement of a
+British battle-cruiser.
+
+He worked in an electric-lit, steel tunnel, with red-hot furnaces on one
+side, and the gaping mouths of coal caverns on the other.  You reached it
+by perpendicular steel ladders descending through a web of hissing steam
+pipes and machinery; once across greasy deck-plates and through a maze of
+dimly lit alleys, you would find Nosey shovelling coal into the furnaces
+under the direction of a hairy-chested individual afflicted, men said, by
+religious mania, who sucked pieces of coal as an antidote to chronic
+thirst, and spat about him indiscriminately.
+
+There were eight-hour intervals in this work, during which Nosey slept or
+ate his meals or played a mouth-organ in the lee of one of the
+turret-guns on deck, according to the hour of the day.  He slept in a
+hammock slung in an electric-lit passage far below the water-line; the
+passage was ten feet wide, and there were six hammocks slung abreast
+along the entire length of it.
+
+He ate his meals in a mess with twenty other men, the mess consisting of
+a deal plank covered with oilcloth for a table, and two narrower planks
+on either side as seats; there were shelves for crockery against the
+ship's side.  All this woodwork was scrubbed and scoured till it was
+almost as white as ivory.  Other messes, identical in every respect,
+situated three feet apart, ranged parallel to each other as far as the
+steel, enamelled bulkheads.  There were twenty men in each mess, and
+seventeen messes on that particular mess-deck, and here the members
+simultaneously ate, slept, sang, washed their clothes, cursed and
+laughed, skylarked or quarrelled all round during the waking hours of
+their watch-off.
+
+Still Nosey did not forget.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+Then came Janie's letter from the Middlesex Hospital.  Janie was in a
+"decline."
+
+The men who go down into trenches in the firing-line are, if anything,
+less heroic than the army of cooks and Janies who descend to spend their
+lives in the basement "domestic offices" of Bloomsbury.  Dark and
+ill-ventilated in summer, gas-lit and airless throughout the foggy
+winter.  Flight upon flight of stairs up which Janie daily toiled a
+hundred times before she was suffered to seek the attic she shared with
+cook under the slates.  Overwork, lack of fresh air and recreation--all
+these had told at last.
+
+Nosey availed himself of week-end leave from Portsmouth to journey up to
+London, and was permitted an interview with her in the big airy ward.
+Neither spoke much; at no time had they been great conversationalists,
+and now Janie, more diminutive and angular than ever, lost in the folds
+of a flannel nightgown, was content to hold his hand as long as he was
+allowed to remain.
+
+The past was ignored, or nearly so.  "You didn't orter gone off like
+that," said Janie reproachfully.  "But I'm glad you're a sailor.  You
+looks beautiful in them clothes.  An' there's prospecks in the Navy."
+Poor little Janie: she had "prospecks" herself at last.
+
+He left the few flowers he had brought with the sister of the ward when
+the time came to leave.  The nurse followed him into the corridor.  "Come
+and see her every visiting day you can," she said.  "It does her good and
+cheers her.  She often speaks of you."
+
+Nosey returned to Portsmouth and his ship.  His mess--the mess-deck
+itself--was agog with rumours.  Had he heard the "buzz"?  Nosey had not.
+"I bin to London to see a fren'," he explained.
+
+Then they told him.
+
+The battle-cruiser to which he belonged had been ordered to join the
+Mediterranean Fleet.  That was Monday; they were to sail for Malta on
+Thursday.
+
+And Janie was dying in the Middlesex Hospital.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+The next visiting day found him at Janie's bedside.  But, instead of his
+spick-and-span serge suit of "Number Ones" and carefully ironed blue
+collar, Nosey wore a rusty suit of "civvies" (civilian clothes).  Instead
+of being clean-shaven, an inconsiderable moustache was feeling its way
+through his upper lip.
+
+"Where's your sailor clothes?" asked Janie weakly.
+
+Nosey looked round to reassure himself that they were not overheard.  "I
+done a bunk!" he whispered.
+
+Janie gazed at him with dismayed eyes.  "Not--not deserted?"
+
+Nosey nodded.  "Don't you take on, Janie.  'S only so's I can stay near
+you."  He pressed her dry hand.  "I got a barrer--whelks an' periwinkles.
+I've saved a bit o' money.  An' now I can stay near you an' come 'ere
+visiting days."
+
+Janie was too weak to argue or expostulate.  It may have been that she
+was conscious of a certain amount of pride in Nosey's voluntary outlawry
+for her sake; and she was glad enough to have someone to sit with her on
+visiting days and tell her about the outside world she was never to see
+again.  She even went back in spirit to the proud days when they walked
+out together. . . .  It brought balm to the cough-racked nights and the
+weary passage of the days.
+
+Then the streets echoed with the cries of paper-boys.  The nurses
+whispered together excitedly in their leisure moments; the doctors seemed
+to acquire an added briskness.  Once or twice she heard the measured
+tramp of feet in the streets below, as a regiment was moved from one
+quarters to another.
+
+England was at war with Germany, they told her.  But the intelligence did
+not interest Janie much at first.  That empires should battle for
+supremacy concerned her very little--till she remembered Nosey's late
+calling.
+
+It was two days before she saw him again, and he still wore his "civvy"
+suit.  Janie smiled as he approached the bed, and fumbled with the
+halfpenny daily paper that somebody had given her to look at.
+
+'"Ere," she whispered, "read that."
+
+Nosey bent over and read the lines indicated by the thin forefinger.
+
+
+His Majesty the King has been graciously pleased to approve of pardons
+being granted to all deserters from the Royal Navy and Marines who
+surrender themselves forthwith.
+
+
+There was silence in the ward for a moment.  Far below in the street
+outside a transport wagon rumbled by.  Janie braced herself for the
+supreme act of her life.
+
+"You gotter go," said she.
+
+Nosey stared at her and then back at the newspaper.  "Not me!" he
+retorted, and took possession of her hand.
+
+"That's the King's pardon," said Janie, touching the halfpenny news-sheet
+with transparent fingers.  "'Tain't no use you comin' 'ere no more, 'cos
+I won't see you.  I'll ask 'em at the door not to let you in."
+
+Nosey knew that note of indomitable obstinacy in the weak voice.  He
+knew, as he sat looking down upon the fragile atom in the bed, that he
+could kill her with the pressure of a finger.
+
+But there was no way of making Janie go back on her decision once her
+mind was made up.  "If there's a war, you orter be fightin'," she added.
+"There's prospecks . . ."  Her weak voice was almost inaudible, and the
+nurse was coming down the ward towards them.
+
+Nosey lifted the hot, dry little claw to his lips.  "If you sez I gotter
+go, I'll go," and rose to his feet.
+
+"'Course you gotter go.  The King sez so, an' I sez so.  Don't you get
+worritin' about me; I'll be all right when you comes 'ome wiv yer medals.
+. . ."
+
+Nosey caught the nurse's eye and tiptoed out of the ward.  Janie turned
+her face to the Valley of the Shadow.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+AN OFF-SHORE WIND
+
+The circular rim of the fore-top took on a harder outline as the sky
+paled at the first hint of dawn.
+
+From this elevation it was possible to make out the details of the
+ships astern, details that grew momentarily more distinct.  Day,
+awakening, found the Battle Fleet steaming in line ahead across a
+smooth grey sea.  The smoke from the funnels hung like a long dark
+smear against the pearly light of the dawn; but as the pearl changed to
+primrose and the primrose to saffron, the sombre streamers dissolved
+into the mists of morning.
+
+Somewhere among the islands on our starboard bow a little wind awoke
+and brought with it the scent of heather and moist earth.  It was a
+good smell--just such a smell as our nostrils had hungered for for many
+months--and it stirred a host of vagrant memories as it went sighing
+past the halliards and shrouds.
+
+It was the turn of the Indiarubber Man (with whom I had shared the
+night's vigil aloft) to snatch a "stretch off the land" with his back
+against the steel side of our erie [Transcriber's note: eyrie?].  He
+shifted his position uneasily, and the hood of his duffel-suit fell
+back: his face, in the dawning, looked white and tired and unshaven.
+Cinders had collected in the folds of the thick garment as wind-blown
+snow lies in the hollows of uneven ground.
+
+As I stood looking down at him an expression of annoyance passed across
+his sleeping countenance.
+
+"Any old where----" he said in a clear, decisive voice.  "Down a
+rabbit-hole . . ."
+
+And I laughed because the off-shore wind had fluttered the same page in
+the book of pleasant memories that we both shared.  The petulant
+expression passed from his face, and he sank into deeper oblivion,
+holding the Thermos flask and binoculars against him like a child
+clasping its dolls in its sleep.
+
+It was just before we mobilised for the summer--a mobilisation which,
+had we but known it, was to last until our book of pleasant memories
+was thumbed and dog-eared and tattered with much usage--that the
+Indiarubber Man suggested taking a day off and having what he called a
+"stamp."  He fetched our ordnance map and spread it on the ward-room
+table, and we pored over it most of the evening, sucking our pipes.
+
+All Devon is good; and for a while the lanes had called us, winding
+from one thatched village to another between their fragrant,
+high-banked hedges.  "Think of the little pubs . . ." said the
+Indiarubber Man dreamily.  We thought of them, but with the vision came
+one of cyclists of the grey-sweater variety, and motorists filling the
+air with petrol fumes and dust.
+
+There was the river: woodland paths skirting in the evening a world of
+silver and grey, across which bats sketched zigzag flights.  Very nice
+in the dimpsey light, but stuffy in the daytime.  So the moor had it in
+the end.  We would trudge the moor from north to south, never seeing a
+soul, and, aided by map and compass, learn the peace of a day spent off
+the beaten tracks of man.
+
+We had been in the train some time before the Indiarubber Man made his
+electrifying discovery.
+
+"Where's the map?"  We eyed one another severely and searched our
+pockets.  "We were looking at it before I went to get the tickets," he
+pursued.  "I gave it to you to fold up."
+
+So he had.  I left it on the station seat.
+
+At a wayside station bookstall we managed to unearth an alleged
+reproduction of the fair face of South Devon to replace the lost map.
+
+The Indiarubber Man traced the writhings of several caterpillars with
+his pipe-stem.  "These are tors," he explained generously.  After this
+we studied the map in silence, vainly attempting to confirm our
+recollections of a course marked out the previous evening on an
+ordnance survey map.
+
+We were both getting slightly confused when, with a screech of brakes,
+the train pulled up at the little moorside station that was our
+destination by rail.  Sunlight bathed the grey buildings on the
+platform and the sleepy village beyond.  From the blue overhead came
+the thin, sweet notes of a lark, and as we listened in the stillness we
+heard a faint whispering "swish" like the sound of a very distant
+reaper.  It was the wind flowing across miles of reeds and grass and
+heather from the distant Atlantic.  But it was not until half an hour
+later, when we breasted the crest of the great hog-back that stretched
+before us like a rampart, that we ourselves met the wind.  It came out
+of the west, athwart the sun's rays, a steady rush of warm air; and
+with it came the tang of the sea and hint of honey and new-mown hay
+that somehow clings to Devon moorland through all the changing seasons.
+
+A cluster of giant rocks piled against the sky to our left drew us
+momentarily out of our course.  With some difficulty we scrambled up
+their warm surfaces, where the lichen clung bleached and russet, and
+stood looking out across the rolling uplands of Devon.  Worthier
+adventurers would have improved the shining hour with debate as to the
+origin of this upflung heap of Nature's masonry.  Had it served
+departed Phoenicians as an altar?  Heaven and the archaeologists alone
+knew.
+
+To the northward the patchwork of plough and green corn, covert and
+hamlet commenced at the edge of the railway and stretched undulating
+over hill and dale to where a grey smudge proclaimed the sea.
+
+South lay the moor, inscrutable and mysterious, dotted with the
+monuments of a people forgotten before walls ringed the seven hills of
+Rome.  The outlines of tors, ever softening in the distance, led the
+eye from rugged crest to misty beacon till, forty miles away, they
+dissolved into the same grey haze.
+
+The Indiarubber Man pointed a lean, prophetic forefinger to the rolling
+south.  "There's Wheatwood," he said.  "Come on."  And so, shouldering
+our coats, with the hot sunlight on our right cheeks and the day before
+us, we started across Dartmoor.
+
+For nearly two hours the tor from which we had started watched with
+friendly reassurance over intervening hills; then it dipped out of
+sight, and we were conscious of a sudden loneliness in a world of
+enigmatic hut-circles, peopled by sheep and peewits.  We were working
+across a piece of ground intersected by peat-cuttings, and after half
+an hour of it the Indiarubber Man fished out the map and compass from
+his pocket.
+
+"There ought to be a clump of trees, a hut-circle, and a Roman road
+knocking about somewhere.  Can you see anything of them?"
+
+I searched the landscape through glasses from my recumbent position in
+the heather, but prolonged scrutiny failed to reveal a single tree, nor
+was the Roman road startlingly obvious in the trackless waste.  Our map
+had proved too clever for us.  In the circumstances there was only one
+thing to be done.  With awful calm we folded the sheet, tore it into
+little pieces, and hid them in a rabbit-hole.
+
+For about five miles after that we kept along a promontory that
+shouldered its way across an undulating plain, ringed in the distance
+by purple hills; then we sighted our distant landmark--a conical
+beacon--that we had been steering for.  We were descending, thigh-deep
+in bracken, when the wind bore down to us from a dot against the
+skyline of a ridge the tiniest of thin whistles.  A few minutes later a
+sheep-dog raced past in the direction of a cluster of white specks.
+For a while we watched it, and each lithe, effortless bound, as it
+passed upon its quest, struck a responsive chord within us--we who
+floundered clumsily among the boulders in our path.
+
+But, for all this momentary exhilaration, it seemed a long time later
+that we struck the source of the burn which would in time guide us to
+our half-way halting place.  To us, who had been nurtured on its broad
+bosom,[1] there was something almost pathetic--as in meeting an old
+nurse in much reduced circumstances--about this trickle among the peat
+and moss.  Lower down, however, it widened, and the water poured over
+granite boulders, with a bell-like contralto note, into a succession of
+amber pools.
+
+There we shed our few garments on the bank, and the moments that
+followed, from the first exultant thrill as the water effervesced over
+our bodies till we crawled out dripping to dry in the wind and sun,
+seemed to hold only gratitude--an immense undefined gratitude to the
+Power that held all life.  At its heels came hunger, wonderfully well
+defined.
+
+Lower down, where the road that stretches like a white ribbon over the
+bosom of the moor crosses the river, there is an inn.  I will not name
+it: writers of poems and guide-books--worthier penmen all--have done
+that.  Besides, quite enough people go there as it is.  We dropped, via
+a kine-scented yard and over a seven-foot bank, into the road abreast
+the inn door, and here a brake, freighted with tourist folk, brought us
+suddenly back to the conventions that everyday life demands.
+
+True, we were never fain to cling to these; but, standing there on the
+King's high-road, clad in football knickers and thin jerseys, sun-burnt
+and dishevelled, we were conscious of a sudden immense embarrassment.
+And, in sooth, had we dropped from the skies or been escaping from the
+grey prison not far distant, the tenants of the brake could hardly have
+been less merciful in their scrutiny or comments.
+
+After the clean wind of the moor, the taint of the last meal and
+over-clad fellow-beings seemed to cling unpleasantly to the
+low-ceilinged room whither we fled, and I do not think we breathed
+comfortably again till we had paid our bill and returned to the
+sunlight.  Before leaving we inquired the time, and learned it was
+nearly four o'clock.
+
+One ought to "know the time," it seems, among men's haunts; but, once
+out of sight of these, it suffices, surely, to eat when hungry, sleep
+when tired, roam as long as daylight and legs will let one--in fine, to
+share with the shaggy ponies and browsing sheep a lofty disregard for
+all artificial divisions of the earth's journey through space.  And our
+joint watch happened at the time to be undergoing repairs in Plymouth.
+
+To follow the ramifications of a road gives one no lasting impression
+of the surrounding country, but directly a wanderer has to depend on
+landmarks as a guide, all his powers of observation quicken.  One
+ragged hill-top guided us to another, across valleys scored with the
+workings of forgotten tin-mines.  A brook, crooning its queer,
+independent moor-song between banks of peat, rambled beside us for some
+time.  Then, as if wearying of our company, it turned abruptly and was
+lost to view; in the summer stillness of late afternoon we heard it
+babbling on long after our ways separated.
+
+If the truth be known, I suspect it deemed us dullish dogs.  But we
+were tiring--not with the jaded weariness begotten of hard roads, when
+the spine aches and knees stiffen; no, a comfortable lassitude was
+slackening our joints and bringing thoughts of warm baths and supper.
+However, our shadows, valiant fellows, swung along before us across the
+rusty bracken with a cheerful constancy, and, encouraged by their
+ever-lengthening strides and by the solitude, we even found heart to
+lift our voices in song.  Now and again small birds fled upwards with
+shrill twitters at our approach, and settled again to resume their
+interrupted suppers; but after a while they left for their roosts in
+the rowans and sycamores to the south, and rabbits began to show
+themselves in the open spaces among the furze.  As if reluctantly, the
+perfect day drew to its close.
+
+We raced up the flank of a long ridge to keep the setting sun in view,
+reaching the crest as it dipped to meet a ragged tor, and sank in a
+golden glow.  A little wind, like a tired sigh, ruffled the tops of the
+heather, swayed the grass an instant, and was gone.
+
+"Ah-h-h!" breathed the Indiarubber Man in the stillness.
+
+A thousand feet below us smoke was curling from the thickly wooded
+valley.  It was five miles away, but somewhere amid those trees men
+brewed and women baked.
+
+"Come on," he added tensely.  "Beer!"
+
+As we descended into the lowlands a widening circle of night was
+stealing up into the sky--the blue-grey and purple of a pigeon's
+breast.  A single star appeared in the western sky, intensifying the
+peace of the silent moor behind us.  Stumbling through twilit woods and
+across fields of young barley, we met a great dog-fox _en route_ for
+someone's poultry-run.  He bared his teeth with angry effrontery as he
+sheered off and gave us a wide berth across the darkening fields.
+Doubtless he claimed his supremacy of hour and place, as did the
+sheep-dog that passed us so joyously earlier in the day.  And, after
+all, what were we but interlopers from a lower plane!
+
+The thirty-odd miles of our ramble reeled up like a tape-measure as we
+reached the lane, splashed with moonlight, that led us to the village.
+The gateway to every field held a pair of lovers whispering among the
+shadows: yet inexplicably they seemed an adjunct of their surroundings
+and the faintly bewildering night-scents.  A dog sitting at the gate of
+a cottage uttered a short bark as we neared his domain; then, with a
+queer grumbling whimper, he came to us across the dust, and perhaps
+because--as far as is given to man in his imperfections--we had not
+wittingly done evil that day, he slobbered at our hands.
+
+In the flagged and wainscotted parlour of the village inn a child
+brought us bread and cheese and froth-crested mugs of beer.  While we
+ate and drank, she watched us with tranquil interest in violet-coloured
+eyes that foretold a sleepless night for some bucolic swain in years to
+come.
+
+The Indiarubber Man finished his last draught and stood up with a
+mighty sigh to loosen his belt.  Then, bending down, he took the
+child's flower-like face between his hands:
+
+"'Now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace,'" he said gravely.
+Beer was ever prone to lend a certain smack of Scripture to his remarks.
+
+"Surt'nly," said the little maid, all uncomprehending, and ran out to
+fetch our reckoning.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+The Thermos flask slid with a clatter on to the steel deck of the top,
+and the Indiarubber Man opened his eyes.  He yawned and stretched
+himself and rose stiffly to his feet.
+
+The first rays of the sun were rising out of the sea.  "Hai-yah!"  He
+yawned.  "Another bloomin' day. . . .  I was dreaming . . . about . . .
+blowed if I can remember what I was dreaming about."  He adjusted the
+focus of his glasses and stared out across the North Sea.  "I wonder if
+they're coming out to-day."
+
+It was the two hundred and seventy-third morning we had wondered that.
+
+
+
+[1] The River Dart.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+THE DAY
+
+Although it all happened in that dim, remote period of time "Before the
+War," Torps and the First Lieutenant, the Indiarubber Man (who was the
+Lieutenant for Physical Training Duties), the Junior Watchkeeper, and
+others who participated, long afterwards referred to it as "The Day."
+
+Since then they have seen their own gunfire sink an enemy's ship as a
+well-flung brick disposes of an empty tin on the surface of a pond.
+The after twelve-inch guns, astride whose muzzles David and Freckles
+once soared to the giddy stars, have hurled instantaneous and awful
+death across leagues of the North Sea.  The X-ray apparatus, by the
+agency of which Cornelius James desired to see right through his own
+"tummy," has enabled the Fleet Surgeon to pick fragments of steel out
+of tortured bodies, as a conjurer takes things out of a hat.  The
+after-cabin, that had witnessed so many informal tea-and-muffin
+parties, has been an ether-reeking hospital.
+
+Yet these memories grew blurred in time, as mercifully such memories
+do.  It was another and more fragrant one that sweetened the grim
+winter vigil in the North, when every smudge of smoke on the horizon
+might have been the herald of Armageddon.  They were yet to see men die
+by scores in the shambles of a wrecked battery, by hundreds on the
+shell-torn decks of a ship that sank, fighting gallantly to the last.
+And the recollection of what I am about to relate doubtless supplied
+sufficient answer to the question that at such times assails the minds
+of men.
+
+Two who helped in that unforgettable good-night scene on the aft-deck
+were destined to add their names to the Roll of Britain's Honour.  It
+is not too much to hope that the echo of children's merriment guided
+their footsteps through that dark Valley of the Shadow to the peaks of
+Eternal Laughter which lie beyond.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+It all started during one of those informal tea-parties the Skipper's
+Missus sometimes held in the after-cabin.  They were delightful
+affairs.  You needn't accept the Invitation if you didn't want to;
+there was no necessity to put on your best monkey-jacket if you did.
+You were just told to "blow in" if you wanted some tea, and then you
+made your own toast, and there was China tea, in a big blue-and-white
+pot, that scented the whole cabin.
+
+The Skipper's Missus sat by the fire, with her hands linked round her
+knees in her habitually graceful and oddly characteristic attitude;
+Torps and Jess, those gentle philosophers, occupied the chintz-covered
+settee; the A.P. sat on the hearth-rug, cross-legged like a tailor, so
+that he could toast and consume the maximum number of muffins with the
+minimum amount of exertion; the Junior Watchkeeper, who by his own
+admission "went all the bundle on his tea," and the Indiarubber Man,
+who was clumsy with a tea-cup, shared the table and a jam-pot, and sat
+munching, tranquil-eyed, like a pair of oxen in a stall.
+
+The Captain and the First Lieutenant were rummaging through the drawers
+of the knee-hole table in search of an ancient recipe of the former's
+for manufacturing varnish of a peculiar excellence wherewith to
+beautify the corticene on the aft-deck.
+
+"How are the children?" asked the Torpedo Lieutenant, helping himself
+to milk and Jess to a lump of sugar.  "Out of quarantine yet?"
+
+"Yes," replied the youthful mother of Georgina, Jane, and Cornelius
+James.  "At last, poor things!  Christmas is such a wretched time to
+have measles.  No parties, no Christmas-tree----"
+
+The A.P. looked up from the absorbing task of buttering a muffin to his
+satisfaction.  "D'you remember the Christmas when you all came on
+board--wasn't it a rag?  I broke my glasses because I was a tiger.  I
+was that fierce."
+
+"And I was chased by the dockyard police all the way from the Admiral
+Superintendent's garden with a young fir-tree under my arm.  We had it
+for a Christmas-tree in the wardroom.  Do you remember?"
+
+They were all old friends, you see, and had served two commissions in
+succession with this Captain.
+
+"Isn't it rather hard on the _Chee-si's_?" asked Torps, "being done out
+of their parties--no, Jess, three lumps are considered quite enough for
+little dogs to consume at one sitting."
+
+The Skipper's Missus looked across the cabin at her husband: "Tim, your
+tea's getting cold.  Why shouldn't we have a children's party on board
+one day next week?  It isn't too late, is it?"
+
+"Yes, sir," chimed in the Indiarubber Man.  "A _pukka_ children's
+party, with wind-sails for them to slither down and a merry-go-round on
+the after-capstan?"
+
+The Captain drank his tea thoughtfully; his blue eyes twinkled.  "Let
+us have a definition of _children_, Standish.  I seem to remember a
+certain bridesmaid at the Gunnery Lieutenant's wedding of what I
+believe is technically called the 'flapper' age----"
+
+"Quite right, sir," cut in the Torpedo Lieutenant.  "Our lives were a
+misery for weeks afterwards.  He burbled about 'shy flowerets' in his
+sleep, sir----"
+
+The Indiarubber Man blushed hotly.  "Not 't'll, sir.  They're talking
+rot.  She thought I was ninety, and daft at that.  They always do," he
+added sighing, the sigh of a sore heart that motley traditionally
+covers.
+
+"I propose that we have no one older than Georgina or younger than
+Cornelius James," suggested the Junior Watchkeeper.  "That limits the
+ages to between ten and seven, and then I think Standish's susceptible
+heart would be out of danger."
+
+"How many children do you propose to turn loose all over the ship?"
+inquired the First Lieutenant dourly.  "No one seems to have taken my
+paint-work into consideration.  It's all new this week."
+
+The Skipper's Missus laughed softly.  "We were so concerned about Mr.
+Standish's heart, Mr. Hornby, that we quite forgot your paint-work.
+Couldn't it be all covered up just for this once?  Besides, they are
+such tiny children . . ."
+
+There are many skippers' missuses, but only one mother of Georgina,
+Jane, and Cornelius James.
+
+The First Lieutenant capitulated.
+
+"I vote we don't have any grown-ups, either," contributed the Junior
+Watchkeeper, "except ourselves.  Mothers and nurses always spoil
+children's parties."
+
+The mother of Georgina, Jane, and Cornelius James wrung her hands in
+mock dismay.  "Oh, but mayn't I come?  I promise not to spoil
+anything--I love parties so!"
+
+The A.P. rushed in where an angel might have been excused for
+faltering.  "Glegg means that you don't count as a grown-up at a
+children's party," he explained naively, regarding the Skipper's Missus
+through his glasses with dog-like devotion.
+
+She laughed merrily.  "You pay a pretty compliment, Mr. Gerrard!"
+
+"Double-O" Gerrard reddened and lapsed into bashful silence.
+
+"It is agreed, then.  We are to have a children's party, and I may
+come.  Won't the children be excited!"
+
+"Torps, what are you going to do with them," asked the First
+Lieutenant, "besides breaking their necks by pushing them down the
+windsails?"  He spoke without bitterness, but as a man who had in his
+youth embraced cynicism as a refuge and found the pose easier to retain
+than to discard.
+
+The Torpedo Lieutenant regarded him severely.  "It's no good adopting
+this tone of lofty detachment, Number One.  You're going to do most of
+the entertaining, besides keeping my grey hairs company."
+
+The First Lieutenant laughed, a sad, hard laugh without any laughter in
+it.  "I don't amuse children, I'm afraid.  In fact, I frighten them.
+They don't like my face.  No, no----"
+
+"Mr. Hornby," interposed the Skipper's Missus reproachfully, "that
+isn't quite true, is it?  You know Jane prays for you nightly, and
+Corney wouldn't for worlds sleep without that wooden semaphore you made
+him----"
+
+"I think Hornby would make an admirable Father Neptune," said the
+Captain, considering him mischievously, "with a tow wig and beard----"
+
+"And my green bath kimono," supplemented the A.P.  "I bought it at
+Nagasaki, in the bazaar.  It's got green dragons all over it----"  He
+met the First Lieutenant's eye and lapsed into silence again.
+
+"Yes!  Yes!  And oyster-shells sewn all over it, and seaweed
+trailing . . ."  The Skipper's Missus clapped her hands.  "And
+distribute presents after tea.  Oh, Mr. Hornby, _wouldn't_ that be
+lovely!"
+
+The First Lieutenant took no further part in the discussion.  But late
+that night he was observed to select a volume of the "Encyclopaedia
+Britannica" (L-N) from the wardroom library, and retire with it to his
+cabin.  His classical education had been scanty, and left him in some
+doubt as to what might be expected of the son of Saturn and Rhea at a
+children's party.
+
+
+
+2
+
+"I doubt if any of 'em'll face it," said the First Lieutenant
+hopefully, when The Day arrived.  "There's a nasty lop on, and the
+glass is tumbling down as if the bottom had dropped out.  It's going to
+blow a hurricane before midnight.  Anyhow, they'll all be sick coming
+off."
+
+The Torpedo Lieutenant was descending the ladder to the picket-boat.
+"Bunje and I are going in to look after them.  It's too late to put it
+off now."  He glanced at the threatening horizon.  "They'll be all snug
+once we get them on board, and this'll all blow over before tea-time."
+
+Off went the steamboats, the Torpedo Lieutenant in the picket-boat and
+the Indiarubber Man in the steam pinnace, and a tremor of excitement
+ran through the little cluster of children gathering at the jetty steps
+ashore.
+
+"It's awfully rough outside the harbour," announced Cornelius James,
+submitting impatiently to his nurse's inexplicable manipulation of the
+muffler round his neck.  "I'm never sick, though," he confided to a
+small and rather frightened-looking mite of a girl who clung to her
+nurse's hand and looked out to the distant ship with some trepidation
+in her blue eyes.  "My daddy's a Captain," continued Cornelius James;
+"and I'm _never_ sick--are you?"
+
+She nodded her fair head.  "Yeth," she lisped sadly.
+
+"P'r'aps your daddy isn't a Captain," conceded Cornelius James
+magnificently.
+
+The maiden shook her head.  "My daddy's an Admiral," was the slightly
+disconcerting reply.
+
+"I shall steer the boat," asserted Cornelius James presently, by way of
+restoring his shaken prestige.
+
+"Oh, Corney, you can't," said Jane.  "Casey always lets Georgie steer
+father's galley--you know he does.  You're only saying that to show
+off."
+
+"'M not," retorted Cornelius James.  "I'm a boy: girls can't steer
+boats.  'Sides, Georgie'll be sick."
+
+"Oh, I hope there'll be a band and dancing," said Georgina rapturously.
+
+"That's all you girls think about," snorted a young gentleman of about
+her own age, with deep scorn.  "_I_ hope there'll be a shooting
+gallery, an' those ras'berry puffs with cream on top. . . ."  His eye
+followed the pitching steamboats, fast drawing near.  "Anyhow, I hope
+there'll be a shooting gallery. . . .  I say, it's rather rough, isn't
+it?"
+
+The children, cloaked and muffled in their wraps, watched the boats
+buffet their way shoreward in clouds of spray.  The parting injunctions
+of nurses and governesses fell on deaf ears.  How could anyone be
+expected to listen to prompted rigmaroles about "bread and butter
+before cake" and "don't forget to say thank you for asking me" with the
+prospect of this brave adventure drawing so near?
+
+Georgina, standing on tip-toe with excitement, suddenly emitted a
+shrill squeal of emotion.  "Oh! there's Mr. Mainwaring in the first
+boat!"
+
+"Who's Mr. Mainwaring?" inquired a small girl with a white bow over one
+ear, secretly impressed by Georgina's obvious familiarity with the
+inspiring figure in the stern sheets of the picket-boat.
+
+"_Dear_ Mr. Mainwaring!"  repeated Georgina under her breath, gazing
+rapturously at her idol.
+
+White Bow repeated her query.
+
+"He's--he's Mr. Mainwaring," replied Georgina.  "My Mr. Mainwaring."
+Which is about as much information as any young woman may reasonably be
+expected to give another who betrays too lively an interest in her
+beloved.
+
+The Torpedo Lieutenant waved his arm in a gesture of indiscriminate
+greeting, and the children responded with a fluttering of hands and
+dancing eyes.  The steam pinnace was following hard in the wake of the
+picket-boat.
+
+Jane, with the far-seeing eye of love, recognised the occupant
+instantly.  "There's Mr. Standish," she said.  "_My_ Mr. Standish!"
+
+The nurse of Georgina, Jane, and Cornelius James turned to the
+Providence that brooded over a small boy with a freckled face.  "Did
+you ever hear such children?" she asked in an aside.  "_Her_ Mr.
+Standish!  That's the way they goes on all day!"
+
+The other nodded.  "Mine's like that, too; only it's our ship's
+Sergeant of Marines with him."  Master Freckles's choice in the matter
+of an idol had evidently not lacked the wise guidance of his nurse.
+
+The boats swung alongside in the calm waters of the basin.  The Torpedo
+Lieutenant handed his freight of frills and furbelows to the Coxswain's
+outstretched arms.  The small boys to a man disdained the helping hand,
+but scrambled with fine independence into the stern sheets.
+
+"Sit still a minute." The Indiarubber Man counted.  ". . .
+Eight--twelve!  Hallo!  Six absentees----  No, Corney, you can't steer,
+because I'm going to clap you all below hatches the moment we get
+outside."  He raised his voice, hailing the picket-boat.  "All right,
+Torps?"  The Torpedo Lieutenant signified that they were all aboard the
+lugger, and off they went.
+
+The nurses assembled on the end of the jetty waved their handkerchiefs
+with valedictory gestures; the wind caught their shrill farewells and
+tossed them contemptuously to where the gulls wheeled far overhead.
+
+"My!  Isn't it blowing!" said the small boy in freckles, indifferent to
+his nurse's lamentations of farewell.  "Look at Nannie's skirts, like a
+balloon. . . ."
+
+"Yes," agreed the Torpedo Lieutenant gravely.  "It's what's called a
+typhoon.  I've only seen one worse, and that was the day I sailed in
+pursuit of Bill Blubbernose, the Bargee Buccaneer."
+
+Georgina cast him a glance of passionate credence.
+
+"Oh!" gasped Freckles, "have you really chased pirates?"  The Torpedo
+Lieutenant nodded.  A certain three weeks spent in an open cutter off
+the coast of Zanzibar as a midshipman still remained a vivid
+recollection.
+
+"Tell us about it," said the children, and snuggled closer into the
+shelter of the Torpedo Lieutenant's long arms.
+
+The steamboats drew near the ship, and in the reeling stern-sheets of
+the steam-pinnace the Indiarubber Man stood holding two small figures
+by the collars--two small figures whose heads projected far beyond the
+lee gunwale.  They were Cornelius James and the young gentleman whose
+valiant soul had yearned for shooting galleries and eke raspberry
+puffs.  And, horror of horrors! the little girls were laughing.
+
+The picket-boat had no casualties to report, and as she went plunging
+alongside, the Junior Watchkeeper (in sea-boots at the bottom of the
+ladder) heard the Torpedo Lieutenant say:
+
+"We cut their noses off and nailed them to the flying jibboom."
+
+"And what happened then?" gasped the enthralled Freckles as he was
+picked up and hoisted over the rail on to the spray-splashed ladder.
+
+"And they all lived happily ever afterwards," murmured the Torpedo
+Lieutenant absently.  "Come on, who's next?  One, two, three--on the
+next wave.  _Hup_ you go!"
+
+At the top of the ladder to greet each small guest stood the mother of
+Georgina, Jane, and Cornelius James.  She had lunched on board with her
+husband and had spent the early part of the afternoon fashioning a
+garment for Father Neptune--
+
+  "That the feast might be more joyous,
+  That the time might pass more gaily,
+  And the guests be more contented,"
+
+quoted the First Lieutenant with his twisted smile, as he tried it on.
+
+The quarterdeck had been closed in with an awning and side curtains of
+canvas that made all within as snug as any nursery.  The deck had been
+dusted with French chalk; bright-coloured flags draped the canvas
+walls; the band was whimpering to start.
+
+Cornelius James and his fellow sufferer were not long in recovering
+from their indisposition; a glass of milk and biscuits soon restored
+matters to the normal, and together they sallied forth to sample the
+joys that had been prepared for them.
+
+There were windsails stretched from the after-bridge to mattresses on
+the quarter-deck, down which one shot through the dizzy darkness to end
+in a delicious "wump" at the bottom.  The after-capstan was a
+roundabout, with its squealing passengers suspended from capstan-bars.
+Each grim twelve-inch gun had a saddle strapped round the muzzle, on
+which one sat, thrilled and ecstatic, while the great guns rose slowly
+to extreme elevation and descended again to mundane levels.
+
+There were pennies for the venturesome, to be extracted at great
+personal risk from an electric dip; in a dark casemate a green light
+shivered in a little glass tube; you placed your hand in front of it,
+and on a white screen a skeleton hand appeared in a manner at once
+ghostly and delightful.  Cornelius James returned to the quarter-deck
+as one who had brushed elbows with the Black Arts.  "But I wish I could
+see right froo my own tummy," he confided, sighing, to the First
+Lieutenant.
+
+The First Lieutenant, however, was rather _distrait_; he glanced
+constantly upwards at the bellying awning overhead and then walked to
+the gangway to look out upon the tumbling grey sea and lowering sky.
+Once or twice he conferred with a distinguished-looking gentleman who
+had not joined in the revels, but, carrying a telescope and wearing a
+sword-belt, remained aloof with a rather worried expression.  This was
+the Officer of the Watch.
+
+"We'll furl it while they're having tea," said the First Lieutenant.
+"But how the deuce they're going to get ashore the Lord knows.  I'll
+have to hoist in the boats if it gets any worse.  Keep an eye on the
+compass and see we aren't dragging."  The Captain came across the deck.
+
+"You must furl the awning, Hornby; we're in for a blow."  He looked
+round regretfully at the laughing throng of youngsters.
+
+"Yes, sir.  And I think we ought to send the children ashore while
+there's still time."  As he spoke a wave struck the bottom of the
+accommodation ladder and broke in a great cloud of spray.
+
+"Too late now, I'm afraid.  They'll have to stay till it moderates.
+The wind has backed suddenly.  Get steam on the boat-hoist and hoist in
+the boats.  You'd better top-up the ladders.  Pretty kettle of fish,
+with my wife and all these children on board."
+
+
+
+3
+
+Tea had passed into the limbo of things enjoyed, if not forgotten, and
+the guests had gathered in the after-cabin.  "Children!" cried the
+mother of Georgina, Jane, and Cornelius James, "a visitor has come on
+board to see you!"  As she spoke, a gaunt apparition appeared in the
+doorway.  He wore a gilt paper crown, and was dressed in a robe of the
+brightest green.  Seaweed hung in festoons from his head and shoulders,
+oyster-shells clashed as he walked; in one hand he carried a trident,
+and on his back a heavy pannier.  His legs were encased in mighty
+boots, a shaggy beard hung down over his chest; his eyes, sombre and
+unsmiling, roved over the assembled children.
+
+There was a sudden silence: then the small girl with the white bow over
+one ear burst into tears.  "Boo-hoo!" she cried.  "Don't like nasty
+man," and ran to bury her face in her hostess's gown.  Her fears were
+infectious, and symptoms of a general panic ensued.  "I knew it,"
+mumbled the visitor despairingly into his beard, "I _knew_ this would
+happen."
+
+"Children, children, don't be silly--it's only Father Neptune.  He's
+got presents for you all.  Won't you go and say how d'you do to him!
+He's come all the way from the bottom of the sea."
+
+Cornelius James pulled himself together and advanced with outstretched
+hand, as befitted the son of a post-captain on board his father's ship.
+"I know who you are," he asserted stoutly.  "You're Father Christmas's
+brother!"
+
+The First Lieutenant hastily accepted this new mythology.  "Quite
+right," he replied with gratitude, "quite right!"  Then, as if
+realising that something further was required of him, added in a deep
+bass voice:
+
+"_Fee!  Fi!  Fo!  Fum!_"
+
+White Bow screamed, and even Cornelius James the valiant fell back a
+pace.  Matters were beginning to look serious, when the Torpedo
+Lieutenant appeared, rather out of breath.  "Sorry we had to rush away
+just now, but we had to furl the awning----"  His quick eye took in the
+situation at a glance.
+
+"Hallo! old chap," he cried, and smote the dejected Father Neptune
+on the back.  "I _am_ delighted to see you!  How are all the
+mermaids and flying-fish?  Bless my soul! what have you got in this
+pannier--dolls . . . lead soldiers, air-guns!  I _say_----"
+
+The children rallied round him as the children of another age must have
+rallied round Saint George of England.
+
+"Don't like nasty old man," repeated White Bow, considering the First
+Lieutenant with dewy eyes.  "Nasty cross old man."  The visitor from
+the bottom of the sea fumbled irresolutely with his trident.
+
+"Is it really Father Christmas's own brother?" queried a small sceptic,
+advancing warily.
+
+"Of course it is!  Look here, look at all the things he's brought you,"
+and in an undertone to the First Lieutenant, "Buck up, Number One,
+don't look so frightened!"  They unslung the pannier and commenced to
+unpack the contents; the children gathered round with slowly returning
+confidence, and by twos and threes the remainder of the hosts returned
+from the upper-deck.
+
+"Why aren't they all wet if they've come from the bottom of the sea?"
+demanded Freckles the materialist.  "Why isn't Father Christmas's
+brother wet?"
+
+They looked round in vain.  Father Christmas's brother had vanished.
+
+At that moment the Captain entered and sought his wife's eye.  For a
+few moments they conferred in an undertone; then she laughed, that
+clear confident laugh of hers with which they had shared so many of
+life's perplexities.
+
+"Children!" she cried, "listen!  Here's an adventure!  We've all got to
+sleep on board to-night!"
+
+"Oh, mummie!" gasped Georgina with rapture, "how _lovely_!"  This was a
+party, and no mistake.  "Can I sleep in Mr. Mainwaring's cabin?"
+
+"And can I sleep in Mr. Standish's cabin?" echoed Jane earnestly.  "And
+we needn't go to bed for hours and hours, need we?" chimed in Cornelius
+James.
+
+"Where are they to sleep?" asked the Captain's wife, turning to the
+Torpedo Lieutenant with laughter still in her eyes.   "I never thought
+of that.  One always has spare rooms in a house, but a battleship is so
+different. . . ."
+
+"It's all right," he replied.  "I've arranged all that.  There are a
+lot of people ashore: the children can use their cabins, and some of us
+can sling in cots for the night.  They'll have to wear our
+pyjamas. . . .  But I don't know about baths----"
+
+"I think they must have plenary absolution from the tub to-night."  She
+glanced at the tiny watch at her wrist.  "Now then, children, half an
+hour before bed time: one good romp.  What shall we play?"
+
+"Oranges and lemons," said Georgina promptly, and seized the
+Indiarubber Man's hand.
+
+"I don't know the words," replied her partner plaintively; "I only
+'knows the toon,'" as the leadsman said to the Navigator.
+
+So the children supplied the words to the men's bass accompaniment; the
+Captain and his wife linked hands.  The candle came to light them to
+bed; the chopper came to chop off a head; and at the end a grand
+tug-of-war terminated with two squealing heaps of humanity in miniature
+subsiding on top of the Young Doctor and the A.P.
+
+Then they played "Hunt the slipper," at which Torps, with his long
+arms, greatly distinguished himself, and "Hide the thimble," at which
+Double-O Gerrard, blinking through his glasses straight at the quarry
+without seeing it, was hopelessly disgraced.  "General Post" and "Kiss
+in the Ring" followed, and quite suddenly the mother of Georgina, Jane,
+and Cornelius James decreed it was time for bed, and the best game of
+all began.
+
+The Captain's wife gathered six pairs of vasty pyjamas over her arm.
+"I'll take the girls all together and look after them in my husband's
+cabin," she said.  "We'll come along when we're ready.  Will you all
+look after the boys?"
+
+Freckles fell to the lot of the Junior Watchkeeper; David, specialist
+in raspberry puffs, had already attached himself to the Indiarubber
+Man.  The A.P. found himself leading off a young gentleman with an
+air-gun which he earnestly desired as a bed-fellow.  The remaining two,
+red-headed twins who had spent most of the afternoon locked in combat,
+were in charge of Torps and the Young Doctor.
+
+"Where's Cornelius James?" asked the First Lieutenant suddenly.  "What
+a day, what a day!"  A search party was promptly instituted, and the
+Captain's son at last discovered forward in the Petty Officers' mess.
+Here, seated on the knee of Casey, his father's coxswain, he was being
+regaled with morsels of bloater, levered into his willing mouth on the
+point of a clasp knife, and washed down by copious draughts of strong
+tea out of a basin.
+
+"I went to say 'Good night' to Casey," explained the delinquent as he
+was being led back to civilisation, "and Casey said I ought to be
+hungry after mustering my bag this afternoon.  What does that mean?"
+
+"I shouldn't listen to everything Casey tells you," replied the First
+Lieutenant severely.
+
+"That's what daddy says sometimes," observed Cornelius James.  "But I
+like Casey awfully.  Better'n Nannie.  He taught me how to make a
+reef-knot, an' I can do semaphore--the whole alphabet . . . nearly."
+
+"Here we are," interrupted his harassed mentor, stopping before the
+door of his cabin.  "This is where you've got to sleep."  He lifted his
+small charge on to the bunk.  "Now then, let's get these shoes
+off. . . ."
+
+The flat echoed with the voices of children and the sounds of
+expostulation.  The Marine sentry (specially selected for the post "on
+account of 'im 'avin' a way with children," as the Sergeant-Major had
+previously explained to the First Lieutenant) drifted to and fro on his
+beat with a smile of ecstatic enjoyment on his faithful R.M.L.I.
+features.  For some moments he hovered outside the Junior Watchkeeper's
+cabin.  There were indications in the conversation drifting out through
+the curtained doorway that all was not well within.  At length Private
+Phillips could contain himself no longer.  "Better let me do it, sir.
+Bein' a married man, sir, I knows the routine, in a manner o'
+speakin' . . ." he said, and plunged into the fray.
+
+"Oh, is that you, Phillips?" the relieved voice of the Junior
+Watchkeeper was heard to say.  "I can't get the lead of this infernal
+rice-string--don't wriggle, Jim--it's rove so taut. . . ."
+
+"What '_normous_ pyjamas," said Cornelius James, suffering himself to
+be robed in his night-attire.  The operation was conducted with some
+difficulty because of the sheathed sword which the visitor had found in
+a corner of his host's cabin and refused thereafter to be parted from.
+"Have you ever killed anyone with this sword?"  A blustering sea broke
+against the ship's side and splashed the glass of the scuttle with
+spray.  "Hark at the waves outside!  Can't I have the window open?
+Shall I say my prayers to you?"
+
+"No," replied the First Lieutenant, with a little wry smile, as the
+shadow-fingers of the might-have-been tightened momentarily round his
+heart.  "No, I think you'd better wait till Mummie comes."  Shrill
+voices and peals of laughter sounded outside.  "Here she is now."
+
+He stepped outside, and met the mother of Georgina, Jane, and Cornelius
+James at the head of her flock.
+
+"Here we are," she exclaimed, laughing.  "But, oh, Mr. Hornby, our
+pyjamas are so _huge_!"
+
+"So are ours," said the First Lieutenant, and stooped to gather into
+his arms a pathetic object whose pyjama coat of many colours almost
+trailed along the deck.  "Cornelius James wants you to go and hear him
+say his prayers. . . .  I will find sleeping quarters for this one."
+
+Ten minutes later the last child had been swung into its unaccustomed
+sleeping quarters; the twins in adjacent cabins had ceased to hurl
+shrill defiance at each other; and silence brooded over the flat.  By
+the dim light of the police-lamp Private Phillips paced noiselessly up
+and down on his beat, and the mother of Georgina, Jane, and Cornelius
+James passed softly from cabin to cabin in that gentle meditation
+mothers play at bedtime.
+
+On her way aft to the after-cabin she met the Torpedo Lieutenant.  "The
+children all want to say 'Good night' to you," she said softly.  "Only
+don't stay long.  They are so excited, and they'll never go to sleep."
+Of all the men on board the Torpedo Lieutenant's heart was perhaps
+nearest that of a child.  He tiptoed into the cabin-flat and drew the
+curtain of the nearest cabin.
+
+"Who's in here?"
+
+"Me," said a small voice.  Torps approached the bunk.  "Who's
+'me'--Georgina?"
+
+"Yes.  Goodnight, Mr. Mainwaring."
+
+"Good night, shrimp," replied her idol, submitting to the valediction
+of two skinny arms twined tightly round his neck.  "Good night, and
+sweet dreams. . . .  No, I can't tell you stories to-night; it's much
+too late. . . .  Lie down and go to sleep."
+
+In the next cabin, the sound of deep breathing showed that the small
+occupant had passed into dreamland.  It was Freckles.  Jane remained
+awake long enough to kiss his left eyebrow and was asleep the next
+instant.  White Bow also was asleep, and nearly all the remainder
+drowsy.  Cornelius James, clasping the First Lieutenant's sword,
+however, remained wide-eyed.  "I'm so firsty," he complained
+plaintively.
+
+"That's called Nemesis, my son," said Torps, and gave him to drink out
+of the water-bottle.  "Fank you," said Cornelius James, and sighed, as
+children and dogs do after drinking.
+
+"Good night, Corney. . . .  Now you must go to sleep and dream of
+bloaters.  Oh, aren't you really sleepy?  Well, if you shut your eyes
+tight perhaps the dustman won't see you," and switched out the light.
+As he was leaving a drowsy voice again spoke out of the darkness.
+
+"What did the Buccaneer say when you nailed his nose to the flying
+jibboom?"
+
+"Please make me a good boy," replied Torps, somewhat at random.
+
+"Oh, same's I do," said Cornelius James.
+
+"More or less; isn't that sword very uncomfortable?"
+
+But no answer came back, for Cornelius James, the hilt of the sword
+grasped firmly in two small hands, had passed into the Valhalla of
+Childhood.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+THE MUMMERS
+
+The sun had not long set, and its afterglow bathed the bay in pink
+light.  It was a land-locked harbour, and the surface of the water held
+the reflections of the anchored Battle-fleet mirrored to its smallest
+detail.  So still was the evening that sounds travelled across the
+water with peculiar acute distinctness.
+
+On the quarter-deck of the end ship of the lee line a thousand men were
+trying to talk in undertones, lighting and relighting pipes, rallying
+their friends on distant points of vantage, and humming tunes under
+their breath.  The resultant sound was very much like what you would
+hear if you placed your ear against a beehive on a summer day, only
+magnified a million-fold.
+
+The ship's company of a super-Dreadnought, and as many men from other
+ships as could be accommodated on board, were gathered on the foremost
+part of the quarter-deck, facing aft.  They sat in rows on mess stools,
+they were perched astride the after-turret guns, on the shields of the
+turrets, clinging to rails, stanchions and superstructure, tier above
+tier of men clad in night-clothing--that is to say, in blue jumper and
+trousers, with the white V of the flannel showing up each seaman's
+bronzed neck and face.  Seamen and marines all wore their caps tilted
+comfortably on the backs of their heads, as is the custom of men of
+H.M. Navy enjoying their leisure.  Above them all the smoke from a
+thousand pipes and cigarettes trembled in a blue haze on the still air
+of a summer evening.
+
+They were there to witness an impromptu sing-song--a scratch affair
+organised at short notice to provide mirth and recreation for a ship's
+company badly in need of both.  It was a ship's company hungry for
+laughter after endless months of watching and waiting for an enemy that
+was biding his time.  Their lungs ached for a rousing, full-throated
+chorus ("_All_ together, lads!").  They were simply spoiling to be the
+most appreciative audience in the world.
+
+On the after-part of the quarter-deck a stage had been hurriedly
+constructed--a rude affair of planks and spars that could be disposed
+of in a very few moments if necessity arose--that supported a piano.  A
+canvas screen, stretched between two stanchions behind the stage, did
+duty as scenery, and afforded the performers a "green-room"--for, of
+all the ritual connected with appearing upon a stage, the business of
+"making-up" lies nearest to the sailor's heart.  Provide him with a
+lavish supply of grease-paint, wigs, and the contents of the chaplain's
+or the officer of his division's wardrobe, and the success or otherwise
+of his turn, when it ultimately comes, matters little to the
+sailor-man.  He has had his hour.
+
+In front of the stage, a little in advance of the men, rows of chairs
+and benches provided sitting accommodation for the officers.  They came
+up from dinner, lighting pipes and cigars, a full muster from Wardroom,
+Gunroom and Warrant Officers' Mess.  The Captain came last, and his
+appearance was the signal for a great outburst of cheering from the
+closely packed audience.  They had been waiting for this moment.  It
+gave them an opportunity of relieving their pent-up feelings; it also
+gave them a chance to show the rest of the Fleet their attitude towards
+this Captain of theirs.
+
+It was something they were rather proud that the rest of the Fleet
+should see.
+
+Moreover, the rest of the Fleet, leaning over the forecastle rails and
+smoking its evening pipe, did see, and was none the worse for it.
+
+A man might have been excused if he betrayed some self-consciousness at
+finding himself thus suddenly the cynosure of a thousand-odd pair of
+eyes whose owners were doing their best to show him, after their
+fashion, that they thought him an uncommonly fine fellow.  The
+atmosphere was electrical with this abrupt, boyish ebullition of
+feeling.  Yet the Captain's face, as he took his seat, was as composed
+as if he were alone in the middle of his own wide moors.  He lit a pipe
+and nodded to the Commander beside him to signify that as far as he was
+concerned the show could start as soon as they liked.
+
+All happy ships own a sing-song party of some sort or another.  It may
+be that the singers are content to sit pipe in mouth in the lee of a
+gunshield and croon in harmony as the dusk settles down on a day's work
+done.  Other ships' companies are more ambitious; the canteen provides
+a property-box, and from a flag-decked stage the chosen performers
+declaim and clog-dance with all the circumstance of the drama.
+
+In days of piping peace, the Operatic and Dramatic Company of this
+particular ship had known many vicissitudes.  Under the guidance of a
+musically inclined Ship's Steward, it had faced audiences across
+impromptu footlights as "The Pale Pink Pierrots," and, as such, had
+achieved a meteoric distinction.  But unhappily the Ship's Steward was
+partial to oysters, and bought a barrelful at an auction sale ashore.
+On the face of things, it appeared a bargain; but the Ship's Steward
+neglected to inquire too closely into the antecedents of its contents,
+and was duly wafted to other spheres of usefulness.
+
+The Chaplain, an earnest man but tone-deaf, rallied the leaderless
+troupe of musicians.  During the period of his directorship they were
+known to fame as "The Musical Coons."  Musical in that each one wielded
+a musical instrument with which he made bold to claim acquaintance,
+Coons because they blacked their faces with burnt cork and had
+"corner-men."  The corner-men were the weak spots in an otherwise
+well-planned organisation.
+
+A sailor can be trusted with the integrity of a messmate's honour or
+the resources of the mint, conceivably with the key of a brewery
+cellar, and justify the confidence reposed in him.  But he cannot be
+trusted to be a corner-man, "gagging" with a black face and a pair of
+bones.  The Musical Coons dissolved after one performance, during which
+the Captain's brow grew black and the Chaplain turned faint, and an
+ecstatic ship's company shouted itself hoarse with delirious enjoyment.
+
+Thereafter, for a period, the breath of rebuke and disrepute clung to
+the songsters; but a ship without a sing-song party is like a dog
+without a tail.  A committee of Petty Officers waited upon the First
+Lieutenant, as men once proffered Cromwell the Protectorship of
+England, lest a worse thing befell them.  The First Lieutenant, with a
+reluctance and a full sense of the responsibilities involved, that was
+also Cromwellian, finally consented to become the titular head of the
+sing-song party.
+
+He it was, then, who rose from his chair, holding a slip of paper, and
+faced the great bank of faces with one hand raised to enjoin silence.
+The cheering redoubled.
+
+For perhaps fifteen seconds he stood with raised hand, then he lowered
+it and the smile left his eyes.  His brows lowered too.  The cheering
+wavered, faltered, died away.  They knew what Number One meant when he
+looked like that.
+
+"The first item on the programme," he said in his clear voice, "is a
+song by Petty Officer Dawson, entitled, 'The Fireman's Daughter,'" and
+sat down again amid loud applause.
+
+The A.P. rose, hopped on to the stage, and sat down at the piano that
+occupied one wing of the stage.  Petty Officer Dawson, who was also the
+ship's painter, emerged from behind the canvas screen, coyly wiping his
+mouth on the back of his hand.  The piano tinkled out the opening bars
+of the song, and the concert began.
+
+It was a sad song; the very first verse found the fireman's daughter on
+her death-bed.  But the tune was familiar and pleasantly mournful, and,
+as the piano thumped the opening bars of the refrain for the second
+time, the hundreds of waiting men took it up readily.  The melody
+swelled and rose, till the sadness of the theme was somehow overwhelmed
+by the sadness that is in the harmony of men's voices singing in the
+open air.
+
+Petty Officer Dawson was a stout man addicted in daily life to the
+inexplicable habit of drying his gold-leaf brush in the few wisps of
+hair Nature had left him with.  His role on the occasion of a concert
+was usually confined to painting the scenery.  The nation being at war,
+and this particular concert held during the effective blockade of an
+enemy's empire, scenery was out of the question.  So, as one of the
+recognised members of the sing-song party, he sang--with, be it added,
+considerable effect.
+
+"The next item," announced the First Lieutenant (who knew his audience
+better even than they knew him), "is a comic song entitled, 'Hold
+tight, Emma!' by Stoker Williams."
+
+This was "Taff" Williams, Stoker First-class, comedian tenth-class, and
+master of patter unintelligible (mercifully so, perhaps) to any but a
+bluejacket audience.  He was a wisp of a man with a pale, beardless
+face and small features; incidentally, too, the scrum half of the
+ship's Rugby team and the referee's terror.
+
+But he was more than this: he was the ship's wag, and so was greeted
+with shouts and whistles of approval as he stepped on to the stage
+attired in the burlesque counterfeit of an airman's costume.
+
+Perhaps you might not have thought his song so very funny after all.
+It might even have struck you as vulgar, since it depended for its
+humour upon gorgonzola cheese, the eldest son of the German Emperor,
+_mal-de-mer_, and a number of other things not considered amusing in
+polite society.  But the sailor's susceptibilities are peculiar: they
+were there to enjoy themselves, and again and again a great gust of
+laughter swept over the audience as an autumn gale convulses the trees
+on the outskirts of a forest.  The singer's topical allusions, sly
+incomprehensibilities, he flung about him like bombs that burst in an
+unfailing roar of delight among his shipmates.  No wonder they liked
+him; and even the padre, who perforce had to knit his brows once or
+twice, looked regretful when the last encore was over.
+
+Taff Williams's song was succeeded by a duet.  The singers were also
+comedians, but of a different calibre.  Some odd freak of Nature had
+fashioned them both astoundingly alike in face and frame.  They were
+baldish men, short and sturdy, with sandy eyebrows and lashes of so
+light a colour as to be almost invisible.  Their countenances were
+round and expressionless, and their song, which was called "We are the
+Brothers Boo-Hoo!" contained little beyond reiterations of the fact,
+interspersed with "steps" of a solemn and intricate nature.
+
+Ordinarily their avocations and walks in life were separated by a wide
+gulf.  One was a Petty Officer and L.T.O., the other a stoker.  But
+Fame recognises no distinctions of class or calling, and circumstances
+over which they had little control, the universal decree of the ship's
+company in short, drove them on to the stage to face successive
+audiences side by side as The Brothers Boo-Hoo.  Neither dreamed of
+appearing there without the other, although off it, save for a few
+grave rehearsals, they rarely met.  They were not vocalists, but they
+bowed to popular demand, preserving their stolid, immobile demeanours,
+and sang in accents sternly and unintelligibly Gaelic.
+
+Their turn over, the First Lieutenant announced a juggling display by
+Boy Buggins.  Boy Buggins appeared, very spick and span in a brand new
+suit of Number Threes, and proceeded to juggle with canteen eggs,
+Indian clubs and mess crockery (while the caterer of his mess held his
+breath to the verge of apoplexy) in a manner quite bewildering.
+
+The Captain took his pipe out of his mouth and leaned towards the
+Commander.  "Where did the lad pick up these antics?" he inquired,
+smiling.
+
+The Commander shook his head.  "I don't know, sir.  Probably in a
+circus."
+
+As a matter of fact, Boy Buggins did start life (as far as his memory
+carried him) in grubby pink tights and spangles.  But he followed in
+the train of no circus; it was in front of public-houses in a district
+of London where such pitches recurred with dreary frequency that he cut
+capers on a strip of carpet.  He visited them nightly in the company of
+a stalwart individual who also wore pink tights.  After each
+performance the stalwart one ordained an interval for refreshment.  On
+good days he used to reach home very much refreshed indeed.
+
+They called it home (it was a cellar) because they slept there; and as
+often as not a thin woman with tragic eyes was there waiting for them.
+She used to hold out her hand with a timid, shamed gesture, and there
+was money in it which the man took.  If he had had a good day or she a
+bad one--it was always one or the other--the stalwart one beat the
+woman, or, in his own phraseology, "put it acrost" her.  But ultimately
+he had one good day too many, or else he felt unusually stalwart, for
+the woman lay motionless in the corner of the cellar where she was
+flung, and wouldn't answer when he had finished kicking her.
+
+The police took the stalwart one away to swing for it, and "the parish"
+took the thin woman away in a deal box.  Boy Buggins passed, via an
+industrial training ship, into the Royal Navy, and earned the
+Distinguished Conduct Medal before this particular sing-song had passed
+out of the minds of those who were present at it.
+
+One must conclude that all these things were, as the Arabs say, on his
+forehead.
+
+"Private Mason, R.M.L.I.--Concertina Solo!"
+
+A great burst of laughter and cheering broke out from the sailors, and
+redoubled as a private of Marines, holding a concertina in his gnarled
+fists, walked on to the stage.  Even the officers put their hands up to
+smile behind them; one or two nearest the First Lieutenant leaned over
+and patted him on the back as if he had achieved something.
+
+The whole audience, officers and men, were evidently revelling in some
+tremendous secret reminiscence conjured up by the appearance of this
+private of Marines.  Yet, as he stood there, fingering the keys of his
+instrument, waiting for the uproar to subside, there was little about
+him to suggest high humour.  He was just a thin, rather
+delicate-looking man with a grizzled moustache and dreamy eyes fixed on
+vacancy.  His claim to notoriety, alas, lay in more than his
+incomparable music.  Human nature at its best is a frail thing.  But
+human nature, as typified by Private Mason, was very frail.  Apart from
+his failing he was a valuable asset to the sing-song party; but,
+unhappily, it required all the resources and ingenuity of its promoters
+to keep Private Mason sober on the night of an entertainment.
+
+When and how he acquired the wherewithal to wreck the high hopes of the
+reigning stage manager was a mystery known to him alone.  His messmates
+drained their tots at dinner with conscientious thoroughness, and his
+into the bargain, striving together less in the cause of temperance
+than from a desire that he should for once do himself and his
+concertina (of which he was a master) justice.
+
+Yet, his turn announced, on the last occasion of a concert before the
+war, the curtain rose upon an empty stage.  The Carpenter's party
+happened upon him, as archaeologists might excavate a Sleeping Bacchus
+or a recumbent Budda, in the process of dismantling the stage.  Private
+Mason was underneath it, breathing stertorously, a smile of beatific
+contentment on his worn features, his head pillowed on his concertina.
+
+The Fleet Surgeon subsequently missed a large-sized bottle of
+eau-de-Cologne from his cabin, which he was bringing home from
+Gibraltar as a present for his wife.  The discovery of the loss
+assisted him in his diagnosis of the case.
+
+Silence fell on the audience at length, and the concertina solo began.
+As has been indicated, Private Mason could play the concertina.  In his
+rather tremulous hands it was no longer an affair of leather and wood
+(or of whatever material concertinas are constructed), but a living
+thing that laughed and sobbed, and shook your soul like the Keening.
+It became a yearning, passionate, exultant daughter of Music that
+somehow wasn't quite respectable.
+
+And when he had finished, and passed his hand across his moist forehead
+preparatory to retiring from the stage, they shouted for more.
+
+"Church bells, Nobby!" cried a hundred voices.  "Garn, do the church
+bells!"  So he did the church bells, as the wind brings the sound
+across the valley on a summer evening at home, wringing his shipmates'
+sentimental heartstrings to the limit of their enjoyment.
+
+"Strewth!" ejaculated a bearded member of the audience when the turn
+was over, relighting his pipe with a hand that shook.  "I 'ear Nobby
+play that at the Canteen at Malta, time Comman'er-in-Chief an' 'is
+Staff was there--Comman'er-in-Chief, so 'elp me, 'e sob' like a woman.
+. . ."
+
+The reminiscence may not have been in strict accordance with the truth,
+but, even considered in the light of fiction, it was a pretty testimony
+to Private Mason's art.
+
+The last turn of the evening came an hour later when the slightly
+embarrassed Junior Watchkeeper stepped on to the stage.  His appearance
+was the signal for another great outburst of enthusiasm from the men.
+He was not perhaps more of a favourite with them than any of his
+brethren seated on the chairs below; but he was an officer, obviously
+not at ease on a concert stage, only anxious to do his bit towards
+making the evening a success.  They realised it on the instant, with
+the readiness of seamen to meet their officers half-way when the latter
+are doing something they evidently dislike to help the common weal.
+They knew the Junior Watchkeeper didn't want to sing, and they cared
+little what he sang about, but they cheered him with full-throated
+affection as he stood gravely facing them, waiting for a lull.
+
+It is just this spirit, of which so much has been imperfectly conveyed
+to the layman--is, in fact, not comprehended in its entity by
+outsiders--which is called for want of a better term "sympathy between
+officers and men."  It is a bond of mutual generosity and loyalty,
+strong as steel, more formidable to an enemy than armaments;
+strengthened by monotony and a common vigil, it thrives on hardships
+shared, and endures triumphant, as countless tales shall tell, down to
+the gates of Death.
+
+The Junior Watchkeeper's song was an old one--one that had stirred the
+hearts of sailors no longer even memories with his audience.  He sang
+simply and tunefully in the strong voice of one who knew how to pitch
+an order in the open air.  When it was finished, he acknowledged the
+tumultuous applause by a stiff little bow and retreated, flushing
+slightly.  The sing-song was over.
+
+The officers were rising from their chairs, the A.P. at the piano was
+looking towards the Commander for permission to crash out the opening
+bars of the Anthem that would swing the audience as one man to its
+feet.  At that moment a Signalman threaded his way through the chairs
+and saluted the Captain.
+
+The latter took the signal-pad extended to him, and read the message.
+Then he turned abruptly to the audience, his hand raised to command
+silence.  The last of the warm glow that lingered long in the northern
+summer twilight lit his strong, fine face as he faced his men.  There
+was a great hush of expectancy.
+
+"Before we pipe down," he said, "I want to read you a message that has
+just come from the Commander-in-Chief.  'One of our destroyers engaged
+and sank by gunfire two of the enemy's destroyers this afternoon.'"
+
+A great roar of cheering greeted the curt message.  The listening fleet
+took it up, and in the stillness of the land-locked harbour the volume
+of sound reverberated, savagely and triumphantly exultant.
+
+The hills ashore caught the echo and tossed it sleepily to and fro.
+
+Then, flushed with excitement and hoarse with shouting, they sang the
+National Anthem to a close.
+
+Altogether, it was a very noisy evening.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+CHUMMY-SHIPS
+
+The Lieutenant for Physical Training Duties came down into the Wardroom
+and sank into the one remaining arm-chair.
+
+"I must say," he ejaculated, "the sailor is a cheerful animal.  Umpteen
+days steaming on end without seeing any enemy--just trailing the tail
+of our coat about the North Sea--we come into harbour and we invite the
+matelots to lie on their backs on the upper-deck (minus cap and jumper)
+and wave their legs in the air by way of recreation.  They comply with
+the utmost good humour.  They don't believe that it does them the
+smallest good, but they know I get half-a-crown a day for watching them
+do it, and they go through with it like a lot of portly gentlemen
+playing 'bears' to amuse their nephews."
+
+The Indiarubber Man broke off and surveyed his messmates with a
+whimsical grey eye.  The majority were assimilating the contents of
+illustrated weeklies over a fortnight old; two in opposite corners of
+the settee were asleep with their caps tilted over their noses,
+sleeping the sleep of profound exhaustion.  One member of the mess was
+amusing himself with a dice-box at the table, murmuring to himself as
+he rattled and threw.
+
+The Indiarubber Man, in no wise irritated at the general lack of
+interest in his conversation, wriggled lower in his arm-chair till he
+appeared to be resting on the flat of his shoulder-blades, with his
+chin buried in the lappels of his monkey-jacket.  "I maintain," his
+amiable monologue continued, "that there's something rather touching
+about the way they flap their arms about and hop backwards and
+forwards, and 'span-bend' and agonise themselves with such unfailing
+good humour--don't you think so, Pills?"
+
+The Young Doctor gathered the dice again, knitting his brows.  ". . .
+Seventy-seven, seventy-eight--that's seventy-eight times I've thrown
+these infernal dice without five aces turning up.  And twenty-three
+times before breakfast.  How much is seventy-eight and twenty-three?
+Three and eight's eleven, put down one and carry one--I beg pardon, I
+wasn't listening to you.  Did you ask me a question?"
+
+"I was telling you about the sailors chucking stunts on the
+quarter-deck."
+
+"I don't want to hear about the sailors: they make me tired.  There
+isn't a sick man on board except one I've persuaded to malinger to keep
+me out of mischief.  They're the healthiest collection of human beings
+I've ever met in my life."
+
+"That's me," retorted the Indiarubber Man modestly.  "_I_ am
+responsible for their glowing health.  They haven't been ashore
+for--how long is it?"
+
+"Ten years it feels like," said someone who was examining the pictorial
+advertisements of an illustrated paper with absorbed interest.
+
+"Quite.  They haven't had a run ashore for ten years--ever since the
+war started, in fact; and yet, thanks to the beneficial effects of
+physical training, as laid down in the book of the words, and
+administered by the underpaid Lieutenant for Physical Training Duties,
+the Young Doctor is enabled to sit in the mess all day and see how
+often he can throw five aces.  In short, he becomes a world's worker."
+
+"It's just _because_ they haven't been ashore for weeks and months, and
+in spite of the Lieutenant for Physical Training--och!  No, Bunje,
+don't start scrapping--it's too early in the morning, and we'll
+wake . . . those . . . poor devils----Eugh!  Poof!  There!  What did I
+tell you!"
+
+The two swaying figures, after a few preliminary cannons off sideboard,
+arm-chair and deck stanchion, finally collapsed on to the settee.  The
+sleepers awakened with disgust.
+
+"Confound you, Bunje, you clumsy clown!" roared one.  Between them they
+seized the Young Doctor, who was a small man, and deposited him on the
+deck.  "Couldn't you see I was asleep, Pills?" demanded the other
+hotly.  "You've woken Peter, too.  He's had--how many is it,
+Peter?--eight morning watches running.  I've brooded over him like a
+Providence from the fore-top through each weary dawning, so I ought to
+know."  He yawned drowsily.  "Peter saw a horn of the crescent moon
+sticking out of a cloud this morning, and turned out the anti-aircraft
+guns' crews.  Thought it was the bows of a Zeppelin.  Skipper was
+rather peevish, wasn't he, Peter?"
+
+The Junior Watchkeeper grunted and turned over on to his other side.
+"Well, you nearly opened fire on a northern diver in that flat calm at
+dawn the other morning."  The speaker cocked a drowsy eye on the mess
+from under his cap-peak.  "Silly ass vowed it was the periscope of an
+enemy's submarine coming to the surface."
+
+"Truth is," said the Indiarubber Man, "your nerves are shattered.
+Pills, here's a job for you.  Give the lads two-penn'orth of bromide
+and stop their wine and extras.  In the meanwhile," he pulled a small
+book out of his pocket, "I have here a dainty _brochure_, entitled,
+'_Vox Humana_--Its Ascendancy over Mere Noise'--otherwise, 'Handbook
+for Physical Training.'  I may say I was partly responsible for its
+production."
+
+"I believe you, faith!" said the Fleet Surgeon bitterly, over the top
+of the B.M.J.
+
+The Indiarubber Man wheeled round.  "P.M.O.!  That's not the tone in
+which to speak to your Little Ray of Sunshine.  It lacked _joie de
+vivre_."  The speaker beamed on the mess.  "I think we are all getting
+a little mouldy, if you ask me.  In short, we are not the bright boys
+we were when war broke out.  Supposing now--I say supposing--we
+celebrated our return to harbour, and the fact that we haven't bumped a
+mine-field, by asking our chummy-ship to dinner to-night, and giving
+them a bit of a chuck-up!  Which is our chummy-ship, by the way?
+Where's the _What Ho!_ lying?"  He walked to the scuttle and stuck his
+head out.  "Blessed if I can tell t'other from which now we're all so
+beautifully disguised."
+
+"We haven't got a chummy-ship," replied the A.P.  "We don't want a
+chummy-ship.  Nobody loves us.  We hate each other with malignant
+hatred by reason of hobnailed livers."
+
+"And if we had," interposed another Lieutenant gloomily, "they'd far
+rather stay on board their own rotten ship.  They're probably getting
+used to their messman by now.  The sudden change of diet might be
+fatal."  The speaker turned to the Young Doctor.  "Pills, what d'you
+get when you change your diet sudden-like--scurvy, or something awful,
+don't you?"
+
+"Hiccoughs."  The Surgeon dragged his soul from the depths of a frayed
+_Winning Post_ and looked up.  His face brightened.  "Why?  Anyone
+here----"
+
+"No, no, that's all right, my merry leech.  Only Bunje wants to ask the
+_What Ho's_ to dinner."
+
+"Yes," interposed the Gunnery Lieutenant, with a sudden access of
+enthusiasm.  "Let's ask 'em.  Where's the Navy List?"  He flung a
+tattered Navy List on the table and pored over it.
+
+"Hear, hear!" chimed in the Engineer Lieutenant-Commander.  "Let's be a
+band of brothers, an' all drinks down to the mess the whole evening."
+
+The mess generally began to consider the project.
+
+"Here's the Commander," said someone.  "Casting-vote from him!  D'you
+mind if we ask the _What Ho's_ to dinner, sir?  We all feel we should
+be better, nobler men after a heart-to-heart talk with our
+chummy-ships."
+
+"Ask anyone you like," replied the Commander, "as long as they don't
+ask me to dine with them in their ship by way of revenge."
+
+"Carried!" exclaimed the Indiarubber Man.  "'Commander, 'e sez, spoke
+very 'andsome!'  I will now indite a brief note of invitation.  Bring
+me pens, ink and paper.  _Apportez-moi l'encre de mon cousin, aussi du
+poivre, du moutard et des legumes--point a la ligne_!  I got a prize
+for French in the _Britannia_."
+
+Here the Fleet Surgeon said something in an undertone about a village
+idiot, and left the mess.  As he went out the First Lieutenant entered
+with an apologetic mien which everyone appeared to recognise
+instinctively.
+
+The Torpedo Lieutenant looked up from his book.  "Oh, no, Number One,
+spare us for just one morning.  I've got a headache already from
+listening to Bunje."
+
+The A.P. threw himself into an attitude of supplication.  "Number One,
+consider the awful consequences of your act before it's too late.
+Consider what it means.  If you make the wardroom untenable, I shall
+have to sit in the office all the morning.  I might even have to do
+some work!"
+
+The First Lieutenant shook his head dourly.  "The chipping party is
+going to start in the wardroom this morning.  Paint's inches thick on
+the bulkheads, and a shell in here would start fires all over the
+place.  Bunje, if you want to write letters you'd better go somewhere
+else and do it."
+
+The Indiarubber Man thumped the blotting-paper on his freshly written
+sheets and looked up with his penholder between his teeth.  "I've
+finished, Number One.  Admit your hired bravoes."
+
+As he spoke an ear-splitting fusillade of hammering commenced outside.
+The steel bulkheads reverberated with blows that settled down to a
+persistent rain of sound, deafening, nerve-shattering.
+
+"They've started outside," shouted the First Lieutenant.
+
+A general exodus ensued, and the Indiarubber Man gathered his writing
+materials preparatory to departure.  "I guessed they had," he was heard
+to say.  "I thought I heard a sound as it might have been someone
+tapping on the bulkhead."
+
+The watchkeepers asleep on the settee stirred in their sleep, frowned,
+and sank again into fathomless oblivion.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+The Indiarubber Man entered the wardroom in company with the Paymaster
+as the corporal of the ward-room servants was putting the finishing
+touches to the dinner-table.  They surveyed the apartment without
+enthusiasm.
+
+"Considered as a banquet hall, I confess it does lack something,"
+observed the former.
+
+"There's a good deal of paint lacking from the bulkheads.  Number One
+has had a field day and a half."
+
+The other nodded.  "In the words of the song:
+
+  'There's no carpet on the floor,
+  And no knocker on the door,
+  Oh, ours is a happy little home . . .'
+
+Phillips, bring me the menu, and let's see the messman has succeeded in
+being funny without being vulgar."
+
+Corporal Phillips brought the menu with the air of one who connives at
+a felony.  "Messman says, sir, it ain't all 'e'd like it to be, what
+with guests comin' and that.  But I says to 'im, 'war is war,' I says,
+'an' we can't expect eggs-on-meat _entrees_, same's if it was peace
+time.'"
+
+"To-day's beautiful thought!" remarked the Indiarubber Man when the
+corporal had withdrawn.  "Really, Phillips has a knack of disclosing
+great truths as if they were the lightest gossip."
+
+The Engineer Commander came in, glancing at the clock.  "Five minutes
+more and the _What Ho's_ will be here.  Bunje, my lad, you were
+responsible for this _entente_--have you any idea what we are going to
+do with them after dinner?"
+
+"None," replied the Indiarubber Man; "none whatever.  It will come to
+me sudden-like.  I might dress up as a bogey, and frighten you all--or
+shall we try table-turning?  Or we could dope their liquor and send
+them all back insensible.  Wouldn't that be true Oriental hospitality!
+They'd wake up to-morrow morning under the impression that they'd had
+the night of their lives."
+
+The members of the mess began to collect round the fireplace with the
+funereal expressions customary whenever a mess-dinner is impending.
+
+"Which of the _What Ho's_ are coming?"
+
+"Where're they going to sit?"
+
+"Who asked them?"
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Are drinks going down to the mess?"
+
+And then the door opened and the guests arrived, smiling, a little shy,
+as the naval officer is wont to be when he finds himself in a strange
+mess.
+
+They were relieved of caps and cloaks, and, under the mellowing
+influence of sherry and bitters, began to settle down.
+
+"Jolly good of you fellows to ask us to dinner," said the First
+Lieutenant, an officer with a smiling cherubic visage and a choleric
+blue eye.  "We were getting a bit bored with our hooker.  A fortnight
+of looking for _Der Tag_ gets a bit wearisome.  D'you think the devils
+are ever coming out?"
+
+"We didn't want to ask you a bit, really," explained one of the hosts
+(the advantage of having a chummy-ship is that you can insult them in
+your own mess).  "It's only a scheme of Bunje's for drinking
+intoxicating liquor to excess at the expense of his messmates."
+
+The guests grinned sympathetically.  As a matter of fact, most of the
+company drank little else than water during those days of strain and
+vigil.  Frequent references to indulgence might, therefore, be regarded
+as comic, in a sense.
+
+"We thought of bringing our own chairs," added one, "in case you'd
+landed all your spare ones."
+
+"Yes," chimed in a third politely.  "We didn't expect to find such a
+wealth of furniture--it's like a Model Homes Exhibition.  You should
+see our mess!"
+
+The Gunnery Lieutenant made a gesture of deprecation.  "The
+watchkeepers insist on keeping the settee to caulk on in the intervals
+of hogging in their cabins.  The piano was retained for the benefit of
+the Young Doctor.  He can play _Die Wacht am Rhein_ with one
+finger--can't you, Pills?"
+
+The Young Doctor beamed with simple pride.  "My sister's German
+governess taught me when I was a kid," he explained.  "We have it every
+night--it's the only tune I know."
+
+"The sideboard is to support the empty glasses of the bridge-players
+after the Padre has put down one of his celebrated 'no-trumps'
+hands--we had to keep the sideboard.  The arm-chair is for Number One
+to sit in and beat time while his funny party chip paint off the
+bulkheads."  The Gunnery Lieutenant looked round.  "And so on, and so
+on--oh, the gramophone?  Bunje bu'st all the records except three, and
+we're getting to know those rather well.  But as you're a guest, old
+thing, would you like 'Tipperary,' Tosti's 'Good-bye,' or 'A Little
+Grey Home in the West'?"
+
+The corporal of the ward-room servants interrupted these amenities with
+the announcement that dinner was ready, and a general move was made to
+the table.
+
+Thereafter the conversation flowed evenly and generally.  It was not
+confined to war.  The men who make war, either afloat or ashore, do not
+talk about it over-much.  There are others--even in this England of
+ours--by tradition better qualified to do the talking, in that they see
+most of the game. . . .  On the whole, perhaps, more "shop" was
+discussed than would have been the case in peace-time, but for the most
+part it eddied round much the same subjects as Wardroom conversation
+always does, with the Indiarubber Man's Puck-like humour and gay
+mock-cynicism running through it like a whimsical pattern in an
+otherwise conventional design.
+
+War had been their trade in theory from earliest youth.  They were all
+on nodding terms with Death.  Indeed, most of the men round the long
+table had looked him between the eyes already, and the obituary pages
+in the Navy List had been a reminder, month by month, of others who had
+looked there too--and blinked, and closed their eyes--shipmates and
+fleetmates and familiar friends.
+
+War was the Real Thing, that was all.  There was nothing about it to
+obsess men's minds.  You might say it was the manoeuvres of 19-- all
+over again, with the chance of "bumping a mine" thrown in, and also the
+glorious certainty of ultimately seeing a twelve-inch salvo pitch
+exactly where the long years of preparation ordained that it should.
+
+A submarine specialist, whom the war caught doing exile in a "big
+ship," dominated the conversation for a while with lamentations that he
+was constrained to dwell in the Tents of Kedah.  Two minutes of his
+talk having nearly convinced everyone that the sole _raison d'etre_ of
+the big ship was to be sunk by submarine attack, he and his theories
+passed into a conversational siding.  The watchkeepers exchanged mutual
+condolences on the exasperating tactics of drift-net trawlers, notes on
+atmospheric conditions prevalent in the North Sea, methods of removing
+nocturnal cocoa-stains from the more vital portions of a chart, and
+other matters of interest to watchkeepers.
+
+The Commander and the First Lieutenant of the _What Ho's_ discussed the
+training of setters.  The Young Doctor and his opposite number, and
+those near them found interest in morphia syringes, ventilation of
+distributing stations, and--a section of the talk whirling into a
+curious backwater--the smell of cooking prevalent in the entrance halls
+of Sheerness lodging-houses. . . .
+
+The dinner went its course: they drank, sitting (as was their privilege
+and tradition), the King's health.  Then the cigarettes went round,
+chairs turned a little sideways, the port circulated a second time.
+The conversation was no longer general.  In pairs or by threes,
+according to taste, temperament or individual calling, the members of
+the mess and their guests settled down to a complacent enjoyment of the
+most pleasant half-hour in a battleship's long day.
+
+Presently, while the bridge-table was being set out, the Indiarubber
+Man rose from the table, and, crossing to the piano, began to vamp
+lightly on the keys, humming under his breath.  A chorus quickly
+gathered round.  A battered Naval Song Book was propped up on the
+music-rest--more from habit than necessity, since the Indiarubber Man
+could not read a note of music and everybody knew the words of the
+time-honoured chanties.  The pianist's repertoire was limited: half a
+dozen ding-dong chords did duty as accompaniment to "Bantry Bay," "John
+Peel," and "The Chinese Bumboatman" alike; but a dozen lusty voices
+supplied melody enough, the singers packed like herrings round the
+piano, leaning over each other's shoulders, and singing with all the
+strength of their lungs.
+
+They exhausted the favourites at length, and the player wheeled round
+on his stool.
+
+"What about one of the guests for a song?"
+
+"Yes, yes!" cried several voices.  "Where's Number One?  He's our
+Madame Patti.  You ought to hear him sing '_We don't serve bread with
+one fish-ball!_'  It's really worth it.  But it takes a lot of port to
+get him started.  How d'you feel about it, Number One?"  They spoke
+with indulgent affection, as a nurse might persuade a bashful child to
+show off before company.
+
+He of the choleric blue eye was still sitting at the table with one of
+his hosts.  He turned in his chair, smiling grimly.
+
+"What's that about me?  I don't want to start scrapping in a strange
+mess, Snatcher, but if you really _are_ looking for trouble----!"
+
+"Don't mind us!" shouted the Indiarubber Man delightedly.  "We'll put
+up a scrap for you in half a jiffy if you feel like a crumpled
+shirt-front!"  He looked round the mess.  "Wait till Flags and the
+Secretary come in from dinner with the Old Man, and we'll out the
+gilded Staff.  They're good 'uns to scrap."
+
+As he spoke the door opened, and the Flag Lieutenant came in, to be met
+by a volley of greetings.
+
+"We of the cuddy," he began in a tone of mincing severity, "are not
+pleased at the raucous uproar said to be coming from a mess of officers
+and gentlemen.  We are pained.  We come to lend our presence to what
+might otherwise develop into an unseemly brawl----"  He helped himself
+to a walnut out of a dish on the sideboard.  "Here comes my colleague
+the Secretary-bird.  He, too, is more grieved than angry."
+
+The Secretary entered warily, and intending combatants girded their
+loins for battle.
+
+"Pouf!" he exclaimed.  "What a fug!"  And elevated his nose with a
+sniff.  The Fiery Cross was out.
+
+"Out Staff!" said the Indiarubber Man in a low voice.  "Dogs of war!
+Out gilded popinjays!"
+
+With a promptitude that hinted at long experience of internecine
+warfare, the newcomers embraced the first maxim of war: "If you must
+hit, hit first, hit hard, and keep on hitting."
+
+Like a flash, the two members of the Personal Staff were on the
+Indiarubber Man.  A chair went crashing, a broken glass tinkled on to
+the deck, to the accompaniment of protests from the Paymaster, and,
+before the mess could join battle, the Indiarubber Man hurtled through
+the doorway on to the aft-deck, to pitch at the feet of a delighted
+Marine sentry.  By the rules of the game, once through the portals of
+the mess there was no return until a truce was declared.  The younger
+members of the mess rose to a man; for a moment the guests hung back.
+It is not in the best of form to scrap in a strange mess, except by
+express invitation.
+
+"Come on!" shouted the Junior Watchkeeper.  "Bite 'em in the stomach!"
+and flung himself upon the Secretary.
+
+The guests waited for no second invitation.  It was a battle royal, and
+the Indiarubber Man, interned on the aft-deck, yelped encouragement to
+his erstwhile conquerors because they were fighting valiantly against
+hopeless odds.
+
+A Rugby International and a middle-weight boxer of some pretensions,
+although hampered by aiguilettes and outnumbered six to one, were not
+easily disposed of.  But they were ultimately overpowered, and carried,
+puffing with exhaustion and helpless with laughter, over the debris of
+the bridge-table, gramophone and paper-rack, out through the doorway.
+
+The mess, breathing heavily, adjusted its ties and collars and smoothed
+its dishevelled hair.  The Flag Lieutenant and Secretary retired to
+their cabins for more extensive repairs.  The bridge-table was set upon
+its legs once more, the scattered cards collected.
+
+"Polo!" said the Indiarubber Man.  "Let's play polo!"
+
+"How d'you do that?" asked one of the ecstatic guests.  At the bottom
+of his heart he was also wondering why the greybeards of the mess stood
+all this tomfoolery without protest.  He had never been shipmates with
+the Indiarubber Man.
+
+The Indiarubber Man took an orange off the sideboard, a dessert-spoon
+out of a drawer, and straddled over the back of a chair.  "Like this,
+d'you see?  We generally play three a-side, but as there are six of you
+we'll play double sides."  He tossed the orange on to the deck, and
+hopped his chair in pursuit, brandishing the dessert-spoon.
+
+"That's a great game," said the First Lieutenant of the _What Ho!_ and
+got him to horse.  "Come on, our side, boot and saddle!"
+
+As the game was about to start the door opened, and the Flag Lieutenant
+entered hurriedly.  He carried a signal-pad in his hand, and there was
+that in his face that silenced the polo players and caused the bridge
+players to lay down their hands.
+
+"Signal," he said curtly.  "Raise steam for full speed.  Prepare for
+immediate action on leaving harbour."  And was gone.
+
+Those who had immediate duties elsewhere stampeded out of the mess.
+Overhead there was a thud of feet and ropes ends and the shrilling of
+pipes as the watch fell in.  A Midshipman thrust his head inside the
+door of the Wardroom.  "Boat's alongside, sir!" he said, and vanished.
+
+The First Lieutenant of the visitors flung his boat-cloak over his
+shoulders.  "Well," he said, "we've had a topping evening.  S'long, and
+thanks very much."
+
+Their hosts helped the departing ones into their great-coats.  "Not 't
+all," they murmured politely in return.  "Sorry to break up a cheery
+evening.  Let's hope they've really come out this time!"
+
+The Indiarubber Man slid on to the music-stool again, put his foot on
+the soft pedal, lightly touched the familiar chords, and began humming
+under his breath:
+
+  "We don't want to lose you----
+  But we _think_ you ought to go . . ."
+
+There are many ways of saying _Moriturus te saluto_.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+THE HIGHER CLAIM
+
+1
+
+All night long the wind, blowing in across the dunes from the North
+Sea, had brought the sound of firing.
+
+At times it was hardly perceptible: a faint reverberation of the ether
+that could scarcely be defined as sound; it would resolve itself into a
+low, continuous rumble, very much like distant thunder, that died away
+and recommenced nearer and more distinct.  Then the sashes of the open
+window trembled, and Margaret, who had lain awake all night, every
+nerve strained to listen, leaned on one elbow to stare from her bed out
+into the darkness.
+
+She had tried not to listen.  For hours she had lain without moving,
+with limbs tense beneath the coverings, the palms of her hands pressed
+against her ears.  But imagination sped through the dark passages of
+her mind, brandishing a torch, compelling her at length to listen again.
+
+She had no very clear idea, of course, what a naval action was like.  A
+confused recollection of pictures seen in childhood only suggested
+stalwart men, stripped to the waist and bare-footed, working round the
+smoking guns of ships whose decks blazed up in flame to taunt the quiet
+heavens; while the ships' scuppers ran red.
+
+Modern naval warfare could be nothing like that, though.
+
+She had only seen the results of modern warfare.  Men tortured till
+they came near to forgetting their manhood; burnt, deaf, scalded, torn
+by splinters, blinded; she had seen them smiling under circumstances
+that thrilled her to feel they shared a common Flag.
+
+On the outbreak of war the training institute on the East Coast, of
+which Margaret was the matron, had, on account of its position near the
+coast and other advantages, been converted into a Naval Hospital.  Miss
+Dacre, the principal, Margaret, and a few others who had already
+qualified in nursing, were retained as Red Cross sisters, and it was
+not long before the classrooms and dormitories were occupied by very
+different inmates from those for whom they were intended.  Only the
+more serious cases reached these wards.  The less dangerously hurt
+passed by rail or hospital ship to the base hospitals in the South.
+
+All night long the wounded men in the long wards stirred fretfully
+under the white counterpanes, each man translating the sounds according
+to his own imagination or experience.  The night-sisters moved softly
+to and fro on the beeswaxed boards, smoothing tumbled pillows,
+adjusting a splint or a bandage, calming the bearded children who
+fretted because they were hopelessly "out of it."
+
+Towards the dawn the sounds of firing gradually grew fainter, and died
+away as the first pale bands of light appeared in the east.  The
+sparrows under the eaves stirred and commenced a sleepy twittering.
+Margaret rose as soon as objects in her room were discernible, bathed
+her face and hands in cold water, and stood awhile at the window
+watching the day growing over the sea and sombre sky.
+
+The sounds of the battle that passed away to the northward had shaken
+her nerves as had nothing else in all her experience.  Standing there
+by the open window, drinking in the indescribable freshness of the
+dawn, she despised herself.  She, who had devoted her life to a
+Purpose, should be above the petty weakness of her sex.  Yet the cold
+fear that had been her bedfellow throughout the night, and was
+concerned with neither defeat nor victory, haunted her still.
+
+She closed the window, lit a small spirit-lamp on a side table, and,
+while the kettle boiled, dressed in riding things.  The earliness of
+the hour made it improbable that she would meet a soul, and yet she
+dressed carefully, coiling her soft hair, with its silver threads, on
+the nape of her neck, fastidiously dusting riding boots, and giving a
+brisk rub to the single spur before she strapped it on.  She was
+adjusting her hard-felt hat before the glass when someone knocked at
+the door.
+
+She turned questioningly, with hands still raised.  "Come in!"
+
+A girl was standing in the doorway; she wore a dressing-gown, and
+beneath it her slim ankles peeped out of a pair of the felt slippers
+nurses wear at night.
+
+"Betty!  What's the matter?"
+
+"Did you hear the firing?"
+
+Margaret nodded.  Was the betrayal of her nerves infectious?  Had it
+communicated itself to the whole staff?  For a swift instant she
+despised her sex--she who had devoted her life to it.  "Yes.  Another
+big engagement.  We shall be busy.  I was going to ride down to the
+cliffs to see. . . .  What's the matter, Betty--can't you sleep?  Come
+in and shut the door; I'll give you a cup of tea."  She spoke in her
+accustomed quiet tone, and crossed to the side table, where the kettle
+was giving out little fitful puffs of steam.
+
+Betty closed the door and sat down on the edge of the bed, her hands in
+the side pockets of her dressing-gown.  Her hair was plaited loosely in
+two long plaits, one of which hung down over her shoulder and somehow
+gave her face an added effect of extreme youth.
+
+Margaret handed her a cup of tea.  "Drink that and run back to bed.
+No--hop into mine and keep warm.  Haven't you slept?"
+
+Betty drank the tea and drew the dressing-gown closer round her young
+form.  "I couldn't sleep.  The firing . . .  No, I'm quite warm,
+thanks.  But it got on my nerves lying there waiting for it to get
+light.  I heard you moving, and I got up."  She passed her hand over
+her eyes.  "After the last time I kept seeing those poor things. . . .
+I don't mind once we start--I don't mind the operating-table.  It's
+when they come in . . . like dumb things--trying to smile, with their
+mouths all screwed up and tight."  She caught her breath half
+hysterically.
+
+Margaret put down her cup quickly and sat down by the girl's side.
+"Betty!  Don't talk like that.  You mustn't think about it in that way.
+Listen----"
+
+"It's easy to be calm when you haven't any--anybody out there in the
+North Sea belonging to you.  But I've got a brother and a--and he's a
+Gunnery Lieutenant," ended Betty a little feebly.
+
+"I know, dear.  But you mustn't go to pieces when we all want every bit
+of pluck and steadiness.  We're getting used to it now, too--and I'm
+sure your brother would like to think you were being as brave as--as
+he. . . ."  She turned her head and stared out of the window.  Was she
+a hypocrite, she wondered, to try to preach to anyone the virtue of
+womanly courage when her own heart was sick with she knew not what?
+
+Betty stood up.  "I'm a fool," she said abruptly.  "Can I come with
+you?  Could you wait ten minutes while I put my riding things on?  Miss
+Dacre said I could take her horse when I wanted to--will you wait for
+me, Margaret?  I'll ride down to the sea with you."
+
+Margaret nodded and rose, too.  "I'll get the horses saddled while you
+dress. . . .  Bring some biscuits."
+
+She descended the broad oak stairway, crossed the hall, and opened the
+door of a little room adjoining the main entrance.  It was her day
+sanctum--in scholastic days, the matron's sitting-room, a small
+apartment, with pretty chintz-covered furniture, and roses in bowls on
+the table and bookstands.  Margaret unhooked a pair of field-glasses
+hanging on the wall, and passed out into the early morning sunlight.
+
+Betty joined her ten minutes later in the stables, and together they
+mounted and rode down the long avenue, bordered by firs, out on to the
+open wold that commanded a view of the sea.
+
+With the dewy turf under them, they shook their impatient horses into a
+canter until they reached the highest point of a bluff promontory that
+stretched out into the sea.  Here they reined in and scanned the
+horizon, side by side.
+
+The water was leaden-coloured, shot with coppery gleams.  Below them to
+the northward the little harbour of the fishing village was stirring to
+life: wisps of smoke, curling from a score of chimneys, blended with
+the mists of early morning.  Small specks that were people began to
+move about an arm of the breakwater, towards which a dinghy came
+stealing sluggishly from one of the anchored fishing craft.
+
+Without speaking, Betty abruptly raised her whip and pointed towards
+the north.  A Torpedo Boat Destroyer was approaching the entrance to
+the harbour, her funnels jagged with shot-holes pouring out smoke.  In
+silence Margaret handed the glasses to her companion.  On the far
+horizon there were faint columns of smoke north and east.  Some were
+smudges that dissolved and faded to nothing; others grew darker, and
+presently resolved themselves into distant cruisers passing rapidly
+south.  Margaret's horse lowered his head and began cropping the short
+grass.
+
+"Margaret," said Betty suddenly, "did you ever care for anybody--a man,
+I mean?"  To Betty's mind the thirty-five years that sat so lightly on
+Margaret's brow relegated such a possibility, if it ever happened, to a
+past infinitely remote.  For a moment there was no reply.
+
+Margaret stretched out her hand for the glasses, and focused them on
+the horizon.
+
+"Yes," she said at length, quietly.  The Destroyer was entering the
+harbour; faint confused sounds of cheering drifted up to them.
+
+"Why didn't you marry him?  Did you send him away?"
+
+Again a pause, and again came the low-voiced affirmative.  Margaret
+lowered the glasses and returned them to the case slung across her
+shoulder.  "I thought I was doing right. . . .  But I was wrong."  The
+night had not been without its lesson.  "He's out there."  She nodded
+towards the North Sea, and as she spoke the blunt bows of a hospital
+ship crept round a distant headland, making towards them.  Silence tell
+between them again.
+
+Margaret broke it.  "Betty," she said, "if the time ever comes for you
+to choose between the love of the man you love and--and anything else
+in the wide world, don't be misled by other claims . . . by what may
+seem to be higher claims.  Loving and being loved are the highest
+responsibilities that life holds."
+
+Betty turned her head and stared.  "But," she said, "if you think duty
+doesn't give you the right to----"
+
+"Love gives you all the right a woman wants," replied Margaret, still
+in the same low, sad tone.  "If it's only the right to cry. . . .  If
+you forego love, you forego even that."  She gathered the reins and
+turned her horse.  "Now we must get back to bath and dress.  There's a
+lot of work ahead of us."
+
+Neither spoke again as they rode back across the downs.  In the filmy
+blue overhead a lark sang rapturously, pouring out its soul in gladness.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+Margaret was in the hall when the first of the long line of
+stretcher-bearers arrived.  As each stretcher was brought in, a surgeon
+made a brief examination of the wounded man, and he passed through one
+or other of the wide doorways opening out on either side of the hall.
+There was a subdued murmur of voices as every moment brought a fresh
+arrival.  Two blue-jackets, who came up the steps carrying a hooded
+stretcher, stood looking about them as if for orders.  The surgeons
+were all occupied, but, catching sight of Margaret in uniform, with the
+broad red cross on her breast, the blue-jackets crossed the hall
+towards her and laid the stretcher at her feet, as if they had brought
+their burden all this way for her alone.
+
+"Second door on the left," said Margaret.  "Wait--is it a bad case?"
+
+"Too late, I'm afraid, Sister," said the stalwart at the head of the
+stretcher.  "'E's died on the way up."
+
+"'Emmerage, Sister," supplemented the other, anxious to display his
+familiarity with the technicalities of her profession.  "'E wouldn't
+take 'is turn to be attended to aboard of us--we was in a Destroyer,
+an' picked 'im up 'angin' on to a spar.  Would 'ave the doctor fix up a
+German prisoner wot was bleedin' to death.  Said 'e wasn't in no
+particular 'urry, speakin' for 'isself.  An' 'im a-bleedin' to death,
+too.  As fine a gentleman as ever stepped."
+
+The other nodded, warming, sailor-like, to the hero-worship of an
+officer.  "That's right, Sister.  'E give 'is life for one of them
+Germans, you might say."
+
+"Is he dead?" asked Margaret in her clear, incisive tones.
+
+"Yes, Sister."  The speaker knelt down and turned back the hood,
+uncovering the face and shoulders of the motionless figure on the
+stretcher.
+
+For a moment a feeling of giddiness seized Margaret.  A great blackness
+seemed to close round her, shutting out the busy scene, the voices of
+the bearers, and the shuffle of their feet across the tiled hall.  With
+a supreme effort she mastered herself, and somehow knew she had been
+waiting for this moment, expecting it. . . .
+
+The man who had been kneeling rose to his feet, and the two stood
+before her as if awaiting orders.  Outside the entrance a motor
+ambulance arrived and drew up with throbbing engine.
+
+"The mortuary----" she began.  "No--bring him here . . . out of all
+this."  She walked across the hall and opened the door of the small
+room on the left of the entrance.  The scent of roses greeted them: it
+was the room from which she had fetched her glasses early in the
+morning.
+
+The two men deposited the stretcher on the floor and came out, glancing
+at her white face as they passed.  "Shall we carry on, Sister?"
+
+"What? . . .  Oh, yes, please."
+
+They saluted awkwardly, and left her standing irresolute, as if dazed,
+in the midst of all the bustle and traffic of suffering.
+
+He had come back to her.  Torps, who in life had never broken his word,
+was also faithful to it in death.
+
+
+
+2
+
+The journey across the lawn to one of the seats in the shelter of the
+clipped hedge of evergreens was accomplished at length.
+
+The Indiarubber Man lowered himself with a little grimace into the
+seat, and laid the crutches down beside him.  One leg, encased in
+splints and bandages, was stiffly outstretched on a stool in front of
+him; his uniform cap--a very disreputable one, with a tarnished
+badge--was perched on top of the bandages that still swathed his head.
+
+"Phew!" he said; "thank you.  That was a bit of a Marathon, wasn't it?"
+He measured the distance across the lawn with a humorous eye.
+
+"It was very good for a first attempt," said Betty, considering him
+professionally.  "Is that leg comfortable?"
+
+"Quite, thank you."  He leaned back and closed his eyes with a
+luxurious sigh.  "'Pon my word, this is what I call cutting it pretty
+fat.  Fancy my lolling here in the sun, and you . . . and you----" he
+opened his eyes, regarding her as she stood before him in her trim,
+nurse's uniform.  "It's quite like a play, isn't it, where everything
+comes right in the end?  Miss Betty----"
+
+"You mustn't call me that," said Betty primly.  "I told you before.
+You must say 'Nurse.'"
+
+"Can't I say 'Nurse Betty'?"
+
+"My name is Elizabeth.  If you wanted to distinguish me from other
+nurses you might conceivably say 'Nurse Elizabeth.'  But even that's
+not necessary, as I'm the only nurse here at the moment."
+
+The Indiarubber Man looked cautiously round the sunlit enclosure.
+"True.  So you are----"
+
+"And it's time for your beef-tea," added Betty severely, marching off
+in the direction of the distant wing.
+
+Her patient watched her slim form retreating and vanish down a green
+alley.  "You dear," he said, "you dear!"  He meditated awhile.  "It's a
+rum world," he soliloquised.  "Torps has gone.  The Young Doc.'s gone.
+The Pay's gone."
+
+He mused awhile.  "But we gave 'em an almighty hammering.  And here am
+I, alive and kicking again.  And there's Betty. . . .  It's a rum
+world."  He bent forward and gathered a daisy growing in the border
+beside his seat.  With his bleached, rather unsteady, fingers, he began
+picking the petals from it one by one.
+
+"She does, she doesn't.  She does, she doesn't.  She doesn't," repeated
+the Indiarubber Man in a woeful voice.
+
+A thrush hopped across the lawn, and paused to regard him with one
+bright eye.  Apparently reassured, it deftly secured and swallowed a
+worm.
+
+The Indiarubber Man laughed.  "Doesn't anybody love you either?" he
+said.
+
+Betty reappeared in the distance carrying a tray in her hands.  The
+thrush, as if realising that two is company and three none, flew away.
+
+Betty handed a cup to the invalid.  "There's a piece of toast too--you
+must soak it in the beef-tea, and here is a little bell.  If you want
+anything, or you aren't comfortable, you can ring it."
+
+"I see."  The Indiarubber Man gravely accepted all three gifts and laid
+them on the seat beside him.  "Thank you awfully.  But you aren't going
+away, are you?"
+
+"Of course I am," said Betty.  "I'm very busy.  You _must_ remember
+that this is a hospital, that you're a patient and I'm a nurse."  She
+moved off sedately.
+
+"Miss Betty!" called the Indiarubber Man.  "I mean 'Nurse.'"  Betty
+turned and retraced her footsteps.  "Wouldn't it be awful if I was
+suddenly taken very ill indeed--if I came over all of a tremble, and
+tried to ring the toast and soaked the bell in my beef-tea?"
+
+"From what I've seen of you during the last six weeks," replied Betty
+the Hospital Nurse, "such a thing wouldn't surprise me a little bit."
+She left him to his graceless self.
+
+For a while after she had gone the Indiarubber Man tried to read a
+book.  Tiring of that, he lit a pipe and smoked it without enthusiasm.
+Tobacco tasted oddly flavourless and unfamiliar.  Then he remembered
+his beef-tea and drank it obediently, soaking the toast as he had been
+bidden.  Remained the bell.  For a long time he sat staring at it.
+
+"Much better get it over," he said aloud.  "One way or the other."
+
+Cautiously he looked round.  No one was in sight; the windows at the
+back of the hospital that overlooked this secluded lawn had been the
+windows of class-rooms, and were of frosted glass.  With the aid of his
+crutches he got up unsteadily, and then, maintaining a precarious
+balance with one crutch, he thrust the other one under the seat
+leverwise, and with an effort tipped it over backwards on to the
+flowerbed.
+
+This accomplished, the Indiarubber Man looked round again to convince
+himself that the manoeuvre was unobserved.  Reassured on this point, he
+lowered himself down gingerly over the seat until he was lying on his
+back with his legs in the air and his head in a clump of marigolds.  In
+this attitude he seized the bell and rang it furiously, feebly waving
+his uninjured leg the while.
+
+The moments passed.  From his prostrate position behind the seat he was
+unable to obtain a view of the lawn, and stopped ringing the bell to
+listen.  He heard a faint cry in the distance, and then the flutter of
+skirts.  The next instant Betty was bending over him, white and
+breathless.
+
+"Oh!" she cried, "how _did_ it happen?  Did the seat tip over
+backwards--are you hurt?" and kneeling beside him raised his unhallowed
+head.  The Indiarubber Man closed his eyes.
+
+"You told me to ring if I wasn't comfortable, and I wasn't a bit.  I
+hate the smell of marigolds too.  No--please don't move; I'm very
+comfortable now."  Betty looked wildly in the direction of the house
+for help.
+
+"I heard the bell," she said in a queer, breathless little voice, "and
+I just came out to look . . . and then I ran.  I ought to have called
+someone.  Ring the bell--I can't move you by myself.  We must have
+assistance.  How _did_ this happen?"
+
+The Indiarubber Man opened his eyes.  "The seat tipped over backwards."
+
+"But _how_?"
+
+"It--it just tipped--as it were."
+
+"Will you promise to lie still for one minute while I run for help--are
+you in pain?"
+
+"No.  As a matter of fact, I wanted to ask you a question."
+
+"What?" asked Betty, reaching for the bell with her disengaged hand.
+
+"Betty, will you marry me?"
+
+The Indiarubber Man's bandaged head was deposited once more among the
+marigolds.  Betty rose to her feet, astonishment and indignation
+joining forces to overcome laughter within her.  The resultant of all
+three was something suspiciously like tears.
+
+"_What_?  Oh, I do believe--I don't believe it was an accident at
+all----"
+
+"Will you, Betty?" queried the Indiarubber Man from the depths of the
+marigolds.
+
+Voices sounded beyond the yews.  A white-coated orderly appeared in the
+distance, stood a moment in astonishment, and came running across the
+grass towards them.
+
+"Quick!  There's someone coming.  I swear I won't be budged till you
+answer."
+
+The orderly arrived panting.  "What's up, miss, an accident?"
+
+"Oh," gasped Betty.  "Yes!"
+
+The Indiarubber Man suffered himself to be moved.
+
+
+
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