Part 12 (1/2)
”None that I can make out yet, Sir.”
”Then slow to eight knots. We'll jog down to forty-nine, forty-five, or four about, and three east. That puts us say forty miles from Torbay by nine o'clock to-morrow morning. We'll have to muck about till dusk before we run in and try our luck with the cruisers.”
”Yes, Sir. Their picket boats will be panickin' round them all night. It's considered good for the young gentlemen.”
”Hallo! War's declared! They're off!” said Moorshed.
He swung 267's head round to get a better view. A few miles to our right the low horizon was spangled with small b.a.l.l.s of fire, while nearer ran a procession of tiny cigar ends.
”Red hot! Set 'em alight,” said Mr. Pyecroft. ”That's the second destroyer flotilla diggin' out for Commander Fa.s.sett's reputation.”
The smaller lights disappeared; the glare of the destroyers' funnels dwindled even as we watched.
”They're going down Channel with lights out, thus showin' their zeal an'
drivin' all watch-officers crazy. Now, if you'll excuse me, I think I'll get you your pyjamas, an' you'll turn in,” said Pyecroft.
He piloted me to the steel tunnel, where the ham still swung majestically over the swaying table, and dragged out trousers and a coat with a monk's hood, all hewn from one hairy inch-thick board.
”If you fall over in these you'll be drowned. They're lammies. I'll chock you off with a pillow; but sleepin' in a torpedo-boat's what you might call an acquired habit.”
I coiled down on an iron-hard horse-hair pillow next the quivering steel wall to acquire that habit. The sea, sliding over 267's skin, worried me with importunate, half-caught confidences. It drummed tackily to gather my attention, coughed, spat, cleared its throat, and, on the eve of that portentous communication, retired up stage as a mult.i.tude whispering.
Anon, I caught the tramp of armies afoot, the hum of crowded cities awaiting the event, the single sob of a woman, and dry roaring of wild beasts. A dropped shovel clanging on the stokehold floor was, naturally enough, the unbarring of arena gates; our sucking uplift across the crest of some little swell, nothing less than the haling forth of new worlds; our half-turning descent into the hollow of its mate, the abysmal plunge of G.o.d-forgotten planets. Through all these phenomena and more--though I ran with wild horses over illimitable plains of rustling gra.s.s; though I crouched belly-flat under appalling fires of musketry; though I was Livingstone, painless, and incurious in the grip of his lion--my shut eyes saw the lamp swinging in its gimbals, the irregularly gliding patch of light on the steel ladder, and every elastic shadow in the corners of the frail angle-irons; while my body strove to accommodate itself to the infernal vibration of the machine. At the last I rolled limply on the floor, and woke to real life with a bruised nose and a great call to go on deck at once.
”It's all right,” said a voice in my booming ears. ”Morgan and Laughton are worse than you!”
I was gripping a rail. Mr. Pyecroft pointed with his foot to two bundles beside a torpedo-tube, which at Weymouth had been a signaller and a most able seaman. ”She'd do better in a bigger sea,” said Mr. Pyecroft. ”This lop is what fetches it up.”
The sky behind us whitened as I laboured, and the first dawn drove down the Channel, tipping the wave-tops with a chill glare. To me that round wind which runs before the true day has ever been fortunate and of good omen. It cleared the trouble from my body, and set my soul dancing to 267's heel and toe across the northerly set of the waves--such waves as I had often watched contemptuously from the deck of a ten-thousand-ton liner. They shouldered our little hull sideways and pa.s.sed, scalloped, and splayed out, toward the coast, carrying our white wake in loops along their hollow backs. In succession we looked down a lead-grey cutting of water for half a clear mile, were flung up on its ridge, beheld the Channel traffic--full-sailed to that fair breeze--all about us, and swung slantwise, light as a bladder, elastic as a basket, into the next furrow.
Then the sun found us, struck the wet gray bows to living, leaping opal, the colourless deep to hard sapphire, the many sails to pearl, and the little steam-plume of our escape to an inconstant rainbow.
”A fair day and a fair wind for all, thank G.o.d!” said Emanuel Pyecroft, throwing back the cowl-like hood of his blanket coat. His face was pitted with coal-dust and grime, pallid for lack of sleep; but his eyes shone like a gull's.
”I told you you'd see life. Think o' the _Pedantic_ now. Think o' her Number One chasin' the mobilised gobbies round the lower deck flats. Think o' the pore little snotties now bein' washed, fed, and taught, an' the yeoman o' signals with a pink eye wakin' bright 'an brisk to another peris.h.i.+n' day of five-flag hoists. Whereas _we_ shall caulk an' smoke cigarettes, same as the Spanish destroyers did for three weeks after war was declared.” He dropped into the wardroom singing:--
If you're going to marry me, marry me, Bill, It's no use muckin' about!
The man at the wheel, uniformed in what had once been a Tam-o'-shanter, a pair of very worn R.M.L.I. trousers rolled up to the knee, and a black sweater, was smoking a cigarette. Moorshed, in a gray Balaclava and a brown mackintosh with a flapping cape, hauled at our supplementary funnel guys, and a thing like a waiter from a Soho restaurant sat at the head of the engine-room ladder exhorting the unseen below. The following wind beat down our smoke and covered all things with an inch-thick layer of stokers, so that eyelids, teeth, and feet gritted in their motions. I began to see that my previous experiences among battles.h.i.+ps and cruisers had been altogether beside the mark.
PART II
The wind went down with the sunset-- The fog came up with the tide, When the Witch of the North took an Egg-sh.e.l.l (_bis_) With a little Blue Devil inside.
”Sink,” she said, ”or swim,” she said, ”It's all you will get from me.
And that is the finish of him!” she said, And the Egg-sh.e.l.l went to sea.
The wind got up with the morning, And the fog blew off with the rain, When the Witch of the North saw the Egg-sh.e.l.l And the little Blue Devil again.
”Did you swim?” she said. ”Did you sink?” she said, And the little Blue Devil replied: ”For myself I swam, but I think,” he said, ”There's somebody sinking outside.”
But for the small detail that I was a pa.s.senger and a civilian, and might not alter her course, torpedo-boat No. 267 was mine to me all that priceless day. Moorshed, after breakfast--frizzled ham and a devil that Pyecroft made out of sardines, anchovies, and French mustard smashed together with a spanner--showed me his few and simple navigating tools, and took an observation. Morgan, the signaller, let me hold the chamois leathers while he cleaned the searchlight (we seemed to be better equipped with electricity than most of our cla.s.s), that lived under a bulbous umbrella-cover amids.h.i.+p. Then Pyecroft and Morgan, standing easy, talked together of the King's Service as reformers and revolutionists, so notably, that were I not engaged on this tale I would, for its conclusion, subst.i.tute theirs.