Traffics and Discoveries Part 12

"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.

I would speak of Hinchcliffe--Henry Salt Hinchcliffe, first-cla.s.s engine- room artificer, and genius in his line, who was prouder of having taken part in the Hat Crusade in his youth than of all his daring, his skill, and his nickel-steel nerve. I consorted with him for an hour in the packed and dancing engine-room, when Moorshed suggested "whacking her up" to eighteen knots, to see if she would stand it. The floor was ankle-deep in a creamy batter of oil and water; each moving part flicking more oil in zoetrope-circles, and the gauges invisible for their dizzy chattering on the chattering steel bulkhead. Leading stoker Grant, said to be a bigamist, an ox-eyed man smothered in hair, took me to the stokehold and planted me between a searing white furnace and some h.e.l.l-hot iron plate for fifteen minutes, while I listened to the drone of fans and the worry of the sea without, striving to wrench all that palpitating firepot wide open.

Then I came on deck and watched Moorshed--revolving in his...o...b..t from the canvas bustle and torpedo-tubes aft, by way of engine-room, conning-tower, and wheel, to the doll's house of a foc'sle--learned in experience withheld from me, moved by laws beyond my knowledge, authoritative, entirely adequate, and yet, in heart, a child at his play. _I_ could not take ten steps along the crowded deck but I collided with some body or thing; but he and his satellites swung, pa.s.sed, and returned on their vocations with the freedom and s.p.a.ciousness of the well-poised stars.

Even now I can at will recall every tone and gesture, with each dissolving picture inboard or overside--Hinchcliffe's white arm buried to the shoulder in a hornet's nest of spinning machinery; Moorshed's halt and jerk to windward as he looked across the water; Pyecroft's back bent over the Berthon collapsible boat, while he drilled three men in expanding it swiftly; the outflung white water at the foot of a homeward-bound Chinaman not a hundred yards away, and her shadow-slashed, rope-purfled sails bulging sideways like insolent cheeks; the ribbed and pitted coal-dust on our decks, all iridescent under the sun; the first filmy haze that paled the shadows of our funnels about lunch time; the gradual die-down and dulling over of the short, cheery seas; the sea that changed to a swell: the swell that crumbled up and ran allwhither oilily: the triumphant, almost audible roll inward of wandering fog-walls that had been stalking us for two hours, and--welt upon welt, chill as the grave--the drive of the interminable main fog of the Atlantic. We slowed to little more than steerage-way and lay listening. Presently a hand-bellows foghorn jarred like a corncrake, and there rattled out of the mist a big s.h.i.+p literally above us. We could count the rivets in her plates as we scrooped by, and the little drops of dew gathered below them.

"Wonder why they're always barks--always steel--always four-masted--an'

never less than two thousand tons. But they are," said Pyecroft. He was out on the turtle-backed bows of her; Moorshed was at the wheel, and another man worked the whistle.

"This fog is the best thing could ha' happened to us," said Moorshed. "It gives us our chance to run in on the quiet.... Hal-lo!"

A cracked bell rang. Clean and sharp (beautifully grained, too), a bowsprit surged over our starboard bow, the bobstay confidentially hooking itself into our forward rail.

I saw Pyecroft's arm fly up; heard at the same moment the severing of the tense rope, the working of the wheel, Moorshed's voice down the tube saying, "Astern a little, please, Mr. Hinchcliffe!" and Pyecroft's cry, "Trawler with her gear down! Look out for our propeller, Sir, or we'll be wrapped up in the rope."

267 surged quickly under my feet, as the pressure of the downward-bearing bobstay was removed. Half-a-dozen men of the foc'sle had already thrown out fenders, and stood by to bear off a just visible bulwark.

Still going astern, we touched slowly, broadside on, to a suggestive crunching of fenders, and I looked into the deck of a Brixham trawler, her crew struck dumb.

"Any luck?" said Moorshed politely.

"Not till we met yeou," was the answer. "The Lard he saved us from they big s.h.i.+ps to be spitted by the little wan. Where be'e gwine tu with our fine new bobstay?"

"Yah! You've had time to splice it by now," said Pyecroft with contempt.

"Aie; but we'm all crushed to port like aigs. You was runnin' twenty-seven knots, us reckoned it. Didn't us, Albert?"

"Liker twenty-nine, an' niver no whistle."

"Yes, we always do that. Do you want a tow to Brixham?" said Moorshed.

A great silence fell upon those wet men of the sea.

We lifted a little toward their side, but our silent, quick-breathing crew, braced and strained outboard, bore us off as though we had been a mere picket-boat.

"What for?" said a puzzled voice.

"For love; for nothing. You'll be abed in Brixham by midnight."

"Yiss; but trawl's down."

"No hurry. I'll pa.s.s you a line and go ahead. Sing out when you're ready."

A rope smacked on their deck with the word; they made it fast; we slid forward, and in ten seconds saw nothing save a few feet of the wire rope running into fog over our stern; but we heard the noise of debate.

"Catch a Brixham trawler letting go of a free tow in a fog," said Moorshed listening.

"But what in the world do you want him for?" I asked.

"Oh, he'll came in handy later."