"You'd better brush up on it if you want to do anything with
French girls. I hear your M.P.'s are very strict. You must be
able to toss the word the minute you see a skirt, and make your
date before the guard gets onto you."
"I suppose French girls haven't any scruples?" Claude remarked
carelessly.
Victor shrugged his narrow shoulders. "I haven't found that girls
have many, anywhere. When we Canadians were training in England,
we all had our week-end wives. I believe the girls in Crystal
Lake used to be more or less fussy,--but that's long ago and far
away. You won't have any difficulty."
When Victor was in the middle of a tale of amorous adventure, a
little different from any Claude had ever heard, Tod Fanning
joined them. The aviator did not acknowledge the presence of a
new listener, but when he had finished his story, walked away
with his special swagger, his eyes fixed upon the distance.
Fanning looked after him with disgust. "Do you believe him? I
don't think he's any such heart-smasher. I like his nerve,
calling you `Leftenant'! When he speaks to me he'll have to say
Lootenant, or I'll spoil his beauty."
That day the men remembered long afterward, for it was the end of
the fine weather, and of those first long, carefree days at sea.
In the afternoon Claude and the young Marine, the Virginian and
Fanning, sat together in the sun watching the water scoop itself
out in hollows and pile itself up in blue, rolling hills. Usher
was telling his companions a long story about the landing of the
Marines at Vera Cruz.
"It's a great old town," he concluded. "One thing there I'll
never forget. Some of the natives took a few of us out to the old
prison that stands on a rock in the sea. We put in the whole day
there, and it wasn't any tourist show, believe me! We went down
into dungeons underneath the water where they used to keep State
prisoners, kept them buried alive for years. We saw all the old
instruments of torture; rusty iron cages where a man couldn't lie
down or stand up, but had to sit bent over till he grew crooked.
It made you feel queer when you came up, to think how people had
been left to rot away down there, when there was so much sun and
water outside. Seems like something used to be the matter with
the world." He said no more, but Claude thought from his serious
look that he believed he and his countrymen who were pouring
overseas would help to change all that.
V
That night the Virginian, who berthed under Victor Morse, had an
alarming attack of nose-bleed, and by morning he was so weak that
he had to be carried to the hospital. The Doctor said they might
as well face the facts; a scourge of influenza had broken out on
board, of a peculiarly bloody and malignant type.* Everybody was
a little frightened. Some of the officers shut themselves up in
the smoking-room, and drank whiskey and soda and played poker all
day, as if they could keep contagion out.
* The actual outbreak of influenza on transports carrying United
States troops is here anticipated by several months.
Lieutenant Bird died late in the afternoon and was buried at
sunrise the next day, sewed up in a tarpaulin, with an eighteen
pound shell at his feet. The morning broke brilliantly clear and
bitter cold. The sea was rolling blue walls of water, and the
boat was raked by a wind as sharp as ice. Excepting those who
were sick, the boys turned out to a man. It was the first burial
at sea they had ever witnessed, and they couldn't help finding it
interesting. The Chaplain read the burial service while they
stood with uncovered heads. The Kansas band played a solemn
march, the Swedish quartette sang a hymn. Many a man turned his
face away when that brown sack was lowered into the cold, leaping
indigo ridges that seemed so destitute of anything friendly to
human kind. In a moment it was done, and they steamed on without
him.
The glittering walls of water kept rolling in, indigo, purple,
more brilliant than on the days of mild weather. The blinding
sunlight did not temper the cold, which cut the face and made the
lungs ache. Landsmen began to have that miserable sense of being
where they were never meant to be. The boys lay in heaps on the
deck, trying to keep warm by hugging each other close. Everybody
was seasick. Fanning went to bed with his clothes on, so sick he
couldn't take off his boots. Claude lay in the crowded stern, too
cold, too faint to move. The sun poured over them like flame,
without any comfort in it. The strong, curling, foam-crested
waves threw off the light like millions of mirrors, and their
colour was almost more than the eye could bear. The water seemed
denser than before, heavy like melted glass, and the foam on the
edges of each blue ridge looked sharp as crystals. If a man
should fall into them, he would be cut to pieces.
The whole ocean seemed suddenly to have come to life, the waves
had a malignant, graceful, muscular energy, were animated by a
kind of mocking cruelty. Only a few hours ago a gentle boy had
been thrown into that freezing water and forgotten. Yes, already
forgotten; every one had his own miseries to think about.
Late in the afternoon the wind fell, and there was a sinister
sunset. Across the red west a small, ragged black cloud
hurried,--then another, and another. They came up out of the
sea,--wild, witchlike shapes that travelled fast and met in the
west as if summoned for an evil conclave. They hung there against
the afterglow, distinct black shapes, drawing together, devising
something. The few men who were left on deck felt that no good
could come out of a sky like that. They wished they were at home,
in France, anywhere but here.