At midnight on August 4th, Poldhu flung the news out to all ships, and
Anthony Strange, on the _Boulotte_, took the message in the middle of
the West Bay. He carried on accordingly past Weymouth, and in the
morning was confronted with the wall of great breakers off St. Alban's
Head. The little boat ran towards that barrier with extraordinary
swiftness. Strange put her at a gap close into the shore where the
waves broke lower, and with a lurch and a shudder she scooped the
water in over her bows and clothed herself to her brass gunwale-top in
a stinging veil of salt. Never had the _Boulotte_ behaved better than
she did that morning in the welter of the Race, and Strange, rejoicing
to his very finger-tips, forgot the news which was bringing all the
pleasure-boats, great and small, into the harbours of the south,
forgot even that sinking of the heart which had troubled him
throughout the night. But it was only in the Race that he knew any
comfort. He dropped his anchor in Poole Harbour by mid-day, and fled
through London to a house he owned on the Berkshire Downs.
There for a few days he found life possible. It was true there were
sentries under the railway bridges, but the sun rose each day over a
country ripe for the harvest, and the smoke curled from the chimneys
of pleasant villages; and there was no sign of war. But soon the
nights became a torture. For from midnight on, at intervals of five to
ten minutes, the troop-trains roared along the Thames Valley towards
Avonmouth, and the reproach of each of them ceased only with the
morning. Strange leaned out of his window looking down the slopes
where the corn in the moonlight was like a mist. Not a light showed in
the railway carriages, but the sparks danced above the funnel of the
engine, and the glare of the furnace burnished the leaves of the
trees. Soldiers, soldiers, soldiers on the road to France. Then
there came a morning when, not a hundred yards from his house, he saw
a string of horses in the road and others being taken from the
reaping-machines in a field. Strange returned to town and dined with a
Mrs. Kenway, his best friend, and to her he unburdened his soul.
"I am ashamed ... don't know how to look people in the face.... I
never thought to be so utterly unhappy. I am thirty and useless. I
cumber the ground."
The look of surprise with which his friend turned to him hurt him like
the cut of a whip. "Of course you can't help," it seemed to say. "The
world is for the strong, this year and the next, and for how many
more?"
Strange had to lie on his back for some hours each day, and he
suffered off and on always. But that had been his lot since boyhood,
and he had made light of his infirmity and grown used to it until this
4th of August. He had consoled himself with the knowledge that to the
world he looked only rather delicate. He was tall, and not set apart
from his fellows.
"Now," he said. "I wish that everybody knew. Yes, I wish that I showed
that service was impossible. To think of us sitting here round a
dinner-table--as we used to! Oh, I know what you'll think! I have the
morbid sensitiveness of sick men. Perhaps you are right."
"I don't think it at all," she said, and she set herself to comfort
him.
Strange went from the dinner-party to his club. There was the
inevitable crowd, fighting the campaign differently, cutting up the
conquered countries, or crying all was lost. Some of them had written
to the papers, all were somehow swollen with importance as though the
war was their private property. Strange began to take heart.
"They are not ashamed," he thought. "They speak to me as if they
expected I should be here. Perhaps I am a fool."
A friend sat down by his side.
"Cross went yesterday," he said. "George Crawley was killed at Mons.
Of course you have heard."
Strange had not heard, and there rose before his eyes suddenly a
picture of George Crawley, the youngest colonel in the army, standing
on the kerb in St. James's Street and with uplifted face blaspheming
to the skies at one o'clock in the morning because of a whiskered
degenerate dandy with a frilled shirt to whom he had just before been
introduced. But his friend was continuing his catalogue.
"Chalmers is training at Grantham. He's with the new army. Linton has
joined the Flying Corps. Every day someone slips quietly away. God
knows how many of them will come back."
Strange got up and walked out of the club.
"I shall see you to-morrow," his friend cried after him.
"No, I am going back to my boat."
"For how long?"
"Till the war's over."
The resolution had been taken that instant. He loved the _Boulotte_
better than anything else in the world. For on board of her he was
altogether a man. She was fifty-five feet long over all, fourteen
feet in beam, twenty-five tons by Thames measurement, and his debt to
her was enormous. He had found her in a shed in the Isle of Wight,
re-coppered her, given her a new boiler, fixed her up with forced
draught, and taken out for himself after a year's hard work a master's
certificate. He took her over to Holland, and since her bows worked
like a concertina in the heavy seaway between Dover and Dieppe he
strengthened them with cross-pieces. He never ceased to tinker with
her, he groused at her, and complained of her, and sneered at her, and
doted on her in the true sailor's fashion. For some years past life
had begun for him in the spring, when he passed Portland Bill bound
westward for Fowey and Falmouth and the Scillies, and had ended in the
late autumn, when he pulled the _Boulotte_ up on the mud of Wootton
Creek. Now he turned to her in his distress, and made a most miserable
Odyssey. He spent a month in the estuary above Salcombe, steamed
across to Havre, went down through the canals to Marseilles in the
autumn of 1914, and sought one of the neutral coasts of the
Mediterranean. Here, where men wore buttons in their coats inscribed,
"Don't speak to me of the war," he fancied that he might escape from
the shame of his insufficiency. He came to a pleasant harbour, with a
broad avenue of trees behind the quay, and a little ancient town
behind the trees.
"I will drop my anchor here," he said, "until the war ends"; and he
remained, speaking to no one but his crew, sleeping in his little
cabin, and only going on shore to buy his newspapers and take his
coffee. And after five weeks the miracle began to happen. He was
sitting on his deck one morning reading a local newspaper. At right
angles to him half a dozen steamers, moored in a line, with their
sterns to the quay and their anchors out forward, were loading with
fruit. He looked up from his paper, and his eyes fell upon the nearest
ship, which was showing him her starboard broadside. He looked first
of all carelessly, then with interest, finally he laid his paper down
and walked forward. The boat had received on the lower part of her
hull, up to the Plimsoll line, a brilliant fresh coat of red paint. So
far, of course, there was nothing unusual, but forward, halfway
between her bows and her midships, and again aft on her quarter, she
had a broad perpendicular line of the same red paint standing out
vividly from the black of her upper plates. Strange called to his
engineer, John Shawe, and pointed to the streaks.
"What do you make of them?" he asked.
Shawe shrugged his shoulders.
"Very wasteful it do seem, sir," he said; and to a casual glance it
did indeed appear as if the paint had been allowed, through some
carelessness on deck, to drip down the side at those two points.
Strange, however, was not satisfied. The bands of scarlet were too
regular, too broad. He had himself rowed out in his dinghy past the
steamer's bows.
"That will do, Harry," he said. "We can go back."
On the port bows and quarter of the steamer he had seen the same vivid
streaks. Strange spoke again to John Shawe.
"Waste isn't the explanation, that's sure. You go about the town a
bit, don't you? You know some of the men about the port. You might
find out for me--quietly, you know--what you can about that boat"; and
the phrase "quietly, you know," made all at once a different man of
John Shawe. Strange at this time was really more moved by curiosity
than suspicion, but he did use the phrase, and John Shawe, a big,
simple, south countryman, who knew his engine and very little else,
swelled at once into a being of mystery, full of brow-twisting wisdom
and portentously sly.
"I understand, sir," he said in a knowing whisper. "I know my dooty.
It shall be done." He put on his best brass-buttoned coat that
evening, and went down the three steps of the gangway ladder with a
secret air, a sleuth; but he brought back his news nevertheless.
"All those boats, sir, are chartered by a German here named Rehnke."
"But some of them are English. They are flying the red flag," cried
Strange in revolt.
"It's God's truth, sir, and here's more of it. Every one of them's
bound for England, consigned to English firms. One's for Manchester,
two for Cardiff, one for Liverpool."
"But it's impossible. It's trading with the enemy," Strange exclaimed.
"That don't apply to the enemy in neutral countries, they say. Oh,
there's a deal of dirty work going on in England. Will you come on
deck?"
Strange nodded. The saloon door opened into the cockpit, and the cabin
roof was the deck of the after-part of the _Boulotte_. They climbed by
a little ladder out of the cockpit. It was twelve o'clock on a night
of full moon.
"Look, sir," said Shawe.
The English boat had sailed that afternoon. The starboard side of its
neighbour was now revealed. Strange looked through his glasses and he
saw. Over the bows of that tramp steamer at midnight a man was
suspended on a plank, and he was painting a broad, perpendicular, red
streak.
Strange thought over his discovery lying on his back in the saloon.
Distinguishing marks on a row of ships chartered by a German--there
was just one explanation for them! Strange did not even whisper it to
John Shawe, but he went ashore the next morning and called upon the
British Consul.
His card was taken into a room where two men were speaking. At once
the conversation stopped, and it was not resumed. There was not a
whisper, nor the sound of any movement. Strange had a picture in his
mind of two men with their heads together staring at his card and
exchanging an unspoken question. Then the clerk appeared again.
"Mr. Taylor will see you with pleasure," he said.
As Strange entered the room a slim, elderly, indifferent gentleman,
seated at a knee-hole table, gazed vaguely at him through his
spectacles and offered him a chair.
"What can I do for you, Mr. Strange?" he asked, and since Strange
hesitated, he turned towards his companion.
"This is Major Slingsby," said the Consul. "He will not be in your
way."
Major Slingsby, a square, short, rubicund man of forty, with the face
of a faun, bowed, and, without moving from his chair, seemed,
nevertheless, to remove himself completely from the room.
"Not at all," said Strange. He had not an idea that he was in the
presence of the two shrewdest men in those parts. To him they were
just a couple of languid people whom it was his duty to arouse, and he
told his story as vividly as he could.
"And what do you deduce from these mysterious signs?" asked the
Consul.
Strange's answer was prompt.
"German submarines in the Mediterranean."
"Oh! And why not the Channel?" asked Mr. Taylor. "These steamers are
on their way there."
To that question there was no reply. Strange rose. "I thought that I
ought to tell you what I had noticed," he said stiffly.
"Thank you, yes. And I am very grateful," replied Taylor.
Major Slingsby, however, followed Strange out of the room.
"Will you lunch with me?" he asked, and the question sent the blood
rushing into Strange's face. He swung between his instinct to hide his
head from any man who was doing service and his craving to converse
with a fellow-countryman. The craving won.
"I shall be very pleased," he stammered.
"Right. It is half-past twelve now. Shall we say one at the Cafe de
Rome?"
As they sat against the wall by the window of the cafe Slingsby talked
of ordinary matters, which any one of those in the chairs outside upon
the pavement might overhear and be none the wiser. But he talked
sagely, neither parading mysteries nor pretending disclosures. He let
the mere facts of companionship and nationality work, and before
luncheon was over Strange was won by them. He longed to confide, to
justify himself before a fellow-citizen of his miserable inertness.
Over the coffee, indeed, he would have begun, but Slingsby saw the
torrent of confession coming.
"Do you often lunch here?" he said quickly. "I do whenever I happen to
be in the town. Sit in this window for an hour and you will see all
the town paraded before you like a show, its big men and little men,
its plots and its intrigues. There, for instance," and he nodded
towards a large, stout person with a blonde moustache, "is
Rehnke--yes, that's your man. Take a good look at him."
Strange looked at the German hard. He looked also towards a youth who
had been sitting for the last hour over a cup of coffee and a
newspaper outside the window. Slingsby interpreted the look.
"He's all right. He's trying to listen, of course. Most foreigners do,
whether they understand your language or not. And he doesn't--not a
word of it. I have been watching him. However, we may as well go, for
I would very much like you to show me your little boat."
Strange, eager and enthusiastic, jumped up from the table.
"Rather," he cried. "She's not big, of course, but she can keep the
sea, especially since I strengthened her bows."
"Oh, you have done that, have you?" said Slingsby, as he paid the
bill. "That's interesting."
They crossed the boulevard to the quay and went on board the
_Boulotte_. Every inch of brass on her, from the stanchions round the
deck to the engine-room telegraph, flashed, and she was varnished and
white and trim like a lady fresh from her maid.
"What can you do with your forced draught?" asked Slingsby.
"Thirteen," replied Strange proudly. "With a good wind astern
fourteen. Once I went out past the Needles buoy----" and off he went
in a glowing account of a passage to Cherbourg at the end of a stormy
September. Slingsby never once interrupted him. He followed meekly
from the rudder to the bow, where he examined with some attention the
famous struts and cross-pieces.
"You have got a wireless, I see," he said, looking up to the aerial,
which, slackened and disconnected, dangled from the masthead.
"Yes. But it's a small affair. However, I can hear four hundred miles
if the night's still. I can only send seventy."
Slingsby nodded, and the two men returned to the saloon. There, at
last, over a whisky and soda. Strange was encouraged to unload his
soul. The torture of the August nights on the Berkshire Downs above
the Thames Valley, the intolerable sense of uselessness; the feeling
that he wore a brand of shame upon his forehead for all men to see,
and the poignancy of the remorse which had shrivelled him when a
wounded soldier from Ypres or Le Cateau limped past him in the street;
all tumbled from his lips in abrupt, half-finished sentences.
"Therefore I ran away," he said.
Slingsby sat back in his chair.
"So that's it," he said, and he laughed in a friendly fashion. "Do you
know that we have all been greatly worried about you? Oh, you have
caused a deuce of a fluttering I can tell you."
Strange flushed scarlet.
"I was suspected!" he cried. "Good God!" It just wanted that to
complete his utter shame. He had been worse than useless; he had given
trouble. He sat with his eyes fixed, in the depths of abasement. Then
other words were spoken to him:
"How long will it take you to bring your boat to Marseilles?"
"You want it, then?" said Strange.
"I can use you," said Slingsby. "What's more, you are necessary."
Strange, with a buzzing head, got out his chart from a locker and
spread it on the table. He took paper and a lead pencil and his
compasses. He marked his course and measured it.
"Forty-seven hours' steaming and six hours to get up steam. It's four
o'clock now, and the day's Tuesday. I can be at Marseilles on Thursday
afternoon at four."
"I have done a good day's work," said Major Slingsby, as he rose to
his feet, and he meant it. Slingsby was an intelligence officer as
well as an officer of intelligence, and since he had neither boats to
dispose of nor money to buy them with, Anthony Strange was a Godsend
to him. "But I don't want you until to-day week. I shall want a little
time to make arrangements with the French."
The _Bulotte_ steamed round the point at three o'clock on the
appointed afternoon. The pilot took her through the Naval Harbour into
the small basin where the destroyers lie, and by half-past she was
berthed against the quay. Strange had been for the best part of two
days on his bridge, but at eleven he was knocking at a certain door
without any inscription upon it in the Port office, and he was
admitted to a new Major Slingsby in a khaki uniform, with red tabs on
the collar, and clerks typewriting for dear life in a tiny room.
"Hallo," said Slingsby. He looked into a letter-tray on the edge of
his desk and took a long envelope from it and handed it to Strange.
"You might have a look at this. I'll come on board to-morrow morning.
Meanwhile, if I were you I should go to bed, though I doubt if you'll
get much sleep."
The reason for that doubt became more and more apparent as the evening
wore on. In the first place, when Strange returned, he found workmen
with drills and hammers and rivets spoiling the white foredeck of his
adored _Boulotte_. For a moment he was inclined, like Captain Hatteras
when his crew cut down his bulwarks for firewood, to stand aside and
weep, but he went forward, and when he saw the work which was going on
his heart exulted. Then he went back to the saloon, but as he
stretched himself out upon the cushions he remembered the envelope in
his pocket. It was stamped "On His Majesty's Service," and it
contained the announcement that one Anthony Strange had been granted a
commission as sub-lieutenant in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve.
After that sleep was altogether out of the question. There was the
paper to be re-read at regular intervals lest its meaning should have
been misunderstood. And when its meaning was at last firmly and
joyfully fixed in Strange's mind there was the paper itself to be
guarded and continually felt, lest it should lose itself, be stolen,
or evaporate into air. Towards midnight, indeed, he did begin to doze
off, but then a lighter came alongside and dumped ten tons of Welsh
steam coal on board, all that he could hold, it's true, but that gave
him ten days' steaming at ordinary draught. And at eight o'clock to
the minute Slingsby hailed him from the quay.
"You will go back now to your old harbour," he said. "You have been a
little cruise down the coast, that's all. Just look out for a sailing
schooner called the _Santa Maria del Pilar_. She ought to turn up in
seven days from now to take on board a good many barrels of carbonate
of soda. I'll come by train at the same time. If she arrives before
and takes her cargo on board, you can wire to me through the Consul
and then--act on your own discretion."
Strange drew a long breath, and his eyes shone.
"But she won't, I think," said Slingsby. "By the way, you were at
Rugby with Russell of my regiment, weren't you?"
"Yes."
"And you know Cowper, who was admiral out here?"
"Yes, he's my uncle."
"Exactly."
Strange smiled. It was clear that a good many inquiries must have been
made about him over the telegraph wires during the last week.
"Well, that's all, I think," said Slingsby. "You'll push off as soon
as you can, and good luck."
But there was one further ceremony before the _Boulotte_ was ready for
sea. The small crew was signed on under the Naval Discipline Act. Then
she put out, rounded the point, and headed for her destination over a
smooth sunlit sea, with, by the way, an extra hand on board and a fine
new capstan on her foredeck. Two days later she was moored in her old
position, and Strange went to bed. The excitement was over, a black
depression bore him down; he was deadly tired, and his back hurt him
exceedingly. What was he doing at all with work of this kind? If he
had to "act on his own discretion," could he do it with any sort of
profit? Such questions plagued him for two days more, whilst he lay
and suffered. But then relief came. He slept soundly and without pain,
and rose the next morning in a terror lest the _Santa Maria del Pilar_
should have come and gone. He went up on to the deck and searched the
harbour with his glasses. There was but one sailing boat taking in
cargo, and she a brigantine named the _Richard_, with the Norwegian
flag painted on her sides. Strange hurried to the Consul, and returned
with a mind at ease. The _Santa Maria del Pilar_ had not yet sailed in
between the moles. Nor did she come until the next afternoon, by which
time Slingsby was on board the _Boulotte_.
"There she is," said Strange in a whisper of excitement, looking
seawards. She sailed in with the sunset and a fair wind, a white
schooner like a great golden bird of the sea, and she was nursed by a
tug into a berth on the opposite side of the harbour. Slingsby and
Strange dined at the Cafe de Rome and came on board again at nine. The
great globes of electric light on their high pillars about the quays
shone down upon the still, black water of the harbour. It was very
quiet. From the cockpit of the _Boulotte_ the two men looked across to
the schooner.
"I think there's a lighter alongside of her, isn't there?" said
Slingsby.
Strange, whose eyesight was remarkable, answered:
"Yes, a lighter loaded with barrels."
"Some carbonate of soda," said Slingsby, with a grin. They went into
the cockpit, leaving the door open.
It was a hot night, and in a cafe beyond the trees a band was playing
the compelling music of _Louise_. Strange listened to it, deeply
stirred. Life had so changed for him that he had risen from the depths
during the last weeks. Then Slingsby raised his hand.
"Listen!"
With the distant music there mingled now the creaking of a winch.
Strange extinguished the light, and both men crept out from the
cockpit. The sound came from the _Santa Maria del Pilar_, and they
could see the spar of her hoisting tackle swing out over the lighter
and inboard over the ship's deck.
"She's loading," said Strange, in a low voice.
"Yes," answered Slingsby; "she's loading." And his voice purred like a
contented cat.
He slept on a bed made up in the saloon that night. Strange in his
tiny cabin, and at nine o'clock the next morning, as they sat at
breakfast, they saw the _Santa Maria del Pilar_ make for the sea.
"We ought to follow, oughtn't we?" said Strange anxiously.
"There's no hurry."
"But she'll do nine knots in this breeze." Strange watched her with
the eye of knowledge as she leaned over ever so slightly from the
wind. "She might give us the slip."
Slingsby went on eating unconcernedly.
"She will," he answered. "We are not after her, my friend. Got your
chart?"
Strange fetched it from the locker and spread it out on the table.
"Do you see a small island with a lighthouse?"
"Yes."
"Four miles west-south-west of the lighthouse. Got it?"
"Yes."
"How long will it take you to get to that point?"
Strange measured his course.
"Five to five and a half hours forced draught."
"Good. Suppose we start at six this evening."
The _Boulotte_ went away to the minute. At eight it began to grow
dark, but no steaming light was hoisted on the mast, and no sidelamps
betrayed her presence. In the failing light she became one with the
sea but for the tiniest wisp of smoke from her chimney, and soon the
night hid that. A lantern flashed for a while here and there on the
forward deck in the centre of a little group, and then Slingsby came
back to Strange at the wheel.
"It's all right," he whispered softly.
Nights at sea! The cool, dark tent of stars, the hiss and tinkle of
waves against the boat's side, the dinghy, slung out upon the davits,
progressing above the surface of the water, the lamp light from the
compass striking up on the brasswork of the wheel and the face of the
steersman; to nights at sea Strange owed all the spacious moments of
his crippled life. But this night was a sacred thing. He was admitted
to the band of the young strong men who serve, like a novice into the
communion of a church; and his heart sang within his breast as he kept
the _Boulotte_ to her course. At a quarter past eleven he rang the
telegraph and put the indicator to "slow." Five minutes later he
stopped the engine altogether. Four miles away to the north-eastward a
light brightened and faded.
"We are there," he said, and he looked out over an empty sea.
Under Slingsby's orders he steamed slowly round in a circle, ever
increasing the circumference, for an hour, and then the new hand--who,
by the way, was a master gunner--crept aft.
"There it is, sir."
A hundred yards from the port bow a dark mass floated on the sea. The
_Boulotte_ slid gently alongside of it. It was a raft made of barrels
lashed together.
"We have seen those barrels before, my friend," said Slingsby, his
nose wrinkling up in a grin of delight. Before daybreak the work was
done. Fifty empty barrels floated loose; there was a layer of heavy
oil over the sea and a rank smell in the air.
"Now," said Slingsby, In a whisper, "shall we have any luck, I
wonder?"
He went forward. The capstan head had been removed, and in its place
sat a neat little automatic gun, which could fling two hundred and
seventy three-pound shells six thousand yards in a minute. For the
rest of that night the _Boulotte_ lay motionless without a light
showing or a word spoken. And just as the morning came, in the very
first unearthly grey of it, a wave broke--a long, placid roller which
had no right to break in that smooth, deep sea. Slingsby dipped his
hand into the cartridge box and made sure that the band ran free; the
gunner stood with one hand on the elevating wheel, the other on the
trigger; eight hundred yards away from the _Boulotte_ there was
suddenly a wild commotion of the water, and black against the misty
grey a conning tower and a long, low body of steel rose into view.
U-whatever-its-number was taken by surprise. The whole affair lasted a
few seconds. With his third shot the gunner found the range, and then,
planting his shells with precision in a level line like the
perforations of a postage stamp, he ripped the submarine from
amidships to its nose. Strange had a vision for a second of a couple
of men trying to climb out from the conning tower, and then the nose
went up in the air like the snout of some monstrous fish, and the sea
gulped it down.
"One of 'em," said Slingsby. "But we won't mention it. Lucky you saw
those red streaks, my friend. If a destroyer had come prowling up this
coast instead of the harmless little _Boulotte_ there wouldn't have
been any raft on the sea or any submarine just here under the sea.
What about breakfast?"
Strange set the boat's course for Marseilles, and the rest of that
voyage was remarkable only for a clear illustration of the difference
between the amateur and the professional. For whereas Strange could
not for the life of him keep still during one minute, Slingsby,
stretched at his ease on the saloon sofa, beguiled the time with
quotations from the "Bab Ballads" and "Departmental Ditties."