purchase again. Yes, there were the words, crossed and recrossed by
faintly scratched names and dates, covered by successive layers of
varnish, but still plain to read, deep carven in the wood:
DAY IS A SCAB
The room was half full of smoke when I had finished, and the acrid
smell of burning presently brought an alarmed housemaid to the
threshold.
"It's nothing," I reassured her. "I was only doing a little
poker-work on this desk." I replaced the fireiron in the fender, and
opened the window to let the smoke out as the maid withdrew.
An uneasy wind was fretting the invisible rhododendrons with the
threat of rain on the morrow.
"I'm sorry, Day," I said to the darkened universe. "But it's all
right now. I've burnt it out."
IX
THE ENGLISH WAY
(1917)
1
The Quartermaster of the Watch pushed aside the tarpaulin cover to
the Wardroom hatchway and whistled softly through his teeth. "Mail,"
he said to the Officers' Steward, who stepped out of the diminutive
pantry in answer to the summons, and, bending down, thrust a bundle
of sodden envelopes into the outstretched hand. It was snowing hard,
and the whaler that brought off the Destroyer's Christmas mail had
shipped sufficient water to call for a muttered protest from beneath
the sou'-wester of the stroke oar.
"I don' mind wettin' my blinking shirt," he muttered, as he tugged at
the oar, "not so long as we brings 'ope 'an' comfort. But if them
perishin' mail-bags is goin' to sit in a pool o' water--what the
'ell's the use? No one can't read a letter wot's bin soaked in the
Norf Sea for a hour!" The whaler's crew murmured concurrence.
The Coxswain, nursing the mail-bags on his knee with a hand on each
and his elbow on the tiller, bade the crew chuck their weight into
their oars and mind their ensanguined business--what time he, the
Coxswain, would mind his. This admirably adjusted division of labour
brought them eventually alongside, and the mail inboard.
The Surgeon Probationer, whose body was buried in the depths of a
wicker arm-chair (with the exception of his feet, which were on top
of the stove; and his heart, which was in the keeping of the "Wren"
driver of an Admiralty car), heard the whaler come alongside and was
at the bottom of the hatchway as soon as the steward.
"Gimme the ruddy things," he muttered, hungrily, and awoke the
partially gassed inmates of the Wardroom with a joyous whoop.
"Mail!" he shouted, and dealt the moist envelopes into the laps of
the recumbent figures sleeping off the effects of a Christmas
luncheon in various attitudes of statuesque abandon.
The Mess awoke bleary-eyed, and fumbled with its correspondence. One
by one the forms sat upright; grunts were succeeded by articulate
expressions of approval. The Lieutenant (E), who sat nearest the
bell, rose to his feet and pressed it fervently. Then he sat down
again, ordered a drink, and slit open the first of four fat
envelopes. It was from a favourite sister, ætat fourteen, who,
having made up her feminine mind that Sir David Beatty's position in
the naval cosmos was one that her brother would fill with more
picturesque and efficient completeness, speedily surrounded that
officer in a comfortable aura of giggling self-complacency.
The Midshipman R.N.R. burst open a bulging envelope and stepped
straightway on to a magic carpet, which wafted him out of the steel
shell of a Destroyer's Wardroom into a Berkshire vicarage.
The Sub sat on the settee with his legs in heavy leather sea-boots
and his elbows on his knees reading a letter from a farm in
Northamptonshire. The writer of the letter had spent the morning
cleaning out a byre, and the early part of the afternoon sorting
potatoes. She had then bathed and sat down in her prettiest
crêpe-de-chine kimono and a mingled fragrance of China tea and bath
salts to the composition of a letter that spread a slowly widening
grin of ecstasy across the weather-beaten features of the recipient,
who had almost forgotten what a woman's voice sounded like.
The clouds of tobacco-smoke curled to and fro in the close atmosphere
of the Destroyer's Wardroom, and the silence--save for the rustle of
a quickly-turned page or the snicker of a knife opening a fresh
envelope--was profound. Then the Surgeon Probationer chuckled
hoarsely. It was a profane sound and passed unnoticed; but presently
he bent forward and thrust a gaudy strip of pasteboard beneath the
nose of the enraptured Sub-Lieutenant.
"Call that nuffin'?" he queried, coarsely.
The Sub detached his soul with difficulty from the seventh heaven,
and considered a highly-coloured representation of a robin upon a
snowy background, and the legend "Peace on earth and goodwill among
men" picked out in frosted letters against a border of holly leaves.
"'Snice, ain't it?" said the Surgeon Probationer.
"Fair bit of all-right," said the Sub, good-humouredly, and resumed
page seven of the closely scribbled sheet:
"_I am writing this by the firelight, and if only you were here we'd
draw up our chairs close and p'r'aps----_"
"My Aunt Agatha sent it to me," continued the voice of the
importunist. "Read what's written on the back."
The Sub, who was what is called a good mess-mate, turned the
pasteboard over rather absent-mindedly.
"_Love your enemies_," was written in angular spidery handwriting
across the inoffensive surface of the card. The Sub was twenty, but
he had known four years of warfare against the Powers of Evil, which
we call Germany for short.
"Any relation of Lansdowne or Ramsay Macdonald, your Aunt Agatha?" he
inquired, and tossed the card back, to return instantly to a firelit
twilight and "p'r'aps."
The Surgeon looked round the Mess in search of a fresh confidant.
The First Lieutenant sat hunched up on his right, holding a bunch of
sheets of paper clenched in his hand, and staring at the stove with
unseeing eyes.
"Here, Number One," said Aunt Agatha's nephew, and smote his
neighbour on the knee. "You look as if you wanted brightening up.
Read that, my lad! Both sides. Every picture tells a story."
The Lieutenant turned eyes like those of a startled horse upon the
speaker.
"Eh?" he said. He, too, had come back a long way to answer a living
voice.
"Read that, my pippin."
The Lieutenant read obediently, turning the card backwards and
forwards in his fingers as if looking for something that wasn't
there. The crumpled sheets of his letter dropped to the deck and lay
unheeded.
Then abruptly he laughed; it was not a laugh common to Englishmen,
and so disconcerting was the sound that two or three faces lifted
from the preoccupation of letter or illustrated paper, and tranquil
eyes stared curiously.
"My God!" said the First Lieutenant. "That's the best joke--the best
joke----" His voice dropped low. He handed back the Christmas-card
and fumbled blindly for the fallen sheets of his letter. One by one
he straightened them on his knees, smoothing out the creases
mechanically.
"The best joke----" He rose to his feet with something in his white
face that jerked the medical man instantly upright beside him.
"Sit down," said the First Lieutenant, and there was a note in his
voice the Doctor obeyed, because it was something he was still young
enough to acknowledge. "Listen," said the Lieutenant, in hard, dry
tones. "You've got to share this--you've all got to share this."
Papers rustled and every eye was on the speaker. "It's--it's too
good to keep to oneself. My brother"--he made a little gesture with
the letter in his hand--"my brother was wounded--broken thigh--twenty
miles behind the line in a base hospital--the Huns bombed it in broad
daylight, with the Red Cross flying on every flagstaff and painted on
every roof--bombed it in cold blood, and killed thirty-four wounded
officers and men and two V.A.D.'s. They killed my brother, and they
killed----" He thrust the letter into the limp hands of the Surgeon
Probationer. "You gave me something to read just now. Read that!
They killed the whitest woman--she was trying to save him--with the
Red Cross on her breast--and his thigh broken. Goodwill among men!
Love your enemies! Love your----"
The Gunner came across the mess with his heavy tread, his stolid face
full of concern.
"No offence, I'm sure, sir," he said, glancing at the Surgeon. "Mr.
Dantham didn't know--how _could_ he? Nor yet his aunt----"
The tragedy of one is the tragedy of all in a community as small and
as intimate as a Destroyer Wardroom; but the innate sense of justice
in the Briton's heart found expression in the Gunner's inarticulate
sympathy. He held no brief for the Hun, but he was the champion of
the shocked Surgeon and Aunt Agatha for all her pacifist leanings.
The Surgeon sat with the unread letter in his hands staring up at the
First Lieutenant.
"Oh!" he said. "Oh, the swine." A growl of confirmation ran round
the Mess, but no one addressed the First Lieutenant direct.
"Yes," he said. "Bestial swine. Brutal, bestial swine. If he'd
been killed by the shell that broke his leg I wouldn't have minded.
That would have been fair fight; and she--if it had been septic
poisoning or disease; those are the risks all nurses run: the enemies
they face and fight all day and night. But this!" He spoke in low,
measured tones. "If I ever get to grips with a Hun after this----"
The mask of icy self-control slipped for a moment from his face. His
features worked and his hands made a movement somehow suggestive and
brutal.
"Best have a drink," said the Gunner, soothingly, and as he spoke
there was a trampling of men's feet overhead, muffled by the snow on
the thin plating. The Quartermaster's pipe rippled and shrilled, to
be succeeded by a hoarse sing-song bellow. "Boot and saddle" sounded
in a cavalry barracks never stirred the stables as that rush of
unseen feet overhead, breaking the peace of a Christmas afternoon in
harbour, galvanised the Wardroom into sudden activity.
"Stand by to slip from the buoy," said the Gunner, and made for the
hatchway. But the First Lieutenant was before him, bareheaded,
cramming his Christmas mail into his pocket as he swung himself up
the iron rungs of the ladder.
2
The Commander, who had been standing peering through his glasses for
the last five minutes, lowered them suddenly and glanced at the chart
clamped on the bracket beside him.
His First Lieutenant continued to stare across the grey sea to the
north-west. Day was dawning, and the spray, flung from the reeling
bows of the Destroyer, was like a frozen whip-lash on their faces.
"Yes, that's them," he said, in a grimly ungrammatical undertone. To
the naked eye nothing was visible above the ragged skyline, but every
man on the bridge was standing gazing intently in the same direction,
as if the wind carried with it the scent of the quarry they sought.
The Commander gave an order to the Signalman standing attentive
beside the daylight searchlight, and immediately the shutters broke
into a chattering "View halloa!"
A blink answered on the instant, where, two cables astern, the second
boat in the line followed in the heaving wake. Out of the faint haze
of smoke that almost screened the rest of the division from view, one
after the other the answers flickered, and then the leader spoke.
The lights all blinked back together.
"Signal passed, sir!" said the Yeoman.
"Right," replied the Commander. He bent over the chart again for an
instant, and straightening, gave an order to the wheel.
The leader's bows leaped at a charging sea, rose shuddering, and fell
away from the wind a couple of points; the drone of the turbines
below took on a different, higher note. The Commander turned and
glanced along the upper deck with a little grim smile above the turns
of his worsted muffler. The Destroyer was stripped for the fight,
and at the mid-ship and after guns the crews were blowing on their
hands and jesting amongst themselves. The Gunner sat astride the
torpedo tube glancing along the sights as the twin tubes trained
slowly round like ponderous accusing fingers.
"Your brother ain't going to be long unavenged," said the Commander
to his First Lieutenant, as the latter climbed into the fire-control
position. "We've caught this party cold!"
The First Lieutenant nodded, unsmiling, as he turned away.
"We'll sink the lot," he said. "But that's too good a death for a
Hun. The sea's too clean to drown 'em in. I'd----" He checked the
sentence and busied himself about his fire-control instruments.
Then out of the north-west came a stutter of light. It winked
suspiciously, and the Commander laughed, with his hand on the
fire-gong key.
"_There's_ my answer, Fritz," he said, and before the words were out
of his mouth the foremost gun opened fire. "You're dev'lish good at
raiding merchant convoys--let's see how you take a hiding." The
acrid cordite smoke, as his guns gave reply to the German challenge,
caught him in the throat, and his words ended in a cough.
The German Destroyers turned for home, held their course for eight
bitter minutes, steaming hell-for-leather and husbanding their
ammunition. Their instructions were peculiar, inasmuch as they were
ordered to return at all costs to their base. In destroyer warfare
the nation that holds command of the seas can afford to omit this
bitter clause from its light-craft's sailing orders; but an Admiralty
that knows it can send nothing to the succour of its disabled
adventurers perforce plays for safety.
The German flotilla leader, bending over his chart and stop-watch,
deluged with spray from falling projectiles, made a rapid mental
calculation and realised that this was no tip-and-run business. He
had played that game twice and brought it off, and played it once too
often. In golfing parlance, of which he was entirely ignorant, he
was stymied.
He laid a smoke-screen, and turned under cover of it, avoided a
long-distance torpedo by six feet, and applied himself to the
voice-pipe connecting him with the engine-room. What he said to the
blond perspiring engineer at the other end does not concern this
story, because a "browning" salvo at four miles' range struck his
quivering fugitive command amidships, and beat her into a flaming,
smoking welter of flying fragments and spouting foam.
His opponent saw things appearing above the smear of that hasty
smoke-screen, things that leaped into view against the grey sky and
descended again into invisibility. He lowered his glasses, glanced
grinning at his First Lieutenant, and gave another order to the
Quartermaster at the wheel.
But the Quartermaster was seized with a sudden preoccupation. He was
leaning back against a stanchion with the broken spokes of the wheel
still in his hands, looking with stupefied amazement at the pulsating
jet squirting from his thigh.
"Hand steering-gear!" bawled the Commander, striving to dominate the
din of the action with a mechanical shout. He jumped the body of the
Yeoman of Signals, sprawled bloodily across the head of the ladder,
and stumbled blindly down the iron rungs.
"Give 'em hell, Number One!" he shouted, and caught a glimpse of his
Second-in-Command's head and shoulders above the rent and tattered
splinter-mats. "The blighters have got our range," he muttered, and
as he reached the upper deck he saw another torpedo hurtle from the
tube and vanish in a cloud of spray.
"Keep it going, boys!" he shouted, as he passed the midship gun.
"Give it to 'em hot and strong!"
The gun-layer turned from the eye-piece as he passed and grinned as
the smoking breech clanged open. His jumper and jersey were rent
from shoulder to hip, and he stanched a wound with cotton-waste while
the loader slammed a fresh cartridge home. The Destroyer,
temporarily out of control, fell broadside on to the sea; the waves
leaped at them and sluiced knee-deep across the deck ere the
Commander reached the after steering position and got the kicking
hand-wheel manned. The wind carried the sound of cheering to the
Commander's ears, and he glanced over his shoulder to see the rest of
the division wheel and go crashing past his quarter in a cloud of
spray and funnel smoke. The next astern had taken charge as the
leader fell out of line. A burst of shrapnel whipped the after
funnel into a colander, and the Gunner rolled into the scuppers,
clutching helplessly at a cleat, and slid into the embrace of a
curling sea that folded its arms about him and carried him from sight.
The Lieutenant (E) appeared on deck and clawed his way aft through
clouds of steam.
"Main steam-pipe, port engine-room's cut, sir," he shouted. "Nine
knots is the best we'll get out of her." He stared ruefully to
leeward.
The fight had swept away to the south, and the crippled leader
followed, to pass presently across the battle's trail. Clinging to
lifebuoys and scraps of German wreckage were pitiful drenched human
beings. Hands waved, white faces appeared in the smooth flanks of
the waves or vanished, smothered in their breaking crests.
The Commander jerked the telegraphs and surveyed his rolling deck.
"Cease fire!" he bawled, satisfied himself that the battered whaler
was still seaworthy, and gave the order, "Away lifeboat's crew!"
They lowered her, manned by men still breathless with the exultant
flush of battle, some with hasty bandages about them, and to and fro
they plied amid that tumbling sea and the unmanned foe calling for
dear life at their rough hands. The Destroyer turned to make a lee,
and along her rail the ship's company gathered, with heaving-lines
and lifebuoys.
A wave passed surging down the ship's side, carrying on its crest the
head and shoulders of a man. His face was ashen grey, and his hands
grabbed ineffectually at the slipping coils of a rope's end thrown
from the forecastle. He slid helplessly into the trough of the sea,
his eyes wide and terrified, staring at the rows of faces above him.
"'Ere, Fritz," said a rough voice, "'ang on!" and another rope jerked
and fell with a splash beside him. Again the clutching hands went
out, but his strength was gone. The white face fell forward--jerked
back, gasping and choking--the hands went up.
"Gangway, you fools! He'll drown!" Two able seamen, leaning over
the side--one had escaped from a German prison camp six months
previously, and was enjoying himself--were thrust apart; a burly
figure in socks, and divested of his reefer jacket, steadied himself
with one hand on a davit while he measured the distance, and dived.
"Number One!" gasped the incredulous Commander. "Don't tell me
that's the First Lieutenant?"
"Yessir," said the Wardroom Steward, who had been passing up
ammunition, with a cigarette behind his ear, and a hastily-collected
gallery of lady-loves' photographs projecting from his breast-pocket.
"Yessir." Adding, as one in the confidence of the Wardroom: "'Im as
lost 'is brother, bombed by them 'Uns. Actin' regardless, you might
say."
The First Lieutenant, treading water, was effecting a businesslike
bowline under the armpits of the drowning man, and avoiding his
enfeebled embrace with considerable presence of mind.
Finally the two were hauled inboard and the ship's company raised a
cheer.
"Shut up, will you!" spluttered the First Lieutenant, angrily,
wringing the water from his sodden nether garments. He avoided the
eye of his Commanding Officer.
The ship's company, under direction of the Surgeon, applied
themselves to first aid with all the enthusiasm of victors and
amateurs in the gentle art of saving life. The whaler, laden with
dazed and bedraggled captives, was pulling wearily up to the quarter,
rising and plunging in the steep seas. The business of the ensuing
five minutes brought the Commander and his First Lieutenant face to
face.
"Funny little fellow, ain't you?" said the former.
"Bah!" said the Lieutenant. Then added, savagely, "You wait till
next time!"
X
THE PARTING OF THE WAYS
(1919)
The Light Cruiser that had shortened-in, whose paying-off pendant
hung limp from mainmast-head to quarter-deck, asked permission to
proceed.
From her berth in the upper waters of the Firth the Flagship was
invisible; but repeating ships and dockyard signal station caught the
query, tossed it from one to the other till the Flagship had it, and
sent the affirmative signal back to the Light Cruiser as her Captain
stepped up the ladder to the bridge.
He walked to the rail that overlooked the forecastle, caught the eye
of the First Lieutenant, and nodded. The latter raised his arm, as
one who had received and understood an order. He transmitted it
apparently by telepathy, for immediately the last lengths of cable
came grinding through the hawse pipe.
The anchor was weighed, the invisible propellers began to eddy the
water round the stern, hoists of flags shot from the lockers to the
yardarm, said their say, and descended in whirls of colour; yet
everywhere was the same scrupulous economy of word and gesture.
Officers and men were performing a task--that of getting under
weigh--so familiar as to be almost mechanical; yet, conscious that
they were carrying it out together for the last time, gave, as it
were, a little exhibition of supreme competency, each for his own
soul's private satisfaction.
The Captain, looking down on it all from the altitude of the bridge,
saw that it was good. It was so good that it gave him a sort of lump
in the throat. He knew the Chief Yeoman was watching him, awaiting
the word that would send their last signal to the anchored remnant of
the fleet ahead. Yet now it came to the moment, he hated the words
those gaily coloured flags would spell.
"Odd numbered ships and even numbered ships"--thus you address a
fleet--"Good-bye."
He glanced aft and saw the paying-off pendant take the wind of their
passage, unfold its sinuous length, and float out into the breeze
with the gilded bladder dancing lightly in the smoke above their
wake--glanced ahead at their grey "comrades of the mist," lying
patiently at anchor awaiting the summons that would bid them also
"return in peace to enjoy the blessings of the land"--glanced finally
at the Chief Yeoman....
They passed a Battleship at a cable's length, a towering mammoth
whose superstructures were alive with men. From somewhere forward a
man's voice reached them across the water: "Stand by to give three
cheers.... Hip! Hip! Hip!" and a great roar of sound breaking like
rollers against the hills of the South Shore, those misty wooded
hills whose sameness they had cursed so often through four years of
war.
Ship after ship cheered them as they passed. The rows of motionless
figures standing stiffly at attention warmed to those cheers. They
attributed their obvious gusto to the proud patches on funnels and
side, the little Cruiser's battle scars. They were conscious of a
clean record in the canteen ashore and on the upland playing-fields,
for these things weigh in the quick reckoning of men's hearts at
parting. But they were being cheered above all for the paying-off
pendant they flew. All the world loves a lover, grateful to this
ebullition of nature for reminder and promise alike. To the sailor,
however, there is no fairer sight than a ship with 600 feet of white
bunting floating astern. It may not be his ship, but it reminds him
that his turn will come.
A semaphore waved a parting message from a brother Captain: a cryptic
jest that wrinkled the corners of the recipient's eyes; a great man
stepped out on to the spacious grandeur of his quarter-deck, and
raised his cap with a dignified, half-affectionate gesture of
farewell.... And then they were sliding under the towering girders
of the Forth Bridge.
Southward ho! With the threat of a north-easterly gale on the
quarter to speed their heels: south and west for a night and a day,
pricking off the familiar names of light vessels amid the steep
yellow waves off the east coast; overtaking Channel traffic creeping
out to seas where once more no fear was; red ensigns and white
dipping in salute and acknowledgment; with the land like a grey
shadow on the starboard hand; with war a grey shadow on the memory,
fading fast....