THE OFFICERS.
The _Belligerent's_ captain, John Horatio Spencer, D.S.O., was a fine
type of the modern British naval officer, and a thorough seaman, who
had risen in his profession through sheer merit and force of character.
He had been lucky, it is true, for as a young lieutenant he had seen
much active service in West Africa, had been severely wounded, was
mentioned in despatches for 'great gallantry and resource,' and had
received the Distinguished Service Order. In 1900, again, as the senior
lieutenant of a second-class cruiser on the Cape of Good Hope station,
he was landed with the naval guns for the relief of Ladysmith. He again
did excellent service, was promoted to commander in 1901, to captain
seven years later, and 1914 found him commanding a first-class
battleship at the comparatively early age of forty-three.
In appearance he was a big, thick-set man, nearly six feet tall, and
broad in proportion. He had a red, clean-shaven face, a pair of
penetrating blue eyes which seemed to read one's innermost thoughts,
and dark hair slightly shot with gray over the temples.
Every ship he had ever commanded, from a destroyer upwards, had been a
happy one. His officers loved him as a friend and admired him as a
superior, and 'Our John,' as they affectionately called him, spent far
more time in their company than he did in the fastnesses of his own
cabin. He hated the solitude of life in his own apartments in the
after-end of the ship, and, when he had no guests of his own,
frequently had meals in the wardroom as an honorary member, and played
bridge and spun yarns in the smoking-room. He had the happy knack of
being friendly with every one with whom he came in contact, and
invariably treated his officers as equals when he was off duty.
On deck, of course, it was a different matter, for there he was very
much their commanding officer, and they his subordinates; and, as
Tickle, the junior watch-keeper, once put it, 'the owner[10] was the
whitest and the straightest man on God's earth; but Heaven help you if
you make a fool of yourself on deck!'
[10] The commanding officer of a man-of-war is frequently
referred to as 'the owner,' or 'the old man.'
Captain Spencer did bite sometimes, and bite hard; but the culprit
generally deserved all he got, and bore no grudge whatsoever. More
often than not he would be discovered the same evening in the
smoking-room having a sherry-and-bitters with 'the old man,' just to
show there was no ill-feeling on either side.
On the mess-deck the captain was revered in rather a different way, for
the men, while admiring him, regarded him with a certain amount of awe.
Some of the younger and more timid ordinary seamen and boys, indeed,
looked upon him as a sort of awful deity, an ogre almost, who sat in
his cabin all day long inventing new schemes for their eternal
damnation. They were frightened of him, and, on the rare occasions when
they did catch sight of his four gold stripes on deck, felt rather
inclined to run away and hide their faces. It was foolish of them, for
a kinder-hearted man than the skipper it would be impossible to
imagine.
But the men saw comparatively little of him, and had few opportunities
of discovering his true character. He appeared on deck for 'divisions'
every morning; walked round on Sundays criticising their clothes, the
length of their hair, and the cleanliness of the ship; was always on
the bridge at sea; and punished them when they misbehaved themselves.
They realised he was just, and justice is what the bluejacket most
admires; but they were not aware that he took a deep interest in them
and their affairs, and that he knew everything that went on on board.
Neither did they perceive that he frequently went to a great deal of
trouble to stretch points in their favour in the way of leave and other
privileges.
'Our John' hated advertisement in any form; and this, perhaps, was why
the men never really understood his true kindliness of heart. For
instance, when he subscribed five pounds towards a fund for the benefit
of the widow of one of his men who had died, or two pounds towards the
ship's concert party, he gave the money anonymously. When he granted
the men an extra forty-eight hours' leave on his own responsibility,
and because he considered they had earned it by their good behaviour,
he never told them so.
So, from the lower-deck point of view, Captain Spencer was justly
admired and greatly feared; but there was not a man on board who had
not the fullest confidence in him and his judgment, or who would not
cheerfully have followed him to the very gates of hell if he had asked
them. Neither was there a more efficient or a happier ship than the
_Belligerent_. Her officers and men knew it, and gloried in the fact.
But no small credit for this excellent state of affairs was due to the
commander and other officers. The former, the Honourable Algernon
D'Arcy Travers, was the direct antithesis of the captain in appearance.
He was tall and very thin, but was a pleasant messmate with a very
pronounced sense of humour, and on occasions behaved with all the
boisterous bonhomie of a junior sub-lieutenant. His excessive leanness
did not worry him in the least, though he did once say that he wished
his 'hinge' were a little better padded and the wardroom chairs rather
softer. It was a matter of some import to his wife, though, for that
lady sent him bottles of malt extract to thicken the flesh on his
bones. This nutritive compound, however, was generally handed over to
his bluejacket messenger, who liked the sweet taste of it; and that
youth, already chubby and well-favoured, was gradually assuming the
proportions of a young elephant. The commander found that being thin
was an advantage in some ways; and on riotous guest nights, when he
made as much noise as anybody present, it certainly permitted him to
scramble through the square opening in the back of one of the wardroom
chairs without much difficulty.
It was a feat few of his messmates could perform. The
engineer-commander, George Piston, a well-covered officer, had tried it
on one occasion, and had stuck half-way through. His messmates, headed
by the commander himself, cheered him on with howls of merriment; but
the victim was laughing so much that he seemed to have swelled. He
could not budge one way or the other, and there was every prospect of
his having to go through life with a chair securely fastened round his
portly middle. They took off his garments one by one; but it was no
use. They used vaseline and oil as lubricants, and endeavoured to tuck
the folds of flesh through the narrow opening, but without avail.
'For heaven's sake send for a saw!' spluttered the gasping officer,
relapsing uncomfortably on the sofa and beginning to feel rather
alarmed. 'I can hardly breathe. Give me a whisky-and-soda, some one, or
I shall burst!'
The saw arrived in due course, and the chair was removed with some
damage to itself. The gallant officer never attempted the feat again.
The commander, an ex-torpedo specialist, was a good officer at his
work, and the _Belligerent_ always looked as clean and as smart as
a new pin. Her organisation, too, was as perfect as it could be. The
ship's company were very fond of 'the Bloke,' as they called him; and
when men did misbehave themselves he generally made the punishment fit
the crime. When two ordinary seamen, Barter and Hitchcock, began to
give trouble, for instance, he hit upon rather an original method of
dealing with them. He provided both of them with an ordinary
singlestick and a face-mask, but no body-pads, and then promised them
one penny each for every visible wale inflicted on the anatomy of the
other. The instigator imagined that he would have to shell out a
shilling at the most; but after a bout lasting for a fierce fifteen
minutes, examination in the bathroom at the hands of a ship's corporal
showed that Barter had earned one shilling and eightpence, and
Hitchcock two and a penny. They were never obstreperous again, and the
ship's company, instead of offering them sympathy, laughed
immoderately.
The commander, like other naval officers, had his bad moments, and
sometimes the watch-keepers found it advisable to steer clear of him
before breakfast. But even if an explosion did occur no bones were ever
broken, for they all knew he said a great deal more than he meant.
After breakfast and a pipe he was amiability itself, provided nothing
went wrong.
Chase, the senior lieutenant-commander and gunnery officer, has already
been described; and the next in seniority was Vernon Hatherley, the
lieutenant-commander (T.). He was something of an exquisite. He took a
great pride in his personal appearance, was reported to wear silk
slumber-wear, and kept a store of cosmetics and unguents in his cabin
for the anointing of his face and hair. His messmates knew this, and,
headed by No. 1, sometimes shampooed him with whisky-and-soda after
dinner. But Torps, as they called him, was an excellent fellow, and
took the ragging all in good part. Moreover, he generally succeeded in
getting his own back by discovering something wrong with the electric
lights in his tormentors' cabins at times when they most wanted to use
them. He was an x-chaser, in that he had done remarkably well in all
his different examinations; but besides being an expert theorist, he
was an officer who knew the practical side of his business from A to Z.
The navigator, Christopher Colomb, had just married a young and pretty
wife, and did not spend more time on board than he could possibly help.
As a consequence, his messmates saw comparatively little of him, unless
the _Belligerent_ was cruising, and Mrs Colomb could not follow her
husband. The captain occasionally succeeded in getting him to play golf
in the afternoons; but Colomb preferred his wife's society to that of
any one else. When he was on board in the evenings he shut himself in
his cabin, and spent the time writing a learned treatise on _Magnetic
Influences at Sea_. The book is still being written.
Peter Wooten, the next senior non-specialist officer of the military
branch, was doing a two-year spell in a battleship, after having been
in command of destroyers and gunboats for the past six years. He hated
the drudgery of big-ship life, where he acted as the commander's
understudy on the upper deck, had charge of the midshipmen and their
instruction, arranged the ordinary seamen's training classes, worked
the derrick for hoisting in and out boats, and generally acted as a
sort of 'odd job' man. The life was fairly comfortable, it is true; but
he much preferred the joys of commanding his own small ship to being a
comparative nobody in a vessel the size of the _Belligerent_. He was a
burly, deep-chested man, with fair, curly hair, tanned face, and a pair
of clear, humorous blue eyes. He was fresh from China, where he had
commanded a tiny river gunboat up the Yang-tse-kiang; and there, miles
up the great river, far away from any admiral, and completely 'on his
own,' he had made history in a small way. He was a great character, and
his stories of the Chinese revolution, when he could be induced to tell
them, were sometimes amusing and always interesting. (He was the
commanding officer of Martin's destroyer when that ordinary seaman
joined the 'black navy' soon after the outbreak of the present war, so
perhaps we may be pardoned for allowing him to spin one of his yarns.
It has the advantage of being true.)
'It was quite a pretty little show,' he said one evening in the
smoking-room after dinner, when somebody had egged him on to talk after
a second glass of port. 'Have any of you fellows ever heard of a place
called Kiang-fu, up the Yang-tse? You might know it, No. 1; you're an
old China bird.'
Chase shook his head. 'Sorry I don't, Peter. But let's have the yarn,
all the same.'
Wooten lit his pipe. 'Kiang-fu,' he started, 'is one of their walled
towns on the banks of the river. It's a beastly place, full of stinks
and bugs and abominations generally; and the only white people there
are the consul and his wife, a couple of missionaries, and two
merchants. Well, one morning my old _Kingfisher_ was lying about
twenty miles downstream, and a Chinaman from the consulate at Kiang-fu
arrived in a sampan with a note from the consul to say that five
thousand rebels had arrived before the place, and that there was going
to be some scrapping. There were about a thousand Imperial troops
inside the town, Johnson the consul said, and he was in a bit of a funk
as to what would happen when the rebels took the place. They'd have
butchered every one, of course, Europeans included. My orders were to
protect British interests, but not to fight, so I upped killick[11] and
steamed for Kiang-fu for all I was worth. We got about six and an
onion[12] out of the old bus, I remember, and reached there about noon.'
He paused and sucked thoughtfully at his pipe.
[11] Weighed anchor.
[12] A fraction of a knot.
'And what happened then?' queried some one.
'I found the bally battle in full swing,' Wooten went on. 'Guy Fawkes
Day wasn't in it, and both sides were blazing away for all they were
worth, and making a hell of a row. However, they weren't doing much
damage to each other. I anchored my hooker about a couple of hundred
yards from the shore, where we could get a decent view of what went on,
manned my two six-pounders and the Maxim, and hoisted an ensign and a
large white flag--wardroom tablecloth it was--in a boat, and then went
ashore to see Johnson. Things were pretty lively, and shells were
bursting and bullets were whistling all over the place. The rebel
attack was to come off that night, and as there could be only one end
to it, I took Johnson and his missus, the two missionaries, the two
shopkeepers, and Heaven alone knows how many Christian Chinese off to
my ship. The upper deck was fairly packed with 'em. Then we sat down to
watch the sport. One of the shopkeepers, I may say, was a Scotsman, and
the other a Yank, and they wanted me to order the rebs. to shove off
out of it and leave Kiang-fu alone. They had a lot of valuable stuff in
their godowns[13] waiting to be shipped down the river, and said the
whole lot of it 'u'd be looted if the city fell.
[13] A 'godown' is a warehouse.
'I cursed them for a couple of tizzy-snatchers,' he resumed, grinning
at the recollection; 'I told 'em they ought to be jolly thankful to
have got off with their lives; and asked 'em how the dooce I could
dictate to five thousand ruddy cut-throats with Mauser rifles and Lord
knows how many field guns--decent guns, too; none of your clap-trap
rubbish. I had exactly thirty men all told, a broken-winded eighty-ton
gun-boat, two six-pounders, and one Maxim. Pretty tall order, wasn't
it? However, I was still yapping to 'em on deck when I heard a sort of
_phut_, and a bally bullet buried itself in the deck about a foot
off my leg. It came from the direction of the rebel trenches, about
five hundred yards off, and some silly blighter had evidently eased off
a rifle at us for the fun of the thing. I heard one or two more bullets
come whistling overhead--damned bad shooting they made--so sent all the
refugees over to the lee side of the deck out of harm's way. Then I
trained my guns on the rebs., and hoisted all the ensigns I had. They
knocked off firing then, so I got into the boat with the consul, the
wardroom tablecloth, and the largest ensign I could find, and pulled
ashore.' He paused.
'Had you any weapons with you?' somebody asked.
'Lord, no!' said Wooten. 'Doesn't do to let a Chinaman see you're
frightened of him. I took a walking-stick, and Johnson had a white
umbrella. I was in a dooce of a funk, though, and when we landed we
found a whole bally company of soldiers waiting to receive us.'
'What! a guard of honour?' asked Chase.
'Don't you believe it. They had fixed bayonets and loaded rifles, and I
felt rather nervous as to what was going to happen. You see, there
wasn't another British ship within a hundred miles of us. However, I
landed with the consul, and a Chinese officer with a drawn sword came
forward to receive us. He wasn't a bad fellow, and talked quite decent
English, with an American accent. I asked him what the dooce they meant
by having the troops there as if they wanted to scupper us, and told
him who the consul was, and that I was the C.O. of the man-of-war, and
that, on behalf of his Britannic Majesty, we wished to see his General.
He said the old bloke was having his afternoon caulk, and that they
daren't wake him. I said he'd better roust the old josser out, and be
damned smart about it. He hummed and hawed a bit over that, and then
said that if we'd come along with him he'd take us to the headquarters,
and see if we could have an interview. I wasn't going to kow-tow to any
bally Chinaman, though, so I told him that if he didn't take steps to
have the General brought to us in less than half-an-hour I'd raise
hell's delight. It's no use being anything but dictatorial with
Chinamen,' he went on to explain; 'and if you can bluff 'em into
believing that you've got the whip-hand they generally knuckle under.
We had some more talkee-talkee, and then he did go off with his men,
and jolly glad I was to see the last of 'em. Twenty minutes later the
General arrived. He was rather a fine-looking old boy, with no pigtail,
and was dressed up in khaki and a sword. He had a couple of A.D.C.'s
with him. He couldn't talk English, so I asked him through the consul
what he meant by allowing his troops to fire on my ship, and said that
I should have to report it, and so on. He said they hadn't done it. I
said they had, and that if he came on board I'd jolly soon prove it.
Well, after a lot of jawbation we got him into the boat, with the
A.D.C.'s, took him off to the ship, and showed him the bullet-mark in
the deck. He got in a bit of a funk then, so Johnson and I drew up a
document in Chinese and English, in which he said he was sorry for what
had occurred, and so on. It went on to say that he agreed to abandon
the siege of Kiang-fu, as British interests were at stake, so we'd more
or less cornered him. He signed like a lamb, wily old devil; but then
we remembered that no document is valid in China unless it's stamped
with the official seal of the man who signed it. We asked him where the
seal was, but he hadn't got it on him. Johnson asked him where it was,
and he said he'd got it in his old headquarters, about ten miles
downstream. He volunteered to go and fetch it, but we weren't having
any. The upshot of the whole affair was that we sent one of the
A.D.C.'s ashore to order the siege to be stopped, and the rebels to
retire, and took the General and the other A.D.C. down the river. Then
we sent the A.D.C. ashore to get the seal, and had the document
properly stamped. That's all, I think.'
'But did the rebels retire?' asked the commander.
Wooten nodded. 'Yes,' he said. 'They left the place like lambs, and the
Imperialist colonel inside nearly fell on my neck and wept. The two
shopkeepers gave me a box of a hundred cigars between them! Damned
nasty cigars, too!'
His listeners laughed.
'And what happened to you?' asked Chase.
'Oh,' smiled Wooten, 'I sent the document to the admiral, with a
covering letter, and jolly nearly got badly scrubbed for exceeding my
duty and abducting the General. However, it was all right in the end,
and I believe the old man was secretly rather pleased with what I'd
done.'
'So he jolly well ought to have been,' remarked one of the
watch-keepers.
'M'yes, but he was a man who didn't say much. However, a month later a
British colonel and a couple of other officers came down from Pekin to
confer with me about putting Kiang-fu in a state of defence in case the
rebels came again, for by that time the powers that be had come to the
conclusion that if they did capture it, it wouldn't do us any good. The
colonel and I went ashore together, he with his two officers, and I
with a sheet of paper and a pencil.
'"You'd better loophole that wall," he started off, pointing at a solid
stone affair about three feet thick. "This house had better be
demolished, and you'll have to dig a trench along here, with decent
sand-bag head-cover. I should think a hundred and fifty rifles will be
enough to man it, provided you have a couple of Maxims at each corner.
Over there we'll have an emplacement for a field-gun, and there another
trench."
'He went on like that the whole of one grilling forenoon, and by the
time he'd finished I'd totted up my figures, and found he'd used the
best part of a thousand men.
'"That's all right, sir," said I; "and when may I expect the regiment?"
'"Regiment!" he said, rather surprised. "What regiment d'you mean?"
'"The regiment for doing all this work and garrisoning the place, sir,"
said I innocently. "You've been talking about knocking down houses,
erecting barricades, and digging trenches right and left. I've only got
thirty men."
'"The deuce you have!" he said thoughtfully. "We'd better"----
'"Go and have lunch, sir," I chipped in.
'"Excellent idea," said he, mopping his face.
'So off we went, had a top-hole _tiffin_, and that was the last we
ever heard of it. Kiang-fu never was put in a state of defence so far
as I know. However, the rebels never came there again, so every one was
quite happy. I tell you,' Wooten concluded with a grin, 'one
occasionally has some pretty rummy times up the Yang-tse.'
One had, apparently, and Peter Wooten was an officer of great
initiative and resource, who had served his country well, and had
upheld the dignity of her flag on more than one occasion. Chinese
generals, mandarins, and other Celestial potentates were nothing to
him. He bullied or bluffed them all into doing what he wanted, and they
used to walk in terror of 'the red-faced devil with the loud voice,' as
they called him. No wonder, then, that Peter felt himself tied by the
leg in a battleship, where, to use his own expression, he was a 'mere
dog's body.'
The watch-keeping lieutenants were George English, Aubrey Plantagenet
Fitz-Johnson (usually known in the wardroom as 'the Dook'), Henry
Archer Boyle, and Tobias Tickle.
English was a mild, inoffensive little man, whose chief ambition in
life was to retire from the navy while he was still young, marry a
wife, live in a small whitewashed cottage miles away from any sea, rear
pigs and chickens, and collect butterflies. For all his lack of
ambition, however, he was a good and zealous officer. He never made a
bad mistake; but never, on the other hand, did anything very brilliant.
He was a conscientious plodder.
'The Dook' was a tall, dashing, immaculate person, with sleek and shiny
hair. He had a wonderful taste in dress, and how many different suits
of plain clothes he possessed nobody but himself and his servant knew.
How much he owed his tailor and his haberdasher nobody was aware of but
those long-suffering tradesmen themselves, for Fitz-Johnson cast all
his bills into the fire immediately on their receipt. His garments were
always fashionable and well cut; his ties, collars, shirts, and socks
of the newest and most exclusive pattern. His uniform frock-coat fitted
his _svelte_ figure like a glove; his trousers were always perfectly
creased; and on Sundays he always appeared at 'divisions' with a
brand-new pair of kid gloves--he never wore the same pair twice. The
men called him Algy. He looked it. He was essentially a lady-killer.
His cabin was full of autographed photographs of feminine admirers and
mementoes in the shape of faded dance-programmes and little knots and
bows of ribbon. His bedspread, a wonderful creation in blue silk,
embroidered with his crest and monogram, had been worked by one set of
fair fingers; his door and scuttle curtains, of chintz, by some one
else; and a little bag for his hairbrushes by a third lady. When the
mail arrived his letter-rack in the wardroom was crammed with bills,
and letters in feminine handwriting. He kept up a voluminous
correspondence, but was wise enough never to have more than one ardent
admirer in any one place. He was a regular 'devyl with the girls,'
there was no doubt about that; and if the ship arrived at some new
place, and the wardroom took it into its head it would like to give a
tea-fight, 'the Dook' was immediately sent ashore to prospect. How he
did it nobody quite knew; but at the end of twenty-four hours he would
be on friendly terms not only with all the young and pretty girls in
the place, but also with their mothers, aunts, and female cousins. He
was always on the verge of being engaged to be married, but never quite
pulled it off. His host of unpaid bills, and the fact that he had
little or no money besides his pay, probably frightened him. But, at
any rate, he was a valuable acquisition as a messmate, for he sang
well, and could play almost any musical instrument under the sun.
His chief failing was that he was never less than a quarter of an hour
late for his watch. 'I'm deuced sorry, old chap,' was his usual excuse
to the officer he had to relieve. 'The fella didn't call me properly.'
'Oh, to hell with you and your rotten excuses!' would growl the
irritated watch-keeper who had been kept up. 'You're about the frozen
limit! The corporal of the watch was hammering on your cabin door for
at least a quarter of an hour!'
'It really wasn't my fault, though,' Fitz-Johnson would protest mildly.
'Please don't get shirty, old chap.'
It was impossible to be really angry with him; but he continued to
relieve late until the other watch-keepers hit upon a scheme of keeping
him up for an extra half-hour at the end of his own watch. That cured
him eventually.
Boyle, the next in seniority, was a young, enthusiastic, and very
energetic officer, who wished one day to become a gunnery officer. He
had charge of the after-turret, with its pair of twelve-inch guns, and
spent much of his time in a suit of oily overalls scrambling about in
the depths of the hydraulic machinery. He was of an inventive turn of
mind too, and even at the comparatively early age of twenty-four had
already designed a self-stabilising seaplane, a non-capsizable boat, a
patent razor-stropper, and an adjustable chair. This last, which he
used in his cabin, was really most ingenious. It had hidden springs all
over it, and you pushed a button and it did the rest. You could use it
for anything, from an operating-table to a trousers-press; and it was
often brought into the wardroom after dinner on guest-nights for its
various uses to be demonstrated. It worked beautifully, until one night
the _padre_, who was reclining gracefully at full length, pressed
the wrong button in a sudden fit of exuberance. The chair promptly
bucked like a kicking mule. The front shot up and the back fell down,
and the reverend occupant hurtled adroitly backwards straight into the
arms of an astonished marine servant with a tray full of whiskies and
sodas. He came to the ground with a crash, with the marine and the
liquid on top of him, and everybody laughed.
The servant, drenched through, retired grumbling to change his
garments; and the Rev. Stephen Holiman scrambled to his feet, surveyed
the mess of broken glass and liquor on the deck, and then felt his
pulped collar and examined his clothes.
'Boyle, you silly ass!' he expostulated, justifiably annoyed, and
trying to mop himself dry with a handkerchief, 'why the d-dickens
couldn't you tell me the thing was going to pitch me over backwards
like that?'
'I'm awfully sorry, _padre_,' spluttered the inventor, weak with
laughing. 'You must have pressed the wrong button; but even then I've
never known it do that before. Perhaps it wants oiling.'
'Take the rotten thing away and drown it!' retorted the _padre_, as
angry as he ever got. 'It oughtn't to be allowed on board. It's ruined
my clothes!' But the _padre_ was a sportsman with a sense of humour,
and after a little more grumbling, during which he got no sympathy from
his messmates, cheered up and went off to change. Ever afterwards, when
the chair appeared, he endeavoured to make it play the same trick on
some unsuspecting guest. But it never would.
Tobias Tickle, commonly known as 'Toby,' was the officer of Martin's
division, whom we have already met. He had married very young, and had
a rich and pretty wife, who was as popular as himself; but this did not
prevent Toby from being a very riotous member of society on occasions.
He was loved by his men; for, while very strict, he took a great
interest in them and their affairs. He knew the surname and Christian
name of every bluejacket in his division; knew whether they were
married, engaged to be married, courting, or single; and always gave
them good advice when they asked for it. They often did. On more than
one occasion he or his wife had helped them in other ways.
Once, when Mrs Buttings, the wife of an able seaman, had been ailing,
and had had to undergo a rather serious operation, Mrs Toby heard of it
through her husband. She promptly visited the patient, found her living
in a miserable little dwelling in a back street in Landport, with four
children between the ages of six months and five years, and nobody to
look after her except the neighbours. This would not do for Mrs Tickle.
She promptly engaged a trained nurse, sent the children off to a
farmhouse in the country, visited the invalid daily, saw that she had a
proper diet, and provided her with many sovereigns' worth of coal and
luxuries.
Buttings himself, when he went ashore and saw the transformation in his
usually rather slovenly home, was furious. Like most bluejackets, he
hated the idea of charity in any form, and went straight off to see
Tickle.
'Look 'ere, sir,' he said; 'with orl my doo respects to you, it ain't
playin' the game!'
'Not playing the game!' answered the lieutenant, quite at a loss to
understand what the man was driving at. 'What d'you mean?'
'Well, sir, it's like this 'ere. I goes 'ome an' finds my 'ouse rigged
up like a bloomin' 'orspitle, an' the missus lyin' in bed with flowers,
an' beef-tea, an' port wine, an' sich like. I finds another 'ooman
there a-lookin' 'arter 'er--dressed up like a 'orspitle nurse, she
wus--an' w'en I arsks 'er wot she done with the kids, she sez as 'ow
they'd bin sent to the country. W'en I wants to know 'oo's done it, she
sezs Mrs Tickle. It ain't fair on a man, sir, doin' a thing like that,
an' habductin' of 'is kids. S'welp me, it ain't!' Buttings paused for
breath.
'I'm sorry you think that, Buttings,' said Tickle gently. 'Your wife
has been very ill, and what she wants is good food and proper
treatment. She's getting that now. The children, too, are out in the
country having an excellent time. After all, my wife didn't do it
without asking Mrs Buttings.'
'Yessir. That's all werry well; but I pays the rent o' the bally
'ouse.'
'Of course I understand that. But surely you don't grudge your wife a
little comfort after she's been so ill?'
'No, sir, o' course not,' said the seaman, scratching his head. 'But
'oo's goin' to pay for orl this 'ere? Port wine an' chicken jelly ain't
got for nothin'.'
Tickle felt half-inclined to tell him outright that he, or, rather, his
wife, was prepared to pay for everything; but if he had, the able
seaman would at once have been in open rebellion. The nurse alone came
to two guineas a week, and the food and little luxuries for the invalid
to as much again. 'Well, Buttings,' he said, pretending to consider,
'suppose it costs about seven-and-six a week. That's about it, I should
imagine.'
Buttings seemed rather relieved. 'Seven an' a tanner,' he said, more
happily. 'I kin manage that, sir. I ain't got much money to splosh
abart, o' course,' he hastened to explain; 'but I don't like ter think
as 'ow I ain't payin' for what my old 'ooman's gettin'.'
And so, for the time being, the matter ended, and both parties were
satisfied.
Mrs Buttings recovered in due course, and became her old buxom self,
and then it was that she enlightened her husband as to what the Tickles
had really done. Buttings was speechless with rage.
But Christmas came soon afterwards, and on the morning itself, as
Tickle was having his bath, there came a knock at his cabin door.
'Hallo, what is it?' he asked, springing up and wrapping a towel round
himself.
'It's Buttings, sir,' said the seaman, pulling aside the curtain. 'I've
got this 'ere for you, sir, from my missus an' meself; an' this, sir,
is for your lady. We both wishes you an' your lady a 'Appy Christmas,
sir.' There was a suspicious huskiness in his voice; and, after pushing
two small parcels into the astonished officer's hands, he fled before
Tickle could say so much as 'Thank you.'
One package contained a highly ornamental silver cigarette-case, and
the other a small gold brooch of impossible design. Accompanying each
gift was a flamboyant card with a chaste design of clasped hands,
wreaths and sprigs of forget-me-nots, and true-lovers' knots. Below
were the words: 'In friendship we are united.' Inside, in very
laborious handwriting, came the inscription: 'With great gratitude from
Able Seaman and Mrs Reuben Buttings.'
'Well, I'm damned!' muttered the lieutenant, gazing at the presents,
deeply touched. The little gifts, which had cost Buttings and his wife
many of their hard-earned shillings, were their way of showing that
they had not forgotten.
Mrs Toby was so overcome when she received her brooch that she nearly
wept with emotion. 'Dear, dear people!' she murmured gently; 'I love
them!'
And still some folk have the effrontery to say that there is no bond of
sympathy between the officers and men of the Royal Navy.