leave for Calais, which being duly caught he sat back and let thoughts
run through his brain valves with an open throttle. He reached Paris
the next morning and called on his French colleagues, who were
Directors of the lines to the Riviera. Haltingly but obstinately he
explained how important it was that he should have certain flowers in
London by the evening of the following day. It was believed that there
was one horticulturist in the South of France who kept a camellia farm.
He had long held the repute of a mad Englishman among his French
colleagues and his predilection for driving engines appeared only
a vagary of sport. It was more conceivable to them that he should
want a special train to fetch camellias from the Riviera, but even
so whether it was, as he said, for a wedding or, as they suspected,
_pour complimenter une dame_, it seemed an inconceivable luxury. They
suggested telegraphing and arranging for the next train from the
Riviera to bring a few blossoms on his behalf. He assented wildly and
waited a day and a night in Paris. He was fond of describing how the
Riviera Express reached Paris on the early morning of Wednesday leaving
him one half-hour to transfer the expected bouquet of camellias to the
first train leaving for London. What was his amazement when he found
the officials of the train struggling under three huge baskets full!
There was just time to convey them from the _Paris, Lyon Méditerranée_
station to the train at the _Gare du Nord_. That evening he reached
her apartment and sent a fresh bouquet to her while she was dressing.
The answer was an invitation to her box that night. He had moved her
at last! The compliment had shot home and it only remained for him to
crown his deed by scattering the remainder of the flowers outside her
doors as a surprise. He emptied three basketfuls. There were a hundred
bunches at least in each and to his delight they carpeted the whole of
the tiny space between her dressing-room and her sitting-room. Bunch by
bunch he flowered the floor and went his way. The result could only be
imagined. When Melissa Delme swept out of her room in an opera cloak
of the colour of green agate with a silver lining she felt her feet
treading on something soft. It was a minute before she realised that
the carpet had changed its touch and texture during the time she had
taken to change herself into evening clothes. Later in the evening she
allowed Ernest to know that he had added a full minute’s delight to her
simpler emotions. It was undiluted triumph!
News of Ernest’s _coup_ percolated the Clubs and led to more and more
serious attempts to win the unwinnable. His contemporaries racked
their brains and their bank accounts in the endeavour to surprise and
please her, but she was difficult to surprise and impossible to please.
For her generation she remained more than a little unattainable. She
was the great unattained. In fantasy I can visualise her now. She had
green-pupilled eyes like emeralds washed under spring water, and hair
that was neither gold nor bronze. Her step was long famous on the
boards. It was said by critics to be precisely composed of a Fairy’s
falter, an Angel’s tread and a Dryad’s trip. The divinities entrusted
with her composition had very deceptively fitted layers of Aphrodite
and Adonis in the mould without vitiating the exquisiteness of her sex.
Her boyishness made her girlishness even more feminine. Her femininity
framed her boyishness to perfection. While she reigned on the stage,
her dazzling purity, based on boredom and the unfortunate omission of
one vital element in her celestial make-up, made the acting profession
even more respectable than it really is. Clergymen’s daughters applied
for places in the Chorus; an Archdeacon’s wife wrote a play called
“Archidiaconal Functions,” which three Bishops incidentally denounced
by Pastoral without having read, and several Dowagers wrote to Mr.
Edwardes of the Gaiety Theatre giving permission for their unmarried
daughters to play leading parts.
And all the while Ernest was devising new ways of surprising her, and
his brother was trying to cap and supplant him. Ernest’s love became
Platonic perforce. He took the habit of inquiring her holiday movements
and taking the engine-driver’s place on the metals. It pleased him
fiercely to think that her life unwittingly was in his hands; that he
was even directing her path and her speed; that while she lay back in
cushioned companionship he kept lone watch spying out her lightning
track, as though it had been granted to him to carry her through space.
The first time he had hopped off the cab at the end of the journey and
revealed himself under his oily rags she was more than surprised. For
the second time in his life he had pleased her. No admirer hitherto had
adopted such an unexpected disguise of approach. The second time he
appeared to her as an engine-driver she took no notice. In the end he
was content to drive the trains in which she was travelling out of pure
and unrewarded intellectual love.
Peter had no profession or accomplishments, so he could only waste ways
and means to keep step with his brother’s courtship of Melissa. He
once crossed the Continent to watch her change trains at York. She was
staying in a country house, to which he had failed of an invitation,
but he travelled two days and a night to be in time to meet her on the
platform and to carry her wraps to the next. Then he waited bareheaded
while her train drew out.
Soon after this romantic excursion Peter’s affairs passed from bad to
worse financially, and finally a family conclave met to decide whether
to cut his losses or cut him adrift. Peter was the only light-hearted
person at this domestic trial and investigation. Though Melissa was
never mentioned, it was found that his debts had been largely incurred
in planning and conducting surprises, parties and compliments on
her behalf. His family were grave but generous. Ernest, as head of
the family, took a lenient view towards one whom he considered an
ineffectual rival; the game was in his hands. He suggested that his
brother should leave the country and promise his family not to return
provided they guaranteed him a tolerable income out of their own
inheritances. Peter’s future was thus settled. After the meeting Peter
approached his brother and rather limply muttered that he was sorry
to have caused all this trouble, but that if his brother would lend
him sixty pounds down that day he would gladly sail to Australia and
forgo the annuity his relations so kindly proposed for him. He promised
they would never hear of him again unless he struck gold or won the
Melbourne Cup. Ernest looked into his brother’s sheepy eyes and felt
moved both to pity and economy. It was surely better to present him
with sixty pounds then and there than to give him a banker’s order for
an annual hundred. He drove him to the Bank and gave him the sum in
crisp new notes, said good-bye handsomely and returned to his Club. He
had reason to feel virtuous, generous and comfortable.
An hour later he was about to sit down to a good dinner when a
messenger arrived from the Terminus station-master with an emergency
summons to drive a Special to the South Coast that evening. He looked
at his watch. He had twenty minutes to get to Victoria and look over
his engine. It always did him good mentally and physically to drive a
fast train to the sea, especially a small one made up of Saloon and
Guard’s Van. He could imagine making a speed record with no stops.
He was at Victoria in ten minutes. His overalls were ready and his
favourite fireman was already wiping the clutches with an oil rag. It
was a new powerful engine, the finest on the line, and he spent every
minute before the start fingering and touching levers and parts. Steam
had brought the boiler to the point of exasperation. At the sound of
the whistle he loosed the engine with a sniff and a plunge across the
Thames. It was exhilarating to gather speed and he had no thought
of the occupants of the Saloon--semi-royalties or South American
millionaires, no doubt. He gave them a rippling run over the steel
threads through Surrey and Kent. The engine throbbed and danced to
all the emotions that are procurable to steam and grease and steel,
and Ernest made the dash of his life--one indeed that he was never to
forget, though it was years before he dared tell, even in the secret
recesses of his Club.
As he neared Folkestone he felt proud of his own driving. He had not
lost a minute out of the fastest expected time. He was moving the
engine across the points as slickly as a dancer moves his partner in
and out of corners on a dancing floor. He slowed the train down to an
exact standstill like a musician bringing to final poise and close some
great piece upon the organ. He felt the great instrument of hissing
pipes and pounding pistons and escaping winds sink under his powerful
handling to a solemn standstill. But when all was over and the fireman
was creeping round the front of the engine with the oiler, Ernest felt
a certain curiosity to see what particular Pasha or Serene Highness or
Great Mogul or plain New Yorker could have afforded the cost of such
a trip. Slipping off the panting mass of metal he passed round the
station into the waiting-room, through which the passengers were bound
to pass. With a greater throb at heart than the engine had given in
its fastest moments, Ernest reeled. He had recognised that the Serene
Highness in this case was Melissa Delme. He could only pull the greasy
cap off his head and stand to foolish attention. Whether she deigned
to recognise him or not he never knew, for he devoted his eyesight
to exchanging a long and meaning look with the Pasha. The Pasha was
brother Peter! Ernest said he just stood and choked, as though he had
swallowed a lump of train grease. When the couple had both disappeared
in the direction of the Boulogne boat he began to feel that there was
something magnificent in his brother’s performance. Ernest crawled home
on a goods train and on arrival at Victoria inquired what the cost of
the Special had been. He was told that it had cost just sixty pounds!
A STUDY IN SMOKE
All that winter of the war men laboured at furious speed to furnish
the guns which the British Government had forgotten to make before the
war. Guns were needed imperatively for the navy, and even more for the
hapless army bogged in Flanders mud. So the factories and foundries of
Woolhurst worked at full pressure. The factories screamed and glittered
through day and night, and the foundries drew a muffled roar as an
occasional red mist burst out of their chimneys and a gun or part of a
gun was cast. It was slow but furious work--furious in the detail of
fire and molten metal, slow in the aggregate of fitting and testing
each mighty gun. Furious work for the sweltering workers, stokers, and
moulders, but slow, infinitely slow, to the waiting officials, and
slowest still for the officers and men waiting for gun equipment by
land or sea.
To beget a gun on official paper is a different thing from its long
generation and growth in the foundries. An order can order but not
quicken a gun’s delivery. The most imperious official cannot make the
molten metal more malleable to man’s dire need.
Thousands of workers wrought like cogs in a machine, surrendering
their thought and strength to the metal. The pay was good and the toil
overwhelming. There was no time or strength left to think of anything
except the immediate toil. They were fascinated and caught like moths
upon the outskirts of that chaotic bonfire for which they were binding
iron faggots and filling steel squibs. Cranes, lorries, and trucks
picked up their output and disappeared. There was no time to ask a
question. The harder and fiercer they worked, the sooner the war would
be over. Only madmen and Socialists asked why. The argument stood that
the higher and brighter the bonfire was piled, the sooner it would be
burnt out to a finish. No one in the Woolhurst factories queried the
uselessness and meaninglessness of all their labour except Ben, the
local Labour leader. Whatever he was known as to the officials, he was
Ben to his fellows, and always had been, in strike and out of strike
time. He worked with the rest but he did not think with them. The
bitter humours, which a little reading and much agitating had left in
his brain, were not dissipated in the burning fires of the foundry. He
grew bitter as he grew wearier. He felt careless whether he gave his
full power to the work of destroying the workmen of another country. It
was only the war of one ant-hill against another. Patriotism had not
caught him in the board-school, and less during his apprenticeship to
work. His education was what he had given himself out of the _Labour
Press_ and from second-hand copies of Marx and Carlyle. As he grew
careless, he grew clumsier and earned the curses of the foreman, as
far as curses availed against the hot blasts. He hated his work and
all around him.... He hated the great gun which they were casting in
molten form. He could see the white-hot metal pouring like milk out of
the furnace. The sight did not exhilarate him in the way it seemed to
inspire the others. His muscles relaxed and his eyes went languidly out
of focus. The seething mass of blazing liquid drew his languor into
itself. The foreman was still cursing. It needed only a touch to upset
his balance. Without a splash or a ripple he passed into the fiery mass
... an accident!
There are times when a ship cannot be stopped for a paltry individual
who has fallen overboard, and the foundry could not be held up for one
man’s remains. A big gun is worth many human lives. Besides, he had
disappeared. Cremation was complete and total.
By the time the glowing liquor had passed into the moulds and entered
into the long process of cooling, the human moth was charred to the
nothingness of carbon, and every bone and particle was digested by the
steel. His tomb not only enclosed but absorbed him. He had become part
and ingredient of his own sepulchre.... And there could be no inquest,
for there was no relic for a coroner’s inspection. Long before the gun
was adjusted with all its minute and meticulous parts, long before
it was tested and sent to a naval dockyard, the unfortunate man it
contained was forgotten, and had become as nameless and anonymous as
the gun itself. Nameless was the six-inch gun that was sent to sea, and
nameless let the cruiser remain on which it was hoisted.
* * * * *
For weary weeks _H.M.S. ----_ patrolled the northern mists, with a
brighter interval in the Mediterranean. Undeviating drill and perpetual
practice brought crews and armament to a stage of perfection bordering
on staleness. The chaplain came into the captain’s room with a puzzled
look.
“Sick?” queried the skipper.
“No,” said the chaplain, “I have been talking to the men.”
“Not done talking to them yet?” laughed the other, who took a
good-natured but perfectly sceptical view about chaplains and their
functions.
“Well, I should say,” suggested the chaplain, “that they have been
talking to me lately.”
“What about?”
“About spirits!”
The captain shifted his foot and spun round: “I thought it was your
business to talk to them about spirits, and what you didn’t know about
the spiritual simply wasn’t spirits”--and he laughed outright.
“This is not my kind of spirit.”
“The men will want to be teaching me my job next!” exclaimed the
captain.
“These are not the spirits of the Prayer Book so much as ...”
“What?”
“The spirits that are called ghosts.”
“Well, are there no ghosts in the Bible?”
“Yes, but not quite the same kind that the men have come to believe is
on board this ship.”
Anything affecting the nerves of the men became a preoccupation of the
skipper, and he grew grave.
“Go on.”
“Well, sir, it is very like a hallucination, but I thought you had
better know what the men are thinking about, in case it is interfering
with their work. They do not like handling one of the starboard
six-inch guns.”
“What do you mean? It is brand-new and tested to the ounce.”
“The men think there is a spirit in that gun and that he appears every
time they fire the gun.”
“Cannot they blow him out?”
“No, for it is in the smoke after firing that they discern the figure
of a man, and they think that he will end by sinking the ship....”
There was a longish silence, for the captain was far too good a sailor
not to know the part superstition plays in a sailor’s life. Devoid
of religion himself, he was calculating the result of such a fear
on the gun’s crew. For months the Grand Fleet had been chafing at
anchor, with intervals spent bursting through the fogs or charging
the mists. Mysterious performances known as P. Z. exercises, devised
by admirals, carried out by captains, and rectified in practice by
humble individuals in chart-rooms, occupied most of their seagoing.
The exact strategists were learning that accuracy and certainty were
more difficult to obtain on the water than on paper. The reckonings of
ships varied, and the value of given fire against given armament did
not always respond to theory. Even blindfold chess gave more certain
results. This was blindfold boxing against an enemy who was as often
below as above the waters. Months of phantom-chasing took its effect
on men’s minds. Crews became used to being called to action preceding
no action. Destroyers reported enemies that melted into mist, and
imaginary submarines caused panic in the Firth and the Flow. The
invisible enemy preyed more substantially on their minds than would
have been the case had action materialised. The strain told, and the
sarcastic elements seemed to mimic the thunder of guns whose smoke only
curled into the mocking clouds.
The practice day following the conversation of chaplain and captain on
_H.M.S. ----_ was fine and clear. The Dreadnoughts were slowly making
line to the practice-ground, preceded by the cruisers in formation,
while the destroyers ran in and out like bicycles twisting amongst
huge motor-buses. The captain of _H.M.S. ----_ took his position on
the bridge, and asked the chaplain to stand on the far end to note the
firing, while he remained at the other.
“Watch the firing of the forecastle-guns, and especially of the
starboard six-inch. I shall be glad to have your detailed report.”
At a signal from the flag-ship the fire-control of the cruisers was
tested. They fired in turn at a slow-moving target. The turn came for
_H.M.S. ----_. The port forecastle-gun emitted a cloud of smoke, a
great rolling blanket of white vapour. Captain and chaplain pierced it
with their glasses, and it had rolled away before the splash of the
shell showed where the aim had fallen short. The cruiser swung slowly
round, and the brand-new 9·2 fired for the tenth time in its existence.
Captain and chaplain watched the smoke without raising their glasses.
It slowly melted in the bright breeze, disintegrating and discolouring
of itself. It was quite thin before a man’s figure could be discerned
struggling in the dissolving smoke. It seemed obvious, matter-of-fact,
and chemical, except that it was a figure of smoke. The figure was
only comprehensible for a moment or two, for the wind elongated his
writhings; and his limbs, as though on the rack, were torn apart with
delirious speed. But the impression of human agony remained with every
human being who watched the torment of the smoke. Only the officer
controlling the fire watched the target and noted how near the shell
fell this time. By the time the next shot was fired, not a wisp of the
ghostly smoke remained.... And the fear of doom remained in every
heart on board that night except with the captain and the chaplain. The
chaplain had decided clearly that it was either a fantasy or a divine
omen. In the latter case it was for the good, and in the first case it
did not matter. As for the captain, he was both puzzled and unafraid.
The chaplain had noted the firing and its results very carefully as
directed, and he handed his notes to the captain, who read them in his
cabin. They were accurate and corresponded to the official account in
the log.
“You make no mention of the smoke,” suggested the captain.
“No.”
“Well, I saw a very distinct outline of a man in the smoke, and I
expected you would have recorded it.”
“No,” replied the other. “I particularly left the spook to you. It
would have been no evidence for me to have seen and reported it, for I
am officially supposed to believe in spirits.”
“Well,” said the captain, “I who do not believe in them have seen this.”
“Blessed rather are those who have not seen and yet have believed,”
said the chaplain.
“That is hardly my case,” replied the captain, “for I have most
distinctly seen and yet have not believed.”
Both turned then as sensible men to consider the effect of the
hallucination, or whatever it was, on the crew of the gun, and
incidentally on the whole ship. The men had come to regard it as a bad
omen. To them it was worse than carrying round a corpse. They thought
the gun was haunted and that, however deadly its firing to the enemy,
it would in the end prove more fatal to the ship. They believed they
were on a doomed vessel. It was no use changing the crew of the gun, as
the whole ship seemed involved.
“Provided I can drop a hit on the enemy with that gun in action, I do
not so much mind if the ship sinks under me,” was the captain’s final
deliberation....
The long wait of months was broken for some by the instantaneous
decision of mine or explosion, for others by change of latitude and
ship; for some, indeed, it was never broken; but for a few it was
crossed by the magic signal, “action!” On a joyous day for _H.M.S.
----_ issue was joined in the North Sea with a German raider supported
in the dim distance by enemy light forces. The captain gathered all the
threads of his life and training into his hand, and stood glued to the
bridge. The chaplain went down to steady the men, who in the glad glow
of coming action forgot all their troubles of body or mind. The moving
smoke on the horizon was the sign of retreating enemy, and cruisers
with torpedoes were dashing to cut them off. Every heart on board beat
in steady throb of unison with the ship’s engines. Precious minutes
passed, and the smokes on the horizon were no nearer. The largest
smoke was separating from the others. Half an hour passed and a hull
was outlined. It corresponded to the raider, one of those sweet prizes
which had been dashing in and out of middies’ dreams for months. As
the raider drew off from her escort, chancing a northern mist, _H.M.S.
----_ followed into the gathering vapour. Fire was being exchanged
between the others, but he reserved the raider to his own. Careless
whether she was dropping mines, he pushed into her direct wake. In ten
minutes he would open fire. And he did.
The fore-guns flashed in turn and eager glasses picked up the splash
of the first shell falling short. The captain groaned, but his groan
was choked with relief as he watched the next shell drop with a red
flash on the raider’s bridge. He telephoned his congratulations to the
gun’s crew, who received them in British silence. The red glare of fire
was rising from the raider under the British fire. She was blazing
steadily, and the captain no longer kept check of his guns. They were
being fired in irregular but enthusiastic salvoes. The German flag was
visible, white against the yellow smoke, so good were the captain’s
glasses. Another glance and the flag was gone. He immediately gave the
signal to cease firing. A destroyer ran in and fired a torpedo, whereat
the raider turned quietly over....
Leaving the rescuing to the destroyers, the captain of _H.M.S. ----_
cheerfully inquired if there had been any casualties. The chaplain
joined him on the bridge with a list.
“I am afraid there have been a few.”
“I never knew we were hit.”
“No, we were not hit by the enemy, but unfortunately a six-inch gun
starboard exploded after firing one shot, the second shot of the
action, and the whole crew were killed or wounded.”