"Jubbs!" said Jerry.
A moment's pause, while the motionless figure in the next bed gathered
energy for a last effort of speech. Then--
"Coming!" said Jubbs.
*X.*
*THE CHOSEN FOUR.*
The Admiral, it was rumoured, had said, "Let there be Signal
Midshipmen." Wherefore the Flag-Lieutenant communed with the Commander,
who sent for the Senior Midshipman.
The Senior Midshipman responded to the summons with an alacrity that
hinted at a conscience not wholly void of offence.
"Let there be Signal Midshipmen," said the Commander, or words to that
effect, "in four watches."
"Aye, aye, sir," said the Senior Midshipman. He emerged from the
Commander's cabin and breathed deeply, as one who had passed unscathed
through a grave crisis. Apparently that small matter of the
picket-boat's damaged stem-piece had been overlooked.
Ere he was out of earshot, however, the Commander spoke again. "By the
way," added the Arbiter of his little destinies, "I don't want to see
your name in the leave-book again until the picket-boat is repaired."
"Aye, aye, sir," repeated the Senior Midshipman. He descended to the
Gunroom, where, it being "make-and-mend" afternoon, his brethren were
wrapped in guileless slumber. An 'Inman's Nautical Tables,' lying handy
on the table, described a parabola through the air, and, striking a
prominent portion of the nearest sleeper's anatomy, ricochetted into his
neighbour's face. The two sat up, glowered suspiciously at each other
for an instant, and joined battle. The shock of their conflict
overturned a form, and two more recumbent figures awoke wrathfully to
"life and power and thought."
"You four," announced the Senior Midshipman calmly, when the uproar had
subsided, "will take on signal duty from to-morrow morning." Then,
having satisfactorily discharged the duty imposed upon him, he settled
himself to slumber on the settee.
Three of the four, to whom this announcement was made gasped and were
silent. _Signals_! Under the very eye of the Admiral! Each one saw
himself an embryo Flag-Lieutenant.... One even made a little prophetic
motion with his left arm, as though irked by the aiguilette that in
fancy already encircled it. The fourth alone spoke---
"Crikey!" he muttered, "an' my only decent pair of breeches are in the
scran-bag"[#]
[#] The "scran-bag" is the receptacle for articles of clothing, &c.,
left lying about at First Lieutenant's rounds in the morning. Gear thus
impounded can be redeemed once a week by payment of a bar of soap.
* * * * *
Men say that with the passing of "Masts and Yards" the romance of the
Naval Service died. This is for those to judge who have seen a fleet of
modern battleships flung plunging from one complex formation to another
at the dip of a "wisp of coloured bunting," and have watched the stutter
of a speck of light, as unseen ships talk across leagues of darkness.
The fascination of a game only partly understood, yet ever hinting vast
possibilities, seized upon the minds of the Chosen Four. Morse and
semaphore of course they knew, and the crude translations of the flags
were also familiar enough. But the inner mysteries of the science (and
in these days it is a very science) had not as yet unfolded themselves.
At intervals the Flag-Lieutenant would summon them to his cabin, where,
with the aid of the Signal Books and little oblong pieces of brass, he
demonstrated the working of a Fleet from the signal point of view, and
how a mistake in the position of a flag in the hoist might result in
chaos--and worse.
The Chosen Four sat wide-eyed at his feet amid cigarette ash and the
shattered fragments of the Third Commandment.
Harbour watch-keeping perfected their semaphore and Morse, till by
ceaseless practice they could read general signals flashed at a speed
that to the untrained eye is merely a bewildering flicker. As time wore
on they began to acquire the almost uncanny powers of observation common
to the lynx-eyed men around them on the bridge.
Each ship in a Fleet is addressed by hoisting that ship's numeral
pendants. The ship thus addressed hoists an answering pendant in reply.
At intervals all through the day the Signal Yeoman of the Watch would
suddenly snap his glass to his eye, pause an instant as the wind
unfurled a distant flutter of bunting at some ship's yard-arm, and then
jump for the halyard that hoisted the answering pendant. The smartness
of a ship's signal-bridge is the smartness of that ship, and in
consequence this is a game into which the stimulus of competition
enters, Signal Boatswain, Midshipmen, and Yeomen vying with each other
to be the first to give the shout, "Up Answer!"
One night at the Junior Officers' Club one of the Chosen Four
encountered another of his ilk from a different ship: and, since at
eighteen (if you are ever to become anything) shop is a right and
necessary topic of conversation, they fell to discussing their
respective bridges.
Presently said he of the other ship, waxing pot-valiant by reason of
Marsala, "I'll bet you a dinner ashore we'll show your pendants before
the week's up."
Now should a ship fail to see a signal made to her, other ships present
can be very offensive by hoisting the pendants of the ship addressed at
mast-head and yard-arms. This is to hold the delinquent up as an object
of scorn and derision to the Fleet, and is a fate more dreaded by
right-minded signalmen than the Plagues of Egypt.
"An' I'll give you fifteen seconds' grace," added the speaker.
The challenge was accepted, and for five sweltering days--it was summer
at Malta--the two ships watched each other from sunrise till dark, the
pendants "bent" to the halyards in readiness. On the evening of the
sixth day a thunderstorm that had been brewing all the afternoon burst
in a torrential downpour over the harbour. At that instant a signal
crept to the flagship's yard-arm.
On board the ship addressed the Midshipman had dashed for the shelter of
the bridge-house, the Yeoman was struggling into an oilskin, and the
Second Hand had stepped into the lee of a search-light.
"Stand by--thirteen, fourteen..." counted the small figure standing in
the driving rain on the flagship's bridge, watch in hand: "fifteen,
Hoist!" Then for the first time in his short career he deserted his
post. Clattering pell-mell down the ladders to the Gunroom, where the
remainder of the Chosen Four were playing cut-throat whist, he flung
back the drab-coloured curtain.
"Got him!" he shouted triumphantly. "By the aching stomach, I had him
_cold_!"
* * * * *
I have said that of the Chosen Four--three saw visions, while the other
bewailed the inaccessibility till the end of the week of his best
trousers. Now of the four he alone came to wear the aiguilettes of a
Flag-Lieutenant, and to-day the mysteries of Tactics, Fleet Organisation
and Formation, are to him as an open book. A Baker Street photographer
once had the temerity to display his photograph in the window, in
uniform, tinted. Passing by, I heard a woman gush foolishly to her
companion, "Oh, isn't he a darling!"
The relevancy of this anon.
Another forsook the bunting-draped path of Signals to climb to fame
through the smoke of many battle practices. He now adds after his rank
the cryptic initial (G). The third married an heiress and her
relations, and retired. He has several children and is reported to have
lost interest in the Service.
The remaining one, when I saw him last, had also lost interest in the
Service. He was lying in a curiously crumpled heap across the stakes of
a jungle stockade, his empty revolver dangling by the lanyard round his
neck. A handful of his men fought like demons to recover possession of
the mutilated body.
"Sure," said a bearded Petty Officer, half apologetically, wiping his
cutlass with a tussock of grass, "we couldn't lave him there--an'
himself somewan's darlin', likely..."
Sailors are inveterate sentimentalists.
*XI.*
*A COMMITTEE OF SUPPLY.*
The Junior Watch-keeper entered the Wardroom and rang the bell with an
air of gloomy mystery.
"The Russians are coming," he announced. "Cocktail, please, waiter."
The Young Doctor looked up from the year-old 'Bradshaw' with which he
was wont to enliven moments of depression by arranging mythical
week-ends at friends' houses in various parts of England. It was a
dreary amusement, and, conducted off the coast of Russian Tartary,
stamped him as the possessor of no small imaginative powers.
"Who said so?"
"Skipper: three Russian Destroyers, an' we're to invite them to dinner,
an' there's nothing to eat." The Junior Watch-keeper managed the
affairs of the Mess for that quarter.
"Those chaps feed like fighting-cocks," observed the Assistant
Paymaster. "Let's send for the Messman."
The Junior Watch-keeper applied himself to his cocktail in silence, and
the Celestial bandit who, in consideration of a monthly levy of thirty
dollars per head, starved or poisoned them according to his whim,
appeared in the doorway. The Mess broached the subject with quailing
hearts; it was proposed to dine the representatives of a foreign Power.
Could he for once rise to the occasion and produce a suitable repast?