PAGE 7
"Their Lawful Occasions"
by
“The tax-payer,” said Mr. Moorshed.
“An’ newspapers,” added Mr. Pyecroft. “In Torbay they’ll look as they was muckin’ about for strategical purposes–hanamerin’ like blazes in the engine room all the weary day, an’ the skipper droppin’ questions down the engine-room hatch every two or three minutes. I’ve been there. Now, Sir?” I saw the white of his eye turn broad on Mr. Moorshed.
The boy dropped his chin over the speaking-tube.
“Mr. Hinchcliffe, what’s her extreme economical radius?”
“Three hundred and forty knots, down to swept bunkers.”
“Can do,” said Moorshed. “By the way, have her revolutions any bearing on her speed, Mr. Hinchcliffe?”
“None that I can make out yet, Sir.”
“Then slow to eight knots. We’ll jog down to forty-nine, forty-five, or four about, and three east. That puts us say forty miles from Torbay by nine o’clock to-morrow morning. We’ll have to muck about till dusk before we run in and try our luck with the cruisers.”
“Yes, Sir. Their picket boats will be panickin’ round them all night. It’s considered good for the young gentlemen.”
“Hallo! War’s declared! They’re off!” said Moorshed.
He swung 267’s head round to get a better view. A few miles to our right the low horizon was spangled with small balls of fire, while nearer ran a procession of tiny cigar ends.
“Red hot! Set ’em alight,” said Mr. Pyecroft. “That’s the second destroyer flotilla diggin’ out for Commander Fassett’s reputation.”
The smaller lights disappeared; the glare of the destroyers’ funnels dwindled even as we watched.
“They’re going down Channel with lights out, thus showin’ their zeal an’ drivin’ all watch-officers crazy. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll get you your pyjamas, an’ you’ll turn in,” said Pyecroft.
He piloted me to the steel tunnel, where the ham still swung majestically over the swaying table, and dragged out trousers and a coat with a monk’s hood, all hewn from one hairy inch-thick board.
“If you fall over in these you’ll be drowned. They’re lammies. I’ll chock you off with a pillow; but sleepin’ in a torpedo-boat’s what you might call an acquired habit.”
I coiled down on an iron-hard horse-hair pillow next the quivering steel wall to acquire that habit. The sea, sliding over 267’s skin, worried me with importunate, half-caught confidences. It drummed tackily to gather my attention, coughed, spat, cleared its throat, and, on the eve of that portentous communication, retired up stage as a multitude whispering. Anon, I caught the tramp of armies afoot, the hum of crowded cities awaiting the event, the single sob of a woman, and dry roaring of wild beasts. A dropped shovel clanging on the stokehold floor was, naturally enough, the unbarring of arena gates; our sucking uplift across the crest of some little swell, nothing less than the haling forth of new worlds; our half-turning descent into the hollow of its mate, the abysmal plunge of God-forgotten planets. Through all these phenomena and more–though I ran with wild horses over illimitable plains of rustling grass; though I crouched belly-flat under appalling fires of musketry; though I was Livingstone, painless, and incurious in the grip of his lion–my shut eyes saw the lamp swinging in its gimbals, the irregularly gliding patch of light on the steel ladder, and every elastic shadow in the corners of the frail angle-irons; while my body strove to accommodate itself to the infernal vibration of the machine. At the last I rolled limply on the floor, and woke to real life with a bruised nose and a great call to go on deck at once.
“It’s all right,” said a voice in my booming ears. “Morgan and Laughton are worse than you!”
I was gripping a rail. Mr. Pyecroft pointed with his foot to two bundles beside a torpedo-tube, which at Weymouth had been a signaller and a most able seaman. “She’d do better in a bigger sea,” said Mr. Pyecroft. “This lop is what fetches it up.”
The sky behind us whitened as I laboured, and the first dawn drove down the Channel, tipping the wave-tops with a chill glare. To me that round wind which runs before the true day has ever been fortunate and of good omen. It cleared the trouble from my body, and set my soul dancing to 267’s heel and toe across the northerly set of the waves–such waves as I had often watched contemptuously from the deck of a ten-thousand-ton liner. They shouldered our little hull sideways and passed, scalloped, and splayed out, toward the coast, carrying our white wake in loops along their hollow backs. In succession we looked down a lead-grey cutting of water for half a clear mile, were flung up on its ridge, beheld the Channel traffic–full-sailed to that fair breeze–all about us, and swung slantwise, light as a bladder, elastic as a basket, into the next furrow. Then the sun found us, struck the wet gray bows to living, leaping opal, the colourless deep to hard sapphire, the many sails to pearl, and the little steam-plume of our escape to an inconstant rainbow.