It is not for me to attempt any convincing record of the imperceptible stages by which, as the days passed, Graeme fell in love with Claire Mayne.
She obtruded upon his thoughts as sunlight enters a room past curtains waving in the breeze, while with the dour perversity of his queer nature he tried to shut her out.
There were women about whom no one could cherish any illusions; with these Graeme Jakes was half contemptuously, half pityingly at ease. But in Claire Mayne he saw someone who approached so exquisitely to his ideal of womanhood that he dreaded disillusionment. Thus and thus must his goddess be fashioned, and the first word or act of hers that betrayed feet of clay would have filled him with bitterness and disappointment.
However, as time went on, one after another he drew forth timidly from the secret hiding-place of his soul some fresh idealism; draping them about his conception of her, until the real and the imaginary woman blended into that dear, everlastingly inaccessible unreality which is all mankind's first love.
Transports of this nature are usually apparent enough in the demeanour; but Graeme Jakes's oriental imperturbability of countenance gave not the slightest betrayal of the turmoil in his thoughts.
Claire Mayne herself remained serenely unconscious of anything in the air more vibrant than a grave friendliness and a shy, half-reluctant admiration. She would not have been the normal, healthy young woman she was had she not thought about him a good deal. When the children were in bed and the stars made visible the dark outline of the hills opposite, she sat by her open window, with the tiny room behind her in darkness; there, chin in hand, she tried to assign him to some known category amongst her limited male acquaintances, and found the task difficult.
Since girlhood her pet character in fiction had been Alan Breck; not for his swashbuckling gallantry, nor the efficient way with him in sword play, but because, as she herself put it, "he wanted looking after so dreadfully."
Graeme Jakes, in some subtle way that eluded analysis, appealed to her in much the same manner. His clothes lacked buttons at times and his hair was generally dreadfully untidy. She would like, she thought, to brush his hair for him ... in a brisk, sisterly fashion.
The tranquillity of her meditations would have been sorely disturbed could she have seen the object of her thoughts. Half a mile away, from a vantage point amid the dewy bracken, stood her devout lover, watching with all a lover's faculty for self-hypnotism a light burning behind a blind in one of the upper windows of the farm. Fondly he watched its orange glow through the darkness until it was abruptly extinguished, and returned home in a mood of exalted melancholy. Judge though how greater the melancholy had he realised the blind screened no other than the conjugal chamber of the farmer and his wife....
The days went by thus to merge into weeks, and the children's visit was fast drawing to a close. Graeme, too, had received orders to attend at the Admiralty for medical survey. The halcyon days were numbered.
They had planned an expedition to the coast, an all-day affair that was to include sea-bathing for the children, for the last day. The sun shone out of a cloudless sky, the air was clear and sweet with autumn scents, and the cavalcade set forth on the appointed morning in wild spirits. Mrs. Mackworth had provided lunch and tea, and the food, together with bathing things, cameras, and all the impedimenta of a holiday, were piled into the pony cart. Miss Mayne held the reins and Georgina walked at the pony's head; Jane and her brother ranged along the hedgerows like a couple of terriers; while Graeme brought up the rear, outwardly cheerful, but inwardly experiencing the varied sensations of a man who has decided to propose ere the going down of the sun to a damsel whose only concern appeared to be to avoid being left alone in his company.
They reached the sea about noon; Graeme had chosen a little bay where the sands were safe for bathing. The coast stretched away on one hand in a waste of dunes and marsh, and on the other rose in indented cliffs from a rock-strewn beach.
On the top of the cliffs they unpacked the baskets, turned the pony loose to graze, and, when the children had had their longed-for bathe, lunched al fresco as might the gods have eaten upon Olympus.
It was after lunch that Graeme made his first anxious bid for the company of Miss Mayne alone. "Supposing you three go and explore the caves," he suggested to the children, a clumsy argument which, for its very ingenuousness, roused no suspicions in that maiden's heart.
"But what about you and Miss Mayne?" inquired Jane.
"Well," said Graeme feebly, "p'raps we'll go and look for seagulls' eggs along the cliffs."
"Gulls don't lay eggs in September," said Miss Mayne. "Why shouldn't we all go and explore caves?"
Nothing was further from her mind than the imminence of the proposal shaping itself on Graeme's lips, but a pretty loyalty to the children's parents forbade her to let them out of her vision. "A nice business," said her conscience, "if one of them got hurt. Where was Miss Mayne? Philandering somewhere out of sight with a Naval officer.... Well, not philandering exactly, but——"
"I thought perhaps you might be tired," broke in the voice of the Naval officer upon her meditations.
"Not in the least," she replied. "Come along, we'll all go down to the beach."
So off they set and awakened the echoes of the shallow caves with their voices, explored the pools left by the tide; built with the aid of pieces of driftwood a sand castle that had cockle shells for windows and a tiny green crab as keeper of the gateway, and through all the absorption of this light nonsense Graeme was conscious of Claire Mayne, whether she spoke or was silent, in view or out of sight, as a man is aware of the sunlight and the wind on his cheek. She seemed inevitable—inevitable and indispensable.
The children found him dullish and rather distrait.
Curiously enough it was she who at last gave him his opportunity to speak his heart. The children decreed it was time for their next bathe, and while they undressed in the shelter of the rocks, Graeme set about unpacking the tea-things and boiling the kettle. He watched, kneeling, the three slim forms scamper across the short stretch of sands in the sunlight to meet the incoming tide, and suddenly Miss Mayne joined him on the cliff.
"I'll help you," she said; "I can watch the children from here and cut bread and butter at the same time. They are quite safe."
Her manner was unconcerned; she spoke in the unrestrained note of comradeship, and stood watching the children capering in the sunlit waves, with the wind moulding her garments to her long limbs and drawing loose tendrils of her hair in careless, happy disorder across the curve of her cheek outlined against the sky.
Graeme knelt observing her, suddenly tongue-tied. You can invent speeches to a goddess, aye, and deliver them effectively enough to a silent night of stars, but this radiant, composed girl was flesh and blood; he could almost see the warm vitality glowing through her skin. She needed no clap-trap speech about love such as fellows deliver in novels.... He rose to his feet. The wind and the sunshine and the sound of the sea seemed to sing and shout together. "Man! Here's your mate at last!" was the burden of the song. "Here's the goal of all your heart's desire; the haven of your soul's adventure! Look at her, shaped for you by incalculable forces and laws, beautified and perfected and handed down through infinite ages, to stand thus within your arms' reach. Yours, man, if you can but win her! Tell her, fool ... tell her."
"I'm glad you came," said the fool, and his voice, husky and unfamiliar, startled him.
A sound, distinct from the noises of wind and shore, obtruded upon his consciousness as he spoke, and the girl heard it too, for she wheeled sharply and stood staring, not at her companion, but back across the sheep-cropped turf.
Two horses were approaching at a canter, near enough already for their riders' faces to be discernible. One was Josephine Smedley; the other, a vapid-faced young man in extravagant equestrian attire. They drew rein and approached the cliff at a walk, Miss Smedley waving her whip in greeting. Her companion touched his horse with the spur, holding it on the curb while it curveted effectively.
"Topping day!" cried Josephine. "Watching the kids bathe, Mrs. Jakes?"
Graeme heard the girl give a little gasp. She stood quite motionless for a few seconds and then, still staring at the rider, he heard her say in a low voice, as if speaking to herself: "This has gone far enough; it's got to stop." Miss Smedley's cavalier had rather overdone the spur business and was having considerable difficulty in controlling his horse, which was plunging and pulling some distance away.
Graeme stepped forward. "I'll explain," he said. "Miss Smedley——"
"No," interrupted Claire Mayne, "leave this to me. You should have explained before this." She took a few steps in the direction of the other girl. "Miss Smedley," she said in a clear voice, "I think it only right I should tell you I am not married. I am not Mr. Jakes's wife." She paused, apparently from loss of breath.
In the middle distance the young man, obviously losing control of his mount, was shouting something over his shoulder. Miss Smedley glanced in his direction and then looked Claire Mayne brutally from head to toe. "Please don't apologise," she said, "I—we suspected as much." It took the short, hard laugh that followed the words to drive the insult home. She flicked her horse sharply on the flank and rode after her escort.
The sound of the horses' hoofs had died away before Miss Mayne spoke.
"Did she mean—was that woman trying to——?" she began, and stopped. Mechanically she knelt down and began setting out the tea-things as if in a trance.
"Why didn't you leave it to me?" expostulated Graeme, kneeling beside her. "I'd have explained properly. She misunderstood ... or pretended to."
The girl raised a face from which all vestige of colour had fled. Her eyes were wide and pitiful; she held a sugar basin in one hand, in the other a butter knife.
"But I did explain," she said. "How could I know...?"
"You should have left it to me," repeated Graeme. He put out his hand and took the sugar basin from her. She laid the butter-knife with precision beside the cabbage leaf containing the butter. Their actions were mechanical and inconsequent, as if the kneeling figures were two automata actuated by wires.
"I thought I'd left enough to you," she said. "You laughed it over the first time, as if it were a joke. Perhaps it was a joke. One would rather look at it in that light. But at least you could have made sure there would have been no second misunderstanding. No possibility of my being—being insulted." The colour flamed back into her cheeks. "And you did nothing—nothing." She bit her lower lip to control its trembling.
Graeme forced a wan smile. "There wasn't time, then.... But I will do something—and anyhow, it doesn't matter, really."
"Doesn't matter!" she echoed in frozen tones. "Doesn't matter! You put me in odiously false positions, you expose me to an outrageous insult ... and you—you laugh and say it doesn't matter! Oh, this is intolerable!" Angry tears forced themselves to her eyelashes.
Graeme groped for the hand that fumbled for a preposterous handkerchief (with what care had that little scrap of cambric been selected a few short hours before, and with what unconsciousness of the purpose it would serve!) "Claire! Claire! don't you understand, I want you to marry me."
She whipped to her feet. "Oh, don't be absurd!" she cried. "Do you imagine—is this your idea of doing something? Of rep—reparation for dragging my name—my brother's——" She was weeping now.
From somewhere on the sands below came the voices of the children returning from their bathe. With a wrung heart Graeme realised his chance had gone; the children could see them. Miss Mayne turned her face from the sea. "I'm going for a walk for a few minutes," she said; "will you all start tea?"
"But won't you give me a chance to speak to you later on?" gasped Graeme, "just for a second. It isn't anything to do with this wretched business. I mean I don't want you to marry me just because——"
Miss Mayne turned a tear-wet face towards him for one instant. "If you are what I once thought you were—if you even remotely resemble what I've always heard of Naval officers, you'll never, never broach this odious topic again, by word or letter or implication."
And with that she went off along the cliff, walking very fast with her head bent.
Mouldy Jakes fell to buttering a slice of bread.
Dies irae! And the night that followed, little better for most of the participators in that memorable picnic. Tears wetted two pillows at least; a third remained uncreased until the dawn by the head that ought to have lain there.
Cornelius James awoke on the morrow to manifold perplexities.
To Jane, his confidante in most tribulations, he unburdened himself after an early breakfast, what time Miss Mayne and Georgina, the former heavy-lidded and both uncommunicative, were putting finishing touches to the packing. The two children were taking a valedictory stroll round the farm.
"Miss Mayne's been crying," he observed gloomily. He abhorred tears.
Jane confirmed this with a nod that set her curls bobbing. "So's Georgie."
"I know." Cornelius James's tone was one of exasperation. "I'm sorry to be leaving Glebe Farm, but I don't cry about it. You're sorry, too, aren't you, Jane?"
Jane nodded again, but hesitated before disclosing the maiden secret of another's breast. "'Tisn't that, Georgie wasn't crying 'cos we're leaving, 'xactly."
"Thenwhy?" demanded her brother. He scrambled on to the wall of the pigsty, and sat moodily dropping bits of stone on the porker's back.
"You see," explained Jane, not without diffidence, "she's in love."
"What next!" gasped her outraged brother. "Who's she in love with?"
"Mr. Jakes."
Cornelius James could find no words applicable to the situation.
"But—but," he finally exclaimed, "even if she is, what's she got to cry about?"
Jane clambered up beside her brother. "Well, you see," she began, "it was that picnic."
"It was a jolly picnic," maintained the other.
"Yes, but Georgie counted on having Mr. Jakes all to herself on the way back."
"So she jolly well did!" commented her brother wrathfully.
"Yes, but he never opened his mouth 'cept once, and then he only said something about selling a farm and going to sea, and Georgie thinks he hates her."
Cornelius James pondered over this insight into the enigma of the feminine heart.
"She's an ass!" was his final comment. "And what about Miss Mayne? Don't tell me she's in love!" Assuredly the queen could do no wrong nor stoop to such folly.
"I don't know," replied Jane, "but last night I went to her room to borrow a ribbon to tie my hair up with 'cos I'd lost mine, an' she was lying on her bed with her face in her hands. I thought she had a headache, and I was going out again when she jumped up. Her face was all smeary and her eyes were red, like when her brother was killed. 'Member? I per-tended I didn't notice anything, and asked for the ribbon and she got it from a drawer and gave it to me without a word, and suddenly she sat down on the window seat and put her arms round me and held me against her so tight I could hardly breathe."
The mystified eyes of the brother and sister met. "But didn't shesayanything?" demanded the former. "Has anybody been killed she's fond of?"
"I don't think so," replied Jane; "she hardly said anything. Just whispered little soft words like 'darling.'"
"She did that when we tried to cheer her up 'cos her brother died," said the boy, as if condoning a lapse on Miss Mayne's part.
"Oh, there was one thing," added Jane after reflection; "she said, 'Oh, Janie, Janie, don't grow up!'"
Which left Cornelius James not much the wiser.
To a more sophisticated mind the utterance might have meant much or little. For my part I look for my clue to the riddle in a later remark Miss Mayne made aloud to the darkness, from off a crumpled tear-wet pillow.
"He never said he loved me," she pleaded. The darkness held no answer.
1
The ship was doing her annual refit at a Dockyard Port in the south, and the Captain and I shared what leave there was going; in my case it amounted to eight days, and I spent them trout fishing in Breconshire. I have tried a good many experiments in the way of how to make the most of a week's leave, and I have come to the conclusion that few things take the taste of war out of a man's mouth as effectively as whipping a "mountainy" trout stream.
It was a long and tedious railway journey back; I suppose I am as fond of my ship as most Commanders: she probably means more to me than a ship does to a man with a wife and bairn of his own, but I can't say I looked forward to slipping into harness again after the week's freedom from routine and responsibility, and the contemplation of returning to another nine months' exile in the North Sea didn't add any gaiety to the train journey. I was uncommonly glad, therefore, when I changed at Bristol and walked into Frank Milsom on the platform.
He was a "Red" Marine and an old shipmate of mine in the Mediterranean Flagship 'way back in the dark ages: one of those born leaders of men, possessing (although I believe it doesn't always follow) a curiously magnetic fascination for women. Yet I believe women bored him; I remember he once told me he would as soon kiss a dog as a woman, unless he was drunk. He was full of "parlour-tricks," too—the things that make a man sought after as a messmate; he could vamp a comic song and do sleight of hand conjuring tricks, and he had the most infectious laugh that ever kept a mouldy wardroom alive. The only vice I ever observed in him was a passion for gambling, but he had a peculiarity which is unusual in the Navy: we used to say he was "fey." He had queer dreams sometimes that used to come true—the date for paying off and things like that—and on one occasion I recollect drawing back the curtain of his cabin on my way down from the middle watch, because I heard him laughing and wondered who was with him at that hour. He was sitting up in his bunk with the moonlight pouring through the open scuttle, and his hand stretched out in gesticulation (a way he had when animated); otherwise the cabin was empty. He was wide awake, told me he was talking to his mother, and cursed me for interrupting. She was at the time about 2,800 miles away as the crow flies.
He came towards me wheeling a ramshackle motor-bicycle, with a cocker spaniel on a chain, and a porter following with his bags and golf clubs. "Bill Hornby!" he said, and the years between us and our last meeting seemed to close up like a telescope. We climbed into an empty carriage and settled down in two corners facing each other, lugging out our pipes and 'baccy pouches preparatory to a long yarn when, just as the train was starting, there was a bit of a commotion outside. A porter jerked open the door, pitched a woman's dressing-case on to the seat (we were sitting at the end furthest from the door), and fumbled for his tip as the owner of the dressing-case followed. She was a long-legged, graceful girl, dressed in tweeds and rather neatly shod. Milsom swore softly under his breath when the dressing-case appeared and stopped filling his pipe. But presently, when the train had started and our fellow-passenger had settled down in the corner facing the engine next to the door and opened a novel, Milsom leaned forward in his seat and asked her permission to smoke.
Until she was addressed the girl had not shown that she was aware of our presence in the carriage. She had not even glanced in our direction, and now, hearing herself spoken to, she turned a rather pale face and two almost startled grey eyes towards each of us in turn.
"D'you mind this?" enquired Milsom, in the kindly tolerant voice in which he spoke to women, and held out his iniquitous looking briar for her inspection.
The girl shook her head unsmiling. "Not at all. I—I——" she glanced swiftly from us to the window and the obvious
(mirror-image SMOKING)
on the glass panel. "I beg your pardon," she said. "I didn't notice. I was late and the porter hustled me in——" She turned her eyes on me; she had well marked, delicate brows, and a firm chin. Altogether I thought her a remarkable-looking young woman (I was sitting with my back to the engine, facing her diagonally), and had it not been for a certain touch of diffidence in her rather shy manner, I should have written her down as decidedly strong-minded.
For a moment she looked as if she were contemplating flight to the corridors in search of another carriage.
"Train's very full," said Milsom, "but if you like I'll go and see if there's room in a non-smoker."
She shook her head. "I don't mind smoking—unless you mind my staying where I am?"
We both mumbled polite reassurances, and she returned to her book, obviously dismissing us completely from her consciousness.
For all our protestations, neither of us was much at ease after that; we kept up a desultory conversation for a bit, but we were unaccustomed to having women near us, and a man can't talk squarely to another man with a woman in hearing. So after a bit we gave it up and retired behind our papers. I even dozed for a bit, and must have slept for nearly an hour when I was awakened by my pipe dropping out of the corner of my mouth.
My eyes, as they opened, rested first on the girl. She appeared to be sleeping; at all events she was leaning back with her eyes closed and her book lying unheeded on her lap. I glanced at Milsom in front of me, and found him leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, staring across the carriage at the window beside the only vacant corner—that is to say, the one opposite the girl. There was a faintly puzzled expression on his face, and he kept glancing from the window to the girl. Then he looked at me with a queer enigmatic smile. We neither of us spoke, I suppose with the idea of not waking our fellow-passenger, but Milsom presently drew a pencil-case from the pocket of his waistcoat and scribbled something on the margin of his newspaper. This he handed to me:
"Come and sit beside me; don't make a noise."
I obeyed rather curiously, and he continued to study the window. We had just emerged from a short tunnel when he wrote again on his paper:
"Watch that window and tell me if you can see anyone's reflection in it." He indicated with a nod the window alongside the vacant seat opposite the girl.
I stared and could see nothing but the landscape and the telegraph poles flicking by. Then we plunged into a cutting, and for a moment the sheet of glass became a mirror. I felt Milsom grip my arm hard above the elbow. "Well?" he breathed.
I shook my head, and for the third time he drew the paper on to his knee and scribbled hard.
"Don't tell me you couldn't see that bloke's reflection?"
I frowned at him in hopeless bewilderment. "What bloke?" I mouthed.
He shrugged his shoulders and shook his head with raised eyebrows, and at that moment the train began to slow and shudder as the brakes were applied.
"Get back," he whispered, and I resumed my seat opposite him as the third occupant of the carriage began to stir her limbs like one awaking from sleep.
For the life of me I don't know why, but I had the feeling that it would be wrong to see her face as she opened her eyes. I somehow felt it would be like listening if she had talked in her sleep.
Milsom was collecting his impedimenta. "Change here," he said, yawning, and hauled the reluctant spaniel from under the seat. "This train goes on to London. Heigh-ho! Who wouldn't sell his little farm and go to sea?"
I was turning to get my rod down from the rack when I saw the girl give a little start and shoot a swift interrogatory glance at Milsom over her shoulder. It was the first symptom of interest she had shown in either of us. But after Milsom and I had disembarked on to the platform, and the train began slowly to resume its journey Londonwards, I saw her knit her handsome brows and stare rather curiously at Milsom from the window of the moving train.
We stood beside our luggage in silence, watching the train pass from sight round a distant curve in the line.
Then I turned to Milsom. "Now," I said, "what did all those billets doux you wrote me mean?"
He looked at me quizzically. "Sure you saw no one there?"
"What d'you mean—reflected in the window?"
He nodded, with a smile hovering about the corners of his mouth.
"No, of course I didn't. There were only three of us in the carriage, and from where we were sitting—all facing the engine—that window couldn't catch the reflection of any of us. I've forgotten most of the optics I ever learned, but I remember enough to be sure of that."
Milsom fingered his moustache. "I might have realised——" he said musingly. He gave an imperceptible shrug of the shoulders and laughed softly.
I got rather irritated. "Come on, Soldier," I said. "For heaven's sake explain, and don't keep on with this Maskelyne and Devant business." But he shook his head, still laughing. "No," he said, "it's too good to waste here. Come and have dinner up at the Mess to-night and we'll exchange theories. And now," he continued, hauling in the slack of the spaniel's chain, "let's buy a pack of cards and play picquet. Our train's due already."
The carriage was too full for me to broach the subject again, and Milsom took thirty shillings out of me instead. At our destination we parted: he to go to the Marine Depôt, where he was Adjutant; I in a musty four wheeler to the dockyard where the ship was lying.
2
Milsom greeted me a couple of hours later in the big oak-panelled hall of the Officers' Mess at the Marine Headquarters. I had been on board the ship, had half an hour's yarn with the Skipper (who was full of the ways of Dockyard Officials and the tale of our Defect List), shifted, and got up to the Marines' Mess as the first dinner bugles were sounding.
Every time I enter that hall, with its tattered Colours hanging from the walls and the portraits of bygone Commandants staring down over their gorgets, I am struck afresh by the reminders, cherished here on all sides, of the proud past of the Corps. Greenwich Hospital excepted, the Navy has no shrines where the emblems of its traditions are preserved, but the Marine Headquarters always seem to echo with whispers of the Marines' history. In the seconds that it took me to cross the wide floor, I had a blurred vision of the Rock, taken by storm and held against odds; of haggard, fever-stricken detachments in rotting pith helmets, fighting their way through swamp and jungle, of the African sun catching the reddened bayonets of a desert square....
"Cocktail, I think." Milsom beckoned to a waiter, and, slipping his arm through mine, drew me down beside him on to the high-padded fender of the old fireplace that is a miracle of carving. He had had a game of squash, he explained, and a tub since his arrival, and felt that he had decidedly earned a drink. "Plenty of time," he added as he lit a cigarette. "Guest night, and the Colonel's waiting for a guest!" We sipped our cocktails, and while we yarned I studied the gathering all round us on the look-out for old shipmates and familiar faces. The Commandant I knew well, a grizzled veteran, whose skin had been so baked by tropic suns that it had the appearance of ancient parchment. He came towards us for a few minutes' chat, limping slightly from the effects (so it was said) of a mauling by a lion in Somaliland, and sat rolling his cigarette round and round between his fingers and thumb, his keen old eyes watching the door for his guest. Markham was there, upright and groomed to the last hair, and the sight of his face instantly recalled the vision I always cherish of him astride the wall of a Chinese fort, plying his sword like a swashbuckler, and endeavouring to shield the body of an unconscious N.C.O. from the pikes of the Boxer rabble below. Ye gods! And we called that war!
The hall was full, and the guests included a fair sprinkling of soldiers from neighbouring camps and a good many N.O.'s from ships in harbour. At one end of the room clustered a dozen freshly joined subalterns: they whispered constrainedly amongst themselves and eyed the assembly with furtive interest. "Straight out of the egg," observed Milsom. "Mammy's darlings, every one of 'em. They shall sing us Songs of Araby after dinner or I'll eat my hat." I had my own ideas how Milsom should amuse himself after dinner, but I said nothing. "Watch them gloating over Markham and his V.C." Markham, according to his kindly nature, had gone over and was talking to the new-comers. They clustered round him in the unabashed hero-worship of youth, their shyness perceptibly evaporating: clean, robust striplings with down on their upper lips and the stamp of the Public School plain upon them.
The swing doors opened and the Commandant tossed away his cigarette and rose as the guest of the Mess entered. He was a youthful Colonel of Marines on leave from the Western Front, a tall, lean man with a scar across his forehead and the look of wearied habitual alertness you always see in the faces of men fresh from the trenches, and also of our patrol Destroyer Officers. I had never seen him in the flesh, though the illustrated papers have by now made him a familiar figure enough. For this was Henry Havelock, destined to wear before he died every gallantry award in the gift of England and France. He was a contemporary of Milsom's, and when presently we adjourned to the vast arched messroom, I found myself sitting between them at the Commandant's end of the table. The talk was war, of course, because war made up every man's experience of life for the past three years and a half. But the range and variety of the fields which were being discussed down the shining length of the mahogany table made it unique. In one sector it was Antwerp and the raging inferno that had once been Lierre held for a live-long night against the headlong onslaught of the Hun. In another, Gallipoli held sway, and as the wine circulated and tongues were loosened, tales of that splendid failure were told that assuredly will never find their way into any printed history of the Great War. The hum of voices under the old beams of the vaulted roof was the echo of strife carried from Serbia to the Cameroons, with Mesopotamia and the Persian Gulf thrown in. The only man who appeared disinclined to talk war was Havelock; he and Milsom were exchanging pre-war reminiscences of a visit paid by the Mediterranean Fleet to Monte Carlo; how a certain lady with an impulsive temperament lost her heart to the embarrassed Milsom, who was challenged to a duel by an indignant husband; this worthy Havelock plied with absinthe until he (the husband) was all for Havelock running off with the lady and thus easing a complicated situation; and as the evening wore on and the assiduous Corporal of Marines—brooding behind us with a gold-topped bottle gripped in one white cotton gloved fist—redoubled his attentions, Havelock's eyes lost their weary strained expression, and the stern lines round his mouth relaxed.
We had finished dinner and the port had gone round for the King, and following the second circulation the Commandant rose, and after a neat little speech, proposed Havelock's health, which we drank with musical honours. Havelock replied, and in a few brief sentences he sketched the part played, not by himself but by the Royal Marine Units at the front under his command. Listening to his pithy descriptive rendering into prose of the epic of Beaumont Hamel, it was not difficult to understand the magnetic command of men with which he has been credited, nor the devotion of their willingness to follow him to the gates of Hell.
The Commandant was for snooker after that. "Are you and your guest going to take a cue?" he asked Milsom, but Milsom shook his head. "No. They'll want me at the piano presently. Take Havelock along and some of the others." So Havelock and his host departed to gather in a party and Milsom beckoned for the cigars.
"Now," he said, "I promised you a yarn, didn't I? Well"—he clipped and lit a cigar—"I've been thinking about the whole thing, and what I am going to tell you is partly theory and the rest ain't fact as you probably understand the term." He spilt a drop of water from his finger-bowl on to the shining surface of the table and sketched an oblong outline with the end of a burnt match. "This represents the carriage we were travelling in this afternoon with that young woman:
(diagram of carriage seating)
The arrow indicates the direction in which the train was travelling. The blobs are you and me opposite each other, and the other's the girl. Got that? Well——"
"What's the cross?" I asked.
"That's an empty seat. The symbol is 'X,' which stands for the unknown. That's the corridor on the right. Now, I was sitting facing the engine—this is me in the bottom right-hand corner—and from my seat I could see the window beside X quite clearly—naturally; and you may have observed that if something dark is placed between the light and a sheet of glass, the said sheet of glass becomes to all intents and purposes a mirror. The effect, I think, is increased if the observer is placed at an oblique angle to the surface of the glass. In other words, from where I was sitting I was better able to see a reflection in the glass than you were."
He drained his liqueur glass and puffed reflectively at his cigar for a few moments.
"We were running parallel to a goods train—a line of big, closed wagons, when I noticed a reflection in the window beside the blank seat. I noticed it because it wasn't—as it ought to have been—your reflection."
I laughed. "Whose was it—the Devil's?"
"No. A stranger's. I bent forward to have a better look at him because I couldn't see very clearly, when we drew ahead of the goods train and the reflection vanished."
Had it been anyone but Milsom telling the tale I should have put it down as pure invention, but as I have hinted Milsom possessed peculiar qualities, and I grew still more interested.
"Go on," I said.
"Well, I waited because I knew sooner or later I should get another chance; any cutting or tunnel we passed would do the trick. But up till then I hadn't somehow connected the thing with the girl. It didn't occur to me. I wasn't interested in her and I ain't well up on the science of these phenomena. However, in a little while we boomed into a tunnel and I got all I wanted. It was no one I'd ever seen before, a dark, thin, rather lugubrious-looking bloke. He had his arm through the leather loop thing and his hand was tied up in bandages."
"But do you mean you saw him?" I interrupted.
"No, no; his reflection only. And while I watched he shook his head and smiled (not a very gay effort—sort of twisted) and said something; at least, his lips moved. Of course I looked instinctively at the girl then. She was sitting with her eyes shut and her head leaning back, but what gave me the clue was the fact that her lips moved too. She was talking to the fellow."
My cigar had gone out, and I discovered my brandy was still untouched. I nodded, not because I understood any more clearly, but because I felt that words would break a spell.
"Now my mater—she died a couple of years ago, bless her dear soul—used to belong to a lot of societies that deal with phenomena of various kinds. I don't mean spiritualistic séances and that sort of humbug, but suggestion and telepathy. She used to believe in a thing she called Projection; concentrating will power upon something until the thought becomes more or less a material object—like blowing tobacco smoke into a soap bubble—d'you tumble?"
I didn't, but I nodded again.
He was hopelessly out of my depth, but I remembered spending a few days' leave once with Milsom at his home when we were youngsters, and seeing a black spot against a white wall upon which his mother used to concentrate her mind entirely by way of mental exercise for long periods daily. She was a charming, sympathetic woman and, as far as I could observe, perfectly normal in other respects.
"Now if my mother had been sitting in the carriage she'd have seen the actual figure. I couldn't do that, but I'm what they call clairvoyant enough to see the reflection. And then we whisked out of the tunnel, and I got you to come and sit beside her. I wanted to see if you could see him and recognise his face. As I've said, it was no one I've ever seen before."
I drank my brandy then because I felt I wanted it.
"What's it all mean, Soj? What's projection and bubbles full of smoke got to do with it? I'm a plain sailorman and I don't understand all this psychic business."
Milsom chuckled. "I don't understand it either," he said, "and God knows I don't want to understand too much. But this all seems simple enough to me. The girl was thinking desperately hard about some fellow—the hum of the wheels and the telegraph wires have a hypnotic effect upon some temperaments, and she just unconsciously projected the figure of the man she was thinking about into the seat opposite her and in her imagination was having a chat with him. She was probably in love with the real individual and possibly wasn't getting much joy out of it. She didn't look happy."
Voices from the ante-room were shouting Milsom's name: someone was strumming the piano. Milsom pushed back his chair.
"But was he really there, though?" I queried, as we rose. The long messroom was empty save for the waiters and ourselves. The hubbub in the ante-room redoubled, and someone started a song. Milsom laughed.
"How d'you mean? Of course he wasn't there really. Just because you think of someone it doesn't mean they dump themselves down in front of you. Think of someone now."
I obeyed and stared hard at the portrait of an ensign of "The Noble Free and Spirited Manchester Corps of the Marines" hanging opposite.
Milsom followed the direction of my eyes. "That wasn't a good choice," he said dryly. "That fellow has been sitting opposite us for the last half-hour. Ever since Markham vacated that chair!"
It occurred to me that perhaps Milsom had had all the liqueur brandy to drink that was good for him.
3
It may or may not have been the effect of the old brandy, but in all the years Milsom and I were shipmates I never remember him in a mood of such sheer light-hearted reckless gaiety as that into which he seemed to slip on the threshold of the antechamber.
A sing-song was in progress round the piano, but on his arrival the group turned and bellowed for "The Tuppeny Tube." "The Tuppeny Tube," it must be explained, was a song of his own invention, accompanied by a great deal of patter and not a little horseplay. In pantomime he herded the Public (the newly joined subalterns filled the rôle) into an imaginary overcrowded tube lift, and with clashing fire-irons imitated the closing and opening of the gates. His stentorian bellow of "'Urry up there, step smartly! Plenty of room in front!" was the gag that presently involved the Mess and its guests in a furious mêlée amid overturned card-tables and chairs. Little did we guess as we sprawled gasping, breathless with laughter and exertion, on the leather upholstered chesterfields, in what grim surroundings many of us were to hear again and thrill at that slogan.
The snooker players, wearied of the decorum of the billiard room, presently rejoined the remainder, and in five minutes Milsom, like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, had them dancing to his music. I don't dance: but I leaned over the back of the piano, sucking my pipe and watching his smiling, half-mocking face as he swayed dreamily to the music that tinkled out from underneath his fingers. His eyes were puckered up in the smoke of the cigar he kept screwed into the corner of his mouth, and as he played I saw him watching with a queer inscrutable smile the dancers revolving round him, Majors, Captains and Subalterns, aye and a couple of Colonels, for Havelock and Markham were footing it with the best of them.
"This room has seen some good jamborees in its time, Hornby," he said after a while, speaking with the butt end of the cigar between his teeth. "I dare say men have carried worse memories across the Line than their last night in the old Mess before they sailed." He changed into another air, an old-fashioned valse with a slow haunting melody; the Bostoners and bunnyhuggers checked and picked up the altered step. "I envy you going back to sea," he went on. "It's a good life, afloat. A clean life.... Better'n mucking about ashore with women.... But our turn'll come."
"You aren't due for sea yet, are you, Soj?" I asked.
"I ain'tdue," he said slowly, nodding his head to the melody. "The others ain't due, but they're going ... some day...."
"When are you going?"
He shrugged his shoulders, and again the tune changed:
"With me bundle on me shoulderSure there's no man could be bolder" ...
He raised his voice in song, and the dancers took up the words till the great hall rang with men's voices:
"For I'm off to Philadelphia in the morning."
The player brought down his hands in a crash of bass chords and rose laughing, amid a storm of protest.
"No more. Fineesh.... Phew! It's a long ship, this."
Havelock approached us, glass in hand. "Milsom," he said, "I take that last song as an augury."
"Why?" asked Milsom, smiling.
"Well, my old governor—he was a Marine, you know—told me that they sang that on the last guest night before theBirkenheadsailed. The Marines didn't exactly disgrace themselves in theBirkenhead, and we'll hope your playing it to-night means the Corps are going to get another chance to show the sort of stuff they're made of."
It was the first time I'd heard the loss of theBirkenheadmentioned as other than a disaster: but that was Havelock's way of looking at things.
"They're doing that all day long," said Milsom, "but I'll add 'Amen!'"
4
We sailed two days later, and I did not see Milsom again before we left. He had walked part of the way back with me when, somewhere in the sma' hours, that hectic guest night drew to a close. We parted at the head of a dry dock, where a Light Cruiser was lying shored up in the midst of an abyss of shadows, and for a moment Milsom leaned over the guard rail and stared down the tiers of smooth masonry into the darkness beneath us.
"Hornby," he said, "I wish I had my mother's clearness of vision. I feel somehow that you and I are on the eve of something—an awfully big adventure of sorts."
"I feel it now," went on Milsom, staring down into the dock with its flights of giant steps of granite, and speaking in a low voice. "It's a sort of—sort of pricking of the thumbs!" The beam of an inquisitive searchlight on one of the harbour defences swung round and for an instant dazzled us, painted the objects round us ebon and silver, and passed. Milsom straightened up. "Stonework and searchlights..." he said, as if repeating a half-forgotten lesson. "Stonework and searchlights and darkness beneath.... Oh, I wish I knew! I wish I knew!"
Then abruptly his mood changed. He broke into one of his delightful laughs, fetched his right hand out of his pocket and slapped me on the shoulderblade. "Sleep well!" he cried. "Sleep tight—and don't let the bogies bite!"
That was the last I saw of him.
5
We had been back at the Grand Fleet Base nearly a fortnight, and leave had slipped into the limbo of the past. The usual after-effects of a spell at a dockyard were beginning to be apparent: the married men were cheering up and the bachelors were showing feverish interest in the mails. We had a racing cutter in training and a gunnery programme under way that Guns vowed was going to bring him in grey hairs and sorrow to the grave. Then one busy morning when I had mapped out a nice little programme for myself, the Boatswain and the Captain of the Side going round the ship in a skiff, the Skipper sent for me in the after-cabin.
"Hornby," he said, "what are your plans for the future?" I stared at him a bit. I'd only been promoted three years, and I wasn't worrying about a Command. I felt I was doing pretty good work where I was, and the ship, though perhaps I say it what shouldn't, didn't figure badly in the Squadron Returns. However, I decided he was contemplating a change of Commanders and was sorry, because he was a White Man.
"Plans, sir," I said. "I don't know that I have worried much about making plans. I believe in going where I'm sent and leaving it at that."
He nodded with his dry smile and picked up a telescope off his desk. "I know you won't think I'm butting into your private affairs, Hornby, or being inquisitive"—he focused the glass through a port on a distant cutter under sail—"but are you by any chance thinking of getting married again?"
"No," I said.
He closed the glass with a snap and faced me squarely. "Got any one dependent on you?"
I shook my head, wondering what on earth he was driving at.
"Well then, I won't beat about the bush any more. There's a certain operation in contemplation over the other side; a pretty desperate business as far as I can make out, and the odds against coming out of it alive are considerable. A Captain is wanted to command a certain unit of the force; are you on for it?"
"I'm on for it all right," I replied, "but I'm not a Captain."
"That's all right," said the Skipper. He looked at me a bit queerly. "I was dining with the Admiral last night and he hinted the nature of the business and asked me if I thought you'd do. I told him you would, but the thing is uncommonly like signing a very old friend's death warrant. However, if you pull through you'll not exactly lose by it."
I suddenly felt a most extraordinary elation, like a schoolboy promised an unexpected holiday.
"Can you give me any details, sir?" I asked. "Something to go on and make arrangements?"
The Owner shook his head, and sitting down at his desk pulled a signal pad towards him. "No," he said, "but I'll make a signal to the Admiral that you accept and he'll probably send for you in the course of the day." He rang the bell as he spoke and handed the signal to a messenger.
"Give that to the Yeoman of the Watch and tell him to make it to 'Flag.'" Then he nodded to me. "That's all then, Commander. We'll leave it at that for the present."
"Aye, aye, sir," I replied, and so left him, feeling younger than I had felt for many a long day.
I hadn't long to wait for the summons from the Flagship. Barely an hour had elapsed before the Chief Yeoman stood in the doorway of my cabin. I was going through the Defaulters' List with the Master-at-Arms, I remember.
"Signal from Flag, sir," said the Chief Yeoman. "Admiral wishes to see Commander Hornby at once." He had evidently shown it to the Officer of the Watchen route, because as he spoke I heard the pipe of the Boatswain's Mate shrill along the upper deck, calling away the picket boat. I've noticed that when the gods elect to disturb the course of human destinies they don't dally long upon the road.
I had a surprise on the threshold of the Great Man's after cabin. The Flag Lieutenant ushered me in and left me on the mat with a murmured "Commander Hornby, sir."
The Admiral was standing with his back to the empty stove. Sitting on the arm of a chintz upholstered sofa, swinging his leg and smoking a cigarette through a foot-long amber holder, was no less a person than the Director of Naval Offensives, whom I, in common with the rest of the Navy, imagined at that moment to be seated at his desk in a Whitehall office.
"Morning, Hornby," said the Admiral. "I've got your Captain's signal. Very glad to get it. Just cast your eye over that chart on the table."
From where I was standing I could see it was a big scale chart of the German coast. I crossed the cabin, and the Admiral, who was standing by the table, bent and placed his forefinger on a spot half way up the coast. "See that place, Hornby?"
"Yes," I said, "Angerbad. The new German destroyer and submarine base."
"That's it," said the man who spent his life watching it as a cat watches a mouse-hole. "We want you to block it...."
I confess that caught me in the wind a bit.
The Director of Offensives chuckled and blew a cloud of smoke. "We'll help you, Hornby," he said. I think I flushed a bit. It was the cold insolence, the calculated madness of the thing that took away my breath.
"Aye, aye, sir," I said, and as I spoke I noted the red markings scattered about that section of the coast and clustering thick round the port of Angerbad till there was not an inch thus unadorned. Every mark was a German battery, and the guns ranged from 15 in. to 3-pounders or thereabouts.
"Just give him the outline of the thing," said the Admiral, and the Director of Offensives got down from his perch and joined us at the table. With the mouthpiece of his cigarette holder he traced the course of the canal to where it debouches into the harbour.
Our conversation for the ensuing half-hour need not be recorded here. It was concerned with ways and means and a good deal of detail that was subsequently found impracticable or to require modification. But it wasn't very long before I realised the magnitude of the task ahead of us, and while he talked the Director of Offensives sat twisted on the side of the table, enveloped in cigarette smoke, talking in curt sentences that gave one insight enough into the icy, almost terrible, intelligence that lay behind his smooth forehead. The other occupant of the cabin spoke but little, pacing slowly to and fro with bent head, pausing every now and again to caress the great wolfhound that lay sprawled across the hearth and never took his eyes off his master.
At length, however, when the broad outlines of the plan had been unfolded, the Admiral halted in his walk.
"We'll give you an obsolete Cruiser to fit out for the job, and you'll run her alongside, disembark the assaulting parties, and bring them off again when the work's finished. It's a seaman's job, and we've picked you to do it."
"Thank you, sir," I said, and meant it.
"What about the officers and men?" he said. "My pack want blooding again. Got any suggestions?"
"Yes, sir," I said. "I know of two I'd like to see there, and I'd like to take a Lieutenant called Thorogood as my First Lieutenant; I think I can answer for his willingness to come."
"Well, that can wait for the present," said the Director of Offensives. "We've got to get you South first of all and choose the ships. Then we'll find some men to put into 'em. We want a real Prince Rupert of a Marine to lead the storming party on the Mole, and some good subalterns——" He climbed stiffly off the table and threw away the stump of his cigarette. "Eh!" he said, "why ain't I twenty years younger! They didn't do these things when I was a boy!"
I heard the words, but my mind was far away in the corner of a southern dockyard at night, and as in a dream I heard Milsom's voice:
"Stonework and searchlights.... I wish I knew.... IwishI knew."
Ye Gods! Was this what the bogie in him was driving at?
"I'll wire to the Admiralty for your relief at once," said the Admiral, as I withdrew to return to my ship. "He'll be North in three days, and you can start in on this business."
And so I went out, past the motionless figure of the Marine sentry in the lobby, to begin an awfully big adventure.
6
I was sitting in my cabin after dinner writing up my night order book when Jakes pushed back the curtain and stepped inside. I believe in being accessible, and don't let people knock at my door.
"Hullo, Mouldy," I said, "what can I do for you?"
He was our Assistant Gunnery Lieutenant, and he was called Mouldy in the Wardroom on account of a silent sardonic manner he usually affected. Popularity is a mysterious thing; no man ever sought harder to avoid it or achieved it more readily than our silent "fathom of misery," as the First Lieutenant affectionately termed him. I think fellows in a Mess read character rather well and ignore externals. Anyhow, for all his dry cynicism, I knew Mouldy to have an absurdly tender heart, and to be as sensitive of soul as a soft-shelled egg. He stood with his cap under his arm and his hands joined in front of him, the fingers twisting.
"'Speak to you for a minute, sir?" he mumbled. As a matter of fact, before he introduced the formula that signifies private affairs, I guessed at the first glance that Mouldy was in trouble of some sort. I nodded at the armchair.
"Take a sit-down, old lad," I said, "and have a cigarette; I shan't be a minute finishing this."
I had been too busy since we returned from leave to pay much attention to affairs in the Mess. But I had observed that Mouldy never seemed to be about, and when he came to meals appeared even more taciturn and self-contained than his wont. I left him alone for a few minutes and then turned round. He was still standing before the door slowly twisting his fingers. I got a pipe and began scraping it out.
"Cough it up, Mouldy," I said.
He cleared his throat. "It's nothing much, sir," he replied, in a rather husky tone of forced detachment. "I—I just wanted to say that I thought I'd—er—rather like to leave the ship."
I said nothing, but went on scraping out my pipe.
"I don't feel I'm doing much good, sir, an' I thought I'd like to volunteer for a 'mystery ship,' or something with a bit of risk attached to it. I'd take on anything as long as there was some danger mixed up with it. I feel I'm growing moss and barnacles up here."
I didn't altogether like that. Mouldy was as brave as anyone I knew, but he was no adventurer by nature.
"Well," I said, "of course the Skipper'll send your name in if you want me to ask him, but I'd think it over for a bit if I were you."
"I've thought it over," was the reply. "I've done nothing else since I came back from sick leave." He made a little movement with his damaged hand. "And I—the fact is, sir, I can't stick it any longer."
There was a note in the old thing's voice that somehow wrung my heart. There was trouble here, and my imagination coursed wildly over fields of improbability. For an instant I thought of a woman, but dismissed the idea. The sort of women that Mouldy usually bestowed a fleeting affection upon were not the type to send a man looking for glory.
"Look here," I said, "we've known each other some years now. I'm not the man, as you've probably discovered, to butt into a fellow's private affairs or worm confidences out of anyone, but if you're in trouble of any sort, and it would help to get it off your chest——"
He hesitated for an instant, and in that moment he looked somehow pathetic; awfully young and boyish and in need of advice. "I'm a good deal older than you are, Mouldy," I went on, "and I've been through my own Valley of the Shadow in my time."
He took a long breath, and for a second I thought the floodgates were going to be loosed. Then the painful reserve and shyness of his nature closed on the impulse like a vice. "No, sir," he said, "no ... thanks awfully.... I just wanted to get away ... just that."
Whatever fox was gnawing under his shirt, he preferred to hold on to it rather than another eye should see his hurt. Well, I think I liked him all the better for it. I never found talking about my trouble lightened it. It's a matter of temperament, I suppose.
"Right-o!" I said instantly. "I'll see what can be done. In fact I'll go further. I'll promise you all the change and danger and excitement you could possibly want." And with that I sent him to turn in.
7
My relief turned up three days later, and that night they gave me a farewell dinner in the Wardroom. It was like all shows of the kind—a mixture of wild joviality and moments of sentiment, real or stimulated by the cup. I had to make a speech, of course, and altogether was not sorry when it was at last possible to escape to the Quarter Deck. I had given no reason for my abrupt departure from the ship, and I was conscious that I had succeeded in surrounding myself with a sort of glamour of mystery. Bunje (he was our First Lieutenant then) would have it that I was about to contract a matrimonial alliance with an exiled princess, and made a moving speech after dinner that was not in all its features fit for reproduction in these pages.
The Young Doctor stoutly maintained that I had decided to embrace Holy Orders, and insisted on borrowing the Padre's cassock to wear while he outlined my probable career as a missionary in the valley of the Yangtse-Kiang.
It was Thorogood who joined me on the Quarter Deck where I was finishing a final pipe before turning in, and he fell into step beside me, linking His arm in mine in the boyish, spontaneous manner in which his affectionate nature revealed itself.
"We'll miss you awfully, Commander," he said.
"You haven't seen the last of me yet, James," I replied.
"No," he answered, "but you're off to-morrow, aren't you? And God knows when I'll see you again."
"Hang it, why shouldn't I drop him a hint," I thought. If the flower of the Service was needed for this bloody business, then I'd choose Jimmy Thorogood amongst the bunch.
"James," I said, "would you care to come with me to my next job?"
He stopped short and stared at me through the darkness. "D'you mean it?" he cried. "By Jove! If I thought——"
"Listen," I said. "Its a business that wants thinking over. It's a pretty risky affair, and you are liable to get scuppered. The odds are a hundred to one on your being killed. I can't tell you any details at present, but think it over. You're not to tell a soul, and I'll write to you later and renew my offer. I shan't think you a coward if you refuse." Upon my soul, at that moment I half hoped he would refuse. I was awfully fond of Jimmy Thorogood.
"My aunt!" he gasped, just as I had gasped in the Admiral's cabin in fact. "How perfectlytopping! ... I say, thanks awfully, sir!"
I left it at that.
8
For the next couple of months I was a busy man. I made my headquarters ashore, but they gave me a roving commission, and I spent a good deal of the time at the Admiralty and paid a lot of flying visits to Dockyard Ports. It would take too long to go into all that part of the business and describe our hunt round the scrap heaps of the Navy for just the craft we needed. I fixed on the oldIntolerantfor my share of the business, and I shan't forget the thrill with which I first saw her, black against the sunset one evening, lying at her rusty moorings on the Motherbank. For the three blockships we selected the three obsolete Cruisers of the "D" class:Daring,Dauntless, andDetermination, and presently their Captains arrived down from the North in obedience to a telegram from the Director of Offensives. They invaded my diggings at the Base one forenoon, tumbling out of a rickety four-wheeler, burdened with rugs and suitcases, all jabbering at once; James Thorogood, a contemporary of his called Glegg, and another Lieutenant-Commander I didn't know, named Brakespear. They were in the highest spirits and loudly demanded food. I fed them and gave them drink, and finally, when they had their pipes alight and were sprawling at their ease, I unfolded what lay ahead. Of course, they had an inkling—in fact, they had to be told a certain amount when they were asked to volunteer. But they wanted details now, and what I told them ought to have sobered a circus. Instead of which, Glegg danced a war dance, and Thorogood solemnly stood on his head in a corner of the sofa, while Brakespear flung cushions at him and scared the landlady's cat to the verge of delirium.
It was the next day that I learned for the first time who was to lead the Marines' storming party on to the Mole from the deck of the oldIntolerant. I received a telephone message from the Director of Offensives that he wanted to see me, and accordingly I went to town and reached his office about noon. There, studying a roll of aerial photographs through a magnifying glass at the Admiral's side, was Milsom. I somehow felt no surprise, but he raised his eyebrows and smiled in his half-mocking whimsical way.
"You know each other?" said the Admiral. "That's all right. Now what about the demolition party. We want a Lieutenant-Commander for that; a Gunnery man for preference. Any suggestions, Hornby?"
"Yes," I said. "Lieutenant-Commander Jakes." I named my old ship.
He nodded. "Send for him and let me see him. In the meanwhile you two had better go and have a Council of War. It wouldn't be a bad plan if you went down and looked at theIntoleranttogether. They've started work on her, and as soon as the living quarters are ready, you, Hornby, can take up your quarters on board. Milsom won't need to for some time yet." He turned to the Marine. "You can pick your men and start in a preliminary training ashore. No need to be uncomfortable till you've got to! By the way, if you are going down to see theIntolerantyou can take a letter for me to the Commander-in-Chief. Just wait while I dictate a few lines."
He pressed a button on his desk, and I carried a couple of the photographs to the window to get a better light. They were photographs of Angerbad, obtained by our aircraft the previous day, and I studied them with considerable interest. The weather had been bad for reconnaissance of late, and the most recent photographs I had seen previously were taken ten days before. I don't think I heard the door open, but I did hear Milsom give a funny little gasp behind me, and I turned to see a girl standing in the doorway. The light was full in her face, and my heart gave the most unaccountable jump. I suppose it was astonishment, because the new-comer was the girl who had travelled with us in the train returning from leave—what now seemed centuries ago. She didn't appear to see me, but her eyes, with their curious concentrated gaze, were levelled on Milsom. She stood quite motionless for a moment, and I realised for the first time that she was very tall. I am not a short man, and her startled eyes were level with mine. A little half-smile of recognition passed over her face. Then, with a slight inclination of her graceful head, she slipped into a chair, with pencil poised and notebook on her knee. The Director, deep in papers that strewed his desk, dictated a note, smoked half a cigarette while it was being typed, and signed it. As the girl was leaving the room he said: "By the way, Miss Mayne—Captain Hornby—Colonel Milsom." The girl bowed, but Milsom stepped forward. "We've met before," he said, and held out his hand.
"Yes," said Miss Mayne. A faint colour came into her pale face. She gave him one searching, half-puzzled look (just such another glance as I intercepted in the railway carriage), and quietly left the room.
9
Some day I hope a better man than I will write the story of that grim preparation with its hours of heartbreaking labour; its disappointments and anticipations, the close, almost affectionate, intimacy between officers and men. "Eat, drink, and be merry" was the motto of the Force, and those who know the sailorman's lightheartedness and cheerful oblivion to the things of the morrow will realise, with a morrow as uncertain as ours, how care-free was to-day. As a psychological study it must have presented strange and interesting sidelights. We only had one punishment—a threat of dismissal from the Force; and I vow that the dread of the cat in the Navy of old never produced such a state of discipline as ruled on board those ancient crowded ships.
I got a First Lieutenant appointed, a lad called Jervis, who, immediately on joining, decided that his rôle required of him that he should grow a beard with all speed; as a facial adornment it was not a success, but regarded as a terrifying war-mask it left little to be desired. He was a laughable, lovable soul, a regular soda-water bottle of fizzing spirits and optimism, and the men worshipped him. Selby was our Navigator, a dry, thoughtful old stick, with eyes that always seemed full of memories that clung like sheep's wool along a bramble hedge. He was one of those men you never get to know thoroughly, yet who never make you conscious they are keeping you at arm's length. It's a type the Navy breeds prolifically. Never knowing privacy from earliest youth onwards has a good deal to do with it.
In all the preliminary fitting out, however, the men who really slaved and on whom so much of the final success depended were Shorty Casseen, our Engineer-Lieutenant-Commander, and the Gunnery Lieutenant, Teigne. The former found a scrap heap, and converted it into a set of engines that was not only to be relied upon to take the ship to Angerbad, but we rather hoped would also bring her back after an almighty hammering. I've often wondered why he volunteered for the job: he had a little wife he adored and two bonny kids. But he came, and he lived through it, bless him.
"Guns" (Teigne) was one of those gunnery enthusiasts who make you wonder what profession he'd have chosen if no one had discovered gunpowder. He saw the world through telescopic sights, I believe, and is reputed, on first seeing the large hotel that was a prominent landmark near where we were then anchored, to have muttered longingly: "My aunt! What a target!"
Of course, as the time drew near, and we had rehearsed and drilled to the last gasp of preparedness, others were added to the complement. We had a Padre, a bullet-headed athlete, who before the war was the parson of a roaring miners' camp in the North. Not the wife-beater's terror of the Sunday periodicals to look at, though—a quiet, friendly little chap, with a way of blinking when he talked, as though the sun was in his eyes. But one night in the Mess when we were having a scrap to keep our spirits up and help our digestions, he picked me up and threw my twelve stone about like a rag doll.
Jock Macrae was our P.M.O., with two assistants fresh from some hospital. For a man who was no despiser of whisky he had the most iron nerve and steadiest hand of any "butcher" I've met. I have wondered since how many torn and bloody bundles of humanity owe their lives to his imperturbable pluck and skill. He brought a banjo with him, and night after night he would sit cross-legged on the deck, plucking at the catgut with those long surgical fingers of his, and sing old Jacobean ballads to the moon.
The blockships were moored not far away from us, and we organised concerts and dinners that will always remain vivid in my memory as the gayest entertainments of the kind I have ever participated in.
I saw little of Mouldy or Milsom during the training period. The former was coaching his braves in the gentle art of demolishing things ashore at the Base, and the latter was at Headquarters introducing his band of warriors to the inner mysteries of bomb-throwing, flame projecting, and similar cults. Once or twice I went over to confer with them separately, and found that, by a curious succession of accidents, they had never met each other.