Part 15

The daylight had gone from the outside world and there was only firelight in the room. The little desk I had bought earlier in the day still stood in the corner where I had deposited it, and as I lay half-dozing in the saddlebag chair, the mocking flames played strange tricks. It seemed as if another figure were in the room--a restless, uneasy shadow among the shadows, and ever and again it seemed to hover round the desk. I lay with my eyes half closed, identifying one by one the familiar objects of the room, and gradually the presence of this shadow puzzled me to wakefulness. The poker, left carelessly between the bars of the grate, dropped a few inches, and the handle struck the fender with a little rattle. The fire spluttered and flared brightly, so that I saw the figure by the desk distinctly. It was a tall, gaunt man in a uniform I didn't recognise for the moment--a ragged, mud-stained jacket and baggy trousers. Then I remembered seeing a regiment of them on the march once near Algiers. It was the uniform of the Foreign Legion.

The figure was bending over the desk tracing something on it with a lean forefinger.

I sat upright, and as I moved the tall man turned his face towards me. There was a grimy stained bandage round his head, and it was twenty years since I had seen him, but I recognised the queer pale eyes and thin lips.

"Day!" I exclaimed.

"Yes," he said. It gave me an inexplicable shiver down the back to hear him speak. "But I didn't do it. I didn't cut Windsails down." He fingered the surface of the desk like a lost soul feeling for the latch of Heaven's gate.

"I meant to do it," he went on, "and I had my razor ready. I was going to keep you all in suspense for a bit. And then, suddenly, before I touched it, the lanyard broke. I think Windsails cut off the frayed ends afterwards. He hated us all."

There was a dark stain on the left breast of Day's jacket that seemed to be spreading slowly.

"I came back to tell you," he said, his voice sounding faint and far away. "I don't care what the others think. But this----" Again he fingered the desk.

Within reach of my hand was an electric desk lamp, one of those portable things with a switch at the base. I reached out and turned it on, flooding the room with light.

The desk was there all right, but I was alone.

Carrying the lamp in my hand, I rose and crossed over to examine my purchase again. Yes, there were the words, crossed and recrossed by faintly scratched names and dates, covered by successive layers of varnish, but still plain to read, deep carven in the wood:

DAY IS A SCAB

The room was half full of smoke when I had finished, and the acrid smell of burning presently brought an alarmed housemaid to the threshold.

"It's nothing," I reassured her. "I was only doing a little poker-work on this desk." I replaced the fireiron in the fender, and opened the window to let the smoke out as the maid withdrew.

An uneasy wind was fretting the invisible rhododendrons with the threat of rain on the morrow.

"I'm sorry, Day," I said to the darkened universe. "But it's all right now. I've burnt it out."

IX

THE ENGLISH WAY

(1917)

1

The Quartermaster of the Watch pushed aside the tarpaulin cover to the Wardroom hatchway and whistled softly through his teeth. "Mail," he said to the Officers' Steward, who stepped out of the diminutive pantry in answer to the summons, and, bending down, thrust a bundle of sodden envelopes into the outstretched hand. It was snowing hard, and the whaler that brought off the Destroyer's Christmas mail had shipped sufficient water to call for a muttered protest from beneath the sou'-wester of the stroke oar.

"I don' mind wettin' my blinking shirt," he muttered, as he tugged at the oar, "not so long as we brings 'ope 'an' comfort. But if them perishin' mail-bags is goin' to sit in a pool o' water--what the 'ell's the use? No one can't read a letter wot's bin soaked in the Norf Sea for a hour!" The whaler's crew murmured concurrence.

The Coxswain, nursing the mail-bags on his knee with a hand on each and his elbow on the tiller, bade the crew chuck their weight into their oars and mind their ensanguined business--what time he, the Coxswain, would mind his. This admirably adjusted division of labour brought them eventually alongside, and the mail inboard.

The Surgeon Probationer, whose body was buried in the depths of a wicker arm-chair (with the exception of his feet, which were on top of the stove; and his heart, which was in the keeping of the "Wren" driver of an Admiralty car), heard the whaler come alongside and was at the bottom of the hatchway as soon as the steward.

"Gimme the ruddy things," he muttered, hungrily, and awoke the partially gassed inmates of the Wardroom with a joyous whoop.

"Mail!" he shouted, and dealt the moist envelopes into the laps of the recumbent figures sleeping off the effects of a Christmas luncheon in various attitudes of statuesque abandon.

The Mess awoke bleary-eyed, and fumbled with its correspondence. One by one the forms sat upright; grunts were succeeded by articulate expressions of approval. The Lieutenant (E), who sat nearest the bell, rose to his feet and pressed it fervently. Then he sat down again, ordered a drink, and slit open the first of four fat envelopes. It was from a favourite sister, ætat fourteen, who, having made up her feminine mind that Sir David Beatty's position in the naval cosmos was one that her brother would fill with more picturesque and efficient completeness, speedily surrounded that officer in a comfortable aura of giggling self-complacency.

The Midshipman R.N.R. burst open a bulging envelope and stepped straightway on to a magic carpet, which wafted him out of the steel shell of a Destroyer's Wardroom into a Berkshire vicarage.

The Sub sat on the settee with his legs in heavy leather sea-boots and his elbows on his knees reading a letter from a farm in Northamptonshire. The writer of the letter had spent the morning cleaning out a byre, and the early part of the afternoon sorting potatoes. She had then bathed and sat down in her prettiest crêpe-de-chine kimono and a mingled fragrance of China tea and bath salts to the composition of a letter that spread a slowly widening grin of ecstasy across the weather-beaten features of the recipient, who had almost forgotten what a woman's voice sounded like.

The clouds of tobacco-smoke curled to and fro in the close atmosphere of the Destroyer's Wardroom, and the silence--save for the rustle of a quickly-turned page or the snicker of a knife opening a fresh envelope--was profound. Then the Surgeon Probationer chuckled hoarsely. It was a profane sound and passed unnoticed; but presently he bent forward and thrust a gaudy strip of pasteboard beneath the nose of the enraptured Sub-Lieutenant.

"Call that nuffin'?" he queried, coarsely.

The Sub detached his soul with difficulty from the seventh heaven, and considered a highly-coloured representation of a robin upon a snowy background, and the legend "Peace on earth and goodwill among men" picked out in frosted letters against a border of holly leaves.

"'Snice, ain't it?" said the Surgeon Probationer.

"Fair bit of all-right," said the Sub, good-humouredly, and resumed page seven of the closely scribbled sheet:

"_I am writing this by the firelight, and if only you were here we'd draw up our chairs close and p'r'aps----_"

"My Aunt Agatha sent it to me," continued the voice of the importunist. "Read what's written on the back."

The Sub, who was what is called a good mess-mate, turned the pasteboard over rather absent-mindedly.

"_Love your enemies_," was written in angular spidery handwriting across the inoffensive surface of the card. The Sub was twenty, but he had known four years of warfare against the Powers of Evil, which we call Germany for short.

"Any relation of Lansdowne or Ramsay Macdonald, your Aunt Agatha?" he inquired, and tossed the card back, to return instantly to a firelit twilight and "p'r'aps."

The Surgeon looked round the Mess in search of a fresh confidant. The First Lieutenant sat hunched up on his right, holding a bunch of sheets of paper clenched in his hand, and staring at the stove with unseeing eyes.

"Here, Number One," said Aunt Agatha's nephew, and smote his neighbour on the knee. "You look as if you wanted brightening up. Read that, my lad! Both sides. Every picture tells a story."

The Lieutenant turned eyes like those of a startled horse upon the speaker.

"Eh?" he said. He, too, had come back a long way to answer a living voice.

"Read that, my pippin."

The Lieutenant read obediently, turning the card backwards and forwards in his fingers as if looking for something that wasn't there. The crumpled sheets of his letter dropped to the deck and lay unheeded.

Then abruptly he laughed; it was not a laugh common to Englishmen, and so disconcerting was the sound that two or three faces lifted from the preoccupation of letter or illustrated paper, and tranquil eyes stared curiously.

"My God!" said the First Lieutenant. "That's the best joke--the best joke----" His voice dropped low. He handed back the Christmas-card and fumbled blindly for the fallen sheets of his letter. One by one he straightened them on his knees, smoothing out the creases mechanically.

"The best joke----" He rose to his feet with something in his white face that jerked the medical man instantly upright beside him.

"Sit down," said the First Lieutenant, and there was a note in his voice the Doctor obeyed, because it was something he was still young enough to acknowledge. "Listen," said the Lieutenant, in hard, dry tones. "You've got to share this--you've all got to share this." Papers rustled and every eye was on the speaker. "It's--it's too good to keep to oneself. My brother"--he made a little gesture with the letter in his hand--"my brother was wounded--broken thigh--twenty miles behind the line in a base hospital--the Huns bombed it in broad daylight, with the Red Cross flying on every flagstaff and painted on every roof--bombed it in cold blood, and killed thirty-four wounded officers and men and two V.A.D.'s. They killed my brother, and they killed----" He thrust the letter into the limp hands of the Surgeon Probationer. "You gave me something to read just now. Read that! They killed the whitest woman--she was trying to save him--with the Red Cross on her breast--and his thigh broken. Goodwill among men! Love your enemies! Love your----"

The Gunner came across the mess with his heavy tread, his stolid face full of concern.

"No offence, I'm sure, sir," he said, glancing at the Surgeon. "Mr. Dantham didn't know--how _could_ he? Nor yet his aunt----"

The tragedy of one is the tragedy of all in a community as small and as intimate as a Destroyer Wardroom; but the innate sense of justice in the Briton's heart found expression in the Gunner's inarticulate sympathy. He held no brief for the Hun, but he was the champion of the shocked Surgeon and Aunt Agatha for all her pacifist leanings.

The Surgeon sat with the unread letter in his hands staring up at the First Lieutenant.

"Oh!" he said. "Oh, the swine." A growl of confirmation ran round the Mess, but no one addressed the First Lieutenant direct.

"Yes," he said. "Bestial swine. Brutal, bestial swine. If he'd been killed by the shell that broke his leg I wouldn't have minded. That would have been fair fight; and she--if it had been septic poisoning or disease; those are the risks all nurses run: the enemies they face and fight all day and night. But this!" He spoke in low, measured tones. "If I ever get to grips with a Hun after this----" The mask of icy self-control slipped for a moment from his face. His features worked and his hands made a movement somehow suggestive and brutal.

"Best have a drink," said the Gunner, soothingly, and as he spoke there was a trampling of men's feet overhead, muffled by the snow on the thin plating. The Quartermaster's pipe rippled and shrilled, to be succeeded by a hoarse sing-song bellow. "Boot and saddle" sounded in a cavalry barracks never stirred the stables as that rush of unseen feet overhead, breaking the peace of a Christmas afternoon in harbour, galvanised the Wardroom into sudden activity.

"Stand by to slip from the buoy," said the Gunner, and made for the hatchway. But the First Lieutenant was before him, bareheaded, cramming his Christmas mail into his pocket as he swung himself up the iron rungs of the ladder.

2

The Commander, who had been standing peering through his glasses for the last five minutes, lowered them suddenly and glanced at the chart clamped on the bracket beside him.

His First Lieutenant continued to stare across the grey sea to the north-west. Day was dawning, and the spray, flung from the reeling bows of the Destroyer, was like a frozen whip-lash on their faces. "Yes, that's them," he said, in a grimly ungrammatical undertone. To the naked eye nothing was visible above the ragged skyline, but every man on the bridge was standing gazing intently in the same direction, as if the wind carried with it the scent of the quarry they sought.

The Commander gave an order to the Signalman standing attentive beside the daylight searchlight, and immediately the shutters broke into a chattering "View halloa!"

A blink answered on the instant, where, two cables astern, the second boat in the line followed in the heaving wake. Out of the faint haze of smoke that almost screened the rest of the division from view, one after the other the answers flickered, and then the leader spoke. The lights all blinked back together.

"Signal passed, sir!" said the Yeoman.

"Right," replied the Commander. He bent over the chart again for an instant, and straightening, gave an order to the wheel.

The leader's bows leaped at a charging sea, rose shuddering, and fell away from the wind a couple of points; the drone of the turbines below took on a different, higher note. The Commander turned and glanced along the upper deck with a little grim smile above the turns of his worsted muffler. The Destroyer was stripped for the fight, and at the mid-ship and after guns the crews were blowing on their hands and jesting amongst themselves. The Gunner sat astride the torpedo tube glancing along the sights as the twin tubes trained slowly round like ponderous accusing fingers.

"Your brother ain't going to be long unavenged," said the Commander to his First Lieutenant, as the latter climbed into the fire-control position. "We've caught this party cold!"

The First Lieutenant nodded, unsmiling, as he turned away.

"We'll sink the lot," he said. "But that's too good a death for a Hun. The sea's too clean to drown 'em in. I'd----" He checked the sentence and busied himself about his fire-control instruments.

Then out of the north-west came a stutter of light. It winked suspiciously, and the Commander laughed, with his hand on the fire-gong key.

"_There's_ my answer, Fritz," he said, and before the words were out of his mouth the foremost gun opened fire. "You're dev'lish good at raiding merchant convoys--let's see how you take a hiding." The acrid cordite smoke, as his guns gave reply to the German challenge, caught him in the throat, and his words ended in a cough.

The German Destroyers turned for home, held their course for eight bitter minutes, steaming hell-for-leather and husbanding their ammunition. Their instructions were peculiar, inasmuch as they were ordered to return at all costs to their base. In destroyer warfare the nation that holds command of the seas can afford to omit this bitter clause from its light-craft's sailing orders; but an Admiralty that knows it can send nothing to the succour of its disabled adventurers perforce plays for safety.

The German flotilla leader, bending over his chart and stop-watch, deluged with spray from falling projectiles, made a rapid mental calculation and realised that this was no tip-and-run business. He had played that game twice and brought it off, and played it once too often. In golfing parlance, of which he was entirely ignorant, he was stymied.

He laid a smoke-screen, and turned under cover of it, avoided a long-distance torpedo by six feet, and applied himself to the voice-pipe connecting him with the engine-room. What he said to the blond perspiring engineer at the other end does not concern this story, because a "browning" salvo at four miles' range struck his quivering fugitive command amidships, and beat her into a flaming, smoking welter of flying fragments and spouting foam.

His opponent saw things appearing above the smear of that hasty smoke-screen, things that leaped into view against the grey sky and descended again into invisibility. He lowered his glasses, glanced grinning at his First Lieutenant, and gave another order to the Quartermaster at the wheel.

But the Quartermaster was seized with a sudden preoccupation. He was leaning back against a stanchion with the broken spokes of the wheel still in his hands, looking with stupefied amazement at the pulsating jet squirting from his thigh.

"Hand steering-gear!" bawled the Commander, striving to dominate the din of the action with a mechanical shout. He jumped the body of the Yeoman of Signals, sprawled bloodily across the head of the ladder, and stumbled blindly down the iron rungs.

"Give 'em hell, Number One!" he shouted, and caught a glimpse of his Second-in-Command's head and shoulders above the rent and tattered splinter-mats. "The blighters have got our range," he muttered, and as he reached the upper deck he saw another torpedo hurtle from the tube and vanish in a cloud of spray.

"Keep it going, boys!" he shouted, as he passed the midship gun. "Give it to 'em hot and strong!"

The gun-layer turned from the eye-piece as he passed and grinned as the smoking breech clanged open. His jumper and jersey were rent from shoulder to hip, and he stanched a wound with cotton-waste while the loader slammed a fresh cartridge home. The Destroyer, temporarily out of control, fell broadside on to the sea; the waves leaped at them and sluiced knee-deep across the deck ere the Commander reached the after steering position and got the kicking hand-wheel manned. The wind carried the sound of cheering to the Commander's ears, and he glanced over his shoulder to see the rest of the division wheel and go crashing past his quarter in a cloud of spray and funnel smoke. The next astern had taken charge as the leader fell out of line. A burst of shrapnel whipped the after funnel into a colander, and the Gunner rolled into the scuppers, clutching helplessly at a cleat, and slid into the embrace of a curling sea that folded its arms about him and carried him from sight.

The Lieutenant (E) appeared on deck and clawed his way aft through clouds of steam.

"Main steam-pipe, port engine-room's cut, sir," he shouted. "Nine knots is the best we'll get out of her." He stared ruefully to leeward.

The fight had swept away to the south, and the crippled leader followed, to pass presently across the battle's trail. Clinging to lifebuoys and scraps of German wreckage were pitiful drenched human beings. Hands waved, white faces appeared in the smooth flanks of the waves or vanished, smothered in their breaking crests.

The Commander jerked the telegraphs and surveyed his rolling deck. "Cease fire!" he bawled, satisfied himself that the battered whaler was still seaworthy, and gave the order, "Away lifeboat's crew!"

They lowered her, manned by men still breathless with the exultant flush of battle, some with hasty bandages about them, and to and fro they plied amid that tumbling sea and the unmanned foe calling for dear life at their rough hands. The Destroyer turned to make a lee, and along her rail the ship's company gathered, with heaving-lines and lifebuoys.

A wave passed surging down the ship's side, carrying on its crest the head and shoulders of a man. His face was ashen grey, and his hands grabbed ineffectually at the slipping coils of a rope's end thrown from the forecastle. He slid helplessly into the trough of the sea, his eyes wide and terrified, staring at the rows of faces above him.

"'Ere, Fritz," said a rough voice, "'ang on!" and another rope jerked and fell with a splash beside him. Again the clutching hands went out, but his strength was gone. The white face fell forward--jerked back, gasping and choking--the hands went up.

"Gangway, you fools! He'll drown!" Two able seamen, leaning over the side--one had escaped from a German prison camp six months previously, and was enjoying himself--were thrust apart; a burly figure in socks, and divested of his reefer jacket, steadied himself with one hand on a davit while he measured the distance, and dived.

"Number One!" gasped the incredulous Commander. "Don't tell me that's the First Lieutenant?"

"Yessir," said the Wardroom Steward, who had been passing up ammunition, with a cigarette behind his ear, and a hastily-collected gallery of lady-loves' photographs projecting from his breast-pocket.

"Yessir." Adding, as one in the confidence of the Wardroom: "'Im as lost 'is brother, bombed by them 'Uns. Actin' regardless, you might say."

The First Lieutenant, treading water, was effecting a businesslike bowline under the armpits of the drowning man, and avoiding his enfeebled embrace with considerable presence of mind.

Finally the two were hauled inboard and the ship's company raised a cheer.

"Shut up, will you!" spluttered the First Lieutenant, angrily, wringing the water from his sodden nether garments. He avoided the eye of his Commanding Officer.

The ship's company, under direction of the Surgeon, applied themselves to first aid with all the enthusiasm of victors and amateurs in the gentle art of saving life. The whaler, laden with dazed and bedraggled captives, was pulling wearily up to the quarter, rising and plunging in the steep seas. The business of the ensuing five minutes brought the Commander and his First Lieutenant face to face.

"Funny little fellow, ain't you?" said the former.

"Bah!" said the Lieutenant. Then added, savagely, "You wait till next time!"

X

THE PARTING OF THE WAYS

(1919)

The Light Cruiser that had shortened-in, whose paying-off pendant hung limp from mainmast-head to quarter-deck, asked permission to proceed.

From her berth in the upper waters of the Firth the Flagship was invisible; but repeating ships and dockyard signal station caught the query, tossed it from one to the other till the Flagship had it, and sent the affirmative signal back to the Light Cruiser as her Captain stepped up the ladder to the bridge.

He walked to the rail that overlooked the forecastle, caught the eye of the First Lieutenant, and nodded. The latter raised his arm, as one who had received and understood an order. He transmitted it apparently by telepathy, for immediately the last lengths of cable came grinding through the hawse pipe.