Part 5

"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:

[Illustration: (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't _due_," 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 shoulder Sure 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 the _Birkenhead_ sailed. The Marines didn't exactly disgrace themselves in the _Birkenhead_, 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 the _Birkenhead_ mentioned 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 Watch _en 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.... I _wish_ I 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."