PURE VANITY took me over to Agg’s cottage with my new 18-h.p.
Decapod in search of Henry Salt Hinchcliffe, E.R.A. who appreciates good machinery.

‘He’s down the coast with Agg and the cart,’ said Pyecroft, sitting
in the doorway nursing Agg’s baby, who in turn nursed the cat.
‘What’s come to your steam-pinnace that we marooned the bobby with?
Mafeesh? Sold? Well, I pity the buyer, whoever he is; but it don’t
seem to me, in a manner o’ speaking, that this navy-coloured beef-boat
with the turtle-back represents what you might technically call lugshury.’

‘That’s only a body that the makers have sent down. The real
one’s at home: we shall put it on tomorrow. It is all varnish and paint,
like a captain’s galley.’

‘Much more my style,’ said Pyecroft, putting down the baby.
‘Where are you bound?’

‘Just about and about. We’re running trials,’ I replied.

He looked at the dust-covered, lead-painted road-body, with the
single tool-box seat where the tonneau should have been; at Leggatt,
my engineer, attired like a ratcatcher turned groom, and rested his
grave eyes on my disreputable dust-coat, gaiters, and cap.
Then he went indoors, to return in a short time clad in blue
civilian serge and a black bowler.

‘Aren’t there regulations?’ I said. ‘You look like a pilot.’

‘Or a police inspector,’ murmured Leggatt.

‘Decency forbids’, said he, climbing into the back seat, ‘or I
might say somethin’ about coalin’ rig an’ lighters.’

Leggatt turned down a lever, and she flung half a mile of road
behind her with a silky purr.

‘No — not lighters,’ said Pyecroft. ‘She’s a destroyer. She licked
up that last stretch like an Italian eatin’ macaroni.’
He stood up and steadied himself by a pole in the middle of the front
seat which carried the big acetylene lamp.

‘Why, this is like the periscope gadget on the Portsmouth
submarines. Does she dive?’ said he.

‘No, fly!’ I said, and we proved it over a bare upland road (this
was in the days before the numbering of the cars) that brought us
within sight of the summer sea.

Pyecroft pointed automatically to the far line of silver. ‘The beach
is always a good place,’ he said. ‘An’ it’s goin’ to be a warm day.’

So we took the fairest of counties to our bosom for an easy hour;
rocking through deep-hedged hollows where the morning’s coolth still
lingered; electrifying the fine dust of a league of untempered main
road; bathing in the shadows of overarching park timber; slowing
through half-built, liver-coloured suburbs that defiled some exploited
hamlet; speculating in front of wonderful houses all fresh from the
middle parts of Country Life; or shooting a half-vertical hill
from mere delight in the Decapod’s power, but always edging away
towards the good southerly blue.

Among other things, I remember, we discussed the new naval
reforms. Pyecroft’s criticisms would have been worth votes to any Government.
He desired what he called ‘a free gangway from the lower deck to the
admiral’s stern walk’ — the career open to the talents.

‘An’ they’d better begin now,’ he concluded, ‘for to
this complexion will it come at last, ‘Oratio. Three weeks after war breaks out,
the painstakin’ and meritorious admirals will have collapsed, owin’ to
night work and reflecting on their responsibilities to the taxpayer,
takin’ with them seventy-five per cent. of the ambitious but aged captains.
The junior ranks, not carin’ two straws for the taxpayer, an’ sleepin’ where
they can, will survive, in conjunction with the gunner, the boatswain,
an’ similar petty an’ warrant officers, ‘oo will thus be seen commandin’
first, second, an’ third-class cruisers seriatim.’

‘That’s rather a bold prophecy.’

‘Prophecy be blowed!’ said Pyecroft, leaning on the light-pole
and sweeping the landscape with my binoculars, which had slung
themselves round his neck five minutes after our departure. ‘It’s what’s
goin’ to happen.’

‘Meaning you’d take the Channel Fleet into action?’ I suggested.

‘Setteris paribus — the others being out of action. I’d ‘ave a try.’

page 2

‘Hinchcliffe, or the engine-room staff, would be where poor Tom Bowling’s
body was, an’ one man’s orders down the speakin’ tube is very like
another’s. Besides, think o’ the taxpayer’s feelin’s. What ‘ud you say
to me if I came flyin’ back to the beach signallin’ for a commissioned
officer to continue the battle — there bein’ two warrants an’ one carpenter
still survivin’? ‘Tain’t common sense — in the Navy. Hullo! Here’s the
Channel! Bright and beautiful, an’ bloomin’ ‘ard to live with — as usual.’
We had swung over a steep, oak-crowned ridge, and overlooked
a map-like stretch of marsh ruled with roads, ditches, and canals that
ran off into the still noonday haze on either hand. At our feet lay
Wapshare, that was once a port, and even now commanded a few dingy
keels. Southerly, five or six miles across the levels, the sea whitened
faintly on grey-blue shingle spaced with martello towers. As the car
halted for orders, the decent breathing of the Channel was broken
by a far away hiccough out of the heat haze.

‘Big guns at Lydd,’ said Pyecroft. ‘They’ll have some triflin’ errors
due to mirage this forenoon. Well, I handle such things for a livin’.
We needn’t go there. What’s yonder — three points on the port bow.
between those towers?’

He pointed to a batch of tall-chimneyed buildings at the very edge
of the wavering beach.

‘I believe it has something to do with making concrete blocks
for some big Admiralty works down the coast,’ I answered.

‘A thirsty job with the lime flyin’ an’ the heat strikin’ off the
shingle. What a lot of ‘ard work one misses on leaf! It looks cooler
below here,’ he said, and waved a hand.

We slid into Wapshare, which, where the jerry builder has left
it alone, precisely resembles an illustration in a mediaeval missal.
Skirting the shade of its grey flint walls, we found ourselves on a
wharf above a doubtful-minded tidal river and a Poole schooner —
she was called the Esther Grant — surrounded by barges of
fireclay for the local potteries.

‘All asleep,’ said Pyecroft, ‘like a West India port. Let’s go down
the river. There’s a sort of road on one side — out where that barge
is lyin’.’

We trundled along a line of wooden offices, crackling in the heat,
seeing here and there a shirt-sleeved clerk. Then a policeman stopped us.

‘Can’t come any further,’ he said. ‘This is Admiralty ground,
and that’s an explosives barge yonder.’ He glanced curiously at
Pyecroft and the severe outlines of my car.

‘That nothin’. I know all about the Admiralty — at least, they
know all about me.’

‘Perhaps if you told me —’ the policeman began.

‘But I don’t think I’ll inspect stores today.’ Pyecroft leaned back
and folded his arms royally. ‘What are your instructions? Repeat ’em
in a smart and lifelike manner.’

‘To allow nobody beyond this barrier,’ the policeman began
obediently, ‘unless certain that he is a duly authorised agent of the
Admiralty.’

‘That’s me. I’ve been one for eighteen years.’

‘To allow no communication of any kind, wines, spirits, or tobacco,
from any quarter to the barge, and to see that the watchman does not
come ashore till properly relieved, after searchin’ the relief for wine,
tobacco, spirits or matches.’

Pyecroft nodded with slow approval.

‘I’ve heard it come quicker off the tongue in — in other quarters,
but that will do. I’m not a martinet, thank ‘Eaven. Now let us inspect
‘im from a safe distance.’

He turned the binoculars on the lonely barge a quarter of a mile
away, where a man sat under a coachman’s umbrella holding his head
in his hands.

‘If I was any judge,’ he said, ‘I’d say that our friend yonder
was recoverin’ from the effects of what I’ve heard called a bosky
beano.’

‘Oh, no, sir,’ said the policeman hurriedly —’at least, nothing to
signify. ‘E ‘asn’t got a drop now. He’s only the watchman.’

‘He’s taken two large laps out o’ that bucket beside ‘im since
I’ve had ‘im under observation. It is now,’ he unshackled a huge watch,
‘eleven twenty-seven. The prima facie evidence is that ‘e got that
grievous mouth last night about two a.m. What’s in the barge?
Shells?’ he said, turning to the half-petrified policeman.

page 3

‘No. No ammunition comes here, sir. It’s only
the Admiralty dynamite for the works down the coast. Sixteen tons with
fuses — waitin’ for the Government tug to tow ’em round when the tide makes.
He isn’t the regular crew. He’s one of the watchmen. He’s relieved
at four.’

‘But where’s his red flags?’ said Pyecroft suddenly. ‘A powder
barge ought to ‘ave two.’

‘Why, they aren’t there!’ said the policeman, as though he
observed the deficiency for the first time.

‘H’m,’ said Pyecroft. ‘They must ‘ave been the banner he fought
under last night, or else he pawned ’em for drink.’ He passed me the
binoculars. ‘There he dives again! One imperial quart o’ warmish
water an’ sixteen ton o’ dynamite to sober up on — in this ‘eat. Give
me cells any day.’

‘You — you won’t report it, sir, will you? He’s only the watchman
— not a regular ‘and,’ the policeman urged.

I saw Leggatt’s shoulders shake. Pyecroft wrapped himself up in
his virtue.

‘I have not yet been officially informed there’s anything to report,’
he answered ponderously. ‘The man’s present and correct. You’ve
searched ‘im?’

‘That I assure you I ‘ave,’ said the policeman.

‘Then there’s no evidence he ain’t drinkin’ for a cure — or a bet.
I don’t believe in seein’ too much; an’ speakin’ as one man to another,
from the soles o’ my feet upwards I pity the beggar!’

The policeman expanded like one blue lotus of the Nile.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You’ve seen the miserablest man in Wapshare.
‘E can’t drink nor smoke. I’m the next, because I can’t either — on my
beat. I was ‘opin’ when I saw you, you’d exceed the legal limit —’

‘That isn’t necessary, is it?’ I said.

”Tis with me. I ‘ave a conscience. Then I’d ‘ave to stop you, and
then — so I thought till I saw who you was — you’d ‘ave to bribe me.’

‘What’s it like at the ‘Fuggle Hop’? ‘I demanded. We were very
hot where we stood. The policeman looked irresolutely at Pyecroft,
who naturally echoed the sentiments.

‘Not so good as at the ‘ ‘Astings Smack’, if I might be allowed,’
and alluring to brighter realms, the policeman himself led the way back.

‘He takes you for some sort of inspector,’ I said.

‘Haven’t I answered ‘is expectations?’ Pyecroft retorted. ‘Where’d
you find another Johnty ‘ud let ‘im drink on ‘is beat?’

‘It’s the boots.’ said Leggatt. ‘The boots and those tight blue clothes.’

It was very good at the ‘Hastings Smack.’ The policeman took
his standing, but we withdrew with ours and some lunch (summer pubs
are full of flies) to the shade of a deserted coal-wharf by the Poole
schooner.

‘This is what I call a happy ship an’ a good commission,’ said
Pyecroft, brushing away the crumbs. ‘Last time we motored together,
we ‘ad zebras an’ kangaroos, if I remember right. ‘Ere we ‘ave, as the
poet so truly sings —

‘Beef when you are hungry,
Beer when you are dry,
Bed when you are sleepy,
An’ ‘eaven when you die.’

Three more mugs will just do it.’

The potboy brought four, and a mariner with them — a vast and
voluminous man all covered with china clay, whose voice was as the
rolling of hogsheads over planking.

‘Have you seen my mate?’ he thundered.

‘No,’ said Pyecroft above the half-raised mug. ‘What might your
Number One have been doin’ recently?’

‘Drink—desertion—refusal o’ lawful orders, an’ committin’
barratry with a public barge. Put that in your pipe an’ smoke it. I see
you’re a man o’ principles. I may as well tell you here an’ now — or
now an’ ‘ere, as I should rather say — that I’m a Baptist; but if you
was to tell me that God ever made a human man in Cardiff, I’d — I’d —
I’d dissent from your principles. Attend to me! The Welsh ‘appened
at the change of watch when the Devil took charge o’ the West coast.
That was when the Welsh ‘appened. I hope none o’ you gentlemen are
Welsh, because I can’t dissent from my principles.’

page 4

None of us were Welsh at that hour.

‘He seems a gay bird, your mate,’ said Pyecroft.

‘If I wasn’t a Baptist, an’ he wasn’t my cousin, besides bein’ part
owner of the Esther Grant (it comes to ‘im with a legacy), I’d say he
was a red-‘eaded, skim-milk-eyed, freckle-jawed, stern-first-talkin’,
Cardiff booze-hound. That’s just what I’d say o’ Llewellyn. Attend to
me! I paid five pounds for him at Falmouth only last winter for compound
assault or fracture or whatever it was; an’ all ‘e can do to show ‘is
gratitude is to go an’ commit barratry with a public barge.’

‘He would,’ said Pyecroft, but this crime was new to me, and I
asked eagerly for particulars.

‘I gave him ‘is orders last night when ‘e couldn’t ‘ave been more
than moist. Last night I told ‘im to take a barge o’ clay to the potteries
‘ere. Potteries — one barge. ‘E might ‘ave got drunk afterwards. I’d ‘ave
said nothing — it’s against my principles — but ‘e couldn’t lay ‘is course
even that far. They come to me this mornin’ from the potteries — look —’
he pulled out papers, a dozen, from several pockets and waved them —
‘they wrote me an’ they telephoned me at the wharf askin’ where that
barge was, because she was missin’. Now, I ask you gentlemen, do
I look as if I kept barges up my back? ‘E’d committed barratry clear
enough, ‘adn’t ‘e?’

‘Plain as a pikestaff,’ said Pyecroft.

‘That bein’ so, I want to know where my legal liability for the
missin’ barge comes in?’

‘Just what I’d ha’ thought,’ said Pyecroft.

‘Besides, ’tisn’t as if I used their pottery, either.’

There are times when I despair of training Leggatt to my needs.
At this point he got up and fled choking.

‘When I catch Master Llewellyn, I’ve my own bill to settle, too.
He’s broken the ‘eart of a baker’s dozen of my whisky. You’d never
be drinkin’ cold beer ‘ere if ‘e ‘adn’t. You’d be on the Esther Grant
quite ‘appy by now. Four bottles ‘e went off with ! Four bottles for a
hymn-singin’, ‘arp-strummin’, passive-resistin’ Non-conformist who talks
a non-commercial language to ‘is wife! But I ain’t goin’ to pander to
‘is family any more. If you run across ‘im, tell ‘im that I’ll knock ‘is
red ‘ead flush with ‘is shoulders. Tell ‘im I’ll pay fifteen pounds for
‘im this time. ‘E’ll know what I mean. A red ‘eaded, goat-shanked,
saucer-eared, fig-nosed, banana-skinned, Cardiff booze-hound answerin’
to the name o’ Llewellyn. You can’t miss ‘im. ‘Ave you got it all down?’

‘Every word,’ I said.

The policeman entered the shed, followed by Leggatt, and I closed
the notebook I was using so shamelessly.

‘Excuse me,’ said the policeman, addressing the audience at large,
‘but a gentleman outside wants to speak to the owner of the car.’

‘I can testify in their behalf,’ said the mariner. ‘Blow ‘igh, blow
low or sugared by his mate, Captain Arthur Dudeney’ll testify in your
be’alf unless it ‘appens to be a Welshman. The Welsh ‘appened at the
change o’ watch when the Devil’.

‘Drop it, you fool! It’s young Mr. Voss,’ the policeman murmured.

‘Be it so. So be it. But remember barratry’s the offence, which
must be brought ‘ome to Master Llewellyn.’

Captain Dudeney sat down,
and we went out to face a tall young man in grey trousers, frock-coat
with gardenia in buttonhole, and a new top-hat, furiously biting his nails.

‘I beg your pardon, but I’m Mr. Voss, of Norden and Voss — the
cement works. They’ve telephoned me that the works have stopped.
I can’t make out why. I sent for a cab, but it would take me nearly an
hour — and I’m in a particular hurry — so, seein’ your motor — I thought
perhaps —’

‘Certainly,’ I said. ‘Won’t you get in and tell us where you want
to go?

‘Those big works on the beach have stopped since nine o’clock.
It’s only five miles away — but it’s very inconvenient for me.’ He pointed
across the shimmering levels of the marsh as Leggatt wound her up.

‘It’s no good,’ said Pyecroft, climbing in beside me on the narrow
back seat. ‘We two go out ‘and in ‘and, like the Babes in the Wood,
both funnels smoking gently, for a coastwise cruise of inspection, an’
sooner or later we find ourselves manœvrin’ with strange an’ ‘ostile fleets,
till our bearin’s are red ‘ot an’ our superstructure’s shot away. There’s
a ju-ju on us somewhere. Well, it won’t be zebras this time!’

page 5

We jumped out on a dead-level, dead-straight road, flanked by a
canal on one side and a deep marsh ditch on the other, whose perspective
ended in the cement-works and the shingle ridge behind.

‘Oh, be quick! I want to get back,’ said Mr. Voss, and that was
an unfortunate remark to make to Leggatt, who has records.

Conversation was blown out of our mouths; Mr. Voss had just
time to save his hat. Pyecroft stood up (he was used to destroyers) by the
lamp-pole and raked the landscape with my binoculars. The marsh
cattle fled from us with stiff tails. The canal streaked past like blue tape,
the inshore landmarks — coast-house and church-spire—opened, closed,
and stepped aside on the low hills, and the cement works enlarged
themselves as under a nearing lens. Leggatt slowed at last, for the latter
end of the road was badly loosed by traffic.

‘The steam-mixer has stopped!’ panted Mr. Voss. ‘We ought to
hear it from here.’ There was certainly no sound of working machinery.
‘And where are all the men?’ he cried.

A few hundred yards further on, the canal broadened into a little
basin immediately on the front of the machinery-shed. The road, worse
at each revolution, ran on between two tin sheds, and ended, so far
as we could see, in the shingle of the beach.

‘Slow! Dead slow! said Pyecroft to Leggatt, ‘we don’t yet know
the accommodation of the port nor the disposition of the natives.’

The machine-shed doors were wide open. We could see a vista
of boiler-furnaces, each with a pile of fuming ashes in front of it, and
the outlines of arrested wheels and belting. A man on a barge in the
middle of the basin waved a friendly hand.

I felt Pyecroft start and recover himself.

‘Come on,’ said the man, taking the pipe out of his teeth. ‘Don’t
you be shy.’

‘What’s the matter?’ said Mr. Voss, standing up. ‘Where are
my men?

‘Playing. I’ve ordered a general strike in Europe, Asia, Africa and
America.’

He relit his pipe composedly with a fusee.

‘Who the deuce are you?’ Mr. Voss was angry.

‘Johannes Stephanus Paulus Kruger,’ was the answer. Pyecroft
chuckled.

‘Man’s mad.’ Mr. Voss bit his lip.

A breath of hot wind off the corrugated iron rippled the face of
the basin and lifted out two very dingy but perfectly distinct red flags,
one at each end of the barge.

‘Go on! It’s a powder-barge,’ said Mr. Voss, sitting down heavily.

Leggatt asserts that he acted automatically. All I know is that
he must have whirled the car forward between the two sheds and up the
shingle ridge behind; for when I had cleared my dry throat, we had
topped the bank, hung for a fraction on the crest, and amid a roar of
pebbles (the seaward side was steep) slid down on to hard sand in the
face of the untroubled Channel and a mob of acutely interested men.
They looked like a bathing-party. Most of them were barefoot and wore
dripping shirts tied round their necks. All were very, very red over as
much of them as I could see.

‘What’s the matter?’ cried Mr. Voss, while they surged round
the car.

This was a general invitation, accepted as such, and Mr. Voss
waved his white hands.

‘Why were you so unusual bloomin’ precipitate?’ said Pyecroft
to Leggatt under cover of the riot. ‘You very nearly threw us out.’

‘I’m not fond o’ powder. Besides, it’s a new car,’ Leggatt replied.

‘Didn’t you see ‘oo the joker was, then?’ Pyecroft asked.

‘Friend o’ yours?’ Leggatt asked. The clamour round us grew.

‘No — but a friend of Captain Dudeney’s, if I’m not mistook. ‘E
‘ad all the marks of it. But, to please you, we’ll take soundings. Mr.
Voss seems to be sufferin’ from ‘is mutinous crew, so to put it.’

At that moment Mr. Voss turned an anxious glance on the
tight-buttoned blue coat and the hard, squarish hat.

page 6

‘Stop!’ said Pyecroft. The voice was new to me and to the others.
It checked the tumult as the bottom checks the roaring anchor-chain.

‘You with the stiff neck, two paces to the front and begin!’

‘It’s an Inspector,’ someone whispered. ‘Mr. Voss ‘as brought
the Police.’ And the mob came to hand like cooing doves.

‘Look at my blisters!’ said Pyecroft’s chosen. He stood up in coaly
trousers, the towel that should have supported them waving wet round
his peeled shoulders. ‘You’d ‘ave a neck, too, if you’d been lying out on
the shingle since nine like a bloomin’ dotterel. An’ I’m a fair man by nature.’

‘Stow your nature!’ said Pyecroft. ‘Make your report, or I’ll
disrate you!’

The man rubbed his neck uneasily. ‘We found ‘im ‘ere when we
come. We ‘eard what ‘e ‘ad: we saw ‘ow ‘e was: an’ we bloomin’ well
‘ooked it,’ he said.

Now, I consider that almost perfect art; but the crowd growled at the
baldness thereof, and the blistered man went on.

‘So’d you, if a beggar called ‘imself Mabon an’ lit all ‘is pipes with
fusees settin’ on top o’ sixteen tons of Admiralty dynamite. Ain’t that
what he done ever since nine? It’s all very well for you, but why didn’t
you come sooner an’ ‘elp us?’

‘Stop!’ said Pyecroft. ‘We don’t want any of your antitheseses
Where’s the chief petty — where’s the fireman?

A black-bearded giant stood forth. He, too, was stripped to the
waist, and it had done him little good.

‘Now, what about the dynamite?’ Pyecroft’s throne was the back
seat of my car. Mr. Voss, the gardenia already wilted in the heat, made
no attempt to interfere: we could see that his soul leaned heavily on the
stranger. The giant lifted shy eyes.

‘We found him here when we came to work. He said he had sixteen
tons of dynamite with fuses; and when he wasn’t drinkin’, he was lightin’
his pipe with fusees and throwin’ ’em about.’

‘Continuous?’ said Pyecroft.

‘All the time.’ This with the indescribable rising inflection of the
county.

Leggatt and I exchanged glances with Pyecroft.

‘That sort o’ stuff ain’t issued in duplicate,’ he said to me.

‘Any more than petrol. You have to have a receipt,’ Leggatt
assented. ‘An’ I do think ‘is hair was red, but I didn’t look long.’

‘Which only bears out my original argument when you slung us
over the ridge, Mr. Leggatt. You’ve been too precipitous,’ said Pyecroft.

‘What’s the good o’ talkin’?’ said the blistered man. ‘We saw
‘om ‘e was: we ‘eard what ‘e ‘ad; an’ we ‘ooked it. I’ve told you once.’

‘Go on,’ said Pyecroft to the giant. ‘Sixteen tons with fuses.
Most upsettin’, you might say.’

‘When he said he was going to blow a corner off England, I ordered
the men out of the works while we drew fires. Jernigan drew the fires,
Mr. Voss.’

‘Yes, I did,’ the blistered man cried. ‘We ‘ad ninety pounds steam,
an’ I know Number Four boiler; but Duncan ‘ere ‘e got me the time to
draw ’em.’ The crowd clapped.

”E ‘asn’t told you ‘arf. ‘E put ‘is ‘ands behind ‘is back an’ ‘e sung
‘ymns to that beggar in the barge all through breakfast-time. It’s as true
as I’m standing ‘ere. ‘E sung ‘A Few More Years Shall Roll’ right on
the edge of the basin, with the beggar throwin’ live fusees about regardless
all the time. Else I couldn’t ‘ave drawn the fires, Mr. Voss.’

”Ighly commendable, Mr. Duncan,’ said Pyecroft, as though it
were his right to praise or blame, and the crowd clapped again.

‘How did you get to the telephone to send me the message?’ said
Mr. Voss.

‘On ‘is ‘ands an’ knees over the shingle.’ There was no suppressing
the blistered man. ‘While Mr. Mabon was ‘oldin ‘an I’Stifford by ‘imself.’

“I — what?’ said Pyecroft.

‘I’Stifford. They ‘ave ’em in Bethesda. I’ve worked there. A Welsh
concert like.”

‘Oh, ‘e’s Welsh, then?’

page 7

Pyecroft fixed Leggatt with an accusing left eyeball.

‘You’ve only to listen to ‘im. ‘E’s seldom quiet. ‘Ark now.’ The
blistered man held up his hand.

The tide crept lazily in little flashes over the sand. A becalmed
fishing-boat’s crew stood up to look at our assembly, and certain gulls
wheeled and made mock of us. East and west the ridge shook in the
heat; the martello-towers flatting into buns or shooting into spires as the
oily streaks of air shifted. We stood about the car as shipwrecked,
mariners in the illustration gather round the long-boat, and seldom were
any sailors more peeled and puffed and salt-scurfed.

A thin voice floated over the ridge in high falsetto quavers. It was
certainly not English.

‘That’s ‘ow they sing at Bethesda on a Sunday,’ said the blistered
man. ‘I wish ‘e was there now. This’ll all come off in frills-like,
to-morrow,’ he pulled at his whitening nose.

‘And the more you go into the water, the more it seems to sting
you coming out,’ said another drearily. ‘You’d better ‘ave a wet
‘andkerchief round your ‘ead, Mr. Voss.’

“Hark the tramp of Saxon foemen,
Saxon spearmen, Saxon bowmen—
Be they knight or be they yeomen—”

the unseen voice went on, in clipped English.

‘If I had a cousin like that, I’d have drowned ‘im long ago,’ said
Pyecroft half to himself.

‘Drownin’s too good for ‘im. We’ve been ‘ere since nine cookin’
like ostrich eggs. Baines, run an’ wet a ‘andkerchief for Mr. Voss.’ It
was the blistered man again. Duncan stood moodily apart chewing his
beard.

‘Thank you. Oh, thank you!’ said Mr. Voss. ‘The machinery
cost thirty thousand, and it’s a quarter of a million contract.’ He turned
to Pyecroft as he knotted the dripping handkerchief round his brows
under the radiant hat.

‘Tactically, Mr. Mabon Kruger’s position is irreproachable,’
Pyecroft replied. ‘Or, to put it coarsely, there’s no getting at the
beggar with a brick for instance?’

‘I ain’t goin’ to ‘eave bricks at a dynamite barge, for one,’ said the
blistered man, and this seemed the general opinion.

‘Nonsense!’ I began. ‘Why, there’s no earthly chance—’

‘Not if you want it to go off,’ said Pyecroft hurriedly. ”You can fair
chew dynamite then; but if it’s any object with you to delay ignition,
a friendly nod will fetch her smilin’. I ought to know somethin’ about it.’

‘Presently,’ said Duncan, the foreman, with great simplicity, ‘he’ll
have to sleep, an’ I’ll go out to him. I’ll wait till then.’

‘No, you don’t!’ cried many voices. ‘Not till you’ve ‘ad a drink
an’ a feed an’ a sleep … Don’t talk fulish, Duncan. Go an’ wet yer
‘ead.’

‘He made me sing hymns,’ Duncan went on in the same flat voice.

‘That won’t ‘elp you when you’re bein’ ‘ung at Lewes. . . Don’t
be fulish, Duncan,’ the voices replied, and a man behind me muttered:
‘I’ve seen ‘im take an’ throw a fireman from the furnace door to the
canal — eight yards. We measured it. No, no, Duncan.’

I thanked fortune that my little plan of dramatically revealing all
to the crowd had been dismissed on a nod from Pyecroft, the reader of
souls, who had seen it in my silly eye.

‘No,’ he said aloud, answering me and none other. ‘I ain’t slept
with a few thousand men in hammocks for twenty years without knowin’
their nature. Mr. Mabon Kruger is in the fairway and has to be shifted;
but whatever ‘e’s done, let us remember that ‘e’s given us a day off.’

‘Off be sugared!’ said the blistered man. ‘On — on a bloomin’
gridiron! If you’d come to the beach when we did, you wouldn’t be so
nasty just to the beggar. You talk a lot, but what we want to know is
what you’re going to do?’

”Ear! ‘ear!’ said the crowd, ‘that’s what we want to know.
Go and shift ‘im yourself.’

Pyecroft bit back a weighty reproof.

‘Wind her up, Mr. Leggatt,’ he said, ‘and ram ‘er at the first
lowest place in the ridge. You men fall in an’ push behind if she checks.’

page 8

‘What’s that for? You ain’t never —’

‘We’re goin’ to shift ‘im. All you’ve got to do is to ‘elp the car
over the ridge an’ then take cover. You talk too much.’ He swung out of
the car, and Leggatt mounted. The churn of the machinery drowned Mr. Voss’s
protests, but as the car drew away along the sands westerly,
followed by the men, he said to Pyecroft: ‘But — but suppose you annoy
him? He may blow up the works. Ha — hadn’t we better wait?’

‘With him chuckin’ fusees about every minute? Certainly not.
Come along!’ He started at a trot towards the shingle ridge which
Leggatt was already charging.

‘Would you mind,’ Mr. Voss panted, ‘telling me who you are?
‘Pyecroft looked at him reproachfully and he continued: ‘I can see that
you’re in a responsible position, but … I’d like to know.’

‘You’re right. I hold a position of some responsibility under the
Admiralty. That’s Admiralty dynamite, ain’t it?’

‘Yes, but I don’t understand how it came here.’

‘Nor I. But someone will be hung for it. You can make your mind
quite easy about that. That explains everything, don’t it? The plain
facts of the case is that someone has blundered, an’ ‘ence there’s not a
minute to be lost. Don’t you see?’ He edged towards the car on the
top of the ridge, Mr. Voss clinging to his manly hand.

‘But, suppose —’ said Mr. Voss. ‘The risks are frightful.’

‘They are. You know ‘ow it is with the horrors. If he catches sight
o’ one o’ your men, ‘e’s as like as not to touch off all the fireworks, under
the impression that ‘e’s bein’ bombarded. Keep ’em down on the beach
well under cover while we try to coax ‘im. You know ‘ow it is with the
horrors.’

‘No, I don’t,’ said Mr. Voss with a sudden fury. ‘Confound it
all, I’m going to be married today!’

‘I’d postpone it if I was you,’ Pyecroft returned. ‘But that explains
much, as you might say.’

‘We want to say —’ the blistered man clutched Pyecroft’s leg as
he mounted. I took the back seat, none regarding.

‘I’ll ‘ear all the evidence pro and con tomorrow. Go back to the
beach! Don’t you move for an hour! We may ‘ave to coax ‘im!’ he
shouted. ‘Get back and wait! Let ‘er go, Leggatt!’

We plunged down the shingle to the pebble-speckled turf at the
back of the sheds. Leggatt doubled with mirth, steering most vilely.
The crowd retired behind the ridge.

‘Whew!’ said Pyecroft, unbuttoning his jacket. ‘Another minute
and that bridegroom in the four-point-seven hat would have made me
almost a liar.’

‘Stop!’ I said, as Leggatt leaned forward helpless on the tiller;
but Pyecroft continued: ”Ere’s three solitary unknown strangers
committin’ a piece of blindin’ heroism besides which Casablanca is obsolete;
an’ all the cement-mixer can think o’ saying is: ”Oo are you?’ Or
words to that effect. He must ‘ave wanted me to give ‘im my card.’

‘I wonder what he thinks,’ I said, as we ran between the sheds to
the basin.

‘The machinery cost thirty thousand pounds, ‘e says. ‘E’s sweatin’
blood to that amount every minute. He ain’t thinkin’ of his bride.’

An empty whisky bottle broke like a shell before our wheels. We
had come between the sheds within effective range of the man on the
barge.

‘Good hand at description, Captain Dudeney is,’ said Pyecroft
critically, never moving a muscle. ‘Fig-nose — saucer-ear, freckle-jaw —
all present an’ correct. What a cousin! Perishin’ ‘Eavens Above! What
a cousin! Good afternoon, Mr. Llewellyn! So here’s where you’ve ‘id
after stealing Captain Dudeney’s whisky, is it?’

‘What? What?’ the man capered the full length of the barge, a
bottle in either hand. ‘The old ram! Me hide? Me? No. indeed — what
for? What have I done to be ashamed of?’ He rubbed his broken nose
furiously.

‘If that’s what the Captain paid five pounds for, he got the value
of his money, so to speak,’ said Pyecroft, and raising his voice: ‘All
right. Goodbye. I’ll tell your cousin I’ve seen you, but you’re afraid to
come back.’

The answer I take it was in Welsh.

page 9

‘He told me to tell you that next time he’ll pay fifteen pounds for
you, besides knocking your red head flush with your shoulders.
Goodbye, Llewellyn.’

I had barely time to avoid a hissing coil of rope hurled at my feet.

‘He said thatt!’ the man screamed. ‘Catch! Pull! Haul! The old ram!
No, indeed. You shall not go away. I will have him preached of
in chapel. I will bring the bottles. I will show him how! My hair red!
Fetch me away! My cousin!’

‘Unmoor, then, and we’ll tow you!’ Pyecroft hauled on the rope.
‘It’s easier than I thought,’ he said to me. ‘I remember a Welsh
fireman in the Sycophant ‘oo got drunk on Boaz Island, an’ the only way
we could coax ‘im off the reef, where numerous sharks were anticipatin’
‘im, was by urgin’ ‘im to fight the captain.’

The barge bumped at our feet, and Pyecroft leaped aboard.

I seemed to see some sort of demonstrative greeting between the
two — a hug or a pat on the back, perhaps. And then Llewellyn sat in
the stern, lacking only the label for despatch as a neatly corded mummy.

‘Quacks like a duck. All that’s pure Welsh,’ said Pyecroft. ‘But
I don’t think it ‘ud do you an’ me any good in a manner o’ Speakin’
even if translated.’

”Ere! Look out!’ said Leggatt. ‘You’ll pull the rear axle out o’
her.’

‘You don’t know anythin’ about movin’ bodies. I don’t know much
— yet. We can but essay.’ Pyecroft was on his knees tying expert knots
round the rear axle. I had never seen motorcars applied to canal traffic
before, and so stood deaf to Leggatt’s highly technical appeals.

‘Go ahead slow and take care the tow don’t foul the port tyre. A
towin’ piece an’ bollards is what we really need. One never knows what
one’ll pick up on inspection tours like ours.’

‘Why, she goes!’ said Leggatt over his shoulder, as the barge
drew after the car.

‘Like a roseleaf on a stream,’ said Pyecroft at the tiller. ‘Jump in!
Kindly increase speed to fifty-seven revolutions, an’ the barge an’ its
lethal cargo will show you what she can do. Look ‘ere, Mr. Llewellyn,
you ain’t with your wife now, an’ your non-commercial language don’t appeal.
If you’ve anything on your mind, sing it in a low voice.
We’re runnin’ trials. Sixty-seven revolutions, if you please, Mr. Leggatt.’

I have the honour to report here that an 18-h.p. Decapod petrol
motor can haul a barge of x tons capacity down a straight canal at the
rate of knots; but that the wash and consequent erosion of the banks
is somewhat marked. The Welshman lay still. Pyecroft was at the tiller,
the delighted Leggatt was stealing extra knots out of her. Our wash
roared behind us — a foot high from bank to bank. I sat in the bows
crying ‘Port!’ or ‘Starboard!’ as guileless fancy led, and rejoiced
in this my one life.

The cement works grew small behind us — small and very still.

‘They have not yet resoomed,’ said Pyecroft. ‘I take it they
hardly anticipated such prompt action on the part o’ the relievin’ column.
A little more, Mr. Leggatt, if you please.’

‘It’s all very, very beautiful,’ I cooed, for the heat of the day was
past and Llewellyn had fallen asleep; ‘but aren’t we making rather a
wash? There’s a lump as big as Beachy Head just fallen in behind us.”

‘We ‘ave, so to speak, dragged the bowels out of three miles of
‘er,’ Pyecroft admitted. ‘Let’s hope it’s Mr. Voss’s canal. That bakin’
bridegroom owes us a lot. A little more, Mr. Hinchcliffe — or Leggatt, I
should say. We’re creepin’ up to twelve.’

‘People — comin’ from Wapshare — four of ’em!’ cried Leggatt who
from the high car seat could see along the road.

Pyecroft passed me the tiller as he unslung the binoculars to look.
None but Pyecrofts should steer barges at P. and O. speeds. In that brief
second, just as he said ‘Captain Dudeney!’ the barge’s nose ran with
ferocity feet deep into the mud; and as I hopefully waggled the tiller,
her stern flourished across the water and stuck even deeper on the
opposite bank. Our wash bottled up by this sudden barricade leaped
aboard in a low, muddy wave that broke all over our Mr. Llewellyn.

‘Who’s that dish-washer at the wheel?’ he gurgled.

‘You may well ask,’ said Pyecroft, with professional sympathy.

‘Relieve him at once. I’ll show him how.’ He sat up in his bonds
rolling blinded eyes.

page 10

Pyecroft lifted him, laid his two hands, freed as far as the elbows,
on the tiller, to which he clung fervently, and bellowed in his ear:
‘Down! Hard down for your life. You’ll be ashore in a minute.
Don’t abandon the ship!’

We withdrew over the bows to dry land. I felt I need not apologise
to Leggatt, for, after all, it was my own car that I had brought up with
so round a turn. The barge seemed well at rest.

‘They’ll ‘ave to dig ‘er out — unless they care to blow ‘er up’ said
Pyecroft, climbing into the seat. ‘But all the same, that Man of ‘Arlech
‘as the feelin’s of a sailor. Meet ‘er ! Meet ‘er as she scends! You’ll
roll the sticks out of her if you don’t!’ he shouted in farewell.

We left Mr. Llewellyn clawing off a verdant lee shore, and this the
more readily because Captain Dudeney and three friends were running
towards us. But they passed us, with eyes only for the barge, as though
we had been ghosts. Captain Dudeney roared like all the bulls of the
marshes. I will never allow Leggatt to drive for any distance with his
chin over his shoulder, so we stopped anew.

The Welshman still steered, but when his cousin’s challenge came
down the wind, he forsook all and, with fettered feet, crawled like a
parrot on a perch to meet him. Like a parrot, too, he screamed and
pointed at us.

We saw the five faces all pink in the westering sun; the Welshman
was urging them to the chase.

‘Ungrateful blighter! After we’ve saved ‘im from being killed at
the cement works,’ said Pyecroft. ‘Home’s the port for me. There’s too
much intricate explanation necessary on this coast. Let’s navigate.’ …
Ten minutes later we were three miles from Wapshare and two
hundred feet above it, commanding the map-like stretch of marsh ruled
with roads, ditches, and canals that, etc.

One canal seemed to be blocked by a barge drawn across it, and
here five dots clustered, separated, rejoined, and gyrated for a full
twenty minutes ere they seemed satisfied to go home. Anon (we were all
fighting for the binoculars) a stream of dots poured from the cement
works and moved — oh, so slowly! — along the white road till they reached
the barge. Here they scattered and did not rejoin for a great space upon
the other side; resembling in this respect a column of ants whose march
has been broken by a drop of spilt kerosene.

‘Amen! Amen!’ said Emanuel Pyecroft, bareheaded in the gloom
of an oak hanger. ‘This day hasn’t been one of the worst of ’em, either,
in a manner o’ speakin’. I’ll come tomorrow incognito an’ ‘elp pick up
the pieces. Because there will be lots of ’em, as one might anticipate.’

The morrow sent me visitors — young, fair, and infernally curious.
They had heard much of the beauties of Wapshare, which, where the
suburban builder has left it alone, it precisely resembles. And though
I praised half the rest of England, Wapshare they would see. The car’s new,
mirror-like body—scarlet and claret with gold lines—looked as
spruce as Leggatt in his French smock, and I flatter myself that my own
costume, also Parisian, which included nickel-plated goggles with
flesh-coloured flaps on the cheek-bones and a severely classic leather hat,
was completely of the road.

My guests were delighted with their trip.

‘We had such a perfect day,’ they explained at tea. ‘There was
a delightful wedding coming out of that old church up that cobbled
street — don’t you remember? And just below it by that place where the
ships anchored there was quite a riot. We saw it all from that upper road
by that old tower — hundreds and hundreds of men throwing coal at a
little ship that was trying to go to sea. Oh, yes, and a most fascinating
man with the wonderful eyes who touched his hat so respectfully (all
sailors are dears) — he told us all about it.’

‘What did he say?’ someone asked.

‘He said it wasn’t anything to what it had been. He said we ought
to have been there at noon when he came — before the poor little ship
got away from the wharf. He said they nearly called out the Militia. I
should like to have seen that. Oh, and do you remember that big,
black-bearded man at the very edge of the wharf who kept on throwing
coal at the ship and shouting all the time we watched?’

‘What had the little ship done?’

‘The coastguard said that he was a stranger in these parts and
didn’t quite know. Oh, yes, and then the chauffeur swallowed a fly and
choked. But it was a simply perfect day.’

page 1 of 7

THE day that I chose to visit H.M.S. Peridot in Simon’s Bay was the day that the Admiral had chosen to send her up the coast. She was just steaming out to sea as my train came in, and since the rest of the Fleet were either coaling or busy at the rifle-ranges a thousand feet up the hill, I found myself stranded, lunchless, on the sea-front with no hope of return to Cape Town before 5 p.m. At this crisis I had the luck to come across my friend Inspector Hooper, Cape Government Railways, in command of an engine and a brake-van chalked for repair.‘If you get something to eat,’ he said, ‘I’ll run you down to Glengaritf siding till the goods comes along. It’s cooler there than here, you see.’

I got food and drink from the Greeks who sell all things at a price, and the engine trotted us a couple of miles up the line to a bay of drifted sand and a plank-platform half buried in sand not a hundred yards from the edge of the surf. Moulded dunes, whiter than any snow, rolled far inland up a brown and purple valley of splintered rocks and dry scrub. A crowd of Malays hauled at a net beside two blue and green boats on the beach; a picnic party danced and shouted barefoot where a tiny river trickled across the flat, and a circle of dry hills, whose feet were set in sands of silver, locked us in against a seven-coloured sea. At either horn of the bay the railway line, cut just above highwater mark, ran round a shoulder of piled rocks, and disappeared.

‘You see, there’s always a breeze here,’ said Hooper, opening the door as the engine left us in the siding on the sand, and the strong south-easter buffeting under Elsie’s Peak dusted sand into our tickey beer. Presently he sat down to a file full of spiked documents. He had returned from a long trip up-country, where he had been reporting on damaged rolling-stock, as far away as Rhodesia. The weight of the bland wind on my eyelids; the song of it under the car-roof, and high up among the rocks; the drift of fine grains chasing each other musically ashore; the tramp of the surf; the voices of the picnickers; the rustle of Hooper’s file, and the presence of the assured sun, joined with the beer to cast me into magical slumber. The hills of False Bay were just dissolving into those of fairyland when I heard footsteps on the sand outside, and the clink of our couplings.

‘Stop that!’ snapped Hooper, without raising his head from his work. ‘It’s those dirty little Malay boys, you see: they’re always playing with the trucks . . . .’

‘Don’t be hard on ’em. The railway’s a general refuge in Africa,’ I replied.

‘’Tis—up-country at any rate. That reminds me,’ he felt in his waistcoat-pocket, ‘I’ve got a curiosity for you from Wankies—beyond Bulawayo. It’s more of a souvenir perhaps than——’

‘The old hotel’s inhabited,’ cried a voice. ‘White men, from the language. Marines to the front! Come on, Pritch. Here’s your Belmont. Wha—i—i!’

The last word dragged like a rope as Mr. Pyecroft ran round to the open door, and stood looking up into my face. Behind him an enormous Sergeant of Marines trailed a stalk of dried seaweed, and dusted the sand nervously from his fingers.

‘What are you doing here?’ I asked. ‘I thought the Hierophant was down the coast?’

‘We came in last Tuesday—from Tristan d’Acunha—for overhaul, and we shall be in dockyard ’ands for two months, with boiler-seatings.’

‘Come and sit down.’ Hooper put away the file.

‘This is Mr. Hooper of the Railway,’ I explained, as Pyecroft turned to haul up the black-moustached sergeant.

‘This is Sergeant Pritchard, of the Agaric, an old shipmate,’ said he. ‘We were strollin’ on the beach.’ The monster blushed and nodded. He filled up one side of the van when he sat down.

‘And this is my friend, Mr. Pyecroft,’ I added to Hooper, already busy with the extra beer which my prophetic soul had bought from the Greeks.

‘Moi aussi,’ quoth Pyecroft, and drew out beneath his coat a labelled quart bottle.

‘Why, it’s Bass!’ cried Hooper.

‘It was Pritchard,’ said Pyecroft. ‘They can’t resist him.’

‘That’s not so,’ said Pritchard mildly.

‘Not verbatim per’aps, but the look in the eye came to the same thing.’

‘Where was it?’ I demanded.

‘Just on beyond here—at Kalk Bay. She was slappin’ a rug in a back verandah. Pritch ’adn’t more than brought his batteries to bear, before she stepped indoors an’ sent it flyin’ over the wall.’

Pyecroft patted the warm bottle.

‘It was all a mistake,’ said Pritchard. ‘I shouldn’t wonder if she mistook me for Maclean. We’re about of a size.’

I had heard householders of Muizenberg, St. James, and Kalk Bay complain of the difficulty of keeping beer or good servants at the seaside, and I began to see the reason. None the less, it was excellent Bass, and I too drank to the health of that large-minded maid.

‘It’s the uniform that fetches ’em, an’ they fetch it,’ said Pyecroft. ‘My simple navy blue is respectable, but not fascinatin’. Now Pritch in ’is Number One rig is always “purr Mary, on the terrace”—ex officio as you might say.’

‘She took me for Maclean, I tell you,’ Pritchard insisted. ‘Why—why—to listen to him you wouldn’t think that only yesterday——’

‘Pritch,’ said Pyecroft, ‘be warned in time. If we begin tellin’ what we know about each other we’ll be turned out of the pub. Not to mention aggravated desertion on several occasions——’

‘Never anything more than absence without leaf—I defy you to prove it,’ said the Sergeant hotly. ‘An’ if it comes to that, how about Vancouver in ’87?’

‘How about it? Who pulled bow in the gig going ashore? Who told Boy Niven . . .?’

‘Surely you were court-martialled for that?’ I said. The story of Boy Niven who lured seven or eight able-bodied seamen and marines into the woods of British Columbia used to be a legend of the Fleet.

page 2

‘Yes, we were court-martialled to rights,’ said Pritchard, ‘but we should have been tried for murder if Boy Niven ’adn’t been unusually tough. He told us he had an uncle ’oo’d give us land to farm. ’E said he was born at the back o’ Vancouver Island, and all the time the beggar was a balmy Barnado Orphan!’

‘But we believed him, said Pyecroft. ‘I did—you did—Paterson did—an’ ’oo was the Marine that married the cocoanut-woman afterwards—him with the mouth?’

‘Oh, Jones, Spit-Kid Jones. I ’aven’t thought of ’im in years,’ said Pritchard. ‘Yes, Spit-Kid believed it, an’ George Anstey and Moon. We were very young an’ very curious.’

‘But lovin’ an’ trustful to a degree,’ said Pyecroft.

‘’Remember when ’e told us to walk in single file for fear o’ bears? ’Remember, Pye, when ’e ’opped about in that bog full o’ ferns an’ sniffed an’ said ’e could smell the smoke of ’is uncle’s farm ? An’ all the time it was a dirty little outlyin’ uninhabited island. We walked round it in a day, an’ come back to our boat lyin’ on the beach. A whole day Boy Niven kept us walkin’ in circles lookin’ for ’is uncle’s farm! He said his uncle was compelled by the law of the land to give us a farm!’

‘Don’t get hot, Pritch. We believed,’ said Pyecroft.

‘He’d been readin’ books. He only did it to get a run ashore an’ have himself talked of. A day an’ a night—eight of us—followin’ Boy Niven round an uninhabited island in the Vancouver archipelago! Then the picket came for us an’ a nice pack o’ idiots we looked!’

‘What did you get for it?’ Hooper asked.

‘Heavy thunder with continuous lightning for two hours. Thereafter sleet-squalls, a confused sea, and cold, unfriendly weather till conclusion o’cruise,’ said Pyecroft. ‘It was only what we expected, but what we felt—an’ I assure you, Mr. Hooper, even a sailor-man has a heart to break—was bein’ told that we able seamen an’ promisin’ marines ’ad misled Boy Niven. Yes, we poor back-to-the-landers was supposed to ’ave misled him! He rounded on us, o’ course, an’ got off easy.’

‘Excep’ for what we gave him in the steerin’-flat when we came out o’ cells. ’Eard anything of ’im lately, Pye?’

‘Signal Boatswain in the Channel Fleet, I believe—Mr. L. L. Niven is.’

‘An’ Anstey died o’ fever in Benin,’ Pritchard mused. ‘What come to Moon? Spit-Kid we know about.’

‘Moon—Moon! Now where did I last . . .? Oh yes, when I was in the Palladium. I met Quigley at Buncrana Station. He told me Moon ’ad run when the Astrild sloop was cruising among the South Seas three years back. He always showed signs o’ bein’ a Mormonastic beggar. Yes, he slipped off quietly an’ they ’adn’t time to chase ’im round the islands even if the navigatin’ officer ’ad been equal to the job.’

‘Wasn’t he?’ said Hooper.

‘Not so. Accordin’ to Quigley the Astrild spent half her commission rompin’ up the beach like a she-turtle, an’ the other half hatching turtles’ eggs on the top o’ numerous reefs. When she was docked at Sydney her copper looked like Aunt Maria’s washing on the line—an’ her ’midship frames was sprung. The commander swore the dockyard ’ad done it haulin’ the pore thing on to the slips. They do do strange things at sea, Mr. Hooper.’

‘Ah! I’m not a taxpayer,’ said Hooper, and opened a fresh bottle. The Sergeant seemed to be one who had a difficulty in dropping subjects.

‘How it all comes back, don’t it?’ he said. ‘Why, Moon must ’ave ’ad sixteen years’ service before he ran.’

‘It takes ’em at all ages. Look at—you know,’ said Pyecroft.

‘Who?’ I asked.

‘A service man within eighteen months of his pension is the party you’re thinkin’ of,’ said Pritchard. ‘A warrant ’oo’s name begins with a V., isn’t it?’

‘But, in a way o’ puttin’ it, we can’t say that he actually did desert,’ Pyecroft suggested.

‘Oh no,’ said Pritchard. ‘It was only permanent absence up-country without leaf. That was all.’

‘Up-country?’ said Hooper. ‘Did they circulate his description?’

‘What for?’ said Pritchard, most impolitely.

‘Because deserters are like columns in the war. They don’t move away from the line, you see. I’ve known a chap caught at Salisbury that way tryin’ to get to Nyassa. They tell me, but o’ course I don’t know, that they don’t ask questions on the Nyassa Lake Flotilla up there. I’ve heard of a P. and O. quartermaster in full command of an armed launch there.’

‘Do you think Click ’ud ha’ gone up that way?’ Pritchard asked.

‘There’s no saying. He was sent up to Bloemfontein to take over some Navy ammunition left in the fort. We know he took it over and saw it into the trucks. Then there was no more Click—then or thereafter. Four months ago it transpired, and thus the casus belli stands at present,’ said Pyecroft.

‘What were his marks?’ said Hooper again.

‘Does the Railway get a reward for returnin’ ’em, then?’ said Pritchard.

‘If I did d’you suppose I’d talk about it?’ Hooper retorted angrily.

‘You seemed so very interested,’ said Pritchard with equal crispness.

‘Why was he called Click?’ I asked, to tide over an uneasy little break in the conversation. The two men were staring at each other very fixedly.

page 3

‘Because of an ammunition hoist carryin’ away,’ said Pyecroft. ‘And it carried away four of ’is teeth-on the lower port side, wasn’t it, Pritch? The substitutes which he bought weren’t screwed home, in a manner o’ sayin’. When he talked fast they used to lift a little on the bedplate. ’Ence, “Click.” They called ’im a superior man, which is what we’d call a long, black-’aired, genteelly-speakin’,’alf-bred beggar on the lower deck.’

‘Four false teeth in the lower left jaw,’ said Hooper, his hand in his waistcoat-pocket. ‘What tattoo marks?’

‘Look here,’ began Pritchard, half rising. ‘I’m sure we’re very grateful to you as a gentleman for your ’orspitality, but per’aps we may ’ave made an error in——’

I looked at Pyecroft for aid—Hooper was crimsoning rapidly.

‘If the fat marine now occupying the foc’sle will kindly bring ’is status quo to an anchor yet once more, we may be able to talk like gentlemen—not to say friends,’ said Pyecroft. ‘He regards you, Mr. Hooper, as a emissary of the Law.’

‘I only wish to observe that when a gentleman exhibits such a peculiar, or I should rather say, such a bloomin’ curiosity in identification marks as our friend here——’

‘Mr. Pritchard,’ I interposed, ‘I’ll take all the responsibility for Mr. Hooper.’

‘An’ you’ll apologise all round,’ said Pyecroft. ‘You’re a rude little man, Pritch.’

‘But how was I——’ he began, wavering.

‘I don’t know an’ I don’t care. Apologise!’

The giant looked round bewildered and took our little hands into his vast grip, one by one.

‘I was wrong,’ he said meekly as a sheep. ‘My suspicions was unfounded. Mr. Hooper, I apologise.’

‘You did quite right to look out for your own end o’ the line,’ said Hooper. ‘I’d ha’ done the same with a gentleman I didn’t know, you see. If you don’t mind I’d like to hear a little more o’ your Mr. Vickery. It’s safe with me, you see.’

‘Why did Vickery run?’ I began, but Pyecroft’s smile made me turn my question to ‘Who was she?’

‘She kep’ a little hotel at Hauraki—near Auckland,’ said Pyecroft.

‘By Gawd!’ roared Pritchard, slapping his hand on his leg. ‘Not Mrs. Bathurst!’

Pyecroft nodded slowly, and the Sergeant called all the powers of darkness to witness his bewilderment.

‘So far as I could get at it, Mrs. B. was the lady in question.’

‘But Click was married,’ cried Pritchard.

‘An’ ’ad a fifteen-year-old daughter. ’E’s shown me her photograph. Settin’ that aside, so to say, ’ave you ever found these little things make much difference? Because I haven’t.’

‘Good Lord Alive an’ Watchin’! . . . Mrs. Bathurst. . . .’ Then with another roar: ‘You can say what you please, Pye, but you don’t make me believe it was any of ’er fault. She wasn’t that!’

‘If I was going to say what I please, I’d begin by callin’ you a silly ox an’ work up to the higher pressures at leisure. I’m trying to say solely what transpired. M’rover, for once you’re right. It wasn’t her fault.’

‘You couldn’t ’aven’t made me believe it if it ’ad been,’ was the answer.

Such faith in a Sergeant of Marines interested me greatly. ‘Never mind about that,’ I cried. ‘Tell me what she was like.’

‘She was a widow,’ said Pyecroft. ‘Left so very young and never re-spliced. She kep’ a little hotel for warrants and noncoms close to Auckland, an’ she always wore black silk, and ’er neck——’

‘You ask what she was like,’ Pritchard broke in. ‘Let me give you an instance. I was at Auckland first in ’97, at the end o’ the Marroquin’s commission, an’ as I’d been promoted I went up with the others. She used to look after us all, an’ she never lost by it—not a penny! “Pay me now,” she’d say, “or settle later. I know you won’t let me suffer. Send the money from home if you like.” Why, gentlemen all, I tell you I’ve seen that lady take her own gold watch an’ chain off her neck in the bar an’ pass it to a bosun ’oo’d come ashore without ’is ticker an’ ’ad to catch the last boat. “I don’t know your name,” she said, “but when you’ve done with it, you’ll find plenty that know me on the front. Send it back by one o’ them.” And it was worth thirty pounds if it was worth ’arf-a-crown. The little gold watch, Pye, with the blue monogram at the back. But, as I was sayin’, in those days she kep’ a beer that agreed with me—Slits it was called. One way an’ another I must ’ave punished a good few bottles of it while we was in the bay—comin’ ashore every night or so. Chaffin’ across the bar like, once when we were alone, “Mrs. B.,” I said, “when next I call I want you to remember that this is my particular just as you’re my particular.” (She’d let you go that far!) “Just as you’re my particular,” I said. “Oh, thank you, Sergeant Pritchard,” she says, an’ put ’er hand up to the curl be’ind ’er ear. Remember that way she had, Pye?’

‘I think so,’ said the sailor.

‘Yes, “Thank you, Sergeant Pritchard,” she says. “The least I can do is to mark it for you in case you change your mind. There’s no great demand for it in the Fleet,” she says, “but to make sure I’ll put it at the back o’ the shelf,” an’ she snipped off apiece of her hair ribbon with that old dolphin cigar-cutter on the bar – remember it, Pye?—an’ she tied a bow round what was left just four bottles. That was ’97-no, ’96. In ’98 I was in the Resilient—China station—full commission. In Nineteen One, mark you, I was in the Carthusian, back in Auckland Bay again. Of course I went up to Mrs. B.’s with the rest of us to see how things were goin’. They were the same as ever. (Remember the big tree on the pavement by the side-bar, Pye?) I never said anythin’ in special (there was too many of us talkin’ to her), but she saw me at once.’

‘That wasn’t difficult?’ I ventured.

‘Ah, but wait. I was comin’ up to the bar, when, “Ada,” she says to her niece, “get me Sergeant Pritchard’s particular,” and, gentlemen all, I tell you before I could shake ’ands with the lady, there were those four bottles o’ Slits, with ’er ’air-ribbon in a bow round each o’ their necks, set down in front o’ me, an’ as she drew the cork she looked at me under her eyebrows in that blindish way she had o’ lookin’, an’, “Sergeant Pritchard,” she says, “I do ’ope you ’aven’t changed your mind about your particulars.” That’s the kind o’ woman she was—after five years!’

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‘I don’t see her yet somehow,’ said Hooper, but with sympathy.

‘She—she never scrupled to feed a lame duck or set ’er foot on a scorpion at any time of ’er life,’ Pritchard added valiantly.

‘That don’t help me either. My mother’s like that for one.’

The giant heaved inside his uniform and rolled his eyes at the car-roof. Said Pyecroft suddenly:—

‘How many women have you been intimate with all over the world, Pritch?’

Pritchard ’blushed plum-colour to the short hairs of his seventeen-inch neck.

‘’Undreds,’ said Pyecroft. ‘So’ve I. How many of ’em can you remember in your own mind, settin’ aside the first—an’ per’aps the last—and one more?’

‘Few, wonderful few, now I tax myself,’ said Sergeant Pritchard relievedly.

‘An’ how many times might you ’ave been at Auckland?’

‘One—two,’ he began—‘why, I can’t make it more than three times in ten years. But I can remember every time that I ever saw Mrs. B.’

‘So can I—an’ I’ve only been to Auckland twice—how she stood an’ what she was sayin’ an’ what she looked like. That’s the secret. ’Tisn’t beauty, so to speak, nor good talk necessarily. It’s just It. Some women’ll stay in a man’s memory if they once walk down a street, but most of ’em you can live with a month on end, an’ next commission you’d be put to it to certify whether they talked in their sleep or not, as one might say.’

‘Ah!’ said Hooper. ‘That’s more the idea. I’ve known just two women of that nature.’

‘An’ it was no fault o’ theirs ?’ asked Pritchard.

‘None whatever. I know that!’

‘An’ if a man gets struck with that kind o’ woman, Mr. Hooper?’ Pritchard went on.

‘He goes crazy—or just saves himself,’ was the slow answer.

‘You’ve hit it,’ said the Sergeant. ‘You’ve seen an’ known somethin’ in the course o’ your life, Mr. Hooper. I’m lookin’ at you!’ He set down his bottle.

‘And how often had Vickery seen her?’ I asked.

‘That’s the dark an’ bloody mystery,’ Pyecroft answered. ‘I’d never come across him till I come out in the Hierophant just now, an’ there wasn’t any one in the ship who knew much about him. You see, he was what you call a superior man. ’E spoke to me once or twice about Auckland and Mrs. B. on the voyage out. I called that to mind subsequently. There must ’ave been a good deal between ’em, to my way o’ thinkin’. Mind you, I’m only giving you my résumé of it all, because all I know is second-hand so to speak, or rather I should say more than second-’and.’

‘How?’ said Hooper peremptorily. ‘You must have seen it or heard it.’

‘Ye-es,’ said Pyecroft. ‘I used to think seein’ and hearin’ was the only regulation aids to ascertainin’ facts, but as we get older we get more accommodatin’. The cylinders work easier, I suppose . . . . Were you in Cape Town last December when Phyllis’s Circus came?’

‘No—up-country,’ said Hooper, a little nettled at the change of venue.

‘I ask because they had a new turn of a scientific nature called “Home and Friends for a Tickey.” ‘

‘Oh, you mean the cinematograph—the pictures of prize-fights and steamers. I’ve seen ’em upcountry.’

‘Biograph or cinematograph was what I was alludin’ to. London Bridge with the omnibuses—a troopship goin’ to the war—marines on parade at Portsmouth, an’ the Plymouth Express arrivin’ at Paddin’ton.’

‘Seen ’em all. Seen ’em all,’ said Hooper impatiently.

‘We Hierophants came in just before Christmas week an’ leaf was easy.’

‘I think a man gets fed up with Cape Town quicker than anywhere else on the station. Why, even Durban’s more like Nature. We was there for Christmas,’ Pritchard put in.

‘Not bein’ a devotee of Indian peeris, as our Doctor said to the Pusser, I can’t exactly say. Phyllis’s was good enough after musketry practice at Mozambique. I couldn’t get off the first two or three nights on account of what you might call an imbroglio with our Torpedo Lieutenant in the submerged flat, where some pride of the West Country had sugared up a gyroscope; but I remember Vickery went ashore with our Carpenter Rigdon—old Crocus we called him. As a general rule Crocus never left ’is ship unless an’ until he was ’oisted out with a winch, but when ’e went ’e would return noddin’ like a lily gemmed with dew. We smothered him down below that night, but the things ’e said about Vickery as a fittin’ playmate for a Warrant Officer of ’is cubic capacity, before we got him quiet, was what I should call pointed.’

‘I’ve been with Crocus—in the Redoubtable,’ said the Sergeant. ‘He’s a character if there is one.’

‘Next night I went into Cape Town with Dawson and Pratt; but just at the door of the Circus I came across Vickery. “Oh!” he says, “you’re the man I’m looking for. Come and sit next me. This way to the shillin’ places!” I went astern at once, protestin’ because tickey seats better suited my so-called finances. “Come on,” says Vickery, “I’m payin’.” Naturally I abandoned Pratt and Dawson in anticipation o’ drinks to match the seats. “No,” he says, when this was ’inted—“not now. Not now. As many as you please afterwards, but I want you sober for the occasion.” I caught ’is face under a lamp just then, an’ the appearance of it quite cured me of my thirst. Don’t mistake. It didn’t frighten me. It made me anxious. I can’t tell you what it was like, but that was the effect which it ’ad on me. If you want to know, it reminded me of those things in bottles in those herbalistic shops at Plymouth—preserved in spirits of wine. White an’ crumply things—previous to birth as you might say.’

‘You ’ave a beastial mind, Pye,’ said the Sergeant, relighting his pipe.

page 5

‘Perhaps. We were in the front row, an’ “Home an’ Friends” came on early. Vickery touched me on the knee when the number went up. “If you see anything that strikes you,” he says, “drop me a hint”; then he went on clicking. We saw London Bridge an’ so forth an’ so on, an’ it was most interestin’. I’d never seen it before. You ’eard a little dynamo like buzzin’, but the pictures were the real thing—alive an’ movin’.’

‘I’ve seen ’em,’ said Hooper. ‘Of course they are taken from the very thing itself—you see.’

‘Then the Western Mail came in to Paddin’ton on the big magic-lantern sheet. First we saw the platform empty an’ the porters standin’ by. Then the engine come in, head on, an’ the women in the front row jumped: she headed so straight. Then the doors opened and the passengers came out and the porters got the luggage just like life. Only—only when any one came down too far towards us that was watchin’, they walked right out o’ the picture, so to speak. I was ’ighly interested, I can tell you. So were all of us. I watched an old man with a rug ’oo’d dropped a book an’ was tryin’ to pick it up, when quite slowly, from be’ind two porters—carryin’ a little reticule an’ lookin’ from side to side—comes out Mrs. Bathurst. There was no mistakin’ the walk in a hundred thousand. She come forward—right forward—she looked out straight at us with that blindish look which Pritch alluded to. She walked on and on till she melted out of the picture—like—like a shadow jumpin’ over a candle, an’ as she went I ’eard Dawson in the tickey seats be’ind sing out: “Christ! there’s Mrs. B.!”’

Hooper swallowed his spittle and leaned forward intently.

‘Vickery touched me on the knee again. He was clickin’ his four false teeth with his jaw down like an enteric at the last kick. “Are you sure?” says he. “Sure,” I says, “didn’t you ’ear Dawson give tongue? Why, it’s the woman herself.” “I was sure before,” he says, “but I brought you to make sure. Will you come again with me tomorrow?”

‘“Willingly,” I says, “it’s like meetin’ old friends.”

‘“Yes,” he says, openin’ his watch, “very like. It will be four-and-twenty hours less four minutes before I see her again. Come and have a drink,” he says. “It may amuse you, but it’s no sort of earthly use to me.” He went out shaking his head an’ stumblin’ over people’s feet as if he was drunk already. I anticipated a swift drink an’ a speedy return, because I wanted to see the performin’ elephants. Instead o’ which Vickery began to navigate the town at the rate o’ knots, lookin’ in at a bar every three minutes approximate Greenwich time. I’m not a drinkin’ man, though there are those present’;—he cocked his unforgettable eye at me—‘who may have seen me more or less imbued with the fragrant spirit. None the less when I drink I like to do it at anchor an’ not at an average speed of eighteen knots on the measured mile. There’s a tank as you might say at the back o’ that big hotel up the hill—what do they call it?’

‘The Molteno Reservoir,’ I suggested, and Hooper nodded.

‘That was his limit o’ drift. We walked there an’ we come down through the Gardens—there was a South-Easter blowin’—an’ we finished up by the Docks. Then we bore up the road to Salt River, and wherever there was a pub Vickery put in sweatin’. He didn’t look at what he drunk—he didn’t look at the change. He walked an’ he drunk an’ he perspired in rivers. I understood why old Crocus ’ad come back in the condition ’e did, because Vickery an’ I ’ad two an’ a half hours o’ this gipsy manœuvre an’ when we got back to the station there wasn’t a dry atom on or in me.’

‘Did he say anything?’ Pritchard asked.

‘The sum total of ’is conversation from 7.45 p.m. till 11.15 p.m. was “Let’s have another.” Thus the mornin’ an’ the evenin’ were the first day, as Scripture says . . . . To abbreviate a lengthy narrative, I went into Cape Town for five consecutive nights with Master Vickers, and in that time I must ’ave logged about fifty knots over the ground an’ taken in two gallon o’ all the worst spirits south the Equator. The evolution never varied. Two shilling seats for us two; five minutes o’ the pictures, an’ perhaps forty-five seconds o’ Mrs. B. walking down towards us with that blindish look in her eyes an’ the reticule in her hand. Then out-walk—and drink till train time.’

‘What did you think?’ said Hooper, his hand fingering his waistcoat-pocket.

‘Several things,’ said Pyecroft. ‘To tell you the truth, I aren’t quite done thinkin’ about it yet. Mad? The man was a dumb lunatic—must ’ave been for months—years p’raps. I know somethin’ o’ maniacs, as every man in the Service must. I’ve been shipmates with a mad skipper—an’ a lunatic Number One, but never both together, I thank ’Eaven. I could give you the names o’ three captains now ’oo ought to be in an asylum, but you don’t find me interferin’ with the mentally afflicted till they begin to lay about ’em with rammers an’ winch-handles. Only once I crept up a little into the wind towards Master Vickers. “I wonder what she’s doin’ in England,” I says. “Don’t it seem to you she’s lookin’ for somebody?” That was in the Gardens again, with the South-Easter blowin’ as we were makin’ our desperate round. “She’s lookin’ for me,” he says, stoppin’ dead under a lamp an’ clickin’. When he wasn’t drinkin’, in which case all ’is teeth clicked on the glass, ’e was clickin’ ’is four false teeth like a Marconi ticker. “Yes! lookin’ for me,” he said, an’ he went on very softly an’ as you might say affectionately. “But,” he went on, “in future, Mr. Pyecroft, I should take it kindly of you if you’d confine your remarks to the drinks set before you. Otherwise,” he says, “with the best will in the world towards you, I may find myself guilty of murder! Do you understand?” he says. “Perfectly,” I says, “but would it at all soothe you to know that in such a case the chances o’ your being killed are precisely equivalent to the chances o’ me being outed.” “Why, no,” he says, “I’m almost afraid that ’ud be a temptation.” Then I said—we was right under the lamp by that arch at the end o’ the Gardens where the trams come round—“Assumin’ murder was done—or attempted murder—I put it to you that you would still be left so badly crippled, as one might say, that your subsequent capture by the police—to ’oom you would ’ave to explain—would be largely inevitable.” “That’s better,” ’e says, passin’ ’is hands over his forehead. “That’s much better, because,” he says, “do you know, as I am now, Pye, I’m not so sure if I could explain anything much.” Those were the only particular words I had with ’im in our walks as I remember.’

‘What walks!’ said Hooper. ‘Oh my soul, what walks!’

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‘They were chronic,’ said Pyecroft gravely, ‘but I didn’t anticipate any danger till the Circus left. Then I anticipated that, bein’ deprived of ’is stimulant, he might react on me, so to say, with a hatchet. Consequently, after the final performance an’ the ensuin’ wet walk, I kep’ myself aloof from my superior officer on board in the execution of is duty, as you might put it. Consequently, I was interested when the sentry informs me while I was passin’ on my lawful occasions that Click had asked to see the captain. As a general rule warrant-officers don’t dissipate much of the owner’s time, but Click put in an hour and more be’ind that door. My duties kep’ me within eyeshot of it. Vickery came out first, an’ ’e actually nodded at me an’ smiled. This knocked me out o’ the boat, because, havin’ seen ’is face for five consecutive nights, I didn’t anticipate any change there more than a condenser in hell, so to speak. The owner emerged later. His face didn’t read off at all, so I fell back on his cox, ’oo’d been eight years with him and knew him better than boat signals. Lamson—that was the cox’s name—crossed ’is bows once or twice at low speeds an’ dropped down to me visibly concerned. “He’s shipped ’is court-martial face,” says Lamson. “Some one’s goin’ to be ’ung. I’ve never seen that look but once before, when they chucked the gun-sights overboard in the Fantastic.” Throwin’ gun-sights overboard, Mr. Hooper, is the equivalent for mutiny in these degenerate days. It’s done to attract the notice of the authorities an’ the Western Mornin’ News—generally by a stoker. Naturally, word went round the lower deck an’ we had a private over’aul of our little consciences. But, barrin’ a shirt which a second-class stoker said ’ad walked into ’is bag from the marines’ flat by itself, nothin’ vital transpired. The owner went about flyin’ the signal for “attend public execution,” so to say, but there was no corpse at the yard-arm. ’E lunched on the beach an’ ’e returned with ’is regulation harbour-routine face about 3 p.m. Thus Lamson lost prestige for raising false alarms. The only person ’oo might ’ave connected the epicycloidal gears correctly was one Pyecroft, when he was told that Mr. Vickery would go up-country that same evening to take over certain naval ammunition left after the war in Bloemfontein Fort. No details was ordered to accompany Master Vickery. He was told off first person singular—as a unit—by himself.’

The marine whistled penetratingly.

‘That’s what I thought,’ said Pyecroft. ‘I went ashore with him in the cutter an’ ’e asked me to walk through the station. He was clickin’ audibly, but otherwise seemed happy-ish.

‘“You might like to know,” he says, stoppin’ just opposite the Admiral’s front gate, “that Phyllis’s Circus will be performin’ at Worcester to-morrow night. So I shall see ’er yet once again. You’ve been very patient with me,” he says.

‘“Look here, Vickery,” I said, “this thing’s come to be just as much as I can stand. Consume your own smoke. I don’t want to know any more.”

‘“You!” he said. “What have you got to complain of?—you’ve only ’ad to watch. I’m it,” he says, “but that’s neither here nor there,” he says. “I’ve one thing to say before shakin’ ’ands. Remember,” ’e says—we were just by the Admiral’s garden-gate then—“remember that I am not a murderer, because my lawful wife died in childbed six weeks after I came out. That much at least I am clear of,” ’e says.

‘“Then what have you done that signifies?” I said. “What’s the rest of it?”

‘“The rest,” ’e says, “is silence,” an’ he shook ’ands and went clickin’ into Simonstown station.’

‘Did he stop to see Mrs. Bathurst at Worcester?’ I asked.

‘It’s not known. He reported at Bloemfontein, saw the ammunition into the trucks, and then ’e disappeared. Went out—deserted, if you care to put it so—within eighteen months of his pension, an’ if what ’e said about ’is wife was true he was a free man as ’e then stood. How do you read it off?’

‘Poor devil!’ said Hooper. ‘To see her that way every night! I wonder what it was.’

‘I’ve made my ’ead ache in that direction many a long night.’

‘But I’ll swear Mrs. B. ’ad no ’and in it,’ said the Sergeant, unshaken.

‘No. Whatever the wrong or deceit was, he did it, I’m sure o’ that. I ’ad to look at ’is face for five consecutive nights. I’m not so fond o’ navigatin’ about Cape Town with a South-Easter blowin’ these days. I can hear those teeth click, so to say.’

‘Ah, those teeth,’ said Hooper, and his hand went to his waistcoat-pocket once more. ‘Permanent things false teeth are. You read about ’em in all the murder trials.’

‘What d’you suppose the captain knew—or did?’ I asked.

‘I’ve never turned my searchlight that way,’ Pyecroft answered unblushingly.

We all reflected together, and drummed on empty beer bottles as the picnic-party, sunburned, wet, and sandy, passed our door singing ‘The Honeysuckle and the Bee.’

‘Pretty girl under that kapje,’ said Pyecroft.

‘They never circulated his description?’ said Pritchard.

‘I was askin’ you before these gentlemen came,’ said Hooper to me, ‘whether you knew Wankies—on the way to the Zambesi—beyond Bulawayo?’

‘Would he pass there—tryin’ to get to that Lake what’s ’is name?’ said Pritchard.

Hooper shook his head and went on: ‘There’s a curious bit o’ line there, you see. It runs through solid teak forest—a sort o’ mahogany really—seventy-two miles without a curve. I’ve had a train derailed there twenty-three times in forty miles. I was up there a month ago relievin’ a sick inspector, you see. He told me to look out for a couple of tramps in the teak.’

‘Two?’ Pyecroft said. ‘I don’t envy that other man if——’

‘We get heaps of tramps up there since the war. The inspector told me I’d find ’em at M’Bindwe siding waiting to go North. He’d given ’em some grub and quinine, you see. I went up on a construction train. I looked out for ’em. I saw them miles ahead along the straight, waiting in the teak. One of ’em was standin’ up by the dead-end of the siding an’ the other was squattin’ down lookin’ up at ’im, you see.’

‘What did you do for ’em?’ said Pritchard.

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‘There wasn’t much I could do, except bury ’em. There’d been a bit of a thunderstorm in the teak, you see, and they were both stone dead and as black as charcoal. That’s what they really were, you see—charcoal. They fell to bits when we tried to shift ’em. The man who was standin’ up had the false teeth. I saw ’em shinin’ against the black. Fell to bits he did too, like his mate squatting down an’ watchin’ him, both of ’em all wet in the rain. Both burned to charcoal, you see. And—that’s what made me ask about marks just now—the false-toother was tattooed on the arms and chest—a crown and foul anchor with M.V. above.’

‘I’ve seen that,’ said Pyecroft quickly. ‘It was so.’

‘But if he was all charcoal-like?’ said Pritchard, shuddering.

‘You know how writing shows up white on a burned letter? Well, it was like that, you see. We buried ’em in the teak and I kept . . . But he was a friend of you two gentlemen, you see.’

Mr. Hooper brought his hand away from his waistcoat-pocket—empty.

Pritchard covered his face with his hands for a moment, like a child shutting out an ugliness.

‘And to think of her at Hauraki!’ he murmured—‘with ’er ’air-ribbon on my beer. “Ada,” she said to her niece . . . Oh, my Gawd !’ . . .

‘On a summer afternoon,
when the honeysuckle blooms,
And all Nature seems at rest,
Underneath the bower,
’mid the perfume of the flower,
Sat a maiden with the one
she loves the best——’

sang the picnic-party waiting for their train at Glengariff.

‘Well, I don’t know how you feel about it,’ said Pyecroft, ‘but ’avin’ seen ’is face for five consecutive nights on end, I’m inclined to finish what’s left of the beer an’ thank Gawd he’s dead!’

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I CAUGHT sight of their faces as we came up behind the cart in the narrow Sussex lane; but though it was not eleven o’clock, they were both asleep.That the carrier was on the wrong side of the road made no difference to his language when I rang my bell. He said aloud of motor-cars, and specially of steam ones, all the things which I had read in the faces of superior coachmen. Then he pulled slantwise across me.

There was a vociferous steam air-pump attached to that car which could be applied at pleasure ….

The cart was removed about a bowshot’s length in seven and a quarter seconds, to the accompaniment of parcels clattering. At the foot of the next hill the horse stopped, and the two men came out over the tail-board.

My engineer backed and swung the car, ready to move out of reach.

‘The blighted egg-boiler has steam up,’ said Mr. Hinchcliffe, pausing to gather a large stone. ‘Temporise with the beggar, Pye, till the sights come on!’

‘I can’t leave my ’orse!’ roared the carrier; ‘but bring ’em up ’ere, an’ I’ll kill ’em all over again.’

‘Good morning, Mr. Pyecroft,’ I called cheerfully. ‘Can I give you a lift anywhere?’

The attack broke up round my fore-wheels.

‘Well, we do ’ave the knack o’ meeting in puris naturalibus, as I’ve so often said.’ Mr. Pyecroft wrung my hand. ‘Yes, I’m on leaf. So’s Hinch. We’re visiting friends among these kopjes.’

A monotonous bellowing up the road persisted, where the carrier was still calling for corpses.

‘That’s Agg. He’s Hinch’s cousin. You aren’t fortunit in your family connections, Hinch. ’E’s usin’ language in derogation of good manners. Go and abolish ’im.’

Henry Salt Hinchcliffe stalked back to the cart and spoke to his cousin. I recall much that the wind bore to me of his words and the carrier’s. It seemed as if the friendship of years were dissolving amid throes.

‘’Ave it your own silly way, then,’ roared the carrier, ‘an’ get into Linghurst on your own silly feet. I’ve done with you two runagates.’ He lashed his horse and passed out of sight still rumbling.

‘The fleet’s sailed,’ said Pyecroft, ‘leavin’ us on the beach as before. Had you any particular port in your mind?’

‘Well, I was going to meet a friend at Instead Wick, but I don’t mind——’

‘Oh! that’ll do as well as anything! We’re on leaf, you see.’

‘She’ll hardly hold four,’ said my engineer. I had broken him of the foolish habit of being surprised at things, but he was visibly uneasy.

Hinchcliffe returned, drawn as by ropes to my steam-car, round which he walked in narrowing circles.

‘What’s her speed?’ he demanded of the engineer.

‘Twenty-five,’ said that loyal man.

‘Easy to run?’

‘No; very difficult,’ was the emphatic answer.

‘That just shows that you ain’t fit for your rating. D’you suppose that a man who earns his livin’ by runnin’ 30-knot destroyers for a parstime—for a parstime, mark you!—is going to lie down before any blighted land-crabbing steampinnace on springs?’

Yet that was what he did. Directly under the car he lay and looked upward into pipes—petrol, steam, and water—with a keen and searching eye.

I telegraphed Mr. Pyecroft a question.

‘Not—in—the—least,’ was the answer. ‘Steam gadgets always take him that way. We had a bit of a riot at Parsley Green through his tryin’ to show a traction-engine haulin’ gipsy-wagons how to turn corners.’

‘Tell him everything he wants to know,’ I said to the engineer, as I dragged out a rug and spread it on the roadside.

‘He don’t want much showing,’ said the engineer. Now, the two men had not, counting the time we took to stuff our pipes, been together more than three minutes.

‘This,’ said Pyecroft, driving an elbow back into the deep verdure of the hedge-foot, ‘is a little bit of all right. Hinch, I shouldn’t let too much o’ that hot muckings drop in my eyes. Your leaf’s up in a fortnight, an’ you’ll be wantin’ ’em.’

‘Here!’ said Hinchcliffe, still on his back, to the engineer. ‘Come here and show me the lead of this pipe.’ And the engineer lay down beside him.

‘That’s all right,’ said Mr. Hinchcliffe, rising. ‘But she’s more of a bag of tricks than I thought. Unship this superstructure aft’—he pointed to the back seat—‘and I’ll have a look at the forced draught.’

The engineer obeyed with alacrity. I heard him volunteer the fact that he had a brother an artificer in the Navy.

‘They couple very well, those two,’ said Pyecroft critically, while Hinchcliffe sniffed round the asbestos-lagged boiler and turned on gay jets of steam.

‘Now take me up the road,’ he said. My man, for form’s sake, looked at me.

‘Yes, take him,’ I said. ‘He’s all right.’

‘No, I’m not,’ said Hinchcliffe of a sudden—‘not if I’m expected to judge my water out of a little shaving-glass.’

The water-gauge of that steam-car was reflected on a mirror to the right of the dashboard. I also had found it inconvenient.

page 2

‘Throw up your arm and look at the gauge under your armpit. Only mind how you steer while you’re doing it, or you’ll get ditched!’ I cried, as the car ran down the road.

‘I wonder!’ said Pyecroft, musing. ‘But, after all, it’s your steamin’ gadgets he’s usin for his libretto, as you might put it. He said to me after breakfast only this mornin’ ’ow he thanked his Maker, on all fours, that he wouldn’t see nor smell nor thumb a runnin’ bulgine till the nineteenth prox. Now look at him! Only look at ’im!’

We could see, down the long slope of the road, my driver surrendering his seat to Hinchcliffe, while the car flickered generously from hedge to hedge.

‘What happens if he upsets?’

‘The petrol will light up and the boiler may blow up.’

‘How rambunkshus! And’—Pyecroft blew a slow cloud—’Agg’s about three hoops up this mornin’, too.’

‘What’s that to do with us? He’s gone down the road,’ I retorted.

‘Ye—es, but we’ll overtake him. He’s a vindictive carrier. He and Hinch ’ad words about pig-breeding this morning. O’ course, Hinch don’t know the elements o’ that evolution; but he fell back on ’is naval rank an’ office, an’ Agg grew peevish. I wasn’t sorry to get out of the cart . . . . Have you ever considered how, when you an’ I meet, so to say, there’s nearly always a remarkably hectic day ahead of us! Hullo! Behold the beef-boat returnin’!’

He rose as the car climbed up the slope, and shouted: ‘In bow! Way ‘nuff!’

‘You be quiet!’ cried Hinchcliffe, and drew up opposite the rug, his dark face shining with joy. ‘She’s the Poetry o’ Motion! She’s the Angel’s Dream. She’s——’ He shut off steam, and the slope being against her, the car slid soberly downhill again.

‘What’s this? I’ve got the brake on!’ he yelled.

‘It doesn’t hold backwards,’ I said. ‘Put her on the mid-link.’

‘That’s a nasty one for the chief engineer o’ the Djinn, 31-knot T.B.D.,’ said Pyecroft. ‘Do you know what the mid-link is, Hinch?’

Once more the car returned to us; but as Pyecroft stooped to gather up the rug, Hinchcliffe jerked the lever testily, and with prawn-like speed she retired backwards into her own steam.

‘Apparently ’e don’t,’ said Pyecroft. ‘What’s he done now, Sir?’

‘Reversed her. I’ve done it myself.’

‘But he’s an engineer.’

For the third time the car manoeuvred up the hill.

‘I’ll teach you to come alongside properly, if I keep you tiffies out all night!’ shouted Pyecroft. It was evidently a quotation. Hinchcliffe’s face grew livid, and, his hand ever so slightly working on the throttle, the car buzzed twenty yards uphill.

‘That’s enough. We’ll take your word for it. The mountain will go to Ma’ommed. Stand fast!’

Pyecroft and I and the rug marched up where she and Hinchcliffe fumed together.

‘Not as easy as it looks—eh, Hinch?’

‘It is dead easy. I’m going to drive her to Instead Wick—aren’t I?’ said the first-class engineroom artificer. I thought of his performances with No. 267 and nodded. After all, it was a small privilege to accord to pure genius.

‘But my engineer will stand by—at first,’ I added.

‘An’ you a family man, too,’ muttered Pyecroft, swinging himself into the right rear seat. ‘Sure to be a remarkably hectic day when we meet.’

We adjusted ourselves and, in the language of the immortal Navy doctor, paved our way towards Linghurst, distant by mile-post 11¾ miles.

Mr. Hinchcliffe, every nerve and muscle braced, talked only to the engineer, and that professionally. I recalled the time when I, too, had enjoyed the rack on which he voluntarily extended himself.

And the County of Sussex slid by in slow time.

‘How cautious is the tiffy-bird!’ said Pyecroft.

‘Even in a destroyer,’ Hinch snapped over his shoulder, ‘you ain’t expected to con and drive simultaneous. Don’t address any remarks to me!’

‘Pump!’ said the engineer. ‘Your water’s droppin’.’

‘I know that. Where the Heavens is that blighted by-pass?’

He beat his right or throttle hand madly on the side of the car till he found the bent rod that more or less controls the pump, and, neglecting all else, twisted it furiously.

My engineer grabbed the steering-bar just in time to save us lurching into a ditch.

‘If I was a burnin’ peacock, with two hundred bloodshot eyes in my shinin’ tail, I’d need ’em all on this job!’ said Hinch.

‘Don’t talk! Steer! This ain’t the North Atlantic,’ Pyecroft replied.

‘Blast my stokers! Why, the steam’s dropped fifty pounds!’ Hinchcliffe cried.

‘Fire’s blown out,’ said the engineer. ‘Stop her!’

‘Does she do that often?’ said Hinch, descending.

‘Sometimes.’

page 3

‘Any time?’

‘Any time a cross-wind catches her.’

The engineer produced a match and stooped.

That car (now, thank Heaven, no more than an evil memory) never lit twice in the same fashion. This time she backfired superbly, and Pyecroft went out over the right rear wheel in a column of rich yellow flame.

‘I’ve seen a mine explode at Bantry—once—prematoor,’ he volunteered.

‘That’s all right,’ said Hinchcliffe, brushing down his singed beard with a singed forefinger. (He had been watching too closely.) ‘Has she any more little surprises up her dainty sleeve?’

‘She hasn’t begun yet,’ said my engineer, with a scornful cough. ‘Some one ’as opened the petrol-supply-valve too wide.’

‘Change places with me, Pyecroft,’ I commanded, for I remembered that the petrol-supply, the steam-lock, and the forced draught were all controlled from the right rear seat.

‘Me? Why? There’s a whole switchboard full o’ nickel-plated muckin’s which I haven’t begun to play with yet. The starboard side’s crawlin’ with ’em.’

‘Change, or I’ll kill you!’ said Hinchcliffe, and he looked like it.

‘That’s the tiffy all over. When anything goes wrong, blame it on the lower deck. Navigate by your automatic self, then! I won’t help you any more.’

We navigated for a mile in dead silence.

‘Talkin’ o’ wakes——’ said Pyecroft suddenly.

‘We weren’t,’ Hinchcliffe grunted.

‘There’s some wakes would break a snake’s back; but this of yours, so to speak, would fair turn a tapeworm giddy. That’s all I wish to observe, Hinch . . . . Cart at anchor on the port bow. It’s Agg!’

Far up the shaded road into secluded Bromlingleigh we saw the carrier’s cart at rest before the post-office.

‘He’s bung in the fairway. How’m I to get past?’ said Hinchcliffe. ‘There’s no room. Here, Pye, come and relieve the wheel!’

‘Nay, nay, Pauline. You’ve made your own bed. You’ve as good as left your happy home an’ family cart to steal it. Now you lie on it.’

‘Ring your bell,’ I suggested.

‘Glory!’ said Pyecroft, falling forward into the nape of Hinchcliffe’s neck as the car stopped dead.

‘Get out o’ my back-hair! That must have been the brake I touched off,’ Hinchcliffe muttered, and repaired his error tumultuously.

We passed the cart as though we had been all Bruges belfry. Agg, from the post-office door, regarded us with a too pacific eye. I remembered later that the pretty postmistress looked on us pityingly.

Hinchcliffe wiped the sweat from his brow and drew breath. It was the first vehicle that he had passed, and I sympathised with him.

‘You needn’t grip so hard,’ said my engineer. ‘She steers as easy as a bicycle.’

‘Ho! You suppose I ride bicycles up an’ down my engine-room?’ was the answer. ‘I’ve other things to think about. She’s a terror. She’s a whistlin’ lunatic. I’d sooner run the old SouthEaster at Simonstown than her!’

‘One of the nice things they say about her,’ I interrupted, ‘is that no engineer is needed to run this machine.’

‘No. They’d need about seven.’

‘“Common-sense only is needed,”’ I quoted.

‘Make a note of that, Hinch. Just commonsense,’ Pyecroft put in.

‘And now,’ I said, ‘we’ll have to take in water. There isn’t more than a couple of inches of water in the tank.’

‘Where d’you get it from?’

‘Oh!—cottages and such-like.’

‘Yes, but that being so, where does your much-advertised twenty-five miles an hour come in? Ain’t a dung-cart more to the point?’

‘If you want to go anywhere, I suppose it would be,’ I replied.

‘I don’t want to go anywhere. I’m thinkin’ of you who’ve got to live with her. She’ll burn her tubes if she loses her water?’

‘She will.’

‘I’ve never scorched yet, and I’m not beginnin’ now.’ He shut off steam firmly. ‘Out you get, Pye, an’ shove her along by hand.’

‘Where to?’

‘The nearest water-tank,’ was the reply. ‘And Sussex is a dry county.’

‘She ought to have drag-ropes—little pipe-clayed ones,’ said Pyecroft.

We got out and pushed under the hot sun for half a mile till we came to a cottage, sparsely inhabited by one child who wept.

page 4

‘All out haymakin’, o’ course,’ said Pyecroft, thrusting his head into the parlour for an instant. ‘What’s the evolution now?’

‘Skirmish till we find a well,’ I said.

‘Hmm! But they wouldn’t ’ave left that kid without a chaperon, so to say . . . I thought so! Where’s a stick?’

A bluish and silent beast of the true old sheepdog breed glided from behind an outhouse and without words fell to work.

Pyecroft kept him at bay with a rake-handle while our party, in rallying-square, retired along the box-bordered brick path to the car.

At the garden gate the dumb devil halted, looked back on the child, and sat down to scratch.

‘That’s his three-mile limit, thank Heaven!’ said Pyecroft. ‘Fall in, push-party, and proceed with land-transport o’ pinnace. I’ll protect your flanks in case this sniffin’ flea-bag is tempted beyond ’is strength.’

We pushed off in silence. The car weighed 1200 lb., and even on ball-bearings was a powerful sudorific. From somewhere behind a hedge we heard a gross rustic laugh.

‘Those are the beggars we lie awake for, patrollin’ the high seas. There ain’t a port in China where we wouldn’t be better treated. Yes, a Boxer ’ud be ashamed of it,’ said Pyecroft.

A cloud of fine dust boomed down the road.

‘Some happy craft with a well-found engineroom! How different!’ panted Hinchcliffe, bent over the starboard mudguard.

It was a claret-coloured petrol car, and it stopped courteously, as good cars will at sight of trouble.

‘Water, only water,’ I answered in reply to offers of help.

‘There’s a lodge at the end of these oak palings. They’ll give you all you want. Say I sent you. Gregory—Michael Gregory. Good-bye!’

‘Ought to ’ave been in the Service. Prob’ly is,’ was Pyecroft’s comment.

At that thrice-blessed lodge our water-tank was filled (I dare not quote Mr. Hinchcliffe’s remarks when he saw the collapsible rubber bucket with which we did it) and we re-embarked. It seemed that Sir Michael Gregory owned many acres, and that his park ran for miles.

‘No objection to your going through it,’ said the lodge-keeper. ‘It’ll save you a goodish bit to Instead Wick.’

But we needed petrol, which could be purchased at Pigginfold, a few miles farther up, and so we held to the main road, as our fate had decreed.

‘We’ve come seven miles in fifty-four minutes, so far,’ said Hinchcliffe (he was driving with greater freedom and less responsibility), ‘and now we have to fill our bunkers. This is worse than the Channel Fleet.’

At Pigginfold, after ten minutes, we refilled our petrol tank and lavishly oiled our engines. Mr. Hinchcliffe wished to discharge our engineer on the grounds that he (Mr. Hinchcliffe) was now entirely abreast of his work. To this I demurred, for I knew my car. She had, in the language of the road, held up for a day and a half, and by most bitter experience I suspected that her time was very near. Therefore, three miles short of Linghurst, I was less surprised than any one, excepting always my engineer, when the engines set up a lunatic clucking, and, after two or three kicks, jammed.

‘Heaven forgive me all the harsh things I may have said about destroyers in my sinful time!’ wailed Hinchcliffe, snapping back the throttle. ‘What’s worryin’ Ada now?’

‘The forward eccentric-strap screw’s dropped off,’ said the engineer, investigating.

‘That all ? I thought it was a propeller-blade.’

‘We must go an’ look for it. There isn’t another.’

‘Not me,’ said Pyecroft from his seat. ‘Out pinnace, Hinch, an’ creep for it. It won’t be more than five miles back.’

The two men, with bowed heads, moved up the road.

‘Look like etymologists, don’t they? Does she decant her innards often, so to speak?’ Pyecroft asked.

I told him the true tale of a race-full of ball bearings strewn four miles along a Hampshire road, and by me recovered in detail. He was profoundly touched.

‘Poor Hinch! Poor—poor Hinch!’ he said. ‘And that’s only one of her little games, is it? He’ll be homesick for the Navy by night.’

When the search-party doubled back with the missing screw, it was Hinchcliffe who replaced it in less than five minutes, while my engineer looked on admiringly.

‘Your boiler’s only seated on four little paperclips,’ he said, crawling from beneath her. ‘She’s a wicker-willow lunchbasket below. She’s a runnin’ miracle. Have you had this combustible spirit-lamp long?’

I told him.

‘And yet you were afraid to come into the Nightmare’s engine-room when we were runnin’ trials!’

‘It’s all a matter of taste,’ Pyecroft volunteered. ‘But I will say for you, Hinch, you’ve certainly got the hang of her steamin’ gadgets in quick time.’

He was driving her very sweetly, but with a worried look in his eye and a tremor in his arm.

‘She don’t seem to answer her helm somehow,’ he said.

‘There’s a lot of play to the steering-gear,’ said my engineer. ‘We generally tighten it up every few miles.’

‘‘Like me to stop now? We’ve run as much as one mile and a half without incident,’ he replied tartly.

page 5

‘Then you’re lucky,’ said my engineer, bristling in turn.

‘They’ll wreck the whole turret out o’ nasty professional spite in a minute,’ said Pyecroft. ‘That’s the worst o’ machinery. Man dead ahead, Hinch—semaphorin’ like the flagship in a fit!’

‘Amen!’ said Hinchcliffe. ‘Shall I stop, or shall I cut him down?’

He stopped, for full in the centre of the Linghurst Road stood a person in pepper-and-salt raiment (ready-made), with a brown telegraph envelope in his hands.

‘Twenty-three and a half miles an hour,’ he began, weighing a small beam-engine of a Waterbury in one red paw. ‘From the top of the hill over our measured quarter-mile—twenty-three and a half.’

‘You manurial gardener——’ Hinchcliffe began. I prodded him warningly from behind, and laid the other hand on Pyecroft’s stiffening knee.

‘Also—on information received-drunk and disorderly in charge of a motor-car—to the common danger—two men like sailors in appearance,’ the man went on.

‘Like sailors! . . . That’s Agg’s little roose. No wonder he smiled at us,’ said Pyecroft.

‘I’ve been waiting for you some time,’ the man concluded, folding up the telegram.

‘Who’s the owner?’

I indicated myself.

‘Then I want you as well as the two seafaring men. Drunk and disorderly can be treated summary. You come on.’

My relations with the Sussex constabulary have, so far, been of the best, but I could not love this person.

‘Of course you have your authority to show?’ I hinted.

‘I’ll show it you at Linghurst,’ he retorted hotly—‘all the authority you want.’

‘I only want the badge, or warrant, or whatever it is a plain-clothes man has to show.’

He made as though to produce it, but checked himself, repeating less politely the invitation to Linghurst. The action and the tone confirmed my many-times-tested theory that the bulk of English shoregoing institutions are based on conformable strata of absolutely impervious inaccuracy. I reflected and became aware of a drumming on the back of the front seat that Pyecroft, bowed forward and relaxed, was tapping with his knuckles. The hardly checked fury on Hinchcliffe’s brow had given place to a greasy imbecility, and he nodded over the steering-bar. In longs and shorts, as laid down by the pious and immortal Mr. Morse, Pyecroft tapped out, ‘Sham drunk. Get him in the car.’

‘I can’t stay here all day,’ said the constable.

Pyecroft raised his head. Then was seen with what majesty the British sailor-man envisages a new situation.

‘Met gennelman heavy sheeway,’ said he. ‘Do’ tell me British gelman can’t give ’ole Brish Navy lif’ own blighted ste’ cart. Have another drink!’

‘I didn’t know they were as drunk as all that when they stopped me,’ I explained.

‘You can say all that at Linghurst,’ was the answer. ‘Come on.’

‘Quite right,’ I said. ‘But the question is, if you take these two out on the road, they’ll fall down or start killing you.’

‘Then I’d call on you to assist me in the execution o’ my duty.’

‘But I’d see you further first. You’d better come with us in the car. I’ll turn this passenger out.’ (This was my engineer, sitting quite silent.) ‘You don’t want him, and, anyhow, he’d only be a witness for the defence.’

‘That’s true,’ said the constable. ‘But it wouldn’t make any odds—at Linghurst.’

My engineer skipped into the bracken like a rabbit. I bade him cut across Sir Michael Gregory’s park, and if he caught my friend, to tell him I should probably be rather late for lunch.

‘I ain’t going to be driven by him.’ Our destined prey pointed at Hinchcliffe with apprehension.

‘Of course not. You take my seat and keep the big sailor in order. He’s too drunk to do much. I’ll change places with the other one. Only be quick; I want to pay my fine and get it over.’

‘That’s the way to look at it,’ he said, dropping into the left rear seat. ‘We’re making quite a lot out o’ you motor gentry.’ He folded his arms judicially as the car gathered way under Hinchcliffe’s stealthy hand.

‘But you aren’t driving!’ he cried, half rising.

‘You’ve noticed it?’ said Pyecroft, and embraced him with one anaconda-like left arm.

‘Don’t kill him,’ said Hinchcliffe briefly. ‘I want to show him what twenty-three and a quarter is.’ We were going a fair twelve, which was about the car’s limit.

Our passenger swore something and then groaned.

‘Hush, darling!’ said Pyecroft, ‘or I’ll have to hug you.’

The main road, white under the noon sun, lay broad before us, running north to Linghurst. We slowed and looked anxiously for a side track.

‘And now,’ said I, ‘I want to see your authority.’

‘The badge of your ratin’,’ Pyecroft added.

page 6

‘I’m a constable,’ he said, and kicked. Indeed, his boots would have bewrayed him across half a county’s plough ; but boots are not legal evidence.

‘I want your authority,’ I repeated coldly; ‘some evidence that you are not a common, drunken tramp.’

It was as I had expected. He had forgotten or mislaid his badge. He had neglected to learn the outlines of the work for which he received money and consideration; and he expected me, the taxpayer, to go to infinite trouble to supplement his deficiencies.

‘If you don’t believe me, come to Linghurst,’ was the burden of his almost national anthem.

‘But I can’t run all over Sussex every time a blackmailer jumps up and says he is a policeman.’

‘Why, it’s quite close,’ he persisted.

‘’Twon’t be—soon,’ said Hinchcliffe.

‘None of the other people ever made any trouble. To be sure they was gentlemen,’ he cried. ‘All I can say is, it may be very funny, but it ain’t fair.’

I laboured with him in this dense fog, but to no end. He had forgotten his badge, and we were villains for that we did not cart him to the pub or barracks where he had left it.

Pyecroft listened critically as we spun along the hard road.

‘If he was a concentrated Boer, he couldn’t expect much more,’ he observed. ‘Now, suppose I’d been a lady in a delicate state o’ health—you’d ha’ made me very ill with your doings.’

‘I wish I ’ad. ’Ere!’Elp!’Elp! Hi!’

The man had seen a constable in uniform fifty yards ahead, where a lane ran into the road, and would have said more but that Hinchcliffe jerked her up that lane with a wrench that nearly capsized us as the constable came running heavily.

It seemed to me that both our guest and his fellow-villain in uniform smiled as we fled down the road easterly betwixt the narrowing hedges.

‘You’ll know all about it in a little time,’ said our guest. ‘You’ve only yourselves to thank for runnin’ your ’ead into a trap.’ And he whistled ostentatiously.

We made no answer.

‘If that man ’ad chose, ’e could have identified me,’ he said.

Still we were silent.

‘But ’e’ll do it later, when you’re caught.’

‘Not if you go on talking. ’E won’t be able to,’ said Pyecroft. ‘I don’t know what traverse you think you’re workin’, but your duty till you’re put in cells for a highway robber is to love, honour, an’ cherish me most special—performin’ all evolutions signalled in rapid time. I tell you this, in case o’ anything turnip’ up.’

‘Don’t you fret about things turnip’ up,’ was the reply.

Hinchcliffe had given the car a generous throttle, and she was well set to work, when, without warning, the road—there are two or three in Sussex like it—turned down and ceased.

‘Holy Muckins!’ he cried, and stood on both brakes as our helpless tyres slithered over wet grass and bracken—down and down into forest—early British woodland. It was the change of a nightmare, and that all should fit, fifty yards ahead of us a babbling brook barred our way. On the far side a velvet green ride, sprinkled with rabbits and fern, gently sloped upwards and away, but behind us was no hope. Forty horse-power would never have rolled wet pneumatic tyres up that verdurous cliff we had descended.

‘H’m!’ Our guest coughed significantly. ‘A great many cars thinks they can take this road; but they all come back. We walks after ’em at our convenience.’

‘Meanin’ that the other jaunty is now pursuin’ us on his lily feet?’ said Pyecroft.

‘Precisely.’

‘An’ you think,’ said Pyecroft (I have no hope to render the scorn of the words), ‘that’ll make any odds? Get out!’

The man obeyed with alacrity.

‘See those spars up-ended over there? I mean that wickyup-thing. Hop-poles, then, you rural blighter. Keep on fetching me hop-poles at the double.’

And he doubled, Pyecroft at his heels; for they had arrived at a perfect understanding.

There was a stack of hurdles a few yards down stream, laid aside after sheep-washing; and there were stepping-stones in the brook. Hinchcliffe rearranged these last to make some sort of causeway; I brought up the hurdles; and when Pyecroft and his subaltern had dropped a dozen hop-poles across the stream, laid them down over all.

‘Talk o’ the Agricultur’l Hall!’ he said, mopping his brow—‘’tisn’t in it with us. The approach to the bridge must now be paved with hurdles, owin’ to the squashy nature o’ the country. Yes, an’ we’d better have one or two on the far side to lead her on to terror fermior. Now, Hinch Give her full steam and ’op along. If, she slips off, we’re done. Shall I take the wheel?’

‘No. This is my job,’ said the first-class engine-room artificer. ‘Get over the far side, and be ready to catch her if she jibs on the uphill.’

page 7

We crossed that elastic structure and stood ready amid the bracken. Hinchcliffe gave her a full steam and she came like a destroyer on her trial. There was a crack, a flicker of white water, and she was in our arms fifty yards up the slope; or rather, we were behind her pushing her madly towards a patch of raw gravel whereon her wheels could bite. Of the bridge remained only a few wildly vibrating hop-poles, and those hurdles which had been sunk in the mud of the approaches.

‘She—she kicked out all the loose ones behind her, as she finished with ’em,’ Hinchcliffe panted.

‘At the Agricultural Hall they would ’ave been fastened down with ribbons,’ said Pyecroft. ‘But this ain’t Olympia.’

‘She nearly wrenched the tiller out of my hand. Don’t you think I conned her like a cock-angel, Pye?’

‘I never saw anything like it,’ said our guest propitiatingly. ‘And now, gentlemen, if you’ll let me go back to Linghurst, I promise you you won’t hear another word from me.’

‘Get in,’ said Pyecroft, as we puffed out on to a metalled road once more. ‘We ’aven’t begun on you yet.’

‘A joke’s a joke,’ he replied. ‘I don’t mind a little bit of a joke myself, but this is going beyond it.’

‘Miles an’ miles beyond it, if this machine stands up. We’ll want water pretty soon.’

Our guest’s countenance brightened, and Pyecroft perceived it.

‘Let me tell you,’ he said earnestly, ‘it won’t make any difference to you whatever happens. Barrin’ a dhow or two Tajurrah-way, prizes are scarce in the Navy. Hence we never abandon ’em.’

There was a long silence. Pyecroft broke it suddenly.

‘Robert,’ he said, ‘have you a mother?’

‘Yes.’

‘Have you a big brother?’

‘Yes.’

‘An’ a little sister?’

‘Yes.’

‘Robert. Does your mamma keep a dog?’

‘Yes. Why?’

‘All right, Robert. I won’t forget it.’

I looked for an explanation.

‘I saw his cabinet photograph in full uniform on the mantelpiece o’ that cottage before faithful Fido turned up,’ Pyecroft whispered. ‘Ain’t you glad it’s all in the family somehow?’

We filled with water at a cottage on the edge of St. Leonard’s Forest, and, despite our increasing leakage, made shift to climb the ridge above Instead Wick. Knowing the car as I did, I felt sure that final collapse would not be long delayed. My sole concern was to run our guest well into the wilderness before that came.

On the roof of the world—a naked plateau clothed with young heather—she retired from active life in floods of tears. Her feed-water-heater (Hinchcliffe blessed it and its maker for three minutes) was leaking beyond hope of repair; she had shifted most of her packing, and her waterpump would not lift.

‘If I had a bit of piping I could disconnect this tin cartridge-case an’ feed direct into the boiler. It ’ud knock down her speed, but we could get on,’ said he, and looked hopelessly at the long dun ridges that hove us above the panorama of Sussex. Northward we could see the London haze. Southward, between gaps of the whale-backed Downs, lay the Channel’s zinc-blue. But all our available population in that vast survey was one cow and a kestrel.

‘It’s down hill to Instead Wick. We can run her there by gravity,’ I said at last.

‘Then he’ll only have to walk to the station to get home. Unless we take off ’is boots first,’ Pyecroft replied.

‘That,’ said our guest earnestly, ‘would be theft atop of assault and very serious.’

‘Oh, let’s hang him an’ be done,’ Hinchcliffe grunted. ‘It’s evidently what he’s sufferin’ for.’

Somehow murder did not appeal to us that warm noon. We sat down to smoke in the heather, and presently out of the valley below came the thick beat of a petrol-motor ascending. I paid little attention to it till I heard the roar of a horn that has no duplicate in all the Home Counties.

‘That’s the man I was going to lunch with!’ I cried. ‘Hold on!’ and I ran down the road.

It was a big, black, black-dashed, tonneaued twenty-four-horse Octopod; and it bore not only Kysh my friend, and Salmon his engineer, but my own man, who for the first time in our acquaintance smiled.

‘Did they get you? What did you get? I was coming into Linghurst as witness to character—your man told me what happened—but I was stopped near Instead Wick myself,’ cried Kysh.

‘What for?’

‘Leaving car unattended. An infernal swindle, when you think of the loose carts outside every pub in the county. I was jawing with the police for an hour, but it’s no use. They’ve got it all their own way, and we’re helpless.’

Hereupon I told him my tale, and for proof, as we topped the hill, pointed out the little group round my car.

All supreme emotion is dumb. Kysh put on the brake and hugged me to his bosom till I groaned. Then, as I remember, he crooned like a mother returned to her suckling.

page 8

‘Divine! Divine!’ he murmured. ‘Command me.’

‘Take charge of the situation,’ I said. ‘You’ll find a Mr. Pyecroft on the quarter-deck. I’m altogether out of it.’

‘He shall stay there. Who am I but the instrument of vengeance in the hands of an over-ruling Providence? (And I put in fresh sparking-plugs this morning.) Salmon, take that steamkettle home, somehow. I would be alone.’

‘Leggatt,’ I said to my man, ‘help Salmon home with my car.’

‘Home? Now? It’s hard. It’s cruel hard,’ said Leggatt, almost with a sob.

Hinchcliffe outlined my car’s condition briefly to the two engineers. Mr. Pyecroft clung to our guest, who stared with affrighted eyes at the palpitating Octopod; and the free wind of high Sussex whimpered across the ling.

‘I am quite agreeable to walkin’ ’ome all the way on my feet,’ said our guest. ‘I wouldn’t go to any railway station. It ’ud be just the proper finish to our little joke.’ He laughed nervously.

‘What’s the evolution?’ said Pyecroft. ‘Do we turn over to the new cruiser?’

I nodded, and he escorted our guest to the tonneau with care. When I was in, he sat himself broad-armed on the little flap-seat which controls the door. Hinchcliffe sat by Kysh.

‘You drive?’ Kysh asked, with the smile that has won him his chequered way through the world.

‘Steam only, and I’ve about had my whack for to-day, thanks.’

‘I see.’

The long, low car slid forward and then dropped like a bullet down the descent our steam toy had so painfully climbed. Our guest’s face blanched, and he clutched the back of the tonneau.

‘New commander’s evidently been trained on a destroyer,’ said Hinchcliffe.

‘What’s ’is wonderful name?’ whispered Pyecroft. ‘Ho! Well, I’m glad it ain’t Saul we’ve run up against—nor Nimshi, for that matter. This is makin’ me feel religious.’

Our impetus carried us half-way up the next slope, where we steadied to a resonant fifteen an hour against the collar.

‘What do you think?’ I called to Hinchcliffe.

‘’Taint as sweet as steam, o’ course; but for power it’s twice the Furious against half the Jaseur in a head-sea.’

Volumes could not have touched it more exactly. His bright eyes were glued on Kysh’s hands juggling with levers behind the discreet backward-sloping dash.

‘An’ what sort of a brake might you use?’ he said politely.

‘This,’ Kysh replied, as the last of the hill shot up to one in eight. He let the car run back a few feet and caught her deftly on the brake, repeating the performance cup and ball fashion. It was like being daped above the Pit at the end of an uncoiled solar plexus. Even Pyecroft held his breath.

‘It ain’t fair! It ain’t fair!’ our guest moaned. ‘You’re makin’ me sick.’

‘What an ungrateful blighter he is!’ said Pyecroft. ‘Money couldn’t buy you a run like this . . . . Do it well overboard!’

‘We’ll just trundle up the Forest and drop into the Park Row, I think,’ said Kysh. ‘There’s a bit of good going hereabouts.’

He flung a careless knee over the low raking tiller that the ordinary expert puts under his armpit, and down four miles of yellow road, cut through barren waste, the Octopod sang like a six-inch shell.

‘Whew ! But you know your job,’ said Hinchcliffe. ‘You’re wasted here. I’d give something to have you in my engineroom.’

‘He’s steering with ’is little hind-legs,’ said Pyecroft. ‘Stand up and look at him, Robert. You’ll never see such a sight again!’

‘Nor don’t want to,’ was our guest’s reply. ‘Five ’undred pounds wouldn’t begin to cover ’is fines even since I’ve been with him.’

Park Row is reached by one hill which drops three hundred feet in half a mile. Kysh had the thought to steer with his hand down the abyss, but the manner in which he took the curved bridge at the bottom brought my few remaining hairs much nearer the grave.

‘We’re in Surrey now; better look out,’ I said.

‘Never mind. I’ll roll her into Kent for a bit. We’ve lots of time; it’s only three o’clock.’

‘Won’t you want to fill your bunkers, or take water, or oil her up?’ said Hinchcliffe.

‘We don’t use water, and she’s good for two hundred on one tank o’ petrol if she doesn’t break down.’

‘Two hundred miles from ’ome and mother and faithful Fido to-night, Robert,’ said Pyecroft, slapping our guest on the knee. ‘Cheer up! Why, I’ve known a destroyer do less.’

We passed with some decency through some towns, till by way of the Hastings road we whirled into Cramberhurst, which is a deep pit.

‘Now,’ said Kysh, ‘we begin.’

‘Previous service not reckoned towards pension,’ said Pyecroft. ‘We are doin’ you lavish, Robert.’

‘But when’s this silly game to finish, any’ow?’ our guest snarled.

‘Don’t worry about the when of it, Robert. The where’s the interestin’ point for you just now.’

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I had seen Kysh drive before, and I thought I knew the Octopod, but that afternoon he and she were exalted beyond my knowledge. He improvised on the keys—the snapping levers and quivering accelerators—marvellous variations, so that our progress was sometimes a fugue and sometimes a barn-dance, varied on open greens by the weaving of fairy rings. When I protested, all that he would say was: ‘I’ll hypnotise the fowl! I’ll dazzle the rooster!’ or other words equally futile. And she—oh! that I could do her justice!—she turned her broad black bows to the westering light, and lifted us high upon hills that we might see and rejoice with her. She whooped into veiled hollows of elm and Sussex oak; she devoured infinite perspectives of park palings; she surged through forgotten hamlets, whose single streets gave back, reduplicated, the clatter of her exhaust, and, tireless, she repeated the motions. Over naked uplands she droned like a homing bee, her shadow lengthening in the sun that she chased to his lair. She nosed up unparochial byways and accommodation-roads of the least accommodation, and put old scarred turf or new-raised molehills under her most marvellous springs with never a jar. And since the King’s highway is used for every purpose save traffic, in mid-career she stepped aside for, or flung amazing loops about, the brainless driver, the driverless horse, the drunken carrier, the engaged couple, the female student of the bicycle and her staggering instructor, the pig, the perambulator, and the infant school (where it disembogued yelping on cross-roads), with the grace of Nellie Farren (upon whom be the Peace) and the lithe abandon of all the Vokes family. But at heart she was ever Judic as I remember that Judic long ago—Judic clad in bourgeois black from wrist to ankle, achieving incredible improprieties.

We were silent—Hinchcliffe and Pyecroft through professional appreciation; I with a layman’s delight in the expert; and our guest because of fear.

At the edge of the evening she smelt the sea to southward and sheered thither like the strong-winged albatross, to circle enormously amid green flats fringed by martello towers.

‘Ain’t that Eastbourne yonder?’ said our guest, reviving. ‘I’ve a aunt there—she’s cook to a J.P.—could identify me.’

‘Don’t worry her for a little thing like that,’ said Pyecroft; and ere he had ceased to praise family love, our unpaid judiciary, and domestic service, the Downs rose between us and the sea, and the Long Man of Hillingdon lay out upon the turf.

‘Trevington—up yonder—is a fairly isolated little dorp,’ I said, for I was beginning to feel hungry.

‘No,’ said Kysh. ‘He’d get a lift to the railway in no time …. Besides, I’m enjoying myself . . . . Three pounds eighteen and sixpence. Infernal swindle!’

I take it one of his more recent fines was rankling in Kysh’s brain; but he drove like the Archangel of the Twilight.

About the longitude of Cassocks, Hinchcliffe yawned. ‘Aren’t we ever goin’ to maroon our Robert? I’m hungry, too.’

‘The commodore wants his money back,’ I answered.

‘If he drives like this habitual, there must be a tidyish little lump owin’ to him,’ said Pyecroft. ‘Well, I’m agreeable.’

‘I didn’t know it could be done. S’welp me, I didn’t,’ our guest murmured.

‘But you will,’ said Kysh. And that was the first and last time he addressed the man.

We ran through Penfield Green, half stupefied with open air, drugged with the relentless boom of the Octopod, and extinct with famine.

‘I used to shoot about here,’ said Kysh, a few miles farther on. ‘Open that gate, please,’ and he slowed as the sun touched the sky-line. At this point we left metalled roads and bucked vigorously amid ditches and under trees for twenty minutes.

‘Only cross-country car on the market,’ he said, as we wheeled into a straw-yard where a lone bull bellowed defiance to our growlings. ‘Open that gate, please. I hope the cattle-bridge will stand up.’

‘I’ve took a few risks in my time,’ said Pyecroft as timbers cracked beneath us and we entered between thickets, ‘but I’m a babe to this man, Hinch.’

‘Don’t talk to me. Watch him! It’s a liberal education, as Shakespeare says. Fallen tree on the port bow, Sir.’

‘Right! That’s my mark. Sit tight!’

She flung up her tail like a sounding whale and buried us in a fifteen-foot-deep bridle-path buttressed with the exposed roots of enormous beeches. The wheels leaped from root to rounded boulder, and it was very dark in the shadow of the foliage.

‘There ought to be a hammer-pond somewhere about here.’ Kysh was letting her down this chute in brakeful spasms.

‘Water dead ahead, Sir. Stack o’ brushwood on the starboard beam, and—no road,’ sang Pyecroft.

‘Cr-r-ri-key!’ said Hinchcliffe, as the car on a wild cant to the left went astern, screwing herself round the angle of a track that overhung the pond. ‘If she only had two propellers, I believe she’d talk poetry. She can do everything else.’

‘We’re rather on our port wheels now,’ said Kysh ; ‘but I don’t think she’ll capsize. This road isn’t used much by motors.’

‘You don’t say so,’ said Pyecroft. ‘What a pity!’

She bored through a mass of crackling brushwood, and emerged into an upward-sloping fernglade fenced with woods so virgin, so untouched, that William Rufus might have ridden off as we entered. We climbed out of the violet-purple shadows towards the upland where the last of the day lingered. I was filled to my moist eyes with the almost sacred beauty of sense and association that clad the landscape.

‘Does ’unger produce ’alluciations ?’ said Pyecroft in a whisper. ‘Because I’ve just seen a sacred ibis walkin’ arm in arm with a British cock-pheasant.’

‘What are you panickin’ at?’ said Hinchcliffe. ‘I’ve been seein’ zebra for the last two minutes, but I ’aven’t complained.’

He pointed behind us, and I beheld a superb painted zebra (Burchell’s, I think), following our track with palpitating nostrils. The car stopped, and it fled away.

There was a little pond in front of us from which rose a dome of irregular sticks crowned with a blunt-muzzled beast that sat upon its haunches.

page 10

‘Is it catching?’ said Pyecroft.

‘Yes. I’m seeing beaver,’ I replied.

‘It is here!’ said Kysh, with the air and gesture of Captain Nemo, and half turned.

‘No—no—no ! For ’Eaven’s sake—not ’ere!’ Our guest gasped like a sea-bathed child, as four efficient hands swung him far out-board on to the turf. The car ran back noiselessly down the slope.

‘Look! Look! It’s sorcery!’ cried Hinchcliffe.

There was a report like a pistol-shot as the beaver dived from the roof of his lodge, but we watched our guest. He was on his knees, praying to kangaroos. Yea, in his bowler hat he kneeled before kangaroos—gigantic, erect, silhouetted against the light—four buck-kangaroos in the heart of Sussex!

And we retrogressed over the velvet grass till our hind-wheels struck well-rolled gravel, leading us to sanity, main roads, and, half an hour later, the ‘Grapnel Inn ‘at Horsham.

After a great meal we poured libations and made burnt-offerings in honour of Kysh, who received our homage graciously, and, by the way, explained a few things in the natural history line that had puzzled us. England is a most marvellous country, but one is not, till one knows the eccentricities of large landowners, trained to accept kangaroos, zebras, or beavers as part of its landscape.When we went to bed Pyecroft pressed my hand, his voice thick with emotion.

‘We owe it to you,’ he said. ‘We owe it all to you. Didn’t I say we never met in pup-pup-puris naturalibus, if I may so put it, without a remarkably hectic day ahead of us?’

‘That’s all right,’ I said. ‘Mind the candle.’ He was tracing smoke-patterns on the wall.

‘But what I want to know is whether we’ll succeed in acclimatisin’ the blighter, or whether Sir William Gardner’s keepers ’ll kill ’im before ’e gets accustomed to ’is surroundin’s?’

Some day, I think, we must go up the Linghurst road and find out.

The Rt. Hon. R. B. Haldane, Secretary of State for War, was questioned in the House of Commons on April 8th about the rocking-horses which the War Office is using for the purpose of teaching recruits to ride. Lord Ronaldshay asked the War Secretary if rocking-horses were to be supplied to all the cavalry regiments for teaching recruits to ride. ‘The noble Lord,’ replied Mr. Haldane, ‘is doubtless alluding to certain dummy horses on rockers which have been tested with very satisfactory results.’ . . . The mechanical steed is a wooden horse with an astonishing tail. It is painted brown and mounted on swinging rails. The recruit leaps into the saddle and pulls at the reins while the riding-instructor rocks the animal to and fro with his foot. The rocking-horses are being made at Woolwich. They are quite cheap. (Daily Paper)

page 1 of 6

MY instructions to Mr. Leggatt, my engineer, had been accurately obeyed. He was to bring my car on completion of annual overhaul, from Coventry via London, to Southampton Docks to await my arrival; and very pretty she looked, under the steamer’s side among the railway lines, at six in the morning. Next to her new paint and varnish I was most impressed by her four brand-new tyres.

‘But I didn’t order new tyres,’ I said as we moved away. ‘These are Irresilients, too.’

‘Treble-ribbed,’ said Leggatt. ‘Diamond-stud sheathing.’

‘Then there has been a mistake.’

‘Oh no, sir; they’re gratis.’

The number of motor manufacturers who give away complete sets of treble-ribbed Irresilient tyres is so limited that I believe I asked Leggatt for an explanation.

‘I don’t know that I could very well explain, sir,’ was the answer. ‘It ’ud come better from Mr. Pyecroft. He’s on leaf at Portsmouth—staying with his uncle. His uncle ’ad the body all night. I’d defy you to find a scratch on her even with a microscope.’

‘Then we will go home by the Portsmouth road,’ I said.

And we went at those speeds which are allowed before the working-day begins or the police are thawed out. We were blocked near Portsmouth by a battalion of Regulars on the move.

‘Whitsuntide manœuvres just ending,’ said Leggatt. ‘They’ve had a fortnight in the Downs.’

He said no more until we were in a narrow street somewhere behind Portsmouth Town Railway Station, where he slowed at a green-grocery shop. The door was open, and a small old man sat on three potato-baskets swinging his feet over a stooping blue back.

‘You call that shinin’ ’em?’ he piped. ‘Can you see your face in ’em yet? No! Then shine ’em, or I’ll give you a beltin’ you’ll remember!’

‘If you stop kickin’ me in the mouth perhaps I’d do better,’ said Pyecroft’s voice meekly.

We blew the horn.

Pyecroft arose, put away the brushes, and received us not otherwise than as a king in his own country.

‘Are you going to leave me up here all day?’ said the old man.

Pyecroft lifted him down and he hobbled into the back room.

‘It’s his corns,’ Pyecroft explained. ‘You can’t shine corny feet—and he hasn’t had his breakfast.’

‘I haven’t had mine either,’ I said.

‘Breakfast for two more, uncle,’ Pyecroft sang out.

‘Go out an’ buy it then;’ was the answer, ‘or else it’s half-rations.’

Pyecroft turned to Leggatt, gave him his marketing orders, and despatched him with the coppers.

‘I have got four new tyres on my car,’ I began impressively.

‘Yes,’ said Mr. Pyecroft. ‘You have, and I will say’—he patted my car’s bonnet—‘you earned ’em.’

‘I want to know why——,’ I went on.

‘Quite justifiable. You haven’t noticed anything in the papers, have you?’

‘I’ve only just landed. I haven’t seen a paper for weeks.’

‘Then you can lend me a virgin ear. There’s been a scandal in the junior Service—the Army, I believe they call ’em.’

A bag of coffee-beans pitched on the counter, ‘Roast that,’ said the uncle from within.

Pyecroft rigged a small coffee-roaster, while I took down the shutters, and sold a young lady in curl-papers two bunches of mixed greens and one soft orange.

‘Sickly stuff to handle on an empty stomach, ain’t it?’ said Pyecroft.

‘What about my new tyres?’ I nsisted.

‘Oh, any amount. But the question is’—he looked at me steadily—‘is this what you might call a court-martial or a post-mortem inquiry?’

‘Strictly a post-mortem,’ said I.

‘That being so,’ said Pyecroft, ‘we can rapidly arrive at facts. Last Thursday—the shutters go behind those baskets—last Thursday at five bells in the forenoon watch, otherwise ten-thirty a.m., your Mr. Leggatt was discovered on Westminster Bridge laying his course for the Old Kent Road.’

‘But that doesn’t lead to Southampton,’ ‘Interrupted.

‘Then perhaps he was swinging the car for compasses. Be that as it may, we found him in that latitude, simultaneous as Jules and me was ong route for Waterloo to rejoin our respective ships—or Navies I should say. Jules was a permissionaire, which meant being on leaf, same as me, from a French cassowary-cruiser at Portsmouth. A party of her trusty and well-beloved petty officers ’ad been seeing London, chaperoned by the R.C. chaplain. Jules ’ad detached himself from the squadron and was cruisin’ on his own when I joined him, in company of copious lady-friends. But, mark you, your Mr. Leggatt drew the line at the girls. Loud and long he drew it.’

page 2

‘I’m glad of that,’ I said.

‘You may be. He adopted the puristical formation from the first. “Yes,” he said, when we was annealing him at—but you wouldn’t know the pub—“I am going to Southampton,” he says, “and I’ll stretch a point to go via Portsmouth; but,” says he, “seeing what sort of one hell of a time invariably trarnspires when we cruise together, Mr. Pyecroft, I do not feel myself justified towards my generous and long-suffering employer in takin’ on that kind of ballast as well.” I assure you he considered your interests.’

‘And the girls?’ I asked.

‘Oh, I left that to Jules. I’m a monogomite by nature. So we embarked strictly ong garçong. But I should tell you, in case he didn’t, that your Mr. Leggatt’s care for your interests ’ad extended to sheathing the car in matting and gunny-bags to preserve her paint-work. She was all swathed up like an I-talian baby.’

‘He is careful about his paint-work,’ I said.

‘For a man with no Service experience I should say he was fair homicidal on the subject. If we’d been Marines he couldn’t have been more pointed in his allusions to our hob-nailed socks. However, we reduced him to a malleable condition, and embarked for Portsmouth. I’d seldom rejoined my vaisseau ong automobile, avec a fur coat and goggles. Nor ’ad Jules.’

‘Did Jules say much?’ I asked, helplessly turning the handle of the coffee-roaster.

‘That’s where I pitied the pore beggar. He ’adn’t the language, so to speak. He was confined to heavings and shruggin’s and copious Mohg Jews! The French are very badly fitted with relief-valves. And then our Mr. Leggatt drove. He drove.’

‘Was he in a very malleable condition?’

‘Not him! We recognised the value of his cargo from the outset. He hadn’t a chance to get more than moist at the edges. After which we went to sleep; and now we’ll go to breakfast.’

We entered the back room where everything was in order, and a screeching canary made us welcome. The uncle had added sausages and piles of buttered toast to the kippers. The coffee, cleared with a piece of fish-skin, was a revelation.

Leggatt, who seemed to know the premises, had run the car into the tiny backyard where her mirror-like back almost blocked up the windows. He minded shop while we ate. Pyecroft passed him his rations through a flap in the door. The uncle ordered him in, after breakfast, to wash up, and he jumped in his gaiters at the old man’s commands as he has never jumped to mine.

‘To resoom the post-mortem,’ said Pyecroft, lighting his pipe. ‘My slumbers were broken by the propeller ceasing to revolve, and by vile language from your Mr. Leggatt.’

‘I—I——’ Leggatt began, a blue-checked duster in one hand and a cup in the other.

‘When you’re wanted aft you’ll be sent for, Mr. Leggatt,’ said Pyecroft amiably. ‘It’s clean mess decks for you now. Resooming once more, we was on a lonely and desolate ocean near Portsdown, surrounded by gorse bushes, and a Boy Scout was stirring my stomach with his little copper-stick.’

‘“You count ten,” he says.

‘“Very good, Boy Jones,” I says, “count ’em,” and I hauled him in over the gunnel, and ten I gave him with my large flat hand. The remarks he passed, lying face down tryin’ to bite my leg, would have reflected credit on any Service. Having finished I dropped him overboard again, which was my gross political error. I ought to ’ave killed him; because he began signalling—rapid and accurate—in a sou’ westerly direction. Few equatorial calms are to be apprehended when B.P.’s little pets take to signallin’. Make a note o’ that! Three minutes later we were stopped and boarded by Scouts—up our backs, down our necks, and in our boots! The last I heard from your Mr. Leggatt as he went under, brushin’ ’em off his cap, was thanking Heaven he’d covered up the new paint-work with mats. An ’eroic soul!’

‘Not a scratch on her body,’ said Leggatt, pouring out the coffee-grounds.

‘And Jules?’ said I.

‘Oh, Jules thought the much advertised Social Revolution had begun, but his mackintosh hampered him.’

‘You told me to bring the mackintosh,’ Leggatt whispered to me.

‘And when I ’ad ’em half convinced he was a French vicomte coming down to visit the Commander-in-Chief at Portsmouth, he tried to take it off. Seeing his uniform underneath, some sucking Sherlock Holmes of the Pink Eye Patrol (they called him Eddy) deduced that I wasn’t speaking the truth. Eddy said I was tryin’ to sneak into Portsmouth unobserved—unobserved mark you!—and join hands with the enemy. It trarnspired that the Scouts was conducting a field-day against opposin’ forces, ably assisted by all branches of the Service, and they was so afraid the car wouldn’t count ten points to them in the fray, that they’d have scalped us, but for the intervention of an umpire—also in short under-drawers. A fleshy sight!’

Here Mr. Pyecroft shut his eyes and nodded. ‘That umpire,’ he said suddenly, ‘was our Mr. Morshed—a gentleman whose acquaintance you have already made and profited by, if I mistake not.’

‘Oh, was the Navy in it too?’ I said; for I had read of wild doings occasionally among the Boy Scouts on the Portsmouth Road, in which Navy, Army, and the world at large seemed to have taken part.

‘The Navy was in it. I was the only one out of it—for several seconds. Our Mr. Morshed failed to recognise me in my fur boa, and my appealin’ winks at ’im behind your goggles didn’t arrive. But when Eddy darling had told his story, I saluted, which is difficult in furs, and I stated I was bringin’ him dispatches from the North. My Mr. Morshed cohered on the instant. I’ve never known his ethergram installations out of order yet. “Go and guard your blessed road,” he says to the Fratton Orphan Asylum standing at attention all round him, and, when they was removed—“Pyecroft,” he says, still sotte voce, “what in Hong-Kong are you doing with this dun-coloured sampan?”

‘It was your Mr. Leggatt’s paint-protective matting which caught his eye. She did resemble a sampan, especially about the stern-works. At these remarks I naturally threw myself on ’is bosom, so far as Service conditions permitted, and revealed him all, mentioning that the car was yours. You know his way of working his lips like a rabbit? Yes, he was quite pleased. “His car!” he kept murmuring, working his lips like a rabbit. “I owe ’im more than a trifle for things he wrote about me. I’ll keep the car.”

page 3

‘Your Mr. Leggatt now injected some semi-mutinous remarks to the effect that he was your chauffeur in charge of your car, and, as such, capable of so acting. Mr. Morshed threw him a glarnce. It sufficed. Didn’t it suffice, Mr. Leggatt?’

‘I knew if something didn’t happen, something worse would,’ said Leggatt. ‘It never fails when you’re aboard.’

‘And Jules?’ I demanded.

‘Jules was, so to speak, panicking in a water-tight flat through his unfortunate lack of language. I had to introduce him as part of the entente cordiale, and he was put under arrest, too. Then we sat on the grass and smoked, while Eddy and Co. violently annoyed the traffic on the Portsmouth Road, till the umpires, all in short panties, conferred on the valuable lessons of the field-day and added up points, same as at target-practice. I didn’t hear their conclusions, but our Mr. Morshed delivered a farewell address to Eddy and Co., tellin’ ’em they ought to have deduced from a hundred signs about me, that I was a friendly bringin’ in dispatches from the North. We left ’em tryin’ to find those signs in the Scout book, and we reached Mr. Morshed’s hotel at Portsmouth at 6.27 p.m. ong automobile. Here endeth the first chapter.’

‘Begin the second,’ I said.

The uncle and Leggatt had finished washing up and were seated, smoking, while the damp duster dried at the fire.

‘About what time was it,’ said Pyecroft to Leggatt, ‘when our Mr. Morshed began to talk about uncles?’

‘When he came back to the bar, after he’d changed into those rat-catcher clothes,’ said Leggatt.

‘That’s right. “Pye,” said he, “have you an uncle?” “I have,” I says. “Here’s santy to him,” and I finished my sherry and bitters to you, uncle.’

‘That’s right,’ said Pyecroft’s uncle sternly. ‘If you hadn’t I’d have belted you worth rememberin’, Emmanuel. I had the body all night.’

Pyecroft smiled affectionately. ‘So you ’ad, uncle,’ an’ beautifully you looked after her. But as I was saying, “I have an uncle, too,” says Mr. Morshed, dark and lowering. “Yet somehow I can’t love him. I want to mortify the beggar. Volunteers to mortify my uncle, one pace to the front.”

‘I took Jules with me the regulation distance. Jules was getting interested. Your Mr. Leggatt preserved a strictly nootral attitude.

‘“You’re a pressed man,” says our Mr. Morshed. “I owe your late employer much, so to say. The car will manœuvre all night, as requisite.”

‘Mr. Leggatt come out noble as your employee, and, by ’Eaven’s divine grace, instead of arguing, he pleaded his new paint and varnish which. was Mr. Morshed’s one vital spot (he’s lootenant on one of the new catch-’em-alive-o’s now). “True,” says he, “paint’s an ’oly thing. I’ll give you one hour to arrange a modus vivendi. Full bunkers and steam ready by 9 p.m. to-night, if you please.”

‘Even so, Mr. Leggatt was far from content. I ’ad to arrange the details. We run her into the yard here.’ Pyecroft nodded through the window at my car’s glossy back-panels. ‘We took off the body with its mats and put it in the stable, substitooting (and that yard’s a tight fit for extensive repairs) the body of uncle’s blue delivery cart. It overhung a trifle, but after I’d lashed it I knew it wouldn’t fetch loose. Thus, in our composite cruiser, we repaired once more to the hotel, and was immediately dispatched to the toyshop in the High Street where we took aboard one rocking-horse which was waiting for us.’

‘Took aboard what?’ I cried.

‘One fourteen-hand dapple-grey rocking-horse, with pure green rockers and detachable tail, pair gashly glass eyes, complete set ’orrible grinnin’ teeth, and two bloody-red nostrils which, protruding from the brown papers, produced the tout ensemble of a Ju-ju sacrifice in the Benin campaign. Do I make myself comprehensible?’

‘Perfectly. Did you say anything?’ I asked.

‘Only to Jules. To him, I says, wishing to try him, “Allez à votre bateau. Je say mon Lootenong. Eel voo donneray porkwor.” To me, says he, “Vous ong ate hurroo! Yamay de la vee!” and I saw by his eye he’d taken on for the full term of the war. Jules was a blue-eyed, brindle-haired beggar of a useful make and inquirin’ habits. Your Mr. Leggat he only groaned.’

Leggatt nodded. ‘It was like nightmares,’ he said. ‘It was like nightmares.’

‘Once more, then,’ Pyecroft swept on, ‘we returned to the hotel and partook of a sumptuous repast, under the able and genial chairmanship of our Mr. Morshed, who laid his projecks unreservedly before us. “In the first place,” he says, opening out bicycle-maps, “my uncle, who, I regret to say, is a brigadier-general, has sold his alleged soul to Dicky Bridoon for a feathery hat and a pair o’ gilt spurs. Jules, conspuez l’oncle!” So Jules, you’ll be glad to hear——’

‘One minute, Pye,’ I said. ‘Who is Dicky Bridoon?’

‘I don’t usually mingle myself up with the bickerings of the junior Service, but it trarnspired that he was Secretary o’ State for Civil War, an’ he’d been issuing mechanical leather-belly gee-gees which doctors recommend for tumour—to the British cavalry in loo of real meat horses, to learn to ride on. Don’t you remember there was quite a stir in the papers owing to the cavalry not appreciatin’ ’em? But that’s a minor item. The main point was that our uncle, in his capacity of brigadier-general, mark you, had wrote to the papers highly approvin’ o’ Dicky Bridoon’s mechanical substitutes an ’ad thus obtained promotion—all same as a agnosticle stoker psalmsingin’ ’imself up the Service under a pious captain. At that point of the narrative we caught a phosphorescent glimmer why the rocking-horse might have been issued; but none the less the navigation was intricate. Omitting the fact it was dark and cloudy, our brigadier-uncle lay somewhere in the South Downs with his brigade, which was manoeuvrin’ at Whitsun manœuvres on a large scale—Red Army versus Blue, et cetera; an’ all we ’ad to go by was those flapping bicycle-maps and your Mr. Leggatt’s groans.’

‘I was thinking what the Downs mean after dark,’ said Leggatt angrily.

‘They was worth thinkin’ of,’ said Pyecroft, When we had studied the map till it fair spun, we decided to sally forth and creep for uncle by hand in the dark, dark night, an’ present ‘im with the rocking-horse. So we embarked at 8.57 P.M.’

‘One minute again, please. How much did Jules understand by that time?’ I asked.

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‘Sufficient unto the day—or night, perhaps I should say. He told our Mr. Morshed he’d follow him more sang frays, which is French for dead, drunk or damned. Barrin’ ’is paucity o’ language, there wasn’t a blemish on Jules. But what I wished to imply was, when we climbed into the back parts of the car, our Lootenant Morshed says to me, “I doubt if I’d flick my cigar-ends about too lavish, Mr. Pyecroft. We ought to be sitting on five pounds’ worth of selected fireworks, and I think the rockets are your end.” Not being able to smoke with my ’ead over the side I threw it away; and then your Mr. Leggatt, ’aving been as nearly mutinous as it pays to be with my Mr. Morshed, arched his back and drove.’

‘Where did he drive to, please?’ said I.

‘Primerrily, in search of any or either or both armies; seconderrily, of course, in search of our brigadier-uncle. Not finding him on the road, we ran about the grass looking for him. This took us to a great many places in a short time. ’Ow ‘eavenly that lilac did smell on top of that first Down—stinkin’ its blossomin’ little heart out!’

‘I ’adn’t leesure to notice,’ said Mr. Leggatt. ‘The Downs were full o’ chalk-pits, and we’d no lights.’

‘We ’ad the bicycle-lamp to look at the map by. Didn’t you notice the old lady at the window where we saw the man in the night-gown? I thought night-gowns as sleepin’ rig was extinck, so to speak.’

‘I tell you I ’adn’t leesure to notice,’ Leggatt repeated.

‘That’s odd. Then what might ’ave made you tell the sentry at the first camp we found that you was the Daily Express delivery-waggon?’

‘You can’t touch pitch without being defiled,’ Leggatt answered. ‘’Oo told the officer in the bath we were umpires?’

‘Well, he asked us. That was when we found the Territorial battalion undressin’ in slow time. It lay on the left flank o’ the Blue Army, and it cackled as it lay, too. But it gave us our position as regards the respective armies. We wandered a little more, and at 11.7 p.m., not having had a road under us for twenty minutes, we scaled the heights of something or other—which are about six hundred feet high. Here we ’alted to tighten the lashings of the superstructure, and we smelt leather and horses three counties deep all round. We was, as you might say, in the thick of it.’

‘“Ah!” says my Mr. Morshed. “My ’orizon has indeed broadened. What a little thing is an uncle, Mr. Pyecroft, in the presence o’ these glitterin’ constellations! Simply ludicrous!” he says, “to waste a rocking-horse on an individual. We must socialise it. But we must get their ’eads up first. Touch off one rocket, if you please.”

‘I touched off a green three-pounder which rose several thousand metres, and burst into gorgeous stars. “Reproduce the manœuvre,” he says, “at the other end o’ this ridge—if it don’t end in another cliff.” So we steamed down the ridge a mile and a half east, and then I let Jules touch off a pink rocket, or he’d ha’ kissed me. That was his only way to express his emotions, so to speak. Their heads come up then all around us to the extent o’ thousands. We hears bugles like cocks crowing below, and on the top of it a most impressive sound which I’d never enjoyed before because ’itherto I’d always been an inteegral part of it, so to say—the noise of ’ole armies gettin’ under arms. They must ’ave anticipated a night attack, I imagine. Most impressive. Then we ’eard a threshin’-machine. “Tutt! Tutt! This is childish!” says Lootenant Morshed. “We can’t wait till they’ve finished cutting chaff for their horses. We must make ’em understand we’re not to be trifled with. Expedite ’em with another rocket, Mr. Pyecroft.”

‘“It’s barely possible, sir,” I remarks, “that that’s a searchlight churnin’ up,” and by the time we backed into a providential chalk cutting (which was where our first tyre went pungo) she broke out to the northward, and began searching the ridge. A smart bit o’ work.’

‘’Twasn’t a puncture. The inner tube had nipped because we skidded so,’ Leggatt interrupted.

‘While your Mr. Leggatt was effectin’ repairs, another searchlight broke out to the southward, and the two of ’em swept our ridge on both sides. Right at the west end of it they showed us the ground rising into a hill, so to speak, crowned with what looked like a little fort. Morshed saw it before the beams shut off. “That’s the key of the position!” he says. “Occupy it at all hazards.”

‘“I haven’t half got occupation for the next twenty minutes,” says your Mr. Leggatt, rootin’ and blasphemin’ in the dark. Mark, now, ’ow Morshed changed his tactics to suit ’is environment. “Right!” says he. “I’ll stand by the ship. Mr. Pyecroft and Jules, oblige me by doubling along the ridge to the east with all the maroons and crackers you can carry without spilling. Read the directions careful for the maroons, Mr. Pyecroft, and touch them off at half-minute intervals. Jules represents musketry an’ maxim fire under your command. Remember, it’s death or Salisbury Gaol! Prob’ly both!”

‘By these means and some moderately ’ard runnin’, we distracted ’em to the eastward. Maroons, you may not be aware, are same as bombs, with the anarchism left out. In confined spots like chalk-pits, they knock a four-point-seven silly. But you should read the directions before ’and. In the intervals of the slow but well-directed fire of my cow-guns, Jules, who had found a sheep-pond in the dark a little lower down, gave what you might call a cinematograph reproduction o’ sporadic musketry. They was large size crackers, and he concluded with the dull, sickenin’ thud o’ blind shells burstin’ on soft ground.’

‘How did he manage that?’ I said.

‘You throw a lighted squib into water and you’ll see,’ said Pyecroft. ‘Thus, then, we improvised till supplies was exhausted and the surrounding landscapes fair ’owled and ’ummed at us. The Junior Service might ’ave ’ad their doubts about the rockets, but they couldn’t overlook our gunfire. Both sides tumbled out full of initiative. I told Jules no two flat-feet ’ad any right to be as happy as us, and we went back along the ridge to the derelict, and there was our Mr. Morshed apostrophin’ his ’andiwork over fifty square mile o’ country with “Attend, all ye who list to hear!” out of the Fifth Reader. He’d got as far as “And roused the shepherds o’ Stonehenge, the rangers o’ Beaulieu” when we come up, and he drew our attention to its truth as well as its beauty. That’s rare in poetry, I’m told. He went right on to—“The red glare on Skiddaw roused those beggars at Carlisle”—which he pointed out was poetic licence for Leith Hill. This allowed your Mr. Leggatt time to finish pumpin’ up his tyres. I ’eard the sweat ’op off his nose.’

‘You know what it is, sir,’ said poor Leggatt to me.

‘It warfted across my mind, as I listened to what was trarnspirin’, that it might be easier to make the mess than to wipe it up, but such considerations weighed not with our valiant leader.’

‘“Mr. Pyecroft,” he says, “it can’t have escaped your notice that we ’ave one angry and ’ighly intelligent army in front of us, an’ another ’ighly angry and equally intelligent army in our rear. What ’ud you recommend?”

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‘Most men would have besought ’im to do a lateral glide while there was yet time, but all I said was: “The rocking-horse isn’t expended yet, sir.”

‘He laid his hand on my shoulder. “Pye,” says he, “there’s worse men than you in loftier places. They shall ’ave it. None the less,” he remarks, “the ice is undeniably packing.”

‘I may ’ave omitted to point out that at this juncture two large armies, both deprived of their night’s sleep, was awake, as you might say, and hurryin’ into each other’s arms. Here endeth the second chapter.’

He filled his pipe slowly. The uncle had fallen asleep. Leggatt lit another cigarette.

‘We then proceeded ong automobile along the ridge in a westerly direction towards the miniature fort which had been so kindly revealed by the searchlight, but which on inspection (your Mr. Leggatt bumped into an outlyin’ reef of it) proved to be a wurzel-clump; c’est-à-dire, a parallelogrammatic pile of about three million mangold-wurzels, brought up there for the sheep, I suppose. On all sides, excep’ the one we’d come by, the ground fell away moderately quick, and down at the bottom there was a large camp lit up an’ full of harsh words of command.

‘“I said it was the key to the position,” Lootenant Morshed remarks. “Trot out Persimmon!” which we rightly took to read, “Un-wrap the rocking-horse.”

‘“Houp la!” says Jules in a insubordinate tone, an’ slaps Persimmon on the flank.

‘“Silence!” says the Lootenant. “This is the Royal Navy, not Newmarket”; and we carried Persimmon to the top of the matrgel-wurzel clump as directed.

‘Owing to the inequalities of the terrain (I do think your Mr. Leggatt might have had a spiritlevel in his kit) he wouldn’t rock free on the bedplate, and while adjustin’ him, his detachable tail fetched adrift. Our Lootenant was quick to seize the advantage.

‘“Remove that transformation,” he says. “Substitute one Roman candle. Gas-power is superior to manual propulsion.”

‘So we substituted. He arranged the pièce de resistarnce in the shape of large drums—not saucers, mark you—drums of coloured fire, with printed instructions, at proper distances round Persimmon. There was a brief interregnum while we dug ourselves in among the wurzels by hand. Then he touched off the fires, not omitting the Roman candle, and, you may take it from me, all was visible. Persimmon shone out in his naked splendour, red to port, green to starboard, and one white light at his bows, as per Board o’ Trade regulations. Only he didn’t so much rock, you might say, as shrug himself, in a manner of speaking, every time the candle went off. One can’t have everything. But the rest surpassed our highest expectations. I think Persimmon was noblest on the starboard or green side-more like when a man thinks he’s seeing mackerel in hell, don’t you know? And yet I’d be the last to deprecate the effect of the port light on his teeth, or that bloodshot look in his left eye. He knew there was something going on he didn’t approve of. He looked worried.’

‘Did you laugh?’ I said.

‘I’m not much of a wag myself; nor it wasn’t as if we ’ad time to allow the spectacle to sink in. The coloured fires was supposed to burn ten minutes, whereas it was obvious to the meanest capacity that the junior Service would arrive by forced marches in about two and a half. They grarsped our topical allusion as soon as it was across the foot-lights, so to speak. They were quite chafed at it. Of course, ’ad we reflected, we might have known that exposin’ illuminated rockin’ horses to an army that was learnin’ to ride on ’em partook of the nature of a double entender, as the French say—same as waggling the tiller lines at a man who’s had a hanging in the family. I knew the cox of the Archimandrite’s galley ’arf killed for a similar plaisanteree. But we never anticipated lobsters being so sensitive. That was why we shifted. We could ’ardly tear our commandin’ officer away. He put his head on one side, and kept cooin’. The only thing he ’ad neglected to provide was a line of retreat; but your Mr. Leggatt—an ’eroic soul in the last stage of wet prostration—here took command of the van, or, rather, the rear-guard. We walked downhill beside him, holding on to the superstructure to prevent her capsizing. These technical details, ’owever, are beyond me.’ He waved his pipe towards Leggatt.

‘I saw there was two deepish ruts leadin’ down’ill somewhere,’ said Leggatt. ‘That was when the soldiers stopped laughin’, and begun to run uphill.’

‘Stroll, lovey, stroll!’ Pyecroft corrected. ‘The Dervish rush took place later.’

‘So I laid her in these ruts. That was where she must ’ave scraped her silencer a bit. Then they turned sharp right—the ruts did—and then she stopped bonnet-high in a manure-heap, sir; but I’ll swear it was all of a one in three gradient. I think it was a barnyard. We waited there,’ said Leggatt.

‘But not for long,’ said Pyecroft. ‘The lights were towering out of the drums on the position we ’ad so valiantly abandoned; and the Junior Service was escaladin’ it en masse. When numerous bodies of ‘ighly trained men arrive simultaneous in the same latitude from opposite directions, each remarking briskly, “What the ’ell did you do that for?” detonation, as you might say, is practically assured. They didn’t ask for extraneous aids. If we’d come out with sworn affidavits of what we’d done they wouldn’t ’ave believed us. They wanted each other’s company exclusive. Such was the effect of Persimmon on their clarss feelings. Idol’try, I call it! Events transpired with the utmost velocity and rapidly increasing pressures. There was a few remarks about Dicky Bridoon and mechanical horses, and then some one was smacked—hard by the sound—in the middle of a remark.’

‘That was the man who kept calling for the Forty-fifth Dragoons,’ said Leggatt. ‘He got as far as Drag . . . ‘

‘Was it?’ said Pyecroft dreamily. ‘Well, he couldn’t say they didn’t come. They all came, and they all fell to arguin’ whether the Infantry should ’ave Persimmon for a regimental pet or the Cavalry should keep him for stud purposes. Hence the issue was soon clouded with mangold-wurzels. Our commander said we ’ad sowed the good seed, and it was bearing abundant fruit. (They weigh between four and seven pounds apiece.) Seein’ the children ’ad got over their shyness, and ’ad really begun to play games, we backed out o’ the pit and went down, by steps, to the camp below, no man, as you might say, making us afraid. Here we enjoyed a front view of the battle, which rolled with renewed impetus, owing to both sides receiving strong reinforcements every minute. All arms were freely represented; Cavalry, on this occasion only, acting in concert with Artillery. They argued the relative merits of horses versus feet, so to say, but they didn’t neglect Persimmon. The wounded rolling downhill with the wurzels informed us that he had long ago been socialised, and the smallest souvenirs were worth a man’s life. Speaking broadly, the junior Service appeared to be a shade out of ’and, if I may venture so far. They did not pay prompt and unhesitating obedience to the “Retires” or the “Cease Fires” or the “For ’Eaven’s sake come to bed, ducky” of their officers, who, I regret to say, were ’otly embroiled at the heads of their respective units.’

‘How did you find that out?’ I asked.

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‘On account of Lootenant Morshed going to the Mess tent to call on his uncle and raise a drink; but all hands had gone to the front. We thought we ’eard somebody bathing behind the tent, and we found an oldish gentleman tryin’ to drown a boy in knickerbockers in a horse-trough. He kept him under with a bicycle, so to speak. He ’ad nearly accomplished his fell design, when we frustrated him. He was in a highly malleable condition and full o’ juice de spree. “Arsk not what I am,” he says. “My wife ’ll tell me that quite soon enough. Arsk rather what I’ve been,” he says. “I’ve been dinin’ here,” he says. “I commanded ’em in the Eighties,” he says, “and, Gawd forgive me,” he says, sobbin’ ’eavily, “I’ve spent this holy evening telling their Colonel they was a set of educated inefficients. Hark to ’em!” We could, without strainin’ ourselves; but how he picked up the gentle murmur of his own corps in that on-the-knee party up the hill I don’t know. “They’ve marched and fought thirty mile today,” he shouts, “and now they’re tearin’ the intestines out of the Cavalry up yonder! They won’t stop this side the gates o’ Delhi,” he says. “I commanded their ancestors. There’s nothing wrong with the Service,” he says, wringing out his trousers on his lap. “’Eaven pardon me for doubtin’ ’em! Same old game—same young beggars.”

‘The boy in the knickerbockers, languishing on a chair, puts in a claim for one drink. “Let him go dry,” says our friend in shirt-tails. “He’s a reporter. He run into me on his filthy bicycle and he asked me if I could furnish ’im with particulars about the mutiny in the Army. You false-’earted proletarian publicist,” he says, shakin’ his finger at ’im—for he was reelly annoyed “I’ll teach you to defile what you can’t comprehend! When my regiment’s in a state o’ mutiny, I’ll do myself the honour of informing you personally. You particularly ignorant and very narsty little man,” he says, “you’re no better than a dhobi’s donkey! If there wasn’t dirty linen to wash, you’d starve,” he says, “and why I haven’t drowned you will be the lastin’ regret of my life.”

‘Well, we sat with ’em and ’ad drinks for about half-an-hour in front of the Mess tent. He’d ha’ killed the reporter if there hadn’t been witnesses, and the reporter might have taken notes of the battle; so we acted as two-way buffers, in a sense. I don’t hold with the Press mingling up with Service matters. They draw false conclusions. Now, mark you, at a moderate estimate, there were seven thousand men in the fighting line, half of ’em hurt in their professional feelings, an’ the other half rubbin’ in the liniment, as you might say. All due to Persimmon! If you ’adn’t seen it you wouldn’t ’ave believed it. And yet, mark you, not one single unit of ’em even resorted to his belt. They confined themselves to natural producks—hands and the wurzels. I thought Jules was havin’ fits, till it trarnspired the same thought had impressed him in the French language. He called it incroyable, I believe. Seven thousand men, with seven thousand rifles, belts, and bayonets, in a violently agitated condition, and not a ungenteel blow struck from first to last. The old gentleman drew our attention to it as well. It was quite noticeable.

‘Lack of ammunition was the primerry cause of the battle ceasin’. A Brigade-Major came in, wipin’ his nose on both cuffs, and sayin’ he ’ad ’ad snuff. The brigadier-uncle followed. He was, so to speak, sneezin’. We thought it best to shift our moorings without attractin’ attention; so we shifted. They ’ad called the cows ’ome by then. The Junior Service was going to bye-bye all round us, as happy as the ship’s monkey when he’s been playin’ with the paints, and Lootenant Morshed and Jules kept bowin’ to port and starboard of the superstructure, acknowledgin’ the unstinted applause which the multitude would ’ave given ’em if they’d known the facts. On the other ’and, as your Mr. Leggatt observed, they might ’ave killed us.

‘That would have been about five bells in the middle watch, say half-past two. A well-spent evening. There was but little to be gained by entering Portsmouth at that hour, so we turned off on the grass (this was after we had found a road under us), and we cast anchors out at the stern and prayed for the day.

‘But your Mr. Leggatt he had to make and mend tyres all our watch below. It trarnspired she had been running on the rim o’ two or three wheels, which, very properly, he hadn’t reported till the close of the action. And that’s the reason of your four new tyres. Mr. Morshed was of opinion you’d earned ’em. Do you dissent?’

I stretched out my hand, which Pyecroft crushed to pulp. ‘No, Pye,’ I said, deeply moved, ‘I agree entirely. But what happened to Jules?’

‘We returned him to his own Navy after breakfast. He wouldn’t have kept much longer without some one in his own language to tell it to. I don’t know any man I ever took more compassion on than Jules. ’Is sufferings swelled him up centimetres, and all he could do on the Hard was to kiss Lootenant Morshed and me, and your Mr. Leggatt. He deserved that much. A cordial beggar.’

Pyecroft looked at the washed cups on the table, and the low sunshine on my car’s back in the yard.

‘Too early to drink to him,’ he said. ‘But I feel it just the same.’

The uncle, sunk in his chair, snored a little; the canary answered with a shrill lullaby. Pyecroft picked up the duster, threw it over the cage, put his finger to his lips, and we tiptoed out into the shop, while Leggatt brought the car round.

‘I’ll look out for the news in the papers,’ I said, as I got in.

‘Oh, we short-circuited that! Nothing trarnspired excep’ a statement to the effect that some Territorial battalions had played about with turnips at the conclusion of the manœuvres. The taxpayer don’t know all he gets for his money. Farewell!’

We moved off just in time to be blocked by a regiment coming towards the station to entrain for London.

‘Beg your pardon, sir,’ said a sergeant in charge of the baggage, ‘but would you mind backin’ a bit till we get the waggons past?’

‘Certainly,’ I said. ‘You don’t happen to have a rocking-horse among your kit, do you?’

The rattle of our reverse drowned his answer, but I saw his eyes. One of them was blackish-green, about four days old.

1. Now Viscount Haldane of Cloan.

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The wind went down with the sunset—
The fog came up with the tide,
When the Witch of the North took an Egg-shell
With a little Blue Devil inside.
‘Sink,’ she said, ‘or swim,’ she said,
‘It’s all you will get from me.
And that is the finish of him!’ she said,
And the Egg-shell went to sea.

The wind got up with the morning,
And the fog blew off with the rain,
When the Witch of the North saw the Egg-shell
And the little Blue Devil again.
‘Did you swim?’ she said. ‘Did you sink?’ she said,
And the little Blue Devil replied
‘For myself I swam, but I think,’ he said,
‘There’s somebody sinking outside.’

BUT for the small detail that I was a passenger and a civilian, and might not alter her course, torpedo-boat No. 267 was mine to me all that priceless day. Moorshed, after breakfast—frizzled ham and a devil that Pyecroft made out of sardines, anchovies, and French mustard smashed together with a spanner—showed me his few and simple navigating tools, and took an observation. Morgan, the signaller, let me hold the chamois leathers while he cleaned the searchlight (we seemed to be better equipped with electricity than most of our class), that lived under a bulbous umbrella-cover amidships. Then Pyecroft and Morgan, standing easy, talked together of the King’s Service as reformers and revolutionists, so notably, that were I not engaged on this tale I would, for its conclusion, substitute theirs.

I would speak of Hinchcliffe—Henry Salt Hinchcliffe, first-class engine-room artificer, and genius in his line, who was prouder of having taken part in the Hat Crusade in his youth than of all his daring, his skill, and his nickel-steel nerve. I consorted with him for an hour in the packed and dancing engine-room, when Moorshed suggested ‘whacking her up’ to eighteen knots, to see if she would stand it. The floor was ankle-deep in a creamy batter of oil and water; each moving part flicking more oil in zoetrope-circles, and the gauges invisible for their dizzy chattering on the chattering steel bulkhead. Leading Stoker Grant, said to be a bigamist, an ox-eyed man smothered in hair, took me to the stokehold and planted me between a searing white furnace and some hell-hot iron plate for fifteen minutes, while I listened to the drone of fans and the worry of the sea without, striving to wrench all that palpitating firepot wide open.

Then I came on deck and watched Moorshed—revolving in his orbit from the canvas bustle and torpedo-tubes aft, by way of engine-room, conning-tower, and wheel, to the doll’s house of a foc’sle—learned in experience withheld from me, moved by laws beyond my knowledge, authoritative, entirely adequate, and yet, in heart, a child at his play. I could not take ten steps along the crowded deck but I collided with some body or thing; but he and his satellites swung, passed, and returned on their vocations with the freedom and spaciousness of the well-poised stars.

Even now I can at will recall every tone and gesture, with each dissolving picture inboard or overside—Hinchcliffe’s white arm buried to the shoulder in a hornet’s nest of spinning machinery; Moorshed’s halt and jerk to windward as he looked across the water; Pyecroft’s back bent over the Berthon collapsible boat, while he drilled three men in expanding it swiftly; the outflung white water at the foot of a homeward-bound Chinaman not a hundred yards away, and her shadow-slashed, rope-purfled sails bulging sideways like insolent cheeks; the ribbed and pitted coal-dust on our decks, all iridescent under the sun; the first filmy haze that paled the shadows of our funnels about lunch-time; the gradual die-down and dulling over of the short, cheery seas; the sea that changed to a swell; the swell that crumbled up and ran allwhither oilily; the triumphant, almost audible roll inward of wandering fog-walls that had been stalking us for two hours, and—welt upon welt, chill as the grave—the drive of the interminable main fog of the Atlantic. We slowed to little more than steerage-way and lay listening. Presently a hand-bellows foghorn jarred like a corncrake, and there rattled out of the mist a big ship literally above us. We could count the rivets in her plates as we scrooped by, and the little drops of dew gathered below them.

‘Wonder why they’re always barks—always steel—always four-masted—an’ never less than two thousand tons. But they are,’ said Pyecroft. He was out on the turtle-backed bows of her; Moorshed was at the wheel, and another man worked the whistle.

‘This fog is the best thing could ha’ happened to us,’ said Moorshed. ‘It gives us our chance to run in on the quiet . . . . Hal-lo!’

A cracked bell rang. Clean and sharp (beautifully grained, too), a bowsprit surged over our starboard bow, the bobstay confidentially hooking itself into our forward rail.

I saw Pyecroft’s arm fly up; heard at the same moment the severing of the tense rope, the working of the wheel, Moorshed’s voice down the tube saying, ‘Astern a little, please, Mr. Hinchcliffe !’ and Pyecroft’s cry, ‘Trawler with her gear down! Look out for our propeller, Sir, or we’ll be wrapped up in the rope.’

267 surged quickly under my feet, as the pressure of the downward-bearing bobstay was removed. Half-a-dozen men of the foc’sle had already thrown out fenders, and stood by to bear off a just visible bulwark.

Still going astern, we touched slowly, broadside on, to a suggestive crunching of fenders, and I looked into the deck of a Brixham trawler, her crew struck dumb.

‘Any luck?’ said Moorshed politely.

‘Not till we met yeou,’ was the answer. ‘The Lard he saved us from they big ships to be spitted by the little wan. Where be’e gwine to with our fine new bobstay?’

‘Yah ! You’ve had time to splice it by now,’ said Pyecroft with contempt.

‘Aie ; but we’m all crushed to port like aigs. You was runnin’ twenty-seven knots, us reckoned it. Didn’t us, Albert?’

‘Liker twenty-nine, an’ niver no whistle.’

‘Yes, we always do that. Do you want a tow to Brixham?’ said Moorshed.

A great silence fell upon those wet men of the sea.

page 2

We lifted a little toward their side, but our silent, quick-breathing crew, braced and strained outboard, bore us off as though we had been a mere picket-boat.

‘What for?’ said a puzzled voice.

‘For love; for nothing. You’ll be abed in Brixham by midnight.’

‘Yiss; but trawls down.’

‘No hurry. I’ll pass you a line and go ahead. Sing out when you’re ready.’ A rope smacked on their deck with the word; they made it fast; we slid forward, and in ten seconds saw nothing save a few feet of the wire rope running into fog over our stern; but we heard the noise of debate.

‘Catch a Brixham trawler letting go of a free tow in a fog,’ said Moorshed, listening.

‘But what in the world do you want him for?’ I asked.

‘Oh, he’ll come in handy later.’

‘Was that your first collision?’

‘Yes.’ I shook hands with him in silence, and our tow hailed us.

‘Aie! yeou little man-o’-war!’ The voice rose muffled and wailing. ‘After us’ve upped trawl, us’ll be glad of a tow. Leave line just slack abaout as ’tis now, and kip a good fine look-out be’ind ’ee.’

‘There’s an accommodatin’ blighter for you !’ said Pyecroft. ‘Where does he expect we’ll be, with these currents evolutin’ like sailormen at the Agricultural Hall?’

I left the bridge to watch the wire-rope at the stern as it drew out and smacked down upon the water. By what instinct or guidance 267 kept it from fouling her languidly flapping propeller, I cannot tell. The fog now thickened and thinned in streaks that bothered the eyes like the glare of intermittent flash-lamps; by turns granting us the vision of a sick sun that leered and fled, or burying all a thousand fathom deep in gulfs of vapours. At no time could we see the trawler though we heard the click of her windlass, the jar of her trawl-beam, and the very flap of the fish on her deck. Forward was Pyecroft with the lead; on the bridge Moorshed pawed a Channel chart; aft sat I, listening to the whole of the British Mercantile Marine (never a keel less) returning to England, and watching the fog-dew run round the bight of the tow back to its motherfog.

‘Aie! yeou little man-o’-war! We’m done with trawl. Yeou can take us home if you know the road.’

‘Right O!’ said Moorshed. ‘We’ll give the fishmonger a run for his money. Whack her up, Mr. Hinchcliffe.’

The next few hours completed my education. I saw that I ought to be afraid, but more clearly (this was when a liner hooted down the back of my neck) that any fear which would begin to do justice to the situation would, if yielded to, incapacitate me for the rest of my days. A shadow of spread sails, deeper than the darkening twilight, brooding over us like the wings of Azrael (Pyecroft said she was a Swede), and, miraculously withdrawn, persuaded me that there was a working chance that I should reach the beach—any beach—alive, if not dry; and (this was when an economical tramp laved our port-rail with her condenser water) were I so spared, I vowed I would tell my tale worthily.

Thus we floated in space as souls drift through raw time. Night added herself to the fog, and I laid hold on my limbs jealously, lest they, too, should melt in the general dissolution.

‘Where’s that prevaricatin’ fishmonger?’ said Pyecroft, turning a lantern on a scant yard of the gleaming wire-rope that pointed like a stick to my left. ‘He’s doin’ some fancy steerin’ on his own. No wonder Mr. Hinchcliffe is blasphemious. The tow’s sheered off to starboard, Sir. He’ll fair pull the stern out of us.’

Moorshed, invisible, cursed through the megaphone into invisibility.

‘Aie! yeou little man-o’-war!’ The voice butted through the fog with the monotonous insistence of a strayed sheep’s. ‘We don’t all like the road you’m takin’. ’Tis no road to Brixham. You’ll be buckled up under Prawle Point by’mbye.’

‘Do you pretend to know where you are?’ the megaphone roared.

‘Iss, I reckon; but there’s no pretence to me!,

‘0 Peter!’ said Pyecroft. ‘Let’s hang him at ’is own gaff.’

I could not see what followed, but Moorshed said: ‘Take another man with you. If you lose the tow, you’re done. I’ll slow her down.’

I heard the dinghy splash overboard ere I could cry ‘Murder!’ Heard the rasp of a boat-hook along the wire-rope, and then, as it had been in my ear, Pyecroft’s enormous and jubilant bellow astern: ‘Why, he’s here! Right atop of us! The blighter ’as pouched half the tow, like a shark!’ A long pause filled with soft Devonian bleatings. Then Pyecroft, solo arpeggio: ‘Rum? Rum? Rum? Is that all? Come an’ try it, uncle.’

I lifted my face to where once God’s sky had been, and besought The Trues I might not die inarticulate, amid these halfworked miracles, but live at least till my fellow-mortals could be made one-millionth as happy as I was happy. I prayed and I waited, and we went slow—slow as the processes of evolution—till the boat-hook rasped again.

‘He’s not what you might call a scientific navigator,’ said Pyecroft, still in the dinghy, but rising like a fairy from a pantomime trap. ‘The lead’s what ’e goes by mostly; rum is what he’s come for; an’ Brixham is ’is ’ome. Lay on, Macduff!’

A white-whiskered man in a frock-coat—as I live by bread, a frock-coat!—sea-boots, and a comforter, crawled over the torpedo-tube into Moorshed’s grip and vanished forward.

‘’E’ll probably ’old three gallon (look sharp with that dinghy!); but ’is nephew, left in charge of the Agatha, wants two bottles command-allowance. You’re a taxpayer, Sir. Do you think that excessive?’

‘Lead there! Lead!’ rang out from forward. ‘Didn’t I say ’e wouldn’ understand compass deviations? Watch him close. It’ll be worth it!’

As I neared the bridge I heard the stranger say: ‘Let me zmell un!’ and to his nose was the lead presented by a trained man of the King’s Navy.

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‘I’ll tell ’ee where to goo, if yeou’ll tell your donkey-man what to du. I’m no hand wi’ steam.’ On these lines we proceeded miraculously, and, under Moorshed’s orders—I was the fisherman’s Ganymede, even as ‘M. de C.’ had served the captain—I found both rum and curaçoa in a locker, and mixed them equal bulk in an enamelled iron cup.

‘Now we’m just abeam o’ where we should be,’ he said at last, ‘an’ here we’ll lay till she lifts. I’d take ’e in for another bottle—and wan for my nevvy; but I reckon yeou’m shart-allowanced for rum. That’s nivver no Navy rum yeou’m give me. Knowed ’en by the smack to un. Anchor now!’

I was between Pyecroft and Moorshed on the bridge, and heard them spring to vibrating attention at my side. A man with a lead a few feet to port caught the panic through my body, and checked like a wild boar at gaze, for not far away an unmistakable ship’s bell was ringing. It ceased, and another began.

‘Them!’ said Pyecroft. ‘Anchored!’

‘More!’ said our pilot, passing me the cup, and I filled it. The trawler astern clattered vehemently on her bell. Pyecroft with a jerk of his arm threw loose the forward three-pounder. The bar of the back-sight was heavily Mobbed with dew; the foresight was invisible.

‘No—they wouldn’t have their picket-boats out in this weather, though they ought to.’ He returned the barrel to its crotch slowly.

‘Be yeou gwine to anchor?’ said Macduff, smacking his lips, ‘or be yeou gwine straight on to Livermead Beach?’

‘Tell him what we’re driving at. Get it into his head somehow,’ said Moorshed ; and Pyecroft, snatching the cup from me, enfolded the old man with an arm and a mist of wonderful words.

‘And if you pull it off,’ said Moorshed at the last, ‘I’ll give you a fiver.’

‘Lard! What’s fivers to me, young man? My nevvy, he likes ’em; but I do cherish more on fine drink than filthy lucre any day o’ God’s good weeks. Leave goo my arm, yeou common sailorman! I tall ’ee, gentlemen, I bain’t the ram-faced, ruddle-nosed old fule yeou reckon I be. Before the mast I’ve fared in my time; fisherman I’ve been since I seed the unsense of sea-dangerin’. Baccy and spirits—yiss, an’ cigars too, I’ve run a plenty. I’m no blind harse or boy to be coaxed with your forty-mile free towin’ and rum atop of all. There’s none more sober to Brix’am this tide, I don’t care who ’tis—than me. I know—I know. Yander’m two great King’s ships. Yeou’m wishful to sink, burn, and destroy they while us kips ’em busy sellin’ fish. No need tall me so twanty taime over. Us’ll find they ships! Us’ll find ’em, if us has to break our fine new bowsprit so close as Crump’s bull’s horn!’

‘Good egg!’ quoth Moorshed, and brought his hand down on the wide shoulders with the smack of a beaver’s tail.

‘Us’ll go look for they by hand. Us’ll give they something to play upon; an’ do ’ee deal with them faithfully, an’ may the Lard have mercy on your sowls! Amen. Put I in dinghy again.’

The fog was as dense as ever—we moved in the very womb of night—but I cannot recall that I took the faintest note of it as the dinghy, guided by the tow-rope, disappeared toward the Agatha, Pyecroft rowing. The bell began again on the starboard bow.

‘We’re pretty near,’ said Moorshed, slowing down. ‘Out with the Berthon. (We’ll sell ’em fish, too.) And if any one rows Navy-stroke, I’ll break his jaw with the tiller. Mr. Hinchcliffe’ (this down the tube), ‘you’ll stay here in charge with Gregory and Shergold and the engine-room staff. Morgan stays, too, for signalling purposes.’ A deep groan broke from Morgan’s chest, but he said nothing. ‘If the fog thins and you’re seen by any one, keep ’em quiet with the signals. I can’t think of the precise lie just now, but you can, Morgan.’

‘Yes, Sir.’

‘Suppose their torpedo-nets are down?’ I whispered, shivering with excitement.

‘If they’ve been repairing minor defects all day, they won’t have any one to spare from the engine-room, and “Out nets!” is a job for the whole ship’s company. I expect they’ve trusted to the fog—like us. Well, Pyecroft?’

That great soul had blown up on to the bridge like a feather. ‘’Ad to see the first o’ the rum into the Agathites, Sir. They was a bit jealous o’ their commandin’ officer comin’ ’ome so richly lacquered, and at first the conversazione languished, as you might say. But they sprang to attention ere I left. Six sharp strokes on the bells, if any of ’em are sober enough to keep tally, will be the signal that our consort ’as cast off her tow an’ is manoeuvrin’ on ’er own.’

‘Right O! Take Laughton with you in the dinghy. Put that Berthon over quietly there! Are you all right, Mr. Hinchcliffe?’

I stood back to avoid the rush of half-a-dozen shadows dropping into the Berthon boat. A hand caught me by the slack of my garments, moved me in generous arcs through the night, and I rested on the bottom of the dinghy.

‘I want you for prima facie evidence, in case the vaccination don’t take,’ said Pyecroft in my ear. ‘Push off, Alf!’

The last bell-ringing was high overhead. It was followed by six little tinkles from the Agatha, the roar of her falling anchor, the clash of pans, and loose shouting.

‘Where be gwine to? Port your ’ellum. Aie! you mud-dredger in the fairway, goo astern! Out boats! She’ll sink us!’

A clear-cut Navy voice drawled from the clouds

‘Quiet! you gardeners there. This is the Cryptic at anchor.’

‘Thank you for the range,’ said Pyecroft, and paddled gingerly. ‘Feel well out in front of you, Alf. Remember your fat fist is our only Marconi installation.’

The voices resumed

‘Bournemouth steamer he says she be.’

‘Then where be Brixham Harbour?’

‘Damme, I’m a taxpayer tu. They’ve no right to cruise about this way. I’ll have the laa on ’ee if anything carries away.’

Then the man-of-war

‘Short on your anchor! Heave short, you howling maniacs! You’ll get yourselves smashed in a minute if you drift.’

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The air was full of these and other voices as the dinghy, checking, swung. I passed one hand down Laughton’s stretched arm and felt an iron gooseneck and a foot or two of a backward-sloping torpedo-net boom. The other hand I laid on broad, cold iron—even the flank of H.M.S. Cryptic, which is twelve thousand tons.

I heard a scrubby, raspy sound, as though Pyecroft had chosen that hour to shave, and I smelled paint. ‘Drop aft a bit, Alf; we’ll put a stencil under the stern six-inch casements.’

Boom by boom Laughton slid the dinghy along the towering curved wall. Once, twice, and again we stopped, and the keen scrubbing sound was renewed.

‘Umpires are ’ard-’earted blighters, but this ought to convince ’em . . . . Captain Panke’s stern-walk is now above our defenceless ’eads. Repeat the evolution up the starboard side, Alf.’

I was only conscious that we moved around an iron world palpitating with life. Though my knowledge was all by touch—as, for example, when Pyecroft led my surrendered hand to the base of some bulging sponson, or when my palm closed on the knife-edge of the stem and patted it timidly—yet I felt lonely and unprotected as the enormous, helpless ship was withdrawn, and we drifted away into the void where voices sang:

Tom Pearse, Tom Pearse, lend me thy gray mare,
All along, out along, down along lea!
For I want for to go to Widdicombe Fair
With Bill Brewer, Jan Stewer, Peter Gurney,
Peter Davy, Dan’l Whiddon, Harry Hawke,
Old Uncle Tom Cobbleigh an’ all.

‘That’s old Sinbad an’ ’is little lot from the Agatha! Give way, Alf! You might sing somethin’, too.’

‘I’m no burnin’ Patti. Ain’t there noise enough for you, Pye?’

‘Yes, but it’s only amateurs. Give me the tones of ’earth and ’ome. Ha! List to the blighter on the ’orizon sayin’ his prayers, Navy-fashion. ’Eaven ’elp me argue that way when I’m a warrant-officer!’

We headed with little lapping strokes toward what seemed to be a fair-sized riot.

‘An’ I’ve ’eard the Devolution called a happy ship, too,’ said Pyecroft. ‘Just shows ’ow a man’s misled by prejudice. She’s peevish—that’s what she is—nasty-peevish. Prob’ly all because the Agathites are scratching ’er paint. Well, rub along, Alf. I’ve got the lymph!’

A voice, which Mr. Pyecroft assured me belonged to a chief carpenter, was speaking through an aperture (starboard bow twelve-pounder on the lower deck. He did not wish to purchase any fish, even at grossly reduced rates. Nobody wished to buy any fish. This ship was the Devolution at anchor, and desired no communication with shore boats.

‘Mark how the Navy ’olds its own. He’s sober. The Agathites are not, as you might say, an’ yet they can’t live with ’im. It’s the discipline that does it. ’Ark to the bald an’ unconvincin’ watch-officer chimin’ in. I wonder where Mr. Moorshed has got to?’

We drifted down the Devolution’s side, as we had drifted down her sister’s; and we dealt with her in that dense gloom as we had dealt with her sister.

‘Whai! ’Tis a man-o’-war, after all! I can see the captain’s whisker all gilt at the edges! We took’ee for the Bournemouth steamer. Three cheers for the real man-o’-war!’

That cry came from under the Devolution’s stern. Pyecroft held something in his teeth, for I heard him mumble, ‘Our Mister Moorshed!’

Said a boy’s voice above us, just as we dodged a jet of hot water from some valve: ‘I don’t half like that cheer. If I’d been the old man I’d ha’ turned loose the quick-firers at the first go-off. Aren’t they rowing Navy-stroke, yonder?’

‘True,’ said Pyecroft, listening to retreating oars. ‘It’s time to go ’ome when snotties begin to think. The fog’s thinnin’, too.’

I felt a chill breath on my forehead, and saw a few feet of the steel stand out darker than the darkness, disappear—it was then the dinghy shot away from it—and emerge once more.

‘Hallo! what boat’s that?’ said the voice suspiciously.

‘Why, I do believe it’s a real man-o’-war, after all,’ said Pyecroft, and kicked Laughton.

‘What’s that for?’ Laughton was no dramatist.

‘Answer in character, you blighter! Say somethin’ opposite.’

‘What boat’s thatt?’ The hail was repeated.

‘What do yee say-ay?’ Pyecroft bellowed, and, under his breath to me: ‘Give us a hand.’

‘It’s called the Marietta—F. J. Stokes—Torquay,’ I began, quaveringly. ‘At least that’s the name on the name-board. I’ve been dining—on a yacht.’

‘I see.’ The voice shook a little, and my way opened before me with disgraceful ease.

‘Yesh. Dining private yacht. Eshmesheralda. I belong to Torquay Yacht Club. Are you member Torquay Yacht Club?’

‘You’d better go to bed, Sir. Good-night.’ We slid into the rapidly thinning fog.

‘Dig out, Alf. Put your nix mangiare back into it. The fog’s peelin’ off like a petticoat. Where’s Two Six Seven?’

‘I can’t see her,’ I replied, ‘but there’s a light low down ahead.’

‘The Agatha!’ They rowed desperately through the uneasy dispersal of the fog for ten minutes and ducked round the trawler’s bow.

‘Well, Emanuel means “God with us”—so far.’ Pyecroft wiped his brow, laid a hand on the low rail, and as he boosted me up to the trawler, I saw Moorshed’s face, white as pearl in the thinning dark.

‘Was it all right?’ said he, over the bulwarks.

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‘Vaccination ain’t in it. She’s took beautiful. But where’s 267, Sir?’ Pyecroft replied.

‘Gone. We came here as the fog lifted. I gave the Devolution four. Was that you behind us?’

‘Yes, sir; but I only got in three on the Devolution. I gave the Cryptic nine, though. They’re what you might call more or less vaccinated.’

He lifted me inboard, where Moorshed and six pirates lay round the Agatha’s hatch. There was a hint of daylight in the cool air.

‘Where is the old man?’ I asked.

‘Still selling ’em fish, I suppose. He’s a darling! But I wish I could get this filthy paint off my hands. Hallo! What the deuce is the Cryptic signalling?’

A pale masthead light winked through the last of the fog. It was answered by a white pencil to the southward.

‘Destroyer signallin’ with searchlight.’ Pyecroft leaped on the stern-rail. ‘The first part is private signals. Ah! now she’s Morsing against the fog. “ P-O-S-T—yes, postpone”—“D-E-P(go on!) departure—till—further—orders—which—will—be com (he’s dropped the other m) unicated—verbally. End.”’ He swung round. ‘Cryptic is now answering: “Ready—proceed—immediately. What—news—promised—destroyer—flotilla?”’

‘Hallo!’ said Moorshed. ‘Well, never mind. They’ll come too late.’

‘Whew! That’s some ’igh-born suckling on the destroyer. Destroyer signals: “Care not. All will be known later.” What merry beehive’s broken loose now?’

‘What odds! We’ve done our little job.’

‘Why—why—it’s Two Six Seven!’

Here Pyecroft dropped from the rail among the fishy nets and shook the Agatha with heavings. Moorshed cast aside his cigarette, looked over the stern, and fell into his subordinate’s arms. I heard. the guggle of engines, the rattle of a little anchor going over not a hundred yards away, a cough, and Morgan’s subdued hail . . . . So far as I remember, it was Laughton whom I hugged; but the men who hugged me most were Pyecroft and Moorshed, adrift among the fishy nets.

There was no semblance of discipline in our flight over the Agatha’s side, nor, indeed, were ordinary precautions taken for the common safety, because (I was in the Berthon) they held that patent boat open by hand for the most part. We regained our own craft, cackling like wild geese, and crowded round Moorshed and Hinchcliffe. Behind us the Agatha’s boat, returning from her fish-selling cruise, yelled : ‘Have ’ee done the trick? Have ’ee done the trick?’ and we could only shout hoarsely over the stern, guaranteeing them rum by the hold-full.

‘Fog got patchy here at 12.27,’ said Henry Salt Hinchcliffe, growing clearer every instant in the dawn. ‘Went down to Brixham Harbour to keep out of the road. Heard whistles to the south and went to look. I had her up to sixteen good. Morgan kept on shedding private Red Fleet signals out of the signal-book, as the fog cleared, till we was answered by three destroyers. Morgan signalled ’em by searchlight: “Alter course to South Seventeen East, so as not to lose time.” They came round quick. We kept well away—on their port beam—and Morgan gave ’em their orders.’ He looked at Morgan and coughed.

‘The signalman, acting as second in command,’ said Morgan, swelling, ‘then informed destroyer flotilla that Cryptic and Devolution had made good defects, and, in obedience to Admiral’s supplementary orders (I was afraid they might suspect that, but they didn’t), had proceeded at seven knots at 11.23 p.m. to rendezvous near Channel Islands, seven miles N.N.W. the Casquet light. (I’ve rendezvoused there myself, Sir.) Destroyer flotilla would therefore follow cruisers and catch up with them on their course. Destroyer flotilla then dug out on course indicated, all funnels sparking briskly.’

‘Who were the destroyers?’

‘Wraith, Kobbold, Stiletto, Lieutenant-Commander A. L. Hignett, acting under Admiral’s orders to escort cruisers received off the Dodman at 7 p.m. They’d come slow on account of fog.’

‘Then who were you?’

‘We were the Afrite, port engine broke down, put in to Torbay, and there instructed by Cryptic, previous to her departure with Devolution, to inform Commander Hignett of change of plans. Lieutenant-Commander Hignett signalled that our meeting was quite providential. After this we returned to pick up our commanding officer, and being interrogated by Cryptic, marked time signalling as requisite, which you may have seen. The Agatha representing the last known rallying-point—or, as I should say, pivot-ship of the evolution—it was decided to repair to the Agatha at conclusion of manoeuvre.’

We breathed deeply, all of us, but no one spoke a word till Moorshed said: ‘Is there such a thing as one fine big drink aboard this one fine big battleship?’

‘Can do, sir,’ said Pyecroft, and got it. Beginning with Mr. Moorshed and ending with myself, junior to the third firstclass stoker, we drank, and it was as water of the brook, that two and a half inches of stilt, treacly Navy rum. And we looked each in the other’s face, and we nodded, bright-eyed, burning with bliss.

Moorshed walked aft to the torpedo-tubes and paced back and forth, a captain victorious on his own quarter-deck; and the triumphant day broke over the green-bedded villas of Torquay to show us the magnitude of our victory. There lay the cruisers (I have reason to believe that they had made good their defects). They were each four hundred and forty feet long and sixty-six wide; they held close upon eight hundred men apiece, and they had cost, say, a million and a half the pair. And they were ours, and they did not know it. Indeed, the Cryptic, senior ship, was signalling vehement remarks to our address, which we did not notice.

‘If you take these glasses, you’ll get the general run o’ last night’s vaccination,’ said Pyecroft. ‘Each one represents a torpedo got ’ome, as you might say.’

I saw on the Cryptic’s port side, as she lay half a mile away across the glassy water, four neat white squares in outline, a white blur in the centre.

‘There are five more to starboard. ’Ere’s the original!’ He handed me a paint-dappled copper stencil-plate, two feet square, bearing in the centre the six-inch initials, ‘G.M.’

‘Ten minutes ago I’d ha’ eulogised about that little trick of ours, but Morgan’s performance has short-circuited me. Are you happy, Morgan?’

page 6

‘Bustin’,’ said the signalman briefly.

‘You may be. Gawd forgive you, Morgan, for as Queen ’Enrietta said to the ’ousemaid, I never will. I’d ha’ given a year’s pay for ten minutes o’ your signallin’ work this mornin’.’

‘I wouldn’t ’ave took it up,’ was the answer. ‘Perishin’ ’Eavens above! Look at the Devolution’s semaphore !’ Two black wooden arms waved from the junior ship’s upper bridge. ‘They’ve seen it.’

‘The mote on their neighbour’s beam, of course,’ said Pyecroft, and read syllable by syllable ‘“ Captain Malan to Captain Panke. Is—sten—cilled—frieze your starboard side new Admiralty regulation, or your Number One’s private expense?” Now Cryptic is saying, “Not understood.” Poor old Crippy, the Devolute’s raggin’ ’er sore. “Who is G.M.?” she says. That’s fetched the Cryptic. She’s answerin’: “You ought to know. Examine own paintwork.” Oh Lord! they’re both on to it now. This is balm. This is beginning to be balm. I forgive you, Morgan!’

Two frantic pipes twittered. From either cruiser a whaler dropped into the water and madly rowed round the ship, as a gay-coloured hoist rose to the Cryptic’s yardarm : ‘Destroyer will close at once. Wish to speak by semaphore.’ Then on the bridge semaphore itself : ‘Have been trying to attract your attention last half-hour. Send commanding officer aboard at once.’

‘Our attention? After all the attention we’ve given ’er, too,’ said Pyecroft. ‘What a greedy old woman!’ To Moorshed : ‘Signal from the Cryptic, Sir.’

‘Never mind that!’ said the boy, peering through his glasses. ‘Out dinghy quick, or they’ll paint our marks out. Come along!’

By this time I was long past even hysteria. I remember Pyecroft’s bending back, the surge of the driven dinghy, a knot of amazed faces as we skimmed the Cryptic’s ram, and the dropped jaw of the midshipman in her whaler when we barged fairly into him.

‘Mind my paint!’ he yelled.

‘You mind mine, snotty,’ said Moorshed. ‘I was all night putting these little ear-marks on you for the umpires to sit on. Leave ’em alone.’

We splashed past him to the Devolution’s boat, where sat no one less than her first lieutenant, a singularly unhandy-looking officer.

‘What the deuce is the meaning of this?’ he roared, with an accusing forefinger.

‘You’re sunk, that’s all. You’ve been dead half a tide.’

‘Dead, am I? I’ll show you whether I’m dead or not, Sir!’

‘Well, you may be a survivor,’ said Moorshed ingratiatingly, ‘though it isn’t at all likely.’

The officer choked for a minute. The midshipman crouched up in the stern said, half aloud

‘Then I was right—last night.’

‘Yesh,’ I gasped from the dinghy’s coal-dust. ‘Are you member Torquay Yacht Club?’

‘Hell!’ said the first lieutenant, and fled away. The Cryptic’s boat was already at that cruiser’s side, and semaphores flicked zealously from ship to ship. We floated, a minute speck, between the two hulls, while the pipes went for the captain’s galley on the Devolution.

‘That’s all right,’ said Moorshed. ‘Wait till the gangway’s down and then board her decently. We oughtn’t to be expected to climb up a ship we’ve sunk.’

Pyecroft lay on his disreputable oars till Captain Malan, full-uniformed, descended the Devolution’s side. With due compliments—not acknowledged, I grieve to say—we fell in behind his sumptuous galley, and at last, upon pressing invitation, climbed, black as sweeps all, the lowered gangway of the Cryptic. At the top stood as fine a constellation of marine stars as ever sang together of a morning on a King’s ship. Every one who could get within earshot found that his work took him aft. I counted eleven able seamen polishing the breech-block of the stern nine-point-two, four marines zealously relieving each other at the lifebuoy, six call-boys, nine midshipmen of the watch, exclusive of naval cadets, and the higher ranks past all census.

‘If I die o’ joy,’ said Pyecroft behind his hand, ‘remember I died forgivin’ Morgan from the bottom of my ’eart, because, like Martha, we ’ave scoffed the better part. You’d better try to come to attention, Sir.’

Moorshed ran his eye voluptuously over the upper deck battery, the huge beam, and the immaculate perspective of power. Captain Panke and Captain Malan stood on the well-browned flash-plates by the dazzling hatch. Precisely over the flagstaff I saw Two Six Seven astern, her black petticoat half hitched up, meekly floating on the still sea. She looked like the pious Abigail who has just spoken her mind, and, with folded hands, sits thanking Heaven among the pieces. I could almost have sworn that she wore black worsted gloves and had a little dry cough. But it was Captain Panke that coughed so austerely. He favoured us with a lecture on uniform, deportment, and the urgent necessity of answering signals from a senior ship. He told us that he disapproved of masquerading, that he loved discipline, and would be obliged by an explanation. And while he delivered himself deeper and more deeply into our hands, I saw Captain Malan wince. He was watching Moorshed’s eye.

‘I belong to Blue Fleet, Sir. I command Number Two Six Seven,’ said Moorshed, and Captain Panke was dumb. ‘Have you such a thing as a frame-plan of the Cryptic aboard?’ He spoke with winning politeness as he opened a small and neatly folded paper.

‘I have, sir.’ The little man’s face was working with passion.

‘Ah! Then I shall be able to show you precisely where you were torpedoed last night in’ he consulted the paper with one finely arched eyebrow—‘in nine places. And since the Devolution is, I understand, a sister ship’—he bowed slightly toward Captain Malan ‘the same plan—’

I had followed the clear precision of each word with a dumb amazement which seemed to leave my mind abnormally clear. I saw Captain Malan’s eye turn from Moorshed and seek that of the Cryptic’s commander. And he telegraphed as clearly as Moorshed was speaking: ‘My dear friend and brother officer, I know Panke; you know Panke; we know Panke—good little Panke! In less than three Greenwich chronometer seconds Panke will make an enormous ass of himself, and I shall have to put things straight, unless you who are a man of tact and discernment—’

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‘Carry on.’ The Commander’s order supplied the unspoken word. The cruiser boiled about her business around us; watch and watch-officers together, up to the limit of noise permissible. I saw Captain Malan turn to his senior.

‘Come to my cabin!’ said Panke gratingly, and led the way. Pyecroft and I stayed still.

‘It’s all right,’ said Pyecroft. ‘They daren’t leave us loose aboard for one revolution,’ and I knew that he had seen what I had seen.

‘You, too!’ said Captain Malan, returning suddenly. We passed the sentry between white-enamelled walls of speckless small-arms, and since that Royal Marine Light Infantryman was visibly suffocating from curiosity, I winked at him. We entered the chintz-adorned, photo-speckled, brass-fendered, tile-stowed main cabin. Moorshed, with a ruler, was demonstrating before the frame-plan of H.M.S. Cryptic.

‘—making nine stencils in all of my initials G.M.,’ I heard him say. ‘Further, you will find attached to your rudder, and you, too, Sir’—he bowed to Captain Malan yet again—‘one fourteen-inch Mark IV practice torpedo, as issued to first-class torpedo-boats, properly buoyed. I have sent full particulars by telegraph to the umpires, and have requested them to judge on the facts as they—appear.’ He nodded through the large window to the stencilled Devolution awink with brass-work in the morning sun, and ceased.

Captain Panke faced us. I remembered that this was only play, and caught myself wondering with what keener agony comes the real defeat.

‘Good God, Johnny!’ he said, dropping his lower lip like a child, ‘this young pup says he has put us both out of action. Inconceivable—eh? My first command of one of the class. Eh? What shall we do with him? What shall we do with him—eh?’

‘As far as I can see, there’s no getting over the stencils,’ his companion answered.

‘Why didn’t I have the nets down? Why didn’t I have the nets down?’ The cry tore itself from Captain Panke’s chest as he twisted his hands.

‘I suppose we’d better wait and find out what the umpires will say. The Admiral won’t be exactly pleased.’ Captain Malan spoke very soothingly. Moorshed looked out through the stern door at Two Six Seven. Pyecroft and I, at attention, studied the paintwork opposite. Captain Panke had dropped into his desk chair, and scribbled nervously at a blotting-pad.

Just before the tension became unendurable, he looked at his junior for a lead. ‘What—what are you going to do about it, Johnny—eh?’

‘Well, if you don’t want him, I’m going to ask this young gentleman to breakfast, and then we’ll make and mend clothes till the umpires have decided.’

Captain Panke flung out a hand swiftly.

‘Come with me,’ said Captain Malan. ‘Your men had better go back in the dinghy to—their—own—ship.’

‘Yes, I think so,’ said Moorshed, and passed out behind the captain. We followed at a respectful interval, waiting till they had ascended the ladder.

Said the sentry, rigid as the naked barometer behind him : ‘For Gawd’s sake! ’Ere, come ’ere! For Gawd’s sake! What’s ’appened? Oh! come ’ere an’ tell.’

‘Tell? You?’ said Pyecroft. Neither man’s lips moved, and the words were whispers: ‘Four ultimate illegitimate grandchildren might begin to understand, not you—nor ever will.’

‘Captain Malan’s galley away, Sir,’ cried a voice above; and one replied: ‘Then get those two greasers into their dinghy and hoist the Blue Peter. We’re out of action.’

‘Can you do it, Sir?’ said Pyecroft at the foot of the ladder. ‘Do you think it is in the English language, or do you not?’

‘I don’t think I can, but I’ll try. If it takes me two years, I’ll try.’

There are witnesses who can testify that I have used no artifice. I have, on the contrary, cut away priceless slabs of opus alexandrinum. My gold I have lacquered down to dull bronze, my purples overlaid with sepia of the sea, and for hell-hearted ruby and blinding diamond I have substituted pale amethyst and mere jargoon. Because I would say again ‘Disregarding the inventions of the Marine Captain whose other name is Gubbins, let a plain statement suffice.’