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H.M.S. Gardenia (we will take her name from the Herbaceous Border which belonged to the sloops, though she was a destroyer by profession) came quietly back to her berth some time after midnight, and disturbed half-a-dozen of her sisters as she settled down. They all talked about it next morning, especially Phlox and Stephanotis, her left- and right-hand neighbours in the big basin on the east coast of England, that was crowded with destroyers.But the soul of the Gardenia—Lieutenant-in-Command H.R. Duckett—was lifted far above insults. What he had done during his last trip had been well done. Vastly more important—Gardenia was in for a boiler-clean, which meant four days’ leave for her commanding officer.

“Where did you get that fender from, you dockyard burglar?” Stephanotis clamoured over his rail, for Gardenia was wearing a large coir-matting fender, evidently fresh from store, over her rail. It creaked with newness. “You common thief of the beach, where did you find that new fender?”

The only craft that a destroyer will, sometimes, not steal equipment from is a destroyer; which accounts for the purity of her morals and the loftiness of her conversation, and her curiosity in respect to stolen fillings.

Duckett, unmoved, went below, to return with a valise which he carried on to His Majesty’s quarter-deck, and, atop of a suit of rat-catcher clothes, crammed into it a pair of ancient pigskin gaiters.

Here Phlox, assisted by her Dandy Dinmont, Dinah, who had been trained to howl at certain notes in her master’s voice, gave a spirited and imaginary account of Gardenia’s return the night before, which was compared to that of an ambulance with a lady-driver. Duckett retaliated by slipping on to his head for one coquettish instant a gravy-coloured soft cloth cap. It was the last straw. Phlox and Stephanotis, who had no hope of any leave for the present, pronounced it an offence, only to be wiped out by drinks.

“All things considered,” said Duckett, “I don’t care if I do. Come along!” and, the hour being what it was, he gave the necessary orders through the wardroom’s tiny skylight. The captains came. Phlox—Lieutenant-Commander Jerry Marlett, a large and weather-beaten person, docked himself in the arm-chair by the ward-room stove with his cherished Dinah in his arms. Great possessions and much land, inherited from an uncle, had removed him from the Navy on the eve of war. Three days after the declaration of it he was back again, and had been very busy ever since. Stephanotis—Lieutenant-in-Command Augustus Holwell Rayne, alias “The Damper,” because of his pessimism, spread himself out on the settee. He was small and agile, but of gloomy outlook, which a D.S.O. earned, he said, quite by mistake could not lighten. “Horse” Duckett, Gardenia’s skipper, was a reversion to the primitive Marryat type—a predatory, astute, resourceful pirate, too well known to all His Majesty’s dockyards, a man of easily injured innocence who could always prove an alibi, and in whose ship, if his torpedo-coxswain had ever allowed any one to look there, several sorts of missing Government property might have been found. His ambition was to raise pigs (animals he only knew as bacon) in Shropshire (a county he had never seen) after the war, so he waged his war with zeal to bring that happy day nearer. He sat in the arm-chair by the door, whence he controlled the operations of “Crippen,” the wardroom steward, late of Bolitho’s Travelling Circus and Swings, who had taken to the high seas to avoid the attentions of the Police ashore.

As usual, Duckett’s character had been blackened by My Lords of the Admiralty, and he was in the midst of a hot campaign against them. An able-seaman’s widowed mother had sent a ham to her son, whose name was E. R. Davids. Unfortunately, Engineroom-Artificer E. Davies, who swore that he had both a mother and expectations of hams from her, came across the ham first, and, misreading its address, had had it boiled for, and at once eaten by, the Engineers’ mess. E. R. Davids, a vindictive soul, wrote to his mother, who, it seems, wrote to the Admiralty, who, according to Duckett, wrote to him daily every day for a month to know what had become of E. R. Davids’ ham. In the meantime the guilty Engineroom-Artificer E. Davies had been transferred to a sloop off the Irish coast.

“An’ what the dooce am I to do?” Duckett asked his guests plaintively.

“Apply for leave to go to Ireland with a stomach-pump and heave the ham out of Davies,” Jerry suggested promptly.

“That’s rather a wheeze,” said Duckett. “I had thought of marrying Davids’ mother to settle the case. Anyhow, it was all Crippen’s fault for not steering the ham into the wardroom when it came aboard. Don’t let it occur again, Crippen. Hams are going to be very scarce.”

“Well, now you’ve got all that off your chest”—Jerry Marlett lowered his voice—“suppose you tell us about what happened—the night before last.”

The talk became professional. Duckett produced certain evidence—still damp—in support of the claims that he had sent in concerning the fate of a German submarine, and gave a chain of facts and figures and bearings that the others duly noted.

“And how did your Acting Sub do?” asked Jerry at last.

“Oh, very fair, but I didn’t tell him so, of course. They’re hard enough to hold at the best of times, these makee-do officers. Have you noticed that they are always above their job—always thinkin’ round the corner when they’re thinkin’ at al!? On our way back, this young merchant o’ mine—when I’d almost made up my mind to tell him he wasn’t as big tripes as he looked—told me his one dream in life was to fly. Fly! He flew alright by the time I’d done with him, but—imagine one’s Sub tellin’ one a thing like that! ‘It must be so interestin’ to fly,’ he said. The whole North Sea one blooming burgoo of what-come-nexts, an’ this pup complainin’ of lack of interest in it! Fly! Fly! When I was a Sub-Lootenant——”

He turned pathetically towards The Damper, who had known him in that rank in the Mediterranean.

“There wasn’t much flyin’ in our day,” said The Damper mournfully. “But I can’t remember anything else we didn’t do.”

“Quite so; but we had some decency knocked into us. The new breed wouldn’t know decency if they met it on a dungfork. That’s what I mean.”

“When I was Actin’ Sub,” Jerry opened thoughtfully, “in the Polycarp—the pious Polycarp—Nineteen-O-Seven, I got nine cuts of the best from the Senior Sub for occupyin’ the bathroom ten seconds too long. Twenty minutes later, just when the welts were beginnin’ to come up, y’ know, I was sent off in the gig with a Corporal o’ Marines an’ a private to fetch the Headman of All the Pelungas aboard. He was wanted for slavery, or barratry, or bigamy or something.”

“All the Pelungas?” Duckett repeated with interest. “’Odd you should mention that part of the world. What are the Pelungas like?”

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“Very nice. Hundreds of islands and millions of coral reefs with atolls an’ lagoons an’ palm-trees, an’ all the population scullin’ round in outrigger canoes between ’em like a permanent regatta. Filthy navigation, though. Polycarp had to lie five miles out on account of the reefs (even then our navigator was tearin’ his hair), an’ I had an hour’s steerin’ on hot, hard thwarts. Talk o’ tortures! You know. We landed in a white lather at the boat-steps of the Headman’s island. The Headman wasn’t takin’ any at first. He’d drawn up his whole army—three hundred strong, with old Martini rifles an’ a couple of ancestral seven-pounders—in front of his fort. We didn’t know anything about his domestic arrangements. We just dropped in among ’em, so to say. Then my Corporal of Marines—the fattest man in the Service bar one—fell down the landin’ steps. The Headman had a Prime Minister—about as fat as my Corporal—and he helped him up. Well, that broke the ice a bit. The Prime Minister was a statesman. He poured oil on the crisis, while the Headman cursed me and the Navy and the British Government, and I kept wrigglin’ in my white ducks to keep ’em from drawin’ tight on me. You know how it feels! I remember I told the Headman the Polycarp ’ud blow him an’ his island out of the water if he didn’t come along quick. She could have done it in a week or two; but we were scrubbin’ hammocks at the time. I forgot that little fact for the minute. I was a bit hot—all over. The Prime Minister soothed us down again, an’ by and by the Headman said he’d pay us a state call—as a favour. I didn’t care what he called it s’long as he came. So I lay about a quarter of a mile off-shore in the gig, in case the seven-pounders pooped off—I knew the Martinis couldn’t hit us at that range—and I waited for him till he shoved off in his State barge—forty rowers a side. Would you believe it, he wanted to take precedence of the White Ensign on the way to the ship? I had to fall him in behind the gig and bring him alongside properly. I was so sore I could hardly get aboard at the finish.”

“What happened to the Headman? “said The Damper.

“Nothing. He was acquitted or condemned—I forget which—but he was a perfect gentleman. We used to go sailing with him and his people—dancing with ’em on the beach and all that sort of thing. I don’t want to meet a nicer community than the Pelungaloos. They aren’t used to white men—but they’re first-class learners.”

“Yes, they do seem a cheery crowd,” Duckett commented.

“Where have you come across them?” said Jerry.

“Nowhere; but this Acting Sub of mine has got a cousin who’s been flying down there.”

“Flying in All the Pelungas? “Jerry cried. “That’s impossible!”

“In these days? Where’s your bright lexicon of youth? Nothing’s impossible anywhere now,” Duckett replied. “All the best people fly.”

“Count me out,” Jerry grunted. “We went up once, Dinah, little dog, and it made us both very sick, didn’t it? When did it all happen, Horse?”

“Some time last year. This chap, my Sub’s cousin—a man called Baxter—went adrift among All the Pelungas in his machine and failed to connect with his ship. He was reported missing for months. Then he turned up again. That’s all.”

“He was called Baxter?” said The Damper. “Hold on a shake! I wonder if he’s ‘Beloo’ Baxter, by any chance. There was a chap of that name about five years ago on the China Station. He had himself tattooed al! over, regardless, in Rangoon. Then he got as good as engaged to a woman in Hongkong—rich woman too. But the Pusser of his ship gave him away. He had a regular cinema of frogs and dragonflies up his legs. And that was only the beginnin’ of the show. So she broke off the engagement, and he half-killed the Pusser, and then he became a Buddhist, or something.”

“That couldn’t have been this Baxter, or my Sub would have told me,” said Duckett. “My Sub’s a morbid-minded young animal.”

“Maskee your Sub’s mind!” said Jerry.

“What was this Baxter man—plain or coloured—doin’ in All my Pelungas?”

“As far as I can make out,” said Duckett, “Lootenant Baxter was flyin’ in those parts—with an observer—out of a ship.”

“Yes, but what for?” Jerry insisted. “And what ship?”

“He was flyin’ for exercise, I suppose, an’ his ship was the Cormorang. D’you feel wiser? An’ he flew, an’ he flew, an’ he flew till, between him an’ his observer and the low visibility and Providence and all that sort of thing, he lost his ship—just like some other people I know. Then he flapped about huntin’ for’ her till dusk among the Pelungas, an’ then he effected a landin’ on the water.”

“A nasty wet business—landin’ that way; Dinah. We know,” said Jerry into the keen little cocked ear in his lap.

“Then he taxied about in the dark till he taxied on to a coral-reef and couldn’t get the machine off. Coral ain’t like mud, is it?” The question was to Jerry, but the insult was addressed to The Damper, who had lately spent eighteen hours on a soft and tenacious shoal off the East Coast. The Damper launched a kick at his host from where he lay along the settee.

“Then,” Duckett went on, “this Baxterman got busy with his wireless and S O S’ed like winkie till the tide came and floated the old bus off the reef, and they taxied over to another island in the dark.”

“Thousands of Islands in All the Pelungas,” Jerry murmured. “Likewise reefs—hairy ones. What about the reefs?”

“Oh, they kept on hittin’ reefs in the dark, till it occurred to them to fire their signal lights to see ’em by. So they went blazin’ an’ stinkin’ and taxyin’ up and down the reefs till they found a gap in one of ’em and they taxied bung on to an uninhabited island.”

“That must have been good for the machine,” was Jerry’s comment.

“I don’t deny it. I’m only tellin’ you what my Sub told me. Baxter wrote it all home to his people, and the letters have been passed round the family. Well, then, o’ course, it rained. It rained all the rest of the night, up to the afternoon of the next day. (It always does when you’re in a hole.) They tried to start their engine in the intervals of climbin’ palm-trees for coco-nuts. They’d only a few biscuits and some water with ’em.”

“’Don’t like climbin’ palm-trees. It scrapes you raw,” The Damper moaned.

“An’ when they weren’t climbin’ or crankin’ their engine, they tried to get into touch with the natives on the next nearest island. But the natives weren’t havin’ any. They took to the bush.”

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“Ah!” said Jerry sympathetically. “That aeroplane was too much for ’em. Otherwise, they’re the most cosy, confidential lot I ever met. Well, what happened?”

“Baxter sweated away at his engine till she started up again. Then he flew round lookin’ for his ship some more till his petrol ran out. Then he landed close to another uninhabited island and tried to taxi up to it.”

“Why was he so keen on uninhabited islands? I wish I’d been there. I’d ha’ shown him round the town,” said Jerry.

“I don’t know his reasons, but that was what he wrote home to his people,” Duckett went on. “Not havin’ any power by that time, his machine blew on to another reef and there they were! No grub, no petrol, and plenty of sharks! So they snugged her down. I don’t know how one snugs down an aeroplane,” Duckett admitted, “but Baxter took the necessary steps to reduce the sail-area, and cut the spanker-boom out of the tail-tassels or whatever it is they do on an aeroplane when they want her to be quiet. Anyhow, they more or less secured the bus to that reef so they thought she wouldn’t fetch adrift; and they tried to coax a canoe over that happened to be passing. Nothin’ doin’ there! ‘Canoe made one bunk of it.”

“He tickled ’em the wrong way,” Jerry sighed. “There’s a song they sing when they’re fishing.” He began to hum dolefully.

“I expect Baxter didn’t know that tune,” Duckett interrupted. “He an’ his observer cursed the canoe a good deal, an’ then they went in for swimmin’ stunts all among the sharks, until they fetched up on the next island when they came to it—it took ’em an hour to swim there—but the minute they landed the natives all left. ’Seems to me,” said Duckett thoughtfully, “Baxter and his observer must have spread a pretty healthy panic scullin’ about All the Pelungas in their shirts.”

“But why shirts?” said Jerry. “Those waters are perfectly warm.”

“If you come to that, why not shirts?” Duckett retorted. “A shirt’s a badge of civilization——”

“Maskee your shirts. What happened after that?” said The Damper.

“They went to sleep. They were tired by that time—oddly enough. The natives on that island had left everything standing when they bunked—fires lighted, chickens runnin’ about, and so forth. Baxter slept in one of the huts. About midnight some of the bold boys stole back again. Baxter heard ’em talkin’ just outside, and as he didn’t want his face trod on, he said ‘Salaam.’ That cleared the island for the second time. The natives jumped three foot into the air and shoved off.”

“Good Lord!” said Jerry impatiently. “I’d have had ’em eating out of my hand in ten seconds. ‘Salaam’ isn’t the word to use at all. What he ought to have said——”

“Well, anyhow, he didn’t,” Duckett replied. “He and his observer had their sleep out an’ they woke in the mornin’ with ragin’ appetites and a strong sense of decency. The first thing they annexed was some native loin-cloths off a bush. Baxter wrote all this home to his people, you know. I expect he was well brought up.”

“If he was ‘Beloo’ Baxter no one would notice——” The Damper began.

“He wasn’t. He was just a simple, virtuous Naval Officer—like me. He an’ his observer navigated the island in full dress in search of the natives, but they’d gone and taken the canoe with ’em. Baxter was so depressed at their lack of confidence that he killed a chicken an’ plucked it and drew it (I bet neither of you know how to draw fowls) an’ boiled it and ate it all at once.”

“Didn’t he feed his observer?” The Damper asked. “I’ve a little brother what’s an observer up in the air. I’d hate to think he——”

“The observer was kept busy wavin’ his shirt on the beach in order to attract the attention of local fishin’ craft. That was what he was for. After breakfast Baxter joined him an’ the two of ’em waved shirts for two hours on the beach. An’ that’s the sort of thing my Sub prefers to servin’ with me!—Me! After a bit, the Pelungaloos decided that they must be harmless lunatics, and one canoe stood pretty close in, an’ they swam out to her. But here’s a curious thing! Baxter wrote his people that, when the canoe came, his observer hadn’t any shirt at all. ’Expect he’d expended it wavin’ for succour. But Baxter’s shirt was all right. He went out of his way to tell his people so. An’ my Sub couldn’t see the humour of it one little bit. How does it strike you?”

“Perfectly simple,” said Jerry. “Lootenant Baxter as executive officer in charge took his subordinate’s shirt owin’ to the exigencies of the Service. I’d ha’ done the same. Pro-ceed.”

“There’s worse to follow. As soon as they got aboard the canoe and the natives found they didn’t bite, they cottoned to ’em no end. ’Gave ’em grub and dry loin-cloths and betel-nut to chew. What’s betel-nut like, Jerry?”

“Grateful an’ comfortin’. Warms you all through and makes you spit pink. It’s nonintoxicating.”

“Oh! I’ve never tried it. Well then, there was Baxter spittin’ pink in a loin-cloth an’ a canoeful of Pelungaloo fishermen, with his shirt dryin’ in the breeze. ’Got that? Well, then his aeroplane, which he thought he had secured to the reef of the next island, began to drift out to sea. That boy had to keep his eyes open, I tell you. He wanted the natives to go in and makee-catchee the machine, and there was a big palaver about it. They naturally didn’t care to compromise themselves with strange idols, but after a bit they lined up a dozen canoes—no, eleven, to be precise—Baxter was awfully precise in his letters to his people—an’ tailed on to the aeroplane an’ towed it to an island.”

“Excellent,” said Jerry Marlett, the complete Lieutenant-Commander. “I was gettin’ worried about His Majesty’s property. Baxter must have had a way with him. A loin-cloth ain’t uniform, but it’s dashed comfortable. An’ how did All my Pelungaloos treat ’em?”

“We-ell!” said Duckett, “Baxter was writin’ home to his people, so I expect he toned things down a bit, but, readin’ between the lines, it looks as if—an’ that’s why my Sub wants to take up flyin’, of course!—it looks as if, from then on, they had what you might call Garden-of-Eden picnics for weeks an’ weeks. The natives put ’em under a guard o’ sorts just for the look of the thing, while the news was sent to the Headman, but as far as I can make out from my Sub’s reminiscences of Baxter’s letters, their guard consisted of the entire male and female population goin’ in swimmin’ with ’em twice a day. At night they had concerts—native songs versus music-hall—in alternate what d’you call ’em? Anti-somethings. ’Phone, ain’t it?”

“They are a musical race! I’m glad he struck that side of their nature,” Jerry murmured.

“I’m envious,” Duckett protested. “Why should the Flyin’ Corps get all the plums? But Baxter didn’t forget His Majesty’s aeroplane. He got ’em to tow it to his island o’ delights, and in the evenings he an’ his observer, between the musical turns, used to give the women electric shocks off the wireless. And, one time, he told his observer to show ’em his false teeth, and when he took ’em out the people all bolted.”

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“But that’s in Rider Haggard. It’s in King Solomon’s Mines,” The Damper remarked.

“P’raps that’s what put it into Baxter’s head then,” said Duckett. “Or else,” he suggested warily, “Baxter wanted to crab his observer’s chances with some lady.”

“Then he was a fool,” The Damper snarled. “It might have worked the other way. It generally does.”

“Well, one can’t foresee everything,” said Duckett. “Anyhow, Baxter didn’t complain. They lived there for weeks and weeks, singin’ songs together and bathin’ an’—oh, yes!— gamblin’. Baxter made a set of dice too. He doesn’t seem to have neglected much. He said it was just to pass the time away, but I wonder what he threw for. I wish I knew him. His letters to his people are too colourless. What a life he must have led! Women, dice and song, an’ your pay rollin’ up behind you in perfect safety with no exertion on your part.”

“There’s a dance they dance on moonlight nights,” said Jerry, “with just a few banana leaves—— Never mind. Go ahead!”

“All things bright and beautiful—fineesh,” Duckett mourned. “Presently the Headman of All the Pelungas came along——”

“’My friend? I hope it was. A first-class sportsman,” said Jerry.

“Baxter didn’t say. Anyhow, he turned up and they were taken over to the capital island till they could be sent back to their own ship. The Headman did ’em up to the nines in every respect while they were with him (Baxter’s quite enthusiastic over it, even in writin’ to his own people), but, o’ course, there’s nothing like first love, is there? They must have felt partin’ with their first loves. I always do. And then they were put into the full uniform of All the Pelungaloo Army. What’s that like, Jerry? You’ve seen it.”

“It’s a cross between a macaw an’ a rainbow-ended mandrill. Very tasty.”

“Just as they were gettin’ used to that, and they’d taught the Headman and his Court to sing: ‘Hello! Hello! Who’s your lady friend?’ they were embarked on a dirty common sailin’ craft an’ taken over the ocean and returned to the Cormorang, which, o’ course, had reported ’em missing and dead months before. They had one final kick-up before returnin’ to duty. You see, they’d both grown torpedo-beards in the Pelungas, and they were both in Pelungaloo uniform. Consequently, when they went aboard the Cormorang they weren’t recognized till they were half-way down to their cabins.”

“And then?” both Captains asked at once.

“That’s where Baxter breaks off—even though he’s writin’ to his own people. He’s so apologetic to ’em for havin’ gone missin’ and worried ’em, an’ he’s so sinful proud of havin’ taught the Headman music-hall songs, that he only said that they had ‘some reception aboard the Cormorang.’ It lasted till midnight.”

“It is possible. What about their machine?” said Jerry.

“The Cormorang ran down to the Pelungas and retrieved it all right. But I should have liked to have seen that reception. There is nothing I’d ha’ liked better than to have seen that reception. And it isn’t as if I hadn’t seen a reception or two either.”

“The leaf-signal is made, sir,” said the Quartermaster at the door.

“Twelve-twenty-four train,” Duckett muttered. “Can do.” He rose, adding, “I’m going to scratch the backs of swine for the next three days. G’wout!”

The well-trained servant was already fleeting along the edge of the basin with his valise. Stephanotis and Phlox returned to their own ships, loudly expressing envy and hatred. Duckett paused for a moment at his gangway rail to beckon to his torpedo-coxswain, a Mr. Wilkins, a peace-time sailor of mild and mildewed aspect who had followed Duckett’s shady fortunes for some years.

“Wilkins,” he whispered, “where did we get that new starboard fender of ours from?”

“Orf the dredger, sir. She was asleep when we came in,” said Wilkins through lips that scarcely seemed to move. “But our port one come orf the water-boat. We ’ad to over’aul our moorin’s in the skiff last night, sir, and we—er—found it on ’er.”

“Well, well, Wilkins. Keep the home fires burning,” and Lieutenant-in-Command H.R. Duckett sped after his servant in the direction of the railway-station. But not so fast that he could outrun a melody played aboard the Phlox on a concertina to which manly voices bore the burden:

Moved, Heaven knows whether by conscience or kindliness, Lieutenant Duckett smiled at the policeman on the Dockyard gates.

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WHEN that sloop known to have been in the West Indies trade for a century had been repaired by Mr. Randolph of Stephano’s Island, there arose between him and her owner, Mr. Gladstone Gallop, a deep-draught pilot, Admiral (retired) Lord Heatleigh, and Mr. Winter Vergil, R.N. (also retired), the question how she would best sail. This could only be settled on trial trips of the above Committee, ably assisted by Lil, Mr. Randolph’s mongrel fox-terrier, and, sometimes, the Commander of the H.M.S. Bulleana, who was the Admiral’s nephew.

Lil had been slid into a locker to keep dry till they reached easier water. The others lay aft watching the breadths of the all-coloured seas. Mr. Gallop at the tiller, which had replaced the wheel, said as little as possible, but condescended, before that company, to make his boat show off among the reefs and passages of coral where his business and delight lay.

Mr. Vergil, not for the first time, justified himself to the Commander for his handling of the great Parrot Problem, which has been told elsewhere. The Commander tactfully agreed with the main principle that—man, beast, or bird—discipline must be preserved in the Service; and that, so far, Mr. Vergil had done right in disrating, by cutting off her tail-feathers, Josephine, alias Jemmy Reader, the West African parrot . . . .

He himself had known a dog—his own dog, in fact—almost born, and altogether brought up, in a destroyer, who had not only been rated and disrated, but also re-rated and promoted, completely understanding the while what had happened, and why.

‘Come out and listen,’ said Mr. Randolph, reaching into the locker. ‘This’ll do you good.’ Lil came out, limp over his hand, and braced herself against the snap and jerk of a sudden rip which Mr. Gallop was cutting across. He had stood in to show the Admiral Gallop’s Island whose original grantees had freed their Carib slaves more than a hundred years ago. These had naturally taken their owners’ family name; so that now there were many Gallops—gentle, straight-haired men of substance and ancestry, with manners to match, and instinct, beyond all knowledge, of their home waters—from Panama, that is, to Pernambuco.

The Commander told a tale of an ancient destroyer on the China station which, with three others of equal seniority, had been hurried over to the East Coast of England when the Navy called up her veterans for the War. How Malachi—Michael, Mike, or Mickey—throve aboard the old Makee-do, on whose books he was rated as ‘Pup,’ and learned to climb oily steel ladders by hooking his fore-feet over the rungs. How he was used as a tippet round his master’s neck on the bridge of cold nights. How he had his own special area, on deck by the raft, sacred to his private concerns, and never did anything one hair’s-breadth outside it. How he possessed an officers’ steward of the name of Furze, his devoted champion and trumpeter through the little flotilla which worked together on convoy and escort duties in the North Sea. Then the wastage of war began to tell and . . . The Commander turned to the Admiral.

‘They dished me out a new Volunteer sub for First Lieutenant—a youngster of nineteen—with a hand on him like a ham and a voice like a pneumatic riveter, though he couldn’t pronounce “r” to save himself. I found him sitting on the wardroom table with his cap on, scratching his leg. He said to me, “Well, old top, and what’s the big idea for to-mowwow’s agony?” I told him—and a bit more. He wasn’t upset. He was really grateful for a hint how things were run on “big ships” as he called ’em. (Makee-do was three hundred ton, I think.) He’d served in Coastal Motor Boats retrieving corpses off the Cornish coast. He told me his skipper was a vet who called the swells “fuwwows” and thought he ought to keep between ’em. His name was Eustace Cyril Chidden; and his papa was a sugar-refiner . . . .’

Surprise was here expressed in various quarters; Mr. Winter Vergil adding a few remarks on the decadence of the New Navy.

‘No,’ said the Commander. ‘The “old top” business had nothing to do with it. He just didn’t know—that was all. But Mike took to him at once.

‘Well, we were booted out, one night later, on special duty. No marks or lights of course—raining, and confused seas. As soon as I’d made an offing, I ordered him to take the bridge. Cyril trots up, his boots greased, the complete N.O. Mike and I stood by in the chart-room. Pretty soon, he told off old Shide, our Torpedo Coxswain, for being a quarter-point off his course. (He was, too; but he wasn’t pleased.) A bit later, Cyril ships his steam-riveter voice and tells him he’s all over the card, and if he does it again he’ll be “welieved.” It went on like this the whole trick; Michael and me waiting for Shide to mutiny. When Shide came off, I asked him what he thought we’d drawn. “Either a dud or a diamond,” says Shide. “There’s no middle way with that muster.” That gave me the notion that Cyril might be worth kicking. So we all had a hack at him. He liked it. He did, indeed! He said it was so “intewesting” because Makee-do “steered like a witch,” and no one ever dreamed of trying to steer C.M.B.’s. They must have been bloody pirates in that trade, too. He was used to knocking men about to make ’em attend. He threatened a stay-maker’s apprentice (they were pushing all sorts of shore-muckings at us) for imitating his lisp. It was smoothed over, but the man made the most of it. He was a Bolshie before we knew what to call ’em. He kicked Michael once when he thought no one was looking, but Furze saw, and the blighter got his head cut on a hatch-coaming. That didn’t make him any sweeter.’

A twenty-thousand-ton liner, full of thirsty passengers, passed them on the horizon. Mr. Gallop gave her name and that of the pilot in charge, with some scandal as to her weakness at certain speeds and turns.

‘Not so good a sea-boat as her!’ He pointed at a square-faced tug—or but little larger—punching dazzle-white wedges out of indigo-blue. The Admiral stood up and pronounced her a North Sea mine-sweeper.

‘’Was. ’Ferry-boat now,’ said Mr. Gallop. ‘’Never been stopped by weather since ten years.’

The Commander shuddered aloud, as the old thing shovelled her way along. ‘But she sleeps dry,’ he said. ‘We lived in a foot of water. Our decks leaked like anything. We had to shore our bulkheads with broomsticks practically every other trip. Most of our people weren’t broke to the life, and it made ’em sticky. I had to tighten things up.’

The Admiral and Mr. Vergil nodded.

‘Then, one day, Chidden came to me and said there was some feeling on the lower deck because Mike was still rated as “Pup” after all his sea-time. He thought our people would like him being promoted to Dog. I asked who’d given ’em the notion. “Me,” says Cyril. “I think it’ll help de-louse ’em mowally.” Of course I instructed him to go to Hell and mind his own job. Then I notified that Mike was to be borne on the ship’s books as Able Dog Malachi. I was on the bridge when the watches were told of it. They cheered. Fo’c’sle afloat; galley-fire missing as usual; but they cheered. That’s the Lower Deck.’

Mr. Vergil rubbed hands in assent.

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‘Did Mike know, Mr. Randolph? He did. He used to sniff forrard to see what the men’s dinners were going to be. If he approved, he went and patronised ’em. If he didn’t, he came to the wardroom for sharks and Worcester sauce. He was a great free-fooder. But—the day he was promoted Dog—he trotted round all messes and threw his little weight about like an Admiral’s inspection—Uncle. (He wasn’t larger than Lil, there.) Next time we were in for boiler-clean, I got him a brass collar engraved with his name and rating. I swear it was the only bit of bright work in the North Sea all the War. They fought to polish it. Oh, Malachi was a great Able Dog, those days, but he never forgot his decencies . . . .’

Mr. Randolph here drew Lil’s attention to this.

‘Well, and then our Bolshie-bird oozed about saying that a ship where men were treated like dogs and vice versa was no catch. Quite true, if correct; but it spreads despondency and attracts the baser elements. You see?’

‘Anything’s an excuse when they are hanging in the wind,’ said Mr. Vergil. ‘And what might you have had for the standing-part of your tackle?’

‘You know as well as I do, Vergil. The old crowd—Gunner, Chief Engineer, Cook, Chief Stoker, and Torpedo Cox. But, no denyin’, we were hellish uncomfy. Those old thirty-knotters had no bows or freeboard to speak of, and no officers’ quarters. (Sleep with your Gunner’s socks in your mouth, and so on.) You remember ’em, sir?’ The Admiral did—when the century was young—and some pirate-hunting behind muddy islands. Mr. Gallop drank it in. His war experiences had ranged no further than the Falklands, which he had visited as one of the prize-crew of a German sailing-ship picked up Patagonia-way and sent south under charge of a modern sub-lieutenant who had not the haziest notion how to get the canvas off a barque in full career for vertical cliffs. He told the tale. Mr. Randolph, who had heard it before, brought out a meal sent by Mrs. Vergil. Mr. Gallop laid the sloop on a slant where she could look after herself while they ate. Lil earned her share by showing off her few small tricks.

‘Mongrels are always smartest,’ said Mr. Randolph half defiantly.

‘Don’t call ’em mongrels.’ The Commander tweaked Lil’s impudent little ear. ‘Mike was a bit that way. Call ’em “mixed.” There’s a difference.’

The tiger-lily flush inherited from his ancestors on the mainland flared a little through the brown of Mr. Gallop’s cheek. ‘Right,’ said he. ‘There’s a heap differ ’twixt mongrel and mixed.’

And in due time, so far as Time was on those beryl floors, they came back to the Commander’s tale.

It covered increasing discomforts and disgusts, varied by escapes from being blown out of water by their own side in fog; affairs with submarines; arguments with pig-headed convoy-captains, and endless toil to maintain Makee-do abreast of her work which the growing ignorance and lowering morale of the new drafts made harder.

‘The only one of us who kept his tail up was Able Dog Malachi. He was an asset, let alone being my tippet on watch. I used to button his front and hind legs into my coat, with two turns of my comforter over all. Did he like it? He had to. It was his station in action. But he had his enemies. I’ve told you what a refined person he was. Well, one day, a buzz went round that he had defiled His Majesty’s quarterdeck. Furze reported it to me, and, as he said, “Beggin’ your pardon, it might as well have been any of us, sir, as him.” I asked the little fellow what he had to say for himself; confronting him with the circumstantial evidence of course. He was very offended. I knew it by the way he stiffened next time I took him for tippet. Chidden was sure there had been some dirty work somewhere; but he thought a Court of Inquiry might do good and settle one or two other things that were loose in the ship. One party wanted Mike disrated on the evidence. They were the——’

‘I know ’em,’ sighed Mr. Vergil; his eyes piercing the years behind him. ‘The other lot wanted to find out the man who had tampered with the—the circumstantial evidence and pitch him into the ditch. At that particular time, we were escorting mine-sweepers—every one a bit jumpy. I saw what Chidden was driving at, but I wasn’t sure our crowd here were mariners enough to take the inquiry seriously. Chidden swore they were. He’d been through the Crystal Palace training himself. Then I said, “Make it so. I waive my rights as the dog’s owner. Discipline’s discipline, tell ’em; and it may be a counter-irritant.”

‘The trouble was there had been a fog, on the morning of the crime, that you couldn’t spit through; so no one had seen anything. Naturally, Mike sculled about as he pleased; but his regular routine—he slept with me and Chidden in the wardroom—was to take off from our stomachs about three bells in the morning watch (half-past five) and trot up topside to attend to himself in his own place. But the evidence, you see, was found near the bandstand—the after six-pounder; and accused was incapable of testifying on his own behalf . . . . Well, that Court of Inquiry had it up and down and thort-ships all the time we were covering the minesweepers. It was a foul area; rather too close to Fritz’s coast. We only drew seven feet, so we were more or less safe. Our supporting cruisers lay on the edge of the area. Fritz had messed that up months before, and lots of his warts—mines—had broke loose and were bobbing about; and then our specialists had swept it, and laid down areas of their own, and so on. Any other time all hands would have been looking out for loose mines. (They have horns that nod at you in a sickly-friendly-frisky way when they roll.) But, while Mike’s inquiry was on, all hands were too worked-up over it to spare an eye outboard . . . . Oh, Mike knew, Mr. Randolph. Make no mistake. He knew he was in for trouble. The Prosecution were too crafty for him. They stuck to the evidence—the locus in quo and so on . . . . Sentence? Disrating to Pup again, which carried loss of badge-of-rank—his collar. Furze took it off, and Mickey licked his hand and Furze wept like Peter . . . . Then Mickey hoicked himself up to the bridge to tell me about it, and I made much of him. He was a distressed little dog. You know how they snuffle and snuggle up when they feel hurt.’

Though the question was to Mr. Randolph, all hands answered it.

‘Then our people went to dinner with this crime on their consciences. Those who felt that way had got in on me through Michael.’

‘Why did you make ’em the chance?’ the Admiral demanded keenly.

‘To divide the sheep from the goats, sir. It was time. . . . Well, we were second in the line—How-come and Fan-kwai next astern and Hop-hell, our flagship, leading. Withers was our Senior Officer. We called him “Joss” because he was always so infernally lucky. It was flat calm with patches of fog, and our sweepers finished on time. While we were escorting ’em back to our cruisers, Joss picked up some wireless buzz about a submarine spotted from the air, surfacing over to the north-east-probably recharging. He detached How-come and Fan-kwai to go on with our sweepers, while him and me went-look-see. We dodged in and out of fog-patches—two-mile visibility one minute and blind as a bandage the next-then a bit of zincy sun like a photograph—and so on. Well, breaking out of one of these patches we saw a submarine recharging-hatches open, and a man on deck—not a mile off our port quarter. We swung to ram and, as he came broadside on to us, I saw Hop-hell slip a mouldie—fire a torpedo—at him, and my Gunner naturally followed suit. By the mercy o’ God, they both streaked ahead and astern him,

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because the chap on deck began waving an open brolly at us like an old maid hailing a bus. That fetched us up sliding on our tails, as you might say. Then he said, “What do you silly bastards think you’re doin’?” (He was Conolly, and some of his crowd had told us, ashore, that the brolly was his private code. That’s why we didn’t fire on sight, sir.—“Red” Conolly, not “Black.”) He told us he’d gone pretty close inshore on spec the night before and had been hunted a bit and had to lie doggo, and he’d heard three or four big ships go over him. He told us where that was, and we stood by till he’d finished recharging and we gave him his position and he sculled off. He said it was hellish thick over towards the coast, but there seemed to be something doing there. So we proceeded, on the tip Conolly gave us . . . . Oh, wait a minute! Joss’s Gunner prided himself on carrying all the silhouettes of Fritz’s navy in his fat head, and he had sworn that Conolly’s craft was the duplicate of some dam U-boat. Hence his shot. I believe Joss pretty well skinned him for it, but that didn’t alter the fact we’d only one mouldie apiece left to carry on with . . . .

‘Presently Joss fetched a sharp sheer to port, and I saw his bow-wave throw off something that looked like the horns of a mine; but they were only three or four hock bottles. We don’t drink hock much at sea.’

Mr. Randolph and Mr. Gallop smiled. There are few liquors that the inhabitants of Stephano’s Island do not know—bottled, barrelled, or quite loose.

The Commander continued.

‘Then Joss told me to come alongside and hold his hand, because he felt nervous.’

The Commander here explained how, with a proper arrangement of fenders, a trusty Torpedo Cox at the wheel, and not too much roll on, destroyers of certain types can run side by side close enough for their captains to talk even confidentially to each other. He ended, ‘We used to slam those old dowagers about like sampans.’

‘You youngsters always think you discovered navigation,’ said the Admiral. ‘Where did you steal your fenders from?’

‘That was Chidden’s pigeon in port, sir. He was the biggest thief bar three in the Service. C.M.B.’s are a bad school . . . . So, then, we proceeded—bridge to bridge—chinning all comfy. Joss said those hock bottles and the big ships walking over Conolly interested him strangely. It was shoaling and we more or less made out the set of the tide. We didn’t chuck anything overboard, though; and just about sunset in a clear patch we passed another covey of hock bottles. Mike spotted them first. He used to poke his little nose up under my chin if he thought I was missing anything. Then it got blind-thick, as Conolly said it would, and there was an ungodly amount of gibber on the wireless. Joss said it sounded like a Fritz tip-and-run raid somewhere and we might come in handy if the fog held. (You couldn’t see the deck from the bridge.) He said I’d better hand him over my surviving mouldie because he was going to slip ’em himself hence-forward, and back his own luck. My tubes were nothing to write home about, anyhow. So we passed the thing over, and proceeded. We cut down to bare steerage-way at last (you couldn’t see your hand before your face by then) and we listened. You listen better in fog.’

‘But it doesn’t give you your bearings,’ said Mr. Gallop earnestly.

‘True. Then you fancy you hear things—like we did. Then Mike began poking up under my chin again. He didn’t imagine things. I passed the word to Joss, and a minute or two after, we heard voices—they sounded miles away. Joss said, “That’s the hock-bottler. He’s hunting his home channel. I hope he’s too bothered to worry about us; but if this stuff lifts we’ll wish we were Conolly.” I buttoned Mike well in to me bosom and took an extra turn of my comforter round him, and those ghastly voices started again—up in the air this time, and all down my neck. Then something big went astern, both screws—then ahead dead slow—then shut off. Joss whispered, “He’s atop of us!” I said, “Not yet. Mike’s winding .. him to starboard!” The little chap had his head out of my comforter again, sniffin’ and poking my chin . . . . And then, by God! the blighter slid up behind us to starboard. We couldn’t see him. We felt him take what wind there was, and we smelt him—hot and sour. He was passing soundings to the bridge, by voice. I suppose he thought he was practically at home. Joss whispered, “Go ahead and cuddle him till you hear me yap. Then amuse him. I shall slip my second by the flare of his batteries while he’s trying to strafe you.” So he faded off to port and I went ahead slow—oh, perishing slow! Shide swore afterwards that he made out the loom of the brute’s stern just in time to save his starboard propeller. That was when my heart stopped working. Then I heard my port fenders squeak like wet cork along his side, and there we were cuddling the hock-bottler! If you lie close enough to anything big he can’t theoretically depress his guns enough to get you.’

Mr. Gallop smiled again. He had known that game played in miniature by a motor-launch off the Bahamas under the flaring bows of a foreign preventive boat.

‘. . . ’Funny to lie up against a big ship eaves-dropping that way. We could hear her fans and engine-room bells going, and some poor devil with a deuce of a cough. I don’t know how long it lasted, but, all that awful while, Fritz went on with his housekeeping overhead. I’d sent Shide aft to the relieving tackles—I had an idea the wheel might go—and put Chidden on the twelve-pounder on the bridge. My Gunner had the forward six-pounders, and I kept Makee-do cuddling our friend. Then I heard Joss yap once, and then the devil of a clang. He’d got his first shot home. We got in three rounds of the twelve, and the sixes cut into her naked skin at-oh, fifteen feet it must have been. Then we all dived aft. (My ewe-torpedo wouldn’t have been any use anyhow. The head would have hit her side before the tail was out of the tube.) She woke up and blazed off all starboard batteries, but she couldn’t depress to hit us. The blast of ’em was enough, though. It knocked us deaf and sick and silly. It pushed my bridge and the twelve-pounder over to starboard in a heap, like a set of fire-irons, and it opened up the top of the forward funnel and flared it out like a tulip. She put another salvo over us that winded us again. Mind you, we couldn’t hear that! We felt it. Then we were jarred sideways—a sort of cow-kick, and I thought it was finish. Then there was a sort of ripping woolly feel—not a noise—in the air, and I saw the haze of a big gun’s flash streaking up overhead at abou’ thirty degrees. It occurred to me that she was rolling away from us and it was time to stand clear. So we went astern a bit. And that haze was the only sight I got of her from first to last! . . . After a while, we felt about to take stock of the trouble. Our bridge-wreckage was listing us a good deal to starboard: the funnel spewed smoke all over the shop and some of the stays were cut; wireless smashed; compasses crazy of course; raft and all loose fittings lifted overboard; hatches and such-like strained or jammed and the deck leaking a shade more than usual. But no casualties. A few ratings cut and bruised by being chucked against things, and, of course, general bleeding from the nose and ears. But—funny thing—we all shook like palsy. That lasted longest. We all went about shouting and shaking. Shock, I suppose.’

‘And Mike?’ Mr. Randolph asked.

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‘Oh, he was all right. He had his teeth well into my comforter throughout. ’First thing after action, he hopped down to the wardroom and lapped up pints. Then he tried to dig the gas taste out of his mouth with his paws. Then he wanted to attend to himself, but he found all his private area gone west with the other unsecured gadgets. He was very indignant and told Furze about it. Furze bellows into my ear, “That’s proof it couldn’t have been him on the quarterdeck, sir, because, if ever any one was justified in being promiscuous, now would be the time. But ’e’s as dainty as a duchess.” . . . Laugh away!—It wasn’t any laughing matter for Don Miguel.’

‘—I beg his pardon! How did you settle his daintiness?’ said the Admiral.

‘I gave him special leave to be promiscuous, and just because I laughed he growled like a young tiger . . . . You mayn’t believe what comes next, but it’s fact. Five minutes later, the whole ship was going over Mike’s court-martial once again. They were digging out like beavers to repair damage, and chinning at the top of their voices. And a year—no—six months before, half of ’em were Crystal Palace naval exhibits!’

‘Same with shanghaied hands,’ said Mr. Gallop, putting her about with a nudge of his shoulder on the tiller and some almost imperceptible touch on a sheet. The wind was rising.

‘. . . I ran out of that fog at last like running out of a tunnel. I worked my way off shore, more or less by soundings, till I picked up a star to go home by. Arguin’ that Joss ’ud do about the same, I waited for him while we went on cutting away what was left of the bridge and restaying the funnel. It was flat calm still; the coast-fog lying all along like cliffs as far as you could see. ’Dramatic, too, because, when the light came, Joss shot out of the fog three or four miles away and hared down to us clearing his hawsers for a tow. We did look rather a dung-barge. I signalled we were all right and good for thirteen knots, which was one dam lie . . . . Well . . . so then we proceeded line-ahead, and Joss sat on his depth-charge-rack aft, semaphoring all about it to me on my fo’c’sle-head. He had landed the hock-bottler to port with his first shot. His second—it touched off her forward magazine—was my borrowed one; but he reported it as “a torpedo from the deck of my Second in Command!” She was showing a blaze through the fog then, so it was a sitting shot—at about a hundred yards, he thought. He never saw any more of her than I did, but he smelt a lot of burnt cork. She might have been some old craft packed with cork like a life-boat for a tip-and-run raid. We never knew.’

Even in that short time the wind and the purpose of the waves had strengthened.

‘All right,’ said Mr. Gallop. ‘Nothin’ due ’fore to-morrow.’ But Mr. Randolph, under sailing-orders from Mrs. Vergil, had the oilskins out ere the sloop lay down to it in earnest. ‘Then—after that?’ said he.

‘Well, then we proceeded; Joss flag-wagging me his news, and all hands busy on our funnel and minor running-repairs, but all arguin’ Mike’s case hotter than ever. And all of us shaking.’

‘Where was Mike?’ Mr. Randolph asked as a cut wave-top slashed across the deck.

‘Doing tippet for me on the fo’c’sle, and telling me about his great deeds. He never barked, but he could chin like a Peke. Then Joss changed course. I thought it might be mines, but having no bridge I had no command of sight. Then we passed a torpedo-bearded man lolling in a life-belt, with his head on his arms, squinting at us—like a drunk at a pub . . . . Dead? Quite. . . . You never can tell how the lower deck’ll take anything. They stared at it and our Cook said it looked saucy. That was all. Then Furze screeched: “But for the grace o’ God that might be bloody-all of us!” And he carried on with that bit of the Marriage Service—“I ree-quire an’ charge you as ye shall answer at the Day of Judgment, which blinkin’ hound of you tampered with the evidence re Malachi. Remember that beggar out in the wet is listenin’.” ’Sounds silly, but it gave me the creeps at the time. I heard the Bolshie say that a joke was a joke if took in the right spirit. Then there was a bit of a mix-up round the funnel, but of course I was busy swapping yarns with Joss. When I went aft—I didn’t hurry—our Chief Stoker was standing over Furze, while Chidden and Shide were fending off a small crowd who were lusting for the Bolshie’s blood. (He had a punch, too, Cywil.) It looked to me—but I couldn’t have sworn to it—that the Chief Stoker scraped up a knife with his foot and hoofed it overboard.’

‘Knife!’ the shocked Admiral interrupted.

‘A wardroom knife, sir, with a ground edge on it. Furze had been a Leicester Square waiter or pimp or something, for ten years, and he’d contracted foreign habits. By the time I took care to reach the working-party, they were carrying on like marionettes, because they hadn’t got over their shakes, you see . . . . I didn’t do anything. I didn’t expect the two men Chidden had biffed ’ud complain of him as long as the Bolshie was alive; and our Chief Stoker had mopped up any awkward evidence against Furze. All things considered, I felt rather sorry for the Bolshie . . . . Chidden came to me in the wardroom afterwards, and said the man had asked to be “segwegated” for his own safety. Oh yes!—he’d owned up to tampering with the evidence. I said I couldn’t well crime the swine for blackening a dog’s character; but I’d reinstate and promote Michael, and the lower deck might draw their own conclusions. “Then they’ll kill the Bolshie,” says the young ’un. “No,” I said, “C.M.B.’s don’t know everything, Cywil. They’ll put the fear of death on him, but they won’t scupper him. What’s he doing now?” “Weconstwucting Mike’s pwivate awea, with Shide and Furze standing over him gwinding their teeth.” “Then he’s safe,” I said. “I’ll send Mike up to see if it suits him. But what about Dawkins and Pratt?” Those were the two men Cyril had laid out while the Chief Stoker was quenching the engine-room ratings. They didn’t love the Bolshie either. “Full of beans and blackmail!” he says. “I told ’em I’d saved ’em fwom being hung, but they want a sardine-supper for all hands when we get in.”’

‘But what’s a Chief Stoker doin’ on the upper deck?’ said Mr. Vergil peevishly, as he humped his back against a solid douche.

‘Preserving discipline. Ours could mend anything from the wardroom clock to the stove, and he’d make a sailor of anything on legs—same as you used to, Mr. Vergil. . . . Well, and so we proceeded, and when Chidden reported the “awea” fit for use I sent Mike up to test it.’

‘Did Mike know?’ said Mr. Randolph.

‘Don’t ask me what he did or didn’t, or you might call me a liar. The Bolshie apologised to Malachi publicly, after Chidden gave out that I’d promoted him to Warrant Dog “for conspicuous gallantwy in action and giving valuable information as to enemy’s whaiwabouts in course of same.” So Furze put his collar on again, and gave the Bolshie his name and rating.’

The Commander quoted it—self-explanatory indeed, but not such as the meanest in His Majesty’s Service would care to answer to even for one day.

‘It went through the whole flotilla.’ The Commander repeated it, while the others laughed those gross laughs women find so incomprehensible.

‘Did he stay on?’ said Mr. Vergil. ‘Because I knew a stoker in the old Minotaur who cut his throat for half as much as that. It takes ’em funny sometimes.’

‘He stayed with us all right; but he experienced a change of heart, Mr. Vergil.’

‘I’ve seen such in my time,’ said the Ancient.

The Admiral nodded to himself. Mr. Gallop at the tiller half rose as he peered under the foresail, preparatory to taking a short-cut where the coral gives no more second chance than a tiger’s paw. In half an hour they were through that channel. In an hour, they had passed the huge liner tied up and discharging her thirsty passengers opposite the liquor-shops that face the quay. Some, who could not suffer the four and a half minutes’ walk to the nearest hotel, had already run in and come out tearing the wrappings off the whisky bottles they had bought. Mr. Gallop held on to the bottom of the harbour and fetched up with a sliding curtsey beneath the mangroves by the boat-shed . . . .

‘I don’t know whether I’ve given you quite the right idea about my people,’ said the Commander at the end. ‘I used to tell ’em they were the foulest collection of sweeps ever forked up on the beach. In some ways they were. But I don’t want you to make any mistake. When it came to a pinch they were the salt of the earth—the very salt of God’s earth—blast ’em and bless ’em. Not that it matters much now. We’ve got no Navy.’

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!’

page 4

‘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!’

page 6

‘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!’

WE WERE wallowing through the China Seas in a dense fog, the horn blowing every two minutes for the benefit of the fishery craft that crowded the waterways. From the bridge the fo’c’sle was invisible; from the hand-wheel at the stern by the captain’s cabin. The fog held possession of everything – the pearly white fog. Once or twice when it tried to lift, we saw a glimpse of the oily sea, the flitting vision of a junk’s sail spread in the vain hope of catching the breeze, or the buoys of a line of nets. Somewhere close to us lay the land, but it might have been the Kurile Islands for aught we knew.

Very early in the morning there passed us, not a cable’s length away, but as unseen as the spirits of the dead, a steamer of the same line as ours. She howled melodiously in answer to our bellowing, and passed on.

‘Suppose she had hit us,’ said a man from Saigon. ‘Then we should have gone down,’ answered the chief officer sweetly. ‘Beastly thing to go down in a fog,’ said a young gentleman who was travelling for pleasure. ‘Chokes a man both ways, y’ know.’ We were comfortably gathered in the smoking-room, the weather being too cold to venture on the deck. Conversation naturally turned upon accidents of fog, the horn tooting significantly in the pauses between the tales. I heard of the wreck of the Eric, the cutting down of the Strathnairn within half a mile of harbour, and the carrying away of the bow plates of the Sigismund outside Sandy Hook.

‘It is astonishing,’ said the man from Saigon, ‘how many true stories are put down as sea yarns. It makes a man almost shrink from telling an anecdote.’ ‘Oh, please don’t shrink on our account,’ said the smoking-room with one voice. ‘It’s not my own story,’ said the man from Saigon. ‘A fellow on a Massageries boat told it me. He had been third officer of a sort on a Geordie tramp – one of those lumbering, dish-bottomed coal-barges where the machinery is tied up with a string and the plates are rivetted with putty. The way he told his tale was this.

The tramp had been creeping along some sea or other with a chart ten years old and the haziest sort of chronometers when she got into a fog – just such a fog as we have now.’ Here the smoking-room turned round as one man, and looked through the windows. ‘In the man’s own words, “just when the fog was thickest, the engines broke down. They had been doing this for some weeks, and we were too weary to care. I went forward of the bridge, and leaned over the side, wondering where I should ever get something that I could call a ship, and whether the old hulk would fall to pieces as she lay. The fog was as thick as any London one, but as white as steam.

While they were tinkering at the engines below, I heard a voice in the fog about twenty yards from the ship’s side, calling out, ‘Can you climb on board if we throw you a rope?’ That startled me, because I fancied we were going to be run down the next minute by a ship engaged in rescuing a man overboard. I shouted for the engine-room whistle; and it whistled about five minutes, but never the sound of a ship could we hear.

The ship’s boy came forward with some biscuit for me. As he put it into my hand, I heard the voice in the fog, crying out about throwing us a rope. This time it was the boy that yelled, ‘Ship on us!’ and off went the whistle again, while the men in the engine-room – it generally took the ship’s crew to repair the Hespa’s engines – tumbled upon deck to know what we were doing. I told them about the hail, and we listened in the smother of the fog for the sound of a screw.

We listened for ten minutes, then we blew the whistle for another ten. Then the crew began to call the ship’s boy a fool, meaning that the third mate was no better. When they were going down below, I heard the hail the third time, so did the ship’s boy. ‘There you are,’ I said, ‘it is not twenty yards from us.’ The engineer sings out, ‘I heard it too! Are you all asleep?’ Then the crew began to swear at the engineer; and what with discussion, argument, and a little swearing, – for there is not much discipline on board a tramp, – we raised such a row that our skipper came aft to enquire. I, the engineer, and the ship’s boy stuck to our tale. ‘Voices or no voices,’ said the captain, ‘you’d better patch the old engines up, and see if you’ve got enough steam to whistle with. I’ve a notion that we’ve got into rather too crowded ways.’

The engineer stayed on deck while the men went down below. The skipper hadn’t got back to the chart-room before I saw thirty feet of bowsprit hanging over the break of the fo’c’sle. Thirty feet of bowsprit, sir, doesn’t belong to anything that sails the seas except a sailing-ship or a man-of-war. I speculated quite a long time, with my hands on the bulwarks, as to whether our friend was soft wood or steel plated. It would not have made much difference to us, anyway; but I felt there was more honour in being rammed, you know.

Then I knew all about it. It was a ram. We opened out. I am not exaggerating – we opened out, sir, like a cardboard box. The other ship cut us two-thirds through, a little behind the break of the fo’c’sle. Our decks split up lengthways. The mizzen-mast bounded out of its place, and we heeled over. Then the other ship blew a fog-horn. I remember thinking, as I took water from the port bulwark, that this was rather ostentatious after she had done all the mischief. After that, I was a mile and a half under sea, trying to go to sleep as hard as I could. Some one caught hold of my hair, and waked me up. I was hanging to what was left of one of our boats under the lee of a large English ironclad. There were two men with me; the three of us began to yell. A man on the ship sings out, ‘Can you climb on board if we throw you a rope?’ They weren’t going to let down a fine new man-of-war’s boat to pick up half-drowned rats.

We accepted the invitation. We climbed – I, the engineer, and the ship’s boy. About half an hour later the fog cleared entirely; except for the half of the boat away in the offing, there was neither stick nor string on the sea to show that the Hespa had been cut down. ‘And what do you think of that now?’ said the man from Saigon.

(A Tale of ’15)

page 1 of 6

THE head-waiter of the Carvoitz almost ran to meet Portson and his guests as they came up the steps from the palmcourt where the string band plays.‘Not seen you since—oh, ever so long,’ he began. ‘So glad to get your wire. Quite well—eh?’

‘Fair to middling, Henri.’ Portson shook hands with him. ‘You’re looking all right, too. Have you got us our table?’

Henri nodded toward a pink alcove, kept for mixed doubles, which discreetly commanded the main dining-room’s glitter and blaze.

‘Good man!’ said Portson. ‘Now, this is serious, Henri. We put ourselves unreservedly in your hands. We’re weather-beaten mariners—though we don’t look it, and we haven’t eaten a Chrihristian meal in months. Have you thought of all that, Henri, mon ami?’

‘The menu, I have compose it myself,’ Henri answered with the gravity of a high priest.

It was more than a year since Portson—of Portson, Peake and Ensell, Stock and Share Brokers—had drawn Henri’s attention to an apparently extinct Oil Company which, a little later, erupted profitably; and it may be that Henri prided himself on paying all debts in full.

The most recent foreign millionaire and the even more recent foreign actress at a table near the entrance clamoured for his attention while he convoyed the party to the pink alcove. With his own hands he turned out some befrilled electrics and lit four pale rose-candles.

‘Bridal!’ some one murmured. ‘Quite bridal!’

‘So glad you like. There is nothing too good.’ Henri slid away, and the four men sat down. They had the coarse-grained complexions of men who habitually did themselves well, and an air, too, of recent, red-eyed dissipation. Maddingham, the eldest, was a thick-set middle-aged presence, with crisped grizzled hair, of the type that one associates with Board Meetings. He limped slightly. Tegg, who followed him, blinking, was neat, small, and sandy, of unmistakable Navy cut, but sheepish aspect. Winchmore, the youngest, was more on the lines of the conventional pre-war ‘nut,’ but his eyes were sunk in his head and his hands black-nailed and roughened. Portson, their host, with Vandyke beard and a comfortable little stomach, beamed upon them as they settled to their oysters.

‘That’s what I mean,’ said the carrying voice of the foreign actress, whom Henri had just disabused of the idea that she had been promised the pink alcove. ‘They ain’t alive to the war yet. Now, what’s the matter with those four dubs yonder joining the British Army or—or doing something?’

‘Who’s your friend?’ Maddingham asked.

‘I’ve forgotten her name for the minute,’ Portson replied, ‘but she’s the latest thing in imported patriotic piece-goods. She sings “Sons of the Empire, Go Forward!” at the Palemseum. It makes the aunties weep.’

‘That’s Sidney Latter. She’s not half bad.’ Tegg reached for the vinegar. ‘We ought to see her some night.’

‘Yes. We’ve a lot of time for that sort of thing,’ Maddingham grunted. ‘I’ll take your oysters, Portson, if you don’t want ’em.’

‘Cheer up, Papa Maddingham! ’Soon be dead!’ Winchmore suggested.

Maddingham glared at him. ‘If I’d had you with me for one week, Master Winchmore——’

‘Not the least use,’ the boy retorted. ‘I’ve just been made a full-lootenant. I have indeed. I couldn’t reconcile it with my conscience to take Etheldreda out any more as a plain sub. She’s too flat in the floor.’

‘Did you get those new washboards of yours fixed?’ Tegg cut in.

‘Don’t talk shop already,’ Portson protested. ‘This is Vesiga soup. I don’t know what he’s arranged in the way of drinks.’

‘Pol Roger ’04,’ said the waiter.

‘Sound man, Henri,’ said Winchmore. ‘But,’ he eyed the waiter doubtfully, ‘I don’t quite like . . . What’s your alleged nationality?’

‘’Henri’s nephew, monsieur,’ the smiling
waiter replied, and laid a gloved hand on the table. It creaked corkily at the wrist. ‘Bethisy-sur-Oise,’ he explained. ‘My uncle he buy me all the hand for Christmas. It is good to hold plates only.’

‘Oh! Sorry I spoke,’ said Winchmore.

‘Monsieur is right. But my uncle is very careful, even with neutrals.’ He poured the champagne.

‘Hold a minute,’ Maddingham cried. ‘First toast of obligation: For what we are going to receive, thank God and the British Navy.’

‘Amen!’ said the others with a nod toward Lieutenant Tegg, of the Royal Navy afloat, and, occasionally, of the Admiralty ashore.

‘Next! “Damnation to all neutrals!”’ Maddingham went on.

‘Amen! Amen!’ they answered between gulps that heralded the sole a la Colbert. Maddingham picked up the menu. ‘Suprême of chicken,’ he read loudly. ‘Filet béarnaise, Woodcock and Richebourg ’74, Pêches Melba, Croûtes Baron. I couldn’t have improved on it myself; though one might,’ he went on—‘one might have substituted quail en casserole for the woodcock.’

‘Then there would have been no reason for the Burgundy,’ said Tegg with equal gravity.

‘You’re right,’ Maddingham replied.

The foreign actress shrugged her shoulders. ‘What can you do with people like that?’ she said to her companion. ‘And yet I’ve been singing to ’em for a fortnight.’

‘I left it all to Henri,’ said Portson.

‘My Gord!’ the eavesdropping woman whispered. ‘Get on to that! Ain’t it typical? They leave everything to Henri in this country.’

‘By the way,’ Tegg asked Winchmore after the fish, ‘where did you mount that one-pounder of yours after all?’

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‘Midships. Etheldreda won’t carry more weight forward. She’s wet enough as it is.’

‘Why don’t you apply for another craft?’ Portson put in. ‘There’s a chap at Southampton just now, down with pneumonia and——’

‘No, thank you. I know Etheldreda. She’s nothing to write home about, but when she feels well she can shift a bit.’

Maddingham leaned across the table. ‘If she does more than eleven in a flat calm,’ said he, ‘I’ll—I’ll give you Hilarity.’

‘’Wouldn’t be found dead in Hilarity,’ was Winchmore’s grateful reply. ‘You don’t mean to say you’ve taken her into real wet water, Papa? Where did it happen?’

The other laughed. Maddingham’s red face turned brick colour, and the veins on the cheekbones showed blue through a blurr of short bristles.

‘He’s been convoying neutrals—in a tactful manner,’ Tegg chuckled.

Maddingham filled his glass and scowled at Tegg. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘and here’s special damnation to me Lords of the Admiralty. A more muddle-headed set of brass-bound apes——’

‘My! My! My!’ Winchmore chirruped soothingly. ‘It don’t seem to have done you any good, Papa. Who were you conveyancing?’

Maddingham snapped out a ship’s name and some details of her build.

‘Oh, but that chap’s a friend of mine!’ cried Winchmore. ‘I ran across him—the—not so long ago, hugging the Scotch coast—out of his course, he said, owing to foul weather and a new type of engine—a Diesel. That’s him, ain’t it—the complete neutral?’ He mentioned an outstanding peculiarity of the ship’s rig.

‘Yes,’ said Portson. ‘Did you board him, Winchmore?’

‘No. There’d been a bit of a blow the day before and old Ethel’s only dinghy had dropped off the hooks. But he signalled me all his symptoms. He was as communicative as—as a lady in the Promenade. (Hold on, Nephew of my Uncle! I’m going to have some more of that Béarnaise fillet.) His smell attracted me. I chaperoned him for a couple of days.’

‘Only two days. You hadn’t anything to complain of,’ said Maddingham wrathfully.

‘I didn’t complain. If he chose to hug things, ’twasn’t any of my business. I’m not a Purity League. ’Didn’t care what he hugged, so long as I could lie behind him and give him first chop at any mines that were going. I steered in his wake (I really can steer a bit now, Portson) and let him stink up the whole of the North Sea. I thought he might come in useful for bait. No Burgundy, thanks, Nephew of my Uncle. I’m sticking to the Jolly Roger.’

‘Go on, then—before you’re speechless. Was he any use as bait?’ Tegg demanded.

‘We never got a fair chance. As I told you, he hugged the coast till dark, and then he scraped round Gilarra Head and went up the bay nearly to the beach.’

‘’Lights out?’ Maddingham asked.

Winchmore nodded. ‘But I didn’t worry about that. I was under his stern. As luck ’ud have it, there was a fishing-party in the bay, and we walked slam into the middle of ’em—a most ungodly collection of local talent. ’First thing I knew a steam-launch fell aboard us, and a boy,  a nasty little Navy boy, Tegg—wanted to know what I was doing. I told him, and he cursed me for putting the fish down just as they were rising. Then the two of us (he was hanging on to my quarter with a boat-hook) drifted on to a steam trawler and our friend the Neutral and a ten-oared cutter full of the military, all mixed up. They were subs from the garrison out for a lark. Uncle Newt explained over the rail about the weather and his engine-troubles, but they were all so keen to carry on with their fishing, they didn’t fuss. They told him to clear off.’

‘Was there anything on the move round Gilarra at that time?’ Tegg inquired.

‘Oh, they spun me the usual yarns about the water being thick with ’em, and asked me to help; but I couldn’t stop. The cutter’s stern-sheets were piled up with mines, like lobster-pots, and from the way the soldiers handled ’em I thought I’d better get out. So did Uncle Newt. He
didn’t like it a bit. There were a couple of shots fired at something just as we cleared the Head, and one dropped rather close to him. (These duck-shoots in the dark are dam’ dangerous, y ’know.) He lit up at once—tail-light, head-light, and side-lights. I had no more trouble with him the rest of the night.’

‘But what about the report that you sawed off the steam-launch’s boat-hook?’ Tegg demanded suddenly.

‘What! You don’t mean to say that little beast of a snotty reported it? He was scratchin’ poor old Ethel’s paint to pieces. I never reported what he said to me. And he called me a damned amateur, too! Well! Well! War’s war. I missed all that fishing-party that time. My orders were to follow Uncle Newt. So I followed—and poor Ethel without a dry rag on her.’

Winchmore refilled his glass.

‘Well, don’t get poetical,’ said Portson. ‘Let’s have the rest of your trip.’

‘There wasn’t any rest,’ Winchmore insisted pathetically. ‘There was just good old Ethel with her engines missing like sin, and Uncle Newt thumping and stinking half a mile ahead of us, and me eating bread and Worcester sauce. I do when I feel that way. Besides, I wanted to go back and join the fishing-party. Just before dark I made out Cordeilia—that Southampton ketch that old Jarrott fitted with oil auxiliaries for a family cruiser last summer. She’s a beamy bus, but she can roll, and she was doing an honest thirty degrees each way when I overhauled her. I asked
Jarrott if he was busy. He said he wasn’t. But he was. He’s like me and Nelson when there’s any sea on.’

‘But Jarrott’s a Quaker. ’Has been for generations. Why does he go to war?’ said Maddingham.

‘If it comes to that,’ Portson said, ‘why do any of us?’

page 3

‘Jarrott’s a mine-sweeper,’ Winchmore replied with deep feeling. ‘The Quaker religion (I’m not a Quaker, but I’m much more religious than any of you chaps give me credit for) has decided that mine-sweeping is life—saving. Consequently’—he dwelt a little on the word—‘the profession is crowded with Quakers—specially off Scarborough. ’See? Owin’ to the purity of their lives, they “all go to Heaven when they die—Roll, Jordan, Roll! “’

‘Disgustin’,’ said the actress audibly as she drew on her gloves. Winchmore looked at her with delight. ‘That’s a peach-Melba, too,’ he said.

‘And David Jarrott’s a mine—sweeper,’ Maddingham mused aloud. ‘So you turned our Neutral over to him, Winchmore, did you?’

‘Yes, I did. It was the end of my beat—I wish I didn’t feel so sleepy—and I explained the whole situation to Jarrott, over the rail. ’Gave him all my silly instructions—those latest ones, y’know. I told him to do nothing to imperil existing political relations. I told him to exercise tact. I—I told him that in my capac’ty as Actin’ Lootenant, you see. Jarrott’s only a Lootenant-Commander—at fifty-four, too! Yes, I handed my Uncle Newt over to Jarrott to chaperone, and I went back to my—I can say it perfectly—pis-ca-to-rial party in the bay. Now I’m going to have a nap. In ten minutes I shall be on deck again. This is my first civilised dinner in nine weeks, so I don’t apologise.’

He pushed his plate away, dropped his chin on his palm and closed his eyes.

‘Lyndnoch and Jarrott’s Bank, established 1793,’ said Maddingham half to himself. ‘I’ve seen old Jarrott in Cowes week bullied by his skipper and steward till he had to sneak ashore to sleep. And now he’s out mine-sweeping with Cordelia! What’s happened to his—I shall forget my own name next—Belfast-built two-hundred tonner?’

‘Goneril,’ said Portson. ‘He turned her over to the Service in October. She’s—she was Culana.’

‘She was Culana, was she? My God! I never knew that. Where did it happen?’

‘Off the same old Irish corner I was watching last month. My young cousin was in her; so was one of the Raikes boys. A whole nest of mines, laid between patrols.’

‘I’ve heard there’s some dirty work going on there now,’ Maddingham half whispered.

‘You needn’t tell me that,’ Portson returned. ‘But one gets a little back now and again.’

‘What are you two talking about?’ said Tegg, who seemed to be dozing too.

‘Culana,’ Portson answered as he lit a cigarette.

‘Yes, that was rather a pity. But . . . What about this Newt of ours?’

‘I took her over from Jarrott next day—off Margate,’ said Portson. ‘Jarrott wanted to get back to his mine-sweeping.’

‘Every man to his taste,’ said Maddingham. ‘That never appealed to me. Had they detailed you specially to look after the Newt?’

‘Me among others,’ Portson admitted. ‘I was going down Channel when I got my orders, and so I went on with him. Jarrott had been tremendously interested in his course up to date—specially off the Wash. He’d charted it very carefully and he said he was going back to find out what some of the kinks and curves meant. Has he found out, Tegg?’

Tegg thought for a moment. ‘Cordelia was all right up to six o’clock yesterday evening,’ he said.

‘’Glad of that. Then I did what Winchmore did. I lay behind this stout fellow and saw him well into the open.’

‘Did you say anything to him?’ Tegg asked.

‘Not a thing. He kept moving all the time.’

‘’See anything?’ Tegg continued.

‘No. He didn’t seem to be in demand anywhere in the Channel, and, when I’d got him on the edge of soundings, I dropped him—as per your esteemed orders.’

Tegg nodded again and murmured some apology.

‘Where did you pick him up, Maddingham?’ Portson went on.

Maddingham snorted.

‘Well north and west of where you left him heading up the Irish Channel and stinking like a taxi. I hadn’t had my breakfast. My cook was seasick; so were four of my hands.’

‘I can see that meeting. Did you give him a gun across the bows?’ Tegg asked.

‘No, no. Not that time. I signalled him to heave to. He had his papers ready before I came over the side. You see,’ Maddingham said pleadingly, ‘I’m new to this business. Perhaps I wasn’t as polite to him as I should have been if I’d had my breakfast.’

‘He deposed that Maddingham came alongside swearing like a bargee,’ said Tegg.

‘Not in the least. This is what happened.’ Maddingham turned to Portson. ‘I asked him where he was bound for and he told me—Antigua.’

‘Hi! Wake up, Winchmore. You’re missing something.’ Portson nudged Winchmore, who was slanting sideways in his chair.

‘Right! All right! I’m awake,’ said Winchmore stickily. ‘I heard every word.’

Maddingham went on. ‘I told him that this wasn’t his way to Antigua——’

‘Antigua. Antigua!’ Winchmore finished rubbing his eyes. ‘“There was a young bride of Antigua——”’

‘Hsh! Hsh!’ said Portson and Tegg warningly.

page 4

‘Why? It’s the proper one. “Who said to her spouse, ‘What a pig you are!’”’

‘Ass!’ Maddingham growled and continued: ‘He told me that he’d been knocked out of his reckoning by foul weather and engine-trouble, owing to experimenting with a new type of Diesel engine. He was perfectly frank about it.’

‘So he was with me,’ said Winchmore. ‘Just like a real lady. I hope you were a real gentleman, Papa.’

‘I asked him what he’d got. He didn’t object. He had some fifty thousand gallon of oil for his new Diesel engine, and the rest was coal. He said he needed the oil to get to Antigua with, he was taking the coal as ballast, and he was coming back, so he told me, with coconuts. When he’d quite finished, I said: “What sort of damned idiot do you take me for?” He said: “I haven’t decided yet!” Then I said he’d better come into port with me, and we’d arrive at a decision. He said that his papers were in perfect order and that my instructions—mine, please!—were not to imperil political relations. I hadn’t received these asinine instructions, so I took the liberty of contradicting him—perfectly politely, as I told them at the Inquiry afterward. He was a small-boned man with a grey beard, in a glengarry, and he picked his teeth a lot. He said: “The last time I met you, Mister Maddingham, you were going to Carlsbad, and you told me all about your blood-pressures in the wagon-lit before we tossed for upper berth. Don’t you think you are a little old to buccaneer about the sea this way?” I couldn’t recall his face—he must have been some fellow that I’d travelled with some time or other. I told him I wasn’t doing this for amusement—it was business. Then I ordered him into port. He said: “S’pose I don’t go?” I said: “Then I’ll sink you.” Isn’t it extraordinary how natural it all seems after a few weeks? If any one had told me when I commissioned Hilarity last summer what I’d be doing this spring I’d—I’d . . . God! It is mad, isn’t it?’

‘Quite,’ said Portson. ‘But not bad fun.’

‘Not at all, but that’s what makes it all the madder. Well, he didn’t argue any more. He warned me I’d be hauled over the coals for what I’d done, and I warned him to keep two cables ahead of me and not to yaw.’

‘Jaw?’ said Winchmore sleepily.

‘No. Yaw;’ Maddingham snarled. ‘Not to look as if he even wanted to yaw. I warned him that, if he did, I’d loose off into him, end-on. But I was absolutely polite about it. ‘Give you my word, Tegg.’

‘I believe you. Oh, I believe you,’ Tegg replied.

‘Well, so I took him into port—and that was where I first ran across our Master Tegg. He represented the Admiralty on that beach.’

The small blinking man nodded. ‘The Admiralty had that honour,’ he said graciously.

Maddingham turned to the others angrily. ‘I’d been rather patting myself on the back for what I’d done, you know. Instead of which, they held a court-martial——’

‘We called it an Inquiry,’ Tegg interjected.

‘You weren’t in the dock. They held a court-martial on me to find out how often I’d sworn at the poor injured Neutral, and whether I’d given him hot-water bottles and tucked him up at night. It’s all very fine to laugh, but they treated me like a pickpocket. There were two fat-headed civilian judges and that blackguard Tegg in the conspiracy. A cursed lawyer defended my Neutral and he made fun of me. He dragged in everything the Neutral had told him about my blood-pressures on the Carlsbad trip. And that’s what you get for trying to serve your country in your old age!’ Maddingham emptied and refilled his glass.

‘We did give you rather a grilling,’ said Tegg placidly. ‘It’s the national sense of fair play.’

‘I could have stood it all if it hadn’t been for the Neutral. We dined at the same hotel while this court-martial was going on, and he used to come over to my table and sympathise with me! He told me that I was fighting for his ideals and the uplift of democracy, but I must respect the Law of Nations!’

‘And we respected ’em,’ said Tegg. ‘His papers were perfectly correct; the Court discharged him. We had to consider existing political relations. I told Maddingham so at the hotel and he——’

Again Maddingham turned to the others. ‘I couldn’t make up my mind about Tegg at the Inquiry,’ he explained. ‘He had the air of a decent sailor-man, but he talked like a poisonous politician.’

‘I was,’ Tegg returned. ‘I had been ordered to change into that rig. So I changed.’

Maddingham ran one fat square hand through his crisped hair and looked up under his eyebrows like a shy child, while the others lay back and laughed.

‘I suppose I ought to have been on to the joke,’ he stammered, ‘but I’d blacked myself all over for the part of Lootenant-Commander R.N.V.R. in time of war, and I’d given up thinking as a banker. If it had been put before me as a business proposition I might have done better.’

‘I thought you were playing up to me and the judges all the time,’ said Tegg. ‘I never dreamed you took it seriously.’

‘Well, I’ve been trained to look on the law as serious. I’ve had to pay for some of it in my time, you know.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Tegg. ‘We were obliged to let that oily beggar go—for reasons, but, as I told Maddingham, the night the award was given, his duty was to see that he was properly directed to Antigua.’

‘Naturally,’ Portson observed. ‘That being the Neutral’s declared destination. And what did Maddingham do? Shut up, Maddingham!’

Said Tegg, with downcast eyes: ‘Maddingham took my hand and squeezed it; he looked lovingly into my eyes (he did!); he turned plumcolour, and he said: “I will” just like a bride
groom at the altar. It makes me feel shy to think of it even now. I didn’t see him after that till the evening when Hilarity was pulling out of the Basin, and Maddingham was cursing the tug-master.’

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‘I was in a hurry,’ said Maddingham. ‘I wanted to get to the Narrows and wait for my Neutral there. I dropped down to Biller and Grove’s yard that tide (they’ve done all my work for years) and I jammed Hilarity into the creek behind their slip, so the Newt didn’t spot me when he came down the river. Then I pulled out and followed him over the Bar. He stood nor-west at once. I let him go till we were well out of sight of land. Then I overhauled him, gave him a gun across the bows and ran alongside. I’d just had my lunch, and I wasn’t going to lose my temper this time. I said: “Excuse me, but I understand you are bound for Antigua?” He was, he said, and as he seemed a little nervous about my falling aboard him in that swell, I gave Hilarity another sheer in—she’s as handy as a launch—and I said: “May I suggest that this is not the course for Antigua?” By that time he had his fenders overside, and all hands yelling at me to keep away. I snatched Hilarity out and began edging in again. He said: “I’m trying a sample of inferior oil that I have my doubts about. If it works all right I shall lay my course for Antigua, but it will take some time to test the stuff and adjust the engines to it.” I said: “Very good, let me know if I can be of any service,” and I offered him Hilarity again once or twice—he didn’t want her—and then I dropped behind and let him go on. Wasn’t that proper, Portson?’

Portson nodded. ‘I know that game of yours with Hilarity,’ he said. ‘How the deuce do you do it? My nerve always goes at close quarters in any sea.’

‘It’s only a little trick of steering,’ Maddingham replied with a simper of vanity. ‘You can almost shave with her when she feels like it. I had to do it again that same evening, to establish a moral ascendancy. He wasn’t showing any lights, and I nearly tripped over him. He was a scared Neutral for three minutes, but I got a little of my own back for that damned court-martial. But I was perfectly polite. I apologised profusely. I didn’t even ask him to show his lights.’

‘But did he?’ said Winchmore.

‘He did—every one; and a flare now and then,’ Maddingham replied. ‘He held north all that night, with a falling barometer and a rising wind and all the other filthy things. Gad, how I hated him! Next morning we got it, good and tight from the nor-nor-west out of the Atlantic, off Carso Head. He dodged into a squall, and then he went about. We weren’t a mile behind, but it was as thick as a wall. When it cleared, and I couldn’t see him ahead of me, I went about too, and followed the rain. I picked him up five miles down wind, legging it for all he was worth to the south’ard—nine knots, I should think. Hilarity doesn’t like a following sea. We got pooped a bit, too, but by noon we’d struggled back to where we ought to have been—two cables astern of him. Then he began to signal, but his flags being end-on to us, of course, we had to creep up on his beam—well abeam—to read ’em. That didn’t restore his morale either. He made out he’d been compelled to put back by stress of weather before completing his oil tests. I made back I was sorry to hear it, but would be greatly interested in the results. Then I turned in (I’d been up all night) and my lootenant took on. He was a widower (by the way) of the name of Sherrin, aged forty-seven. He’d run a girls’ school at Weston-super-Mare after he’d left the Service in ’ninety-five, and he believed the English were the Lost Tribes.’

‘What about the Germans?’ said Portson.

‘Oh, they’d been misled by Austria, who was the Beast with Horns in Revelations. Otherwise he was rather a dull dog. He set the tops’ls in his watch. Hilarity won’t steer under any canvas, so we rather sported round our friend that afternoon, I believe. When I came up after dinner, she was biting his behind, first one side, then the other. Let’s see—that would be about thirty miles east-sou-east of Harry Island. We were running as near as nothing south. The wind had dropped, and there was a useful cross-rip coming up from the south-east. I took the wheel and, the way I nursed him from starboard, he had to take the sea over his port bow. I had my sciatica on me—buccaneering’s no game for a middleaged man—but I gave that fellow sprudel! By Jove; I washed him out! He stood it as long as he could, and then he made a bolt for Harry Island. I had to ride in his pocket most of the way there because I didn’t know that coast. We had charts, but Sherrin never understood ’em, and I couldn’t leave the wheel. So we rubbed along together, and about midnight this Newt dodged in over the tail of Harry Shoals and anchored, if you please, in the lee of the Double Ricks. It was dead calm there, except for the swell, but there wasn’t much room to manoeuvre in, and I wasn’t going to anchor. It looked too like a submarine rendezvous. But first, I came alongside and asked him what his trouble was. He told me he had overheated his something-or-other bulb. I’ve never been shipmates with Diesel engines, but I took his word for it, and I said I ’ud stand by till it cooled. Then he told me to go to hell.’

‘If you were inside the Double Ricks in the dark, you were practically there,’ said Portson.

‘That’s what I thought. I was on the bridge, rabid with sciatica, going round and round like a circus-horse in about three acres of water, and wondering when I’d hit something. Ridiculous position. Sherrin saw it. He saved me. He said it was an ideal place for submarine attacks, and we’d better begin to repel ’em at once. As I said, I couldn’t leave the wheel, so Sherrin fought the ship—both quick-firers and the maxims. He tipped ’em well down into the sea or well up at the Ricks as we went round and round. We made rather a row; and the row the gulls made when we woke ’em was absolutely terrifying. ‘Give you my word!’

‘And then?’ said Winchmore.

‘I kept on running in circles through this ghastly din. I took one sheer over toward his stern—I thought I’d cut it too fine, but we missed it by inches. Then I heard his capstan busy, and in another three minutes his anchor was up. He didn’t wait to stow. He hustled out as he was—bulb or no bulb. He passed within ten feet of us (I was waiting to fall in behind him) and he shouted over the rail: “You think you’ve got patriotism. All you’ve got is uric acid and rotten spite!” I expect he was a little bored. I waited till we had cleared Harry Shoals before I went below, and then I slept till 9 a.m. He was heading north this time, and after I’d had breakfast and a smoke I ran alongside and asked him where he was bound for now. He was wrapped in a comforter, evidently suffering from a bad cold. I couldn’t quite catch what he said, but I let him croak for a few minutes and fell back. At 9 a.m. he turned round and headed south (I was getting to know the Irish Channel by then) and I followed. There was no particular sea on. It was a little chilly, but as he didn’t hug the coast I hadn’t to take the wheel. I stayed below most of the night and let Sherrin suffer. Well, Mr. Newt kept up this game all the next day, dodging up and down the Irish Channel. And it was infernally dull. He threw up the sponge off Cloone Harbour. That was on Friday morning. He signalled: “Developed defects in engine-room. Antigua trip abandoned.” Then he ran into Cloone and tied up at Brady’s Wharf. You know you can’t
repair a dinghy at Cloone! I followed, of course, and berthed behind him. After lunch I thought I’d pay him a call. I wanted to look at his engines. I don’t understand Diesels, but Hyslop, my engineer, said they must have gone round ’em with a hammer, for they were pretty badly smashed up. Besides that, they had offered all their oil to the Admiralty agent there, and it was being shifted to a tug when I went aboard him. So I’d done my job. I was just going back to Hilarity when his steward said he’d like to see me. He was lying in his cabin breathing pretty loud-wrapped up in rugs and his eyes sticking out like a rabbit’s. He offered me drinks. I couldn’t accept ’em, of course. Then he said: “Well, Mr. Maddingham, I’m all in.” I said I was glad to hear it. Then he told me he was seriously ill with a sudden attack of bronchial pneumonia, and he asked me to run him across to England to see his doctor in town. I said, of course, that was out of the question, Hilarity being a man-of-war in commission. He couldn’t see it. He asked what had that to do with it? He thought this war was some sort of joke, and I had to repeat it all over again. He seemed rather afraid of dying (it’s no game for a middle-aged man, of course) and he hoisted himself up on one elbow and began calling me a murderer. I explained to him—perfectly politely—that I wasn’t in this job for fun. It was business. My orders

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were to see that he went to Antigua, and now that he wasn’t going to Antigua, and had sold his oil to us, that finished it as far as I was concerned. (Wasn’t that perfectly correct?) He said: “But that finishes me, too. I can’t get any doctor in this Godforsaken hole. I made sure you’d treat me properly as soon as I surrendered.” I said there wasn’t any question of surrender. If he’d been a wounded belligerent, I might have taken him aboard, though I certainly shouldn’t have gone a yard out of my course to land him anywhere; but as it was, he was a neutral—altogether outside the game. You see my point? I tried awfully hard to make him understand it. He went on about his affairs all being at loose ends. He was a rich man—a million and a quarter, he said—and he wanted to redraft his will before he died. I told him a good many people were in his position just now—only they weren’t rich. He changed his tack then and appealed to me on the grounds of our common humanity. “Why, if you leave me now, Mr. Maddingham,” he said, “you condemn me to death, just as surely as if you hanged me.”’

‘This is interesting,’ Portson murmured. ‘I never imagined you in this light before, Maddingham.’

‘I was surprised at myself—’give you my word. But I was perfectly polite. I said to him: “Try to be reasonable, sir. If you had got rid of your oil where it was wanted, you’d have condemned lots of people to death just as surely as if you’d drowned ’em.” “Ah, but I didn’t,” he said. “That ought to count in my favour.” “That was no thanks to you,” I said. “You weren’t given the chance. This is war, sir. If you make up your mind to that, you’ll see that the rest follows.” “I didn’t imagine you’d take it as seriously as all that,” he said—and he said it quite seriously, too. “Show a little consideration. Your side’s bound to win anyway.” I said: “Look here! I’m a middle-aged man, and I don’t suppose my conscience is any clearer than yours in many respects, but this is business. I can do nothing for you.”’

‘You got that a bit mixed, I think,’ said Tegg critically.

‘He saw what I was driving at,’ Maddingham replied, ‘and he was the only one that mattered for the moment. “Then I’m a dead man, Mr. Maddingham,” he said. “That’s your business,” I said. “Good afternoon.” And I went out.’

‘And?’ said Winchmore, after some silence.

‘He died. I saw his flag half-masted next morning.’

There was another silence. Henri looked in at the alcove and smiled. Maddingham beckoned to him.

‘But why didn’t you lend him a hand to settle his private affairs?’ said Portson.

‘Because I wasn’t acting in my private capacity. I’d been on the bridge for three nights and——’ Maddingham pulled out his watch—‘this time to-morrow I shall be there again—confound it! Has my car come, Henri?’

‘Yes, Sare Francis. I am sorry.’ They all complimented Henri on the dinner, and when the compliments were paid he expressed himself still their debtor. So did the nephew.

‘Are you coming with me, Portson?’ said Maddingham as he rose heavily.

‘No. I’m for Southampton, worse luck! My car ought to be here, too.’

‘I’m for Euston and the frigid calculating North,’ said Winchmore with a shudder. ‘One common taxi, please, Henri.’

Tegg smiled. ‘I’m supposed to sleep in just now, but if you don’t mind, I’d like to come with you as far as Gravesend, Maddingham.’

‘Delighted. There’s a glass all round left still,’ said Maddingham. ‘Here’s luck! The usual, I suppose? “Damnation to all neutrals!”’

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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.

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‘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.’

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‘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.

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‘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.

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‘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.

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‘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.’

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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.

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‘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.