Chapter 7 No.7

At the window of one of the detached houses in the residential part of the town a small Naval Cadet stood with his nose flattened against the window-pane.

"I say, Betty," he ejaculated presently, "they're giving leave to the

Fleet. I can see crowds of officers coming ashore."

His sister continued to knit industriously. "Well, I don't suppose any of them are coming here. You needn't get so excited."

Her brother watched the uniformed figures filing along the distant road from the landing place. "I hope this war goes on for another couple of years," he sighed.

"Joe! You mustn't say such dreadful things. You don't know what you're talking about."

"That's all jolly fine, but you haven't got to do another year at Osborne-- I say, Betty, one of them is coming here! How jolly exciting! He's coming up the avenue now. He's got red hair. . . . I believe-yes, it's-what was the name of that Lieutenant at Jack's wedding, d'you remember? The funny man. He made you giggle all the time."

For a moment the knitting appeared to demand his sister's undivided attention; she bent her head over it. "That was a long time ago-before I put my hair up. I'm sure I didn't giggle either. Oh, yes, I think I remember who you mean. Is he coming here? I wonder-come away from the window, Joe!"

The front door bell rang in a distant part of the house; she dropped her knitting on a small side table and walked quietly out of the room. "I'll tell mother," she said as she went out.

"You needn't trouble to do that," said Joe. "She's out-I thought you knew." But the door had closed.

A moment later the Indiarubber Man was ushered in. The two representatives of His Majesty's Navy shook hands. "I recognised you from your photograph," said the host. "D'you remember the wedding group? You were a groomsman when Jack and Milly were married, weren't you?"

"I was," replied the Indiarubber Man. "I performed a number of menial offices that day. But were you there? I don't seem to remember you."

Joe shook his head. "No, I had mumps. Wasn't it rot? It must have been an awful good rag. But I remember about you because Betty told me afterwards-she's my sister, you know. She said you were-oh, here she is."

Betty entered. She cast one swift glance at her brother that might have been intended to convey interrogation or admonition, or both, and then greeted the Indiarubber Man with friendly composure. "How nice of you to come and see us! Mother is out, I'm afraid, but she will probably be in presently. Do sit down. Yes, of course I remember you-Joe, ring the bell, and we'll have tea."

"We were 'opposite numbers' at your brother's wedding," said the Indiarubber Man, taking a seat, and nervously hitching up the legs of his trousers to an unnecessary extent.

"Yes, I remember restraining you with difficulty from going into the garden to eat worms! Nobody--" she broke off abruptly. "What a long time ago that seems!" She laughed quietly and considered him with merriment in her pretty eyes. The Indiarubber Man made a swift mental comparison between the schoolgirl bridesmaid who vied with midshipmen in devouring ices, and his hostess of three years or so later.

"Doesn't it?" he said. For one instant their eyes met, shyly questioning, a little curious. The laughter died out of hers.

"My eldest brother's in the North Sea now. We haven't seen him since the War started."

The Indiarubber Man nodded. "Yes, he's in a battle-cruiser, isn't he? We don't get ashore much either, as a matter of fact. But to-day--" He entered into a lengthy statement of naval policy that led up to his visit and the circumstances connected with it. It was a rather tedious explanation, but it filled in the time till tea arrived, when Betty busied herself among the tea-cups; her brother drew his chair close to their guest, and sat regarding him with breathless expectancy. Was this the side-splitting humorist Betty had talked so much about for months after the wedding-and then abruptly refused to mention again?

Joe experienced a growing sense of disillusionment. There was nothing about the Indiarubber Man's conversation to justify high hopes of laughter-provoking humour. In fact, the guest's general demeanour compared unfavourably with that of the curate-a shy young man, victim (had Joe but known it) of a hopeless and unrequited passion.

Joe handed the Indiarubber Man his cup with the air of one prepared to enjoy at all events the spectacle of a juggling trick with the teaspoon or saucer. The guest's chief concern, however, appeared to be in finding a more secure resting-place for it than his knee, coupled with anxiety not to drop crumbs on the carpet.

Betty, presiding behind the silver tea-tray, had adopted her most grown-up manner. Decidedly it was all Betty's fault, therefore. The most confirmed humorist could hardly be expected to indulge in drolleries in the presence of a girl who stuck her nose in the air and put on enough side for six. It became increasingly obvious that the depressed jester must straightway be removed from this blighting influence or ever the cap and bells would jingle.

No sooner was tea over, therefore, than Joe sprang to his feet. "I say, would you like to go for a walk?" Once outside, the flower of wit would expand without a doubt.

The Indiarubber Man appeared nonplussed at the proposal. "I-it's very kind of you--" Then he turned to Betty. "Shall we all three go for a walk?"

"Oh, it's no use asking her to go for a proper walk," interposed the alarmed Joe. "Her skirts are too narrow; she can't keep step, or jump ditches, or anything."

Betty laughed. "Are you anxious to jump ditches, Mr. Standish? Because, if not, I think I might be able to keep up with you both." She rose to her feet, a slim, gracefully modelled young woman who looked perfectly capable of keeping up with anyone-or of jumping ditches, too, for that matter. "I'll get my things if you will wait a second." Joe, unseen by their guest, made a face at her of unfeigned brotherly disgust.

In the open air, however, the guest's spirits gave no more evidence of an upward tendency than they had indoors. The trio walked, via the sea front, to the gardens on top of the cliffs that overlooked the harbour. Joe directed the conversation; it was largely concerned with battle and bloodshed.

"Mr. Standish, what do you do in action?" he asked presently.

"Nothing," was the reply. "I just put my fingers in my ears and shut my eyes-I'm the officer of the after turret. But when it's all over I put on overalls and crawl about the works on my stomach and get a dirty face with the best of them. A wit once defined a turret as a bundle of tricks done up in armour."

"Is it thick armour?" asked Betty.

"They tell me it is-fellows on board who pretend to know everything.

But I suspect that to be a mere ruse to get me to stay inside it."

Joe sighed. "I do envy you," he said. "Everyone seems to have something to do, 'cept me. Even Betty here--"

The Indiarubber Man turned his head sharply. "Why, what--"

Betty turned pink. "I'm going to nurse-on the East Coast. My old school has been turned into a hospital. And the other day Miss Dacre-she was the principal, you know, and she is nursing there now-wrote to mother and said they would take me."

"But," said the Indiarubber Man, "d'you think you could stick it-hacking off fellows' legs, and that sort of thing? Blessed if I could do it."

"Oh, yes," was the calm reply. "I passed all my exams, a long time ago-in fact, I've been working down here at this hospital for the last six months. We learned a good deal at school, you see. Home nursing, and so on."

"Did you, by Jove! Simple dishes for the sick-room and spica bandages, and all the rest of it?"

Betty laughed. "Oh, yes, all that."

The Indiarubber Man glanced at her small, capable hands, and from them to the dainty profile beside him. "Well," he said, "if I get bent by an eight-inch shell I shall know where to come."

Betty laughed again; "I should have to look that up in a book, then, before I nursed you. It might mean complications!"

"It might," replied the Indiarubber Man.

From the town below, where here and there a window went suddenly aflare with the reflection of the sunset-light, there drifted up to them the faint, clear call of a bugle. Another took it up along the front, and yet another. The Indiarubber Man raised his head abruptly.

"That's the recall!" he said, and turned towards the ships. "Yes, they've hoisted the Blue Peter. I wonder-the boats are coming in, too."

"Does that mean you must go at once?"

He nodded soberly. "I'm afraid so," and held out his hand. "Good-bye."

"Hallo!" said Joe. "I say, you're not off, are you? What's up?"

"That's what I'm going to find out," was the reply. "I believe it's another of their dodges to lure me inside my turret. Good-bye, Miss Betty. Don't forget to read up the book of the words-in case of complications. . . . Good-bye!" The Indiarubber Man departed down one of the steep paths that led to the lower road and the landing-place. The brother and sister turned and walked slowly back to the house.

Their conversation on the way was confined to speculation on the part of Joe as to the reason for this sudden recall. His theories covered a wide range of possibilities. Only when they reached the house did Betty volunteer a remark, and then in the privacy of her own room, whose window looked out across the harbour and the sea.

"Oh, I hate the War," she said. "I hate it, I hate it. . . ."

[1] Paying calls.

V

THE KING'S PARDON

Ask the first thousand bluejackets you meet ashore, any afternoon the Fleet is giving leave, why they joined the navy. Nine hundred and ninety-nine will eye you suspiciously, awaiting the inevitable tract. If none is forthcoming they will give a short, grim laugh, shake their heads, and, as likely as not, expectorate. These portents may be taken to imply that they really do not know themselves, or are too shy to say so, if they do.

The thousandth does not laugh. He may shake his head; spit he certainly will. And then, scenting silent sympathy, he guides you to a quiet bar-parlour where you can pay for his beer while he talks.

This is the man with a past and a grievance.

* * * * *

Nosey Baines, Stoker Second-class, was a man with a past. He also owned a grievance when he presented himself for entry into His Majesty's Navy. They were about his only possessions.

"Nosey" was not, of course, his strict baptismal name. That was Orson-no less. Therein lay the past. "Nosey" was the result of facial peculiarities quite beyond his control. His nose was out of proportion to the remainder of his features. This system of nomenclature survives from the Stone Age, and, sailors being conservative folk, still finds favour on the lower-decks of H.M. Ships and Vessels.

The Writer in the Certificate Office at the Naval Depot, where Nosey Baines was entered for service as a Second-class Stoker under training, had had a busy morning. There had been a rush of new entries owing to the conclusion of the hop-picking season, the insolvency of a local ginger-beer bottling factory, and other mysterious influences. Nosey's parchment certificate (that document which accompanies a man from ship to ship, and, containing all particulars relating to him, is said to be a man's passport through life) was the nineteenth he had made out that morning.

"Name?"

Nosey spelt it patiently.

"Religion?"

Nosey looked sheepish and rather flattered-as a Hottentot might if you asked him for the address of his tailor. The Writer gave the surface of the parchment a preparatory rub with a piece of indiarubber. "Well, come on-R. C., Church of England, Methodist . . . ?"

Nosey selected the second alternative. It sounded patriotic at all events.

"Next o' kin? Nearest relative?"

"Never 'ad none," replied Nosey haughtily. "I'm a norfun."

"Ain't you got no one?" asked the weary Writer. He had been doing this sort of thing for the last eighteen months, and it rather bored him. "S'pose you was to die-wouldn't you like no one to be told?"

Nosey brought his black brows together with a scowl and shook his head. This was what he wanted, an opportunity to declare his antagonism to all the gentler influences of the land. . . . If he were to die, even . . .

The Ship's Corporal, waiting to guide him to the New Entry Mess, touched him on the elbow. The Writer was gathering his papers together. A sudden wave of forlornness swept over Nosey. He wanted his dinner, and was filled with emptiness and self-pity. The world was vast and disinterested in him. There were evidences on all sides of an unfamiliar and terrifying discipline. . . .

"You come allonger me," said the voice of the Ship's Corporal, a deep, alarming voice, calculated to inspire awe and reverence in the breast of a new entry. Nosey turned, and then stopped irresolutely. If he were to die--

"'Ere," he said, relenting. "Nex' o' kin-I ain't got none. But I gotter fren'." He coloured hotly. "Miss Abel's 'er name; 14 Golder's Square, Bloomsbury, London. Miss J. Abel."

This was Janie-the Grievance. It was to punish Janie that Nosey had flung in his lot with those who go down to the sea in ships.

Prior to this drastic step Nosey had been an errand-boy, a rather superior kind of errandboy, who went his rounds on a ramshackle bicycle with a carrier fixed in front. Painted in large letters on the carrier was the legend:

J. HOLMES & SON,

FISHMONGER ICE, ETC.,

and below, in much smaller letters, "Cash on delivery."

Janie was a general servant in a Bloomsbury boarding-house. She it was who answered the area door when Nosey called to deliver such kippers and smoked haddock as were destined by the gods and Mr. Holmes for the boarding-house breakfast table.

It is hard to say in what respect Janie lit the flame of love within Nosey's breast. She was diminutive and flat-chested; her skin was sallow from life-long confinement in basement sculleries and the atmosphere of the Bloomsbury boarding-house. She had little beady black eyes, and a print dress that didn't fit her at all well. One stocking was generally coming down in folds over her ankle. Her hands were chapped and nubbly-pathetic as the toil-worn hands of a woman alone can be. Altogether she was just the little unlovely slavey of fiction and the drama and everyday life in boarding-house-land.

Yet the fishmonger's errand-boy-Orson Baines, by your leave, and captain of his soul-loved her as not even Antony loved Cleopatra.

Janie met him every other Sunday as near three o'clock as she could get away. The Sunday boarding-house luncheon included soup on its menu, which meant more plates to wash up than usual. They met under the third lamp-post on the left-hand side going towards the British Museum.

Once a fortnight, from 8 p.m. till 10 p.m., Janie tasted the penultimate triumph of womanhood. She was courted. Poor Janie!

No daughter of Eve had less of the coquette in her composition. Not for a moment did she realise the furrows that she was ploughing in Nosey's amiable soul. Other girls walked out on their Sundays. The possession of a young man-even a fishmonger's errand-boy on twelve bob a week-was a necessary adjunct to life itself. Of all that "walking out" implied: of love, even as it was understood in Bloomsbury basements, Janie's anaemic little heart suspected very little; but romance was there, fluttering tattered ribbons, luring her on through the drab fog of her workaday existence.

It was otherwise with Nosey. His love for Janie was a very real affair, although what sowed the seeds was not apparent, and although the soil in which they took root and thrived-the daily interviews at the area door and these fortnightly strolls-seemed, on the face of it, inadequate. Perhaps he owed his queer gift of constancy to the mysterious past that gave him his baptismal name. They were both unusual.

A certain Sunday afternoon in early autumn found them sitting side by side on a seat in a grubby London square. Janie, gripping the handle of cook's borrowed umbrella, which she held perpendicularly before her, the toes of her large boots turned a little inwards, was sucking a peppermint bull's-eye.

To Nosey the hour and the place seemed propitious, and he proposed heroic marriage.

"Lor!" gasped Janie, staring before her at the autumn tints that were powdering the dingy elms with gold-dust. There was mingled pride and perplexity in her tones; slowly she savoured the romantic moment to the full, turning it over in her mind as the bull's-eye revolved in her cheek, before finally putting it from her. Then:

"I couldn't marry you," she said gently. "You ain't got no prospecks." Walking out with twelve bob a week was one thing; marriage quite a different matter.

In the Orphanage where she had been reared from infancy the far-seeing Sisters had, perhaps, not been unmindful of the possibility of this moment. A single life of drudgery and hardship, even as a boarding-house slavey, meant, if nothing more, meals and a roof over her head. Improvident marriage demanded, sooner or later, starvation. This one star remained to guide her when all else of the good Sisters' teaching grew dim in her memory.

Prospecks-marry without and you were done. So ran Janie's philosophy.

The remains of the bull's-eye faded into dissolution.

Nosey was aghast. The perfidy of women! "You led me on!" he cried. "You bin carry in' on wiv me. . . . 'Ow could you? Pictur' palaces an' fried fish suppers an' all." He referred to the sweets of their courtship. "'Ow, Janie!"

Janie wept.

After that the daily meetings at the area door were not to be thought of. Nosey flung himself off in a rage, and for two successive nights contemplated suicide from the parapet of Westminster Bridge. The irksome round of duties on the ramshackle bicycle became impossible. The very traffic murmured the name of Janie in his ears. London stifled him; he wanted to get away and bury himself and his grief in new surroundings. Then his eye was caught by one of the Admiralty recruiting posters in the window of a Whitehall post office. It conjured up a vision of a roving, care-free life . . . of illimitable spaces and great healing winds. . . . A life of hard living and hard drinking, when a man could forget.

But somehow Nosey didn't forget.

* * * * *

The Navy received him without emotion. They cut his hair and pulled out his teeth. They washed and clothed and fed him generously. He was taught in a vast echoing drill-shed to recognise and respect authority, and after six months' preliminary training informed that he was a Second-class Stoker, and as such drafted to sea in the Battle-Cruiser Squadron.

Here Nosey found himself an insignificant unit among nearly a thousand barefooted, free-fisted, cursing, clean-shaven men, who smelt perpetually of soap and damp serge, and comprised the lower-deck complement of a British battle-cruiser.

He worked in an electric-lit, steel tunnel, with red-hot furnaces on one side, and the gaping mouths of coal caverns on the other. You reached it by perpendicular steel ladders descending through a web of hissing steam pipes and machinery; once across greasy deck-plates and through a maze of dimly lit alleys, you would find Nosey shovelling coal into the furnaces under the direction of a hairy-chested individual afflicted, men said, by religious mania, who sucked pieces of coal as an antidote to chronic thirst, and spat about him indiscriminately.

There were eight-hour intervals in this work, during which Nosey slept or ate his meals or played a mouth-organ in the lee of one of the turret-guns on deck, according to the hour of the day. He slept in a hammock slung in an electric-lit passage far below the water-line; the passage was ten feet wide, and there were six hammocks slung abreast along the entire length of it.

He ate his meals in a mess with twenty other men, the mess consisting of a deal plank covered with oilcloth for a table, and two narrower planks on either side as seats; there were shelves for crockery against the ship's side. All this woodwork was scrubbed and scoured till it was almost as white as ivory. Other messes, identical in every respect, situated three feet apart, ranged parallel to each other as far as the steel, enamelled bulkheads. There were twenty men in each mess, and seventeen messes on that particular mess-deck, and here the members simultaneously ate, slept, sang, washed their clothes, cursed and laughed, skylarked or quarrelled all round during the waking hours of their watch-off.

Still Nosey did not forget.

* * * * *

Then came Janie's letter from the Middlesex Hospital. Janie was in a "decline."

The men who go down into trenches in the firing-line are, if anything, less heroic than the army of cooks and Janies who descend to spend their lives in the basement "domestic offices" of Bloomsbury. Dark and ill-ventilated in summer, gas-lit and airless throughout the foggy winter. Flight upon flight of stairs up which Janie daily toiled a hundred times before she was suffered to seek the attic she shared with cook under the slates. Overwork, lack of fresh air and recreation-all these had told at last.

Nosey availed himself of week-end leave from Portsmouth to journey up to London, and was permitted an interview with her in the big airy ward. Neither spoke much; at no time had they been great conversationalists, and now Janie, more diminutive and angular than ever, lost in the folds of a flannel nightgown, was content to hold his hand as long as he was allowed to remain.

The past was ignored, or nearly so. "You didn't orter gone off like that," said Janie reproachfully. "But I'm glad you're a sailor. You looks beautiful in them clothes. An' there's prospecks in the Navy." Poor little Janie: she had "prospecks" herself at last.

He left the few flowers he had brought with the sister of the ward when the time came to leave. The nurse followed him into the corridor. "Come and see her every visiting day you can," she said. "It does her good and cheers her. She often speaks of you."

Nosey returned to Portsmouth and his ship. His mess-the mess-deck itself-was agog with rumours. Had he heard the "buzz"? Nosey had not. "I bin to London to see a fren'," he explained.

Then they told him.

The battle-cruiser to which he belonged had been ordered to join the

Mediterranean Fleet. That was Monday; they were to sail for Malta on

Thursday.

And Janie was dying in the Middlesex Hospital.

* * * * *

The next visiting day found him at Janie's bedside. But, instead of his spick-and-span serge suit of "Number Ones" and carefully ironed blue collar, Nosey wore a rusty suit of "civvies" (civilian clothes). Instead of being clean-shaven, an inconsiderable moustache was feeling its way through his upper lip.

"Where's your sailor clothes?" asked Janie weakly.

Nosey looked round to reassure himself that they were not overheard. "I done a bunk!" he whispered.

Janie gazed at him with dismayed eyes. "Not-not deserted?"

Nosey nodded. "Don't you take on, Janie. 'S only so's I can stay near you." He pressed her dry hand. "I got a barrer-whelks an' periwinkles. I've saved a bit o' money. An' now I can stay near you an' come 'ere visiting days."

Janie was too weak to argue or expostulate. It may have been that she was conscious of a certain amount of pride in Nosey's voluntary outlawry for her sake; and she was glad enough to have someone to sit with her on visiting days and tell her about the outside world she was never to see again. She even went back in spirit to the proud days when they walked out together. . . . It brought balm to the cough-racked nights and the weary passage of the days.

Then the streets echoed with the cries of paper-boys. The nurses whispered together excitedly in their leisure moments; the doctors seemed to acquire an added briskness. Once or twice she heard the measured tramp of feet in the streets below, as a regiment was moved from one quarters to another.

England was at war with Germany, they told her. But the intelligence did not interest Janie much at first. That empires should battle for supremacy concerned her very little-till she remembered Nosey's late calling.

It was two days before she saw him again, and he still wore his "civvy" suit. Janie smiled as he approached the bed, and fumbled with the halfpenny daily paper that somebody had given her to look at.

'"Ere," she whispered, "read that."

Nosey bent over and read the lines indicated by the thin forefinger.

His Majesty the King has been graciously pleased to approve of pardons being granted to all deserters from the Royal Navy and Marines who surrender themselves forthwith.

There was silence in the ward for a moment. Far below in the street outside a transport wagon rumbled by. Janie braced herself for the supreme act of her life.

"You gotter go," said she.

Nosey stared at her and then back at the newspaper. "Not me!" he retorted, and took possession of her hand.

"That's the King's pardon," said Janie, touching the halfpenny news-sheet with transparent fingers. "'Tain't no use you comin' 'ere no more, 'cos I won't see you. I'll ask 'em at the door not to let you in."

Nosey knew that note of indomitable obstinacy in the weak voice. He knew, as he sat looking down upon the fragile atom in the bed, that he could kill her with the pressure of a finger.

But there was no way of making Janie go back on her decision once her mind was made up. "If there's a war, you orter be fightin'," she added. "There's prospecks . . ." Her weak voice was almost inaudible, and the nurse was coming down the ward towards them.

Nosey lifted the hot, dry little claw to his lips. "If you sez I gotter go, I'll go," and rose to his feet.

"'Course you gotter go. The King sez so, an' I sez so. Don't you get worritin' about me; I'll be all right when you comes 'ome wiv yer medals. . . ."

Nosey caught the nurse's eye and tiptoed out of the ward. Janie turned her face to the Valley of the Shadow.

VI

AN OFF-SHORE WIND

The circular rim of the fore-top took on a harder outline as the sky paled at the first hint of dawn.

From this elevation it was possible to make out the details of the ships astern, details that grew momentarily more distinct. Day, awakening, found the Battle Fleet steaming in line ahead across a smooth grey sea. The smoke from the funnels hung like a long dark smear against the pearly light of the dawn; but as the pearl changed to primrose and the primrose to saffron, the sombre streamers dissolved into the mists of morning.

Somewhere among the islands on our starboard bow a little wind awoke and brought with it the scent of heather and moist earth. It was a good smell-just such a smell as our nostrils had hungered for for many months-and it stirred a host of vagrant memories as it went sighing past the halliards and shrouds.

It was the turn of the Indiarubber Man (with whom I had shared the night's vigil aloft) to snatch a "stretch off the land" with his back against the steel side of our erie [Transcriber's note: eyrie?]. He shifted his position uneasily, and the hood of his duffel-suit fell back: his face, in the dawning, looked white and tired and unshaven. Cinders had collected in the folds of the thick garment as wind-blown snow lies in the hollows of uneven ground.

As I stood looking down at him an expression of annoyance passed across his sleeping countenance.

"Any old where--" he said in a clear, decisive voice. "Down a rabbit-hole . . ."

And I laughed because the off-shore wind had fluttered the same page in the book of pleasant memories that we both shared. The petulant expression passed from his face, and he sank into deeper oblivion, holding the Thermos flask and binoculars against him like a child clasping its dolls in its sleep.

It was just before we mobilised for the summer-a mobilisation which, had we but known it, was to last until our book of pleasant memories was thumbed and dog-eared and tattered with much usage-that the Indiarubber Man suggested taking a day off and having what he called a "stamp." He fetched our ordnance map and spread it on the ward-room table, and we pored over it most of the evening, sucking our pipes.

All Devon is good; and for a while the lanes had called us, winding from one thatched village to another between their fragrant, high-banked hedges. "Think of the little pubs . . ." said the Indiarubber Man dreamily. We thought of them, but with the vision came one of cyclists of the grey-sweater variety, and motorists filling the air with petrol fumes and dust.

There was the river: woodland paths skirting in the evening a world of silver and grey, across which bats sketched zigzag flights. Very nice in the dimpsey light, but stuffy in the daytime. So the moor had it in the end. We would trudge the moor from north to south, never seeing a soul, and, aided by map and compass, learn the peace of a day spent off the beaten tracks of man.

We had been in the train some time before the Indiarubber Man made his electrifying discovery.

"Where's the map?" We eyed one another severely and searched our pockets. "We were looking at it before I went to get the tickets," he pursued. "I gave it to you to fold up."

So he had. I left it on the station seat.

At a wayside station bookstall we managed to unearth an alleged reproduction of the fair face of South Devon to replace the lost map.

The Indiarubber Man traced the writhings of several caterpillars with his pipe-stem. "These are tors," he explained generously. After this we studied the map in silence, vainly attempting to confirm our recollections of a course marked out the previous evening on an ordnance survey map.

We were both getting slightly confused when, with a screech of brakes, the train pulled up at the little moorside station that was our destination by rail. Sunlight bathed the grey buildings on the platform and the sleepy village beyond. From the blue overhead came the thin, sweet notes of a lark, and as we listened in the stillness we heard a faint whispering "swish" like the sound of a very distant reaper. It was the wind flowing across miles of reeds and grass and heather from the distant Atlantic. But it was not until half an hour later, when we breasted the crest of the great hog-back that stretched before us like a rampart, that we ourselves met the wind. It came out of the west, athwart the sun's rays, a steady rush of warm air; and with it came the tang of the sea and hint of honey and new-mown hay that somehow clings to Devon moorland through all the changing seasons.

A cluster of giant rocks piled against the sky to our left drew us momentarily out of our course. With some difficulty we scrambled up their warm surfaces, where the lichen clung bleached and russet, and stood looking out across the rolling uplands of Devon. Worthier adventurers would have improved the shining hour with debate as to the origin of this upflung heap of Nature's masonry. Had it served departed Phoenicians as an altar? Heaven and the archaeologists alone knew.

To the northward the patchwork of plough and green corn, covert and hamlet commenced at the edge of the railway and stretched undulating over hill and dale to where a grey smudge proclaimed the sea.

South lay the moor, inscrutable and mysterious, dotted with the monuments of a people forgotten before walls ringed the seven hills of Rome. The outlines of tors, ever softening in the distance, led the eye from rugged crest to misty beacon till, forty miles away, they dissolved into the same grey haze.

The Indiarubber Man pointed a lean, prophetic forefinger to the rolling south. "There's Wheatwood," he said. "Come on." And so, shouldering our coats, with the hot sunlight on our right cheeks and the day before us, we started across Dartmoor.

For nearly two hours the tor from which we had started watched with friendly reassurance over intervening hills; then it dipped out of sight, and we were conscious of a sudden loneliness in a world of enigmatic hut-circles, peopled by sheep and peewits. We were working across a piece of ground intersected by peat-cuttings, and after half an hour of it the Indiarubber Man fished out the map and compass from his pocket.

"There ought to be a clump of trees, a hut-circle, and a Roman road knocking about somewhere. Can you see anything of them?"

I searched the landscape through glasses from my recumbent position in the heather, but prolonged scrutiny failed to reveal a single tree, nor was the Roman road startlingly obvious in the trackless waste. Our map had proved too clever for us. In the circumstances there was only one thing to be done. With awful calm we folded the sheet, tore it into little pieces, and hid them in a rabbit-hole.

For about five miles after that we kept along a promontory that shouldered its way across an undulating plain, ringed in the distance by purple hills; then we sighted our distant landmark-a conical beacon-that we had been steering for. We were descending, thigh-deep in bracken, when the wind bore down to us from a dot against the skyline of a ridge the tiniest of thin whistles. A few minutes later a sheep-dog raced past in the direction of a cluster of white specks. For a while we watched it, and each lithe, effortless bound, as it passed upon its quest, struck a responsive chord within us-we who floundered clumsily among the boulders in our path.

But, for all this momentary exhilaration, it seemed a long time later that we struck the source of the burn which would in time guide us to our half-way halting place. To us, who had been nurtured on its broad bosom,[1] there was something almost pathetic-as in meeting an old nurse in much reduced circumstances-about this trickle among the peat and moss. Lower down, however, it widened, and the water poured over granite boulders, with a bell-like contralto note, into a succession of amber pools.

There we shed our few garments on the bank, and the moments that followed, from the first exultant thrill as the water effervesced over our bodies till we crawled out dripping to dry in the wind and sun, seemed to hold only gratitude-an immense undefined gratitude to the Power that held all life. At its heels came hunger, wonderfully well defined.

Lower down, where the road that stretches like a white ribbon over the bosom of the moor crosses the river, there is an inn. I will not name it: writers of poems and guide-books-worthier penmen all-have done that. Besides, quite enough people go there as it is. We dropped, via a kine-scented yard and over a seven-foot bank, into the road abreast the inn door, and here a brake, freighted with tourist folk, brought us suddenly back to the conventions that everyday life demands.

True, we were never fain to cling to these; but, standing there on the King's high-road, clad in football knickers and thin jerseys, sun-burnt and dishevelled, we were conscious of a sudden immense embarrassment. And, in sooth, had we dropped from the skies or been escaping from the grey prison not far distant, the tenants of the brake could hardly have been less merciful in their scrutiny or comments.

After the clean wind of the moor, the taint of the last meal and over-clad fellow-beings seemed to cling unpleasantly to the low-ceilinged room whither we fled, and I do not think we breathed comfortably again till we had paid our bill and returned to the sunlight. Before leaving we inquired the time, and learned it was nearly four o'clock.

One ought to "know the time," it seems, among men's haunts; but, once out of sight of these, it suffices, surely, to eat when hungry, sleep when tired, roam as long as daylight and legs will let one-in fine, to share with the shaggy ponies and browsing sheep a lofty disregard for all artificial divisions of the earth's journey through space. And our joint watch happened at the time to be undergoing repairs in Plymouth.

To follow the ramifications of a road gives one no lasting impression of the surrounding country, but directly a wanderer has to depend on landmarks as a guide, all his powers of observation quicken. One ragged hill-top guided us to another, across valleys scored with the workings of forgotten tin-mines. A brook, crooning its queer, independent moor-song between banks of peat, rambled beside us for some time. Then, as if wearying of our company, it turned abruptly and was lost to view; in the summer stillness of late afternoon we heard it babbling on long after our ways separated.

If the truth be known, I suspect it deemed us dullish dogs. But we were tiring-not with the jaded weariness begotten of hard roads, when the spine aches and knees stiffen; no, a comfortable lassitude was slackening our joints and bringing thoughts of warm baths and supper. However, our shadows, valiant fellows, swung along before us across the rusty bracken with a cheerful constancy, and, encouraged by their ever-lengthening strides and by the solitude, we even found heart to lift our voices in song. Now and again small birds fled upwards with shrill twitters at our approach, and settled again to resume their interrupted suppers; but after a while they left for their roosts in the rowans and sycamores to the south, and rabbits began to show themselves in the open spaces among the furze. As if reluctantly, the perfect day drew to its close.

We raced up the flank of a long ridge to keep the setting sun in view, reaching the crest as it dipped to meet a ragged tor, and sank in a golden glow. A little wind, like a tired sigh, ruffled the tops of the heather, swayed the grass an instant, and was gone.

"Ah-h-h!" breathed the Indiarubber Man in the stillness.

A thousand feet below us smoke was curling from the thickly wooded valley. It was five miles away, but somewhere amid those trees men brewed and women baked.

"Come on," he added tensely. "Beer!"

As we descended into the lowlands a widening circle of night was stealing up into the sky-the blue-grey and purple of a pigeon's breast. A single star appeared in the western sky, intensifying the peace of the silent moor behind us. Stumbling through twilit woods and across fields of young barley, we met a great dog-fox en route for someone's poultry-run. He bared his teeth with angry effrontery as he sheered off and gave us a wide berth across the darkening fields. Doubtless he claimed his supremacy of hour and place, as did the sheep-dog that passed us so joyously earlier in the day. And, after all, what were we but interlopers from a lower plane!

The thirty-odd miles of our ramble reeled up like a tape-measure as we reached the lane, splashed with moonlight, that led us to the village. The gateway to every field held a pair of lovers whispering among the shadows: yet inexplicably they seemed an adjunct of their surroundings and the faintly bewildering night-scents. A dog sitting at the gate of a cottage uttered a short bark as we neared his domain; then, with a queer grumbling whimper, he came to us across the dust, and perhaps because-as far as is given to man in his imperfections-we had not wittingly done evil that day, he slobbered at our hands.

In the flagged and wainscotted parlour of the village inn a child brought us bread and cheese and froth-crested mugs of beer. While we ate and drank, she watched us with tranquil interest in violet-coloured eyes that foretold a sleepless night for some bucolic swain in years to come.

The Indiarubber Man finished his last draught and stood up with a mighty sigh to loosen his belt. Then, bending down, he took the child's flower-like face between his hands:

"'Now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace,'" he said gravely.

Beer was ever prone to lend a certain smack of Scripture to his remarks.

"Surt'nly," said the little maid, all uncomprehending, and ran out to fetch our reckoning.

* * * * *

The Thermos flask slid with a clatter on to the steel deck of the top, and the Indiarubber Man opened his eyes. He yawned and stretched himself and rose stiffly to his feet.

The first rays of the sun were rising out of the sea. "Hai-yah!" He yawned. "Another bloomin' day. . . . I was dreaming . . . about . . . blowed if I can remember what I was dreaming about." He adjusted the focus of his glasses and stared out across the North Sea. "I wonder if they're coming out to-day."

It was the two hundred and seventy-third morning we had wondered that.

[1] The River Dart.

VII

THE DAY

Although it all happened in that dim, remote period of time "Before the

War," Torps and the First Lieutenant, the Indiarubber Man (who was the

Lieutenant for Physical Training Duties), the Junior Watchkeeper, and

others who participated, long afterwards referred to it as "The Day."

Since then they have seen their own gunfire sink an enemy's ship as a well-flung brick disposes of an empty tin on the surface of a pond. The after twelve-inch guns, astride whose muzzles David and Freckles once soared to the giddy stars, have hurled instantaneous and awful death across leagues of the North Sea. The X-ray apparatus, by the agency of which Cornelius James desired to see right through his own "tummy," has enabled the Fleet Surgeon to pick fragments of steel out of tortured bodies, as a conjurer takes things out of a hat. The after-cabin, that had witnessed so many informal tea-and-muffin parties, has been an ether-reeking hospital.

Yet these memories grew blurred in time, as mercifully such memories do. It was another and more fragrant one that sweetened the grim winter vigil in the North, when every smudge of smoke on the horizon might have been the herald of Armageddon. They were yet to see men die by scores in the shambles of a wrecked battery, by hundreds on the shell-torn decks of a ship that sank, fighting gallantly to the last. And the recollection of what I am about to relate doubtless supplied sufficient answer to the question that at such times assails the minds of men.

Two who helped in that unforgettable good-night scene on the aft-deck were destined to add their names to the Roll of Britain's Honour. It is not too much to hope that the echo of children's merriment guided their footsteps through that dark Valley of the Shadow to the peaks of Eternal Laughter which lie beyond.

* * * * *

It all started during one of those informal tea-parties the Skipper's Missus sometimes held in the after-cabin. They were delightful affairs. You needn't accept the Invitation if you didn't want to; there was no necessity to put on your best monkey-jacket if you did. You were just told to "blow in" if you wanted some tea, and then you made your own toast, and there was China tea, in a big blue-and-white pot, that scented the whole cabin.

The Skipper's Missus sat by the fire, with her hands linked round her knees in her habitually graceful and oddly characteristic attitude; Torps and Jess, those gentle philosophers, occupied the chintz-covered settee; the A.P. sat on the hearth-rug, cross-legged like a tailor, so that he could toast and consume the maximum number of muffins with the minimum amount of exertion; the Junior Watchkeeper, who by his own admission "went all the bundle on his tea," and the Indiarubber Man, who was clumsy with a tea-cup, shared the table and a jam-pot, and sat munching, tranquil-eyed, like a pair of oxen in a stall.

The Captain and the First Lieutenant were rummaging through the drawers of the knee-hole table in search of an ancient recipe of the former's for manufacturing varnish of a peculiar excellence wherewith to beautify the corticene on the aft-deck.

"How are the children?" asked the Torpedo Lieutenant, helping himself to milk and Jess to a lump of sugar. "Out of quarantine yet?"

"Yes," replied the youthful mother of Georgina, Jane, and Cornelius James. "At last, poor things! Christmas is such a wretched time to have measles. No parties, no Christmas-tree--"

The A.P. looked up from the absorbing task of buttering a muffin to his satisfaction. "D'you remember the Christmas when you all came on board-wasn't it a rag? I broke my glasses because I was a tiger. I was that fierce."

"And I was chased by the dockyard police all the way from the Admiral Superintendent's garden with a young fir-tree under my arm. We had it for a Christmas-tree in the wardroom. Do you remember?"

They were all old friends, you see, and had served two commissions in succession with this Captain.

"Isn't it rather hard on the Chee-si's?" asked Torps, "being done out of their parties-no, Jess, three lumps are considered quite enough for little dogs to consume at one sitting."

The Skipper's Missus looked across the cabin at her husband: "Tim, your tea's getting cold. Why shouldn't we have a children's party on board one day next week? It isn't too late, is it?"

"Yes, sir," chimed in the Indiarubber Man. "A pukka children's party, with wind-sails for them to slither down and a merry-go-round on the after-capstan?"

The Captain drank his tea thoughtfully; his blue eyes twinkled. "Let us have a definition of children, Standish. I seem to remember a certain bridesmaid at the Gunnery Lieutenant's wedding of what I believe is technically called the 'flapper' age--"

"Quite right, sir," cut in the Torpedo Lieutenant. "Our lives were a misery for weeks afterwards. He burbled about 'shy flowerets' in his sleep, sir--"

The Indiarubber Man blushed hotly. "Not 't'll, sir. They're talking rot. She thought I was ninety, and daft at that. They always do," he added sighing, the sigh of a sore heart that motley traditionally covers.

"I propose that we have no one older than Georgina or younger than Cornelius James," suggested the Junior Watchkeeper. "That limits the ages to between ten and seven, and then I think Standish's susceptible heart would be out of danger."

"How many children do you propose to turn loose all over the ship?" inquired the First Lieutenant dourly. "No one seems to have taken my paint-work into consideration. It's all new this week."

The Skipper's Missus laughed softly. "We were so concerned about Mr.

Standish's heart, Mr. Hornby, that we quite forgot your paint-work.

Couldn't it be all covered up just for this once? Besides, they are

such tiny children . . ."

There are many skippers' missuses, but only one mother of Georgina,

Jane, and Cornelius James.

The First Lieutenant capitulated.

"I vote we don't have any grown-ups, either," contributed the Junior Watchkeeper, "except ourselves. Mothers and nurses always spoil children's parties."

The mother of Georgina, Jane, and Cornelius James wrung her hands in mock dismay. "Oh, but mayn't I come? I promise not to spoil anything-I love parties so!"

The A.P. rushed in where an angel might have been excused for faltering. "Glegg means that you don't count as a grown-up at a children's party," he explained naively, regarding the Skipper's Missus through his glasses with dog-like devotion.

She laughed merrily. "You pay a pretty compliment, Mr. Gerrard!"

"Double-O" Gerrard reddened and lapsed into bashful silence.

"It is agreed, then. We are to have a children's party, and I may come. Won't the children be excited!"

"Torps, what are you going to do with them," asked the First Lieutenant, "besides breaking their necks by pushing them down the windsails?" He spoke without bitterness, but as a man who had in his youth embraced cynicism as a refuge and found the pose easier to retain than to discard.

The Torpedo Lieutenant regarded him severely. "It's no good adopting this tone of lofty detachment, Number One. You're going to do most of the entertaining, besides keeping my grey hairs company."

The First Lieutenant laughed, a sad, hard laugh without any laughter in it. "I don't amuse children, I'm afraid. In fact, I frighten them. They don't like my face. No, no--"

"Mr. Hornby," interposed the Skipper's Missus reproachfully, "that isn't quite true, is it? You know Jane prays for you nightly, and Corney wouldn't for worlds sleep without that wooden semaphore you made him--"

"I think Hornby would make an admirable Father Neptune," said the

Captain, considering him mischievously, "with a tow wig and beard--"

"And my green bath kimono," supplemented the A.P. "I bought it at Nagasaki, in the bazaar. It's got green dragons all over it--" He met the First Lieutenant's eye and lapsed into silence again.

"Yes! Yes! And oyster-shells sewn all over it, and seaweed trailing . . ." The Skipper's Missus clapped her hands. "And distribute presents after tea. Oh, Mr. Hornby, wouldn't that be lovely!"

The First Lieutenant took no further part in the discussion. But late that night he was observed to select a volume of the "Encyclopaedia Britannica" (L-N) from the wardroom library, and retire with it to his cabin. His classical education had been scanty, and left him in some doubt as to what might be expected of the son of Saturn and Rhea at a children's party.