Part 4

She accompanied him on board the following day, to be led by a grave-faced Petty Officer along spotless decks that smelt of tar and resin. She saw the chest-deck, where servants were slinging hammocks above the black-and-white painted chests--the chest-deck with its wide casement ports and rows of enamelled basins, and everywhere that smell of hemp and scrubbed woodwork.

"Number 32, you are, sir," said the Petty Officer; and as he spoke she knew the time had come when her boy was no longer hers alone.

They bade farewell by the gangway, under the indifferent eyes of a sentry, and Number 32 watched the frail figure in the waterman's boat till it was out of sight. Then he turned with a desperate longing for privacy--anywhere where he could go and blubber like a kid. But from that time onwards (with the rare exceptions of leave at home) he was never to know privacy again.

*II.*

The old _Britannia_ training consisted of four terms, each of three months' duration, during which a boy fresh from the hands of a tutor or crammer had many things to learn. He was taught to "drop everything and nip!" when called; how, when, and whom to salute. To pull an oar and sail a boat; to knot, splice, and run aloft; how to use a sextant. He learned that trigonometry and algebra were not really meaningless mental gymnastics, but a purposeful science that guided men upon trackless seas. In short, at an age when other schoolboys see their education nearing its end, he had to begin all over again, to be moulded afresh for a higher purpose.

The path of the "New" in those days was by no means strewn with roses. Jerry had to submit to strange indignities and stranger torments at the hands of Olympian "Niners" (Fourth-term Cadets). He had to accustom himself to bathe, dress and undress, to sleep and to pray, surrounded by a hundred others. There was also the business of the hammock, in and out of which he was learning to turn without dishonour.

But the conclusion of the first breathless three months found him amazingly fit and happy. His mind was stored with newly-acquired and vastly interesting knowledge. The beagles and football sweated the "callow suet" off him and gave him the endurance of a lean hound. He was fitting into the new life as a hand into a well-worn glove.

The end of his second term brought the coveted triangular badge on the right cuff that marks the Cadet Captain among his fellows. The duties (which are much the same as those of monitor or prefect) offered him his first introduction to the peculiar essence we call tact, necessary in dealing with contemporaries. About this time began his friendship with Jubbs. This young gentleman's real name was as unlike his sobriquet as anything could be; among a community of Naval Cadets this was perhaps a sufficient _raison d'etre_: anyhow none other was ever forthcoming. They earned their "Rugger" colours together as scrum and stand-off halves, and as time went on a slow friendship matured and knit between them. Their first sight of each other had been in the hotel the evening before joining. Thenceforward it pleased the power that is called Destiny to run the brief threads of their lives together to the end.

At the close of their third term they became Chief Cadet Captains, and Jubbs' papa, a long, lean baronet with a beak-like nose, came down to attend the prize-giving. At the conclusion of the ceremony he was piloted to the Canteen, where the Cadet Captains were pleased to "stodge" at his expense, while he--as one who sits at meat among the gods--trumpeted his satisfaction into a flaring bandana handkerchief.

At the end of the fourth and last term Jerry's mother came down to see the last prize-giving, and thus was present when her son received the King's Medal. For one never-to-be-forgotten moment she watched him turn from the dais and come towards her, erect and rather pale, with compressed lips. But the cheering broke from the throats of three hundred inveterate hero-worshippers like a tempest, and then a mist hid him from her sight.

*III.*

A P. & O. liner, a few months later, carried Jerry and Jubbs to China. During the voyage they came in contact with a hitherto unrecognised factor in life, and found themselves faced with unforeseen perplexities. One evening, as they leaned over the rail experimenting gingerly with two cigars, Jubbs unburdened himself. "... Besides, they jaw such awful rot," was his final summary of feminine allurements. Jerry nodded, tranquil-eyed. "I know. I told Mrs What's-her-name--that woman with the ear-rings--that I'd got one mother already; and as I'm going to China, and she's going to India, I didn't see the use of being tremendous friends. 'Sides, she's as old as the hills."

Jerry! Jerry! The lady in question was barely thirty, even if she had an unaccountable partiality for taking him into the bows to watch the moon rise over the Indian Ocean.

They joined their ship at Hong-Kong, and found themselves members of a crowded, cockroach-haunted gunroom, where every one was on the best of terms with every one else, and there reigned a communism undreamed of in their philosophy. It is said that in those days of stress and novelty, among unknown faces and unfamiliar surroundings, their friendship bound them in ever-closer ties. The Sub-Lieutenant, when occasion arose for the chastisement of one, thrashed the other out of sheer pity. They kept watch, took in signal exercise, went ashore, shot snipe, picnicked and went through their multifarious duties generally within hail of one another. Till at length Jerry's call of "Jubbs!" and Jubbs' unfailing "Coming!" brought half-wistful smiles to older eyes.

The Boxer rising broke out like a sudden flame, and their letters home, those voluminous and ill-spelt missives that meant so much to the recipients, announced the momentous tidings. Jerry was landing in charge of a maxim gun; Jubbs was to be aide-de-camp to the Commander. Their whites were being dyed a warlike tint of khaki, and they were being sent up to take part in the defence of Tientsin. For a while silence, then at last a letter scrawled in pencil on some provision wrappers. Jerry boasted a three-weeks' growth of stubble, and had killed several peculiarly ferocious Boxer bravos. They were looking forward to being moved up to Peking for the relief of the Legations, and there was practically no danger as long as a fellow took reasonable precautions. He had not seen Jubbs for some time, but expected to meet him before long.

As a matter of fact, they came together the next afternoon, and their meeting-place was a Joss-house that had been converted into a temporary field-hospital. Jerry was the first to arrive, "in the bight of a canvas trough"--Jerry, very white and quiet, a purple-brown stain spreading over his dusty tunic and a bullet lodged somewhere near the base of the spine. Towards sunset he became conscious, and the Red Cross nursing sister supported his head while he drank tepid water from a tin mug. "'Sparkling Cider,'" he whispered weakly, "for luck, ... thank you, mummie darling."

The firing outside was becoming intermittent and gradually growing more distant, when the patch of dusty sunlight in the doorway was darkened by a fresh arrival. The stretcher party laid him on the bed next to Jerry and departed. The Surgeon made a brief examination, and as he straightened up, met the pitying eyes of the Red Cross sister. He shook his head.

"The poor children," she whispered. Outside there came a sudden renewal of firing and the spiteful stammer of a maxim. It died away, and there was silence, broken by the buzzing of flies in the doorway and the sound of some one fighting for his breath. In the heavy air the sickly smell of iodoform mingled with the odours of departed joss-sticks and sun-baked earth.

Suddenly, from a bed in the shadows, a weak voice spoke--

"Jubbs!" said Jerry.

A moment's pause, while the motionless figure in the next bed gathered energy for a last effort of speech. Then--

"Coming!" said Jubbs.

*X.*

*THE CHOSEN FOUR.*

The Admiral, it was rumoured, had said, "Let there be Signal Midshipmen." Wherefore the Flag-Lieutenant communed with the Commander, who sent for the Senior Midshipman.

The Senior Midshipman responded to the summons with an alacrity that hinted at a conscience not wholly void of offence.

"Let there be Signal Midshipmen," said the Commander, or words to that effect, "in four watches."

"Aye, aye, sir," said the Senior Midshipman. He emerged from the Commander's cabin and breathed deeply, as one who had passed unscathed through a grave crisis. Apparently that small matter of the picket-boat's damaged stem-piece had been overlooked.

Ere he was out of earshot, however, the Commander spoke again. "By the way," added the Arbiter of his little destinies, "I don't want to see your name in the leave-book again until the picket-boat is repaired."

"Aye, aye, sir," repeated the Senior Midshipman. He descended to the Gunroom, where, it being "make-and-mend" afternoon, his brethren were wrapped in guileless slumber. An 'Inman's Nautical Tables,' lying handy on the table, described a parabola through the air, and, striking a prominent portion of the nearest sleeper's anatomy, ricochetted into his neighbour's face. The two sat up, glowered suspiciously at each other for an instant, and joined battle. The shock of their conflict overturned a form, and two more recumbent figures awoke wrathfully to "life and power and thought."

"You four," announced the Senior Midshipman calmly, when the uproar had subsided, "will take on signal duty from to-morrow morning." Then, having satisfactorily discharged the duty imposed upon him, he settled himself to slumber on the settee.

Three of the four, to whom this announcement was made gasped and were silent. _Signals_! Under the very eye of the Admiral! Each one saw himself an embryo Flag-Lieutenant.... One even made a little prophetic motion with his left arm, as though irked by the aiguilette that in fancy already encircled it. The fourth alone spoke---

"Crikey!" he muttered, "an' my only decent pair of breeches are in the scran-bag"[#]

[#] The "scran-bag" is the receptacle for articles of clothing, &c., left lying about at First Lieutenant's rounds in the morning. Gear thus impounded can be redeemed once a week by payment of a bar of soap.

* * * * *

Men say that with the passing of "Masts and Yards" the romance of the Naval Service died. This is for those to judge who have seen a fleet of modern battleships flung plunging from one complex formation to another at the dip of a "wisp of coloured bunting," and have watched the stutter of a speck of light, as unseen ships talk across leagues of darkness.

The fascination of a game only partly understood, yet ever hinting vast possibilities, seized upon the minds of the Chosen Four. Morse and semaphore of course they knew, and the crude translations of the flags were also familiar enough. But the inner mysteries of the science (and in these days it is a very science) had not as yet unfolded themselves.

At intervals the Flag-Lieutenant would summon them to his cabin, where, with the aid of the Signal Books and little oblong pieces of brass, he demonstrated the working of a Fleet from the signal point of view, and how a mistake in the position of a flag in the hoist might result in chaos--and worse.

The Chosen Four sat wide-eyed at his feet amid cigarette ash and the shattered fragments of the Third Commandment.

Harbour watch-keeping perfected their semaphore and Morse, till by ceaseless practice they could read general signals flashed at a speed that to the untrained eye is merely a bewildering flicker. As time wore on they began to acquire the almost uncanny powers of observation common to the lynx-eyed men around them on the bridge.

Each ship in a Fleet is addressed by hoisting that ship's numeral pendants. The ship thus addressed hoists an answering pendant in reply. At intervals all through the day the Signal Yeoman of the Watch would suddenly snap his glass to his eye, pause an instant as the wind unfurled a distant flutter of bunting at some ship's yard-arm, and then jump for the halyard that hoisted the answering pendant. The smartness of a ship's signal-bridge is the smartness of that ship, and in consequence this is a game into which the stimulus of competition enters, Signal Boatswain, Midshipmen, and Yeomen vying with each other to be the first to give the shout, "Up Answer!"

One night at the Junior Officers' Club one of the Chosen Four encountered another of his ilk from a different ship: and, since at eighteen (if you are ever to become anything) shop is a right and necessary topic of conversation, they fell to discussing their respective bridges.

Presently said he of the other ship, waxing pot-valiant by reason of Marsala, "I'll bet you a dinner ashore we'll show your pendants before the week's up."

Now should a ship fail to see a signal made to her, other ships present can be very offensive by hoisting the pendants of the ship addressed at mast-head and yard-arms. This is to hold the delinquent up as an object of scorn and derision to the Fleet, and is a fate more dreaded by right-minded signalmen than the Plagues of Egypt.

"An' I'll give you fifteen seconds' grace," added the speaker.

The challenge was accepted, and for five sweltering days--it was summer at Malta--the two ships watched each other from sunrise till dark, the pendants "bent" to the halyards in readiness. On the evening of the sixth day a thunderstorm that had been brewing all the afternoon burst in a torrential downpour over the harbour. At that instant a signal crept to the flagship's yard-arm.

On board the ship addressed the Midshipman had dashed for the shelter of the bridge-house, the Yeoman was struggling into an oilskin, and the Second Hand had stepped into the lee of a search-light.

"Stand by--thirteen, fourteen..." counted the small figure standing in the driving rain on the flagship's bridge, watch in hand: "fifteen, Hoist!" Then for the first time in his short career he deserted his post. Clattering pell-mell down the ladders to the Gunroom, where the remainder of the Chosen Four were playing cut-throat whist, he flung back the drab-coloured curtain.

"Got him!" he shouted triumphantly. "By the aching stomach, I had him _cold_!"

* * * * *

I have said that of the Chosen Four--three saw visions, while the other bewailed the inaccessibility till the end of the week of his best trousers. Now of the four he alone came to wear the aiguilettes of a Flag-Lieutenant, and to-day the mysteries of Tactics, Fleet Organisation and Formation, are to him as an open book. A Baker Street photographer once had the temerity to display his photograph in the window, in uniform, tinted. Passing by, I heard a woman gush foolishly to her companion, "Oh, isn't he a darling!"

The relevancy of this anon.

Another forsook the bunting-draped path of Signals to climb to fame through the smoke of many battle practices. He now adds after his rank the cryptic initial (G). The third married an heiress and her relations, and retired. He has several children and is reported to have lost interest in the Service.

The remaining one, when I saw him last, had also lost interest in the Service. He was lying in a curiously crumpled heap across the stakes of a jungle stockade, his empty revolver dangling by the lanyard round his neck. A handful of his men fought like demons to recover possession of the mutilated body.

"Sure," said a bearded Petty Officer, half apologetically, wiping his cutlass with a tussock of grass, "we couldn't lave him there--an' himself somewan's darlin', likely..."

Sailors are inveterate sentimentalists.

*XI.*

*A COMMITTEE OF SUPPLY.*

The Junior Watch-keeper entered the Wardroom and rang the bell with an air of gloomy mystery.

"The Russians are coming," he announced. "Cocktail, please, waiter."

The Young Doctor looked up from the year-old 'Bradshaw' with which he was wont to enliven moments of depression by arranging mythical week-ends at friends' houses in various parts of England. It was a dreary amusement, and, conducted off the coast of Russian Tartary, stamped him as the possessor of no small imaginative powers.

"Who said so?"

"Skipper: three Russian Destroyers, an' we're to invite them to dinner, an' there's nothing to eat." The Junior Watch-keeper managed the affairs of the Mess for that quarter.

"Those chaps feed like fighting-cocks," observed the Assistant Paymaster. "Let's send for the Messman."

The Junior Watch-keeper applied himself to his cocktail in silence, and the Celestial bandit who, in consideration of a monthly levy of thirty dollars per head, starved or poisoned them according to his whim, appeared in the doorway. The Mess broached the subject with quailing hearts; it was proposed to dine the representatives of a foreign Power. Could he for once rise to the occasion and produce a suitable repast?

The Oriental summed up the situation with impassive brevity--

"No can do."

"Oh, rot!" said the Junior Watch-keeper, who up to this juncture had been gracefully pursuing the olive at the bottom of his glass with the tip of his tongue. "Pull your socks up, Ah Chee, an' think of something."

The Messman brooded darkly. "S'pose you go shore-side, catchee salmon, catchee snipe, pl'aps can do."

"By Jove, yes," said the A.P., rising and walking to the scuttle. "We never thought of that. But it's a God-forsaken place--look at it."

The ship was anchored in a little bay off the mouth of a shallow river. On one side the ground rose abruptly to a bleak promontory, and on the other stretched a waste of sand-dunes. Inland not a tree or vestige of human habitation broke the dreary expanse of plain, which was covered with stunted bushes and rolled away to a range of low hills in the distance.

"All very fine to talk about salmon," said the Young Doctor, "but there isn't a rod in the ship, and no one could use it if there was."

"Make one," suggested the Junior Watchkeeper, with cheerful resource begotten of cocktails.

"But flies--? A rod's no good without flies and things."

"I'll make a spinner. They won't take a fly in these parts, a fellow told me at Shanghai. 'Sides, we can't chuck a fly."

The Carpenter was summoned to the conclave, and the result of his labours was a formidable spar, resembling more closely a hop-pole than a salmon-rod, some fourteen feet in length.

"Why not take the lower boom and have done with it?" inquired the Young Doctor, who had abandoned 'Bradshaw' in favour of his gun-case, and was dabbling with awful joy in oil and cotton-waste.

The Junior Watch-keeper vouched no reply. His was the spirit of the "Compleat Angler," and armed with a nippers and clasp-knife he wrestled grimly with the lid of a tobacco-tin. Half an hour's toil, conducted in profane silence, resulted in a triangular object which, embellished with red bunting and bristling with hooks, he passed round for the startled consideration of the Mess.

"Well," admitted the Young Doctor, with the air of one generously conceding a debatable point, "you _might_ catch the bottom, with a certain amount of luck, but--" a well-flung cushion cut short further criticism, and the Committee of Supplies adjourned.

The rising sun next morning beheld three depressed-looking figures disembarking on the sandy beach. The Junior Watch-keeper had fashioned a wondrous reel out of pieces of a cigar-box, and the Boatswain had provided about thirty fathoms of mackrel-line and some thin wire. The A.P. essayed a joke about using the rod as a flagstaff to commemorate their landing, but it lacked savour--as indeed jests do in the pale light of dawn. Wreaths of mist hung over the river, swirling between sandy banks, leaden-grey and noiseless. A few gulls wheeled overhead, protesting at the invasion with dismal cries, and the waves broke whispering along the beach in an arc of foam.

The three adventurers gazed despondently at the sand-dunes, the receding stern of the boat, and finally each other's sleepy, unshaven faces. The Young Doctor broke suddenly into a feeble cackle of laughter. An unfamiliar chord of memory vibrated, and with it came a vision of a certain coffee-stall outside Charing Cross Station and the Junior Watch-keeper's wan face surmounted by a battered opera-hat. "Jove!" he murmured. "... Reminds me ... Covent Garden Ball...!"

The A.P. had toiled to the top of an adjacent mound, from which, like Moses of old, he "surveyed the landscape o'er." "Come on," he shouted valiantly.

"Well," said the Junior Watch-keeper, "_Vive le sport_! If there were no fools there'd be no fun." He shouldered his strange impedimenta and joined the A.P.

Away to their left a glint of water showed intermittently as the river wound between clumps of low bushes and hillocks. Patches of level ground covered with reeds and coarse grass fought with the sand-dunes, and stretched away in dreary perspective to the hills. Briefly they arranged their plan of campaign: the Junior Watch-keeper was to fish up-stream, the other two meeting him about five miles inland in a couple of hours' time. They separated, and the Junior Watchkeeper dipped behind a rise and was lost to view.

It is not recorded what exactly the snipe were doing that day. The Young Doctor had it that they were "taking a day off," the A.P. that they had struck the wrong part of the country. But the melancholy fact remains that two hours later they sat down to share their sandwiches with empty bags and clean barrels. A faint shout from out of the distance started them again into activity.

"He's fallen in," suggested the Young Doctor with cheerful promptitude.

"Sat on the hook, more likely." There was grim relish in the A.P.'s tone. Neither was prepared for the spectacle that met their astonished eyes when they reached the river.

Standing on a partly submerged sand-bank, in the middle of the stream, dripping wet and "full of strange oaths," was the Junior Watchkeeper. The point of his rod was agitated like the staff of a Morse signaller's flag, while a smother of foam and occasional glimpses of a silver belly twenty yards up-stream testified that the age of miracles had not yet passed.

"Play him, you fool!" yelled the A.P.

"Can't," wailed the Junior Watch-keeper, battling with the rod. "The reel's jammed!"

"Look out, then!" shouted the Young Doctor, and the safety-catch of his gun snapped. "Let me have a shot----"

But the Junior Watch-keeper had abandoned his rod. Seizing the stout line in his fingers, his feet braced in the yielding sand, shamelessly he hauled the lordly fish, fighting, to his feet. "Come on," he spluttered, "bear a hand, you blokes!" The "blokes" rushed into the shallows, and together they floundered amid a tangle of line and showers of spray, grabbing for its gills. Eventually it was flung ashore, and the _coup de grace_ administered with the butt-end of the A.P.'s gun.

"Thirty pounds, if it's an ounce," gasped the Junior Watch-keeper, wringing the water out of his trousers. They stood and surveyed it in amazed silence, struck dumb with the wonder of the thing. Contrasted with the salmon as they knew it--decorated with sprigs of fennel on a fishmonger's slab--it looked an uncouth creature, with an underhung jaw and a curiously arched back. The A.P. prodded it suspiciously with the toe of his boot.

"'S'pose it's all right--eh? Clean run, an' all the rest of it?"