‘And a half-nine!’ sang the leadsman, cursing the long-stocked port-anchor under his breath, for he had to cast to one side of it and it stuck out like a cat’s whiskers.
We were between two rocky beaches, split and weathered by all the gales of the Atlantic, black boulders embroidered with golden weed, and beryl bays where the rollers had lost their way and were running in rings. Behind them the green, tiny-fielded land, dotted with white cottages, climbed up to the barren purple hills.
‘Ah! The Arrogant's here anyhow. See her puff!’
The Strongest Fleet in the World
A monstrous plume of black, heavy smoke went up to the sky. We whipped round a buoy and came on the Fleet. There were eight battleships alike as peas to the outsider; and four big cruisers. They were not cruising or manœuvring just then; but practising their various arts and crafts.
The Marines fell in on the poop, and with bugles and all proper observances we paid our compliments as we ran past the sterns of the cruisers, waiting the Admiral’s word to moor.
‘He’s given us a billet of our own. Under his wing too.’ An officer shot down on to the foc’sle, while the yeoman of signals, whose nose is that of a hawk, kept an unshut eye on the Flag.
‘Isn’t there a four-foot patch somewhere about here?’ said a calm and disinterested voice. The Navigator having brought her in did not need to wrestle with cables; and our anchors with their low, cramped davits are no treat.
‘We told ’em about our anchors in the Dockyard,’ said the bridge. ‘We told ’em so distinctly, and they said: “We’re very much obliged to you for the information, and we’ll make the changes you recommend—in the next boat of your class.” That’s what I call generosity.’
‘Does that ship always behave like that?’ I asked. From all three funnels of a high, stubby cruiser the smoke of a London factory insulted the clean air.
‘Oh, no; she’s only burning muckings like the rest of us. She’s our “chummy” ship. She’s a new type—she and the Furious. Fleet rams they call ’em. Rather like porcupines, aren’t they?’
The two had an air of bristling, hog-backed ferocity, strangely out of keeping with the normal reserve of a man-of-war.
The Blake, long and low, looked meek and polite beside them, but I was assured that she could blow them out of the water. Their own Captains, of course, thought otherwise.
Ashore in Ireland
All Ireland was new to me, and I went ashore to investigate Castletown’s street of white houses, to smell peat smoke and find Dan Murphy, owner of a jaunting car and ancient friend of the ward-room. In this quest me and the Navigator mustered not less than half the male population of Cork County, the remainder being O’Sullivan’s; but we found Dan at last—old, grizzled, with an untameable eye, voluble and beautifully Celtic.
‘Will I meet ye to-morrow at Mill Cove at nine-thirty? I will. Here’s my hand an’ word on it. Will I dhrive ye to Glenbeg for the fishing? I will. There’s my hand an’ word on it. Do I mean it? Don’t I know the whole livin’ fleet, man an’ boy, for years?’
He appeared at the appointed hour with a raw-boned horse and wonderful yarns of trout taken by ‘the other gentlemen’ in Glenbeg, the lough of our desire, fourteen miles across the hills. It was a cloudless day with a high wind—bad for trout but good for the mere joy of life; and the united ages of my companions reached forty-five. We were quite respectable till we cleared Castletown, and such liberty-men as might have been corrupted by our example. Then we sang and hung on to the car at impossible angles, and swore eternal fidelity to the bare-footed damosels on the road, they being no wise backward to return our vows; and behaved ourselves much as all junior officers do when they escape on holiday. It was a land of blue and grey mountains, of raw green fields, stone-fenced, ribbed with black lines of peat, and studded with clumps of gorse and heather and the porter-coloured pools of bog water. Great island-dotted bays ran very far inland, and bounding all to Westward hung the unswerving line of Atlantic. Such a country it was as, without much imagination, one could perceive its children in exile would sicken for—a land of small holdings and pleasant green ways where nobody did more work than was urgent.
Roaring Day of Sun and Wind
At last we came on an inky-black tarn, shut in by mountains, locked and lonely and lashed into angry waves by a downward-smiting blast.
There was no special point in the fishing; not even when the Sub-Lieutenant tried to drown himself; but the animal delight of that roaring day of sun and wind will live long in one memory. We had it all to ourselves—the rifted purple flank of Lackawee, the long vista of the lough darkening as the shadows fell; the smell of a new country, and the tearing wind that brought down mysterious voices of men from somewhere high above us.
None but the Irish can properly explain away failure. We left with our dozen fingerlings, under the impression—Mister Cornelius Crowley gave it—that we had caught ten-pounders.
Chapter V
So home, blown through and through with fresh air; sore with hanging on to the car and laughing at nothing; to dine with two Cruiser Captains aboard one of the big fleet-rams. My hosts had been friends since their Britannia days (it is this uniformity of early training that gives to the Navy its enduring solidarity), and, one reminiscence leading to another, I listened enchanted to weird yarns in which Chinese Mandarins, West Coast nigger Chiefs, Archimandrites, Turkish Pashas, Calabrian Counts, dignity balls, Chilian beachcombers, and all the queer people of the earth were mingled.
‘But it’s a lonely life—a lonely life,’ said one. ‘I’ve commanded a ship since Eighty something, and—you see.’
How could one help seeing? Between the after-cabin and the rest of the world (with very few exceptions) lies the deep broad gulf that is only overpassed by sentries, signalmen, and subordinates entering with reports. A light tap, a light foot, a doffed cap, and—‘Rounds all correct, sir.’ Then the silence and the loneliness settle down again beyond the hanging red curtain in the white steel bulkhead. Herman Melville has it all in White Jacket, but it is awesome to see with bodily eyes.
Sometimes the talk gets serious, and the weather-bitten faces discuss how they would ‘work her in a row.’ Each delivers his opinion with side-digs at his neighbour, less heavily armoured or more lightly gunned, but the general conclusion (which I shall not give) is nearly always the same. It is a terrible power that they wield, these Captains, for, saving the Admiral, there is no one that can dictate to them in the exercise of their business. They make their ships as they make or unmake the careers of their men. Yet, mark how Providence arranges an automatic check! It is in the Navy that you hear the wildest and freest adjectives of any Service, the most blistering characterisation of superiors, the most genuinely comic versions of deeds that elsewhere might be judged heroic.
A Service of Humourists
Things are all too deadly serious and important for any one to insult by taking seriously. Every branch of the Service is forced to be a humourist in spite of itself; and by the time men reach the rank of Captain the least adaptable have some saving sense of fun hammered into them. A Captain remembers fairly well what song the Midshipmen were used to sing about the Lieutenant; what views he held in his own Lieutenancy of his Commander, and what as a Commander he thought of his Captain. If he forgets these matters, as in heat, on lonely stations, or broken with fever some men do, then God help his ship when she comes home with a crop of Court-martials and all hands half crazy!
But