“What did Arabella do?” I had heard a
good deal of Arabella.
“Oh, Arabella’s quite different.
Her job has always been to look after her master’s
pyjamas—folded up at the head of the bunk,
you know. She found out pretty soon the bridge
was no place for a lady, so she hopped downstairs
and got in. You know how she makes three little
jumps to it—first, on to the chair; then
on the flap-table, and then up on the pillow.
When the show was over, there she was as usual.”
“Was she glad to see her master?”
“Ra-ather. Arabella was the bold, gay
lady-dog then!”
Now Arabella is between nine and eleven and a half
inches long.
“Does the Hun run to pets at all?”
“I shouldn’t say so. He’s an
unsympathetic felon—the Hun. But he
might cherish a dachshund or so. We never picked
up any ships’ pets off him, and I’m sure
we should if there had been.”
That I believed as implicitly as the tale of a destroyer
attack some months ago, the object of which was to
flush Zeppelins. It succeeded, for the flotilla
was attacked by several. Right in the middle of
the flurry, a destroyer asked permission to stop and
lower dinghy to pick up ship’s dog which had
fallen overboard. Permission was granted, and
the dog was duly rescued. “Lord knows what
the Hun made of it,” said my informant.
“He was rumbling round, dropping bombs; and the
dinghy was digging out for all she was worth, and
the Dog-Fiend was swimming for Dunkirk. It must
have looked rather mad from above. But they saved
the Dog-Fiend, and then everybody swore he was a German
spy in disguise.”
“And—about this Jutland fight?”
I hinted, not for the first time.
“Oh, that was just a fight. There was more
of it than any other fight, I suppose, but I expect
all modern naval actions must be pretty much the same.”
“But what does one do—how
does one feel?” I insisted, though I knew it
was hopeless.
“One does one’s job. Things are happening
all the time. A man may be right under your nose
one minute—serving a gun or something—and
the next minute he isn’t there.”
“And one notices that at the time?”
“Yes. But there’s no time to keep
on noticing it. You’ve got to carry
on somehow or other, or your show stops. I tell
you what one does notice, though. If one
goes below for anything, or has to pass through a
flat somewhere, and one sees the old wardroom clock
ticking, or a photograph pinned up, or anything of
that sort, one notices that. Oh yes, and
there was another thing—the way a ship seemed
to blow up if you were far off her. You’d
see a glare, then a blaze, and then the smoke—miles
high, lifting quite slowly. Then you’d get
the row and the jar of it—just like bumping
over submarines. Then, a long while after p’raps,
you run through a regular rain of bits of burnt paper
coming down on the decks—like showers of
volcanic ash, you know.” The door of the
operating-room seemed just about to open, but it shut
again.
