The sky behind us whitened as I laboured, and the
first dawn drove down the Channel, tipping the wave-tops
with a chill glare. To me that round wind which
runs before the true day has ever been fortunate and
of good omen. It cleared the trouble from my
body, and set my soul dancing to 267’s heel
and toe across the northerly set of the waves—such
waves as I had often watched contemptuously from the
deck of a ten-thousand-ton liner. They shouldered
our little hull sideways and passed, scalloped, and
splayed out, toward the coast, carrying our white wake
in loops along their hollow backs. In succession
we looked down a lead-grey cutting of water for half
a clear mile, were flung up on its ridge, beheld the
Channel traffic—full-sailed to that fair
breeze—all about us, and swung slantwise,
light as a bladder, elastic as a basket, into the next
furrow. Then the sun found us, struck the wet
gray bows to living, leaping opal, the colourless
deep to hard sapphire, the many sails to pearl, and
the little steam-plume of our escape to an inconstant
rainbow.
“A fair day and a fair wind for all, thank God!”
said Emanuel Pyecroft, throwing back the cowl-like
hood of his blanket coat. His face was pitted
with coal-dust and grime, pallid for lack of sleep;
but his eyes shone like a gull’s.
“I told you you’d see life. Think
o’ the Pedantic now. Think o’
her Number One chasin’ the mobilised gobbies
round the lower deck flats. Think o’ the
pore little snotties now bein’ washed, fed, and
taught, an’ the yeoman o’ signals with
a pink eye wakin’ bright ’an brisk to another
perishin’ day of five-flag hoists. Whereas
we shall caulk an’ smoke cigarettes,
same as the Spanish destroyers did for three weeks
after war was declared.” He dropped into
the wardroom singing:—
If you’re going to marry me, marry me, Bill,
It’s no use muckin’ about!
The man at the wheel, uniformed in what had once been
a Tam-o’-shanter, a pair of very worn R.M.L.I.
trousers rolled up to the knee, and a black sweater,
was smoking a cigarette. Moorshed, in a gray Balaclava
and a brown mackintosh with a flapping cape, hauled
at our supplementary funnel guys, and a thing like
a waiter from a Soho restaurant sat at the head of
the engine-room ladder exhorting the unseen below.
The following wind beat down our smoke and covered
all things with an inch-thick layer of stokers, so
that eyelids, teeth, and feet gritted in their motions.
I began to see that my previous experiences among
battleships and cruisers had been altogether beside
the mark.
PART II
The wind went down with the sunset—
The fog came up with the tide,
When the Witch of the North took an Egg-shell
(bis)
With a little Blue Devil inside.
“Sink,” she said, “or
swim,” she said,
“It’s all you
will get from me.
And that is the finish of him!”
she said,
And the Egg-shell went to
sea.
