Traffics and Discoveries eBook

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.