With the sensation that I had survived into a strange and a hostile era that had nothing to do with me, for its affairs were not mine, I was inside a submarine, during the War, talking to her commander.  He was unravelling for me the shining complexity of his “box of tricks,” as he called his ship.  He was sardonic (there was no doubt he was master of the brute he so lightly villified), and he was blithe, and he illustrated his scientific monologue with stories of his own experiences in the Heligoland Bight.  These, to me, were like the bedevilments of those dreams from which we groan to awake, but cannot.  The curious doings of this new age, I thought as I listened to him, would have just the same interest for me as the relics of an extinct race of men, except for the urgent remembrance that one of the monstrous accidents this child knows of might happen now.  That made an acute difference.  This was not nightmare, nor ridiculous romance, but actuality.  And as I looked at this mocking youngster, I saw he was like the men of that group on the Queen Mary who were similarly mocking, for my benefit, but a few weeks before, their expert share in forwarding the work we had given them in this new age; and then where were they?  Ships I knew, but not such ships as these, nor such work.

Another officer joined us, an older man, and said this to him was strange navigation.  He was a merchant seaman.  He had served his time in sailing ships.  I asked him to name some of them, having the feeling that I could get back to the time I knew if I could but hail the ghost, with another survivor from the past, of one of those forgotten ships.  “Well,” he replied, “there was the Cutty Sark.”

If he had said the Golden Hind I should not have been more astonished.  In a sense, it was the same thing.  The Cutty Sark was in the direct line with the Elizabethan ships, but at the end.  That era, though it closed so recently, was already as far as a vague memory.  The new sea engines had come, and here we were with them, puzzled and embarrassed, having lost our reasonable friends.  I told him I had known the Cutty Sark, and had seen that master of hers—­a character who went about Poplar in a Glengarry cap—­who gave one of her masts (the mizzen, I think) a golden rooster, after he had driven her from Sydney Heads to the Channel to break the record—­Captain Woodget.  His men said it was like living in a glass house.

I recalled to him that once, when my business was concerned with bills of lading and freight accounts, I was advised to ship four hundred cases to Sydney, New South Wales; and one-half of that consignment, my instructions ran, was to arrive a month before the other.  The first lot went in a modern steel barque, the Cairnbulg. ("I have seen her,” said this submarine officer).  More than a fortnight later, being too young to remember that the little Cutty Sark had been one of the China tea clippers, I shipped the last half of the consignment in her.  But she disordered all the careful plans of the consignees.  She got in a fortnight ahead of the Cairnbulg.