CHAPTER I
THE TWO SUB-LIEUTENANTS
"Below there! You in, George?"
George—otherwise Kenneth Meredith, sub-lieutenant R.N.V.R. and second-in-command of H.M. Motor Launch 1071—deliberately blotted five lines of his weekly epistle to the fond ones at home. Unperturbed by a heavy fusillade upon the deck—the sound being caused by a broken golf club vigorously manipulated by an as yet invisible person—Meredith dexterously threw into envelopes and blotting-pad into a conveniently placed rack, rammed the cork into the glass ink-bottle, and thrust his fountain-pen, which either "founted" like a miniature Niagara or else obstinately refused to "fount" at all, into the breast pocket of his monkey-jacket.
Interruptions are many and varied on board the M.L.'s. At almost any hour of the day and night when the little craft were lying alongside the parent ship, casual visitors were apt to drop in, to say nothing of callers on more or less urgent Service matters. An officer is supposed to receive visitors with complete equanimity whether he be in the midst of shaving, dressing, having a meal, or even a bath. Privacy is practically non-existent. Almost the only exception is when the lawful occupant of the cabin is engaged in private correspondence.
Hence Meredith's hurried preliminaries before replying to the noisy summons on deck.
"Come in," he shouted. "Visitors are requested to leave sticks and umbrellas in charge of the hall porter—Oh, dash it all! That's my toe!" he ejaculated, as the steel-shod end of the golf club was dropped through the hatchway and fell with a dull thud upon the Sub's foot.
Seizing the lethal weapon, Meredith stood up and prepared to take summary vengeance upon the lower portions of its owner, who was descending the vertical ladder leading to the diminutive ward-room of M.L. 1071.
Instinctively the newcomer must have realised that reprisals were in the air, for, grasping the rim of the coaming, he dropped lightly to the floor and faced the second-in-command.
"Cheerio!" exclaimed the visitor. "Where's everybody? Where's Wakefield this fine evening?"
Kenneth, without replying, opened the door leading into the after-cabin and took a lengthy survey; he repeated the tactics in the galley at the for'ard end of the ward-room. Then, going on his knees, he lifted the blue baize table-cloth and peered under the swing table.
"'Fraid he's not here, old man," he remarked. "Now I think of it, I believe he went on the beach at seven bells. Have a cigarette?"
"Thanks.... Wakefield wasn't on the links this afternoon. Strange—very. What's his little game, Meredith? Don't tell me he went ashore in his Number Ones, with his trousers creased an' all that sort of thing! 'A wedding has been arranged and a subscription-list will follow in due course,' eh?"
Jock McIntosh lit his cigarette and took stock of the ward-room, looking for evidence to confirm his suspicions of the absent Wakefield's mysterious visits "to the beach."
Sub-lieutenant McIntosh and Sub-lieutenant Meredith were widely different in appearance. The former was a tall, raw-boned Scot with fair features and close-cut sandy hair that even in its closeness evinced a tendency to curl. Never cut out for a seafaring life, he found himself much against his will in the uniform of an R.N.V.R. officer, while his brother Angus, who simply loved the sea and was part-owner of a yacht and knew how to handle almost every type of small craft afloat, was given a commission in a line regiment.
Jock would have made an ideal platoon commander: Angus would have shone as a skipper of an M.L.; but since from time immemorial the powers-that-be who run the Admiralty and War Office delight in putting square pegs in round holes, Jock McIntosh was manfully sticking to a job that was obviously uncongenial, while his brother was doing likewise; and each envied the other.
Meredith, on the other hand, was literally "made for the job." Slightly above middle height, broad and square-shouldered, heavy-browed and with a firm and somewhat prominent jaw, Kenneth looked and was a sailor-man, every inch of him. At the age of twelve he could handle a sailing dinghy with a skill that was the envy and admiration of many so-called yachtsmen, who would be hopelessly at sea in a double sense without the assistance of their paid hands. Between the ages of twelve and fifteen he spent every available holiday afloat in his father's ten-ton yacht, until he knew intimately the art of fore and aft sailing, and incidentally gained first-hand information of practically every harbour and creek on the south coast of England.
Then came the outbreak of the Great War. Promptly the Ripple, Mr. Meredith's cutter, was laid up, while her owner, exchanging a yachting suit for a khaki uniform, went to India as second-in-command of a Territorial battalion.
Kenneth went back to school, bitterly bewailing the fact that he had not been born three years earlier. Fellows from the senior form—in many cases physically inferior to him—donned khaki and disappeared into the mists of Flanders. At intervals some turned up at the old school, bronzed, aged and ballasted with a more than nodding acquaintance with life and death: others never returned—their names figured prominently in the School Roll of Honour as fingerposts to the path of Higher Duty.
At length Meredith's chance came. He had to admit that it was influence that did the trick. A certain retired Admiral whose name Kenneth had never heard, but who knew Mr. Meredith years ago, worked the oracle, and the lad found himself a full-fledged sub-lieutenant of the R.N.V.R. The only fly in the ointment was the fact that Meredith had been appointed to a northern M.L. flotilla, where, in strange and remote waters, there appeared to be little chance of seeing the "actual thing." He had hoped to be appointed to the Dover Patrol, where his intimate knowledge of the Channel would be a decided asset and where the prospects of smelling powder would be almost certain to materialise.
M.L. 1071, one of the fifteen motor launches belonging to the Auldhaig Patrol, was lying next but one alongside the parent ship Hesperus, an obsolete second-class cruiser. It was early in May. Already the northern evenings were drawing out and the nights becoming shorter and shorter. In the land-locked firth the lofty serrated hills were capped with fleecy mists that threatened with the going down of the sun to steal lower and lower and envelop the placid water in a pall of baffling fog.
"The main object of my visit this evening," remarked McIntosh ponderously—he was rather prone to verbosity—"is to enlist your assistance in the matter of this mashie."
"I thought it was a patent lead-swinging device," interposed Meredith drily—"a sort of means of getting me on the sick-list with a pulverised instep."
"Not at all, laddie," continued Jock, unruffled by the interruption. "D'ye ken, I'm no hand at splicing, and I'm not giving myself away by asking any of my merry wreckers to take on the job. Perhaps you'll be kind enough to do it to-morrow."
"When do you want this instrument of torture?" asked Meredith, as he examined the fractured ends.
"By three on Wednesday afternoon," replied McIntosh.
Kenneth shook his head.
"Can't be done, old son—that is, if you want me to tackle it to-morrow."
"Why not?"
"'Cause I'm on patrol to-night."
A terrible reverberation as the engine-room staff gave a preliminary run with the powerful motors corroborated Meredith's statement.
"But I'll do it now, if you like," he added. "You might ask Coles to bring along some seaming-twine and beeswax."
"Don't envy you, old thing," remarked Jock, returning with the required articles. "It's coming on thick. Personally, I'm jolly glad."
"Why?"
"The matter of those X-lighters," replied McIntosh. "We are handing them over to the R.A.F., and we've been expecting some one from that crush down to inspect 'em. And we look like going on expecting. 'Tany rate, the S.N.O.'s fed up with the lighters, so I've orders to take 'em round to Donnikirk and dump 'em on the R.A.F. people. Hanged if I want the job! Plugging along with four-knot barges isn't in my line, so I hope it's foggy."
Meredith nodded sympathetically, as his deft yet horny fingers waxed the twine and began the intricate task of "whipping" the broken pieces of the golf club. He little knew the part those unwieldy X-lighters would play in his subsequent experiences afloat.
The X-lighters were almost flat-bottomed barges, about a hundred feet in length and with a beam of roughly twenty feet. Originally built for work in connection with the naval river flotillas in Mesopotamia, they had found their way to a northern base. Then as a result of negotiations between the Admiralty and the Air Ministry, the former expressed their intention of turning over the lighters to the Royal Air Force for kite-balloon work.
Anxious to get rid of the cumbersome craft, which occupied a large amount of valuable mooring-space in Auldhaig Harbour, the Senior Naval Officer had decided not to await the long-delayed visit of the Air Force representative, but to send the barges round to their new base.
"You're quite right, old man," observed Meredith, when, the task of mending the golf club completed, he accompanied Jock McIntosh on deck. "It's going to be a beast of a night. An' No. 1071's doing the Outer Patrol stunt this time."
"Well, good luck!" exclaimed McIntosh.
Kenneth smiled sourly.
"Good luck!" he echoed bitterly. "Nothin' doin', I'm afraid. It's out nosing through the fog, seeing nothing and doing nothing. Haven't had so much as a sniff at a strafed U-boat yet, and don't seem like doing so until the end of the war—whenever that comes off."
"Sooner the better as far as I'm concerned," said McIntosh. "I'm fed up to the back teeth absolutely."
"Think so?" asked Meredith quietly. "From a purely personal point of view, we'll be jolly sorry when the war is over. Most of us will be wishing ourselves back in the M.L.'s before many weeks have passed."
"I'll risk it," rejoined Jock. "Give me the piping times of peace any old day—s'long as we win, which we're bound to do. Hello! here's Wakefield. Now the fun's about to commence. I'll hook it."
And with a friendly gesture of greeting to the returning officer commanding H.M.M.L. 1071, McIntosh leapt over the rail, crossed the deck of an intervening craft, and ascended the accommodation-ladder of the parent ship Hesperus.