"While shepherds watched their flocks by night,
All seated on the ground."
"That's poor old Jim Hunt," said Captain Morgan. He rose and drew the thick red curtains from the window to peer out into the blackness.
"Turn the lamp down," said the councilor, "or we'll be arrested under the anti-aircraft laws."
Davidson turned the lamp down and they all looked out of the window. They saw the figure of a man, black against the glimmering water of the harbor below. He walked with a curious floundering gait that might be mistaken for the effects of drink. He waved his arms over his head like a windmill and bellowed his hymn as he went, though the words were now indistinguishable from the tumult of wind and sea.
Captain Morgan drew the curtains, and the three sat down again by the fire without turning up the lamp. The firelight played on the furrowed and bronzed old faces and revealed them as worthy models for a Rembrandt.
"Poor old Jimmy Hunt!" said Captain Kendrick. "You never know how craziness is going to take people. Jimmy was a terror for women and the drink, till he was taken off the Albatross by that German submarine. They cracked him over the head with an iron bolt, down at the bottom of the sea, because he wouldn't answer no questions. He hasn't touched a drop since. All he does is to walk about in bad weather, singing hymns against the wind. But there's more in it than that."
Captain Kendrick lighted his pipe thoughtfully. The wind rattled the windows. Outside, the sign-board creaked and whined as it swung.
"A man like Jim Hunt doesn't go crazy," he continued, "through spending a night in a 'U' boat, and then floating about for a bit. Jimmy won't talk about it now; won't do nothing but sing that blasted hymn; but this is what he said to me when they first brought him ashore. They said he was raving mad, on account of his experiences. But that don't explain what his experiences were. Follow me? And this is what he said. 'I been down,' he says, half singing like. 'I been down, down, in the bloody submarine that sank the Lusitania. And what's more,' he says,'I seen 'em!'
"'Seen what?' I says, humoring him like, and I gave him a cigarette. We were sitting close together in his mother's kitchen. 'Ah!' he says, calming down a little, and speaking right into my ear, as if it was a secret. 'It was Christmas Eve the time they took me down. We could hear 'em singing carols on shore; and the captain didn't like it, so he blew a whistle, and the Germans jumped to close the hatchways; and we went down, down, down, to the bottom of the sea.
"'I saw the whole ship,' he says; and he described it to me, so that I knew he wasn't raving then. 'There was only just room to stand upright,' he says, 'and overhead there was a track for the torpedo carrier. The crew slept in hammocks and berths along the wall; but there wasn't room for more than half to sleep at the same time. They took me through a little foot-hole, with an air-tight door, into a cabin.