After that the daily meetings at the area door were not to be thought of. Nosey flung himself off in a rage, and for two successive nights contemplated suicide from the parapet of Westminster Bridge. The irksome round of duties on the ramshackle bicycle became impossible. The very traffic murmured the name of Janie in his ears. London stifled him; he wanted to get away and bury himself and his grief in new surroundings. Then his eye was caught by one of the Admiralty recruiting posters in the window of a Whitehall post office. It conjured up a vision of a roving, care-free life . . . of illimitable spaces and great healing winds. . . . A life of hard living and hard drinking, when a man could forget.
But somehow Nosey didn't forget.
* * * * *
The Navy received him without emotion. They cut his hair and pulled out his teeth. They washed and clothed and fed him generously. He was taught in a vast echoing drill-shed to recognise and respect authority, and after six months' preliminary training informed that he was a Second-class Stoker, and as such drafted to sea in the Battle-Cruiser Squadron.
Here Nosey found himself an insignificant unit among nearly a thousand barefooted, free-fisted, cursing, clean-shaven men, who smelt perpetually of soap and damp serge, and comprised the lower-deck complement of a British battle-cruiser.
He worked in an electric-lit, steel tunnel, with red-hot furnaces on one side, and the gaping mouths of coal caverns on the other. You reached it by perpendicular steel ladders descending through a web of hissing steam pipes and machinery; once across greasy deck-plates and through a maze of dimly lit alleys, you would find Nosey shovelling coal into the furnaces under the direction of a hairy-chested individual afflicted, men said, by religious mania, who sucked pieces of coal as an antidote to chronic thirst, and spat about him indiscriminately.
There were eight-hour intervals in this work, during which Nosey slept or ate his meals or played a mouth-organ in the lee of one of the turret-guns on deck, according to the hour of the day. He slept in a hammock slung in an electric-lit passage far below the water-line; the passage was ten feet wide, and there were six hammocks slung abreast along the entire length of it.
He ate his meals in a mess with twenty other men, the mess consisting of a deal plank covered with oilcloth for a table, and two narrower planks on either side as seats; there were shelves for crockery against the ship's side. All this woodwork was scrubbed and scoured till it was almost as white as ivory. Other messes, identical in every respect, situated three feet apart, ranged parallel to each other as far as the steel, enamelled bulkheads. There were twenty men in each mess, and seventeen messes on that particular mess-deck, and here the members simultaneously ate, slept, sang, washed their clothes, cursed and laughed, skylarked or quarrelled all round during the waking hours of their watch-off.
Still Nosey did not forget.
* * * * *