Together we dragged the relic into the light of day. "You see?" he said, and switched a duster over the varnished sloping surface. One glance sufficed.
"Yes," I replied, "I see.... I'll take the desk. I'll take it now if you can get me a taxi."
"Thank you," he said.
"Thank you," said I.
* * * * * *
The fashionable epidemic prevailing at the time was mumps. The stricken and the suspect were herded in separate enclosures between decks, segregated by canvas screens hung from the beams overhead to the deck. The migratory mump germs probably found the canvas screens less of an obstacle to freedom than their victims, and to these, doomed to the confines of a hammock, the time passed with leaden slowness. Even the novelty of contemplating in a mirror the unfamiliar distortion of one's jowl palled after a bit. "Dracula," a much-thumbed and germ-impregnated volume, circulated from hammock to hammock until even Bram Stoker's vampires failed to stir the pulse. Meals, reduced to proportions in themselves an insult, did little to break the monotony, and the hour arrived when Satan, on the look-out for idle hands, must have found his task what a later generation would have called a "cinch."
It was the custom, when visitations of this nature descended upon the cadets, for a sick-berth steward to be banished into exile with the stricken. The job can have been no sinecure, although germs ignored the individual in question with as great indifference as bees display towards an apiarist. Frequent sojourns in the camps of the afflicted had soured the temper of this sick-berth steward and warped a nature that can at no time have been a sunny one. As a ministering angel his appearance was not æsthetic; he was a ponderous fellow, with a neck that ran to creases at the back and appeared to undulate imperceptibly into his bullet head. In fact, it was difficult to say where neck ended and head began. His eyes were small and furtive; his nose a button; Nature, in a well-meaning attempt to balance matters, had given him enormous ears set at right angles to his head. It was this peculiarity that earned him the title of "Windsails," a name by which he was universally known among the cadets, and to which, curiously enough, he answered without resentment.
Now, it happened that one of the victims of the mump scourge was a certain cadet whom, for purposes of this reminiscence, we will call Day. As events transpired, he was not long destined to wear the King's uniform, but passed a few years afterwards to a walk of life whose ethics obeyed a less trammelled code than that of the Royal Navy.
In worldly knowledge, ingenuity of mind, and humour of a certain standard, he was far in advance of his years. Possessed of a cold-blooded courage, utterly indifferent to consequences, he was an unfaltering ringleader in a "rux." In fact, it was this last quality that made for such popularity as he commanded. No one really liked him, but there were a good many who held him in half-grudging admiration, and so passed under an influence not wholly to the good, but dominated by his personality and controlled by a glib and bitter tongue.
Boredom hit him harder than the more placid temperaments; they might be provoked to mischief thereby, but in the soul of Day it roused a very devil of perversity. Finally, one evening when the slender evidences of the last meal had been removed, and life became a blank without outlook or hope, Day broached his scheme to half a dozen of his languid fellow-patients who lounged round the open gun-port watching the afterglow dying in the western sky.