An uneasy wind was fretting the invisible rhododendrons with the threat of rain on the morrow.
"I'm sorry, Day," I said to the darkened universe. "But it's all right now. I've burnt it out."
IX
THE ENGLISH WAY
(1917)
1
The Quartermaster of the Watch pushed aside the tarpaulin cover to the Wardroom hatchway and whistled softly through his teeth. "Mail," he said to the Officers' Steward, who stepped out of the diminutive pantry in answer to the summons, and, bending down, thrust a bundle of sodden envelopes into the outstretched hand. It was snowing hard, and the whaler that brought off the Destroyer's Christmas mail had shipped sufficient water to call for a muttered protest from beneath the sou'-wester of the stroke oar.
"I don' mind wettin' my blinking shirt," he muttered, as he tugged at the oar, "not so long as we brings 'ope 'an' comfort. But if them perishin' mail-bags is goin' to sit in a pool o' water—what the 'ell's the use? No one can't read a letter wot's bin soaked in the Norf Sea for a hour!" The whaler's crew murmured concurrence.
The Coxswain, nursing the mail-bags on his knee with a hand on each and his elbow on the tiller, bade the crew chuck their weight into their oars and mind their ensanguined business—what time he, the Coxswain, would mind his. This admirably adjusted division of labour brought them eventually alongside, and the mail inboard.
The Surgeon Probationer, whose body was buried in the depths of a wicker arm-chair (with the exception of his feet, which were on top of the stove; and his heart, which was in the keeping of the "Wren" driver of an Admiralty car), heard the whaler come alongside and was at the bottom of the hatchway as soon as the steward.