"Oh!" he said, "I'm not making out it's a joy-ride. Thirty years ago I might have laughed at it. Remember," he said, pointing the stem of his pipe at me. "I'm not making a proposal that I'm not going to see through myself. I'm going to lead the boats in. But I feel that it would be wrong not to have a try at saving some of those gallant children's lives. Why," he went on, "I might have had a son there——" He broke off and was silent for a moment, puffing hard as if he were laying one of his own defensive smoke screens.
"We're the R.N.V.R.," he said. "Remember that. We want to show the Navy what we're good for. The R.N.V.R.!" he repeated. "Lord! I could tell you tales of the old days. The Buzzard——"
He laughed, a little hard laugh without any mirth in it.
We were silent for a while after that. My brain was busy with this new development of the affair, and I was beginning to see all manner of heroic possibilities in the proposal.
"When a man gets to my age," continued Armitage presently, "he sees things more clearly somehow—the things that matter and things that don't. You get down to bedrock. Money! I know something about that commodity, and just how much happiness you can buy with it." He made a little movement with an empty hand. "Hope makes for two-thirds of the happiness of life: hoping for something you believe God'll be good enough to give you—something you think you've lived clean enough to earn. Maybe you get it, maybe you don't. But you just go on hoping something, you know." He looked at me with patient, steadfast eyes. "I want to be of some use to somebody before my number goes up. And if I bring back to his lover some boy who might otherwise have been buried by a German funeral party, perhaps I shan't altogether have lived in vain.
"'A little hope that when we die
We reap our sowing, so—good-bye!"
he quoted, smiling. And I thought his smile was as pathetic as his words.
11
The storming and demolition parties came on board one lovely sunny morning—the sort of day that makes you want to forget there's a war. They were two of the finest bodies of men I've ever set eyes upon, and as I watched them disencumbering themselves of their arms and accoutrements along the upper deck, laughing and joking among themselves, it occurred to me that if blood must be the price of Admiralty, we were going to pay full measure of our best.
We had a sort of informal Council of War in the Wardroom during the morning, and the Mess was crowded to the limits of its capacity with Subalterns and Lieutenants, smoking and talking nineteen to the dozen. Into that Dutch Parliament presently strolled Mouldy Jakes, and stood a moment in the doorway. "My word," he ejaculated, "who wouldn't sell his little farm and go to sea—eh, boys? Anybody got a drink to give the Officer in Charge of the demolition party?" Someone handed him a cocktail and his lugubrious face brightened. It then occurred to me that he and Milsom had not yet met, and I rose from my seat on the edge of the table to find the latter in the crowd. I discovered him standing upright by the door staring at Mouldy with one of his odd, inscrutable smiles, and it struck me, I remember, that he looked unusually white. I introduced him and left him yarning over a drink.