* * * * *
The short day was fading into dusk, and the Mess sat eyeing one another sorrowfully over the tea-table. You can't drink champagne, sing "Good King Wenceslas," and beat the fire all day.
"What price being at home now?" said the Engineer-Lieutenant, gloomily buttering a piece of bread and smearing it with treacle.
"Yes, and charades, and kids, and snapdragon," added the A.P. He mused awhile reminiscently. "Christmas is rotten without kids to buck things up."
The Day-on looked up from a book. "You're right. I don't feel as if it were Christmas day—except for my head," he added reflectively.
The First Lieutenant entered, holding a note in his hand. "Look here, the Skipper wants us to have him and his missus to supper. He'll motor in, and"—he referred again to the note—"he's bringing the four youngsters—and a Christmas-tree. Wants to know if we can put up a turn for them."
In the annals of the Service had such a thing ever happened before? The Mess stared wild-eyed at one another. "Crackers," gasped the Day-on, visions of childhood fleeting through his mind. "Santa Claus!" murmured the Young Doctor, already mentally reviewing his store of cotton-wool. "Holly and mistletoe," supplemented the Engineer-Lieutenant, eyeing the bare walls of the Mess.
There was much to be done, but they did it somehow. The A.P. sallied forth and stole crackers from a Mission schoolroom. The First Lieutenant and Young Doctor between them fashioned a wondrous wig and beard for Santa Claus. The Junior Watch-keeper is rumoured to have uprooted (under cover of darkness) an entire holly bush from the Admiral Superintendent's garden, and their guests arrived to find the Mess transformed. No sooner was supper over than the First Lieutenant vanished, and they entered the smoking-room to find a genuine Santa Claus, with snowy beard and gruff voice, dispensing gifts from the magic tree. There were miraculous presents for all: Zeiss binoculars for one (had he not been bemoaning the want of a pair on the bridge a fortnight before?): a wrist-watch for another (it replaced one smashed while working targets not long ago), a fountain-pen for another, a cigarette-holder for a fourth, whose tobacco-stained fingers had long been a subject of reproach from his Captain's wife.
And when the tree was denuded at last, what an ambush for lurking dragons! They were slain ultimately with a sword-scabbard by a flushed Knight astride the champing Junior Watch-keeper. It figured further in the tiger-shoot conducted from the howdah of an elephant—a noble beast in whose identity no one would have recognised the grey-painted canvas cover of a 3-pdr. gun, much less the Engineer-Lieutenant inside it.
For the matter of that, had you seen the tiger who died, roaring terribly almost within reach of its tethered quarry (Jess, the bored and disgusted terrier), you would never have known the A.P.—especially as he had broken his glasses in the throes of realistic dissolution.