When it was all over, the "Skipper's Missus" sat down at the piano, and together they sang the old, memory-haunted Christmas hymns, the woman's contralto and children's trebles blending with the voices of men who at heart were ever children themselves.
The First Lieutenant didn't sing. The fire needed so much attending to.
V.
THE ARGONAUTS.
"... Lest perchance them grow weary
In the uttermost parts of the Sea,
Pray for leave, for the good of the Service,
As much and as oft as may be."
—The Laws of the Navy.
Life on board a man-of-war in the tropics, especially Gunroom life, is attended by discomforts peculiarly its own. To begin with, a trip at sea heats the ship like a steel-walled Inferno, and on reaching harbour she swings at her anchor, bows-on to what breeze there may be; the chances of getting a cool draught through scuttles and gun-ports are thus reduced to a minimum. There is, furthermore, an Affliction known as "prickly heat," beside which chastisement with scorpions is futile and ineffectual; moreover, you must meet the same faces day after day, month after month, at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, till Junior Officers of His Majesty's Navy have been known to revile one another over each other's style of masticating food. From these conditions of life spring, indeed, a candid and illuminating intimacy; but they are also at times responsible for a weariness of the soul that passes utterly all boredom.
* * * * *
The trouble began in the bathroom, an apartment 12 feet long by 8 feet broad, and occupied at the time by six people in various stages of their ablutions. It concerned the ownership of a piece of soap, which may seem a trivial enough matter—as indeed it was; but when you have lain sweating under the awnings all through a breathless night, when, having watched another aching dawn creep over the sea, you descend to splash sulkily in three inches of lukewarm water, the tired brain lacks a fine sense of the proportion of things.
It finished as suddenly as it flared up, and both combatants realised the childishness of it all ere the blood had time to dry on their damaged knuckles. But beyond a peevish request that they should not hold their dripping noses over the basins, no one present appeared interested or dismayed—which was a very bad sign indeed.
* * * * *