Thorogood, lounging in any easy attitude against the door, took up the tale of gallantry. "Apparently the star film of the afternoon was 'Britain's Sea-Dogs, or Jack-Tars at War,' and that appears to have been too much for our little Lord Fauntleroy. He slipped out unbeknownst to the fairy, and I found him at the club an hour later playing billiards with the marker."
The cavalier relaxed not a muscle of his sphinx-like gravity. "Never know what to do with myself on leave," he observed in sepulchral tones. "Always glad to get back. Like the fellow in the Bastille—what?" He raised his empty tumbler and scanned the light through it with sombre interest. "Long ship, this, James."
The phrase is an old Navy one, and signifies much the same thing as the
Governor of North Carolina said to the Governor of South Carolina.
"Sorry," apologised the host. "There isn't any more soda, I'm afraid, but——"
"Don't mind water," said his guest, diluting his tot from the water-bottle. He turned to the India-rubber Man.
"What ship're you going to?" he asked.
Standish named the ship to which he had been appointed. The other took a sip of his whisky and water and nodded with the air of one whose worst misgivings had been confirmed.
"I remember now: I saw your appointment. James and I belong to her. We're going to be shipmates, then." He blew a cloud of smoke ceilingwards. "It's all right in one of those new ships: no scuttles: tinned air and electric light between decks: wake up every morning feeling's if you'd been gassed. An' the turrets——" He plunged gloomily into technicalities that conveyed the impression that the interior of a turret of the latest design was the short cut to a lunatic asylum. "I'm the Assistant Gunnery Lieutenant in our hooker, and I tell you it's a dirty business."
"What d'you do for exercise?" queried the India-rubber Man when the
Assistant Gunnery Lieutenant lapsed again into gloomy silence.
"Plenty of that," said Thorogood. "Deck-hockey and medicine-ball—you mark out a tennis-court on the quarter deck, you know, and heave a 9-lb. ball over a 5 ft. net—foursomes. Fine exercise." He spoke with the grave enthusiasm of the athlete, to whom the attainment of bodily fitness is very near to godliness indeed. "You can get a game of rugger when the weather is good enough to allow landing, and there's quite a decent little 9-hole golf course. Oh, you can keep fit enough."