“What happened?” asked Mayhew. “We never hear any details of these things up north.”
“Well, they got holed and sank stern first apparently. Stuck in the bottom. However, they managed to stop the hole up with clothing and tallow and stopped the inrush of water: but they couldn’t move the boat. Blew everything and shifted weights, but she wouldn’t budge. Then the first lieutenant volunteered to go out through the bow torpedo tube. They tied a message to his wrist and he crawled into the tube: they fired it with compressed air, as if he’d been a torpedo. They waited for a couple of hours, and then someone opened the tube door, just to make sure.... But he was still there—jambed....”
The butler entered with the coffee, and the narrator was silent till he had gone.
“You know the foremost hatch in those boats, for lowering torpedoes?” he resumed. “Apparently they decided to try getting a big air pressure in the boat, then open this hatch and chance being blown through to the surface in the bubble.” The speaker puffed a cloud of smoke and watched it eddy about the flowers in the centre of the table. “So they stripped and put on swimming collars and life-belts, and mustered two-deep under the hatchway.”
Longridge was tracing a pattern in the ash from his cigarette on the side of his dessert-plate. “All of ’em?” he interrupted. “Shouldn’t have thought there was room.”
“No there wasn’t. There wasn’t room for him or his coxswain. We found those two fully dressed, without life-belts or anything, right the other end of the compartment away from any hope of escape. But he wrote his report, giving clear and explicit directions for salving, amongst other things, and tied it to the second coxswain’s wrist.... Then when they were all ready he gave the word—from the other end of the compartment—and the men all heaved the hatch up together.”
Behind the speaker’s shoulders the blue oblongs of the windows had darkened into blackness. A nightingale far off among the laurels was pouring out her liquid song into the night, and for a while Brakespear seemed to be listening to it, twirling the stem of his wine-glass absently between finger and thumb. No one spoke.
“It was one of those stupid little accidents,” he went on presently, still in the same low, grave tones, “a thing so utterly insignificant, that stood between Life and Death for them. Yet it happened. The hatch opened about six inches and jambed. They could neither raise nor lower it. The water just poured in.”
“Drowned ’em,” said Longridge tensely. The superfluity of the remark seemed to strike him. “Of course,” he added, as if talking to himself.
“Yes.”