The Admiral doffed his cap after the manner in which a forgotten naval generation saluted.
“Be damned to your sorrow, sir,” he said. “It’s a young man’s war,” and turned to descend the ladder to the dinghy that waited alongside.
CHAPTER VI
GIPSIES OF THE SEA
August 4th, 1914, probably found the yachtsmen of Great Britain less unprepared for war with Germany than any other civilian community in the Empire.
Men turn to the sea as a profession for a variety of reasons; but the amateur yachtsman embraced the sea as a mistress with a complete and very genuine passion. To those who seek her thus, the sea has much to tell; she will whisper a thousand secrets ’twixt dusk and dawn to the little ships resting snug in her curlew-haunted creeks, or riding lazy to a long cable in the lee of desolate sand-banks—things denied to the busy wayfarer on her wide thoroughfares.
Yachtsmen as a class are meditative folk. A man who spends his week-ends alone, or in the company of one other in a three-ton yacht, has opportunities for reflection denied to the devotees of other pursuits. He learns more than the ways of the tides and Primus stoves.
In the queer, uneasy tranquillity of the decade before the war there came in gradually increasing numbers to our east and south-east coasts an unobtrusive visitor. Few people encountered him, because he chose sequestered places to visit, but the yachtsman met him, talked much with him, and afterwards sat in the cuddy and smoked many pipes, thinking about him and his unholy thirst for information.