There was no question of “showing off” before a stranger—indeed they had forgotten my existence; it was not even ragging. It was just that I had accidentally witnessed the workings of some great Law, immutable and inexplicable as Fate, in full swing about my uncomprehending head.
The meal progressed as if nothing had occurred to break its serenity. I pleaded for light.
“It’s just our mail, you see,” explained the President. “Something has happened to our mails. All the rest of the ships get theirs regularly and ours hasn’t fetched up once since we’ve been here.”
“It’s the fault of the ship’s name,” chipped in another (the ship bore the name of a great American State); “d’rectly the bags reach Liverpool, someone looks at the labels an’ says, ‘Here, ain’t that somewhere in America?’ an’ back they go. They’ve been goin’ backwards an’ forwards for months.” “With Fritz takin’ pot-shots at them as they come and go,” added a voice.
Muffled requests for reinforcements of buttered toast drifted up from underneath the table. “Well?” I queried, still hopelessly in the dark. “Oh, well, you see, anyone who mentions the word ‘mail’ at meals just has to quit an’ go underneath the table; we’ve made it a rule.”
A British midshipman who draws a dirk in the gunroom stands a round of port after dinner. To each navy its own etiquette—and penalties.
It was when we had lit our pipes (the exile had been suffered to return to our midst) and sprawled in comfort, elbows on table, that the real inner meaning of this great Alliance dawned fully upon me. Together we refought Jutland as it has been refought in scores and scores of gunrooms amid tobacco smoke and the shifting of spoons and matches across a tablecloth; after that, it was baseball instead of rugger; Annapolis instead of Dartmouth training college; but it all amounted to a common ideal, voiced, not by politicians or diplomats, but by a nation’s youth in common speech with ours.
I visited the compact double cabins—only they called them staterooms—each with its intimate links with home suggested by the backs of familiar books on a shelf and photographs pinned to the heads of bunks. In fancy I made obeisance to the smiling American girlhood that has good cause to be proud of its knights: and so back to the gunroom, where one of the gay company had just sat down to the piano.
We perched round on the table and the backs of chairs, and sang. They were the latest patriotic songs from the United States, tuneful, emotional jingles whereby every nation going to the wars shamelessly strives to voice its inner feelings. And when the player’s repertoire was ended we started afresh; while the more energetic fox-trotted to and fro across the narrow deck space.
Tune and words have since escaped me; but the refrain of the last song lingers still by reason of its significance in these sombre days. “We’re coming over, we’re coming over!” roared the young voices; and I stole a glance at the lean faces, at the laughing, confident eyes all about me—“AND WE WON’T COME BACK TILL IT’S OVER, OVER THERE!”