"Yes. One of these new standards—built for eleven knots and chocked up afterwards with fancy gear and 'gadjets' to rob the boilers."
"Lemme see—nine knots"—turning to the pages of a tide-book, the convoy officer makes a rough sum of it. "High water at Oysterpool—so—arrived here—distance—and seventy-one. Why, he's come on from Oysterpool at ten, no less, and that's not allowing for the zigzag either!"
The lieutenant looks round for his cap. Clearly there is a definite 'drill' for captains who come on from Oysterpool at ten and declare their speed as nine, and he is ready when the P.C.O. passes orders. "All right. You go off and see the captain. Try to get him to spring at least half a knot. I expect he's allowing a bit for 'coming up,' and going easy till he knows his new ship. . . . I'll 'phone Pearl Shell's agents and warn 'em to hustle round for firemen. Marmion? Yes. Board Marmion on your way back. Wants ten hours—she should be able to keep her sailing." A year agone there would have been but moderate and passive interest in the varying troubles of the ships and their crews, but much water has flowed over the Red Ensign since then, and we are learning.
The convoy lieutenant goes down a winding path to the boat-slip and boards his launch to set off for the Roads. The morning, that broke fair and unclouded, has turned grey; a damp sea-mist is wandering over the bay in thin wraiths and feathers, but sunlight on the brown of the distant hills promises a clearing as the day draws on. Fishing-smacks, delayed by want of wind, are creeping in to the market steps under sweep of their long oars, and their lazy canvas rustles, and the booms and sheet-blocks creak as the wash of the picket-launch sets them swaying. In from the sea channels, with their sweeps still wet and glistening, come the Agnes Whitwell, Fortuna, the Dieudonné, and Brother Fred, each with a White Ensign aloft and a naked grey gun on their high bows. They are late in their return, and one can guess at deadly iron spheres stirred from the depths of the fairways, thrown buoyant in the wash astern, and destroyed by crack of gunfire. The commodore of the sisterly pairs, a young lieutenant of Reserve, waves a cheery greeting as we pass.
DAWN: CONVOY PREPARING TO PUT TO SEA
And now the Roads, windless and misty, the anchored merchantmen swung at different angles, in their gay fantasy of dazzle-paint, borrowing further motley from the mist, and leering grotesquely through the thin vapours. But for her lines, undeniably fine and graceful, War Trident is the standardest of standards. Dazzle-painters have slapped their spite at her in lurid swathes and, not content, have draped her sheer in harlequin crenellations. Her low pipe-funnel upstands in rigid perpendicular. ("Chief! Pit yer haun' up an' feel if th' kettle's bilin'!") No masts break the long length of her, saving only a midship signal-pole that serves her wireless aerials and affords a hod-like perch for the look-out aloft. She is stark new, smooth of plating, and showing even the hammer-strokes on her rivets. Through the thin paint on her sides, marks and symbols of construction appear, the letters of her strakes painted in firm white, with here and there an unofficial shipyard embellishment—"Good old Jeemy Quin," or "Tae hell wi' the Kiser!" She is ready for sea, and life-boats and davits, swung outboard, tower overhead as the picket-launch draws up at her gaunt side. She is in ballast trim, and it is evident that her standard carpenters hold strictly to a rule that ignores a varying freeboard—the side ladder is short by eight feet, and only by middling the rungs (a leap at the bottom, a long swaying climb, and a drag at the top) are we able to clamber on board.