PART III
CHAPTER IX
OUT IN THE NORTH SEA. PREPARING FOR ACTION
The bees were humming through the orchard with a long, droning sound as I lay in the hammock of my old home, once more a careless boy. My eyes were closed, but the bright sun shone upon my face, and Peters, my father's old butler, was coming over the grass to tell me that tea was ready.
He touched my arm.
It was not Peters; it was a pale, clean-shaved fellow with an obsequious manner, who held a wooden bowl of steaming milk and coffee in his hands. I sat up and rubbed my eyes. The deep, droning noise, which had seemed like the bees of childhood in my dream, was the noise of engines not far away. I had slept three hours in the hammock, as my brother had insisted, and here was the captured German waiter bringing me coffee. I took it, but half-awake, and watched the man go to two other hammocks which stretched away in front of me. The Dickson boys tumbled out of them and I became fully conscious of where I was.
For the moment, but only for a moment, I was unmanned. The horror of all that we had been through so recently rolled over me like a flood. The shambles that the submarine had become, the ruthless killing of fourteen men—the horrible little snick as I broke the back of my own victim!...
But it passed. The coffee was excellent and invigorating, and in a minute I tossed the empty bowl into the hammock and stood upon a steel grating, looking about me with wide eyes.
At that moment my brother came up, walking briskly, like a man at home. He seemed changed in some way, and I realised what it was—the policeman on his beat, and unbuttoned and at ease, the parson in his pulpit or trimming roses in the rectory garden, are two very different people.