However, he had no time to worry too much about the stores, for he had quite enough to think about with the machinery and boilers of the ship herself. He had seen all his air-pumps, feed-pumps, air-compressors, and what-nots erected and tested in the shop before they had been built into his ship. He had examined his boilers, bearings, and thrust-blocks, and had supervised the delicate adjustments of the turbines; and now he spent all his days and most of his nights in the engine-room seeing if everything worked in harmony. Occasionally things went wrong, and he found himself embroiled in long and highly technical arguments with the representatives of the firm. They wanted things done in their way because they were building the ship; while he, quite rightly, preferred his own method because he would have to run her when she got to sea. They generally came to some sort of a compromise; but Thompson always avers that that last awful week took at least ten years off his life, and I am inclined to believe him.
The sub-lieutenant, Hargreaves, who had only his charts to correct, was perhaps the lightest-worked officer of them all; but Mr Menotti became apoplectic about the face, and was brought to the verge of lunacy thrice daily. First he had discovered that he had too much ammunition; and then, on counting again, that he had thirty projectiles too few. He promptly sent a frantic telegram to the ordnance depot which had supplied the ammunition in the first instance, to receive in reply a curt message stating that so many shell—the proper number—had been despatched on such and such a date. They held his signed receipt for them, so would he kindly verify his statement? Their meaning could not have been plainer if they had wired, 'If you're such a silly juggins as to go losing shell, it is certainly not our fault!'
The gunner, with awful visions of courts of inquiry and courts-martial for the loss of valuable Government stores—to wit, shell, lyddite, thirty in number—searched high and low, but without success. They eventually turned up the day the ship sailed, arriving in a hand-cart propelled by two small youths, who said they—the shell, not the youths—had been found in a remote storehouse in the shipyard where Mr Menotti himself had put them for safety. The gunner always had a very short memory when he was harassed.
The shipyard was a depressing place, full of gaunt cranes, overhead gantries, grimy buildings, and huge corrugated-iron erections with tall chimneys which befouled and blotted out every vestige of the sky with their oily black smoke. Besides two destroyers and some other small craft, the firm were building a battleship, and the noise and clatter of the pneumatic riveters and drilling-machines was deafening. Cranes, with steel plates hanging precariously from their jibs, staggered drunkenly to and fro on their lines, screeching as they went. Piles of rusty plates, which presently would be built into some ship, lay everywhere in seeming confusion for people to bark their shins against after dark; while pale, apathetic youths stood here and there working the bellows of huge brazier affairs with coke fires for heating rivets. A shout from a grimy gentleman perilously balanced on a plank some ten feet overhead would warn them that another rivet was wanted; and, seizing the morsel of red-hot steel in a pair of tongs, the boys, with a dexterous flick of their wrists, would send it flying through space, to be caught as cleverly by a man with a bucket. To an outsider the whole yard seemed to be in a state of chaotic confusion, but in reality it was very highly organised, for gang relieved gang, and the work went on night and day.
It was nearly always raining, and the horrible slime was carried on board the Mariner until her decks and living-spaces were literally an inch deep in black filth well trodden in by the feet of many workmen. The white wooden tables and stools on the mess-decks were caked in grime and covered with paint-splashes and candle-grease, while workmen shocked the susceptibilities of the first lieutenant by their monotonous and indiscriminate expectoration. He nearly wept every time he went on board. He would have to get the ship clean some day, and at present the labours of Hercules in the Augean stables seemed nothing to what he would have to undertake.
II.
At last came the day when the Mariner left the river to carry out the first of a series of steam trials. As yet she was not a full-fledged man-of-war, and, being still in the hands of the contractors, was in the charge of a pilot. Wooten was present merely as a spectator, and to take over the command in the rare eventuality of their happening to sight an enemy. They sighted no enemy; but the trip shook many of the civilian voyagers to the core.
It was a cold and blustery day. The wind was off the shore, and had raised what Wooten called 'a little bit of a lop,' but what, in the opinion of the contractors' men, was 'a terrible storm.' It is true that the motion was supremely uncomfortable, and that when the destroyer was travelling at something over thirty knots she was deluged fore and aft in sheets of spray. The ship was very crowded, too. To start with, she carried the eighty odd souls who formed her proper naval crew. Then there were the Admiralty officers, overseers, and officials, the builders' representatives and foremen, and others from different sub-contracting firms who had supplied various portions of the machinery. The firm, who never did anything by halves, provided lunch in the wardroom for the officers and the more important officials. And such a lunch it was, brought on board in three enormous wicker hampers which filled the officers' bathroom! It would seem that food and drink were presently to circulate as freely in the wardroom as would lubricating oil and north-country blasphemy in the engine-room. But most of them had no food until the ship returned into harbour in the afternoon. They had reckoned without that fickle mistress, the sea, and she flattened many of them out. Bovril and brandy were more to their liking than solid food. Moreover, some of them were rather nervous about going out of the harbour at all.
'I say, commander,' one of the firm's bigwigs had said to Wooten as they steamed down the river, 'is it true that the Germans have been laying mines off the coast?'
'M'yes,' said the lieutenant-commander; 'I believe it is.'