III.
One dark winter evening the Mariner and three other destroyers were groping their way back toward the British coast after being at sea for two days and two nights. They had had the usual North Sea weather, thick haze and some rain; but during the later portion of the trip there had been a gale of wind from the south-west and an unusually bad sea. Even now, when they were close to the coast, and should have been more or less under the lee of the land, it still blew hard, with a heavy perpendicular lop which made the little ships pitch and wallow as they drove through it. The evening was as black as the mouth of the nethermost pit, and the sky was completely overcast, while for the last forty-eight hours they had never had a glimpse of the sun or the land. Their position, as usual in such circumstances, was more or less an unknown thing, a mere matter of dead reckoning and guesswork, which even the constant use of the sounding-machine could not verify.
Making the land after dark in peace-time, with all shore lights blazing, sometimes gives cause for anxiety; but in war, when all the lighthouses and lightships are extinguished, when many buoys are removed, and there are various dangerous mined areas to be dodged and avoided, it becomes something more than a joke. If mines are known to be present, the feeling is not at all a pleasant one. It is rather like being blindfolded and trying to find the door in a pitch-dark room, the floor of which is well strewn with bombs ready to explode on being touched. That was the sort of sensation at the back of Wooten's mind.
The Mariner happened to be the third ship in the line of four, and at five-fifty-one precisely, when the skipper, the sub-lieutenant, and the usual quartermaster, signalman, and lookouts were on the bridge watching the next ahead, there came a rumbling, crashing roar from somewhere close astern. It made the ship dance and tremble, and was nothing the least like the sharp report of a gun. The sound was more or less muffled, and the violent, reverberating thud could only be compared with the sudden banging of a heavy steel velvet-covered door in a jerry-built villa, if such a thing can be imagined.
Wooten, who had heard such reports before, knew at once what it was. 'God!' he exclaimed anxiously, looking astern; 'some one's got it in the neck!'
Some one had—the Monsoon, the ship astern—and a moment later her signal-lamp was flickering agitatedly in and out in the darkness. 'Have struck a mine!' she spelt out hastily.
Wooten cursed under his breath. 'These things always happen on nights like this!' he observed bitterly. 'Just like our rotten luck!—Signalman!'
'Sir?'
'Tell Monsoon I'm coming to her assistance,' Wooten gave the necessary orders to the quartermaster at the wheel.—'Hargreaves, have the boats turned out ready for lowering in case she goes, and send down to No. 1, and tell him to be ready for taking her in tow. As fast as you can!'
The sub. hurriedly left the bridge, and Wooten, working the helm and the twin screws, circled round until his ship was about fifty yards away from and abreast of the damaged vessel, which had fallen off into the trough of the sea. The Mariner's men, meanwhile, in all stages of deshabille, had thronged to the upper deck at the sound of the explosion, and were making the various necessary preparations.