“And is your nerve all right? I mean, are you perfectly cool?” I demanded.
“As cool as the honourable cucumber,” he asserted. “Feel my unworthy hand.”
I could not help laughing. Here was the inevitable “honourable” being dragged in again. I seized his hand and held it loosely in mine for a few seconds. It was firm and steady as a rock.
“Good!” I said. “You will do, Ito. Go down and work the tubes, my boy, and see that you excel yourself to-night. And, Ito, if you love me, do not, for heaven’s sake, forget to withdraw the honourable safety pin from the honourable fan before you honourably fire the
honourable torpedo, or you will make no honourable hits this honourable night. Do you honourably take me?”
There! I had fired off my little joke on Ito; illustrated to him, I fondly thought, the absurdity of indiscriminately dragging in the word “honourable” in and out of season. How would he take it, I wondered.
“The august captain may honourably rely upon his unworthy lieutenant to do his honourable best,” he gravely answered; and the next moment was “honourably” descending the bridge ladder to the deck. My miserable attempt at jocularity had absolutely missed fire; the dear, innocent fellow had accepted my speech as uttered in all seriousness.
It was at this moment that I first caught the loom of the Russian ships, showing up a deeper black against the black shadow of the frowning cliffs away to starboard; and a second or two later a long, brilliant beam of intensely white light shot out from one of the black shapes and slowly swept hither and thither, now striking the heaving surface of the black water, and anon vividly illumining one of her sisters. Our orders had been not to discharge at a higher range than five hundred metres.
Slowly, the beam swept round toward us until it halted and rested steadily upon a great lump of a craft that towered out of the water like a castle, almost immediately between itself and us. Luckily, the dazzling light itself was hidden from our eyes by the bulk of the ship upon which it rested, but it invested her with a sort of halo of radiance against which she stood out black and grim, a perfect silhouette. She was a big craft, evidently a battleship, with a lofty superstructure, three big funnels cased half-way up, a long overhanging bridge, and two stout military masts with fighting tops, and two yards across each. She was just within range, and, seizing a megaphone, I was in the act of raising it to my lips to order Ito to let fly at her, when I saw a long, silvery shape flash out from our after-deck, and a few seconds later a great cone of water leaped into the air and fell like a deluge upon the great ship, which seemed to lift half out of the water, as though hove up by a giant. A heavy boom followed, and I had the extreme gratification of knowing that the little Kasanumi’s first Whitehead had got home.