Bought for us To-morrow.”
Ian Hay
London, July, 1918
The Last Million
CHAPTER ONE
THE ARGONAUTS
A ship is sailing on the sea—a tall ship, with several masts and an imposing array of smokestacks. She is moving at a strictly processional pace, with a certain air of professional boredom. In fact, the disconsolate hissing of her steam escape-pipes intimates quite plainly that she is accustomed to a livelier life than this. But a convoy belongs to the straitest sect of Labour-Unionism: its pace is regulated to that of the slowest performer; so ocean greyhounds in such company must restrain themselves as best they may.
All around her steam other ships. They are striped, spotted, and ringstraked as to their hulls, smokestacks, and spars in a manner highly gratifying to that school of unappreciated geniuses, the Futurists,—or Cubists, or Vorticists, or whatever the malady is called,—but exasperating to the submerged Hun, endeavouring to calculate knottage and obtain ranging-points through a perplexed periscope. On the outer fringe of the flotilla fuss the sheep-dogs—the escorting warships.
If you seek to ascertain the nationality of our tall ship, by internal evidence, you will probably begin by observing certain notices painted up about the decks and cabins, requesting you to keep off the bridge, or to refrain from throwing cigar-ends on the deck, or not to leave this tap running. You will next observe that these notices are inscribed in English, French, and another language. What language, it is impossible to say, for some one has pasted a strip of blank paper over the inscription in every case. But it is easy to guess. In the depths, here and there, German is still spoken; but upon the face of the broad ocean it is a dead language.