He couldn't talk; he couldn't get to his feet. His C.P.O. friend—a game one, too—shook his fist at me across his body. "Only a week out of the hospital and you had to beat him up. But, beaten or not beaten—go ahead, smash me again if you want to, you big brute—he's still a better man than you are or ever will be!"
A score of people had found their way in under the seats. None who cared to know but would hear a word of every blow that was passed in that fight. Going home after the fight it was borne in on me that less than ever was I the hero I was wishful to make myself out to be.
I slept little that night, and in the morning—nothing within the four walls of a house suited me any more—I slipped out into the sun and walked along the docks; and walking the docks I reached the gates to the navy-yard. I went in.
A ship!—'tis like nothing else in the world. Ships! In the romances I'd been reading since ever I could read, there had been tales of ships and of the sea. Phoenician galleys, Roman triremes, the high-prowed boats of the Vikings, carved Spanish caravels—they had carried the men who made history. Great ships were they, and yet here were ships that could take—any one of them here—could take a score, a hundred, of the ancient craft with all their shielded men at arms and stand off—a mile, two miles, ten miles off—and with one broadside blow them from the face of the waters. Dreams of what had been and what might be—what use were they? Things as they are—that was it!
What most people, maybe, would call common sense was coming to me; and maybe something finer than all the common sense in the world was flying from me. So I've often thought since of that morning.
I enlisted in the navy. And it was good for me. To look out on the wide 'waters—day or night—'tis to calm a man's soul, to widen his thought.
I had no ambition to rise. The blazing life of the four quarters of the world was soaking into me. My eyes, perhaps, were seeing too much, and my mind pondering on what I saw too much, to be breaking any ship records for efficiency.
But I was getting my rating when it was time and I was forgetting old shore troubles, when there was a warrant-officer came to our ship. His name—no matter his name—he's no longer in the navy. He was the— But you've seen the little man on the big job?—the sure sign of it being the pompous manner and the arrogant word. There he was, licking the boots of those above him and setting his own boots on the necks of those below! He strutted like a governor-general. Maybe you know what sort of talk is passed along the gun-decks when such a one is parading by!
The ridiculousness of him was too wide a target for any man with an eye in his head to miss. I was never short of an eye, nor oil for the trunnions of my tongue, and no ship's company ever lacked a messenger to carry the disturbing word. For the fun I poked at him my bold superior had me spotted for his own target later.
There was a chest of alcohol on the lower flag bridge and there was a marine sentry standing by it night and day. As much for the devilment as for the drink, four or five of the lads in our gun crew one night rushed the ladder to the bridge, stood the sentry on his head, broke open the chest, grabbed the alcohol, and got away.