The Boy meekly obeyed instructions. He pegged the end of the string firmly down and returned to the Attraction, who was engaged in hunting out a hoe from among a litter of horticultural implements that lay in a corner of the garden wall. He stood watching her for a moment, and with her eyes away from him, his attitude altered slightly and became almost proprietary, while his face seemed to harden a shade and give an inkling of the naval stamp that it would develop later on. She looked round suddenly and saw him again as a shy and awkward youth.
"Have you done it?" she said. "All right, you can really start doing some work now. I'm going to make you dig a trench. That's the best way to serve your country when you're ashore and have the chance. And to think you've never used a hoe before!"
The Boy scraped the hoe reflectively with the toe of his boot. It did not seem to him politic to mention the fact that vegetable gardens do not usually grow either on the decks of battleships or on the shell-beaten slopes of Gallipoli. He made no attempt to follow the tortuous wanderings of a feminine mind, but held on his own course. "Are you going to help?" he said.
"No. You'd only loaf at the work if I did, and I've got other things to do, too. Now, come along and start, or you'll never get it finished by to-night."
"I'm leaving to-morrow," said the Boy.
"So you've told me—heaps of times to-day. But you must finish that trench before you go."
The Boy nodded and walked away towards the pegged-out end of the string. The lady, without turning her head, walked back up the path until she came to the grassy slope at its end. Selecting a spot from which a view could be obtained through the hedge of her oppressed admirer, she sat down and carefully laid the basin of peas on the bank beside her.
"He's rather a dear," she observed cautiously to herself. "But he is such a child. 'Wonder why boys are always so awfully young compared to women?"
The flotilla would have turned round for its run back in another half-hour if the last destroyer in the enemy's line had not shown a faint funnel-glare for the fractional part of a second. They were only a couple of miles from the end of the "beat" when it showed, and considering the poor visibility that accompanied the frequent snow-showers, it was a piece of happy luck that the glare was seen at all. Three people on the leader's bridge saw it together; two of them gave a kind of muffled yelp, as foxhound puppies would at sight of their first cub, while the third gave an order on the instant. The destroyer settled a little by the stern, her course altered slightly, and she began really to travel. For some hours she had been jogging along at seventeen knots, but her speed now began to rise in jumps of five knots at a time, till in a few minutes she had become a mad and quivering fabric of impatient steel. As she gained her speed the snow began to pour down again, blotting out the faint shadow that had meant the bow of her next astern. The Captain glanced aft once, and then continued his intent gazing forward. He had passed a rough bearing and the signal to chase to his subordinates astern, and could do no more till he could get touch again. He had no intention of easing his speed to wait for clearer visibility. He knew too much of flotilla war to let a chance of fighting go by in that way. If he once got to the enemy, the rest of his flotilla would steer to the sound of the guns; and anyhow, he decided, if he did have to fight single-handed, the worse the visibility was and the greater the confusion and doubt among the enemy, the better would be the chances for him. The snow ahead cleared for a minute to leave a long narrow lane between the showers, and he saw the loom of the last ship of the enemy's line. The German destroyer seemed to fall back to him, as if she was stopped, though in reality she was holding station on her next ahead at a fair sixteen knots. With a startling crash and a blaze of blinding light the guns opened from along the leader's side—the German guns waiting, surprised, for a full minute before they replied. When they did open fire, the duel had become too one-sided to be called a fight at all. Between the crashes of the guns, the clatter and ring of ejected cartridge-cases could be heard but faintly, yet as the big leader passed her battered opponent at barely half a cable distance, through the din and savage intensity of a yard-arm fight the quartermaster stooped over his tiny wheel, oblivious to all things but the clear quiet voice that conned the ship past and on to her next victim. The rear destroyer of the enemy swung away, stopped, and remained—a horrible illustration of the maxim of naval warfare, which says that he who is unready should never leave harbour.