“I might have known that Kipling worked it out with a chart,” he exclaimed; “but what a thrill it gives one to find it exact, even to the soundings!”
The margins of “The Mary Gloster,” in my “Seven Seas,” bear the pencilled records—now thumbed and fingered into dim blurs—of our “mid-sea madness” to this day, and there is nothing that I treasure more. B—— would never have taken his 5,000-ton freighter miles off her course, at the cost of some hours of time and a number of tons of good Nagasaki coal, had he been any less daft about Kipling than I was. But all British sailors love Kipling; as a class, I have always felt that they had a fuller appreciation of the message of “the uncrowned Laureate” than have any others.
For an hour at least I must have turned in fancy the pages of Kipling, now with this well-remembered skipper, now with that, until the recollection of how kind old N——, of a Liverpool Para-Manaos freighter, had read to me “The Hymn Before Action” one night when I was half delirious from the Amazon “black-water” fever he had been nursing me through set the current of my thought on another tack. N—— was only one of a dozen who had coddled me through some sort of tropical illness or patched me up after some sort of a smash-up.
It was R——, of the Valparaiso-Panama coaster, who had put my hand in splints after it had been crushed between the gangway and a dug-out full of ivory nuts off some pile-built village of Ecuador, and it was my fault rather than his that the little finger was still crooked. And it was H——, of the big White Star freighter on the Australia-South Africa run, who laboured for an hour in helping the ship’s doctor worry back into place the shoulder I had dislocated in the “sports” one afternoon; and it was D——, of the Rangoon-Calcutta “B.I.,” who had reduced with horse-liniment the ankle I had sprained in dodging out of the path of a temperamental water-buffalo while ashore at Akyab; and it was A——, of the Lynch river boat plying from Basra to Bagdad, who stitched up my scalp after the Arabs of the bazaar of then almost unheard-of Kut-el-Amara had amused themselves with bouncing rocks off my head because (this was during the Turco-Italian war) they imagined I looked like an “alien enemy.”
A—— was killed when the Turks shelled his ship—then a transport—early in the Mesopotamian operations, I remembered, and this led my thoughts off to the long watch I kept by the bedside of poor old Y——, on whose “B.P.” steamer I had been roaming in and out among the Solomons, New Hebrides, Fijis and other islands of western Polynesia for two months. Y——’s heart had been giving out for a number of years, and now very hot weather following, the excitement of seeing his ship through an unusually heavy hurricane had hastened an end long inevitable. He knew his “number was up,” and so he told me, that night, of things he wanted me to explain and set right for him in Australia. It was the thinking of these, and the visit that I subsequently paid to his wife and children in the Illawara, that finally brought my mind back to that other bereaved family in the little red house beneath my window.
The short night had passed, the fog had lifted, and now in the early morning light I saw a milkman stop his cart a half-dozen doors from the Fryatt home and go softly tip-toeing on his near-by deliveries to avoid making unnecessary noise. Out of the retreating fog-bank to seaward two small freighters took sharpened line and headed for the harbour mouth. They were much of a size and type, but the gay red and white splashes on the bows of the more northerly ones indicated she sailed under the flag of an enterprising Scandinavian country, while the unbroken black of the side of the other told just as plainly that she was British. As I watched, the shifting of the shadows on the sides of the Norwegian told me that she was altering her course sharply every few hundred yards—“zigzagging” to minimise the danger from submarine attacks. A wise precaution, I told myself; now what about the other? I took up my glass and held it on the Briton. One, two, three, four, five minutes passed. All the time the wave curled evenly back from her forefoot; not a ripple of shifting light or shadow told of deviation in her course of the fraction of a point.
“Straight on to your goal, little ship,” I said, saluting with my glass.
But I might have known as much. That was Fryatt’s way, and that was the way all my friends of the Red Ensign did, and always will do. “Good luck, fair weather and snug berths to you all; aye, and a quiet haven when the last watch, the long watch, is finally over!”
Knots of troubled sailor men still gathered along Harwich quay this morning, but now that I understood by what they were moved I no longer hesitated to mingle and talk with them. Their slow anger was steadily mounting—gradually crowding out all other feelings—with every word that was spoken, with every hour that passed; but among them were still men who were stunned and dazed, who could not understand how a thing so monstrous really could have happened.
“But w’y, w’y ha’ the ’Uns done it?” persisted a grizzled old salt, turning his troubled eyes to mine after all the others had shaken their heads perplexedly.