CHAPTER VI
YANK BOAT versus U-BOAT
It was the turn of the tide and the turn of the day on the “quiet waters of the River Lee.” Pale blue columns of smoke rose above the verdant boskiness which masked the squat brown cabins where the peat fires smouldered, and along the straggling stone wall which crowned the ridge the swaying heads of home-returning cows showed intermittently against the glowing western sky. The peacefulness of it was almost palpable. You seemed to breathe it, and could all but reach out with the hand and touch it.
It permeated even to the long lines of lean destroyers in the stream, and it was the subtly suggestive influence of it which had deflected homeward the minds of the motley-clad sailors who were lounging at ease about the stern of the first of a “cluster” of three of these—like a sheaf of bright multi-coloured arrows the trim craft looked, with the level rays of the setting sun striking across them where they lay moored alongside each other—and set tongues wagging of the little things which, magnified by distance, loom large in the imaginations of men in exile.
They were deep in the “old home town” stuff when I sauntered inconsequently aft on the off-chance of picking up a yarn or two, but as there appeared to be no one present from my part of the country, no immediate opportunity to break in presented itself. Equally an outsider was I when the flow of discussion turned to woollen sweaters and socks and mufflers, and the golden trails of romance leading back from the names and messages sewed or knitted into them.
No fair unknowns had ever sent me any of these soft comforts, and after I had heard a lusty youngster from Virginia tell how a “sweater address” he had written what he described as a “lettah that was good and plenty w’am, b’lieve me,” replied that she was “jest goin’ twelve years,” and that her mother didn’t think she ought to be thinking of marriage just yet—after that I didn’t feel quite so bad over not having had a chance to open one of these “woolly” correspondences. There was some solace, too, in hearing a pink-cheeked young ex-bank clerk tell how the “abdominal bandage” (they name them, as a rule, after the garment that starts the correspondence), with whom he had exchanged something like a dozen letters of cumulative passion, brought the affair to a sudden and violent end by some indirect and inadvertent admission which showed that she remembered when Grant was President.
But when the talk drifted, as it always does in
the end, to baseball and baseballers, I knew that there was going to be an opening for me presently, and stood by to take advantage of it. A three-year absentee from the bleachers, I was not sufficiently up on last season’s pennant race “dope” to do more than make frequent sapient observations on this or that big-leaguer’s stickwork or fielding as he was mentioned; but when they began to discuss, or rather to wrangle over, for discuss is far too polite a term, the theory of the game and to grow red in the face over such esoterics (or “inside stuff,” to put it in “Fanese”) as how and when a “squeeze” ought to be pulled off, I showed them the bulbous first joint of the little finger of my right hand—which there is no other way of acquiring than by the repeated telescopings of many seasons on the diamond—and was welcomed at last on equal terms. A seat was offered me on a depth-charge, across the business end of which an empty sack had been thrown to prevent a repetition of what came near happening the time a stoker, who was proving that Hans Wagner could never again be a popular idol now that we were at war with the Huns, punctuated his argument by hammering with a monkey-wrench on the firing mechanism.
They were not as impressed as they should have been when I told them that I learned the game under the tutelage of the mighty Bill Lange (this, of course, because the incomparable “Big Bill” was at his zenith long before their time); but they