M.L. —— looked more diminutive than ever as I was rowed out to her anchorage in the chill grey mists of the following morning; but a raw cold, which had been striking through to the marrow of my bones, dissolved, as by magic, before the friendly warmth of the welcome which awaited me, when I had clambered up the sawn-off Jacob’s Ladder and over the wobbly wire rail. A slender but lithely active chap in a greasy overall and jumper, to give it the Yankee name, gave me a finger-crushing grip with his right hand, while with his left he deftly caught and saved from immersion my kit-bag, which had fallen short in the toss that had been given it from below. Just for an instant the absence of visible insignia of rank made me think that he was a petty officer of engineers, or something of the kind; then the magnetism of his personality flowed to me through the medium of his hand-clasp, and I knew I was looking into the eyes of a man who
would not be likely to figure for long as anything less than “Number One” on any kind of job he ever undertook.
“You’re just in time for a ‘square,’” he said heartily, leading the way to the tiny hatch and preceding me down the ladder. “You’ll be needing it, too, after that pull with nothing more than that sloppy dish-wash kaffy-o-lay that you get at the hotel at this hour of the morning on your stomach. Don’t try to bluff me that you had anything more. I know by sad experience. Now I’ll give you something that’ll stick to your ribs. What do you say to some Boston baked beans and a ‘stack o’ hots’? Guess I know what a ’Murican likes. Sorry my maple syrup’s gone, but here’s some dope I synthesised out of melted sugar and m’lasses—treacle, they call it over here.”
Reaching the lower deck, we edged along to a transom at the end of a table which all but filled the tiny dining-cabin.
“Shake hands with Mac,” said the skipper by way of introducing me to a tall and extremely good-looking youth in a Cardigan jacket, duffel trousers, and sea-boots, who rose with a smile of welcome as we dropped down beside him. “Mac’s a Canuck, like myself,” he went on, after asking me if I liked my eggs “straight up” or “turned over,” and passing the order on to a diminutive Cockney with a comedian’s face, who came tripping in almost as though wafted on the “smell o’ cooking” which
preceded him through the opened galley door.
“Mac learned his sailoring on his dad’s yacht on Lake Ontario, and I learned mine driving a ‘deep-seagoing’ side-wheel tractor on a ranch in Alberta. Only time I was ever afloat before I became a ‘Capt’in in the King’s Navee’ was on a raft on the old Missouri, in Dakota; and that isn’t really being afloat, you know, for ’bout one half the water of that limpid stream is mud and the other half catfish. A great pair of old salts, we two—hey, Mac?
“And the rest of the crew’s no more ‘saline’ than its ‘orfficers.’ That’s the way they say it, ain’t it, Mac? Little ’Arry, the galley-slave, was a knock-about artist in the London music-halls before he ‘eard the sea a-callin’, and now he doesn’t ’eed nothin’ else, do you, Harry? And you’ll hear the sea a-callin’ that nice big breakfast of yours just as soon as we get outside the Heads, won’t you, Harry? And then you won’t ’eed nothin’ else for quite a while. And so’ll Mac hear the sea a-calling his breakfast, and so’ll I, and so’ll all the rest of us—every mother’s son. It’s a fine lot of Jack Tars we are, the whole bunch of us. Did I tell you that one of my quartermasters is an ex-piano-tuner, and that the other was a Salvation Army captain before he entered the Senior Service for the duration? And my Chief—that’s him you hear alternating between tinkering and swearing at the engines on the other side of that bulkhead you’re leaning against—owned a motor-boat of his own before the War, and
appears to have divided his waking hours between racing that and his stable of motor-cars? You can tell he was a gentleman once by the fluency of his cussing. He’s the only man I’ve met over here that could give yours truly any kind of a run in dispensing the pungent persiflage; but I had the advantage of driving mules as a kid.
“But cussing, though it helps with a lot of things, doesn’t make a sailor, and the Chief’s no more of a Jack Tar than me or Mac or Harry. Fact is, that the only man aboard who ever made his living out of the sea before the war is a fisherman from the Hebrides; and even the glossary in the back of my Bobbie Burns won’t translate his lingo. Two or three times, when the sea has been kicking up a bit, he has managed to tell us that no self-respecting God-fearing sailor would be oot in such weather. Possibly he’s been right; but, as none of us are sailors, we don’t feel called on to pay much attention to his ravings. Our duty is to harass any Huns that encroach on our beat; and the fact that we’ve had a modicum of success in that line proves you don’t have to be a sailor to qualify for the job. Which don’t mean, though,” he concluded with a smile of sad resignation as he rose and reached for his oil-skins, “that I don’t hope and pray that I’ll develop the legs and stomach of a sailor before the war’s over.”