We were just passing the riven wreck of a large freighter as I sidled inconsequently along to the forecastle, and the strange way in which the stern appeared to be stirring to the barely perceptible swell gave ample excuse for turning to the crew of the foremost gun for a possible explanation. It was Leading Seaman Gains, as incisive of speech as he was quick of movement, who replied, and I recognized him at once as a youth of force and personality, one of the type to whom the broadened opportunities for quick promotion offered the Lower
Deck through the war has given a new outlook on life.
“She was a tramp with a cargo of American mules for the Serbs, sir,” he said, “and she was submarined two or three miles off shore. The mouldie cracked her up amidships, but her back didn’t break till she grounded on that sand spit there. At first her stern sank till her poop was awash at high tide—there’s only a few feet rise and fall here, as you probably know, sir—but when the bodies of the mules that had been drowned ’tween decks began to swell they blocked up all the holes and finally generated so much gas that the increased buoyancy lifted the keel of the stern half clear of the bottom and left it free to move with the seas. I have heard they intend to blow out her bottom and sink her proper for fear that end of her might float off in a storm and turn derelict.”
That story was, as I learned later, substantially true, but it had just enough of the fantastic in it to tempt the twinkling eyed “Number Two” to a bit of embroidery on his own account. He was the one with the muscular forearms and the slight limp. The suggestion of “New World” accent in his speech was traceable, he subsequently told me, to the many years he had spent on the Esquimault station in British Columbia.
“They do say, sir,” he said solemnly, rubbing hard at an imaginary patch of inferior refulgency
on the shining breech of his gun, “that she’s that light and jumpy with mule-gas, after the sun’s been beating on her poop all day, that she lifts right up in the air and tugs at her moorings like a kite balloon. And there’s one buzz winging round that they’re going to run a pipe-line to her end and use the gas for inflating——”
Gains, evidently feeling that there were limits to which the credulity of a landsman should be imposed upon, cut in coldly and crushingly with: “She’s not the only old wreck ’round here that they could draw on for ‘mule-gas’ if there’s ever need of it, my boy; and as for her rising under her own power—well, if she ever goes as far as you did under yours the night you jumped from the Seagull to the Bow I’ll——”
The gusty guffaw that drowned the rest of Gains’ broadside left us all on good terms, and, by a happy chance, with the “Jutland ice” already broken. Number Two, joining heartily in the laugh, said that, “nifty” as was his jump from the Seagull to the Bow, it wasn’t a “starter” to the “double back-action-summerset” with which Jock Campbell was chucked from the Bow to the Seagull. “We played a sort of ‘Pussy-Wants-a-Corner’ exchange, Jock and me,” he said, “for Jock was Number Four or ‘Trainer’ of the crew of one of the fo’c’sle guns of the Bow, and I was the same in the Seagull. We didn’t quite land in each other’s place when the wallop came, but it wasn’t
far from it; and we each finished the scrap in the other guy’s ship. You might pike aft and try to get a yarn out of Jock when ‘Pack up!’ sounds. He’s a close-mouthed tyke, though, and if you can get him to tell how he played the human proj, you’ll be doing more’n anyone else has been able to pull off down to now. He’s half clam and half sphinx, I think Jock is, and that makes a ‘dour lad’ when crossed with a ‘Glasgie’ strain. Which makes it all the sadder to have him qualify for membership in the ‘Black Marias,’ and me, because I finished in the Bow, froze out.”
I told him that I would gladly have a try at Jock later, provided only that he would first tell me what happened in his own case, adding that it wasn’t every British sailor who could claim the distinction of fighting the Hun from two different ships within the hour.