Half a minute later the little lift came to a creaking standstill, and we squeezed out to a ladder which led up to the main deck. The wash swirled to our knees in an angle of the mess-deck, but the warrant officers' mess, to which I was conducted by my guide, was warm and dry. Toasting bread for our tea in the genial glow of the electric heater, he told me yarns of the days when he himself had (to use his own picturesque expression) "stood at the small end of a shovel" before the furnace doors.
He had once been scalded with escaping steam in the hold of an old cruiser off the coast of South America, once imprisoned in the stokehold of a destroyer for forty-eight hours in a gale in the sub-Arctic, and once he had been "mentioned" for putting out a fire started by a German shell in some nondescript craft in which he found himself at the time the British Navy was trying to protect the retreat along the Flemish coast. The latter sounded like a "story," and I threw a "lead" or two to draw it out. This was about all I got.
"The old Flighty got in too close," he said, turning the slice on his toasting fork, "and the Huns opened up on us with bigger stuff than we reckoned they had there. There was a big crash, just like when a big lump of sea hits you, only worse, and all the stokers and me (I was a petty officer then) was knocked flat. We were under forced draught, and the fires needing all the coal we could pitch on to them. No one was much hurt, and I got them to shovelling again as soon as I could. Then I took a squint up the ventilator down which most of the shock seemed to come.
"There was a bit of a fire getting under way up there, and so I pitched up two or three buckets of water and put it out. Didn't notice till afterwards that a small fragment of shell had come down and hit me in the forehead—right here" (touching a jagged cut just under the hair).
"Captain seemed rather pleased about it, as the men on fire station in that part of the ship had been knocked out, and he appeared to think I had kept the blaze from getting a big headway.
"'Nother funny thing"—and he went on to tell of a stoker of a trawler who, after having his face slightly scalded by steam, had lain down and gone to sleep with his head pillowed among some of the steward's recent purchases, and of how the cook, foraging in the twilight and starting to pick up what he thought was a boiled lobster, had nearly pulled off one of the unlucky chap's burned ears!
I sought the fo'c'sle deck for a breath of fresh air after that, and pushed my head out of the after superstructure just as a hulking cinder came winging aft before the snoring north-east gale. It was quite possible (I said to myself as I ducked inside and pulled down my eyelid in an endeavour to deposit the unwelcome fragment on my cheek) that this very cinder was one which I myself had dumped down one of the bunker chutes during our last coaling.
At any rate, I knew that, save for that last leg skywards by way of the furnaces, I had followed the path of the coal from the collier to the funnel-top, and even a bit further. I had, therefore, no legitimate cause for resentment over the fact that it had taken to following me.