By which time Hogarth was standing at a cubical cabin of steel on the roof, with him Loveday and Quilter-Beckett, his brow puckered with wrinkles, the sun troubling his eyes.
“I suppose the chef is warned?”—he threw away his cigar.
“Oh, yes, my Lord King”, Quilter-Beckett answered.
And Loveday: “She sweats like a thoroughbred”—haggard, but assuming calm: “few things could be more profusely expeditious”.
“Ah, make phrases, John,” murmured Hogarth.... “Well, but hadn't you better be getting out the boats?”
Upon which Quilter-Beckett stepped into the little erection, touched a button, and in a minute the water round the southern side was swarming with twenty-three boats whose blue-jackets began to row toward the Kaiser.
And presently, “It's no use waiting”, said Hogarth, looking in upon Quilter-Beckett: “I should mine and shell her at the same moment, if I were you; tell them to get it in well amidships”.
Now a few seconds, full of expectation, passed, the Kaiser Wilhelm already two miles away: till suddenly space opened its throat in a gulf to bay gruff and hollow like hell-gate dogs; and, almost at the same moment, close by the Kaiser a column of water hopped with one humph of venom two hundred feet on high: when this dropped back broad-showering with it came showering a rain of wreckage; and instantly a shriek of lamentation floated over the sea, mixed with another shriek of steam.
For the moment the ship, enveloped in vapours, could not be seen; but in two minutes glimpses of her hull appeared, shewing the bluff bulge of her starboard bottom: for she leaned steeply to port with a forward crank, her two starboard screws, now free, spinning asleep like humming-tops. A six-inch shell, beautifully aimed, had shattered her engines, killing two stokers, and a torpedo-mine had knocked a hole nine feet across in her port beam.
But as the Boodah's boats, meanwhile, had been racing toward her, and as her own port boats were quickly out, all were got off; in fact, she floated so long, that her ship's papers with £270,000 in specie, and a few hundred-weight of mailbags were saved, and even after the boats reached the Boodah she still stretched there motionless, until, with a sudden flurry, she determined to plunge.