SINGAPORE in the year 1919 was a very important naval station. During the last six or seven years it had undergone great changes. The practical abandonment of a powerful war-squadron on the China Station, owing to the understanding with Japan, had led to a decline in the greatness of Hong-Kong as a base. And what Hong-Kong had lost Singapore had gained—with compound interest. Henceforth that little island at the extreme south of the Malay Peninsula was to be the greatest British naval station on the portals of the Pacific.
Additional docks, capable of taking the largest battleships afloat, had been constructed, with smaller basins for submarines, of which twelve of the "C" class and six of the "D" type were stationed there. Bomb-proof sheds for seaplanes had been built, and the whole defended by modern forts armed with the most up-to-date and powerful guns.
At half-past eight on the morning following the event recorded in the first chapter a signal was made from the dockyard to the flagship of Rear-Admiral Maynebrace. It read: "Commander-in-Chief to 'Repulse': French instructor will proceed on board at four bells. Please send boat to meet him at Kelang Steps."
The receipt of this message was duly acknowledged and then communicated through the manifold yet proper channels to the gun-room, where the midshipmen received it with ill-concealed disgust.
They had planned a picnic along the well-kept country road that, fringed on either side by unbroken avenues of fruit-trees and luxuriant palms, led to the lofty Who Hen Kang. There they had hoped to revel in the gorgeous glades, eating pine-apples and coco-nuts till the services of the sick-bay staff might have to be called into requisition. The prospect, ignoring the consequences of their injudicious appetites, was most alluring; till almost on the eve of the anticipated picnic came this disconcerting message that the French instructor was about to come off to the ship.
French lessons with the temperature at ninety-eight in the shade! This ordeal was sufficient to crush even the resistance of a punch-ball, let alone a dozen irresponsible midshipmen.
Such terrors did not exist for Rear-Admiral Maynebrace. He had forgotten all the foreign languages that had been dinned into his head forty years ago, and since the King's Regulations say nothing about flag officers polishing up their French, Maynebrace felt no qualms. As it happened he had an invitation to meet the Governor.
With due ceremony the Admiral was piped over the side and his motor-pinnace landed him at the Kelang Steps. Somehow there was no conveyance in waiting, not even a rickshaw, so Maynebrace and his flag-lieutenant had to walk.
On his way through the dockyard the Admiral's attention was directed towards an individual who, even amidst the quaintly-costumed inhabitants of Singapore, looked singularly bizarre.
The person who attracted the notice of the mighty Maynebrace was tall, inclined to corpulence, and bowed in the shoulders. His sun-dried face was partly concealed by a bristling black moustache and an imperial. His hair, or at least what was visible outside a top hat of wondrous style, was grey.