A Fritz who will not run!”
But if actual battles were few in the American patrol flotilla that Summer and Fall, there was plenty of incident. Storms became numerous as Autumn appeared, and the Gyandotte gave the lie to those pessimists who doubted her seaworthiness. There were occasions when Nelson concluded that if he ever reached land again it would be either in a small boat or atop a deck hatch, but the little cruiser always came through somehow, even if she almost stood on her beam ends doing it! Meanwhile Nelson found promotion of a sort. A vacancy in the crew of Number Four gun placed him as trainer, a position for which his study and Garey’s instructions had well fitted him, and he blossomed forth with a seaman gunner’s distinguishing mark, a bursting bomb worked in white silk on his sleeve. He was rather proud of that insignia and fairly ached for a chance to make good at his job.
He received one letter from Martin about the first of October, mailed at some town on the East coast of Scotland whose name Nelson could not decipher, and which, he decided, he wouldn’t have been able to pronounce in any case. Martin reported that the Q-4 was lying up undergoing battery replacements. “We’ve had a busy time of it since I saw you last,” he continued. “We’re helping the Limie subs patrol this beastly coast around here. There’s a big base about twelve miles away where the British fleet is tucked up, and it’s our stunt to see that no one slips in and ‘strafes’ them when they’re having tea. It isn’t bad fun, but nothing ever happens. They talk about going up and shelling the German fleet out of its base, but I guess it’s only talk. It’s none of my business, but if I was Jellicoe I’d want more action. The Englishers are a fine lot and we get along with them top-hole. (I’m getting to talk like one fast!) But this is a bleak old corner of the world and we nearly freeze to death when we go out. I wish they’d change us to the Mediterranean this Winter. Send me a letter to the address below and tell me what you’re doing these days. Did you see that New York had copped the pennant? Some team, old scout, some team! You remember Jimmy Sanford, on my crew? He’s the one with a bald spot in the middle of his head. Well, Jimmy’s from Chicago and he won’t speak to anyone since he’s learned that Chicago has lost the World’s Championship. I’ll be mighty glad when this shindy is over, old settler. Me for home the first chance I get. I’m sort of fed up on this ‘submarinery.’ ‘I know now that dad was right!’”
Nelson answered the first time he went ashore, but there came no further response from the distant Martin. Nelson had made other friends by now, both aboard the cruiser and ashore, but with none of them was he very intimate and none took the place of Martin in his affections. There was a young English midshipman named Tipper—more generally known as Tip—with whom Nelson chummed ashore. Tip was nineteen, a freckle-faced, tilt-nosed youngster full of fun and enthusiasm. Tip was aboard the British patrol boat Sans Souci, the flippant name having, through inadvertency, been allowed to remain, although most craft of the kind were distinguished by a mere number. Tip was second in command of the Sans Souci and had for superior officer a grave and reverend Reserve lieutenant of fifty-seven or -eight years who, if one believed Tip, left such trifles as navigation in the hands of the junior. There was a further complement of twelve petty officers and men, mostly young and enthusiastic, who apparently begrudged every day that the little converted yacht spent inside the booms. It was the Sans Souci’s mission to ride a certain square section of the sea south of St. George’s Channel, fair weather or foul, and watch for U-boats, mines and suspicious characters generally.
Nelson made young Mr. Tipper’s acquaintance quite by accident in the Y. M. C. A. hut, Tip having come across a joke in an English weekly which he felt compelled to share with someone else. As Nelson happened to be the nearest, Nelson was chucklingly invited to read the humorous paragraph. He did so, found it funny, laughed and was instantly—and metaphorically—clasped to the breast of the smart, good-looking young midshipman. The fact that Nelson was not even a petty officer appeared to have no weight with Tip, who was surprisingly democratic for a British naval officer. Later Nelson discovered a kind of explanation, which was that in Tip’s eyes an American was quite different from other beings and that with him the ordinary rules didn’t hold good. Tip had queer ideas on the subject of American life and customs, largely due to his reading. He firmly believed that New York and San Francisco were, if not adjacent, at least within a day’s journey of each other, and that anywhere between the two cities one plunged into trackless forests and crossed limitless plains inhabited by Indians, cowboys, “bad men,” panthers, rattlers, alligators and a variety of less ferocious animals such as elk, bison and antelope. Somewhere north of the plains and forests lay a wild pile of mountains, filled with glaciers and mountain sheep, and beyond those again was a country called Canada, inhabited by Younger Sons. He surprised Nelson one day by asking him if he had Indian blood in him, and was palpably disappointed when Nelson said no. At first Nelson dubbed his new acquaintance “a cheerful idiot,” but it didn’t take long to find that while Tip was undoubtedly cheerful he was far from being an idiot. Tip had plenty of money and was happiest when spending it. A “jolly good feed” was his favorite extravagance, and Nelson was frequently his guest. Had Tip had his way Nelson would have been entertained in the little hotel he had discovered, at every meal ashore, but Nelson had to refuse many times when he wanted very much to accept simply because he didn’t care to be in the other’s debt too greatly. On thirty-six dollars a month, which was his present pay as a seaman gunner, he couldn’t play host very frequently. One day he went out in a very smart little gig to the Sans Souci and was shown that diminutive “warship.”
The Sans Souci had once been a rather luxurious cruising yacht, but luxuries had been shorn away with a stern hand until now she was little more than a hull accommodating engine and bunks, with a small rapid-fire gun mounted on the bow. In length she was just over the dimension of the Wanderer. In seaworthiness, however, she appeared to have the better of that boat. She burned gasoline—or petrol, as they called it in those waters—and storage tanks were scattered all over her, above deck and below. The officers lived in Spartan simplicity, commander and junior sharing a tiny stateroom abaft the engine and eating forward in the galley.
“We have our chunk first, you know,” explained Tip. “But it’s very seldom we sit down to it, for when this little lady gets into a sea you simply can’t keep anything on the table.”
Nelson secretly thought that careening about the channel in the Sans Souci might be exciting enough, but he was sort of thankful he didn’t have to do it. Sailing the waters of Nantucket Sound in the old Wanderer had been fairly safe work, but tossing about a hundred miles from land in this shallop was another thing entirely! He admired Tip’s pluck but didn’t envy him.
The Sans Souci had been black at one time, and then the vogue of decorating ship’s hulls with lines and ripples and spots had come in, and the little craft was a strange and fearsome thing above the water line. Tip was very proud of the camouflaging, though. He had even taken a hand at it himself, borrowing a brush from the painter and adding some gruesome streaks of pea green to the black, gray, white and blue already there. Tip claimed that you couldn’t tell the Sans Souci from a mermaid half a mile distant, and Nelson was prepared to believe it, even though he had never seen a mermaid. Lieutenant Putnam-Earle greeted Nelson politely but failed to accept the hand that Nelson unthinkingly extended. (“You mustn’t mind Put,” said his junior afterwards. “He’s like that. Awf’ly fussy, you know, about rank and all that rot. Comes of one of our oldest families. So old it’s fairly putrid. He’s not a half bad old chap.”) Nelson didn’t allow the incident to worry him. Of course the lieutenant had been quite right. A commanding officer doesn’t shake hands with an ordinary seaman on being introduced; at least, not on duty. The lieutenant struck Nelson as being a far from cheerful companion for a fellow like Tip, and wondered what it was like to have to live with him for three days at a stretch at sea. The crew seemed a fine lot of young Britons, and he could understand a portion of Tip’s enthusiasm for his command.
As the Sans Souci spent three days on duty and three days in port alternately, Nelson usually had a good deal of Tip’s society when the Gyandotte was in Queenstown. Liberty was freely granted when the cruiser was in port and Nelson and Tip made several excursions to nearby points of interest, once getting as far afield as Dublin and once to Limerick. Cork was a favorite jaunt until the men of the fleets were forbidden to visit that city because of Sinn Fein demonstrations. Ireland was as much terra incognita to Tip as it was to Nelson, and they had a good deal of fun in exploring it.