Next time you see the ‘blue’ ashore you do not stare unintelligently. You have watched him on his native heath. You know what he eats, and what he says, and where he sleeps, and how. He is no longer a unit; but altogether such an one as yourself—only, as I have said, better. The Naval Officer chance met, rather meek and self-effacing, in tweeds, at a tennis party, is a priest of the mysteries. You have seen him by his altars. With the Navigating Lieutenant ‘on the ’igh an’ lofty bridge persecuting his vocation’ you have studied stars, mast-head angles, range-finders, and such all; the First Lieutenant has enlightened you on his duties as an Upper Housemaid, (see Note Ia.) and the Juniors have guided you through the giddy whirl of gunnery, small-arm drill, getting up an anchor, and taking kinks out of a cable. So it comes that next time you see, even far off, one of Her Majesty’s cruisers, all your heart goes out to her. Men live there.
CHAPTER IV
It was the Captain’s coxswain (see Note II.)—precise, immaculate, and adequate as ever—who met the returning guest at Devonport a year later—September, 1898. This time my cruiser was not with the Fleet, but on urgent private affairs. A misguided collier had seen fit to sit on her ram for a minute or so in Milford Haven, a few days before, and had twisted it thirteen inches to starboard. The collier was beached as soon as possible, and the Admiral he said to us (this I got from the coxswain as we drove to North Corner, by night, through blue-jacketed Devonport): ‘Can you go round to Plymouth with your nose in that state?’ ‘Lord love you, yes,’ said we, or words to that effect. ‘Very good,’ said the Admiral, ‘then you go.’ This we did at an average speed of sixteen knots, through a head-sea, with a collision-mat over our nose (‘Same mat we used when we tied up the Thrasher, sir’), and we ran her up to eighteen point two for a few hours to see how the bulkhead would stand it. The carpenter and the carpenter’s mate (‘Yes, they’re the same as last year, sir’) sat up to watch, but nothing happened.
‘An’ now we’re under orders to go back and join the Fleet at Bantry. We’ve been cruising all round England since August.’
THE RECORD OF A YEAR
Once aboard the lugger the past twelve months rolled up like a chart that one needs no longer. The ‘commodious coffee-grinder’ welcomed me as a brother, for by good luck no one had been changed; the same faces greeted me in the little ward-room, and we fell to chattering like children. Had I seen the new fore and aft bridge that we had managed to screw out of the Dockyard? A great contraption—a superior contraption. We had worked in a little extra deck under the forebridge, so that now the signalman had a place to stand in, which I would remember was not the case last year. Had I heard of our new coaling record? Nearly fifty tons per hour, which for a third-class cruiser represented four times that amount for a battleship. Had I heard of the zephyr that blew at Funchal; of unrecorded evolutions in Minorca Bay; of the First Lieutenant’s great haul of paint; of a recent target-practice when nothing was left of the target; of the influenza that overtook the steam-whistle; and a hundred other vital matters?
The record of a year with the Channel Fleet is not to be told in two hours, but I gathered a good deal ere I dropped into my well-remembered berth that joyous night. We departed at noon the next day, unhampered by signals. A liner leaves Plymouth in one style; a cruiser snakes out from Devonport in quite another, which was explained to me on the ‘’igh an’ lofty bridge’ as we skated round buoy after buoy, courteously pulled out a little not to interfere with a yacht race, and ran through the brown-sailed Plymouth fishing fleet. It was divine weather—still, cloudless, and blue—and the bridge was of opinion that he who had a farm should sell it and forthwith go to sea.
OUR NOBLE SELVES
The Cornwall coast slid past us in great grey-blue shadows, laid out beyond the little strip of sail-dotted blue; but my eyes were all inboard considering our noble selves. We had accumulated all sorts of small improvements since last year. She had shaken into shape, as a new house does when one has decided where to put the furniture. The First Lieutenant, as usual, explained that we were in no sense clean; that twenty ton at least of the four hundred we had just taken in lay about the deck in dust, and that it would cost a fortnight to put any appearance on her.
‘We’re supposed to be burning No. 2 Welsh. It’s road sweepings and soot really. That’s on account of the Welsh Coal Strike. Isn’t it filthy? We smoked out the whole of the Fleet and the Rock of Gibraltar the other day. But wait till you see some of the others. They’re worse. Isn’t she a pukka pigsty?’