The only craft that a destroyer will, sometimes, not steal equipment from is a destroyer; which accounts for the purity of her morals and the loftiness of her conversation, and her curiosity in respect to stolen fillings.
Duckett, unmoved, went below, to return with a valise which he carried on to His Majesty’s quarter-deck, and, atop of a suit of rat-catcher clothes, crammed into it a pair of ancient pigskin gaiters.
Here Phlox, assisted by her Dandy Dinmont, Dinah, who had been trained to howl at certain notes in her master’s voice, gave a spirited and imaginary account of Gardenia’s return the night before, which was compared to that of an ambulance with a lady-driver. Duckett retaliated by slipping on to his head for one coquettish instant a gravy-coloured soft cloth cap. It was the last straw. Phlox and Stephanotis, who had no hope of any leave for the present, pronounced it an offence, only to be wiped out by drinks.
“All things considered,” said Duckett. “I don’t care if I do. Come along!” and, the hour being what it was, he gave the necessary orders through the wardroom’s tiny skylight. The captains came. Phlox—Lieutenant Commander Jerry Marlett, a large and weather-beaten person, docked himself in the arm-chair by the wardroom stove with his cherished Dinah in his arms. Great possessions and much land, inherited from an uncle, had removed him from the Navy on the eve of war. Three days after the declaration of it he was back again, and had been very busy ever since. Stephanotis—Lieutenant-in-Command Augustus Holwell Rayne, alias “The Damper,” because of his pessimism, spread himself out on the settee. He was small and agile, but of gloomy outlook, which a D. S. O. earned, he said, quite by mistake, could not lighten. “Horse” Duckett, Gardenia’s skipper, was a reversion to the primitive Marryat type—a predatory, astute, resourceful pirate, too well known to all His Majesty’s dockyards, a man of easily injured innocence who could always prove an alibi, and in whose ship, if his torpedo-coxswain had ever allowed any one to look there, several sorts of missing Government property might have been found. His ambition was to raise pigs (animals he only knew as bacon) in Shropshire (a county he had never seen) after the war, so he waged his war with zeal to bring that happy day nearer. He sat in the arm-chair by the door, whence he controlled the operations of “Crippen,” the wardroom steward, late of Bolitho’s Travelling Circus and Swings, who had taken to the high seas to avoid the attentions of the Police ashore.
As usual, Duckett’s character had been blackened by My Lords of the Admiralty, and he was in the midst of a hot campaign against them. An able-seaman’s widowed mother had sent a ham to her son whose name was E. R. Davids. Unfortunately, Engineroom-Artificer E. Davies, who swore that he had both a mother and expectations of hams from her, came across the ham first, and, misreading its address, had had it boiled for, and at once eaten by, the Engineers’ mess. E. R. Davids, a vindictive soul, wrote to his mother, who, it seems, wrote to the Admiralty, who, according to Duckett, wrote to him daily every day for a month to know what had become of E. R. Davids’ ham. In the meantime the guilty Engineroom-Artificer E. Davies had been transferred to a sloop off the Irish coast.
“An’ what the dooce am I to do?” Duckett asked his guests plaintively.
“Apply for leave to go to Ireland with a stomach-pump and heave the ham out of Davies,” Jerry suggested promptly.
“That’s rather a wheeze,” said Duckett. “I had thought of marrying Davids’ mother to settle the case. Anyhow, it was all Crippen’s fault for not steering the ham into the wardroom when it came aboard. Don’t let it occur again, Crippen. Hams are going to be very scarce.”
“Well, now you’ve got all that off your chest”—Jerry Marlett lowered his voice—“suppose you tell us about what happened—the night before last.”
The talk became professional. Duckett produced certain evidence—still damp—in support of the claims that he had sent in concerning the fate of a German submarine, and gave a chain of facts and figures and bearings that the others duly noted.