“Yes, Sir. Their picket boats will be panickin’ round them all night. It’s considered good for the young gentlemen.”
“Hallo! War’s declared! They’re off!” said Moorshed.
He swung 267’s head round to get a better view. A few miles to our right the low horizon was spangled with small balls of fire, while nearer ran a procession of tiny cigar ends.
“Red hot! Set ’em alight,” said Mr. Pyecroft. “That’s the second destroyer flotilla diggin’ out for Commander Fassett’s reputation.”
The smaller lights disappeared; the glare of the destroyers’ funnels dwindled even as we watched.
“They’re going down Channel with lights out, thus showin’ their zeal an’ drivin’ all watch-officers crazy. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll get you your pyjamas, an’ you’ll turn in,” said Pyecroft.
He piloted me to the steel tunnel, where the ham still swung majestically over the swaying table, and dragged out trousers and a coat with a monk’s hood, all hewn from one hairy inch-thick board.
“If you fall over in these you’ll be drowned. They’re lammies. I’ll chock you off with a pillow; but sleepin’ in a torpedo-boat’s what you might call an acquired habit.”
I coiled down on an iron-hard horse-hair pillow next the quivering steel wall to acquire that habit. The sea, sliding over 267’s skin, worried me with importunate, half-caught confidences. It drummed tackily to gather my attention, coughed, spat, cleared its throat, and, on the eve of that portentous communication, retired up stage as a multitude whispering. Anon, I caught the tramp of armies afoot, the hum of crowded cities awaiting the event, the single sob of a woman, and dry roaring of wild beasts. A dropped shovel clanging on the stokehold floor was, naturally enough, the unbarring of arena gates; our sucking uplift across the crest of some little swell, nothing less than the haling forth of new worlds; our half-turning descent into the hollow of its mate, the abysmal plunge of God-forgotten planets. Through all these phenomena and more—though I ran with wild horses over illimitable plains of rustling grass; though I crouched belly-flat under appalling fires of musketry; though I was Livingstone, painless, and incurious in the grip of his lion—my shut eyes saw the lamp swinging in its gimbals, the irregularly gliding patch of light on the steel ladder, and every elastic shadow in the corners of the frail angle-irons; while my body strove to accommodate itself to the infernal vibration of the machine. At the last I rolled limply on the floor, and woke to real life with a bruised nose and a great call to go on deck at once.
“It’s all right,” said a voice in my booming ears. “Morgan and Laughton are worse than you!”