A clear-cut Navy voice drawled from the clouds: “Quiet! you gardeners there. This is the Cryptic at anchor.”
“Thank you for the range,” said Pyecroft, and paddled gingerly. “Feel well out in front of you, Alf. Remember your fat fist is our only Marconi installation.” The voices resumed:
“Bournemouth steamer he says she be.”
“Then where be Brixham Harbor?”
“Damme, I’m a tax-payer tu. They’ve no right to cruise about this way. I’ll have the laa on ’ee if anything carries away.”
Then the man-of-war:
“Short on your anchor! Heave short, you howling maniacs! You’ll get yourselves smashed in a minute if you drift.”
The air was full of these and other voices as the dinghy, checking, swung. I passed one hand down Laughton’s stretched arm and felt an iron gooseneck and a foot or two of a backward-sloping torpedo-net boom. The other hand I laid on broad, cold iron—even the flanks of H.M.S. Cryptic, which is twelve thousand tons.
I heard a scrubby, raspy sound, as though Pyecroft had chosen that hour to shave, and I smelled paint. “Drop aft a bit, Alf; we’ll put a stencil under the stern six-inch casements.”
Boom by boom Laughlin slid the dinghy along the towering curved wall. Once, twice, and again we stopped, and the keen scrubbing sound was renewed.