All around are uniforms naval and military, British, French, Italian, and so forth. It is here, I say, that East and West do meet. Here the skipper from Nagasaki finds an old shipmate just in from New Orleans. Here a chief engineer, burned brown and worn thin by a summer at Basra, drinks with a friend bound East from Glasgow to Rangoon. Here the gossip of all the ports of the Seven Seas changes hands over the little tables under the dim green-shaded lights. Outside, beyond the screen of verdure, a carriage will go by stealthily in the dust, a cigar glowing under the hood. Itinerant salesmen of peanuts in glass boxes, beads, Turkish delight, postals, cigarettes, news-sheets, postage-stamps, and all the other passenger junk, pass to and fro. A native conjuror halts as we sit down, sadly produces a dozen lizards from an apparently empty fez, and passes on as I look coldly upon his peripatetic legerdemain. Here and there parties of residents sit round a table—a French family, perhaps, or Italian, or Maltese, or Greek, or Hebrew, or Syrian—for they are all to be found here in Pelusium, the latter making money out of their conquerors, just as, I dare say, they did in Roman times. Papa is smoking a cigarette; Mamma is sitting back surveying the other denizens of the artificial forest through her lorgnon; the young ladies converse with a couple of youthful ‘subs’ in khaki, and a bare-legged boy, in an enormous pith hat like an inverted bath, is haggling over half a piastre with a vender of peanuts. Tommy and I sit in the shadow of a shrub and I order gin and lime-juice. He wants beer, but there is no beer—only some detestable carbonated bilge-water at half a dollar (ten piastres) the bottle.
And soldiers go by continually to and from the cafés and canteens. Many are Colonials, and their wide-brimmed hats decorated with feathers give them an extraordinarily dissipated air. There is something very un-English about these enormous, loose-limbed, rolling fighting-men, with their cheeks the color of raw beef and their truculent eyes under their wide hats. They remind me at times of the professional soldiers of my school-days, who dressed in scarlet and gold and were a race apart. As they pass us, in twos and threes and singly, slouching and jingling their spurs, and roll off into darkness again, I think of Master Angus MacFadden and his chums, and I wonder what the future holds for us all. Then I hear Tommy talking and I begin to listen.
No use trying to tell the story as he told it. Whoever thinks he can, is the victim of an illusion. Tommy’s style, like his personality, is not literary. I often wonder, when I think of the sort of life he has led, how he comes to express himself at all. For he often startles me with some queer semi-articulate flash of intuition. A direct challenge to Life! As when he said, looking up at me as we leaned over the bulwarks and watched the sun rise one morning in the Caribbean, ‘Yo’ know, I haven’t had any life.’
Well, as I said, he and I are chums on some mysteriously taciturn, North Country principle that won’t bear talking about! And I must tell the story in my own way, merely quoting a phrase now and then. I owe him that much because, you see, he was there.
III
That voyage he made in the Polynesian was her usual London to South American ports. And nothing happened until they were homeward bound and making Ushant. It was a glorious day, as clear as it ever is in northern waters, and the Third Mate was astonished to see through his glasses what he took to be land. Ushant already! As he looked, he saw a flash and his wonder deepened. He told himself, well, he’d be blowed! A tremendous bang a hundred yards abeam of the Polynesian nearly shook him overboard. It has come at last, then!
The Old Man came from his room, running sideways, his face set in a kind of spasm, and stood by the rail, clutching it as if petrified. The Third Mate, a friend of Tommy’s, pointed and handed the binocular just in time for the Old Man to see another flash. The morning telegraph clanged and jangled. The Third Mate ran to the telephone and was listening, when the second shell, close to the bows, exploded on the water and made him drop the receiver. Then he heard the Old Man order the helm over—over—over, whirling his arm to emphasize the vital need of putting it hard over. A few moments of tense silence, and then, with a roar that nearly split all their ear-drums, the Polynesian’s six-inch anti-raider gun loosed off at nine thousand yards.
So you must envisage this obscure naval engagement on that brilliant summer day in the green Atlantic. Not a ripple to spoil the aim, not a cloud in the sky, as the two gunners, their sleeves rolled to the shoulders, their bodies heaving, thrust a fresh shell and cartridge into the breech, shoved in the cap, and swung the block into place with the soft ‘cluck’ of steel smeared with vaseline. As the ship veers, the gun is trained steady on the gray dot. Nine thousand and fifty, no deflection—‘Stand away!’ There is another roar, and the gunner, who has stood away, now stands with his feet apart, his elbows out, staring with intense concentration through his glasses.
Down below, the engine-room staff, which included Tommy doing a field-day on the spare generator, were clustered on the starting platform. The expansion links had been opened out full,—any locomotive driver will show you what I mean,—and the Polynesian’s engines, four thousand seven hundred horse-power indicated, driven by steam at two hundred pounds to the square inch from her four Scotch boilers, were turning eighty-nine revolutions per minute and making very good going for her, but nothing to write home about, when a modern submersible cruiser doing sixteen knots on the surface was pelting after her. The tremendous explosions of the six-inch gun discouraged conversation.
The Chief Engineer, a tall man with a full chestnut moustache and a stern contemptuous expression born of his hatred of sea-life, was striding up and down the plates. The Second appeared, like Ariel, around, above, below, intent on sundry fidgets of his own, and whistling—nobody knew why. The Fourth was in the stokehold and back in the engine-room every ten minutes. The Fifth, as though he had been naughty and was being punished by that stern man with the four gold-and-purple wings on his sleeve, was standing with his face to the wall, big rubber navy-phone receivers on his ears and his eyes fixed in a rapt saintly way on two ground-glass discs above him, one of which was aglow and bore the legend More Revolutions. The other, Less Revolutions, was dull and out of use. So he stood, waiting for verbal orders.