In Peril on the Sea

BY

MONTAGUE T. HAINSSELIN

AUTHOR OF "IN THE NORTHERN MISTS," ETC.

HODDER AND STOUGHTON LONDON NEW YORK TORONTO

THE SAME AUTHOR

IN THE NORTHERN MISTS GRAND FLEET DAYS NAVAL INTELLIGENCE THE CURTAIN OF STEEL

PREFACE

Having spread myself discursively in four books dealing with the naval aspect of many things; videlicet and to wit:

of Shoes; especially of Pusser's Crabs, footwear of the British Matlow in all climes; of sea-boots, which may be taken up On Loan, and with a certain amount of tact and discretion may be attracted into the orbit of personal and private gear; and of Uniform Boots, plain-fronted and without toe-caps, the mark of the correctly-garbed Naval Officer, distinguishing the pukka navy man not seldom from his temporary brother who is apt to be known by his Feet of Clay, i.e. a pair of Plain-clothes boots with patterns punched in holes all over their bows:

and Ships; treating of them according to their various classes and according to their many kinds of work in the Great War:

and Sealing-wax; also of Red Tape, and other such weapons of officialdom; how they vex the souls of bluff happy-go-lucky sailormen; how they can be parried and evaded by guile and experience; and how the command to Give Reasons In Writing must be correctly met by the soft answer that turneth away wrath, beginning with I Have The Honour To Submit and finishing with the additional Honour—(really, it is a wonder that the humble delinquent can bear the weight of so many honours!)—of Being Your Obedient Servant:

of Cabbages; and other succulent produce of the kitchen garden, sent by the very kindest of Committees to the men of the Grand Fleet month after month, a welcome change from the official spud. Also of other cabbages, grown by optimistic and energetic and enthusiastic Naval Officers in extemporised gardens upon the islands of Flotta and Fara:

and Kings, and notably of our own most gracious sovereign Liege Lord, and his visits to the Fleet where he was welcomed indeed as King, but doubly and trebly welcomed as being himself a Navy man.

—Having, I say, discoursed of these and similar matters in certain volumes which both the general public and the reviewers have received with very great kindness—though a friend of mine did say to me, "whenever I find that I can't go to sleep I just take up one of your books and read a chapter, and then I soon drop off"; and I am left guessing to this very day whether or not he meant it as a compliment—having, I repeat, written these four books of essays and sketches (this sentence is really going to close now) it occurred to me that it would be a great relief to myself, if not to my readers, if I were to write a story.

A Naval story, of course. I quite understand that I must confine myself to my own sphere and not try to write about people and things I didn't know—though I believe there have been story-writers who have been known to do such a thing.

Well, it sounds easy enough, to write a Naval story. But it is the very dickens of a job when you actually settle down to do it; and I'll tell you why.

First, because most of the fashionable methods of treatment, applicable readily enough to shore-going stories, do not fit in at all well with a nautical atmosphere.

For example, there is the method which may be described politely as the Biological—and impolitely as, well, choose your own word for it, please. Books of this kind generally contain a Triangle and a Problem, like Euclid; but with this exception they do not at all resemble him.

Even with the worst intentions, however, it would be almost impossible to conform to this method, because the Navy is not Bisexual: unless you count the Wrens; and these, unfortunately—or is it fortunately?—are not allowed to go to sea; and anyhow, the Wrens deserve a story all to themselves, and it should be written in letters of gold.

Then there is another favourite story-form, in which you are told at great length how John Smith, of Yorkshire or the Midlands, cooms doon fro' th' hoose to th' works i' th' morning and fares back fro' th' works to th' hoose at neet, and does this for twenty-odd years without any more exciting incident than taking tea on one occasion wi' a neebour; and that's all there is to it.

Here again, the method appears scarcely thrilling enough for a sea story, and I'm quite sure you wouldn't really like it.

Or there is that other method, greatly affected by certain writers, of describing minutely the hero's daily doings from the moment of his birth, through his childhood, youth, adolescence, and early manhood, until—until you feel that you really couldn't stick another page of him!

That is all very well in its way; but the lives of all naval officers are really so very much alike in most details that if I were to attempt this sort of writing I might get myself into serious trouble with the very senior officers, who would want to know why I had dug up their past in this barefaced manner!

And that reminds me; in my last book, "The Curtain of Steel," I took particular pains to insist, in the preface, that there were no portraits amongst the characters therein depicted; there was, I stated only one part-exception to this—I had drawn from life in one sole instance; "and that," said I, "was the face of a good man." Well in due course I had a letter from one of my late messmates, which said, "when we read the preface and saw it stated that there was one portrait, the face of a good man, everyone blushed self-consciously." It just shows how hard it is to ram an idea into some people, doesn't it?

Anyhow, at the risk of being again disbelieved or misunderstood, I beg to repeat the statement in reference to this present book that THERE ARE NO PORTRAITS IN IT.

But, to go back to the difficulties of writing a sea story. The second of these is that there is always Captain Marryat to contend with.

I mean that this splendid old fellow has set the pace so rapidly that any modern weakling who endeavours to follow lamely in his footsteps will not be considered to be giving his readers their money's worth unless he provides a fight with cannons and cutlasses, or some hairbreadth escape, on every other page.

Now, naval warfare up to date has been proved to be somewhat monotonously free from stirring incidents. Marryat would probably have used up the whole of this war's sea-fighting in one book, or in two at most. There have been plenty of actions with the enemy, of course, and very thrilling ones; but they have been so equally distributed amongst the various units of the Navy that it would be an impossibility to make a hero participate in a sufficient number to enable one to make a whole volume out of him.

So the only thing to do was to take an incident—or rather, in this case, to invent one—and with it fill up the two hours' traffic of a book. The incident had of course to be of the real old-fashioned cut-and-thrust order; nobody wants analytical and psychological character drawing in a naval story. The play's the thing—and, after all, in spite of the people who scorn to introduce into their books anything so utterly démodé as a plot, and even sniff at the vulgarity of mere incidents, there is something to be said for a yarn which does not profess to be anything more than a yarn with no more purpose than that of wiling away an idle hour or two.

I like writing prefaces. I don't know if you like reading them. Do you mind if I go on with this one for a bit?

I know I shall get into hot water about Patrick Sheridan's dialect. Once upon a time I wrote a little story in which I made an Irishman say:

Begobs; it was, perhaps, a weak thing to do, but really I meant no harm. Well, an Irish correspondent wrote at once to the paper, very indignantly, to protest against my putting that expression into the mouth of one of his compatriots. And it appears that something of this sort nearly always happens when anyone attempts to reproduce a so-called Irish dialect, and especially when he reproduces it very badly—as I admit I do.

This is very strange; one may with impunity write in that peculiar and well-known Loamshire dialect which is nowhere found but in the English novel or on the English stage—and no Englishman ever thinks of grumbling; he is, indeed, rather amused, though generally still more bored. But if one dares to make an Irishman say "fwhat" for "what," or "whoy" for "why"—well, it is treated as just one more injustice to Ireland!

Yet, what can one do? There are conventions to be observed and these are maintained because they are not only conventions but conveniences; and just as you have a stage Irishman whom you can recognise at once by his knee-breeches, flower-pot hat, and little black dudheen, so you have also the book-Irishman who is labelled as such by a few unmistakable turns of speech. It makes no difference that the stage-Irishman and the book-Irishman are never seen and never have been seen in real life. Their peculiarities are simply labels, like those which the Elizabethans used to stick up on their back-cloths to say "This is a castle"; it wasn't in the remotest degree like a castle, but everyone knew what was meant.

And, of course, even the most scrupulously careful effort to reproduce dialect phonetically in print is bound to be a lamentable failure. Many people will probably be surprised to be told that the function of the written or printed word is primarily to record ideas, and only secondarily—if at all—to record sounds. Certainly, our own English alphabet, with its ridiculously inadequate complement of twenty-six letters, is hopelessly unfitted to do the work of a gramophone; the thing would be impossible, really, were the alphabet ten times as big. And that is why the very greatest writers, such as Dickens, never seriously attempt to reduce to writing every word of their dialect-characters in the exact form implied, but content themselves with inserting a dialect-word here and there, thus avoiding a form of writing which would be an intolerable labour to the reader, while sufficiently indicating that the curiosities of speech are to be understood throughout. It is not necessary to place milestones at every yard of the road.

I hope it is not necessary also for me to apologise for this same Patrick Sheridan being a thorough Bad Hat. If you can't employ a Villain in a story, what can you do? It does not necessarily follow that the villain is taken as a type of his whole race and nation; and in this present case I positively disavow any such intention; so be it known to all men by these presents.

Oh yes, there is one thing more. When I announced, in the sanctity of the home circle, my determination to write a story, the Critic on the Hearth—the junior one—said, "Well, mind you don't write anything about girls and Love; 'cause you can't do it!"

Did you ever hear of such a thing? Of course, no man could take a dare like that; and, besides, what would a naval story be like if it didn't contain something about both of these subjects? A wishy-washy affair! Try and imagine Jack without his Faithful Poll! The thing simply can't be done. So there just had to be Girls and Love in it. But whether I have given satisfaction or not must remain unknown until the aforesaid Critic on the Hearth reads the attempt in cold print; and then it will be too late to complain.

Naval readers will be certain to note a few inaccuracies in the description of a "Court of Iniquity" at the end of the book.

But that is because...

And I am confident that this will be recognised as an adequate explanation.

And now, having as I hope disarmed criticism all round beforehand—a wise precaution to take, and one which I trust will be justified by results—perhaps I had better go ahead with the yarn.

H.M.S. Vivid, 1919.

In Peril on the Sea

CHAPTER I

It is cold, very cold, up on the bridge of the solitary cruiser.

The chilling mist which has been gathering over the face of the still waters all the afternoon now thickens and banks up into a dense white fog as the short October evening closes swiftly in.

An anxious time indeed for those on the bridge; a fog is more to be dreaded than the heaviest gale. Not half so dangerous is the sea when its lashing waves sweep the ship's decks as when it lies treacherously calm, leaden and lifeless, beneath the impenetrable shroud of the white sea-mist.

Yet the grim irony of War can make even this axiom suffer a sea-change: if any testimony were needed to the stern reality of naval life in war time it could be found in this, that even the hated sea-fog may have its welcome side.

One danger drives out another. If the fog blinds the eyes of the look-out men, it also blankets the periscope of any lurking hostile submarine.

So the Marathon slows down to ten knots: and presently to seven. The escorting destroyers, one on either bow, can no longer be seen; they can only be heard by the mournful ringing of the fog-bell at one minute intervals, the sound coming muffled and diminished across the veiled waters.

The navigating bridge, which is the highest platform of a complex structure built around the foremast, forms a little world of its own, poised between sea and sky and isolated from that other little world of the ship far beneath.

The occupants of this island in mid-air are few—to be exact, just four men; two bluejacket look-out men, the officer of the watch, and the navigator.

Of these, the look-out men have nothing to do just at present, for the simple reason that they cannot see even as far as the bows; the officer of the watch also finds his position a sinecure, since the ship is on a steady course and he has not even an order to call down the voice-pipe to the bridge beneath, where the quartermaster stands by the side of the able seaman at the wheel.

The navigating officer alone of the four finds something to occupy his time. He is standing at a tiny chart table with a hinged glass cover which, when raised, acts as a wind screen. Here he bends over his chart and makes many calculations in silence, as he has in fact been doing for the past half-hour.

Stapleton, the officer of the watch, finds the proceedings distinctly uninteresting. He has had no one to speak to and practically nothing to do ever since he came on watch. The cold strikes through his thick duffel coat, and even his heavy sea-boots and the woollen stockings drawn well up over his knees outside his trousers are a poor protection in this raw weather.

Pulling down the wrist of his gauntlet he glances at his watch in the fading light, and notes with satisfaction that it is close on six o'clock. In a very few minutes he will be able to leave the bridge and go below.

But in reality he does not mind either the cold or the tedium of watch-keeping. He is far too keen for that. Every line of his tall, strong-knit figure and of his somewhat hatchet-like face spells keenness. And if proof of this were wanted, there is the fact that there is no need at all for him to be keeping watch; as first lieutenant and executive officer of the ship watch-keeping forms no part of his regular duties; yet he has undertaken to keep a standing first dog, to relieve the other watchkeepers and to keep things in this department up to the high-water mark of smartness and efficiency.

That is his way.

Now that his self-imposed task is nearly over he steps forward to the navigating officer at the chart table, and says:

"I'm away below in a moment, Navvy. What about it? It's beastly thick—do you think we ought to give the Owner a call?"

The navigator looks up from his work and peers into the fog-bank. "Well, I shouldn't—not yet," he answers. "The old man is having a doss in his sea-cabin—he'll be up all through the night, probably. I shall be here for a bit myself, and I'll call him if necessary. But I think the fog may lift presently. It seems to me to be more patchy than it was. Shouldn't be surprised if it were only local, and if so we may run out of it before long."

"All right, old man, if you think so." And with a nod he turns away, as Morley, the lieutenant who is to keep the last dog, appears coming up the ladder on the very stroke of four bells. Relieving the bridge strictly up to time is a virtue of the Marathon, thanks to the first lieutenant, who won't countenance any slackness in this respect, and sets a good example himself. With a few rapid words technical phrases and seaman's language he "turns over" to Morley; and then, relapsing into everyday phraseology, he callously bids that young officer "Don't let yourself get over-heated—and beware of being led away into idle gossiping by that garrulous navigator." And with a laugh he rattles down the ladder and makes his way to the wardroom.

The half dozen officers whom he finds assembled in that very warm and cosy room he greets with:

"Phew, what a cheery old fug!" and it certainly is a very different atmosphere from that of the navigating bridge. As for being cheery, the blazing fire and the glow of the electric lights beneath their shades of yellow silk make the wardroom a very pleasant place indeed.

Stapleton peels off his thick duffel coat and sheds some of his other trappings, then flings himself into a comfortable arm-chair near the fire and announces to the mess in general that he is not too proud to accept a drink from anyone. As, however, this hint meets with no acceptance, he is constrained to summon the waiter himself and to make the necessary arrangements.

"What's it like up topside?" queries Dale, the surgeon, looking up from the card-table where he is playing bridge with the fleet-paymaster, the senior engineer-lieutenant, and one of the watchkeepers.

"Pretty thick. But I think it's beginning to clear a little."

"Well," remarks the engineer-lieutenant. "I hope so, anyway. I don't much care for crawling along at this speed. Hallo! what's that?"—his attentive ear has caught the sound of a bell in the engine-room ringing a quick succession of sharp strokes. "Slowing down again? What's that for, I wonder?"

He looks puzzled; and with a brief excuse to the others at the card table makes off to go below, where he feels he may be wanted.

But the reason for slackening speed is not for long a mystery. A messenger from the bridge, a smart young signalman, enters and approaches the recumbent first lieutenant, and presents a signal-pad. The first lieutenant takes it carelessly and reads aloud:

"Floating object, apparently mine, on surface bearing right ahead of you. Hm, cheerful prospect, isn't it?"

"Who's that from, Number One?" enquires the fleet-paymaster.

"From one of our destroyers. I suppose we are slowing down to touch it off. Well, it isn't in my line. Someone else can attend to that business, I'm not going to disturb myself for that—all right, signalman. Guns, this seems to be more in your line than mine."

The gunnery-lieutenant who has been, chuckling quietly to himself over a novel, has in fact already pricked up his ears at the mention of something relating to his own beloved artillery; and elated at the prospect of firing one of his guns, if only at a floating mine, he flings down his novel and strides off to make for the upper deck.

There is a mild excitement amongst those in the wardroom who have not followed him up on deck to watch the proceedings. Someone remarks with contemptuous disgust on the flagrant disregard for the ways of civilisation which has prompted the Hun to scatter his floating mines broadcast on the ocean in defiance of all international law. But the remark is made with little fervour and scarcely any bitterness—the Hun has multiplied his diabolical deeds in so many other undreamt of directions that such a trifle as this has long ago ceased to seem a thing to be wondered at.