Читать книгу Under Sealed Orders - Lewis Anselm da Costa Ricci - Страница 3

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Nick Ainsworth and his father arrived at Weymouth in time for tea.

They had travelled from Cheshire, where they lived, and for a long time Nick had been thinking about that tea. At one time in the afternoon he thought he’d just have tea and toast and jam. Strawberry jam. And perhaps one slice of cake. Later he added a boiled egg. Nearing Dorchester, he decided that two boiled eggs would be better, and substituted scones for toast because they were more filling. He couldn’t decide about the cake. A good dark rich plum cake: that would be one kind. And another—he didn’t know what it was called—but it had sugar outside, and when you cut it, it was coloured in squares. That was a good cake to finish off with. Of course there were other things: shrimps, dripping, brown sugar on bread, treacle.... He sat staring out of the window, thinking about these things.

Major Ainsworth watched his son’s profile. He thought Nick looked awfully young to be a midshipman. He was going to join his first ship at Portland next morning, and his father wondered what he was thinking about, staring out of the window as if trying to catch a glimpse of all that lay ahead of him in the unknown.

He wished, the way fathers do, that he could go with his son—sailing, as it were, under sealed orders, into the strange new life awaiting him. Not to fuss round and interfere, but just to be within hail when Nick wanted him. But that was impossible, he knew, and Nick would have to fend for himself and take his chance the way everybody does.

“What are you thinking about, old boy?” he asked.

Nick turned from the contemplation of the flying landscape.

“There’s a cake, made in squares——” Nick sketched vaguely in the air with his forefinger. “Chocolate and pink and yellow and—I think—green. D’you know what it’s called?”

Nick’s father hadn’t an idea. He was awfully vague about cakes. They didn’t interest him.

“Why?” he asked. The train was slowing down. “Are you hungry?”

They had lunched off sandwiches hours before. What a question! Nick nodded.

In the lounge of the hotel Nick saw two familiar faces. One was a sunburnt, rather untidy face, and the other long and solemn, like a sheep’s. These faces belonged to two young gentlemen named respectively Usher and Wainwright. They had been in the same term as Nick in the Britannia and they had also been appointed to the same ship as Nick and were joining her at nine o’clock next morning. They were sitting side by side on a sofa, pretending to read magazines and looking, Nick thought, pretty doleful.

For a moment he couldn’t think why they looked unfamiliar, and then he realised that, like him, they were wearing the white patches of a midshipman on the collars of their very new monkey-jackets; and Usher, who had been a Cadet Captain, no longer wore the triangular gold braid on his sleeve that was his badge of office in the training-ship.

They brightened considerably when they saw Nick, and he introduced them to his father.

“That’s jolly,” said Major Ainsworth; “now we can all have tea together,” and they brightened still more. He beckoned a waiter, and told Nick to do the ordering. So Nick ordered all the things he had thought of in the train, and when he got to the end Major Ainsworth said, “Snooks! You boys must have hollow legs.”

But the waiter took it quite calmly, and even went one better. “Honey?” he asked; “what about honey?” Nick hadn’t thought of that.

They went for a walk after tea, and Wainwright said it was queer, but whenever he thought of honey it was always in a square comb; the honey they had had for tea was in a jar. Major Ainsworth said life was rather like that. Nothing was quite what you expected it to be, but it all came to pretty much the same in the end.

They walked along the front towards the cliffs, and talked about the things they had done during the leave. At the back of their minds they were wondering about the ship that they were going to join in the morning, but none of them liked to talk about her in front of Major Ainsworth, because they knew awfully little about a man-of-war, and they hadn’t the faintest idea what was going to happen to them. Occasionally they passed bluejackets who saluted them; this made them feel rather self-conscious as they returned the salutes. Some of the bluejackets were accompanied by young ladies with very pink cheeks and feathers in their hats, who slapped their escorts and screamed with laughter at every remark. When these happy couples saw the three midshipmen approaching, they turned seaward and admired the view till they had gone by, after which the slapping and giggling broke out again.

Perhaps Major Ainsworth felt that his companions could talk more freely without him, because presently he turned back, with a reminder that dinner was at seven-thirty, and the three boys went on and climbed past the coastguard cottages on to the cliff.

From there they could see the Fleet at anchor in Portland Harbour. The ships were too far off to be seen very distinctly; they could just make out the masts and fighting-tops and funnels above the lines of hulls. They stood and stared in silence for a little while. Then Usher said, “I wonder which is the Vengeance.”

They were all wondering that: wondering what the senior midshipman was like, and if the Sub would expect them to know all the etiquette of a gunroom, and what boats they would be told off for, and where they would sleep, and a lot of things that were a blur of half-remembered details they had been told by their Term Lieutenant in the Britannia.

By common consent they sat down on the headland, and chewed grass stalks. The white Dorset cliffs undulated away to their left, and beneath them stretched the sea, blue and darkened here and there by cats’-paws of wind. A little boat with a brown sail, tacking inshore, held the eyes of all three.

“Mandy said that if you draw your dirk in the mess you have to stand drinks all round,” observed Usher presently in a rather gloomy voice. “D’you remember his telling us that, Sheep?” Sheep remembered. “They bet you your dirk has a round point, and you swear it hasn’t, and when you pull it out of the sheath——”

“Scabbard,” amended Nick. “You get six with a dirk scabbard for practically anything.”

“Scabbard, I mean. You pull the dirk out to show them the point, and you’re had. You stand drinks all round.”

“What sort of drinks, d’you suppose?” inquired Nick.

“Port,” conjectured Usher. “It’s awfully expensive stuff.”

“Mandy said you get twenty-four hours to sling your hammock,” observed Sheep. Mandy was their nickname for their Term Lieutenant. “That means you don’t have any duties to do. You just pick up the hang of things. After that, you are expected to know everything and do anything.”

“Twenty-four hours!” echoed Usher. “I shan’t get the hang of anything under twenty-four weeks.”

“Supposing you don’t get the hang of things?” Nick’s voice was a bit faint and far away. “Eh, Sheep?”

“Sheath—I mean scabbard. I wish Mandy was going to be on board the Vengeance.” They suddenly discovered they were fonder of Lieutenant Mandville than almost anybody they knew. He had nursed them from their infancy, that is to say from the day they joined the Britannia. He knew everything, and he had done his best, especially during the last term, to describe life afloat in the Fleet, and to make them feel it was all going to be huge fun. But that night, as they sat watching the hulls of the Fleet darken against the sunset light, it seemed a formidable and rather frightening leap into the unknown. Their teas were evaporating, and they were beginning to feel hungry again.

“Well, anyway, we shall all be together,” observed Usher forlornly. “I mean, it isn’t like going into the middle of a lot of strangers by yourself.”

“We all know each other jolly well,” agreed Sheep, and would have liked to add, “and are jolly fond of each other,” but he thought that sounded a bit feeble. He would have been surprised if he had been told how much better they would all know each other and how much fonder they would grow of one another before the time came for them to part company. But just then Nick felt that it didn’t really help much. Joining a strange gunroom for the first time wasn’t made pleasanter because he knew that Sheep had a mole on his left shoulder-blade, and that Usher fainted when he was vaccinated because he couldn’t stand the sight of blood, although in other ways he was as brave as anything. It would be he, Nick Ainsworth, who would be saluting the Commander at nine o’clock next morning and saying, “Come aboard to join, sir.” Or was it, “Come on board ...?” Anyhow, when it came to facing things, you ultimately faced them alone even if you were in a crowd. However, he didn’t try to put these reflections into words. Instead, he said, “Time we started back, or we shall be late for dinner.” The thought of dinner cheered everybody.

On the way back they passed a Naval patrol escorting a bluejacket to the patrol-room. He had lost his cap, and was struggling with his escort, and his uniform was soiled with dust. They glanced at the poor chap’s flushed, distorted face as they went past, and Usher said, “A drunk liberty man.” The passers-by paid very little attention, and seemed to take the sight as a matter of course.

Nick wondered a bit apprehensively whether it would fall to his lot to have to deal with drunk liberty men some day, and inwardly quailed at the prospect; but they soon reached the hotel where Major Ainsworth was waiting for them, and a comforting smell which hinted that dinner was somewhere in the offing.

Nick’s father insisted that the other two should be his guests, and after dinner they sat on the verandah and drank coffee while he smoked a cigar. They were joined by a gentleman with a large white moustache, whom Major Ainsworth had known in India, and had met before dinner. He had a rather purple face and a wheezy laugh, and he talked to Nick’s father about the Frontier and what sounded like an endless war that went on among the hill tribes.

“We’ve got to stop their getting rifles,” he said, gulping down brandy and water, and looking fiercely at Usher and Sheep. “That’s where you fellows come in. Stop the gun-running in the Persian Gulf. Eh? That’s what you’ve got to do. Put a stop to it. The Navy’s job.”

Usher and Sheep tried to look as if they intended to start putting a stop to it the very first thing next morning.

Colonel Bearbrace—that was the name of Major Ainsworth’s acquaintance—puffed out his expensive-looking cheeks, and drank some more brandy and water. “Dhows do the gun-running. Then camels. But you can’t catch the camels, can you?” He frowned sternly at Usher who promptly shook his head. He had never tried to catch a camel, but he was sure it would be hopeless.

“Then catch the dhows,” said the Colonel. “That’s what I kept telling them at Simla—all the staff-wallahs there. I said, ‘Tell the Navy to catch the dhows.’”

Major Ainsworth thought the three boys looked a bit bewildered, and he explained that both slaves and rifles were brought into the Persian Gulf by Arab dhows, and that the rifles were carried by camel caravans to the North-West Frontier of India, where they fetched high prices among the tribesmen.

The Colonel nodded. “High prices. That’s right. But we pay higher. Well, I must be getting along to the Club.”

He finished his brandy and water, shook hands with everybody, and marched off, his hat at a gallant angle and his cigar glowing red in the night. Then Major Ainsworth told them that the Colonel’s son, a youngster of nineteen, had been shot on the North-West Frontier in an ambush, and that was why he talked so much about gun-running. He had retired now, and lived in Weymouth because it suited his wife’s health.

Sheep said thoughtfully, that perhaps he drank brandy and water to help him forget, and Nick’s father said perhaps he did, although it wasn’t a good way to forget things.

But when presently they went to bed, Nick had a curious dream. He dreamed that he was sitting at a table, munching a piece of very stale bread, and while he munched some one crept up behind him. He was aware of this threatening presence, but was powerless to move. The next moment a sack descended over his head, almost suffocating him; he struggled wildly, expecting at any moment to be stabbed. He awoke, sweating with terror, to find that the bed-clothes had got enveloped round his head. They had had roast pork for dinner, which perhaps accounted for his nightmare, but it was not long before he went off to sleep again; and the next time he awoke, the chambermaid came in with his hot water, and it was time to get up and go off to join H.M.S. Vengeance.