Chapter IX

IT was the hour preceding dinner, and a small boy in the uniform of a Naval Cadet stood on the balcony of an hotel at Dartmouth.

Earlier in the day a tremendous self-importance had possessed his soul; it was begotten primarily of brass buttons and a peaked cap, and its outward manifestation at Paddington Station had influenced a shortsighted old lady in her decision that he was a railway official of vast, if premature, responsibilities. He leaned over the balustrade and looked up harbour; beyond the scattered yachts and coal-hulks, black against the path of the sunset, lay the old Britannia. She was moored, this cradle of a generation's Naval destiny, where the Dart commenced to wind among green hills crowned by woods and red-brown plough lands. and as he stared, the smaller vanities of the morning passed from him.

He was barely fifteen, and his ideas were jumbled and immature, but in a confused sort of way he thought of the thousands of other boys those wooden walls had sheltered, and who, at the bidding of unknown powers, had gone down to the sea in ships.

He pictured them working their pinnaces and cutters - as he would some day - soaked and chilled by winter gales. Others departed for the Mediterranean, where, if the testimony of an aunt (who had once spent a. winter at Malta) was to be accepted, life was all picnics and dances. He saw them yet farther afield, chasing slavers, patrolling pirate-infested creels, fighting through jungle and swamp, lying stark beneath desert stars, . . . and ever fresh ones came to fill the vacant-places, bred for the work - even as he was to be - on the placid waters of the Dart, amid Devon coombes. It was all a little vainglorious, perhaps; and if his imagination was coloured by the periodicals and literature of boyhood, who is to blame him?

Why it was necessary for these things to be he understood vaguely, if at all. But in some dim way he realised it was part of his new heritage, a sort of brotherhood of self-immolation and hardship into which he was going to be initiated.

His thoughts went back along the path of the last few years that had followed his father's death. With a tightening of the heart-strings he saw how an Empire demands other sacrifices. How, in order that men might die to martial music, must sometimes come first an even greater heroism of self-denial. Years of thrift and contrivance, new clothes foresworn, a thousand renunciations this had been his mother's part, that her son might in time bear his share of the Empire's burden.

She carne out on to the balcony as the sun dipped behind the hills, and the woods were. turning sombre, and slipped a thin arm inside his. It is rarely given to men to live worthy of the mothers that bore them; a few--a very few--are permitted to die worthy of them. Perhaps it was some dim foreknowledge of the end that thrilled him as he drew her closer.

They had dinner, and with it, because it was such a great occasion, a bottle of"Sparkling Cider,"drunk out of wine-glasses to the inscrutable Future. Another boy was dining with his parents at a distant table, and at intervals throughout the meal the embryo admirals glanced at one another with furtive interest. After dinner the mother and son sat on the balcony watching the lights of the yachts twinkling across the water, and talked in low voices scarcely raised above the sound of the waves lapping along the quay. At times their heads were very close together, and, since in the star-powdered darkness there were none to see, their hands met and clung.

She accompanied him on board the following day, to be led by a grave-faced Petty Officer along spotless decks that smelt of tar and resin. She saw the chest-deck, where servants were slinging hammocks above the black and white painted chests - the chest-deck with its wide casement ports and rows of enamelled basins, and everywhere that smell of hemp and scrubbed woodwork.

"Number 32, you are, sir,"said the Petty Officer; and as he spoke she knew the time had come when her boy was no longer hers alone.

They bade farewell by the gangway, under the indifferent eyes of a sentry, and Number 32 watched the frail figure in the waterman's boat till it was out of sight. Then he turned with a desperate longing for privacy - anywhere where he could go and blubber like a kid. But from, that time onwards (with the rare exceptions of leave at home) he was never to know privacy again.

The old Britannia training consisted of four terms, each of three months' duration, during which a boy fresh from the hands of a tutor or crammer had many things to learn. He was taught to"drop everything and nip !"when called; how, when, and whom to salute. To pull an oar and sail a boat; to knot, splice, and run aloft; how to use a sextant. He learned that trigonometry and algebra were not really meaningless mental gymnastics, but a purposeful science that guided men upon trackless seas. In short, at an age when other schoolboys see their education nearing its end, he had to begin all over again, to be moulded afresh for a higher purpose.

The path of the"New"in those days was by no means strewn with roses. Jerry had to submit to strange indignities and stranger torments at the hands of Olympian"Niners"(Fourth-term Cadets). He had to accustom himself to bathe, dress and undress, to sleep and to pray, surrounded by a hundred others. There was also the business of the hammock, in and out of which he was learning to turn without dishonour.

But the conclusion of the first breathless three months found him amazingly fit and happy. His mind was stored with newly acquired and vastly interesting knowledge. The beagles and football sweated the"callow suet"off him and gave him the endurance of a lean hound. He was fitting into the new life as a hand into a well-worn glove.

The end of his second term brought the coveted triangular badge on the right cuff that marks the Cadet Captain among his fellows. The duties (which are much the same as those of monitor or prefect) offered him his first introduction to the peculiar essence we call tact, necessary in dealing with contemporaries. About this time began his friendship with Jubbs. This young gentleman's real name was as unlike his sobriquet as anything could be; among a community of Naval Cadets this was perhaps a sufficient raison d'être : anyhow none other was ever forthcoming. They earned their"Rugger"colours together as scrum and stand-off halves, and as time went on a slow friendship matured and knit between them. Their first sight of each other had been in the hotel the evening before ,joining. Thenceforward it pleased the power that is called Destiny to run the brief threads of their lives together to the end.

At the close of their third term they became Chief Cadet Captains, and Jubbs' papa, a long, lean baronet with a beak-like nose, came down to attend the prize-giving. At the conclusion of the ceremony he was piloted to the Canteen, where the Cadet Captains were pleased to"stodge"at his expense, while he - as one who sits at meat among the gods - trumpeted his satisfaction into a flaring bandana handkerchief.

At the end of the fourth and last term Jerry's mother came down to see the last prize-giving, and thus was present when her son received the King's Medal. For one never-to-be-forgotten moment she watched him turn from the dais and come towards her, erect and rather pale, with compressed lips. But the cheering broke from the throats of three hundred inveterate hero-worshippers like a tempest, and then a mist hid him from her sight.

III

A P. & 0. liner, a few months later, carried Jerry and Jubbs to China. During the voyage they came in contact with a hitherto unrecognised factor in life, and found them selves faced with unforeseen perplexities. One evening, as they leaned over the rail experimenting gingerly with two cigars, Jubbs unburdened himself.". . . Besides, they jaw such awful rot,"was his final summary of feminine allurements. Jerry nodded, tranquil-eyed."I know. I told Mrs What's-her-name - that woman with the ear-rings - that I'd got one mother already; and as I'm going to China, and she's going to India, I didn't see the use of being tremendous friends. 'Sides, she's as old as the hills."

Jerry! Jerry! The lady in question was barely thirty, even if she had an unaccountable partiality for taking him into the bows to watch the moon rise over the Indian Ocean.

They joined their ship at Hong-Kong, and found themselves members of a crowded, cockroach-haunted gunroom, where every one was on the best of terms with every one else, and there reigned a communism undreamed of in their philosophy. It is said that in those days of stress and novelty, among unknown faces and unfamiliar surroundings, their friendship bound them in ever-closer ties. The Sub-Lieutenant, when occasion arose for the chastisement of one, thrashed the other out of sheer pity. They kept watch, took in signal exercise, went ashore, shot snipe, picnicked and went through their multifarious duties generally within hail of one another. Till at length Jerry's call of"Jubbs !"and Jubbs' unfailing"Coming !"brought half-wistful smiles to older eyes.

The Boxer rising broke out like a sudden flame, and their letters home, those voluminous and ill-spelt missives that meant so much to the recipients, announced the momentous tidings. Jerry was landing in charge of a maxim gun; Jubbs was to be aide-de-camp to the Commander. Their whites were being dyed a warlike tint of khaki, and they were being sent up to take part in the defence of Tientsin. For a while silence, then at last a letter scrawled in pencil on some provision wrappers. Jerry boasted a three-weeks' growth of stubble, and had killed several peculiarly ferocious Boxer bravos. They were looking forward to being moved up to Peking for the relief of the Legations, and there was practically no danger as long as a fellow took reasonable precautions. He had not seen Jubbs for some time, but expected to meet him before long.

As a matter of fact, they came together the next afternoon, and their meeting-place was a Joss-house that had been converted into a temporary field-hospital. Jerry was the first to arrive,"in the bight of a canvas trough"Jerry, very white and quiet, a purple-brown stain spreading over his dusty tunic and a bullet lodged somewhere near the base of the spine. Towards sunset he became conscious, and the Red Cross nursing sister supported his head while he drank tepid water from a tin mug."'Sparkling Cider,'"he whispered weakly,"for luck, . . thank you, mummie darling."

The firing outside was becoming intermittent and gradually growing more distant, when the patch of dusty sunlight in the doorway was darkened by a fresh arrival. The stretcher party laid him on the bed next to Jerry and departed. The Surgeon made a brief examination, and as he straightened up, met the pitying eyes of the Red Cross sister. He shook his head.

"The poor children,"she whispered. Outside there came a sudden renewal of firing and the spiteful stammer of a maxim. It died away, and there was silence, broken by the buzzing of flies in the doorway and the sound of some one fighting for his breath. In the heavy air the sickly smell of iodoform mingled with the odours of departed joss-sticks and sun-baked earth.

Suddenly, from a bed in the shadow, a weak voice spoke

"Jubbs !"said Jerry.

A moment's pause, while the motionless figure in the neat bed gathered energy for a last effort of speech. Then.....

"Coming!"said Jubbs.

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