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Title: Brown on Resolution
Author: Forester. C. S. [Cecil Scott]
   [Smith, Cecil Louis Troughton] (1899-1966]
Date of first publication: 1929
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   London: Michael Joseph, April 1963
   [third reprint of the April 1952 "Greenwich Edition"]
Date first posted: 15 January 2017
Date last updated: 15 January 2017
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1391

This ebook was produced by Al Haines


PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Italics in the original printed edition are indicated _thus_.

As part of the conversion of the book to its new digital
format, we have made certain minor adjustments in its layout.






  C. S. FORESTER

  _Brown on Resolution_



  GREENWICH EDITION



  _London_
  MICHAEL JOSEPH




  _First published_ 1929
  _First published in the Greenwich Edition by_
  MICHAEL JOSEPH LTD.
  26 _Bloomsbury Street_
  _London W.C._1

  APRIL 1952
  REPRINTED OCTOBER 1954
  REPRINTED DECEMBER 1957
  REPRINTED APRIL 1963




  _Printed in Great Britain by
  The Hollen Street Press Ltd., London, W.1
  and bound by James Burns at Esher_




_Chapter I_

Leading Seaman Albert Brown lay dying on Resolution.  He was huddled in
a cleft in the grey-brown lava of which that desolate island is largely
composed, on his back with his knees half-drawn up in his fevered
delirium.  Sometimes he would mumble a few meaningless words and writhe
feebly on to his side, only to fall back again a second later.  He was
dressed in what had once been a sailor's suit of tropical white, but
now it was so soiled and stained and draggled, so torn and frayed, as
literally to be quite unrecognizable--it was now only a few thin,
filthy rags feebly held together.  His face was swollen and distorted,
as were his hands, being quite covered with hideous lumps as a result
of the poisoned bites of a myriad of flies--a little cloud of which
hung murderously over him as he lay, combining with the shimmering reek
of the sun-scorched rock almost to hide him from view.  His feet, too,
although a few fragments of what were once shoes still clung to them,
were horribly swollen and bruised and cut.  They were more like sodden
lumps of raw horse-flesh than human feet.  Not the cruellest human
being on earth could have contemplated those dreadful feet without a
throb of pity.

Yet a very cursory inspection of Albert Brown's dying body would be
enough to show that he was not dying because of the biting flies, nor
even because of the hideous condition of his feet.  For the dingy rags
on his right shoulder were stained a sinister brown, and when he turned
on his side he revealed the fact that those at his back were similarly
stained, and a closer look through the tatters of cloth would discover
that Brown's right breast was covered with a black, oozing clot of
blood like an empty football bladder hanging from a bullet wound over
Brown's third rib.

Brown lay at the edge of the central, lifeless portion of the island.
Mounting up above him rose the bare lava of the highest point of
Resolution, a distorted muddle of naked rock bearing a million million
razor edges--razor edges which readily explained the frightful
condition of his feet.  Just at Brown's level, stretching along at each
side (for Resolution is a hog-backed island bent into a half-moon)
began the cactus, ugly, nightmarish plants, like bottle-nosed pokers,
clustering together thicker and thicker on the lower slopes, each
bearing a formidable armament of spikes which explained the tattered
condition of Brown's clothes.  Frequently, stretched out in the scanty
line of shade cast by the cacti, there lay iguanas--mottled crested
lizards--somnolently stupid.  Overhead wheeled sea-birds, and
occasionally a friendly mocking-bird, strayed up from the lower slopes,
would hop close round Brown's dying body and peer at him in seeming
sympathy.  Down at the water's edge, where the Pacific broke against
the lava boulders, there massed a herd of marine iguanas--fantastic
creatures which bear only their Latin generic name--industriously
gnawing the seaweed on which they live, while round them strayed
marvellous scarlet crabs and the other representatives of the
amphibious life of this last, almost unknown member of the Galapagos
Islands.

The sky above was of a glaring, metallic blue, in which hung a
burnished sun that seemed to be pouring a torrent of molten heat upon
the tortured fragment of land beneath it.  The sea was of a kindlier
blue, and far out near the horizon could be seen a grey line stretching
out of sight in both directions, which marked the edge of an ocean
current, haunted by sea-birds in hundreds, gathered there to revel in
the food, living and dead, which clustered along this strange border.

No trace of human life could be seen around the whole wide horizon,
save only for Leading Seaman Albert Brown, huddled in his cleft, and
hunger and thirst and fever and loss of blood were soon to make an end
even of him, the sole representative of the human race in all this wide
expanse; perhaps in years to come some exploring scientist would happen
across his bleached bones and would ponder over that broken rib and
that smashed shoulder-blade.  It is doubtful, though, whether he would
explain them.




_Chapter II_

It all began more than twenty years earlier, with Lieut.-Commander R.
E. S. Saville-Samarez, R.N., seated in the train which was carrying him
from the Royal Naval College, Greenwich, and a not very arduous course
of professional study therein, towards London and a not very closely
planned week of relaxation therein.  He sat in his first-class carriage
and looked, now at his newspaper, now out of the window, now up at the
carriage roof, now at the lady who was seated demurely in the
diametrically opposite corner of the carriage.  For the Commander was
not much given to prolonged reading, nor to prolonged following of any
one train of thought.  He thought, as was only natural, of the
influence of first-class certificates upon promotion, and from that he
passed to the consideration of Seniority versus Selection, and the Zone
System, and he wondered vaguely if he would ever attain the comfortable
security and majestic authority of Captain's rank with its consequent
inevitable climb upwards to the awesome heights of an Admiral's
position.  Admirals in one way were mere commonplaces to the Commander,
for he came of a long line of naval ancestors, and an uncle of his was
an Admiral at that moment, and his grandfather had commanded a ship of
the line at Cronstadt during the Crimean War, and his grandfather had
fought at the Nile and had been an Admiral during the reign of George
IV.

But he did not think long about Admirals, for he felt oddly restless
and fidgety, and he wished that the lady was not in his carriage so
that he could put his feet up on the opposite seat and smoke.  He
glanced across at her, and found, to his surprise, that she was
contemplating him in a manner difficult to describe--detached yet
friendly; certainly not in the way a lady ought to look at a man (even
if it is granted she might look at all) with whom she was alone in a
railway carriage in the year of our Lord 1893.  The Commander was quite
startled; he looked away, but his eyes strayed back, stealthily and
shyly, as soon as he was sure her gaze was averted.  No, she was not at
all _that_ sort--no one could be with that placid, calm look, almost
like a nun's.  But she was a fine woman, for all that, with her stylish
sailor hat on the top of her head with a feather at the back, and her
smart costume with its leg-of-mutton sleeves and her white collar, and
the toe of one neat shoe just showing beneath her skirt as she sat.  A
fine upstanding figure of a woman, in fact, trim-waisted and corseted
with correct severity.  As he looked, she turned and met his gaze
again, and he flushed with shy embarrassment down his sunburnt neck and
hurriedly looked out of the window.  But once again his eyes stole back
again, inevitably.  And she was smiling at him.

Agatha Brown's father was a Nonconformist green-grocer; but, as his
Nonconformist friends would hurriedly explain when speaking of him, a
greengrocer in a very large line of business.  His big shop at Lewisham
employed a dozen assistants, and he had two other shops besides, at
Woolwich and Deptford, and the wealthy residents of the big houses of
Blackheath always came to him for such delicacies as asparagus and
early strawberries.  He even handled a little wholesale trade, and long
ago he had climbed high enough to leave off living over his shop and to
take instead a substantial house beside Greenwich Park and furnish it
in the best manner of the 1880's.  Here he lived with his three sons
and his daughter (his eldest child) who managed the house in the
efficient and spacious manner possible in that era.  His wife was dead
and much regretted, but, thanks to Agatha's domestic efficiency, not
much missed in the economic sphere.

That morning at breakfast Agatha had not felt any premonition of what
was going to be the most marvellous day of her life.  She had risen at
her usual hour of six-thirty, and had helped one maid with the
breakfast while the other looked to the fires.  She had poured out tea
for Will and Harry and sat at table with them while they hurried
through breakfast, and had closed her eyes and clasped her hands
devoutly when Dad, having come back with George in the trap from
market, read prayers what time the other two stood impatiently waiting
to get off to their business of managing the Woolwich and Deptford
shops.  Then Dad, too, ate his breakfast, and it was then that Agatha
had the first inkling that it was time something happened to her.  Dad
of course read his newspaper, and of course being preoccupied with that
he could not attend properly to his table manners.  With the newspaper
propped up against the marmalade jar he would bring his mouth down to
his fork rather than his fork up to his mouth, and he would open the
latter alarmingly (which was quite unpleasant when, as was usual, he
had not quite swallowed the preceding mouthful) and thrust the fork
home and snap down his big moustache upon it in the way he always did,
which Agatha found on this particular morning to be positively
distressing.  He drank his tea, too, noisily, through his moustache,
and although Agatha had listened to the performance daily for
twenty-nine years somehow she found it unusually distasteful.  She
found herself telling herself that it was time she had a change, and
realizing on the instant that although she was that very day going for
five days' stay with a bosom friend at Ealing that amount of change
would not suffice her.  Her first reaction was to promise herself a
dose of senna that evening (senna was Agatha's prescription for all the
ills flesh is heir to) and her second, amazingly, was to consider senna
inadequate.  Only slightly introspective though she was, Agatha found
herself surprised at being in such an odd frame of mind.

Then when Dad had taken his departure Agatha had busied herself with
the stupendous task of leaving everything in the house prepared for her
five days' absence.  She went round and paid the tradesmen's books.
She instructed the cook very positively as to all the menus to come;
she enjoined upon the housemaid the necessity to turn out the
drawing-room on Tuesday and the dining-room on Wednesday, and Mr.
Brown's bedroom and Mr. George's bedroom on Thursday and Mr. Harry's
bedroom and Mr. Will's bedroom on Friday.  She did her share of the
morning's work; she lunched, as was her habit, excessively lightly, and
when the afternoon came round she made herself ready for departure.  At
four o'clock she left the house with her little suitcase.  She felt
lighthearted and carefree; the tingle of her clean starched underlinen
was pleasant to her; she was free of the house and all its troubles for
five whole days; but all the same she did not want to spend five days
at the home of Adeline Burton at Ealing.  The old great friendship
between Agatha and Adeline had of course cooled a little with the
coming of maturity and with the migration of the Burton family to
Ealing, and the Burton household was very like the Brown household,
when all was said and done.  But, still, Agatha felt strangely
light-hearted as she walked to the station; she hummed a little song;
and then she found herself in the same carriage as Lieut.-Commander R.
E. S. Saville-Samarez.

She liked him, at first sight, and at first sight she knew him for what
he was, a naval officer of the best brand of British stupidity.  She
liked his good clothes and his smooth cheeks (Agatha, as she regarded
these last, felt a revulsion of feeling against the fashionable
hairiness of 1893) and the way he blushed when she caught him looking
at her.  She knew he would speak to her soon, and she knew she would
answer him.

Agatha's smile set the coping-stone on Samarez's unsettledness.  He
positively jumped in his seat.  Automatically his hands fluttered to
his pockets.

'Mind if I smoke?' he asked hoarsely;

'Not at all,' said Agatha.  'I should like it.'

That, of course, was at least four words more than any lady ought to
have said.  Samarez feverishly pulled out his silver cigarette-case and
matchbox, lit a cigarette with fingers which were nearly trembling, and
drew a lungful of smoke deep into himself in an unthinking effort after
self-control.

Agatha was still smiling at him, the placid, innocent smile one would
expect to see on the face of a nun or a mother.  Samarez simply had to
go on talking to her, and the Englishman's invariable opening topic
came to his lips like an inspiration.

'Beastly weather,' he said, with a nod through the carriage window,
where February sunshine fought a losing battle against February gloom.

'I rather like it, somehow,' said Agatha.  She would have liked any
weather at the moment.  'Of course you find it very different from the
tropics,' she went on, to Samarez's amazement.  How on earth could she
tell he had been to the tropics?

'Er--yes,' he said.  'Beastly hot there, sometimes.'

'China station?' she asked.  Agatha's knowledge of the Navy was only
what might be expected of a secluded young woman of the middle class of
1893, but she had heard the blessed words 'China Station' somewhere and
they drifted into her mind now and were seized upon gratefully.

'Yes,' said Samarez, more amused than ever, 'that was my last
commission.'

The China Station was a pleasant source of conversation.  Thanks to the
exaltation of her mood, Agatha was able to talk--or rather to induce
Samarez to talk--without displaying any annoying ignorance, and by the
blessing of Providence they chatted really amicably for a few minutes.
Samarez's heart warmed to this charming woman, so refined, so friendly
without being cheap, with such a musical contralto voice and such a
ready laugh.  Stations came and stations went unheeded, and Samarez was
quite surprised when they peered out of the window and saw that they
had reached London Bridge--London Bridge on a dark, damp, February
evening.  With a little chill of disappointment he realized that in a
few minutes he would have to separate from this friend.  He deemed
himself fortunate even that she was travelling on to Charing Cross.

Friends at the moment were scarce.  Samarez had a week's leave on his
hands, and he was almost at a loss as to how to employ it.  He had had
in mind dinner at the Junior Rag, possibly an encounter with an
acquaintance, and a seat at a musical comedy afterwards.  But he had
done that for several evenings already, previous to his course at
Greenwich, and the prospect bored him, nearly unborable as he was.  On
the China Station, stifling under the awnings, the most delectable spot
on earth had appeared to be the dining-room of the Junior Army and Navy
Club, but now it did not seem half so attractive.

And, above all, Agatha Brown was a woman, well fleshed and desirable to
the eye of 1893.  Women did not count for much in Samarez's life;
marriage, of course, was unthinkable to a man of his sturdy devotion to
the profession, and his contact with other women had been slight and
nearly forgotten.  But--but the urge was there, unadmitted but
overwhelming.  Samarez at present had nothing more in his mind than
companionship.  He wanted to talk to a woman--to this woman, now that
he had made the first impossible plunge.  He wanted neither men's talk
nor solitude.  He would have been scared by his intensity of emotion
had he had a moment in which to realize it--but he had not.  They had
rattled through Waterloo Junction, and were rumbling on to Charing
Cross railway bridge.  Through the window he could see the wide, grey
river, and the lights of Charing Cross Station were close at hand.
Agatha glanced up at her suitcase on the rack, in evident mental
preparation for departure.  Samarez stood up in the swaying carriage;
his hands flapped with embarrassment.

'L-look here,' he said, 'we don't want to say good-bye yet.  Oh, we
don't.  Let's--let's come and have dinner somewhere.'

He stood holding to the luggage rack, appalled by his realization that
he had definitely committed himself, that he was guilty (if the lady
chose to find him so) of an ungentlemanly action.  His innocent eyes
pleaded for him.  And Agatha's eyes softened; for he was so like an
artless little boy begging for more cake.  She felt motherly and not a
bit daring as she said yes.

Once out of the train Samarez, despite his stupefied elation, displayed
all the orderly logic of deed of the disciplined man of action.
Agatha's suitcase and his own leather kit-bag were ticketed-in at the
cloakroom, a cab was summoned, and with a flash of brilliance he
recalled the name of the one restaurant which in those bleak days was
suitable for ladies and at the same time was tolerant of morning dress.
The cab-horse's hoofs clattered across the station courtyard and out
into the Strand, and they sat side by side as the lamps went by.

Pleasant it was, and each was conscious of a comforting warmth from the
other.  Each felt supremely befriended and most deliciously
expectant--of what, they could not say.  The drive passed all too
quickly; to Agatha it hardly seemed a moment before she found herself
being helped from the cab by the whiskered and uniformed restaurant
porter.

From opposite sides of the table each regarded the other, seemingly
with some slight misgiving regarding their good fortune.  It was too
good to be true, for the one that he should be sitting with and talking
dazzlingly to a woman of good sense and irreproachable morals (to a
sailor such an encounter is all too rare an occurence), and for the
other that she should be in a restaurant at all (this was nearly
Agatha's first experience of restaurants) let alone with a clean-bred,
good-looking young man opposite her.  Samarez ordered a good
dinner--trust him for that--and summoned the wine waiter.  The very
mention of the word 'wine' caused Agatha to start a little in her
chair, for the worthy Mr. Brown was a staunch, true-blue, even violent,
abstainer, who would not allow villainous alcohol even the shelter of
his roof.  But here of course, amid the gilding and the gay people and
the supple-backed waiters, it was all different.

'Choose for yourself,' said Agatha, as Samarez looked across at her
from the wine list.

Dinner passed by in a delicious dream.  Agatha's acquaintance with food
so far had been of the roast beef and apple-tart order.  When she
consulted Mrs. Beeton, it had been for the purpose of designing
substantial and unambitious meals for the hearty Browns, who one and
all, following in Mr. Brown's footsteps, lost no opportunity of
expressing their contempt for what they termed 'made dishes.'  So far
the subtleties of sauces and the refinements of foods had passed Agatha
by, so that now each succeeding course lingering brilliantly upon the
palate came as a new and delicious revelation.  Not even the necessity
of tactfully observing which implements Samarez employed and imitating
his example could mar her enjoyment, and the wine, with its
unaccustomed influence, warming and comforting and heartening, was the
finishing touch.  She leant forward towards Samarez and talked without
a care, and he talked back with what seemed to him to be positively
dazzling wit.  They made a good pair; Agatha with her smooth cheeks and
bright eyes and upright figure, Samarez bronzed and blond and
clean-looking, with the far-seeing expression in his grey eyes which
characterizes the majority of sailors.  He was very young for his
years; even though, as Agatha realized with a pang of regret, he was
actually younger than she was.  And once or twice his head went back
and he chuckled deep down in his chest with wrinkles round his eyes in
a manner which brought a great big pain into Agatha's breast, and made
her long to stretch out her barren arms and draw his rough head down to
her bosom.  She found herself imagining herself rubbing her cheek
against his short rebellious hair, and the mere thought turned her
faint with longing as she sat in her chair, strangely maternal.

'Well, I'm blest,' said the Commander suddenly.  'Do you know, I've
been talking to you all this time and I don't even know what your name
is?'

'It's Agatha,' said Agatha--that much of her name was tolerable to her,
although the 'Brown' always rankled--'and I don't know yours either.'

Samarez hesitated for one regretted second; he was sure that it was
unwise to tell one's name to a strange woman, but this woman was so
different.

'It's a very long one,' he said, 'but it begins with Richard.'

'Of course it would,' said Agatha bewilderingly, 'and they call you
Dickie, don't they?'

'They used to,' admitted Samarez, 'but they mostly call me Sammy
nowadays, men do.'

'Then I shall call you Dickie,' said Agatha decidedly, and she finished
her coffee as though to seal the bargain.

So dinner was finished, and the room was beginning to throng with more
sensible people dining at a more reasonable hour.  They had no possible
excuse for lingering on, and yet they both of them were most
desperately unwilling to part.  Their eyes met again and again across
the table, and conversation died a fevered death, and neither could
voice what each had most in mind.  Agatha simply did not know the usual
gambits leading up to the making of a new appointment; Samarez with an
odd touch of sensitiveness felt that it would be banal and discordant
to speak about it--this was not an ordinary woman.  The restaurant was
growing crowded; the waiter brought his bill unasked, and hovered round
the table with the unmistakable intention of showing them that the
management would prefer to see them make way for fresh comers.  Fate
simply forced them, with sinking hearts, to rise from the table with
the words unspoken.  Samarez waited for her in the foyer in a really
restless and unsettled state of mind.

And Agatha, adjusting her veil in the cloakroom, felt on the verge of
tears.  She had been mostly wildly unladylike; she had talked with
strange men in the gilded halls of vice; it was past seven o'clock and
she really must reach Ealing and the Burtons' by nine at the latest;
and she did not want to leave Dickie.  Most emphatically she did not
want to.  But she had not the faintest idea of what she did want.

At the door circumstances forced them further towards separation.

'Cab, I suppose?' said Samarez huskily.

They climbed into a four-wheeler, and Samarez, still retaining a grain
of sanity, directed the driver to Charing Cross Station.  Agatha had
clean forgotten the luggage left there.  The cab wormed its way through
the clattering traffic and turned into Chandos Street, dim-lighted and
quiet.  Restlessly Samarez took off his hat and wiped his fretted
forehead.  A passing street lamp showed up his boyish face and his
rumpled hair.

'Oh,' said Agatha uncontrollably.  One hand went to his shoulder, the
other fumbled for his lean brown hand in the darkness.  Samarez turned
clumsily with his arms out to her, and all their unhappiness melted
away under their wild kisses.




_Chapter III_

It was the lights of the Strand and of the courtyard entrance at
Charing Cross which brought them back momentarily to reality.  Agatha's
face was wet with tears, her hat hung by one hatpin, as their embrace
came to an end.  The cab halted outside the station and a porter tore
open the door.

'I--I can't get out,' stammered Agatha, shrinking away into a corner.

Samarez climbed out and shut the door.

'Wait!' he flung at the driver, and pelted into the station, dragging
out the luggage receipt from his pocket as he hastened to the cloakroom
with fantastic strides, blinded by the lights.  By the grace of
Providence there was no one there awaiting attention; it was only a
matter of seconds before he came back, suitcase and kit-bag in hand.
He opened the door of the cab, and Agatha came to life again out of her
mazed dream.

'Where to, sir?' asked the cab-driver.

'Where to?' echoed Samarez stupidly.

'I don't know--Ealing, I suppose,' said a little voice from the depths
of the cab.

'Ealing,' said Samarez to the cab-driver.

'Ealing, sir?  Ealing Broadway, sir?  Right, sir,' said the cab-driver,
and round came the horse and the door slammed to, with Samarez and
Agatha in blessed solitude once more, happily ignorant of the meaning
wink of the cabdriver and the broad grins of the porters.  It was quite
several seconds before hand met hand and lip met lip again in the
velvet darkness of the cab, while the horse's hoofs clip-clopped
solidly onwards towards Ealing.

Passion had them greatly in thrall.  Agatha's hat was off by now, and
the tears flowed freely from her eyes as she pressed against Samarez
with all the abandon her corseted waist permitted.  Agatha had
forgotten she was twenty-nine, of strict Wesleyan upbringing.
Twenty-nine years of bottled-up emotion were tearing her to pieces;
some faint, unknown cause had obscurely begun the explosion--perhaps
even before she had met Samarez--and there was no power on earth that
could check it now before it had run its course.  She gave herself up
to him in an ecstasy of giving.

As for Samarez there is less to be said.  He at least had known kisses
before, and the encirclement of a woman's arms was not quite new to
him.  Even purchased caresses ought to have given him sufficient
experience to have told him whither they were straying, but reaction
from loneliness and the fierce insistent urge of his sex had swept him
away.  Agatha's sweet flesh in his arms and the touch of her
unpractised lips on his mouth were all the facts of which he was
conscious at the moment.  He never dreamed of discretion while he let
his instincts carry him away in the darkness, and he pressed her hotly.

Somehow or other Agatha found herself speaking, her hands on his breast
and her face lifted to his.

'Of course, I've _got_ to go to Ealing,' she said.  It was a statement
doomed to extinction at birth, made automatically in an automatic hope
of contradiction.

'What are you going to do there?' asked Samarez.

'I'm going to stay with friends.  They're expecting me.'

The little voice whispering in the darkness added fresh fuel to the
flames of Samarez's passion.  Into the back of his mind leapt the
sudden realization that in the cab with them, beside them on the other
seat lay her luggage and his, all their necessaries for days.

'Can't you put them off?' he asked, hardly realizing what he was
saying.  'Send them a wire.  Don't go.'

'Oh, my _dear_,' came the answering whisper.

Let it not be imagined that Agatha acted in ignorance.  At twenty-nine,
when one is an old maid and busy with Chapel work, one hears things.
Married women say things just as if one were married oneself, and
Chapel work sometimes brings one into contact with illegitimate
motherhood and even sometimes undisguised adultery.  Agatha knew quite
well what happened when a man 'stayed with' a woman--at least, she had
a general idea of it even if she were hazy as to detail.  So that her
wordless consent to Samarez's fierce suggestion, and her acquiescence
when Samarez leaned out of the window and redirected the cabman, were
absolutely inexcusable, so her fellow-workers would think.  But her
fellow-workers had never known, perhaps would never know, the careless,
happy stupefaction of sudden passion.

The hotel porter was discreet; the hotel reception clerk was friendly;
in fact, no one in the hotel thought twice about them, because Agatha
looked the last person in the world to share a bedroom with a man who
was not her husband, and her glove concealed the absence of a
wedding-ring.  In the dignified seclusion of the hotel bedroom
Samarez's enforced calm fell away from him like a discarded garment.
He opened his arms to her and she came gladly to them, giving herself
with a delicious, cool relaxation.  She felt fantastically motherly
towards this tousle-headed boy even during his greediest caresses, and
when he sighed out his content with his face upon her bosom she clasped
him against it with the same gesture as she would have used to a child.

And the next day, and the day after, and the day after that this
maternal attitude became more and more marked.  She was so many years
older than he, she felt.  The sheer physical longing she had felt for
him had given way to a stranger, calmer affection.  She seemed to have
grown suddenly used to him.  It was odd, but true.  No twinge of
conscience came to ruffle the serenity of her soul; she was flooded
with a sense of well-being that was not diminished by the necessity for
practical arrangements, such as writing to Adeline Burton a careful
letter explaining that an unforeseen domestic crisis had compelled her
reluctantly to postpone her visit at such brief notice as to prevent
her even from letting her know.  Agatha would come some other time, as
soon as she could, if Adeline did not mind.  The lies which Agatha
wrote flowed so naturally from her pen that she did not give them a
thought--to Agatha's mind the aged aunt suddenly stricken with mortal
illness and demanding immediate nursing seemed to be an actual living
character.  She did not even feel relieved that Greenwich and Ealing
should be so far apart as to render it quite impossible for Adeline to
discover by a casual call that no such lady existed.

Samarez, on the other hand, was very puzzled and almost uncomfortable
of conscience on those occasions when it occurred to him to think what
he was doing, and to make deductions from the somewhat meagre data
presented to him.  Agatha had never 'been there before'; he was sure of
that for more reasons than one.  No one could have been, anyway, and
still retained the blossoming innocence which she displayed at every
moment.  She clearly had not even toyed with the idea of dallying with
men.  Her underclothing proved that, if nothing else did.  It was
exquisitely neat, with a myriad tucks and gatherings, but it was not to
be called frivolous.  It was even pathetic in its lack of sex appeal.
Just the sort of white, longcloth underclothing a nun would wear, if
(Samarez had no information on the point) nuns wore underclothing.
Samarez's knowledge of underclothing was limited; but in those days it
was only daughters of joy who wore garments other than virgin white and
strove after ornament as well as utility.  And Agatha's pathetically
severe nightgown, high-buttoned and severe and undecorated, settled
that matter to Samarez's mind.  So that Agatha was a respectable member
of a respectable family, who had bestowed her virginity on him just as
she might have given half a crown to a beggar.  It made Samarez queerly
uncomfortable.  And yet, after three days' intimacy, she was far less
attainable than ever before.  Samarez could feel no thrill of pride of
possession while he was with her, not even in the most triumphant
moments of intimacy.  Something was still out of reach, beyond
attainment, and he was piqued in consequence.  He tried to buy presents
for her, to lavish money on her for clothes and jewellery, but whenever
he tried she put the suggestion aside with a smiling, irresistible
negative.  Poor Samarez was not to know that Agatha's main reason for
refusal was the impossibility of subsequently explaining away these
gifts to her family.

So it was with a queer mixture of pique and gentlemanly feeling that,
after three days, Samarez proposed marriage to her.  He did not want
to; he held the strongest possible opinion regarding the unsuitability
of marriage for naval officers, and he did not believe in marriage
much, anyway.  But he proposed, and as he did so he regarded her
anxiously with expectant eyes, at the same moment annoyed with himself
for throwing away his future and comforted by the knowledge that he was
doing the 'right thing.'  And Agatha, her hands on his shoulders,
looked deep into those anxious eyes before she slowly shook her head.

'No, Dickie,' she said, 'it would be better if we didn't.  But it was
awfully nice of you to ask me.'

Then she strained him impulsively to her, and kissed him hotly.  She
saw the unwisdom of marrying a man whom one only loved as one might
love a pet St. Bernard, and who would never be able to claim that
entire devotion and subservience which Agatha, in accordance with the
ideas of the time, thought she ought to give to her husband.  But she
was keenly alive to the extent of the sacrifice Samarez had proposed
making, and appreciative of it.

So that after five days the affair came to an end.  Five days during
which Agatha had had a glimpse of the sort of life led by women who are
not greengrocers' daughters; five days of theatres (an annual pantomime
and an annual circus was the nearest Agatha had ever come to a theatre
until then), of good food, of leisure, of ample spendings.  Truth to
tell, the waste of money and time, by the end of the five days, had so
worked upon Agatha's mind that she was quite glad of the prospect of
returning home to economical housekeeping and domestic industry.  And
Samarez had begun to cease to interest her--he was not a tremendously
interesting fellow, as a matter of fact.

Yet the parting was painful.  Samarez did not want her to go; he clung
to her as they kissed good-bye in the hotel bedroom, with his hand to
her breast.  He felt almost humble and subdued, almost frightened at
the prospect of two days' loneliness before rejoining his ship; and
Agatha's eyes were wet, too, although she realized she was doing the
sensible thing, and it was very gently that she put his hands aside and
turned away.  He held her hand in the cab as they drove to Charing
Cross, and he even tried to make one last appeal after she had boarded
the train for Greenwich.  She only shook her head and smiled, however,
and two minutes later Samarez was alone on the platform, watching the
train round the bend in the distance, trying obstinately not to feel
relieved.

It was the end of the incident for him.  In later years he forgot what
his own attitude had been, and he only remembered it as a rather
pleasant and unusual encounter, which he would like to repeat with
someone else (he never did).  Sometimes, years later, in expansive
moments, he would tell other men of his strange meeting with 'quite a
nice, well-brought-up woman, a lady, you know, with whom he had stayed
five delightful days at Benjamin's Hotel, who had refused all his
presents except the wedding-ring they had found it advisable to buy,
and whose surname and address he had never known.'  The other men would
be incredulous and envious, and Samarez, Commander Samarez or Captain
Samarez or Admiral Samarez, as he came to be, would pull down his
waistcoat and plume himself upon his unusual good fortune and dexterity.




_Chapter IV_

Agatha arrived home to find everything quite normal, save for the
inevitable deterioration of efficiency consequent upon the mistress's
absence.  No hint had reached the Browns that she had not been staying
with the Burtons, and she told one or two placid lies regarding these
latter, which gave a little local colour to the idea that she had been
there; and, as lying was unusual to her, she almost came to believe she
had been there.  For her exalted mood died away.  Within a week it
seemed incredible to her that she could have been guilty of such
terrible conduct; she had forgotten the state of mind which had led her
into it; she felt and hoped that it had only been a very vivid and
shocking dream.  She ceased in consequence to carry the ring Samarez
had bought her on the ribbon round her neck.

Yet very soon she became actively aware that it was not a dream, could
not have been a dream.  For a time she thrust her fears behind her and
went on grimly with her household affairs, but they continually
recurred to her.  She was worried about them, and uncertain of what she
ought to do.  She knew Samarez's name and ship (of course she would!)
and for a moment thought of writing to him, but she put the idea aside
as unworthy.  But as the symptoms became unmistakable and she began to
fear discovery she grew more worried, and it was a positive relief when
the storm broke.  Mr. Brown came home one day at five--rather earlier
than his usual time.

'No, I don't want any tea,' he said, and there was that in his voice
which told Agatha what he knew.

'Come here, my girl,' went on Mr. Brown, 'I want to talk to you.'

'Well?' said Agatha, quite calm and steady now that the crisis had come.

'I met Burton this afternoon, quite by accident.  And he said--he said
he was sorry to hear about my sister, and what a pity it was you
weren't able to go over to Ealing and stay there the last time it was
arranged.'

Mr. Brown stared at his daughter from under his heavy eyebrows.  The
thing was incredible to him--and yet--and yet--his doubts led him to
work himself up into a rage.

'Didn't you tell me last February you were going to stay there, and
didn't you come back and say you had?' he blared.

'Yes,' said Agatha.

'Well, where did you get to?  Where the _devil_ did you get to?'

Agatha made no reply.

'You made me look such a bleedin' fool when Burton said that to me,'
raved Mr. Brown--the adjective showed he was nearly beside himself.
'Where the devil did you get to?'

The horrible and incredible doubts which had assailed him and which he
had put aside as quite impossible renewed themselves and goaded him
into frightful agitation.

'Was--was it a _man_?' he demanded.  'Tell me this minute, girl.'

Agatha knew that it was no use telling Mr. Brown about Samarez.  He
wouldn't understand.  She didn't understand herself.

'My God, it was!' said Mr. Brown.  'Who was it?  What filthy swine----?'

He mouthed and spluttered his rage.

'Who was it?  Was it young Evans?'

Evans was the local rou, a greasy-haired young man whom Agatha hated.
The suggestion was so comic that Agatha had to smile, and the smile
increased her father's frenzy.

'Who was it?  Tell me, or I'll----'

'It wasn't anybody you know, Dad,' said Agatha.

'Damned if I care.  Tell me his name and I'll find him.  I'll teach
him.'

'No you won't, Dad, I won't tell you.'

'You won't?  We'll see, my girl.'

'Yes, we'll see,' said Agatha.  Her old exalted mood was coming over
her again, leaving her outwardly calm and placid and nunlike, but
inwardly rejoicing.  Mr. Brown stared at her serene face, and his rage
simmered down into incredulous astonishment.

'Who the devil was it, if it wasn't Evans?' he pleaded pitifully.

'It was someone else,' said Agatha quite calmly, looking over his head
at something a thousand miles distant.

'But--but he didn't do you any _harm_, Aggie, old girl, did he?'
wheedled Mr. Brown.

Agatha met his eyes, and nodded with certitude.

'You would say he did, Dad,' said Agatha.

The flush of Mr. Brown's anger gave way to a yellow pallor.  His very
bulk as he sat in his sacred chair seemed to diminish.

'You don't mean that, do you, dear?' he asked quite unnecessarily, for
he knew she did.

Later he gave way to pathetic helplessness.

'What am I to do?' he pleaded.  'Whatever will the Chapel say?'

Upon Mr. Brown dawned the awful realization that despite his three
shops, despite his wholesale connection, despite his fine house and
solid furniture, the Chapel would find huge stores of food for gossip
in this terrible catastrophe.  The finger of scorn would be pointed at
him; he would never be able to hold up his head again.  Never more
would the proud privilege be his of passing round the plate at morning
service.

The arrival of his two eldest sons prolonged the discussion.  Will and
Harry were brimful of the ferocious energy which had carried their
father to such heights in the world of greengrocery, and, unlike him,
they were still young and able to reach instant, Napoleonic decisions.

'People mustn't know about it,' said Will positively, 'that's certain.
Agatha will have to go away for the--as soon as it's necessary.  We'll
have to say she's gone to stay with friends in Edinburgh or somewhere.'

'That's it,' chimed in Harry, 'and the--the child will have to be
boarded out when she comes back.  It ought to be easy enough.'

The three of them looked to Agatha for agreement, and found none.  Her
face was as though cut in stone.  The bare thought of having her child
'boarded out,' the child for whom she was ready, even anxious, to
endure so much, was like a savage blow in the face.

'No,' she said, 'I won't have him boarded out.  I'm going to be with
him, always.'

The pronoun she used displayed her silly, baseless hope that her child
would be a son, but it passed unnoticed and uncommented upon.

'Don't be silly,' said Harry, with immense scorn.  'Of course we must
board the child out--if it lives.'

The thought and the wish that fathered it tore at Agatha's
heart-strings.

'Oh, how I hate you!' she burst out.  'Of course he's going to live.
And I'm going to keep him too.  Don't you dare say anything else!'

'Pooh!' sneered Will.  'You'll have to do what you're told.  Beggars
can't be----'

Will's speech broke off short as he caught sight of a flash of triumph
in Agatha's face, and was reminded by it of a forgotten factor in the
argument.  He met the eyes of his father and his brother with some
uneasiness.

For fifteen years ago, when Mr. Brown had just begun to be successful
in business, he had followed the prudent example of thousands of others
by investing his savings in house property and deeding it over to his
wife.  That, of course, had been in the days before limited liability,
and was a wise precaution ensuring the possession of capital and the
necessaries of life even if bankruptcy were to strip Mr. Brown
nominally of all he possessed.  Mr. Brown had seen to it that his wife
made a will in his favour, and had thought no more about it.  Until his
wife's death for then, as soon as Mrs. Brown was in her grave, a
wretched pettifogging lawyer from the purlieus of Deptford, had
produced a will of recent date (made, in fact, as soon as Mrs. Brown
was aware that she was suffering from the cancer which caused her
death) by which all her property, real and personal, was left to her
daughter Agatha.  It had been Mrs. Brown's one exceptional action in
life (corresponding to that one of Agatha's whose results they were
just discussing) and had been undoubtedly inspired by the desire to
render Agatha free of that dependence upon mankind which even Victorian
ladies found so exasperating on occasions.  Dad and the boys, as soon
as they had recovered from their astonishment, had tried to laugh the
matter off.  Dad had gone on collecting the weekly rents of the six
houses in Beaconsfield Terrace as usual, and as usual had devoted them
to his own purposes without rendering account.  But those houses were
Agatha's all the same, as was the hundred pounds a year clear which
they brought in.  Will and Harry and Mr. Brown looked at each other
with an uneasy suspicion of defeat.

'I'm not a beggar,' said Agatha, 'so I can be a chooser if I like.  And
I'm going to choose.  I'm going to live with my boy wherever I like.
So there!'

Will did not know when he was beaten, and he tried to continue the
argument.

'Don't be a fool, Aggie,' he said, 'you can't do that.  You can't
manage property and--and--have a baby and all that sort of thing.
You'll be cheated right and left and you'll come whining back to us for
help before the year's out.  And then----'

His tone and expression made it unpleasantly clear what would happen
then.  Agatha only shrugged her shoulders and turned away; she sniffed
with contempt as if she had been fourteen instead of twenty-nine and a
budding mother.  And that sniff completed Will's exasperation.  He
boiled over with rage at being thus contemptuously treated by a mere
woman--and especially at the thought of all that goodly money being
taken out of the family.

'Come here!' he said, and sprang across and seized her wrist.

For a second or two the brother and sister stood and glared at each
other.  But Agatha rallied all her waning moral strength, and continued
her amazing rebellion against the godlike male.

'Let me go!' she said.

She tore herself free, and shrank aside from his renewed attempt to
grab hold of her.  She evaded his grip, and forgetful of all decorum
she brought her hand round in a full swing so that it landed with an
echoing slap upon Will's pudgy cheek.  He staggered back with his ear
singing and his heart appalled at this frightful rebellion.  Then
Agatha turned away and walked slowly from the room, and slowly upstairs
to her bedroom, where, with calm, unthinking deliberation she packed
the suitcase which had accompanied her on that wonderful trip to London
nearly three months before.  She included her jewel case with her few
petty pieces of jewellery; then, struck by a sudden thought, she opened
it again, took out the wedding ring Samarez had bought her, and slipped
it on to the third finger of her left hand.  Then, suitcase in hand,
she descended the stairs and walked slowly to the front door.  The
dining-room stood half open as she passed it, and her glance within
showed her Dad huddled spiritlessly in his armchair, and Will and Harry
collapsed and despondent in two chairs by the table.  Perhaps if
George, her favourite brother, had been there too, Agatha might even
then have stayed her steps.  But he had not yet returned from work, and
the others hardly looked up as she went by.  She opened the door and
walked out down the pretentious, tiny carriage drive to the road, and
turned to the left towards the station.  Somehow as she walked thither
panic came over her and she hastened her steps more and more until she
was almost running.  When she reached the station and found there was
no up train for half an hour she could not bring herself to wait;
instead she boarded the down train and travelled on it for a couple of
stations, and then changed trains and returned back through Greenwich.
And so Harry and George, sent out to make peace at any price by a
despairing Dad ten minutes after she had left the house, quite missed
her.




_Chapter V_

So that at midsummer, 1893, a pleasant-faced widow, Mrs. Agatha Brown,
attired in all the hideous panoply of mourning for a newly-dead husband
which the Queen's example had made nearly compulsory, came to live in
lodgings at Peckham.  Her sympathetic landlady soon knew all about
her--about the husband, rather a bad lot, seemingly, who had been in
the greengrocery trade and had died suddenly of some rather vague
disease, but leaving his widow well provided for by the standards of
that simple place and time; about the happy event which was to be
expected shortly; about her general friendlessness and the dislike with
which her late husband's family regarded her for intercepting the
legacies they had come to look upon as their due.  Mrs. Rodgers became
a great admirer of Mrs. Brown.  Mrs. Brown was so evidently a lady, yet
withal she had so sound a knowledge of practical affairs, and, most
important, she had round her that tremendous aura of 'independent
means' which implies so much to a working-class dependent for its daily
bread upon the whim of an employer.  Mrs. Brown paid splendidly regular
money for her furnished rooms, but she paid only a tiny amount more
than the lowest market value, so that contempt could not creep in to
adulterate Mrs. Rodgers's admiration.  Mrs. Brown knew all about the
prices of things and how long they ought to last, and she always knew
how much of her little joints and of her butter and tea and other
supplies she had left, so that Mrs. Rodgers's first tentative stealings
were calmly checked, and she bore no ill will--quite the contrary.  She
was soon a very subservient ally.

Mr. Deane, too, who had drawn up that astonishing will of Agatha's
mother which had enabled Agatha to become Mrs. Brown of Peckham, was
very helpful and kind.  He shook his head sympathetically when Agatha,
calling upon him, told him about family trouble which had led her to
leave home, and of course, seeing that such was his business, he
readily consented to take upon himself the management of Agatha's
'estate'--the six houses of Beaconsfield Terrace.  He looked up
curiously and sharply when Agatha explained that at her new address she
was known as Mrs. Brown, and when he noticed the expression on her face
he pulled his white whiskers and looked down at his notes again in
embarrassed fashion.  After all, he was a solicitor, and solicitors
should not be shocked at encountering family skeletons.

Colchester Street, Peckham, was a brief road of a hundred houses a
side, nearly similar but not quite, the pavements grimly flagged, the
rest grimly macadamized.  At one end was the main road, along which
poured a volume of traffic considered large for those times--horse
trams and horse buses predominating--and at the other end was a public
house, the 'Colchester Arms'; but despite this latter handicap
Colchester Street was very respectable and at that time very few of the
houses accommodated more than one family.  Just here and there widows
or widowers or maiden-ladies (school teachers) occupied one or two
rooms, but that was a very different matter from other possible
developments.  Agatha had drifted to 37 Colchester Street as a result
of a brief examination of the small advertisements of the local paper;
it was the first address she had called at, and she was satisfied.  She
settled in, and settled down, to a life which was an odd blend of the
strictly orderly and logical and nightmarishly fantastic.  It was quite
orderly and logical of course that she should pay her weekly bills
promptly and keep a close eye on her expenditure and exact respect from
those whom she encountered, but it was wildly fantastic that she should
have no exacting daily duties, that time should hang idly on her hands,
that she should have no calls to make nor callers to receive, that she
should be addressed as 'Mrs.,' that she should go to the local doctor
and surrender her sweet private body to him for examination and
decision on her condition.

The doctor's verdict, of course, was only in agreement with her own.
He, too, looked at her sharply; he knew her for a widow and a newcomer,
and he guessed shrewdly that there was more in her history than she was
likely to tell him, although--although--her sedate costume and sedate,
assured manner and placid purity of expression made him doubt his
doubts, only to have them return in renewed strength when he found that
she was friendly with no woman--that, seemingly, she was without a
friend in the world.  But he did all his duty and more; he prescribed a
regimen for her, gave her information on points of which she was quite
ignorant, and finally obtained for her two or three books, written in
the genteel round-the-corner style in which such books were then
written, which more or less gave her guidance towards the approaching
great event.

In the 'nineties expectant mothers were real invalids; they must not do
this and they must not do that, and it were better if they did not do
the other; the books hedged in Agatha with all sorts of restrictions
and prescriptions, and they took it for granted that she would be
really unwell, whereas, if the truth must be told, she never felt
better in her life.  At times she was puzzled about it, but she took
the written word for Gospel--that and the manifold hints and
suggestions of Mrs. Rodgers--because, after all, she knew no more about
it than what they told her.  So now she rose late, only when the
children were passing whistling to each other under her bedroom window
on their way to school, and she breakfasted in her dressing-gown, and
she sat by a closed window (with a fire until summer was indubitably
come) and watched the petty pageant of the streets while she stitched
and stitched and dreamed in all the unreality of occupied idleness.

For, although the books assumed her to be an invalid, they offered some
compensation at least in the array of garments they prescribed as
necessary for the 'little stranger'--that horrible expression of which
they made such free use.  It was not a horrible expression to Agatha;
she would have called it a genteel necessary circumlocution if it had
ever occurred to her to employ such an exotic phrase.  The 'little
stranger,' then, had to have a myriad garments--binders yards and yards
long, matinee jackets, veils and shawls and christening gowns, socks
and gloves, daygowns and nightgowns of flannel exquisitely embroidered
in silk--and Agatha made every blessed thing herself, stitching away
patiently by the window.  She stitched and stitched, but of the dreams
she wove in with the silk it would not be right to tell.

She came to know that side street and its habitus so well.  There were
rag-and-bone men, each chanting his call in his own particular manner;
there were the milkmen on the eleven o'clock round, and the smart
baker's cart, and the butcher's dog-cart drawn by a showy chestnut
sadly overdriven by the butcher's greasy-haired son; there was the
insurance agent, frock-coated and bowler-hatted, and the fruit-sellers
and knife-grinders.  On three afternoons a week organ grinders came,
one of them with a shivering monkey in a red coat, and another, who was
a real Italian, bronzed and handsome with marvellously white teeth, who
sang 'O Sole Mio' so sentimentally that Agatha always opened the window
and threw him a penny.  And besides all these there were the
children--oh, the children!  Every house had its two and three, who
came trotting home to dinner at twelve and back again to school at two,
and down the street once more at half-past four.  Agatha knew them all,
the big ones and the little ones, the late ones and the early ones, the
good ones and the naughty ones.  Big sisters often had one or two to
escort, and more than once during those six months Agatha watched the
rise of a new independence when some baby boy would suddenly decide
that big sisters were no longer of use to him and would find his own
way to school, not quite sure of himself either, with an occasional
look round to see that the sister was not unattainably out of reach.
Agatha could not have watched with greater interest the beginning of a
new planet.

Some there were to whom the grim flagstones of the pavement were
friendly and sociable, for it was a great game to walk to school
entirely on the lines between them; and just outside No. 37 there were
three successive very wide flagstones, much wider than the ordinary
six-year-old could stride, and Agatha would find herself leaning
forward in great excitement to see whether this little boy or that
little girl would accomplish the perilous passage in safety.  There
were naughty little boys who played 'knocking down ginger'--knocking at
nearly every door in the street and running away before they opened.
Agatha's heart used to beat quite fast in case they were caught, but
they never were.  Tops were all the rage when Agatha first came to No.
37, and they were succeeded by marbles and skipping ropes (according to
sex), and cherry stones and little balls and one or two cricket bats
made their appearance before football came into its own again.  There
was one dreadful incident when a prized tennis ball rolled down a
drain, and Agatha watched palpitating while the grating was prised up
and two small urchins of seven hung on to the legs of another small
urchin of nine while he lowered three-quarters of himself head
downwards down the hole and reached the ball by a convulsive stretching
which threatened every moment to precipitate him upside down into the
horrible hole.

It was the little boys in whom Agatha took most interest, although the
little girls claimed a good share.  She knew the tidy ones and the
untidy ones, and the prim ones and the tomboyish ones, and, with
typical partiality, she liked the tidy ones best.  Her heart was really
wrung with agony when a disaster occurred to the primmest and tidiest
of them all, when that self-satisfied, smug ten-year-old found her
drawers slipping down there in the road with a whole lot of people
about.  It was into the front garden of No. 37 that she retired, and
Agatha, with yearning sympathy, watched her putting matters right while
cowering behind the stunted privet bushes.

Strange that children should thus hold her fascinated.  Agatha had
never before thought about children; she had been too preoccupied with
two maids and a house to look after, and the little she had known about
the method of arrival selected by children had displeased her.  She had
felt a sort of contempt for the shapeless, helpless wives upon whom she
had sometimes called--Mr. Brown's fellow-Nonconformists were prolific
fathers--and she despised wailing babies, and wet babies, and sick
babies.  All the babies she knew fell into one of these three
categories, and children were always quarrelsome, or stupid, or
self-assertive.  It was all different now; Agatha, stitching a thousand
tucks into one ridiculous nightgown, or implanting wonderful embroidery
into the corners of a flannel daygown, thought of few things besides
children.  But then of course she was a prisoner for the time, and
prisoners, by common report, take interest in spiders and mice and
things like that, just as Agatha did.

There was another matter in which she took an interest, though.  One
day while casually glancing through the newspaper a name caught her
eye, and with a slight sense of shock she looked again.  The name was
that of Lieutenant-Commander R. E. S. Saville-Samarez, and it occurred
half-way down a list headed 'Naval Appointments.'  Agatha may perhaps
have seen that column before, but it had conveyed nothing to her.  She
had not realized before that by its aid she would be able to follow
Samarez's professional career, and the discovery stimulated her
attention.  She found there was another column which sometimes
appeared, headed 'Movements of H.M. Ships,' and with the aid of these
two she could trace Samarez hither and thither wherever the Lords of
Admiralty might send him.  After that Agatha always bought her own
newspaper instead of depending on casual readings of Mrs. Rodger's, and
it was for these items that she always looked first.  It became her
hobby, just as children had become her main interest.

Day passed after day, and week after week.  The chair by the
first-floor front window had become a second nature to her, just as had
her evening walks by side streets.  It had almost begun to seem as if
she had done nothing else all her life than await the arrival of the
son she so confidently expected, and as if she would do nothing else.
It called for quite an effort to make herself realize that her time was
at hand.  Doctor Walters of course treated the affair in a far more
matter-of-fact manner, and it was the businesslike solemnity of his
visits which did most to impress Agatha with the need to complete her
arrangements.

Within the last few weeks a new portent had appeared in Salisbury Road,
next to Colchester Road.  A board had spread itself with wide-open
welcoming arms there, bearing the legend 'Nursing Home--Surgical,
General, Maternity.'  Until that era nursing homes in the suburbs had
been almost non-existent.  Suburban people, if they were ill, went into
hospitals; if they were only not quite so ill they struggled back to
life or on to death in their own rabbit hutches of houses; nine hundred
and ninety-nine suburban babies out of a thousand were born in the
suburban beds which had seen their engendering.  The average wife would
never have dreamed of going cold-bloodedly elsewhere for her
confinement, especially when domestic servants were still common.
Suburban nursing homes and restaurants and all the other insidious
wreckers of home life were only to burgeon into full blossom with the
lack of domestic servants.  The Salisbury Nursing Home was a little
before its time; its 'Surgical' and 'General' departments were merely
heroic gestures, and even its 'Maternity' side never flourished.  The
venture came to a disastrous end after a year's struggle, but that year
saw the arrival of Agatha's child.

Agatha made her arrangements with Doctor Walters's full approval, for
the doctor, with lingering happy memories of hospital experience and
trained assistance and proper appliances, was thoroughly dissatisfied
with the makeshifts he usually had to employ in practice, with
curtained rooms and feather beds and all the other hideously unhygienic
arrangements with which mothers could find no fault.  So it was with a
strange excited feeling that one day Agatha walked round to the
Salisbury Nursing Home with Mrs. Rodgers at her side, carrying the
historic suitcase, the suitcase which was accompanying her for the
third successive occasion on a great adventure.  Agatha liked it all;
she liked the bare, clean rooms and the trim, efficient nurses and the
cheerfully unsympathetic aspect of the place; for Agatha was of a
Spartan turn of mind mostly.

She looked on pain as a necessary part of life; she had been imbued
since childhood with notions about 'the curse of Eve' and similar
predestinate ideas; she knew (and it tortured her) that she had
'sinned,' and she went unshrinkingly forward.  The grit that had
carried her father from errand running to wholesaling took her into
maternity without a tremor or a regret.  The slight pains came, and she
was packed away into bed; Doctor Walters called, was unhesitatingly
cheerful, and went away again.  And then the real pains came, wave
after wave of them, so that she found herself flung into a sea of pain
of an intensity she had not believed possible.  The smooth, efficient
face of the nurse, and Doctor Walters's, with its kindly detachment,
floated into her consciousness and out again through a grey mist.  She
caught a whiff of ether, but at the time she had no idea that it was
being used on her.  Then it was all over (Agatha, looking back, would
have said that it had only taken half an hour or so) and she was free
to hold her child on her arm for a few wonderful minutes.  The delights
of motherhood were very obvious and none the less pleasant.  It was a
boy of course.  Agatha had been quite certain of it from the first.
Nothing else could have been possible.  Agatha to her dying day never
realized that it was only a successful even chance, and not a fixed,
settled certainty.




_Chapter VI_

She called him Albert; goodness knows why.  She would not have 'Dick,'
which one might have thought her natural choice.  Somewhere within her
she realized that Richard Saville-Samarez did not possess quite as much
brains as she would like her child to have, and she would take no
chances.  She had hesitated over 'George,' but had put it aside in case
she ever encountered her family again, for 'George' was her father's
name as well as her favourite brother's, and she would not have them
think that the child was called after them; for it might give them a
feeling of proprietary interest, and she did not want that; Albert was
all her own.  So she chose 'Albert.'  She knew personally no one of
that name at all, which satisfied her jealous desire for possession,
while about the name there clung a flavour of association with the
Royal Family which endeared it to her rather bourgeois little heart.

And Albert Brown grew up and developed just as other babies did,
although Agatha would have indignantly denied any similarity.  He took
his food manfully.  He played with his toys at first with feeble,
fumbling fingers of helpless babyhood, and later with the more
purposeful action of growing muscle sense.  He cut his teeth and
fretted over them just as much as one would expect of a healthy child
of healthy parents.  He achieved his first sitting up and his first
straggling attempt to kick.  Once or twice he allowed his digestion to
become upset.  Soon he achieved the miracle of an erect attitude, and
eventually came the glorious day when he first addressed Agatha as
'Mummy,' and not long after Mrs. Rodgers developed into Miss Ozzes.

For Agatha had returned to No. 37 Colchester Road from the Salisbury
Nursing Home.  It was comfortable and she did not want to seek out a
new resting-place, and Mrs. Rodgers had found no new satisfactory
tenant, and--those six months of approaching motherhood had endeared
even that unromantic, unambitious little street to Agatha.  Moreover,
Agatha soon began to establish a business connection in the locality.
Albert's marvellous garments were the admiration of all who saw them,
and the tale of them was told round about.  It was not long before
Agatha received tentative inquiries as to whether she would mind making
similar things for other Peckham babies, newly arrived or expected
shortly.  Agatha had found that even the labour of looking after the
finest baby in England left her with much free time, and idleness was
abhorrent to her.  She accepted commissions eagerly, and it was not
long before she found that she had little spare time left; those firm
decisive fingers of hers were busy most of the day (when they were not
occupied by Albert Brown) stitching away at marvellous embroidery on
pelisses and christening robes and, by a natural extension, on wedding
dresses and trousseau underclothing.  There was not much profit to be
made, but still there was a little, and Agatha, although she had found
that it was easy enough to live on a hundred pounds a year, was eager
to increase her income and accumulate savings.  Mr. Deane, the
solicitor, had looked at her incredulously when she had told him it was
her intention to make Albert an officer in the Navy; he had even hinted
as tactfully as he might that perhaps admission to the _Britannia_
might not easily be obtained for the illegitimate son of a
greengrocer's daughter, and he had declaimed in his soft-spoken way at
the expense as a waste of money, but Agatha cherished the ambition none
the less.  If foresight and money and good training could gain the
King's commission for Albert, she was going to leave no stone unturned
to provide that foresight and money and good training.  Agatha set her
round chin firmer still and bent to her sewing with renewed
forcefulness.

So Albert Brown grew up in a world of many sections.  Upstairs there
was his mother, who spoke to him softly and clearly, and whom he knew
by continual experience it was best to obey promptly.  On the other
hand, he knew that if he could manage the perilous descent of the
stairs there would be a warm welcome for him from Mrs. Rogers, who was
always ready with a word, or a piece of bread and butter covered with
brown sugar, or an unimaginative although ready part in whatever game
he chose to devise, or some other equally welcome contribution to his
routine.  Yet Mrs. Rodgers, with all her honeyed or brown-sugared
endearments, did not bulk one half as large in Albert's imagination,
and most certainly not in his affection, as did his mother, who played
games really well, and who read entrancing books to him, and whose
voice, with its sweetness and purity of intonation, was worth a
thousand times as much as Mrs. Rodgers's hoarse utterance.  Outside the
house there was the Street with its myriad mighty attractions--the
carts with their big straining horses, mightily feathered about the
fetlocks, hugely hoofed and grandly quartered, hides glistening and
nosebags tossing; and errand boys and sweeps and buses and road-mending
gangs, and toyshop windows and little boys and girls; and beyond the
Street was the Park, where little boys with a high internal pressure of
energy could run madly up and down and hoot and screech and scream and
look at the boats on the pond and make friends with stray dogs and
gallop back to where Mother was sitting and gallop away again at a gait
alternating between that consonant with a horseman in a hurry and a
locomotive with its whistle in full blast.  The Park and the Street and
Upstairs and Downstairs were all exceedingly splendid places most
times, and if the earthrending unhappiness of childhood ever got a grip
on you then there was always Mother's sweet-scented breast on which to
pour out your woes, and Mother's soft, round arms to go round you, and
her nice hands to pat you on the back until your sorrows were
inconsequently forgotten.  Soon the world had a fifth quarter, which
was School, presided over by an omnipotent deity called Miss Farrow,
who knew everything, and who was so supremely great that you never
realized her smiles might be intended for you, and who on terrible
occasions wielded the cane with dreadful results upon such small boys
as dared to be naughty.  That cane was much more to be feared than any
possible smacking Mummy might give.

In fact, Agatha, watching the development of her child with all the
terrible detachment of a mother born to be gushingly affectionate and
restrained by a hot ambition, came early to the conclusion that her son
was not a genius, not greatly above the average brains, and much more
amenable to discipline than ever she could picture Nelson or Drake to
be in their childhood.  He was an orderly and law-abiding sprig of
modern civilization; school rules and home rules meant something to him
unless the temptation to break them was of an unusually compelling
nature.  Agatha felt a little twinge of disappointment; surely a child
so lawlessly conceived ought to be vastly different from the ordinary
herd!  But those plans, so often revised and lovingly re-revised during
the six months at Colchester Road before Albert's arrival, were easily
capable of covering even this state of affairs.  The calm foresight of
a woman with only herself and her child to consider began to plan a new
system of training aimed at carrying young Albert's footsteps with
security along the thorny road of Admiralty.

Perhaps if Albert's father had been a stockbroker Agatha's thoughts
would have been directed towards stocks and shares.  If he had been an
artist Agatha would have begun to study art; as it was the fact that he
was an officer in the Royal Navy gave her the first necessary impetus
towards adopting the Navy as her hobby.  The beginnings were small of
course--it is not often that we are so fortunate as to be able to trace
eventual vast enterprises from their earliest germ--but they blossomed
speedily, and their fruit is recorded in the pages of history.  Chance
showed her how to study Naval appointments and movements in newspapers;
and chance settled the matter by guiding her to the Navy List in the
Free Library, where she could study the whole commissioned personnel of
the Navy and watch the weary climb of Lieutenant-Commander R. E. S.
Saville-Samarez up the heights of Seniority with the ogre of the age
limit continually in pursuit.  From this it was but a step to those
books of reference which described every fighting ship in the world,
and in which she could study each successive ship to which Samarez was
appointed.  It was not long before Agatha had quite a developed
knowledge of armaments and tonnages and displacements.  She could read
about protective decks without bewilderment; she could even follow
arguments on the burning question of 'Should Armoured Cruisers take
their Place in the Line?' It was an extraordinary hobby for a woman to
take up; but no one ever dare predict in what direction a woman cut off
and isolated from the world will expend her energies.  The Library
found all sorts of books on its shelves to interest Agatha; she had no
use for fiction of course, as became her upbringing, and she read Lives
of various admirals, and Naval Histories, and the 'Letters of Lord
Nelson.'  If essay writing had been in her line she could have written
quite a fair essay on Howe's Tactics on the First of June, or on
Nelson's refusal in defiance of orders to expose Sicily.  Innumerable
references in the books led her on to the study of Mahan and his
classic studies of Sea Power, and from thence she was lured inevitably
to deep and solemn consideration of the immense sombre influence of
maritime supremacy, of the doctrine of the Fleet in Being, and other
things which other people do not think twice about.  With pathetic
cunning she early began to lead young Alberts thoughts in the same
direction.  If Albert had no genius, then orderly training and astute
education of taste might serve the same purpose.

Mr. Deane, the solicitor, could not understand it.  He pulled his
patriarchal whiskers and stroked his domed forehead, sorely puzzled by
Agatha's repeated demands that he should ascertain for her the
conditions of entry on the _Britannia_, and the costs of a naval
education and similar highfalutin' absurdities.  He ventured to point
out that it Agatha persisted in her decision to send young Albert to
the Navy she could count him lost to her from the age of twelve.
Agatha fully realized it already, and set her jaw as she told him so.
Agatha believed that self-sacrifice was the primary duty of mankind;
that man (and much more so woman) was born to sorrow; and that she
should give up her child seemed to her right and proper, especially if
the Navy benefited.  The British Navy was to her the noblest creation
in the world; it was the outward and visible manifestation of the
majesty of God.  Mr. Deane sighed incredulously and impatiently; he had
been brought up in a world where women never had any ideas of their own
and never, never dreamed of acting contrary to masculine advice.

Perhaps it was this impatience of his which impelled him along the
steep and slippery road on which his footsteps were even then straying.
Perhaps he could not bear to see good money wasted on sending Albert
Brown to the _Britannia_, and he embezzled it as the only method of
prevention.  Joking apart, Agatha's insistence must really be taken
into account in estimating the circumstances of the misdeeds of that
venerable old hypocrite.

Temptation certainly came his way.  A whole series of road improvements
and tramway extensions and industrial developments in South-East London
had led to the sale of a great deal of house property lately--Agatha's
included.  Mr. Deane found himself in charge temporarily of a large
amount of his clients' capital.  Mr. Deane--the awful truth appeared
later--led two lives, one in the company of his good wife, and the
other in the company of a damsel of a class which the newspapers
sometimes designated as 'fair Cyprians.'  Mr. Deane's expenses were
naturally in excess of his income.  Mr. Deane endeavoured to right such
a state of affairs by tactful speculation.  Mr. Deane selected the
South African market as the field of his activities.  Mr. Deane lost
money, for South African securities slumped heavily before the threat
of the South African War.  Mr. Deane shrank from the thought of
suicide, or of prison and poverty.  Mr. Deane gathered together what
remained of his clients' negotiable assets and departed for Callao,
accompanied by the fair Cyprian.  The Official Receiver found much work
to do in clearing up the ruin left by Mr. Deane.

Agatha's money had nearly all vanished.  The Official Receiver sorted
out for her a tiny fraction of the original capital, but it was a
woefully small amount.  The fate which Will Brown had predicted for her
money had descended upon it.  It was that fact, that prophecy of
Will's, quite as much as anything else, which made Agatha set her lips
and turn with energy into continuing her life's work without reference
to her family.  She would not go back to them, nor crave their help.
She would not have them say, 'I told you so'.  The fine sewing which
she had done light-heartedly before to earn luxuries now was called
upon to supply necessities.  Lucky it was that she had built up a
connection, and that not much further effort was needed to establish
herself in the good graces of the local big drapers and gain herself a
small but assured market.  No _Britannia_ for Albert now.  If she had
thought her father or her brothers would have supplied the money for
that she would have gone back to them and eaten humble pie, eaten the
bread of penitence and drunk the waters of affliction, but she was all
too sure that they would not.  Their idea of their duty towards her
would include the necessity of boarding Albert out and getting rid of
him, to the colonies or the mercantile marine, as rapidly,
inconspicuously and inexpensively as possible.  They were heathens,
infidels, upon whom the light of the Navy had not descended.

So fine sewing, embroidery, pleating and button-making continued to
earn the daily bread of Agatha and Albert.  One more set of plans had
to be devised for Albert's future.  If he was to receive a commission
in the usual way (perhaps it was as well that Mr. Deane had been
involved with the fair Cyprian, for Albert might easily never have made
his way past a Selection Board) then he must gain one in the unusual
way.  Commissions sometimes were gained by the lower deck--'aft through
the hawsehole' was the technical expression.  Albert must begin as a
seaman and work his way upward.  If he started with sound ideas on his
profession, with enthusiasm--fanaticism--and a good general education,
it might well come about.  Agatha kept her two hundred pounds in the
bank against that day, when he would need an outfit and some money to
spend, and flung herself with ardour into the business of providing
Albert with the grounding she thought necessary.

That was easy enough, for Albert was an amenable little boy, and he had
not nearly enough personality (it would have been extraordinary if he
had) to withstand the infection of all Agatha's enthusiasm.  A board
school education was of course all his mother could afford for him, but
a board school education backed up by strong home influence will do as
much for any boy up to eleven years of age as any other form of
education.  Agatha had been taught at a young ladies' college, but her
sound common sense and mighty will enabled her to recover from this
catastrophe.  So that even while Agatha was entering upon the study of
the higher aspects of Sea Power and gaining a blurred insight into the
ballistics of big gunnery she was at the same time helping Albert with
his sums and beginning his first tentative introduction to Drake and
Nelson.

Tentative indeed, for Agatha found it impossible to bestow upon Albert
the high dramatic insight which infused her dreams.  Ships were just
ships to young Albert.  He could not picture them, as Agatha did, as
minute fragments of man-made matter afloat on an enormous expanse of
water, smaller relatively than grains of dust upon a tennis lawn, which
yet could preserve, positively and certainly, an island from a
continent.  Albert could not be impressed (perhaps it was more than
could ever be expected of a ten-year-old) by the mighty pageant of
England's naval history.  Lagos and Quiberon, the Nile and Trafalgar
were to him mere affairs where Englishmen asserted their natural
superiority over Frenchmen; their enormous consequences, both hidden
and dramatic, were to him inconceivable.  He was a matter-of-fact young
man, and Agatha dully realized the fact, with vague disappointment.
Even Agatha, with all her dreams and insight, could not foresee the
sprouting of the grain she was sowing in such seemingly inhospitable
soil.




_Chapter VII_

With the birth of her child Agatha suddenly entered upon a wonderful
late blooming, like the blossoming of an autumn rose.  She put on a
little more flesh--but flesh in the 1890's was in no way the
abomination it was to become in later years.  When Agatha walked
nowadays she gave hints of broad, motherly hips and ample, comfortable
thighs beneath her skirt, and her arms were very, very plump and round,
and her face had filled out smoothly and deliciously, accentuating the
creaminess of her really lovely complexion.  She was a fine Junoesque
woman now, stately, queenly even, and her stateliness was borne out by
the dignified placidity of her facial expression.  She was a mother to
be proud of--a mother, especially, to admire; small wonder then, that
young Albert was strongly influenced by her ideas and never dreamed of
acting contrary to them.

Little Mr. Gold loved her at first sight.  He was a nice refined little
gentlemanly man, whose name was most eminently appropriate, for he had
hair of pale gold (not as much, now, alas, as he once had had) and
gold-rimmed spectacles, and across his insignificant little stomach was
a gold watch-chain with a gold medal.  He was neat in his dress and
precise in his habits, and when one was once able to overlook the
faintly receding chin and the general lack of personality about his
face he was quite a handsome little fellow; it was a pity that all his
character had been refined right away.  Mr. Gold in conversation often
made great play with remarks about 'leading boys instead of driving
them' and 'kindliness always tells in the long run,' and this, it is to
be feared, were outward signs of an inward timidity, for Mr. Gold was a
master at an elementary school--at the school Albert attended, in fact.
Mr. Gold, when he was taking a class, would often make a great show of
anger; he would shake his fists and try to make his eyes (little pale
blue eyes) flash fire, and he flattered himself that by so doing he was
successful in intimidating the boys, but Mr. Gold never entered into
conflict of personality with boys singly, never caned one, lout of
fourteen or child of eight, without feeling an inward tremor of
doubt--'What on earth shall I do if he won't hold out his hand when I
tell him?'  Mr. Gold had even developed the weakest characteristic of a
master; he would send big riotous boys to the headmaster for quite
minor offences, dodging a personal clash under the voiced explanation
that they had done something much too wicked for him to deal with.

All this, though, was quite lost on young Albert when he was moved up
from the infants' school and entered Mr. Gold's class in the boys'
school.  If Mr. Gold had any effect at all upon Albert, it was a slight
impression of neatness and dapperness; Albert had too great a respect
for authority to dream that it might ever be possible for a master to
have limbs of water and a heart of fear.  And when, one evening, just
after school, Albert fell down in the playground and cut his chin
rather badly, Albert was quite grateful to Mr. Gold for the kindly
manner in which he washed the cut and staunched the bleeding and
inquired how he was feeling now; and finally Albert took it quite
kindly that Mr. Gold should walk down Colchester Road with him in case
he should feel ill on the way, and to explain to his mother that the
bloodstains on his shirt and collar were not really his fault.

It was of course tea-time when Mr. Gold and Albert reached No. 37
Colchester Road; the china gleamed upon the tablecloth and the kettle
steamed beside the fire.  What could be more natural than that Mr. Gold
should be asked to have a cup?  And nothing could be more natural than
that Mr. Gold, landlady-ridden bachelor that he was, should yearn for
the comfort of Mrs. Brown's sitting-room and fireside, and should
accept with alacrity--alacrity which warmed into well-being when Mr.
Gold began to notice Mrs. Brown's beautiful complexion and well-filled
bodice.

Young Albert, of course, as soon as the novelty of having a
schoolmaster to tea wore off, found the situation irksome and quietly
made his way out of the room, but Mr. Gold lingered.  He expanded in
the grateful warmth of the fire and Agatha's well-trained deference
towards the superior sex.  They chatted amicably enough for quite a
while before at last Mr. Gold took himself off after having begged
permission to come again, and Agatha at his departure found herself
almost dreamy.  Queenly she was, but she was of that type of queen
which inclines towards a Prince Consort.  Mr. Gold's personified
inadequacy made a very definite appeal to her.  Why, he was almost
shorter than her; she could pick him up and carry him if she wanted to.
And he was so refined and gentlemanly too (as a matter of fact,
'refaned' was the most frequent word on his lips), while he avoided
being so terrifyingly of the public school class as Commander
Saville-Samarez.  Agatha actually began to calculate what effect a
marriage with Mr. Gold might have upon her cherished ambition for
Albert, and she decided it would be a good one.

And of course, Agatha having decided that, Mr. Gold's career as a
bachelor was as good as ended.  Not that he was unwilling; he walked
away from No. 37 through the dusky side streets with his mind full of
rosy visions.  Mr. Gold was not at all a man to think often about arms
and legs, and certainly not about the other parts of the female body,
but he caught himself doing so quite often that evening.  The hang of
the back of Agatha's skirt, and her neat hands, and her sweet face and
firm bosom all conspired to set him imagining.  Next morning in class
he treated Albert with such downright favouritism that Albert's fellow
nine-year-olds turned and rent him at playtime.

But one single moment of expansion sufficed to destroy all Mr. Gold's
chances.  The pity of it was that he was never to know what it was
which snatched from his reach all Agatha's sweet charms, which deprived
him of the encirclement of her round white arms, which barred him for
ever from the paradise of her breast and the calm sweetness of her
throat.  It was at Mr. Gold's third visit, or it may have been his
fourth--it was his last, at any rate.  Mr. Gold was sitting by the fire
in the single armchair; he was comfortably inflated with tea and hot
buttered toast and an extraordinary good opinion of himself; all three
combined to bulge out his waistcoat.

Agatha, of course, as an inferior female ought to do, was sitting
before the fire on a less comfortable chair, bent over her sewing.  The
charming femininity of the pose made a vast appeal to Mr. Gold; he
admired the bent head and neck with the firelight playing upon them;
whiteness and roundness combined to set little pink pictures moving at
the back of his mind.  He even visualized Agatha's legs in their trim
stockings--and of course, as the old vulgar saying has it, there was
something in her stocking besides her leg!  Agatha _and_ a bit of
money; an efficient housekeeper and a white-armed wife!  The picture
was far too irresistible.  Mr. Gold puffed himself out a little more;
soon he would propose, and he would taste the honeyed sweetness of
those demure lips.  Meanwhile, the present line of conversation was
pleasant; he continued it, laying down the law to the accompaniment of
Agatha's dutiful 'Reallys?' and 'of courses.'

Agatha too, as she sewed, had little pictures, only not nearly as
defined, at the back of her mind.  Not, of course, that she visualized
any normally clothed portion whatever of Mr. Gold's anatomy.  Agatha
did not have that sort of imagination.  But she had vague ideas of
feeling Mr. Gold's weak little face pressing upon her breast, and of
clasping him in her arms, and of spending every evening as a wife
should in the less comfortable of the two chairs by the fire while a
tired husband told her what she ought to think about the world in
general.  But she suddenly stopped sewing, aghast, when the import of
Mr. Gold's latest remarks penetrated to her active intelligence.

'And all this money we spend on unproductive things too,' Mr. Gold was
saying.  'I don't believe in it.  A one-and-sixpenny income tax will
ruin the country before very long.  Look at the money we spend on the
Army and the Navy.  Millions.  This Dreadnought that they speak about.
Twelve-inch guns and all.  To my mind it's only an excuse for spending
money so that there will be more places for people's nephews and
cousins.  What do we want a Navy for?  Who's going to attack us, and
what good would they get by it, and what harm would it do, anyway?  A
Navy doesn't do any good to anyone except the people who get good jobs
in it.  Germany's getting just as bad, apparently.  It's all a lot of
silly dangerous nonsense.  Look at the last war.  What right had we got
in South Africa?  None at all.  We were wrong to fight, and it was the
hotheads who forced us into it.  I said so all along, although of
course it made me unpopular.  That was why I had to change my school
and come to Colchester Road.  They called me a pro-Boer, and all that
sort of thing.  But I stuck it out.  I'm a man of peace, I am.'

Mr. Gold only ceased when he noticed the look on Agatha's face.  That
so alarmed him that he got up from his chair.

'Good gracious, Mrs. Brown, whatever's the matter?  Are you unwell?'

'No,' said Agatha, shrinking away from him.  'No.'

She was merely appalled by the heresies she had heard enunciated.  That
Mr. Gold, whom she thought she liked, should be a Little Englander, an
advocate of disarmament, a pro-Boer, a scoffer at the Dreadnought!  It
was far too terrible for words.  At the same moment she realized what a
terribly narrow escape she had had.  She dreaded to think what the
result upon Albert might have been had he had Mr. Gold as a stepfather.
Fancy a world without a British Navy!  It was dreadful.  Mr. Gold, try
as he would, could have thought of nothing to say that could have hurt
her more.

'No,' said Agatha.  'I'm quite well.'

Quite unconsciously she was imitating the heroines of the novels she
had read in the dead old days before the British Navy took hold of her.
She 'drew herself up to her full height,' her eyes 'flashed fire,' she
'made an imperious gesture.'

'Please----' said Mr. Gold.

'I--I think it is time for you to go,' said Agatha.  Poor Mr. Gold
simply could not understand it.

'But, Mrs. Brown----'

All Agatha did was to walk across the room and open the door, and it
would have taken someone of stronger personality than Mr. Gold to have
withstood the implied command.  He crept out crestfallen, and Agatha
shut the parlour door decisively behind him.  Nothing remained for Mr.
Gold to do except to take his hat and coat from the pegs on the
landing, stumble downstairs, and let himself out.

'Now listen, Mrs. Rodgers,' said Agatha that evening, 'if that--man
ever comes again, tell him I'm not at home.  You understand?'

And she looked so queenly and her eyes flashed so bright as she said it
that Mrs. Rodgers could only say 'Lor, mum, yes, mum,' and gaze at her
with admiration and without a thought of asking questions.  Moreover,
when Mr. Gold, inevitably, came calling again, she conveyed Agatha's
message to him with such force and unction as simply to infuriate the
unfortunate little man.  He had written to her already, and Agatha had
simply ignored his letter.  He made up for it in the end by calling
Albert out of class and giving him a good hiding for no reason whatever.

When Albert told his mother about it later Agatha merely nodded and
offered no consolation.  She did not mind at all if antipathy sprang up
between Albert and the heretical Mr. Gold.  Quite on the contrary.
Besides, Agatha knew, without even Albert telling her, that hidings
from Mr. Gold were not of much account.

Mr. Gold eventually solaced his puzzled exasperation by convincing
himself that Agatha was mad.




_Chapter VIII_

So years followed years, and each succeeding year dragged more heavily
and more painfully than did the one before.  To Agatha's tortured
conscience it seemed as if retribution was being exacted from her for
her vile sin.  To her it was natural that a lifetime of pain and
squalor should be the consequence of a five days' madness.  Fine sewing
sank steadily in value; private customers fell away--the economic
causes of a falling birth-rate and marriage-rate broke her on their
wheel.  There was not so much demand nowadays for baby clothes or
wedding dresses, and simplicity was creeping into fashion even in such
garments as were ordered of her.  The shops which had first bought her
output had grown larger and had amalgamated, and obscurely she was
squeezed out from supplying them.  Competition was growing fiercer, and
money was scarcer in the 1900's than it had been in the 1890's.
Agatha's earnings grew smaller, and there were often weeks when she had
to draw upon her hoarded capital to meet Mrs. Rodgers's weekly bill.
She was finding less work and smaller pay for what she did.

Nor was this all.  Physical pain, that last exaction by a relentless
deity in payment for her sin, had come into her life.  Sometimes it was
slight, and Agatha could seemingly set it aside unnoticed.  But at the
other times it was sharper, more intense, drastic.  It was not a fair
pain.  It did not come upon her when she was expecting it and braced
against it.  When she stood up from her chair and held herself ready
for it, it did not come, but the instant she relaxed to go on with what
she was doing it fell upon her and rent her with agony.  It was a
fierce, horrible pain.

It had begun to come upon her when Albert was eleven, when he had grown
into a thick-set freckled boy with unruly hair just like his father's.
He had done more than his masters had expected of him by winning a
scholarship and proceeding from the Council School to a Secondary
School.  Agatha's careful supervision of his studies thus bore its
first fruit.  She was maternally proud of his progress even while she
had to reconcile herself to the fact that he was only an ordinary
little boy--just like what his father must have been.  Agatha, with a
growing obsession of sin, tried hard not to think of Albert's father,
but Albert reminded her of him at every turn, overwhelming her with
conscience-stricken yearning for something unknown--certainly not for
further contact with the Commander, even though she had followed his
progress step by step up the Navy List, and had watched apprehensively
the reports of the combined expedition in China in 1900 (wherein
Commander Saville-Samarez had led a portion of the Naval Brigade), and
had even prayed that he would not be damagingly involved in the great
Fisher-Beresford feud which was then threatening the Navy with
disruption.

Agatha still was up to date in naval affairs.  She followed all the
twists and turns of the controversy between Lord Charles and Sir John;
she appreciated the trend of the new construction so that the details
of the _Dreadnought_, when they were published, roused no surprise in
her; she thoroughly understood the import of Fisher's new policy at the
Admiralty whereby ships were scrapped in scores and the Navy recalled
to home waters until nine of its guns out of ten were pointing at
Germany.

But all that, of course, was before pain came upon her.  Pain, and the
pressing need of seeking more and more work, began to distract her from
this life study.  She tried to accept the pain in the philosophic
spirit with which she had accepted all the other buffetings of Fate.
Pain was all a woman should expect, especially a woman who had sinned
as grievously and unrepentantly as she.  Pain was natural to a woman at
her time of life.  Pain--the grinding, lacerating spasms of agony
brought sweat down her drawn face and made her gasp and choke even as
she was trying to explain it to herself.  She lost her smooth, placid
good looks.  Her cheeks fell inwards and her mouth compressed itself
into a harder line.  Wrinkles came between her eyebrows as a result of
the continual distortion of her forehead during the agonizing bursts of
pain.

Young Albert, full of the pressing and immediate interests of a new
school, and a secondary school at that, did not notice the gradual
change which came over his mother--nor is it specially surprising,
seeing that Agatha always managed to raise a smile for him on his
entrance, and continued, with a fervour more vivid than ever, to
impress upon him the great tradition of Duty and the magnificence of
England upon the seas, rousing his limited imagination to heights one
would have thought unscalable to such a combination of the solemn and
matter-of-fact.  He did not even notice at first his mother's
unaccountable fits of sudden abstraction and convulsive gripping of the
arms of her chair.

But there came a time when even Agatha could no longer endure the
torment, nor explain it to herself as natural in a woman of
forty-three.  For the second time in her life she yielded up her body
to Doctor Walters's anxious examination, and for the second time
listened to his verdict.  A different verdict this time, delivered
sadly instead of jovially, with regret instead of hope.  Even as he
spoke Agatha realized that what he was saying was not news to her--it
only voiced a fact she had refused to admit to herself.  Doctor
Walters's heart was wrung with pity, as only a heart can be upon which
pity makes continual demands, the while he told her what he had found,
told her of the operation which would be necessary--and strove to keep
from his voice any hint of what he knew would be the end even after the
operation.  Agatha looked him in the face as he spoke; she was not of
the stuff that flinches.  It was Doctor Walters instead who avoided a
meeting of the eyes.  He was sick at heart the while he chafed to
himself about the cursed suffering obstinacy of womankind which
postpones action until action is too late.

So Albert came home from school to a new world, a world where Mrs.
Rodgers had to deputize for a mother who had vanished, her place
preposterously taken by a shattered wreck in the hospital, moaning
vaguely and turning dim, unseeing eyes upon him.  He went on at school
in the unimaginative fashion which was to be expected, but now his
Wednesday afternoons and Saturday afternoons were spent in journeys to
the hospital and in a few fleeting, worried minutes in a chair beside
his mother's bed.

She died hard, died game, as befitted the daughter of a self-made man.
She rallied round despite the fearful things they did to her with
knives.  For a little while the authorities even began to think that
she would make a recovery, unexpected and nearly inconceivable.  For a
little while understanding returned to her, and she was able to smile
upon the scared little boy at her bedside and talk to him sensibly
about his work--and his future.  That future!  There was one afternoon
when she stretched her arm out suddenly from the bedclothes (a
frightening arm; pain and suffering had stripped the smooth flesh from
it and left it a skinny bundle of bones and tendons) and pointed at him.

'Albert,' she said, 'Albert, you know about the Navy?  You know you're
going to join the Navy?'

'Of course, mother,' said Albert.  That had been understood between
them for years now.

'Promise me, then, boy,' said Agatha.  Her eyes were too large for her
thin face, and she gazed at him with an intensity which scared him.

'Of course I will, mother.  Of course.'

Agatha's scarecrow hand dropped, and she turned aside her face
contentedly again, much to Albert's relief.

But before ever she had begun to regain strength the cancer which had
gnawed at her lifted up its foul head again.  There was a significant
shaking of heads among the hospital staff.  Next time Albert came he
found a feebler, stranger mother still.  She did not know him.  Her
eyelids were drooped until the line of the pupil they still allowed to
show appeared inhuman and unnatural.  She was inert and dreamy.  Opium
had her; the doctors were kind.  She would die the pleasant death of
the poppy, and not that of the lunatic torture of cancer.  Each
succeeding visit of Albert's found her muttering and silly.  Towards
the end pain reasserted itself.  Opium began to lose its mastery, and
little stabs of agony showed themselves on her face, and a surprised
ejaculation or two broke through her mutterings.  Yet Fate was kind
enough; Agatha's life went out of her while she floated above a vast
grey sea sombrely tinted with opium, while around her loomed up the
immense beetling silhouettes of the battle squadrons, the grey, craggy
citadels of England's glory and hope.  Their funnel smoke swirled round
her, veiling the worried freckled face of the child of her sin, and she
smiled happily.  Mrs. Rodgers wept hysterically on Albert's shoulder.

For Mrs. Rodgers had gloried vicariously in Agatha's illness.  It was
of the right savoury type to appeal to her.  It was something to talk
about with pride to her friends, with much whisperings of gory and
distorted detail; it was a disease from which only women could suffer,
and hence a source of immense interest.  'Orsepitals and operations and
cancer of the womb--why, they provided her with precedence in
conversation for months afterwards.  She had, naturally, full charge of
the funeral arrangements subsequently too, and that was unmixed
delight.  There was a hundred pounds in Agatha's account at the bank,
so that Mrs. Rodgers had no need whatever to skimp or scrape about it.
Agatha could have a funeral worthy of the lady she was.  She could have
the best oak coffin, and a first-class 'earse, and 'eaps and 'eaps of
flowers--Mrs. Rodgers bought two or three wreaths out of Agatha's
money, because of course Agatha had not known enough people for their
contributions to make a good enough show--and two coaches.  Mrs.
Rodgers was able to ask all her intimate cronies too, and indulge in
all the orgy of ghoulish formality for which her soul craved.  Albert
had to have a black suit, and a black tie, and black gloves--Mrs.
Rodgers would have insisted on a black shirt too if there had been any
shadow of precedent for it--and travel in the first coach as chief
mourner along with Mrs. Rodgers and Mr. Dickens, the vicar, and two of
Mrs. Rodgers's best friends.  And there were mutes in plenty, in tall
hats and frock-coats, walking with solemn, dignified sorrow beside the
hearse.  And when the business was over there was a real slap-up dinner
at No. 37, with cold 'am and tongue and beef and trifle and port and
sherry, with afterwards cup after cup of strong tea and delightful
conversation around the fire with half a dozen women with their best
party manners and black gowns.  Quite one of the happiest and most
satisfactory days in all Mrs. Rodgers's life.  Albert went through it
all in a walking nightmare, and afterwards remembered hardly anything
about it.




_Chapter IX_

There is little enough need to lay emphasis on the next section of
Albert Brown's career.  Aged fourteen and a half, he could not join the
Navy (as he knew already) until he was fifteen and a quarter.  Mrs.
Rodgers fussed over him until even he, insensitive though he was, could
hardly bear the sight of her.  He said good-bye to his school with
hardly a twinge of regret; he had early been impregnated with Agatha's
fatalistic tendencies and he could, even at fourteen, accept the
inevitable without complaint.  Totally without introspection and
without much notice for the circumstances in which he found himself, he
was never more than vaguely unhappy during the following nine months.

He had the sense to keep to himself his crystallized determination to
join the Navy as soon as he was old enough--he never said very much at
any time--and the school sympathetically found him an office boy's
position with a City firm.  The only part of his life that he really
hated was the bowler hat which convention compelled him to wear--even
Albert could appreciate the hideous incongruity of a bowler hat on a
fourteen-year-old head--and it was not until afterwards that he
realized how much he detested everything connected with an office boy's
life.  He left home (he called Mrs. Rodgers's house 'home' still) at
ten minutes to eight each morning, and he came back at half-past six
each night.  He travelled on a tram to Blackfriars from Camberwell
Green and to Camberwell Green from Blackfriars.  He swept out the front
office, he filled ink-wells, he took messages (painfully learning his
way about London in the process); he brought in cups of tea from the
teashop next door (this was, of course, before the era of regular
office teas); he copied letters; he was slightly initiated into the
beginnings of book-keeping, he experienced the incredible boredom and
occasional fierce spasms of work which everyone in an office
experiences.  And since ordinary diligence was habitual to him, and
honesty was part of his mental content, and he had brains of a quite
good average order, he was looked upon with approving eyes by the
powers that were, and after six months his wages were raised from five
shillings a week to seven and sixpence.  This official recognition gave
him no thrill of pride or pleasure; office life was a mere marking time
before he took the tremendous stride towards the goal he not merely
desired, but considered necessary and inevitable.  The time came at
length for him to take it.

When Albert Brown was fifteen years and three months old all but one
week he approached the chief clerk and gave him the week's notice which
the law demanded.  The chief clerk looked Albert up and down and
whistled softly in surprise.  He remembered painful experiences with
other office boys, Albert's predecessors, who were one and all slack
and unpunctual and dishonest and given to lying and who were
intolerable nuisances to every one.  He contemplated with dismay a
renewal of these experiences and all the bothersome inconveniences of
having to train another boy.  He realized that stocktaking, the
quarterly upheaval, was nearly due, and that Albert's absence would be
really tiresome.

'What in hell do you want to leave for?' he demanded.  'Or are you just
playing up for another rise?'

'Don't want a rise,' said Albert.  'I only want to give notice.'

'Got another job, I suppose?' said the chief clerk.

'No,' said Albert.

'Well, you _are_ a looney,' decided the chief clerk.  'You're getting
on well here.  In another six months--or any day, in fact--you'll be
junior clerk here.  Look at _me_.  I was junior clerk here, once.  What
in the name of Jesus do you want to give notice for?  Had a fortune
left you?'

'No,' said Albert.

'Well, what are you going to do, then?'

'I'm going to join the Navy,' said Albert.

'Whe-e-e-ew,' said the chief clerk; he was certain now that Albert was
crazy.

The office entirely agreed with him.  Only boys who were suffering from
an overdose of penny dreadfuls would ever dream of leaving the
sequestered calm of an office for the uncertain turbulence of a
fighting service--and they would not do more than dream of it.  As for
acting upon the dream, throwing up a safe job for a trifling whim, that
was sheer lunacy.  The Junior Partner himself saw fit to emerge from
his Olympian seclusion and to discuss the matter with this
extraordinary office boy; there were almost tears in his eyes as he
besought Albert to reconsider his decision; in the end he utterly broke
down--broke down far enough, at any rate, to offer Albert yet another
half-crown a week on to his princely salary if only he would stay on
and not blast his career in this fashion.  But even this mighty
condescension and this magnificent temptation left Albert unmoved.  He
hardly noticed them, although the storm of incredulous astonishment his
announcement raised (quite unexpectedly to him, for he considered it
the most logical move possible to join the Navy at fifteen and a
quarter) left him slightly bewildered.  He persisted in giving notice.
In the end the Junior Partner yielded.  He patted Albert on the
shoulder, and swallowed hard, and produced some second-hand platitudes
about the Navy--'wish more people had as much interest in the
Navy'--'very healthy and natural for a boy to want to
join'--'Nelson'--'England expects'--'hope you do well, my boy.'  Then
finally, and most extraordinary of all, he fished three half-crowns out
of his pocket, gave them to Albert as his next week's wages, and told
him he could leave now and have a week's holiday before taking the
decisive step.  For which ridiculous proceeding he was heartily cursed
(privately) by the outer office, which he had heedlessly left
office-boy-less, the while he earned no gratitude whatever from Albert,
who did not find any joy in a week spent hanging disconsolately about
unnecessarily exposed to the maudlin pleadings of Mrs. Rodgers, who
wept profusely over him at every opportunity, and who took it for
granted that entry into the Navy implied an immediate watery grave.

Authority at Whitehall, when Albert presented himself, received him
with open arms.  This was the kind of stuff they needed for the
Navy--an orphan without a relation in the world, and no half-starved
weakling either, but a sturdy, well-set-up young man of undoubted
physique.  Educated too; three years at a secondary school, nine months
in a City office, with the very best of characters from both.  Written
characters were not much evidence with most of the stray candidates for
admission to the Navy.  Boys from good homes who joined at fifteen as a
result of a vocation were either the best of material or woefully bad
bargains, and Albert had all the earmarks of the good material.
Albert's birth certificate (Agatha, fifteen years ago, had rendered
herself, unknowingly, liable to imprisonment on account of a false
declaration to the registrar) was duly inspected and passed.  He had no
legal guardian (Albert indignantly denied Mrs. Rodgers's claim to that
position) and no next-of-kin.  That was all quite uninteresting; the
Navy of course did not know (neither did Albert) that Albert Brown was
the only son of Captain Richard E. S. Saville-Samarez, C.B., M.V.O.,
nor that through his paternal grandmother he had two second cousins in
the peerage.

Yet, however it was, Albert was a man of mark after six months at
Shotley Barracks.  His was not an original mind, Heaven knows, and he
was not of distinguished personality.  But a secondary school education
which had gone as far as the beginnings of trigonometry and mechanics
was not common at Shotley.  And he was not an institution boy, nor was
he the starveling scion of a poor family either.  The institutions
which supplied a great part of the young entry were admirable affairs
for the most part.  They fed and clothed and even taught the waifs who
drifted into them quite adequately, but no institution can help being
an institution.  The boys who came from them all displayed,
unavoidably, some signs of being machine made.  Independence of thought
or action, careless assumption of responsibility, spontaneous
action--all these are, inevitably, foreign to the boy who has spent all
his life in a regular routine under close adult supervision in narrow
contact with hundreds of his fellows.  Albert, on the other hand, had
the natural self-containedness of the only child; he was accustomed to
independent and solitary action; even those hated months in the City
office had served their turn in broadening his mind and accustoming him
to keeping his head in encounters with strangers.  His memory was good
even though his brains were not brilliant, and little of the
hard-earned knowledge gained at school had faded out during his City
life.  The very elementary mathematics taught at Shotley were child's
play to him even while they were stumbling blocks to his misty-minded
fellows.  The severely practical instruction in seamanship was a joy to
his logical mind, and his fingers were deft in their work and powerful
when strength was demanded.  Albert's main competitors, in fact, were
never the institution boys, but the sons of seamen---petty officers'
sons destined to follow in their father's footsteps, dockyard
artificers' sons, and boys from coast towns, in all of whom the
tradition of the sea was strongly imbued, and who had in most cases the
same sort of advantage over Albert in seamanship as he had over them in
theoretical work.  But to most of these boys rules and regulations were
a sad stumbling block.  Breaches of discipline were unhappily habitual
among them, thanks to their exuberant high spirits and independent
intolerance of control.  For them was the cane, the extra lesson, the
awful terror of the Commander's wrath.  Good young Albert, who found
discipline merely a convenient means to an end, knew nothing of these
frightful penalties.  His record sheets remained unstained by the black
blots they bore in their train.  Albert's career moved logically and
inexorably onwards through musketry and swimming and elementary gunnery
and seamanship and drill, from second-class boyhood to first-class
boyhood, from Shotley Barracks to H.M. Training Ship _Ganges_, until at
last even first-class boyhood was left behind and he became a
full-blown ordinary seaman in the newly commissioned third-class
cruiser _Charybdis_, which left Portsmouth late in 1912 to continue the
old tradition (sadly weakened by new strategical arrangements) of
showing the Flag in Eastern waters and to maintain the very necessary
policing of those rather disorderly shores.

Albert Brown was not, let it be repeated, of an imaginative or romantic
turn of mind.  It is doubtful if he experienced any of the conventional
thoughts as England vanished from sight, or if emotion of any sort came
to him.  Quite likely he was feeling annoyed about the lower-deck
crowding resulting from the fact that _Charybdis_ was taking out drafts
on board for other ships on Eastern stations; conceivably there passed
through his mind some vague wonderings about promotion; but his last
glimpse of England (the last of all his short life, as it turned out)
meant nothing more to him.  His intense love for his country, his
delight and pride in her naval might, his glory in her past and his
ambitions for her future, were real enough and solid enough; they were
a living and essential part of him.  But they found no voice.  Brown
had no use for words in relation to them, and they were too deep to
raise any surface disturbance, any facile emotion.  Brown turned
stolidly to his duty the while the relentless thrust of _Charybdis'_
screws bore him away from the land for which he was ready to give his
life.




_Chapter X_

The beginning of the war found _Charybdis_ at Singapore.  There was a
buzz of joy throughout the lower deck; even among the ratings of the
Navy the opinion had grown stronger and stronger that Germany's huge
naval effort could only end in war between England and Germany, and for
years now the English sailor had forgotten the centuries-old blood feud
with France and had awaited with joyous expectation the North Sea
clash, in anticipation of which he had been steadily withdrawn from the
Mediterranean and the Pacific by the foresight of his supreme
controllers, so that at the very time when England's Navy was stronger
than ever it had been there was a smaller English force than ever
before in Eastern waters.  And that summer night when the First Fleet,
happily mobilized, went speeding northwards to its gloomy war station
at Scapa, the 'preparative' flashed by wireless and cable to the few
scattered units which flew the White Ensign in the Pacific.

For there was cause for some anxiety there.  Von Spee was lost in the
vast expanse of the ocean; he had cannily cleared from Tsing-tao before
ever the war clouds had grown over-ominous, and no one knew where he
might appear or where he might strike.  His armoured cruisers,
_Gneisenau_ and _Scharnhorst_, held the big gun records of the German
fleet, and what that meant was all too clear to the minds of those who
had gained an insight into the achievements of German naval gunnery.
There were light cruisers with him too; whether others had joined him
since his departure from Tsing-tao was not known for certain--Muller
with the _Emden_ and von Lutz with the _Ziethen_ were free to attach
themselves to him if they wished--but it was obvious enough that he had
a fast-moving, hard-hitting squadron which any English fleet without
battleships might without shame be chary of encountering.  No one knew
where he might appear; he could strike at the South American nitrate
trade, at the Indian shipping, at the South African coast where were
Boer rebels and German armies to welcome him; on the high seas there
were fleets bearing Australian troops, New Zealand troops, Indian
troops, English troops.  If one such fleet were left unconvoyed he
might encounter it and deal one of the most terrible blows given in
war.  At every point of danger there had to be stationed against him a
squadron of strength superior to his own, and England was, as ever at
the outbreak of war, woefully short of cruisers.  The naval might of
England had definitely asserted its superiority--the German merchant
flag had vanished from the seas with the outbreak of war, and the
German battle fleet had withdrawn in sullen impotence to the protection
of its minefields--but here in the Pacific there was this one rebel,
hopeless and desperate, who might yet strike a fierce blow or two
before Fate overtook him.

That in the end Fate would overtake him there was no doubt whatever.
With the Japanese declaration of war and siege of Tsing-tao he had no
harbour left him.  Coal could only be obtained with difficulty through
German agents established here and there before the war.  The myriad
spare parts he would need would be unobtainable; the myriad small
defects which would develop would be irremediable.  His ships' bottoms
would grow foul, and there was no graving dock open to him.  Sooner or
later, whether or not he encountered an enemy, he would have to call
the game lost and seek internment in some neutral port.  But were he
not hunted down and destroyed the material damage he might do would be
enormous, and the damage to British prestige would be more serious
still.  Small wonder that the air was electric with messages flying
back and forth summoning all the scattered Pacific units of the British
fleet into rallying groups converging on the million square miles
wherein he lay concealed.

The lower deck ratings of the _Charybdis_ thought nothing of the task.
They put a happy trust in their officers, who would bring a superior
force against von Spee; and if they were not in superior force, then
English grit and English gunnery would take no heed of odds and would
carry the matter through just as at Trafalgar or the Nile.  No man
aboard _Charybdis_ but would cheerfully and eagerly have accepted the
chance to fight in that obsolescent cruiser against _Scharnhorst_ or
_Gneisenau_ with their deadly 8-inch guns.  They eagerly anticipated
victory; it is only giving them their due to say further that they
would have gone as willingly to certain defeat for the Navy's sake.
For the terrible superiority of the 5.9 over the almost obsolete Mark
W. 4.7 they cared nothing.  The lower-deck buzz was cheerful and
vigorous, and the knowledge that the war-heads were being set in the
torpedoes was sufficient compensation for the hateful fatigue of
hurried coaling.

Leading Seaman Albert Brown (he had been Leading Seaman now for a
fortnight after a bare year as Ordinary Seaman, and another as A.B.)
had a more intimate knowledge of the facts and probabilities.  He knew,
as did the others, of the imminent hunt for von Spee, but he had a
clearer appreciation of the difficulties.  The _Charybdis_ could not
hope to fight successfully any one of the majority of von Spee's
squadron, and she had hardly speed sufficient to escape danger.
_Scharnhorst_ or _Gneisenau_, those big armoured cruisers, would blow
her out of the water instantly.  _Ziethen_, an earlier and smaller
armoured cruiser, would have hardly more difficulty.  Brown even
foresaw serious danger in an encounter with a light cruiser, with
_Emden_ or _Dresden_, with their smaller but more modern and dangerous
guns.  But Brown had the better kind of courage; he could foresee
danger and not flinch, not even inwardly.  If death came to him--well,
he died, and that was the end of speculation.  If not--war-time and an
expanding Navy meant promotion.  He was Leading Seaman now, though
barely twenty.  The commission he hardly dared to think about seemed at
last a faint possibility instead of an incredible possibility.  Brown
knew that it was the first step in promotion which was the hardest to
come by.

So _Charybdis_ left Singapore hurriedly and drove eastward, obedient to
the flickering wireless, into the wide-spread deserts of the Pacific.
This was the very earliest beginning of the war, before Japan had
turned against Germany and sent her army to Kiao-chau, and her navy in
a wide sweep south-eastwards after von Spee.  _Charybdis_ took her
course across the China Sea; she nosed her way through the Carolines,
exploring that straggling group of flat, miserable islands, and from
the Carolines she threaded her way through dangerous seas on to the
Marshalls.  On the opposite side of the world an anxious Admiralty
awaited her reports, for the Carolines and Marshalls were German
possessions, and there, if anywhere, would von Spee be found.  But a
thousand miles of sea leaves much room in which a small squadron can be
lost, and _Charybdis_ missed contact with von Spee by the barest margin
of twenty-four hours.  _Charybdis'_ negative reports, relayed round the
world, came in to puzzle the naval staff more than ever.  They were at
a loss to think where von Spee could have hidden himself.  The
Australian navy was on its guard to the southward; the Japanese fleet
was sweeping down from the north; a concentration was gradually taking
shape at the Falklands.  There was a loosely-knit combination forming
against von Spee, but there was room enough for him to slip through if
he cared to.  Reports were instantly to hand that Muller, in _Emden_,
had indeed slipped through; she was at large in the Indian Ocean,
ravaging the rich merchant shipping, capturing and sinking and
destroying.  She had stolen in disguise within range of Madras, and had
shelled the invaluable oil tanks there.  But her movements were no
indication of von Spee's whereabouts, for he had clearly detached her
and moved in some new direction himself--perhaps right across the
Pacific.  Contact with him must be made.  He might even pass the Panama
Canal and appear in the West Indies, and break across the Atlantic in a
desperate effort to reach home.  The wireless orders summoned
_Charybdis_ farther yet across the Pacific, south again to the Line to
a secret coaling station and onwards towards Panama, with every nerve
strained awaiting the look-out's report that von Spee was in sight--a
signal to set the wireless transmission crackling, proclaiming his
presence to all the world, the while the helm brought the ship round in
desperate flight from those deadly 8-inch guns.

Blind chance--the chance that had ordained von Spee should evade
_Charybdis_ in the Marshalls, and which sent him to his death at the
Falklands--directed that here, in the most desolate waters of the
world, cruiser should meet cruiser.  Von Spee, striking across to the
South American coast, had detached _Ziethen_ (Captain von Lutz) with
orders to steer for Australasian waters.  _Ziethen_, with her large
displacement, her ten 6-inch guns and thick armour, would be a match
for any of the British light cruisers; against her the British would
have to scatter broadcast armoured cruisers, and that implied an
absence of defence against the blow he meditated against the Falklands.
_Ziethen_, being in no way homogeneous with his own squadron, could be
well spared.  So _Ziethen_ was detached, and a thousand miles from land
she encountered _Charybdis_.

_Charybdis_ saw a smudge of smoke on the horizon.  _Charybdis_ steered
towards it.  Soon _Ziethen's_ three tall funnels could be descried.
The Captain of _Charybdis_ peered anxiously through his glasses.  He
ran through his memory to pick out which remembered silhouette was hers.

'That's _Ziethen_,' said Captain Holt.  'Now where are the others?'

For a few minutes both ships held on slightly divergent courses, each
anxious to ascertain whether the other was in the company of others.
But no other smoke clouds showed upon the horizon.  They were alone
upon a waste of water.

'Fight or run?' said the Captain to himself, knowing the answer as he
said it.

Run?  He must not run.  It was his duty to shadow _Ziethen_ if he could
not fight her, keep her under observation by virtue of his half-knot
superiority in speed until someone came up who could fight her.  But
shadow a ship of superior force over two thousand miles of dangerous
sea with only such a tiny additional speed?  The odds would be a
hundred to one that he would lose her--and his professional reputation
along with her.  Leading Seaman Albert Brown, gunlayer of No. 2 4.7
gun, at his action station, paralleled his Captain's thoughts as they
occurred.  He must fight then--old 4.7's against new 5.9's, four
thousand tons against eight thousand.  Luck might aid him; a sea fight
is always a chancy business.  At the worst he might do _Ziethen_ some
serious damage before _Charybdis_ sank, and the _Ziethen_ seriously
damaged meant the _Ziethen_ rendered useless, for she had no place
where she might effect repairs.

'Action stations' had gone long ago; steam was being raised in all
boilers; the propellers were beating a faster rhythm as both ships
tried to work up to full speed, swinging round each other in the
momentary sparring before rushing in to grapple.  The Captain put the
glasses to his eyes again, and while he did so, casually, as befitted
an Englishman at a mighty crisis, he spoke to the man at the wheel.
Round went the wheel, and _Charybdis_ heeled as she swung round sharply
under maximum helm at high speed.  The Captain was making the most of
his chances, closing the range as rapidly as possible to avoid as much
as he could being hit without being able to hit back.  Even as
_Charybdis_ came round the wireless signalman was sending out, over and
over again, the message telling of the encounter, giving latitude and
longitude, trying to inform the expectant British fleet where _Ziethen_
was to be found.  And while he did so _Ziethen's_ operator was
'jamming' hard.  No message could hope to get through that tangled
confusion, especially over a distance of thousands of miles, in the
unkindly ether of the Pacific.

But _Ziethen_ was ready for _Charybdis'_ manoeuvre.  Well did Captain
Lutz appreciate the superiority of the 6-inch over the 4.7.  He put his
helm over too, and _Ziethen_ came round until the courses of the two
ships were almost parallel, and, as _Charybdis_ turned further, he
continued his turn until it almost seemed as if he were running away.
It was a pretty sight, those two great ships wheeling round each other
on the blue, blue Pacific with a blue sky over them and peace all about
them.  Only the spread smudges from the heavily smoking funnels marred
the picture.

'Out of range still, curse them!' groaned the Gunnery Lieutenant,
hearkening to the monotonous chant of the range-taking petty officer.

A sudden little haze became apparent round _Ziethen_, and almost
simultaneously a group of tall pillars of water shot up suddenly from
the surface of the sea two hundred yards from _Charybdis'_ bow.  The
Gunnery Lieutenant started in surprise.  Practice as good as this was
more than he expected.  _Charybdis_ heeled again under pressure of helm
in her effort to close.  The tall fountains of water shot up again,
this time only a hundred yards from the quarter; some of the water
splashed on to _Charybdis'_ deck.  The thunder of _Ziethen's_ guns did
not reach her until half a dozen seconds later.

'Bracketed, by God!' said the Gunnery Lieutenant, and then, in
surprised admiration of a worthy opponent, 'Good shooting!  Dam' good
shooting!'

_Charybdis_ turned sharply to disconcert the German range-takers, but
the next salvo pitched close alongside, flooding the decks with water.
Down below, below the level of the water, under the protective deck,
the stokers were labouring like lunatics to supply the steam which was
being demanded so insistently; but _Ziethen's_ stokers were labouring
too, and proof of their efforts was displayed in the huge volumes of
smoke pouring from her funnels.  Victory might well incline to the ship
which first reached her maximum speed; speed would enable _Charybdis_
to close, or enable _Ziethen_ to keep away and continue to blast her
enemy with salvoes to which no reply was possible.  Once only did the
Gunnery Lieutenant see his beloved guns in action; once only.  They
fired at extreme range, on the upward roll, but it was a vain hope.
The Gunnery Lieutenant groaned his bitter disappointment--the more
bitter because the hope had been so frail--when he saw the tall columns
of water leap half a mile on the hither side of the enemy.  But the
anguish of the Gunnery Lieutenant's soul ended with his groan, for
_Ziethen's_ next salvo, flickering down from the blue, came crashing
fair and deadly upon the _Charybdis'_ deck; five 6-inch shells falling
together.  They blew the Gunnery Lieutenant into bloody and
unrecognizable rags; they dashed to pieces the range-taking petty
officer and his instrument; they wiped out the crew of No. 4 gun; they
left the superstructure riddled and the funnels tottering; they started
a blaze of fire here, there and everywhere, so that the Executive
Officer and his hose-party, choking in the smoke, could not cope with
one-half of the work before them.  Nor was that one salvo all.  Salvo
followed salvo, with barely half a minute between them.  The pitiless
shells rained down upon the wretched ship, smashing and rending and
destroying.  The _Ziethen's_ gunners were toiling with the disciplined
rapidity resulting from years of gun drill, heaving up the heavy
hundred-pound shells and thrusting them home with a trained convulsive
effort, training, firing, reloading, not even, thanks to their solid
discipline, sparing a moment to view the ruin they were causing.
_Charybdis_ reeled beneath the blows; smoke poured from her in
increasing volume, but her vitals, her motive power, were down below
her protective deck, and she could still grind through the water with
undiminished speed.  The Captain was down and dying, torn open by a
splinter, and it was the Commander who gave the orders now; dead men
lay round the guns, and the stewards were bearing many wounded down
below to where the Surgeon laboured in semi-darkness; but scratch crews
manned the guns, which flamed and thundered at hopelessly long range.
Yet fierce resolution, half a knot more speed and a slightly converging
course all did their work.  The high-tossed pillars of water crept
nearer to _Ziethen_, and soon a shrill cheer from a gun-layer, cutting
through the insane din, greeted _Charybdis'_ first hit.  There were
dead Germans now upon _Ziethen's_ deck.

But _Charybdis_ was a dying ship, even though the thrust of her screws
still drove her madly through the water.  Her side was torn open; she
would have been wrapped in flame were it not that the shells pitching
close alongside sometimes threw tons of water on board and extinguished
some of the fire.  The merciless shells had riven and wrenched her
frail upper works until the dead there outnumbered the living.  Her
guns still spoke spasmodically through the smoke; the White Ensign
still flew overhead, challenging the interloping Black Cross on a white
ground which flaunted itself from _Ziethen_.  When the oldest navy met
the newest, pride left no room for surrender; barbaric victory or
barbaric death were the only chances open to the iron men in their iron
ships.  Feebly spoke _Charybdis'_ guns, and for every single shell
which was flung at _Ziethen_ a full salvo came winging back, five
shells at a time, directed by an uninjured central control, with the
range known to a yard.  Even as _Charybdis_ made her last hit her death
was in the air.  It smote her hard upon her injured side; it reached
and detonated the starboard magazine so that a crashing explosion tore
the ship across.  The hungry sea boiled in; the stokers and the
artificers and the engineers whom the explosion had not killed died in
their scores as the water trapped them below decks.  Even as the
boilers exploded, even as the ship drove madly below the surface,
_Ziethen's_ last salvo smote her and burst amid the chaos caused by its
predecessors.  In thirty seconds _Charybdis_ had passed from a living
thing to a dead, from a fighting ship to a twisted tangle of iron
falling through the sunlit upper waters of the Pacific down into the
freezing darkness of the unfathomed bottom.  Above her the circling
whirlpools lived their scanty minute amid the vast bubbles which came
boiling up to the surface; a smear of oil and coal dust marred the
azure beauty of the Pacific, and at its centre floated a little
gathering of wreckage, human and inhuman, living and dead--nearly all
dead.




_Chapter XI_

The record of Brown's doings while _Charybdis_ fought _Ziethen_ is not
material to this history.  He was only a part of a whole, and whatever
he did the credit belongs not to him, but to the Navy, the tremendous
institution which had trained him and disciplined him.  If in the last
few desperate moments he fought his gun without superior direction,
that was because handling a 4.7 under all conditions had been grained
into his nature; the credit should rather go to the whiskered admirals
of an earlier epoch who had laid down the instructions for gun drill.
Brown was a brave man, and he did not flinch from his post, but many
men less brave than he would have done the same had they been parts of
the same whole.  It was the Navy of the unrivalled past which gained
glory from the defeat of this, an inconsiderable fraction of itself,
just as that same Navy must bear the blame, if blame there is.  That is
as it should be, but at the same time the argument hands over to Brown
all the glory and honour for what he did on Resolution, and to Brown as
an individual must be given the credit for the eventual destruction of
_Ziethen_.  For he acted on Resolution without orders, on his own keen
initiative, under conditions where neither discipline nor training
could help him.

That was all still in the future, however, and not one of the German
boat's crew which picked him up as they pulled through the scattered
wreckage knew that they would soon meet their deaths through the agency
of this shaken fragment of humanity.  Very thoroughly did the boat's
crew search, rowing hither and yon over the oil-streaked water, but
they found little.  There were two dead men--one of them so shattered
that he hardly appeared human--two or three wounded, and one merely
half-stunned; this last was a stoutly-built fellow of medium height,
very freckled, with hard grey eyes and light-brown hair, inclined to be
as rebellious as was possible within the narrow limits of its close
crop.  He was very badly shaken, having been blown from the deck to the
water when the magazine exploded, and he was hardly conscious of
holding on to a stray rolled hammock which came to the surface
providentially near him when _Charybdis_ sank.  He lay limp in the
bottom of the boat as it rowed back to _Ziethen_, and he had to be
assisted to the ship's deck.

All he wanted at that time was to allow his weakness to overcome him,
to fall to the deck and sleep heavily, but the exigencies of war would
not allow him that luxury.  He was the only one of the three survivors
of _Charybdis_ who was even half conscious, and Captain Lutz, bearing
on his shoulders the responsibility for _Ziethen_ and her hundreds of
men, must know at once how _Charybdis_ came to be where she was;
whether she had consorts near who could have heard her wireless,
whether the meeting was intentional or accidental--everything, in fact,
which would enable him to spin out his little hour in being.  They did
not treat Brown unkindly; they dried him and gave him spirits and
wrapped him in a comfortable woollen nightshirt and allowed him to sit
in a chair in the dispensary beside the sick-bay while he was being
questioned.

Brown rolled dazed eyes over his questioners as he sat huddled in his
chair.  The bearded officer with the four rings of gold lace must be
_Ziethen's_ captain, he knew; the young officer was a sub-lieutenant;
the shirt-sleeved man was the Surgeon (who had been doing gory work on
the half-dozen wounded _Charybdis'_ shells had injured), and the naval
rating in the background was the sick-bay steward.

Fierce and keen were the Captain's questions, uttered in a guttural and
toneless English; occasionally the Captain would turn and speak
explosively in German to the Sub-Lieutenant, who in turn would address
Brown in an English far purer and without a trace of accent.  Brown
made halting replies, his eyelids drooping with weariness.  He told of
_Charybdis'_ slow progress through the Carolines and Marshalls, and
steady course eastwards across the Pacific.  No, he did not know of any
other English ship near.  He had heard nothing of any concentration
against the German squadron.  It was at this point that the Captain
called upon the Sub-Lieutenant to interpret, and the Sub-Lieutenant
duly informed Brown in passionless tones that a prisoner who made false
statements was guilty of espionage, and as such was liable to be shot,
and undoubtedly in this instance would be shot.

'Yes,' said Brown.

'Was _Charybdis_ expecting to encounter _Ziethen_?'

'I don't know,' said Brown.

'What was her course and destination at the time of meeting?'

'I don't know,' said Brown.

'Now, did he want to be well treated while he was on board?'

'Yes,' said Brown.

Then let him answer their questions sensibly.  Whither was _Charybdis_
bound?'

'I don't know,' said Brown, and at this point the medical officer
intervened, and Captain Lutz left him testily.  Brown had been speaking
the truth when he said he did not know; but he had a very shrewd idea
all the same, and had he told Captain Lutz of his suspicions he might
have relieved that officer of a great burden of worry.  But that was no
way Brown's business--on the contrary.  Captain Lutz's ill-timed threat
had reminded him of the fact at the very moment when, in his half-dazed
condition, he was likely in reply to kindly questioning to have told
all he knew or thought.

The Surgeon spoke to the sick-bay steward, who summoned a colleague,
and between them they tucked Brown into a cot in the sick-bay, put a
hot bottle at his feet (shock had left him cold and weak) and allowed
him to fall away into that deep, intense sleep for which his every
fibre seemed to be clamouring.  And while Brown slept _Ziethen_ came
round on her heel and headed back eastwards.

For _Charybdis_ had not gone to the bottom quite without exacting some
compensation.  One of her 4.7-inch shells had struck _Ziethen_ fair and
true a foot above the waterline, and a yard forward of the limits of
her armour belt.  There the shell had burst, smashing a great hole
through which the sea raced in such a volume that the pumps were hard
put to it to keep the water from gaining until, after the battle, a
sweating work party had got a collision mat over the hole, while inside
the stokers cleared the bunker, into which the hole opened, of the coal
which interfered with the work of the pumps.  Examination of the damage
showed it to be extensive.  Nowhere else on all the side of the ship
could a shell of that calibre have been put to better use.  The forward
armour plate, starboard side, was slightly buckled and loose on its
rivets; there was a hole in the skin ten feet across, one-third of it
below water, and, worst of all, the bulkhead and watertight door
between the injured compartment and the next (the boiler compartment,
and largest of all) were involved in the damage as well.  The ship was
actually in danger; in smooth water she had nothing to fear, but, given
a Pacific gale and Pacific rollers, the collision mat inevitably torn
off, and the pumps choked with coal-dust, two compartments might fill
and _Ziethen_ would go to join _Charybdis_ on the bottom.

Clearly it meant the postponement of _Ziethen's_ projected raid.  The
New Zealand meat ships and the Australian convoys would be left in
peace for the time.  No captain would risk his ship on a long voyage in
such a condition, least of all the captain of a German warship with no
friends within five thousand miles, with the constant possibility of a
battle at any moment, and the certainty of one sooner or later.
_Ziethen_ must find a harbour, a haven of some sort, where she could
rest while her shattered hull was being patched, and that without
delay.  A neutral port would mean almost certain internment, the most
ignominious ending possible to a voyage; or if by any miracle she was
not interned, her presence would be broadcast far and wide, and on her
exit from neutral waters she would find awaiting her an overwhelming
force of the enemy.  So that ports with docks and stores and
necessaries were barred to her.  She must find somewhere a deserted
piece of land from which news would not spread, where she would be able
to find shelter while her own artificers forged and fixed new plates,
and where it was unlikely that enemy warships would find her or
inquisitive Government officials complain of breaches of neutrality.
In the Pacific there was more than one such haven, but the nearest was
far superior to all others; Captain Lutz knew the answer to the
question he set himself before even he had found it by consultation of
charts and sailing directions.  Resolution Island, that last, most
northerly outlier of the Galapagos Archipelago, would suit him best of
all.  So _Ziethen_ set her course for Resolution Island, a thousand
miles away, her pumps at work, while a relay of sweating artificers
down in the Stygian depths of her toiled to keep them clear.  Brown
slept the heavy, exhausting sleep of profound shock the while
_Ziethen's_ propellers beat their monotonous rhythm, driving her
onwards to where Brown's fate awaited him.

He slept all the rest of the day and most of the night.  And though he
had the sailor's habit of sound sleep and the readiness of sleep of the
strong-minded, towards morning he was wakened more than once by a
painful, unexplainable noise, a bubbling howl which in his sleepy
condition appeared to him to be neither human nor connected with the
ship.  It died away each time, however, and he slept again, but in the
morning, when he was fully awake, he heard it again.  It seemed to come
from the other side of the bulkhead, and he could not explain it to
himself.  He looked about him; he was alone, although there was another
empty cot in the cabin.  The interior was a cool white, and a whirling
electric fan helped out the portholes in their business of ventilation,
but the air which came in hardly seemed to cool the cabin.  For
_Ziethen_ was almost on the Equator, and iron decks and iron bulkheads
mean a sweltering heat under a vertical sun.  The heat was dry and
redolent of hot metal, but Brown was used to it; two years on the lower
deck in the tropics had made such a state of affairs almost normal to
him.

Brown had not much time to think before the sick-bay steward he
remembered from yesterday entered the cabin.  His jolly German face
creased into a smile as he saw Brown normal and conscious again.  He
put a thermometer into Brown's mouth, and smiled again as he read it
and noted the result on the chart at the head of the cot.  He spoke to
him amicably, and grinned as he realized that Brown did not understand
a word he said.  He made Brown comfortable as dexterously as a nurse
might, twitched the blankets into place and smoothed the bedclothes and
waddled away with a friendly look over his shoulder.  Ten minutes later
he returned with the Surgeon.

'Bedder, eh?' said that officer with a glance at the chart.
Automatically he took Brown's wrist and produced his watch
simultaneously, felt his pulse and nodded.

'Any bain any blace?' he asked.

'No, sir,' said Brown.

'Feeling all right, eh?'

'Yes, sir.'

'You can haf breagfast, den.'

The Surgeon spoke to the steward, who vanished and returned almost at
once.  He brought good grey bread and tinned butter, and coffee which
was not as good as either; but Brown relished it all.  As the Surgeon
retired the steward brought him a bundle of clothes--shirt and jumper
and loose trousers, and socks and shoes; they were the white duck
uniform of a German sailor, and Brown put them on, a little troubled by
the minor differences between it and the English naval uniform--the
collar, for example, had to be buttoned awkwardly inside--but the
general fit was not too bad.  The plump steward still grinned in
elephantine friendliness.

The rest of the morning passed.  The Commander, cold-eyed and detached,
came in on a round of inspection, ran his eye over him and went his way
without a word.  Then he was led once more into the presence of the
Captain and searchingly questioned.  Brown did his best not to give
information; he fell back when hard-pressed upon a stolid, brainless
stupidity, and the most penetrating questions rattled harmlessly from
his 'I don't knows.'  And since it was extremely probable that a mere
leading seaman from an isolated cruiser should know nothing, the
Captain in the end dropped the inquisition.  And, after all, it is
doubtful if anything Brown could have told him would have added to
Captain von Lutz's information.  The Captain was about to dismiss him
when the Sub-Lieutenant interposed with a respectful question.  The
Captain thought for a moment, exchanged a few sentences with the
Sub-Lieutenant, and uttered his verdict.  It was verdict settling
Brown's fate--and the fate of _Ziethen_ too, but no one was to know
that.

Brown heard of the decision on his return to the sick-bay.

'You are to helb here,' said the Surgeon to him.

Brown could only stare without understanding, and the Surgeon (with
enormous condescension on the part of an officer towards a man in
ordinary seaman's uniform) explained in a fatherly manner.

'What are we to do wit you on board here?' he asked.  'Pud you in
prison?  Prison is not good in the dropigs.  You gan ztay and helb
nurse your vrients.  You will not run away, we know.'

And he laughed throatily; Brown did not realize how exceedingly
condescending it was on the part even of a non-combatant German officer
to crack a joke with a seaman.

It was thus that Brown learned the explanation of the groaning noise of
the night before.  The plump steward led him into the adjoining ward of
the sick-bay.  There on two cots lay two wrecks of men.  One had his
head half swathed in bandages, through which once more a red stain was
beginning to show.  He lay on his back in the cot with his fingers
writhing, and through a shapeless hole in the bandages over his mouth
there came a continued low, bubbling groan--low now, but clearly likely
to rise at any moment to that higher penetrating pitch Brown remembered
so well.  Half a forehead and one eye remained uncovered to show Brown
that beneath the bandages lay what had once been the homely, friendly
features of Ginger Harris, a messmate of his and a bosom friend of two
years' standing.  There was no hint of recognition in that one eye of
Ginger's when it opened; all Ginger's thoughts were at present
concentrated upon himself.  Later, when Brown saw what was beneath the
bandages, he was not surprised.

The second cot was occupied by a leading signalman whom Brown did not
know at all well, and he hardly recognized him because of the
marble-like pallor which had overspread his face; he was so thin and so
exceedingly pale--even his lips were white--that he was more like a
soulless visitor from another world as he lay motionless in the cot.
Brown wondered what was the injury from which he was suffering, and
looked inquiringly at the fat steward.  The latter soon enlightened
him; he indicated a bulge beneath the bedclothes, whirled his arms
round like a windmill, said 'Sh-sh,' and tapped his leg.  Brown gasped
his meaning; the leading signalman had come within reach of one of
_Charybdis'_ gigantic propellers as she sank and had lost his leg.
Perhaps he had been lucky in that the whirling blades had not cut him
to mincemeat instead of merely hacking off a limb, but Brown realized
that there could be two opinions about that.

So that he and these two wrecks were the sole survivors of the four
hundred and odd men who had constituted the crew of _Charybdis_.  Four
hundred dead men were drifting in the middle depths of the Pacific, a
prey for the shark and the squid.  It had been a vain, frantic
sacrifice, part of the price the Navy must pay for the glory of keeping
the bellies of an unthinking population charged with their accustomed
meat and bread.  Brown could picture, back in England, the arrival of
the news of the loss of _Charybdis_ with all hands.  The tea-parties
would say, 'Dear me, how sad!' and go on talking about cancer of the
womb; and the business offices would say, 'Mismanagement somewhere, of
course,' and revert to the Cesarewitch or the delinquencies of office
boys.  Brown had no illusions about that.  He knew how little the
people for whom he was fighting appreciated his services and those of
his fellows.  They might inflate themselves with pride over having the
largest Navy in the world, and sing little songs about 'Britannia, the
Pride of the Ocean,' and stand a bluejacket a drink, and the better
read might talk hazily about 'the command of the sea'; but of the
irresistible strength of sea power, of the profundity of study and
research and self-sacrifice necessary to employ it--or of what lay
beneath Ginger Harris's bandages--they knew nothing.  Brown's upper lip
rose a little, and his blunt chin came forward at the same time.  None
of that affected his determination to do his duty; his duty to the Navy
to himself and (although he would not think of it in those words) to
the memory of his mother.  He would help feed the babbling mob of
civilians, if he could, but not for the civilians' sake.

Later he found himself jeering bitterly at himself for his highfalutin
determinations.  He was a prisoner in the hands of the enemy, and
helpless.  He could think of no means to hold back _Ziethen_ from her
mission of destruction.  As soon as her side was repaired she would go
off capturing and sinking British ships, just as _Emden_ was doing.
Five million pounds was a small estimate of the cost of her probable
sinkings.  And he would be forced to witness them--or else, with
contemptuous carelessness, he might be put on board a neutral vessel to
find his way home while _Ziethen_ continued her career.  There was
nothing he could do.  He knew too much about the internal discipline of
a ship to hope to disable the engines or bring off any other boy's
adventure book coup, although it must be admitted that he tried to
think of some scheme to achieve some such end.  Helplessness and
despair and loneliness combined to force him into frightful
despondency--the utter black misery of the twenty-year-old--during the
three days that _Ziethen_ was ploughing her crippled way to Resolution.




_Chapter XII_

The Galapagos Archipelago is a group of volcanic islands, bisected by
the Equator, seven hundred miles from the American coast.  They support
no inhabitants--mainly because they have little water--and they are
sufficiently distant from the ordinary trade routes (at least until the
opening of the Panama Canal) to have remained comparatively unvisited.
Their flora and fauna have followed their own lines of evolution
without interference from the mainland, so that they boast their own
special species of insects and reptiles and cacti.  The monstrous
Galapagos tortoises gave the Archipelago its collective name, but the
individual islands were christened by the Englishmen who called there
on sundry occasions--Albemarle, Indefatigable, Chatham, Barrington,
Resolution and the rest are all reminiscent of ships or admirals or
statesmen.  Hither came Woodes, Rogers and Dampier, privateering, and
Anson with King George's commission.  The Pacific whalers--Hermann
Melville among them--called to stock their ships with tortoises.
H.M.S. _Beagle_ came here a hundred years ago with a young naturalist
of an inquiring turn of mind on board, by name Charles Darwin, who was
so struck by the evidences of evolution among the living creatures
there that his thoughts were directed to the consideration of the
Origin of Species by Natural Selection.

Resolution Island is the loneliest and least visited of them all.  Once
it was a volcanic crater, but it has been extinct for a thousand years
or more, and the Pacific has broken in at one point so that in shape it
is an incomplete ring of towering cliffs surrounding a central lagoon
half a mile across.  The entrance gives twenty fathoms of water; the
centre of the lagoon is of unplumbed depth.  The cliffs themselves (the
ring is nowhere more than a quarter of a mile thick) are of lava in
huge tumbled jagged blocks with edges like knives, the lower slopes
covered thinly with spiky cactus, the upper slopes a naked tangle of
rock.  The extreme highest ridge, however, where the wind had full
play, has been somewhat weathered down, so that the lava edges have
been blunted, and are disguised, by a layer of smaller pumice.

One glimpse of that central lagoon convinced Captain von Lutz that here
indeed was the haven he desired.  It was a land-locked harbour which
would give shelter in any wind that blew, and already in his mind's eye
he could see _Ziethen's_ side repaired and the ship herself free to
traverse the Pacific and wreak confusion and destruction among the
helpless British mercantile marine.  Cautiously he made his entrance,
for the sailing directions are excessively vague regarding Resolution.
He sent a picket boat on ahead, and followed her cautiously, sounding
as he went.  _Ziethen_ breasted gallantly the race of the tide through
the gap (for at the ebb the piled-up water in the lagoon comes surging
out through the narrow exit like a mill-race) made her way through with
the naked cliffs close on either hand and emerged safely into the
lagoon.  As she entered the stifling heat of the place closed in upon
her with crushing force, for the cliffs cut off the wind and the sun
beats down all day upon their sloping surfaces and is pitilessly
reflected inwards to a central focus.  But heat must be endured;
cautiously and very, very slowly _Ziethen_ swung sideways.  An anchor
roared from her hawsehole and took grip of the bottom away from the
vast depths of the central throat of the old crater.  Tide and
propellers and rudder were balanced against each other while another
anchor was got away from the stern, and soon _Ziethen_ was riding
safely and comfortably in the heart of Resolution.  It was a sound
piece of seamanship, which Brown thoroughly appreciated, despite the
fact that his view of the proceedings was limited to what he could see
from portholes.

And as soon as mooring was completed, _Ziethen's_ crew sprang into
furious action.  Alone on a sea where every man's hand was against
them, it was dangerous to linger within sight of land however deserted.
The work must be done at once, so that _Ziethen_ could emerge from her
concealment, with sea room to fight if necessary, and her injured side
healed, so that she could fight or run or capture as occasion dictated.
The stokers were set to work clearing the starboard bunkers as far as
might be and transferring their contents to the port side.  The Gunnery
Lieutenant supervised the activity of a party which laboured to empty
the starboard magazines and fill the port ones.  Even the starboard
battery twelve-pounders were unshipped, with infinite labour, and taken
across, and the central guns were trained out to port.  For a modern
ship in fighting trim is not so easy to careen as were the tiny wooden
ships of the buccaneers.  To expose a foot of the ship's bottom
necessitates the transference of hundreds of tons of weight--and even
that is a dangerous and chancy matter in a ship whose sides are
plastered with armour plate.  Small wonder that _Ziethen_ needed the
shelter of Resolution for the business.

All this dawned upon Brown as he looked round him during the dog
watches that evening when he was allowed upon deck under the friendly
chaperonage of the fat steward.  He looked up at the towering cliffs,
and felt the increasing heel of the deck.  If those cliffs were in the
possession of an enemy with a gun--a six-inch--a twelve-pounder even!
_Ziethen_, heavily listed, would be helpless.  Her decks could be
swept, the repairing party overside could be wiped out, and the mending
of the side could be postponed indefinitely, until either the ship was
sunk or she remedied her list again and cleared off in disgust to some
new refuge; and refuges as good as Resolution were necessarily few.  He
scanned the desolate cliff again, warily.  They were barely more than a
quarter of a mile away at any point, within easy rifle-shot, in fact.
Rifle-shot!  An idea sprang into pulsing life in Brown's brain, and the
blood surged hot beneath his skin.  He turned away from the fat steward
lest he should betray his sudden agitation.  But again and again he
peered up at the cliffs, turning over in his mind the details of his
plan, searching for flaws in it and debating consequences.  He could
find no flaws; he could foresee possibly profound consequences.

Back in the sick-bay, alone, waiting to hear the feeble cry of the
Leading Signalman or the renewed sound of Ginger Harris's agony, he
plunged more seriously into his plans.  If he could delay _Ziethen's_
repairs for a time, or if (as he hardly hoped) he could drive her away
unrepaired, he would have achieved much.  Somewhere, of course, British
ships were seeking her out, and the longer she could be kept in one
spot the more chance they would have of finding her.  The news of the
sinking of _Charybdis_ must have brought many ships hot upon the trail.
(Brown did not know that _Charybdis'_ wireless messages never got
through, and the loss of _Charybdis_ was at long last ascribed to
internal causes, the same as accounted for _Bulwark_ and other ships.)
To hold _Ziethen_ helpless for a few days might well settle the matter.
It might cost him his life, but that was a price he expected to pay.
Nelson and Blake and Drake had given their lives in other wars.  And
although a slight tremor ran through him at the thought of dying--death
comes hard at twenty--it did not affect his determination at all, or
weigh in the balance of his plans.  Agatha Brown's influence was
bearing its fruit, and perhaps his heritage on the male side from a
long line of fighting naval ancestors had something to say in the
matter too.

Brown's escape from _Ziethen_ was absurdly simple.  This of course was
largely because he was not expected to want to escape--who on earth
would desire to be marooned on a barren and waterless island?--and
partly because at first sight it seemed as if his escape would be a
relief for _Ziethen_.  Prisoners of war are out of place on a raiding
cruiser; to hold them safely means treating them harshly, and no one on
board had the least desire to treat Brown harshly.  Yet he was
definitely in the way where he was, save for the fact that he was of
some slight assistance in the nursing of the two English wounded men.
He was a bit of grit in the machinery of _Ziethen_--slight, but
noticeable.

Now at the foot of the gangway outside the sick-bay stood an arms rack.
In the rack stood twelve rifles, and above them hung twelve sets of
equipment.  For _Ziethen_ was a raiding cruiser, and must be ready at a
moment's notice to send away an armed boarding or landing party.  The
rifles and equipment stood ready for the use of one of the boats'
crews.  Brown had noted them casually more than once, but now he opened
the door and stole out gently to examine them more closely.  The rifles
were heavily greased, as was necessary in the tropics.  The equipments
were in marching order, ready for instant use.  He felt the pouches;
they were full--sixty rounds per set.  The leather pouches at the back
of each belt contained two heavy packages--a day's emergency ration in
each.  The water-bottles were empty, however.  Brown removed two,
tiptoed back and filled them, and drove the corks well home.  Inside
the door he listened carefully, heard no one coming, and slipped out
again.  He replaced one water-bottle in its sling and buckled the other
to the belt of the same set of equipment.  He emptied the pouches of
another set and filled his pockets with the ammunition.  He put another
day's rations into the pouch of the set he proposed taking with him,
and his preparations were complete.  If, with two days' food and water
and one hundred and twenty rounds, he could not keep _Ziethen_
thoroughly annoyed for a week he would be very surprised.

But to be ready to depart was one thing; to transfer himself and his
captures to the mainland of Resolution was quite another.  Brown
realized how easily his plan might fail at this point, and how
discovery would mean an ignominious marching off to the punishment
cells and the end of all his hopes.  That was a risk that had to be
faced, however.  He had weighed the chances and had decided he might
perhaps succeed.  All that was necessary, in fact, was a cool head and
moderate good fortune.  It would be a distortion of English to say that
Brown had a cool head; at the moment he was a mere incarnation of duty,
selfless and unselfish and impersonal, so that coolness of head had
nothing to do with his condition.  He was a fighting machine, and as
little likely to become flustered as any other machine.

Outside it was tropically dark; the young moon had not quite cleared
the highest ridge of Resolution, to light the lagoon and the ship
within.  Brown lifted the full set of equipment, put it over his
shoulders, and buckled it about him.  He took a rifle, slung it on one
shoulder, and stole up the gangway.  In five seconds he was crouched
beneath the the port side boat swung in its davits, unobserved by the
watch, by the armed sentry, or by any casual wanderers.  With noiseless
unfumbling rapidity he set about his preparations for the next step.

With his knife he cut the lashings of the boat cover, reached inside
and pulled out, after a small search, two of the lifebelts which were
there in readiness.  One of them he bound about his rifle as tightly as
he could; it would be a sorry fiasco if the weapon were to sink and he
were to arrive on Resolution safe but unarmed.  The other he bound
about him.  Then he fished out one of the boat's lines and dropped the
end very, very quietly overside.  Slinging his rifle again, he gripped
the rope and lowered himself down.  He was hampered by the bulkiness of
the lifebelt and the mass of his equipment, but patience and brute
strength saved him from swinging with a crash against the steel side of
the ship; he went down foot by foot, cautiously.  At last he felt the
sea at his ankles, and by the time he had reached the end of the rope
it was at his waist.  He let himself fall the rest of the way, sinking
until the water closed over his head in his effort to avoid a splash
before the lifebelt brought him to the surface again.  The rest was
easy.  Lying as much on his back as the lifebelt would allow, and
clinging like grim death to his rifle, he struck out gently with his
feet along the ship's side; the water was as warm as milk.  Heading
steadily and patiently past _Ziethen's_ stern he moved away by almost
imperceptible degrees.  It was half an hour before his slow, powerful
strokes bore him to the side of the lagoon, and he had to swim along
the side for another ten minutes before he could discover, in the faint
light of the rising moon, a bit of beach which shelved sufficiently to
allow him to clamber up.  There he unfastened the lifebelts and dropped
them in a cactus clump, and hitching his equipment more firmly round
his wet body he set his face in the darkness towards the steep,
horribly tangled slope before him.

Brown knew nothing of the Galapagos Islands--truth to tell, he did not
know that he was on one of them--and he was hardly expecting the
appalling effort which the climb demanded.  The island was only a mass
of lava blocks welded together, overgrown with cactus; to make a yard's
progress involved hauling oneself up a six-foot block guarded with
razor edges, tearing through spiky cactus at the same time.  In a very
short time his hands and feet were raw, his clothes were in rags, blood
was running from his scratches, and he was streaming with sweat in
consequence of his violent exertion in that stifling atmosphere.  After
fifty yards of progress body and mind were numb with fatigue, but he
still toiled on, the perfect fighting machine with duty as its motive
power.  One stray thought came through his dull mind and cheered him
during that desperate struggle; that was that if his progress was so
slow that of a landing party would be equally so, and with his rifle in
a point of vantage he would be able to hold any number of men back.
So, fumbling forward, gasping with fatigue, finding handhold and
foothold in the dark, heaving himself up with gigantic efforts,
occasionally lowering himself cautiously at breaks in the slope, he
forced his way to the top, and there, on a projecting knuckle of rock
which his instinct told him would be an advantageous strategic
position, he lay down to wait until dawn, his rifle at his side.
Instant sleep, the sleep of overstrain, closed over him as he lay, face
downwards with his head on his arms.




_Chapter XIII_

But while Brown was crawling up the steep side of Resolution, and while
he was asleep on the projecting saddle of rock, many things had
happened.  Tremendous news had reached _Ziethen_ from the wireless
stations on the American mainland; the whole ether of the Eastern
Pacific had been in a chattering turmoil, for von Spee had struck his
first blow upon the ring of enemies which had closed in upon him.
Admiral Sir Christopher Cradock had encountered him, with two weak
armoured cruisers against two powerful ones.  He could have refused
battle; he could have fallen back on a slow battleship which was
wallowing along after him two hundred miles away, but he had refused to
lose touch with an enemy who had already proved so elusive.  He had
gone boldly into action, hoping to do von Spee enough damage to cripple
him, but he had not been so fortunate as had been _Charybdis_ in her
battle with _Ziethen_.  _Good Hope_ and _Monmouth_ had sunk with all
hands under the guns of _Scharnhorst_ and _Gneisenau_, and von Spee was
now for a brief space master of all the Southern Pacific coast.  The
nitrate ships, vital to the manufacture of British explosives, were
cowering in Chile ports while von Spee, with all the prestige of
victory, was lording it down the coast and an exasperated Admiralty in
London was hurriedly searching for the wherewithal to close the gap
which von Spee had hewn in the ring they had flung round him.  In the
last desperate matter of national life or death von Spee's victory was
unimportant--what were two obsolete armoured cruisers to a Navy which
could put thirty Dreadnoughts into line?--but to the life of a Cabinet
it was supremely important.  With _Emden_ still loose in the Indian
Ocean sinking ships every day, with _Ziethen's_ whereabouts unknown, so
that at any moment a fresh series of depredations might clamour for
public attention, and with von Spee triumphant in the Pacific, the
Cabinet's prestige might well be so shaken as to ensure its fall; and
the results of such an overturn were incalculable.  Well was it,
indeed, that _Ziethen_ in her damaged condition had not dared to let
loose her wireless and announce the destruction of _Charybdis_.  Once
let her repair herself so that she could move about and evade pursuit,
and she would be emboldened to proclaim her victory; the streets of
London would be full of posters: 'Another Naval Disaster in the
Pacific,' and the Cabinet might come crashing down.  That is what
Captain von Lutz realized as he read the stream of wireless messages,
and it was visualizations of this sort which fired him with impatience
as he supervised the heeling of the ship and hastened below to inspect
the achievements of the ship's smith and artificers who were preparing
the plates which were to close the yawning hole in _Ziethen's_ side.
Not a moment was to be lost, although in all conscience Kapitan zur See
von Lutz could see no cause for delay.  Twelve hours from dawn would
see those plates in position, _Ziethen_ out once more in the Pacific,
blazoning the destruction of _Charybdis_ to all the world, and
privately informing the German secret agent in Peru of her need for
coal and of the rendezvous whither a collier should be sent.

Even the news that the captured English sailor had escaped and taken a
rifle with him did not disturb Captain von Lutz's state of pleased
anticipation; the escape of the sailor could do no harm--von Lutz
wondered why the sailor had bothered to arm himself seeing that they
would not trouble to pursue him--and the Captain contented himself with
putting into prison the kindly sick-bay steward and the marine sentry
of the upper deck, for purely disciplinary reasons.

Brown awoke when dawn was rushing into the sky.  He was very sore and
tired and thirsty; but he gratified his thirst only to the extent of
two swallows from his water-bottle.  He looked to his rifle.  As he had
hoped, the thick grease with which it had been smeared had kept the
water from the metal, and no trace of rust appeared on it or in it.  He
opened the chamber of the butt, extracted oil-bottle and pull-through,
and cleaned the barrel ready for action.  He had never before handled a
Mauser rifle, but the supreme simplicity of the breech mechanism and
sighting arrangements held no secrets for him.  He filled the magazine
and lay ready for action.

Below him, a scant quarter of a mile away, the _Ziethen_ lay immobile
nearly at the centre of the lagoon.  The water round her was smooth,
glassy, save for the strong ripple which Brown's powerful eyesight
could detect about her stern and her anchor chains when the rapid tide
swirled round them.  She lay like a ship of the dead; even from her
funnels there came only a shimmering hint of internal activity.

Yet as the light improved Brown could see white-clad figures on her
deck and upper works, and he fingered his rifle, sighting on them each
in turn, while refraining from pulling the trigger.  He wanted every
cartridge for more important work than casual killings.  Later the
white flag with the black cross soared upwards; the day was officially
begun on board _Ziethen_.  Immediately afterwards there was a stir of
activity on the starboard side, and Brown's keen eyesight could see
that the work he was expecting had begun.  Two bo'sun's chairs were
lowered down the side, one to each extremity of the hole made by
_Charybdis'_ shell, and a couple of white-clad figures scrambled down
Jacob's ladders on to each of them.  The damaged plates were to be
unriveted and removed the while the new ones were preparing.  Brown
laid his rifle to his shoulder and his cheek to the butt.

During the brief while he was taking aim there was time for a myriad
thoughts.  If he did not press the trigger he would be left unpursued;
_Ziethen_ would effect her repairs and clear from Resolution, and he
would remain, a free man, to take his chance of being picked up by a
passing ship to serve his country again.  Once let him fire and kill
one of _Ziethen's_ crew, and all the hundreds of German sailors on
board would become his sworn enemies, and might hound him down to his
death.  Death lay on the one hand, and liberty on the other; it was a
momentous choice and one over which Brown might have hesitated.  He did
not hesitate at all; he did not even think about the choice.  He had
made up his mind last night, and when a man like Brown makes up his
mind there is no room left for hesitation.

Slowly the sights came into line.  Through the U of the backsight could
be seen a tiny triangle of white--the white of the jumper of the man on
the bo'sun's chair.  Up into the U crept the wedge of the foresight; it
moved steadily upward until its tip was exactly in line with the top of
the U.  There it stayed for a tiny instant of time, the while Brown,
mindful of his musketry training at Harwich, and his periodical
practices since, steadied his breathing, took the first pull of the
trigger, and slowly squeezed the trigger back further through the final
tenth of an inch.  Then the rifle went off, and the echo of its report
ran menacingly round the circle of the cliffs.

Maschinistmaat Zimmer had set cheerfully about his task of drilling out
the rivets about the broken plate.  He whistled to himself as he
adjusted his tools, and he even cracked a joke or two with the three
other men swinging beside him in the bo'sun's chairs.  Tools and
machinery had ever been a joy to him, and the prospect of using them,
even after all this time, still cheered him up.  He had no thought for
his native Hamburg, nor even for the pretty young blonde wife whom he
had not seen for eighteen months.  He applied himself without a thought
or a care to the work in hand.  Then something hit him hard on the left
side close to his heart, and for an instant of time he knew pain,
agonizing pain, before darkness shut in upon him.  He was dead as his
knees gave way under him and he fell back over the rail of the chair;
his feet caught under the lower rail, and he hung head downwards,
grotesquely inert.  A bright splash on the plate where he had been
working showed where the bullet which had passed through him had
flattened.  There was another widow now in Hamburg.

But no one at all paid any attention at that time to the dead body of
Maschinistmaat Zimmer hanging by its knees, and certainly no one
thought at all about his widow.  Leading Seaman Brown saw him fall,
snicked the bolt of the Mauser out and in, aimed again coolly and
rapidly, and fired.  The other man on Zimmer's bo'sun's chair fell dead
even as he looked round to see what had happened to Zimmer; one man on
the other chair died as he turned to see whence came the firing; the
fourth man crumpled up as, panic-stricken, he sprang towards the
Jacob's ladder to safety.

Brown fired three more shots into the groups of men who swarmed to the
side of the ship on the upper deck out of curiosity; they took effect,
and in a few seconds the upper deck was deserted as far as Brown could
see.  _Ziethen_ swung idly at her anchors, grey and grim, with her big
guns peering dumbly forth.  At her side, absurdly small, the white
corpse of Maschinistmaat Zimmer dangled head downward, and above him
lay two white splotches which were the bodies of his mates.  The fourth
man had fallen into the sea.

It was an apt picture of the simultaneous power and helplessness of
modern machinery.  On the one hand lay _Ziethen_, with her ten 6-inch
guns and her hundreds of crew and her horse-power reckoned in
thousands, and on the other a lad of five foot eight, aged twenty,
dominating her and enforcing his will upon her.  But Brown was only
powerful in consequence of his rifle, the handiest, neatest, most
efficient piece of machinery ever devised by man.  Not for the first
time was the rifle altering the course of history.  Brown was not a
marvellously good shot, but to hit four men with four shots at a
quarter of a mile when they are entirely exposed and conspicuous in
white against a dark background does not call for marvellous shooting.
Brown could handle his weapon in good workmanship fashion, and that is
all the rifle demands.  He had won the first trick, and he snuggled
down into his niche on the saddle of rock to await the next
development.  A head appeared beyond _Ziethen's_ foremost funnel, upon
the bridge.  He fired quickly, missed, and felt annoyed with himself.

On board the _Ziethen_ there was annoyance at the tiresome incident; it
would have remained mere annoyance save that five men had been killed.
Were it not for the fury roused by the death of these men, messmates
and friends, the attitude of _Ziethen's_ officers and men would have
been one of exasperated amusement--amusement that one man should dare
to pit himself against an armoured cruiser, and exasperation at the
delay to the repairing of the ship.  From points of vantage--portholes,
turret sighting slits--they scanned the cliffs anxiously to obtain a
glimpse of this lunatic Englishman who was acting in so odd a manner.
Captain von Lutz, the angriest man on the ship, strode out upon the
bridge; but a bullet smacked against a stanchion close at his ear and
sang off into the distance.  Even Captain von Lutz, one of the
cleverest minds in the Imperial German Navy, marked out for high
command in the near future, did not realize the difficulty of the task
before him.  He gave abrupt orders to clear away the steam pinnace,
which had lain alongside since the night before, so that a landing
party could arrest this irritating fellow and bring him on board to be
dealt with.

Brown lay patiently in his niche.  Where he lay he could command the
stern and the whole starboard side of the ship.  His rifle was pushed
forward between two blocks of lava which gave him almost perfect
protection; the straggling cactus was an efficient screen, and the
bulge of the saddle and the nick in its tip gave him command of most of
the face of the cliffs even where he lay.  He was perfectly satisfied
with his position; he saw that his magazine was filled and submitted
patiently to the scorching heat, which was beginning to roast him
slowly on his slab of naked rock.

Suddenly the next development made itself apparent.  Round _Ziethen's_
stern, shooting swiftly for the shore, came her steam pinnace, with
twenty men aboard her.  Brown's rifle cracked out again and again,
taking swift toll before the men in her flung themselves down under
shelter.  The helmsman dropped, shot through the breast, but the
officer in command, the gold flashing on his white coat, grasped the
tiller and held her to her course as Brown's next bullet tore the cap
from his head.  Next second the boat was out of sight under the steep
drop of the bare rock at the water's edge.  Brown recharged his
magazine.

The lieutenant in command of the landing party realized, in the instant
that he grasped the helm, that this was not going to be the simple
arrest of a nearly helpless man which he had anticipated.  It dawned
upon him that a man with a rifle a hundred yards away can take severe
toll of a mass of men rushing upon him.  There was a further lesson in
addition to this which he was to learn, but that was yet to come.  At
present he made the arrangements which seemed satisfactory to him.  He
restrained the tendency of his men to bundle out of the pinnace and
rush wildly up the slope.  Under shelter of the steep bank he spread
his men out over the fifty yards of the bank's extent.  He saw that
they had their rifles loaded.  He got them all into position, and then
he gave the word for a simultaneous rush.

But here began the second lesson.  No one who had not attempted it
could realize that the word 'rush' had no place in the vocabulary of
Resolution.  The dreadful razor-edged blocks of lava and the clustered
clinging cacti made anything like rapid progress impossible.  An active
man could move about on Resolution as fast as a snail in a garden, as
Brown had discovered the night before.

Brown, motionless in his cranny, saw appear below him a line of men's
heads at the water's edge, and he promptly put a bullet through one of
them.  The other heads developed shoulders and bodies and legs and came
towards him, falling out of sight behind lava blocks, rising into full
view again as they struggled over, creeping up towards him at an
absurd, ridiculously slow pace.  He fired slowly and deliberately,
waiting for each shot until a man had heaved himself up into full view.
A man's whole body at a hundred yards makes a superb target.  Brown had
fired six shots and hit six men before the 'rush' died away.  No man
seeing his companions killed at each side of him could bring himself to
heave himself up and expose himself to the next shot.  The dozen
survivors stayed behind the cover they chanced to have at hand, and lay
without attempting to make further upward progress.  They pushed their
rifles forward and began to fire up at the hidden death above them.
The clatter and rattle of musketry began to resound round the island,
shattering its stillness.

Yet, despite the numerical odds against him, all the advantages were
still with Brown.  No one yet in the attacking party had a clear
knowledge of his hiding-place; thanks to the two close blocks of lava
and the cacti, he was thoroughly hidden.  To an attacker all that might
be in sight was a rifle muzzle and two or three square inches of face
in deep shadow, and it would call for keener eyes, if unaided by
chance, than the human race possessed to detect that much in the
possible thousand square yards of rock and cactus where he might be
hidden.  Brown was not hampered to any such extent.  He was higher up
and could see farther over the edges of the lava blocks.  He had more
enemies to shoot at, and those enemies occupied positions taken up by
chance in the heat of the moment.  He was cool and unflurried by
exertion.  He knew the line his enemies had reached.

Bullets began to shriek overhead in the heated air, to raise clouds of
pumice-dust when they hit the rocks, or to cut their way rustling
through the fleshy cactus leaves.  Not one came within ten yards of
Brown.  Coolly, cold-bloodedly even, he began to take toll of his
attackers.  Here there was a shoulder, there a leg, over there a head
and shoulders completely exposed.  He took deliberate aim and fired,
shifted his aim, fired again, slewed round carefully to avoid any
exposure of himself, and fired once more.  Each shot echoed flatly
round the cliff; in that heated air the noise of the report was no
guide whatever to the position of the marksman.  Shot after shot went
home.  Wounded men lay groaning in hollows and crevices.  Dead men lay
with their faces on their rifles.  Very soon the few survivors dared
not fire back, but crouched down in the advantageous bits of cover they
chanced to be in, afraid to move lest this deadly enemy should send a
bullet winging to their hearts.  The firing died away.  The lieutenant,
mad with rage, leapt to his feet to shout to his men, and received a
bullet full in the face which flung him over backward, a kicking,
senseless huddle of limbs upon a cluster of spiny cactus.  Then silence
descended again.  Brown blew gently down the breech of his rifle
barrel, peered through fierce, narrowed eyes for any sign of his
enemies, and resumed his patient, tense waiting, eyes and ears alert
for any sign of activity down the cliff, where some rash enemy might be
trying to creep unobserved up to him, or along the base of the cliff to
outflank him.  For an hour nothing happened save for one attempt on the
part of an unfortunate to stretch his cramped limbs, an attempt which
secured him a bullet through the knee which drained the life-blood out
of him in half an hour.

So that a duel of patience ensued between the watcher on the cliff
above and the dwindled half-dozen down below.  After the rude reports
of the rifles the eternal stillness of Resolution once more took
possession.  The sun climbed steadily upward, pouring down a stream of
brassy heat upon the tortured rocks.  The lagoon was of a vivid blue,
and in the centre of it _Ziethen_ swayed idly at anchor.  As the heat
increased the objects on the island took on a vaguely unreal appearance
as the air above them shimmered hazily.  Minutes dragged by like hours,
but the crouching living sailors at the base of the cliff dared make no
movement--not with the groans for help of their late wounded companion
still remembered in their ears.

Over on the _Ziethen_ everyone was puzzled at what had happened.  They
had watched the landing; they had seen men fall; they had heard the
firing abruptly increase and die away to nothing; but they could not
explain the sequence of events.  They could still see the pinnace
against the shore, and the boat guard sitting therein, but save for
three or four dead bodies they could see nothing of the landing party,
which was not surprising considering the tangle of rocks and cactus
into which it had fallen.  The opinion on board suddenly crystallized
that the attack must have moved up into some gully unnoticeable from
the ship, driving its quarry before it.  At that rate the danger to
workers on the damage must have vanished.  Captain von Lutz, on fire
with impatience to have his ship ready for action again, abruptly gave
the order for a further party of artificers to recommence work.

Brown, up on his shelf of rock, saw the white-clothed figures, dwindled
to the size of dolls, descend the Jacob's ladders.  He gave them plenty
of time; they sent up the bodies of their predecessors to the upper
deck by a rope hoist, and then they began work.  As they began he
opened fire, and once again the echoes of his shots ran flatly round
the island.  The little white figures collapsed pitifully in the
bo'sun's chairs.  The sudden firing over their heads roused the men
crouching down the cliff, and they, wearied with waiting and
conscience-smitten about the non-fulfilment of their duty, took up
their rifles once again.  Someone down there had at last formed a
shrewd guess as to where Brown was hidden, and as the rifles resumed
their clatter bullet after bullet began to hit the rocks near him.  One
of them even drove dust into his eyes.  Brown realized the danger.  He
paid no attention at present to the other riflemen firing at him, but,
lying deadly still, peered this way and that through the slit between
his two blocks of lava for this one keen-eyed or quick-witted enemy.
He saw him at last--part of him, anyway.  A bit of white jumper and
dark collar, a hand and a cheek, deep in the shadow of a rock, and
beyond the rock another bit of white which was probably the end of a
trouser leg.  Their owner was still firing away enthusiastically, and
at each shot a bullet came buzzing nearby, or smacked against cactus
and rock to go off at a new note.  Remorselessly Brown took his aim,
sighting for the edge of the collar against the white jumper.  At a
hundred yards he could not miss; as he pressed the trigger he saw the
jumper jerk, and his target rolled struggling into view; some
fair-haired boy, not so very unlike Brown himself, striving
ridiculously to hold together his shattered right shoulder with his
left hand, the blood pouring through his fingers and his face distorted
with pain.  Brown did not think twice about it.  He turned his
attention to the others, whose bullets were ploughing into the cliff
face twenty yards on either side of him.  One of them he killed,
helplessly exposed to fire from above, and the fire of the others
ceased abruptly again as they crouched down in their hollows.  Even as
they did so Brown observed that the boat guard, consumed with
curiosity, was standing up trying to see what was going on, and in
doing so exposing his head and shoulders over the rim of rock at the
edge of the lagoon.  Him Brown killed too, without mercy as without
rancour.

It was nearly noon by now.  Brown had delayed the repairs of _Ziethen_
for six hours already.  That in itself was a vast achievement.




_Chapter XIV_

The next incident in the battle of Resolution was a tribute to Brown's
power--to the power of the rifle which lay hot in his hand.  There was
a flutter of white from _Ziethen's_ upper deck, a flutter of white long
repeated.  Then two figures climbed down the Jacob's ladders, and in
one of them, even at that distance, Brown could recognize the rather
portly form of the Surgeon who had condescended to crack a joke with
him.  Out of sheer rigidity of mental pose Brown found himself pointing
his rifle at him before he remembered the white flag and desisted.  The
new-comers bent over the writhing figures on the bo'sun's chairs,
busied themselves with bandages and splints, and soon (but every minute
meant delay to _Ziethen_) the wounded men were hoisted inboard and
their attendants climbed up after them.

And as they went there was a sudden commotion at the foot of the cliff.
Someone there was too uncomfortable where he was.  He could not bear
the heat and the cramp and the strain any longer.  Also he was the
nearest to the water's edge--having had the steepest bit of cliff to
ascend he had the easiest descent.  He flung himself suddenly, on all
fours, down a little precipice, rolled down another, crashed through a
cluster of cactus on which he left bits of his clothes and of his skin,
and tumbled over the last descent to the water.  A bullet from Brown's
rifle tore past his ear as he did so, but in his flustered panic he
never noticed it.

His example was infectious.  The other survivors of the landing party
rose simultaneously and flung themselves down the cliff.  Brown smashed
the spine of one of them as he gathered himself for his last leap, but
the other two reached the water's edge--and safety--unhurt save for
gashes and scratches.  Three men now crouched in the steam pinnace;
they were the only unwounded survivors of a landing party of twenty-one.

But to the puzzled, fuming officers on _Ziethen_, their appearance by
the pinnace meant relief from the worry of guessing what had happened
to the landing party.  The bridge semaphore began a series of staccato
gesticulations, sending question after question to the dazed,
conscience-stricken trio crouching in the lee of the rock edge.
Sitting with their feet in the water (for if they stood their
signalling hands came into Brown's view and within reach of his
bullets) they produced a couple of handkerchiefs and signalled
back--misspelt, badly signalled sentences went limping back to the
cruiser, where dozens of pairs of keen eyes read off the halting words.
Happily most of the questions asked could be answered in one word.

'Where is the rest of the party?'

'Dead.'

'Where is Lieutenant Stunner?'

'Dead.'

'How many men opposed you?'

'One.'

One question, however, the gesticulating semaphore demanded again and
again, and the bothered sailors' blundering best constituted
unsatisfactory replies.

'Where is the escaped prisoner?' demanded the semaphore repeatedly, and
the wretched men beside the pinnace struggled vainly to satisfy their
persistent captain.

'Up the cliff,' they signalled, and 'Hidden,' and 'We do not know,' and
'In the same place as he was this morning,' and similar hopeless
answers which drove Captain Lutz into a state of blind fury, which was
not alleviated by the knowledge that part of the crew was reading off
the answers and that the whole would know of them within the hour.

Exasperated officers raked the face of the cliff with powerful glasses,
but there was no possible chance of their finding Brown in that way.
The crew were furious with rage at the killing of the landing party.
The last man shot by Brown in the bo'sun's chair had been smitten
through both hips, and had lain shrieking with agony until the Surgeon
reached him--and every shriek had been heard by the men.  They were
annoyed with their officers, and they thirsted, one and all, for the
blood of the man who had put this shame upon their ship.  And von Lutz
knew all about it, as a good officer should.  This insolent runaway had
undone all the good effected by the victory over _Charybdis_, and only
his death would restore good feeling.  Von Lutz appreciated the need of
good feeling in a crew about to set out on a voyage of half-senseless
destruction with certain defeat sooner or later at the end of it.
Besides, he must not allow the men to stay idle.  Von Lutz had every
possible motive when he issued orders to prepare for a landing at once
of the largest party _Ziethen_ could put on shore without entirely
crippling herself--two hundred men.  The news ran round the lower deck
to the accompaniment of a buzz of joy.

Meanwhile the work of repair must go on.  The Kapitan-Leutnant received
his orders from the Captain.  Some sort of screen for the workers must
be arranged, so that the men at work on the injured plating could be
hidden from the view of the rifleman on the cliff.  A working party
hurriedly fell upon the task of preparing booms and awnings--further
delay for _Ziethen_.

Brown in his eyrie on the cliff might have found time heavy on his
hands were he not so wholly absorbed in the possibility of the need for
immediate action.  The sun was slowly roasting him alive on the bare
rock as though he were on a grid-iron.  More than once he was forced to
have recourse to one of his two water-bottles, and it was a worse
torture to have to tear his lips away after a couple of grudging
mouthfuls than it was to bear the thirst which preceded and followed
them.  Already one bottle was half empty, however, and Brown refused to
allow himself anything approaching indulgence in the warm,
metal-flavoured fluid.  He sternly thrust back the cork and buckled the
bottles to his belt.  Small beauty is there in war--no one could find
beauty in the tumbled bodies of the dead down below or in the tortured
wounded calling feebly for water on the scorching rocks.  But beauty
could be found in that gesture of Brown's; one lone man--boy,
rather--unwatched, unordered, putting aside the drink he craved at the
call of what he considered his duty.  He set his small white teeth
while the sweat ran down his face and caked the streaked lava dust
which grimed it, his rifle ever to his hand, suffering and enduring
without regret or hesitation.  The suffering and self-sacrifice and
uncomplaining heroism which war has demanded, had they only been given
to causes which mankind deems ignobler, could in the million years of
man's existence have eliminated the need for suffering anywhere within
mankind's sphere of activity.  Brown, had this been pointed out to him,
would not have thought such an end worth achieving at any price--most
certainly not at the price demanded.

He took advantage of the lull to run the pull-through down his rifle
barrel again.  He looked with attention to the breech mechanism, for
the lava dust was a serious clog to its smooth working.  He counted his
cartridges and settled them more handily in his pouches.  He thought
about having a meal, but put the idea aside; he was not at all hungry,
and excitement and the sun pouring down on to his back between them
were not Likely to allow him to be for some time.  Still time dragged
on.

Meanwhile, bent over the meagre charts of Resolution that were all any
ship could boast, Captain von Lutz and his officers were planning the
attack upon Brown which should put an end to the tiresome incident.
This time nothing was to be left to chance.  There was to be no
repetition of the blunder of the morning, when too few men were flung
idly upon an impossible climb in the face of a weapon of precision.
The campaign was mapped out with real German thoroughness.  All men
were to carry food and water.  Each landing party was allotted a
different section of the island to beat through.  As the small-arm
supplies were limited, each party was carefully arranged in sections of
beaters and riflemen.  There was to be no taking of the bull by the
horns.  Brown's flanks were to be turned and he was to be forced upon
the move first before he was directly attacked.  The riflemen in the
tops were to continue their watch for him--a bullet could travel from
_Ziethen_ to the island as easily as from the island to _Ziethen_.  The
hunt was to be continued all night if necessary.  The capture or death
of the quarry was to be broadcast by a prearranged whistle signal,
whereupon the landing parties were to return immediately to the boats.
All possible arrangements seemed to have been made; the only flaw was
that the men who made the plans were still unaware of the difficulty of
movement upon the island.

Brown, idling away the weary minutes, became aware of great activity on
board _Ziethen_.  The semaphore messages in German had of course been
unreadable to him, and they had been the last incident of note, having
occurred two hours ago.  Now men began to show themselves here and
there on the upper deck and boat deck.  They exposed themselves no more
than they could help, and Brown, firing rapidly when opportunity
occurred, kept them harried.  He hit at least four men, who dropped
upon the upper deck, lying still or crawling away to shelter, and his
shots were answered from the ship by hidden riflemen--who, all the
same, had no knowledge of his exact position, and whose efforts in
consequence caused him little trouble.  A boom suddenly was run out on
the starboard side abaft the bridge (Brown got in two shots into the
little group he could see) and from it dropped a long strip of awning
which quite screened the damaged area from his present position.  At
the same time another canvas screen was run up across the upper deck at
the stern, and despite the elevation of his position he could not quite
see over it.  He sent three bullets through it, however, before he
realized that this was a mere waste of priceless ammunition.  The
bridge semaphore wig-wagged again hysterically, and the result of its
message was seen shortly, when the three wretched men in the steam
pinnace left their shelter under the rock and made a wild dash back to
the ship.  The pinnace steered an erratic enough course, for the
helmsman was lying flat on his back under the gunwale in his desperate
anxiety to avoid fire, but all the same Brown could do her no harm and
she soon shot round _Ziethen's_ stern out of sight into safety.  The
sound of bustle and activity even came across the lagoon to Brown's
ears, but the screens hid everything from view save the ship's stern,
upper works, and starboard side as far as the outboard screen, and he
could not form any accurate idea of what was going on.  He soon knew,
however.

Out from _Ziethen's_ port bow, where they had been manned out of his
sight, shot four boats.  The steam pinnace led, towing the other three,
and they were all four crammed with men.  A bubble of rifle-fire rose
from _Ziethen_ at the same time and now a new menace was added--machine
guns.  Two of these raved at him from _Ziethen's_ fore-top, traversing
slowly backward and forward across the suspected area, at each new
traverse taking a line lower down the cliff.  Bullets were sending the
dust flying everywhere; the cactus was dropping here and there as the
fleshy stems were cut through.  Under that leaden hail Brown forced
himself to think clearly.  He could do little to stop those boats--the
death of a dozen men would not stop them--and to fire he must expose
himself a little in that deadly horizontal rain.  It was not worth the
risk.  Brown crouched down into the hollow on the top of the saddle,
behind the twin lava blocks which had served their turn so well.  The
sharp rap of a bullet upon one of them and the sound of others close
above him made the propriety of the movement apparent immediately
after.  Then the hail passed on.

Brown, squirming round on his stomach, peered between the blocks, could
see nothing, and squirmed round further to where he could see round
them.  The string of boats, instead of making straight for him, had
dashed out through the opening of the lagoon, and even as he caught
sight of them, had swung round to port, to his part of the island but
on the outside, the sea face.  His position was to be taken in reverse.
It was then that Brown looked anxiously at the sun; there were still
three hours more of daylight--only three hours, thank God.

The persistent beating of the machine-gun bullets started a little
avalanche of rock thirty yards away on the right, and this disturbance
attracted the attention of all the marksmen on the ship; bullets rained
upon the spot until a wide dust cloud arose from it, drifting away on
the hardly perceptible wind.  Then the firing stopped; ammunition had
been used in prodigious quantities, and even small-arm ammunition must
not be allowed to run short on a raiding cruiser.  From the ship came a
rattle and buzz of machinery, and the creaking of tackle.  Brown knew
that the repairs were in progress, and he knew too that it would be
hard for him to interfere for a while; it made him frown in anguish.
But while his face of the cliff was being raked by a dozen glasses, and
while a score of marksmen, finger on trigger, were waiting anxiously
for any sign of movement, he dared not make an open attempt to shift
his position so as to be able to fire round the screen.  Behind him,
too, he knew that men were being landed at the outer margin of the
island; soon they would be climbing up the outer face.  Then they would
reach the crest.  His saddle of rock was dominated from one or two
points on the crest.  If the enemy reached one of those points in
daylight he was certain of death.  If he moved from where he was by
daylight he was certain of death.  His life depended upon the coming of
night.  It may be at once taken for granted that Brown had no
particular concern about the loss of his life; he was not yet oppressed
by the fear of death.  All he prayed for was the opportunity to
continue to delay _Ziethen_ at Resolution.  He had done all he could at
present, all the same.  With dogged determination he lay upon his ledge
of rock waiting for night--or for the firing from the crest which would
presage his death.  There is a sublime, hard satisfaction in awaiting
death when one has done all that could be done to avert it.  Brown knew
that satisfaction, even while he kept the cruiser under patient
observation lest any further opportunity should display itself.




_Chapter XV_

The steam pinnace, towing empty boats this time, suddenly shot into
view through the break in the cliffs and dashed up to _Ziethen_; in a
quarter of an hour she shot out again with the boats full of men once
more.  Machine guns and rifles opened again from the ship upon the
cliffs to prevent him from firing, but, as before, he had no intention
of doing so.  But he saw the boats turn to port as they had done the
first time before the cliffs cut them from his view.  That meant that
the sweep across the island by a line of men, which Brown keenly
foresaw, would only take place across a limited length; if he could
only move along the island sufficiently far he would evade the sweep.
Two hundred men, which was Brown's accurate estimate of their number,
at ten-yard intervals cover two thousand yards and the outside edge of
Resolution is about four thousand yards in circumference.  Brown
realized that he must transfer himself to a point rather more than
half-way round the island if he were to have any chance of escape.

Yet he could not move at all till nightfall.  He waited on with anxious
patience, not knowing from one minute's end to another when fire would
be opened upon him from the crest of the island.  Even Brown, with his
sturdy, thoughtless resignation of Fate and Duty, cast anxious glances
upward at the sun as it sank steadily in his face.

The seaward face of Resolution is very like the inner face, save that
the angle of ascent is much less steep.  The inner face is the nearly
vertical wall of the throat of a crater; the outer face is the hardened
remains of the lava flow.  But on the outer face the blocks of lava
resulting from sudden cooling are just as razor-edged and difficult of
negotiation, and the cactus is just as impenetrable.  The German
landing party proceeded with German thoroughness.  The first half was
lined out along the seashore at accurate intervals, and was kept
waiting until the second half was brought from the ship and lined out
in continuation of it.  Every man knew his job, which was to push
straight up the face of the island ahead of him, keeping correct
alignment and spacing, scanning every bush and cranny for the fugitive.
The Lieutenant in command raced from one end of the line to the other
in the steam pinnace, saw that everything was in order, and took up his
position in the centre of the line.  He gave the word and the line
began its ascent.

Alas for the accurate alignment!  The weary climb up the seaward face
was of necessity reduced in pace to that of the slowest, and the
slowest was very slow.  Not until it was really attempted could anyone
guess the fiendish difficulty involved in moving about on Resolution.
The frightful heat radiated from the rocks--which were nearly too hot
for the naked hand--was the least of the difficulties.  Cactus and lava
combined to lacerate feet and hands.  Two ankles were sprained in the
first half-hour.  The clumsy, rigid line made excruciatingly slow
progress.  Thirst descended instantly upon the sweating, swearing
sailors, and the shirkers among them--there must always be shirkers in
any large body of men--began to hang back and hold up their fellows.
The fuming officers did their best by example and exhortation to keep
the men on the move, but cramped living in a cruiser in the tropics is
not the best preparation for a difficult piece of mountaineering.  Here
and there parts of the island were really unscalable, and men were
compelled to move to one side to climb at all; but as soon as the
difficulty was evaded the petty officers, with the pedantic adherence
to orders resulting from an over-strict discipline, held up their
sections of the line until the intervals were corrected.  No one could
see very far to the left or right, thanks to convexity of the face and
the lunatic roughness of the surface, so that any attempt to command or
lead the whole line on the part of the Lieutenant was quite hopeless.
Bound by its first rigid orders, the line crawled up the face of the
island at a pace much slower than even the slowest among them could
have proceeded alone.

An hour before nightfall (at least an hour, that is to say, later than
he had expected to reach the crest) the exasperated Lieutenant sent
word along the line for each man to push on as best he could.  But it
takes time to pass orders from mouth to mouth along an extended line,
and only one-third of the distance had been covered when they were
issued.  The sun sank gaudily into the purple sea and night fell with
dramatic rapidity to find Brown still unfired at, and two hundred
German sailors spread out and tangled in the darkness over a mile of
leg-breaking rock.

Brown waited with sturdy, unyielding patience for complete darkness.
Throughout the afternoon he had been peering down the cliff below him,
mapping out in his mind a path down the cliff--a handhold here, a
foothold there, a slide lower down.  When night came he was ready; his
hands were bound about with strips torn from his jumper, his equipment
fastened about him, his mind as resolute as ever.  He was glad that the
German landing party had not caught him, but it was a temperate
gladness, in no way to be associated with thankfulness.  It did not
occur to him to be thankful.  Without a regret or a thought save for
the business in hand, he climbed off the shelf which had been his
fortress for twelve hours and swung himself down.  The cruel lava tore
and hacked at him as he slid and tumbled down the cliff.  The razor
edges tore through his shoes and cut deep into his feet.  The cactus
spines scratched great cuts into his body, making long lines like the
marks of a tiger's claws.  He wrenched ankle and knee so that they
pained him excruciatingly.  Yet he kept in his mind the various points
to be aimed at, and it was not long before he had covered the three
hundred feet of descent and had reached the place of his landing the
day before.

The first, ill-fated German landing party had reached the island a
hundred yards away to his right, and it was there that the tumbled,
tossed bodies of its dead lay along with the dozen wounded whose
pitiful cries had climbed the rock to Brown's ears all the afternoon.
Gladly would Brown have gone to them, have tried to tend their hurts
and given them the water for which they had moaned unceasingly, were it
not that to do so would have imperilled the execution of his duty.  As
it was, he shut his ears to the pitiful sounds, just as he had done all
day, and proceeded with his task.  Nothing could weigh in the scale at
all against his conception of what he had to do.  Several of the
wounded died that night.

His two lifebelts still lay in their cactus clump, and he picked them
out and buckled them round himself and his rifle as on the preceding
night.  Then he lowered himself into the water and set out across the
lagoon.  The sea-water added intensely to the pain of his cuts and
scratches.

The Germans had acted in disagreement with one of Napoleon's best-known
maxims of war--one should only manoeuvre about a fixed point; to have
done so he needed to be held, pinned to his position by a menace from
the front.  With the coming of darkness he was free to move about as
much as physical conditions would allow, and that, as long as the
lagoon was open to him, was a considerable amount.  All the German
turning movements, all their advances upon his rear and his flanks,
were useless.  Their blows were blows in the air as long as Brown could
evade them.

Brown paddled steadily round the lagoon fifty yards from shore, keeping
away from the ship.  Far behind him, on the unseen face of the island,
the wretched German sailors were labouring and toiling as they pursued
their stumbling way over the lava.  Cut feet and sprained ankles and
broken wrists occurred regularly.  The island was alive with the clash
and clatter of dropped rifles and stumbling feet.  No one knows who
fired the first shot.  Most probably it was an accident, the result of
a stumble by some fool (there are always fools to be found among two
hundred men) who had slipped a cartridge into his rifle.  The noise of
the shot echoed through the darkness.  Brown, paddling across the
lagoon, heard it and wondered.  The example was infectious.  Bewildered
men all along the straggling line began to load their rifles, and it
was only a matter of seconds before the rifles went off.  The scared
iguanas, nocturnal creatures, scurrying over rocks and round bushes,
gave frights to various people, and there was quite a respectable
bubble of musketry round the island before the whistles of the officers
and the shouted orders brought about a cessation of fire.  The fact
that no one was hit by the hundreds of bullets which went whistling in
all directions is simply astonishing.  On board _Ziethen_ the sound was
accepted as a welcome proof that the murderous fugitive had met his
fate, the while Brown steadily made his way across the lagoon to a
point on the shore broad on _Ziethen's_ starboard beam.  Here, with
some difficulty, he found a place where he could land, and once more he
let drop his lifebelts into a cluster of cactus.  Then he set his teeth
and began to climb the steep cliff.

But his cuts and his bruises and his stiffness and the awful rawness of
his feet reduced his activity to a pitifully small minimum.  Climb he
must if he were to maintain for another day his annoyance of _Ziethen_.
He must be high enough to be able to beat off attacks from the shore
and to dominate _Ziethen's_ deck.  Also he must be close in to the foot
of an overhanging bit of cliff if he was to have any security against
fire from above, and it would be as well if he had cover to his left
and right in addition, seeing that there were scores of riflemen at
large upon the island seeking his death.  What he needed was something
like a cave half-way up the cliff, and for this, in the light of the
late-rising moon, he peered about anxiously between his convulsive,
agonized efforts to scale the successive precipices of the cliff.

His rifle and ammunition, too, were serious hindrances to his progress,
and the sweat poured off him and his face was distorted with strain at
each heartbreaking struggle.  Both his feet and his hands left bloody
imprints upon the rock where they touched it.  Yet he struggled on,
upwards and sideways, to where in the faint light he thought he could
make out a shallow vertical cleft in the cliff face which might be
suitable for his purpose.  It was long past midnight before he reached
it, passed judgment upon it, and roused himself to one further
struggle, despite the stubborn reluctance of nerves and sinews, to
climb yet a little higher to a better place still.  There he fell
half-fainting upon the harsh lava.

Even then, after half an hour's rest, he fought his way back to
consciousness again and raised his head and eyed _Ziethen_, whose
malignant bulk, black in the faint light, swam on the magical water of
the lagoon.  On her starboard side, square to his front, hung a faint
patch of light, and the noise of riveters came to his ears over the
water.  The hole in the ship's side, screened forward and aft, and
partly screened in front, had been lit up by electric lights dangled
over the side, and there the repairing crews were toiling to replace
the damaged plates and striving to make up for the six hours' delay
Brown had imposed upon them.  Through the gaps in the outer screen
Brown could just see on occasions human figures moving back and forth,
and with a snarl of fainting determination he slid his rifle forward.
But he checked himself even as his finger reached the trigger.  He was
too shaky after his exertions to be sure of hitting hard and often
without too many misses.  Besides, a rifleman, however invisible by
daylight, show up all too plainly by night by reason of the flash of
his weapon.  With enemies possibly within close range he dared not (for
the love of his duty, not of his life) expose himself to this danger
without adequate chance of return.  Brown's fighting brain weighed all
these considerations even while every fibre of his body shrieked with
agony, and he reached a sound conclusion.  He laid his rifle down, and
then, before even he could settle himself comfortably, he collapsed on
to the rifle butt.  No one knows whether he fainted or slept, or both.
And meanwhile the two hundred men of the landing party stumbled and
swore as they endeavoured to sweep across the island, and still fired a
stray shot or two when the strain became too much for their nerves.




_Chapter XVI_

Brown woke, or regained consciousness, just as dawn was climbing
brilliantly up the sky.  His first action was to drink temperately from
the dwindling supply in his second water-bottle.  His cracked lips and
lava-impregnated mouth and throat permitted of no choice of action.
Then, doggedly, he began to make sure of his position and situation.
Looking out of his notch in the cliff face, hoisting himself cautiously
on his knees to do so, he saw a dozen white figures creeping slowly on
the very crest of the island a quarter of a mile from him.  On the
inner face of the island, round about his previous position, he saw
about a dozen others perched precariously here and there, still
endeavouring to carry out their fantastic orders to sweep the island
from one sea to another.  Of the rest of the landing party Brown could
see nothing, but he could guess shrewdly enough.  They were scattered
hither and thither over the outer face of Resolution, perhaps still
struggling on, perhaps nursing cut feet or broken ankles, perhaps
sleeping or dodging duty in the way unsupervised men will.  Brown
shrank down into his notch again; he was safe enough from observation,
and out of sight, indeed, of nearly every point of the island.

In front, however, _Ziethen_ was in full view.  The gay screens hung
out over the damaged part were like a box applied to the ship's side--a
box defective down one edge, however.  Through the gap Brown could see
occasionally a white figure appear and disappear, although for the
moment the noise of the hammers had ceased.  Actually, with the removal
of the damaged plates, the operation now in progress was the lowering
down of the new plates to be riveted into position.  It was in
consequence of the demands of the tackle for this business that the
booms of the screens had been shifted to leave the small gap Brown
noted; and as Brown had not fired at the ship for fifteen hours a
certain carelessness had been engendered, to say nothing of the fact
that _Ziethen_ believed, and could hardly help believing, that the
landing party had killed Brown hours ago.

Brown pulled the oily rag through his rifle barrel; he oiled the
breech, which was beginning to stick badly, and then he sighted
carefully for the gap in the screen.  He awaited the most favourable
moment and then fired twice, quickly, and he killed the two men he
could see.  Then, to make the most of his surprise, he fired again and
again through the screen, scattering his shots here and there across it
and up and down it.  He actually, although he did not know it, hit one
or two men, and his misses were quite efficacious also, in that they
scared into jumpiness the men they did not hit.  The moment when a
ten-ton steel plate is swinging in tackles is a bad moment to be shot
at.

The killings and the wounds and the interruption roused _Ziethen_ to a
pitch of fury previously unreached.  Those on board were maddened by
the deaths of their friends, and they were furiously angry with the
landing party, who had so absurdly failed in its mission.  Captain von
Lutz, in a flaming rage, set the bridge semaphore into staccato action,
and the wretched Lieutenant in command on shore, staggering
bleared-eyed along the crest after a sleepless night of fevered action,
read the messages he sent with a sick feeling at his heart.  The vivid
sentences poured out by a gesticulating semaphore as Captain von Lutz
vehemently demanded what on earth the Lieutenant and landing party were
about stung the wretched officer to the quick.  A Japanese lieutenant
would have committed suicide; a German one merely called out his last
reserves of energy and tried to gather a body of the less faint-hearted
and push on round the island to where Brown lay hidden.

On board _Ziethen_ work was suspended temporarily--another triumph to
Brown's credit.  Too many skilled ratings had been lost already for the
Captain to order his remaining ones to take the chance of the bullets
which Brown was sending at intervals through the screen.  Instead he
decided to turn _Ziethen_ away from the point of attack, and to turn an
unwieldy armoured cruiser, with her five hundred feet of length, and
listing badly at that, in a lagoon wherein the tide was swirling in a
whirlpool, was an operation called for care and consuming much time.
The two anchors had to be raised, the propellers set in motion, and
_Ziethen_ gently nursed into position, one anchor dropped, the set of
the current combated, and then the other anchor dropped--and good
holding ground was scarce in that fathomless crater.  Altogether it was
an hour before the delicate operation of mooring was completed and the
delicate operation of lowering the new plates into position was
resumed.  Brown heard at length the clatter of the riveting, and knew
that the delays he had imposed upon _Ziethen_ were ending at last.

But the labours of the landing party were still in full blast.  The
Lieutenant found it hard to move any sort of force along the island.
His two hundred men were scattered over a mile of almost impossible
country, and the problem of supplies suddenly leaped into prominence
and added another burden to the Lieutenant's overloaded shoulders.
Every man had landed with a day's water; they had been violently
exerting themselves for nearly twenty-four hours, and nine men out of
ten had consumed the last drop of their water several hours back.  The
Equatorial sun, mounting steadily higher, called the attention of
everyone to his overwhelming thirst.  The unhappy Lieutenant signalled
to his captain that he could not hope to move without water.  Captain
von Lutz signalled back in blistering fashion, but the Lieutenant,
under the spur of most dire and urgent necessity, held to his
contention.  The Captain, raging, sent off water to him round the
island, and his Commander as well, to take over control, under strict
orders not to return without bringing back Brown, dead or alive.

For the moral situation was serious.  No captain could dream of setting
out on a long and arduous cruise with a crew in such a temper as
_Ziethen's_ was.  Thirty-four men killed and wounded (their loss alone
would be a serious nuisance with prize crews to be thought of) and two
ignominious reverses had upset discipline to a tiresome extent.  If
_Ziethen_ were to sail away without taking vengeance on Brown the crew
would lose all respect for their officers.  And discipline would be
under severe strain on a raiding voyage, with its necessary
accompaniments of coaling at sea, and loot, and imminent prospects of a
fight.  Captain von Lutz, weighing all factors in the situation,
decided that Brown must die, even though killing him meant prolonging
their dangerous sojourn in the vicinity of land and postponing their
ravening onslaught upon British shipping.

So the water was sent, and the Kapitan-Leutnant took over the command;
and he did not find it an easy burden.  To distribute water among his
scattered, weary command, each individual of whom was stuck where he
was nearly as effectively as a fly upon a fly-paper, consumed hours of
time and much of the strength of the twenty men he brought as
reinforcements.  It was afternoon before he was ready to make his first
move, and by that time the riveting on _Ziethen_ was completed and she
was a whole ship again, ready to steam out of Resolution.  Brown could
now credit himself with further delays to her--all the length of time,
in fact, which he occupied in dying.

The Commander acted with energy.  He sent his casualties--heat-stroke,
broken ankles, cut feet--down the cliff to where the first landing had
been made.  There the men Brown had wounded the day before at last
received attention and water; the dead and wounded were sent back to
the ship for attention or burial, but all this was in rear of the
Commander's headquarters and main line of assault.  Having purged his
force of its weaker elements, the Commander proceeded to make his way
along the crest of the island, while a boat with full crew lay ready to
dash to any point to which it might be signalled, and another one
landed more men across the opening of the lagoon to cut off any attempt
Brown might make to evade attack again.  The Commander, thrusting aside
with contempt the expostulations of the Lieutenant he had superseded,
still did not realize the hopelessness of movement on the land, or, if
he did, he did not care how much time the business consumed as long as
it was done thoroughly.  From _Ziethen's_ bridge he had watched the
failure of the first frontal assault, and he was not going to throw
away another dozen lives in that fashion.  These long, weary flanking
movements were the alternative, and he accepted it stoically.  All the
same, a day of little water and a night of no rest had taken most of
the heart out of his men, and it was woefully slow progress that he
made.  Night came down and found his men still tangled utterly in the
crevasses of Resolution.  It found Brown, too, lodged in his cleft in
the cliff, tormented with thirst, running a dry tongue round his
cracked lips, agonized by the pain in his hands and feet, bitten in
every part of his body by the vicious flies, but all the same without a
thought of surrender.  That simply did not occur to him.  It was not
consonant with his heredity nor with his childish training.




_Chapter XVII_

Herr Hans Schmidt lay sleeping peacefully and noisily in his porch in
Panama.  He lay on his back; when he went to sleep his hands had been
crossed upon his stomach, but with the passage of time they had slid
down the incline until now they lay on his chest, so that his attitude
was entirely one of peace and resignation.  Beside him Frau Schmidt
slumbered just as peacefully and not quite as noisily; for the Schmidts
believed in maintaining the good old tradition of the family double bed
despite the heat of the tropics.

Verily was Herr Schmidt entitled to the blissful sleep which comes of a
sense of completed duty.  He was head of the German unofficial
representatives on the Pacific coast, and all his work so far had been
thorough and successful.  He had gleaned from stray references the
strength of Admiral Cradock's squadron and he had reported it to
Admiral von Spee, and the result had been obvious at Coronel.  At
Guayaquil and Callao he had colliers ready to sail on the instant--one
of them, thanks to lavish expenditure of funds and jugglery with
papers, actually under the British flag.  Should von Spee decide to
return northwards from Coronel he would find abundance of best Welsh
steam coal awaiting him, or if _Ziethen_ turned up unexpectedly there
would be the same kindly reception ready for her.  Everywhere German
agents were seeking bits of news to report to him, so that he could
piece them together and pass them on.  He knew all about the British
battle cruiser in the West Indies, and he could name the ships which
were watching lest German commerce destroyers should push out of
American Atlantic ports; he did not know, all the same, about Admiral
Sturdee's fleet which was fitting out in England, but for that he bears
no blame.  The discovery of the object of this squadron was the
business of the central organization, which failed lamentably.  No,
Schmidt had done everything that could be expected of him, and he was
fully entitled to the blissful sleep which encompassed him and which
was about to be so rudely interrupted.

The telephone at the bedside rang sharply, and Schmidt started up,
blinking himself into rapid wakefulness.  Beside him his wife muttered
heavily, humped over on her side, and clawed her tangled hair out of
her eyes.  She switched on the light while Schmidt pulled back the
mosquito net and reached for the telephone instrument.

The first sounds to reach his ear were apparently meaningless
gibberish, but it seemingly did not disconcert him.  He uttered
gibberish in reply, and with password and countersign thus exchanged
his agent could safely pour forth his news into Herr Schmidt's
receptive ear.  The torrent of rapid German was of an import which made
Herr Schmidt start in surprise.

'What?' he demanded.  'Where are they now?'

'They were going through Gatun when I tried to telephone first, sir,'
came the answer.  'They must be almost at the Cut now.'

'But why did I not hear of this at once?' demanded Herr Schmidt
savagely.

The voice at the receiver fell away into a placatory whine.

'I couldn't, sir.  Really, sir.  These two Englishmen here were too
closely after us.  They've taken Schulz.  I'm sure they have.  I've
told you about them often before.  I simply couldn't get a line to
Panama before this.  They were all too busy, sir.'

'Rubbish!' exploded Herr Schmidt.  'You Gatun set are a gang of cowards
and worse.  You say you don't even know the battle cruiser's name?'

'No, sir.  Couldn't get it anyway.  But it's a battle cruiser for
certain.  Twenty thousand tons.  And the light cruiser's the
_Penzance_.'

'Bah!' said Schmidt.  'Get her name at once.  And all about her--where
she comes from and what she's doing.  If you can't do that in Gatun
you're not on my pay list any more.  Report again in two hours' time.'

Schmidt slammed down the receiver and heaved himself out of bed.  His
hairy legs protruded beneath his brief nightshirt, and there was a hint
of hairy chest at its open throat.  He put on his thick round glasses
with one hand and reached for his trousers with the other.  While
pulling on his trousers he thrust his bare feet anyhow into his shoes.
Then, with a growl at his wife, he went clattering out of the house to
the garage.  Three minutes later, in the growing light of dawn, his car
was roaring out of Panama with its headlights blazing, while Schmidt,
thick body bent, grasped the wheel in his big hairy hands.  Out of
Panama he went, with his car leaping madly over the fantastic bumps and
hollows of the country road.  He tore through the ruins of Old Panama
and onward where the road degenerated into a mere track at the spot
where the Canal Zone adjoined the Republic of Panama.  A steady hand
and powerful wrists were necessary to hold the car to the track, but
burly Hans Schmidt was a brilliant driver.  He swung aside on to an
even narrower path where the undergrowth crashed beneath his wheels and
tore at the body.  Uphill he went, his foot steady on the accelerator,
until the path ran into a small clearing beyond which stood a tall
half-ruined building which, nevertheless, by its patching and by the
condition of its courtyard, showed signs of recent occupation.  Here
Schmidt stopped the car, and with an agility unexpected in one of his
bulk he scrambled out and rushed into the building and up the rotten
stone stairs.

The tall room at the top of the tower was modern in its furnishings;
indeed, the modernity was carried to an extreme pitch, for the main
parts of the furniture comprised a receiving and transmitting wireless
plant of the highest possible power.  The old ruined tower, once a
fortress which had been taken and sacked by Morgan and his buccaneers
two and a half centuries ago, was now one of the central ganglia of the
German Pacific secret service.  On a camp bed at one side of the room
lay a young man, half asleep, at the table by the instruments sat
another, with the receivers on his ears.  They both looked up when Herr
Schmidt entered, but they were treated with scant courtesy.  Schmidt's
first action was to jerk head and thumb back to the door, and they rose
slowly to obey.  The one with the instruments offered Schmidt the
bearing pad the messages recently intercepted--all sorts of messages,
in code and _en clair_, mercantile and military--but Schmidt cast it
aside after flipping through its pages and running an eye over the
messages.

'Outside,' he growled, 'quickly.'

They went, shambling, while Schmidt threw himself into the chair,
adjusted the receiver, and began tuning in the instruments with his
thick hands, making the adjustments for a general call with steady
delicacy.  From a pocket at the back of his trousers he produced a
small book printed on fine paper; and with a stub of pencil and a scrap
of writing-paper he made a note or two, constantly referring to the
book.  Soon the message he had in mind was written in code on the
paper; with his heavy face upturned to the ceiling he memorized it, and
then, striking a match, he burnt the piece of paper bearing his notes.
The code book was thrust back into his pocket, and above it, inside the
pocket, he adjusted the fish-hook which was fastened in the lining.
The unwary hand which dived into that pocket in search of Germany's
most secret naval code would be lacerated and torn excruciatingly.
Then Schmidt set about broadcasting his message, sending it out again
and again.  His sub-stations at Callao and Valparaiso would take it in
and relay it; the cables would bear it by devious routes back to
Germany.  Von Spee on the Chilean coast would receive it; the
_Ziethen_, lost somewhere in the Pacific, would take it in as well.
Hour after hour Schmidt sent out that message, sitting in his grotesque
garb of nightshirt and trousers while the sweat ran down his unshaved
cheeks and heavy jowl.  It was not the sort of message he could trust
to subordinates.

For the tremendous naval strength of England was to be exerted against
von Spee's squadron.  There was to be no more attempts to engage him
with armoured cruisers or obsolete battleships.  There was a new power
at the Admiralty--Fisher, who had become First Sea Lord at the time of
the disaster at Coronel.  Von Spee was to be hounded down and
exterminated.  Battle cruisers were to be used, the most deadly enemies
of the armoured cruiser.  Admiral Sturdee was to be sent from England
with _Invincible_ and _Inflexible_ and half a dozen modern cruisers
round the Horn to sweep northwards up the Pacific.  But this part of
the plan was unknown to Schmidt--it was unknown to any German until von
Spee at the Falklands saw the tripod masts of the battle cruisers and
read his death in that sight.  The southward sweep was what concerned
Schmidt at the moment.

H.M. battle cruiser _Leopard_ had been stationed for three weeks
already in the West Indies; there she could guard against von Spee, or
any detachment from his force, passing the Panama Canal and ravaging
the rich English shipping of the Caribbean and the Gulf, and there also
she could be ready to cut off any movement of the Germans northward
round the Horn.  But to the new personality at the Admiralty any such
defensive attitude was distasteful and obnoxious.  _Leopard_ must be
used offensively.  Let her pass the Canal herself, instead of waiting
for the Germans to do it; let her seek out the enemy instead of waiting
passively for the enemy to come within her grasp.  It was the truer,
more decisive strategy, and the orders were passed to _Leopard_ on the
same day that the other orders were given to Admiral Sturdee.

So that _Leopard_ and her attendant light cruiser _Penzance_ had passed
out of the West Indies and the cognizance of the German agents there,
and was even now making the passage of the Canal, the first ship of all
Britain's fleet to make use of the waterway--one month open, only.  The
whining voice on Herr Schmidt's telephone had told him of her passing
Gatun lock, and now, while Schmidt was broadcasting his warning to all
who might read it, she was going through Miraflores lock and her bow
was wet with the salt water of the Pacific.  Her twenty-four knots and
her 12-inch guns meant death to any German ship on that ocean; small
wonder, then, that Herr Schmidt received the news so gravely, and small
wonder that he prayed to his German God that the electrical
disturbances of the Pacific would not prevent the reception of the
warning he was sending out.  With the damp, sticky heat calling forth
the sweat from every pore he bent again and again to his duty, his
masterful hands tapping out the staccato Morse at regular half-hour
intervals.  He did his duty thoroughly, as every German did.  From down
below came the faint thud-thud of the engine and the deep hum of the
dynamo; the shrill whine of the mosquitoes circling round the sweating
head blended with the hum.  They bit the back of his thick neck, and
they sought out his uncovered ankles.




_Chapter XVIII_

Albert Brown had spent a weary night.  Before morning he had used the
last of his water, and his thirst occupied nearly all his thoughts.
His hunger had led him to eat some of his tinned provisions, and that,
of course, increased his thirst inordinately.  From the cessation of
the noise of the riveting on board _Ziethen_ he deduced that repairs
were completed, but as long as a landing party was on shore it was his
duty to go on fighting and keep it occupied, and so detain _Ziethen_
longer still at Resolution.  He fought down his thirst, and he fell now
and again into a troubled sleep, from which he awoke each time with a
start and listened to the clamorous noises made in the otherwise still
night by the landing party.

It is difficult to imagine the condition of the surface of Resolution.
Think of a stretch of mud exposed to the sun.  It cracks in all
directions, breaking up into small cakes.  The lava of Resolution has
done the same thing; the pieces of lava of which it is composed are of
much the same size and shape as a dining-room table would be if it were
solid down to the end of its legs, and the cracks between the pieces
vary in depth from one to ten feet.  Now realize that the edges of each
cake are sharp as knives, and that the surfaces of each cake are seamed
with minor cracks whose edges are equally sharp.  Add to this the facts
that landslides and earthquake action have tumbled the blocks over each
other higgledy-piggledy, and that the general slope of the whole mass
is on one side steeper than the roof of a house and on the other nearly
as steep.  Finally, dot the whole slopes with intensely spiny cactus,
and a faint mental picture can be formed of the difficulty of progress
over them in the dark, especially when hampered by thirst on a hot
night.  A hundred yards in an hour is a high speed--six hundred yards
in six hours is impossible.

This was the lesson which each officer of _Ziethen_ had to learn in
turn, and which each refused to accept as truth from his junior.  The
Commander doubted what the Lieutenant said about it, and Captain von
Lutz, who, of course, did not leave his ship, doubted both the
Commander and the Lieutenant.  When morning came and found Brown still
alive and untaken (he informed every one of the fact by sending a
couple of bullets along _Ziethen's_ bridge, narrowly missing the
officer of the watch), pleasant expectation on board changed to furious
consternation.

The semaphore came into action to goad the unhappy Commander with a
proper sense of his failure.  Captain von Lutz interfered with the
plans of the Commander, and abruptly sent the last fifty men who could
be spared from the work of the ship in a dash for the inner shore in an
assault upon the place where he judged Brown to be.  He was only one
hundred yards out in his estimate of the line; that was good judgment,
not bad, considering that he had only the noise of rifle shots echoing
from a cliff to guide him, and that _Ziethen_, thanks to her turn away,
was now nearly half a mile from Brown.

Brown saw the boats coming and turned his rifle upon them, but now,
with his teeth chattering with fever and his hands trembling, he could
not make even moderately good practice.  He knew that Fate was close
upon him as he looked along the rifle barrel and saw the foresight
dancing like a live thing in the U of the backsight, and as shot after
shot went wide.  But the rifle is a sweet tool, and gives of its best
even in bungling hands as far as in it lies.  Twice Brown loosed off,
almost by accident, at the right moment, and each time a man in one of
the boats collapsed upon his thwart.  Two casualties could not stop the
boats.  They rushed in to the foot of the cliff and the boats' crews
bundled out, just as in the first misguided attempt, scattering a
little swarm of _Amblyrhincus_--marine iguanas--who had been
comfortably feeding on seaweed at the water's edge regardless of the
din of battle echoing round the island.

Even at a hundred yards Brown found that he made but poor practice.  He
dropped two men only in five shots, and then, reaching into his pouches
to refill his magazine, he realized that only two of them were full; he
had only twenty rounds left.  With such a small reserve he knew that he
could hardly stop this close attack--and the one which must develop
soon out on his left would be able to push forward unopposed.  It was
the last, desperate death grapple.  Brown's lips parted in a harsh grin
so that the black cracks upon them showed in deep contrast with his
white teeth.  He pulled his failing strength together for one more
effort, steadied his weak limbs, and tried to shoot the attackers down
deliberately, one by one.

More than one of the struggling attacking party dropped, but far more
by reason of the difficulties of the ascent than in consequence of the
casualties the forward impetus died away.  Just as before the climbers
crouched down in hollows and crannies; from the sound of Brown's firing
they had formed some idea of his position, and they began to fire back
at him.  Once more Brown heard the sharp noise of bullets passing close
beside him, and once more little puffs of lava dust arose here and
there where the bullets struck.  But on this occasion the attack had
begun farther off to one side and Brown was not perched quite so high
up.  So that his position was not nearly so dominating, and he could
not overlook the lumps of rock behind which lay his enemies.  Only here
and there could he see small portions of the bodies of the men firing
at him, and in his shaking condition he could not hit these with
certainty or anything approaching certainty.  He caused another two
casualties, but these did not deter the forty men who were firing at
him, and when he had filled his magazine with his last cartridges he
had to keep these in reserve to use against the last rush.  He lay as
close to the lava as he could, awaiting in uncomplaining patience for
the end to come, while the bullets crackled and sang all round about
him.

Soon his quiescence was noted by those below; the bolder and the
stronger among them heaved themselves up and made little advances up
the face of the cliff from one block to another, out of one crevice
into the next.  Before long most of the line was bellying forward, up
the cliff, and working along it, emboldened by the cessation of Brown's
fire.  Only half a dozen men, the less energetic or the fainter
hearted, still lay crouched in their cover and maintained a hectic fire
on the patch where they thought Brown lay.  They wasted ammunition at
an amazing rate, but they made an encouraging noise even if they did
nothing else.  Brown, peering with one eye over the edge, could see two
or three men actually only twenty yards below him and fifty yards away.
Soon one of them would get a clear sight of him, and that would be the
end.  He felt no resentment, either against Fate or against the men who
were about to take his life; he had done all he could.

At that very moment the battle was interrupted.  A tremendous braying
from _Ziethen's_ siren called every one's attention clamorously to the
signal which was being wig-wagged rapidly and repeatedly from her
bridge semaphore.  It was the general recall.

For some minutes the attackers hesitated.  It was hard to go back when
success was so close at hand.  But the siren brayed again, and the
semaphore gesticulated feverishly.  No one could act in independence of
orders so definite and so oft repeated.  Reluctantly the officer
commanding the landing party blew his whistle and the attackers turned
back down the cliff, crawling back perilously, dropping down little
precipices, more slowly than they would have gone had their effort been
successful.  Brown saw them go, and as a last effort he raised himself
and sent a bullet through the shoulder of the officer in command--which
had the very desirable effect of delaying the retreat while the landing
party turned and wasted much further ammunition upon him until further
trumpetings of _Ziethen's_ siren recalled them to duty.  They dropped
down to the boats, lifted in their wounded and dead, and pulled slowly
back to the cruiser.

Nevertheless it was not the evacuation of the island by the landing
party which took up so much time; the real delay was caused by the
huge, useless, straggling mob on the outer face.  After the Commander
in charge had read the signals from the vantage point on the crest he
had so painfully gained, he had still to pass the word for retreat
throughout the length and breadth of his straggling command, and having
done so he still had to get his men down to the beaches.  Most of them
had been straying loose over Resolution for nearly forty-eight hours;
they were dispirited, lame, fatigued, and most woefully undisciplined.
Many of the lazy and insubordinate among them had found crannies here
and there and were stretched out fast asleep in some tiny area of
shade.  In the blinding noonday heat even the best of the men moved
slowly when the heart was taken out of them by the order to retreat,
and many of them strayed back in directions quite opposite to the one
the Commander desired.  The frightful heat of the rocks, enough to
blister a bare hand laid upon them, discouraged activity; men who would
struggle cheerfully forward into action would soon cease to struggle
when defeat, and that by a single man, had to be admitted.  The
Commander and the Lieutenant raved and swore as much as their dry
throats permitted, while the sweat drenched their soiled ducks; the
petty officers struggled to keep the men within earshot of them on the
move; but it was a painful, hopeless task.  A man a hundred yards away
might as well be ten miles away for all the use it was giving orders to
him--there was no going back to him without wasting another hour.

To the wretched Commander on the crest the hours after noon seemed to
race by; the sun seemed to sink towards the horizon at three times its
usual speed, while the messages spilt out by the accursed semaphore
became more and more caustic.  He watched the incredibly slow progress
of his men down to the boats with fever consuming his soul.  There
seemed no end to the white-clad figures who came into sight one after
the other, round the bulge of the island at ten minute intervals--and
some of them were actually still trying to make their way up to the
crest instead of down to the boats.

Seaman Muller, the ship's bad character, came struggling along the top
of the crest past the Commander.  His feet were very sore and his
clothes were in tatters, and his gait was, to use a homely simile, like
that of a cat on hot bricks.  With his rifle hitched over his shoulder
he was picking his way along the more easy stretch of small lava at the
top of the island.  He came within fifty yards of the blaspheming
Commander, who shouted to him to get away diagonally down the slope to
the boats, but Seaman Muller made an inaudible reply--he was not a very
disciplined character at the very best of times.  He was certainly not
going to plunge down into that awful inferno of rocks and cactus until
he had to.  He would keep along the crest until he was above the boats,
and then he would, perhaps, graciously go down the steep slope.  Until
then he was going to keep to this easier part of the island--easier,
but most uneasy.  He hitched his equipment about him and continued the
agonizing effort of struggling up and down the lava blocks.

A hundred yards past the Commander he stopped to rest.  He sat down
where a lava block now cast a fair amount of shade, thanks to the
setting of the sun.  He mopped his streaming face; he considered his
thirst and went off into a happy dream, imagining one hundred ways of
quenching it, in none of which water took any part whatever.  And as he
allowed these delightful visions to play over him his eye roamed about
carelessly over the tangle of cliff across the arc of the lagoon.  A
quarter of a mile away, one-third the way up the cliff, he seemed to
see a speck of something which was neither cliff nor cactus.  It might
be the head and shoulder of a man who was kneeling up and peering round
about over the top of a block of lava.  Seaman Muller unslung his rifle
and threw himself upon his face.  He slipped a cartridge into the
breech.  The red splendour of the setting sun illuminated the speck of
target presented to him.  Muller was neither a good shot nor a musketry
enthusiast.  He took aim and fired just as he would have thrown a stone
at a stray cat or bird.  He did not even see whether he hit what he
aimed at, for at the sound of the shot the empurpled face of a petty
officer shot up from a hollow close beside him and an order bellowed
into his ear roused even the undisciplined Muller to rise to his feet
and sling his rifle and continue his slouching march back to the boats.
And for firing the shot against orders he was very properly run into
the punishment cells as soon as he and the Commander had reached
_Ziethen_ again.

But that last shot, fired in the last few minutes of daylight, had
reached its billet.  The sharp-nosed bullet had hit Brown high up on
the right shoulder; it had smashed a rib and a shoulder-blade on its
way through, and had flung him back into his crevice.  At first he was
merely numb.  He put his hands to his wound and was surprised to find
them red with blood.  It was some time before pain came--after the sun
had set, in fact.




_Chapter XIX_

The beginnings of Herr Schmidt's urgent calls had reached _Ziethen_
soon after sunrise, but they were in a very mutilated form and so
distorted that it could not even be guessed what cypher was being
employed.  The wireless telegraphist declared he could recognize the
touch on the key of the main American agent, but this thin bit of
evidence carried no weight.  Only later was clear proof obtained that
the message was in the Most Secret code, and from Schmidt himself, and
it was nearly noon before the fragments of successive messages could be
pieced together so that Captain von Lutz could read their dread
import--that a British battle cruiser and light cruiser had passed the
Panama Canal into the Pacific.  As soon as he was sure of it there was
no hesitation about his decisions.  With certain death cruising after
him in this fashion he was not going to linger within sight of land.
He issued immediate orders for the recall of the landing party.

Nevertheless, as has been seen, those orders were more easily issued
than obeyed.  It was past three o'clock by the time that the inner
landing party had reached the ship with a fresh load of wounded and
dead to madden those who had stayed on board, and by the time night
fell on Resolution only the smallest driblets of the other force had
trickled down to the boats; there were still nearly two hundred men
hopelessly entangled on the slope.  And with the coming of darkness the
task of getting the weary men to imperil neck and limb by continuing
the descent became hopeless.  The petty officers blew their whistles
and bellowed orders through megaphones into the night, but they did
small enough good.  Now and again a little group or a stray individual
would come sliding down the last descent to where the boats lay, but
the hours went by and the numbers on the cliff had not diminished very
much.  Messages flashed to _Ziethen_ did nothing to allay the
impatience of Captain von Lutz as he strode about fuming.  With very
little additional motive he would have taken the ship out and abandoned
what was left of the landing party, but it was really too much to risk.
Even if he had them all back, _Ziethen_ would be perceptibly
shorthanded, thanks to the casualties Brown had caused and the
innumerable cut feet and sprained ankles incurred.  The loss of another
fifty men would be extremely serious, for Captain von Lutz had to bear
in mind the prospect of strenuous coaling at sea and of sending away
prize crews, to say nothing of having to fight further battles against
hostile ships.  He could not bring himself to abandon the stragglers,
especially as it meant leaving them to certain death on a waterless
island.  He could only fret and fume and send orders to get the men
into the boats as soon as possible, the while he calculated the chances
of the British battle cruiser setting a course for the Galapagos and
the time it would take her to get there.

The night wore through and morning came, and the broad light of day was
pouring upon the tortured rocks before the last worn straggler came
stumbling into the boats; it was almost high noon before _Ziethen_ had
her anchors up and was heading out of that accursed lagoon to the open
sea with a depressed, weary crew and exasperated officers.  For once
the magnificent German efficiency had come to grief; the stern German
discipline had failed.  Much may be made of the rocks and thorns of
Resolution, but some people are inclined to take most of the credit for
the achievement away from these natural and incidental circumstances
and bestow it upon Leading Seaman Brown, who had voluntarily opposed
himself to the might of an armoured cruiser, who had foreseen that the
enterprise would cost him his life, and who had gladly paid this price
without hope of applause for the sake of the Navy in which he served.

For Brown was dying surely enough.  A night of torture had followed his
wound.  The pain came steadily, growing stronger and stronger as the
crushing numbness following the initial shock had died away.  He was in
a high fever, and the dreadful pain made him heave and toss in pitiful,
child-like efforts to get away from what was tormenting him.  He had
been thirsty enough before, but that thirst was nothing compared to the
suffering he was now experiencing.  Several times that night he had
struggled back to consciousness, obsessed by an overwhelming thought
that there might be a little water left in one of his two
water-bottles.  Each time he had writhed himself about until his left
hand could grasp them and draw the corks and raise each in turn to his
cracked and swollen lips.  Once only--the first time--had this
agonizing effort encountered success; three or four drops of fluid,
cool and delightful, trickled out of the bottle's iron neck into his
furred mouth, but that was all.  There was never anything in either of
the bottles afterwards, but Brown always hoped there was.

And as Brown held his left hand to his riven shoulder a troubled memory
drifted into his mind of the German boy he had shot through the
shoulder the day before yesterday.  Brown's regretful mind recalled
just how that boy had rolled out from behind his cover, trying to hold
his shoulder together just as Brown was doing now.  He remembered the
frown of pain upon the boy's pleasant face, and he remembered how all
day afterwards he had lain in the torturing sun with the flies thick
about him, calling feebly in his unknown tongue for what Brown guessed
must be water.  Water!  Of course it was water for which he was asking.
No one would dream of asking for anything else; there was nothing else
in all this world one-millionth part as valuable as water.  The
heartbroken cries of the German boy echoed in Brown's ears with
pathetic persistence; he heard them so long that he felt he must rouse
himself to satisfy them.  Once he had made up his mind to the effort it
was easy enough.  There had descended upon him a God-given ability to
float quietly and without effort through the air; it was so easy Brown
was surprised he had not discovered it before.  He floated down to
where the German boy was lying, with the sun on his pale hair; he took
his hand, and the boy opened his eyes and smiled.  It was such a
friendly smile; Albert loved him from that moment for the niceness of
his blue, childlike eyes and his golden sunburn.  Brown lifted him ever
so easily just by the hand he held, and together they drifted away from
the ugly sharp rocks into a place where there was a pleasant shade.
The boy turned to him and made a gentle inquiry, and Brown nodded his
head and said, 'Presently.'  So they went on to where tall trees reared
themselves up over a meadow of green grass, and there, beside the
trees, there was a little, deep river of clear water; you could see it
winding away over the green plain.  And they drank of the water, and it
was perfectly cool and wonderful.  They drank and they drank, and they
turned to each other and laughed with their happiness, and then they
lowered themselves into the clear depths and drifted with the stream,
lapped about with water, in companionable nakedness.  Everything was
very friendly and happy and most blissfully perfect.

Then Brown turned and smiled to the pale-haired boy again, but he did
not smile back.  Instead his face was contorted with pain again, and he
menaced Brown with his fists and glared at him with wild eyes, and
Brown writhed back from him and found that the cool water had fallen
away from around him, leaving him on the rocky bottom.  And it was hot
again, and the rocks beneath him were sharp--oh, and his shoulder hurt
him so!  With a start and a groan Brown came back to consciousness, to
a dark world wherein flaming wheels hovered on his eyelids--a world of
torment and agony and thirst, thirst, thirst.

The good things of this world had passed him by.  He had never had an
eye for the joy and wonder of a woodland triumphant with primroses or
mysterious with bluebells.  He had never known woman's love, not even
bought love, and he had never known the love of a child, the touch of a
tiny soft palm upon his cheek and fairy laughter.  He knew nothing of
the grim majesty of Lear nor of the sunny happiness of Twelfth Night.
Good food and good wine and the glory of Rembrandt had alike passed him
by.  Never even had he known liberty; he had been all his life the
slave either of a mother's ambition or of a Navy which demands her
servitors' all to bestow upon unthinking ingrates.  All his happiness,
all his talents, his life itself, had been swept away in the tide of
the Iron Age, the Age of the Twelve-Inch Gun.  The achievements of
Brown at twenty embraced nothing older than death and destruction.
Brown might have died at eighty in a better-adjusted world and left
behind him a long record of steady addition to the sum of human
happiness, and the test of that might be whether he had not left behind
any materials for a story.  Yet if Brown had had the choice, just
before his landing on Resolution, he would undoubtedly have selected
for himself the career which has been outlined in these pages, and
other people would have chosen the same for him too.

Brown never knew the satisfaction of success; he never knew what
stupendous results eventually crowned his efforts.  Later on that last
day he came back to consciousness; he swept the flies from his face
and, under the impulse of his one consuming motive, he edged himself to
the brink of the rock and peered out over the lagoon.  The blue, blue
water luxuriated in the drenching sunshine; the grim surround of cliffs
danced and wavered in the shimmering heat before his reeling eyes.  At
the water's edge the marine iguanas browsed upon the seaweed as their
Stone Age great-grandfathers had done.  Far put at sea the gulls
wheeled and sank over the grey line that marked the ocean currents'
edge.  But of _Ziethen_ Brown could see nothing; the jagged cliffs cut
off from his view the smudge of smoke which marked where she was
heading out for the horizon.  She had gone; she had got clear, and all
Brown's efforts to detain her had only ended in a trivial forty-eight
hours' delay, of no importance at all in a six months' cruise.  Brown
fell forward on to the rock again with a groan of broken-hearted
despair, and flaming thirst and dreadful pain wrapped him about once
more.  They killed him between them, did pain and thirst, before the
end of that day.  He had been a plaguey long time dying, but he was
dead at last.




Chapter XX

Captain Richard E. S. Saville-Samarez, C.B., M.V.O., sat alone in his
cabin at his desk pondering the problems set before him by the terse
Admiralty instructions received by wireless and cable, by the small
Pacific chart before him bearing the estimated positions of von Spee
and his squadron, and by the various possibilities which had gradually
accumulated in his not highly imaginative brain.  Of a surety his
passage of the Panama Canal in H.M.S. _Leopard_ with _Penzance_ in
company had caused very considerable stir.  The Canal authorities had
been dubious enough about letting him through, despite the fact that
His Britannic Majesty's representative on the spot had made
preparations for his arrival twenty-four hours before, quoting terms
and treaties which declared the Canal open to all shipping whether in
peace or war.  Cables everywhere had been alive with the news when he
entered the Canal; excited American papers would on the morrow be
informing their readers that at last the British Navy had shown a sign
of life instead of leaving hapless squadrons to be exterminated by von
Spee.  Already _Leopard's_ presence would be notified to Berlin, and
German diplomatists would protest the while the German Admiralty noted
the information and weighed anxiously the effect of this slight
dispersion upon the crushing superiority of the Grand Fleet at Scapa,
where thirty Dreadnoughts awaited the emerging of the High Sea Fleet
from its mine-fields and protected harbours.

Captain Saville-Samarez was not very different in appearance from what
he had been twenty years before; he was not of the type that alters
greatly with age.  There were grey hairs now among his irrepressible
brown ones, and authority and responsibility had brought character into
his face; there were two firm vertical lines between his eyebrows, and
his eyes seemed deeper set, and there was a grim line or two about his
mouth, but he still seemed extraordinarily young, with his fresh
complexion and upright carriage.  Truth to tell, responsibility and
authority sat lightly on his shoulders; he was never a man for deep
thought or of much imagination, and the steadiness of his nerve had
brought him out of whatever difficulties he had found himself in
without any ageing flurry or worry.  Little jobs like picking up
moorings in a twenty-thousand-ton battleship in a crowded harbour with
a full gale blowing he had simply accepted and carried through with
automatically-acquired skill, and without any frightening pictures of
what might happen if he made a mistake.

But just at present he was thinking deeply and trying his utmost to use
all the imagination he possessed.  He realized how fortunate he had
been at present, the commander of a battle cruiser was perhaps the
biggest plum in the Service open to one of his rank.  Moreover, he held
an independent command at present, and the exigencies of the Service
had put _Penzance_ under his command as well.  He grinned to himself at
the recollection of the series of chances which had kept _Leopard_ free
from admirals--there were dozens of admirals who might have received
the chance, and been glad of it, under some slight variation of
circumstances.  And an admiral would of course have gained the credit
of any exploits _Leopard_ might achieve, and Captain Saville-Samarez
would be forgotten, forced to be content with a casual inevitable
reference in the official report.

Nevertheless, an admiral, while receiving the credit of success, would
also have to bear the responsibility for failure, and in the absence of
an admiral that responsibility would belong to Captain Saville-Samarez,
and the Captain was almost worried about it.  His instructions gave him
a free enough hand; what he had to do was to hunt down von Spee and his
squadron, concerting for that purpose with the other officers on the
spot.  The only tie upon him was the emphasis laid in his orders upon
the necessity to keep _Leopard_ from damage, no destruction of armoured
cruisers would be worth the loss of a battle cruiser.  To a staff
officer such a condition would appear natural enough, as _Leopard_ had
an advantage of at least four knots in speed over any of von Spee's
armoured cruisers, and her guns outranged any of von Spee's by a couple
of miles or more.  But if _Leopard_ by herself encountered von Spee
with his three armoured cruisers all at once--_Scharnhorst_,
_Gneisenau_ and _Ziethen_--things might not be so easy.  Two cruisers
might close into range while he was sinking the third, or they might
all scatter and he would be lucky to bag one of them, while the light
cruisers would make themselves unpleasant simultaneously by trying to
torpedo him.  _Penzance_ might get badly hit too, and that would be his
fault as well.  The rage of the British public if it heard that a
damaged British ship had had ignominiously to seek internment in a
neutral port would be unbounded.

So that a battle, were one to take place, would demand caution--it was
this need for caution which was one of the factors worrying the
Captain.  And, all the same, a battle need not necessarily take place.
Von Spee had last been heard of three thousand miles away, and to find
a squadron hidden in three thousand miles of water was not an easy
matter; on the contrary, it was an exceedingly difficult one.  Von Spee
might round the Horn and make a dash for home across the Atlantic and
be half-way back before the news reached _Leopard_; he might even turn
northward again and slip past _Leopard_ and gain the Panama Canal--and
that would mean Captain Saville-Samarez's professional ruin.  The
Captain realized that he needed all his wits to be sure of encountering
the enemy.

And he wanted to encounter them too.  With the age limit steadily
pursuing him up the captain's list, he could see plainly enough that
without something extraordinary happening he would just reach
rear-admiral's rank before he had to retire.  Unless he did something
to distinguish himself he would end his life as rear-admiral on the
retired list like fifty others he could name.  He wanted to do
something to make his name remembered, and the surest way would be to
sink a German ship or two.  Then the public would know him as
'Saville-Samarez, the chap who caught von Spee,' or 'Saville-Samarez,
you know, 'im 'oo sank the _Scharnhorst_'; and the Captain knew how
valuable such a label tied on to him would be.  It would be very handy
if he went in for politics; it might bring him a K.C.B.--and he wanted
knighthood, for it had been the reward of his grandfather and
great-grandfather before him.  Above all, it might obtain for him a
fat, comfortable colonial governorship on his retirement, and
Saville-Samarez, with no means beyond his pay, urgently desired one.
With the reward of success so rich, and the penalty of failure so
severe, it behoved him to devote all possible energy to the solution of
the problem.

Characteristically, however, he was making his final decision by
himself.  He had run through the meagre data with the Captain of
_Penzance_, and heard his opinion, but he had left the final making up
of his mind until he was alone.  He did not shirk responsibility, and
he had the utmost contempt for those who did--contempt which was only
equalled by his contempt for councils of war in general.

He looked at the map, whereon von Spee was noted as as last heard of at
Valparaiso.  He studied the scattered shipping lanes.  He tried to get
into von Spee's skin and work out what he would do in von Spee's
position.  He glanced once more through the last reports of the British
secret agents.  There was coal at German disposal in various South
American Pacific ports, so that there was quite a sporting chance of
von Spee returning northward.  The wireless room of _Leopard_ was
continuously reporting hearing powerful messages in an unknown code,
and it seemed extremely likely that they were warnings of his approach
sent out to the German squadron.  That made it possible that the German
agents on the mainland thought it conceivable that German ships were
near.

Now von Spee had fought at Coronel and had entered Valparaiso with only
two armoured cruisers, _Scharnhorst_ and _Gneisenau_.  That was
certain.  Therefore his smallest armoured cruiser _Ziethen_, had been
detached before Coronel.  Whither would von Spee be likely to send her?
Northward?  Not likely, with the whole Japanese navy on the look-out
for her, and not much plunder to be obtained in the Northern Pacific.
Westward, to the Indian Ocean?  That was the richest field of all; but
_Emden_ was there already, and the English fleet could as well hunt
down two cruisers as one.  Besides, _Charybdis_ lay on that route and
had made no report of meeting German ships, although that was no real
proof that _Ziethen_ had not gone that way.  (Captain Saville-Samarez
did not appreciate the profound truth of this last deduction.)
South-westward, to New Zealand and Australian waters?  Quite likely.
But in that case Captain Saville-Samarez had no business with her; his
duty was to get into touch with the main body.  But supposing _Ziethen_
had not been sent anywhere like this?  Supposing she was still near the
American coast?  Shipping certainly had not reported her, but she might
have her own reasons for lying in concealment.  She might have been in
collision or had engine-room trouble.  Certainly it was odd that she
had neither fought at Coronel nor been reported elsewhere.  Now
supposing she had been damaged, where would she try to effect repairs?
Somewhere within wireless reach of Panama too, added Captain
Saville-Samarez, making a false deduction from Herr Schmidt's
activities without making allowance for that gentleman's supreme
conscientiousness and ignorance of _Ziethen's_ whereabouts.  Captain
Saville-Samarez looked at the map just as Captain von Lutz had done a
week before, and came to exactly the same conclusion.  The Galapagos
Archipelago presented the most opportunities to a ship in need of
repair.

Captain Saville-Samarez went on to consider ways and means.  The
Archipelago lay a little out of his direct course south from Panama.
But _Penzance's_ most economical cruising speed was far in excess of
_Leopard's_.  The ships would overlook far more water separated than in
company.  And _Penzance's_ speed was far larger than that of any one of
von Spee's squadron, except perhaps _Dresden_.  She could look after
herself and keep out of danger by herself unless she experienced the
very worst of luck--and Captain Saville-Samarez was not of the type
which makes mental pictures of what might happen in the very worst of
circumstances.  He reached his final decision with promptitude.  and
did not think about it again.  His signal flew for the _Penzance's_
Captain to come on board _Leopard_, and a few quite brief sentences
explained to that officer what Captain Saville-Samarez wanted done.

So that when the Captain of _Penzance_ reached his own ship again he
set a fresh course which gradually took his ship away from _Leopard_,
diverging slightly away to the westward as the two ships headed south
across the Bay of Panama.  Leading Seaman Albert Brown at this moment
was only slightly thirsty; Muller's bullet did not hit him until sunset
that day, when _Penzance_ and _Leopard_ had diverged until they were
quite out of sight of each other.




_Chapter XXI_

Nelson once wrote that five minutes makes the difference between
victory and defeat.  It was hardly more than five minutes which made
the difference between the detection of _Ziethen_ and her possible
escape from observation.  Had _Ziethen_ only sailed half an hour
earlier she would have got away undetected to begin her career of
destruction, and the history of the world--of the British Cabinet at
any rate--would have been different.  For as _Penzance_, detached by
Captain Saville-Samarez to look round the Galapagos Archipelago, came
down upon Resolution from the north-east, _Ziethen_ was steering
north-west away from the island.  Just as Resolution came in sight a
pair of keen eyes on _Penzance_ detected a little trace of smoke far
away on the westerly horizon.  Smoke in that lost corner of the world
was uncommon, and therefore suspicious, and _Penzance_ headed after it
in all the pride of her twenty-seven knots.  In half an hour _Ziethen_
was definitely identified, and the ether was thrilling with the news as
_Penzance_ broadcast her information.

Vain it was now for _Ziethen_ to try to jam _Penzance's_ messages.
_Leopard_ was only a hundred miles away; besides, the men who built and
equipped _Penzance_ had a very clear idea of the duties she was to
perform, which is more than can be said of those who built _Charybdis_.
_Penzance_ was one of the most modern of cruisers, designed solely to
be of the utmost service to battleships.  She was a battleship's eyes,
a battleship's message bearer, and her immense speed and her powerful
wireless installation were given her solely for these ends.  Her news
trickled in to _Leopard_ hardly mutilated, and that great ship swung
her twenty-thousand tons round in pursuit.

The Captain of _Penzance_ knew his duty.  Although his ship could match
_Ziethen's_ 6-inch guns with 6-inch guns of her own, it was not his
business to put her fragile hull within reach when there was a battle
cruiser no distance off who would do the business for him without any
risk of damage.  _Ziethen_ was a bigger ship and carried armour far
more effective than _Penzance's_ fragile protective deck.  _Penzance_
could only possess the speed she boasted by reason of abandoning nearly
all other protection; _Ziethen_, built in an age when the naval mind
was a little muddled, had tried to combine all factors, speed (twenty
knots at the time of her launching was a high speed), hitting power
(German authorities did not place the same value upon large calibres as
did the English) and armour, with the result that now she was helpless
against a specialist.

She challenged action boldly enough; she wheeled, with her guns trained
out upon _Penzance_ and the range-takers eagerly chanting the ranges;
she charged forward, but _Penzance_ was not inclined to accept the
challenge.  Not a man on board who would not gladly have fought
_Ziethen_ to the death, but what was the use of incurring senseless
losses when _Leopard_ was pounding up behind with her 12-inch guns,
which would settle the matter without _Ziethen_ having the chance of
scoring a hit?  _Penzance_ kept away.  Her seven knots advantage in
speed was overwhelming.  No possible manoeuvre of _Ziethen's_ could
inveigle her into range.  It was not very long before _Ziethen_
sullenly abandoned her attempt to make a fight of it and turned
southwards at full speed in the hope of shaking off pursuit, or of
closing in to a fight, when darkness came.  And in reply to
_Penzance's_ reports _Leopard_ turned away to a converging course,
working up to her full twenty-four knots, edging rapidly up to the two
ships which were cleaving their way through the blue Pacific.

It was then, perhaps, during the weary hours of that long pursuit, that
Captain von Lutz tasted defeat and failure and self-contempt at their
bitterest.  One single man had caused this disaster; one man armed with
a rifle had brought about the destruction of _Ziethen_.  Captain von
Lutz looked back over those three days at Resolution.  A single one of
them would have sufficed to repair _Ziethen_ and set her off again upon
her career of destruction.  _Emden_ had done ten million pounds' worth
of destruction, and was still loose upon the Indian Ocean.  What of
_Ziethen_, with her more powerful guns and armour?  She had fought and
sunk one miserable third-class cruiser thirty years old which mattered
neither one way nor another in the clash of nations.  Now, because one
wretched English sailor had held her up at Resolution for forty-eight
hours longer than was necessary, _Ziethen's_ career was being ended.
Captain von Lutz had no illusions about that.  He knew that a battle
cruiser and a light cruiser had passed the Canal; the light cruiser had
arrived and was keeping him under observation, so that the battle
cruiser could not be far away.  And a battle cruiser would have no
difficulty at all in setting the final seal on the work which Albert
Brown had achieved at the cost of his life.  The tea ships and meat
ships and sugar ships, the ships carrying troops and the ships carrying
bullion, would pass to and fro across the southern waters without
_Ziethen_ to sink and burn them.

Yet although Captain von Lutz was so convinced of the approaching
destruction of his ship, he had no thought of giving up the game
without at least a final struggle.  Vigorous messages passed to the
engine-room, and soon _Ziethen's_ boilers were filled up with every
ounce of steam they could bear.  Night was not far off, and if thick
weather came with it _Ziethen_ had a chance of escape, or, on the other
hand, she might have a chance of closing with her adversaries and doing
as much damage as she herself received.  The pursuit must be prolonged
until dark, and it was with an anxious eye that Captain von Lutz
scanned the horizon as he paced about the bridge, the while officers
and men laboured furiously making every preparation for a fight for
life, stripping the ship of every conceivable combustible material,
handling ammunition, and testing range-finders and gunnery controls;
such is the queer nature of mankind that the imminent prospect of a
fight in which every single man of them might lose his life cheered
them all up immensely, and the depression and indiscipline which had
settled upon the ship after the ineffective attempts upon Resolution
vanished like mist.

Night came while _Leopard_ was still out of sight, and _Ziethen_ began
her attempts either to throw off _Penzance's_ pursuits or else to close
with her.  But the night was clear, and _Penzance's_ speed was
one-third as much again as _Ziethen's_.  An hour after nightfall the
moon rose, and it was an easy enough matter for the look-outs on
_Penzance_ to pick up the loom of the big cruiser in the darkness.
_Ziethen_ turned sixteen points and came charging back straight up her
own wake, but _Penzance_ saw her and kept out of her way.  _Ziethen_
resumed her old course, maintained it for half an hour, and then turned
two points to starboard.  That time _Penzance_ nearly lost her, but her
great speed enabled her to zigzag down the original course and find her
quarry again.  Before midnight the long expected help came--_Leopard_
with her 12-inch guns and twenty-four knots.  Then the two English
ships were able to take up positions comfortably on _Ziethen's_ port
and starboard quarters so that the wretched cruiser's chance of escape,
small enough to begin with, were now much less than half what they were.

All through the night the three ships drove on southwards through the
Pacific.  The Germans had no friends at sea within two thousand miles,
and they were acutely and uncomfortably conscious of the menacing,
silent presence of the British ships which were following after them,
like Death on his pale horse.  Twice already that night, in the hope
that the shadowy cruiser which had hovered after them was within range,
had they switched on searchlights and blasted the night with a salvo,
but each time they had gained no profit from the performance save for
the very definite comfort of noise and action.  It seemed to temper
down in their minds the terrible inevitability of the morrow.

But it could not be said that discipline was faltering.  German naval
_esprit de corps_ was of new but sturdy growth.  Every single man on
board (for the rumour had run round, as lower-deck rumours will) knew
that a battle cruiser was close upon them and that further resistance
was hopeless, yet no word was breathed of surrender and hardly a man
would have given his vote in favour of surrender.  A young navy cannot
afford to begin its traditions with a record of that sort.  German
sailors must fight to the death, so that those that follow after might
have at least a glorious failure to look back upon.  Four hundred men
must die for that sole purpose; at least let it be recorded that they
died not unwillingly.

With the first faint beginnings of daylight Captain Saville-Samarez
gave orders to reduce speed below the nineteen knots at which _Leopard_
had been ploughing through the sea since her junction with _Penzance_.
He was going to take no chances, with those stringent passages from his
instructions running in his mind.  Daylight was not going to find him
anywhere nearly in range of _Ziethen's_ 6-inch guns.  Even he,
phlegmatic and confident though he was, had found the tension and
excitement too great for sleep.  He had been pacing about all night,
the while the crackling wireless was sending through the relay ships to
the Admiralty in Whitehall the glad news that one at least of the
German Pacific Squadron was within the grip of the British Navy.
Before dawn a reply had reached him, and he knew that the K.C.B. he
desired would be his by the end of the year--if only he did what was
expected of him.

And when daylight was almost come Captain von Lutz on _Ziethen's_
bridge knew that his last hope was gone.  Far away on the horizon,
almost dead astern, his powerful glasses could make out through the
clear atmosphere the unmistakable tripod mast of a Dreadnought battle
cruiser.  There was death in that insignificant little speck.  Still
there was some chance of doing damage.  _Penzance_ lay closer in, on
the starboard quarter.  _Ziethen_ wheeled, with her guns reaching up to
extreme elevation.  As the sun's disc cleared the sea a crashing salvo
broke forth from her side, but the range was too great.  The columns of
water where the shells fell rose from the surface of the sea nearly
half a mile from the target.  Five seconds later _Penzance_, in
obedience to an irritated signal from _Leopard_, had turned away and
was racing out of danger at her full twenty-seven knots, clearing the
range for the 12-inch guns.

On _Leopard's_ bridge stood Captain Saville-Samarez.  The conning tower
was no place for him during this affair.  The whole business would be
as dangerous as shooting a sitting rabbit; and Captain Saville-Samarez
had taken _Leopard_ into Heligoland Bight astern of _Lion_, and from
the bridge had seen _Mainz_ blown to pieces by the shattering salvoes.
Now he saw _Ziethen_ swing eastwards, racing towards the level sun in
one last hope of distracting the aim of the English gunners.  But
_Leopard_ turned eastward too, steering a parallel course with the sun
dead ahead and her guns training out to port.  Eight 12-inch guns
composed _Leopard's_ main armament; and the 12-inch gun had twice the
range of the 6-inch gun and fired a shell eight times as heavy, with a
shattering effect twenty times as great.

_Leopard_ turned two points to port to get _Ziethen_ comfortably within
range, resumed her original course, and battle began.  One gun from
each turret volleyed forth in its deafening, appalling thunder, and
four 12-inch shells went soaring forth on their ten-mile flight.  Each
shell weighed half a ton, and between them they contained enough
explosive to lay all the City of London in ruins.  Woe betide _Ziethen_
with her half-hearted attempt at armour plating and her fragile upper
works!

'Short,' said the Gunnery Commander up in the gunnery control tower,
watching with detached professional interest the shooting of his
beloved guns.  'Up two hundred.'

The other four guns bellowed in their turn, and the half-ton shells
shrieked out on their flight--ten miles in half a minute, reaching two
miles up into the air as they went.

'Short,' said the Gunnery Commander again.  The four immense columns of
water were well this side of the racing armoured cruiser.  'Up two
hundred.  This blasted climate's played Old Harry with the cordite!'

Punctually at twenty-five-second intervals the salvoes blared forth
from the fifty-foot-long turret guns.

'Over,' said the Gunnery Commander.  'Short.  Hit.  Hit.  Hit.  Over.'

Three times in a minute and a half _Ziethen_ was struck by a ton of
steel containing a ton of high explosive.  The wretched ship's upper
works were shattered and flung about, the steel plates were twisted and
torn as though they were sheets of paper in a giant's hands.  One shell
burst fair and true on the breech of a starboard side 6-inch gun, wiped
out the gun's crew and pitched the gun overside.  But there was still
life in the ship; the black cross still streamed out on its white
ground from the tottering mast.  Round she came, trying feebly to close
with the enemy--just as, five days before, _Charybdis_ had tried to do.
But _Leopard_ did as _Ziethen_ had done then; she turned away at full
speed, keeping her distance while the target moved slowly back abaft
the beam.  It was a hopeless effort to seek to close even to 6-inch gun
range; there was no chance at all of being able to use torpedoes with
effect.

'Hit,' said the Gunnery Commander.  'Over.  Hit.  Hit.  My God!'

The 12-inch shells had blasted away great holes in the unarmoured upper
works; one had blown a gap in the horizontal protective deck.  The
Gunnery Commander saw her lurching through the waves, smoke--furnace
smoke, and shell fumes, and smoke from fires--pouring from every
crevice; but she was still a ship; she still moved, she still floated;
she might still fire her guns.  But two shells from the last salvo
crashed through the protective deck and burst amid her very vitals.
Boilers and magazines alike exploded in one huge detonation.  The
rending flash was visible in the strong tropical sunshine for a tiny
instant as the ship blew apart before the merciful black smoke bellied
out and hid everything from view.  Then, as this cleared before the
fresh breeze, there was nothing to be seen, nothing.  _Ziethen_ had
gone the way of _Good Hope_ and _Monmouth_, the way _Scharnhorst_ was
to go, and _Defence_ and _Black Prince_, armoured cruisers all, sunk
with all hands by gunfire.  Twelve salvoes had done it--hardly more
than five minutes' firing.  Every man on board had perished, including
two Englishmen, the leading signalman and Ginger Harris, whom Brown had
tended; but of course the English ships did not know of their existence
on board--and never would.

The black smoke eddied away, upward and to one side, and _Leopard_ and
_Penzance_ raced for the spot where _Ziethen_ had been.  They found
little enough: a dead man--half a man, rather--a few floating bits of
wreckage, and nothing else.  Iron ships stripped for action have little
enough on board that will float.  Then _Leopard's_ triumphant wireless
proclaimed the news far and wide--a welcome little victory, come just
in time to counter the depression resulting from the defeat of Coronel,
the sinking of _Cressy_, _Hogue_ and _Aboukir_, and the depredations of
_Emden_.  It was England's proclamation of the mastery of the seas, to
be confirmed within a week by _Sydney's_ fortunate encounter with
_Emden_, and within a month by Sturdee's annihilation of von Spee,
where once again 12-inch guns blew armoured cruisers to destruction.

Then Captain Saville-Samarez was free to turn his ship back to England,
to the misty North Sea for which he pined, and the prospects of 'The
Day.'  He was to take _Leopard_ into the clamorous, bloody confusion of
Jutland when the battle cruisers raced into action with _Lion_ leading,
and he was to stand watch and ward with the others amid the tempestuous
Shetlands, but that was his great day.  As he had foreseen, he became
known as 'the man who sank the _Ziethen_.'  But nobody was to know to
whom the destruction of that ship was really due.




      *      *      *      *      *      *      *      *




  _Books by_
  C. S. FORESTER


  _Novels_

  PAYMENT DEFERRED
  BROWN ON RESOLUTION
  PLAIN MURDER
  DEATH TO THE FRENCH
  THE GUN
  THE AFRICAN QUEEN
  THE GENERAL
  THE EARTHLY PARADISE
  THE CAPTAIN FROM CONNECTICUT
  THE SHIP
  THE SKY AND THE FOREST
  RANDALL AND THE RIVER OF TIME
  THE NIGHTMARE
  THE GOOD SHEPHERD


  _The 'Hornblower' novels in chronological order_

  MR MIDSHIPMAN HORNBLOWER
  LIEUTENANT HORNBLOWER
  HORNBLOWER AND THE HOTSPUR
  HORNBLOWER AND THE ATROPOS
  THE HAPPY RETURN
  A SHIP OF THE LINE
  FLYING COLOURS
  THE COMMODORE
  LORD HORNBLOWER
  HORNBLOWER IN THE WEST INDIES


  _Omnibus Volumes_

  CAPTAIN HORNBLOWER, R.N.
  (_The Happy Return, A Ship of the Line, Flying Colours_)
  HORATIO HORNBLOWER
  (_The Commodore_ and _Lord Hornblower_)


  _Travel_

  THE VOYAGE OF THE 'ANNIE MARBLE'
  THE 'ANNIE MARBLE' IN GERMANY


  _Biography_

  NELSON


  _Plays_

  U97
  NURSE CAVELL
  (with C. E. Bechofer Roberts)


  _Miscellaneous_

  MARIONETTES AT HOME


  _For Children_

  POO-POO AND THE DRAGONS


  _History_

  THE NAVAL WAR OF 1812
  HUNTING THE 'BISMARCK'






[End of Brown on Resolution, by C. S. Forester]
