Henry Dorling - Pincher Martin, O.D. - A Story of the Inner Life of the Royal Navy

But no small credit for this excellent state of affairs was due to the commander and other officers. The former, the Honourable Algernon D'Arcy Travers, was the direct antithesis of the captain in appearance. He was tall and very thin, but was a pleasant messmate with a very pronounced sense of humour, and on occasions behaved with all the boisterous bonhomie of a junior sub-lieutenant. His excessive leanness did not worry him in the least, though he did once say that he wished his 'hinge' were a little better padded and the wardroom chairs rather softer. It was a matter of some import to his wife, though, for that lady sent him bottles of malt extract to thicken the flesh on his bones. This nutritive compound, however, was generally handed over to his bluejacket messenger, who liked the sweet taste of it; and that youth, already chubby and well-favoured, was gradually assuming the proportions of a young elephant. The commander found that being thin was an advantage in some ways; and on riotous guest nights, when he made as much noise as anybody present, it certainly permitted him to scramble through the square opening in the back of one of the wardroom chairs without much difficulty.

It was a feat few of his messmates could perform. The engineer-commander, George Piston, a well-covered officer, had tried it on one occasion, and had stuck half-way through. His messmates, headed by the commander himself, cheered him on with howls of merriment; but the victim was laughing so much that he seemed to have swelled. He could not budge one way or the other, and there was every prospect of his having to go through life with a chair securely fastened round his portly middle. They took off his garments one by one; but it was no use. They used vaseline and oil as lubricants, and endeavoured to tuck the folds of flesh through the narrow opening, but without avail.

'For heaven's sake send for a saw!' spluttered the gasping officer, relapsing uncomfortably on the sofa and beginning to feel rather alarmed. 'I can hardly breathe. Give me a whisky-and-soda, some one, or I shall burst!'

The saw arrived in due course, and the chair was removed with some damage to itself. The gallant officer never attempted the feat again.

The commander, an ex-torpedo specialist, was a good officer at his work, and the Belligerent always looked as clean and as smart as a new pin. Her organisation, too, was as perfect as it could be. The ship's company were very fond of 'the Bloke,' as they called him; and when men did misbehave themselves he generally made the punishment fit the crime. When two ordinary seamen, Barter and Hitchcock, began to give trouble, for instance, he hit upon rather an original method of dealing with them. He provided both of them with an ordinary singlestick and a face-mask, but no body-pads, and then promised them one penny each for every visible wale inflicted on the anatomy of the other. The instigator imagined that he would have to shell out a shilling at the most; but after a bout lasting for a fierce fifteen minutes, examination in the bathroom at the hands of a ship's corporal showed that Barter had earned one shilling and eightpence, and Hitchcock two and a penny. They were never obstreperous again, and the ship's company, instead of offering them sympathy, laughed immoderately.

The commander, like other naval officers, had his bad moments, and sometimes the watch-keepers found it advisable to steer clear of him before breakfast. But even if an explosion did occur no bones were ever broken, for they all knew he said a great deal more than he meant. After breakfast and a pipe he was amiability itself, provided nothing went wrong.

Chase, the senior lieutenant-commander and gunnery officer, has already been described; and the next in seniority was Vernon Hatherley, the lieutenant-commander (T.). He was something of an exquisite. He took a great pride in his personal appearance, was reported to wear silk slumber-wear, and kept a store of cosmetics and unguents in his cabin for the anointing of his face and hair. His messmates knew this, and, headed by No. 1, sometimes shampooed him with whisky-and-soda after dinner. But Torps, as they called him, was an excellent fellow, and took the ragging all in good part. Moreover, he generally succeeded in getting his own back by discovering something wrong with the electric lights in his tormentors' cabins at times when they most wanted to use them. He was an x-chaser, in that he had done remarkably well in all his different examinations; but besides being an expert theorist, he was an officer who knew the practical side of his business from A to Z.

The navigator, Christopher Colomb, had just married a young and pretty wife, and did not spend more time on board than he could possibly help. As a consequence, his messmates saw comparatively little of him, unless the Belligerent was cruising, and Mrs Colomb could not follow her husband. The captain occasionally succeeded in getting him to play golf in the afternoons; but Colomb preferred his wife's society to that of any one else. When he was on board in the evenings he shut himself in his cabin, and spent the time writing a learned treatise on Magnetic Influences at Sea . The book is still being written.

Peter Wooten, the next senior non-specialist officer of the military branch, was doing a two-year spell in a battleship, after having been in command of destroyers and gunboats for the past six years. He hated the drudgery of big-ship life, where he acted as the commander's understudy on the upper deck, had charge of the midshipmen and their instruction, arranged the ordinary seamen's training classes, worked the derrick for hoisting in and out boats, and generally acted as a sort of 'odd job' man. The life was fairly comfortable, it is true; but he much preferred the joys of commanding his own small ship to being a comparative nobody in a vessel the size of the Belligerent . He was a burly, deep-chested man, with fair, curly hair, tanned face, and a pair of clear, humorous blue eyes. He was fresh from China, where he had commanded a tiny river gunboat up the Yang-tse-kiang; and there, miles up the great river, far away from any admiral, and completely 'on his own,' he had made history in a small way. He was a great character, and his stories of the Chinese revolution, when he could be induced to tell them, were sometimes amusing and always interesting. (He was the commanding officer of Martin's destroyer when that ordinary seaman joined the 'black navy' soon after the outbreak of the present war, so perhaps we may be pardoned for allowing him to spin one of his yarns. It has the advantage of being true.)

'It was quite a pretty little show,' he said one evening in the smoking-room after dinner, when somebody had egged him on to talk after a second glass of port. 'Have any of you fellows ever heard of a place called Kiang-fu, up the Yang-tse? You might know it, No. 1; you're an old China bird.'

Chase shook his head. 'Sorry I don't, Peter. But let's have the yarn, all the same.'

Wooten lit his pipe. 'Kiang-fu,' he started, 'is one of their walled towns on the banks of the river. It's a beastly place, full of stinks and bugs and abominations generally; and the only white people there are the consul and his wife, a couple of missionaries, and two merchants. Well, one morning my old Kingfisher was lying about twenty miles downstream, and a Chinaman from the consulate at Kiang-fu arrived in a sampan with a note from the consul to say that five thousand rebels had arrived before the place, and that there was going to be some scrapping. There were about a thousand Imperial troops inside the town, Johnson the consul said, and he was in a bit of a funk as to what would happen when the rebels took the place. They'd have butchered every one, of course, Europeans included. My orders were to protect British interests, but not to fight, so I upped killick 11 11 Weighed anchor. and steamed for Kiang-fu for all I was worth. We got about six and an onion 12 12 A fraction of a knot. out of the old bus, I remember, and reached there about noon.' He paused and sucked thoughtfully at his pipe.