Chapter XVI A Glorious Picnic
Among the many queer characters they met at Ieros, none was more quaint than a Mr. M’Andrew, who appeared on the scene in a very smart, rakish little motor yacht with two masts and a gay awning, very reminiscent of the River Thames. Sometimes he appeared flying the Greek flag, and bringing the rubicund military governor of Mytilene to “protest” against the British having done “this” or “that”; with a cheery “Au revoir, Messieurs; à Constantinople!” when he left the ship. At other times he flew the red ensign, and took Captain Macfarlane and the Commander for—as far as the gun-room knew—pleasant little sea trips. Generally he flew no flag at all, and had a most motley crew of picturesque brigands with him.
Occasionally the yacht used to lie alongside the Achates, and once or twice the Sub tempted Mr. M’Andrew down into the gun-room to take a glass of iced soda-water, of which he seemed excessively fond. He never touched alcohol.
He looked like a retired bank-manager who possibly devoted his leisure to teaching in a Sunday or “ragged” school; he was broad and plump, and perhaps fifty years of age—a most placid-looking individual who always wore an old, but not shabby, blue suit, across the ample waistcoat of which stretched a very thick gold watch and chain. He talked very simply—as if talking was mere waste of breath—and his conversation was chiefly about soda-water and the places he remembered where you could buy it cheapest. He always carried a bunch of raisins in one of his side-pockets, and ate them deliberately, one at a time, whenever he was not smoking a very old briar pipe. The Sub used to ask him to dinner or lunch, but he would refuse. “No, thank you; I never have meals; I just go on munching raisins, and have some bread occasionally.”
Rumour had told the Honourable Mess that he was really a daring pirate, and led forays against the Turks in the little bays on the mainland—over against Mytilene—though never a word could they get from him about his adventures—about anything, in fact, except soda-water, the merits of dried raisins, and the unfortunate family troubles of his crew.
There was one old man who used to sit on the top of the deck-house all day long without saying a word to a soul—a shrunken old Greek with very sharp features and black eyes which seemed to blaze from their deep sockets in the most startling way. When you first saw him he looked a poor, withered, feeble old “dodderer”, in spite of the Winchester rifle he always gripped across his knees, and the two filled bandoliers of cartridges round his waist and shoulders; but when he turned to look at you the fierceness of his eyes gave him a most extraordinary appearance. Mr. M’Andrew used to take him down a loaf of bread—provided by the gun-room—pat him on the shoulder, and say a few words to him. “Poor old man!” Mr. M’Andrew told them, “poor old man; he’s rather miserable. You see, he and his three sons kept a flock of sheep on some little island near the coast, and the Turks came along, killed his sons and the sheep, and tried to kill him, but he managed to escape. He knew of a crack in a rock, where he hid by day—for three days—crawling out at night to suck the grass and eat berries and leaves, until the Turks gave up looking for him and went away—thought he must be dead. I just happened to be going past there yesterday, saw him wave, and brought him along. He won’t be really happy again until he’s killed a Turk for each of his sons; he thinks I’ll give him the chance soon, so won’t leave me.”
“But shall you?” the Honourable Mess cried with one accord.
“This really is not at all bad soda-water,” Mr. M’Andrew went on in his slow, deliberate way. “I remember when I was in Mexico—no, it reminds me of some I got at Haiti during the revolution, the one of 1901. As I was saying, most of my crew have had a good deal of family trouble one way or the other. There’s that little lad who cleans the brasswork. He’s the only one left of a family of twelve—father, mother, brothers, and sisters. He hid in the roof when the Turks cut the throats of the others one night. He came along here—no, I don’t know how—and wants me to let him have a rifle. Oh, those other chaps; nice, gentle-looking fellows, aren’t they? They can’t bear the Turks—more or less for the same reason! Some of their relatives have been killed by them, or they’ve been driven away from the mainland and have nothing left of farms, or shops, or flocks, wives or children. They just come along to me, and I lend them some old rifles I just happen to have.”
“Have they had a chance of using them?” the snotties asked. “Most of them say they have killed a Turk or two; tell me so when they come first. And I expect they have,” went on Mr. M’Andrew in his placid voice, feeling in his pocket for another raisin, and fumbling with the fob of his gold watch-chain.
The China Doll, in fact all the gun-room officers, spent a good deal of time watching him moving about among the fierce, black-eyed ruffians, who sat about the deck of the smart little motor-yacht with their bandoliers across their shoulders, their rifles (which Mr. M’Andrew just happened to have lent them) gripped firmly in their hands. They cleaned these interminably, and Mr. M’Andrew walked about and spoke a few words to each, just as you could picture him walking about the boys in his Ragged School in Glasgow, distributing raisins and bread to them just as he might have done to his boys.
One day the motor-yacht towed in a clumsy, old, local trading schooner, and anchored her abreast the Achates. She turned out to be a Turkish trading ship which had been becalmed off some Greek village. The Greeks captured her, and had killed at least one of her crew, for his body still lay on the deck, just at the break of the poop.
“Oh, no!” said Mr. M’Andrew, in genuine surprise, “I had nothing to do with it. I simply found her a derelict and towed her in here. The rest of the crew were probably killed as well, but thrown overboard. Oh, no! that’s nothing unusual.”
The dead Turk was handed over to the authorities, and this lumbering old derelict—she looked at least fifty years old, and was probably a hundred—swung at anchor, close to the Achates, for some days.
The Sub had a brilliant “brain wave”, and suggested that the gun-room should commission her, one day, for a picnic. Captain Macfarlane gave permission, and then came the question of asking the War Baby. Finally it was unanimously decided to do so; and—“Well”, as Bubbles said when he gave the invitation, “if you can bring some sardines and sausages along with you, so much the better.” They asked Mr. Meredith, the R.N.R. Lieutenant, and Dr. Gordon, the R.N.V.R. Surgeon, and they asked the Padre too; and, wonderful to relate, that pale-faced little man jumped at the offer—“so long as he could smoke his pipe all the time”. The other two of course accepted.
After dinner, and after considerable deliberation and more noise, the following notice appeared on the board in the gun-room, under the alarum-clock and the five broken-down wrist-watches:—
NOTICE
To-morrow, Thursday, 17th June, H.M. Schooner *What’s Her
Name* will be commissioned, at 1.30 p.m.
The following appointments have been made to her:—
Captain........................ The Sub. First-class Passenger............ Mr. Meredith. First Lieutenant and Boatswain...... The Pink Rat. Officer of Marines and Master-at-Arms The War Baby. Surgeon and Captain of the Main-top... Dr. Gordon. Chaplain and Official Photographer... The Rev. Horace Gibbons. Paymaster and Man-of-all-Work...... Uncle Podger. Captain of the Fore-top............ The Lamp-post. Foretopmen..................... The Hun, The Orphan, Rawlins Maintopmen..................... Bubbles, The Pimple. Cabin Boy..................... The China Doll. Second Cabin Boy............... Barnes. The Ancient Mariner............... Fletcher the Stoker. The Albatross.................. “Kaiser Bill”.
Coloured shirt, vest, or jersey.
Trousers or shorts.
Head-dress—any old thing, as long as it’s hideous.
Fletcher they asked because they thought the old man would enjoy “a bit of an outing”, and “Kaiser Bill” was asked because Fletcher wouldn’t enjoy it without him.
Barnes, on reading the notice and seeing his own appointment, growled to the messman: “What did them young gen’l’men a-think they was a-doin’ of; no, ’e wasn’t a-goin’ a-sailorisin’ in that ’ere craft what murder ’ad been done in, an’ the blood-stain on ’er deck an’ all—not ’e;” but he changed his mind and went aboard with the Pirate Crew, grinning like a huge schoolboy, with his big basket of food (including the War Baby’s sardines and sausages), a bucket of coal and wood to make a fire, a kettle, frying-pan, and a barricoe of water. They climbed aboard, handed up all the “gear” and their towels, and the Sub ran a boat’s ensign, which he had borrowed, up to the main masthead.
“Hello, Doc! brought your Harley Street bag with you, I see.” Dr. Gordon laughed. “Yes,” he twinkled, “it might be useful.” The little Padre, beaming, passed aboard his camera, and climbed up after it.
To give you an idea of what this piratical crew looked like, the Orphan wore a red tam-o’-shanter, a yellow-and-black sweater, running “shorts”, and gymnasium shoes; and Bubbles had an old kicked-in bowler hat on the back of his head, a green football shirt stuffed into striped bathing drawers, and a pair of sea-boots. He made a picturesque villain, especially when he gripped a captured Turkish bayonet between his teeth and gurgled at the China Doll. Most of them started with naked Turkish bayonets tucked into their belts; but, on Uncle Podger’s advice, the Sub sent these back in the boat which had taken them all to the What’s Her Name. What a funny old-fashioned tub she was, and what stories she could have told of all the years she had been toiling round the coast, among the islands! Her high poop had rails round it, some of the wooden posts beautifully carved, but most of them of rough wood, which showed that she had “come down in the world” in her old age. Between the poop and the still higher fo’c’sle was a “well” deck, with its dark blood-stain, the foremast right amidships, and two big open hatchways, one for’ard and one abaft the mast. Round her fo’c’sle were more rails, some handsomely carved, and on it was an antediluvian windlass for hoisting the anchor. The cable was so rusted and worn that it seemed hardly possible that she could trust to it to ride out even the lightest of gales.
Her masts—the lower masts at any rate—and the wide-spreading foreyard were good, sound bits of timber, but the top-masts and fore-tops’l yards looked anything but sound, and her “standing” rigging was so chafed and so badly “set up” that her murdered crew must have been “past masters” in the art of sailing her gently to prevent her masts carrying away.
“Well, what about it?” the Sub asked Mr. Meredith, with a note of anxiety in his voice. “The breeze is blowing straight out of the harbour; if we run to lee’ard, ’twill be too narrow there to beat back, won’t it? We’d best start beating to wind’ard, hadn’t we? Look here,” he said, “this is rather out of my line; you’d best run the show. You’d better start a mutiny right away.”
As Mr. Meredith had been in sailing-ships for years, and had been Captain of a full-rigged ship before he was thirty, what he didn’t know about sailing wasn’t worth knowing. “All right,” he smiled, “I’m game;” and seizing the unresisting Sub by the neck of his coloured jersey, hurled him to the deck with fierce yells, and planting one foot on his chest, roared: “Clear lower deck! I’m now the Captain of the What’s Her Name. Now, you dog,” he hissed, as the pirate crew “fell in”, “get up and ’fall in’ among those rascals; another word and you’ll walk the plank, and your bones shall bleach on the coral islands of the Spanish Main. Ha! ha!”
The crew, overawed by his daring, and the ferocity of his appearance in a Turkish fez, a red shirt, Sam Browne belt, and khaki riding-breeches, gave three cheers for the new Captain; old Fletcher, who had put “Kaiser Bill” in a safe place where he could not fall down the hatchways, smiled indulgently; and Barnes, trying to enter into the spirit of the game, grumbled in an undertone: “This ’ere ‘clear lower deck’ and ’fall in’ sounds too much like the real thing,” and “’e didn’t see quite where the fun came in.”
Then the Lamp-post and his foretopmen, the Hun, the Orphan, and Rawlins, were sent off to clear the jibs and slack away the tops’l gaskets up aloft, and to learn where their proper halyards “ran”; Dr. Gordon, the Pimple, and Bubbles went aft to get the big spanker ready for setting; Barnes and the China Doll were ordered to explore the little cook-house, just under the fo’c’sle; Fletcher had strict orders to keep alight the cigar which the Sub had brought him, and enjoy himself at all costs, and all the others followed Mr. Meredith up on the fo’c’sle to heave up the cable.
In five minutes after getting on board, the Orphan and Rawlins were climbing out along the bowsprit and jib-boom, and the Lamp-post and the Hun were up aloft, out along the tops’l-yard, unlashing the gaskets and having a grand time; whilst the crowd on the fo’c’sle began levering round the old horizontal windlass (“wild cat”, Mr. Meredith told them, was its proper name) with two long levers, like crowbars, stuck in the holes at each end of it.
“Let’s have a ‘chanty’,” they called, and the Sub started “We’ll rant and we’ll roar”; but that did not “fit in”, so Mr. Meredith gave them a very old one:
“For the times are hard, and the wages low;
Leave her, Johnny, leave her.
Last night I heard the Old Man say,
’Tis time for us to leave her.”
Whilst he sung the first line to a mournful dirge, they shifted the crowbars into fresh holes, and then, hauling aft on them, joined in the chorus: “Leave her, Johnny, leave her”; shifted them again whilst he chanted the third line, and pulled to “’Tis time for us to leave her”; and each time they pulled the “wild cat” round, the links of the old rusty cable came creaking in through the hawse-pipe, and the metal pawls of the “wild cat” fell, “clink-clank”, into the ratchet notches.
In a minute everybody had joined in the chanty, the Orphan and Rawlins out beyond the fo’c’sle on the bowsprit, the Lamp-post and the Hun busy aloft, Dr. Gordon and his “hands” aft. The China Doll, dashing up to have one pull at the levers, chipped in too; whilst Barnes bellowed “Leave her, Johnny, leave her” (thinking it was something about a girl) from inside the cook-house; and old Fletcher, busy with his cigar, beamed at everyone through his gold spectacles.
Presently Mr. Meredith, leaning over the bows, sang out: “She’s ‘up and down’. Heave away, my hearties! ‘Leave her, Johnny, leave her’,” and ran aft to take the wheel; the Orphan and Rawlins, scrambling back on the fo’c’sle, hoisted the jib, and in a few more turns of the “wild cat” the clumsy old “tub” began to pay off before the breeze.
Dr. Gordon, the Pink Rat, and the Pimple set the spanker, hauled taut the clumsy “sheet”, and the poor old What’s Her Name slowly pushed her way through the water.
“Stand by aloft!” Mr. Meredith hailed the fore-top. “Let go gaskets! Overhaul buntlines! Come down from aloft! You on deck, there! Sheet home! Sheet home! Haul taut lee braces! Right you are!” as, somewhat confused and muddled, the foretopmen managed at last to set that tops’l. “Belay all!”
Mr. Meredith made a wry face. “She won’t reach to wind’ard much, Doc, with that old fore-tops’l drawing.
“Haul taut your lee braces, lads! Hoist your fore stays’l! Ease off jib sheets!”
The foretopmen were having all the sport, so the maintopmen dashed for’ard to help them; and by the time the anchor had been catted and secured, the What’s Her Name was, as Mr. Meredith said, “moving as fast as a snail and as sideways as a crab”. “We shan’t get far to-day, Doc.”
Nor did they; though what mattered that? They were as happy as kings; the “going about” was such fun; everybody had something to do, especially when the Padre, the China Doll, or the War Baby slacked off a wrong rope at the right time or a right rope at the wrong time. It was grand fun, and old Fletcher, sitting on the poop yarning with Uncle Podger, thoroughly enjoyed himself; whilst from for’ard a little column of grey smoke, and an occasional bellow of “Leave her, Johnny, leave her”, showed that Barnes, getting tea ready, was also quite happy.
The China Doll stole aft and called up to the Pimple, standing on the main “cross-trees”, above the spanker “jaws”: “Pimple, I say, Pimple, there are five tins of sausages. Isn’t that grand?”
Suddenly, from for’ard, there came shrieks and agonized yells for Fletcher.
“Fletcher! Hurry! Come quickly! Help! Help!”
The Orphan and the Hun flew up the rigging, yelling “that ‘Kaiser Bill’ had broken loose, and was attacking them”; Bubbles, bursting with laughter, climbed the dangerously weak ratlines after them; the Lamp-post and Rawlins swarmed up the rigging on the other side, and even the little Padre, catching the infection, sprang up as well.
“We won’t come down till he’s chained up. Look at him! Careering round and snapping at everything. Save us, Fletcher! Save us!”
Old Fletcher, smiling kindly, came along from the poop, asking: “Where is he?”
“There; there—near the water-butt! Do be careful! Get at him from behind. Wave a lettuce leaf in front of him. We’ve brought a lettuce in case he attacked us. Barnes! Barnes! Bring the lettuce! ‘Kaiser Bill’ has broken out!”
The old stoker, peering about for the tortoise, found him just where he had left him—his legs and head well tucked “inside”—-picked him up, placed him inside his “jumper”; got a lettuce from Barnes, who grunted “they young gen’l’men will be a-breaking their blooming necks afore long, I reckon”; and went aft again, to try and tempt the tortoise to put his head out, and show some interest in the picnic.
Then the Padre and some of the snotties ventured on deck, again, though most of them preferred to lie out on the tops’l-yard, which was so frail, and its “lifts” so badly “set up”, that it bent ominously, as did the fore-topmast itself.
“Come down off that yard!” Mr. Meredith shouted. “Only two of you are to be there at a time.”
They begged him to let them set the upper tops’l, but that yard was more like a broom-handle than anything else.
“The Hun can do it; no one else. The mast is rotten, and the yard too,” Mr. Meredith shouted. (The Hun was the lightest of all the midshipmen.) So the others gathered in the “top” and watched the Hun swarm up the topmast, and so out on that tiny yard, casting off the gaskets of the tiny sail.
Then they dashed down on deck, before Mr. Meredith’s voice bellowed out: “Let fall upper tops’l gaskets; overhaul your buntlines; sheet home, sheet home. Belay all!”
Then came the “pipe”: “Clear lower deck! All hands ’bout ship’!”
When once the ship had tacked away from the shore, most of them made some excuse or other to find their way aloft again or out on the bowsprit; and though it may have looked curious to see the What’s Her Name slowly beating to wind’ard, backwards and forwards, across the harbour, with most of her crew up aloft or clinging to the bowsprit all the time, what did anything matter? They all enjoyed themselves hugely; those up aloft sniffing as the fragrant odour of cooking sausages floated up to them from the cook-house.
Tea-time came before they knew it.
“Seven bells, Bos’n,” Mr. Meredith called out. The Pink Rat found an old tin and beat it. Everybody sang out for Barnes, came down from the mast, the bowsprit, or the poop, and rushed to help bring aft all the luxuries.
Old Fletcher fidgeted and looked at the Sub.
“Right you are, Fletcher!” he said, knowing that the old stoker would enjoy his tea more with Barnes than with them; so whilst they all sat round the poop and had a gorgeous tea—what a tea!—Barnes and Fletcher and “Kaiser Bill” had tea by themselves at the break of the fo’c’sle, and Bubbles, good-natured Bubbles, steered. However, there was so little breeze that it did not much matter whether anybody steered or not; and Dr. Gordon, finishing his meal quickly, relieved him.
“Where are we going to have our bathe?” Bubbles asked.
“Nowhere, my jumping Jimmy! I’m not going to weigh that anchor again, it is too much like work; we’ll just sail about,” the Sub said.
When nothing but empty plates, empty tins, and an empty teapot remained, and they were just going to fill their pipes, Dr. Gordon at the wheel called out: “Fetch my surgical bag, someone. I knew it would be wanted.”
The Hun fetched it, opened it, and inside were three tins of pine-apple.
“You are splendid, sir,” they shouted, as they opened the tins and cut the pine-apples into fat slices. “Won’t these fill up odd corners?”
What a grand feast that was!
Then it was time to go back. The breeze had fallen still more, so the helm was put up, sheets were eased, the foretops’l and its little upper tops’l squared away, and the What’s Her Name wafted slowly back to her anchorage, whilst everybody lay back, contentedly smoking and thoroughly happy.
They came abreast the Achates; sail was taken off her; the anchor let go; the “wild cat” whirled round (they knew then why it was called a “wild cat”); and there was nothing to do except pack up and stow away everything “shipshape”, and wait until the Officer of the Watch sent the cutter across for them.
She came. They were taken back to the Achates, and the poor old What’s Her Name left desolate. Never could she have made a more happy voyage or borne a merrier crew than she did that afternoon—not in all her long life.
They had noticed that the motor-yacht had come in and run alongside the Achates soon after they had started on their picnic; and when they went on board, the Officer of the Watch told the Sub that Captain Macfarlane wanted to see him directly he had shifted into uniform. In ten minutes he was ready, went aft, and found the Captain in conversation with Mr. M’Andrew.
“Oh! Come in!” the Captain said. “Had a good picnic? No lives lost? Your crew seemed to spend most of their time aloft. I was afraid that you’d kill someone before you’d finished.”
“Everyone all right, sir. We had a grand time.”
“Well, we have a job for you. Mr. M’Andrew has brought in two refugees, escaped from a place called Ajano, a little village, up a creek, not far from Smyrna. They say that there is a Turkish patrol-boat hiding up there. I want you to take the picket-boat and “cut her out” to-morrow morning at dawn.”
The Sub grinned with delight, and forgetting where he was, burst out with: “My jumping Jimmy! what a show!—I beg pardon, sir. I meant ‘what a splendid job.’ Thank you, sir, I’d love to go;” whilst the Captain crossed his thin knees, tugged at his beard, and smiled at his eagerness. In ten minutes he had given him all instructions; and the Sub, going out, found the Orphan waiting for him outside his cabin in a great state of excitement.
“What is it? What’s going to happen? They’re sticking the maxim in the picket-boat, and bolting on those shields in front of the wheel. Jarvis tells me that they are going to fix steel plates all round the stern-sheets as well.”
“My perishing Orphan! What a show it’s going to be!” And the Sub pulled the Orphan inside his cabin, shoved him down on top of the wash-stand, and spread out the rough chart which Captain Macfarlane had just given him.
“It beats the band, Sonny. We’ve to go out at midnight. The motor-yacht is coming along with us, and we have to rendezvous with the Kennet at about three o’clock. She will take us to the mouth of the creek—here,” and the Sub pointed to the creek marked on the chart. “Two refugees from the village are coming with us to show the way in—up we sprint—cut out a Turkish patrol-boat hiding up there in front of the village—tow her out to the destroyer, and bring her back—a prize. What d’you say to that, my guzzling Orphan? What d’you say to that for a job? Fancy catching them asleep, waking them up, and banging them on the head if they don’t hand over their old junk quietly.”
“Or toppling them overboard,” gasped the Orphan, wild with delight. In his wildest dreams he had never imagined such a grand adventure.
“Well, off you go. See that the boat is all right. Oh,” the Sub called, as the midshipman began to run off, “we’re to take four more ‘hands’. I’ll choose ’em. I’ve got ’em in my mind. Everybody has to take rifle and cutlass. You’d better take a pistol, but don’t shoot me with it. That’s all. I’ll arrange about the grub. Off you go.”
The Orphan dashed away to supervise the fitting out of the picket-boat.
Notes
* Uniform of the day—Pirate Rig.*