A Tall Ship Part 16

"I know who you are," he a.s.serted stoutly. "You're Father Christmas's brother!"

The First Lieutenant hastily accepted this new mythology. "Quite right," he replied with grat.i.tude, "quite right!" Then, as if realising that something further was required of him, added in a deep ba.s.s voice:

"_Fee! Fi! Fo! Fum!_"

White Bow screamed, and even Cornelius James the valiant fell back a pace. Matters were beginning to look serious, when the Torpedo Lieutenant appeared, rather out of breath. "Sorry we had to rush away just now, but we had to furl the awning----" His quick eye took in the situation at a glance.

"Hallo! old chap," he cried, and smote the dejected Father Neptune on the back. "I _am_ delighted to see you! How are all the mermaids and flying-fish? Bless my soul! what have you got in this pannier--dolls . . . lead soldiers, air-guns! I _say_----"

The children rallied round him as the children of another age must have rallied round Saint George of England.

"Don't like nasty old man," repeated White Bow, considering the First Lieutenant with dewy eyes. "Nasty cross old man." The visitor from the bottom of the sea fumbled irresolutely with his trident.

"Is it really Father Christmas's own brother?" queried a small sceptic, advancing warily.

"Of course it is! Look here, look at all the things he's brought you,"

and in an undertone to the First Lieutenant, "Buck up, Number One, don't look so frightened!" They unslung the pannier and commenced to unpack the contents; the children gathered round with slowly returning confidence, and by twos and threes the remainder of the hosts returned from the upper-deck.

"Why aren't they all wet if they've come from the bottom of the sea?"

demanded Freckles the materialist. "Why isn't Father Christmas's brother wet?"

They looked round in vain. Father Christmas's brother had vanished.

At that moment the Captain entered and sought his wife's eye. For a few moments they conferred in an undertone; then she laughed, that clear confident laugh of hers with which they had shared so many of life's perplexities.

"Children!" she cried, "listen! Here's an adventure! We've all got to sleep on board to-night!"

"Oh, mummie!" gasped Georgina with rapture, "how _lovely_!" This was a party, and no mistake. "Can I sleep in Mr. Mainwaring's cabin?"

"And can I sleep in Mr. Standish's cabin?" echoed Jane earnestly. "And we needn't go to bed for hours and hours, need we?" chimed in Cornelius James.

"Where are they to sleep?" asked the Captain's wife, turning to the Torpedo Lieutenant with laughter still in her eyes. "I never thought of that. One always has spare rooms in a house, but a battleship is so different. . . ."

"It's all right," he replied. "I've arranged all that. There are a lot of people ash.o.r.e: the children can use their cabins, and some of us can sling in cots for the night. They'll have to wear our pyjamas. . . . But I don't know about baths----"

"I think they must have plenary absolution from the tub to-night." She glanced at the tiny watch at her wrist. "Now then, children, half an hour before bed time: one good romp. What shall we play?"

"Oranges and lemons," said Georgina promptly, and seized the Indiarubber Man's hand.

"I don't know the words," replied her partner plaintively; "I only 'knows the toon,'" as the leadsman said to the Navigator.

So the children supplied the words to the men's ba.s.s accompaniment; the Captain and his wife linked hands. The candle came to light them to bed; the chopper came to chop off a head; and at the end a grand tug-of-war terminated with two squealing heaps of humanity in miniature subsiding on top of the Young Doctor and the A.P.

Then they played "Hunt the slipper," at which Torps, with his long arms, greatly distinguished himself, and "Hide the thimble," at which Double-O Gerrard, blinking through his gla.s.ses straight at the quarry without seeing it, was hopelessly disgraced. "General Post" and "Kiss in the Ring" followed, and quite suddenly the mother of Georgina, Jane, and Cornelius James decreed it was time for bed, and the best game of all began.

The Captain's wife gathered six pairs of vasty pyjamas over her arm.

"I'll take the girls all together and look after them in my husband's cabin," she said. "We'll come along when we're ready. Will you all look after the boys?"

Freckles fell to the lot of the Junior Watchkeeper; David, specialist in raspberry puffs, had already attached himself to the Indiarubber Man. The A.P. found himself leading off a young gentleman with an air-gun which he earnestly desired as a bed-fellow. The remaining two, red-headed twins who had spent most of the afternoon locked in combat, were in charge of Torps and the Young Doctor.

"Where's Cornelius James?" asked the First Lieutenant suddenly. "What a day, what a day!" A search party was promptly inst.i.tuted, and the Captain's son at last discovered forward in the Petty Officers' mess.

Here, seated on the knee of Casey, his father's c.o.xswain, he was being regaled with morsels of bloater, levered into his willing mouth on the point of a clasp knife, and washed down by copious draughts of strong tea out of a basin.

"I went to say 'Good night' to Casey," explained the delinquent as he was being led back to civilisation, "and Casey said I ought to be hungry after mustering my bag this afternoon. What does that mean?"

"I shouldn't listen to everything Casey tells you," replied the First Lieutenant severely.

"That's what daddy says sometimes," observed Cornelius James. "But I like Casey awfully. Better'n Nannie. He taught me how to make a reef-knot, an' I can do semaph.o.r.e--the whole alphabet . . . nearly."

"Here we are," interrupted his hara.s.sed mentor, stopping before the door of his cabin. "This is where you've got to sleep." He lifted his small charge on to the bunk. "Now then, let's get these shoes off. . . ."

The flat echoed with the voices of children and the sounds of expostulation. The Marine sentry (specially selected for the post "on account of 'im 'avin' a way with children," as the Sergeant-Major had previously explained to the First Lieutenant) drifted to and fro on his beat with a smile of ecstatic enjoyment on his faithful R.M.L.I.

features. For some moments he hovered outside the Junior Watchkeeper's cabin. There were indications in the conversation drifting out through the curtained doorway that all was not well within. At length Private Phillips could contain himself no longer. "Better let me do it, sir.

Bein' a married man, sir, I knows the routine, in a manner o'

speakin' . . ." he said, and plunged into the fray.

"Oh, is that you, Phillips?" the relieved voice of the Junior Watchkeeper was heard to say. "I can't get the lead of this infernal rice-string--don't wriggle, Jim--it's rove so taut. . . ."

"What '_normous_ pyjamas," said Cornelius James, suffering himself to be robed in his night-attire. The operation was conducted with some difficulty because of the sheathed sword which the visitor had found in a corner of his host's cabin and refused thereafter to be parted from.

"Have you ever killed anyone with this sword?" A bl.u.s.tering sea broke against the ship's side and splashed the gla.s.s of the scuttle with spray. "Hark at the waves outside! Can't I have the window open?

Shall I say my prayers to you?"

"No," replied the First Lieutenant, with a little wry smile, as the shadow-fingers of the might-have-been tightened momentarily round his heart. "No, I think you'd better wait till Mummie comes." Shrill voices and peals of laughter sounded outside. "Here she is now."

He stepped outside, and met the mother of Georgina, Jane, and Cornelius James at the head of her flock.

"Here we are," she exclaimed, laughing. "But, oh, Mr. Hornby, our pyjamas are so _huge_!"

"So are ours," said the First Lieutenant, and stooped to gather into his arms a pathetic object whose pyjama coat of many colours almost trailed along the deck. "Cornelius James wants you to go and hear him say his prayers. . . . I will find sleeping quarters for this one."

Ten minutes later the last child had been swung into its unaccustomed sleeping quarters; the twins in adjacent cabins had ceased to hurl shrill defiance at each other; and silence brooded over the flat. By the dim light of the police-lamp Private Phillips paced noiselessly up and down on his beat, and the mother of Georgina, Jane, and Cornelius James pa.s.sed softly from cabin to cabin in that gentle meditation mothers play at bedtime.

On her way aft to the after-cabin she met the Torpedo Lieutenant. "The children all want to say 'Good night' to you," she said softly. "Only don't stay long. They are so excited, and they'll never go to sleep."

Of all the men on board the Torpedo Lieutenant's heart was perhaps nearest that of a child. He tiptoed into the cabin-flat and drew the curtain of the nearest cabin.

"Who's in here?"

"Me," said a small voice. Torps approached the bunk. "Who's 'me'--Georgina?"

"Yes. Goodnight, Mr. Mainwaring."

"Good night, shrimp," replied her idol, submitting to the valediction of two skinny arms twined tightly round his neck. "Good night, and sweet dreams. . . . No, I can't tell you stories to-night; it's much too late. . . . Lie down and go to sleep."

In the next cabin, the sound of deep breathing showed that the small occupant had pa.s.sed into dreamland. It was Freckles. Jane remained awake long enough to kiss his left eyebrow and was asleep the next instant. White Bow also was asleep, and nearly all the remainder drowsy. Cornelius James, clasping the First Lieutenant's sword, however, remained wide-eyed. "I'm so firsty," he complained plaintively.

"That's called Nemesis, my son," said Torps, and gave him to drink out of the water-bottle. "Fank you," said Cornelius James, and sighed, as children and dogs do after drinking.

"Good night, Corney. . . . Now you must go to sleep and dream of bloaters. Oh, aren't you really sleepy? Well, if you shut your eyes tight perhaps the dustman won't see you," and switched out the light.

As he was leaving a drowsy voice again spoke out of the darkness.