"Hey now, hey now, we are coming about. That is well! Drink another draught, comrade! You have had a hellishly narrow squeak. Another time, when flying oversea with dispatches, start early, pick your weather, and ship a life-belt, if you are wise!"
Thus Lieutenant Commander Luttha of Undersea-boat No. 18. You see him as a spare, weather-bitten, black-bearded officer in a full panoply of yellow oilies, and a sou'wester shading little eyes, sharp as lancet-points and now twinkling with his bit of fun.
But the word "dispatches," coupled with the jest about the life-belt, volted through von Herrnung like the discharge from an electric battery. He gulped and choked, collecting enough tinned air to talk with, and at last got out:
"The boy--the boy, with the satchel! Where is he, in the devil's name?"
Thus adjured the Commander answered pithily:
"If you mean the half-drowned little English rat Petty Officer Stoll found washing about in the bows of your aviatik, he's alive. Don't worry about that!"
Through the churning foam upon his lips, von Herrnung spluttered furiously:
"_Himmelkreuezbombenelement_! What is the _verdammt_ boy to me? It is the satchel that was strapped about the boy's middle I am asking for--the Emperor's--_Herr Gott!_--I shall go mad!"
He staggered to his feet, hitting his head a stunning crack against the low white painted overdeck. The incautious reference to the Emperor electrified those who heard, squatting on the little folding bunks, or kneeling on the palpitating deck of the little officer's cabin, into desperate activity. Von Herrnung found himself boosted up a ladder and through a manhole, guided along a narrow slippery catwalk, washed by the surges of the North Sea, to where a collapsible boat was being emptied of a lot of shipped salt water, and the battered wreck of the Bird of War, lashed to the U-18's forward man-rail, was waiting the Commander's order to be finally abandoned to her fate.
*CHAPTER XXXV*
*NUMBER EIGHTEEN*
They launched the collapsible, and ransacked every cranny of the Bird's waterlogged fuselage. Not the ghost of a brown leather satchel rewarded their feverish search. In the forward cockpit the belt swung loose, the patent fastening had been opened by pulling the pin out. Clearly the boy had released himself when the Bird hit the sea.
"Let us go look at this boy!" suggested the Commander, on receiving the news that the Kind had breathed, and vomited sea-water. Luttha promptly led the way to the men's cabin, where Petty Officer Stoll and an earringed first-class seaman were working over a little limp naked body, outspread on the jiggetting deck-plates, in the raucous glare of the electric light.
Bawne was questioned, but nothing could be got out of him just then, except North Sea, so they wrapped him in a blue Navy blanket, and left him in charge of Petty Officer Stoll.
"This is hellishly unfortunate, you must know, Count," said the Commander, alone with von Herrnung in the vibrating steel box over the upper accumulators, called the officers' cabin, and separated from the men's quarters by a paper-thin sliding bulkhead of painted steel. You are asked to consider it furnished with seven narrow folding bunks, a trestle-table about as wide and long as a coffin-lid, some folding chairs, a marvellous array of charts on spring-rollers, fixed against the steel walls, a row of wooden lockers, a chronometer and auxiliary gyro-compass, several cylinders of oxylithe for respiratory emergencies, an electric stove of small size, a log-book and writing materials, a shelf of German literature, chiefly nautical reference-books; sets of dominoes, a violin and a cornet, speaking-tubes and a telephone, a gramophone and a giant cuspidor.
Von Herrnung, having swapped his water-logged flying-kit and soaked underclothes for dry flannels lent by the Second-in-Command, topped off with a pair of the Commander's spare trousers, and a guernsey frock belonging to the biggest man on board. You can see him supplementing the shortness of the trousers with a pair of long sea-boots: thrusting his huge arms into the guernsey, beginning already to be superior to his rescuers upon the strength of his family rank and wealth and his flying-record, his bulk and handsomeness, and his magpie pearl. He was of the Prussian top-dog breed and let others know it, even whilst smarting under his loss. That he felt it was shown by the livid pallor testifying to mental disquiet and physical exhaustion. But he judged it wisest to bluff, and did.
"The cursed machine would have drowned me if you had not arrived in the nick of time," he said suggestively, smiling under the red moustache that hung uncurled over his full sensual lips: "Suppose you say you found me swimming in the water--the aeroplane having foundered--it is merely rewording a report!"
"So many thanks!" ... returned the Commander, chewing hard at an unlighted cigar, sending a jet of saliva into the cuspidor, and smiling in a wry and dubious fashion. "But when I said things were hellishly unfortunate, I meant unfortunate for you!"
He moved to the green baize-covered plank that served as a cabin table, and took from a weighted document-file a pencilled paper-slip.
"As far as they concern you I will read you them as taken down by our Wireless operator. 'To Undersea-boat No. 18, on observation-duty off Spurn Head. Stand by to get in touch with, act pilot, and render aid if necessary to German Imperial Secret Service Messenger, crossing to Nordeich in British aeroplane.' The message comes from the German Embassy in London and the sender is Grand Admiral Prinz Heinrich. I have carried out my instructions to the letter. There is only _one_ man going to be broken over this affair!"
Von Herrnung knew who the man was. The Commander chewed some more of his cigar, picked his oozing yellow oilskins off the deck, thrust himself into them, crowned himself with his sou'wester, and said, taking a farewell shot at the cuspidor:
"And to brew more thunder-beer for you is not my desire! I am sorry for you, _bei Gott_! But to make game of those who command me is not the purpose for which I am commissioned, Herr Count. Nor have I any experience in doctoring reports. I rate only as Lieutenant in the Imperial German Navy--a man born of plain people--without fortune or even _von_ before my family name!"
Von Herrnung sensed that he had bitterly offended the only human being who could help him. He apologised subserviently, and catching at the straw afforded him by the Commander's admission of poverty, offered him the pickings of the wrecked aeroplane.
"For her instruments and signalling outfit--the seats and vacuum flasks even--are well worth the having, and her engine and tractor will sell for----" he named the sum in marks. "There is a patent stabiliser under her belly that I reserve for Majesty--the French have bought it or think they have!"
The speaker rubbed his hands. The hoverer might yet prove a sop for the All Highest. Imperial displeasure thus averted, all would go well. He added, feeling that he might actually afford the luxury of grumbling:
"As for me, I am what the English call 'fed up' with special missions. Conceive it. I am at a Hendon Flying School,--chatting with a handsome Englishwoman who has taken me for her lover--as I am waiting to get an inkling of the sort of invention the French War Ministry think worth buying for use in their Service Aeronautique. I am summoned by a groom of our Embassy to speak to some Excellencies--I follow and find myself clicking my heels before Prinz Heinrich, von Moltke, and Krupp von Bohlen in an Embassy auto-car--to be sent off at a moment's notice in a little cranky devil of an English monoplane--with secret dispatches for the All Highest--on a journey over the North Sea. With the barometer falling and the hour past five meridian. That's my luck!" The speaker paused for breath.
Luttha said, pulling his black beard through his fingers with a crisp sound, a trick of his when in meditation:
"There was no time to lose. And you have a wonderful record for long-distance flying. And luck it was!--if you had been of my mind. Tell me, did not _they_ give you plain instructions?"
"Do 'they' ever speak plainly?" von Herrnung scoffed; and Luttha answered calmly:
"Yes, to an ordinary man, who does not understand obscure language, they would have said: 'Lieutenant Commander Luttha, here is a brown leather satchel, with something inside it belonging to the Emperor. You will convey the satchel to Nordeich and deliver it to His Majesty's hands. And from the moment I entrust it to yours, it shall be close as your very skin to you. If you meet Death upon your errand, die with it next your heart!'"
The speaker added with a wounding accent of irony:
"Perhaps that marks the difference between a plebeian and a nobleman! I would have lashed it to my body, under my clothing. You strapped it about the boy! By the way, what is the boy?"