CHAPTER XVIII
STEVE AND SEA-DUST
THE afternoon did not bring Joan and Garth many additions to their record, but toward its close it brought a gray Government launch steaming very definitely in the direction of the Light.
"It can't be coming here," Garth said; "that is, I don't see why it should."
But the launch proceeded steadily, and made a neat landing at the lighthouse pier. A sailor grappled the steps with a boat-hook, and the launch bobbed and puffed while a white-clad officer came ashore. With his cap in his hand, he ran up the rocks, smiling expectantly. When he saw Joan he stopped short, seemingly much embarrassed, for he was a very young officer.
"I'm mighty sorry," he said, twirling his white and gold cap. "I thought the Pemberleys lived here still." And he was about to flee, when Joan said:
"They do! I'm just staying with them. I'll call them."
"But—that's not Garth, surely! Is it?" he asked.
"It most certainly is," Joan assured him.
"My goodness!" cried the young officer, thrusting out his hand to Garth. "Shake! I reckon you don't remember me, and I must say I shouldn't have known you. The last time I saw you was about four years ago. I guess it was the first summer you were here, and you certainly have changed a heap."
"Have I?" said Garth, gazing at him with much admiration.
"You surely have!" said the ensign. "Seems to me you were sort of lying around in your bunk then. And my gracious! I haven't been able to raise a tan like that on the boat! Do you remember how I toted you over to the window and showed you my ship and the rest of 'em?"
"I'm almost sure I do," reflected Garth, "but I didn't know it was you."
"He was mighty little," the young man said to Joan; "he wouldn't remember me. There's Mrs. Pemberley now!" He jumped up as Elspeth came to the door.
"Well, of all people!" she cried. "How very nice. O Jim! Here's Steve Warren."
She introduced him to Joan, and Jim ran out in another moment. The men shook hands heartily.
"A sure-enough ensign!" said Jim. "The last time we saw you, you were a plebe at Annapolis, weren't you? How's Virginia?"
"I've just come up from down there," Steve said. "Oh, it's finer than ever! I've been home for two weeks. My, I certainly did despise leaving! I joined the Billington at Norfolk."
"Oh, so you're on the Billington now!" said Jim. "We've just been hearing about you and your cucumbers."
Steve grinned.
"Well! Have you been keeping track of us? We'll have to be mighty careful of what we say!"
"We've been absorbed all day," Joan said. "We heard about piping down scrubbed bags and clothes, and all kinds of interesting things. But do tell me how you shake out a reef in a scrubbed hammock?"
"I guess it meant a reef in the clothes-lines," laughed Steve. "What I really came to ask is, whether you-all would like to steam around a while in the launch."
"Is she yours to command?" asked Jim.
"Surely is!" Steve assented. "Captain Fraser's our Flotilla Commander, and when he found out I knew you, he said he did, too. So he sent me over here, because he couldn't come himself, and here's a perfectly good steamer."
"We'd love to go," Elspeth said.
"I doubt if Garth would care about it," Jim remarked solemnly, calling forth a look of deep reproach from his son.
When they boarded the launch, the coxswain saluted and the barefooted sailors stood at attention. Garth was quite overcome with pride and gazed rapturously at the young officer.
"I wish I could take you aboard of a ship," said Steve, as they settled themselves under the canopy and the launch puffed away from the pier, "but I haven't the authority. Awfully strict nowadays. We'll go round among 'em, though."
As they neared the Billington, another steam-launch was seen approaching, a pennant fluttering at her bow.
"Senior boat," said Steve, as the engine of his steamer stopped. He saluted very stiffly; then the engine began to sputter again. "Commanding officer," he explained. "Glad he wasn't going the same way we are, or we'd have had to ask permission to pass him."
"What a lot you need to remember!" said Joan.
"There are harder things to remember than signals and salutes, aren't there, Steve?" said Jim.
"When you get into the Navy this fall, Fogger," said Garth, "Steve will have to salute you like that, won't he?"
Jim laughed.
"By that time," he said, "Steve will probably be a lieutenant, and I shall have to salute him."
The launch circled about under the sharp, curved bows of the destroyers, and the glimpses of busy life on board were very tantalizing.
"If you lean out so far and try to see so much, they'll think you're a German spy," said Jim, pulling Garth back from the gunwale. "Besides, don't you know Paragraph 116, Rule 7? 'The coxswain of a power-boat is especially responsible that the crew and passengers sit down in their proper places; that they do not sit on the gunwale; and that they conduct themselves in a seamanlike and proper manner.'"
A sailor standing just outside the canopy emitted a smothered chuckle.
"I reckon Garth's right about my having to salute you, sir!" grinned Steve.
In the course of the trip it transpired that Steve had shore-leave until half past eight that evening, and it took little persuasion to induce him to have supper at the Light.
"Some of us will set you out to the Billington afterward," Jim assured him, "so you needn't worry about getting back."
"Hooray!" cried Steve. "That's just about fine!"
Consequently, when the launch returned to Silver Shoal, the young officer disembarked with the other passengers.
"It certainly does seem good," he said, when they had sat down to supper, "to get a meal that's like home once in a while. We have great food on the ship, but that's not all that counts."
"What have you chaps been doing since we got into the big fight?" Jim asked. "We've not been seeing much of the Navy lately."
"My!" Steve exclaimed. "I guess not! I wish I could tell you what-all we have been doing, but it's verboten, as the Hun would say."
"Submarines been biting the bottom?" Jim suggested.
"Something like that," Steve agreed. "Shove the sea-dust, will you?"
Then he blushed violently, as Jim passed him the salt.
"You certainly must excuse me, Mrs. Pemberley," he stammered hastily. "We get mighty rough, living on the boats. We get to calling things by the greatest names! You see, we're likely to say 'slide the grease,' when we mean 'pass the butter,' and 'sling the red lead,' instead of 'hand me the tomato catsup.' I guess I'm a pretty bad example for Garth," he said, looking across the table.
Garth, who was having supper with the family on this occasion, was absorbing these phrases with great relish and possibly storing them up for future use.
"I got poor Mother all upset when I was home this time," Steve said, "because I forgot to go easy on the sea-slang, and Shirley soaked it all up and then shot it off at the wrong time, when there were grand folks calling, or something. She's my sister, Miss Kirkland. She's about eleven. I never saw such a kid."
When they rose from the table later, Steve lifted Garth into his arms.
"I'll bet I know what you want to do," he said. "You're pining to go out and see what those ships are saying to each other. Come along, let's look." He stole a furtive glance at Elspeth. "Your mother's going to say you ought to go to bed—I see it in the corner of her starboard eye—but you're not going, are you?"
"What a dreadfully demoralizing creature you are!" cried Elspeth. "Implanting all these revolutionary ideas in my son's mind! But this seems to be a special night, and he might as well keep on with the gay pace. He wouldn't sleep, if I did put him to bed, so out with you!"
They all went outside and sat on the bench and on the rock. Steve sat at Jim's feet, with Garth on his lap, and they looked toward the ships. Although it was not yet fully dark, and the sky still held the deep emerald of late twilight, the destroyers had begun their evening signaling. From the masthead of the Billington two white lights, close together, flashed with bewildering rapidity.
"Don't you really find this much harder than the old Ardois, Steve?" Elspeth asked. "Why, even I could sometimes read those nice red-and-white lights that stayed long enough to be seen."
"Oh, I don't know," Steve replied; "the Blinkies are all right when you're used to 'em. Sometimes, when the fellow that's sending gets careless and doesn't space his letters well, it's pretty messy. But it's a lot quicker than Ardois."
"Have you been watching the Billington, Steve?" Jim asked.
"No," said the ensign. "What's she up to? What the mischief is he saying?"
The men set themselves to untangle the meaning of the flickering signals, and they repeated the messages aloud. For the most part these were ridiculous personalities, the idle small-talk of sailors practising the code. Joan, leaning back, gazed with half-closed eyes. Soft darkness, the ships invisible save for scattered clusters of lights, and above, the signals winking trivialities through the night. She realized that beneath each group of lamps a world lay, an existence complete unto itself. To-morrow night the ships might lie in a different port, they might be on the high seas; but the life aboard them would remain unchanged. The "blinkies" at the masthead would flash American slang across the dark waters of a foreign harbor with the same zeal and detachment as here in Pettasantuck Bay.
A message from the Billington was broken off abruptly, much to the disappointment of the spectators on the rock. In fact, all the destroyers had stopped signaling simultaneously.
"She's going to send an official message, I guess," Steve said.
Dash—dash—dash—dash the lights blinked briskly.
"Cornet again," Jim remarked.
The ships all replied with their own call-letters, and after a great deal of repetition of calls and displaying of steady lights, the Billington proceeded with her message:
Recall all liberty men at once.
"That likewise includes officers on leave of absence, I guess,—meaning me," Steve sighed. "They've gone and pinched a half hour off our time."
"The bay's as flat as a mill-pond," Jim said. "Mrs. Pemberley and Miss Kirkland will row you over to the Billington in no time; I've got to stay on the job. Good luck, Steve! I hope you'll get in again." He gripped the young man's hand.
"Garth's going, too, isn't he?" Steve asked, as they began to move toward the landing.
"Now, really!" Elspeth protested.
"Of course he is!" Steve cried. "I've got him, anyhow, so you can't get him away. Why, it's not eight bells yet! And look what a fine night for rowing around. This is a kind of an occasion, I reckon."
"It seems to be," Elspeth agreed. "I'm glad we don't have ensigns around every day, or there'd be no discipline in this lighthouse!"
The boat slid deliciously over the long oily swell, and the oars splashed a weird trail of phosphorescence at every stroke. The lights of the Billington were doubled with a sharp brightness on the inky water, and their wavering reflections reached halfway to the skiff in clear-cut lines and patches of gold. Steve pulled what he called a "regular cutter stroke" and sang Annapolis songs. As they approached the Billington, he stopped in the middle of a verse.
"I'd better cut it out," he said, "or I'll be getting a reprimand, or something."
"What's that?"' cried Garth suddenly, pointing.
At the bow of the Billington, and apparently suspended in the sky, gigantic black and white figures capered grotesquely, high above the deck.
"It does look funny off here," Steve admitted. "It's the movies. We have 'em every night. It's Charlie Chaplin just now; we get all the old favorites."
"I never saw any in my life,” said Garth, gazing spell-bound at the ridiculous gyrations of Charlie against the stars.
"Really," Elspeth said, "seeing a moving-picture for the first time would be quite amazing enough, without its being cut out of mid-air on the bosom of the sea! How perfectly extraordinary it looks!"
They were all staring at it so hard that the Cymba nearly ran into the bow of the ship.
"It would have been terrible if we'd run down the Billington and sunk her," Steve said. "Captain Fraser would never have forgiven me. We can come alongside the starboard gangway. In bows! Oars! Way enough! There she is!"
He jumped out of the skiff and executed long-distance hand-shakes with every one.
"I just can't tell you what a bright and shining spot you-all have put in my career," he said. "Good-by! I surely am glad to have met you, too, Miss Kirkland. I'll shove your boat off."
He gave the Cymba a push that sent her ten feet from the gangway and ran up to the deck, where he stood waving his cap.
"Steve is a nice child," said Elspeth, as they pulled away, "but he's so very young and strenuous. Are you steering, Garth, or are you asleep? We don't want to go into Quimpaug just at present."
"I'm not asleep," said Garth, hastily pulling the yoke-lines. "I was just looking at those movies."
The destroyers stayed all the next day, filling the harbor with busy life and movement. The clear sound of their bells swung across the water; their launches zig-zagged perpetually back and forth; the signal-flags fluttered up and down; the men semaphored endlessly. But the following morning Silver Shoal woke to find an empty bay.
"They've gone!" Garth lamented, as Joan came downstairs. "Just gone, before we were awake, Oh, I wanted them to stay longer!"
They had slipped out, like gray wraiths in the dawn, and with them had gone Steve Warren, with his straight, honest grin and his slow, Southern speech, and his wonderful white uniform.
"Fogger," said Garth, looking up from his porridge, "will you please shove me the sea-dust?"