Lord of the Sea

by M. P. Shiel

  XXXVI

  THE "BOODAH" AND THE BATTLESHIPS

  The ships had gone forth in two lines ahead at ten knots, Admiral SirHenry Yerburgh, K.C.B., being in the flagship Queen Mary, with thecapital-ships being nearly all of the five mosquito flotillas, and halfthe Home submarine; though what was the object of the torpedo craft(unless they were to go within 2,000 yards of the _Boodah's_ guns) wasnot very evident.

  At that news, Hogarth, putting on a wide-awake, and lighting a cigarwith rough perfunctory puffs, ran along a corridor to call Loveday,whereupon the two went out to the ledge and up to the roof.

  There, at the south edge, stood a marine trumpeting something atHogarth's yacht; and, just landing at the _Boodah_ from his gig, afretful Yankee skipper, register in hand with a bag of L900 sea-rent ingold, while twenty yards yonder rode his smoking ship loaded withgrain for Rouen; and on the eastern horizon the armada, in crescent atpresent, moving with fires banked at two knots, a glare hiding them fromthe naked eye, but the glass revealing them like toys in the abstract,ethereally hazy.

  And now the yacht's cones shewed steam, three of her boats making towardthe _Boodah_; soon at the landing-place stood Wanda, some interpreters,Mons. Roche (the chef), women, engineers, paymasters, civil servants,waiters, etc.; and Hogarth, seeing them, approached, questioned them,and, hearing that they had been ordered a day's pleasure-trip round the_Solon_, with lifting hat shook hands all round.

  By this time some fifty officers and blue-jackets were about the roofand ledge, some discussing, others unfixing lanterns and festoons, withshouted directions. Leaving which, Hogarth and Loveday descended to anoffice of Loveday's, and Hogarth was just saying: "Quilter-Beckett coulddestroy a quarter of those warships yonder--_now_, if he chose--withoutfiring a gun--" when in, with flushed face and stretched stalk,hurried Quilter-Beckett, crying: "My Lord King, I thought you would behere--just look--!"

  He held out a Sea telegraph-form-from O'Hara:

  "F. 39241. Begins. Almost certainty of war: Germany, France, Russiaagainst England. Three corps massing between Harfleur and Rouen,two upon Petersburg, transports at Havre. England undefended on sea.Ministry fallen. Toulon outfitting. Donald, Admiral. Ends.

  Hogarth, with an all-gone gesture, handed the telegram to Loveday.

  But with lightning energy he was at a desk, scribbling:

  "F. 39242. Begins. To Donald, Admiral, Mahomet. Be in half-hourlycommunication with Beech's Bank, Paris and Petersburg branches. Sendhourly bulletins of news. War to be averted by every means. Let Beechthreaten. Warn Cattegat. Richard. Ends."

  And "Quick, Quilter-Beckett", he cried, "send that! What is the speed ofyour quickest picket--?"

  "Fifteen knots--"

  "Then, go yourself to the British Admiral. _Make_ him fly back: he hasyears to attack me in, tell him--I'll write a dispatch--"

  On which Quilter-Beckett telephoned up for a picket, took the dispatch,and was soon away, while Hogarth watched his flight over the Sea.

  An anxious hour passed, and by then a line of ships had been sighted tothe west--the Americans at last; ten minutes later, the picket, too, wasseen returning.

  "Well, now", said Hogarth, watching her, "I wonder. The ships seem to becoming on just the same. You have no idea, John, how the mind of peoplein office becomes fixed, like hardened putty in a hole: I am sorry now Ididn't go myself".

  Some minutes more and Quilter-Beckett was pelting up the steps, his facepink as prickly-heat, blurting out: "My Lord King! I have been grosslyinsulted...!"

  "Ha!" went Hogarth.

  "I met a dispatch-boat coming to make summons of surrender, and,in spite of my white flag, they took me prisoner! How I restrainedmyself--and these people in the hollow of my hand! When I got at last tothe Admiral--it is Yerburgh on the _Queen Mary_--he 'pirated' me--but Ihave no time Yonder, you see, are the Americans. British won't go back:I doubt if they believe--'under orders', and so on. By the way, youshouldn't stay there--no longer safe--"

  He was away: for the moment was near, the _Boodah_ now surrounded with aseries of floating squares hanging deep torpedo-nets against submarines,on both horizons effusions of smoke, the ships no more visions, butmiddle-sized sea-things, seeming fixed in the thick of the sea, thoughsteaming quickly. Hogarth watched them through a hand-glass, whileLoveday, ghastly pallid, whispered: "Come, Richard, come", but stilllingered a little, seeing them grow up--like the infant, the lad, thehairy man--toiling at the bigness of the sea, looking stripped, preparedfor tempest They were six miles away--five.

  Mute lay the _Boodah_; and, surrounding her, perniciously moved theships at forty-eight revolutions a minute, hardly a cable's intervalbetween the host of them, they seeming no more the playthings of thesea, but its masters, each a travelling throne of power; and as theypared so taciturn, with baleful aspect they trained their cannon uponthe sea-fort in their midst: not a soul visible on fort or ships.

  A long while it seems to last, that noonday stillness, a noonday breezyand oceanic, the sea sharp-edged, hard-looking, dark-blue, tossing sprayalong its ridges, not rough, but restless, shewing against the shipswhite foams a moment, which silently glide away.

  But their Admiral is signalling: _Let her have it!_ and in some momentsmore yonder to the far north the _Florida_ breaks into quick-flashingecstasy, like quick-winking Gorgon glances; and the north-east catchesit in a single boom; and in ten seconds more it is as if Nature, withsudden yell, feels to her womb the birth-hour come and rueful throes:and where ships had been appears in one minute nothing but a ring ofstagnant smoke, tugged into rays and out-sticking clouds, flushed withglares and rouges.

  And no question of missing: the _Boodah_ stationary and huge; everyshell told. But, the deluge over, that thunder-marred visage againlooked grimly forth, a face new-risen from smallpox, an apparition,roof-houses gone, lighthouse tops, one of her great 19.5 inchers infragments, in her casemates seventeen dead.

  But where now is the one-masted _Hercules_, which but a momentsince went trembling at the bale of her own bellowing barbettes? The_Hercules_ is in a Nessus-shirt of flame. And whither the _Hercules_ isgoing, thither is the _Idaho_ going, and the _Dante_ gone, and gone theelongated length of the _Invincible_, and twenty destroyers, and thebow-works of the old _Powerful_, which stoops woefully there, screws inair, as the camel of the desert kneels and waits, while into her beamcomes crashing the ram of the poopless _Deutschland_.

  Yet the _Boodah_ has not fired a gun!

  But now she fires: as the broadsides drench her anew, she fires, thehulk--all round the horizon--lowing in travail: and as there is noquestion of missing on the one side, so on the other is assurance, the_Boodah's_ broad-sides of 19.5-inchers and 9.5-inchers, ninety-two inall, being fired by the hand of Quilter-Beckett, who sits at a tablegrim with knobs, buttons, dial-faces, in a cabinet near a saloon whereHogarth, Loveday, and five lieutenants are lunching; and where he sitshe can hear the band in an alcove rendering for the eaters Beethoven'sNinth Symphony: hear, not heed: for two gunners in each casemate havesighted a ship through pivoted glasses, whose fixing, disturbing anelectrical circuit, prints the ship's distance on an indicator beforethe Admiral: whereupon he touches a button--many buttons--in intensesuccession: the _Boodah bawls_: and the thrust-back of her resentmentbecomes intolerable, the ships just like fawns under the paws of an oldlion whose grisly jaws drip gore; the sharks that infest her will farewell of her hand.

  Of forty-three ships fixed, thirty-nine are hit, eleven founder:wreckage so vast and swift, that the Admiral, still afloat in a _QueenMary_ pierced above-belt, is like a man stung by the tarantulas ofdistraction: tries to signal flight--flags cannot be seen; firescoloured pistol-lights: "Retire!"--and soon, all round, the circle is inflight.

  But hapless flight: the _Boodah_ is an octopus whose feelers reach far,and they, within her toils, cannot escape her omnipresence. She sendsafter them no guns: yet they are blown to atoms; the sea becomes adeath-trap thick with pitfalls and shipwreck; one by one they arecaught, they fly aloft
like startled fowl, or they succumb, and lean,and stoop, and sink: the sea, for mile on mile, proving a hell oftorpedoes-dirigible, automobile, mine.

  For in the matter of mines the _Boodah_ had all the advantages of ashore, and as to dirigible torpedoes more than all.

  Her mines, whose weight was adjusted to the specific gravity of saltwater, sank till the pressure at ten fathoms arrested them, they,electrically connected with the forts, reaching out twenty miles;and the whole network, charted to an inch, was coordinated with therange-tables.

  The ordinary l8-inch Whiteheads, moreover, were replaced by a longerdesign running 6,000 yards, the added length being occupied by theflask, whose compressed air runs the engine, they not sinking onfinishing their course: so, if they missed, there they lay, a trap of380 pounds of gun-cotton in the course of the numerous moving foe.

  With these three forms of the same plague the _Boodah_ hunted thefleeing ships, and drove them stumbling through complicated miseries,amazed and thunderstruck: so that seventy-three only, several of themhalf-wrecks, reached her twenty-five mile limit; and, there, over themines of the _Solon_, reassembled.

  Amid the throng on his ruined roof Hogarth watched their flight and theever-coming boatloads of blue-jackets through a mist of smoke and theafter-smell of war, while under the sea wide eyes in hosts were a-gazeat a windfall of 2,400 bodies.

  About half-past four captains and commanders of the survivors were inthe ward-room of the Second-in-Command on the _Orion_--the _Queen Mary_gone--when he, with splendid infatuation, proposed a return to theattack, with a change of tactics to concentration upon one side only ofthe _Boodah_; but the foreigners pointed out the obvious added dangers;and in the midst of a wrangle a dispatch-boat from the _Solon_, elevenmiles south, arrived, demanding the usual sea-rent, by draft, if not ingold; so out, at this unlooked-for incident, broke a new quarrel, theBritish for a whole hour resisting the inexorable; till the _Solon_Lieutenant, his eyes moist with pleading, explained their helplessness,adding that war between the four Powers had been declared that day atnoon from the Stock Exchange steps: and only then the Vice-Admiral,breaking into tears, yielded to destiny.

  Hogarth, meanwhile, was like a wild man, imprisoned, till his yachtreturned at dusk with her excursionists; and without delay he was onher, and away for England.