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Every modern improvement such as ammunition hoists, telegraphs, search-lights, and steam-winches was added. Yet with all this they drew only thirty-nine inches of water.
If I stayed on board a vessel in the harbor, I should miss the life and activity of the city, the quick delivery of daily papers from the North, the news bulletins posted every few hours in the hotel, and all the stories of fight, peril, or adventure told on shady piazzas by officers and correspondents just back from the Cuban coast; while, on the other hand, if I established myself at the hotel, I could not see the bringing in of Spanish prizes from the Florida Strait, the arrival and departure of despatch-boats with news and orders, the play of the search-lights, the gun practice of the big war-ships, the signaling, the saluting, and the movements generally of the fleet.
Occasionally the flotilla flashed their search-lights upon Jebel Surgham, and swept the scrub and desert in front of the troops. The enemy's scouts, however, were never disclosed in the radii of the electric beams.
And, taking his arm, she went downstairs with him, and blew him a kiss from the doorway. He walked away in a sort of dream. Daylight was not quite gone, but the moon was up, just past its full, and the search-lights had begun their nightly wanderings. It was a sky of ghosts and shadows, fitting to the thought which came to him. The finger of Providence was in all this, perhaps!
And there have been nights with the great search-lights over the Thames that tell us as much as those young insistent voices in Buckingham Street could tell, but only of things so tragic and so sombre that I am the more eager to finish the story of our London nights with our Thursdays, in the years when we were burdened by no more serious fighting than the endless fight of friend with friend, of fellow worker with fellow worker, fought in the good cause of work and play, faith and doubt, fear and hope a stirring fight, but one in which words are the weapons, one which can never be won or lost, since no two can ever be found to agree when they talk for pleasure, nor any one man forced to agree with himself for all time.
Now that the train was motionless the impressive voice of the cannon could be heard more distinctly. The long luminous trails of the search-lights passed over the sky at intervals. Impatient at the delay, I got down and walked along the line to the engine. It had stopped at a level crossing.
"Hullo," said I. He pointed seaward with his pipe, his silver ring shone in the sky light. "Rum," he said. "What is?" I asked. "Search-lights! Smoke! Ships going north! If it wasn't for this blasted Milky Way gone green up there, we might see." He was too intent to heed my questions for a time. Then he vouchsafed over his shoulder "Know Bungalow village? rather. Artis' and such. Nice goings on!
The search-lights of the Texas revealed the fact that the two strangers were torpedo-boats, and a heavy fire was opened upon them instantly.
So many women had thought he understood. "I wonder do you understand!" The eyes that Mrs. Nevill Tyson turned on Stanistreet were not search-lights; they were wells of darkness, unsearchable, unfathomable. Something in Stanistreet, equally inscrutable, something that was himself and not himself, answered very low to that vague appeal. "Yes, I understand."
What a wicked thing of the Englander to shell an "undefended" town! The search-lights and the huge gun positions and the maze of trenches, barbed wire and machine-gun emplacements hewn out of the living rock, of course, to the Teuton mind, do not constitute defence. But you must not think that we have had it all our own way in this sea-warfare here.
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