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Updated: May 4, 2025
I saw Pyecroft's arm fly up; heard at the same moment the severing of the tense rope, the working of the wheel, Moorshed's voice down the tube saying, "Astern a little, please, Mr. Hinchcliffe!" and Pyecroft's cry, "Trawler with her gear down! Look out for our propeller, Sir, or we'll be wrapped up in the rope."
Even now I can at will recall every tone and gesture, with each dissolving picture inboard or overside Hinchcliffe's white arm buried to the shoulder in a hornet's nest of spinning machinery; Moorshed's halt and jerk to windward as he looked across the water; Pyecroft's back bent over the Berthon collapsible boat, while he drilled three men in expanding it swiftly; the outflung white water at the foot of a homeward-bound Chinaman not a hundred yards away, and her shadow-slashed, rope-purfled sails bulging sideways like insolent cheeks; the ribbed and pitted coal-dust on our decks, all iridescent under the sun; the first filmy haze that paled the shadows of our funnels about lunch time; the gradual die-down and dulling over of the short, cheery seas; the sea that changed to a swell: the swell that crumbled up and ran allwhither oilily: the triumphant, almost audible roll inward of wandering fog-walls that had been stalking us for two hours, and welt upon welt, chill as the grave the drive of the interminable main fog of the Atlantic.
"I can't see her," I replied, "but there's a light low down ahead." "The Agatha!" They rowed desperately through the uneasy dispersal of the fog for ten minutes and ducked round the trawler's bow. "Well, Emanuel means 'God with us' so far." Pyecroft wiped his brow, laid a hand on the low rail, and as he boosted me up to the trawler, I saw Moorshed's face, white as pearl in the thinning dark.
A white whiskered man in a frock-coat as I live by bread, a frock-coat! sea-boots, and a comforter crawled over the torpedo-tube into Moorshed's grip and vanished forward. You're a tax-payer, Sir. Do you think that excessive?" "Lead there! Lead!" rang out from forward. "Didn't I say 'e wouldn't understand compass deviations? Watch him close. It'll be worth it!"
On these lines we proceeded miraculously, and, under Moorshed's orders I was the fisherman's Ganymede, even as "M. de C." had served the captain I found both rum and curacoa in a locker, and mixed them equal bulk in an enamelled iron cup. "Now we'm just abeam o' where we should be," he said at last, "an' here we'll lay till she lifts.
"Off the Start, Sir; two hours after after she left here this evening, I believe. My orders are to report to you for the manoeuvre signal-codes, and join Commander Hignett's flotilla, which is in attendance on Stiletto." A smothered chuckle greeted this last. Moorshed's voice was high and uneasy.
And while he delivered himself deeper and more deeply into our hands, I saw Captain Malan wince. He was watching Moorshed's eye. "I belong to Blue Fleet, Sir. I command Number Two Six Seven," said Moorshed, and Captain Planke was dumb. "Have you such a thing as a frame- plan of the Cryptic aboard?" He spoke with winning politeness as he opened a small and neatly folded paper. "I have, sir."
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