The False Faces | Page 7

or took swift
departure on grim and secret errands.

There was, moreover, the not-infrequent spectacle of some minor ship
of war--a truculent, gray destroyer as like as not--shepherding in a sleek
submarine, like a felon whale armoured and strangely caparisoned in
gray-brown steel, to be moored in chains with a considerable company
of its fellows on the far side of the roadstead, while its crew was taken
ashore and consigned to some dark limbo of oblivion.
And once, with a light cruiser snapping at her heels, a drab Norwegian
tramp plodded sullenly into port, a mine-layer caught red-handed,
plying its assassin's trade beneath a neutral flag.
Not long after its crew had been landed, volleys of musketry crashed in
the town gaol-yard.
One of a group of three idling on the promenade deck of the
_Assyrian_, Lanyard turned sharply and stared through narrowed
eyelids into the quarter whence the sounds reverberated.
The man at his side, a loose-jointed American of the commercial caste,
paused momentarily in his task of masticating a fat dark cigar.
"This way out," he commented thoughtfully.
Lanyard nodded; but the third, a plumply ingratiative native of Geneva,
known to the ship as Emil Dressier, frowned in puzzlement.
"Pardon, Monsieur Crane, but what is that you say--'this way out'?"
"Simply," Crane explained, "I take the firing to mean the execution of
our nootral friends from Norway."
The Swiss shuddered. "It is most terrible!"
"Well, I don't know about that. They done their damnedest to fix it for
us to drown somewhere out there in the nice, cold English Channel. I'm
just as satisfied it's them, instead, with their backs to a stone wall in the
warm sunlight, getting their needin's. That's only justice. Eh, Monsieur
Duchemin?"
"It is war," said Lanyard with a shrug.
"And war is ... No: Sherman was all wrong. Hell's got perfectly good
grounds for a libel suit against William Tecumseh for what he up and
said about it and war, all in the same breath."
Lanyard smiled faintly, but Dressler pondered this obscure reference
with patent distress. Crane champed his cigar reflectively.
"What's more to our purpose," he said presently: "I shouldn't be
surprised if this meant the wind-up of our rest-cure here. That's the
third mine-layer they've collected this week--two subs, and now this

benevolent nootral. Am I right, Monsieur Duchemin?"
"Who knows?" Lanyard replied with a smile. "Even now the
mine-sweeping flotilla is coming home, as you see; which means, the
neighbouring waters have been cleared. It is altogether a possibility that
we may be permitted to depart this night."
Even so the event: as that day's sun declined amid a portentous welter
of crimson and purple and gold, the moorings were cast off and the
Assyrian warped out into mid-channel and anchored there for the night.
Inasmuch as she was to sail as the tide served, some time before sunrise,
the passengers were advised to seek their berths at an early hour. Thirty
minutes before the steamship entered the danger zone (as she would
soon after leaving the harbour) they would be roused and were
expected promptly to assemble on deck, with life-preservers, and
station themselves near the boats to which they were individually
assigned.
For their further comforting they were treated, in the ebb of the chill
blue twilight, to boat-drill and final instructions in the right adjustment
of life-belts.
A preoccupied company assembled in the dining saloon for what might
be its last meal. In the shadow of the general apprehension,
conversation languished; expressions of relief on the part of those who
had been loudest in complaining at the delays were notably unheard;
even Crane, Lanyard's nearest neighbour at table, was abnormally
subdued. Reviewing that array of sobered and anxious faces, Lanyard
remarked--not for the first time, but with renewed gratitude--that in all
the roster of passengers none were children and but two were women:
the American widow of an English officer and her very English
daughter, an angular and superior spinster.
Avoiding the customary post-prandial symposium in the smoking room,
Lanyard slipped away with his cigar for a lonely turn on deck.
Beneath a sky heavily canopied, the night was stark black and loud
with clashing waters. A fitful wind played in gusts now grim, now
groping, like a lost thing blundering blindly about in that deep darkness.
Ashore a few wan lights, widely spaced, winked uncertainly,
withdrawn in vast remoteness; those near at hand, of the anchored
shipping, skipped and swayed and flickered in mad mazes of goblin
dance. To him who paced those vacant, darkened decks, the sense of

dissociation from all the common, kindly phenomena of civilization
was something intimate and inescapable. Melancholy as well rode upon
that black-winged wind.
At pause beneath the bridge, the adventurer rested elbows upon the
teakwood rail and with importunate