At the last I rolled limply on the
floor, and woke to real life with a bruised nose and a great call to go on
deck at once.
"It's all right," said a voice in my booming ears. "Morgan and Laughton
are worse than you!"
I was gripping a rail. Mr. Pyecroft pointed with his foot to two bundles
beside a torpedo-tube, which at Weymouth had been a signaller and a most
able seaman. "She'd do better in a bigger sea," said Mr. Pyecroft. "This
lop is what fetches it up."
The sky behind us whitened as I laboured, and the first dawn drove down
the Channel, tipping the wave-tops with a chill glare. To me that round
wind which runs before the true day has ever been fortunate and of good
omen. It cleared the trouble from my body, and set my soul dancing to
267's heel and toe across the northerly set of the waves--such waves as I
had often watched contemptuously from the deck of a ten-thousand-ton
liner. They shouldered our little hull sideways and passed, scalloped, and
splayed out, toward the coast, carrying our white wake in loops along
their hollow backs. In succession we looked down a lead-grey cutting of
water for half a clear mile, were flung up on its ridge, beheld the
Channel traffic--full-sailed to that fair breeze--all about us, and swung
slantwise, light as a bladder, elastic as a basket, into the next furrow.
Then the sun found us, struck the wet gray bows to living, leaping opal,
the colourless deep to hard sapphire, the many sails to pearl, and the
little steam-plume of our escape to an inconstant rainbow.
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