Chapter I: Front Matter

In
Peril on the Sea

BY

MONTAGUE T. HAINSSELIN

AUTHOR OF
_"IN THE NORTHERN MISTS," ETC._

HODDER AND STOUGHTON
LONDON NEW YORK TORONTO

_THE SAME AUTHOR_

IN THE NORTHERN MISTS
GRAND FLEET DAYS
NAVAL INTELLIGENCE
THE CURTAIN OF STEEL

_PREFACE_

Having spread myself discursively in four books dealing with the naval aspect of many things; _videlicet_ and to wit:

_of Shoes_; especially of Pusser's Crabs, footwear of the British Matlow in all climes; of sea-boots, which may be taken up On Loan, and with a certain amount of tact and discretion may be attracted into the orbit of personal and private gear; and of Uniform Boots, plain-fronted and without toe-caps, the mark of the correctly-garbed Naval Officer, distinguishing the pukka navy man not seldom from his temporary brother who is apt to be known by his Feet of Clay, i.e. a pair of Plain-clothes boots with patterns punched in holes all over their bows:

_and Ships_; treating of them according to their various classes and according to their many kinds of work in the Great War:

_and Sealing-wax_; also of Red Tape, and other such weapons of officialdom; how they vex the souls of bluff happy-go-lucky sailormen; how they can be parried and evaded by guile and experience; and how the command to Give Reasons In Writing must be correctly met by the soft answer that turneth away wrath, beginning with I Have The Honour To Submit and finishing with the additional Honour--(really, it is a wonder that the humble delinquent can bear the weight of so many honours!)--of Being Your Obedient Servant:

_of Cabbages_; and other succulent produce of the kitchen garden, sent by the very kindest of Committees to the men of the Grand Fleet month after month, a welcome change from the official spud. Also of other cabbages, grown by optimistic and energetic and enthusiastic Naval Officers in extemporised gardens upon the islands of Flotta and Fara:

_and Kings_, and notably of our own most gracious sovereign Liege Lord, and his visits to the Fleet where he was welcomed indeed as King, but doubly and trebly welcomed as being himself a Navy man.

--_Having_, I say, discoursed of these and similar matters in certain volumes which both the general public and the reviewers have received with very great kindness--though a friend of mine _did_ say to me, "whenever I find that I can't go to sleep I just take up one of your books and read a chapter, and then I soon drop off"; and I am left guessing to this very day whether or not he meant it as a compliment--having, I repeat, written these four books of essays and sketches (this sentence is really going to close now) it occurred to me that it would be a great relief to myself, if not to my readers, if I were to write a story.

A Naval story, of course. I quite understand that I must confine myself to my own sphere and not try to write about people and things I didn't know--though I believe there have been story-writers who have been known to do such a thing.

Well, it sounds easy enough, to write a Naval story. But it is the very dickens of a job when you actually settle down to do it; and I'll tell you why.

First, because most of the fashionable methods of treatment, applicable readily enough to shore-going stories, do not fit in at all well with a nautical atmosphere.

For example, there is the method which may be described politely as the Biological--and impolitely as, well, choose your own word for it, please. Books of this kind generally contain a Triangle and a Problem, like Euclid; but with this exception they do not at all resemble him.

Even with the worst intentions, however, it would be almost impossible to conform to this method, because the Navy is not Bisexual: unless you count the Wrens; and these, unfortunately--or is it fortunately?--are not allowed to go to sea; and anyhow, the Wrens deserve a story all to themselves, and it should be written in letters of gold.

Then there is another favourite story-form, in which you are told at great length how John Smith, of Yorkshire or the Midlands, cooms doon fro' th' hoose to th' works i' th' morning and fares back fro' th' works to th' hoose at neet, and does this for twenty-odd years without any more exciting incident than taking tea on one occasion wi' a neebour; and that's all there is to it.

Here again, the method appears scarcely thrilling enough for a sea story, and I'm quite sure you wouldn't really like it.

Or there is that other method, greatly affected by certain writers, of describing minutely the hero's daily doings from the moment of his birth, through his childhood, youth, adolescence, and early manhood, until--until you feel that you really couldn't stick another page of him!

That is all very well in its way; but the lives of all naval officers are really so very much alike in most details that if I were to attempt this sort of writing I might get myself into serious trouble with the very senior officers, who would want to know why I had dug up their past in this barefaced manner!

And that reminds me; in my last book, "The Curtain of Steel," I took particular pains to insist, in the preface, that there were no portraits amongst the characters therein depicted; there was, I stated only one part-exception to this--I had drawn from life in one sole instance; "and that," said I, "was the face of a good man." Well in due course I had a letter from one of my late messmates, which said, "when we read the preface and saw it stated that there was one portrait, the face of a good man, everyone blushed self-consciously." It just shows how hard it is to ram an idea into some people, doesn't it?

Anyhow, at the risk of being again disbelieved or misunderstood, I beg to repeat the statement in reference to this present book that THERE ARE NO PORTRAITS IN IT.

But, to go back to the difficulties of writing a sea story. The second of these is that there is always Captain Marryat to contend with.

I mean that this splendid old fellow has set the pace so rapidly that any modern weakling who endeavours to follow lamely in his footsteps will not be considered to be giving his readers their money's worth unless he provides a fight with cannons and cutlasses, or some hairbreadth escape, on every other page.

Now, naval warfare up to date has been proved to be somewhat monotonously free from stirring incidents. Marryat would probably have used up the whole of this war's sea-fighting in one book, or in two at most. There have been plenty of actions with the enemy, of course, and very thrilling ones; but they have been so equally distributed amongst the various units of the Navy that it would be an impossibility to make a hero participate in a sufficient number to enable one to make a whole volume out of him.

So the only thing to do was to take an incident--or rather, in this case, to invent one--and with it fill up the two hours' traffic of a book. The incident had of course to be of the real old-fashioned cut-and-thrust order; nobody wants analytical and psychological character drawing in a naval story. The play's the thing--and, after all, in spite of the people who scorn to introduce into their books anything so utterly _démodé_ as a plot, and even sniff at the vulgarity of mere incidents, there is something to be said for a yarn which does not profess to be anything more than a yarn with no more purpose than that of wiling away an idle hour or two.

I like writing prefaces. I don't know if you like reading them. Do you mind if I go on with this one for a bit?

I know I shall get into hot water about Patrick Sheridan's dialect. Once upon a time I wrote a little story in which I made an Irishman say:

Begobs; it was, perhaps, a weak thing to do, but really I meant no harm. Well, an Irish correspondent wrote at once to the paper, very indignantly, to protest against my putting that expression into the mouth of one of his compatriots. And it appears that something of this sort nearly always happens when anyone attempts to reproduce a so-called Irish dialect, and especially when he reproduces it very badly--as I admit I do.

This is very strange; one may with impunity write in that peculiar and well-known Loamshire dialect which is nowhere found but in the English novel or on the English stage--and no Englishman ever thinks of grumbling; he is, indeed, rather amused, though generally still more bored. But if one dares to make an Irishman say "fwhat" for "what," or "whoy" for "why"--well, it is treated as just one more injustice to Ireland!

Yet, what can one do? There are conventions to be observed and these are maintained because they are not only conventions but conveniences; and just as you have a stage Irishman whom you can recognise at once by his knee-breeches, flower-pot hat, and little black dudheen, so you have also the book-Irishman who is labelled as such by a few unmistakable turns of speech. It makes no difference that the stage-Irishman and the book-Irishman are never seen and never have been seen in real life. Their peculiarities are simply labels, like those which the Elizabethans used to stick up on their back-cloths to say "This is a castle"; it wasn't in the remotest degree like a castle, but everyone knew what was meant.

And, of course, even the most scrupulously careful effort to reproduce dialect phonetically in print is bound to be a lamentable failure. Many people will probably be surprised to be told that the function of the written or printed word is primarily to record _ideas_, and only secondarily--if at all--to record _sounds_. Certainly, our own English alphabet, with its ridiculously inadequate complement of twenty-six letters, is hopelessly unfitted to do the work of a gramophone; the thing would be impossible, really, were the alphabet ten times as big. And that is why the very greatest writers, such as Dickens, never seriously attempt to reduce to writing every word of their dialect-characters in the exact form implied, but content themselves with inserting a dialect-word here and there, thus avoiding a form of writing which would be an intolerable labour to the reader, while sufficiently indicating that the curiosities of speech are to be understood throughout. It is not necessary to place milestones at every yard of the road.

I hope it is not necessary also for me to apologise for this same Patrick Sheridan being a thorough Bad Hat. If you can't employ a Villain in a story, what can you do? It does not necessarily follow that the villain is taken as a type of his whole race and nation; and in this present case I positively disavow any such intention; so be it known to all men by these presents.

Oh yes, there is one thing more. When I announced, in the sanctity of the home circle, my determination to write a story, the Critic on the Hearth--the junior one--said, "Well, mind you don't write anything about girls and Love; 'cause you can't do it!"

Did you ever hear of such a thing? Of course, no man could take a dare like that; and, besides, what would a naval story be like if it didn't contain something about both of these subjects? A wishy-washy affair! Try and imagine Jack without his Faithful Poll! The thing simply can't be done. So there just had to be Girls and Love in it. But whether I have given satisfaction or not must remain unknown until the aforesaid Critic on the Hearth reads the attempt in cold print; and then it will be too late to complain.

Naval readers will be certain to note a few inaccuracies in the description of a "Court of Iniquity" at the end of the book.

But that is because...

And I am confident that this will be recognised as an adequate explanation.

And now, having as I hope disarmed criticism all round beforehand--a wise precaution to take, and one which I trust will be justified by results--perhaps I had better go ahead with the yarn.

H.M.S. _Vivid_,
1919.

_In Peril on the Sea_