They were crossing the Irish Sea. It was night, blowing a moderate gale, but the moon, aloft on the port bow with a wind, was chock full of such astounding brightness that the turmoil of the dark waves was easy and beautiful to see. The boat was crowded with soldiers on leave; the few civilian passengers—mechanics, labourers, and a miner going to his home in Wexford, who had got drunk at the harbour inn before coming aboard—were congregated in the angles on the lee-side of the saloon bunks and trying to sleep amid the chill seething, roaring, and thudding. The miner, young, powerful, and very much at his ease, sprawled among them intoxicated. He sang, and continued to sing at intervals, a song about “The hat that my father wore,” swaying, with large dreamy gestures, to and fro, round and about, up and down upon the unfortunate men sitting to right and left of him. Close at hand sat another young man, but smaller, who carried a big brass trumpet. “Throw him in the sea, why not, now!” the trumpeter shouted to the drunken man’s weary supporters. “Begad I would do it if he put his pig’s face on e’er[142] a shoulder of me!” He was a small, emphatic young man: “Give him a crack now, and lay on him, or by the tears of God we’ll get no repose at all!”
His advice was tendered as constantly and as insistently as the miner’s song about his parent’s headgear, and he would encourage these incitements to vicarious violence by putting the brass trumpet to his lips and blowing some bitter and not very accurate staves. So bitter and so inaccurate that at length even the drunken miner paused in his song and directed the trumpeter to “shut up.” The little man sprang to his feet in fury, and approaching the other he poured a succession of trumpet calls close into his face. This threw the miner into a deep sleep, a result so unexpected that the enraged trumpeter slung his instrument under his arm and pranced belligerently upon the deck.
“Come out o’ that, ye drunken matchbox, and by the Queen of Heaven I’ll teach ye! Come now!”
The miner momentarily raised himself and recommenced his song: “’Tis the Hat that me Father wore!” At this the trumpeter fetched him a mighty slap across the face.
“Ah, go away,” groaned the miner, “or I’ll be sick on ye.”
“Try it, ye rotten gossoon! ye filthy matchbox! Where’s yer kharkee?”
The miner could display no khaki; indeed, he was sleeping deeply again.
“I’m a man o’ me principles, ye rotten matchbox!” yelled the trumpeter. “In the Munsters I was ... seven years ... where’s your kharkee?”
[143]
He seized the miner by the collar and shook that part of the steamer into a new commotion until he was collared by the sailors and kicked up on to the foredeck.
Nothing up there, not even his futile trumpeting, could disturb the chill rejoicing beauty of the night. The wind increased, but the moonlight was bland and reassuring. Often the cope of some tall wave would plunge dully over the bows, filling the deck with water that floundered foaming with the ship’s movement or dribbled back through the scuppers into the sea. Yet there was no menace in the dark wandering water; each wave tossed back from its neck a wreath of foam that slewed like milk across the breast of its follower.
The trumpeter sat upon a heap of ropes beside a big soldier.
“The rotten matchbox, did ye ever see the like o’ that? I’ll kill him against the first thing we step ashore, like ye would a flea!”
“Be aisy,” said the soldier; “why are ye making trouble at all? Have ye hurt your little finger?”
“Trouble, is it? What way would I be making trouble in this world?” exclaimed the trumpeter. “Isn’t it the world itself as puts trouble on ye, so it is, like a wild cat sitting under a tub of unction! O, very pleasant it is, O ay! No, no, my little sojee, that is not it at all. You can’t let the flaming world rush beyant ye like that....”
“Well, it’s a quiet life I’m seeking,” interjected the soldier, wrapping his great coat comfortingly across his breast, “and by this and by that, a quiet night too.”
[144]
“Is that so? Quiet, is it? But I say, my little sojee, you’ll not get it at all and the whole flaming world whickering at ye like a mad cracker itself. Would ye sleep on that wid yer quiet life and all? It’s to tame life you’d be doing, like it was a tiger. And it’s no drunken boozer can tame me as was with the Munsters in the East ... for seven holy years.”
“Ah, go off wid you, you’ve hurt your little finger.”
“Me little finger, is it?” cried the trumpeter, holding his thin hands up for inspection in the moonlight, “I have not then.”
“You surprise me,” the soldier said, gazing at him with sleepy amused tolerance. “Did you never hear of Tobin the smith and Mary of Cappoquin?”
“I did not then,” snapped the oth............