was about to observe that "stand easy" didn't seem to me quite the
appropriate term to apply to the act of keeping one's balance on a craft
which was blending thirty-degree rolls with forty-degree pitches to form
a corkscrew-like motion of an eccentricity comparable to nothing else in
the gamut of human experience, when he continued with: "Not much like
what I was enjoying a month ago, this," indicating the encompassing
darkness with a rotary roll of his head. "I was in a destroyer at an
Italian base then--Brindisi--with the smell of dust and donkeys and
wine-shops in the air, and straight-backed, black-haired, black-eyed
girls, with rings in their ears and baskets of fruit--soft red and
yellow and blue fruit--on their heads. Now it's"--and she put her nose
deep into a wave that dealt her a sledge-hammer blow and sent spray
flying half-way to the foretop in a solid stream--"this, just this. Grey
by day, black by night, and slap-bang all the time. No light, no colour,
no atmosphere, no----"

"I quite understand," I cut in. "No straight-backed girls with rings in
their ears and fruit-baskets on their heads. Of course, there's more
light and colour down there than here; but wasn't there also a bit of
slap-bang to it now and then?"

"Ay, there was a bit," he replied. "There was the time----" He started
to tell me the already time-worn yarn of the Yarmouth trawler skipper
and the Grimsby trawler skipper, each of whom, enamoured of the same
Taranto maid, wooed her while the other was absent on patrol; of how one
of them, looking through his glass as he stood in toward the entrance on
one of his return trips, saw his rival walking on the beach with arm
round the waist of the artful minx in question, and her red-and-yellow
kerchief-bound head resting on his shoulder; of how the one on the
trawler, consumed by a jealousy fairly Latin in its intensity, swung
round his six-pounder, discharged it at the faithless pair, and--so
crookedly did the rage-blind eyes see through the sights--hit a
fisherman's hut half a mile away from his target!

I had heard the story in Taranto a year previously, and knew it to be
somewhat apocryphal at best. "I didn't mean that kind of 'slap-bang,'" I
said. "I was under the impression that the destroyers had some rather
lively work down there on one or two occasions."

"There were several brushes which might have been called lively while
they lasted," he admitted. "I was in one of them myself just b