III
Sailing by way of Nagasaki, the squadron reached Wei-hai-wei on the first morning of June. The Fane-Herberts, who had travelled overland, were already established there, having taken a small house and equipped it with Chinese servants. Mr. Fane-Herbert had urged his wife not to settle down in a place so deserted. In the absence of the squadron, he told her, there would be little company but that of the somewhat distant regiment. But she had made up her mind, and was not to be dissuaded. The squadron would be at Wei-hai during a part of the summer at least, and, if rumour spoke truly, the Pathshire was to winter there alone. Both she and Margaret wanted to be near Hugh, and taking into consideration the probabilities of the squadron’s ever uncertain movements, they seemed likely to see more of him at Wei-hai than elsewhere.... But he couldn’t do his business at Wei-hai, Mr. Fane-Herbert remonstrated; the boy was quite capable of looking after himself.
“You are quite free,” Mrs. Fane-Herbert had said, “to move about independently of us. If the Pathshire leaves Wei-hai for long we will come anywhere you like, and return when the Pathshire returns. We shall have enough time in her absence to see Japan, and Hong-Kong, and Shanghai, or any other places you feel we ought to see. At present I want to see my son. Wild horses shall not move me.”
She had had enough of travelling. She liked to be settled in a home, and did not intend to trail about the seas at her husband’s heels.
Nick invited himself to dine, and John and Hugh, who would not ask for late leave that night, went ashore in the afternoon.
“Mr. Alter is always talking of you,” Margaret told him when, after tea, he had her alone. “He wants more of your work, and he has given me this letter for you.”
“I have done no more work,” he confessed.
“None?”
“None.”
“Didn’t you get my letter. I addressed it to Colombo.”
“Yes, I got that. I took it up to Kandi with me to read. I made wonderful resolutions that night.”
“And haven’t kept them?”
“No.”
“John, you are hopeless.”
He defended himself as best he could. “I can’t help it,” he said; “I have tried to write and I have tried to read. I have read spasmodically. But it seems useless. I started this naval business too early. My education has been a naval education, and—what is more important—my life is a naval life. If you can’t be alone you can’t think; if you can’t think you are a fool to try to write. Besides, to write you must read and read and read. You must see life from a thousand angles—not from one professional standpoint. And you must feel that, for better or for worse, you are master of yourself—not necessarily of your actions, but of your thinking.”
“But you have written in these very circumstances. Why can’t you write more?”
“For the same reason that a man who chances upon an occasional phrase can’t write an epic. Literature isn’t luck; it’s the result of substantial effort.”
“Others have written who had other things to do than write.”
He wondered if, after all, he was overrating difficulties in order to shield a lack of courage. “Yes,” he said, “but out of their office, or shop, or factory, their life was their own. They went home—to some kind of home. At any rate, it was theirs. A snotty’s life is never his own. He lives in his office the whole twenty-four hours. He never ‘goes home.’”
“Then what are you going to do?”
“Nothing.”
“So you give up?” she asked.
“Yes. What can I do?”
“And you are not nineteen yet. What’s your life going to be?”
“I may get to like it. Perhaps in the senior ranks it will be better.”
“It won’t.”
“I know. Of course it won’t.”
She was tempted to be angry because he had so early abandoned hope, because he was not putting up a fight; but she saw that he was opposed to forces so much stronger than any he could command that by no courage could he unaided stand against them. Then she remembered a source whence help might come.
“John,” she said, “I want you to fight this out.”
“Fight?”
“Because I believe it’s worth the fighting. You feel hopeless now, partly, I dare say, because your other work prevents your writing, but chiefly—isn’t that true?—chiefly because you don’t feel sure that you could ever write.... You can write, you know.”
“What guarantee have you of that?” he asked, in a tone that was unusually hard, because he did not feel hard. Her presence, her voice, her repose above all, affected his uneasy mind profoundly. It was amazing that anyone should care two damns whether he wasted his life or not.
“I think I had better tell you,” she said. “I didn’t intend to. There’s a sort of convention that you mustn’t tell people good of themselves, but I shall tell you this now. I have Mr. Alter’s guarantee.”
“Because he said he liked my work? It’s so easy to say that.”
“No—more than that. He said you were an example of godless waste.”
“Good heavens!” John exclaimed with a laugh.
“And he said,” she went on, “that he believed you could, if you would, be a great man. I asked him at once what reasons he had for saying that. He gave me certain points in your work: I shan’t repeat them or you will strain after them and exaggerate them. But he thought them decisive. He showed your work to other men whose opinions confirmed his own.... What now?”
“It’s wonderfully good to hear,” John said unsteadily. “Margaret, tell me the special points he hit on. I don’t see how it is possible to be sure at this stage.”
“I’ll tell you one point—too general for you to exaggerate and spoil. He said that you wrote naturally, established a curious intimacy with your audience, and that yet what you said was momentous—the rarest of combinations. And he repeated what you heard him say that night at dinner—that your images were chosen with the eyes tight shut or wide open—the full vision, inward or outward. He gave instances.”
“What instances?”
“Those I can’t tell you. If I did you would be bound to imitate them.”
He thought over this in silence. “Margaret,” he said, “may not this be mere talk? You know how great men love an occasional enthusiasm. Mr. Alter is in no way bound by what he says.”
“He acts on it, at any rate. He went to see your mother about it.”
“She wrote that he had called.”
“He has called often,” Margaret said. She smiled as she remembered his words, spoken after one of those expeditions to the country. “Mrs. Lynwood is delightful,” he had said. “She understands everything except her son. She wishes he would settle down to the Navy—a fixed income and an open-air life. She smiles at his poetry, and says, ‘Yes, I dare say it is good, Wing, and I’m glad he does it so well; but there’s no money in it. And we are dreadfully poor, you know.’”
Margaret told John nothing of this. If Mrs. Lynwood did not see fit to mention to her son that she had known Wingfield Alter long enough and intimately enough to call him “Wing,” she had probably good reasons for concealing the fact.
“I must think over all this,” John said. “I want to tell Hartington about it. Hartington is the Sub.”
“The Sub?” she said in surprise. “Does the Sub listen kindly to poetry?”
“Yes, thank Heaven. You must meet him soon.... And I’ll try to write to-night, Margaret.”
“No; don’t try.”
“But I want to write now. I am so suddenly happy. I have been longing and longing to see you. And when you come you bring this wonderful news.”
Near at hand the gulls were crying, and sampan men crooning to themselves as they rocked their bodies over their stern oars.
“Come and tell me about England,” he said; “the Thames, the bridges, the lights, the trains; and pictures and music, and books and plays, and carpets and rugs; and little narrow country lanes, and hills, and being free, and——”
“But I can’t tell you everything at once!”
“Oh, splendid!” he exclaimed. “I guessed you would say that. I have guessed it every night for weeks and weeks. ‘But I can’t tell you everything at once!’ Now it’s coming true. You see,” he explained, “I have been looking forward to this.”
A tremor of joy passed through her because she had made him happy. She began to talk eagerly, so that, for a time at least, he might forget the ship, and might not remember, what she understood now, that “for weeks and weeks” there had been nothing but this meeting to which he might look forward.
From the bridge of the Pathshire Nick Ordith was surveying the shore through a telescope.
“Dull spot, Yeoman,” he said.
The Yeoman of Signals rubbed his hands. “Precious cold in the winter, sir.”