III
Night leave was granted at Shanghai. As many midshipmen as could be spared from ship’s duties accepted it and went ashore. They went with a light conscience, for this affair of women had long ceased in their eyes to have any connection with right or wrong. They regarded it neither from the social nor from the moral standpoint. They did not consider it more seriously than a civilian considers a visit to a theatre. To them it was a break in routine, an escape from sameness, an obtaining, in the only accessible form, of that change of association which is as necessary to the mind as is change of diet to the body.
“In the only accessible form”—in that phrase was the essence of the truth. When first they went to sea they had no taste for drink, no habit of women. What relief they needed from the inevitable hardness of work and discipline they found as other men find it, in the company of those whose interests differed from their own professional interests. According to their tastes they read, or played games, or danced, or flirted. They talked to their mothers or their sisters, and forgot; they went to a theatre and forgot; they saw colour, silk, pictures, furniture, and forgot; they hunted, or read some poem, or walked on high hills, and they forgot with the saving and strengthening forgetfulness of sleep. So men live; such is the meaning of recreation.
In Gunrooms these things, which have in common that their appeal is imaginative, do not exist; and the inhabitants of Gunrooms—and not of Gunrooms only—because the imagination must needs be fed somehow, seek relief where they may. The Pathshire’s midshipmen were not naturally drunkards or gamblers, nor were they naturally corrupt. When they had gone home on leave from the King Arthur they had not drunk or womanized; when they returned from leave they had found the tone of the whole Gunroom temporarily changed. Leave, a chance to break free, an opportunity to meet women other than harlots, had cleared their minds as the opening of a window clears a foul atmosphere. For a time blasphemy had been unpopular, foul language infrequent. But by the pressure of circumstance they had been driven back into the old ways. Now they thought lightly of drinking in excess and of going with women.
“You R.N. snotties,” a merchant service officer had told John, “have the filthiest minds I know.”
That night on which leave was given Hartington dined with the Captain.
“Well,” he said, “what of your snotties now? I suppose they are off with the women. One can’t blame them. There’s nothing to be done out here. They can’t be given home leave.... But the devil of it is, Hartington, that even in home waters they don’t get leave worth speaking of.... The fact of their having women doesn’t worry me. The trouble is that snotties’ minds, their whole manner of life, their outlook—it’s like a gradual debasing of a currency.... They are strange people, the Powers-that-Be. Give them an invention or a strategical idea and they’ll work on it untiringly, develop it with amazing ingenuity and care. Give them boys, as fine human material as is to be found in the world, and for four and a half years they educate them magnificently. Then, before they are eighteen, when their minds are in a most impressionable stage, these boys are sent to sea. They are subjected to persecution; they are flogged continually for no specific wrong-doing; they are deprived of all opportunity for solitude or thought; they are put in a crowded mess where they are cut off from intimate association with men older than themselves, from women of their own kind, from art and culture, from trees and hills, from all legitimate amusement. And the Powers know it. They have absolute authority in the Service, but the evil continues. Wine bills are limited on board, and there is a free issue of prophylactics, but the evil continues. I know the difficulties—the inevitable conditions of sea-service, the need there is that snotties should be taught discipline by a short method. But it’s an odd thing, Hartington, that men with ability and power, who have the interests of the Service at heart, should be unable to find any means of preventing that waste and wrong.”