A TITHE OF ADMIRALTY
It was the hour preceding dinner, and a small boy in the uniform of a Naval Cadet stood on the balcony of an hotel at Dartmouth.
Earlier in the day a tremendous self-importance had possessed his soul; it was begotten primarily of brass buttons and a peaked cap, and its outward manifestation at Paddington Station had influenced a short-sighted old lady in her decision that he was a railway official of vast, if premature, responsibilities. He leaned over the balustrade and looked up harbour; beyond the scattered yachts and coal-hulks, black against the path of the sunset, lay the old Britannia. She was moored, this cradle of a generation's Naval destiny, where the Dart commenced to wind among green hills crowned by woods and red-brown plough lands; and as he stared, the smaller vanities of the morning passed from him.
He was barely fifteen, and his ideas were jumbled and immature, but in a confused sort of way he thought of the thousands of other boys those wooden walls had sheltered, and who, at the bidding of unknown powers, had gone down to the sea in ships.
He pictured them working their pinnaces and cutters—as he would some day—soaked and chilled by winter gales. Others departed for the Mediterranean, where, if the testimony of an aunt (who had once spent a winter at Malta) was to be accepted, life was all picnics and dances. He saw them yet farther afield, chasing slavers, patrolling pirate-infested creeks, fighting through jungle and swamp, lying stark beneath desert stars, ... and ever fresh ones came to fill the vacant places, bred for the work—even as he was to be—on the placid waters of the Dart, amid Devon coombes. It was all a little vainglorious, perhaps; and if his imagination was coloured by the periodicals and literature of boyhood, who is to blame him?
Why it was necessary for these things to be he understood vaguely, if at all. But in some dim way he realised it was part of his new heritage, a sort of brotherhood of self-immolation and hardship into which he was going to be initiated.
His thoughts went back along the path of the last few years that had followed his father's death. With a tightening of the heart-strings he saw how an Empire demands other sacrifices. How, in order that men might die to martial music, must sometimes come first an even greater heroism of self-denial. Years of thrift and contrivance, new clothes foresworn, a thousand renunciations—this had been his mother's part, that her son might in time bear his share of the Empire's burden.
She came out on to the balcony as the sun dipped behind the hills, and the woods were turning sombre, and slipped a thin arm inside his. It is rarely given to men to live worthy of the mothers that bore them; a few—a very few—are permitted to die worthy of them. Perhaps it was some dim foreknowledge of the end that thrilled him as he drew her closer.
They had dinner, and with it, because it was such a great occasion, a bottle of "Sparkling Cider," drunk out of wine-glasses to the inscrutable Future. Another boy was dining with his parents at a distant table, and at intervals throughout the meal the embryo admirals glanced at one another with furtive interest. After dinner the mother and son sat on the balcony watching the lights of the yachts twinkling across the water, and talked in low voices scarcely raised above the sound of the waves lapping along the quay. At times their heads were very close together, and, since in the star-powdered darkness there were none to see, their hands met and clung.
She accompanied him on board the following day, to be led by a grave-faced Petty Officer along spotless decks that smelt of tar and resin. She saw the chest-deck, where servants were slinging hammocks above the black-and-white painted chests—the chest-deck with its wide casement ports and rows of enamelled basins, and everywhere that smell of hemp and scrubbed woodwork.