Almost every rank of Naval officer was represented, from Commander to Sub-Lieutenant and their equivalent ranks in other branches; yet the vast majority shared a curious resemblance. It was elusive and quite apart from the affinity of race. The high physical standard demanded of each on entry, the athletic training of their early years, the stern rigour of life afloat, perhaps accounted for it. But in many of the tanned, clean-shaven faces there was something more definite than that; a strain that might have been transmitted by the symbolic Mother of the Race, clear-eyed and straight of limb, who still sits and watches beneath stern calm brows the heritage of her sons.
A few there were among the gathering with more than youth's unwisdom marring mouth and brow; eyes tired with seeing over-much looked out here and there from the face of Youth. Yet amid the wholesome, virile cheerfulness of that assembly they were but transient impressions, lingering on the mind of an observer with no more permanency than the shadows of leaves flickering on a sunny wall.
A Lieutenant-Commander, on whose left breast the gaudy ribbons of Russian decorations hinted at the nature of his employment during the War, was talking animatedly to a Lieutenant with the eagle of the Navy-that-Flies above the distinction lace on his cuff. A grave-faced Navigating Commander, scenting the possibility of an interesting discussion between these exponents of submarine and aerial warfare, pushed his way towards them through the crush.
"… I remember her quite well," the Flying Man was saying as he stirred his tea. "Nice little thing … married, is she? Well, well…"
"You're a nice pair," said the Commander, smiling. "I came over here expecting to hear you both discussing the bursting area of a submarine bomb, and find you're talking scandal."
"It's a year old at that," said the be-ribboned one, with a laugh. "I've just come back from the White Sea, but I seem to know more about what Timmin's lady friends have been doing in the meanwhile than he does himself!"
He bit firmly into a sardine sandwich and laughed again. A great hum of men's voices filled the room. Scraps of home gossip exchanged between more intimate friends, and comments on the afternoon's boxing mingled with tag-ends of narratives from distant seas and far-off shores. It was nearly all war, of course, Naval war in some guise or other, and it covered most of the navigable globe.
A general conversation of this nature cannot be satisfactorily reproduced. A person slowly elbowing his way from the big tea-urns at one end of the mess to the smoking-room at the other, would, in his passage, cut off, as it were, segments of talk such as the following:
"… Ripping little boxer, isn't he? I had his term at Osborne
College, but he's learnt a good deal since then…."
* * * *