Because he could not trust himself to speak again John went out, his eyes aching as before a storm of tears.
CHAPTER XVI
THE ENGINES
I
About the middle of July the squadron left Wei-hai-wei to visit Chemulpo and Seoul. John was now attached to the Engine-room staff. He kept no more watches on the Upper Deck, attended no lectures, and ran no boats. His connection with the executive branch was limited to the writing up of his log-book, the taking and working out of sights, and to certain gunnery duties of which more shall be said. The executive officers, who objected strongly to the system under which midshipmen were withdrawn periodically from the Upper Deck, and by which they were thus deprived of a full complement of messengers, boat-runners, cocoa-makers, and general assistants, had contrived on this occasion that no more than two, John and Driss, should go below. This arrangement, which John had at first welcomed, was soon found to be less advantageous than he had supposed.
The control of engineering midshipmen had passed into the hands of Aggett. He disliked all midshipmen trained under the New Scheme with the instinctive dislike of a small-minded man for those who, in their education and upbringing, have been more fortunate than he. He objected to these “young gentlemen”—the phrase sounded unusually venomous and scornful as he pronounced it—he objected to their very presence in his Engine-room. They were intruders. At heart they were executive officers. Their interest—if, indeed, this Lynwood had interest in anything but his stuffy books—was in Gunnery, Torpedo, and Seamanship. It was more than likely that, in their own Mess, they referred to engineers as “greasers.” Damned insolence! he thought. Damned insolence! He’d teach them.... To them, of course, the Engine-room was attractive only as a shelter from the fury of the Commander, a place in which they might smoke on duty. Aggett was under no delusion on that point. They thought they could loaf while they were engineers, and get ashore more often in harbour because they would have no boats to run. Not one in twenty of the New Scheme midshipmen was keen on engineering. They looked down upon it, they dared to turn up their noses at his profession. Aggett had an uncomfortable feeling that they despised him—that they gave him salutes which were somehow less respectful than those they accorded to officers of his rank on the Upper Deck.
Moreover, Hartington pampered the little pigs. Midshipmen ought to be flogged; flogging, sound and frequent, was the only way to break them. This, in Aggett, was not mere brutality but an article of faith. He saw in the Pathshire’s midshipmen, several of whom seemed likely in any case to be strangely hindered by temperament from conforming easily to his ideal, young men handicapped by faulty training. He did not believe that a sound officer could be produced unless in his days of apprenticeship he was broken in.
He remembered how he had asked Hartington, early in the commission, for an introduction to Little Benjamin, this being the name given to the stick kept by most Subs for the flogging of midshipmen. Little Benjamin, our Ruler, it was customarily called by midshipmen themselves, or, with familiar affection, Benjy. Within Aggett’s experience Subs had been proud of this implement. They chose it with care, fed it with oil, put whipping on its end to prevent it from splitting, and exhibited to all comers its balance, flexibility, and other attributes. Aggett had seen a tea-party of lady visitors excited to gurgling laughter by one Sub’s scientific application of Benjy to a dusty armchair, and by the historical anecdotes with which he had coloured his performance. One lady had collaborated by providing with her own shrill voice the cries of the imaginary victim. And the other ladies, somewhat shocked perhaps by this uproariousness, had smiled, nevertheless, behind the teacups above the handles of which they crooked such genteel white fingers. It had amused them to think that the young men, ranging in age from eighteen to twenty, who came into the Gunroom now and then and went out quickly that they might not interrupt the Sub’s party, were treated as the dusty armchair was being treated then. They had seemed to think it right, Aggett reflected, and they were thoroughly respectable women.
Aggett had asked to see Hartington’s Benjy, intending only to offer advice as to its treatment and care. Besides, as a point of politeness, one asked to see a Sub’s Benjy just as one asked to see a woman’s last-born babe. And Hartington had said curtly: “I haven’t got one.”
“Then what do you beat the young gents with?”