In the Engine-room from breakfast to lunch; at his gun from lunch to tea; Quarters and Evolution from four to nearly five; Engineering sketch from five to seven; dinner from seven to seven forty-five, when he put on dirty clothes; in the Engine-room from eight to midnight, and again from four to eight—that was an example of such a day as came to John three days in six while the ship was at sea. On the alternate days he was less below and more at his gun. There was little difference in effect.
The effect was dull, unspeaking misery; eyelids that closed, and, being forced open, closed again; limbs gnawed by weariness; a weakness of control that brought hysterical tears and laughter very near. The mind strayed back to childhood and leapt out in jagged flashes towards licentiousness. Aggett could do what he liked with them. No insult could provoke now any desire to protest. They obeyed like whipped curs. “Yes, sir.... No, sir.... I’m sorry, sir.”
“It’s taming ’em,” said Aggett.
Nervous exhaustion, so potent to produce obsessions, urged John to the reading of books in snatches and Driss to interminable calculations of minutes. Driss analyzed his day with pitiless accuracy. He would confront John with pieces of paper on which he had written in his neat round-hand the number of minutes he spent in sleep, in watch-keeping, in standing by his gun, in drawing his sketch, in eating his meals. And John, seeing from these tables that there was no time for reading, became, for that reason, the more determined to read. He read at meals until Hartington, who, when he was present, insisted that the Gunroom should observe at least some of the conventions, told him to put his book away.
“It’s the only time I can read,” John exclaimed. “You know it is the only time I have.”
“I’m sorry,” Hartington answered; “but I’m not responsible for your routine. I can’t have reading at Mess.”
And John, made unreasonably angry by this excellent rule, read at odd moments for five or ten minutes at a time, crouching on his sea-chest when he came off watch at midnight, wasting the precious interval before he went below again at 4 a.m. He read, too, between breakfast and Divisions, between tea and Quarters, between Sunday Divisions and Church. He turned to his book with almost fierce devotion on occasions when no one else would have thought it worth while to open covers that would so soon have to be closed again. And he wrote—wild blank verse. The scansion missed sometimes, but he did not care. He would write no lyrics now; his indignation would not pause for rhymes. Never had his mind been so full of themes demanding expression; never had words come to him like this unsummoned. Tremendous phrases woke him in the night, so that he lay in his hammock, his head a little raised, listening. He heard nothing but the engine’s throbbing and the far-away clashing of the revolution-telegraph. And he would lie down again and hide his face, wondering how, even for a moment, he had been amazed and excited by a phrase which, as he considered it, he saw to be without shape or meaning.
It was not safe, he knew, to take any book he was reading into the Engine-room. Its cover would betray him to the Warrant Officer who kept the watch, to the stokers who worked near him, and to Aggett should he enter suddenly. It was impossible to read on watch.... But he found that he could write with impunity. He took with him a small, marble-covered notebook of the pattern customarily used by midshipmen for rough engineering sketches—diagrams of the lead of pipes, plans of the boiler-rooms showing the feed system, and the like. To make these sketches during the idle stretches of a watch was regarded, not as an offence, but as a sign of laudable enthusiasm. So long as the usual pattern of notebook was used everyone assumed that only professional matter was entered in it; and John encouraged this belief when he was writing by moving his position from time to time, by stooping with an air of curiosity and interest over auxiliary engines that his eyes scarcely saw, and by gazing upward occasionally in the direction of the pipes that he might have been sketching.