“Yes.”
A great shout went up at some joke. Heads were thrown back, slack mouths were opened. Someone slapped his thigh to show his appreciation of the current wit.
“That’s good ... hellish good!... D’you know the one about the Irish girl who——”
John’s glass slipped from his fingers and broke with a clean, tinkling sound. A heel ground the fragments....
The Wardroom officers went their way. The Gunroom sat down to lunch. There was a basket of champagne, brought by the Captain’s steward....
Through the long afternoon the Wardroom and the Gunroom slept. Through the dog watches they slept. A few stirred for supper.
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.