“You R.N. snotties,” a merchant service officer had told John, “have the filthiest minds I know.”
That night on which leave was given Hartington dined with the Captain.
“Well,” he said, “what of your snotties now? I suppose they are off with the women. One can’t blame them. There’s nothing to be done out here. They can’t be given home leave.... But the devil of it is, Hartington, that even in home waters they don’t get leave worth speaking of.... The fact of their having women doesn’t worry me. The trouble is that snotties’ minds, their whole manner of life, their outlook—it’s like a gradual debasing of a currency.... They are strange people, the Powers-that-Be. Give them an invention or a strategical idea and they’ll work on it untiringly, develop it with amazing ingenuity and care. Give them boys, as fine human material as is to be found in the world, and for four and a half years they educate them magnificently. Then, before they are eighteen, when their minds are in a most impressionable stage, these boys are sent to sea. They are subjected to persecution; they are flogged continually for no specific wrong-doing; they are deprived of all opportunity for solitude or thought; they are put in a crowded mess where they are cut off from intimate association with men older than themselves, from women of their own kind, from art and culture, from trees and hills, from all legitimate amusement. And the Powers know it. They have absolute authority in the Service, but the evil continues. Wine bills are limited on board, and there is a free issue of prophylactics, but the evil continues. I know the difficulties—the inevitable conditions of sea-service, the need there is that snotties should be taught discipline by a short method. But it’s an odd thing, Hartington, that men with ability and power, who have the interests of the Service at heart, should be unable to find any means of preventing that waste and wrong.”
CHAPTER XXII
MARGARET IN THE NET
I
In the early days of the New Year, when the Pathshire, after her voyage to Woo-Sung, had proceeded to Hong Kong to refit, Margaret found herself singularly alone at Wei-hai. Her mother and father were with her, but their presence accentuated rather than lessened her sense of isolation. She could never shake off her consciousness of the opposition of their wishes to her own. They did not argue with her or seek to persuade her. They gave her no opportunity to state her case. Instead, by their kindness, by their consideration of all her inessential interests, they made her understand that if she would repent and make reparation they were ready to forgive and forget.
Forgive!... There were moments when she rebelled in her heart against the idea that she stood in need of forgiveness. But her rebellion lacked support and objective. If her mother had sought to persuade, she too could have persuaded. But this tacit assumption that she had done wrong and foolishly, this treatment of her as a child with whom it were idle to negotiate, this slow pressure of silence and unwelcome generosity—there was no fighting against these things.
She began to understand the secret of her father’s power over men. He did not threaten, he gave no opening for retaliation; but he impressed upon her continually and with infinite patience a sense of the extent of his own resources and of her lack of resource. It was as if she fought one possessed of unlimited reserves. She might hold out a month, she might hold out a year, but the time would come when she would fail and yield, and abandon all she had defended.
Why, then, struggle?... Was that the question that all the opponents of her father were at last persuaded to ask themselves?... It would be easier to yield. She had only to accept Ordith in order to escape for ever from the intolerable atmosphere of coercion which filled her own home. As Ordith’s wife she would be, in many respects, independent. If she could but overcome her increasing fear of him, her instinctive shrinking from his touch, her dread of his presence, she might be happy.... And what was the alternative? So long as she was unmarried she could never escape from her home. Her thoughts went out to John, but there was no help in him. He was caught as she was caught. Through different channels the power of Ibble’s was exercised over them both.