CHAPTER I
THE SHORE RECEDES
I
Late on an afternoon in September a boy, wearing a naval mackintosh and a felt hat, came out of Torquay railway-station and hailed a cab. His figure, his voice, and his manner, which was nervous and a little self-conscious, suggested that his age was about eighteen. He took a handful of change out of his pocket, and, when he had selected from it, with momentary hesitation, a sixpence to give the porter who had brought his luggage, he cast over the few bystanders a look almost of resentment, as if he thought they had been watching and criticizing him. If an older man had intercepted this glance its character might have puzzled him. He would have asked himself how, in eighteen years, a boy, who had obviously known nothing of the poverty and hard usage that age the street urchin, could have made the discoveries about life which were reflected in the face he saw. Not that a man’s experience lay in this boy’s features; rather did he seem to have lost too early the swifter wisdom of a child. He had developed a faculty of suspicion before the years had taught him what he should suspect. He had faced sorrow before he had learned to distinguish clearly between sorrow and bitterness. A child’s pride and the humility that springs from discipline; a love of freedom and an acquaintance with restriction; a hatred of cruelty and a knowledge of its refinements—all these had been mingled in him to the destruction of simplicity. He stood there, on the outskirts of the strange naval world into which this cab was to bear him, a boy whose premature manhood might have caused a perceptive woman to fear for him. She would have seen that he was not physically delicate, and have been glad that his body, at any rate, had power to endure; but she would have noticed, too, and trembled for her discovery, that the boy’s lips and eyes suggested an imagination which could throw ugliness as well as beauty into relief.
The cabman, his face screwed up and his cheeks blown out as a protest against the driving rain, looked queerly at the luggage he was hoisting on to his roof. It consisted of a green canvas trunk, bound with wooden splines and leather, and an oblong tin case. Their pattern, which the cabman recognized as uniform, betrayed at once their owner’s calling, for they differed in nothing but the name they bore from the boxes that were invariably brought with them by midshipmen joining their ships. On them was printed in white letters:
JOHN LYNWOOD, R.N.
“You’ll be goin’ to the ’otel, sir, same as the others, I expec’?”
“Yes; you recognize the luggage?” Lynwood answered.
“Ay, sir. It ain’t often the young officers joins their ships ’ere in Torquay, but I knows that tin box an’ the green one, sir, as if they was my own. There’s no mistakin’ ’em.”
“No, I suppose not.”