There they found Wingfield Alter and Mrs. Fane-Herbert. Hugh came in a moment later. Alter had his back to the door as they entered, a square, broad back, full of determination. When he turned his head there were legible in the deeply lined face, with its high forehead and proudly carried chin, a self-confidence and directness of purpose which made it almost unnoticeable that Alter was a short, ungainly man. He wore a spare moustache and a pointed beard which began so far down his chin that his lips were unobscured by it. He waited for no introduction, but took John’s hands at once, welcoming him as his mother’s son, and looking at him closely.
Even at dinner John felt those deep-set eyes turned continually upon him, searching, he supposed, for points of resemblance to his mother. Mrs. Fane-Herbert, tall and slim at the end of the table, was a clever woman and Alter an eager listener. She turned the conversation to the Navy, and for long he was a willing and appreciative pupil. Hugh instructed him with great zest.
“How long is it, sir, since you were in a warship?”
“It must be four or five years. I have been in Russia since, and have lost touch. I see I must renew my acquaintance. I want to see what I can of the officers produced by the New Scheme—all my friends were Britannia cadets. Your education has been broader, less rigidly specialized than theirs. What is the effect on efficiency?”
“There must be a danger,” said Mrs. Fane-Herbert, “of encouraging ideas and tastes, good in themselves, but ill-suited to the naval officer as such.”
“I often wonder about that,” Alter answered. “The Service is very exacting, very highly specialized, narrow in a sense. And boys enter it very early, knowing nothing of what they are or what they will become. They enter it in much the same spirit as that in which they choose the career of an engine-driver. Tendencies undreamed of then are bound to develop later—diverse tendencies, probably opposed in a thousand ways to Service requirements. Am I right?”
“Every word,” said John, leaning forward a little.
“For example,” Alter continued, “what on earth would have become of that young man whose work you showed me, Margaret, if he had committed himself to the Navy at the age of thirteen? Of course, any critic would say those poems were immature. So they were; the technique of the sonnet was awry; the scansion was often loose; here and there they were too sonorous, too strained for the sake of effect. But so many of the essentials of poetry were there—real feeling, real imagination, and observation of the kind that’s worth having. Never an adjective that he had not thought out with his eyes tight shut or wide open. If he can write like that before he is twenty—why, given a chance to develop, he might do anything. But if he were shut up in the Navy, burdened with the sameness of routine, brought into contact only with men whose minds are highly specialized for one purpose, war——” He interrupted himself with a gesture. “And there must be people of that kind in the Fleet—not poets necessarily, but men who, for one reason or another, need—need desperately—intellectual space. Most of us need it, unless our minds are very limited—that’s the worst of the tragedy, most of us need it. And in the Navy, so far as I can judge, it must be almost impossible to obtain—at any rate, it is probably to be purchased only at the price of resignation or professional failure.”
John did not hear the conversation that followed. His thoughts were proceeding by strange paths, now of pride and gladness, now so steep and dark that he could neither see nor imagine any end to them. Later in the evening Alter spoke to him alone.
“I’m unspeakably sorry,” he said. “It was stupid of me not to have guessed; but Margaret ought to have warned me—she, with her mysterious poet whose name she would conceal in order to tantalize me. It’s of no use to ask you not to let my words unsettle you; they are said, and I meant them, and there’s an end of it. But I shall feel responsible now. Will you let me help you, if I can? I don’t mean with master-keys to editors’ rooms—you must win them for yourself. But I can give advice and criticism for what they are worth. I should want to help in any case now, but the more because you are my old friend’s son. Will you remember?”