“That’s the whole point,” cried Mr. Alter, encouraged by this admission. “A man who works in an office all the morning and goes into polite society in the afternoon preserves the same nature throughout the day. He may alter his manners a bit, just as he puts on a clean shirt, but he doesn’t change essentially. You people do. And why? Isn’t it because in the Service circle, within the Service atmosphere, you have standards of life that are unrecognized elsewhere?”
Krame smiled. “I suppose we do see things differently from other people. But doesn’t that apply to almost any profession?”
“No; take the Bar—as distinctive and self-contained as any civilian profession, surely. You hear men talk of the Legal Mind as if it were a thing apart. What does it mean, after all? A little added precision of thought, a yearning after precedent, a reluctance to change—certainly nothing necessarily foreign to unlegal minds. But the naval officer’s attitude towards the essentials of life—so long as he remains within the atmosphere—is altogether different from the attitude of other human beings. Isn’t that so? In a ship and in a naval port, don’t you think of women, for instance, in one way, and when you are at home, don’t you think of them in a way quite different?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Krame. “Of course, one meets here a different kind of woman. One treats her differently. She doesn’t fill the same part of the horizon as the women one meets at home.”
“You are side-tracking,” Mr. Alter objected. He let the pages of a book run through his fingers. “I am not comparing your treatment of harlots with your treatment of women who are not harlots. That contrast is obvious among men in every path of life. Put it this way: A naval officer in London; his mother, his sisters, all his womenfolk in Scotland—out of the way; he spends an evening with an old and intimate friend—a Cambridge man, let us say. Then—for the contrast—the same naval officer spends an evening in London with a naval friend. He goes to the same places, let’s imagine, sees the same people, speaks to the same women as when with his Cambridge friend. Now, isn’t it true that, though the outside circumstances are the same in each case, the naval officer’s outlook upon them changes completely? In one instance, his companion is another naval officer, and the Service atmosphere is undisturbed; in the other, he is with a civilian, and the atmosphere is entirely altered. Not only his action or his speech concerning women, but his inmost thought of them, his whole attitude towards them, undergoes a change. And it’s the same with Religion, with Charity, with Ambition—with all the constituent parts of life itself.”
“I suppose that’s true,” Krame answered. “We go out of one world into another.”
“And all the rules and customs of citizenship change.”
“Yes. You see, in ships we are in a strange position—monks with no vows.”
“The rigours of a severe Order and none of its spiritual support?”