Krame thought over this in silence. Then, from behind him, Driss broke in suddenly: “Isn’t that rather like prison? Don’t men deteriorate in prison?”
Mr. Alter brushed aside a suggestion so dangerous, though it revealed to him much that had hitherto been obscure. “At any rate,” he said, “it is not a natural condition, and is bound to produce phenomena of which we outside have no knowledge, no understanding. Men speak of the Silent Service because they cannot understand the language it speaks.... And there’s one fact more amazing than any other in this connection—that men who are living the Service life, who ought to be able to tell the truth of it, when they sit down to write, write—not the truth as it appears to their naval minds—but the truth as it appears to their minds adapted to civilian conditions. They feel they are talking to civilians. The atmosphere is disturbed. They write what the civilians expect to hear—‘breezy’ stories. Their sailors are, figuratively speaking, for ever hitching up their trousers by the back, in accordance with the civilian music-hall tradition. Have you ever seen a sailor hitch up his trousers by the back? Usually what they do with regard to these particular garments is to curse them because they are so tight and uncomfortable. Why don’t the naval writers say so?”
“Well,” said Howdray, “I was shipmates with one of the fellows that write these magazine yarns, and he said——”
“Yes? What did he say?”
“I remember he had just finished one of them, and chucked it across the table for me to read. When I had read it, I said, ‘Yes, I think that ought to go down well. But why are all your Lieuts. R.N. of the kind that sings at breakfast and plays the banjo in its bath? And why, when your snotties have their leave stopped, are they such infernally cheery devils that they regard it as a joke? In fact,’ I said, ‘why do you lay on the pretty colours so blazing thick?’ ‘My dear old thing,’ he answered, ‘the people who read me like the banjo-playing. You have just said yourself that the tale ought to go down well. That’s the main point, seeing it is going to pay my mess-bill this month. Besides, the public has been taught to picture indomitably cheery “middies” with blue eyes and pink cheeks. It’s no good to tell them about bleary eyes and safety-razors. It doesn’t pay to foist one thing on to them when they are expecting another.’”
“But why shouldn’t the public be asked to admire what is really admirable in the Service? Heaven knows, there’s enough of it,” Mr. Alter said. “Your friend’s attitude, if I may say so, was the attitude of the young journalist who despises art, and he is a man even more intolerable than the young artist who despises journalism. Moreover, being confessedly a journalist, he appears to have despised the public—which is absurd. I’m afraid I shouldn’t like your friend.... There’s fineness in the Service that would amaze the world if it were known. Englishmen are eager about the Service, it’s a part of their national life, it’s their proudest tradition—incidentally, they pay for it. They are entitled to know about it. But they will never discover the real good in it so long as you people blind them with the magazine tradition. You must destroy that first. You must stop putting sugar into the wine if you want the vintage to be appreciated.”
“You mustn’t blame us, sir,” said Krame, laughing at Mr. Alter’s vehemence. “We don’t write stories; that’s your job.”
“Yes; but I live outside the atmosphere. I am no good. But, to be sure, as you say, you don’t write stories, and here am I attacking my hosts. It reminds me of how——”
And the conversation drifted into stories of East and West, of land and sea, Mr. Alter being carefully silent when any midshipman showed a disposition to talk. Darkness fell, lights were switched on, and near the time of gin and bitters and the departure of the officers’ boat, John returned. He explained that the Engineer Commander had kept him in the Dockyard.