“Oh—I see.... There’s your boat called away. You will have to be going soon. Thanks for coming, and thanks for the books. I wanted them—very badly.”
CHAPTER VI
STRAIN AND RELIEF
I
In a ship there is neither bud nor fallen leaf. There is no ploughing of furrows, no scattering of seed. The winds are never sweet with the fragrance of broken earth. Fingers of sunshine touch no grass to vivid green when a shower is over and the clouds have blown away. Rain does not whisper among trees or press the dust of long, white roads into little pits of darkness; it lashes at grey steel, hangs in beads on the metal rims of scuttles, envelops topmasts in an unsteady mist. The seasons are marked by the Navigator’s instruments and by variation in the colour of the waves. On a fixed date white cap-covers are taken out, on a fixed date they are put away again; and thus does summer begin and end. When snow falls the Watch for Exercise banishes it with squeegees. Christmas Day comes when the December wine bills are nearly exhausted. Nothing flowers and goes to rest; nothing is ever born again.
Spring, when the calendar bids her come, comes obediently, but to ships of war she brings few gifts. Even that essence of her which makes men ashore lift their heads and say that spring is in the air, reaches ships changed by the tang of salt, or often, in port, corrupted by the smell of harbour scum. By no visible or tangible promise of her future glory does she give to seamen credit with which they may tide over the lean, harsh months of the early year.
Through January and part of February John struggled hard and honestly to settle down, to convert the inevitable into the desired. Long years ago he himself had chosen to enter the Navy, and now, though he wondered at the decision, he knew he must abide by it. His mother’s means, he felt sure, were too small to re-educate him as he would need to be re-educated if he left the Service. He must put away from him the thought of change. He must make the best of things as he found them. He must work, work and forget, work at naval subjects, and awaken somehow new ambitions, new enthusiasms, new desires, which should stand between him and the old. He would put no pen to paper save the pen of a naval officer. He would banish poetry from him as men banished a drug. Rosebery’s Pitt, Morley’s Gladstone and Walpole, Lecky’s Democracy and Liberty, all should go back to the Chaplain’s cabin; for were not the lives and dreams of statesmen a part of that old world which was to be left behind? Keats, too, should go; and Blake, and Milton’s prose, and Burke’s speeches. One afternoon of resolution he piled them together and carried them off. Still Mr. Alter’s books remained, and these he lent, urging the borrowers to keep them as long as they wished. From his sea-chest he disinterred battered notebooks on Mechanics and Heat and Steam. From the Gunroom shelf he dragged down Sennett and Oram’s standard work on the Marine Steam Engine. This was, indeed, to be a grand burning of boats.
But the boats would not burn; the memory of the abandoned country would not perish; the new enthusiasms, like a constitution hastily formulated, never broke the bonds that their own artificiality imposed upon them. The strength of materials and their curves of elasticity; the names and properties of lubricants; the hundred and one “little dodges” by which the Engineer Commander hoped to save a few pounds of coal—none of these things interested John. He did his utmost to interest himself in them. He even reached a point at which he could say that he liked engineering and believe that this was true. Nor was it altogether untrue. Engine-room watches were less troublous than those on deck. The Commander was out of the way. But these advantages were powerless to awaken in him the saving enthusiasm he desired. The engineer officers for the most part treated New Scheme midshipmen with good-humoured tolerance, convinced that, as they had not received the old-fashioned training, they could not be made into efficient engineers. “I don’t know what the hell’s the good of those Upper Deck snotties wasting their time down here,” they would say. “As soon as they’re beginning to learn something they are whisked away to their seamanship again.” No one except the Engineer Commander himself—and he was too busy to see much of them—took any interest in the engineering midshipmen, and their work resolved itself, partly through their own fault, into a wearisome keeping of watches, a writing-up of notebooks, an uninspired observance of rules. Sennett and Oram returned whence they came.
Then John made a second attempt to sever himself from the past and to engross himself in a naval future; but this, partly because it was a compromise and partly for other reasons, failed as the first had done. He turned to Voluntary Subjects, to French and Naval History. He tried to persuade himself that he was carrying out his original intention to devote himself to Service subjects. If French and Naval History were subjects for a Service examination, surely they were within the limits he had prescribed? That they were also, by reason of the literary aspect they presented, without those limits, John would not allow himself to recognize. He shirked that issue. He quieted his conscience by telling himself that French and Naval History appeared in the official syllabus. He would not admit, what was indeed the truth, that he read Balzac, not because the reading would help him to pass the examinations for the rank of lieutenant, but because Balzac was an artist. He concealed from himself the fact that his love of Naval History centred in the noun rather than in the adjective, and he refused to acknowledge, even to himself, that he cared more for the prose than for the substance of his essay on the Dutch Wars, more for the writing of it than for the examination marks which were to be his ostensible reward.
The result of this, as of all self-deception and confusion of motives, was disaster. As it were a stimulant, it strengthened John for a time, but left him weaker than it had found him. Balzac, Corbett, and Mahan temporarily filled the gap which, by denying himself all but Service books, he had created. Then the Home Fleet came south to carry out combined manœuvres. The King Arthur was much at sea. The pressure of Engine-room watches became so great that French and Naval History had to be abandoned. The drug was taken away. The whole deception was suddenly exposed. During the long hours in the Engine-room John stared at the pounding piston-rods, or at the greasy steel floor on which he was standing, or at the iron bars of the gratings that lay tier upon tier above his head. He listened to the talk of stokers, and to the unending tales of drink and harlots with which the artificer-engineers tried to lessen the tedium of the watch. He liked the stokers; he liked the artificer-engineers who were, he knew, doing their utmost to be pleasant and entertaining. But he grew very tired of steel and oil, and drink and harlots. He revolted against them, not in anger or contempt, or anything like a spirit of righteousness, but because they were unavoidable, because they were ever at hand, because those sights and that conversation were all that, for hours at a time, life had to offer him. And in the intervals there were Gunroom Evolutions and Krame.