“Well, you may as well go below. I’ll look out up here. I’ll send down a side-boy if I want you.”
In the Gunroom John found everyone busy appropriating lockers and bringing in their books and papers from their chests.
“There’s enough room for two lockers each, and three for Hartington,” Dyce said. “Those are your two, Lynwood, in the corner—the worst billet of the lot.... No, we didn’t just push you into them because you were away. We cut round—someone cut for you—and you were lurked.”
“I don’t mind,” John said. “Two lockers anywhere are luxury. I’ll get my books in. By the way, Driss, I think you were right about Hartington. He took over the watch just now; asked if I was tired, and sent me down.”
“Of course I was right,” Driss answered, smiling. “Did you happen to discover where he lives?”
“No; we aren’t on a personal footing yet. I called him ‘sir,’ being on watch.”
They unpacked slowly, pausing often to sit on the table and discuss the most suitable stowage places for sextants and Inman’s Tables and Seamanship Manuals. They had a feeling of spaciousness and independence that was altogether delightful—so glorious did it seem to dispose their own dwelling-place in their own way, instead of availing themselves of whatever odd corners were left over by Krame and Howdray. On the table was a pile of John’s possessions—books, instruments, and innumerable manuscripts which, though he had no hope of being able to shake them into publishable form, he had not the heart to destroy. There was a foolscap book with marble covers into which he had copied such poems as he had completed; there were penny exercise-books in which novels had been sketched and begun; there were bundles of papers tied together with tape; and sheets of all colours and sizes, some of them but half covered with writing, upon which he had set down pieces of description, scraps of narrative and dialogue, and sentences from imaginary political speeches—fragmentary records of fiery and ambitious dreams. How little his best friends in that Gunroom knew of the things that were written there! How they would laugh if they read them, for many were evidence of absurd imaginings! John turned them over. Here was the peroration by which the King Arthur’s able seaman, “’undredth class for conduck, ’undredth class for leave,” was to bring the Albert Hall to its feet—“jes’ as if I ’ad ’em on strings.” And here was John’s own speech to the House of Commons on Home Rule; here his reply to the Foreign Secretary’s pronouncement on the imminence of war with Germany—and in the corner of the manuscript he had written the great sentence from John Bright’s speech on the Crimean War. On the back of an old Torpedo Sketchbook he found his notes on Lawrence’s Principles of International Law—part of the equipment of a Foreign Secretary’s critic, he remembered with a smile, and among the notes was a passionately eulogistic review of Mrs. Lynn Lynton’s True History of Joshua Davidson. Some of his essays had progressed no further than their motto—perhaps the fire within him had dried up his pen, perhaps a boat had been called away....
“Midshipman o’ the Watch ’ere, sir?” said the voice of an invisible side-boy.
“Yes.”
“Orficer o’ the Watch wants you on deck, sir.”