Here the young Nelson learns to obey, in silence and at a run. He has been broken in on the Britannia, but the Gun-room gives him enduring polish. The Admiral knows a Midshipman rather as the Almighty knows a blackbeetle; the Captain knows him as the Head of Harrow might know a babe in a perambulator; the First Lieutenant knows him as the Head of the Games knows a fag in the Lower Third; but the senior Sub-Lieutenant of the Gun-room knows him as a brand to be snatched from the burning; and works over him accordingly. In return, the Midshipman patronises the Admiral at a safe distance; is blandly superior to his Captain—also at a safe distance; sings time-honoured lampoons about the First Lieutenant at a very safe distance; but most strictly obeys the senior Sub-Lieutenant. For seven years, counting his time in the Britannia, he dresses at a chest and sleeps in a hammock, getting to know himself and his associates with that deadly stark intimacy that only flourishes in the Navy. There are no excuses in his Service. He must not answer back; and he must do what he is told—not immediately, but sooner, much sooner. These are the years that weed out those that have mistaken their calling. The incompetents go home, and curse the Navy evermore. The virtuous stay on and learn to steal brass boiler-tubes for their boats; learn to smoke secretly in the fighting-tops (they are forbidden tobacco till eighteen); fall into and out of all manner of tight places that require dexterity and a cheek of cold-drawn brass; pick up more than they learn under the Instructor from the talk of the Warrant Officers and men and the carefully-watched mistakes of their elders; and when they reach commissioned rank impart their lore to their successors with a dirk-scabbard.
A REPUBLIC AND A DESPOTISM
If ‘White Jacket’ had not served before the mast, what a picture he might have given us of the Gunroom! It is at once a Republic and a Despotism—the Extreme Left and the unswerving Centre of old tradition. Individually it is always in hot water; collectively it can and does criticise with point and freedom anything and everything on its horizon, from Fleet Manœuvres to the fit of an Instructor’s collar. Pungent, merciless, indomitable is the Gunroom, but it preserves discipline. The senior Sub-Lieutenant (one could not help thinking of O’Brien when he cured Peter of the sea-sickness) stuck a fork into the equivalent for a beam overhead. Ere it ceased vibrating the Midshipmen had gone, flitting like bats; had flung themselves backwards from their seats, and were through the door.
‘That’s when we think the conversation might hurt their little morals,’ said my host. ‘But they can move much quicker than that.’
‘Make ’em do it again,’ said Twenty-One—a Midshipman three years ago. ‘You’re getting awfully slack, I think. What do you do when——?’ he presented a contingency.
‘Oh, then we——’ The Sub-Lieutenant described the course of action with minute particularity, adding: ‘Wouldn’t you like to see it done?’
Set it to my account that I saved somebody’s darling from being butchered to make a Gun-room holiday. But the Midshipmen have an asylum of their own in the School-room, where, I was assured, they were worked within an inch of their lives. The remnant seemed unusually healthy, for when we went out to visit a big smoking-concert on the Flagship I caught glimpses of limber youths racketting in dumb show round their hammocks.
Not being privileged to have speech with them, I asked Twenty-One what the ‘protective diplomacy’ of Midshipmen might be. He gave me to understand that stirring a hornets’ nest with the bare toe was tame and pale beside too thoroughly irritating the junior members of the Gun-room. Had himself been concerned in such revolutions.
‘We got licked, of course,’ he concluded cheerfully, ‘but the seniors let us alone after that. Wasn’t it a beautifully disciplined Mess, though? I wish you could see ’em at sea in weather. There’s a Midshipman (he used the other term) told off to every scuttle to open it between waves. If he lets in any water of course he catches it. I had about five years of that sort of thing. Well, now we’ll go over to the concert.’
‘UNCLE HENRY’S’ SMOKING CONCERT