TWO WORLDS
A few days after John had rejoined his ship at Portsmouth, Mr. Baring,
who was keeping the first dog watch, turned his telescope on to a
shore-boat of shabby appearance which seemed to be approaching the
_King Arthur_. Reedham, who was midshipman of the watch, likewise
inspected the craft, which seemed to have the impudent intention of
boarding the ship, not by the port gangway, which was, as it were, a
back-door for the use of all and sundry, but by the starboard gangway,
which, with its elaborate handrail of mahogany and brass, was the
front-door of the exalted.
Though an officer less reserved might have said, “Who the devil is
this?” Mr. Baring contented himself with looking from Reedham to the
shore-boat and from the shore-boat to Reedham, for all the world as if
Reedham were responsible for the incursion and for the unseamanlike
appearance of the boat itself. And Reedham looked at the Quartermaster
as if to say, “Well, what are _you_ going to do about it?” And the
Quartermaster did nothing but finger his boatswain’s pipe.
There was, in truth, nothing to be done. It is possible to shout
at a Service boat that is committing a breach of etiquette, but a
shore-boat, though it lack varnish and leave lanyards and fenders
hanging over the stern, cannot be so readily reproved. If it is known
to contain a tradesman or some other dependent of the ship, then the
megaphone may be called into use, but where a doubt exists caution is
advisable. Who knows that it is not an admiral’s guest who approaches?
Admirals have queer guests.
This boat, as it drew near, was seen to contain, in addition to the
oarsman, a small person wearing a bowler hat and a grey overcoat. There
was no attempt at smartness. The hat was old and the coat older, though
both were neat and respectable--so neat and so respectable, in fact,
that Mr. Baring dismissed the idea that this might be an eccentric, and
yet worthy, visitor.
“You had better lie off for the time being,” said the small person
to his boatman, when the craft had reached the gangway, and he, with
a small bag in his hand, had disembarked. “I may need you to take me
back. More probably I shall return in a ship’s boat. If so, I will call
you alongside and pay you.”
“Return in a ship’s boat, will he?” thought Mr. Baring. “We’ll see
about that.... Some commercial, I suppose.”
The small person climbed the ladder slowly. As he stepped on to the
quarter-deck he raised his hat in obedience to a Service custom
well known to him. Mr. Baring, incredulous of such knowledge in a
“commercial,” accepted the salute as if it had been addressed to
himself.
“Well,” he said, “what can we do for you?”
“My name is Alter,” said the small person, “and----”
“Indeed!” Mr. Baring interrupted, determined to enliven an uneventful
watch at the expense of this innocent. “And what is your line?”
A few moments passed before Mr. Alter understood this question. Then,
as he realized that he was a “commercial,” his eyes twinkled.
“Books,” he replied.
“Oh, what kind?”
“Various kinds--novels, biography, poetry.”
“I’m afraid there won’t be much sale for them on the Lower Deck. Have
you a card?”
“Yes.... But it wasn’t the Lower Deck that I was seeking.”
“The Wardroom? The Gunroom?”
“The Gunroom, as a matter of fact. I wanted to see----”
“But the Gunroom officers, as well as the Lower Deck, use the Ship’s
Library. We _have_ a Ship’s Library, you know.”
“Yes, I know. I’m very glad of it.”
Mr. Baring extended his telescope in the direction of Mr. Alter’s bag.
“Where is your stock? Not in that little bag?”
“No; as a matter of fact some of my stock is already in the Ship’s
Library.”
“Come, come,” Mr. Baring exclaimed, “that won’t do; that won’t wash at
all. The Ship’s Library isn’t bought from casual booksellers, you know;
it is a Service issue.”
“Dear me,” answered Mr. Alter, putting down his bag on the deck, and
selecting a visiting-card from his case, “but I don’t think I have made
a mistake.”
“Then I must have made a mistake,” Mr. Baring remarked with sarcasm.
This was a persistent little fellow, he thought.
“Well,” said Mr. Alter, “perhaps we have both made mistakes. I should
have told you my full name and my business at once--in truth, I
intended to do so, but you didn’t give me much chance. I haven’t come
to sell. I should like to pay a call, if you will allow me. There
are friends of mine in the Gunroom--Fane-Herbert and Lynwood. I am
Wingfield Alter. I write books, you know. That’s the card you asked
for.”
It was as if some visitor, unknown by the name of Bennett, had added,
“Arnold Bennett; I write books, you know.” Mr. Baring knew now only
too well. So this odd creature, with a bowler hat and a hand-bag and
a pointed beard, was Wingfield Alter, the friend of many admirals, an
honoured guest in times past at combined manœuvres. Mr. Baring had
an unpleasant vision of great men telling this tale to one another
in the corridors at Whitehall. “And Baring took him for a commercial
traveller. Baring must be an ass!”
“I am very sorry, Mr. Alter,” he said quickly, still feeling that it
was Mr. Alter’s fault--as perhaps it was. “It was your little bag that
deceived me. However, it will make a good tale for you to tell.”
“But I never tell tales against myself,” Mr. Alter answered.
At this moment, Reedham, who had disappeared quickly and discreetly
when Mr. Alter handed his card to the officer of the watch, and who had
been engaged meanwhile in awakening a somnolent Gunroom, and urging
its occupants to “clear up some of the mess and stow away the _Winning
Post_” before the arrival of a literary Order of Merit--Reedham
returned panting to the quarter-deck, and gazed over the side while
he attempted to regain his breath and to look as if he had never been
absent. His face was still pink as a result of his exertion when he
was ordered, as he had known he would be, to escort Mr. Alter to the
Gunroom.
But they had not gone far together when Mr. Baring called him back.
“Reedham!... One moment. Excuse me, Mr. Alter.... Look here Reedham,”
Mr. Baring continued, while Mr. Alter waited out of earshot in the
starboard tunnel, “have you warned the snotties down below?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Gunroom tidy? Look decent?”
“Pretty tidy, sir. Hadn’t much time, sir.”
“That’s all right. The best way with the British Public is to let them
see what’s good for them, you know.... And, Reedham, just drop a hint
to some of the snotties to--er--moderate their language a bit, and not
to offer him too many drinks. It might create a bad impression. You can
never tell with these writing chaps--even the most respectable of them.”
“I imagine,” said Mr. Alter slowly, as he and Reedham went down into
the Chest Flat, “that the officer of the watch is also the officer in
charge of midshipmen?”
“Yes,” Reedham answered, “he is. But what made you think so?”
The Gunroom had been transformed to greet the Almighty Pen and the
gold-laced visitors who might be expected to accompany it. No one was
asleep. There were no glasses on the table. Howdray was reading,
in the second volume of a Manual of Seamanship, the eighty-seventh
page--the page at which he had happened to open it. Elstone was working
industriously, with a pen which he dipped from time to time into an
empty Indian ink bottle, at a log-sketch which Dyce had completed for
him a week ago.
The seemliness of the place was the seemliness of a schoolboy, who,
being dressed for a midnight escapade, jumps into bed boots and all as
he hears the master’s step near the dormitory door. The newspapers and
magazines were thrust together into a pile, from which, as specimens
of the whole, the title-pieces of _Punch_ and the _Morning Post_ had
been made to protrude. The _Winning Post_, which was not hidden even
for the Captain’s Sunday inspections, and _La Vie Parisienne_ and _Le
Rire_, which were decently covered on such occasions, were now not to
be seen--unless the inquisitive eye perceived one of them poking out
its thumbed edges from beneath the leather cushions of the settee. And
on the pile’s summit, chosen to occupy so conspicuous a position by
Krame’s quick spirit, lay the _Hibbert Journal_ that Elstone had long
ago received from a kinswoman who “thought, my dear, you might care to
pass your long watches with some magazines,” and a copy of the _Daily
Chronicle_, which had been hastily borrowed from Wickham, the messman,
in case, as Krame remarked, old Alter had Radical tendencies.
“This is Mr. Wingfield Alter,” said Reedham. “He has come to see
Lynwood and Fane-Herbert.”
“How d’you do?” said the senior midshipman. “My name is Krame. This is
Elstone--Howdray--Driss. I’m afraid Fane-Herbert is ashore on leave,
and won’t be back till dinner. Lynwood is in the Dockyard with the
Engineer Commander. They were expected back before Quarters. They may
be here at any moment now.... Will you sit down and wait?”
“Thanks.... There’s one thing, though.” He turned to Reedham. “Perhaps
you would manage it for me? Would you ask the officer of the watch if
I may go ashore in the officers’ boat, and if he says I may, will you
pay off my boatman with this?”
Reedham took the money. After a moment’s hesitation, seeing no
opportunity to convey Mr. Baring’s warning, and, indeed, feeling no
inclination to do so, he went out of the Gunroom, not a little envious
of those who might remain. It is exciting to see the Name that for
years has stared at you from advertisements, and has twinkled at you
from the gilt-lettered backs of books, come suddenly to life, take off
its hat, put down its bag, and seat itself in your chair. The Name, by
coming to life, assumes responsibility for many illusions.
But Mr. Alter, seated in the chair Krame had offered him, and
explaining that he had had tea and would not have a whisky-and-soda
just at present, was not conscious of being an idol, good or bad, or
of being responsible, however indirectly, for another’s self-respect.
He wondered, with a puckering of his eyes, whether he were wiser to
apologize for having disturbed his hosts, or to pretend that, within
his experience at any rate, midshipmen had always sat, during the dog
watches, in Gunrooms tidy almost to primness, reading Manuals of
Seamanship. It would be pleasant if they would all go to sleep again
and not worry about him. He was an old man, he thought, forgetting
to count his three-and-fifty years, an old man and a restraining
presence. He had broken in upon an hour peculiarly their own. He felt
a nuisance, in fact, as age so often feels in the presence of youth,
and did not realize that youth, in this instance, was tremendously
interested in him. And so, while he hesitated, and while their tongues
were momentarily paralyzed by the thought of his great works and of the
thousands of words they contained--all wiser, no doubt, than any they
could speak--a little wall of silence grew up, over which, so soon as
he perceived it, Mr. Alter leaped at a venture.
“Wondering about that bag of mine?” he demanded. “Others have wondered.
Feel its weight--books and papers. I brought them here for Lynwood, who
is a friend of mine, and they shall revert to the Gunroom when he has
done with them. Do you read much?”
“Nothing very solid, I’m afraid,” said Krame.
“But these aren’t solid--at least, I hope not. Some of them are my own.
Now, I wonder if you could find time to read one or two of them--the
naval ones, for instance?”
“I think we have all read those time and again,” said Krame.
Mr. Alter smiled--pleased as he could never now be pleased by a column
in a newspaper. “I’d dearly love to have your criticism, if ever you
care to go over any of them again. My publisher’s address will always
find me. Look, here’s _The Lower Deck_. That was an early effort.”
Howdray turned it over.
“Are you going to write another book about the Service, sir--the
Service as it is now?”
“I don’t know. It attracts me as the impossible always attracts.
I shall never get the essence of it though. Of course, it is not
necessary as a general rule to live a life in order to describe it. But
still....”
“The Service doesn’t like being described,” said Krame.
“The Service is like no community on earth. Its members have two
distinct natures, one when they are inside the naval boundary, the
other when they are outside it; one when they are in contact with
Service people, the other when they are in contact with Non-Service
people. Very, very seldom, for all my watchfulness, have I gained any
real insight into the essentials of the Navy from words addressed to me
by any officer ashore or afloat.”
“But,” Krame remarked, with a smile that confirmed Mr. Alter’s
declaration, “you have lived in ships?”
“As a visitor.”
“Even as a visitor you must be able to see--well, how we live, what
work we do, and things of that kind.”
“But not how you think, and not how you would act if there were no
spectators from the world outside. That’s what any writer has to
discover about the persons of his drama--not what they do before the
footlights, but what they were thinking before the curtain went up.
Otherwise he can’t make them live.”
All the world loves to hear itself discussed as a mystery, and Mr.
Alter’s mysteriousness produced at least a part of the result for which
he had hoped. Howdray and Elstone were awake now; Krame was delighted
to find a whetstone on which to sharpen his wits; and Driss--Mr. Alter
felt the glow of his personality for the first time, saw him lean
forward and listen intently, though, in the presence of his seniors, he
hesitated to speak. Mr. Alter wanted him to speak, wanted them all to
come out of their shells; but he saw that as yet they were not ready.
He, by talking himself, must give them material they might afterwards
care to pull to pieces.
“Have you ever noticed,” he said, “how Portsmouth and other naval ports
differ from the rest of the world?”
“Lord Almighty! have we not!” Howdray exclaimed in his great voice.
“Pompey, Queensferry, Gib., Sheerness--they are all the same, curse
them.”
“And even Arosa Bay and Vigo?”
“Just the same.”
“Although they are south of the Bay and Pompey north of it? Doesn’t
that strike you as strange?”
“I believe,” said Driss, “that if you could drop the Fleet into the
middle of County Carlow it would bring its own atmosphere with it.”
“That’s what I mean,” Mr. Alter exclaimed, pulling out a pipe. “Its
own atmosphere--it has a definite atmosphere of its own, enveloping
it, hiding it from outsiders. And the atmosphere they breathe changes
naval officers only so long as they breathe it. Once outside it--once
in the train from Portsmouth to London, for instance--they are so much
like the ordinary civilian that he fails to recognize them as visitors
from another world. He notices something a little strange about
them--something he can’t define, something that, in nine cases out of
ten, he dismisses with the catchword ‘breezy.’”
“Breezy!” groaned Elstone. “Don’t we look breezy?”
“No, you don’t--not here and now, because you are within the
atmosphere, though my presence disturbs it somewhat, I dare say. But
if you went ashore to-night, outside Portsmouth, away from naval
people--what then?”
“Ask Krame. He is the poodle-faker.”
“Poodle-faker?”
“A payer of polite calls,” Howdray explained. “A balancer of teacups.
An opener of doors. An eater of small morsels. A maker of small
talk--in short, a specialist in drawing-room duties.”
“But poodle-faking is quite different,” said Krame.
“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?”
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.
“So I shan’t have a chance to talk to you,” said Mr. Alter. “I must go
to London to-night. I have been staying with some Hampshire friends,
and thought I would look you up on my way home.”
They went out on to the after shelter-deck.
“What do you think of the Gunroom, sir?” John asked; “and of the people
you met there?”
“As for the Gunroom,” Mr. Alter replied, “I have lived in worse
quarters--but of my own free will, which makes a difference. The
_Hibbert_ lends it dignity and repose.... And I liked Krame and the
rest.”
“I knew you would.”
“Because I’m a civilian?”
“For a variety of reasons. I like them myself, oddly enough.... How are
Hugh’s people?”
“They are going East. I believe that’s fixed.”
“And is----”
Mr. Alter took no notice of the interruption. “Margaret is going with
her mother,” he said.
“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.”