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.
Of all the junior midshipmen Sentley alone had settled down. He was not
happy, but he looked forward to the satisfaction promotion would bring
him. He lived by rules, and was tempted neither by strong emotions nor
by a strong imagination to break them. They were too well suited to his
placid, dogged temperament. He would never be a great naval officer,
but he had no desire to be great. If very reasonable expectations
were fulfilled by his becoming a captain he would not be disappointed
by failure to fly his admiral’s flag. He was by nature contented,
hard-working, moderate in his somewhat formal religion, moderate in his
vanity, moderate in all things. His life in the Gunroom was unpleasant;
but when he was flogged, it was the pain that troubled him--not the
humiliation, and his resentment vanished with the pain. In speaking,
even in thinking of his superiors in rank, he never used the expression
“ought not.” He seldom used it at all except in a formally religious
sense, and then his condemnation ended when his conscience had been
stilled by a mild utterance of protest. It was not in keeping with his
policy, nor was it within his power, to stand out in opposition to
anything. He drifted easily with the tide.
Driss was very calm. It was impossible to pierce his reserve or to
tell what course his mind had taken. Dyce was frittering away his
soul, now resisting, now yielding, now seeking the easy consolations,
now dragging himself away from them, knowing that very soon he must
return. He laid no plans, and deliberately avoided looking into the
future. His duties were performed perfunctorily, and to no one’s
satisfaction, least of all to his own. Sometimes a chance remark, a
flash of wit in his conversation, would display the true worth of a
mind that was fast becoming dulled. He was a generous friend, a bitter
but ineffectual enemy, and an amusing companion. If he had had money,
and leisure, and independence he would have ended his days at the head
of a country-house dinner-table, passing port to numerous and frequent
guests.
The senior midshipmen had absorbed Cunwell. He did his best to please
them. On Sunday mornings he produced a polishing pad, which he had
bought ashore for this very purpose, and offered to give Krame’s boots
“just a rub over before Divisions, as I am doing my own, you know.”
Then, when he had finished rubbing and breathing from a broad mouth,
he would look round apprehensively to see what the junior midshipmen
had been thinking of him. As a reward for these attentions Krame spared
him a little and patronized him much. Sometimes he would say at dinner,
“My old friend Cunwell will have a glass of port with me?” and Cunwell,
glowing in the joys of privileged familiarity, would shout back,
“Thanks, old Krame, don’t mind if I do.” Krame would keep his lip from
curling, but his eyes flickered his laughing contempt.
Cunwell did not like Krame, who, he said, sneered because he thought
himself clever. As a model he chose Howdray, whose doings were
chronicled and laughed over throughout the Fleet. But the imitation
was not successful. It was as a ragtime played laboriously, for
Howdray imparted to his vice a certain glitter that Cunwell could not
reproduce. Cunwell, when he drank, became immediately dull and sick.
He had no pleasure in risk, no spirit of adventure. His dealings with
women were usually ridiculous, so that the women themselves sniggered
at him behind his back. Soiled collars and a dimness of eye were the
outward signs of the change in him.
Manœuvres, contact with the Home Fleet, and a rumour that the _King
Arthur_ might not return to England to refit, depressed the spirits of
the whole ship’s company. The Commander was impossible to please. The
defaulters were numerous. The relations between Wardroom and Gunroom,
never cordial, became more than usually strained. The Chaplain preached
a bitter sermon on the virtue of contentment. The Captain, who was a
kindly man, regretfully sent more prisoners to cells in a fortnight
than he had condemned to that punishment in the previous two months.
Gunroom Evolutions and floggings became more frequent and severe. When
the men went to physical drill after Divisions, and were commanded, in
accordance with custom, to double round the batteries and quarter-deck,
they ran, not eagerly and good-humouredly as when paying-off time
is near, but at a Service double such as discipline demanded. And
the speed and spirit of this morning procession is generally a good
indication of the temper of a ship’s company. The Commander wrote to
his wife that the commission was stale. The men needed general leave,
he said. And Tintern paused suddenly one night in his playing of the
Alphabet--
“_With a Glory Allelujah in the morning,
In the morning by the gaslight,
See_----”
“I’m not going to play any more,” he wailed, in imitation of a spoilt
child.
“Oh, come on, Tintern; there’s no one else to play but you. You’ll stop
the whole sing-song. Why won’t you play?”
“Why? Because the poor old Konk”--he was referring to the monarch after
whom the ship was named--“because the poor old Konk is bloody-minded,
and so am I.”
It was when affairs had reached this stage that, to the junior
midshipmen, relief came, sudden and unexpected.
II
One forenoon the Captain’s messenger came to the Gunroom to say that
the Captain wished to see Mr. Sentley. After an absence of ten minutes,
Sentley returned. They read in his face that he had good news. In his
hand he carried a sheet from a signal pad.
“We are all to return to England immediately,” he said. “We shall have
about a fortnight or three weeks of leave. Then we are to join the
_Colonsay_ for passage to Colombo, where we are to recommission the
_Pathshire_, China Station.”
“All of us?” said Howdray. “What do you mean?”
“We junior snotties.”
“Not the others?”
“No.”
“Oh, damn! You lucky, lucky little devils!”
That night the Mess dined the junior midshipmen. As the Gunroom had
been drawn together once before by the hope of battle, so was it now
united by the prospect of parting. Wrongs were forgiven, enmities
forgotten. Soon they would be saying of one another: “I was shipmates
with him _once_.” If an association is to end, let it end sweetly.
Speeches were made. Tintern said, “I’ve always thought it odd that the
Service should have a special name for a ship that isn’t mouldy and at
cross-purposes. It sounds as if such ships were rare. And so they are
nowadays, west of Suez. But the China Birds say that there are still
Happy Ships on the China Station. A Happy Ship is a ship in which
all the Messes get on with one another--a ship in which, among other
things, there isn’t bad blood between Wardroom and Gunroom. And I hope
the young gentlemen will get one. I ask you to drink to the health of
the _Pathshire_, and may she be a Happy Ship!”
When the toast had been honoured and the wine passed once more, the
Mess shouted at Krame for a speech. He rose slowly, and looked round
him.
“As Tintern has been talking about a Happy Ship in the future,” he
said, “I suppose the young gentlemen think it’s up to me to say
something about their somewhat lurid past. There’s not much to be
said--no excuses, or apologies, or that kind of thing. But there is
this: a Happy Ship is a happy ship right through, and contrariwise.
Nothing that has happened here has happened because of personal
ill-will. It has happened because--because--Lynwood, what was that line
I picked out of some stuff you were reading? I remember now. It has
happened because we are ‘in the fell clutch of circumstance.’ I hope
that in the better land to which they are going the young gentlemen
will have more leave--not a few hours at a time, pub-loafing at Pompey
or Gib., but real leave, clear away from the ship, and long enough to
give them a chance not to be bloody-minded. Long leave is what the
Service wants, gentlemen, says I, beatin’ the tub! Long leave is what
we wishes the young gen’lemen, says us, liftin’ our glasses.”
Krame sits down amid a roar of applause. Presently Tintern goes to the
piano and plays all the familiar songs. To-morrow this sing-song party
will break up, never to reassemble again. Every tune is made richer by
wine and sentiment--the _Alphabet_, _Napoleon_, _Farewell and Adieu_,
_Screw-Guns_.
“_If a man doesn’t work, why, we drills ’im and teaches ’im
’ow to behave;
If a beggar can’t march, why, we kills ’im an’ rattles ’im
into ’is grave.
You’ve got to stand up to our business an’ spring without
snatchin’ or fuss.
D’you say that you sweat with the field-guns? By God, you must
lather with us. ’Tss! ’Tss!
For you all love the screw-guns...._”
Thus Mr. Kipling to the tune of the _Eton Boating Song_. And now a
round of drinks, and song again--a song whose immortal words are
unpublished, whose tunes are various, whose name is the _Barrack-Gate_.
“_... Then the wily Gym. Instructor ...
Just outside the Barrack-Gate._”
There follows a swift catalogue of the merits of a certain Princess
whose home is in a few manuscripts of an Opera, rhymed wonderfully
by the hand of a master, and sung to music by Sullivan. From this
obscurity a swift return is made to the simplicity of _The Wives_, in
which it is told how the Parson’s wife, strangely clad, decorated her
hat with the midshipmen’s astronomical observations--
“_And in one corner of her hat
She carried the Yearly Sights.
She carried the Yearly Sights, my boys,
And every one was there;
And in the other corner
Was the Book of Common Prayer._”
The evening wears on. _Mandalay_ is sung as a tribute to the East. The
room is heavy with smoke. The yellow lamp-shades that swung to and fro
on those nights of Evolution seem to be swinging now, though the ship
does not roll. The ship seems to roll though the sea is calm. The past
is receding. Voices are loud. The rosy flush of wine takes all the
sadness from farewell....
The Gunroom is being closed. The group that was leaning over Tintern’s
shoulder has scattered. In the Chest Flat Ollenor’s voice is heard
repeating the last chorus, and at the piano Tintern, almost alone now,
is singing to himself a song that is not a Gunroom song:
“_Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill._”