WASTE AND WONDER
There is something in physical drill before breakfast that dissolves
the fabric of dreams. This John had discovered long ago, turning out
of a hammock in whose warm comfort all things had been possible, and
becoming, in the twinkling of an eye, a bare-footed, sleepy midshipman,
in dirty flannels; and this he realized afresh on that June morning
when his meeting Margaret, his letter from Mr. Alter, and his lamp-lit
talk with Hartington had become affairs of yesterday. He went into the
Gunroom, drank cocoa, smoked as much of a cigarette as time allowed
him, and went with the others on to the Upper Deck. Here all was
hosepipes and holystone--gritty to the foot. Ordith, in new sea-boots,
was walking up and down the quarter-deck sniffing the morning air. When
the midshipmen began their drill, he watched them for a moment, and
then turned away.
“Stoop-fallin’--place!” commanded the Instructor. “Feet placin’
forwards and backwards. One--two! One--two! One--two!” The midshipmen,
on all fours, moved their legs in and out lazily, reflecting that
their anatomy was remarkably unlike that of a frog. In any case--and
this, perhaps, was one of the more subtle reasons which inspired the
authorities to order physical drill--it was impossible while so engaged
to imagine one’s self addressing the House of Commons, or falling in
love, or writing a book, or, indeed, doing anything but sprawl on the
deck to the accompaniment of the Instructor’s unceasing “One--two!
One--two!” At Osborne and Dartmouth, of course, where physical drill
had been properly done, it had not been unattractive; moreover, they
were healthier in those days. But now drink, tobacco, and lack of
exercise had made drill an uncomfortable process. It was useless, too,
for they “sloped” through it, and none cared so long as the young
gentlemen obeyed regulations by being on the quarter-deck in flannels
for a stated number of minutes every morning. The fact that they
“sloped” was the young gentlemen’s fault; but not theirs alone.
None cared. The senior officers had other things to do than dry-nurse
the young gentlemen. If they eluded the regulations concerning wine
bills, whose fault was it? Whose fault if they were so bored and had so
lost interest in themselves that in their spare hours they nipped, and
smoked “chains,” and talked women? At Osborne and Dartmouth they had
been educated. At the age of seventeen and a half they had come to sea,
and their education had ceased. The senior officers had other things
to do than worry about the young gentlemen’s education. From time to
time the Gunnery-Lieutenant would dictate obscure notes about guns
that the midshipmen had never seen; or the Torpedo-Lieutenant would
mumble over again lectures on Balance Chamber Mechanism and War Heads,
of just such a kind as had been given in the training cruiser. There
was no system, no syllabus, no timetable, no programme. Sometimes,
to the active irritation of all concerned, there was a lecture; more
often there was not. There were the yearly sights to be worked out;
but these were accomplished on the communal system, and were usually
worked backwards, for reasons that will be clear to seamen. Life was
a haphazard business, in which the only regular intellectual process
was deterioration. One day John discovered that he had forgotten how
to integrate, and that all his mathematics was slipping from him.
Mechanics, too, was a thing of the past; even the elementary formulæ
were forgotten now. Electricity had gone; German had gone utterly;
French was going; Chemistry was no more than a vague recollection of
apparatus and of the red tie worn by the master who had taught him.
“I’ve forgotten everything we ever learnt at Dartmouth,” he confessed.
“So have we all,” Dyce answered.
Borne in the flagship was one Naval Instructor, who was responsible for
all the midshipmen in the squadron. Perhaps he taught the flagship’s
midshipmen; but his visits to the other ships were so rare that he
was unexpectedly popular. Because it was impossible for him to be in
two places at once, it happened that, when the flagship was in one
port of the Station and the _Pathshire_ in another, the _Pathshire’s_
midshipmen were delightfully free from his ministrations. Outwardly
they rejoiced at this emancipation, complaining only that threepence
a day was deducted from the pay of each one of them in order that, in
accordance with regulation, the Naval Instructor might be fittingly
rewarded for being at Hong-Kong while his paying pupils were at
Nagasaki. This seemed unjust.
“Our pay from a grateful Admiralty is twenty-one pence a day,” Dyce
remarked, “on which, apart from what our people provide, we live like
officers and gentlemen. And out of the twenty-one pence three go every
day to the upkeep of this N.I., who comes near us about one morning in
three months. Now, why the hell should I pay one-seventh of my total
income for an education I never receive?”
“Lord Almighty!” Cunwell exclaimed; “you don’t want the damned N.I., do
you?”
“No. But threepence nearly buys a glass of port.”
“Well, let’s put in a moan,” Fane-Herbert said.
“Moan!” Dyce laughed. “We shan’t get much change.”
However, after further discussion, their complaint seemed so
justifiable that they laid it before the powers. The powers considered
it, and decided that midshipmen in ships other than the flagship should
pay the Naval Instructor only when they were in company with the Flag.
This change was certainly an improvement; but still, when the squadron
was at sea, John paid threepence a day for the education he did not
receive from a man who sailed in a ship one-fifth of a mile away.
The apparent charm of the China Station was that there was nothing to
do; its disadvantage, discovered by experience, was that the whole day
was spent doing nothing. Occasionally there occurred “spasms”--periods
of remarkable gunnery activity, when the midshipmen spent hour after
hour on watch or at their guns, waiting for the watch to end or for the
deliverance of the next meal. One of these “spasms” took place soon
after the _Pathshire’s_ arrival at Wei-hai-wei. The ship cruised all
the week in the neighbourhood of Waterwitch and Four Funnel Bays, and
returned to Wei-hai-wei on Friday nights. But even this activity was
powerless to check the growth of the conviction which was finding a
place in John’s mind that all his preparation at Dartmouth was to be
wasted, and that, so far as the Service was concerned, his intellectual
development had come to an end. And from this conviction proceeded a
feeling that his youth and all the energies of youth were purposeless
and useless. Day after day went by and he was never called upon to use
his brains. There was routine to be followed--so many hours on duty,
so many hours standing about, so many hours of waiting. And in the
intervals there was the Gunroom, where one slept, or threw dice for
sixpences, or listened to lurid tales.
As time went on the aspect of the Gunroom became more strange and
more terrible. Usually John was not aware that anything was wrong.
Life seemed slack and easy, and he did not complain. But there were
moments when he realized suddenly that young men not yet twenty do not
naturally sleep through the daylight hours. Dice for sixpences became
poor sport; poker began; the stakes rose; a card-book was started in
which were recorded debts a midshipman’s income could not discharge.
The defaulters satisfied their creditors by keeping their watches and
running their boats for them.
Conversation became incredibly filthy. Even the elements of wit
disappeared from its indecency. The intelligence of the midshipmen was
applied to the invention of new blasphemies, the foulness of which was
the measure of the audience’s applause. There came moments when even
that Gunroom was stricken to silence; and, for a day or two, certain
expressions had to be paid for by a democratically imposed fine.
“I’m sick of it all,” Hugh said. “There’s no earthly point in it.”
“This isn’t a Mess of women,” Cunwell protested, though that was not
the expression he used.
“I dare say it isn’t. But the fact is that our pretty language wouldn’t
pass muster in a room full of men. We are miles outside any possible
limit.”
Driss opened sleepy eyes. “There’s nothing else to talk about,” he
observed, “so we talk like this. We are all sick of it--the same as
you, Fane-Herbert. But we shan’t stop. We can’t stop. It’s a habit
now.” And he rang the bell for cigarettes.
Hartington was powerless; the causes of change in the Gunroom were such
as his influence could not affect. A hot climate, monotony of labour,
and the absence of any kind of intellectual exercise or stimulus
brought the midshipmen to such a pass that first they described their
own minds as being “like cesspools”--stagnant and foul--and then ceased
to care whether their minds were like cesspools or not. From this it
was a short step to carelessness about those things for which in other
circumstances, they would have been greatly concerned--their hair,
their hands, the linen they wore, and the sheets in their hammocks.
Their health suffered, and they did not care. In body and mind they
became flabby and slack; and still they did not care. Rapidly they were
losing their self-respect.
When they were ashore the deterioration seemed to have gone not so far,
and yet far enough. There were in those parts no women with whom they
could go, but at the Club were armchairs, and a bar where cocktails
had nothing to do with their wine bills. When John went to see the
Fane-Herberts the change in him was remarkable. He would wash, shave,
and dress himself more carefully. For a couple of hours, perhaps, his
speech would be clean. But consciousness of the ship’s life never left
him, and he felt in Margaret’s presence always at a disadvantage, as if
he had entered a drawing-room in dirty boots. Self-respect is not to be
laid aside and instantly reassumed, and John was for ever sensible of
a kind of inferiority to which he could not believe others were blind.
As a result he became abnormally sensitive, interpreting a momentary
silence as purposeful neglect of himself, and imagining deliberate
coldness whenever Margaret was less responsive than he desired.
When Ordith, too, was there, John found it impossible to meet him on
even ground. Ordith was a Wardroom officer, and aware of the conditions
of life in the _Pathshire’s_ Gunroom. No doubt he looked upon the
midshipmen with contempt, and smiled to think that one of them presumed
to be his rival. Little by little John fell into the background.
Margaret, wondering at his lack of enterprise, and not understanding
its true cause, was led to imagine that he had ceased to care. His
conversation with her became colourless, his manner nervous and
embarrassed. As the weeks passed they fell further and further apart.
To this estrangement between himself and Margaret John ascribed a
false cause. He regarded it as a consequence of his own insignificant
position as a midshipman without money. He was not cynical and foolish
enough to imagine that Margaret deliberately excluded him from her
consideration because he was poor. Rather, it seemed, the practical
hopelessness of any love for him prevented its growth as naturally
as darkness stifles a flower. How should she learn to love him when
every circumstance of her own life and of his association with her was
evidence that such love must be vain? The sight of Mr. Fane-Herbert was
enough to shatter any dreams. Never was a man a more loyal citizen of
the “world as it is.” To look at his gold watch-chain was to remember
your poverty; to hear him speak of success, of the men who “got there,”
of the “youths who were likely to do something in the world,” was to
become vividly aware that you had neither succeeded, nor got there,
nor were likely to do anything in the world. When Mr. Fane-Herbert’s
business gave him a short respite, which he spent at Wei-hai-wei,
Margaret seemed more than ever unapproachable and Ordith’s position
more than ever assured.
Confronted for the first time by the problem of a woman’s mind, and
having no woman to whom he could go for counsel, John was guilty of an
error in judgment almost as often as he and Margaret met. To him, in
his present mood, every sign seemed a sign of ill-omen. If she went out
of the room when he was there he thought she wished to avoid him. If
she was not at home when he called he imagined that she had foreseen
his coming. To his ears she seemed never to speak of Ordith save with
approval.
In the meantime, Ordith made regular, methodical, and carefully
recorded progress. Margaret could not understand John. At a time
when she had been most eager to help him he had become suddenly
uncommunicative, and lately, without any kind of explanation, he had
ceased to come to the house more often than mere politeness demanded.
Her father regarded him “as one of those snotties,” no more and no
less. And Ordith never missed an opportunity.
He would come continually to the house. He would talk to Margaret
throughout the long summer afternoons, talk about himself, his future,
his ambitions--just such talk as, modestly spoken, flatters any woman
into interest. He would ask her advice, making her feel that her
decision was indeed of importance to him. He had an air of letting her
share his secrets, and a power, that amounted almost to genius, of
making his secrets not only important but amusing.
At the dance which the Admiral gave in his flagship he took entire
charge of her. She could not help noticing that in the flagship the
personality of Ordith had made itself felt. And he was in excellent
form that night, laughing, dancing with extraordinary swing and rhythm,
awakening in her an excitement that brightened her eyes and brought a
hot flush to her cheeks. Through many of the long hours in which she
danced John was in charge of the _Pathshire’s_ picket-boat, lying
alongside the flagship, waiting until, the guests being ready to leave,
the boats should be called to the gangway. He had undertaken this duty,
which was not properly his own, in order that he might avoid a direct
decision as to whether he should attend the dance or deliberately
absent himself from it. He had lacked courage either to compete with
Ordith, or, without some excuse of “duty,” to leave the field clear for
him.
“Not going to the dance?” Hartington had said.
“No.”
“Why on earth not? You are a dancing man, aren’t you?”
“I am running the picket-boat,” John had answered.
But Hartington had seen deeper than this poor excuse.
“Couldn’t you have got someone to run it for you--if you want to go to
the dance?”
“I am taking it for someone else.”
“Oh! Not your own job?”
“No.”
“You are an uncourageous fellow.”
For a moment John had remained silent. Then he had burst out: “Oh, it’s
no good. You don’t know Ordith. You don’t know old Fane-Herbert. The
odds are too big.”
Hartington had shrugged his shoulders.
“That’s for you to decide.”
So John waited in the darkness at the flagship’s side. Above him the
quarter-deck was gay with red and white bunting, and brilliant with
electric lights. John wondered if coachmen and chauffeurs felt as
he did. The colour and music were close to him, but he had no part
in them. He saw shadows move to and fro on the decorative flags,
and wondered if that shadow were Margaret’s, and what she was saying
and doing at that instant. Certainly, he reflected, he could not
be entering into her thoughts; and yet it seemed strange, almost
incredible, that she, of whom he thought so insistently, should occupy
her mind with other things--an experiment in a new dance-step, perhaps,
or the effect of her dress, or the excellence of supper. This thought,
as it were an arm that thrust him back into the darkness from which
he desired to issue, quickened his sense of remoteness. He saw all
his hopes and desires objectively, as if he looked down from a barred
window on to a world he could not enter. There, on the quarter-deck,
within a few yards of him, was Margaret; he could not attain to her,
he could not make her hear; she was dancing and laughing, eating and
drinking, unconscious of his proximity, forgetful of his existence.
He did not see her until the dance ended with an abruptness peculiar
to entertainments on board His Majesty’s ships. At once the sea,
which through the hours had lapped quietly against the steel plates,
was thrashed to foam by the propellers of the waiting steamboats. It
happened, as John had scarcely doubted it would happen, that Margaret
and her mother went ashore in the _Pathshire’s_ picket-boat. John, who
stood where the light fell on him, watched Ordith escort them down
the gangway. He saw that Margaret’s eyes were tired, as if she had
undergone some strain, but this appearance he attributed to physical
weariness. She said nothing to Ordith but a short “Good-night” scarcely
audible. Then, as she stepped on to the deck of John’s boat, she
looked directly at him where he stood beside the engine-room casing.
She looked at and beyond him as if he were not there, and disappeared
into the cabin.
He drove the boat angrily, using too much helm, and brought up by the
landing-stage, not by slowing and then stopping his engines, but by a
sudden stoppage and immediate reversal at full speed. All went well, as
if the Devil were directing his judgment. The stem swung inaccurately,
the engines stopped, and the boat came to rest with the foam boiling
around her. The passengers clambered out with the extraordinary nervous
clumsiness of landfolk in boats.
For a moment John was tempted to draw attention to himself by saying
good-night to Mrs. Fane-Herbert and Margaret. Then he changed his
mind, and kept his place by the wheel, where the brass funnel hid him.
Margaret had seen him alongside the flagship. She must have recognized
him, and she had given no sign of recognition. He would not press the
matter further.
He had other boat-trips that night, but he remembered nothing of them
afterwards except a vague irritation because he could not shout at
the shrill, silly women in his cabin to keep silence in the boat.
When he returned finally to the _Pathshire_ he was conscious of that
odd despair and misery that sometimes attacked him with irresistible
force if he awoke in his hammock in the dark of the early morning. He
seemed to have no reserve of will with which to combat it. The Gunroom
was closed, and he went into the Smoking Casemate, where he sat down
on an upright wooden chair. The room was dirty with the litter of
the day. Cards and newspapers lay on the deck and on the chairs.
Cigarette-ends exuded their juice among the dregs at the bottom of
wine-glasses. From the half-deck, where the midshipmen’s hammocks were
slung, came the sound of regular breathing, and once the cry--almost
the cry of a child, John fancied--of one who dreamed unhappily. He sat
staring at the six-inch gun that gleamed beneath the yellow beam of an
imperfect police-light. What, in God’s name, was this leading to? From
the cruelty and degradation of the _King Arthur_ he seemed now to be
degraded through his own fault. No need to sink into slackness of mind
and body; no need to drink rot-gut liqueurs in the forenoon; no need to
gamble for stakes he could not afford, or to let his thought and speech
be filled with beastliness. His own fault, he supposed; his own fault,
he tried to confess in his eagerness to avoid the finding of excuses
for himself. And yet--he glanced through the half-curtained door beyond
which the others were sleeping--were not they similarly affected? In
other ships were the same Gunroom conditions. There must be a reason
for it, outside and beyond them all; a force greater than their wills,
bearing them down, stifling and slowly destroying the instincts for
cleanness and energy which had once been lively within them.
And suddenly John perceived that his stream of life had become stagnant
and foul because it was dammed, having no outlet in hope. His care
for Margaret, his desire for poetry, his longing for progressive
intellectual work which had been allowed to develop at the training
colleges, were checked now. In his present life, and, so far as he
could see, in the future life the Service promised him, there could
be no spiritual or intellectual expansion. Day after day routine would
repeat itself. The end towards which all effort was directed was war.
War--and what then?
He could not face the questions that were crying unanswered through the
passages of his mind. He began to reckon his gains and losses at cards,
and frowned because the card-book, into which he would have liked to
look, was inaccessible within the locked Gunroom. And presently he
began to ask himself what offence of his had caused Margaret wilfully
to disregard him that night.
Perhaps for ten minutes, perhaps for an hour or more, he had sat thus,
thinking with desperate rapidity, when he looked up to find Hugh,
bare-footed, and clothed in torn pyjamas, standing at the Casemate door.
“I saw you from my hammock,” Hugh said. “You look pretty miserable,
sitting there.”
“I’ve been running the picket-boat,” John answered, as if this were
sufficient explanation. “You were at the dance, weren’t you?”
“Yes. I had to go because my people were going. A flagship dance is no
place for a snotty--too much gold lace and aiglettes.”
“I took your people ashore.”
“I know. I saw them go down into the _Pathshire’s_ boat.”
“Did you notice anything?”
“Notice anything?”
“About Margaret?”
“No. What of her?”
“Merely that she looked straight at me, saw me, and wouldn’t recognize
me.” John laughed shortly. “I wonder what crime I’ve committed.”
“I think she was excited to-night. Sometimes when I spoke to her she
answered me in that vague way of hers, as if her thoughts were far
away. Do you remember how strange she was that Sunday after our dance
in town? It was the same thing to-night.”
“Ordith?”
“Perhaps. She danced with him. I remember, as they passed me, I heard
her laugh--higher pitched than usual.” And Hugh added, with a touch of
embarrassment: “Almost as if she was afraid.”
John paused to consider. He saw her in Ordith’s arms, moving to the
music, her head thrown back a little, laughing. Then, with directness
that surprised himself, he asked suddenly the question he had long
desired and never dared to ask:
“Hugh, do you think she is in love with Ordith?”
“He is with her.”
“I know. That wasn’t my question, though. You know why I ask it.”
“She has never said a word to me about it.”
“She’s not likely to.... But what is your opinion, based on what you’ve
seen and heard?”
“My dear old fellow, how should I know? It does no good to make
yourself wretched.”
“But you think there’s cause?”
“Well, there’s a kind of glamour about Ordith, you know. And Margaret
is very young as yet. I don’t suppose her mind is made up in any way.”
John rose and shivered. “We had better turn in,” he said. “The
half-deck sentry thinks we are mad. I saw him look round the edge of
the curtain just now.”