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 manoeuvres. 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.”