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 manoeuvres. 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.

Manoeuvres, 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—

“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.

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.

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—

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: