At Colombo the exchange of crews between Pathshire and Colonsay was effected as an evolution. With the exception of a few hands left behind for indispensable duties, both ships were simultaneously emptied into their boats. As they met and passed the men tried to cheer, but silence was immediately restored. There would be time for cheering, perhaps, when, with her new freight, the Colonsay left for home.

To John, who was too junior to have seen anything of the traditional “spit and polish” in the old Channel Fleet, the Pathshire was a revelation. In China, where time was less precious than in the North Sea, and where the menace of Wilhelmshaven was more remote, Gunnery, Torpedo Practice, and Fleet Exercises had not made good their claim to undivided attention. The Pathshire was full of bright work, which in home waters would have been obscured by Service grey. Her paint and enamel glistened in the sunlight so that her after-turret was a mirror; her stanchions were burnished like a knight’s armour; her dull metal was overlaid with silver gilt; everywhere were decorative turk’s-heads and whitened lanyards; her upper deck was spotless as a yacht’s.

“Think of Cleaning Stations in this packet!” said Sentley. “It must have cost her Commander and Number One about a third of their pay to provide all the paint and enamel in excess of the Service allowance.”

The Gunroom, they discovered, was but half a Gunroom, their quarters having been cut into two parts by a temporary bulkhead. One part was given over to the Warrant Officers, but, in compensation for this, Hartington obtained permission from the Commander to use as a smoking-room the after main-deck casemate on the starboard side. There had been no midshipmen in the previous commission, so that all furniture other than the scanty Service fittings had to be bought with the Mess Fund. A few wicker armchairs, a couple of cheap card-tables, and several ash-trays—these things being regarded as essentials—were obtained at Colombo, and all else was left, at Hartington’s suggestion, until they should reach the wider market of Hong Kong.

Nearly a week was to pass before they sailed again, and the midshipmen were given leave. John and Hugh went together to Kandi. They avoided the obvious hotel which other officers were likely to visit, and chose a place that consisted of three small bungalows, almost hidden among the trees that covered the hill on the less popular side of the lake. Here came men whose experience of the “best hotels” in the East did not tempt them to strain their finances—quiet folk, who were chiefly remarkable, in John’s eyes, for the matter-of-fact way in which they regarded what to him was novel and amazing. And the hotel itself, save when a breath of wind stirred the branches that overhung it or the sound of gong or bell came up from the lake below, was deeply silent.

After dinner on the evening of their arrival, sitting together in the verandah that ran the whole length of the three bungalows, and watching their cigarette smoke twist and disappear against a sky of so heavy a purple that the stars seemed to be embedded in it, they discussed their plans for the morrow—discussed them happily and at leisure, knowing that their time was their own, and that any decision made to-night might be freely reversed in the morning. As they were on the point of leaving the Pathshire an English mail—the first to reach them since they left home—had been distributed, and each had brought his share to Kandi unread. “Let’s keep them,” John had suggested, “until after dinner to-night, when we shall be alone and quiet, and clear away from the ship.” And now they brought out their letters from their pockets and began the reading they had so long postponed. Soon there was little sound but that of pages being turned. From far down the verandah came the murmur of indistinguishable voices, and from time to time the hiss of a match or the sharp tinkle of a liqueur glass.

Among John’s letters was one from Margaret, which he did not open until all the others had been returned to their envelopes. Then he read it slowly. When he began he was content with the moment. This evening’s beauty and quietness, so wonderful a contrast to the nights he had spent in the King Arthur, seemed a satisfaction of all his desires. For two days he was independent of routine—free to control his own movements, to read, to sleep, to go in and out according to his will. He and Hugh were filled with the spirit of content that visits all men at the beginning of their holiday. There had seemed no need to look further, to question motives or consequences. The night was pleasant; this letter of Margaret’s would add pleasure to the night.

But, as he read, he began to remember many things which the freedom of his new life from persecution had caused him to forget. She spoke of London, of political plots and rumours, of the strength or weakness of new movements, of the expansion of new ideas. New books, new expressions of opinion; the words of men who had been her father’s guests; fears of a strike at Ibble’s—her letter was extraordinarily suggestive of keenness and activity. Much had happened, more was about to happen—and this in a London many weeks away. What, Margaret asked, had he been doing? What had he written? He looked back over weeks of inactivity. He had done nothing but talk to Hartington. Days had slipped by—precious days. Since he left England he had read little, had created nothing, had not tried to create. The storm of the King Arthur being over he had relapsed into lazy content. Time had sped.

To youth, consciousness of the passage of time comes seldom, but coming, it brings with it pain by which age is not affected—pain unsoftened by any acceptance of the inevitable. Still the chance; still the opportunity to make good; still the feverish casting about for means! And middle-age growing nearer—a vision of the insignificant man going to and fro between his home and office, of the two-and-a-half stripe lieutenant many, many times passed over! John saw that he had been wasting his life.

Then he saw, in a flash that left him blind, that, unless its whole course were changed, he would continue to waste his life. Waste—and at the end old age, looking back upon years empty of achievement. “If only I had my time again! If I were but eighteen once more!” It was as if this foreseen wish had been uttered and fulfilled. He was eighteen now. The future was still his.

The letter fell with his hand on to his knees.

“Finished?” Hugh asked. John looked up to encounter his laughing eyes. “I have been watching your face,” he went on. “It seems to have been a disturbing letter.”

“It was,” John answered. “It reminds me how far we are out of the world and how infernally slack I have been.”

He held out the envelope that the writing might be seen.

“Margaret!” Hugh exclaimed. “What has she been saying?”

“She has made me think, thrown me back on things I had forgotten. It was so good to be free of the King Arthur that, during the whole passage out, the world has seemed the best of all possible worlds. It isn’t—or it won’t be long. Oh, Hugh, it’s all very well—a happy ship, a good Wardroom, a good Sub, and no Gunroom persecution; but what does it all lead to? I want to do other things—things I shall never be able to do—and to meet other people.”

Hugh, believing that John was thinking particularly of Margaret, said: “At any rate, some of the ‘other people’ will be out East before long.”

“You dear old fool!” John exclaimed. “That isn’t what I meant.... No; it’s just restlessness, I suppose. I feel that all the work we do is so like a housemaid’s—to-day’s routine the same as to-morrow’s. We never build or make anything. For all our work we leave nothing behind.”

“I don’t see your trouble,” Hugh said. “So long as life is pleasant I don’t want to leave anything behind.”

“We are missing so much. We get out of touch. In whatever progress there is we have no part.”

“I know we are missing a great deal. Every letter I get from outside makes me jealous of the people at home. They can go about and see things, and we are shut up day in and day out.”

“How they would shout if they heard you say that!” John broke in. “Mostly they imagine that it is they who are shut in and we who go about—as they say—seeing the world. It’s all wrong. The world doesn’t consist in places but in people. And the only boundaries are boundaries of thought. Think of the people your sister listens to, the books she reads, the opinions that count—coming to her first hand. Men and women from abroad—Germans, French, Americans—she is beginning to be in touch with them all. But the Service boundaries are desperately close-drawn.”

Hugh leaned back in his chair and yawned. “I suppose we are all much the same,” he said. “We all feel shut in—or shut out, rather—though perhaps for reasons different from yours. Sentley wants plants and birds—being a naturalist; and there’s not a plant or a bird in H.M.’s ships. Driss wants Ireland; Driss is almost sick for Ireland sometimes and he can’t go there. And do you remember Tintern?—he was starved for music. He said to me once—dead serious—that if he could get music he would never get drunk. He used to dream about going to Germany and being educated—‘start life all over again with the five-finger exercise,’ he used to say.... And the strange thing is that officers of the Old Navy didn’t feel like that. I suppose they were made of harder stuff. Last leave I asked an old retired Admiral about his snotty days, and he said, ‘No, we didn’t hanker after shore life as you young fellows do. Of course, we were keen enough to get ashore when we could—better food and beds—but I think we were all of us glad in a way to get back to the ship.’”

“But the Navy was smaller then, and more independent of the outside world,” John said. “I dare say your old Admiral felt an almost personal affection for it. But you can’t have affection for a vast machine that is itself only a unit in a greater system of machinery; you can feel loyalty, perhaps, but not affection. It’s like trying to fall in love with a Board of Directors. The Service is too big and impersonal to love. Moreover, it isn’t a free agent. You know as well as anyone what lies behind it.”

“Ibble’s?”

“And more.”

“And Ordith’s?”

“More than Ibble and Ordith’s, more even than the whole armament ring. Behind the armament firms are the mines, behind the mines is shipping, behind shipping—oh, it goes on for ever expanding and expanding. It goes out in every direction, and drags in every individual in the world—shareholders, banks, the financial houses at home, international finance—there it is, fully expanded again. Your sister, viewing it from her own angle, sums it up as a Net. We are all shut up inside it, and everyone who thinks is swimming round and round trying to find a way out. Discontented devils—so we are! Every novel that says anything is full of protest, and every speech—public or private. The papers call it Industrial Unrest, the Foreign Correspondents European Unrest. The whole world’s affected as it was not in your Admiral’s time.... And in the Service we are shut up in a corner pocket of the Net; we haven’t the chance even to swim round and round.”

“Margaret will never accept anything,” Hugh commented. “Father is always telling her that if only she would watch the world as it is instead of thinking of the world as it might be she would get on much better.”

“You wouldn’t care much for a sister who sat down placidly to watch the world as it is,” John observed.

“No—it wouldn’t be attractive. I don’t mind so long as she doesn’t go to hopeless extremes,” added her cautious brother. “But she won’t do any good. The net is there, and the net will remain.”

“Until it breaks,” John said.

Two men and a woman with a shrivelled face passed along the verandah into the hotel. One of the men was chinking the coins in his pocket. A dog rose sleepily from under the table by which they had been sitting, stretched himself, sniffed the warm air, and pattered after his master.