from the wardrooms of the whole Navy. Small wonder some three hundred grubby urchins fresh from school found in them admirable qualities.
Their example and teaching were the moulds into which, year by year, the molten metal of the Navy’s officer-personnel was poured, thence to be scattered about the seven seas, tempered by winds and stress, and, in God’s good time, tested to the uttermost.
Ashore, on the playing fields or across the red ploughland at the tails of the beagles, they laboured in close intimate fellowship with these atoms of clay thrust by providence beneath their thumbs. But on board it seemed they faded from ken, being rarely seen save at classes and musters, or when in pairs the Term percolated through the wardroom for dessert, plastered as to the hair, patent leather shod, to sip and cough over a glass of ambrosial port at either elbow of their Lieutenant.
Seeing and unseen, knowing their Terms{42} as only men who spend their lives among men can know and understand the embryo, they were the guiding invisible wisdom behind the Cadet Captains, who outwardly ruled the decks.
{42}
The Cadet Captains were chosen from the three senior Terms, set apart from their fellows by the fact that they wore “standup” collars and a triangular gold badge on the left cuff.
Minor Authority in other guises was greeted much the same as it is in all communities of boyhood. The platitudes of notice boards no fellow with his heart in the right place could be expected to remember over well. The acknowledged sway of instructors and masters was largely a matter of knowing to a nicety how far an adventurous spirit could go (in the realms of Science and Freehand Drawing it was a long way) before the badgered pedagogue turned and bit. Terms paid strict allegiance to their own Chief Petty Officers. But, as has already been shown, this was an affair of the heart and the sentiments. He was theirs, and they were his: thus it had been from the beginning.
There was, however, one voice that rarely repeated an order, one court from which appeal, if possible, was undreamed of—that of the Cadet Captain. Their rule was with{43}out vexatious tyranny, but it was an iron rule. The selection of these Cadet Captains was done carefully, and mistakes were few. The standard of the whole was no mean one, and for three months the Lieutenant of the First Term had been studying the raw material, working with it, playing with it, talking to it—or
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