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.’”