Free Brown on Resolution by C S Forester Page B

the most logical move possible to join the Navy at fifteen and a quarter) left him slightly bewildered. He persisted in giving notice. In the end the Junior Partner yielded. He patted Albert on the shoulder, and swallowed hard, and produced some second-hand platitudes about the Navy—‘wish more people had as much interest in the Navy’—‘very healthy and natural for a boy to want to join’—‘Nelson’—‘England expects’—‘hope you do well, my boy’. Then finally, and most extraordinary of all, he fished three half-crowns out of his pocket, gave them to Albert as his next week’s wages, and told him he could leave now and have a week’s holiday before taking the decisive step. For which ridiculous proceeding he was heartily cursed (privately) by the outer office, which he had heedlessly left office-boy-less, the while he earned no gratitude whatever from Albert, who did not find any joy in a week spent hanging disconsolately about, unnecessarily exposed to the maudlin pleadings of Mrs. Rodgers, who wept profusely over him at every opportunity, and who took it for granted that entry into the Navy implied an immediate watery grave.
    Authority at Whitehall, when Albert presented himself, received him with open arms. This was the kind of stuff they needed for the Navy—an orphan without a relation in the world, and no half-starved weakling either, but a sturdy, well-set-up young man of undoubted physique. Educated too; three years at a Secondary School, nine months in a City office, with the very best of characters from both. Written characters were not much evidence with most of the stray candidates for admission to the Navy. Boys from good homes who joined at fifteen as a result of a vocation were either the best of material or woefully bad bargains, and Albert had all the earmarks of the good material. Albert’s birth certificate (Agatha, fifteen years ago had rendered herself, unknowingly, liable to imprisonment on account of a false declaration to the registrar) was duly inspected and passed. He had no legal guardian (Albert indignantly denied Mrs. Rodgers’s claim to that position) and no next-of-kin. That was all quite uninteresting; the Navy of course did not know (neither did Albert) that Albert Brown was the only son of Captain Richard E. S. Saville-Samarez, GB , MVO , nor that through his paternal grandmother he had two second cousins in the peerage.
    Yet, however it was, Albert was a man of mark after six months at Shotley Barracks. His was not an original mind, Heaven knows, and he was not of distinguished personality. But a Secondary School education which had gone as far as the beginnings of trigonometry and mechanics was not common at Shotley. And he was not an institution boy, nor was he the starveling scion of a poor family either. The institutions which supplied a great part of the young entry were admirable affairs for the most part. They fed and clothed and even taught the waifs who drifted into them quite adequately, but no institution can help being an institution. The boys who came from them all displayed, unavoidably, some signs of being machine made. Independence of thought or action, careless assumption of responsibility, spontaneous action—all these are, inevitably, foreign to the boy who has spent all his life in a regular routine under close adult supervision in narrow contact with hundreds of his fellows. Albert, on the other hand, had the natural self-containedness of the only child; he was accustomed to independent and solitary action; even those hated months in the City office had served their turn in broadening his mind and accustoming him to keeping his head in encounters with strangers. His memory was good even though his brains were not brilliant, and little of the hard-earned knowledge gained at school had faded out during his City life. The very elementary mathematics taught at Shotley were child’s play to him even while they were stumbling blocks to his