Post captain, page 26
‘Not at all, sir. I am a naval surgeon.’
‘Very good - you are upon the sea but not in it: you are not an advocate for cold baths. The sea, the sea! Where should we be without it? Frizzled to a mere toast, sir; parched, desiccated by the simoom, the dread simoom. Dr Maturin would like a cup of tea, my dear, against the desiccation. I can offer you a superlative cup of tea, sir.’
‘Dr Maturin is drinking sherry, Cousin Edward.’
‘He would do better to drink a cup of tea,’ said Mr Lowndes, with a look of keen disappointment. ‘However, I do not presume to dictate to my guests,’ he added, hanging down his head.
‘I shall be very happy to take a cup of tea, sir, as soon as I have drunk up my wine,’ said Stephen.
‘Yes, yes!’ cried Mr Lowndes, brightening at once. ‘And you shall have the pot to take with you on your voyages. Molly, Sue, Diana, pray make it in the little round pot Queen Anne gave my grandmama; it makes the best tea in the house. And while it is making, sir, I will tell you a little poem; you are a literary man, I know,’ he said, dancing a few paces and bowing right and left.
The butler brought in the tray, looked sharply from Mr Lowndes to Diana: she shook her head slightly, eased her cousin into a wing-chair, tidied him, tied a napkin round his neck, and, as the spirit-lamp brought the kettle to the boil, measured out the tea and brewed it.
‘Now for my poem,’ said Mr Lowndes. ‘Attend! Attend! Anna virumque cano, etc. There, ain’t it capital?’
‘Admirable, sir. Thank you very much.’
‘Ha, ha, ha!’ cried Mr Lowndes, cramming his mouth with cake, red with sudden pleasure. ‘I knew you were a man of exquisite sensibilities. Take the bun!’ He flung a little round cake at Stephen’s head, and added, ‘I have a turn for verse. Sometimes my fancy runs to Sapphics, sometimes to catalectic Glyconics and Pherecrateans - the Priapic metre, my dear sir. Are you a Grecian? Should you like to hear some of my Priapean odes?’
‘In Greek, sir?’
‘No, sir, in English.’
‘Perhaps at another time, sir, when we are alone - when no ladies are present, it would give me great pleasure.’
‘You have noticed that young woman; have you? You are a sharp one. But then you are a young man, sir. I too was a young man. As a physical gentleman, sir, do you really
think incest so very undesirable?’
‘Cousin Edward, it is time for your bath,’ said Diana; but he grew confused and unhappy - he was sure it would not do to let that fellow alone with a valuable teapot, but he was too polite to say so; his oblique references to it as ‘the dread simoom’ were not understood, and it took her five minutes of coaxing to get him out of the room.
‘What news from Mapes, shipmate?’ asked Jack.
‘What? I cannot hear a word with all this screeching and bawling overhead.’
‘You are as bad as Parker,’ said Jack, and poking his head out of the cabin he called, “Vast heaving the after carronades. Mr Pullings, let these hands reef tops’ls. I said “What news from Mapes?”‘
‘A miscellaneous bag. I saw Sophie alone: she and Diana have parted brass-rags. Diana is looking after her cousin in Dover. I called on her. She asked us both to dinner on Friday, to eat a dish of Dover soles. I accepted for myself, but said I could not answer for you: you might not find it possible to go ashore.’
‘She asked me?’ cried Jack. ‘Are you sure? What is it, Babbington?’
‘I beg your pardon, sir, but the flagship is signalling all captains.’
‘Very well. Let me know the moment Melpomène’s barge touches the water. Stephen, chuck me my breeches, will you?’ He was in working clothes - canvas trousers, a guernsey frock and a frieze jacket - and as he stripped the criss-cross of wounds showed plain: bullets, splinters, cutlasses, a boarding-axe; and the last, a raking thrust from a pike, still showed red about the edges. ‘Half an inch to the left - if that pike had gone in half an inch to the left, you would have been a dead man,’ observed Stephen.
‘My God,’ said Jack, ‘there are times when I wish -however, I must not whine.’ From under his clean white shirt he asked, ‘How was Sophie?’
‘Low in her spirits. She is subjected to the attentions of a moneyed parson.’ No reply. No emergence of the head. He went on, ‘I also saw to everything at Melbury: all is well there, though the lawyer’s men have been hanging about. Preserved Killick asks may he join the ship? I took it upon myself to say that he should come and ask you himself. You will be happy to have the skilled attendance of Preserved Killick. I reduced my femur at the hospital -the leg may be saved - and wished my dement on to them, with a slime-draught to make him easy. I also bought your thread, music-paper, and strings: these I found at a shop in Folkestone.’
‘Thank you, Stephen. I am very much obliged to you. You must have had a damned long ride of it. Indeed, you look dog-tired, quite done up. Just tie my hair for me, like a good fellow, and then you shall turn in. I must get you an assistant, a surgeon’s mate: you work too hard.’
‘You have some grey hairs,’ said Stephen, tying the yellow queue.
‘Do you wonder?’ said Jack. He buckled on his sword, sat down on the locker, and said, ‘I had almost forgot. I had a pleasant surprise today. Canning came aboard! You remember Canning, that admirable chap I liked so much in town, and who offered me his privateer? He has a couple of merchantmen in the road and he came round from the Note to see them off. I have asked him to dinner tomorrow; and that reminds me . . .’ It reminded him of the fact that he had no money, and that he should like to borrow some. He had drawn three lunar months’ pay on joining his ship, but his expenses in Portsmouth - customary presents, vails, a bare minimum of equipment - had swallowed twenty-five guineas and more in a week, quite apart from Stephen’s loan.
It had not allowed him to lay in stores, and that was another thing that was wrong with the running of the Polychrest - he hardly knew his officers except on duty. He had invited Parker and he had dined once with the gun-room during their long calm, tiding up the Channel, but he had barely exchanged half a dozen words with Macdonald or Allen, for example, outside the line of duty; yet they were men upon whom the ship, and his own life and reputation, might depend. Parker and Macdonald had private means and they had entertained him well: he had scarcely entertained them at all. He was not keeping up the dignity of a captain: a captain’s dignity depended in some degree upon the state of his store-room - a captain must not look a scrub - and as his silly, talkative, consequential temporary steward kept telling him so officiously, his was empty apart from a hundredweight of orange marmalade, a present from Mrs Babbington. ‘Where shall I stow the wine, sir? -What shall I do about the live-stock? - When are the sheep coming? - What does your Honour wish me to do about the hen-coops?’ Furthermore, he would soon have to invite the admiral and the other captains of the squadron; and tomorrow there would be Canning. Ordinarily he would have turned at once to Stephen, for although Stephen was an abstemious man, indifferent to money beyond the bare necessities of life, and strangely ill-informed, even unperceptive, about discipline, the finer points of ceremonial, the complexity of the service and the importance of entertaining, he would always give way at once when it was represented to him that tradition called for an outlay. He would produce money from the odd drawers and pots where it lay, disregarded, as though Jack were doing him a particular favour by borrowing it: in other hands he would have been the ‘easiest touch’ afloat. These reflections darted through Jack’s mind as he sat there, stroking the worn lion’s head on the pommel of his sword; but something in the atmosphere, some chill or reserve or inward scruple of his own, prevented him from completing his sentence before the Melpomène’s barge was reported to be in the water.
This was not a Sunday afternoon, with ship-visiting and liberty boats plying to and fro in the squadron; it was an ordinary working day, with all hands creeping up and down the rigging or exercising at the great guns; nothing but a Dover bumboat and a Deal hoveller came anywhere near the Polychrest; and yet long before Jack’s return it was known throughout the ship that she was on the wing. Where bound, no one could tell, though many tried (to the westward, to Botany Bay, the Mediterranean to carry presents to the Dey of Algiers and redeem Christian slaves). But the rumour was so strong that Mr Parker cleared her hawse, heaved short, and, with a hideous memory of unmooring at Spithead, sent the crew to their stations for this manoeuvre again and again, until even the dullest could find the capstan and his place on the bar. He received Jack back aboard with a look of discreet but earnest inquiry, and Jack, who had seen his preparations, said, ‘No, no, Mr Parker, you may veer away astern; it is not for today. Desire Mr Babbington to come into the cabin, if you please.’
‘Mr Babbington,’ he said, ‘you are in a very repellent state of filth.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Babbington, who had spent the first dog-watch in the maintop with two buckets of flush from the galley, showing a framework-knitter, two thatchers
(brothers: much given to poaching), and a monoglot Finn how to grease the masts, sheets and running-rigging generally, and who was liberally plastered with condemned butter and skimmings from the coppers in which salt pork had been boiled. ‘Beg pardon, sir.’
‘Be so good as to scrub yourself from clew to earring, to shave - you may borrow Mr Parslow’s razor, I dare say - to put on your best uniform and report back here. My compliments to Mr Parker and you are to take the blue cutter to Dover with Bonden and six reliable men who deserve liberty until the evening gun. The same to Dr Maturin, and I should be glad to see him.’
‘Aye, aye, sir. Oh thank you, sir.’
He turned to his desk:
Polychrest in the Downs
Captain Aubrey presents his best compliments to Mrs Villiers and much regrets that duty prevents him from accepting her very kind invitation to dine on Friday. However, he hopes to have the honour, and the pleasure, of waiting on her when he returns.
‘Stephen,’ he said, looking up, ‘I am writing to decline Diana’s invitation - we are ordered to sea tomorrow night.
Should you wish to add a word or send a message?
Babbington is making our excuses.’
‘Let Babbington bear mine by word of mouth, if you please. I am so glad you are not going ashore. It would have been the extreme of folly, with the Polychrest known to be on the station.’
Babbington came in, shining with cleanliness, in a frilled shirt and fine white breeches.
‘You remember Mrs Villiers?’ said Jack.
‘Oh yes, sir. Besides, I drove her to the ball.’
‘She is in Dover, at the house where you called for her - New Place. Be so good as to give her this note; and I believe Dr Maturin has a message.’
‘Compliments: regrets,’ said Stephen.
‘Now turn out your pockets,’ said Jack.
Babbington’s face fell. A little heap of objects appeared, some partially eaten, and a surprising number of coins -silver, a gold piece. Jack returned fourpence, observing that that would set him up handsomely in cheesecakes, recommended him to bring back all his men as he should answer the contrary at his peril, and desired him to ‘top his boom’.
‘It is the only way of keeping him even passably chaste,’ he said to Stephen. ‘There are a great many loose women in Dover, I am afraid.’
‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ said Mr Parker, ‘but a man by the name of Killick asks permission to come aboard.’
‘Certainly, Mr Parker,’ cried Jack. ‘He is my steward. There you are, Killick,’ he said, coming on deck. ‘I am happy to see you. What have you got there?’
‘Hampers, sir,’ said Killick, pleased to see his captain, but unable to restrain a wondering eye from running up and down the Polychrest. ‘One from Admiral Haddock. T’other from the ladies up at Mapes, or rather, from Miss Sophie, to speak correct: pig, cheeses, butter, cream, poultry and such, from Mapes; game from next door. Admiral’s clearing off his land, sir. There’s a prime bold roebuck there, sir, hung this sennight past, and any number of hares and such.’
‘Mr Malloch, a whip - no, a double whip to the main-yard. Easy with those hampers, now. What’s the third bundle?’
‘Another roebuck, sir.’
‘Where from?’
‘Which it fouled the wheels of the tax-cart I come in and hurt its leg, sir,’ said Killick, looking at the flagship in the distance with a kind of mild wonder. ‘Just half a mile after the turning to Provender bridge. No, I lie - maybe a furlong closer to Newton Priors. So I put it out of its misery, sir.’
‘Ah,’ said Jack. ‘The Mapes hamper is directed to Dr Maturin, I see.’
‘It’s all one, sir,’ said Killick. ‘Miss told me to say the pig weighs twenty-seven and a half pound the quarter, and I am to set the hams to the tub the very minute I come aboard - the souse she put aside in thicky jar, knowing you liked ‘un. The white puddings is for the Doctor’s breakfast.’
‘Very good, Killick, very good indeed,’ said Jack. ‘Stow ‘em away. Handsomely with that buck - don’t you bruise him on any account.’
‘To think a man’s heart could break over a soused hog’s face,’ he reflected, feigning to turn over the admiral’s game; partridge, pheasant, woodcock, snipe, mallard, wigeon, teal, hares. ‘You brought the rest of the wine Killick?’
‘Which the bottles broke, sir: all but half a dozen of the Burgundy.’
Jack cocked his eye, sighed, but said nothing. Six bottles would do pretty well, with what was left of his corruption from the yard. ‘Mr Parker, Mr Macdonald, I hope you will give me the pleasure of dining in the cabin tomorrow? I am expecting a guest.’
They bowed, smiled, and said they should be very happy; they did indeed feel a real pleasure, for Jack had declined the gunroom’s last invitation, and this had created an uneasiness in their minds - an unpleasant beginning to a commission.
Stephen said the same in effect, when he could be brought to understand. ‘Yes, yes, certainly, of course -much obliged. I did not grasp your meaning.’
‘Yet it was plain enough, in all conscience,’ said Jack, ‘and adapted to the meanest understanding. I said. “Will you have dinner with me tomorrow? Canning is coming, and I have asked Parker, Macdonald and Pullings.”‘
‘My mind dwells with real concern, and yet with what I might term an inquisitive, slightly vulgar concern, upon the state of Mother Williams’s heart when she finds her dairy, poultry-yard, pig-house, larder, stripped bare. Will it burst? Will it stop beating altogether? Dry to a total desiccation - no great step? What the effect upon her visceral humours? How will Sophie reply? Will she attempt concealment, prevarication? She lies with as much skill as Preserved Killick - a desperate stare, and her face the most perfect damask rose. My mind, I say, wanders in this region, lost. I have no acquaintance with English family life, with English female family life: it is to me a region quite unknown.’
It was not a region in which Jack chose to dwell: with a start of intense pain he jerked his mind away. ‘Lord, I love that Sophie so,’ he cried within. He took a quick turn on deck, going right forward to pat the gammoning of the bowsprit - a private consolation from his very earliest days at sea When he came back he said, ‘A most damnable unpleasant thought has just struck me. I know I must not give Canning swine’s flesh, he being a Jew; but can he eat a buck? Is a buck unclean? And hare would not answer, either, for I dare say they are rated with the coney and her kind.’
‘I have no idea. You have no Bible, I suppose?’
‘Indeed I have a Bible. I used it to check Heneage’s signal - The Lord taketh no pleasure in the strength of an horse, do you remember? What did he mean by that, do you suppose? It was not so very witty, or original; for after all, everyone knows the Lord taketh no pleasure in the strength of an horse. He had crossed his tiller-ropes, I dare say. However, I have also been reading it, these last few days.’
‘Ah?’
‘Yes. I may preach a sermon to the ship’s company next Sunday.’
‘You? Preach a sermon?’
‘Certainly. Captains often do, when no chaplain is carried. I always made do with the Articles of War in the Sophie, but now I think I shall give them a clear, well-reasoned - come, what’s the matter? What is so very entertaining about my preaching a sermon? Damn your eyes, Stephen.’ Stephen was doubled in his chair, rocking to and fro, uttering harsh spasmodic squeaks: tears ran down his face. ‘What a spectacle you are, to be sure. Now I come to think of it, I do not believe I have ever heard you laugh before. It is a damned illiberal row, I can tell you - it don’t suit you at all. Squeak, squeak. Very well: you shall laugh your bellyful.’ He turned away with something about ‘pragmatical apes - simpering, tittering’ and affected to look into the Bible without the least concern; but there are not many who can find themselves the object of open, whole-hearted, sincere, prostrating laughter without being put out of countenance, and Jack was not one of these few. However, Stephen’s mirth died away in time - a few last crowing whoops and it was over. He got to his feet, and dabbing his face with a handkerchief he took Jack by the hand. ‘I am so sorry,’ he said. ‘I beg your pardon. I would not have vexed you for the world. But there is something so essentially ludicrous, so fundamentally comic. . . that is to say, I had so droll an association of ideas - pray do not take it personally at all. Of course you shall preach to the men; I am persuaded it will have a most striking effect.’
‘Well,’ said Jack, with a suspicious glance, ‘I am glad it afforded you so much innocent merriment at all events. Though what you find.
‘What is your text, pray?’
‘Are you making game of me, Stephen?’
‘Never, upon my word: would scorn it.’
‘Well, it is the one about I say come and he cometh; for I am a centurion. I want them to understand it is God’s will, and it must be so - there must be discipline -’tis in the Book - and any infernal bastard that disobeys is therefore a blasphemer too, and will certainly be damned. That it is no good kicking against the pricks: which is in the Book too, as I shall point out.’
