Book 2 - Post Captain

by Patrick O'Brian

  'No, sir.'

  'I thought not. You have a head-piece . . . however, I had one some nights ago, about your narwhal; and Sophie was mixed up with it in some way. It sounds nonsense, but it was so full of unhappiness that I woke blubbering like a child. Here it is, by the way.' He reached behind him and passed the long tapering spiral of ivory.

  Stephen's eyes gleamed as he took it and turned it slowly round and round in his hands. 'Oh thank you, thank you, Jack,' he cried. 'It is perfect—the very apotheosis of a tooth.'

  'There were some longer ones, well over a fathom, but they had lost their tips, and I thought you would like to get the point, ha, ha, ha.' It was a flash of his old idiot self, and he wheezed and chuckled for some time, his blue eyes as clear and delighted as they had been long ago: wild glee over an infinitesimal grain of merriment.

  'It is a most prodigious phenomenon,' said Stephen, cherishing it. 'How much do I owe you, Jack?' He put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a handkerchief, which he laid on the table, then a handful of gold, then another, and scrabbled for the odd coins, observing that it was foolish to carry it loose: far better made a bundle of.

  'Good God,' cried Jack, staring. 'What on earth have you been at? Have you taken a treasure-ship? I have never seen so much money all at once in my life.'

  'I have been stripping a jackeen that annoyed me: the young nagin, the coxcomb in the red coat. The lobster, as you would say.'

  'Smithers. But this is gaming, Stephen, not mere play.'

  'Yes. He seemed concerned at his loss: a lardish sweat. But he has all the appearance of wealth—all its petulant arrogance, certainly.'

  'He has private means, I know; but you must have left him very short—this is more than a year's pay.'

  'So much the better. I intended he should smart.'

  'Stephen, I must ask you not to do it again. He is an under-bred puppy, I grant you, and I wonder the jollies ever took him, they being so particular; but the ship is in a bad enough way as it is, without getting a name for gaming. Will you not let him have it back?'

  'I will not. But since you wish it, I shall not play with him again. Now how much do I owe you, my dear?'

  'Oh, nothing, nothing. Do me the pleasure of accepting it as a present. Pray do. It was very little, and the prize paid for it.'

  'You took a prize, so?'

  'Yes. Just one. No chance of any more—the Polychrest can be recognized the moment she is hull up on the horizon, now that she is known. I am sorry you were not aboard, though it did not amount to much: I sold my share to Parker for seventy-five pounds, being short at the time, and he did not make a great deal out of it. She was a little Dutch shalloop, creeping along the back of the Dogger, laden with deals; and we crept just that trifle less almighty slow. A contemptible prize—we should have let her go in the Sophie—but I thought I ought to blood the hands at last. Not that it did much good. The ship is in a bad way; and Harte rides me hard.'

  'Pray show me your honorary sword and the merchants' piece of plate. I called upon Sophie, and she told me about them.'

  'Sophie?' cried Jack, as though he had been kicked. 'Oh. Oh, yes—yes, of course. You called upon her.' As an attempt at diverting his mind to happier thoughts, this was not a success. After a moment he said, 'I am sorry, they are not here. I ran short again. For the time being, they are in Dover.'

  'Dover,' said Stephen, and thought for a while, running the narwhal's horn through his fingers. 'Dover. Listen, Jack, you take insane risks, going ashore so often, particularly in Dover.'

  'Why particularly in Dover?'

  'Because your often presence there is notorious. If it is notorious to your friends, how much more so to your enemies? It is known in Whitehall; it must be known to your creditors in Mincing Lane. Do not look angerly now, Jack, but let me tell you three things: I must do so, as a friend. First, you will certainly be arrested for debt if you continue to go ashore. Second, it is said in the service that you cling to this station; and what harm that may do you professionally, you know better than I. No, let me finish. Third, have you considered how you expose Diana Villiers by your very open attentions, in circumstances of such known danger?'

  'Has Diana Villiers put herself under your protection? Has she commissioned you to say this to me?'

  'No, sir.'

  'Then I do not see what right you have to speak to me in this way.'

  'Sure, Jack, my dear, I have the right of a friend, have I not? I will not say duty, for that smells of cant.'

  'A friend who wants a clear field, maybe. I may not be very clever, no God-damned Macchiavelli, but I believe I know a ruse de guerre when I see one. For a long time I did not know what to think about you and Diana Villiers—first one thing and then another—for you are a devilish sly fox, and break back upon your line. But now I see the reason for this standing off and on, this "not at home", and all this damned unkind treatment, and all this cracking-up of clever, amusing Stephen Maturin, who understands people and never preaches, whereas I am a heavy-handed fool that understands nothing. It is time we had a clear explanation about Diana Villiers, so that we may know where we stand.'

  'I desire no explanations. They are never of any use, particularly in matters of this kind, where what one might term sexuality is concerned—reason, flies out of the window; all candour with it. In any case, even where this passion is not concerned, language is so imperfect, that . . .'

  'Any bastard can cowardly evade the issue by a flood of words.'

  'You have said enough, sir,' said Stephen, standing up. 'Too much by far: you must withdraw.'

  'I shall not withdraw,' cried Jack, very pale. 'And I will add, that when a man comes back from leave as brown as a Gibraltar Jew, and says he had delicate weather in Ireland, he lies. I will stand by that, and I am perfectly willing to give you any satisfaction you may choose to ask for.'

  'It is odd enough,' said Stephen, in a low voice, 'that our acquaintance should have begun with a challenge, and that it should end with one.'

  'Dundas,' he said, in the small room of the Rose and Crown, 'how good of you to come so soon. I am sorry to say I must ask you to be my second. I tried to follow your excellent suggestion, but I mishandled it—I did not succeed. I should have seen he was in a state of unhappy passion, but I persisted untimely, and he called me a coward and a liar.'

  Dundas's face changed to one of horror. 'Oh, that is very bad,' he cried. 'Oh, Lord.' A long, unhappy pause. 'No question of an apology, I suppose?'

  'None whatsoever. One word he did withdraw,'—Captain Aubrey presents his compliments to Dr Maturin, and begs to say that an expression escaped him yesterday evening, a common expression to do with birth, that might have been taken to have a personal bearing. None was intended, and Captain Aubrey withdraws that word, at the same time regretting that, in the hurry of the moment, he made use of it. The other remarks he stands by—'but the gratuitous lie remains. It is not easy of digestion.'

  'Of course not. What a sad, sad business. We shall have to fit it in between voyages. I feel horribly responsible. Maturin, have you been out before? I should never forgive myself if anything were to happen to you. Jack is an old hand.'

  'I can look after myself.'

  'Well,' said Dundas, looking at him dubiously, 'I shall go and see him at once. Oh, what a damned unlucky thing. It may take some time, unless we can arrange it tonight. That is the wretched thing about the Navy: soldiers can always settle out of hand, but with us I have known an affair hang fire three months and more.'

  It could not be arranged that night, for on the evening tide the Polychrest was ordered to sea. She bore away to the south-west with a couple of store-ships, carrying with her more than her usual load of unhappiness.

  The news of their disagreement spread throughout the ship; the extent and the deadly nature of it were quite unknown, but so close an intimacy could not come to a sudden end without being noticed, and Stephen watched the reactions of his shipmates with a certain interest. He knew that in man
y ships the captain played the part of a monarch and the officers that of a court—that there was eager competition for Caesar's favour; but he had never thought of himself as the favourite; he had never known how much the respect paid to him was a reflection of the great man's power. Parker, who revered authority far more than he disliked his captain, drew away from Stephen; so did the featureless Jones; and Smithers did not attempt to conceal his animosity. Pullings behaved with marked kindness in the gun-room; but Pullings owed everything to Jack, and on the quarterdeck he seemed a little shy of Stephen's company. Not that he was often put to this trial, however, for convention required that the principals in a duel, like bride and bridegroom, should see nothing of one another before they reached the altar. Most of the old Sophies shared Pullings' distress; they looked at him with anxious constraint, never with unkindness; but it was clear to Stephen that quite apart from any question of interest, their prime loyalty lay with Jack, and he embarrassed them as little as he could.

  He spent the chief of his time with his patients—the lithotomy called for radical measures: a fascinating case and one that called for hours of close surveillance—reading in his cabin, and playing chess with the master, who surprised him by showing particular consideration and friendliness. Mr Goodridge had sailed as a midshipman and master's mate with Cook; he was a good mathematician, an excellent navigator, and he would have reached commissioned rank if it had not been for his unfortunate battle with the chaplain of the Bellerophon.

  'No, Doctor,' said he, leaning back from the board, 'you may struggle and wruggle as you please, but I have him pinned. It is mate in three.'

  'It is muchwhat like,' said Stephen. 'Must I resign?'

  'I think you must. Though I like a man that fights, to be sure. Doctor,' he said, 'have you reflected upon the phoenix?'

  'Not, perhaps, as often as I should have done. As I remember, she makes her nest in Arabia Felix, using cinnamon for the purpose; and with cinnamon at six and eight-pence, surely this is a thoughtless thing to do?'

  'You are pleased to be facetious, Doctor. But the phoenix, now, is worth your serious consideration. Not the bird of the tales, of course, which cannot be attempted to be believed in by a philosophical gentleman like you, but what I might call the bird behind the bird. I should not care to have it known in the ship, but in my opinion, the phoenix is Halley's comet.'

  'Halley's comet, Mr Goodridge?' cried Stephen.

  'Halley's comet, Doctor; and others,' said the master, pleased with the effect of his words. 'And when I say opinion, I might say fact, for to a candid mind the thing is proved beyond the slightest doubt. A little calculation makes it plain. The best authors give 500, 1416, and 7006 years as the proper intervals between phoenixes; and Tacitus tells us that one appeared under Sesostris, another under Amasis, another in the reign of the third Ptolemy, and another in the twentieth year of Tiberius; and we know of many more. Now let us take the periods of Halley's, Biela's, Lexel's, and Encke's comets and plot them against our phoenixes, just allowing for lunar years and errors of computation in the ancients, and the thing is done! I could show you calculations, with respect to their orbits, that would amaze you, the astronomers are sadly out, because they do not take account of the phoenix in their equations. They do not see that for the ancients the pretended phoenix was a poetical way of saying a blazing heavenly phenomenon—that the phoenix was an emblem; and they are too proud and sullen and dogged and want ing in candour to believe it when told. The chaplain of the Bellerophon, who set up for an astronomer, would not be convinced. I stretched him out on deck with a heaving-mallet.'

  'I am quite convinced, Mr Goodridge.'

  'It ruined my career,'—with a fiery look into the past—'It ruined my career; but I should do it again, the contumelious dog, the . . . however, I must not swear; and he was a clergyman. Since then I have not told many people, but in time I mean to publish—The Phoenix Impartially Considered, A Modest Proposal, by an Officer of Rank in the Royal Navy—and that will flutter some dovecotes I could mention; that will bring them up with a round turn. My phoenixes, Doctor, tell me we may expect a comet in 1805; I will not give the month, because of a doubt in Ussher as to the exact length of the reign of Nabonidus.'

  'I shall look forward to it with confident expectation,' said Stephen; and he reflected, 'I wish they could foretell an end to this waiting.'

  'How strangely I dread the event,' he said, sitting down by his patient and counting his respirations, 'and yet how hard I find it to wait.'

  In the far corner of the sick-bay the low murmur of conversation began again; the men were used to his presence, and to his absences—more than once a messmate had brought in the forbidden grog, walking right past the Doctor without being noticed—and he did not disturb them. At present two Highlanders were talking slowly to an Irishman, slowly and repetitively in Gaelic, as he lay there on his stomach to ease his flayed back.

  'I follow them best when I do not attend at all,' observed Stephen. 'When I do not strain, or try to isolate any word. It is the child in long clothes that understands, myself in Cahirciveen. They are of the opinion that we shall anchor in the Downs before eight bells. I hope they are right; I hope I find Dundas.'

  They were right, and before the way was off the Polychrest he heard the sentry hail a boat and the answering cry of 'Franchise' that meant her captain was coming aboard. The bosun's pipe, the proper respect shown to a post captain, the stumping of feet overhead, and then 'Captain Dundas's compliments, and might he have a word with Dr Maturin, when at leisure?'

  Discretion was of first importance in these matters, and Heneage Dundas, knowing how public a spoken word might be in a crowded sloop, had written his message on a piece of paper. 'Will half past six on Saturday suit? In the dunes. I will come for you.' He handed the paper, with a grave, meaning look. Stephen glanced at it, nodded, and said, 'Perfect. I am obliged to you. Will you give me a lift ashore? I should spend tomorrow in Deal, should I not? Perhaps you would be so very kind as to mention it to Captain Aubrey.'

  'I have: we may go now, if you wish.'

  'I will be with you in two minutes.' There were some papers that must not be seen, a few manuscripts and letters that he prized; but these were almost ready, and his necessary bag was at hand. In two minutes he followed Dundas up the companion-ladder and they rowed away over the calm sea to Deal. Speaking in such a way as to be clear to Stephen alone, Dundas gave him to understand that Jack's second, a Colonel Rankin, could not get down until tomorrow night—Friday; that he had seen Rankin earlier in the week, and that they had decided on an excellent spot near the castle often used for this purpose and convenient in every way. 'You are provided, I suppose?' he asked, just before the boat touched.

  'I think so,' said Stephen. 'If not, I will call on you.'

  'Goodbye, then,' said Dundas, shaking his hand. 'I must go back to my ship. If I do not see you before, then at the time we agreed.'

  Stephen settled in at the Rose and Crown, called for a horse, and rode slowly towards Dover, reflecting upon the nature of dunes; upon the extraordinary loneliness surrounding each man; and on the inadequacy of language—a thought that he would have developed to Jack if he had been given time. 'And yet for all its inadequacy, how marvellously well it allows them to deal with material things,' he said, looking at the ships in the roadstead, the unbelievable complexity of named ropes, blocks, sails that would carry the crowd of isolated individuals to the Bosphorus, the West Indies, Sumatra, or the South Sea whaling grounds. And as he looked, his eyes running along the odd cocked-hat form of the Polychrest he saw her captain's gig pull away from the side, set its lugsail, and head for Dover.

  'Knowing them both, as I do,' he observed, 'I should be surprised if there were much liking between them. It is a perverse relationship. That, indeed, may be the source of its violence.'

  Reaching Dover, he went directly to the hospital and examined his patients: his lunatic was motionless, crouched in a ball, sunk even below tears; but Macdo
nald's stump was healing well. The flaps were as neat as a parcel, and he noted with pleasure that the hair on them continued to grow in its former direction.

  'You will soon be quite well,' he said, pointing this out to the Marine. 'I congratulate you upon an excellent healthy constitution. In a few weeks' time you will rival Nelson, spring one-handed from ship to ship—happier than the Admiral in that you have your sword-arm still.'

  'How you relieve my mind,' said Macdonald. 'I had been mortally afraid of gangrene. I owe you a great deal, Doctor: believe me, I am sensible of it.' Stephen protested that any butcher, any butcher's boy, could have done as much—a simple operation—a real pleasure to cut into such healthy flesh—and their conversation drifted away to the likelihood of a French invasion, of a breach with Spain, and to the odd rumours of St Vincent impeaching Lord Melville for malversation, before it returned to Nelson.

  'He is a hero of yours, I believe?' said Macdonald.

  'Oh, I hardly know anything of the gentleman,' said Stephen. 'I have never even seen him. But from what I understand, he seems quite an active, zealous, enterprising officer. He is much loved in the service, surely? Captain Aubrey thinks the world of him.'

  'Maybe,' said Macdonald. 'But he is no hero of mine. Caracciolo sticks in my gullet. And then there is his example.'

  'Could there be a better example, for a sea-officer?'

  'I have been thinking, as I lie here in bed,' said Macdonald. 'I have been thinking of justification.' Stephen's heart sank: he knew the reputation of the Scots for theological discussion, and he dreaded an outpouring of Calvinistical views, flavoured, perhaps, with some doctrines peculiar to the Royal Marines. 'Men, particularly Lowlanders, are never content with taking their sins upon their own heads, or with making their own law; a young fellow will play the blackguard, not because he is satisfied that his other parts will outweigh the fact, but because Tom Jones was paid for lying with a woman—and since Tom Jones was a hero, it is quite in order for him to do the same. It might have been better for the Navy if Nelson had been put to a stable bucket when he was a wee bairn. If the justification that a fellow in a play or a tale can provide, is enough to confirm a blackguard, think what a live hero can do! Whoremongering—lingering in port—hanging officers who surrender on terms. A pretty example!' Stephen looked at him attentively for signs of fever; they were certainly there, but to no dangerous degree at present. Macdonald stared out of the window, and whatever he may have seen there, apart from the blank wall, prompted him to say, 'I hate women. They are entirely destructive. They drain a man, sap him, take away all his good: and none the better for it themselves.' After a pause, 'Nasty, nasty queans.'