Book 17 - The Commodore

by Patrick O'Brian

  'Thank you, Mr Reade,' said Jack. 'I shall be on deck directly.'

  'And pray be so good as to rouse out my bargemen,' called Dundas, stuffing the bag into his shirt and buttoning his waistcoat over it. And when Reade had vanished at a run, 'Jack, infinite thanks: I must get back to my ship. Clear and come within hail'—he was the senior captain—'and short-handed though Berenice is, I believe the two of us can take on any seventy-four afloat.'

  Out on the cold wet quarterdeck Jack's eyes grew used to the comparative darkness as Dundas groped awkwardly down into the tossing barge, clasping his anxious belly as he went. Comparative darkness, for now an old hunchbacked moon was sending enough light through the low cloud for him to make out a blur of white to windward, a blur that resolved itself into topsails and courses as he focused his glass, and a double row of lit gunports. But it was the hoist that fixed almost the whole of his attention, the reply to the private signal that distinguished friend from foe. It was a string of three lanterns, the topmost winking steadily: there should have been four.

  'I replied do not understand your signal, sir,' said Wilkins, 'but she still keeps this one hoisted.'

  Jack nodded. 'Clear for action and make sail to close the Berenice,' he said.

  'All hands and beat to quarters,' roared Wilkins to the bosun's enchanted mate. 'Forward there, forward: forestaysail and full jib.'

  The Surprise was in very good order: she had seen a great deal of action and she was kept in high training for a great deal more; she could change from a darkling ship, three parts asleep, to a brilliantly-lit man-of-war with guns run out, hammocks in the netting, magazines opened and protected with fearnought screens, and every man in his accustomed, appointed station together with all his mates, ready to give battle at the word of command. But she could not do so in silence, and it was the roar of the drum, the muffled thunder of four hundred feet and the screech of trucks that started Stephen Maturin from his profound and rosy peace.

  He had left Jack and Dundas quite early, for he was something of a check on their flow of reminiscences; and in any case very highly detailed accounts of war at sea reduced him almost to tears after the first hour. They had drunk the usual Saturday toast of sweethearts and wives, and the civil Dundas had added particular compliments to Sophie and Diana, pledging both in bumpers, bottoms up. This meant that Stephen, an abstemious, meagre creature, weighing nine stone and odd ounces, far exceeded his usual two or three glasses, and although he had meant to retire to the rarely-used cabin below to which he was entitled as the ship's surgeon rather than the more spacious, airier place he usually shared with Jack, and there, after his evening rounds, to lie reading, the wine, without making him drunk, had to some extent affected his concentration, and as the book he was reading—Clousaz' Examen de Pyrrhonisme—called for a great deal he put it down at the end of a chapter, aware that he had made nothing of the last paragraph, lay back in his swinging cot and instantly returned to thinking about his wife and daughter, the first a spirited young woman called Diana with black hair and blue eyes, a splendid rider, and the second Brigid, a child he had longed for this many a year but whom he had not yet seen. This reverie was very usual with him, and it required no sort of concentration at all, but rather the reverse, being a series of images, sometimes imprecise, sometimes intensely vivid, of conversations, real or imaginary, and of an indefinite sense of present happiness. Yet tonight for the first time in all this very long parting—no less than a complete circumnavigation of the world by sea, with a great deal happening on land as well—there was a subtle difference, a change of key. At any moment now, he had learnt, they might strike soundings, an expression that in itself had a chilling quality, quite apart from its meaning; and the fact itself brought what had been a vague futurity into the almost immediate present. Now it was not so much a question of wandering in past felicity as of reflecting upon the reality he would meet in a few days' time or even lees if the wind came fair.

  He looked forward to seeing Diana and Brigid with the utmost eagerness, of course, as he had for thousands and thousands of miles; but now this eagerness was mixed with an apprehension that he could not or would not readily name. For almost the whole of this enormous voyage they had been out of touch: he knew that his daughter had been born and that Diana had bought Barham Down, a large, remote house with excellent stabling, good pasture and plenty of gallops—great stretches of down—for the Arabs she intended to breed; but apart from that virtually nothing.

  Years had passed, and years had a bad name: a verse of Horace floated into his mind:

  Singula de nobis anni praedantur euntes;

  eripuere jocos, Venerem, convivia, ludum . . .

  and for a moment he tried to make a tolerable English version; but his

  The years in passing rob us of our delight,

  of merriment and carnal love, of each in turn,

  all sport and dining out . . .

  did not please him and he abandoned the attempt.

  In any case things were not yet quite so desperate: although Venus might be a somewhat remote and flickering planet he still loved a cheerful dinner among friends and a severe, close-fought game of whist or fives. Yet changed he had to some degree, of that there was no doubt: more and more, for example, it seemed to him that the proper study of mankind was man rather than beetle or even bird.

  He had changed: of course he had changed, and probably more than he knew. It was inevitable. What kind of Diana would be find, and how would they agree? She had married him mostly out of friendship—she liked him very well—perhaps to some degree out of pity, he having loved her so long: he was not at all agreeable to look at and from the physical point of view he had never been much of a lover—a state of affairs much influenced by years of addiction to opium, which he neither smoked nor ate but drank in the form of the alcoholic tincture of laudanum, sometimes, in his despair over Diana, reaching heroic doses. Diana, on the other hand, had never taken so much as a drachm, not a scruple of opium, nor anything else to diminish her naturally ardent temperament.

  As the night wore on he worried himself foolishly, as one will in the dark with vitality low and courage, reasoning power and common sense all at their lowest ebb: at times he comforted himself with the reflexion that Brigid was there, a great bond between them; at others he said that the image of Diana as a mother was perfectly absurd; and he longed for the old tincture to ease the torment of his mind. He did possess a substitute in the leaves of the coca plant, much esteemed in Peru for the tranquil euphoria they produced when chewed; but they had the disadvantage of utterly banishing sleep, and sleep was what he wanted more than anything else in the world.

  Somehow, at some point, he must have attained it, since the drum's echoing beat to quarters jerked him up from the depths. In most respects he remained a wholly unimproved landsman in spite of many years at sea, but there were a few naval characteristics to be found in him. Almost all had to do with his function as a naval surgeon, and even before his mind was fully aware of the situation his legs were hurrying him towards his action-station below and right aft on the orlop deck. It being cold as well as damp in the stuffy, fetid triangular hole that he occupied he had turned in all standing, so that he only had to put on an apron to be ready for duty. On reaching the sick-berth he found his loblolly-boy, a large and powerful, almost monoglot Munsterman called Padeen, hauling two chests together under the great lantern to make an operating-table. 'God and Mary be with you, Padeen,' he said in Irish. 'God and Mary and Patrick be with your honour,' said Padeen. 'Is there to be a battle at all?'

  'The Dear knows. How are Williams and Ellis?'

  These were the two invalids in the starboard sick-berth, whom Padeen had been sitting with. They had been sparring, in a spirit of fun, with loggerheads, those massy iron balls with long handles to be carried red-hot from the fire and plunged into buckets of tar or pitch so that the substance might be melted with no risk of flame. 'They are sober now, sir; and penitent, the creatures.' />
  'I shall look at them, when we have everything ready,' said Stephen, beginning to range saws, scalpels, ligatures and tourniquets. Fabien, his assistant, joined him, followed by two little girls, Emily and Sarah: they were only just awake, and they would have been a sleepy pink had they not been extremely black. They had been found long ago on a Melanesian island whose other inhabitants had all been wiped out by the smallpox brought by a visiting whaler; and since they were then too ill and wretched to look after themselves in that charnel-house of a village, Stephen had brought them away. They did not attend at the very horrible surgery that he was sometimes obliged to carry out, but their small, delicate hands were wonderfully skilful at bandaging. They looked after those who had been operated upon, and the convalescents; they were also very useful to Dr Maturin in his frequent dissections of natural specimens, having no trace of squeamishness. They had entirely forgotten the language of Sweeting Island, apart from counting in it as they skipped, but they spoke perfect English, quarterdeck with never an oath or the much more earthy and emphatic lower-deck version, as occasion required.

  Between them they laid out all the material that might be needed during an action and after it: lint, bandages, splints; the purely surgical instruments such as catlings, bistouries and retractors; and their grim companions, the gags and the leather-covered chains. When all these were arranged in their due order, the essentials within reach of the surgeon's hand and himself tied into his apron, they relaxed and listened with the utmost attention, trying to piece through the general confused run of the water alongside the ship, the voice of the eddy on the windward side of the rudder, and the reverberation of the taut rigging transmitted to the hull, to hear some sound that might tell them what was afoot. None came, and presently their sense of urgency diminished. The little girls sat on the deck outside the lantern's strong ring of light, silently playing the game in which an outstretched hand represented a sheet of paper, a stone, or a pair of scissors. Stephen walked into the other berth, looked at his patients and asked them how they did. 'Prime, sir,' they answered, and thanked him kindly.

  'Well, I am glad of that,' he said. 'Yet although they were good clean breaks, immobilized at once, it will be long before you can go aloft, or dance upon the green, if ever we get home, which God send.'

  'Amen, amen, sir,' they answered together.

  'But how did you ever come to be so indiscreet and thoughtless as to beat one another with those vile great loggerheads?'

  'It was only in fun, sir, like we sometimes do, meaning no harm. One has a swipe and the other dodges, turn and turn about.'

  'In all my experience of the sea I have never heard of such a dreadful practice.'

  The patients looked meek, avoiding one another's eyes; and presently Ellis said 'It all depends on the ship, sir. We often used to play in the Agamemnon; and my father, which he was carpenter's crew in the old George, had a real set-to, real serious, with a forecastleman that called him a . . .'

  'Called him what?'

  'I hardly like to say it.'

  'Murmur it in my ear,' said Stephen, bending low.

  'A nymph,' whispered Ellis.

  'Did he indeed, the wicked dog? How did it end, so?'

  'Well, sir, they were at right loggerheads, like I said—the whole forecastle agreed it was right—and my dad fetched him such a crack they had to take his leg off that very evening, much mangled. But it was a blessing to the poor bugger in the end. Having but one leg left, Captain the Honourable Byron, who was always very good to his men, got him a cook's warrant, and he lived till he was drowned on the Coromandel coast.'

  'Sir,' cried Reade in the doorway, with a covered can of coffee in his hand, 'the Captain sends this with his compliments to raise your spirits and soften the blow. There is to be no action after all. The vessel to windward proved to be that famous, seamanlike ship of the line Thunderer, seventy-four. She hauled her wind, not liking the look of us, and in doing so some of the more brilliant officers aboard, those who could count above three, I mean, made out that she had a false signal flying: one lantern short.'

  'Must they not be flogged round the fleet?'

  'I am afraid not, sir. They say they are senior to us, which is quite true; that any possible inconvenience is regretted; and that Captain Dundas, Captain Aubrey and Dr Maturin are desired to breakfast aboard. Lord, sir, I should not be in that signal-lieutenant's shoes for instant promotion to flag-rank.'

  Most of the exchanges that Reade reported were more or less imaginary, and in any case they had been slowly, laboriously transmitted through dense rain by hoists of lights variously arranged; but the breakfast invitation, which was true enough, was repeated at first light by flags and again by a sodden midshipman in a boat; and the two captains, together with Dr Maturin, came alongside just before eight bells in the morning watch, ravenous, cold, wet, indignant.

  Their host, an elderly man called Fellowes, was in much greater danger of promotion to flag-rank than Reade, being so high on the post-captain's list that the next batch of admirals to be gazetted must necessarily include him as a rear-admiral of the blue squadron unless by some unspeakable misfortune he should be yellowed—attached to no particular squadron and given no command. But this unspeakable misfortune might be now at hand. The Thunderer's wretched signal-lieutenant, now confined to his cabin, had aroused a perfectly justified rage in two quite eminent bosoms: the son of a former First Lord and the brother of the present holder of that awful office, in the first place; and in the second that of the Tory member of parliament for Milport. Captain Aubrey might represent no more than a handful of burgesses, all tenants on his cousin's estate (it was a family seat) but his vote in the House counted as much as that of the member for the county. The ill-will of either of these gentlemen might have a horribly yellowing effect. And then there was this Dr Maturin, after whom the Admiralty official the Thunderer was carrying to Gibraltar had asked with such curious insistence . . . had he not been called in to treat Prince William?

  Captain Fellowes greeted his guests with the utmost cordiality, with apologies, explanations, and a breakfast-table covered with all the luxuries that a ship only a few days outward-bound could offer: beef-steaks; mutton-chops; bacon; eggs in all their charming variety; soft-tack, crusty or toasted; mushrooms; pork sausages; a veal and ham pie; fresh butter; fresh milk; fresh cream, even; tea and cocoa: everything except the coffee that Jack's and Stephen's souls longed for.

  Mr Philips, the black-clad Admiralty official, Stephen's neighbour, said 'I do not suppose you have seen the most recent Proceedings of the Royal Society. I have the volume hot from the press in my cabin, and should be charmed to show it to you.' Stephen said that he should be very happy, and Philips went on 'May I help you to one of these kippered herrings, sir? They are uncommon fat and unctuous.'

  'You are very good, sir,' said Stephen, 'but I believe I must refrain. They would increase my thirst.' And in a low confidential tone (in fact they knew one another quite well enough for such a remark), 'Would there never be a drop of coffee, at all?'

  'I hope so,' said Philips, and he asked the passing steward.

  'Oh no, sir. Oh no. This is a cocoa-ship, sir; though tea is countenanced.'

  'Coffee relaxes the fibres,' called out the Thunderer's surgeon in an authoritative voice. 'I always recommend cocoa.'

  'Coffee?' cried Captain Fellowes. 'Would the gentleman like coffee? Featherstonehaugh, run along and see whether the wardroom or the gun-room has any.'

  'Coffee relaxes the fibres,' said the surgeon again, rather louder. 'That is a scientific fact.'

  'Perhaps the Doctor might like to have his fibres relaxed, said Captain Dundas. 'I am sure I should, having stood to all night.'

  'Mr McAber,' called Captain Fellowes down the table to the first lieutenant, 'pray be so good as to encourage Featherstonehaugh in his search.'

  But no amount of zeal could find what did not exist. Stephen protested that it did not signify—it was of no consequence—there was
always (God willing) another day—and that if he might be indulged in a cup of small beer it would go admirably with this pickled salmon. And when at last the uncomfortable meal was over he walked off to Philips' cabin to see the new volume of the Proceedings.

  'How is Sir Joseph?' he asked when they were alone, referring to his close friend and hierarchical superior the head of Naval Intelligence.

  'He is physically well,' said Philips, 'and perhaps a little stouter than when you last saw him: but he is worried. I shall not venture to say what about: you know how cloisonné these matters are with us, if I may use the expression.'

  'We say bulkheaded in the Navy,' observed Stephen.

  'Bulkheaded? Thank you, sir, thank you: a far better term. But this letter'—drawing it from an inner pocket—'will no doubt tell you.'

  'I am obliged to you,' said Stephen, glancing at the black Admiralty seal with its fouled anchor. 'Now please be so good as to give me a detailed account of events since last February, when I had an intelligence report from the Spanish.'

  Philips looked down, reflected for a while, and said 'I wish I could tell you a happier tale. There is progress in Spain, to be sure, but everywhere else there are diplomatic reverses; and everywhere he keeps finding resources in allies, men, money, ships and naval stores, which we cannot do, or only with great and ruinous difficulty. We are stretched to the uttermost, and may break: he seems indestructible. Things are going so badly that if he delivers one more knock-down blow we may have to ask for conditions. Let me take Europe country by country . . .'