The Nutmeg of Consolation

by Patrick O'Brian

  A vain hope; and when at last he left the seamen to the care of their messmates and the ship's butcher, who had held their heads, he was paler than they.

  'It is an odd thing,' he said, returning to the cabin, where Jack was settled on the rudder-casing, plucking the strings of his fiddle and watching the broad wake tear away, 'It is an odd thing, yet although I can take off a shattered limb, open a man's skull, cut him for the stone, or if he is a woman deliver him of an uneasy breech-presentation in a seamanlike manner and without a qualm—not indeed with indifference to the suffering and the danger but with what may perhaps be called a professional constancy of mind—I cannot extract a tooth without real agitation. It is the same with Macmillan, though he is an excellent young man in every other respect. I shall never go to sea again without an experienced tooth-drawer, however illiterate he may be.'

  'I am sorry you had such a disagreeable time,' said Jack. 'Let us both take a cup of coffee.' Coffee was as much his universal remedy as the alcoholic tincture of opium had once been for Stephen, and he now called for it loud and clear.

  Killick looked sourer than usual: coffee was not customary at this time of day. 'It will have to be black, then,' he said. 'I can't go on milking Nanny watch and watch. Do, and she will go dry. A goat ain't a cistern, sir.'

  'Strong black coffee,' said Stephen some minutes later. 'How well it goes down: and how glad I am that I did not indulge myself in my coca-leaves on finishing with the sick-berth as I had intended. They calm the mind, sure, but they do away with one's sense of taste. I shall chew three when the pot is out, however.' These leaves, which he had first encountered in South America, were his present, purely personal, catholicon, and although he travelled with enough, packed in soft leather bags, to last him twice round the world, he was remarkably abstemious: these three leaves, now to be chewed so late in the afternoon, were an unusual treat. 'Surely,' he said, gazing about, 'the ship is going at a most uncommon speed? See how the water flings wide, see how the turbulence sweeps away into the past, and there is a general sound all about us—you are to observe that we both raise our voices—that cannot be located but whose predominant note is almost exactly that G your thumb is plucking'

  Hardly were these words out than Reade came bouncing in. His wound had healed wonderfully, but Stephen still made him wear a kind of padded bandolier to protect the socket in case of falls and lurches, and his empty sleeve was pinned to it. He was treated with extraordinary tenderness by all hands, he had entirely recovered his spirits and he had already developed an agility that almost compensated for his loss. 'Mr Richardson's duty, sir,' he said, and he thought you would like to know that we are doing twelve knots and one fathom almost exactly. I chalked it up myself.'

  Jack laughed aloud. 'Twelve knots one fathom, and that with the wind so far abaft. Thank you, Mr Reade. Pray tell Mr Richardson that he may set a skyscraper on the foremast if he sees fit: and that there will be no quarters this evening.'

  'Aye aye, sir. And if you please he said that was I to see the Doctor I should tell him there is a prodigious curious bird keeping company, very like an albatross, with somewhat in its beak.'

  Stephen ran up on deck in time to watch the bird's long struggle to disengage the cuttle-fish bone it had transfixed. Once the bone was free the albatross wheeled away, racing southward across the wind and vanishing almost at once among the white horses. 'I thank you heartily for showing me the bird,' he said to Richardson, who replied, 'Not at all, sir,' and then, taking him by the elbow, 'If you will stand just here and bend a little, looking at the top of the foremast, I will show you a skyscraper in a minute. We set them flying, you know.'

  Stephen bent and gazed, and amidst a series of orders, pipes and the cry of 'Belay!' he saw a triangular scrap of white appear high above all the other whitenesses, clear in the sun, to the evident satisfaction of the many hands along the immaculate deck—it had just been swept for the second time since dinner.

  'One of the smaller albatrosses,' he said, coming back, 'and it was in the act of detaching a cuttle bone from its upper mandible. The bird may have carried it for a thousand miles and more.'

  'I wish it had been a letter from home,' said Jack. They were both silent for a moment, and then Jack went on, 'I had always connected albatrosses with the high southern latitudes. What kind was this one?'

  'I cannot tell. I only know that it was not Linnaeus' exulans, though he has it wandering in the tropics. There is one species from Japan that has been described and another from the Sandwich Islands. This may have been either or some quite unknown bird; but I should have had to shoot it to make sure, and I have grown rather tired of killing . . . You have noticed, I make no doubt, that the horizon is now quite clear.'

  'Yes. The haze vanished in the night, and we had an excellent observation of Rasalhague and the moon which confirmed not only our position by chronometer but even by our dead reckoning almost to the very minute of longitude, which was tolerably gratifying, I believe.' Then, seeing that this splendid news aroused no particular emotion nor indeed anything but a civil inclination of the head, he said 'What do you say to taking up our game where we left off? I was winning, you will recall.'

  'Winning, for all love: how your ageing memory does betray you, my poor friend,' said Stephen, fetching his 'cello. They tuned, and at no great distance Killick said to his mate, 'There they are, at it again. Squeak, squeak; boom, boom. And when they do start a-playing, it's no better. You can't tell t'other from one. Never nothing a man could sing to, even as drunk as Davy's sow.'

  'I remember them in the Lively: but it is not as chronic as a wardroom full of gents with German flutes, bellyaching night and day, like we had in Thunderer. No. Live and let live, I say.'

  'Fuck you, William Grimshaw.'

  The game they played was that one should improvise in the manner of some eminent composer (or as nearly as indifferent skill and a want of inspiration allowed), that the other, having detected the composer, should then join in, accompanying him with a suitable continuo until some given point understood by both, when the second should take over, either with the same composer or with another. They, at least, took great pleasure in this exercise, and now they played on into the darkness with only a pause at the end of the first dog-watch, when Jack went on deck to take his readings of temperature and salinity with Adams and to reduce sail for the night.

  They were still playing when the watch was set, and Killick, laying the table in the dining-cabin said 'This will stop their gob for a while, thank God. Keep your great greasy thumbs off of the plates, Bill, do: put your white gloves on. Snuff the candles close, and don't get any wax or soot on the goddam snuffers—no, no, give it here.' Killick loved to see his silver set out, gleaming and splendid; but he hated seeing it used, except in so far as use allowed him to polish it again: moderate, very moderate use.

  He opened the door into the moonlit, music-filled great cabin and stood there severely until the very first pause, when he said 'Supper's on table, sir, if you please.'

  It was a good supper, consisting, through Mrs Raffles' kindness, of spaghetti, mutton chops, and toasted cheese followed, again through Mrs Raffles' kindness, by plum cake. During the meal they drank their usual toasts, and with the last of the wine Jack said, 'To the dear Surprise, and may we meet her soon.'

  'With all my heart,' said Stephen, and drained his glass.

  They sat reflecting in silence while the current sang past the hull and after some minutes Jack said 'I wonder whether you would not be well advised to sleep below for this bout. I am going to take the middle watch and I shall be in and out at all hours. I mean to let her run all night and to start disguising her tomorrow; and at first light we shall gut the cabin and trundle the chasers aft.'

  In most of Jack Aubrey's commands Stephen, as the ship's surgeon, had an alternative cabin opening off the gun-room: he lay there now, gently swaying with the Nutmeg's pitch and roll as she ran through the darkness. He lay there on his back, with his hands beh
ind his head, perfectly at his ease. He did not sleep. The coffee and even more the coca leaves quite outweighed the port, but he did not care. His mind ran along as smooth and easy as the Nutmeg, one ear hearing the general deep voice of a taut-rigged ship with a fine spread of canvas abroad, the unchanging naval sounds, the faint, faint bells in due succession, the cry of 'All's well' right round the ship, the muffled trampling of bare feet at the changing of the watch. It ran with no particular guidance, drifting agreeably from one set of ideas to another connected by some tenuous association until they came to the possibility however remote of finding the Surprise at the far end of the Salibabu Passage. As he evoked her name so he had a clear-cut mental image of her; he smiled in the darkness; and then quite suddenly the loss of his fortune came back to him, his present relative poverty. The Surprise might belong to him, but there would be none of those splendid cruises he had promised himself when peace came back again—cruises in which no imperious voice should ever say 'There is not a moment to be lost' and in which he and Martin could wander at large on unknown shores and on remote islands never seen by any man, still less any naturalist, where birds could be taken up by hand, examined, and put back on their nests.

  Relative poverty. He would not be able to cruise; he would not be able to endow his chairs of comparative osteology; they would have to sell the house in Half Moon Street. But although he had committed himself to a certain number of annuities his calculations (such as they were) seemed to show that a modest competence might remain if he continued in the service; and perhaps they might be able to keep Diana's new place in Hampshire, for her Arabian horses.

  In any event he was perfectly certain that she would take it well, even if they had to retire to his half-ruined castle in the mountains of Catalonia. His only fear was that on hearing the news she would sell her famous great diamond, the Blue Peter, the joy of her life: for not only would doing so take away that joy but it would also give her an immense moral advantage, and Stephen was convinced that moral advantage was a great enemy to marriage. Few happy marriages did he know among his friends and acquaintance, and in those few the balance seemed to him equal. Then again he found it more blessed to give than to receive; he had a strong disinclination to being obliged; and sometimes, when he was low-spirited, he put this down to an odious incapacity for gratitude.

  Moral advantage. After his parents' death he had spent much of his childhood and youth in Spain, housed by various members of his mother's family before finding a true home with his godfather and cousin Don Ramón: two of these relations, Cosí Francesc and Cosí Eulália, he knew well at three distinct periods of his life, as a small child, as an adolescent and as a grown man. At the time of his first visit they were a newly-married pair and they seemed quite fond of one another, though they were already tolerably strict and severe—early-morning Mass every day in the icy cathedral of Teruel. During his next stay the fondness was by no means apparent in anything but forms of unselfishness and deference to the other's will; and at his third it was quite clear to him that what fondness there may have been had been eaten away by a struggle for moral superiority. Their life had become a competitive martyrdom: competitive fasting, competitive holiness, competitive fortitude and self-denial, a dreadful uncomplaining cheerfulness in that ancient cold damp stony house, an intensely watchful competition that could only be won by the cousin that died first; though Cosí Eulália told him as a secret never to be divulged that she had spent all Don Ramón's presents and all her dress allowance for the last three years in prayers and Masses for her husband's spiritual welfare.

  It was not that he thought Diana would profit from her advantage in any way or even be aware that she had one—that was not her style at all. It was rather that he, with his fundamentally rather inferior character, should be oppressed by her generosity.

  Six bells, quite distinctly. What watch were they in now, for the love of God? And surely the ship was moving faster still: the fundamental note had risen half a tone. What more tiresome life than a sailor's, perpetually obliged to leap out of bed and run about in the noxious damps? His mind turned to his probable, almost certain daughter, now little more than a larva with virtually no conversation, but with such potentialities! A Mozart string quartet began singing in his head.

  'If you please, sir,' said a voice that had been going on for some time and that he connected with the irregular motion of his cot. 'If you please, sir.'

  'Were you jerking the strings or lifts of my cot, Mr Conway?' asked Stephen, giving him a malevolent look.

  'Yes, sir. Beg pardon, sir,' said Conway. 'Captain's compliments, and it is all over now: hopes you have not been too much disturbed and that you will join him at breakfast.'

  'My compliments to the Captain, if you please, and I shall be happy to wait on him.'

  'There you are, Stephen,' cried Captain Aubrey. 'Good morning to you. I thought you would be amazed.'

  Amazed he was, and for once it showed in his face; for although the forward bulkhead had been replaced, so that he walked into the dining-cabin through the usual door, past the Marine sentry, the rest of the space aft was bare—no wall dividing the dining-cabin from the great cabin—a great bare space with nothing in it but the two chairs, the breakfast-table and far away the nine-pounder chase-guns hard up against the ordinarily imperceptible stern-portlids. The checkered canvas deck-covering was gone; the room was strangely vast and empty—not a chest, not a book-case, not an elbow-chair, nothing but these guns on the bald planking, with their shot-garlands, wads, rammers, worms and the rest. There was almost nothing familiar in the cabin but the table, the far-off stern-windows, the carronades on either side, and the delightful smell of coffee and frying bacon brought aft by who knows what complex eddies and counter-currents.

  Jack rang the bell, observing, 'I have not invited any officers or mids. They are all too filthy; and in any case it is far too late in the day. You will be even more amazed when you go on deck. We started ruining the poor Nutmeg's looks when we ordinarily clean the decks, and I do assure you the forecastle is already a hissing and an abomination.'

  Breakfast came in, breakfast on the heroic scale, calculated for a large, heavy, powerful man who had been up before first light and who had so far eaten no more than a piece of biscuit. The clash of knives and forks, of china upon china, the sound of pouring coffee, a conversation reduced to such words as 'Will I pass you another egg, so?'

  'That cannot have been four bells,' said Stephen, looking up from his plate with an attentive ear.

  'I believe it was, though,' said Jack, who had now reached marmalade and his second pot of coffee.

  'It was benevolent in you to wait, brother,' said Stephen. 'I take it kindly.'

  'I hope you got some sleep, at all events,' said Jack.

  'Sleep? And why should I not sleep, at all?'

  'As soon as the idlers were called we made enough din to raise the dead, getting the chasers aft and opening the portlids. I doubt they had been opened when she was weighed from the bottom of the sea, they were so cruelly tight. Painted in too, of course, right across the upper counter for pretty, so they could not be seen. I thought it would have broken Fielding's heart as we beat and thumped them into some sense of their duty; but he looked a little less wretched when we had the guns in place. The breeching and the tackles hide some of the scars. And so you slept through it all: well, well.'

  Stephen frowned and said 'I cannot conceive what you hope to gain by placing them there, and ruining our parlour, our music-room, our one solace on the ocean's bosom. But then I am no great sailor.'

  'Oh, I should never say that: oh not at all, not really,' said Jack. 'But if you like I will explain them by telling you about my plan of attack, if anything that depends upon one probable surmise but countless unknowns can be called a plan.'

  'I should be very happy to hear it.'

  'As you know, we hope to catch the Cornélie watering at Nil Desperandum, in the cove on the southern side: a not unreasonable hope,
since watering there is a very slow business and she needs a great deal for the next leg of her voyage. In the best of cases I should run in, looking like a Dutch merchantman in need of water too and of course wearing Dutch colours: I should run in under shabby topsails, and with luck I should come close alongside, whip up the ensign, give her a broadside and board her in the smoke. It should not be a very difficult boarding: if she had even a small party ashore our numbers would be about equal, and then there is the immense advantage of surprise. But that is the best of cases, and I must provide for others. Suppose for example she lies awkwardly or suppose I miss the channel—in short, suppose I cannot run close alongside, then I must turn about, since I cannot engage her broadside to broadside at any distance, not with carronades against her long eighteen-pounders. Turn and entice her out, for I have no fear of her not chasing: I know she is short of stores—in fact she is probably very, very short. Her being out of water so soon makes it seem likely that she left Pulo Prabang in a great hurry.'

  'Nothing could be more probable than a quarrel in those circumstances. The Frenchmen had lost all credit.'

  'So, do you see, I am sure of her chasing us: and I am sure of being able to outsail her both by and large. The Dutchman assured me she could not come within seven points close-hauled; and she is wretchedly equipped for a breeze abaft the beam. She was so short of sailcloth that they took mere rags from the Alkmaar as better than what they had. My plan is to make her think we are trying to escape—the usual lame-duck tactics—and so lead her through the Salibabu Passage by night, disappear behind the second island at the far end, sending a well-lit boat ahead, and come out as she passes by. Once she is past we have the weather-gage, and it would be strange if we did not lay her alongside in a matter of a glass or two.'