as he sat at the envoy’s left, stuffed rapidly into his best coat by Jack’s powerful hand, breeched and brushed in one minute twenty seconds flat while the Marine sentry, under penalty of death, held the half-hour glass concealed in his hand to prevent the striking of the bell – as he sat there eating up the last long-preserved delicacies from Mr Stanhope’s store and drinking milk-warm claret in honour of the Duke of Cumberland’s birthday. But he was not without a social conscience, and aware that he had caused great uneasiness, that his very, very dirty face and hands reflected discredit upon the ship, he exerted himself to talk, to be agreeable; and even, after the port had gone round and round, to sing.
Mr Bowes, the purser, had obliged the company with an endless ballad on the battle of the First of June, in which he had served a gun: it was set to the tune of ‘I was, d’ye see, a Waterman,’ but he produced its slow length in an unvarying tone, neither shout nor cry but nearly allied to both, pitched in the neighbourhood of lower A, with his eyes fixed bravely on a knot in the deckhead above Mr Stanhope. The envoy smiled bravely, and in the thundering chorus of ‘To make ’em strike or die’ his neighbours made out his piping treble.
The frigate could boast no high standard of musical accomplishment: Etherege had never really known the tune of his comic song; and now, bemused by Mr Stanhope’s port, he forgot the words too; but when at last he abandoned it, after three heavy falls, he assured them that well sung, by Kitty Pake for example, it was irresistibly droll – how they had laughed! But he was no hand at a song, he was sorry to say, though he loved music passionately; it was far more in the Doctor’s line -the Doctor could imitate cats on the ‘cello to perfection -would deceive any dog you cared to bring forward.
Mr Stanhope turned his worn, polite face towards Stephen, blinking in a shaft of sunlight that darted through a scuttle on the roll; and Stephen noticed, for the first time, that the faded blue eyes were showing the first signs of that whitish ring, the arcus senilis. But from the far end of the table Mr Atkins called out, ‘No, no, your Excellency; we must not trouble Dr Maturin; his mind is far above these simple joys.’
Stephen emptied his glass, set his eyes upon the appropriate knot, tapped the table and began,
‘The seas their wonders might reveal But Chloe’s eyes have more: Nor all the treasure they conceal, Can equal mine on shore.’
His harsh, creaking voice, indicating rather than striking the note, did nothing to improve the ship’s reputation; but now Jack was accompanying him with a deep booming hum that made the glasses vibrate, and he went on with at least greater volume,
‘From native Ireland’s temp ‘rate coast Remove me farther yet, To shiver in eternal frost.
Or melt with India’s heat.’
At this point he saw that Mr Stanhope would not be
able to outlast another verse: the heat, the want of air (the Surprise had the breeze directly aft and almost none came below), the tight-packed cabin, the necessary toasts, the noise, had done their work; and the rapidly-whitening face, the miserable fixed smile, meant a syncope within the next few bars.
‘Come, sir,’ he said, slipping from his place. ‘Come. A moment, if you please.’ He led him to his sleeping-cabin, laid him down, loosened his neckcloth and waistband, and when some faint colour began to return, he left him in peace. Meanwhile the party had broken up, had tiptoed away; and unwilling to answer inquiries on the quarterdeck, Stephen made his way forward through the berth-deck and the sickbay to the head of the ship, where he remained throughout the frigate’s evening activities, leaning on the bowsprit and watching the cutwater sheer through mile after mile of ocean, parting it with a sound like tearing silk, so that it streamed away in even curves along the Surprise’s side to join her wake, now eight thousand miles in length. The unfinished song ran in his head, and again and again he sang beneath his breath,
Her image shall my days beguile
And still my dream shall be…
Dream: that was the point. Little contact with reality, perhaps – a child of hope – a potentiality – infinitely better left unrealised. He had been most passionately attached to Diana Villiers, and he had felt a great affection for her, too, a strong affection as from one human being to another in something of the same case; and that, he thought, she had returned to some degree – all she was capable of returning. To what degree? She had treated him very badly both as a friend and a lover and he had welcomed what he called his liberation from her: a liberation that had not lasted, however. No great while after his last sight of her ‘prostituting herself in a box at the Opera’ – a warm expression by which he meant consciously using her charms to please other
men – the unreasoning part of his mind evoked living images of these same charms, of that incredible grace of movement when it was truly spontaneous; and very soon his reasoning mind began to argue that this fault, too, was to be assimilated to the long catalogue of defects that he knew and accepted, defects that he felt to be outweighed if not cancelled by her qualities of wit and desperate courage:
she was never dull, she was never cowardly. But moral considerations were irrelevant to Diana: in her, physical grace and dash took the place of virtue. The whole context was so different that an unchastity odious in another woman had what he could only call a purity in her: another purity:
pagan, obviously – a purity from another code altogether. That grace had been somewhat blown upon to be sure, but there was enough and to spare; she had destroyed only the periphery; it was beyond her power to touch the essence of the thing, and that essence set her apart from any woman, any person, he had ever known.
This, at least, was his tentative conclusion and he had travelled these eight thousand miles with a continually mounting desire to see her again; and with an increasing dread of the event – desire exceeding dread, of course.
But Lord, the infinite possibilities of self-deception – the difficulty of disentangling the countless strands of emotion and calling each by its proper name – of separating business from pleasure. At times, whatever he might say, he was surely lost in a cloud of unknowing; but at least it was a peaceful cloud at present and sailing through a milky sea towards a possible though unlikely ecstasy at an indefinite remove was, if not the fulness of life, then something like its shadow.
Peace, still deeper peace. The languid peace of the Arabian Sea in the south-west monsoon; a wind as steady as the trades but gentler, so gentle that the battered Surprise had her topgallants abroad and even her lower studdingsails, for she was in an even greater hurry than usual. Her stores
were so low now that for weeks past the gunroom had been living on ship’s provisions, salt beef, salt pork, biscuit and dried peas, and the midshipmen’s berth reported no single rat left alive: what was worse, Stephen and M’Alister had cases of scurvy on their hands once more.
But the lean years were thought to be almost over. At one time Harrowby had wished to steer for the Nine Degree Channel and the Laccadives; but Harrowby was an indifferent, timid navigator and Jack, overruling him, had laid her head for Bombay itself; and now they had been running north-east by east so long that by dead reckoning the Surprise should have been a hundred miles east of the Western Ghauts, another Ark stranded in the hills of Poona But consulting with Pullings, working his lunars again and again, dragging his brighter midshipmen repeatedly through the calculations in search of an error, worshipping his chronometers, and making the necessary corrections, Jack was almost certain of his position. Sea-birds, native craft far off, a single merchantman that fled, crowding sail on the horizon without waiting to learn if they were French or English –
the first sail they had seen in four months – and above all, soundings in eleven fathoms, a bottom of shelly white sand like Direction Bank, strengthened him in his persuasion that he was in 18°34′ N, 72°29’E, and that he should make his landfall the next day. He stood on the quarterdeck, glancing now over the side, now up at the masthead, where the sharpest eyes and the best glasses in the ship were trained steadily eastwards.
Stephen’s confidence in Captain Aubrey’s seamanship was as entire, as blind, as Jack’s in the medical omniscience of Dr Maturin; and untroubled by the cares that now oppressed his friend he sat in the mainchains, as naked as Adam and much the same colour, trailing a purse-net in the sea.