– not a brace to be touched, watch relieving watch – and he and Jack on deck, sawing away, sawing away, lost in their music, until the falling dew untuned their strings. And days when the perfection of dawn was so great, the emptiness so entire, that men were almost afraid to speak.
A voyage whose two ends were out of sight – a voyage sufficient in itself. And on the plain physical side, she was a well-manned sloop, now that her prize-crews were all aboard again: not a great deal of work; a fair sense of urgency; a steady routine day after day; and day after day the exercise with the great guns that knocked the seconds off one by one until the day in 16°31’E., when the larboard watch succeeded in firing three broadsides in exactly five minutes. And, above all, the extraordinarily fine weather and (apart
from a languid week or so of calm far to the east, a little after they had left Sir Sidney’s squadron) fair winds so much so that when a moderate Levanter sprang up as soon as their chronic shortage of water made it really necessary to put into Malta, Jack said uneasily, ‘It is too good to last. I am afraid we must pay for this, presently.’
He had a very particular wish to make a rapid passage,
a strikingly rapid passage that would persuade Lord Keith of his undeviating attention to duty, his reliability; nothing he had ever heard in his adult life had so chilled him (upon reflexion) as the admiral’s remarks about post rank. They bad been kindly meant; they were totally convincing; they haunted his mind.
‘I wonder you should be so concerned over a mere title -a tolerably Byzantine title,’
observed Stephen. ‘After all, you
are called Captain Aubrey now, and you would still only be called Captain Aubrey after that eventual elevation; for no man, as I understand it, ever says “Post-captain So-and-so”.
Surely it cannot be a peevish desire for symmetry – a longing to wear two epaulettes?’
‘That does occupy a great share of my heart, of course,
along with eagerness for an extra eighteenpence a day. But you will allow me to point out, sir, that you are mistaken in everything you advance. At present I am called captain only by courtesy – I am dependent upon the courtesy of a parcel of damned scrubs, much as surgeons are by courtesy called Doctor. How should you like it if any cross-grained brute could call you Mr M the moment he chose to be uncivil? Whereas, was I to be made post some day, I should be captain by right; but even so I should only shift my swab from one shoulder to the other. I should not have the right to wear both until I had three years’ seniority. No. The reason why every sea-officer in his right wits longs so ardently to be made post is this – once you are over that fence, why, there you are! My dear sir, you are there! What I mean is, that from then onwards all you have to do is to remain alive to be an admiral in time.’ –
‘And that is the summit of human felicity?’
‘Of course it is,’ cried Jack, staring. ‘Does it not seem plain to you?’
‘Oh, certainly.’
‘Well then,’ said Jack, smiling at the prospect, ‘well then, up the list you go, once you are there, whether you have a ship or no, all according to seniority, in perfect order – rear-admiral of the blue, rear-admiral of the white, rear-admiral of the red, vice-admiral of the blue, and so on, right up – no damned merit about it, no selection. That’s what I like. Up until that point it is interest, or luck, or the approbation of your superiors – a pack of old women, for the most part. You must truckle to them – yes, sir; no, sir; by your leave, sir; your most humble servant. . . Do you smell that mutton? You will dine with me, will you not? I have asked the officer and midshipman of the watch.’
The officer in question happened to be Dillon, and the acting midshipman young Ellis.
Jack had very early determined that there should be no evident breach, no barbarous sullen inveteracy, and once a week he invited the officer (and sometimes the midshipman) of the forenoon watch to dinner, whoever he was; and once a week he in turn was invited to dine in the gun-room. Dillon had tacitly acquiesced in this arrangement, and on the surface there was a perfect civility between them – a state of affairs much helped in their daily life by the invariable presence of others.
On this occasion Henry Ellis formed part of their protection. He had proved an ordinary boy, rather pleasant than otherwise: exceedingly timid and modest at first and outrageously made game of by Babbington and Ricketts, but now, having found his place, somewhat given to prating. Not at his captain’s table, however: he sat rigid, mute, the tips of his fingers and the rims of his ears bleeding with cleanliness, his elbows pressed to his sides, eating wolf-like gulps of mutton, which he swallowed whole. Jack had always liked the young, and in any case he felt that a guest
was entitled to consideration at his table, so having invited Ellis to drink a glass of wine with him, he smiled affably and
said, ‘You people were reciting some verses in the foretop
this morning. Very capital verses, I dare say – Mr Mowett’s verses? Mr Mowett turns a pretty line.’ So he did. His piece on the bending of the new mainsail was admired throughout the sloop: but most unhappily he had also been inspired to write, as part of a general description:
White as the clouds beneath the blaze of noon
Her bottom through translucent waters shone.
For the time being this couplet had quite destroyed his authority with the youngsters; and it was this couplet they had been reciting in the foretop, hoping thereby to provoke him still further.
‘Pray, will you not recite them to us? I am sure the Doctor would like to hear.’
‘Oh, yes, pray do,’ said Stephen.
The unhappy boy thrust a great lump of mutton into his cheek, turned a nasty yellow and gathered to his heart all the fortitude he could call upon. He said, ‘Yes, sir,’ fixed his eyes upon the stern-window and began,
‘White as the clouds beneath the blaze of noon Oh God don’t let me die
‘White as the clouds beneath the blaze of noon
Her b -‘ His voice quavered, died, revived as a thin desperate ghost and squeaked out
‘Her bottom’; but could do no more.
‘A damned fine verse,’ cried Jack, after a very slight pause. ‘Edifying too. Dr Maturin, a glass of wine with you?’
Mowett appeared, like a spirit a little late for its cue, and said, ‘I beg your pardon, sir, for interrupting you, but there’s a ship topsails up three points on the starboard bow.’
In all this golden voyage they had seen almost nothing on the open sea, apart from a few caiques in Greek waters and a transport on her passage from Sicily to Malta, so when at length the newcomer had come close enough for her topsails. and a hint of her courses to be seen from the deck, she was stared at with an even greater intensity than usual. The Sophie had cleared the Sicilian Channel that morning and she was steering west-north-west, with Cape Teulada in Sardinia bearing north by east twenty-three leagues, a moderate breeze at north-east, and only some two hundred and fifty miles of sea between her and Port Mahon. The stranger appeared to be steering west-south-west or something south, as though for Gibraltar or perhaps Oran, and she bore north-west by north from the sloop. These courses, if persisted in, would intersect; but at present there was no telling which would cross the other’s wake.
A detached observer would have seen the Sophie heel slightly as all her people gathered along her starboard side, would have noticed the excited talk die away on the fo’c’sle and would have smiled to see two-thirds of the crew and all the officers simultaneously purse their lips as the distant ship set her topgallants. That meant she was almost certainly a
man-of-war; almost certainly a frigate, if not a ship of the line. And those topgallants had not been sheeted home in a very seamanlike way – scarcely as the Royal Navy would have liked it.
‘Make the private signal, Mr Pullings. Mr Marshall, begin to edge away. Mr Day, stand by for the gun.’
The red flag soared up the foremast in a neat ball and broke out smartly, streaming forwards, while the white flag and pendant Hacked overhead at the main and the single gun fired to windward.