‘What is your name?’ said Jack.
‘Jackruski, sir. Please: thank you,’ said the Pole.
‘Watch out carefully, Jackruski,’ said Jack, moving easily up the topmast shrouds. He stopped at the masthead, booked an arm through the topgallant shrouds and settled comfortably in the crosstrees: many an hour had he spent there by way of punishment in his youth – indeed, when first he used to go up he had been so small that he could easily sit on the middle crosstree with his legs dangling, lean forward on his arms folded over the after tree and go to sleep, firmly wedged in spite of the wild gyrations of his seat.
How he had slept in those days! He was always sleepy or hungry, or both. And how perilously high it had seemed. It had been higher, of course, far higher, in the old Theseus
– somewhere about a hundred and fifty feet up: and how it had swung about the sky! He had been sick once, mast-headed in the old Theseus, and his dinner had gone straight up into the air, never to be seen again. But even so, this was a comfortable height. Eighty-seven feet less the depth of the kelson – say seventy-five. That gave him a horizon of ten or eleven miles. He looked over those miles of sea to windward
– perfectly clear. Not a sail, not the slightest break on the tight line of the horizon. The topgallantsail above him was suddenly golden: then two points on the larboard bow, in the mounting blaze of light, the sun thrust up its blinding rim. For a prolonged moment Jack alone was sunlit, picked out then the light reached the topsail travelled down it, took in the peak of the boom mainsail and so reached the deck, flooding it from stem to stern Tears welled up in his eyes, blurred his vision, overspilt, rolled down his cheeks they did not use themselves up in lines upon his face but dropped, two, four, six, eight, round drops slanting away through the warm golden air to leeward.
Bending low to look under the topgallantsail he gazed at his charges, the merchantmen: two pinks, two snows, a Baltic cat and the rest barca-longas; all there, and the rearmost was beginning to make sail. Already there was a living warmth in the sun, and a delicious idleness spread through his limbs
This will never do,’ he said there were innumerable things to be seen to below He blew his nose, and with his eves still fixed on the spar-laden cat he reached out for the weather backstay His hand curled round it mechanically, with as little thought as if it had been the handle of his own front door, and he slid gently down to the deck, thinking, ‘One new landman to each gun-crew might answer very well.’
Four bells. Mowett heaved the log, waited for the red tag to go astern and called ‘Turn.’
‘Stop!’ cried the quartermaster twenty-eight seconds later, with the little sand-glass close to his eye. Mowett nipped the line almost exactly at the third knot, jerked out the peg and walked across to chalk ‘three knots’ on the logboard. The quartermaster hurried to the big watch-glass, turned it and called out ‘George’ in a firm and rounded voice. The marine went for’ard and struck the four bells heartily. A moment later pandemonium broke loose: pandemonium, that is, to the waking Stephen Maturin, who now for the first time in his life heard the unnatural wailing, the strange arbitrary intervals of the bosun and his mates
piping ‘Up all hammocks’. He heard a rushing of feet and a great terrible voice calling ‘All hands, all hands ahoy! Out or down! Out or down! Rouse and bitt! Rise and shine! Show a leg there! Out or down! Here I come, with a sharp knife and a clear conscience!’ He heard three muffled dumps as three sleep-sodden landmen were, in fact, cut down: he heard oaths, laughter, the impact of a rope’s end as a bosun’s mate started a torpid, bewildered hand, and then a far greater trampling as fifty or sixty men rushed up the hatchways with their hammocks, to stow them in the nettings.
On deck the foretopmen had set the elm-tree pump a-wheezing, while the fo’c’slemen washed the fo’c’sle with the fresh sea-water they pumped, the maintopmen washed the starboard side of the quarter-deck and the quarter-deck men all the rest, grinding away with holystones until the water ran like thin milk from the admixture of minute raspings of wood and caulking, and the boys and the idlers – the people who merely worked all day –
heaved at the chain-pumps to clear the night’s water out of the bilges, and the gunner’s crew cosseted the fourteen four-pounders; but none of this had had the electrifying effect of the racing feet.
‘Is it some emergency?’ wondered Stephen, working his
way with rapid caution out of his hanging cot. ‘A battle? Fire? A desperate leak? And are they too much occupied to warn me – have forgotten I am here?’ He drew on his breeches as fast as he could and, straightening briskly, he brought his head up against a beam with such force that he staggered and sank on to a locker, cherishing it with both hands.
A voice was speaking to him. ‘What did you say?’ he asked, peering through a mist of pain.
‘I said, “Did you bump your head, sir?”‘
‘Yes,’ said Stephen, looking at his hand: astonishingly it was not covered with blood –
there was not even so much as a smear.
‘It’s these old beams, sir’ – in the unusually distinct, didactic voice used at sea for landmen and on land for half-wits – ‘You want to take care of them; for – they – are -very – low.’
Stephen’s look of pure malevolence recalled the steward to a sense of his message and he said, ‘Could you fancy a chop or two for breakfast, sir? A neat beefsteak? We killed a bullock at Mahon, and there’s some prime steaks.’
‘There you are, Doctor,’ cried Jack. ‘Good morning to you.. I trust you slept?’
‘Very well indeed, I thank you. These hanging cots are a most capital invention, upon my word.’
‘What would you like for breakfast? I smelt the gun-room’s bacon on deck and I thought it the finest smell I had ever smelt in my life – Araby left at the post. What do you say to bacon and eggs, and then perhaps a beefsteak to follow? And coffee?’
‘You are of my way of thinking entirely,’ cried Stephen, who had great leeway to make up in the matter of victuals ‘And conceivably there might be onions, as an antiscorbutic ‘The word onions brought the smell of them frying into his nostrils and their peculiarly firm yet unctuous texture to his palate he swallowed painfully ‘What’s afoot?’ he exclaimed, for the howling and the wild rushing, as of mad beasts, had broken out again
‘The hands are being piped down to breakfast,’ said Jack carelessly. ‘Light along that bacon, Killick. And the coffee. I’m clemmed.’
‘How I slept,’ said Stephen. ‘Deep, deep, restorative, roborative sleep – none of your hypnogogues, none of your tinctures of laudanum can equal it. But I am ashamed of my appearance. I slept so late that here I am, barbarously unshaved and nasty, whereas you are as smug as a bridegroom. Forgive me for a moment.
‘It was a naval surgeon, a man at Haslar,’ he said, coming back, smooth, ‘who invented these modern short arterial ligatures: I thought of him just now, as my razor passed within a few lines Of my external carotid. When it is rough, surely you must get many shocking incised wounds?’
‘Why, no: I can’t say we do,’ said Jack. ‘A matter of use, I suppose. Coffee? What we do get is a most plentiful crop of bursten bellies – what’s the learned word? -and pox.’
‘Hernia. You surprise me.’
‘Hernia: exactly so. Very common. I dare say half the idlers are more or less ruptured: that is why we give them the lighter duties.’
‘Well, it is not so very surprising, now that I reflect upon the nature of a mariner’s labour.
And the nature of his amusements accounts for his pox, of course. I remember to have seen parties of seamen in Mahon, wonderfully elated, dancing and singing with sad drabble-tail pakes. Men from the Audacious, I recall, and the Thaëton: I do not remember any from the Sophie.’
‘No. The Sophies were a quiet lot ashore. But in any case they had nothing to be elated about, or with. No prizes and so, of course, no prize-money. It’s prize-money alone lets a seaman kick up a dust ashore, for precious little does he see of his pay. What do you say to a beefsteak now, and another pot of coffee?’
‘With all my heart.’
‘I hope I may have the pleasure of introducing my lieutenant to you at dinner. He appears to be a seamanlike, gentlemanly fellow. He and I have a busy morning ahead of us: we must sort out the crew and set them to their duties