and half fell, dragging the wheel over with him, his forearm ploughed open from wrist to elbow. The Sophie’s head flew up into the wind, and although Jack and Marshall had the wheel directly, the advantage was gone. The port broadside could only be brought to bear by a further turn that lost still more way; and there was no way to be lost. The Sophie was a good two hundred yards behind the Gloire now, on her starboard quarter, and the only hope was to gain speed, to range up and renew the battle. He and the master glanced up
simultaneously: everything was set that could be set -the wind was too far forward for the studdingsails.
He stared ahead, watching for the stir aboard the chase, the slight change in her wake, that would mean a coming movement to starboard – the Gloire in her turn crossing the Sophie’s stem, raking her fore and aft and bearing up to protect the scattered convoy. But he stared in vain. The Gloire held on to her course. She had drawn ahead of the Sophie even without her royals, but now these were setting:
and the breeze was kinder to her, too. As he watched, the tears brimming over his eyelids from the concentration of his gaze against the rays of the sun, a slant of wind laid her over and the water ran creaming under her lee, her
wake lengthening away and away. The grey-haired captain fired on pertinaciously, a man beside him passing loaded
muskets, and one ball severed a ratline two feet from Jack’s
head; but they were almost beyond musket-range now, and
in any case the indefinable frontier between personal animosity and anonymous warfare had been passed – it did not affect him.
‘Mr Marshall,’ he said, ‘pray edge away until we can salute her. Mr Pullings – Mr Pullings, fire as they bear.’
The Sophie turned two, three, four points from her course.The bow gun cracked out, followed in even sequence by the rest of the port broadside. Too eager, alas: they were well pitched up, but the splashes showed twenty and even thirty yards astern. The Gloire, more attentive to her safety than her honour, and quite forgetful of her duty to Señor Mateu, the unvindictive Gloire did not yaw to reply, but hauled her wind. Being a ship, she could point up closer
than the Sophie, and she did not scruple to do so, profiting
to the utmost by the favour of the breeze. She was plainly
running away. Of the next broadside two balls seemed to bit her, and one certainly passed through her mizen topsail. But the target was diminishing every minute as their courses diverged, and hope diminished with it.
Eight broadsides later Jack stopped the firing. They had knocked her about shrewdly and they had ruined her looks, but they had not cut up her rigging to make her unmanageable, nor carried away any vital mast or yard. And they had certainly failed to persuade her to come back and fight it out yard-arm to yard-arm. He gazed at the flying Gloire, made up his mind and said, ‘We
will bear away for the cape again, Mr Marshall. Southsouth-west.’
The Sophie was remarkably little wounded. ‘Are there
any repairs that will not wait half an hour, Mr Watt?’ he asked, absently hitching a stray slab-line round a pin.
‘No, sir. The sailmaker will be busy for a while; but she sent us no chain nor bar, and she never clawed our rigging, not to say clawed. Poor practice, sir; very poor practice. Not like that wicked little old Turk, and the sharp raps he give US.’
‘Then we will pipe the hands to breakfast and knot and splice afterwards. Mr Lamb, what damage do you find?’
‘Nothing below the water-line, sir. Four right ugly holes amidships and two and four gunports well-nigh beat into one: that’s the worst. Nothing to what we give her (the sodomite),’
he added, under his breath.
Jack went forward to the dismounted gun. A ball from the Gloire had shattered the bulwark where the aft ring-bolts were fastened, just as number four was on the recoil. The gun, partly checked on the other side, had slewed round, jamming its run-out neighbour and oversetting. By wonderful good luck the two men who should have been crushed between them were not there – one washing the blood from a graze off his face in the fire-bucket, the other hurrying for more slow-match – and by wonderful good luck the gun had gone over, rather than running murderously about the deck.
‘Well, Mr Day,’ he said, ‘we were in luck one way, if not the other. The gun may go into the bows until Mr Lamb gives us fresh ring-bolts.’
As he walked aft, taking off his coat as he went – the heat was suddenly unbearable – he ran his eye along the south-western horizon. No sign of Cape Nao in the rising haze: not a sail to be seen. He had never noticed the rising of the sun, but there it was, well up into the sky; they must have run a surprising long way. ‘By God, I could do with my coffee,’ he said, coming abruptly back into a present in which ordinary time flowed steadily once more and appetite mattered. ‘But, however,’ he reflected, ‘I must go below.’ This was the ugly side: this was where
you saw what happened when a man’s face and an iron
ball met.
‘Captain Aubrey,’ said Stephen, clapping his book to the moment he saw Jack in the cockpit. ‘I have a grave
complaint to make.’
‘I am concerned to hear it,’ said Jack, peering about in the gloom for what he dreaded to see.
‘They have been at my asp. I tell you, sir, they have
been at my asp. I stepped into my cabin for a book not three minutes ago, and what did I see? My asp drained -drained, I say.’
‘Tell me the butcher’s bill; then I will attend to your asp.’
‘Bah – a few scratches, a man with his forearm moderately scored, a couple of splinters to draw – nothing of consequence – mere bandaging. All you will find in the sick-bay is an obstinate gleet with low fever and a reduced inguinal hernia: and that forearm. Now my asp -,
‘No dead? No wounded?’ cried Jack, his heart leaping up.
‘No, no, no. Now my asp -‘ He had brought it aboard in its spirits of wine; and at some point in very recent time a criminal hand had taken the jar, drunk up all the alcohol and left the asp dry, stranded, parched.
‘I am truly sorry for it,’ said Jack. ‘But will not the fellow die? Must he not have an emetic?’
‘He will not: that is what is so vexing. The bloody man, the more than Hun, the sottish rapparee, he will not die. It was the best double-refined spirits of wine. ‘Pray come and breakfast with me in the cabin; a pint
of coffee and a well-broiled chop between you and the asp will take away the sting – will appease . . . ‘ In his gaiety
of heart, Jack was very near a witticism; he felt it floating
there, almost within reach; but somehow it escaped and he
confined himself to laughing as cheerfully as Stephen’s vexation would with decency allow and observing, ‘The damned
Villain ran clean away from us; and I am afraid we shall have
but a tedious time making our way back.! wonder, I wonder
whether Dillon managed to pick up the settee, or whether she ran for it, too.’
It was a natural curiosity, a curiosity shared by every man aboard the Sophie, apart from Stephen; but it was not to be satisfied that forenoon, nor yet for a great while after the sun had crossed the meridian. Towards noon the wind fell to something very near a calm; the newly-bent sails flapped, hanging in flaccid bulges from their yards, and the men working on the tattered set had to be protected by an awning. It was one of those intensely humid days when the air has no nourishment in it, and it was so hot that even with all his restless eagerness to recover his boarders, secure his prize and move on up the coast, Jack could not find it in his heart to order out the sweeps. The men had fought the ship tolerably well (though the guns were still too slow by far) and they had been very active repairing what damage the Gloire had inflicted. ‘I will let them be at least until the dog-watch,’ he reflected.
The heat pressed down upon the sea; the smoke from the galley funnel hung along the deck, together with the smell of grog and the hundredweight or so of salt beef the Sophies had devoured at dinner-time: the regular tang-tang of the bell came at such long intervals that long before the snow was seen it appeared to Jack that this morning’s sharp encounter must belong to another age, another life or, indeed (had it not been for a lingering smell of powder in the cushion under his head), to another kind of experience