‘Upon my word, I cannot see what you mean by double loyalty. You can only have one King. And a man’s heart can only be in one place at a time, unless he is a scrub.’
‘What nonsense you do talk, to be sure,’ said Stephen. ‘What “balls”, as you sea-officers say: it is a matter of common observation that a man may be sincerely attached to two women at once – to three, to four, to a very surprising number of women. However,’ he said, ‘no doubt you know more of these things than I. No: what I had in mind were those wider loyalties, those more general conflicts – the
candid American, for example, before the issue became envenomed; the unimpassioned Jacobite in ’45; Catholic priests in France today – Frenchmen of many complexions, in and out of France. So much pain; and the more honest the man the worse the pain. But there at least the conflict is direct: it seems to me that the greater mass of confusion and distress must arise from these less evident divergencies
The moral law, the civil, military, common laws, the code of honour, custom, the rules of practical life, of civility, of amorous conversation, gallantry, to say nothing of Christianity for those that practise it. All sometimes, indeed generally, at variance; none ever in an entirely harmonious relation to the rest; and a man is perpetually required to choose one rather than another, perhaps (in his particular case) its contrary. It is as though our strings were each tuned according to a completely separate system – it is as though the poor ass were surrounded by four and twenty mangers.’
‘You are an antinomian,’ said Jack.
‘I am a pragmatist,’ said Stephen. ‘Come, let us drink up our wine, and I will compound you a dose – requies Nicholai. Perhaps tomorrow you should be let blood: it is three weeks since you was let blood.’
‘Well, I will swallow your dose,’ said Jack. ‘But I tell you what – tomorrow night I shall be in among those gunboats and I shall do the blood-letting. And don’t they wish they may relish it.’
The Sophie’s allowance of fresh water for washing was very small, and she made no allowance of soap at all. Those men who had blackened themselves and one another with paint remained darker than was pleasant; and those who had worked in the wrecked galley, covering themselves with grease and soot from the coppers and the stove, looked, if anything, worse – they had a curiously bestial and savage appearance, worst of all in those that had fair hair.
‘The only respectable-looking fellows are the black men,’ said Jack. ‘They are all still aboard, I believe?’
‘Davies went with Mr Mowett in the privateer, sir,’ said James, ‘but the rest are still with us.’
‘Counting the men left in Mahon and the prize-crews, how many are we short at the moment?’
‘Thirty-six, sir. We are fifty-four all told.’
‘Very good. That gives us elbow-room. Let them have as much sleep as possible, Mr Dillon: we shall stand in at midnight.’
Summer had come back after the rain – a gentle, steady tramontana, warm, clear air, and phosphorescence on the sea. The lights of Barcelona twinkled with uncommon brilliance, and over the middle part of the city floated a luminous cloud: the gunboats guarding the approaches to the port could be made out quite clearly against this background before ever they saw the darkened Sophie:
they were farther out than usual, and they were obviously
on the alert.
‘As soon as they start to come for us,’ reflected Jack, ‘we will set topgallants, steer for the orange light, then haul our wind at the last moment and run between the two on the northern end of the line.’ His heart was going with a steady, even beat, a little faster than usual. Stephen had drawn off ten ounces of blood, and he thought he felt much the better for it. At all events his mind was as clear and sharp as he could wish.
The moon’s tip appeared above the sea. A gunboat fired:
deep, booming note – the voice of an old solitary hound.
‘The light, Mr Ellis,’ said Jack, and a blue flare soared up, designed to confuse the enemy.
It was answered with Spanish signals, hoists of coloured lights, and then another gun, far over to the right. ‘Topgallants,’ he said. ‘jeffreys, steer for that orange mark.’
This was splendid: the Sophie was running in fast, prepared, confident and happy. But the gunboats were not coming on as he had hoped. Now one would spin about and fire, and now another; but on the whole they were falling back. To stir them up the sloop yawed and sent her broadside skipping among them – with some effect, to judge by a distant howl. Yet still the gunboats moved away. ‘Damn this,’ said Jack. ‘They are trying to lead us on. Mr Dillon, trysail and staysails. We’ll make a dash for that fellow farthest out.’
The Sophie came round fast and brought the wind on to her beam: heeling over so that the silk black water lapped at her port-sills, she raced towards the nearest gunboat. But now the others showed what they could do if they chose:
they all faced about in a moment and kept up a continuous
raking fire, while the chosen gunboat fled quartering away, keeping the Sophie’s unprotected stern towards them. A glancing blow from a thirty-six-pounder made her whole hull ring again; another passed just above head-height the whole length of the deck; two neatly severed backstays fell
across Babbington, Pullings and the man at the wheel, knocking them down; a heavy block clattered on to the
wheel itself as James leapt for its spokes.
‘We’ll tack, Mr Dillon,’ said Jack; and a few moments later the Sophie flew up into the wind.
The men working the sloop moved with the unthinking smoothness of long practice; but seen suddenly picked out by the flashes of the gunboats’ fire they seemed to be jerking like so many puppets. Just after the order ‘let go and haul’ there were six shots in quick
succession, and he saw the marines at the mainsheet in a rapid series of galvanic motions
– a few inches between each illumination
– but throughout they wore exactly the same concentrated
diligent expressions of men tallying with all their might.
‘Close hauled, sir?’ asked James.
‘One point free,’ said Jack. ‘But gently, gently: let us see if we can draw them out. Drop the maintopsailyard a couple of feet and slacken away the starboard lift – let us look as though we were winged. Mr Watt, the topgallant backstays are our first care.’
And so they all moved back again across the same miles of sea, the Sophie knotting and splicing, the gunboats following and firing steadily, the old left-handed moon climbing with her usual indifference.
There was not much conviction in the pursuit: but even so, a little while after James Dillon had reported the completion of the essential repairs, Jack said, ‘If we go about and set all sail like lightning, I believe we can cut those heavy chaps off from the land.’
‘All hands about ship,’ said James. The bosun started his call, and racing to his post by the maintopsail bowline Isaac Isaacs said to John Lakev, ‘We are going to cut those two heavy buggers off from the land,’ with intense satisfaction.
So they might have, if an unlucky shot had not struck the Sophie’s foretopgallant yard.
They saved the sail, but her speed dropped at once and the gunboats pulled away ahead, away and away until they were safe behind their mole.
‘Now, Mr Ellis,’ said James, as the light of dawn showed just how much the sloop’s rigging had suffered in the night, ‘here is a most capital opportunity for learning your profession; why, I dare say there is enough to keep you busy until sunset, or even longer, with every variety of splice, knot, service and parcelling you could desire.’ He was singularly gay, and from time to time, as he hurried about the deck, he hummed or chanted a sort of song.
There was the swaying up of the new yard, too, some shotholes to be repaired and the bowsprit to be new gammoned, for the strangest grazing ricochet had cut half the turns without ever touching the wood – something the oldest seamen aboard had never yet beheld, a wonder to be recorded in the log. The Sophie lay there unmolested, putting herself to rights all through that sunny gentle day, as busy as a hive, watchful, prepared, bristling with pugnicity. It was a curious atmosphere aboard her: the men knew very well they were going in again very soon, perhaps for some raid on the coast, perhaps for some cutting-out expedition; their mood was affected by many things – by their captures of yesterday and last Tuesday (the consensus was that each man was worth fourteen guineas more than when he sailed); by their captain’s continuing gravity; by the strong conviction aboard that he had private intelligence of Spanish sailings; and by the sudden strange merriment or even levity of their lieutenant. He had found Michael and Joseph Kelly, Matthew Johnson and John Melsom busily pilfering aboard the Felipe V, between decks, a very serious court-martial offence (although custom winked at the taking of anything above hatches) and one that he particularly abhorred as being ‘a damned privateer’s trick’; yet he had not reported them. They kept peering at him from behind