With a smooth perfection of curve and the familiar, almost unnoticed piping and cries of
‘Ready about – helm’s a-lee – rise tacks and sheets – mainsail haul,’ the Sophie came round, filled and headed back towards the distant packet, still becalmed in a smooth field of violet sea.
She lost the breeze herself when she had run a few miles off the little cape, and she lay there in the twilight and the falling dew, with her sails limp and shapeless.
‘Mr Day,’ said Jack, ‘be so good as to prepare some fire barrels – say half a dozen. Mr Daiziel, unless it comes on to blow I think we may take the boats in at about midnight. Dr Maturin, let us rejoice and be gay.’
Their gaiety consisted of ruling staves and copying a borrowed duet filled with hemidemisemiquavers. ‘By God,’ said Jack, looking up with red-rimmed streaming eyes after
an hour or so, ‘I am getting too old for this.’ He pressed his hands over his eyes and kept them there for a while: in quite another voice he said, ‘I have been thinking about Dillon all day. All day long I have been thinking about him, off and on. You would scarcely credit how much I miss him. When you told me about that classical chap, it brought him so to mind . . . because it was about Irishmen, no doubt; and Dillon was Irish. Though you would never have thought so
– never to be seen drunk, almost never called anyone out, spoke like a Christian, the most gentleman-like creature in the world, nothing of the hector at all – oh Christ. My dear fellow, my dear Maturin, I do beg your pardon. I say these damned things. . . I regret it extremely.’
‘Ta, ta, ta,’ said Stephen, taking snuff and waving his hand from side to side.
Jack pulled the bell, and through the various ship-noises, all muted in this calm, he heard the quick pittering of his steward. ‘Killick,’ he said, ‘bring me a couple of bottles of that Madeira with the yellow seal, and some of Lewis’ biscuits. I can’t get him to make a decent seed-cake,’ he explained to Stephen, ‘but these petty fours go down tolerably well and give the wine a relievo. Now this wine,’ he said, looking attentively through his glass, ‘was given me in Mahon by our agent, and it was bottled the year Eclipse was foaled. I produce it as a sin-offering, conscious of my offence. Your very good health, sir.’
‘Yours, my dear. It is a most remarkable ancient wine. Dry, yet unctuous. Prime.’
‘I say these damned things,’ Jack went on, musing as they drank their bottle, ‘and don’t quite understand at the time, though 1 see people looking black as hell, and frowning, and my friends going “Pst, pst”, and then I say to myself, “You’re brought by the lee again, Jack.” Usually I make out what’s amiss, given time, but by then it’s too late. I am afraid I vexed Dillon often enough, that way’ – looking down sadly – ‘but, you know, I am not the only one. Do not think I mean to run him down in any way – I only mention it as an instance, that even a very well-bred man can make these blunders sometimes, for I am sure he never meant it -but Dillon once hurt me very much, too. He used the word commercial , when we were speaking rather warmly about taking prizes. I am sure he did not mean it, any more than I meant any uncivil reflexion, just now; but it has always stuck hard in my gullet. That is one of the reasons why I am so happy. . .’
Knock-knock on the door. ‘Beg pardon, your honour. Loblolly boy’s all in a mother, sir.
Young Mr Ricketts has swallowed a musket-ball and they can’t get it out. Choking to death, sir, if you please.’
‘Forgive me,’ said Stephen, carefully putting down his glass and covering it with a red spotted handkerchief, a bandanna.
‘Is all well – did you manage . . .?’ asked Jack five minutes later.
‘We may not be able to do all we could wish in physic,’ said Stephen with quiet satisfaction, ‘but at least we can give an emetic that answers, I believe. You were saying, sir?’
‘Commercial was the word,’ said Jack. ‘Commercial. And that is why I am so happy to have this little boat expedition tonight. For although my orders will not allow me to bring
’em off, yet I have to wait for the packet to come up, and there is nothing to prevent me from burning ’em. I lose no time; and the most scrupulous mind could not but say that this is the most uncommercial enterprise imaginable. It is too late, of course – these things always are too late – but it is a great satisfaction to me. And how James Dillon would have delighted in it! The very thing for him! You remember him with the boats at Palamos? And at Palafrugell?’
The moon set. The star-filled sky wheeled about its axis, sweeping the Pleiades right up overhead. It was a midwinter sky (though warm and still) before the launch, the cutter and the jolly-boat came alongside and the landing-party dropped down into them, the men in their blue jackets and wearing white armbands. They were five miles from their prey, but already no voice rose much above a whisper – a few smothered laughs and the clink of weapons handing down and when they paddled off with muffled oars they melted so silently into the darkness that in ten minutes Stephen’s straining eyes lost them altogether.
‘Do you see them still?’ he asked the bosun, lame from his wound and now in charge of the sloop.
‘I can just make out the darkie the captain’s looking at the compass with,’ said Mr Watt. ‘A little abaft the cathead.’
‘Try my night-glass, sir,’ said Lucock, the only midshipman left aboard.
‘I wish it were over,’ said Stephen.
‘So do I, Doctor,’ said the bosun. ‘And I wish I were with them. ‘Tis much worse for us left aboard. Those chaps are all together, jolly like, and time goes by like Horndean fair. But here we are, left all thin and few, nothing to do but wait,
and the sand chokes in the watch-glass. It will seem years and years before we hear anything of them, sir, as you will surely see.’
Hours, days, weeks, years, centuries. Once there was an ominous clangour high overhead – flamingoes on their way to the Mar Menor, or maybe as far as the marshes of the Guadaiquivir: but for the most part it was featureless darkness, almost a denial of time.
The flashes of musketry and the subsequent crackle of firing did not come from the small arc on which his stare had been concentrated, but from well to the right of it. Had the
boats gone astray? Run into opposition? Had he been looking in the wrong direction? ‘Mr Watt,’ he said, ‘are they in the right place?”
‘Why, no, sir,’ said the bosun comfortably. ‘And if I know anything of it, the captain is a-leading of ’em astray.’
The crackling went on and on, and in the intervals a faint shouting could be heard. Then to the left there appeared a deep red glow; then a second, and a third; and all at once the third grew enormously, a tongue of flame that leapt up and up and higher still, a most prodigious fountain of light
– a whole ship-load of olive-oil ablaze.
‘Christ almighty,’ murmured the bosun, deep struck with awe. ‘Amen,’ said one among the silent, staring crew.
The blaze increased: in its light they could see the other fires and their smoke, quite pale; the whole of the bay, the village; the cutter and the launch pulling away from the shore and the jolly-boat crossing to meet them; and all round behind, the brown hills, sharp in light and shade.
At first the column had been perfectly straight, like a cypress; but after the first quarter of an hour its tip began to lean southwards and inland, towards the hills, and the smoke-cloud above to stream away in a long pall, lit from below. The brilliance was if anything greater, and Stephen saw gulls drifting across between the sloop and the land, all heading for the fire. ‘It will be attracting every living thing,’ he reflected, with anxiety. ‘What will be the conduct of the bats?’
Presently the top two-thirds was leaning over strongly, and the Sophie began to roll, with the waves slapping up against her larboard side.
Mr Watt broke from his long state of wonder to give the necessary orders, and coming back to the rail he said, ‘They will have a hard pull, if this goes on.’
‘Could we not bear down and pick them up?’ asked Stephen.