‘Why, to be sure,’ said Clarence, positively bridling, ‘that is very kind of you to say so, upon my word it is. May I call for a pot of coffee?’
‘Not for me, sir, I thank you.’
Clarence raised his head, listening. ‘I think that is the boy on the landing,’ he said. ‘If that is your only condition, I accept it fully, with all my heart.’ He shook Jack’s hand and then opened the door. ‘Come in, Horatio,’ he called. ‘We are quite agreed, and in his great goodness Captain Aubrey will take you aboard Surprise.’
‘Oh thank you, sir: thank you very much indeed,’ cried the boy, intensely moved. ‘I am sure my dear Uncle must have been very happy to hear it.’
He certainly looked very happy, though strangely moved, when he brought Horatio to the White Horse, with a bowed porter carrying the new sea-chest. ‘I am so very glad to see you, Aubrey,’ he called. ‘So very glad to have read your letter over again – admirably well put – and of course I agree to all you have said: admirably well put. Your servant, Doctor.
And I assure you, I am most uncommonly obliged . . . but forgive me, I beg, if I run away.
There is Mornington waiting for me on the other side, and I absolutely cannot bear partings.’ With this, having wrung Jack’s hand yet again, he did in fact literally run, moving heavily and thrusting his way through the crowd.
Horatio looked a little nonplussed: but at this moment Jack called out, ‘Mr. Daniel! There you are: good morning to you. I have four insides, so heave your chest into the boot and get aboard. But first let me introduce Mr. Hanson, who is joining your berth.’ The young men shook hands. ‘He is only a first-voyager, but he already has a pretty sense of number, and I hope you will agree very well.’
People were getting in, crawling like spiders on to the roof; friends pressed closer, some calling out farewells; and a much louder voice cried ‘Get out of my fucking way, you bloody cuckolds,’ and Clarence heaved through the throng, mounted the steps, said ‘God bless you, Horatio,’ bent over him, pressed something into his hand and backed out, stammering something to Jack about ‘. . . present . . . forgotten . . . thank …” And painful it was to see that large pale glabrous face fairly aswim with tears.
‘Let go,’ called the coachman, and in a moment the whole massive affair was under way, contributing to the general roar of Saturday’s traffic – an exceptionally noisy and crowded Saturday, so that it was not until the coach was running over the newly-smoothed and comparatively silent road across Putney Heath that there was any real conversation –
Horatio, much moved, had said nothing at all but ‘Yes, sir,’ or ‘No, sir.’ But now, during this
quiet running, and during a lull in what little talk there was, a clear small bell struck eleven, and Horatio gazed with amazement at the packet Uncle William had thrust into his hand.
In the listening silence Stephen’s own repeater uttered the faintest echo of the chime from his fob. ‘I believe, sir,’ he said, taking out the watch, ‘that you have much the same machine as I. May we compare them?’
They were both indeed Breguet repeating watches, wonderfully accurate, wonderfully resistant – Stephen’s had been with him (sometimes captured, sometimes restored) years without number and its minute voice had accompanied him through many a sleepless night. ‘When we sit down to our dinner,’ he said, ‘which, with the blessing, will be at Guildford, I will show you how mine can be adjusted for fast and slow, loud or soft for chime, repetition and alarm. They are truly wonderful little machines.”
‘Yes, indeed, sir,’ said Horatio, and he gazed at its elegant dial, its creeping hands, almost all the way to Guildford, only pausing now and then to ask Daniel, whose kindness he sensed at once, questions about naval life. ‘So I am not really a midshipman at all?’ he asked, when the others were busy talking.
‘No. Seeing you are joining a frigate, where there is not much room, you will be a member of the midshipmen’s berth, and seeing that you are quite old, you will not be treated as a youngster, although this is your first voyage: but on Surprise’s books you will be a first-class volunteer -a volunteer of the first class – and you will not be a full-blown mid until the Captain promotes you. Still, you wear a mid’s uniform, and you walk the quarterdeck: you are only the first term in a progression, to be sure, but you do belong to it; and that is the great thing.’
Progressions, arithmetic, geometric, or just plain physical tend to be very long; and as far as the emotionally worn-out Horatio Hanson was concerned, this first term in his particular sequence would have seemed almost eternal, but for the successive reassuring chimes in his bosom. Jack had asked the coachman to stop at the Hind, where they had a little more to eat and then piled into two local post-chaises with their sea-chests and night-bags for the last leg to Woolcombe.
It had indeed been a long and weary journey for Horatio, with much nervous strain before, during and after it, when he was presented to the Captain’s family and a large assortment of his future shipmates, some of them, like the master, almost unbelievably old, others belonging to the berth. The supper and the trial of long corridors unknown, a vast strange bedroom and uncertainty whether he might use the chamber-pot.
But what wonders a long night can work: and a huge breakfast in the company of primarily naval people, none of them at all forbidding, most of them benign. The ease and calm authority of the Captain’s daughters and the casual way in which young George wandered to and from the sideboard, helping himself to an improbable number of things, impressed him deeply, but not so much as Mr. Whewell’s play-by-play history of how the house team had indeed crushed the village, in spite of their parson, by eighteen runs.
But this satisfactory account was wholly set aside by Hard-ing’s arrival, with the words ‘Sir, we float!’ which were instantly understood by Captain Aubrey and all his officers to mean that Mr. Seppings had finished well before his promised time, that the frigate was moored in the fairway, with the sheer-hulks standing by to restore her masts and the bosun on hot coals to get back to rigging her.
They were words that released an extraordinary amount of energy among the sailors, a decently-restrained grief in Sophie, less decently in her children, and not at all in Brigid,
who had to be led from the room. All this distressed the men: it did not interrupt their extremely rapid movement -co-ordinated movement, some going almost by instinct rather than order to their various stations with what speed horses, wheeled vehicles or plain feet could command; some, the best-mounted, to Portsmouth to prepare those ordinarily slow-moving local minds for the laying-in of stores: powder and shot, salt beef, salt pork, beer, biscuit, rum, the necessary water, some linear miles of ropes and cordage and square miles of sailcloth; carpenter’s stores, bosun’s stores – all those innumerable objects that even a modest man-of-war required for a voyage of enormous length: even the common rhubarb purgative amounted to seven casks.
Chapter Four
At four bells in the morning watch, Captain Aubrey, in a tarpaulin jacket, his long fair hair, as yet unplaited, streaming over the frigate’s larboard quarter, came on deck, glanced at the grey, rainfilled sky, saw a tall curling wave break over the starboard bow, dodged at least some of the water that came racing aft along the gangway, and said, ‘Good morning, Mr. Somers: I think we may omit the ceremony of washing the decks today. The heavens seem to be looking after it for us.’
‘Good morning, sir,’ said the second lieutenant. ‘Yes, sir.’ And directing his powerful voice forward, ‘Stow swabs, there.’
Turning, Jack saw a slim, smiling, soaked figure saluting him. ‘Why, Mr. Hanson, how are you? Put your hat on again. And are you recovered?’
‘Yes, sir, I thank you: quite well again.’ ‘I am very glad of it. I think we are through the worst of the blow – you see the lightening sky two points on the starboard bow? And if you feel quite well before division we might make an attempt on the mizzen masthead.’ ‘Oh yes, sir, if you please.’
Jack, having towelled himself moderately dry, returned to his still-warm cot and lay there comfortably, rocked by the measured crash and sweep of the tons of water that broke on the starboard bow. Surprise was now heading south-by-west, almost close-hauled under reefed topsails, on a strong but irregular and probably dying west wind: they had cleared the Channel at last, after many days of wearisome beating – they no longer had Ushant and the dreadful reefs he had known so well during the Brest blockade under their lee; and apart from being struck by lightning or by some demented merchantman they had nothing much to fear until they were off Cape Ortegal, which had very nearly drowned him as a midshipman in Latona, 38. However, there were still some hundreds of miles to leeward, and with that comforting reflection and the beat and tremble of the waves he drifted off again until seven bells, when he woke entirely, to bright daylight, a diminished sea, and the disagreeable face of Kil-lick, his steward, bringing hot water for shaving. For once Killick had no bad news of any kind to report, which probably accounted for his more than usually surly mutter in reply to Jack’s greeting; though on reflection he did recall that the Doctor had fallen out of his cot at some time in the middle watch and had been lashed in so tight by Mr. Wantage that he would certainly be late for breakfast.