thought Jack, looking down at her with great benevolence.
The elder Mr Pullings was a farmer in a small way on the skirts of the New Forest, and he had brought a
couple of sucking-pigs, a great deal of the King’s game, and a pie that was obliged to be accommodated with a table of its own, while the inn provided the turtle soup, the wine and the fish. The other guests were junior lieutenants and master’s mates, and to begin with the feast was stiffer and more funereal than might have been wished; Mr Pullings was too shy to see or hear, and once he had delivered his piece about their sense of Captain Aubrey’s kindness to their Tom in a burring undertone whose drift Jack seized only half-way through, he set himself to his bottle with a dreadful silent perseverance. However, the young men were all sharp-set, for this was well past their dinner-hour, and presently the huge amounts of food they ate engendered talk. After a while there was a steady hum, the sound of laughter, general merriment, and Jack could relax and give his attention to Mrs Pullings’s low, confidential account of her anxiety when Tom ran away to sea ‘with no change of linen, nothing to shift into – not even so much as his good woollen stockings’.
‘Truffles!’ cried Stephen, deep in the monumental pie, Mrs Pullings’s particular dish, her masterpiece (young hen pheasants, boned, stuffed tight with truffles, in a jelly of their own life’s blood, Madeira and calves’ foot). ‘Truffles! My dear madam, where did you find these princely truffles?’ – holding one up on his fork.
‘The stuffing, sir? We call ’em yearth-grobbets; and Pullings has a little old spayed sow turns ’em up by the score along the edge of the forest.’
Truffles, morells, blewits, jew’s ears (perfectly wholesome if not indulged in to excess; and even then, only a few cases of convulsions, a certain rigidity of the neck over in two or three days – nonsense to complain) occupied Stephen and Mrs Pullings until the cloth disappeared, the ladies retired, and the port began to go round. By now rank had evened out: at least one young man was as grand, royal and spreading as an admiral, and in the vinous, candle-lit haze Jack’s nagging anxiety about what
the Polychrest would do in a capful of wind with all that tophamper, about her ballast, trim, construction, crew and stores dropped away, leaving him the cheerful lieutenant he had been not so very long ago.
They had drunk the King, the First Lord (‘0 bless him, God bless him,’ cried Pullings), Lord Nelson with three times three, wives and sweethearts, Miss Chubb (the pink child) and other young ladies; they had carried the elder Mr Pullings to his bed, and they were singing
We?! rant and we’ll roar like true British sailors, We’ll range and we?! roam over all the salt seas, Until we strike soundings in the Channel of old
England:
From Ushant to Sally ’tis thirty-five leagues.
We hove our ship to when the wind was south-west, boys,
We hove our ship to for to strike soundings clear,
Then we filled our main-topsail and bore right away, boys,
And right up the Channel our course we did steer.
We’ll rant and we’ll roar…
The din was so great that Stephen alone noticed the door open just enough for Scriven’s questing head: he placed a warning hand on Jack’s elbow, but the rest were roaring still when it swung wide and the bailiffs rushed in.
‘Pullings, pin that whore with the staff,’ cried Stephen, tossing his chair under their legs and clasping Broken-nose round the middle.
Jack darted to the window, flung up the sash, jumped on to the sill and stood there poised while behind him the bailiffs struggled in the confusion, reaching out their staffs with ludicrous earnestness, trying to touch him, taking
no notice of the clogging arms round their waists, knees and chests. They were powerful, determined fellows; the reward was high, and the mêlée surged towards the open window
– one touch amounted to a lawful arrest.
A leap and he was away: but the head tipstaff was fly
– he had posted a gang outside, and they were looking up eagerly, calling out ‘jump for it, sir – we’ll break your fall – it’s only one storey.’ Holding on to the window he craned out, looking down the lane towards the shore – he could see the gleam of water – towards the place where by rights the Polychrests should be drinking Pullings’ beer, sent to them together with the second sucking-pig; and surely Bonden could be relied upon? He filled his lungs.
and hailed ‘Polychrest’ in a tone that echoed back from Portsmouth and stopped the mild gossip in the launch stone dead. ‘Polychrest!’
‘Sir?’ came back Bonden’s voice out of the dripping gloom.
‘Double up to the inn, d’ye hear me? Up the lane. Bring your stretchers.’
‘Aye-aye, sir.’
In a moment the launch was empty. Stretchers, the boat’s long wooden footrests, meant a row. The captain was no doubt pressing some hands, and they, pressed men themselves, did not mean to miss a second of the fun.
The pounding of feet at the end of the lane, coming nearer: behind, the sway and crash of chairs, oaths, a doubtful battle. ‘Here, here! Right under the window,’ cried Jack, and there they were, a little wet mob, gasping, gaping up. ‘Make a ring, now. Stand from under!’ He jumped, picked himself up and cried, ‘Down to the boat. Bear a hand, bear a hand!’
For the first moment the gang in the street hung back, but as the head tipstaff and his men came racing out of the inn shouting ‘In the name of the law! Way there, in the name of the law!’ they closed, and the narrow lane was filled with the sound of hard dry blows, grunts, the crash
of wood upon wood. The sailors, with Jack in the middle, pushed fast in the direction of the sea.
‘In the name of the law!’ cried the tipstaff again, making a most desperate attempt to break through.
‘- the law,’ cried the seamen, and Bonden, grappling with the bailiff, wrenched the staff from him. He flung it right down the lane, fairly into the water, and said, ‘You’ve lost your commission now, mate. I can hit you now, mate, so you watch out, I say. You watch out, cully, or you’ll come home by Weeping Cross.’
The bailiff uttered a low growl, pulled out his hanger and hurled himself at Jack. ‘Artful, eh?’ said Bonden, and brought his stretcher down on his head. He fell in the mud, to be trampled upon by Pullings and his friends, pouring out of the inn. At this the gang broke and fled, calling out that they should fetch their friends, the watch, the military, and leaving two of their number stretched upon the ground.
‘Mr Pullings, press those men, if you please,’ cried Jack from the boat. ‘And that fellow in the mud. Two more? Capital. All aboard? Where’s the Doctor? Pass the word for the Doctor. Ah, there you are. Shove off. Altogether, now, give way. Give way cheerly. What a prime hand he will make, to be sure,’ he added in an aside, ‘once he’s used to our ways –
a proper bulldog of a man.’
At two bells that morning watch the Polychrest was slipping quietly through the cold grey sea, the cold grey air, for at midnight the wind had come a little east of south, and in order not to lose a minute (a ship could be windbound for weeks on end in the Channel at this season) Jack had given orders to unmoor, although the tide was making. A gentle breeze it was, not enough to dispel the fog or raise more than a ripple on the long oily swell, and the Polychrest could have carried a great spread of canvas; however, she was under little more than her topsails, and
she ghosted along, with little more than a whisper of water the length of her side.
The tall dark form of her captain, much larger in his foul-weather clothes, stood over on the windward side of the quarterdeck. At the sound of the log being heaved, the cry of
‘Turn’ and ‘stop’ and the thump of its coming aboard again, he turned. ‘Mr Babbington, what do you have?’ he called.
‘Two knots and a three fathom, if you please, sir.’
Jack nodded. Somewhere out there in the darkness on the larboard bow there would be Selsey Bill, and presently he might have to tack: for the moment he had plenty of room –
the persistent howling under the lee came from the horns of the inshore fishing-boats, and they were a good mile away. To seaward there was the thump of a gun every few minutes