think incest so very undesirable?’
‘Cousin Edward, it is time for your bath,’ said Diana; but he grew confused and unhappy –
he was sure it would not do to let that fellow alone with a valuable teapot, but he was too polite to say so; his oblique references to it as ‘the dread simoom’ were not understood, and it took her five minutes of coaxing to get him out of the room.
‘What news from Mapes, shipmate?’ asked Jack.
‘What? I cannot hear a word with all this screeching and bawling overhead.’
‘You are as bad as Parker,’ said Jack, and poking his head out of the cabin he called,
“Vast heaving the after carronades. Mr Pullings, let these hands reef tops’ls. I said “What news from Mapes?”‘
‘A miscellaneous bag. I saw Sophie alone: she and Diana have parted brass-rags. Diana is looking after her cousin in Dover. I called on her. She asked us both to dinner on Friday, to eat a dish of Dover soles. I accepted for myself, but said I could not answer for you: you might not find it possible to go ashore.’
‘She asked me?’ cried Jack. ‘Are you sure? What is it, Babbington?’
‘I beg your pardon, sir, but the flagship is signalling all captains.’
‘Very well. Let me know the moment Melpomène’s barge touches the water. Stephen, chuck me my breeches, will you?’ He was in working clothes – canvas trousers, a guernsey frock and a frieze jacket – and as he stripped the criss-cross of wounds showed plain: bullets, splinters, cutlasses, a boarding-axe; and the last, a raking thrust from a pike, still showed red about the edges. ‘Half an inch to the left – if that pike had gone in half an inch to the left, you would have been a dead man,’ observed Stephen.
‘My God,’ said Jack, ‘there are times when I wish -however, I must not whine.’ From under his clean white shirt he asked, ‘How was Sophie?’
‘Low in her spirits. She is subjected to the attentions of a moneyed parson.’ No reply. No emergence of the head. He went on, ‘I also saw to everything at Melbury: all is well there,
though the lawyer’s men have been hanging about. Preserved Killick asks may he join the ship? I took it upon myself to say that he should come and ask you himself. You will be happy to have the skilled attendance of Preserved Killick. I reduced my femur at the hospital -the leg may be saved – and wished my dement on to them, with a slime-draught to make him easy. I also bought your thread, music-paper, and strings: these I found at a shop
in Folkestone.’
‘Thank you, Stephen. I am very much obliged to you. You must have had a damned long ride of it. Indeed, you look dog-tired, quite done up. Just tie my hair for me, like a good fellow, and then you shall turn in. I must get you an assistant, a surgeon’s mate: you work too hard.’
‘You have some grey hairs,’ said Stephen, tying the yellow queue.
‘Do you wonder?’ said Jack. He buckled on his sword, sat down on the locker, and said, ‘I had almost forgot. I had a pleasant surprise today. Canning came aboard! You remember Canning, that admirable chap I liked so much in town, and who offered me his privateer?
He has a couple of merchantmen in the road and he came round from the Note to see them off. I have asked him to dinner tomorrow; and that reminds me . . .’ It reminded him of the fact that he had no money, and that he should like to borrow some. He had drawn three lunar months’ pay on joining his ship, but his expenses in Portsmouth – customary presents, vails, a bare minimum of equipment – had swallowed twenty-five guineas and more in a week, quite apart from Stephen’s loan.
It had not allowed him to lay in stores, and that was another thing that was wrong with the running of the Polychrest – he hardly knew his officers except on duty. He had invited Parker and he had dined once with the gun-room during their long calm, tiding up the Channel, but he had barely exchanged half a dozen words with Macdonald or Allen, for example, outside the line of duty; yet they were men upon whom the ship, and his own life and reputation, might depend. Parker and Macdonald had private means and they had entertained him well: he had scarcely entertained them at all. He was not keeping up the dignity of a captain: a captain’s dignity depended in some degree upon the state of his store-room – a captain must not look a scrub – and as his silly, talkative, consequential temporary steward kept telling him so officiously, his was empty apart from a hundredweight of orange marmalade, a present from Mrs Babbington. ‘Where shall I stow the wine, sir? -What shall I do about the live-stock? – When are the sheep coming? – What does your Honour wish me to do about the hen-coops?’ Furthermore, he would soon have to invite the admiral and the other captains of the squadron; and tomorrow there would be Canning. Ordinarily he would have turned at once to Stephen, for although Stephen was an abstemious man, indifferent to money beyond the bare necessities of life, and strangely ill-informed, even unperceptive, about discipline, the finer points of ceremonial, the complexity of the service and the importance of entertaining, he would always give way at once when it was represented to him that tradition called for an outlay. He would produce money from the odd drawers and pots where it lay, disregarded, as though Jack were doing him a particular favour by borrowing it: in other hands he would have been the
‘easiest touch’ afloat. These reflections darted through Jack’s mind as he sat there, stroking the worn lion’s head on the pommel of his sword; but something in the atmosphere, some chill or
reserve or inward scruple of his own, prevented him from completing his sentence before the Melpomène’s barge was reported to be in the water.
This was not a Sunday afternoon, with ship-visiting and liberty boats plying to and fro in the squadron; it
was an ordinary working day, with all hands creeping up and down the rigging or exercising at the great guns; nothing but a Dover bumboat and a Deal hoveller came anywhere near the Polychrest; and yet long before Jack’s return it was known throughout the ship that she was on the wing. Where bound, no one could tell, though many tried (to the westward, to Botany Bay, the Mediterranean to carry presents to the Dey of Algiers and redeem Christian slaves). But the rumour was so strong that Mr Parker cleared her hawse, heaved short, and, with a hideous memory of unmooring at Spithead, sent the crew to their stations for this manoeuvre again and again, until even the dullest could find the capstan and his place on the bar. He received Jack back aboard with a look of discreet but earnest inquiry, and Jack, who had seen his preparations, said, ‘No, no, Mr Parker, you may veer away astern; it is not for today. Desire Mr Babbington to come into the cabin, if you please.’
‘Mr Babbington,’ he said, ‘you are in a very repellent state of filth.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Babbington, who had spent the first dog-watch in the maintop with two buckets of flush from the galley, showing a framework-knitter, two thatchers (brothers: much given to poaching), and a monoglot Finn how to grease the masts, sheets and running-rigging generally, and who was liberally plastered with condemned butter and skimmings from the coppers in which salt pork had been boiled. ‘Beg pardon, sir.’
‘Be so good as to scrub yourself from clew to earring, to shave – you may borrow Mr Parslow’s razor, I dare say – to put on your best uniform and report back here. My compliments to Mr Parker and you are
to take the blue cutter to Dover with Bonden and six reliable men who deserve liberty until the evening gun. The same to Dr Maturin, and I should be glad to see him.’
‘Aye, aye, sir. Oh thank you, sir.’
He turned to his desk:
Polychrest
in the Downs
Captain Aubrey presents his best compliments to Mrs Villiers and much regrets that duty prevents him from accepting her very kind invitation to dine on Friday. However, he hopes to have the honour, and the pleasure, of waiting on her when he returns.
‘Stephen,’ he said, looking up, ‘I am writing to decline
Diana’s invitation – we are ordered to sea tomorrow night.
Should you wish to add a word or send a message?
Babbington is making our excuses.’
‘Let Babbington bear mine by word of mouth, if you please. I am so glad you are not going ashore. It would have been the extreme of folly, with the Polychrest known to be on the station.’