During the service itself he joined other Catholics for a recital of a Saint Brigid’s rosary under the forecastle: they were of all possible colours and origins, and some were momentarily confused by the unusual number of Ayes, but wherever they came from their Latin was recognizably the same; there was a sense of being at home; and they recited away in an agreeable unison while from aft came the sound of Anglican hymns and a psalm. They both finished at about the same time, and
Stephen walked back to the quarterdeck, overtaking Captain Pullings as he was walking into the coach, where he lived, necessarily resigning the cabin to the Commodore.
‘Well, Tom,’ he said, ‘so you have survived your ordeal?’ – As Captain of the Bellona he had just read one of South’s shorter sermons to the people – ‘I have, sir: it comes a little easier, as you said; but sometimes I wish we were just a pack of wicked heathens. Lord, I could do with my dinner, and a drink.’
Dinner, when it came, was quite exceptionally good; and for the best part of an hour before the Bellona’s officers and their guests sat down, a hot wind had been blowing off the land – hot, but startlingly dry, so that their uniform no longer clung to them and their appetite revived amazingly.
‘This is the first blast of the dry season,’ said Whewell, talking to Stephen across the table. ‘The two will chop and change for about a week or two, and then I dare say we shall have a right harmattan, the decks covered with brown dust and everything splitting, and then it settles in till Lady Day.’
The conversation ran on dry seasons – far better than wet
– the delight of satisfying an enormous thirst – and presently Stephen, turning to his right-hand neighbour, a Marine lieutenant from the Stately, said how he admired the soldiers’ endurance of either extreme, standing there like images in the sun or the bitter cold, or marching, wheeling and countermarching with such perfect regularity. ‘There is something wonderfully agreeable in the sight of that self-command – or one might almost say relinquishment of self – in that formal, rhythmic precision, the tuck of drum, the stamp
and clash of arms. Whether it has anything to do with war or not, I cannot tell; but the spectacle delights me.’
‘How I agree with you, sir,’ said the Marine. ‘And it has always seemed to me that there is something far more to drill than simply training in steadiness and obedience to the word of command. Little do I know of the Pyrrhic dance, yet it pleases me to imagine that it was in the nature of our manoeuvres, only with a clearly-acknowledged, rather than a dimly-perceived, sacred function. The Foot Guards offer a fine example of what I mean, when they troop their colours.’
‘The religious element in dancing can scarcely be denied. After all, David danced before the Ark of the Covenant, and in those parts of Spain where the Mozarabic rite is preserved a measured dance still forms part of the Mass.’ Here Stephen was called upon to drink a glass of wine with Captain Pullings, while his neighbour joined an animated discussion on the preservation of game at the other end of the table.
The meal wound on: the first lieutenant carved a saddle of mutton and then a leg in a way that did the Bellona credit, and the claret decanters pursued their steady round. Yet presently even the subject of putting down pheasants and circumventing poachers was exhausted, and Stephen, finding his Marine disengaged, said ‘One thing that I do remember about the Pyrrhic dance is that it was danced in armour.’
‘I am happy to hear you say so, sir,’ said the young man with a smile – a strikingly handsome young man – ‘for it strengthens my point, since we do the same. To be sure, we admit the degeneration that has taken place since Hector and Lysander and we have reduced our equipment in due proportion; but mutatis mutandis, we still drill, or dance, in armour.’
‘Do you indeed?’ cried Stephen. ‘I had never noticed it.’
‘Why, this, sir,’ said the Royal Marine, tapping his gorget, a little silver crescent hanging on the front of his red coat, ‘this is a breast-plate. Somewhat smaller than the breast-plate Achilles wore, but then so are our deserts.’ He laughed very cheerfully, seizing a decanter on the wing, filled Stephen’s glass and his own. He had not drunk the half before Tom Pullings held up his hand, and in a dead silence the cry from the masthead was repeated, coming down clear and plain through the open hatchways and gunports: ‘On deck, there. Land ho! Land broad on the larboard bow.’
‘Mr Harding, you will excuse me: I must acquaint the Commodore. Gentlemen, pray carry on with your dinner. In case I do not come back, thank you all for your hospitality.’
He did not come back: and since there was little point in leaving their meat to see very distant land they did carry on. The hot, almost parching wind was blowing stronger and
although some officers called for negus or lemon shrub, others quenched their rising thirst with claret, and a fresh dozen had to be brought up.
In time, with the absence of the captain and the presence of a newly-promoted first lieutenant with little natural authority, the talk grew louder and much more free. Stephen and his Marine had to raise their voices for their words to be heard at all – words still connected with such things as the formal dancing of the last age in France and with drill as applied to cavalry and whole fleets – and Stephen was disagreeably aware that his neighbour was drinking, had drunk, too much, and that his attention had wandered to the conversation at the purser’s end, where they were talking, often several at once, about sodomy.
‘You may say what you like,’ said the tall, thin lieutenant, second of the Thames,
‘but they are never really men. They may have pretty ways and read books and so on, but they will not toe the scratch in a fight. I had two in a gun-crew when I was a mid in Britannia, and when things grew rather hot they hid between the scuttle-butt and the capstan.’
Other views were heard, other convictions and experiences, some tolerant, even benign, but most more or less violently opposed to sodomites.
‘In this atmosphere I scarcely think it would be worth mentioning Patroclus or the Theban Legion,’ murmured Stephen, but the Marine was too intent on the general medley of voices to pay attention: he filled another glass and drank it without taking his eyes from the group round the purser.
‘You may say what you like,’ said the tall, thin lieutenant, ‘but even if I had the same tastes I should be very sorry to have to go into action aboard a ship commanded by one of them, however stately.’
‘If that is a fling against my ship, sir,’ cried the Marine, pushing his chair back and standing up, very pale, ‘I must ask you to withdraw it at once. The Stately’s fighting qualities admit no sort of question.’
‘I was not aware that you belonged to Stately, sir,’ said the lieutenant.
‘I see that there are others who do not choose to toe the scratch,’ said the Marine; and now there was a general movement to separate the two men, general clamour, general extreme concern. Eventually both were put into their separate boats, the Stately’s most unhappily manned by some of her captain’s young ladies.
Already the land was high and clear: the hot wind blew as strong and as fair as could be wished and the Bellona, Stately and Thames were nearing the point at which they should cut off any fugitive escaping from Philip’s Island. But already signals were passing from the inshore brigs to the pennant by way of the Laurel – there were no fugitives to be cut off – the harbour was empty – the slavers were not to appear for three days, they having been delayed at Takondi, and although the barracoons, the great slave-pens, had held many negroes when the inshore force arrived, they had now been marched off.
Jack Aubrey altered course, and by the grace of the tide and the evening breeze his three ships ran straight into the harbour, conned by Square, who knew the inlets and anchorages intimately well. The signal for all captains broke out aboard the Bellona before her anchor was down, and the boats converged upon her in the brief tropical dusk.
After he had conferred with them he said to Stephen, ‘I intend to stand out to sea again, out of sight, sending the brigs
and schooners east along the coast to the Muni lagoon, to stop any coastwise boats or canoes that might carry warning, and to lay those fellows aboard as soon as they are here in the harbour. According to Whewell’s predictions and to Square’s