‘Ha, ha,’ said Maturin suddenly. ‘I remember what a vile mud-scow we made of the dear Surprise, to deceive the Spartan. Turds everywhere.’
‘Oh sir,’ cried the master in protest.
‘Mind you, Mr Fielding,’ said Jack, ‘the filth does not have to be fundamental. It does not have to bear very close scrutiny. We only have to look so like a merchantman that we can come
within range; for once we start firing we must of course do so under our own colours.’
Stephen left them discussing the details of this horrid change and went to make his rounds. Macmillan greeted him with an anxious face and said ‘I am very sorry to tell you, sir, that two dental cases have reported; and I must confess that I am at a loss, wholly at a loss.’
Macmillan uttered these words in Latin, as well he might, the patients being just at hand, their anguished eyes fixed upon the surgeons. In any case the Latin comforted them, being the tongue of the learned, not of some cow-leach who had taken the bounty and who topped it the physician on the forecastle.
‘So am I,’ said Stephen, having examined the teeth, awkwardly-placed, deeply carious molars in both cases. ‘So indeed am I. However, we must do our best. Let me see what instruments we possess . . .’ Looking them over he shook his head and said ‘Well, at least let us apply oil of cloves and then stuff the hollows with lead in the hope they will not crumble under our forceps.’
A vain hope; and when at last he left the seamen to the care of their messmates and the ship’s butcher, who had held their heads, he was paler than they.
‘It is an odd thing,’ he said, returning to the cabin, where Jack was settled on the rudder-casing, plucking the strings of his fiddle and watching the broad wake tear away, ‘It is an odd thing, yet although I can take off a shattered limb, open a man’s skull, cut him for the stone, or if he is a woman deliver him of an uneasy breech-presentation in a seamanlike manner and without a qualm – not indeed with indifference to the suffering and the danger but with what may perhaps be called a professional constancy of mind – I cannot extract a tooth without real agitation. It is the same with Macmillan, though he is an excellent young man in every other respect. I shall never go to sea again without an experienced tooth-drawer, however illiterate he may be.’
‘I am sorry you had such a disagreeable time,’ said Jack. ‘Let us both take a cup of coffee.’
Coffee was as much his universal remedy as the alcoholic tincture of opium had once been for Stephen, and he now called for it loud and clear.
Killick looked sourer than usual: coffee was not customary at this time of day. ‘It will have to be black, then,’ he said. ‘I can’t go on milking Nanny watch and watch. Do, and she will go dry. A goat ain’t a cistern, sir.’
‘Strong black coffee,’ said Stephen some minutes later. ‘How well it goes down: and how glad I am that I did not indulge myself in my coca-leaves on finishing with the sick-berth as I had intended. They calm the mind, sure, but they do away with one’s sense of taste. I shall chew three when the pot is out, however.’ These leaves, which he had first encountered in South America, were his present, purely personal, catholicon, and
although he travelled with enough, packed in soft leather bags, to last him twice round the world, he was remarkably abstemious: these three leaves, now to be chewed so late in the afternoon, were an unusual treat. ‘Surely,’ he said, gazing about, ‘the ship is going at a most uncommon speed? See how the water flings wide, see how the turbulence sweeps away into the past, and there is a general sound all about us -you are to observe that we both raise our voices – that cannot be located but whose predominant note is almost exactly that G your thumb is plucking’
Hardly were these words out than Reade came bouncing in His wound had healed wonderfully, but Stephen still made him wear a kind of padded bandoher to protect the socket in case of falls and lurches, and his empty sleeve was pinned to it He was treated with extraordinary tenderness by all hands, he had entirely recovered his spirits and he had already developed an agility that almost compensated for his loss ‘Mr Richardson’s duty, sir,’ he said, and he thought you would like to know that we are doing twelve knots and one fathom almost exactly. I chalked it up myself.’
Jack laughed aloud ‘Twelve knots one fathom, and that with the wind so far abaft. Thank you, Mr Reade. Pray tell Mr Richardson that he may set a skyscraper on the foremast if he sees fit: and that there will be no quarters this evening.’
‘Aye aye, sir. And if you please he said that was I to see the Doctor I should tell him there is a prodigious curious bird
keeping company, very like an albatross, with somewhat in its beak.’
Stephen ran up on deck in time to watch the bird’s long struggle to disengage the cuttle-fish bone it had transfixed. Once the bone was free the albatross wheeled away, racing southward across the wind and vanishing almost at once among the white horses. ‘I thank you heartily for showing me the bird,’ he said to Richardson, who replied, ‘Not at all, sir,’
and then, taking him by the elbow, ‘If you will stand just here and bend a little, looking at the top of the foremast, I will show you a skyscraper in a minute. We set them flying, you know.’
Stephen bent and gazed, and amidst a series of orders, pipes and the cry of Belay he saw a triangular scrap of white appear high above all the other whitenesses, clear in the sun, to the evident satisfaction of the many hands along the immaculate deck – it had just been swept for the second time since dinner.
‘One of the smaller albatrosses,’ he said, coming back, ‘and it was in the act of detaching a cuttle bone from its upper mandible. The bird may have carried it for a thousand miles and more.’
‘I wish it had been a letter from home,’ said Jack. They were both silent for a moment, and then Jack went on, ‘I had always connected albatrosses with the high southern latitudes.
What kind was this one?’
‘I cannot tell. I only know that it was not Linnaeus’ exulans, though he has it wandering in the tropics. There is one species from Japan that has been described and another from the Sandwich Islands. This may have been either or some quite unknown bird; but I should have had to shoot it to make sure, and I have grown rather tired of killing. . . You have noticed, I make no doubt, that the horizon is now quite clear.’
‘Yes. The haze vanished in the night, and we had an excellent observation of Rasaihague and the moon which confirmed not only our position by chronometer but even by our dead reckoning almost to the very minute of longitude, which was tolerably gratifying, I believe.’
Then, seeing that this splendid news aroused no particular emotion nor indeed anything but a civil inclination of the head, he said ‘What do you say to taking up our game where we left off? I was winning, you will recall.’
‘Winning, for all love: how your ageing memory does betray you, my poor friend,’ said Stephen, fetching his ‘cello. They tuned, and at no great distance Killick said to his mate,
‘There they are, at it again. Squeak, squeak; boom, boom. And when they do start a-playing, it’s no better. You can’t tell t’other from one. Never nothing a man could sing to, even as drunk as Davy’s sow.’
‘I remember them in the lively: but it is not as chronic as a wardroom full of gents with German flutes, bellyaching night and day, like we had in Thunderer. No. Live and let live, I say.’
‘Fuck you, William Grimshaw.’
The game they played was that one should improvise in the manner of some eminent composer (or as nearly as indifferent skill and a want of inspiration allowed), that the other, having detected the composer, should then join in, accompanying him with a suitable continuo until some given point understood by both, when the second should take over, either with the same composer or with another. They, at least, took great pleasure in this exercise, and now they played on into the darkness with only a pause at the end of the first dog-watch, when Jack went on deck to take his readings of temperature and salinity with Adams and to reduce sail for the night.