They were still playing when the watch was set, and Killick, laying the table in the dining-cabin said ‘This will stop their gob for a while, thank God. Keep your great greasy thumbs off of the plates, Bill, do: put your white gloves on. Snuff the candles close, and don’t get any wax or soot on the goddam snuffers – no, no, give it here.’ Killick loved to see his silver set out, gleaming and splendid; but he hated seeing it used, except in so far as use allowed him to polish it again: moderate, very moderate use.
He opened the door into the moonlit, music-filled great cabin and stood there severely until the very first pause, when he said ‘Supper’s on table, sir, if you please.’
It was a good supper, consisting, through Mrs Raffles’
kindness, of spaghetti, mutton chops, and toasted cheese followed, again through Mrs Raffles’ kindness, by plum cake. During the meal they drank their usual toasts, and with the last of the wine Jack said, ‘To the dear Surprise, and may we meet her soon.’
‘With all my heart,’ said Stephen, and drained his glass.
They sat reflecting in silence while the current sang past the hull and after some minutes Jack said ‘I wonder whether you would not be well advised to sleep below for this bout. I am going to take the middle watch and I shall be in and out at all hours. I mean to let her run all night and to start disguising her tomorrow; and at first light we shall gut the cabin and trundle the chasers aft.’
In most of Jack Aubrey’s commands Stephen, as the ship’s surgeon, had an alternative cabin opening off the gunroom:
he lay there now, gently swaying with the Nutmeg’s pitch and roll as she ran through the darkness. He lay there on his back, with his hands behind his head, perfectly at his ease.
He did not sleep. The coffee and even more the coca leaves quite outweighed the port, but he did not care. His mind ran along as smooth and easy as the Nutmeg, one ear hearing the general deep voice of a taut-rigged ship with a fine spread of canvas abroad, the unchanging naval sounds, the faint, faint bells in due succession, the cry of ‘All’s well’
right round the ship, the muffled trampling of bare feet at the changing of the watch. It ran with no particular guidance, drifting agreeably from one set of ideas to another connected by some tenuous association until they came to the possibility however remote of finding the Surprise at the far end of the Salibabu Passage. As he evoked her name so he had a clear-cut mental image of her; he smiled in the darkness; and then quite suddenly the loss of his fortune came back to him, his present relative poverty. The Surprise might belong to him, but there would be none of those splendid cruises he had promised himself when peace came back again – cruises in which no imperious voice should ever say ‘There is not a moment to be lost’ and in which he and Martin could wander at large on unknown shores and on remote islands never seen by any man, still less any naturalist, where birds could be taken up by hand, examined, and put back on their nests.
Relative poverty. He would not be able to cruise; he would not be able to endow his chairs of comparative osteology; they would have to sell the house in Half Moon Street. But although he had committed himself to a certain number of annuities his calculations (such as they were) seemed to show that a modest competence might remain if he continued in the service; and perhaps they might be able to keep Diana’s new place in Hampshire, for her Arabian horses.
In any event he was perfectly certain that she would take it well, even if they had to retire to his half-ruined castle in the mountains of Catalonia. His only fear was that on hearing the news she would sell her famous great diamond, the Blue Peter, the joy of her life: for not only would doing so take away that joy but it would also give her an immense moral advantage, and Stephen was convinced that moral advantage was a great enemy to marriage. Few happy marriages did he know among his friends and acquaintance, and in those few the balance seemed to him equal. Then again he found it more blessed to give than to receive; he had a strong disinclination to being obliged; and sometimes, when he was low-spirited, he put this down to an odious incapacity for gratitude.
Moral advantage. After his parents’ death he had spent much of his childhood and youth in Spain, housed by various members of his mother’s family before finding a true home with his godfather and cousin Don Ramón: two of these relations, CosI Francesc and CosI Eulália, he knew well at three distinct periods of his life, as a small child, as an adolescent and as a grown man. At the time of his first visit they were a newly-married pair and they seemed quite fond of one another, though they were already tolerably strict and severe –
early-morning Mass every day in the icy cathedral of Teruel. During his next stay the fondness was by no means apparent in anything but forms of unselfishness and deference to the other’s will; and at his third it was quite clear to him that what fondness there may have been had been eaten away by a struggle for moral superiority. Their life had become a com
petitive martyrdom: competitive fasting, competitive holiness, competitive fortitude and self-denial, a dreadful uncomplaining cheerfulness in that ancient cold damp stony house, an intensely watchful competition that could only be won by the cousin that died first; though CosI Eulália told him as a secret never to be divulged that she had spent all Don Ramón’s presents and all her dress allowance for the last three years in prayers and Masses for her husband’s spiritual welfare.
It was not that he thought Diana would profit from her advantage in any way or even be aware that she had one -that was not her style at all. It was rather that he, with his fundamentally rather inferior character, should be oppressed by her generosity.
Six bells, quite distinctly. What watch were they in now, for the love of God? And surely the ship was moving faster still: the fundamental note had risen half a tone. What more tiresome life than a sailor’s, perpetually obliged to leap out of bed and run about in the noxious damps? His mind turned to his probable, almost certain daughter, now little more than a larva with virtually no conversation, but with such potentialities! A Mozart string quartet began singing in his head.
‘If you please, sir,’ said a voice that had been going on for some time and that he connected with the irregular motion of his cot. ‘If you please, sir.’
‘Were you jerking the strings or lifts of my cot, Mr Conway?’ asked Stephen, giving him a malevolent look.
‘Yes, sir. Beg pardon, sir,’ said Conway. ‘Captain’s compliments, and it is all over now: hopes you have not been too much disturbed and that you will join him at breakfast.’
‘My compliments to the Captain, if you please, and I shall be happy to wait on him.’
‘There you are, Stephen,’ cried Captain Aubrey. ‘Good morning to you. I thought you would be amazed.’
Amazed he was, and for once it showed in his face; for although the forward bulkhead had been replaced, so that he walked into the dining-cabin through the usual door, past the Marine sentry, the rest of the space aft was bare – no wall
dividing the dining-cabin from the great cabin – a great bare space with nothing in it but the two chairs, the breakfast-table and far away the nine-pounder chase-guns hard up against
the ordinarily imperceptible stern portlids. The checkered canvas deck-covering was gone; the room was strangely vast and empty – not a chest, not a book-case, not an elbow-chair, nothing but these guns on the bald planking, with their shot-garlands, wads, rammers, worms and the rest. There was almost nothing familiar in the cabin but the table, the far-off stern-windows, the carronades on either side, and the delightful smell of coffee and frying bacon brought aft by who knows what complex eddies and counter-currents.
Jack rang the bell, observing, ‘I have not invited any officers or mids. They are all too filthy; and in any case it is far too late in the day. You will be even more amazed when you go on deck. We started ruining the poor Nutmeg’s looks when we ordinarily clean the decks, and I do assure you the forecastle is already a hissing and an abomination.’
Breakfast came in, breakfast on the heroic scale, calculated for a large, heavy, powerful man who had been up before first light and who had so far eaten no more than a piece of biscuit. The clash of knives and forks, of china upon china, the sound of pouring coffee, a conversation reduced to such words as ‘Will I pass you another egg, so?’