‘Well,’ said Martin, ‘although I have not seen an orang-utang, my journey has not been without its interesting moments. You may recall that last time we had the happiness of walking in the Brazilian forest I was bitten by an owl-faced night-ape.’
‘Certainly I do. How you bled!’
‘This time I was bitten by a tapir, and bled even more.’
‘A tapir, for all love?’
‘A young striped and spotted tapir, Tapirus americanus. I saw his huge dark-brown distracted mother at the turn of a little sort of track or path by the river. She rushed wildly into the water below and was seen no more. I found that he was caught in a pitfall, and when with infinite pains I had seized him and hoisted him to the edge, he bit me. If there were any light I should show you the scar. And before I could get out of the pit a band of Indians came up, no doubt those that had dug it; and they reproached me very bitterly, stabbing the air with their spears. I was exceedingly uneasy, so uneasy that I hardly felt the pain; but happily a party from the ship appeared, and one of the seamen who spoke Portuguese gave them a piece of tobacco and desired them to go about their business.
But it comes to me that one of the party was Wilkins, whose broken arm you saw in the sick-berth: may I break off for a moment and ask what you thought of him?’
‘It seemed to me an ordinary distal radius-ulna transverse fracture with some lateral displacement effectively reduced:
the kind of break you would expect from a fall. But as it was dressed according to the Basra method I did not see much of the arm. When did it take place?’
‘Three weeks ago; and it is not yet knit, nor beginning to knit. The ends are closely approximated – there is crepitus -but there is no union.’
‘You suspect scurvy, I collect? Sure, that is a usual sign, though by no means infallible.
And incipient scurvy would in part account for John Brampton’s extreme lowness of spirits.
Are we out of juice?’
‘No. But I opened a new keg no great while ago, and I doubt its quality. We bought it in Buenos Aires.’
‘I have a net of fresh lemons and an elegant private keg, wholly reliable, which will do for some months. But as Captain Aubrey does not intend to touch at New Guinea, and as the voyage is long, we may ask him to steer in time for a convenient, well-charted, well-stocked island.’
Eight bells below them and the watch was mustered – loud, unmistakable calls, hoots and pipes.
‘Lord,’ cried Stephen, ‘I shall be late again. Will you sup with us?’
‘Thank you: you are very good, but I must beg to be excused this time,’ said Martin, looking through the lubber’s hole with some anxiety. ‘We shall have to climb down in the dark.’
‘So we must,’ said Stephen. ‘If it were not for my engagement I should as soon have stayed up here, so soft and gentle a night, with no fear of the moonpall or of falling damps.’
‘If we had a little dark lantern we could see better,’ said Martin.
‘Truer word was never spoke,’ said Stephen. ‘I do not like to call for one however; it might seem unseamanlike.’
‘It was this very top Wilkins fell from when he broke his arm. It is true he was drunk at the time, but the height is much the same.’
‘Come, let us show more than Roman fortitude,’ said Stephen. ‘Gravity will help us, and perhaps Saint Brendan.’ He let himself down through the hole, his feet groping for the ratlines, very narrow up here, where the shrouds were crowded in so close. His toe found one, far, far down, and he let go the rim; but he did so without considering that he should have waited for the roll to swing him in towards the mast. For a moment as disagreeable as any his hands clawed the empty darkness: they did in fact seize a shroud, the aftermost of all, for he had not waited for the pitch either. He clung there long enough to be able to answer with an even voice when Martin, who being on the other side had profited by the roll, asked him how he did: ‘Perfectly well, I thank you.’
‘Forgive me if I am a little late,’ he said, walking into the smell of toasted cheese. ‘I am just come from the mizentop.’
‘Not at all,’ said Jack. ‘As you see, I have not waited for you.’
‘I was in the mizentop from before sunset until a couple of minutes ago.’
‘Yes,’ said Jack. ‘Should you like some wine, or shall you wait for the punch?’
‘Considering my excesses at dinner and the state of the wine in this climate, I believe I shall confine myself to punch, to a very moderate dose of punch. What an elegant toasted-cheese dish. Have I seen it before?’
‘No. This is the first time it has been out of its box. I had ordered it from the man in Dublin you recommended, and I picked it up when we were last at the cottage. Then I forgot all about it.’
Stephen lifted the lid and there were six several dishes, sizzling gently over a spirit-lamp under the outer shell, the whole gleaming from Killick’s devoted hand. He turned it this way and that, admiring the workmanship, and said ‘It is the long road you have come, Jack, that you can forget a hundred guineas or so.’
‘Lord, yes,’ said Jack. ‘Lord, we were so miserably poor! I remember how you came back to that house in Hampstead with a fine beef-steak wrapped in a cabbage-leaf, and how happy we were.’
They talked of their poverty – bailiffs – arrest for debt -sponging-houses – fears of more arrests – various expedients -but presently, when these, considerations of wealth and poverty, the wheel of fortune and so on had been dealt with, the zest and cheerfulness went out of the conversation; and after his second dish of cheese Stephen became aware of a certain constraint in his friend. The frank hearty laugh was heard no more; Jack’s eyes were directed more at the massive gun that shared the cabin with them than at Stephen’s face. Silence fell, as much silence as could fall in a ship making eight knots, with the water singing along her hull, her troubled wake streaming, and all her standing and running rigging together with its countless blocks uttering their particular notes in a general volume of sound.
Out of this silence Jack said ‘I went round the ship this afternoon to ask our shipmates how they did, and I noticed that they were many of them older than when I saw them last.
That made me think perhaps I was older too; and when you spoke of the barky as an aged man-of-war it quite put me about. And yet it was absurd in me to toss all these together in one gloomy pot; for although the Sethians may have grown beards a yard long, and although no doubt I ought to wear lean and slippery pantaloons, a ship and a man are different things.’
‘Is that right, brother?’
‘Yes, it is: you may not think so, but they are quite different. The Surprise is not old. Look at Victoty. She is tolerably spry, I believe. Nobody would call her old, I believe. But she was built years before the Surprise. Look at the Royal William. You know the William, Stephen? I have pointed her out many and many a time among the hulks at Pompey. A first-rate of 110 guns.’
‘Sure I remember. A dreadful-looking object.’
‘That is only because of the uses she has been put to. It is her heart and life I am talking about: her timbers are as sound as the day she was built, or sounder: you run your knife into one of her knees and it will bend or break in your goddam hand; and I saw a length of one of her shrouds, when the worming and service were taken off, perfectly sound too.
White untarred cordage, and perfectly sound. And the Royal William was laid down in sixteen seventy-six. Sixteen seventy-six. No, no; perhaps the Surprise is not one of your gimcrack modern craft, flung together with unseasoned timber by contract in some hole-in-the-corner yard: she may have been built some time ago, but she is not old. And you know
– who better? -the improvements that have been carried out: diagonal bracing, reinforced knees, sheathing . .
‘You speak quite passionately, my dear: protectively, as if I had said something disagreeable about your wife.’
‘That is because I do in fact feel passionate and protective. I have known this ship so many years, man and boy, that I do not like to hear her blackguarded.’