As the Diane sailed south and south with even stronger winds, through even more tremendous seas, reaching forty-five degrees and then steering due east, he set about learning her true inner nature and her capabilities when she was pushed to the limit. This entailed many changes of sail, very exact trimming, very exact observation, and the closest watch on
sheet and brace; but when the right set was found – they varied of course according to the amount of north or south in the great westerly winds, but they were variations on a single theme – there began a series of splendid days when she would run three hundred miles and more between noon and noon, and when Jack was rarely off the deck, appearing in the cabin only to eat or go fast asleep sitting in his elbow-chair.
This was splendid progress, the degrees of latitude passing in rapid succession; but for any but dedicated seamen the pleasure was intellectual only. This was the southern winter, the sky low and grey, the daylight sparse, the bitterly cold air filled with rain or sleet mixed with spindrift and atomized seawater, the decks permanently awash.
The cry of sweepers was no longer heard; there was no dust, there were no ropeshakings nor any hint of them, and the frozen afterguard could huddle in peace beneath the booms.
Stephen came up from time to time when neither rain nor flying spray was very severe to gaze upon the albatrosses that accompanied the ship, sometimes staying for days together. Most were the Diomedea exulans of Linnaeus, the bird he loved best of all that lived at sea, the great wandering albatross, an immense creature, twelve feet across or even more, the old cock-birds a pure snowy white with black, black edgings; but there were others that he could not identify with any certainty, birds to which the sailors gave the general name of mollymawks.
‘Not nearly enough serious attention has been paid to the albatrosses,’ he said to Fox, who had come to consult him about pains or rather general discomfort in his lower belly, difficulties with defecation, disturbed nights.
‘Nor to the digestive system,’ said Fox. ‘If man is a thinking reed he is also a reed that absorbs and excretes, and if these functions are disturbed so is the first, and humanity recedes, leaving the mere brute.’
‘These pills will recall your colon to its duty, with the blessing, and the diet I have prescribed,’ said Stephen. ‘But you will admit that it is whimsical to make distinctions between
the lesser pettichaps and her kin, counting their wing feathers, measuring their bills, and to neglect the albatrosses, the great soaring birds of the world.’
‘They are not the same pills as before?’ asked Fox.
‘They are not,’ said Stephen with an easy conscience, for this time to the powdered chalk he had added the harmless pink of cochineal.
Fox had consulted him quite often lately, and for a variety of disorders; but it had soon become apparent to Stephen that his trouble was loneliness. He was undoubtedly an able man
– his account of the Malay rajahs and sultans, their intricate lines of descent, their connexions, feuds, alliances, past history and present policy was enough to prove that, without his profound knowledge of early Buddhism or current Mahometan law – but he had a strong, dominant personality and he had so crushed his retiring, unassertive secretary in everything except the matter of whist that the young man was no longer anything of a companion to him.
Yet although Fox might wish to be acquainted and even quite familiar with others, for his own part he did not choose to be known; he was unusually reserved. Then again there was a hint of condescension in his manner, a certain assumption of superior knowledge, status or natural parts, that prevented Jack and Stephen from looking forward to his company with very much pleasure.
Stephen had the impression that Fox thought the mission of very great consequence, in which he was probably right; and that the successful conclusion of it, the carrying home of a treaty, would gratify his ambition and self-esteem to the highest possible degree; but as well as this Stephen felt that he was more flattered by the office of envoy, and by its externals, than might have been expected in a man of his abilities. He never invited the officers, although they had been introduced to him; and if on the quarterdeck he asked them a question to do with the ship or gunnery he would listen to their explanation with a smile and a nod of his head that seemed to say that although he had not known these things the
ignorance did not diminish him in any way – they were merely technical – an honnéte homme was not required to know them.
In any case at this juncture neither Jack nor Stephen had any time to spare for social intercourse. Jack was taken up with sailing his ship and Stephen, quite apart from the preservation, classification and description of his Tristan da Cunha specimens, the rich harvest of extreme activity in a cruelly limited time on the lower parts of that scientifically unknown island, inhabited by numbers of nondescript cryptogams, probably several flowering plants (though this was the wrong season for them), a quantity of beetles and other insects, some spiders, and at least two peculiar birds, a finch and a thrush, and quite
apart from his Malay, had his sick-berth to look after. A full sick-berth, for sailing a ship eastwards in the forties was a dangerous business at any time and more so in the winter, when numb hands had to grapple with frozen ropes high above the deck, while on the deck itself, in spite of the life-lines stretched fore and aft, a heavy sea might dash men against guns, bitts, the capstan and even on one occasion the belfrey. Strained, twisted joints, torn muscles, cracked ribs and yet another broken leg came down, together with rope burns, ordinary burns from the cook and his mates being flung against the galley stove, and of course disabling chilblains by the score – scarcely a watch without a majority of men who hobbled.
Yet it was not always foul weather. One morning after a day and a night of such a blast that the frigate could carry no more than a close-reefed maintopsail and forestaysail, Stephen, who had had little sleep until the changing of the watch at four, made his rounds late after a solitary breakfast in the gunroom. He was showing young Macmillan an expeditious way of fastening a cingulum for a hernia case when Seymour came in with the Captain’s compliments, and when Dr Maturin was at leisure he might like to come on deck. ‘You will need a watch-coat, sir,’ he added. ‘It is right parky up there.’
So it was; but the astonishment of the brilliant blue, the sunshine and the light-filled sails quite took the sense of cold
away. ‘There you are, Doctor,’ cried Jack, who was wearing an antique Monmouth cap as well as a pilot-jacket, ‘Good morning to you, and a very pretty one it is, upon my word. Harding, jump down to the cabin and ask Ahmed to give you a comforter to wrap round the Doctor’s head: he will lose his ears else.’
‘Heavens, what glory,’ said Stephen, gazing about.
‘Yes, ain’t it?’ said Jack. ‘The wind hauled right aft in the morning watch, so we were able to spread more canvas. As you see, we have maintopsail, forecourse and spritsail; I hope for foretopgallant if it eases a little . .
The explanations continued, with some valuable remarks on scandalizing the foretopsail yard, but Stephen was taken up with piecing the elements of this stupendous scene into a whole. First there was the sky, high, pure and of a darker blue than he had ever seen. And then there was the sea, a lighter, immensely luminous blue that reflected blue into the air, the shadows and the sails; a sea that stretched away immeasurably when the surge raised the frigate high, showing an orderly array of great crests, each three furlongs from its predecessor, and all sweeping eastwards in an even, majestic procession. As each approached the Diane’s stern its high white-marbled face reared to the height of the crossjack.yard, threatening destruction; then the stern rose, rose, the deck tilting forward, the force of the wind increasing, and the crest passed smoothly along the side. A few moments later the ship sank into the valley between the waves, her view confined, her sails growing limp. To these there was added the sun, unseen for so long and unseen even now, since the topsail hid it, but filling the world with an almost tangible light. It flashed on the wings of an albatross that came gliding into the wind so close to the quarterdeck rail that it could very nearly be touched.