‘That was a lapsus calami indeed,’ observed Stephen, when the dinner was in motion once again. It was a tolerably good remark, if taken on the bound, and like many of his tolerably good remarks it met with no immediate response whatsoever. But although Aubrey’s coat, waistcoat and breeches were wrecked and Edwards had received a generous splash, Fox had been entirely spared by the melted butter; he had also gained a considerable moral advantage from the disaster and he could afford to dispense with a trifle of it. ‘I do not think I quite follow you, sir,’ he said.
‘It is only a miserable little play on words,’ said Stephen. ‘This cuttlefish, which is a loligo, a calamary, has a horny internal shell like a pen, so very like that the animal is sometimes called a pen-fish. And as you will recall,’ he added, speaking to his opposite neighbour, the midshipman, ‘a lapsus calami is a slip of the pen.’
‘I do wish I had understood at first,’ said Reade. ‘I should have laughed like anything.’
The dinner revived with an excellent saddle of mutton and reached its high point with a pair of albatrosses, stewed with Wilson’s savoury sauce and accompanied by a noble burgundy. When they had drunk their port they returned to the great cabin for their coffee, and as they were sitting down Fox said to Stephen, ‘I have at last routed out the Malay texts I spoke of. They are written in Arabic script and of course the short vowels are not shown, but Ahmed is familiar with the tales, and if he reads them to you please do not hesitate to mark the quantities. I will send them round as soon as our game is over.’
A little later Fielding took his leave, leading Reade off with him: none too soon, for the boy’s second glass of port,
incautiously poured by Edwards as the decanter came round, was working in him: his face was cherry red, and he was growing unsuitably loquacious. The card-table was placed and their usual game of whist began, Jack and Stephen paired against Fox and Edwards.
Although they played for low stakes, Edwards being poor, it was severe, rigorous, determined whist; reasonably amiable too, with no ill-temper, no post mortems, for in this one instance Edwards, who was certainly the best player of the four, would not defer to Fox, nor was Fox overbearing; and since Jack and Stephen usually won more rubbers than they lost it was impossible for the other side to tell them what they ought to have done. They won no rubber this time, however. The first was in the balance, at one game all, when Fielding came in, looking grave, and said, ‘May I speak to the Doctor, sir!”
Macmillan, Graham’s youthful mate, very much needed his advice in the sick-bay Stephen went at once He had taken Graham’s place as a matter of course, Macmillan freely stating that his three months at sea did not fit him for such a charge, and although Stephen was
reasonably well acquainted with seamen he was surprised to find how pleased they were It was not only that Killick and Blonden had told them that he was not a mere surgeon but a genuine certificated physician, one that had been called in to treat the Duke of Clarence and that he had been offered the appointment of Physician to the Fleet by Lord Keith; nor only that he did not make them pay for medicines against venereal diseases (an unsound measure, he thought, one that discouraged a man from presenting himself at the earliest, more easily cured stage): it was the voluntary aspect of his labours that impressed them, and his wholly professional attention to his sick-bay and his patients. To be sure, he had inherited the former surgeon’s cabin, which was convenient for his specimens and for nights when the Captain snored too loud; but that did not affect the matter at all, and they were touchingly grateful.
A message came back to the cabin: Dr Maturin’s regrets, but he was unable to return; he was obliged to operate. If Mr
Edwards wished to be present at an amputation, he should come at once, preferably in an old coat.
Edwards excused himself and hurried off. Jack and the envoy stayed, talking in a desultory manner about common acquaintances, the Royal Society, gunnery, the likelihood of heavy weather ahead, and of their private stores running out before the ship reached Batavia; and at the end of the first dog-watch (quarters having been put back for the Captain’s feast) they parted.
The relations between Fox and Aubrey were curious; although their intercourse could no longer remain formal without absurdity (and clearly implied dislike) in so confined a space, with a quarterdeck sixty-eight feet long and thirty-two feet wide as the only place for exercise, it never reached cordiality, remaining at that stage of quite close acquaintance, governed by exact civility and small good offices, which it reached after the first fortnight or so.
It had not reached cordiality by thirty-seven degrees south in spite of the daily turmoil of clearing the ship for action at quarters; in spite of the gunfire, which interested the envoy to a remarkable degree; and in spite of more or less weekly dining to and fro, a good deal of whist and backgammon and a few games of chess; nor had it any immediate chance of doing so once the Diane reached 42’ 15’S and 8°35 ‘W after a week of unexpectedly mild topgallant and even royal breezes.
The day broke clear, but when Stephen came on deck after having made his rounds of the sick-bay he noticed that Jack, Fielding, the master and Dick Richardson were looking at the sky in a very knowing manner.
‘There you are, Doctor,’ said Jack. ‘How is your patient?’
Stephen had several patients, two with syphilitic gummata who were near their ends and some serious pulmonary cases, but he knew that to the naval mind only an amputation really counted, and he replied, ‘He is coming along quite well, I thank you: more comfortable in his mind and body than I had expected.’
‘I am heartily glad of it, because I believe all your people
will have to go below presently. Look at the cloud just west of the sun.’
‘I perceive a faint prismatic halo.’
‘It is a wind-gall.
Wind-gall at morn
Fine weather all gone.’
‘You do not seem displeased.’
‘I am delighted. The sooner we are in the true westerlies the happier I shall be.
They have been strangely delayed, but they are likely to blow most uncommon hard, we being already so far south. Ha, Mr Crown’ – turning to the bosun, who stood smiling by the hances – ‘we shall have our work cut out.’
The group broke up and Fielding asked whether he might look in on Raikes, the man whose leg Stephen had taken off. ‘I have a fellow-feeling for him,’ he observed as they walked along the lower deck.
‘Well you may,’ said Stephen. ‘You were very nearly in the same boat, if I may use the expression.’
It was in fact the same injury, a broken tibia and fibula, caused by the same instrument, a recoiling gun, in Fielding’s case when he was showing an inexperienced crew how best to handle their piece and the captain of the gun pulled the lanyard too soon, and in Raikes’s because the forward breeching had parted, throwing the gun sideways. But Raikes’s had been a compound fracture and after several promising days gangrene had set in, mounting with frightful rapidity, and the leg had had to go to save his life; whereas Fielding’s was now quite well.
Jack had long since made his arrangements with the bosun and the sailmaker, and double preventer-stays, light hawsers for the mastheads and backstays were laid along, together with storm-canvas in large quantities; while Mr Blyth the purser and his steward had the Magellan jackets sorted in the sloproom, ready to serve out.
And Stephen had long since made his arrangements for a subsidiary sick-berth on the after-platform of the orlop deck,
taking in part of the cockpit and part of the Captain’s storeroom, which would be much less liable to flooding in the kind of seas to be expected in the high latitudes. It might seem less airy, and between the tropics it certainly would not do; but south of the fortieth parallel a trifling wind-sail would bring down all the air the most asthmatic patient could desire. He and Macmillan and their loblolly-boy William Low put the last touches to it that morning and then began transferring the patients, their messmates carrying them below in their hammocks with the utmost care.
He dined in the gunroom afterwards, as he often did, not as a guest but as of right.
He liked most of the people: Spotted Dick Richardson was an old friend and Fielding a particularly agreeable companion; and once they had overcome a certain shyness of the Captain’s guest the mess found he fitted in very well. It so happened that he was the only one among them who had been so far south – the others had served in the West Indies, the Baltic, the Mediterranean and even the African station, but never much below the Cape – and he spent much of the meal answering questions and describing the majestic seas of the fifties with a quarter of a mile, half a mile between their lofty crests.