‘Dearest Sophie,’ he wrote, ‘A captain worth his name knows a great deal about his ship, her capabilities, her stores, her weaknesses and so on; and common daily observation shows him his people’s seamanship and fighting qualities: but he lives so far from his officers and men that unless he listens to tale-bearers there is a great deal he does not know. These last weeks I have been worried by the obvious ill-will in the gunroom and its bad effects on discipline; I had both directly and indirectly told them to be more civil, but only this morning did Tom, horribly confused at informing on his messmates, tell me the reason for this ill-will. I had thought it the usual weariness of a long commission with the same faces, the same jokes, perhaps sharpened by some foolish raillery carried too far, losses at cards, chess, arguments – but all this carried much farther than I should ever have let it go. I am much to blame. Yet this morning, just before I called them in to reprove them for the horrible mess they had made of unmooring the ship, Tom let me know that they hated one another because of Mrs Oakes; and that it would not do to give Oakes an order as acting-lieutenant, because with her at the table their rivalry might well break bounds.
‘It is a shame that such a modest, well-conducted woman should be so persecuted, and kept to the dismal solitary messing of the midshipmen’s berth; I am sure she has given no encouragement, even in the most harmless usual shipboard way, has never said “Pray do up this button for me; my fingers are all thumbs,” or “I hope you do not think my tucker too low.” No. And at a most discreditable dinner the gunroom gave for her, with half her hosts as mute as fishes, she kept things going most courageously. I do like courage in a woman. By the way, I was quite mistaken about Stephen, when I feared he might be too fond: they went for a walk in the country yesterday and came back so pleased and
affectionate together, carrying some extraordinary flowers and a bag of Stephen’s birds and beetles. I have a mind to ask her and her husband to dine tomorrow, to mark the point; but I am not sure. I was so angered by seeing the ship exposed and mishandled this morning that I have little heart for entertaining; and Oakes himself, though a tolerable seaman, is a shocking drag. I shall ask Stephen: he is examining her in his cabin at this minute.’
Although Jack and Stephen had played some deeply satisfying music that evening, Stephen sitting with his feet braced against the heel of the ship on a batten shipped for the purpose and Jack standing to play his fiddle, the Captain woke early in the morning watch on Sunday with the humiliation of his ship’s disgrace still strong in his mind, and a clear recollection of Wainwright’s silent astonishment and tactfully averted eyes when they came on deck. The wind had begun dropping through the middle watch, as some inner recorder told him, and he was not at all surprised to find the ship ghosting along under limp, dew-soaked sails over a grey sea with barely a ripple on the heavy swell from the south.
‘Good morning, Mr Davidge,’ he said, taking the log-board from its place. ‘Good morning, Mr Oakes.’
‘Good morning, sir,’ said Davidge. ‘Good morning, sir,’ said Oakes.
Although there were stars and even their reflexions in the west, the eastern sky was light enough for him to read the board: and from what the sky to starboard told he saw the calm would not last.
‘Have any sharks been seen?’ he asked. Davidge hailed the lookout: no sharks, no sharks at all, sir. ‘I will just peep under the counter, sir,’ said Oakes. ‘Sometimes we have a messmate there.’ A moment later he called ‘All clear, sir.’
‘Thankee, Mr Oakes,’ said Jack. He walked to the gangway stanchions, hung his shirt and trousers over the ridge-rope, breathed deep and dived deeper. The bubbles hissed past him, his whole weight changed; and the water was cool enough to be wonderfully refreshing. He swam powerfully for half a mile, and turning he contemplated the ship, her trim, her perfect lines, as she rose and fell, sometimes disappearing altogether in the trough of the swell. The sun had now turned the whole sky blue, light blue, and he could feel its warmth on the back of his neck. Yet even so some blackness remained; he did not rejoice with the whole of his being. The abiding fury was wholly dissipated however when within twenty yards of the frigate he caught sight of Mrs Oakes leaning over the quarterdeck rail, far aft.
‘Heavens,’ he cried inwardly. ‘I may be seen naked,’ and he instantly dived, swimming as fast and far as he could on one breath.
He need not have feared nor held his breath to so near bursting-point: already Oakes was running in one direction to shield her eyes and Killick, with a towel, in the other, to shield his person.
Killick, seeing his captain’s approach from afar, had also timed his first breakfast with particular care, rather as a keeper obliged to live in the same cage with a testy omnipotent lion might time his gobbets of horseflesh to the very first stroke of the zoological bell.
For once Stephen shared this first breakfast. He had been so much taken up with encoding that he had not looked at a tenth part of his botany specimens nor even at all his birds and their parasites with anything like really close attention, and the thought of them
brought him out of his cot at first light with that almost trembling or rather bubbling excitement he had known from very early days – his first sight of St Dabeoc’s heath when he was seven, of a dell filled with Gold of Pleasure the next year, and of the Pyrenean desman (that rare ill-natured cousin to the shrew) only a few weeks after that!
‘I was very near offering Mrs Oakes a dreadful spectacle just now,’ said Jack after a pause in which they each drank two cups of coffee. ‘I was swimming back – was within pistol-shot
-when I noticed her there at the rail. Had she looked my way she must have beheld a naked man.’
‘That would have been very shocking, indeed,’ said Stephen. ‘Pray pass the breadfruit toast.’ He remembered an earlier occasion on which Mrs Oakes had in fact beheld a naked man, through the scuttle of the cabin in which she had been examined, perfectly unmoved. Jack was standing in a boat, giving directions about the recovery of a hawser cut by the sharp coral rock and on the point of diving himself; and she contemplated him with a detached interest: ‘Captain Aubrey would be considered a fine figure of a man even in Ireland, would he not?’ she asked. ‘But surely he has been most dreadfully cut about?’
‘I should scarcely like to number the wounds I have sewn up and dressed, or the musket and pistol balls I have extracted,’ said Stephen. ‘You are to observe, ma’am, that they are all honourably in front; except for those that are behind.’
That was long before their walk in Annamooka: indeed it was the first time he had distinctly seen anything unusual in her attitude towards men, an almost clinical attitude that disconcerted him to some degree, since neither her face nor her everyday behaviour was marked by any irregularity of life. He was still thinking of her when Jack said
‘Speaking of Mrs Oakes, it is long since I heard her howling on Martin’s viola: or Martin himself, for that matter.’
‘I believe I understood him to say that the neck was out of order: or possibly the head.
How does it come about, do you suppose, that so few people play it? For a score that make their attempts upon a fiddle not more than one, nay less, tries the viola. Yet it has or can have the sweetest voice.’
‘I cannot tell, I am sure. Perhaps they are less easy to come by. Perhaps they are even more difficult to master: think how rare it is to find a player of the very first rate, fit to answer a violin like Cramer or Kreutzer in say Mo/art’s . . . Come in. Come in and sit down, Tom,’ he called, pouring him a cup of coffee.
‘Thank you, sir. It was only that I forgot to ask whether you meant to rig church today.’
‘Yes,’ said Jack, his face clouding again. ‘Yes, certainly: there is nothing like church for bringing a sense of order into things. But only the penitential psalms and the Articles.’
Church by all means, with awnings over the quarterdeck; yet before church came the ceremony of divisions, the formal inspection of all hands lined up under their divisional officers, and of their quarters. It was, as Jack had observed, one of a commander’s best opportunities for taking the ship’s company’s pulse. As he passed along the ranks he looked eye-to-eye at every seaman, petty officer and warrant officer aboard; and he would be a dull fellow if the expression or lack of expression on these scores of well-washed, new-shaven faces did not give him some notion of the ship’s general temper.