‘Twelve books, did you say?’
‘Twelve, upon my soul.’
‘And all by heart? Alas, with a Sunday coming between, I doubt it can be accomplished.
The Sunday in question was emphatically a day of rest, of as much rest as was feasible in a ship at sea. It is true that hammocks were piped up half an hour earlier than usual and that breakfast was swallowed fast so that the deck could be brought to a high state of perfection, with what little brass the frigate possessed blazing in the sun and all the ship’s pigtails (the Surprise, rather old-fashioned in some respects, still had well over fifty, some of a most impressive length) untwined, often washed and always plaited afresh by the seaman’s tie-mate, while all hands put on the clean clothes washed on Thursday and made themselves fine for divisions.
Divisions passed off perfectly well: the wind, though less powerful than it had been for some days, was steady and dead true to its quarter, with never a gust or a flurry; and the Captain, though scarcely jovial, could be said to have lost his wickedness; while when church was rigged it was observed that he had abandoned the Articles, leaving the sermon to Mr Martin.
Martin had no gift for preaching; he did not feel himself qualified to instruct others in moral, still less in spiritual, matters, and his few sermons in the Surprise, delivered long ago when he sailed as a chaplain rather than as surgeon’s assistant, had been ill-received. He now therefore confined himself to reading the works of more able or at least more confident men; and as Stephen reached the half-deck on his way to the cabin from the sick-berth, where he had said a rosary with Padeen and some other Papists, he heard Martin’s voice: ‘Let no man say, I could not miss a fortune, for I have studied all my youth.
How many men have studied more nights than he hath done hours, and studied themselves blind and mad in the mathematics, and yet wither in beggary in a corner? Let him never add, But I studied in a useful and gainful profession. How many have done so
too, and yet never compassed the favour of a judge? And how many that have had all that, have struck upon a rock, even at full sea, and perished there?’ And then some time later: ‘What a dim vespers of a glorious festival, what a poor half-holiday, is Methusalem’s nine hundred years to eternity! What a poor account hath that man that says, This land hath been in my name, and in my ancestors’ from the conquest! What a yesterday is that?
Not six hundred years. If I could believe the transmigration of souls and think that my soul had been successively in some creature or other since the Creation, what a yesterday is that? Not six thousand years. What a yesterday for the past, what a tomorrow for the future is any term that can be comprehended in cipher or counters?’
Jack dined that day, and dined well, off Stephen’s fish, last year’s lamb, and a thumping great spotted dog, his guests being Stephen himself of course, Pullings, Martin and Reade. With the ship running fast and easy, the water racing down her side in a speaking stream, they could not but be happy – a subdued happiness however in Pullings and Reade, still oppressed by the shameful exhibition at Annamooka – and after dinner they moved up to the quarterdeck for their coffee.
Mrs Oakes, who dined a little after twelve, had already been there for some time, her chair installed at the leeward end of the taffrail and her feet resting on a cheese of wads placed there by William Honey, an admirer still, like the rest of his mess. She was alone, her husband, West and even Adams being fast asleep, as indeed were almost all hands who were not actually on duty – the main and fore tops were filled with seamen asprawl on the folded studdingsails, their mouths open and their eyes shut, like Dutch boors in a harvest-field; and Davidge, the officer of the watch, had taken up his usual position by the weather hances. Jack led his troop aft and asked her how she did. ‘Very well indeed, sir, I thank you,’ she said. ‘It would be an ungrateful woman that did not feel amazingly well, being carried over the sea in this splendid fashion. Driving fast on a turnpike in a well-hung carriage is charming, but it is nothing in comparison of this.’
Jack poured her coffee and they talked about the disadvantages of travel by land –
coaches overturning, horses running away, horses refusing to run at all, crowded inns.
That is to say Jack, Clarissa and Stephen talked. The others stood holding their little delicate cups, looking as easy as they could and simpering from time to time, until at last Martin contributed an account of a very wretched journey across Dartmoor in a gig whose wheels came off as night was falling, a rainstorm beating in from the west, the linch-pin lost in a bottomless mire and the horses audibly weeping. Martin was not one of those few men who can speak naturally when they are in a false position, and Stephen observed that Clarissa was secretly amused: yet she helped him along with polite attention and timely cries of ‘Heavens!’ ‘Dear me” and ‘How very horrid it must have been.’
From this, perhaps as an illustration of the greater ease of travel by sea, the conversation passed on to her foot-rest. ‘Why is it called a wad of cheese?” she asked.
‘A cheese of wads, I believe, ma’am,” said Jack. ‘Cheese because it is a cylinder like a tall thin Stilton, and wads because that is what the cloth is filled with. I dare say you have seen a man load his fowling-piece?’ Clarissa bowed. ‘First he puts in his powder, then his shot, and then with his ramrod he thrusts down a wad to hold everything in place until he wishes to fire. That is just what we do with the great guns; only of course the wads are much bigger.’
Again Clarissa bent her head by way of agreement, and Stephen had the impression or rather the certainty that if she had spoken her voice would have been as unnatural as Martin’s.
‘Now that I come to think of it,’ said Jack, gazing amiably at the eastern horizon, upon which Christmas Island should soon appear if his two chronometers, his last lunars and his noonday observation were correct. ‘Now that I reflect, I do not believe you have ever seen the operation: you have always been below. We mean to have target-practice tomorrow, and if it would amuse you to watch, pray come on deck. You could see everything quite well, was you to stand amidships, by the barricade. Though perhaps you may not like the explosions. I know that elegant females’ – smiling – ‘do not always like it when one fires even a fowling-piece at anything like close quarters.”
‘Oh, sir,’ said Clarissa, ‘I am not so elegant a female as to mind the report of a gun: and I should very much like to see your target-practice tomorrow. But now I think I must go and rouse my husband; he particularly desired me to wake him well before his watch.’
She rose; they bowed; and as she went down the companion-ladder the lookout at the masthead cried ‘Land ho! On deck, there, land on the starboard bow. A low sort of long island,’ he added in a subdued voice for the benefit of his friends in the maintops, ‘with more of them fucking palm-trees.’
Early on Monday morning, with the sun slanting low across the long even swell so that its rounded summits, a furlong apart, were visible, though very soon they would be quite lost in the little fret of superficial waves, Captain Aubrey spread top-gallantsails, and the hands racing aloft very nearly crushed Stephen and Martin as they crouched in the mizen-top, training the glass aft over the rail, gazing back at the land and the cloud of birds over it.
‘I am persuaded that it is a vast atoll,’ said Stephen. ‘Vast; prodigiously extensive. Were we to climb higher still we might perhaps see across it, or at least make out a segment of the great circle.”
‘I should be sorry to disturb the men at their work,’ said Martin.
Stephen looked up as the hands came fleeting down, the outer men leaping in from the yardarm like so many gibbons, and did not press the point. He said ‘We have been sailing past it almost all night: and though the rim of the lagoon may be no more than a musket-shot across at any given point, that still amounts to an enormous surface with no doubt a comparably enormous quantity of animals and vegetable life – the palms and the birds we have seen from afar, and some low bushes; but who knows what interesting predators, what wholly unexpected parasites they may have, to say nothing of undescribed forms of mollusc, insect, arachnid . . . there may even be some antediluvian mammals – a peculiar bat – that would confer immortality upon us. But shall we ever see it? No, sir. We shall not.