They sat reflecting; and when Jack had filled their glasses
yet again he said timidly, ‘It would be the most beautiful idea in the world, but for that wretched probability – the probability of a flag.’
Chapter Nine
Christmas, and a dismal time they would have had of it too, but for a singularly fortunate encounter in the first dim light of December z4th, when the fo’c’sle lookout reported two fishing-boats directly to leeward.
Fishing in the bay was a dangerous pursuit, for quite apart from storms, rocks and tide-races, the French authorities punished contact with any ship of the blockading squadron very severely indeed, sometimes with death; and whenever there was even tolerable
visibility watchers with telescopes kept the fishermen in view, while both setting out from port and return were registered. The two boats in question therefore did their best to get away; but they were horribly embarrassed by their catch – a vast net not only crammed with mackerel but also with the porpoises that had been pursuing them and that were now hopelessly entangled in fold upon fold of twisted mesh.
Happily the fishermen were on the Bellona’s seaward side:
they could not have been seen from the shore even if the light had been far better.
Harding quickly had the quarter-boat lowered, and in a brisk exchange bought net, mackerel and porpoises for two guineas. They were hoisted aboard with infinite good will and almost all the mackerel, as fresh as ever fish could be, were eaten for breakfast, while the porpoises, rather strangely jointed by the ship’s butcher, were served out for Christmas dinner and declared better, far better, than roast pork.
They were, however, but the faintest, most wistful of memories a month or so later – a month still quite bare of store-ships, post or news, other than vague rumours of French reverses in Leipzig and of more convincing
recoveries in other places far away – when according to their custom the Bellona’s captain and her surgeon met for breakfast.
‘Good morning, Stephen,’ said Jack. ‘Have you been on deck?’
‘I have not – a good morning to you, however – what little air came down from the hatches as I walked along was so very disagreeable that I chose rather to make my morning rounds before breakfast, close, fetid and nasty though it was down there, in spite of my ventilators.’
‘And I am afraid it is but a fetid, nasty and goddam meagre breakfast that is waiting for you now, very far from the delights of Black’s or even Woolcombe. Yet at least the coffee, though precious thin, is liquid and still reasonably hot. Allow me to pour you a cup.’ Having done so, he went on, ‘If you had not gone below, you would have seen a prodigious curious sky. With the glass rising and falling so often, I really do not know what to make of it: nor does the master. I wish Yann were still aboard. In these waters it is a joy to have a pilot who has fished the whole bay since he was a youngster. I may well be wrong, but I am fairly sure of that odd mixture of strong wind and fog that we met with
– that we suffered from – off Patagonia.’
They spoke of Patagonia, that uncomfortable shore made glorious only by the presence of a gigantic sloth, a ground sloth, unseen it is true by literate man but certainly skinned by his earlier, illiterate cousins: Stephen possessed eighteen square inches of hide, and part of a knuckle-bone.
‘I was called with the other idlers this morning,’ said Jack, ‘but unlike them, I lay for a while, and I reflected upon the extraordinary and I am afraid very ungrateful way I jibbed at the word probability when we were talking about your beautiful scheme some time ago.
You may have forgotten it
– I hope so – but I spoke as though I could conceivably have the certainty of a flag, a flag promised years ahead, which is great nonsense. Apart from anything else I still have a
great many years to serve: there are quantities of people ahead of me on the list who must die or disgrace
themselves before I can really hope for anything – and praying for a bloody war and a sickly season don’t seem to answer nearly as quickly as one could wish. Nevertheless, it would make the probability much more probable if, as you so kindly put it, I were to distinguish myself in the meantime, and wipe out some of the uncivil reports that have been made about me. So, do you see, I quite withdraw any implied fling at the word probability: though on the other hand I do cling, cling with all my might, to reinstatement.
You did use the word reinstatement, did you not?’
‘I did. And as I recall it was quite unqualified.’
‘There is no more beautiful word in the English language, which, I am told, is richer than the Hebrew, Chaldee or Greek. How I honour that dear Sir Joseph. What is it, Killick?’
Preserved Killick walked in with a look of surly triumph on his disagreeable shrewish face and said, jerking his head in Stephen’s direction, ‘Which I only wanted to ask his honour where this little green parcel was to go. In the dispensary? Down the head?’
‘Jesus, M…’ Stephen checked himself and went on, ‘It had flown out of my head entirely, with the anxieties of the journey and the tumult of the waves. It is a Troy pound of Jackson’s best mocha. He sells it by Troy weight as a precious substance, which indeed it is. Good Killick, honest Killick, pray grind it as fast as human power allows and make up a noble great pot.’
Killick had never been called honest before and he was not at all sure how he liked it now.
He sidled out, with suspicious glances back into the cabin.
‘Another point I reflected upon as I lay there this morning,’ said Jack, ‘was your notion that this war might be over quite soon. As for the political side of things I am sure you know much more than I do; but there is also the naval side, and all other things being equal it is weight of metal that decides a battle at sea. A twelve-pounder frigate cannot take on a ship of the line.’
‘There have been exceptions,’ said Stephen, smiling.
‘Oh, surely not,’ said Jack: then, catching the allusion (his fourteen-gun sloop Sophie had captured the thirty-two-gun frigate Cacafuego), he went on, ‘Well, yes, there are exceptions, but broadly speaking it is true; and the French are now building ships at a great pace in Venice, along the Adriatic, where they have much more oak than we have now, and better, Genoa, Toulon, La Rochelle; and here in Brest there is immense activity as well as down the coast. I cannot state it as a fact that we are outnumbered, but I am very sure that we soon shall be.’
‘My dear, you said all other things being equal: but surely it is generally admitted that they are not equal – that our seamanship is very much better than theirs?’
‘On land it is generally admitted that we are the very pink of perfection and that heart-of-oak tars cannot put a foot wrong. But the Americans showed us that we were not quite infallible, and showed us in fair fight too. And as for the French, they have always built better ships than our people could do: our seventy-fours and most of our frigates are modelled on their lines – your own dear Surprise was built at Havre. We certainly were better seamen at the beginning of these wars, when their absurd revolutionary ideas practically wiped out their old seasoned officers. But although that Napoleon is, as you say, a mumping great villain, he has at least knocked all these pernicious democratic and republican notions on the head, and by now there is a new race of French sea-officers, certainly not to be under-estimated. The Admiralty don’t under-estimate them, I can tell you. We have been reinforced to a remarkable extent. . .’ Jack was called away at this point, and Stephen, having emptied the pot, made his way below, where an unhappy patient awaited his knife, already held down by leather-padded chains, already calmed, to a certain degree, by thirty drops of laudanum, his belly already washed and shaved, with his particular friend and tie-mate already standing by to comfort him. The operation was a suprapubic cystotomy and it was one that Stephen had often carried out, almost always with success: he approached this particular case with an unstudied calm that soothed the poor rigid sweating seaman more than the laudanum, more than his friend’s ‘All over very soon, mate – just a twinge or so and Bob’s your uncle’, cast his eye over the range of instruments that his assistant had laid out, took off his coat, reached for the alcohol, and said, ‘Now, Bowden, I am going to pour spirits of wine over your belly to take away the pain: but at first you may feel a little stab. Do not fling away, or I may not be able to come to the trouble.’