‘Certainly, sir. Job, show the Captain into the farther waiting-room.’
Here Sir Joseph joined him directly – asked after the Doctor – congratulated Jack on the Committee’s unanimous approval – and led him along unknown corridors to a particularly dismal, ill-lit, low-ceilinged office with an aged official sitting at a desk, his feet on a carpet eight feet by three, a mark of very great seniority. Even so, the aged official rose, waved them to dimly-seen chairs, and said, ‘Sir Joseph, I believe that you will be pleased with me. I have all the necessary papers signed and in two instances sealed here on my desk.
If Captain Aubrey will be so obliging as to draw his chair a little nearer, so that he can put his name to this acknowledgement of each item – but stay, Sir Joseph, would you have the great kindness to pass them, one by one, so that there can be no mistake in number or content? I will first snuff the candle: some are wrote very small.
One by one Jack acknowledged their receipt; and one by one he put them into his bosom.
After the last, which contained the formal condition ‘I clearly understand that the suspension hereby granted is at once cancelled in the event of war between England and any other power’, the ancient gentleman sanded the signatures, stood up, and said,
‘There, Sir Joseph: as expeditious a piece of work as ever I have seen. Such comfort to an orderly mind.’ With this he bowed.
‘It was a wonderful display of exactly-regulated celerity,’ said Sir Joseph.
‘Very like a well-ordered broadside,’ said Jack. ‘I am deeply obliged to you, sir.’
The official gave a wintry smile, bowed again, and opened the door for them.
‘Now I must take you to the Hydrographer’s quarters,’ said Blame, leading Jack through still other corridors. ‘Let us hope that Mr Dalhousie will be equally brisk.’
He was not, nor anything like it: but Mr Daihousie had spent much of his life at sea – he was a marine animal -and Jack was very much at home with the surveyors and surveying.
Theirs was a pleasant, friendly interview; yet even so, when Jack reached Whitehall, the broad and open street, he was still in something of a daze from that earlier series of orders, instructions, dockets and other papers that he had received and signed for, and by which he was now bound.
‘I was perfectly amazed,’ he told Stephen. ‘I had expected pretty long discussions, explanations, directions and so on, probably with the Fourth Sea Lord and some other grandees, with a possibility of putting in some humble requests of my own: but nothing of the sort – I was packed up like a parcel, and here I am, changed in a little over five minutes from a person fairly high on the post-captains’ list to a man removed from it, lent to the Hydrographic Department and told to proceed to Chile in the hired vessel Surprise within seven calendar months from the present day, there to survey the coast and islands, my proceedings being at all times subordinate to the requirements of the political adviser. My full pay however will continue until the end of this lunar month, after which only half can be claimed or expected. So here I am’ – tapping his swollen bosom – ‘as free as the air and strangely uneasy.’
‘I too have had an almost equally disturbing experience. The person responsible for hiring vessels on behalf of His Majesty received me, instantly agreed to the sum I proposed, gave me a bill at ninety days for the first quarter’s hire, and bade me good day. He even wished me a pleasant voyage.’
‘There is an ale-house somewhere near Dunmow that I used to pass when I was shooting in those parts called The World Turned Upside Down,’ said Jack. He stared out of the window; then, smiling as he turned he said, ‘What do you say to being dogs for once and treating ourselves to a chaise all the way down to Woolcombe? I can see my prizeagent this afternoon, buy some presents for the family, pack
Killick off with our chests by the coach, and set out tomorrow after breakfast.’
Stephen considered for a moment, and returning the smile he said, ‘With all my heart.’
When a sailor, a sailor of Jack Aubrey’s kind, a man-of-war’s man through and through, has sunk the land for a week or two he insensibly parts his ties with the shore (in its wider sense) and returns to his ordered, exactly regulated, deeply traditional seaman’s life, the solid world being bounded by the ship’s bows and stern, the liquid by the unbroken rim of
the horizon; this, together with time measured out by bells, being the natural form of existence.
The same applies in reverse: the sailor, kept long enough at home, particularly in a county far from the sea, will in time revert to the ways and even the looks of the majority; and few people, seeing Captain Aubrey on his stout, stolid grey mare, riding back to Woolcombe, would have taken him for anything but an ordinary cheerful pink-faced country gentleman, like so many of his neighbours. And this was the more remarkable in that he had not really been cut off from the sea, but from the first week after coming home, had been much engaged with the Surprise, carrying her round with a scratch crew from Shelmerston to young Seppings’ yard at Poole, and then going over on most Wednesdays to see how they were getting on – a practice interrupted only by his horse playing the fool and coming down with him on a slippery piece of road near Gromwell, a foolish caper that resulted in a broken collar-bone and the replacement of the sprightly gelding by the serious-minded grey mare.
It was rather his companion, Dr Maturin, that the indifferent observer might have taken for a seaman: this however would not have been caused by anything about him nor by his seat on a horse (in this case the prettiest little Arab filly imaginable) but by a disreputable old blue coat that could still just be recognized as part of a naval surgeon’s uniform and that, according to its owner, still had a great deal of wear in it.
They reined in at the top of the hill and looked down at Woolcombe, the village, the house, the farms and outlying cottages, the great stretch of Simmon’s unviolated Lea. ‘Lord,’ said Jack, ‘how well I remember our coming home
all the women in the blue drawing-room, together with the parson’s wife and Lady Butler, talking away twenty to the dozen and drinking tea. Amazed to see us – taken all aback –
glad, in course: kind words and kisses: but George and Brigid were the only ones that did not seem out of countenance. I felt like an intruder. I had no idea women would get on so well together, just women alone: perhaps nunneries are like that.’
‘Perhaps they are,’ said Stephen, who had seen a good many. ‘I hope so, indeed.’
‘Then they all called out that it was peace now, huzzay, huzzay: we should be home for ever and the children would not grow up so rude and wild. Then there was the awkward business of saying, between cups of their vile tea, that no, not at all, we were off to Chile as soon as the barky could be patched up – what a hullaballoo!’
‘I take great credit to myself for saying that we were engaged only for six months or perhaps a year; and that Government was being extraordinarily liberal.’
‘That was pretty well, it is true. But the real turning-point came at supper, when I said they should all come, with the children, seeing us on our way as far as Madeira, admiring the island with us for a week or two and then going home in the packet. A cruise may not mean much to Diana or Clarissa, but Sophie has never been abroad at all and she is wild to go. So are the children.’
‘They often ask me Portuguese words, and chant them by the hour. But, my dear, are you not being unjust to Sophie?
She is as strongly opposed to your being yellowed as ever you are, and she very clearly sees that further service and the possibility – probability – of distinction are the very best insurance against it.’
‘Yes, of course she does now, because day after day I have told her that however childish it may seem to her, hoisting
my flag is the only thing that would make me happy – make me feel that my career had been a success. But I do believe that those brilliant words about the cruise were the beginning of the light – might also have been influenced by her.’
‘They certainly did no harm.’ Stephen might have added Sophie’s conviction that a husband busy in the South Pacific could not be doing himself harm in the House of Commons; but that would have been to betray her confidence; and as they rode on he reflected that Diana’s attitude, though less solicitous, was more comfortable. She was a soldier’s daughter, and for her, martial engagements, the prospect of advancement and distinction, took precedence over every other consideration. On being told that Stephen was bound for the Horn, she reflected and said, ‘I shall set some of the fishermen’s wives to work at once, knitting you really thick under-shirts and drawers of unbleached wool.’