The Fortune of War (Aubrey/Maturin, #6)

by Patrick O'Brian

He sat down and loosened his neckcloth. ‘I shall get used to it presently, no doubt,’ he said, and then, hearing the voice of his steward raised in blasphemous, whining fury, ‘Killick, Killick there: what’s amiss?’ ‘Which it’s your scraper, sir, your number one scraper. The wombat’s got at it.’ ‘Then take it away from him, for God’s sake.’ ‘I duresn’t, sir,’ said Killick. ‘For fear of tearing the lace.’ ‘Now, sir,’ cried the Captain, striding into the great cabin, a tall, imposing figure. ‘Now, sir,’ – addressing the wombat, one of the numerous body of marsupials brought into the ship by her surgeon, a natural philosopher – ‘give it up directly, d’ye hear me, there?’ The wombat stared him straight in the eye, drew a length of gold lace from its mouth, and then deliberately sucked it in again. ‘Pass the word for Dr Maturin,’ said the Captain, looking angrily at the wombat: and a moment later, ‘Come now, Stephen, this is coming it pretty high: your brute is eating my hat.’ ‘So he is, too,’ said Dr Maturin. ‘But do not be so perturbed, Jack; it will do him no harm, at all. His digestive processes — ’ At this point the wombat dropped the hat, shuffled rapidly across the deck and swarmed up into Dr Maturin’s arms, peering at close range into his face with a look of deep affection.

‘Oh, come sir,’ cried Jack. ‘My lieutenants – and Babbington has followed me since my first command – my midshipmen, and all my bargemen, in one fell sloop? Is this justice, sir?’ ‘What sloop, Aubrey?’ ‘Why, as to that, sir, I do not mean any specific vessel: it was an allusion to the Bible.

The immemorial custom of the service . . . ’ ‘Oh, f — the immemorial custom of the service,’ cried the Admiral: and then, appalled at his own words, he fell silent for a while.

‘Killick, there. Where’s the Doctor?’ ‘Which he gone ashore in a bumboat before the crack of dawn,’ said Killick with a lewd grin; in Killick’s mind there was only one valid reason for going ashore, apart from getting drunk.

‘Listen, Jack,’ said Stephen, ‘if you brood upon it now, without all the data or learned advice, you will do no good, and you will make yourself sick. I know your constitution: who better? It is not one that can withstand prolonged, and above all useless, brooding. You must discipline your mind, my dear. For you are to consider, that thanks to this blessed order, you will be home sooner than the swiftest messenger – you are yourself the swiftest messenger – and that therefore it is your present duty to be reasonably gay, or at least to affect the motions of gaiety. You are to indulge in field-sports, such as the game this afternoon, until La Flèche comes in. Be not idle; be not alone. I speak in all gravity, brother, as a physician.’

In short, that whereas an ordinary surgeon, living on his pay, might not readily be indulged in room for exotic livestock, an imperfectly-preserved giant squid, and several tons of natural specimens, in a stranger’s ship, a wealthy natural philosopher might meet with more consideration; and Jack knew how Stephen prized the collection he had made during their arduous voyage.

And then turning to Stephen he said, ‘Captain Yorke is very handsomely clearing his whole forepeak for you, and all your dunnage must be aboard within the hour. Mr Babbington will give you a party to rouse it out, and you must supervise its stowage. La Flèche’s boats will be alongside as soon as I am relieved. There is not a moment to be lost.’ Stephen was used to the shocking abruptness, the inhuman promptitude of naval decisions – the cry of ‘Lose not a minute’ had echoed in his ears from his first day in the service – but never had he been expected to be required to transfer the fruit of so many months of patient toil from one ship to another in fifty-three minutes. The minerals alone weighed several tons. His mouth opened in protest but he knew that there was no hope, closed it again, and stared distractedly around. ‘This way, sir,’ said Mr Forshaw in his clear treble pipe, leading him to the fore hatchway. ‘I know just where the sea-elephants are stowed. Mind the step, sir, and clap on with both hands.’ Mr Forshaw often protected Dr Maturin, whom he regarded as a worthy man, but quite unfit to be let out alone. Yet in spite of the young gentleman’s protection, and that of the first lieutenant, and the willingness of the party, and the kindness of a great many other Leopards, who lent a hand as soon as their own messmates’ property was shifted – no great task, since they carried almost all of it on their backs, and the rest would scarcely fill a ditty-bag, while a sing...

‘But that is all in hand now,’ said Jack. ‘My coxswain is in the forepeak, seeing to the stowage; it will be perfectly safe now. And most fortunately the Doctor did not trust all his eggs in one basket, ha, ha, ha! Oh no, there are dozens of ’em, each with a different kind – albatrosses’, petrels’, penguins’ . . . ’ Captain Aubrey could not finish: his mirth choked him. ‘All his eggs in one basket’ was not perhaps the very highest point of wit; but it was pretty lofty for him, and it was his own; and he drew so much honest merriment from it that his face, already mahogany-red from the sun and the wind, turned purple. His eyes vanished, and he laughed his deep, intensely amused laugh until the glasses rattled. Yorke watched him affectionately, and Stephen, noticing this, warmed to the Captain of La Flèche. ‘You have not changed much since the old Reso, Aubrey,’ said Yorke at last. ‘I hope you still play your fiddle?’ ‘Yes, I do,’ said Jack, wiping his eyes. ‘All in one basket, ha, ha, ha! Lord, I must remember to tell Sophie that, when I write.

‘I never was a great reader,’ said Jack. His friends looked down at their wine and smiled. ‘I mean I never could get along with your novels and tales. Admiral Burney – Captain Burney then – lent me one wrote by his sister when we were coming back with a slow convoy from the West Indies; but I could not get through with it – sad stuff, I thought. Though I dare say the fault was in me, just as some people cannot relish music; for Burney thought the world of it, and he was as fine a seaman as any in the service. He sailed with Cook, and you cannot say fairer than that.’ ‘That is the best qualification for a literary critic I ever heard of,’ said Yorke.

And for that matter, what else makes the world go round?’ ‘Why, as to that,’ said Jack, ‘I have nothing against the world’s going round: indeed, I am rather in favour of it.

Two weevils crept from the crumbs. ‘You see those weevils, Stephen?’ said Jack solemnly. ‘I do.’ ‘Which would you choose?’ ‘There is not a scrap of difference. Arcades ambo. They are the same species of curculio, and there is nothing to choose between them.’ ‘But suppose you had to choose?’ ‘Then I should choose the right-hand weevil; it has a perceptible advantage in both length and breadth.’ ‘There I have you,’ cried Jack. ‘You are bit – you are completely dished. Don’t you know that in the Navy you must always choose the lesser of two weevils? Oh ha, ha, ha, ha!’

They were not wanted in the galley. All the smokers of the watch below were already there and an awkward silence greeted the arrival of the officers. Silence and disapproval. Their own Doctor they were used to; they did not cordially like his presence in the galley at any time, since it stood to reason he clapped a stopper on any kind of free conversation; but they were used to him. They might not always like what they were used to, but it was dead certain that they would always loathe what they were not used to: and they were not used to this new Doctor. The Leopards might crack him up, and he might in fact be handy with both saw and pill, but at present the Flitches (for Flitches were they called) only wished that he might fall down dead.

If it were not for the health of my marsupials, I could wish nothing changed at all.’ ‘Do they pine, sir?’ ‘They miss their filth. That is to say, the wombats miss their filth. Their quarters are cleaned out most rigorously twice a day, and sometimes, I have reason to believe, by night. Now I am aware that in a man-of-war there is no place for filth – perhaps no place for a troop of wombats either – yet I cannot but regret it, and shall be glad when we reach the Cape. I have an excellent friend at Simon’s Town, that keeps a number of contented aardvarks in purely nominal captivity: to him I shall confide my marsupials.

Unfortunately the midshipmen were still keeping it up. The liveliest of the ship’s young gentlemen had been brought up by his uncle, an Oxford don, and he had instituted gaudy nights. This was one of them, and through his wax Stephen could hear Our Captain was very good to us, He dipped his prick in phosphorus; It shed a light all through the night And steered us through the Bosphorus. Again and again they sang it, and again and again there was the howl of laughter at the end: it seemed to grow funnier with each repetition, and by four bells they could not get beyond ‘was very good to us’ before they were overcome by mirth.

he was obliged to steer his way, half-blind, to the quarter-gallery, and there he fell. ‘The fall very nearly came before the pride,’ he said to himself as he half-lay, half-reclined there

A woman whose acquaintance he greatly valued had once remarked that it was foolish to reflect on the past except where that past was agreeable: he did his best to observe the precept, but it was not much use – a sense of bereavement would keep breaking in. Nor had it been much use to the lady in question; she had withered away after the death of his cousin Kevin, a young man in the Austrian service.

‘I remember when I was a boy in Ajax, and the Apollon was blazing away at us like Guy Fawkes’s night, a spent eighteen-pound ball came in at our port. The lieutenant – it was Mr Horner: you remember him, Bonden?’ ‘Oh yes, sir. A very sprightly gentleman, that loved his laugh.’ ‘He picked it up, called for a piece of chalk, wrote Post Paid on the ball, rammed it down our gun, and so sent it back in double quick time.’ ‘Ha, ha, ha!’ went the gun-crew and their neighbours on either side. ‘And not long after that, he was made a post-captain, ha, ha, ha!’

‘Yet at breakfast this morning Mr Adams, who was also riz in Boston, stated that hominy grits cut no ice with him. I have been puzzling over his words ever since. I am acquainted with the grits, a grateful pap that might with advantage be exhibited in cases of duodenal debility, and I at once perceived that the expression was figurative. But in what does the figure consist? Is it desirable that ice should be cut? And if so, why? And what is the force of with?’ After barely a moment’s pause, Mr Evans said, ‘Ah, there now, you have an Indian expression. It is a variant upon the Iroquois katno aiss’ vizmi – I am unmoved, unimpressed.

Dinner was a long, slow, massive affair, and the conversation was almost entirely carried on by Mr Herapath and Stephen; Michael Herapath said very little, and Aunt James confined herself to asking Stephen whether he believed in the Trinity. ‘Certainly, ma’am,’ he replied. ‘Well, I am glad someone does,’ said she. ‘Nearly all those scoundrels at Harvard are Unitarians, and their wives are worse.’

‘’Tis just as the whim bites, no more; for as you know, one man may lead a horse to the water, but ten cannot make him think.

‘If I no longer love Diana,’ he wrote, ‘what shall I do?’ What could he do, with his mainspring, his prime mover gone? He had known that he would love her for ever – to the last syllable of recorded time. He had not sworn it, any more than he had sworn that the sun would rise every morning: it was too certain, too evident: no one swears that he will continue to breathe nor that twice two is four. Indeed, in such a case an oath would imply the possibility of doubt. Yet now it seemed that perpetuity meant eight years, nine months and some odd days, while the last syllable of recorded time was Wednesday, the seventeenth of May. ‘Can such things be?’ he asked. He knew from examples that this had often happened to other men; and that other men also lost their minds or contracted cancer. Could it be that he was not, as he had implicitly supposed, exceptionally immune?

He was early, which was a relief to him, for a Presbyterian clock, differing as much in time as in doctrine from the many other clocks of Boston, had given him an unpleasant shock: indeed, he was so early that there was no one to receive him.

By the way, what does Pong mean?’ – writing it on a piece of paper. ‘I believe it means a peacock.’ ‘Not a bridge?’ Stephen shook his head. ‘Oh well, never mind. Let us cross that peacock when we come to it.

Will you not come with us, Herapath? I will rate you midshipman in any ship I command, and you could be the Doctor’s assistant again. Things might be unpleasant for you in Boston.’ ‘Oh no, sir,’ said Herapath. ‘That would never do: though I am obliged to you for your care of me. I have ties here . . . and then, you know, we are enemies.’ ‘By God, so we are. I had forgot.

‘No one could call you a light woman, Diana,’

Stephen made several effectual strokes. ‘Boat your oars,’ said Jack. ‘Clap on to the halliard – no, the halliard. God’s death – haul away. Bear a hand, Stephen. Belay. Catch a couple of turns round the kevel – the kevel.’ The scow gave a violent lurch. Jack dropped all, scrambled forward, caught two turns round the kevel and slid back to the tiller. The sail filled, he brought the wind a little abaft the beam, and the scow headed out to sea. ‘You are cursed snappish tonight, Jack,’ said Stephen. ‘How do you expect me to understand your altumal cant, without pondering on it? I do not expect you to understand medical jargon, without giving you time to consider the etymology, for all love.’ ‘Not to know the odds between a halliard and a sheet, after all these years at sea: it passes human understanding,’ said Jack. ‘You are a reasonably civil, complaisant creature on dry land,’ said Stephen, ‘but the moment you are afloat you become pragmatical and absolute, a bashaw – do this, do that, gluppit the prawling strangles, there – no longer a social being at all. It is no doubt the effect of the long-continued habit of command; but it cannot be considered amiable.’ Diana said nothing: she had a considerable experience and she knew that if men were to be at all tolerable they must be fed.

And Jack was particularly impressed by the small-arms men in the tops: the senior Marine officer had provided some of his best marksmen with rifled carbines, and they had done remarkable execution; while the swivel-guns, firing grape down on a hypothetical deck, had done even better. True murdering-pieces, well-plied. He had an uneasy feeling that he had never attended to the tops quite as he should have done . . . Nelson had never much cared for the use of fighting-tops in battle, partly because of the danger of fire, and until recently everything that Nelson said was Gospel to Jack Aubrey. But on the other hand, he had seen the Java carried into battle in obedience to the great man’s dictum, ‘Never mind manoeuvres: go straight at ’em’, and it occurred to him that although Nelson was always right where the French and the Spaniards were concerned, he might have had other views if he had been at war with the Americans.

They walked on to the quarterdeck without speaking: all the officers were there, and all had changed their uniforms, some, like Broke and his midshipmen, in the modern style of round hats and Hessian boots, some, like Jack, in the traditional gold lace, white breeches and silk stockings; but all wore finer clothes than usual, as a mark of respect for the enemy and for the occasion.