Master and Commander (Aubrey & Maturin, #1)

by Patrick O'Brian

The words ‘Very finely played, sir, I believe’ were formed in his gullet if not quite in his mouth when he caught the cold and indeed inimical look and heard the whisper, ‘If you really must beat the measure, sir, let me entreat you to do so in time, and not half a beat ahead.’

‘Good day, sir. I hope Mrs Harte is at home. I must pay my respects and congratulate her – must thank her for the pleasure she gave us last night.’ ‘Was you at the Governor’s then?’ asked Captain Harte, who knew it perfectly well – whose dirty little trick had been based upon knowing it perfectly well. ‘If you had not gone a-caterwauling you might have been aboard your own sloop, in an officerlike manner. God strike me down, but it is a pretty state of affairs when a young fellow prefers the company of Italian fiddlers and eunuchs to taking possession of his own first command.’

As he ran through the familiar lines, now so infinitely more full of meaning, his happiness returned, welling up through the gravity of the occasion, and he rolled out the ‘Hereof nor you nor any of you may fail as you will answer the contrary at your peril’ with a fine relish.

The bosun could not find his way out of his parenthesis,

she could have set her royals, if the amorphous heap of merchantmen under her lee had not determined to travel very slowly until full daylight, no doubt for fear of tripping over the lines of longitude.

‘Oh, he’ll be hanged. Run up at the yard-arm, and boats attending from every ship in the fleet.’ ‘That seems a little extreme.’ ‘Of course it is. Oh, what an infernal bore – witnesses going over to the flagship by the dozen, days lost … The Sophie a laughing-stock. Why will they report these things? The goat must be slaughtered – that’s but fair – and it shall be served out to the mess that informed on him.’ ‘Could you not set them both ashore – on separate shores, if you have strong feelings on the moral issue – and sail quietly away?’ ‘Well,’ said Jack, whose anger had died down. ‘Perhaps there is something in what you propose. A dish of tea? You take milk, sir?’ ‘Goat’s milk, sir?’ ‘Why, I suppose it is.’ ‘Perhaps without milk, then, if you please.

‘But even so,’ he went on, ‘I think we can have a couple of rounds: God knows how long these charges have been lying in the guns. Besides,’ he added in a voice within his inner voice – a voice from a far deeper level, ‘think of the lovely smell.’

‘No, no, no,’ said Stephen. ‘I deprecate violence. My part is to heal rather than to kill; or at least to kill with kindly intent. Pray let me take my place, my station, in the cockpit.’

‘No, no, my dear sir,’ said James Dillon, ‘never let a mere word grieve your heart. We have nominal captain’s servants who are, in fact, midshipmen; we have nominal able seamen on our books who are scarcely breeched – they are a thousand miles away and still at school; we swear we have not shifted any backstays, when we shift them continually; and we take many other oaths that nobody believes – no, no, you may call yourself what you please, so long as you do your duty. The Navy speaks in symbols, and you may suit what meaning you choose to the words.’

‘I remember the fact of extreme, prostrating terror,’ he said, keeping his eye on the tiny bird, ‘but the inward nature of the emotion now escapes me.’

the wicked folly and the wicked brute cruelty, I have had such a sickening of men in masses, and of causes, that I would not cross this room to reform parliament or prevent the union or to bring about the millennium. I speak only for myself, mind – it is my own truth alone – but man as part of a movement or a crowd is indifferent to me. He is inhuman. And I have nothing to do with nations, or nationalism. The only feelings I have – for what they are – are for men as individuals; my loyalties, such as they may be, are to private persons alone.’

you know as well as I, patriotism is a word; and one that generally comes to mean either my country, right or wrong, which is infamous, or my country is always right, which is imbecile.’

Pomp, an unwholesome diet, a cause of choler, a pleasure paid too late and at too high a price, like lying with a peppered paramour.

He was not, indeed, inattentive; but his attention was not so wholly taken up that he did not hear Jack cry, ‘Oh, yes, yes! The rest of them are certainly coming ashore – they are lining the rail in their shore-going rig, with money in their pockets, their eyes staring out of their heads and their pricks a yard long.’ He could scarcely have avoided hearing it, for Jack had a fine carrying voice, and his remark happened to drop into one of those curious silences that occur even in very numerous assemblies. Stephen regretted the remark; he regretted its effect upon the ladies the other side of the orange-tree, who were standing up and mincing away with many an indignant glance; but how much more did he regret Jack’s crimson face, the look of maniac glee in his blazing eyes and his triumphant, ‘You needn’t hurry, ladies – they won’t be allowed off the sloop till the evening gun.’

Stephen felt the odd bareness on his knee that meant his napkin had glided to the floor; he dived after it, and in the hooded tent below he beheld four and twenty legs, six belonging to the table and eighteen to his temporary messmates. Miss Wade had kicked off her shoes: the woman opposite him had dropped a little screwed-up handkerchief: Colonel Pitt’s gleaming military boot lay pressed upon Mrs Harte’s right foot, and upon her left – quite a distance from the right – reposed Jack’s scarcely less massive buckled shoe.

‘The man whose name I forget, the money-man, was an eminently curious study,’ said Stephen. ‘Oh, him,’ said Jack, with an utter want of interest. ‘What do you expect, when a fellow sits thinking about money all day long? And they can never hold their wine, those sorts of people. Harte must be very much in his debt to have him in the house.’ ‘Oh, he was a dull ignorant superficial darting foolish prating creature in himself, to be sure, but I found him truly fascinating. The pure bourgeois in a state of social ferment. There was that typical costive, haemorrhoidal facies, the knock-knees, the drooping shoulders, the flat feet splayed out, the ill breath, the large staring eyes, the meek complacency; and, of course, you noticed that womanly insistence upon authority and beating once he was thoroughly drunk? I would wager that he is very nearly impotent: that would account for the woman’s restless garrulity, her desire for predominance, absurdly combined with those girlish ways, and her thinning hair – she will be bald in a year or so.’

Stephen sent Cheslin for lancets, cigars, the galley bellows; and as the lifeless Henry Ellis rose free of the deck so he swung him forwards two or three times, face down and tongue lolling, and emptied some water out of him. ‘Hold him just so,’ he said, and bled him behind the ears. ‘Mr Ricketts, pray be so good as to light me this cigar.’ And what part of the Sophie’s crew that was not wholly occupied with the fishing of the sprung yard, the bending of the sail afresh and swaying all up, with the continual trimming of the sails and with furtively peering at the frigate, had the inexpressible gratification of seeing Dr Maturin draw tobacco smoke into the bellows, thrust the nozzle into his patient’s nose, and while his assistant held Ellis’ mouth and other nostril closed, blow the acrid smoke into his lungs, at the same time swinging his suspended body so that now his bowels pressed upon his diaphragm and now they did not. Gasps, choking, a vigorous plying of the bellows, more smoke, more and steadier gasps, coughing. ‘You may cut him down now,’ said Stephen to the fascinated seamen. ‘It is clear that he was born to be hanged.’

The sound that woke him in the middle watch: a low cry mounting by quarter tones or less and increasing in volume to a howling shriek, then a quick series of spoken or chanted words, the mounting cry again and the shriek – the Irish men of the crew waking James Dillon, stretched there with a cross in his hands and lanterns at his head and his feet.

Though upon my word,’ he added with a sigh, ‘there are times when it seems to me that nothing short of a radical ablation of the membrum virile would answer, in this case.’ ‘That is very generally the peccant part,’ said Mr Florey.

Ever since Stephen Maturin had grown rich with their first prize he had constantly laid in great quantities of asafetida, castoreum and other substances, to make his medicines more revolting in taste, smell and texture than any others in the fleet; and he found it answered – his hardy patients knew with their entire beings that they were being physicked.

‘Mr Dalziel, let the starboard watch go to breakfast. Ah, there you are, Mr Ricketts: I believe we may serve out a double allowance of cheese – there will be nothing hot for a while.’ ‘If I may say so, sir,’ said the purser with a pale leer, ‘I fancy there will be something uncommon hot, presently.’

‘You go a-walking,’ he said. ‘Do for all love go walking up very steep heights – traverse the Rock from end to end – traverse it again and again on an empty stomach. You are an obese subject; your hams quiver as you go. You must weight sixteen or even seventeen stone.’