Clarissa Oakes (29 page)

   'Have you anything to say for yourself?' asked Jack.

   'Not guilty, your honour, upon my sacred oath,' said the butcher.

   'Have any of his officers anything to say for him?' He waited for a moment: the breeze sang through the rigging: the officers looked into vacancy. 'Strip,' said Jack, and Weightman slowly took off his shirt. 'Seize him up.' The quartermasters tied Weightman's wrists to the grating rather above shoulder-height and cried 'Seized up, sir.'

   Adams passed the Articles. Jack, followed by the officers and midshipmen, took off his hat; he then read ' "No person in or belonging to the fleet shall sleep upon his watch,
or negligently perform the duty imposed on him
, or forsake his station, upon pain of death or such other punishment as the circumstances of his case shall require." Twelve strokes.' And to the senior bosun's mate, 'Vowles, do your duty.'

   Vowles drew the cat from its red baize bag, phlegmatically took up his stance, and as the ship reached the height of her roll he laid on the first stroke. 'Oh my God,' cried Weightman, enormously loud.

   Mrs Oakes and Stephen looked up. 'There is punishment carrying out forward,' he said. 'Some of the people behaved amiss in pulling up the anchor.'

   'So Oakes told me,' she replied, listening to the successive shrieks with no apparent emotion. 'How many does the Captain usually give?'

   'I have never known him give more than a dozen, and rarely so many. Flogging is uncommon in ships under his command.'

   'A dozen? Lord, that would make them stare in New South Wales. There was a horrible parson, a magistrate, who only dealt in hundreds. Dr Redfern hated him.'

   'I know it, my dear. So did I. Breathe deep, will you now, and hold it. Very well. That will do,' he said at last. 'You may put your clothes on again.'

   'You say that in just the same tone as dear Dr Redfern,' said Clarissa from under the folds of her blue cotton dress: and emerging, 'How I adored that man when he told me that I was neither pregnant nor . . . nor diseased. I might well have been both. I had been raped often enough.'

   'I am so sorry; so very sorry,' said Stephen.

   'For some girls it would have been dreadful: it meant little to me, so long as there were no consequences.'

   Flogging was indeed rare in Jack Aubrey's commands, but this time the ship had been outraged and humiliated and he punished severely, flogging seven and stopping grog right and left. Of those who were seized up, none called out except for Weightman; but none came away unmarked. As each was cast loose, Padeen stepped forward, tears streaming down his face, and sponged his shipmate's back with vinegar, while Martin swabbed the wheals with lint and passed the man's shirt, a gesture much appreciated. All this was done with the customary man-of-war formality—charge, response, evidence of character, attenuating circumstances, Captain's decision, relevant Article, sentence, punishment—and although the later sentences never exceeded six strokes, the whole took up a great deal of time which Stephen and Clarissa, for their part, spent in talking quite placidly about men in general, everyday men in their ordinary life.

   The last of those to be beaten presented an unusual case. He was James Mason, a bosun's mate; he was a good seaman, and the officer spoke in his favour. But his offence had been very gross—direct disobedience—and Jack had him brought to the grating. 'In view of what your officers say, it will only be half a dozen,' he said. 'Mr Bulkeley, do your duty.' It was of course the bosun's duty to flog his mates, but the occasion very rarely arose: Bulkeley had not been called upon to officiate for years; he had lost the habit; and taking the cat from Vowles he stood there for a moment, combing its bloody tails through his fingers in a sad state of indecision. He was fond of young James, they got along well together; but the ship's company was watching most attentively and he must not be seen to favour his mate. No, indeed: and his first blow jerked a great gasp out of Mason, rock of fortitude though he was. When he was cast loose he staggered for a moment, wiped his face, and cast a reproachful look at the bosun, the embarrassed, confused and uneasy bosun.

   In Stephen's cabin the conversation had moved on by way of a discussion of pain to the extraordinary difficulty of defining emotions or assigning to them any quantity quality volume or force. 'Harking back to pain,' said Stephen, 'I recall that when Captain Cook was here he used to flog the islanders for stealing: it was no use, said he: one might just as well have flogged the mainmast. And I saw Aborigines in New South Wales who utterly disregarded burns, blows and cruel thorns that I could never have borne; while in the Navy a seaman will generally take his dozen without a murmur. Yet even when all things are considered, youthful resilience, fortitude, pride, habituation and so on, I wonder that your experience did not beat the softer, kinder emotions out of you entirely, leaving you sullen, morose and withdrawn.'

   'Why, as for the softer emotions, perhaps I never was very well endowed; I disliked most cats, dogs and babies; I never cared for dolls or pet rabbits and sometimes I violently resented being crossed; but I never was sullen then and I am not sullen now. Nor am I morose and withdrawn: I think I am fairly kind, or mean to be fairly kind, to people who are kind to me or those who need kindness; and I know I like being liked—I love good company and cheerfulness.

Sic erimus cuncti postquam nos auferet Orcus

ergo vivamus dum licet esse, bene.

And I also know I am not a monster incapable of affection,' she said, laying a hand on Stephen's knee and flushing a little under her tan. 'Only I cannot connect it with that toying, striving, gasping—what can I call it without being gross?—with anything of a carnal nature. They seem to me poles apart.'

   'I am sure they do.
Sic erimus cuncti
. . . so that was where Mr Oakes had his couplet yesterday? I wondered.'

   'Yes. It was a doggerel version I made when I was putting on my gown. But I was astonished he should remember it.'

Stephen's only patients that afternoon were the butcher and the bosun's mate, both of whom, but particularly Mason, needed dressing. Martin had applied the ordinary pads, but he had had little experience with this kind of wound, the
Surprise's
temper being ordinarily so mild, and a more practised hand was required to wind the cingulum that would enable them to move with something approaching ease.

   Yet it was clear to the practised hand that he might have a well-populated berth quite soon. Not only was Jack tautening the ship in all points, but on excusing himself for missing dinner—'he would take an extra bite this evening, and with the wind going down like this they might very well have some fresh fish with their music'—he had also thrown out a remark about a flying column. Quite what he meant by that Stephen had not gathered; but basing himself upon the axiom that what goes up must necessarily come down, he anticipated a fine crop of broken limbs, ribs, even skulls.

   He reflected upon this as he dined in the gun-room, a rather silent gun-room, but one in which the malignance had been largely replaced by anxiety and even by a certain fellow-feeling. Martin ate wolfishly, twice desiring Pullings 'to cut him just a little more of this excellent roast pork', but when at last his empty plate was taken from him before pudding he told Stephen that he had seen a remarkable number of boobies towards the northern horizon, and that old Macaulay, who knows these seas, had confirmed him in his notion that this meant great shoals of fish. They might go a-fishing if the evening fell calm.

   'You medicoes may go a-fishing,' said Pullings. 'But I very much doubt whether we do anything but exercise until next Christmas.'

   Truer words he never spoke. The
Surprise
had by no means passed through the variables, and in the afternoon watch the breeze, which had been boxing the compass for some time, died away almost entirely; yet it did not do so until it had brought the ship within a mile or so of the zone where the boobies were fishing, and Stephen's skiff had long since been lowered down.

   They rowed laboriously out, with rods, hand-nets, sieves for animalculae, pots and jars, baskets, all of which got in the way, impeding their artless progress and making them even slower, even hotter in the damp, unmoving air. Stephen, who had little sense of shame where nakedness was concerned and who had so often exposed his entire person that he feared no sunburn, took off his clothes; Martin, more shamefast by far, only unbuttoned his shirt, rolled up his trousers, and suffered.

   But it was worth their toil. The fishing-ground was sharply defined, and as soon as they were over its border and among the boobies they found that it possessed at least two levels, a turmoil of squids pursuing pelagic crabs and the free-swimming larvae of various forms of marine life that neither could identify, though they were fairly confident of the pearl oyster, and two or three fathoms below these, clearly to be seen, particularly under the shade of the boat, swam schools of fishes, crossing and recrossing, all of the same mackerel-shaped kind, all flashing as they turned, and all feeding upon a host of fry so numerous that they made a globular haze in the clear green water. The boobies preyed on both, either making a slight skimming dive to snatch up a squid just under the surface, or plunging from a height like so many mortar-bombs to reach the depth where the fishes cruised. They took no notice whatsoever of the men, sometimes diving so close to the boat that they splashed water into it; and after some time the men, having classified the birds (two species, neither particularly rare), took no notice of the boobies. They scooped up the squids with their hand-nets and found that they belonged to at least eleven different kinds, two of which they could not name; they sieved great quantities of the squids' food, which they put into well-closed pots; and they caught the fishes—handsome fellows, weighing a couple of pounds—baiting their hooks with pork rind cut in the shape of a minnow.

   'Paradise must have been very like this,' observed Martin, putting another into their basket: and then 'How happy they will be when we bring back our catch. There is nothing like fresh—' Here he looked towards the ship and his face changed entirely. 'Oh,' cried he, 'she has lost a mast!'

   Certainly she looked horribly lopsided, or rather deformed; but Stephen replied 'Not at all, at all.' He reached among his clothes for a little pocket spy-glass, pointed, focussed, and continued 'Never in life, my dear sir: they are only shifting topmasts.'

   He saw from the great activity in the maintop, where topmast shrouds were being set up afresh, that they had begun aft and were working forward in one of the most strenuous exercises known to man.

   Pullings and Oakes were on the forecastle; Davidge was in the foretop; West was perched in the maintopmast crosstrees; they and all the hands under their command were all in a state of extreme activity; and Jack Aubrey, with Reade on one hand and Adams on the other, was timing them with his open watch.

   'I believe you have not seen it done before,' said Stephen, passing the glass. 'Will I tell you what they are at?'

   'If you would be so good.'

   'First they unbend the topgallantsails and send them down and the yard after them; then they strike the topgallant mast, a manoeuvre we are all familiar with—a matter of minutes for skilful mariners, attentive to their duty. But then they do the same to the great topsail, its mighty yard and then the very mast itself, a heavy task indeed. This they have evidently done to the mizzenmast and the main; now they are operating on the foremast, and I perceive from the forms creeping along the bowsprit that they contemplate shifting the jib-boom too, the creatures.'

   'Do they look for flaws and change the defective pieces?'

   'I suppose they do. But I believe the real aim is to make them brisker, to confirm them in their seamanlike activity, and perhaps to strengthen their sense of combined, exactly synchronous effort. Sometimes it is done, not from any desire to enforce discipline and instant compliance with orders but out of a spirit of competition if not indeed of vainglory and showing away. The old
Surprise
, with a crew that had been together a great while, all men-of-war's men, was extraordinarily good at it; and I remember that once, in the West Indies, shifting topmasts at the same moment as the
Hussar
, considered a crack ship, she did so in one hour and twenty-three minutes, the hands dancing hornpipes on the forecastle before the wretched Hussars had even crossed their main topgallant yards. See, the topmast is swaying up—it rises, rises, the capstan turns—higher, higher, secured by a complex system of ropes—high enough—Tom cries "Launch ho!"—it is ridded and safe—they fling themselves upon the shrouds and cast off this and that—the brave topgallant-mast follows . . .'

   So it did; and once the frigate looked like a Christian ship again—for the shifting of the jib-boom was neither here nor there to the medicoes—they returned to their squids, more active now than ever. 'I am almost certain that over there we have a species quite unknown,' said Martin. He leaned out with his long-handled net, but before he had even dipped it he started back. 'Oh,' he said in a shocked voice. 'Do not move. Do not hang your arm over the side. My image of Paradise was only too exact. The Evil One is with us too.'

   They peered cautiously over the gunwale, and there under the frail skiff they saw the familiar form of a shark: one of the many kinds of
Carcharias
no doubt, though to tell just which they would have to look at its teeth; yet it seemed larger than most: far larger.

   'Do you suppose it is likely to bump the boat?' asked Martin in a low voice.

   'Sure he may well do so, by rising suddenly; or sometimes they are known to take a run and launch themselves bodily into the middle, or athwartships as we say, snapping right and left.'

   'I wonder you can speak with such levity,' said Martin. 'And you too a married man.'

   A silence fell, broken from time to time by the splash of a deep-diving booby and the remote shrilling of bosun's calls. A bird dived close at hand, down and down: the shark moved smoothly from under the boat: its bulk covered the diving form and carried on into the depths, growing steadily dimmer though still huge when it vanished. Three or four feathers floated up. 'Will he come back, do you imagine?' asked Martin, still gazing down with shaded eyes.