Master & Commander (26 page)

   The boat reappeared under the stern of the
Aurore
. It was 'the launch and it was filled with liberty-men: there were still one or two merry souls among them, but on the whole the Sophies who could walk were quite unlike those who had gone ashore—they had no money left, for one thing, and they were grey, drooping and mumchance for another. Those who could not walk were laid in a row with the bodies recovered earlier, and Jack said, 'How is the tally, Mr Ricketts?'

   'All aboard, sir,' said the midshipman wearily, 'except for Jessup, cook's mate, who broke his leg falling down Pigtail Stairs, and Sennet, Richards and Chambers, of the foretop, who went off to George Town with some soldiers.'

   'Sergeant Quinn?'

   But there was no answer to be had from Sergeant Quinn: he could, and did, remain upright, bolt upright, but his only reply was 'Yes, sir' and a salute to everything that was proposed to him.

   'All but three of the marines are aboard, sir,' said James privately.

   'Thank you, Mr Dillon,' said Jack, looking over towards the town again: a few pale lights were moving against the darkness of the cliff. 'Then I think we shall make sail.'

   'Without waiting for the rest of the water, sir?'

   'What does it amount to? Two tons, I believe. Yes: we will take that up another time, together with our stragglers. Now, Mr Watt, all hands to unmoor; and let it be done silently, if you please.'

   He said this partly because of a cruel darting agony in his head that made the prospect of roaring and bellowing wonderfully disagreeable and partly because he wished the
Sophie's
departure to excite no attention whatsoever. Fortunately she was moored with simple warps fore and aft, so there would be no slow weighing of anchors, no stamp and go at the capstan, no acid shrieking of the fiddle; in any case, the comparatively sober members of the crew were too jaded for anything but a sour, mute, expeditious casting-off—no jolly tars, no hearts of oak, no Britons never, never, in this grey stench of a crapulous dawn. Fortunately, too, he had seen to the repairs, stores and victualling (apart from that cursed last voyage of water) before he or anyone else had set foot on shore; and rarely had he appreciated the reward of virtue more than when the
Sophie's
jib filled and her head came round, pointing eastward to the sea, a wooded, watered, well-found vessel beginning her journey back to independence.

   An hour later they were in the narrows, with the town and its evil smells sunk in the haze behind them and the brilliant open water out in front. The
Sophie's
bowsprit was pointing almost exactly at the white blaze on the horizon that showed the coming of the sun, and the breeze was turning northerly, freshening as it veered. Some of the night's corpses were in lumpish motion. Presently a hose-pipe would be turned on to them, the deck would return to its rightful condition and the sloop's daily round would begin again.

An air of surly virtue hung over the
Sophie
as she made her tedious, frustrating way south and west towards her cruising-ground through calms, uncertain breezes and headwinds—winds that grew so perverse once they had made their offing that the little Ayre Island beyond the eastern point of Minorca hung obstinately on the northern horizon, sometimes larger, sometimes smaller, but always there.

   Thursday, and all hands were piped to witness punishment. The two watches stood on either side of the main-deck, with the cutter and the launch towing behind to make more room; the marines were lined up with their usual precision from number three gun aft; and the little quarter-deck was crowded with the officers.

   'Mr Ricketts, where is your dirk?' said James Dillon sharply.

   'Forgot it, sir. Beg pardon, sir,' whispered the midshipman.

   'Put it on at once, and don't you presume to come on deck improperly dressed.'

   Young Ricketts cast a guilty look at his captain as he darted below, and he read nothing but confirmation on Jack's frowning visage. Indeed, Jack's views were identical with Dillon's: these wretched men were going to be flogged and it was their right to have it done with due ceremony—all hands gravely present, the officers with their gold-laced hats and swords, the drummer there to beat a roll.

   Henry Andrews, the ship's corporal, brought up his charges one by one: John Harden, Joseph Bussell, Thomas Cross, Timothy Bryant, Isaac Isaacs, Peter Edwards and John Surel, all accused of drunkenness. No one had anything to say for them: not one had anything to say for himself. 'A dozen apiece,' said Jack. 'And if there were any justice on earth you would have two dozen, Cross. A responsible fellow like you—a gunner's mate—for shame.'

   It was the
Sophie's
custom to flog at the capstan, not at a grating: the men came gloomily forward, slowly stripped off their shirts and adapted themselves to the squat cylinder; and the bosun's mates, John Bell and John Morgan, tied their wrists on the far side, more for the form than anything else. Then John Bell stood clear, swinging his cat easily in his right hand, with his eye on Jack. Jack nodded and said, 'Carry on.'

   'One,' said the bosun solemnly, as the nine knotted cords sighed through the air and clapped against the seaman's tense bare back. 'Two. Three. Four . . .'

   So it went on; and once again Jack's cold, accustomed eye noticed how cleverly the bosun's mate set the knotted ends lashing against the capstan itself, yet without giving any appearance of favouring his shipmate. 'It's very well,' he reflected, 'but either they are getting into the spirit-room or some son of a bitch has brought a store of liquor aboard. If I could find him, I should have a proper grating rigged, and there would be none of this hocus-pocus. This amount of drunkenness was more than was right: seven in one day. It was nothing to do with the men's lurid joys ashore, for that was all over—no more than a memory; and as for the paralytic state of the seamen awash in the scuppers as the sloop stood out, that was forgotten too—put down to the easy ways of port, to relaxed harbour discipline, and never held against them. This was something else. Only yesterday he had hesitated about exercising the guns after dinner, because of the number of men he suspected of having had too much: it was so easy for a tipsy fool to get his foot under a recoiling carriage or his face in front of a muzzle. And in the end he had had them merely run in and out, without firing.

   Different ships had different traditions about calling out: the old Sophies kept mum, but Edwards (one of the new men) had been drafted from the
King's Fisher
, where they did not, and he uttered a great howling Oh at the first stroke, which so disturbed the young bosun's mate that the next two or three wavered uncertainly in the air.

   'Come now, John Bell,' said the bosun reproachfully, not from any sort of malignance towards Edwards, whom he regarded with the placid impartiality of a butcher weighing up a lamb, but because a job of work had to be done proper; and the rest of the flogging did at least give Edwards some excuse for his shattering crescendo. Shattering, that is to say, to poor John Surel, a meagre little quota-man from Exeter, who had never been beaten before and who now added the crime of incontinence to that of drunkenness; but he was flogged, for all that, in great squalor, weeping and roaring most pitifully, as the flustered Bell laid into him hard and fast, to get it over quickly.

   'How utterly barbarous this would seem to a spectator that was not habituated to it,' reflected Stephen. 'And how little it matters to those that are. Though that child does appear concerned.' Babbington was indeed looking a little pale and anxious as the unseemly business came to an end, with the moaning Surel handed over to his shamefaced messmates and hurried away.

   But how transient was this young gentleman's pallor and anxiety! Not ten minutes after the swabber had removed all traces of the scene, Babbington was flying about the upper rigging in pursuit of Ricketts, with the clerk toiling with laborious, careful delight a great way behind.

   'Who is that skylarking?' asked Jack, seeing vague forms through the thin canvas of the main royal. 'The boys?'

   'The young gentlemen, your honour,' said the quartermaster.

   'That reminds me,' said Jack. 'I want to see them.'

   Not long after this the pallor and the anxiety were back again, and with good reason. The midshipmen were supposed to take noon observations to work out the vessel's position, which they were to write on a piece of paper. These pieces of paper were called
the young gentlemen's workings
and they were delivered to the captain by the marine sentry,with the words, 'The young gentlemen's workings, sir'; to which Captain Allen (an indolent, easy-going man) had been accustomed to reply, '—the young gentlemen's workings', and toss them out of the window.

   Hitherto, Jack had been too busy working up his crew to pay much attention to the education of his midshipmen, but he had looked at yesterday's slips and they, with a very suspicious unanimity, had shown the
Sophie
in 39°21'N, which was fair enough, but also in a longitude that she could only have reached by cleaving the mountain-range behind Valencia to a depth of thirty-seven miles.

   'What do you mean by sending me this nonsense?' he asked them. It was not really an answerable question; nor were many of the others that he propounded, and they did not, in fact, attempt to answer them; but they agreed that they were not there to amuse themselves, nor for their manly beauty, but rather to learn their professions; that their journals (which they fetched) were neither accurate, full, nor up to date, and that the ship's cat would have written them better; that they would for the future pay the greatest attention to Mr Marshall's observation and reckoning; that they would prick the chart daily with him; and that no man was fit to pass for a lieutenant, let alone bear any command ('May God forgive me,' said Jack, in an internal aside) who could not instantly tell the position of his ship to within a minute—nay, to within thirty seconds. Furthermore, they would show up their journals every Sunday, cleanly and legibly written.

   'You
can
write decently, I suppose? Otherwise you must go to school to the clerk.' They hoped so, sir, they were sure; they should do their best. But he did not seem convinced and desired them to sit down on that locker, take those pens and these sheets of paper, to pass him yonder book, which would answer admirably for them to be read to out of from.

   This was how it came about that Stephen, pausing in the quietness of his sick-bay to reflect upon the case of the patient whose pulse beat weak and thin beneath his fingers, heard Jack's voice, unnaturally slow, grave and terrible, come wafting down the wind-sail that brought fresh air below. 'The quarter-deck of a man-of-war may justly be considered as a national school for the instruction of a numerous portion of our youth; there it is that they acquire a habit of discipline and become instructed in all the interesting minutiae of the service. Punctuality, cleanliness, diligence and dispatch are regularly inculcated, and such a habit of sobriety and even of self-denial acquired, that cannot fail to prove highly useful. By learning to obey, they are also taught how to
command
.

   'Well, well, well,' said Stephen to himself, and then turned his mind entirely back to the poor, wasted, hare-lipped creature in the hammock beside him, a recent landman belonging to the starboard watch. 'How old may you be, Cheslin?' he asked.

   'Oh, I can't tell you, sir,' said Cheslin with a ghost of impatience in his apathy. 'I reckon I might be about thirty, like.' A long pause. 'I was fifteen when my old father died; and I could count the harvests back, if I put my mind to it. But I can't put my mind to it, sir.'

   'No. Listen, Cheslin: you will grow very ill if you do not eat. I will order you some soup, and you must get it down.'

   'Thank you, sir, I'm sure. But there's no relish to my meat; and I doubt they would let me have it, any gate.'

   'Why did you tell them your calling?'

   Cheslin made no reply for a while, but stared dully. 'I dare say I was drunk. 'Tis mortal strong, that grog of theirn. But I never thought they would be so a-dread. Though to be sure the folk over to Carborough and the country beyond, they don't quite like to name it, either.'

   At this moment hands were piped to dinner, and the berth-deck, the long space behind the canvas screen that Stephen had had set up to protect the sick-bay a little, was filled with a tumult of hungry men. An orderly tumult, however: each mess of eight men darted to its particular place, hanging tables appeared, dropping instantly from the beams, wooden kids filled with salt pork (another proof that it was Thursday) and peas came from the galley, and the grog, which Mr Pullings had just mixed at the scuttle-butt by the mainmast, was carried religiously below, everyone skipping out of its way, lest a drop should fall.

   A lane instantly formed in front of Stephen, and he passed through with smiling faces and kind looks on either side of him; he noticed some of the men whose backs he had oiled earlier that morning looked remarkably cheerful, particularly Edwards, for he, being black, had a smile that flashed far whiter in the gloom; attentive hands tweaked a bench out of his way, and a ship's boy was slewed violently round on his axis and desired 'not to turn his back on the Doctor—where were his fucking manners?' Kind creatures; such good-natured faces; but they were killing Cheslin.

'I have a curious case in the sick-bay,' he said to James, as they sat digesting figgy-dowdy with the help of a glass of port. 'He is dying of inanition; or will, unless I can stir his torpor.'

   'What is his name?'

   'Cheslin: he has a hare lip.'

   'I know him. A waister—starboard watch—no good to man or beast.'

   'Ah? Yet he has been of singular service to men and women, in his time.'

   'In what way?'

   'He was a sin-eater.'

   'Christ.'

   'You have spilt your port.'

   'Will you tell me about him?' asked James, mopping at the stream of wine.