The Fortune of War (8 page)

Yes. As a wee bairn McLean first skelpit a mickle whaup his Daddie had whangit wi a stane, and then ilka beastie that came his way; comparative anatomy had been his joy from that day to this, and he named some of the beasties whose inward parts he had compared. But since the scoutie-allen, the partan, the clokie-doo and the gowk seemed not to convey any precise idea, he followed them with the Linnaean names; Stephen did the same for the creatures he referred to, and from this it was no great way to Latin descriptions of their more interesting processes. McLean was fluent in the language, having been to Jena, and Stephen found him far more comprehensible; presently they were talking away at a great rate, with barely a word of English but Och aye, and Hoot awa. They were deep in the caecum of Monodon monoceros when Stephen, becoming aware of a silence on his right, looked up and met the delighted grin of Babbington and Byron.

'We had just been boasting about you, sir,' said Babbington. 'We said you could talk Latin to beat a bishop, and these fellows would not believe it.'

'Duke,' cried Warner, obscurely displeased by all this, 'draw the cloth.' And as soon as the execrable port had appeared, 'Mr Vice, the King.'

Stephen blessed His Majesty, mastered an involuntary grimace, felt in his pocket for an Amboyna cheroot, recollected himself, and said, 'When you are at leisure, Mr McLean, I should be happy to show you some of my collections.'

McLean stood up at once: he was the Doctor's man directly, he said, if he might but have leave to pass by the galley for a pipe, this last with a nervous glance at Mr Warner.

'The galley? To smoke tobacco? I will join you,' said Stephen. 'Please to lead the way.' And to himself he added, 'There is some inherent imbecility in my will. No sooner have I rid myself of one addiction, than I plunge into another. How I long for my cheroot! I will return to snuff.'

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.

In time this was borne in upon Dr Maturin, not by any words or even by wry looks, but by sheer moral force alone; he threw his half-smoked cheroot into the galley range and said, 'Come, colleague; let us go.'

This was the beginning of a close association; it was also the beginning of the pleasantest voyage that Maturin had ever made. The monsoon bore them steadily west and south over a limitless and amiable sea, with never an island, never a ship, and rarely a bird to recall them to any sense of the terrestrial, clouds their only companions. It was a sea-borne life, ordered by an exact sequence of bells and of naval rites: the sound of the decks being holy-stoned, swabbed, and flogged dry in the early morning, hammocks piped up, the forenoon tasks, the ceremony of noon itself, when a dozen sextants shot the sun from La Flèche's crowded quarterdeck and Captain Yorke said 'Make it so, Mr Warner', the bosun and his mates piping the hands to dinner, the fifer fifing them to grog; then the drum for the gunroom's meal, the quiet afternoon, and the drum again for quarters and for retreat, the piping down of hammocks, and the setting of the watch. All these were perfectly familiar to Stephen; but what was less familiar, and what in time came to have a hypnotic effect, as of living in the heart of an illusion, was the fact that these rites were never interrupted by the usual emergencies of the sailor's life: no sudden squalls, no untoward calms broke the smooth run of days. La Flèche sailed across the ocean, across a vast disc of sea whose limits always remained the same, neither nearer nor further; she sailed untroubled by the enemy, by storms, by crime aboard; and presently she might have been sailing for ever. Stephen was cut off from the past, and the future lay at so great and indeterminate a distance that it had little reality. His Leopards and McLean's Flitches were healthy, and however unreasonable it might appear, salt beef, salt pork, dried peas, hard work, far too much rum, stifling quarters, and little sleep kept them so; their surgeons had little to do in the physical line, and every morning after breakfast they repaired to the forepeak, where they sorted, classified, and described the wealth of Desolation and New Holland, discovering fascinating analogies between these forms of life and those with which they were more nearly acquainted. On occasion they withdrew to a lair behind the bitts, McLean's own domain, where by powerful lanterns they dissected, sometimes far into the night, admist a strong smell of alcohol and other preservatives. McLean was not a drinker - the spiritous reek he carried with him was innocent - but he was a smoker, a very heavy smoker, and it was in his lair that he told Stephen how he defied the first lieutenant, keeping his pipe perpetually lit. McLean was a respectable young man, the son of a crofter, who by extraordinary perseverance and exertion had acquired enough knowledge of medicine to qualify himself for a naval surgeon's career, and a much greater fund of anatomy, which was his delight. He was an admirable colleague for this kind of work, accurate, conscientious, learned, and wholly devoted to his chosen pursuit; he had studied under the illustrious Oken at Jena, and he knew an immense amount about the bones of the skull, of all skulls, considered as highly developed vertebral processes. He was prodigiously ignorant of literature, music, and the common graces, but he would have been ideal, from the scientific point of view, if he had not absorbed so much of the learned German's metaphysics that even his respect for Dr Maturin could not keep him from emitting them, together with clouds of smoke. On the more human plane, he could be a tedious companion. He rarely washed, his table manners were offensive, he was extremely umbrageous; and finding that Dr Maturin was an Irishman, he gave full vent to his dislike for the English. Thon southron loons didna ken cleanliness; nor, it seemed, did they ken anything else, much, until the Hunters had taught them anatomy; they profited shamelessly from the Union; and they despised their betters. A puir wambly set of boggarts: where would they be without Scotch generals?

Stephen had no great love of the English government in its dealing with Ireland; in fact he had actively conspired against it. But he was deeply attached to individual English men and women, and in any case he did not like anyone to abuse the country but himself. 'You are mistaken, Mr

McLean,' he said, 'in supposing that the English have no generals. They have; and the truth of the matter is that all of them who accomplish anything, such as Lord Wellington, are Irish. Much the same applies to their writers. Let us return to the parietal foramen and the anomalous carnassial teeth of this Otaria: at the present rate we shall not have described half the Phocidae before we reach the Cape. Nay, before we reach England! And they are decaying fast. Pray, take care of your tobacco-pipe, Mr McLean. It is leaning on the spirit-pot; and you are to consider, that should it take fire, all the specimens we have already described must infallibly be lost.'

Stephen's days were busy, and in spite of the gloom of the gunroom and of McLean's shortcomings most unusually enjoyable. His evenings were usually spent in the cabin, playing music with Jack and Captain Yorke as the ship ran on and on, urged by Warner's unremitting zeal. He often dined there too, escaping the gunroom's purely naval conversation and Spartan fare; for whereas La Flèche's officers had nothing but their pay, Yorke was possessed of comfortable private means. He kept a table, and nearly every day invited two or three of his officers or young gentlemen. After one of these dinners, at which the first lieutenant, the master, and Forshaw had been present, Stephen was walking on the quarterdeck to air his mind and to dispel the fumes of the Captain's port before rejoining McLean in the depths. The fine quartering breeze had slackened, and it had also drawn more astern, so that there was little refreshment in it; and in spite of the awning the sun beat down with more than common force. It was a make-and-mend day, and the Flitches were scattered about the deck forward of the mainmast, quietly sewing and darning, but Warner had scarcely taken a couple of turns, looking up at the rigging and laying his hand on the braces, before he gave an order: the placid groups among the guns broke up in an apparent chaos. Three sharp pipes of the bosun's call; the chaos resolved itself into a pattern; another pipe, and the ship spread her studdingsails. The booms bent, settled to the strain, and the speed increased perceptibly; at the same time what little refreshment there had been died quite away. Stephen took off his coat and folded it absently, his mind dwelling on the question of the anomalous Otaria, with four roots to its carnassial teeth: if in fact it should prove to be a distinct species, which seemed likely, he should name it after McLean. That would be a handsome compliment, a gleam of fame more valued than an appointment to a line-of-battle ship; it would also far outweigh the short answers Stephen had given recently, when McLean had been more than usually wearisome about the English. Like some other Scots he knew, McLean seemed to labour under some sense of inferiority; and to labour rancorously. Strange: it could never occur to an Irishman. And yet the situation of the two countries - here a cascade of small coins, a snuff-box, a tinder-box, a spunk-box, a penknife, two lancets, a cheroot-case, a duodecimo Horace, some pieces of rosin, a variety of small bones and mammalian teeth, and a partially-eaten biscuit fell from his inverted coat pockets on to the deck. Forshaw helped him pick them up, gave him some advice on the proper, the seamanlike, way of folding a coat, warned him against creasing it and against undue exposure to the sun, and said he should carry the coat down for Killick to hang it up in the Doctor's cabin. The cabin was of course below, but Forshaw's road took him by inconsequential leaps along the top of the hammock-cloths with nothing between him and the white racing water but a little slippery canvas: just as he was about to dodge between the forecourse and its deeper studdingsail he lost his footing in a way that would have made Mrs Forshaw turn deathly pale and that did make Dr Maturin feel anxious for his coat. But he seized the sheet and hung there for a moment, laughing up at a friend in the foretop, before vanishing between the sails, as safe as a young ape in its native wood: and as he balanced there in his best cabin-going uniform of silver-buckled shoes, white breeches and blue coat, with his teeth flashing in his sunburnt face and his hair streaming in the wind, he looked uncommonly fetching.

'Can you imagine anything more beautiful?' said Warner, in his harsh, grating voice.

'Not readily,' said Stephen.

'Cracking on when the sun is bright has always been a joy to me,' said Warner quickly, 'and now we have just about everything abroad that she can bear.'

'A noble spread of sails, upon my word,' said Stephen; and indeed he was by no means unmoved by the beauty of sail above sail, sail beyond sail, taut, rounded, and alive, nor by the huge curved shadows, and intricate geometry of line and brilliant surface. But whereas he had often seen a ship under royals and studdingsails aloft and alow, tearing through the deep blue sea with a bone in her teeth, he had rarely seen such a look of hunger, of hunger combined with something else - admiration or rather wonder, affection, tenderness.

'Poor man,' he reflected. 'The instinct so very strong, so very nearly unconquerable even in a phlegmatic. If he is, as I suppose, a paederast, small wonder he should be glum. When I consider what desire has done for me, how it has torn my heart - and mine an avowable desire, glorified by specious, heroic names - I am astonished that such men do not consume themselves entirely. A hard fate, to be shut up day after day with such a longing in a ship, where everything is known; and where this must not be known; where there must be no approach to an overt act.'

The Flitches were no brighter than the next ship's company, but as Dr Maturin observed there was little they did not know of what went on aboard. They knew the nature of Warner's inclinations, for all his ceaseless, rigorous control. They knew that their Captain was an indolent, easy-going, good-natured man, with little ambition to rise and shine in his profession or anywhere else; that he would fight like a good 'un if called upon to do so - he had given proof of that - but that he had no restless urge for action, that he was quite content with a small post-ship rather than a dashing frigate; and that although he would rather have been sent up the Mediterranean, where he could contemplate the Greek remains, he was happy to carry despatches to and from the Indies, leaving the running of the ship to his capable first lieutenant. They knew that the bosun and the carpenter had contrived to move a surprising quantity of the ship's stores to unfrequented places, and they had little doubt that these objects would vanish once La Flèche reached the Cape: the only question was, who shared? They knew a great many other things, some of no importance whatsoever, such as that the Leopard's midshipmen were finding the voyage a burden to their spirits.

Jack Aubrey was a conscientious captain; he thought it his duty to form his youngsters, most of whom had been entrusted to him by friends or relations, not only into officers who understood their profession but into reasonably moral and socially presentable beings as well. During the first part of the Leopard's voyage he had delegated much of this to the schoolmaster and the chaplain; then from the time these men vanished he had had little leisure for education; but now the whole day was his own, and he devoted far more of it than they liked to leading his reefers through Robinson's Elements of Navigation, None's Epitome, and Gregory's Polite Education. For his part Jack had received precious little education, polite or otherwise, and he learnt a great deal from Gregory as he went along - an exact list of the kings of Israel, among other things. There were no doubt conscientious captains at the time of the Spanish armament, when he first went to sea; but those he had sailed with had confined themselves to seeing that their midshipmen's drinking and whoring were kept within limits, limits that varied according to the captain. Only one of his early ships had carried a schoolmaster, a gentleman who passed his waking hours in an alcoholic haze; so that apart from a term or two at school by land, where a little Latin had been beaten into him, he was, from the point of view of literature, as the beasts that perish. Seamanship, of course, had come naturally to him