The Hundred Days (21 page)

His forecast was perfectly accurate: they lay off
the island day after day, sometimes seeing it through the drizzle; and the
frigate’s people spent their time making and mending, pointing ropes,
re-leathering the jaws of booms and gaffs, and of course fishing over the side.
The small rain spoilt dancing on the fo’c’sle, but there was a good deal of
shipvisiting, and Jack and as many of his officers who could be fitted round
the table dined with William Reade aboard Ringle. Jacob’s forecast, however,
was not fulfilled. He was the first to admit that Daniel’s thorax no longer
made the ugly noises that had alarmed them both; yet he did maintain that the
collar-bone was likely to prove long in knitting - that active exercise such as
swarming up the masts was not to be countenanced for a moment. ‘Not that I am
to tell you anything about a froward clavicle,’ he added. ‘Pray forgive me.’

‘Oh, I entirely agree with what you say,’ said
Stephen. ‘When young fellows are returning to health, supervision is often
necessary, and when neither Poll nor the other women nor yet his messmates are
sitting with him, I shall do so. In a sick-bay so sparsely inhabited as this,
boredom is likely to set in, growing to intolerable proportions.’

In fact the Commodore, the master, the other
officers and the inhabitants of the midshipmen’s berth looked in often enough
to prevent any extremity of tedium; but the shoulder continued painful, and
after lights out, which meant no reading, he was very glad of Stephen’s
presence. By the time the dreadful calm of Pantellaria ended in light and
variable breezes, often bringing rain, and the Surprise was working towards Algiers, taking advantage of every
favourable shift, he had quite lost his initial shyness of the Doctor.

Cape Bon was a cruel disappointment: they had
passed it before the sun was up, and when the unwilling day broke at last, all
that could be seen was the distant African shore to a height of twenty feet:
everything above that was thin grey cloud, and although the voices of those
migrant birds that travelled in groups could be heard - the clangour of cranes,
the perpetual gossip of finches - never a one could be seen, though Cape Bon
was a famous point of departure for some very uncommon examples of the later
migrants at this time of the year.

‘I hope you saw your cranes, sir?’ said Daniel when
Stephen came to sit with him that evening.

‘Well, I heard them at least: a great harsh cry up
there in the cloud. Did you ever hear a crane, John Daniel?’

‘Never, sir. But I think I heard or saw
most of the birds in our parts: herons quite often, and sometimes a bittern. Mr
Somerville, our curate and schoolmaster, would point them out: and there were
half a dozen of us, mostly farmers’ sons, that he used
to give a penny a nest - I mean for particular birds, sir, not any old
wood-pigeon or crow. And we were never allowed to touch the eggs. He was very
good to us.’

‘Will you tell me about your school?’

‘Oh, sir, it was an ancient old place, one long
very high room - you could scarcely see the roof-beams - and it was run by the
parson, his son and daughter, and Mr Somerville the curate. It did not set up
for a great deal of learning. Pretty Miss Constance taught the little boys
reading and writing in a small room of her own - how we loved her! And then
they moved up to the great room, where there would be three lessons going on at
once. The boys were mostly farmers’ sons or the better sort of shopkeepers’;
and in spite of the din the brighter ones had a fair am9unt of Latin if they
stayed long enough, and history and scripture and casting accounts. I never
could get ahead in Latin, but I really did shine at sums and what we called
mensuration: I loved numbers even then, and I shall never forget my happiness
when Mr Somerville showed me the use of logarithms.’

‘Time for Mr Daniel’s gruel,’ said Mrs Skeeping.
‘Now, sir, let me spoon it into you.’ She heaved him up in his cot - an
accustomed hand, and he was not a great weight - and with professional skill
and rapidity fed him a bowlful, stopping only when the spoon had cleaned the
sides entirely.

‘Thank you, Poll,’ called Daniel after her, and he
lay back gasping. ‘Logarithms,’ he went on presently. ‘Yes, but that was later,
when my father had had to take me away from school, and I kept the shop while
he catalogued gentlemen’s libraries or went the round of the markets. Mr
Somerville used to give me private lessons; and as some sort of exchange I
copied his mathematical essays fair: he had a difficult hand and he made many,
many corrections, while mine was tolerably neat. He lodged with us, on the
first floor, as I think I said; and we were into conic sections when he died.’

‘I am afraid that must have been a sad loss to
you.’

‘It was, sir: a cruel, cruel loss.’ After a silence
he went on, ‘And although it sounds almost wicked to say so, it could not have
come at a worse moment. Trade had dropped away most shockingly, and without his
few shillings we were poor indeed. I would sit there in the shop all day, and
no one would come in. I read and read - Lord, how I read at that unhappy time.’

‘What did you read, upon the whole?’

‘Oh, Mr Somerville’s mathematical books, as far as
I could: but most were beyond me. Nearly all the time it was books of voyages,
as it always had been in my childhood. My father had taken over a stock of such
collections - Harris, Churchill, Hakluyt and many another. I had learnt my
reading in those heavy great folios. They were beautiful books, full of
delight; yet nobody would buy them. People were not buying books any more, and
if ever a customer appeared it was to sell, not to buy. In the days when people
were buying, my father had sold on credit, long credit; but however long, the
bills were not paid. And then an old gentleman whose library my father had been
cataloguing for a great while and who owed him a large sum that he relied upon,
died. His heirs fell out about the will, and neither side would settle my poor
father’s account - the court would decide who was responsible, they said. In
the town it was reported that the trial would take years and that my father was
penniless. Some tradesmen spoke of suing, for we owed a good deal; none liked
to give any more credit. So we lived on very miserably, selling odds and ends,
doing what we could. Then a London bookseller from whom my
father had had several expensive great books on architecture and the like for gentlemen who had not yet settled, came down, saw how things
were with us, and said he must have his money. This came at the same time as
rent and taxes, and although one of the gentlemen wrote from Ireland saying that he would deal
with the bill on quarter-day, nobody believed him and nobody would lend us a
groat. It was clear that my father would be in a debtors’ prison very soon, so
I walked down to Hereford, to the rendezvous as they call it, and volunteered
for the Navy: they looked rather doubtful, but men were very hard to find, so
they gave me the bounty - all in gold - more than a year’s living in a quiet
way, our debts paid - and I sent it home by a carrier I knew well. Then the
little band of pressed men and...’

‘Oh sir, if you please,’ cried Poll, ‘Dr Jacob says
Captain Hobden has fallen down in a fit and please would you come and look at
him?’

It was clear that Jacob, though an experienced
physician by land, had not served at sea long enough to make an instant and
correct diagnosis of alcoholic coma, a state not uncommon in officers aboard
His Majesty’s ships, they (unlike the hands) being allowed to bring any
quantity of wine and spirits aboard, according to their taste and pocket.

 And in any
event, his practice had been largely among Jews, who drink very little, and
Moslems, who at least in theory drink nothing at all.

Hobden was carried by two admiring, envious seamen
to his cot, where he lay motionless, breathing (but
only just), his face devoid of expression apart from its habitual look of
discontent. ‘There we may leave the sufferer,’ said Stephen. ‘Or rather the
sufferer to be: there is a word for the morning state, but it escapes me.’

‘Crapula,’ said Jacob. ‘A very
loathsome condition that I have rarely encountered.’

Stephen returned to the great cabin, where he found
Jack dictating a letter to his clerk: and Mr Candish the purser was sitting by
with a pile of dockets to be checked and countersigned. In any case it was
almost time for his evening rounds: they amounted to a couple of obstinate
gleets and a tenesmus, and when they had been attended to he said to Jacob, ‘I
shall look after Daniel’s last dressing with Poll, if you like to sit with your
comatose patient and take notes on pulse, rate of breathing and sensitivity to
light.’

The dressing was a simple exercise, but Poll,
running her hand over Daniel’s shoulder, cried, ‘There we are, sir!’

‘Well done, Poll,’ said Stephen, ‘there we are
indeed. Bring me a lancet and the fine pincers and we will have it out in a
moment.’ Poll ran to the dispensary and back. ‘There,’ he said to Daniel, showing
him a splinter of bone, ‘that will allow a quick, clean, painless healing. I
congratulate you: and I congratulate you too, Poll. Now,’ he went on, Poll
having blushed, hung her head, and carried the old dressings and implements
away, ‘a little while ago you were telling me about the beauty and fascination
of number: do you think it allied to the pleasures of music?’

‘Perhaps it is, sir: but I have heard so little I
can hardly give a sensible answer. Yet as for this splinter, sir’ - holding it
up - ‘it may be that my bones are like shaky timber, liable to part, because I
had just such a piece come out some years ago. I was in Rattler, sixteen, and
we were cracking regardless after a French privateer out of La Rochelle that
had taken two West Indiamen in the Bay: she was making for home, deep-laden,
with everything she could bear, and our skipper drove the ship, drove her and
every man aboard, and although our bottom was dirty from lying weeks on end in
the Bight of Benin we were gaining on the chase when the maintopgallant carried
away. I was aloft, and down I came. I was stunned and out of my wits for a
great while, and when I came to I found my mates all disconsolate. We had lost
the Frenchman of course, but Dolphin had snapped her up next morning and carried
her into Dartmouth. She was condemned out of
hand, and she, hull, goods, headmoney and all, was worth £120,000 odd pence. A
hundred and twenty thousand pound, sir! Can you conceive such a sum?’

‘Only with great
difficulty.’

‘And since we were very short-handed
from fever in the Bight, my one and a half shares as seaman would have been
£768. Seven hundred and sixty-eight pound. Happily they did not
tell me until I was over the worst of my wound - it was when my head was being
shaved that the splinter of bone I was telling you about came through my scalp
- or I think I should have run mad. Even as it was I was haunted, right
haunted, by that sum. Seven hundred and sixty-eight pound.
It was not a beautiful prime or anything like that: nor it was not what people
would ordinarily call a fortune; but for me it was or rather would have been
freedom from hard labour and above all freedom from the continual anxiety that
runs through ordinary people’s life - loss of employ, loss of customers, even
loss of liberty. At five per cent it would bring in £38.8.o a year, or
£2.18.11d a month - a lunar month, Navy fashion; whereas even an able seaman
has no more than £1.13.6d No, it was not what would be called wealth, but it
would have meant a quiet life at home, reading and going much farther into the
mathematics, and sometimes fishing - I used to delight in fishing. Dear Lord,
when that Paradise was lost I could not keep my mind clear of it - £768 and how
many groats, farthings or penny pieces it contained - to just this side of
madness: though to be sure some of it was madness too, since the fever took me
every other day or so. But, Lord, sir, I have worn your kind patience cruelly,
a-pitying of myself, and prating so.’

‘Not at all, John Daniel: yet just tell me succinctly
about naval prize-money, will you, and then I must go. I have heard of it for
ever, but I have never retained the principles.’

‘Well, sir, the captain has two eighths of the
value of the prize; but if he is acting under a flag-officer he must give the
admiral a third of what he receives: then the lieutenants, master and captain
of the Marines have equal shares of one eighth: then the Marine lieutenants,
surgeon, purser, bosun, gunner, carpenter, master mates and chaplain, equal
shares in another eighth; while everybody else shares the remaining half,
though not equally, the reefers having four and a half shares each, the lower
warrant-officers like the cook and so on, three; the seamen, able and ordinary,
one and a half, landmen and servants one, and boys half a share each.’

‘Thank you, Mr Daniel: I shall try to keep it in my
mind. At present I shall bid Poll make you
comfortable: give you good night, now.’

Cape Bon had been a disappointment.
Algiers and the Bay of Algiers were not. Commodore Aubrey
sent one of the boys wished upon him in Gibraltar by former shipmates a
short-legged, long-armed little creature, very like an ape- to rouse Stephen
Maturin at the crack of dawn and to beg him to come at once, in his nightshirt
or a dressing-gown or whatever he pleased, but anyhow at once.

‘Lord, how brilliant,’ he cried, blundering up the
ladder to the quarterdeck, his eyes half-closed against the light. Tack gave
him a hand up the last step, saying, ‘Look! Look!’

‘Where away?’

 ‘On the starboard quarter - about a cable’s length on the starboard
quarter.’

Powerful hands gently swivelled him about, his
nightshirt flying in the breeze, and there he saw a fine great company of
egrets, snowy white, so near that he could make out their yellow feet; and
somewhat beyond them another even larger band, all flying with a steady
concentration northwards, presumably to some Balearic swamp. And with the first
group there flew a glossy ibis, absurdly black in this light and company, and
continually uttering a discontented cry, something between a croak and a quack:
from time to time it darted across the path of the leading birds with a louder
shriek.