The Thirteen Gun Salute (36 page)

By a logic clear to all seafaring men, turtles came under the heading of poultry as far as their care and well-being were concerned, and Jemmy Ducks said that he had never seen a brisker nor so likely a creature than the larger of the two in his charge; the other seemed 'timid, rather bashful like'. As for the little Java geese, he had four prime birds, fairly yearning for the spit; and four birds would be plenty for eight gents with quite enough over for manners. The Captain's cook, a one-legged black man from Jamaica, said with a flashing smile that if there was one thing he really could send up to table fit for King George himself, it was a goose; and turtles of course came as natural to him as kiss my hand, he having been weaned on calipash and calipee.

'That was very satisfactory,' said Jack. 'I should have been sorry to keep the matter hanging for any length of time.' And having written the invitation and sent it off he said, 'Since we cannot have our music, what do you say to a hand at piquet? It is years since we played.'

'I should be very happy.'

Happy in a sense, since he always, invariably, with the utmost regularity skinned Jack Aubrey, as he skinned most others at this game, and although the money was now of no significance, it was still a pleasure to see his point of five outdo Jack's by a single pip, his tierce major triumph over a tierce minor, and Jack's eagerly announced septi� beaten down by the almost unheard-of huiti�; yet in another sense unhappy - uneasy at the sight of all this luck slipping away in trivialities. For although there was skill in the game for sure, this kind of success was all luck; and if a man had only a given amount for his whole share, it was a shame to fritter away so much as a pugh.

'What is a pugh?' asked Jack, to whom he had made this observation.

'It is a physical term, a fair and just return for all your poops and garstrakes, and it means as much as you can pick up between your thumb and first two fingers: dried herbs and the like. Jesuits' bark, for example.'

'I have always heard that a Jesuit's bark is worse than his bite,' said Jack, his blue eyes slits of mirth in his fine red face. 'Come in,' he called.

It was Edwards, extremely unhappy. 'Good evening, gentlemen,' he said, and then, addressing Jack, 'His Excellency's compliments, sir, and would it be possible to diminish the noise on the forecastle? He finds it break in upon his work.'

'Does he, indeed?' said Jack, cocking his ear forward. 'I am sorry to hear that.' This was the last dog watch, and the hands had been turned up to dance and sing: not that they needed any encouragement, not that they would not have danced and sung without the pipe, but the pipe made the whole thing legal, not to be checked for any ordinary reason. 'That must be Simmons's tromba marina,' he said, catching the distinctive note, a note that could scarcely be missed, an immensely loud deep brassy hoot marking the end of a measure in the dance and followed by a confused cheering and two more hoots. 'Have you ever seen a tromba marina, Mr Edwards?' he asked, to ease the young man's woe.

'Never, sir.'

'It is a very singular instrument, a kind of prism of three thin planks about a fathom long with a string stretched over a curious bridge - it is played with a bow, though you would never think so from the sound. If you would like to see one, go along forward with the midshipman. A carpenter's mate knocked it together the other day.' He rang his bell and to Seymour he said, 'My compliments to Mr Fielding and the merriment on the forecastle is to diminish by half.'

'I would have sworn that was an answer to my note,' he said, returning to his disastrous game.

In fact the answer did not appear until well on in the next forenoon watch, when he came from the masthead in a long controlled glide down the maintopgallant backstay. The Diane had been on her cruising-ground for some hours now, and each mast had its lookout; in this clear weather they could survey seven hundred square miles of sea, but so far they had seen nothing at all, not so much as a proa or a drifting palm-trunk: a pale cobalt dome of sky, darkening imperceptibly as it came down to the sharp horizon and the true azure of the great disk of ocean - two pure ideal forms, and the ship between them, minute, real, and incongruous.

'Sir, there is a note for you in your cabin, if you please,' said Fleming.

'Thank you, Mr Fleming,' said Jack. 'Pray let me have it, together with my sextant.'

While they were coming he looked at the log-board: between four and five knots with this rather stronger breeze, just one point free. 'Very little leeway, Mr Warren,' he observed.

'Almost none at all, sir,' said the master. 'I paid particular attention each time the log was heaved.'

The note and the sextant came. He slipped the paper into his pocket, stepped over to the starboard hances and brought the sun down to the horizon. The corrections for the time short of noon were clear in his mind; he applied them to his reading and nodded. The Diane was certainly on her true parallel.

He found Stephen in the cabin, working over a musical score by the strong light of the stern-window. 'We are on our true parallel,' he said, and opened the note. 'Well, I'm for ever damned alive,' he said in quite a surprised tone of voice and passed the unfolded sheet.

Mr Fox presents his compliments to Captain Aubrey, whose invitation to dinner on Wednesday he has received but which pressure of work prevents him and his suite from accepting.

'Well,' said Stephen, 'I had not thought a man of his education could be so gross. Tell me, brother, were you very severe?'

'Not at all. The only time I spoke a little sharp was when he asked me whether I knew I was addressing His Majesty's direct representative, and I told him that though he might represent the King by land, I represented him by sea - that under God I was sole captain aboard.'

A pause. 'Killick,' called Jack. 'Killick, there.'

'Now what?' cried Killick with real indignation. He was wearing a frock and gloves that shed powdered chalk at every movement; and there was a long pause before he added the necessary 'Sir.'

'Killick has been polishing the silver,' observed Stephen.

'And only half done and my mates always needing an eye on them, heavy handed hoaves liable to scratch it something cruel.' Killick took a passionate delight in silver and for this dinner he had brought out the rarely-used best service, much tarnished in spite of its green baize.

'Pass the word for Mr Fielding,' said Jack: and to his first lieutenant, 'Mr Fielding, pray sit down. I have a damned awkward request to make of you and the gunroom. The position is this: I had invited the envoy and his colleagues to dine with me tomorrow: foolishly I took their consent for granted and here is poor Killick in a cloud of powdered chalk, while my cook is working double tides at two or even three courses and God knows how many removes. But this morning I find that I had counted my geese without laying their eggs - that I had killed my geese - that is to say, pressure of work prevents Mr Fox and his people from dining with me tomorrow. So what I should like to do, with your permission, is to invade the gunroom and feast among friends. It is a damned left-handed kind of an invitation, yet. .

Left-handed it might have been, but it was an unusually happy and successful one. The gunroom table blazed from a great gilt tureen at its foot to the golden mizenmast in the middle and then to another gilt tureen at its head, and they standing in a spring-tide of silver, exactly squared and set so thick that there was scarcely room for bread between. No direct sun reached it, but in the diffused light the general effect was extraordinarily rich, and the hands brought aft on various pretexts felt that it did their ship the utmost credit.

The splendour had the curious effect of doing away with the stiffness and solemnity that usually and perhaps necessarily attended the Captain's ordinary visits to the gunroom: from the beginning it was clear that this was not going to be one of those many, many Yes, sir, no sir dinners through which Jack Aubrey had sat since his very first command, labouring in an occasionally successful attempt at making official entertainment somewhat less forbidding. It had not needed as much as a single bottle of wine to set the table in a pleasant hum of conversation, though the stream that flowed throughout the meal certainly helped. Nothing particularly brilliant was said, but all the officers sitting there were pleased with their company, pleased with their fare, and pleased with the glory. Another point was the servants. Every man had one behind his chair, sometimes a Marine, sometimes a ship's boy, and although they were well turned out, clean and attentive, they were not highly trained; even the comparatively rigid Marines took a certain part in the feast - much more than usual on this glittering occasion, which pleased them even more than the guests - and the attendants' smiles, nods, becks (for there was no pretence of not listening to what was said at table) and cheerful faces added to the general gaiety. At one point they added too much. Welby, the Marine officer, was almost as inept a teller of anecdotes or jokes as Captain Aubrey, but he did have one story in which he could scarcely go wrong: it was true, it was decent, he had told it many, many times, and it had no pitfalls. Now, in very fine form after his second helping of goose and his sixth glass of wine, he launched upon it.

He caught Jack's eye during a momentary lull in the conversation, smiled at him and said, 'A curious thing happened to me, sir, when I was acting as recruiting officer in the year eight. A young fellow, a fine upstanding young fellow though rather ragged came to the rendezvous: I was sitting there at a table with the clerk, and my sergeant behind me, and I said to him, "You look as if you might suit us. Where do you come from?" "Ware," says he. "Yes, where?" says I, and the sergeant says rather louder, "the Captain asks where you come from - what is your parish?" "Ware," says he. "No," says I, louder still, "Where was you born?" "Ware," says he in a shout, looking dogged, and the sergeant was going to learn him his duty when the clerk whispered, "I believe, sir, he means Ware, the town of Ware, in Hertfordshire."

At this Macmillan's servant, a ship's boy more used to the midshipmen's berth than the gunroom, burst into a halfstrangled hoot of laughter, a hideous adolescent crowing that set off two other boys. They could not look at one another without starting again and they were obliged to be put out: they missed the rest of Welby's tale, a fictitious addition that had just occurred to him in which the recruit's name was Watt.

'A glass of wine with you, Mr Welby,' said Jack when at last the laughter had died away. 'Yes, Mr Harper, what is it?'

'Mr Richardson's compliments and duty, sir, and there is land bearing north-north-east about five leagues.'

The news of land spread through the ship, and after dinner the mission came on deck to gaze at the horizon on the larboard bow, where the False Natunas, already clear from the tops, might soon be seen by those that did not choose to climb. Stephen met Loder, the least objectionable of the Old Buggers, on the companion-ladder.

'You seem to have had a very cheerful time in the gunroom,' said Loder.

'It was most agreeable,' said Stephen. 'Good company, a great deal of mirth, and the best dinner I remember ever to have eaten at sea - such a turtle, such Java geese!'

'Ah,' said Loder, meaning by this that he regretted the turtle and the geese, that he thought Fox's refusal for his colleagues an abuse of authority, and that he for one dissociated himself from the barbarous incivility: a considerable burden for a single 'ah', but one that it bore easily. Stephen had in fact already noticed a decline in the suite's excitement, something of a return to everyday sobriety, though Fox's exaltation was still at the same high and surely very wearing pitch. 'May I consult you, Doctor, when you have a spare moment?' asked Loder in a discreet voice. 'I do not like to speak to the ship's young man.'

'Certainly. Come to the dispensary tomorrow at noon,' said Stephen, and he went on to meet Macmillan himself. They made their round together - the usual port diseases had made their appearance - and when they, for want of an intelligent reliable loblolly boy, had rolled their own pills, prepared their own draughts and triturated their own quicksilver in hog's lard for blue ointment, Stephen said to Macmillan, 'Among your books, do you have Willis on Mental Derangement or any of the other authorities?'

'No, sir. I am sorry to say I have not. All I have in that line is an abstract of Cullen: shall I fetch it?'

'If you would be so very kind.'

He returned to his cabin, carrying the book, by way of the quarterdeck, and there he saw Fox at the lee hances, staring intently at the Natunas, the False Natunas.

All the species and degrees of madness which are hereditary, or that grow up with people from their early youth, are out of the power of physic; and so, for the most part, are all maniacal cases of more than one year's standing, from whatever source they may arise, he read, nodded, and turned the page. Another remarkable circumstance is, that immoderate joy as effectually disorders the mind as anxiety and grief. For it was observable in the famous South Sea year, when so many immense fortunes were suddenly gained, and as suddenly lost, that more people lost their wits from the prodigious flow of unexpected riches, than from the entire loss of their whole substance. 'That is something to the point,' he said, 'but what I really want is a case of the sudden onset of folie de grandeur.' He glanced at the measures recommended: diet low but not too low, bleeding of course, cupping, saline purgatives, emetics, camphorated vinegar, the strait waistcoat, blistering the head, chalybeate waters, the cold bath; and closed the book.

Presently, heavy with turtle soup, goose and a number of side-dishes, he closed his eyes as well.

The Diane stood off and on all night, just south of the False Natunas, and quite early in the morning Captain Aubrey stood tall and shadowy by Stephen's cot. 'Are you awake?' he asked in a soft voice.

'I am not,' said Stephen.

'We are going ashore in the new pinnace, and I thought you might like to come too. There may be a whole colony of nondescript boobies.'