‘Pull under my lee,’ said Jack. The way was off the Polychrest, and she lay there pitching and groaning. The boat touched alongside, hooked to the mainchains, and in the glow of the battle-?lanterns he saw a body crumpled in the stern-?sheets.
‘Le monsieur est touche,’ said the man with the boat-?hook.
‘Is he badly hurt - mauvaisement blessay?’
‘Sais pas, commandant. Il parle plus: je crois bien que c’est un macchabee a present. Y a du sang partout. Vous voulez pas me faire passer une elingue, commandant?’
‘Eh? Parlez - pass the word for the Doctor.’
It was not until they had got his patient into Jack’s cabin that Stephen saw his face. Jean Anquetil, a nervous, timid-?brave, procrastinating, unlucky young man: and he was bleeding to death. The bullet had nicked his aorta, and there was nothing, nothing he could do: the blood was pumping out in great throbs.
‘It will be over in a few minutes,’ he said, turning to Jack.
‘And so, sir, he died within minutes of being brought aboard,’ said Jack.
Admiral Harte grunted. He said, ‘That is everything he had on him?’
‘Yes, sir. Greatcoat, boots, clothes and papers: they are very bloody, I am afraid.’
‘Well, that is a matter for the Admiralty. But what about this death-?or-?money boat?’
So that was the reason for his ill-?humour. ‘I sighted the boat when I was on my station, sir; there were fifty-? three minutes to go before the rendezvous, and if I had borne down I must necessarily have been late - I could never have beaten back in time. You know what the Polychrest is on a bowline, sir.’
‘And you know the tag about workmen and their tools, Captain Aubrey. Anyhow, there is such a thing as being too scrupulous by half The fellow was never at the rendezvous at all: these foreigners never are. And in any case, half an hour or so. . . and it positively could not have been more, even with a crew of old women. Are you aware, sir, that Amethyst’s boats picked up that Deal bugger as he was running into Ambleteuse with eleven hundred guineas aboard? It makes me mad to think of it. . . made a cock of the whole thing.’ He drummed his fingers on the table. The Amethyst was cruising under Admiralty orders, Jack reflected; the flag-?officer had no share in her prize-?money; Harte had lost about a hundred and fifty pounds, he was not pleased ‘However,’ went on the admiral, ‘it is no use crying over spilt milk. As. soon as the wind gets out of the south I am taking the convoy down. You will wait here for the Guinea men to join, and the ships in the list Spalding will give you: you are to escort them as far as the Rock of Lisbon, and I have no doubt on your way back you will make good this little mess. Spalding will give you your orders you will find no cast-?iron rigid rendezvous’.
By morning the wind had shifted into the west-?north-?west, and the blue peter broke out at a hundred foretopmastheads: boats by the score hurried merchant captains, mates, passengers and their relatives from Sandwich, Walmer, Deal and even Dover, and many a cruel extortionate bargain was struck when the flagship’s signals, reinforced by insistent guns, made it clear that time was short, that this time was the true departure. Towards eleven o’clock the whole body, apart from those that had fallen foul of one another, was under way in three straggling divisions, or rather heaps. Orderly or disorderly, however, they made a splendid sight, white sails stretching over four or five miles of grey sea, and the high, torn sky sometimes as grey as the one or as white as the other. An impressive illustration of the enormous importance of trade to the island, too; one that might have served the Polychrest’s midshipmen as a lesson in political economy and on the powers of the average seaman at evading the press - there were some thousands of them there, sailing unscathed from the very heart of the Impress Service.
But they, in common with the rest of the ship’s company, were witnessing punishment. The grating was rigged, the bosun’s mates stood by, the master-?at-?arms brought up his delinquents, a long tally charged with drunkenness - gin had been coming aboard from the bum-?boats, as it always did - contempt, neglect of duty, smoking tobacco outside the galley, playing dice, theft. On these occasions Jack always felt gloomy, displeased with everybody aboard, innocent and guilty alike: he looked tall, cold, withdrawn, and, to those under his power, his nearly absolute power, horribly savage, a right hard horse. This was early in the commission and he had to establish an unquestioning discipline; he had to support his officers’ authority. At the same time he had to steer fine between self-?defeating harshness and (although indeed some of these charges were trivial enough, in spite of his words with Parker) fatal softness; and he had to do so without really knowing three quarters of his men. It was a difficult task, and his face grew more and more lowering. He imposed extra duties, cut grog for three days, a week, a fortnight, awarded four men six lashes apiece, one nine, and the thief a dozen. It was not much, as flogging went; but in the old Sophie they had sometimes gone two months and more without bringing the cat out of its red baize bag: it was not much, but even so it made quite a ceremony, with the relevant Articles of War read out, the drum-?roll, and the gravity of a hundred men assembled.
The swabbers cleaned up the mess, and Stephen went below to patch or anoint the men who had been flogged - those, that is to say, who reported to him. The seamen put on their shirts again and went about their business, trusting to dinner and grog to set them right: the landsmen who had not been beaten navy-?fashion before were much more affected - quite knocked up; and the thieves’ cat had made an ugly mess of thief Carlow’s back, the bosun’s mate being first cousin to the man he robbed.
He came on deck again shortly before the men were piped to dinner, and seeing the first lieutenant walking up and down looking pleased with himself, he said to him, ‘Mr Parker, will you indulge me in the use of a small boat in let us say an hour? I could wish to walk upon the Goodwin sands at low tide. The sea is calm; the day propitious.’
‘Certainly, Doctor,’ said the first lieutenant, always good-?humoured after a flogging. ‘You shall have the blue cutter. But will you not miss your dinner?’
‘I shall take some bread, and a piece of meat.’
So he paced this strange, absolute and silent landscape of firm damp sand with rivulets running to its edges and the lapping sea, eating bread with one hand and cold beef with the other. He was so low to the sea that Deal and its coast were out of sight; he was surrounded by an unbroken disc of quiet grey sea, and even the boat, which lay off an inlet at the far rim of the sand, seemed a great way off, or rather upon another plane. Sand stretched before him, gently undulating, with here and there the black half-?buried carcasses of wrecks, some massive, others ribbed skeletons, in a kind of order whose sense escaped him, but which he might seize, he thought, if only his mind would make a certain shift, as simple as starting the alphabet at X - simple, if only he could catch the first clue. A different air, a different light, a sense of overwhelming permanence and therefore a different time; it was not at all unlike a certain laudanum-?state. Wave ripples on the sand: the traces of annelids, solens, clams: a distant flight of dunlins, close-?packed, flying fast, all wheeling together and changing colour as they wheeled.
His domain grew larger with the ebbing of the tide; fresh sandpits appeared, stretching far, far away to the
