affection for the foremast jack, and if he did not know for certain what would go with the lower deck, at least he was quite sure what would not.
He looked at his watch, put on his best coat, and walked on to the quarterdeck. Six bells in the forenoon watch. His officers were gathering round him, silent, very grave.
‘All hands aft, if you please, Mr Parker,’ he said.
The shrill pipes, the roaring down hatchways, the stampede, the red coats trooping forward through the throng. Silence, but for the tapping of the reef-?points overhead.
‘Men,’ said Jack, ‘I know damned well what’s going on. I know damned well what’s going on; and I won’t have it. What simple fellows you are, to listen to a parcel of makee-?clever sea-?lawyers and politicians, glib, quick-?talking coves. Some of you have put your necks into the noose. I say your necks into the noose. You see the Ville de Paris over there?’ Every head turned to the line-?of-?battle ship on the horizon. ‘I have only to signal her, or half a dozen other cruisers, and run you up to the yardarm with the Rogue’s March playing. Damned fools, to listen to such talk. But I am not going to signal to the Ville de Paris nor to any other king’s ship. Why not? Because the Polychrest is going into action this very night, that’s why. I am not going to have it said in the fleet that any Polychrest is afraid of hard knocks.’
‘That’s right,’ said a voice - Joe Plaice, well out in front, his mouth wide open.
‘It’s not you, sir,’ said another, unseen. ‘It’s him, old Parker, the hard-?horse bugger’.
‘I’m going to take the Polychrest in tonight,’ Jack went on, in a growing roar of conviction, ‘and I’m going to hammer the Frenchmen in Chaulieu, in their own port, dy’ye hear me? If there’s any man here afraid of hard knocks, he’d better stay behind. Is there any man here, afraid of hard knocks?’
A kind of universal growl, not ill-?natured: some laughter; further cries of ‘that hard-?horse bugger’.
‘Silence fore and aft. Well, I’m glad there ain’t. There are some awkward hands among us still - look at that wicked ugly slab-?line - and some men that talk too much, but I never thought there was a faint heart aboard. They may say the Polychrest ain’t very quick in stays; they may say she don’t furl her tops’ls all that pretty; but if they say she’s shy, if they say she don’t like hard knocks, why, black the white of my eye. When we thumped it into the Bellone, there wasn’t a single foremast jack that did not do his duty like a lion. So we’ll run into Chaulieu, I say, and we’ll hammer Bonaparte. That’s the right way to bring the war to an end - that’s the right way, not listening to a set of galley-?rangers and clever chaps - and the sooner it’s over and you can go home, the better I’ll be pleased. I know it’s not a bed of roses, looking after our country the way we have to. Now I tell you this, and mark what I do say. There is going to be no punishment over this business: it will not even be logged, and there’s my word upon it. There is going to be no punishment. But every man and boy must attend to his duty tonight, he must mind it very carefully, because Chaulieu is a tough nut to crack - an awkward set of shoals - an awkward tide - and we must be every hand to his rope, and haul with a will, d’ye hear? Quick’s the word and sharp’s the action. Now I am going to pick some men for the barge, and then we shall crowd all the sail she can bear.’ He walked into the tight crowd of men, into the low buzz of talk, the whispers, and silence went before him. Smiling, confident faces, worried faces or blank, some apprehensive, some brute-?terrified and savage. ‘Davis,’ he said, ‘go along into the barge.’ The man’s eyes were frightened as a wild beast’s: he darted looks left and right. ‘Come on, now, come along, you heard what I said,’ said Jack quietly, and Davis lumbered aft, bowed and unnatural. The silence was general now, the atmosphere quite different. But he was not going to leave these men to have dinner with their messmates and try some desperate foolery. He was in a state of exceedingly acute awareness; he had no shadow of a doubt of the men he chose. ‘Wilcocks, into the barge. Anderson.’ He was far in among them. He had no weapons. ‘Johnson. Look alive.’ The tension was heightening very fast; it must go no higher. ‘Bonden, into the barge,’ he said, looking over his coxswain’s head. ‘Me, sir?’ cried Bonden piteously. ‘Cut along,’ said Jack. ‘Bantock, Lakey, Screech.’ The low excited talk had begun again on the periphery. Men who could not be suspected were being sent into the barge: they were going aft, down the sternladder and into the boat towing behind: this was no punishment, nor no threat of punishment. He flemished down the offending slab-?line in a seamanlike manner and walked back to the quarterdeck.
‘Now, Polychrests,’ he said, ‘now we are going to crack on until she groans again. Stuns’ls aloft and alow, royals, and, damn me, royal stuns’ls and skys’ls if she’ll bear ‘em. The sooner we’re there; the sooner we’re home. Topmen, upperyardmen, are you ready?’
‘Ready, aye ready, sir.’ A comfortable, good body of sound - relief, thankfulness?
‘Then at the word, up you go. Lay aloft!’
The Polychrest bloomed like a white rose. Her rarely-?used studdingsails stretched out brilliant white one after another, her brand-?new royals shone high, and above them all, her hitherto unseen skysails twinkled in the sun. The ship groaned and groaned again as they were sheeted home; she plunged her forefoot deep while behind her the barge raced along in her wake, the water almost to its gunwales.
If the Polychrest could be said to have a good point of sailing, it was with the wind three points abaft the beam; and here the wind stayed all day, scarcely varying from west-?north-?west by north, and blowing with a gentle urgency that kept all eyes aloft for the safety of her royals and skysails. She was cracking on indeed, racing down the Channel as though their lives depended upon it, making so much water that Mr Gray the carpenter, coming up from the well, officially registered his protest. She did carry away a skysail, and at one point a large unidentified object tore from her bottom, but the leagues raced away in her wake, and Jack, perpetually on the quarterdeck, could almost have loved her.
On the forecastle the watch below were at their make and mend; the watch on duty were kept busy, necessarily busy, trimming sail; and everybody seemed to be enjoying the speed, the racing tension to get the last ounce out of her. His orders about starting were being punctually obeyed; and so far no man or boy seemed to move any slower for it. The men in the barge had been brought aboard, lest it should tow under, and they had had their dinner in the galley: he was not afraid of them now - their influence was gone, their shipmates avoided them. Davis, the really dangerous brute for a sudden reckless explosion, seemed wholly amazed; and Wilcocks, the eloquent attorney’s clerk turned pickpocket, could find no one to listen to him. The seamen, for the most part, had turned with their usual calm volatility from one disaster to the interval before the next. For the moment he had the situation in hand.
His only anxiety was the wind. As the afternoon wore on it grew fainter and more irregular, giving every sign of falling away altogether with the setting of the sun: as the damp evening settled from the sky, with the dew tightening the rigging, it revived a little, still breathing from the longed-?for north-?west; but there was no trusting to it.
By six o’clock they had run off their distance, standing in to raise the unmistakable tower and headland of Point Noir, with a cross-?bearing on Camaret; but now, as they steered east-?south-?east to make the coast a little north of Chaulieu, the haze thickened, thickened, until at the very entrance to Chaulieu bay itself, they found themselves in a fog, their royals faint blurs high over the deck - a fog that lay a little above the smoothly swelling surface of the sea, and that was torn in long wafts of thick and clear, faintly luminous from the rising moon.
