representative!’
‘Naval custom is holy at sea, Mr Atkins,’ said Jack, turning away and raising his voice. ‘Foretop, there. Mind what you are about with that euphroe. Mr Callow, when Mr Pullings comes aft, be so good as to give him my compliments, and I should be glad if he would breakfast with me. I hope you will join us, Mr Callow.’
Breakfast at last, and the tide of Jack’s native good humour rose. They were cramped, the four of them, in the coach - the great cabin had been given over to Mr Stanhope - but confinement was part of naval life, and easing himself round in his chair he stretched his legs, lit his cigar and said, ‘Tuck in, youngster. Don’t mind me. Look, there is a whole pile of bacon under that cover; it would be a sad shame to sent it away.’
In the agreeable pause that followed, broken only by the steady champ of the midshipman’s jaws as he engulfed twenty-?seven rashers, they heard the cry pass through the ship. ‘D’ye hear there, fore and aft? Clean for muster at five bells. Duck frocks and white trousers. D’ye hear there, clean shirt and a shave at five bells.’ They also heard, clear through the thin cabin bulkhead, the metallic voice of Mr Atkins, apparently haranguing his chief, and Mr Stanhope’s quiet replies. The envoy was a remote, gentle, grey man, very well-?bred, and it was a wonder that he should ever have attached such a bustling fellow to his service; Mr Stanhope had been ill when he came aboard, had suffered abominably from sea-?sickness as far as Gibraltar, then again right down to the Canaries; and he relapsed in the heavy swell of the doldrums, when the Surprise, log-?like on the heaving sea, often seemed to be about to roll her masts out. This relapse had been accompanied by a fit of the gout which, flying to his stomach, had kept him in his cabin. They had seen very little of the poor gentleman.
‘Tell me, Mr Callow,’ said Jack, partly out of a wish not to hear too much and partly to make his guest welcome, ‘how is the midshipman’s mess coming along? I have not seen your ram this week or more.’ The ancient creature palmed off upon the unsuspecting caterer as a hogget had been a familiar sight, stumping slowly about upon the deck.
‘Pretty low, sir,’ said Callow, withdrawing his hand from the bread-?barge. ‘We ate him in seventy north, and now we are down to the hen. But we give her all our bargemen, sir, and she may lay an egg.’
‘You ain’t down to millers, then?’ said Pullings.
‘Oh yes we are, sir,’ cried the midshipman. ‘Threepence, they have reached, which is a God-?damned - a crying shame.’
‘What are millers?’ asked Stephen.
‘Rats, saving your presence,’ -said Jack. ‘Only we call ‘em millers to make ‘em eat better; and perhaps because they are dusty, too, from getting into the flour and peas.’
‘My rats will not touch anything but the best biscuit, slightly moistened with melted butter. They are obese; their proud bellies drag the ground.’
‘Rats, Doctor?’ cried Pullings. ‘Why do you keep rats?’
‘I wish to see how they come along - to watch their motions,’ said Stephen. He was in fact conducting an experiment, feeding them with madder to see how long it took to penetrate their bones, but he did not mention this. His was a secretive mind; the area of reticence had grown and grown and now it covered the globular, kitten-?sized creatures that dozed through the hot nights and blazing days in his storeroom.
‘Millers,’ said Jack, his mind roaming back to his famished youth. ‘In the aftermost carline-?culver of the larboard berth there is a hole where we used to put a piece of cheese and catch them in a noose as they poked their heads out on their way along the channel to the bread-?room. Three or four a night in the middle watch we used to catch, on the Leeward Islands station. Heneage Dundas’ - nodding to Stephen - ‘used to eat the cheese afterwards.’
‘Was you a midshipman in the Surprise, sir?’ cried young Callow, amazed, amazed. If he had thought about it at all, he would have supposed that post-?captains sprang fully armed from the forehead of the Admiralty.
‘indeed I was,’ said Jack.
‘Good heavens, sir, she must be very, very old. The oldest ship in the fleet, I dare say.’
‘Well,’ said Jack, ’she is pretty old, too. We took her early in the last war - she was the French Unite - and she was no chicken then. Could you manage another egg?’
Callow leapt, jerked almost out of his chair by Pullings’s under-?table hint, changed his Yes, sir, if you please to No, sir, thank you very much, and stood up.
‘In that case,’ said Jack, ‘perhaps you will be so good as to desire your messmates to come into the cabin, with their logs.’
The rest of the morning, until five bells in the forenoon watch, he spent with the midshipmen, then with the bosun, gunner, carpenter and purser, going over their accounts: stores were well enough: plenty of beef, pork, peas and biscuit for six months, but all the cheese and butter had to be condemned - hardened as he was, Jack recoiled from the samples Mr Bowes showed him - and worse, far worse, the water was dangerously short. Some vile jobbery in the cooperage had provided the Surprise with a ground-?tier of casks that drank almost as much as the ship’s company, and the new-?fangled iron tank had silently leaked its heart out. He was still deep in paper when Killick came in, carrying his best uniform coat, and jerked his chin at him.
‘Mr Bowes, we must finish this later,’ said Jack. And as he dressed - the good broadcloth seemed three inches thick in this shattering heat - he thought about the water, about his position, so far westward after these weeks of drifting that when they did pick up the south-?east trades he might find it difficult to weather Cape St Roque in Brazil. He could see the Surprise exactly on the chart; his repeated lunars agreed closely with the chronometers and with the master’s and Mr Hervey’s reckonings; and on the chart he could see the coast of Brazil, not much above five hundred miles away. Furthermore, near the line the trades often came from due south. While he was worrying with these problems and his buttons, neckcloth and sword-?belt, he felt the ship heel to the wind, heel again, and very gently she began to speak - the sound of live water running along her side. He glanced at the compass overhead. WSW1/2W.
Would it die at once? -
When he came on to the crowded, even hotter deck it was still blowing. She just had steerage-?way, as close-?hauled as she could be - yards braced up twanging-?taut, sails like hoards. His plump, myopic first lieutenant, Mr Hervey, sweating in his uniform, smiled nervously at him, though with more confidence than usual. Surely this was right?
‘Very good, Mr Hervey,’ he said. ‘This is what we have been whistling for, eh? Long may it last. Perhaps we might keep her a little off - fore and main-?sheets - give her a fathom.’ Hervey, thank God, was not one of your
