round face was like the rising sun, supposing the sun to wrinkle with merriment. All the faces there, except for Nicolls’s, were a fine red, but Hervey’s outshone the rest. There was an attaching simplicity about the first lieutenant; no striving contention, no pretence, no sort of aggression. How would such a man behave in hand-?to-? hand action? Would his politeness (and Hervey was very much the gentleman) put him at a fatal disadvantage? In any event, he was quite out of place here, poor fellow; far more suitable for a parsonage or a fellowship. He was the victim of innumerable naval connections, an influential family full of admirals whose summum bonum was a flag and who by means of book-?time and every other form of decent corruption meant to impel him into command at the earliest possible age. He had passed for lieutenant before
a board of his grandfather’s prot?g?s, who gravely wrote that they had examined ‘Mr Hervey . . who appears to be twenty years of age. He produceth Certificates. . . of his Diligence and Sobriety; he can splice, knot, reef a sail, work a Ship in sailing, shift his Tides, keep a Reckoning of a Ship’s Way by Plane Sailing and Mercator; observe by Sun or Star, and find the Variation of the Compass, and is qualified to do the Duty of an able Seaman and Midshipman’ - all lies, but for the mathematical part, since he had almost no real sea-?going experience. He would be made commander as soon as they reached his uncle, the admiral on the East India station; and a few months later he would be an anxious, ineffectual, diffident post-?captain. He and the purser would have been happier if they had changed places; Bowes, the purser, had been unable to go to sea as a boy, but being enamoured of the naval life (his brother was a captain) he had bought a purser’s place, and in spite of his club-?foot he had distinguished himself in several desperate cutting-?out expeditions. He was always on deck, understood the manoeuvres perfectly, and prided himself on sailing a boat; he knew a great deal about the sea, and although he was not a particularly good purser he was an honest one: an uncommon bird. Pullings was much as he had always been, a thin, amiable, loose-?limbed youth, delighted to be a lieutenant (his highest ambition), delighted to be in the same ship as Captain Aubrey: how did he manage to remain so tubular, eating with the thoughtless avidity of a wolf? Harrowby, the master: a broad, spade-?shaped face set in a smile -he was smiling now, with his wide mouth open at the corners, the middle closed. It gave an impression of falsity; perhaps unfairly, for although the master was an ignorant, confident man there might be no conscious duplicity there. No teeth. Fair receding hair worn cropped; a vast domed forehead, ordinarily pale, now red and beaded with sweat. An indifferent navigator, it seemed. He owed his advance to Gambier, that evangelical admiral, and when ashore he was a lay-?preacher, belonging to some west-?country sect. Stephen often saw him in the sick-?bay, coming to visit the invalids. ‘There is good in them all,’ he said. ‘We must try to bring them up to our level.’
Maturin: ‘I low do you propose to effect this?’
Harrowby: ‘I rely upon unction and personal magnetism.’
Yet he did in fact bring them wine and chicken; he wrote letters for them and gave or lent small sums of money. He was ready and eager to give; perhaps readier than others to receive. Active: zealous; healthy; extremely clean; somewhat excited, He caught Stephen’s eye and smiled wider, nodding kindly.
Etherege, the Marine lieutenant, was as red as his coat; at the moment he was surreptitiously undoing his belt, looking round with a general benevolence. A small round-?headed man who rarely spoke; yet he gave no impression of taciturnity - his lively expression and his frequent laugh took the place of conversation. He had indeed very little to say, but he was welcome wherever he went.
Nicolls: he was something else again. The only comparatively pale face in the cheerful ring: a black-? haired man, self-?contained, not one to be pushed about. He would have been the skeleton at this orderly, somewhat formal feast if he had not been making an obvious effort at conviviality; but his face was set in unhappiness, and his present application to the port did not seem to be doing him much good. Stephen had seen much of him in Gibraltar, years before, and they had dined together with the 42nd Foot at Chatham, when Nicolls had had to be carried back to his ship, singing like a canary-?bird; but that was immediately before his marriage and no doubt he was in a state of nervous tension. In those days Stephen had thought him a typical sea-?officer, somewhat reserved but good company, one of those who naturally combined good breeding with the necessary roughness of their profession, with a bulkhead between the two. Typical sea-?officer: the phrase was not without meaning, but how to define it? In every gathering of sailors you would see a few from whom the rest seemed variants; but how few to colour a whole profession! To colour it - to set its tone. Off-?hand he could not think of more than a dozen out of the hundreds he had met: Dundas, Riou, Seymour, Jack, perhaps Cochrane; but no, Cochrane ashore was too flamboyant to be typical, too full of himself, too conscious of his own value, too much affected by that Scotch love of a grievance; and there was that unfortunate title hanging about his neck, a beloved millstone. There was something of Cochrane in Jack, a restless impatience of authority, a strong persuasion of being in the right; but not enough to disqualify him, not nearly enough; and in any case it had been diminishing fast these last years.
What were the constants? A cheerful resilience; a competent readiness; an open conversability; a certain candour. How much of this was the sea, the common stimuli? How much was the profession the choice of those who shared a particular cast of mind?
‘The captain is under way,’ whispered his neighbour, touching his shoulder and bending to speak in his ear.
‘Why, so he is,’ said Stephen, getting to his feet. ‘He has catted his fish.’
They slowly climbed the companion-?ladder. The heat on deck was even greater than below now that the breeze had died away entirely. On the larboard side a sail had been lowered into the water, buoyed at its extremities and weighted in the middle to form a swimming-?bath, and half the ship’s company were splashing about in it. To starboard, perhaps two miles away, lay the rocks, no longer anything like ships at all, but still dazzling white from the edge of the deep blue sea to their tops, some fifty feet above the surface in the case of the biggest - so white that the slow surf showed creamy in comparison. A cloud of gannets sailed overhead, with a mingling of dark, smaller terns: every now and then a gannet dived straight down into the sea with a splash like a four-?pounder ball.
‘Mr Babbington, pray lend me your spy-?glass,’ cried Stephen; and when he had gazed for a while, ‘Oh how I wish I were there. Jack - that is to say, Captain Aubrey - may I have a boat?’
‘My dear Doctor,’ said Jack, ‘I am sure you would not have asked, if you had remembered it was Sunday afternoon.’ Sunday afternoon was holy. It was the men’s only holiday, wind, weather and the malice of the enemy permitting, and they prepared for it with enormous labour on Saturday and on Sunday morning. ‘Now I must go below and see to that infernal sail-?room,’ he said, turning quickly away from his friend’s disappointment. ‘You will not forget that we are to call upon Mr Stanhope before quarters?’
‘I will pull you across, if you choose,’ said Nicolls, a moment later. ‘I am sure Hervey will let us have the jolly-? boat.’
‘How very good-?natured of you,’ cried Stephen, looking into Nicolls’ face - somewhat vinous, but perfectly in command of himself. ‘I should be infinitely obliged. Give me leave to fetch a hammer, some small boxes, a hat, and I am with you.’
They crawled along the barge, the launch and one of the cutters to the jolly-?boat - they were all towing behind, to prevent them opening in the heat - and rowed away. The cheerful noise faded behind them; their wake lengthened across the glassy sea. Stephen took off his clothes and sat naked in his sennit hat; he revelled in the
