‘Oh, oh!’ cried the chaplain, staggering into the booms. ‘A fish - a fish has hit me! A flying-?fish hit me in the face.’
‘There is another,’ said Stephen, picking it up. ‘You notice that your high fishes fly paradoxically with the wind. I conceive there must be an upward draught. How they gleam - a whole flight, see, see! Here is a third. I shall offer it, lightly fried, to my sloth.’
‘I cannot imagine,’ said Jack, recovering the chaplain and guiding him along the gangway, ‘what that sloth has against me. I have always been civil to it, more than civil; but nothing answers. I cannot think why you speak of its discrimination.’
Jack was of a sanguine temperament; he liked most people and he was surprised when they did not like him. This readiness to be pleased had been damaged of recent years, but it remained intact as far as horses, dogs and sloths were concerned; it wounded him to see tears come into the creature’s eyes when he walked into the cabin, and he laid himself out to be agreeable. As they ran down to Rio he sat with it at odd moments, addressing it in Portuguese, more or less, and feeding it with offerings that it sometimes ate, sometimes allowed to drool slowly from its mouth; but it was not until they were approaching Capricorn, with Rio no great distance on the starboard bow, that he found it respond.
The weather had freshened almost to coldness, for the wind was coming more easterly, from the chilly currents between Tristan and the Cape; the sloth was amazed by the change; it shunned the deck and spent its time below. Jack was in his cabin, pricking the chart with less satisfaction than he could have wished: progress, slow, serious trouble with the mainmast - unaccountable headwinds by night - and sipping a glass of grog; Stephen was in the mizentop, teaching Bonden to write and scanning the sea for his first albatross. The sloth sneezed, and looking up, Jack caught its gaze fixed upon him; its inverted face had an expression of anxiety and concern. ‘Try a piece of this, old cock,’ he said, dipping his cake in the grog and proffering the sop. ‘It might put a little heart into you.’ The sloth sighed, closed its eyes, but gently absorbed the piece, and sighed again.
Some minutes later he felt a touch on his knee: the sloth had silently climbed down and it was standing there, its beady eyes looking up into his face, bright with expectation. More cake, more grog: growing confidence and esteem. After this, as soon as the drum had beat the retreat, the sloth would meet him, hurrying towards the door on its uneven legs: it was given its own bowl, and it would grip it with its claws, lowering its round face into it and pursing its lips to drink (its tongue was too short to lap). Sometimes it went to sleep in this position, bowed over the emptiness.
‘In this bucket,’ said Stephen, walking into the cabin, ‘in this small half-?bucket, now, I have the population of Dublin, London and Paris combined: these animalculae
- what is the matter with the sloth?’ It was curled on Jack’s knee, breathing heavily: its bowl and Jack’s glass stood empty on the table. Stephen picked it up, peered into its affable, bleary face, shook it, and hung it upon its rope. It seized hold with one fore and one hind foot, letting the others dangle limp, and went to sleep.
Stephen looked sharply round, saw the decanter, smelt to the sloth, and cried, ‘Jack, you have debauched my sloth.’
On the other side of the cabin-?bulkheads Mr Atkins said to Mr Stanhope, ‘High words between the Captain and the Doctor, sir. Hoo, hoo! Pretty strong - he pitches it pretty strong: I wonder a man of spirit can stomach it. I should give him a thrashing directly.’
Mr Stanhope had no notion of listening behind bulkheads, and he did not reply; but he could not prevent himself from catching isolated sentiments, such as ‘ .
tes moeurs crapuleuses. . . tu cherches a corrompre mon paresseux . . . va donc, eh, salope . . . esp?ce de fripouille’, for the dialogue had switched to French on the entrance of the wooden-?faced Killick. ‘I hope they will not be late for our whist,’ he murmured. Now that the air had grown breathable Mr Stanhope’s strength had revived, and he looked forward keenly to these evenings of cards, the only break in the unspeakable tedium of ocean travel.
They were not late. They appeared at the stroke of the hour; but their faces were red, and Stephen was seen to cheat in order to have the envoy as his partner. Jack played abominably; Stephen with a malignant concentration, darting out his trumps like a serpent’s tooth; he excelled himself in post-?mortems, showing clearly how his opponents might have drawn the singleton king, saved the rubber, trumped the ace, and the evening broke up with no slackening of the tension; they looked at him nervously as they settled the monstrous score, and with a factitious air of cheerfulness Jack said, ‘Well, gentlemen, if the master’s reckoning. is as deadly accurate as Dr Maturin’s leads, and if the wind holds, I believe you will wake up tomorrow in Rio de Janeiro: I feel the loom of the land - I feel it in my bones.’
In the dead hour of the middle watch he appeared on deck in his night-?shirt, looked attentively at the log-? board by the binnacle-?light, and desired Pullings to shorten sail at eight bells, He appeared again, like a restless ghost, at five bells, and backed his topsails for a while. His calculations were remarkably exact, and he brought the frigate into Rio just as the sun rose behind her and bathed the whole fantastic spectacle in golden light. Yet even this did not answer: even this did not close the breach: Stephen, on being routed out of bed to behold it, observed ‘that it was curious how vulgar Nature could be at times - meretricious, ad captandum vulgus effects -very much the kind of thing attempted to be accomplished at Astley’s or Ranelagh, and fortunately missed of’. He might have thought of other observations, for the sloth had been very slowly sick all night in his cabin, but at this moment the Surprise erupted in flames and smoke, saluting the Portuguese admiral as he lay there in a crimson seventy-?four under Rat Island.
Jack went ashore with Mr Stanhope after breakfast, his bargemen shaved and trim in sennit hats and snowy duck and himself in his best uniform; and when he came back there was not the least trace of reserve, propitiation or hauteur in his expression. Bonden was carrying a bag, and from far off the cry of Post went round the waiting ship.
‘Captain’s compliments and should be happy if you could spare him a moment,’ said Church, the rattivore. Then grasping Stephen’s sleeve he added in an urgent whisper, ‘And sir, please, please would you put in a good word for Scott and me to go ashore? We have deserved it.’
Wondering just how Mr Church thought he had deserved anything short of impalement, Stephen walked into the cabin. It was filled with a rosy smile, with contentment and the smell of porter; Jack sat there at his table behind a number of opened letters from Sophia, two glasses and a jug. ‘There you are, my dear Stephen,’ he cried. ‘Come and drink a glass of porter, with the Irish Franciscans’ compliments. I have had five letters from Sophie, and there are some for you - from Sussex too, I believe.’ They were lying off a heap of others addressed to Dr Maturin, and the hand was undoubtedly Sophia’s. ‘What a splendid hand she writes, don’t you find?’ said Jack. ‘You can make out every word. And, really, such a style! Such a style! I wonder how she could have got such a style: they must be some of the best letters that were ever wrote. There is a piece here about the garden at Melbury and the pears, that I will read to you presently, as good as anything in all literature. But do not mind me, I beg, if you choose to look at yours now - do not stand on ceremony.’
‘I will not,’ said Stephen absently, putting them into his pocket and shuffling through the rest - Sir Joseph,
