aboard.’
‘God set a flower upon you, my dear, with your ten-?inch spike,’ said Stephen. ‘Of course I know it: you have mentioned them daily these last two hundred leagues, together with your hanging-?ends and double-?sister-?blocks; and nightly too, prattling in your sleep. Bow, bow to predestination or at least confine yourself to silent prayer.’
‘Not so much as a ten-?inch spike, not a mast or boom but what is fished,’ said Jack, shaking his head. And it was true: yet with an irritating complacency Mr Stanhope, his suite, and now even Dr Maturin cried out that this was delightful now - that was the only way of travelling - a post-?chaise on the turnpike road was nothing in comparison of this - they should recommend it to all their friends.
Certainly it was delightful for the passengers, the smooth sea, the invigorating breeze carrying them steadily into warmer airs; but in the latitude of the Isle of France Jack, his carpenter and boatswain, and all his seamanlike officers, looked out eagerly for a French privateer - a spare topmast or so, a few spars, a hundred fathoms of one-?and-?a-?half-?inch rope would have made them so happy! They stared with all their might, and the Indian Ocean remained as empty as the South Atlantic; and here there were not even whales.
On and on she sailed, in warmer seas but void, as though they alone had survived Deucalion’s flood; as though all land had vanished from the earth; and once again the ship’s routine dislocated time and temporal reality so that this progress was an endless dream, even a circular dream, contained within an unbroken horizon and punctuated only by the sound of guns thundering daily in preparation for an enemy whose real existence it was impossible to conceive.
Stephen laid down his pistols, wiped the barrels with his handkerchief and shut the case. They were warm from his practice, but still the bottle hanging from the foreyardarm swung there intact. It was not the fault of the pistols, either; they were the best Joe Manton could produce, and the purser had hit the mark three times. it was true that Stephen had been firing left-?handed, the right having suffered worse at Port Mahon; but a year ago he would certainly have knocked the bottle down, left hand or not. Pressing? Trying too hard? He sighed; and pondering over the nature of muscular and nervous co-?ordination he groped his way up into the mizentop:
Mr Atkins gazed after him, more nearly convinced that it would be safe to quarrel with him once they reached Bombay.
Reaching the futtock-?shrouds, Stephen took a sudden determination: if his body would not obey him in one way it should in another. He seized the ropes that ran outwards to the rim of the platform, and instead of making his way into the top by writhing through them he forced his person grunting upwards, a diagonal reversed climb with his back towards the sea and himself hanging at an angle of forty-?five degrees, and so reached his goal by the path a seaman would have taken - a sailor, but no landsman bound by the ordinary law of gravity. Bonden was still peering down the lubber’s hole, the way Stephen had always come before, the safe, direct, logical, but ignominious road; and his unsuccessful attempt at disguising his astonishment when he turned was a consolation to Stephen’s mind: its element of vanity glowed cherry-?pink. Mastering a laboured gasp that would have ruined the effect, he said, ‘Let us go straight to verse.’ This was all that one inspiration could accomplish and he paused, as if in thought, until his heart was beating normally. ‘Verse,’ he said again. ‘Are you ready, Barret Bonden? Then dash away.
Thus to the Eastern wealth through storms we go;
But now, the Cape once doubled, fear no more:
A constant trade-?wind will securely blow,
And gently lay us on the spicy shore.’
‘An elegant sentiment, sir,’ said Bonden. ‘As good as Dibdin any day. If you wanted to crab it, which far from me be it, you might say the gent was a trifle out in his trade-?wind, this rightly being the monsoon, as we call it by sea. And as for wealth, why, that’s poetic licence; or, as you might say, all my eye. Spice maybe; I’m not saying anything against spice, nor yet spicy shores, though most of them is shit begging your pardon, in Indian ports. But wealth, I make so bold as to laugh, ha, ha; why, sir, bating a few privateers out of the Isle of France and Reunion there’s not a prize for us in this whole Indian mortal ocean, not from here to Java Head, not since Admiral Rainier cleaned up Trincomalee. Unless maybe we take on Admiral Linois on his seventy-?four, that chased us so cruel hard in the poor old Sophie. God love us, he was a merry old gentleman; you remember him, sir?’ Certainly Stephen remembered him; and that bitter chase in the Mediterranean - the loss of their ship - their capture. Bonden’s face changed from smiling reminiscence to stony reserve: he slid his book into his bosom as Mr Callow’s hideous face appeared above the rail with the Captain’s compliments and did Dr Maturin intend shifting his coat?
‘Why in God’s name would I shift my coat?’ cried Stephen. ‘What is more, I have no coat on, at all.’
‘Perhaps he thought you might like to put one on for Mr Stanhope’s dinner, sir: a genteel way of alluding to it. It is within minutes of three bells, sir: the sand is almost out. And he particularly begs you, sir, to come down through the - to come down the usual way.’
‘Mr Stanhope’s dinner,’ said Stephen in an undertone. He stood up and stared down at the quarterdeck, where, except for her captain, all the frigate’s officers were gathered in their full-?dress uniforms. Just so. He had forgotten the invitation. How remote it seemed, that quarterdeck, crowded with blue coats, red coats and half a dozen black, with the busy check-?shirted seamen moving among them:
no great distance vertically - fifty feet or so - but still how remote. He knew all the men there, liked several of them, loved young Babbington and Pullings; and yet he had the impression of living in a vacuum. It came to him strongly now, though some of the upturned faces were winking and nodding at him: he slid his legs through the lubber’s hole with a grave expression on his face and began his laborious descent.
‘So full a ship, so close-?packed a world, moving urgently along, surrounded by its own vacuum; each man bombinating in his own, no doubt. My journal, re-?read but yesterday, gives me this same impression: an egocentric man living amidst pale shades. It reflects none of the complex, vivid life of this crowded vessel. In its pages, my host (whom I esteem) and his people hardly exist, nor yet the gunroom,’ he reflected during intervals of conversation as he sat at the envoy’s left, stuffed rapidly into his best coat by Jack’s powerful hand, breeched and brushed in one minute twenty seconds flat while the Marine sentry, under penalty of death, held the half-?hour glass concealed in his hand to prevent the striking of the bell - as he sat there eating up the last long-?preserved delicacies from Mr Stanhope’s store and drinking milk-?warm claret in honour of the Duke of Cumberland’s birthday. But he was not without a social conscience, and aware that he had caused great uneasiness, that his very, very dirty face and hands reflected discredit upon the ship, he exerted himself to talk, to be agreeable; and even, after the port had gone round and round, to sing.
Mr Bowes, the purser, had obliged the company with an endless ballad on the battle of the First of June, in which he had served a gun: it was set to the tune of ‘I was, d’ye see, a Waterman,’ but he produced its slow length in an unvarying tone, neither shout nor cry but nearly allied to both, pitched in the neighbourhood of lower A, with his eyes fixed bravely on a knot in the deckhead above Mr Stanhope. The envoy smiled bravely, and in the
