‘Aye? Well, damn them for a pack of greasy hounds. Let me show you my relic. I preserved it south of Madagascar, and I preserved it in Bombay. You will have to stand up. Steady, now - clap on to the cheek-?bolt. There!’ He pointed to the cap, a dark, worn, rope-?scored, massive block of wood that embraced the two masts. ‘We cut it out of greenheart in a creek on the Spanish main: it is good for another twenty years. And here, do you see, is my relic.’ On the broad rim of the square hole that sat on the topmast head there were the initials JA cut deep and clear, supported on either side by blowsy forms that might have been manatees, though mermaids were more likely -beer-?drinking mermaids.
‘Does not that raise your heart?’ he asked.
‘Why,’ said Stephen, ‘I am obliged to you for the sight of it, sure.’
‘But it does raise your heart, you know, whatever you may say,’ said Jack. ‘It raises it a hundred feet above the deck. Ha, ha - I can get out a good thing now and then, given time - oh ha, ha, ha! You never smoked it - you was not aware of my motions.’
When Jack was as amused as this, so intensely amused throughout his whole massive being, belly and all, with his scarlet face glorious and shining and his blue eyes darting mirth from their narrowed slits, it was impossible to resist. Stephen felt his mouth widen involuntarily, his diaphragm contract, and his breath beginning to come in short thick pants.
‘But I am truly grateful to you, my dear,’ he said, ‘for having brought me to this proud perilous eminency, this quasi-?apex, this apogee; you have indeed lifted my heart, in the spirit and in the flesh; and I am now resolved to mount up daily. I now despise the mizentop, once my ultima Thule; and I even aspire to that knob up there,’ - nodding to the truck of the royal. ‘What an ape, or even I may say an obese post-?captain can accomplish, that also I can do.’
These words, and the conviction with which they were uttered, wiped the laugh off Jack’s face. ‘Each man to his own trade,’ he began earnestly. ‘Apes and I are born . .
The lookout’s hail ‘On deck there,’ directed nevertheless straight up at the captain, ’sail ho!’ cut him short.
‘Where away?’ he cried.
‘Two points on the larboard bow, sir.’
‘Mr Pullings. Mr Pullings, there. Be so good as to send my glass into the fore crosstrees.’
A moment later Mr Callow appeared,, having run from the cabin to the crosstrees without a pause; and the white fleck in the south-?east leapt nearer - a ship, close-?hauled on the starboard tack: topsails and courses, taking it easy. Already there was a hint of her dark hull on the rise. She would be about four leagues away. At the moment the Surprise was running seven or eight knots with no great spread of canvas; and she had the weather-?gauge. There was plenty of time.
‘Lose not a minute’ was engraved on his heart, however, and saying ‘Shin up to the jacks, Mr Callow: do not watch the chase, but the sea beyond her. Doctor, pray do not stir for the moment,’ he hailed the deck for his coxswain and swung himself into the shrouds with a speed just short of hurry. He met the ascending Bonden, said, ‘Bring the Doctor down handsomely, Bonden. He is to be dressed, full rig, in the top,’ and so reached the quarterdeck.
‘What have they seen, Captain?’ cried Atkins, running towards him. ‘Is it the enemy? Is it Linois?’
‘Mr Pullings, all hands to make sail. Maintopgallants’l, stuns’ls and royal; and scandalise the foretops’l yard.’
‘Maintopgallants’l, stuns’ls and royal, and scandalise foretops’l yard it is, sir.’
The boatswain’s call piped with a fine urgency; the ship was filled with the unaccustomed click of Sunday shoes; and Jack heard Atkins’s shrill voice cut off suddenly as the afterguard bowled him over; in a few moments the wild melee had resolved itself into ordered groups of men aloft and alow, each at his appointed rope. The orders came in the dead silence: in quick succession the sails were sheeted home, and as each filled on the steady breeze so a stronger impulse sent the ship faster through the water -her whole voice changed, and the rhythm of her pitch; all far more living, brilliantly awake. At the last cry of ‘Belay’ Jack looked at his watch. It was pretty well; they were not Livelies yet, not by a minute and forty seconds; but it was pretty well. He caught a look of whistling astonishment on his new first lieutenant’s face, and he smiled privately.
‘South-?south-?west a half south,’ he said to the helmsman. ‘Mr Pullings, I believe you may dismiss the watch below.’
The watch below did in fact vanish into the berth-?deck, but only to take off its best shirts, embroidered at the seams with ribbons, its spotless white trousers, and little low-?cut shoes with bows; it reappeared a few minutes later in working clothes and gathered on the forecastle, in the head and the foretop, staring fixedly at the sail on the horizon.
By this time Jack had begun his ritual pace from the break of the quarterdeck to the taffrail: at each turn he glanced up at the rigging and across the sea to the distant chase - for chase she had become in the frigate’s predatory eyes, although in fact she was not in flight: far from it - her course lay rather towards the Surprise than from her. At this moment she was a whiteness just clear of the larboard lower studdingsail, and if she held her luff she would soon disappear behind it. Now that the whole of the fresh impulse had been transmitted to the frigate’s hull, now that her upper masts had ceased their momentary complaint and that the backstays were less iron-?taut, she was racing through the water: she had nothing on her mizenmast; on her main, topsail, topgallant with studdingsails on either side, and royal, her mainsail being hauled up to let the wind into her foresail; and on her foremast, the course with both lower studdingsails spread like wings, no topsail - the maintopsail would have becalmed it - but the topsail yard on the masthead and its studdingsails set. She was running very smoothly, rippling over the swell with an eager forward thrust, not a hint of steering wild: their courses should converge in about an hour at this rate. Rather less: he might have to reduce sail. And if the chase wore and fled, he still had his spritsail and the kites in hand, as well as an advantage of some two or three knots, in all likelihood.
The civilians had been reduced to silence or shepherded below; Mr Stourton was hurrying quietly about, making ready for the possible order to clear for action; and in the silence of voices, but almost silence of the following wind, all that was to be heard was the steady run of water along her side, an urgent bubbling rush that mingled with the higher excited tumult of her wake.
Six bells. Braithwaite, the mate of the watch, came to the rail with the log. ‘Is the glass clear?’ he cried.
‘All clear, sir,’ said the quartermaster.
Braithwaite heaved the log. It shot astern. ‘Turn,’ he said, as the mark tore through his fingers, the reel
