from Bencoolen, found for the envoy by the Governor of Bombay. Mr Atkins looked upon the new arrival with hatred and suspicion; he tried to make Mr Ahmed Smyth’s life miserable, but outwardly at least he was unsuccessful, for in the oriental secretary the Malay predominated, and his large, black, somewhat oblique eyes shone with merriment.
Mr Stanhope tried to keep the peace between them, but often and often Atkins’s harsh, nasal voice would be heard issuing from the cabin - little or no privacy in a vessel thirty yards long with two hundred men crammed into it- complaining of some infringement of his prerogatives, some slight; and then the envoy’s gentle, conciliating murmur, assuring him Smyth was a very good, well-?behaved, civil, attentive fellow - that he meant no harm, had no idea of encroaching. Ahmed Smyth was popular in the ship although, being a Mahommedan and suffering from his liver, he drank no wine; and when the rearrangement of the frigate’s bowels set free a space long enough to swing a hammock in, Mr Stourton had it screened off as a cabin for the foreign gentleman. This so vexed Atkins, who was obliged to share with poor Mr Berkeley, with whom he was no longer on speaking terms, that he came to Stephen and begged him to use his influence with the captain, to put an end to a gross injustice, a monstrous abuse of authority.
‘I cannot interfere with the running of the ship,’ said Stephen.
Then H.E. will have to have a word with Aubrey himself,’ said Atkins It is intolerable Every day this nigger finds some new way of provoking me If he don’t take care, I shall provoke him, I can tell you .
‘Do you mean you will fight him?’ asked Stephen That is a course no one with your welfare at heart could advise’ ‘Thank you, thank you, Dr Maturin,’ cried Atkins, grasping his hand. He was extremely sensitive to even the most fallacious appearance of affection, poor man. ‘But that is not what I meant. Oh no. A man of my family does not fight with a half-?caste nigger clerk, not even a Christian. After all, un gentilhomme est toujours gentilhomme.’
‘Compose yourself, Mr Atkins,’ said Stephen, for the enthusiasm with which Atkins spoke these last words brought the blood to his nose and ears. ‘In these latitudes, indulgence in passion may bring on a calenture. I do not like your mottled face; you eat too much, drink too much; and are a likely victim.’
Yet it was Mr Stanhope that suffered from the calenture. One afternoon when Ahmed Smyth dined with the gunroom, Atkins could be heard ranting away in the cabin Some feet above the open skylight the carpenter rested his mallet and said privately to his mate, ‘If I was His Excellency, I should put that bugger into the jolly-?boat with a pound of cheese, and bid him look out for another place.’
‘How he does badger and worry the poor old gent, to be sure. You would think they was married. I feel for him: poor old gent - always a civil word.’
A little later Mr Stanhope’s valet brought his master’s compliments - he begged to be excused from their party at whist, and would be most grateful for a word with Dr Maturin at his leisure. Stephen found him looking tired and old and discouraged: it was this wretched bile again, he thought, and should be infinitely obliged for half of a blue pill, or whatever Dr Maturin judged proper. A thready, uneven pulse, a high temperature; dry skin, an anxious face, a brilliant eye: Stephen prescribed bark, his favourite slime-?draught, and a blue-?coloured placebo.
They had some effect, and Mr Stanhope was more comfortable in the morning. Yet his strength did not return, nor his appetite; Stephen was not pleased with his patient, whose temperature rose and fell, with an alternation of febrile excitement and languor that he had never seen before. Mr Stanhope found the heat very hard to bear, yet every day they drew nearer to the equator, and every day the wind died to the smallest breeze between ten and two. They set up a wind-?sail for him, to direct the air into the cabin, where he lay, dry, thin, yellow, suffering from continual nausea, but always polite, always grateful for any attention, apologetic.
Stephen and M’Alister had a fair library of books on tropical medicine; they read them through and through, and admitted to one another, but in Latin, that they were at sea. ‘There is at least one thing we can do,’ observed Stephen. ‘We can get rid of one external source of irritation.’
Mr Atkins was forbidden the cabin on doctor’s orders, and Stephen spent most of his nights there, generally accompanied by the valet or Mr White. He was fond of the envoy; he wished him very well; but above all he was professionally committed. This was a case in which close Hippocratic attention must take the place of drugs; the patient was too weak, the disease too little understood, for any radical measures; and he sat by Mr Stanhope’s bedside watch after watch while the ship moved quietly through the phosphorescent sea. This, he reflected, was his true occupation; this, not the self-?destructive pursuit of a woman far beyond his reach. Medicine, as he saw it, was largely impersonal, and although its effect might be humane, Atkins would have received much the same care. What were his motives, beyond a desire for knowledge, an itch for cataloguing, measuring, naming, recording?
His mind wandered away, losing itself in intricate paths; and when he found that his half-?waking consciousness was suffused with a rosy pleasure, and that there was a smile upon his face, he brought up his vague ideas with a jerk, to find that in fact between two bells and the three that had just struck he had been musing upon Diana Villiers, or rather upon her laughter, particularly bubbling and gay, unaffectedly musical, and the way the hair curled at the nape of her neck.
‘Did you do the Heautontimoroumenos at school?’ whispered Mr Stanhope.
‘I did, too,’ said Stephen.
‘But at sea it is different. I was dreaming of Dr Bulkeley at school and his terrible black face; I really thought I saw him there in the cabin. How he frightened me when I was a little chap. But, however, we are at sea - it is different. Tell me, is it nearly daylight yet? I thought I heard three bells.’
‘Very soon now. Just raise your head, will you now, till I turn your pillow.’ Fresh sheets, sponging, a spoonful of animal soup, sordes removed from his cracked lips, black in the candlelight. At four bells Mr Stanhope fell into a rambling account of the etiquette at the Sultan’s court -Mr Smyth told him the Malay rulers were very particular about precedence; His Majesty’s representative must not give way to any improper claim; he hoped he should do right.
Sponging, a change of position, the small personal ignominies - Mr Stanhope was as shamefaced as a girl. Day after day Stephen felt the balance shift and vary; but after a fortnight of unremitting care he walked into the sick-?bay, his eyes sunk and dark-?rimmed with fatigue, and said ‘Mr M’Alister, a good morning to you. I believe we may cry lo triumphe, at least as far as the anorexia is concerned. We had a pretty crisis at four with a laudable exudation, and a little after six the patient took eleven ounces of animal soup! It is the animal soup that bears the bell away - the animal soup for ever! The vicious anomaly of the pulse remains, and the palpable liver; but I think we may look forward to a gain in weight and strength.’
By day they slung his cot on the weather-?side of the quarterdeck, and the Surprises were happy to see him again, He and his people and his baggage, presents and livestock had been a great nuisance to them these fifteen thousand miles now; but, as they said, the Excellency was a civil gentleman - always had a civil word, not like some touch-?me-?not sodomites - and they were used to him. They liked what they were used to, and they rejoiced to see him getting better as the frigate slipped away south and eastwards through stronger, cooler winds.
