months. Did he risk the Mozambique Channel, the dog?’
Another dawn, of the exquisite purity that is frightening- the perfection must break and fade. This time it was the cry of a sail that brought all hands tumbling up faster than a bosun’s pipe. She was standing southwards on the opposite tack: a man-?of-?war, in all probability. Half an hour later it was certain that she was a frigate, and that she was edging down: All hands stood by to clear for action, and the Surprise made the private signal. She replied, together with her number: Lachesis. The tension died away, to be replaced by a pleasant expectancy. ‘We shall have some news at last,’ said Jack; but as he spoke another hoist broke out, ‘Charged with despatches,’ and she hauled her wind. She might not heave to, not even for an admiral.
‘Ask her if she has any mail,’ said Jack; and with his glass to his eye he read the answer before the signal-? midshipman: ‘No mail for Surprise.’
‘Well, be damned to you for a slab-?sided tub,’ he said as they drew rapidly apart: and at dinner he said, ‘You know what it is, Stephen, I wish we did not have that parson aboard. White is a very good fellow; nothing against him personally; I like him, and should be happy to serve with him in any way, ashore. But at sea it is always reckoned bad luck to carry parsons. I am not in the least superstitious myself, as you know, but makes the hands uneasy. I would not have a chaplain in any ship of mine if I could help it. Besides, they are out of place in a man-? of-?war: it is their duty to tell us to turn the other cheek, and it don’t answer, not in action. I did not care for that ill-?looking bird that crossed our bows, either.’
‘It was only a common booby - from Ascension, no doubt. This grog is the vilest brew, even with my cochineal and ginger in it: how I long for wine again. . . a good full-?bodied red. Will I tell you something? The more I know of the Navy, the more I am astonished that men of a liberal education should be so weak as to believe in bugaboos. In spite of your eagerness to be home, you declined sailing on a Friday, with your very pitiful excuse about the capstan. You will advance the plea that it is for the sake of the men; and to that I will reply, ha, ha.’
‘You may say what you please, but these things work:
I could tell you tales that would raise the wig off your head.’
‘All your sea-?omens are omens of disaster; and of course, with man in his present unhappy state, huddled together in numbers far too great and spending all his surplus time and treasure in beating out his brother’s brains, any gloomy foreboding is likely to be fulfilled; but your corpse, your parson, your St Elmo’s fire is not the cause of the tragedy.’
Jack shook his head, unconvinced; and after chewing on his wooden beef for some time he said, ‘As for your liberal education, I, too, can say ha, ha. We sailors are hardly educated at all. The only way to make a sea-?officer is to send him to sea, and to send him young. I have been afloat, more or less, since I was twelve; and most of my friends never went much beyond the dame’s school. All we know is our profession, if indeed we know that - I should have tried the Mozambique channel. No: we are not the sort of men that educated, intelligent, well-? brought-?up young women cross a thousand miles of sea for. They like us well enough ashore, and are kind, and say Good old Tarpaulin when there is a victory. But they don’t marry us, not unless they do it right away - not unless we board them in our own smoke. Given time to reflect, as often as not they marry parsons, or clever chaps at the bar.’
‘Why, as to that, Jack, you undervalue Sophie: to love her is a liberal education in itself. Of course you are an educated man, in that sense. Besides, lawyers make notoriously bad husbands, from their habit of incessant prating; whereas your sailor has been schooled to mute obedience,’ said Stephen; and to divert the sad current of Jack’s mind he added, ‘Giraldus Cambrensis asserts, that the inhabitants of Ossory can change into wolves at their pleasure.’
Back with his cryptogams his conscience troubled him: he had been so steadily fixed upon his own pursuit - the hope of Madeira, the certainty of London - that he had paid little attention to Jack’s anxiety, an anxiety that, like his own, had been growing as the vague charming future became more sharply defined, more nearly the decisive present. He, too, was oppressed by a feeling that this great happiness of travelling month after month towards a splendid end was soon to be broken: a sense not indeed of impending disaster but rather of some uneasiness that he could not well define.
‘That was the unluckiest stroke,’ he said, thinking of Jack’s they many parsons. ‘Absit, o absit omen,’ for the deepest of his private superstitions, or ancestral pieties, was naming calls.
He found the chaplain alone in the gunroom, setting up a problem on the chess-?board, ‘Pray, Mr White,’ he said, ‘among the gentlemen of your cloth, have you ever met a Mr Hincksey?’
‘Mr Charles Hincksey?’ asked the chaplain, with a civil inclination of his head.
‘Just so. Mr Charles Hincksey.’
‘Yes. I know Charles Hincksey well. We were at Magdalen together: we used to play fives, and walk great distances. A delightful companion - no striving, no competition - and he was very well liked in the university: I was proud to know him. An excellent Grecian, too, and well-?connected; so well-?connected that he has two livings now, both of them in Kent, the one as fat as any in the county and the other capable of improvement. And yet, you know, I do not believe any of us grudged or envied him, even the men without benefices. He is a good, sound preacher, in the plain, unenthusiastic way: I dare say he will be a bishop soon; and so much the better for our church.’
‘Has the gentleman no faults?’
‘I dare say he has,’ said Mr White, ‘though upon my honour I cannot call any to mind. But even if he were another Chartres I am sure people would still like him. He is one of your tall, handsome fellows, not at all witty or alarming, but always good company. How he has escaped marriage until now I cannot tell: the number of caps set in his direction would furnish a warehouse. He is not at all averse to the state, I know; but I dare say he is hard to please.’
Now the days flew by: each was long in itself, but how quickly they formed a week, a fortnight! The baffling winds and calms of the outward voyage restored the average by sweeping the ship northwards across the line and up into the trades with hardly a pause, and presently the peak of Tenerife lay there on the starboard beam, a gleaming triangle under its private cloud, nearly a hundred miles away.
The first consuming eagerness to reach Madeira was in no way diminished; never for a moment did Jack cease driving the fragile ship with a spread of sail just this side
of recklessness; but in both Aubrey and Maturin there was this increasing tension, dread of the event combining with the delight.
The island loomed up in the north against a menacing sky; before sunset it vanished in rain, a steady downpour from low cloud that washed runnels in the new paint on the frigate’s sides; and in the morning there was Funchal road, filled with shipping, and the white town brilliant behind it in the sparkling air. A frigate, the
