Jack laughed with pleasure. 'Well do you see, it is the purest day for viewing,' he said modestly. 'Never a shimmer even by the water's edge. How I. hope it will hold out until tonight. I will show you such a double star in Andromeda, less than a second of arc apart. Think of that, Stephen. Less than a second apart! With my three-inch glass I could never resolve anything much better than two. Should you not like to see a double less than a second apart?'
'Sure, it must be prodigious. But for my part I should as soon watch the shipping. Such life, such activity, and we Olympian above it all. Do you not spend hours and hours up here?'
'I do, Stephen, I do indeed. But I beg you will not mention it at the house. Sophie don't mind my stargazing, however late--and we shall have to sit up until three this morning before I can show you Jupiter--but staring at the Solent ain't astronomy. She don't say anything, but it makes her low in her spirits to think I am pining for the sea.'
'Do you pine much, Jack?' asked Stephen, but before Captain Aubrey could answer their attention was distracted by a clamour from the cottage, by Mrs Williams's hoarse martial voice, the shrill, defiant replies of the servant she was rebuking. Sometimes the motionless air carried the words up the hill with perfect clarity, and they heard the cry' a foreign gentleman left them in my kitchen' several times repeated, but generally the passionate voices overlaid one another, and they were further confused by the echo from the hanging wood on the other side of the valley, by the wail of children, and by the repeated slamming of a door.
Jack shrugged his shoulders: yet after a pause he looked benevolently down at his friend, surveying him. 'You have not really told me how you are, Stephen,' he said. 'How do you do in fact.
'Amazingly well, I thank you, Jack. I took the waters at Caldas de Bohi not long ago, and derived great benefit from them.' Jack nodded: he knew the place, a village in the Pyrenees not far from Dr. Maturin's high sheepwalk; for Stephen, though an Irishman, had property in those parts, coming down to him from his Catalan grandmother. 'And as well as growing as supple as a fawn,' continued Dr. Maturin, 'I was able to make a number of valuable observations on the cretins of Bohi. Bohi is largely inhabited by idiots, my dear.'
'Bohi is not the only place, not by a long chalk. Look at the Admiralty, and what do you see? A general as First Lord, that is what you see. Would you believe it, Stephen? And the first thing this infernal redcoat does, is to take away one of the captain's eighths--he reduces our prize-money by a third, which is stark, raving lunacy. And then, quite apart from the idiots in Whitehall, this village has half a dozen; they squeak and gibber in the market place. And in sober earnest, Stephen, I am sometimes cruelly worried by the twins. They do not look over bright to me, and I should take it very kind, was you to survey them privately. But I dare say you would like to look at the garden first?'
'I should like it of all things. And the bees.'
'Why, as to the bees, they seem to have piped down these last few weeks. That is to say, I have not been very close since I tried to take their honey, but I have not noticed them about. It must be more than a month since I was stung. But if you would like to see them, let us take the upper path.'
The hives stood in a trim row on white painted stools, but never a bee was to be seen. Stephen peered into the entrances, saw the telltale cobweb, shook his head and observed, 'It is the fell wax-moth.' He prised a skep from its stool and held it out, inverted, showing the dirty wreck of combs, with the vile grubs spinning their cocoons.
'The wax-moth!' cried Jack. 'Is there something I should have done?'
'No,' said Stephen. 'Not that I know of.'
'I would not have had it happen for the world. I am so concerned. Sophie and I valued them extremely, as your present.'
'Never mind,' said Stephen. 'I shall bring you some more, of a bolder stock. Pray let us view the garden.'
In the Indian Ocean Captain Aubrey had dreamed of a cottage, with a little land to it: rows of turnips, carrots, onions, cabbages and beans; now his dream was realized. But it had taken no account of the black fly, the wireworm, the turnip-beetle, the leather-jacket, the green-fly and the black, the cabbage white. The rows were there, half an acre of them, dug as straight as a ruler in the poor, shallow, spewy, earth, and in them stood some dwarfish plants. 'Of course,' said Jack, 'there is nothing to be seen at this time of the year; but I mean to get three to four loads of dung on to the land this winter, and that will make a marvelous difference. I have already put some to my Brunswick cabbages, beyond Sophie's rose-garden. This way.' As they skirted the meagre potatoes he pointed over the hedge and said, 'That is the cow.'
'I thought it must be a cow: for milk, I make no doubt?'
'Just so. Vast great quantities of milk, butter, cream, veal: that is to say, we look forward to them presently. At the moment she happens to be dry.'
'Yet she does not look gravid. Rather the reverse, indeed: lean, Pharaonic, cadaverous.'
'Well, the fact of the matter, Stephen,' said Jack, staring at the cow, 'the fact of the matter is that she refuses the bull. He is game enough, oh Lord, yes; but she will have nothing to say to him. Then he flies into a hellfire passion, bellowing and tearing up the ground; and we go without milk.'
'From a philosophical point of view, her behaviour is logical enough. Reflect upon the continual, wearisome pregnancies, the price of a momentary and I may say aleatory pleasure. Reflect upon the physical discomfort of a full udder, to say nothing of the necessary parturition, with its attendant perils. I do not mention the uneasiness of seeing one's offspring turned into a blanquette de veau ; for this is peculiar to the cow. Were I a female of any kind, I should beg to decline these general cares; and were 1, in this particular case, a heifer, I should certainly choose to remain dry. Yet it must be confessed that from a domestical point of view celibacy in a cow takes on a different aspect entirely: here the general good calls out for teeming loins.'
'Yes,' said Jack. 'It does. Now here is Sophie's garden. It will be full of roses, come next June. Do you think they look a trifle spindly, Stephen? Do you think I should cut them back very hard, this winter?'
'Nothing do I know about gardening,' said Maturin. 'Nothing at all. But perhaps they may be a little, shall I say, rachitic?'
'I don't know how it is,' said Jack, 'I don't seem to have much luck with ornamental plants: that was supposed to be a lavender hedge, do you see? The roots came from Mapes. However, come and look at my cabbages. I am quite proud of them.' They passed through a wicket-gate and came to a plot at the back of the cottage: a sea of greenery, with a noble steaming dunghill beyond it. 'There,' cried Jack, 'have you ever seen the like?'
'I have not,' said Stephen.
