'So wide that the hands mutinied when he was appointed to the ship: refused to take her to sea. I was on leave at the time, and when I came back I was surprised to find that the officers sent down from London had persuaded them that he was not as black as he was painted--had persuaded them to return to their duty.'
'Why were you surprised, sir?'
'Because those reputations are never wrong. He was as black as he was painted. He flogged those men down to the line, he flogged them across it, and he flogged them all the way up from the Cape.'
'A parenthesis--did you carry any mail for the Cape, any mail for us?'
'Yes; and we were to carry yours on to Rodriguez. But as you know, we never touched there--turned right about the moment we had spoken the Emma- and I am sorry to say the Frenchman got it all.'
'Well, well. And yet the men fought with great spirit, I collect?'
'With very great spirit; and that was because they had a decent set of officers. Captain Corbett was scarcely on speaking-terms with any of them: never dined in the gunroom but once, never invited. And the men would have fought her even better if they had been taught how to use the guns: never exercised with them once, all because of that holy deck. It must be in a pretty state at this moment. No: the hands had nothing against the officers, who were a decent set of men, as I say, and game to the last--Tullidge fought the ship after the captain was gone, and he was wounded four times; Forder, the second, had a bullet through the lungs, and Parker's head was shot off. Good officers. Once, when we were off Cape St Roque and Corbett was handing out fifty lashes right and left, they asked me whether they might confine him, and I said no. I was sorry for it afterwards, because although the fellow was sane enough ashore, he was mad at sea: mad with authority.'
'Sure, it is a dangerous draught,' said Stephen. 'Yet some resist it. What is the source of their immunity?'
'What indeed?' replied Mr Cotton. His weariness was too great for speculation, though not for civility, and when Stephen took his leave he said, 'You were a God-send, Dr Maturin: may I in my turn be of any use to you?'
'Since you are so good,' said Stephen, 'it does so happen that I have a singularly delicate depressed fracture waiting for me tomorrow, and if by then you feel sufficiently recovered, I should be most grateful for your support. My young man has no experience of the trephine, and my hands are not so steady as they were--they do not possess your admirable firmness of grip.'
'I shall be with you, sir, at any hour you choose to name,' said Mr Cotton; and Mr Cotton, long accustomed to the ways of the Navy, was true to his word and exact to his time. At the first stroke of six bells in the forenoon watch he came swarming up the Boadicea's side, using his powerful arms alone and trailing his withered leg. Once aboard he shipped his half-crutch, saluted the quarterdeck, brushed an officious bosun's mate aside, and stumped aft. Everything was ready: under an awning that spread the brilliant light stood an upright chair, made fast to cleats, and in it sat Colley the patient, lead coloured, snoring still, and so tightly lashed by his friends that he was as incapable of independent movement as the ship's figurehead. The deck and the tops were strangely crowded with men, many of them feigning busyness, for the old Sophies had told their present shipmates of that memorable day in the year two, when, in much the same light, Dr Maturin had sawed off the top of the gunner's head, had roused out his brains, had set them to rights, and had clapped a silver dome over all, so that the gunner, on coming back to life, was better than new: this they had been told, and they were not going to miss a moment of the instructive and even edifying spectacle. From under the forecastle came the sound of the armourer at his forge,
beating a three-shilling piece into a flat and gleaming pancake.
'I have desired him to await our instructions for the final shape,' said Stephen, 'but he has already sharpened and retempered my largest trephine.' He held up the circular saw, still gleaming from its bath, and suggested that Mr Cotton might like to make the first incision. The medical civilities that followed, the polite insistence and refusal, made the audience impatient; but presently their most morbid hopes were gratified. The patient's shaved scalp, neatly divided from ear to ear and flensed away, hung over his unshaved livid snorting face, and now the doctors, poised above the flayed, shattered skull, were talking in Latin.
'Whenever they start talking foreign,' observed John Harris, forecastleman, starboard watch, 'you know they are at a stand, and that all is, as you might say, in a manner of speaking, up.'
'You ain't seen nothing, John Harris,' said Davis, the old Sophie. 'Our doctor is only tipping the civil to the one- legged cove: just you wait until he starts dashing away with his boring-iron.'
'Such a remarkable thickness of bone, and yet the metopic suture has not united,' said Mr Cotton. 'I have never seen the like, and am deeply gratified. 'But, as you say, it confronts us with a perplexing situation: a dilemma, as one might say.'
'The answer, as I conceive it, lies in a double perforation,' said Stephen. 'And here the strength and steadiness of your left forearm will prove invaluable. If you would have the goodness to support the parietal here, while I begin my first cut at this point, and if then we change hands, why, there is a real likelihood that we may lift out the whole in one triumphant piece.'
Had it not been for the need to preserve the appearance of professional infallibility and god-like calm, Mr Cotton would have pursed his lips and shaken his head: as it was he muttered, 'The Lord be with us,' and slid in his flattened probe. Stephen turned back his cuffs, spat on his hands, waited for the roll, placed his point and began his determined cut, the white bone skipping from the eager teeth and Carol swabbing the sawdust away. In the silence the ship's company grew still more intent: the midshipmen's berth, ghouls to a man, craned forward, unchid by their officers. But as the steel bit down into the living head, more than one grew pale, more than one looked away into the rigging; and even Jack, who had seen this grisly performance before, turned his eyes to the horizon, where the distant Astree and Iphigenia flashed white in the sun.
He heard Stephen call out the measurements to the armourer as the second cut began; he heard a renewed hammering on the anvil forward; but as he listened a movement far over there to windward seized upon the whole of his attention. Both the Frenchmen were filling: did they mean to edge down at last? He clapped his glass to his eye, saw them come right before the wind, and shut his telescope with a smile: from the busy way they were passing their sheets it was obvious that they were merely wearing once again, as they had done five times since dawn. Yes, they had hauled their wind. Although they had the weather-gage they did not choose to bring him and the crippled Africaine to action; and if he was not very much mistaken, this last manoeuvre had put it out of their power, now that the mountains of La Reunion were looming on the larboard bow and the breeze was likely to veer two points inshore. To be sure, the Africaine still had all her teeth intact, and the Staunch and the Otter could give a shrewd nip in a melee but even so . . . He laughed aloud, and at the same moment he heard Mr Cotton cry, 'Oh, pretty. Oh, very prettily done, sir.'
Stephen raised the piece of skull entire and held it up to peer at its underside with a look of sober triumph--a moment during which the audience might gaze with fascinated horror into the awful gulf, where Mr Cotton was now fishing for splinters with a pair of whalebone tongs. As he fished, and as a long transverse splinter stirred the
