Jerking himself from an incipient doze over his pudding, he became aware that Captain Aubrey was about to sing. Jack was the least self-conscious being in the world, and he would sing as naturally as he sneezed, 'I heard it in the Boston mad-house,' he said, emptying his glass. 'This is how it goes.' He leant back in his chair, and his deep, melodious voice filled the cabin:
'Oh, oh, the mourning dove
Says, where can she be?
She was my only love
But gone from me, oh gone from me.'
'Well sung, Jack,' said Broke, and turning to Stephen with his rare smile, 'He reminds me of that tuneful Lesbian -
qui ferox bello tamen inter arma sive iactatam religarat udo litore navim.'
'To be sure, sir,' said Stephen, 'and as far as Bacchus and Venus are concerned, and even at a push the Muses, what could be more apt? Yet as I recall it goes on
et Lycum nigris oculis nigroque crine decorum
and although I may well be mistaken, it does not seem to me that the black-haired boy quite suits, in a description of Captain Aubrey's tastes.'
'Very true, sir, very true,' said Broke, put out and disconcerted. 'I was forgetting... There are many objectionable passages in the ancients that are best forgotten.'
'Ha, ha,' said Jack, 'I knew it would never answer, chopping Latin with the Doctor. I have known him knock a full admiral on the head before this, with his ablative absolute.'
Broke gave a conventional laugh, but it was clear that he was unused to contradiction, that he did not possess his cousin's acute sense of humour, and that he disliked anything remotely approaching to bawdy; he was a graver, more earnest man altogether, and he returned to small-arms and great guns with all the earnestness and gravity the moral subject deserved. He described the exercises he had worked out for the frigate, and which the Shannon's people had performed regularly for the last five years and more: Monday, seamen at target; Tuesday, swivelmen at target; Wednesday, swivels in maintop and all Marines at musketry; Thursday, midshipmen at target and carronades.
'Lord, Philip, that must stand you in a pretty penny,' said Jack, thinking of the tons of powder at eight guineas a barrel billowing away in smoke, half a hundredweight for every one of Shannon's broadsides; to say nothing of the shot.
'Yes. Last year I sold the meadows over towards the vicarage, where we used to play cricket with the parson's boys, you remember.'
'No luck with prizes?'
'Oh, we have taken a fair number, at least a score this cruise; but I nearly always burn them. I did send in a couple of recaptures the other day, though it cost me a midshipman, a quartermaster, and two prime hands. But that was only because they belonged to Halifax. Otherwise I prefer to burn them'
'That's heroic,' said Jack, deeply impressed, 'but don't it vex your people?'
'In ordinary times it would scarcely answer but it is different now. After Guerri? I called them aft and told them that if we were to send prizes into Halifax we should have to man them and thus weaken the ship - we should have less chance of getting our own back if we met one of their heavy frigates They are reasonable men, they know we are so short of ships on this station there is little likelihood of recovering our prize-hands before we put in ourselves, and they want their own back as much as I do.
They agreed no murmuring, no sullen looks, oh very far from it They know I lose twenty times as much'.
Jack nodded it was a most striking instance of abnegation 'Well,' he said, 'and so you exercise your midshipmen separately'. That is a very good idea they cannot learn the men their duty, unless they can do it better themselves. A very good idea.
'So it should be, Jack - I had it from you many years ago You shall see them practising what you preached this very afternoon.
Perhaps, sir,' - to Stephen - 'you would like to see them too, and to view the ship' I have made some changes in the gun-sights that might interest a philosophical mind.'
Swallowing a yawn, Stephen said that he should be very happy, and presently they walked out, up the ladder and on to the sunlit quarterdeck. The officers upon it at once moved over to the leeward side and Broke began the tour with a brass six-pounder in a port by the hances specially made for it. 'This is my own,' he said, 'and I use it mostly for the youngsters and the ship's boys; they can rattle it in and out without destroying themselves, and they can point it pretty well too, by now. And here you have my earlier quarter-sight...
'But what is this?' asked Jack.
'A pendulum,' said Broke. 'A heavy pendulum. When it is at zero on this scale, do you see, the deck is horizontal, and at point-blank range a gun will hit its mark even if the captain cannot see it for the smoke. And behind each gun there is a compass cut into the deck, so that it can be trained round on a given bearing if the men are blinded - you know how the smoke lies when there is no great breeze, and what there is stunned by a heavy cannonade.'
Jack nodded, observing that in such cases 'you could hardly see your neighbour, let alone the enemy.'
Then came the carronades, ugly, squat, big-mouthed things, and the stern-chasers, long, elegant, and dangerous: a closely-reasoned discussion of the best breechings for carronades, the best way to prevent them from oversetting, and so forward along the gangway to the forecastle and its armament, more carronades and the bow-chasers. 'Here is my favourite,' said Broke, patting the starboard nine-pounder. 'With a two-and-a-half-pound charge she throws as sweet a ball as ever you could wish, true at a thousand yards. She has my light-duty sight, because only the best crew fires her: you shall see the others on the maindeck.'
'I shall like that,' said Jack. They crossed the forecastle and he noticed a couple of hands slung below the bowsprit, busy about the figure that to the official mind symbolized not Agriculture nor Beer nor Justice but the
