'They did nothing of the kind,' said Harte. 'Properly understood, they did nothing of the kind.'
Nobody saw fit to comment upon this and after a while Admiral Thornton said 'Very well, Captain Aubrey. Although the outcome of this affair is unfortunate in the extreme, I do not think we can usefully say any more. Good day to you.'
'Dear Lord above, sweetheart,' wrote Jack in his serial letter, 'I have never been so relieved in my life. All the way back in the boat I dared scarcely smile, or even congratulate myself; and there was William Babbington waiting for me with such a look of mortal anxiety on his face, as well there might have been, he having beheld the Admiral in the first full flood of his wrath. I carried him into the stern-gallery, it being a sweet evening with a light breeze at SSW and the squadron standing due east under topgallantsails so that we had a capital sunset spread out before us, and gave him an exact account of what had passed. We were as gay as a pair of schoolboys that have escaped a most prodigious flogging and expulsion, and we called Pullings and Mowett in to sup with us. I could not in decency open my mind to them about the Rear-Admiral - I could not even say how painful it was to hear and see a man of his rank and age sounding and looking so very mean, so very like a scrub - but we understood one another pretty well and Mowett asked me whether I remembered a disrespectful song the hands had made up about him when I had the dear Sophie. It was not the sentiment that Mowett objected to, he said, but the metre, which, it appears, broke the laws of prosody.' Yet the sentiment was not wholly inoffensive either, since even the moderate chorus ran
Bugger old Harte, bugger old Harte
That red-faced son of a blue French fart
as Jack remembered very well.
'It was a charming supper-party, only wanting Stephen to make it complete; and even he will be with us, wind and weather permitting, in two days' time. For this morning the Admiral made my signal, received me kindly - no cold glare, no damned icy distance this time, no Captain Aubrey or you, sir - and gave me very welcome orders to proceed to Port Mahon to take certain stores on board and my surgeon, he having had leave of absence in those parts.' The orders had in fact continued, 'Now, Aubrey, I understand from Dr Maturin that you are acquainted with the nature of some of his more confidential expeditions: he also says that he places the utmost reliance on your discretion, and had rather sail with you than any other captain on the list. At present his occasions take him to the French coast, something west of Villeneuve, I believe: you will therefore carry him to the most suitable point for landing and take him off again as and when you shall between you think best. And I do most sincerely hope that you will bring him back safe, with the least possible delay.' But obviously this could form no part of his letter. Nor could another subject that dwelt in his mind, rarely quitting his immediate consciousness. He could and did skirt round it, saying 'I do hope we have a brush with the enemy soon, if only to wipe out the fiasco at Medina. The officers and men who have sailed with me before know that upon the whole I am not wanting in conduct nor I believe I may say in ordinary courage; but most of the ship's company know little or nothing about me and I think some suppose I did not choose to fight. Now it is a very bad thing for men to sail under a commander they suspect of shyness. They cannot of course respect him, and without respect true discipline goes by the board...' Discipline, as the essence of a fighting-ship, was certainly very dear to Jack Aubrey's heart; but there were some things dearer still and reputation was one of them. He had not had the least notion of how he valued it until both Harris and Patterson treated him not indeed with disrespect but with something considerably less than their former deference. This was not immediately after his most unpopular order to leave the Frenchmen lying there, when he knew very well that in the first flat anticlimax and disappointment, the letting-down of very high-wrought spirits, the ship would happily have seen him flogged, but some days after Medina. The incident, if anything so evanescent and impalpable could be called an incident, was followed by a series of unquestionable facts - the appearance of several names on the defaulters' list, charged with fighting, half of them former Skates, half of them men who had sailed with Jack before. Naval justice was crude and amateurish, with no rules of evidence or procedure, but at this quarterdeck level, with the grating rigged for immediate execution, it was not calculated for delay, still less for concealing the real causes at issue, and quite often the truth came out at once, naked and sometimes inconvenient. In this case it appeared that the Skates, comparing Jack's conduct with that of Captain Allen, their last commander, maintained that Captain Aubrey was less enterprising by far. 'Captain Allen would have gone straight at 'em, says he, law or no law: Captain Allen was not near so careful of his health or his paintwork, he says. So I fetch him a little shove, or a nudge as you might call it, to remind him of his manners.'
This evidence explained the battered appearance of many hands who were not charged at all - Bonden, Davis, Martens and several more of Jack's lower-deck friends, even placid old Joe Plaice - the equally battered appearance of a number of Marines as well as former Skates, and the increased animosity between soldiers and seamen. It also led Jack to notice or to fancy he noticed changes in the attitude of some of his officers, a lack of the perhaps somewhat exaggerated awe and respect that they thought due to the genuine salamander's reputation that had surrounded him for so many years, that had made his work so very much easier, and that he accepted as a matter of course.
All this Jack could have put in his letter, and he might even have added his reflection about a man's losing his reputation and a woman's losing her beauty and each of them looking right and left for signs of the loss in much the same manner; but it would not have told Sophie much about her husband's real trouble, which was a dread that he might in fact have behaved cowardly.
He had a profound belief in the lower deck's corporate opinion. There might be a good many fools and landlubbers down there, but the seamen predominated not only in moral force but even in number; and in matters of this kind he had hardly ever known them to be wrong. He had had no great heart for the fight in the first place, none of those tearing spirits and that joy and intense anticipation, like fox-hunting at its best, but fox-hunting raised to the hundredth power, which had preceded other actions_Yet that was neither here nor there: a man could be out of form without being chicken-hearted and he had certainly sought out the enemy with all possible zeal, directly offering a close engagement with the odds against him and even trying to provoke it. On the other hand he remembered his relief when he understood that the Frenchmen were not going to fight: an ignoble relief. Or was ignominious the word? Not at all: it was a perfectly reasonable relief at not having to throw an ill-prepared, unseasoned crew into a desperate fight, in which so many of them must certainly be killed, wounded, crippled, maimed. In actions of that kind there was always a most shocking butcher's bill, and with such a crew it would have been even worse, to say nothing of the strong possibility of defeat.
As for his refusing to land the Marines, on first recollection it had seemed to him perfectly innocent, decided in perfect good faith, his orders being what he had understood them to be. But the Admiral's words had shaken him horribly and by now he had argued the matter over with himself so often that what with accusation and indignant denial he could no longer tell just what the true nature of his intention had been: it was obscured by argument. Yet in this matter intention was everything and there was no point in putting the case to any other person on earth. Sophie for example would certainly tell him that he had behaved correctly, but that, though agreeable, would be no real comfort to him since even she could not get inside his head or heart or vitals to inspect his intentions - his intentions as they had been at that moment.
Nor could Stephen, for that matter: still, Jack looked forward extremely to their meeting, and in something less than two days' time, when the Worcester rounded to under Cape Mola, unable to enter Mahon harbour because of the north-wester, he took his barge, pulling through the narrow mouth and then beating right up the whole length, board upon board, although an exchange of signals with the officer in charge of Royal Naval stores had told him that nothing but a little Stockholm tar had yet arrived for the squadron. This was water that he and his coxswain and at least four of his bargemen knew as well as Spithead or Hamoaze and they sailed up with a
