some likelihood that the freshness of the effect would strike all beholders dumb with admiration; and at present the Surprise was well over five hundred miles from the nearest point of Brazil. Furthermore painting ship almost always meant slower progress, and although of course it would have to be done before they reached soundings, Pullings would have expected Jack not to delay this side of the Line for anything but a rainstorm to fill their rows and rows of empty barrels. Yet both he and Mowett had been brought up from boyhood in a service that did not encourage the questioning of orders, and their 'Yes, sir,' came with no more than a barely measurable hesitation.
Dr Maturin had no such inhibitions. When he came into the cabin that evening he waited until Jack had finished a charming little rondo and then said, 'And are we not to make haste and cut the Line tomorrow, so?'
'No,' said Jack, smiling at him. 'If this wind holds, and it is almost certain to mind its duty as a true trade wind, I hope to cross in a little more than twenty-nine degrees of west latitude on Sunday. So tomorrow you should be quite near your old friends the St Paul's rocks.'
'Is that right? What joy: I must tell poor Martin. Tell, what was the rondo you were playing?'
'Molter.'
Molter?
'Yes. You know, Molter Vivace. You must have heard of Molter Vivace. Oh ha, ha, ha!' When at last he had had his laugh out, he wiped his eyes and wheezed, 'It came to me in a flash, a brilliant illumination, like when you fire off blue lights. Lord, ain't I a rattle? I shall set up for a wit yet, and make my fortune. Molter Vivace.... I must tell Sophie. I am writing her a letter, to be put aboard some homeward-bound merchantman, if we meet one off Brazil next week, which is probable. Molter Vivace, oh dear me.'
'He that would make a pun would pick a pocket,' said Stephen, 'and that miserable quibble is not even a pun, but a vile clench. Who is this Molter?' he asked, picking up the neatly-written score.
'Johann Meichior Molter, a German of the last age,' said Jack. 'Our parson at home thinks the world of him. I copied this piece, mislaid it, and found it ten minutes ago tucked behind our Corelli in C major. Shall we attempt the Corelli now, it being such a triumphal day?'
Nobody could have called the next day triumphal. The Surprise had stages rigged out over her sides and all hands turned to scraping her wood and hammering the rust off her ironwork, and then laying on paint and various kinds of blacking. Early in the morning Stephen had told Martin of their approach to St Paul's rocks, which, in the right season of the year, harboured not only a large variety of terns but also two steganopodes, the brown and far more rarely the blue-faced booby; this was not the right season, but there was some hope of stragglers and as soon as their duties permitted they took chairs to various vantage points from which they might lean their telescopes to look for boobies and even perhaps to view the rocks themselves, rearing lonely from the ocean.
But rarely had they settled for ten minutes before they were desired to move - to mind the paintwork, sir - for God's sake to mind the paintwork: and when they hovered near the taffrail and the elegant gilded carving they were told that they might stay a little while, so long as they touched nothing; but they were not on any account to breathe on the gold leaf until the egg-white had dried and they must certainly not lean their glasses on the rail at any time. Even the boats were better than this, although at sealevel the horizon was brought in to a mere three miles: yet presently the boats too were hauled in for scraping and painting, and when they showed a certain restiveness they were told that 'they would not like to have the barky mistaken for a Newcastle collier, by a parcel of Portuguees, nor her boats for mud-scows.'
It was Calamy who suggested that they should go into the foretop, from which (the foretopsail being dewed up) they could see almost the whole ring of the world, and that for an immense distance too: he helped them to climb up, settling them comfortably on the studdingsails that were kept there, and brought them their telescopes, a broad-brimmed straw hat apiece to preserve their brains from the now almost vertical furnace of the enormous sun, and a pocketful of those broken ends of biscuit known as midshipmen's nuts, against hunger, since dinner was likely to be late.
And it was from this lofty platform that they first saw an undoubted frigate petrel and then, following the cry of the lookout on the maintopgallantyard, the white nick on the horizon as St Paul's rocks heaved up in the south- west. 'Oh, oh,' said Martin, putting his glass to his single eye and focusing carefully, 'Can it be... ?' A line of heavy, purposeful birds came flying towards the ship, quite fast, not very high: a hundred yards out on the starboard beam they checked their run, poised, and plunged one after another like gannets, a headlong dive that sent water jetting up. They rose, circled, dived for some few minutes more and then flew off with equal purpose to the north-east.
Martin relaxed, lowered his glass and turned a radiant face to Stephen. 'I have beheld the blue-faced booby,' he said, shaking him by the hand.
Long before this the seven-bell men had gone to their turpentine-tasting dinner, followed one glass later by the rest of the hands, with their customary bellowing. Now Heart of Oak was beating for the gunroom feast, and presently a messenger came up to tell them that the gentlemen were waiting.
My best compliments to Captain Pullings,' said Stephen, 'and beg to be excused.'
Martin said much the same, and they returned to their contemplation of these barren islands, now quite near. 'Never a herb, never a blade of grass,' observed Stephen. 'Nor yet a drop of water but what falls from the sky. The birds to the left are only noddies, I am afraid: but then, on the topmost round, there is a booby, my dear sir, a brown booby. He is in a sad state of moult, poor fellow, but he is still a true brown booby. All that white is the droppings of the birds, of course, many feet thick in places; and it has so strong an ammoniac reek that it catches you by the throat. I was ashore there once when the birds were breeding: barely a foot of ground without an egg and the fowl so tame you could pick them up.'
'Do you think the Captain would stop for just half an hour?' asked Martin. 'Think what beetles might be there. Could it not be represented to him...'
'My poor friend,' said Stephen, 'if anything could exceed the sea-officer's brutish indifference to birds it would be his brutish indifference to beetles: and do but look at the boats in their new wet paint. I was able to go only because we were becalmed, whereas now we are running at five knots, because it was a Sunday, and because an officer very kindly rowed me over in a boat. James Nicolls was his name.' His mind went back to that deeply unhappy man, who had almost certainly let himself be drowned off this very rock that was now going gently astern a short mile away: he had disagreed with his wife, had tried to make peace, and no peace came. Stephen's thoughts moved on from James Nicolls to marriage in general, that difficult state. He had heard of a race of lizards in the Caucasus that reproduced themselves parthenogenetically, with no sexual congress of any kind, no sexual complications: Lacerta saxicola was their name. Marriage, its sorrow and woe, its fragile joys, filled his mind and he was not altogether surprised when Martin, speaking in a low, confidential tone, told him that he had long been attached to the daughter of a parson, a young lady whose brother he used to botanize with when they were at the university together. She was considerably above him in the worldly consequence and her friends looked upon him with disapproval; nevertheless, in view of his now very much greater affluence, his income of ? 211.8.0 a year,
