With a surly satisfaction he observed that in spite of the changing tide the Surprise did in fact make but a slow passage of her two legs, for the breeze came foul upon her twice: they slowly passed two excellent strands where a boat could have landed them and taken them off, the first in a cove beyond the reef where the blackened carcass of the whaler lay; and it was clear to him that he and Martin might have crept across the island on all fours and still have been in time. 'In half the time,' he muttered, beating the rail in an extremity of frustration.
He watched the dim, cloud-covered Galapagos vanish astern and turned in early, ending his usual prayers with one for a less rancorous mind and lying there in his cot with Boethius' De Consolatione Philosophiae and two measured ounces of laudanum.
Yet in spite of these he was still unusually ill-tempered at two o'clock in the morning, when Padeen roused him and very slowly and with great difficulty told him in Irish and English that Mr Blakeney had swallowed a four-pound grapeshot.
'The thing is materially impossible,' said Stephen. 'The wicked little brute-beast is lying - showing away - topping it the phoenix - making himself interesting. Such a dose I shall give him - the sorrows of Munster will be nothing to his.'
But when he found the poor brute-beast, pale, frightened, apologetic and put to sit by a lantern on the half- deck, and when he learnt that the grape in question was only one of the nine that made up the charge of the launch's fourpounder, he at once had him seized up by the heels, ran for the stomach-pump and forced a large quantity of tepid salt water tinged with rum into his body, reflecting with pleasure, as among the agonized retching he heard the clang of the ball in the basin, that he had cured his patient not only of probably mortal occlusion but of any taste for spirituous liquors for some time to come.
Even so, even with this physical and moral triumph, the next day found him still thoroughly out of humour, and when Adams observed that the Captain was to be the gunroom's guest at dinner - that the dinner was to be an uncommon fine one too, quite a Lord Mayor's feast - he said, 'Oh, indeed,' in a tone that showed no kind of pleasure. 'I have known that fellow hang about in port,' he said to himself, glancing at Jack from the lee gangway as the Surprise ran smoothly over the vast South Sea, pure blue now from rim to unimaginably distant rim, 'I have known him hang about most shamefully when it was a question of a wench - Nelson too and many a post-captain, many an admiral when adultery was concerned - no fine-spun scruples about the King's ship then. No, no: scruples are kept for natural philosophy alone, or any useful discovery. His soul to the Devil, false, hypocritical dog; but he is probably unaware of his falsity - pravum est cor omnium, the heart is perverse above all things and unsearchable. Who shall know it?'
Yet although Stephen was of a saturnine and revengeful temperament he had been brought up to a high notion of hospitality. The Captain was the gunroom's guest, and the ship's surgeon was not to sit there in silent dogged resentment. Putting a considerable force on himself Stephen uttered four civil remarks, and after a proper interval he said, 'A glass of wine with you, sir,' bowing low.
'I must congratulate you most heartily, Doctor, on your preservation of young Blakeney,' said Jack, returning his bow. 'How I could have told our old shipmate that we had let his son perish of grapeshot I do not know. A grapeshot in these circumstances, I mean, not a French or American one.'
'How could he possibly have come to swallow such a thing?' asked Martin.
'When I was a reefer and any of the youngsters talked too much, we used to make him hold one in his mouth,' said Jack. 'We called 'em gob-stoppers. I dare say that is how it came about.'
'May I send you a piece of bonito, sir?' called Howard from the middle of the table.
'If you please. A capital fish, bonito, capital: I could eat it for ever.'
'I caught seven this morning, sir, sitting in the mizen chains and casting along the edge of the wake. I sent one to the sick-bay, one to the midshipmen's berth, three to my Marines, and kept the best for us.'
'Capital, capital,' said Jack again; and indeed it was a capital dinner altogether: best green turtle, delicate flying squid come aboard in the night, a variety of fishes, dolphin pie, and to crown all a great dish of teal, Galapagos teal, indistinguishable in taste from Christian teal, that had been netted by Howard's sergeant, a former poacher. And Stephen noticed, not without irritation, that as he ate and drank his civility was growing less artificial, his deliberately urbane expression more nearly a spontaneous smile, and that he was in danger of enjoying himself. behold the threaden sails
Borne with the invisible and creeping wind, Draw the huge bottoms through the furrow'd sea Breasting the lofty surge,' said Mowett in a momentary silence as the decanters were renewed - he and Martin had been discussing poetry for some time - 'That is the kind of thing I mean.'
'Did you write that, Mowett?' asked Jack.
'No, sir,' said Mowett. 'It was - it was another cove.'
'The invisible and creeping wind,' repeated Maitland. 'They say pigs can see the wind.'
'Stay, gentlemen,' cried Howard, holding up his hand and looking round with a flushed face and a gleaming eye. 'You must forgive me, but I don't often come up with a good thing at the right moment: han't done so this commission, I believe, though I came pretty close to it once off the River Plate. So by your leave, sir,' - bowing to Jack - 'there was an old woman in the Cove of Cork that lived in a cabin with just one room, no more; she bought a pig - a pig eh, that's the point, that's what makes it so apposite - and they said, 'What shall you do about the smell?' Because it had to live in the same room, if you follow me: the pig had to live in the same room as the old woman. 'Oh, ochone,' says she, 'begar, he will have to get used to it,' - mistaking, do you see...'
But Howard's explanation was drowned in a gale of laughter, led by Killick from behind Jack's chair. Jack himself said, 'he will have to get used to it,' threw himself back and had his laugh out, his face scarlet and his eyes a brighter blue than usual. 'Dear me, dear me,' he said at last, wiping them with his handkerchief, 'in this vale of tears it does a man good to laugh from time to time.'
When they were quiet the purser peered round his neighbours at the first lieutenant and asked, 'Was that piece you said just now poetry? The piece before the pig.'
'Yes, it was,' said Mowett.
'It didn't rhyme,' said Adams. 'I told it over to myself, and it didn't rhyme. If Rowan were here, he would knock your poet on the head. His poetry always rhymes. I remember a piece of his as though it were only yesterday:
Awful the grinding noise of keel and heel
With an unusual motion made the crew to reel.'
