well.
Jack had long since made his arrangements with the bosun and the sailmaker, and double preventer-stays, light hawsers for the mastheads and backstays were laid along, together with storm-canvas in large quantities; while Mr Blyth the purser and his steward had the Magellan jackets sorted in the sloproom, ready to serve out.
And Stephen had long since made his arrangements for a subsidiary sick-berth on the after-platform of the orlop deck, taking in part of the cockpit and part of the Captain's storeroom, which would be much less liable to flooding in the kind of seas to be expected in the high latitudes. It might seem less airy, and between the tropics it certainly would not do; but south of the fortieth parallel a trifling wind-sail would bring down all the air the most asthmatic patient could desire. He and Macmillan and their loblolly-boy William Low put the last touches to it that morning and then began transferring the patients, their messmates carrying them below in their hammocks with the utmost care.
He dined in the gunroom afterwards, as he often did, not as a guest but as of right. He liked most of the people: Spotted Dick Richardson was an old friend and Fielding a particularly agreeable companion; and once they had overcome a certain shyness of the Captain's guest the mess found he fitted in very well. It so happened that he was the only one among them who had been so far south - the others had served in the West Indies, the Baltic, the Mediterranean and even the African station, but never much below the Cape - and he spent much of the meal answering questions and describing the majestic seas of the fifties with a quarter of a mile, half a mile between their lofty crests.
'How tall would they be?'
'I cannot say the number of fathoms or feet, but very tall indeed - tall enough to hide a ship of the line; and we were becalmed between them. But when the wind blew even harder than usual their tops came curling over at the crest, sometimes tumbling down the slope in a white cataract, sometimes causing the whole prodigious mass to break in an utter confusion of shattered water, disrupting those that followed. It was then, I understand, that we were in the greatest danger of being pooped, and broaching to.'
'Dear me,' said the purser, 'that must have been a most uncomfortable situation, Doctor.'
'So it was too,' said Stephen. 'But an even greater danger was that of running into a mountain of ice. They are huge, in these waters, vast beyond all imagination, with what can be seen towering high and what can not, spreading far out on either side, as perilous as any reef; they are invisible on a dark night, and even if they were not, one cannot steer as one chooses in such a preternatural blast.'
'But surely, sir,' said Welby, the Marine, 'they must be extremely uncommon, in the parts frequented by shipping?'
'On the contrary, sir,' said Stephen. 'We fleeted past scores, some of them an exquisite aquamarine blue in parts, with the surf raging against their sides, breaking mountains high; and we were partially crushed, almost sunk and quite disabled, our rudder torn off, by one that was reckoned half a mile across. This was in the Leopard, a ship of fifty guns.'
Twice that afternoon Stephen was called on deck, once to see a troop of grampuses, and once to be shown a startling change in the sea, which from a turbid, undistinguished glaucous hue had become clear, glass clear, and of that aquamarine colour which had come back to his mind when he spoke of Leopard's iceberg: the rest of the time he spent in the cabin, speaking Malay with Ahmed or listening to him read from Fox's text. Ahmed was a gentle, good-natured, cheerful young man, an excellent servant, but far too deferential to be much of a teacher; he never corrected any of Stephen's mistakes, he always agreed with Stephen's stress on a word, and he went to infinite pains to understand whatever was said to him. Fortunately Stephen had a gift for languages and an accurate, retentive ear: Ahmed had rarely been called upon to exercise much ingenuity after the first few weeks, and by now they conversed with tolerable ease.
There was no beating to quarters that evening, which was unusual, and having attended to his patients in the last dog watch, Stephen thought he would stroll on the quarterdeck and perhaps converse with Warren, the master, a well-informed and interesting man; but as he set foot on the ladder up from the orlop he was illumined by a flash of lightning so intensely vivid that its reflection pierced down hatchway after hatchway and along shadowy decks with such power that it dimmed the sick-berth lanterns. It was instantly followed by the most enormous and lasting clap of thunder, apparently breaking in the maintop itself. And by the time he had groped his way up to the gunroom bulkhead he could already hear the downpour, a rainstorm of prodigious violence.
'Come and have a look, sir,' cried Reade in great glee, checking his eager pace at the sight of the Doctor, 'I have never seen the like in all my time at sea. Nor has the master. Come along; I will fetch you a griego.'
Most of what Reade said was drowned by the thunder, but he urged Stephen up the ladder to the half-deck, fetched him a hooded watch-coat, and led him up to a total blackness filled with hurtling water, a blackness so thick that the bulwark could not be seen - nothing but a faint orange glow from the binnacle lights. But a moment later the entire horizon, clean round the ship, was lit by such lightning that everything stood out clear- sails, rigging, people, their expressions - the whole length of the ship, in spite of the rain. Stephen felt Reade pull his sleeve and saw his delighted face say something, but the continuous bellow of thunder covered the words.
Jack was standing by the weather rail with Fielding and he called Stephen over. Even his powerful voice, at close quarters, was somewhat overlaid, yet 'beats Guy Fawkes night' came through, and his smile, oddly cut by the intermittent flashes so that it appeared to spread in jerks, was quite distinct. They stood there with this stupendous display roaring and flashing for an indeterminate time and then Jack said, 'You are ankle deep and in your slippers. I will give you a tow below.'
'Lord, Jack,' said Stephen, sitting and dripping in the cabin while Ahmed pulled off his stockings, 'a fleet-action must be quite like this.'
'Very like, but for the lack of smoke,' said Jack. 'Now listen, I shall be in and out till morning, waking you with my light, because it is likely to cut up rough, so you had better sleep below. Ahmed, see that the Doctor's cot is aired, and make sure that his feet are thoroughly dry before he turns in.'
Their Guy Fawkes night was as it were a gateway from one region to another totally different: in the morning the Diane was tearing away to the east-south-east at twelve knots through a confused tumbling sea with a great deal of white water on it but also an underlying pattern of long, consistent moderate swell, a cold, cold sea and a wind with a fierce bite to it; and there was enough north in the westerly gale to make her heel some twenty-five degrees.
A fair amount of water in the form of spray and odd packets came aboard, but nothing like enough to damp the galley fires or the appetites of the officer and the midshipman of the morning watch, Elliott and Greene, who breakfasted with the Captain. They were not Jack's favourite officers, but they had had a rough time of it since four o'clock when they relieved the deck, and in any case there must be no favouritism: he was perhaps a little less genial than he might have been with Richardson and Reade, but he plied them with porridge, eggs from his twelve worthy hens, with somewhat rusty bacon, toasted Irish soda-bread - Stephen's brilliant innovation - and
