Down the path quite peaceably, hand in hand; but when they came to the highest enclosure the little girls set up a roaring and had to be lifted over the wall. They ran straight to a familiar banana and ate all within their reach. The same happened at the second, but by the third both were too tired and weak to go on and Stephen and Martin reached the edge of the sea carrying them, fast asleep.
'We cannot hail the boat without waking them,' observed Martin.
'Oh what a quandary,' said Stephen, whose child was infested with parasites. 'Perhaps I can put it down.' But at his first attempt the black fingers clung to his shirt with such force that he stood up again, abandoning the notion altogether.
There was no need to hail the boat, however. A far less keen-sighted man than Jack Aubrey could tell from half a mile that they were carrying not antiscorbutics but some such creature as a sloth or a wombat; yet even he looked a little blank when he saw them close and heard what was to be done.
'Well, pass them over,' he said. 'Pollack, lay them on the sacks by the mast-thwart.'
'But that will wake them,' said Martin. 'Let me walk gently in by the gang-plank.'
'Nonsense,' said Jack. 'Anyone can see you are not a father, Mr Martin.' He took the child, passed it over, its head lolling, and Pollack eased it down on to the sacks in a competent, husbandlike manner. 'When they are as sleepy as that, when they drool and hang loose,' said Jack in a more kindly tone, 'you can tie them in knots without they wake or complain.'
This was eminently true. The children were handed up the side as limp as rag dolls; nor did they stir when they were put down on a paunch-mat by the break of the forecastle.
'Pass the word for Jemmy Ducks,' said Jack Aubrey.
'Sir?' said Jemmy Ducks, whose name was John Thurlow and whose office was the care of the ship's poultry, a term sometimes held to include rabbits and even larger animals.
'Jemmy Ducks, you are a family man, I believe?' At the Captain's wholly unusual ingratiating tone and smile Jemmy Ducks' eyes narrowed and his face took on a reserved, suspicious expression; but after some hesitation he admitted that he had seven or eight of the little buggers over to Flicken, south by east of Shelmerston.
'Are any of them girls?'
'Three, sir. No, I tell a lie. Four.'
'Then I dare say you are used to their ways?'
'Well you may say so, sir. Howling and screeching, teething and croup, thrust, red-gum, measles and the belly-ache, and poor old Thurlow walking up and down rocking them in his arms all night and wondering dare he toss 'em out of window
Chamber-pots, pap-boats, swaddling clouts drying in the kitchen... That's why I signed on for a long, long voyage, sir.'
'In that case I am sorry to inflict this task upon you. Look at the paunch in the shade of the starboard gangway: those are two children brought back from the island. They are asleep. A party is going to look for any other survivors, but in the meantime they are to be washed all over with warm water and soap as soon as they wake up, and when they are dry the loblolly boy will rub them over with an ointment the Doctor is preparing.'
'Lousy as well as poxed and filthy, sir?'
'Of course. And I dare say he will have their hair off too. When that is done you will feed them in a seamanlike manner and stow them where the lambs were: you may ask Chips or the bosun for anything you need. Carry on, Jemmy Ducks.'
'Aye aye, sir.'
'And if it lasts, you shall have a mate, watch and watch.'
'Thank you kindly, sir: just like by land. Well, they say no man can escape his fate.'
'And if there are no survivors, you shall have two shillings a month hardship money.'
There were no survivors. The Surprise sailed away, sailed away, in search of the south-east trades; but they were elusive, far south of the line this year, and to reach them at all she had to contend both with the equatorial current and with faint, sometimes contrary breezes, so that half a degree of southing between noon and noon was something to celebrate.
It was pleasant sailing, however, with blue skies, a darker sea, occasional squalls of warm rain that freshened the air, and the water cool enough to be refreshing when Jack bathed in the morning, diving from the mizen- chains; the ship was still well supplied with bosun's, carpenter's and gunner's stores from her first lavish fitting- out; the hint of scurvy had receded - Hayes' arm had knit, Brampton's spirits had risen - and she was stocked with long-keeping fresh food.
Long-keeping, which was just as well, since the weeks span out before they found the south-east trades, and even then the languid capricious breezes scarcely deserved their name, still less their reputation for undeviating regularity. She sailed gently on, almost always on an even keel, and the weeks established a steady pattern of her people's life. In the morning they pumped the ship clear of the eighteen inches of sea-water that had been let in through the sweetening-cock, a task in which Stephen and Martin shared, taking their places at the breaks from an obscure feeling that they were responsible for the standing order - a task that was at first looked upon with strong disapproval by the morning watch, but that was carried on out of habit, without thought of complaint, even now that the Surprise was as sweet as the Nutmeg. Then in the forenoon, their few patients having been dealt with, they returned to the gunroom; and the long even swell from the south-east being so easy and predictable, they did not scruple to lay out even their most fragile specimens on the dining-table. That part of the afternoon watch which was not taken up with dining they usually spent in the mizentop, relating their experiences and observations in turn: Stephen had reached that part of his voyage in which he had walked up the side of an immense extinct volcano whose crater contained an isolated paradise in which the animals, protected by religion (Buddhist monks lived there), piety, superstition and plain remoteness, had never been hunted or killed or in any way molested, so that a man could walk about among them, exciting no more than a mild curiosity - a country where he had pushed his way through grazing herds of deer and had sat with orang-utangs.
Martin had no such glories to offer in the cold bare Patagonian steppes to which his narrative had brought the Surprise, but he did his best with the three-toed American ostrich, the long-tailed green parakeet, seen flying as
