quarterdeck for their coffee.
Mrs Oakes, who dined a little after twelve, had already been there for some time, her chair installed at the leeward end of the taffrail and her feet resting on a cheese of wads placed there by William Honey, an admirer still, like the rest of his mess. She was alone, her husband, West and even Adams being fast asleep, as indeed were almost all hands who were not actually on duty - the main and fore tops were filled with seamen asprawl on the folded studdingsails, their mouths open and their eyes shut, like Dutch boors in a harvest-field; and Davidge, the officer of the watch, had taken up his usual position by the weather hances. Jack led his troop aft and asked her how she did. 'Very well indeed, sir, I thank you,' she said. 'It would be an ungrateful woman that did not feel amazingly well, being carried over the sea in this splendid fashion. Driving fast on a turnpike in a well-hung carriage is charming, but it is nothing in comparison of this.'
Jack poured her coffee and they talked about the disadvantages of travel by land - coaches overturning, horses running away, horses refusing to run at all, crowded inns. That is to say Jack, Clarissa and Stephen talked. The others stood holding their little delicate cups, looking as easy as they could and simpering from time to time, until at last Martin contributed an account of a very wretched journey across Dartmoor in a gig whose wheels came off as night was falling, a rainstorm beating in from the west, the linch-pin lost in a bottomless mire and the horses audibly weeping. Martin was not one of those few men who can speak naturally when they are in a false position, and Stephen observed that Clarissa was secretly amused: yet she helped him along with polite attention and timely cries of 'Heavens!' 'Dear me' and 'How very horrid it must have been.'
From this, perhaps as an illustration of the greater ease of travel by sea, the conversation passed on to her foot-rest. 'Why is it called a wad of cheese?' she asked.
'A cheese of wads, I believe, ma'am,' said Jack. 'Cheese because it is a cylinder like a tall thin Stilton, and wads because that is what the cloth is filled with. I dare say you have seen a man load his fowling-piece?' Clarissa bowed. 'First he puts in his powder, then his shot, and then with his ramrod he thrusts down a wad to hold everything in place until he wishes to fire. That is just what we do with the great guns; only of course the wads are much bigger.'
Again Clarissa bent her head by way of agreement, and Stephen had the impression or rather the certainty that if she had spoken her voice would have been as unnatural as Martin's.
'Now that I come to think of it,' said Jack, gazing amiably at the eastern horizon, upon which Christmas Island should soon appear if his two chronometers, his last lunars and his noonday observation were correct. 'Now that I reflect, I do not believe you have ever seen the operation: you have always been below. We mean to have target-practice tomorrow, and if it would amuse you to watch, pray come on deck. You could see everything quite well, was you to stand amidships, by the barricade. Though perhaps you may not like the explosions. I know that elegant females' - smiling - 'do not always like it when one fires even a fowling-piece at anything like close quarters.'
'Oh, sir,' said Clarissa, 'I am not so elegant a female as to mind the report of a gun: and I should very much like to see your target-practice tomorrow. But now I think I must go and rouse my husband; he particularly desired me to wake him well before his watch.'
She rose; they bowed; and as she went down the companion-ladder the lookout at the masthead cried 'Land ho! On deck, there, land on the starboard bow. A low sort of long island,' he added in a subdued voice for the benefit of his friends in the maintops, 'with more of them fucking palm-trees.'
Early on Monday morning, with the sun slanting low across the long even swell so that its rounded summits, a furlong apart, were visible, though very soon they would be quite lost in the little fret of superficial waves, Captain Aubrey spread top-gallantsails, and the hands racing aloft very nearly crushed Stephen and Martin as they crouched in the mizen-top, training the glass aft over the rail, gazing back at the land and the cloud of birds over it.
'I am persuaded that it is a vast atoll,' said Stephen. 'Vast; prodigiously extensive. Were we to climb higher still we might perhaps see across it, or at least make out a segment of the great circle.'
'I should be sorry to disturb the men at their work,' said Martin.
Stephen looked up as the hands came fleeting down, the outer men leaping in from the yardarm like so many gibbons, and did not press the point. He said 'We have been sailing past it almost all night: and though the rim of the lagoon may be no more than a musket-shot across at any given point, that still amounts to an enormous surface with no doubt a comparably enormous quantity of animals and vegetable life - the palms and the birds we have seen from afar, and some low bushes; but who knows what interesting predators, what wholly unexpected parasites they may have, to say nothing of undescribed forms of mollusc, insect, arachnid... there may even be some antediluvian mammals - a peculiar bat - that would confer immortality upon us. But shall we ever see it? No, sir. We shall not. Presently this ship will haul off, heave her wind, and spend hours, hours I say, bombarding the empty sea on the pretext of airing the mariners' intellects and in fact doing nothing but frighten the birds: yet she would never consider stopping for five minutes to let us pick up so much as an annelid.'
Stephen knew that he had said all this before, off the many, many islands and remote uninhabited shores they had passed, irretrievably passed; he knew that he might be being a bore; yet the tolerant smile on Martin's face, though very slight indeed, vexed him extremely.
After dinner - they had eaten alone - he said to Jack, 'At breakfast yesterday, when you were telling me about your first days at sea, I quoted Hobbes.'
'The learned cove that spoke of midshipmen as being nasty, brutish and short?'
'Well, in fact he was speaking of man's life, unimproved man's life: it was I that borrowed his words and applied them to the young gentlemen.' 'Very well applied too.'
'Certainly. Yet later conscience told me that my words were not only improper but also inaccurate. I looked out the passage this morning, and of course my conscience was right - is it ever wrong? - and I had omitted the words solitary and poor. 'Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short' was what he said. And though poor may have been appropriate ...' 'Appropriatissimo,' said Jack.
'The solitude had nothing to do with the overcrowded berth of your childhood. The false quotation was therefore one of those flashy worthless attempts at wit that I so much reprehend in others. Yet the point of all this is not to beat my breast crying mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, but rather to tell you that on the very same page I found that Hobbes, a learned cove, as you so rightly say, considered glory, after competition and diffidence, mankind's third principal cause of quarrel, so that trifles, as a word, a smile, a different opinion or any other sign of undervalue, were enough to bring violence about. Nay, destruction. I had read this passage before of course - it was on the same page, as I said - but its full force had escaped me until today, when just such a trifle...' 'Come in,' called Jack.
'Captain Pullings' compliments and duty, sir,' said Reade, 'and he believed you wished to know the moment the targets were ready.'
