'So you know nothing of what is going forward?'
'Brother, how tedious you can be, on occasion. I did hear some cries of 'Jolly rogers - jolly rogers - we shall roger them.' But in parenthesis, Jack, tell me about this word roger. I have often heard it aboard, but can make out no clear nautical signification.'
'Oh, it is no sea-term. They use it ashore much more than we do - a low cant expression meaning to swive or couple with.'
Stephen considered for a moment and then said, 'So roger joins bugger and that even coarser word; and they are all used in defiance and contempt, as though to an enemy; which seems to show a curious light on the lover's subjacent emotions. Conquest, rape, subjugation: have women a private language of the same nature, I wonder?'
Jack said, 'In some parts of the West Country rams are called Roger, as cats are called Puss; and of course that is their duty; though which came first, the deed or the doer, the goose or the egg, I am not learned enough to tell.'
'Would it not be the owl, at all?'
'Never in life, my poor Stephen. Who ever heard of a golden owl? But let me tell you why we are cracking on like this in what promises to be a very dirty night. There was an Englishman called Shelton in the whaler's crew, a foremast jack in Euryalus when Heneage Dundas had her: he told us of a French four-master, fitted out man-of- war fashion, Alastor by name, that attacks anything she can overpower, whatever its nation; a genuine pirate, wearing the black flag, the Jolly Roger, which means strike and like to or we shall kill every man and boy aboard. We ask no quarter: we give no quarter. We have checked Shelton's account; we have looked at the whaler's chart, pricked all the way from their leaving Callao to yesterday at sunset; and we know just about where the Alastor must be. She means to sail back to the coast and wait off the Chinchas for a Liverpool ship now docking at Callao for the homeward run. Listen!'
The companion overhead lit with three flashes of extreme brilliance; thunder cracked and bellowed at masthead height; and then came the all-pervading sound of enormous rain, not exactly a roar, but of such a volume that Jack had to lean over the table and raise his powerful voice to tell Stephen that 'now he could sponge his patients, aye, and wash them and their clothes too - there would be enough for the whole ship's company - the first ten minutes would carry off all the filth and then they would whip off the tarpaulins and fill the boats and scuttlebutts.'
The rain had no great effect on the swell, rolling strong from the north-west, but it flattened the surface almost as effectually as oil, doing away with countless superficial noises, so that the great voice of the rain came right down into the sick-berth itself, and Stephen, on his evening rounds, had to repeat his exclamation, 'I am astonished to see you here, Mr Martin: you are not fit to be up, and must go back to bed directly.' Of course he was not fit to be up. His eyes were deep-sunk in his now boney head, his lips were barely visible; and although he said, 'It was only a passing indisposition as I told you; and now it is over,' he had to grip the medicine-chest to keep upright. 'Nonsense,' said Stephen. 'You must go back to bed directly. That is an order, my dear sir. Padeen, help Mr Martin to his cabin, will you, now?'
When Stephen's work was done he walked up the ladder and into the gunroom: his was not exactly a seaman's step - there was something too tentative and crablike for that - but no landsman would have accomplished it, paying so little attention to the motion in that pitching ship as she raced with a full-topsail gale three points on her quarter, her stern rising up and up on the following swell; nor would a landsman have stood there, barely conscious of the heave, as he considered his messmates' dwelling-place.
It was a long dim corridor-like room, some eighteen feet wide and twenty-eight in length, with an almost equally long table running down the middle and the officers' cabin doors opening on to the narrow space on either side - opening outwards, since if they opened the other way they must necessarily crush the man within. There was no one in the gunroom at present apart from a seaman who was polishing the table and the foot of the mizenmast, which rose nobly through it half-way along, though Wilkins, whose watch had just been relieved, could be heard snoring in the aftermost larboard dog-hole; yet at four bells the table would be lined with men eager for their supper. Dutourd was likely to be invited, and he was certain to talk: the ransomers were nearly always noisy: it was no place for a sick man. He walked into Martin's cabin and sat down by his cot. Since Martin had retired by order their relations were now changed to those between physician and patient, the physician's authority being enormously enhanced by the Articles of War. In any case a certain frontier had been crossed and at present Stephen felt no more hesitation about dealing with this case than he would have done if Martin had all at once run mad, so that he had to be confined.
Martin's breathing was now easy, and he appeared to be in a very deep, almost comatose sleep; but his pulse made Stephen most uneasy. Presently, shaking his head, he left the cabin: at the foot of the ladder he saw young Wedell coming down, soaked to the skin. 'Pray, Mr Wedell,' he said, 'is the Captain on deck?'
'Yes, sir. He is on the forecastle, looking out ahead.' Stephen grasped the hand-rail, but Wedell cried, 'May I take him a message, sir? I am wet as a whale already.'
'That would be very kind. Pray tell him, with my compliments, that Mr Martin is far from well; that I should like to move him to the larboard midshipmen's berth; and that I should be obliged for two strong sensible hands.'
The hands in question, Bonden and a powerful forecastle-man who might have been his elder brother, took a quick, seamanlike glance at the situation and with no more than a 'By the head, mate. Handsomely, now,' they unshipped Martin's cot, carrying him forward in it at a soft barefoot trot to the empty larboard berth, where Padeen had cleared the deck and hung a lantern. They were of opinion that 'the Doctor's mate was as drunk as Davy's sow, and indeed the inert relaxation, the now-stertorous breathing, gave that impression.
It was not the case, however. Nathaniel Martin had lain down in his clothes and now as Stephen and Padeen undressed him, as limp as a man deeply stunned, they saw the recent and exacerbated sores over much of his body.
'Would this be the leprosy, your honour?' asked Padeen, his low, hesitant speech made slower, more hesitant by the shock.
'It would not,' said Stephen. 'It is the cruel salt on a very sensitive skin, and an ill habit of constitution. Go and fetch fresh water - it will be to be had by now - warm if ever the galley is lit, two sponges, two towels, and clean sheets from the chest by my bed. Ask Killick for those that were last washed in fresh.'
'Salt and worse on a sensitive mind; an unhappy mind,' he added to himself. Leprosy he had seen often enough; eczemas of course and prickly heat carried to the extreme, but never anything quite like this. There were many things about Martin's state that he could not make out; and although analogies kept flitting through his mind like clues to the solution of a puzzle, none would settle or cling to its fellows.
Padeen returned and they washed Martin with warm fresh water all over twice, then laid on sweet oil wherever it would do good, wrapping him at last naked in a clean sheet: no nightshirt was called for in this steady
