and the quiet, unpretentious Dr Jacob, willing to please and to be pleased, succeeded in both: he was somewhat older than the lieutenants, which ensured a certain respect; his friendship with their much esteemed Doctor gave rise to more; and when Woodbine, the master, hurried in he found the gunroom in a fine buzz of conversation. He excused his lateness to the president: ‘That sudden gust took Elpenor the Greek over the side, and we have been fishing him out - a very strong and sudden gust indeed: north-east. How do you do, sir?’ - this to Jacob.
‘You are very welcome, I am sure. A glass of wine with you, sir.’
With shore supplies at hand it was a pleasant meal, with a steady flow of talk, much of it about the sea and its wonders - the enormous rays of the West Indies, albatrosses nesting on Desolation Island (one of the many Desolation Islands) and their tameness, St Elmo’s Fire, the Northern Lights. Woodbine belonged to an older generation than the lieutenants: he had travelled even more widely, and encouraged by the close attention of the medical man he spoke at considerable length about some pools or natural resurgences of pitch in Mexico. ‘Not to be compared to the Pitch-Lake in Trinidad for size, but much more interesting: there is one where the tar comes bubbling up in the middle, so liquid you can take it with a ladle; and every now and then a white bone comes surging up in the great bubble. Such bones! People may prate about their Russian mammoths, but these creatures - or some of them - would make mammoths look like pug-dogs. The gentleman that took me there, a natural philosopher, collects the most curious, and he showed me great curved tusks, oh, three fathoms long and.. .’ Another of those curious furious blasts came down from the face of the Rock, ruffling the whole bay and heeling the Surprise so that all hands automatically reached for their glasses and the mess-servants grasped the backs of the chairs. The master, an unusually truthful, scrupulous man, an elder of the congregation of Sethians in Shelmerston, checked himself and said, ‘Well, perhaps ten foot, to be on the safe side. And I tell you what, gentlemen, I have known this gust or warning foretell a seven-day blow out of the north-east four or even five times when my ship has been lying here.’
‘In that case, God help the poor fellows in Pomone’s boats,’ said Somers: he spoke facetiously, but the master shook his head, asking, ‘Did you ever know a bad omen to be wrong, Mr Somers?’
There did indeed follow a series of strong, steady winds, scarcely varying a point in direction from north-east day after day, nor in force from full to close-reefed topsails: and during all this time Jack and David Adams, his clerk on and off these many years but now styled his secretary (and paid as such) - for although on this occasion it had been agreed that Jack, with a small squadron soon to be split up for various duties while he himself was to have such a particular mission, should not have a captain under him, he was certainly allowed a secretary during all this time they rearranged the forces at hand and the recent drafts, the Commodore exercising them at gunnery whenever it was at all possible and dining regularly with his captains. Two of them he liked very well: young Pomfret in acting command of Pomone and Harris of Briseis, both excellent seamen and both of his own mind entirely about the capital importance of rapid, accurate fire. Brawley and Cartwright of the corvettes Rainbow and Ganymede, though somewhat lacking in authority, were agreeable young men; but they were not fortunate in their officers and neither ship was in first-rate order, which was a pity, since both were Bermuda-built, dry, swift and weatherly. Ward of the Dover on the other hand was the kind of man Jack could not possibly like: heavy, graceless, dark-faced; rude, domineering and inefficient. He was said to be rich and he was certainly mean: a very rare combination in a sailor, though Jack had met it before, a man generally disliked is hardly apt to lavish good food and wine on those who despise him; and Ward’s dinners were execrable.
The wind, which at times was strong enough to send small pebbles flying through the air on the upper reaches of the Rock, did not interrupt Stephen’s habit of visiting the hospital every morning: he generally went there with Jacob, and on two separate occasions he had the pleasure of carrying out his particular operation of suprapubic cystotomy in the presence of the Physician of the Fleet and of Poll, who comforted the patient and passed the sutures. She told Jacob in private ‘that it was the neatest, quickest job she had ever seen - should never have believed it could have been done so quick, and with scarcely a groan. I shall light a candle for each of them, against the infection.’
Yet although the wind did not interfere with his work, which included a very minute dissection, with Jacob’s help, of the anomalous hand, it did away with his outdoor pleasure almost entirely. The migrant birds, always averse to crossing wide expanses of sea and wholly incapable of making headway against gales of this nature, were pinned down in Morocco; and in the sheltered hollows behind Cape Spartel twenty booted eagles might be seen in a single bush. He turned therefore to an occupation that fell into neither category and, it having been turning in his mind for some time, particularly at night, he quickly finished the second part of his suite, a forlan, copied it fair that afternoon and showed it to Jack in the evening.
Sitting there with the score tilted towards the lamp and what little light there was, with the small rain sweeping in swathes across the sea, his mouth now formed for whistling (but silent), now for a very deep humming where the ‘cello came in, Jack came to the end of the saraband, with its curiously reiterated melody. He gathered the sheets and reached for the forlan: ‘It is terribly sad,’ he observed, almost to himself - words he wished unsaid with all his heart.
‘Do you know any happy music?’ asked Stephen. ‘I do not.’
Embarrassment hung there in the great cabin for no more than a moment before it was dissipated first by a measured series of small explosions and then by Salmon, master’s mate, bursting in as the ship, heeling
