Master & Commander (38 page)

   A voyage whose two ends were out of sight—a voyage sufficient in itself. And on the plain physical side, she was a well-manned sloop, now that her prize-crews were all aboard again: not a great deal of work; a fair sense of urgency; a steady routine day after day; and day after day the exercise with the great guns that knocked the seconds off one by one until the day in 16°31'E., when the larboard watch succeeded in firing three broadsides in exactly five minutes. And, above all, the extraordinarily fine weather and (apart from a languid week or so of calm far to the east, a little after they had left Sir Sidney's squadron) fair winds so much so that when a moderate Levanter sprang up as soon as their chronic shortage of water made it really necessary to put into Malta, Jack said uneasily, 'It is too good to last. I am afraid we must pay for this, presently.'

   He had a very particular wish to make a rapid passage, a strikingly rapid passage that would persuade Lord Keith of his undeviating attention to duty, his reliability; nothing he had ever heard in his adult life had so chilled him (upon reflexion) as the admiral's remarks about post rank. They bad been kindly meant; they were totally convincing; they haunted his mind.

   'I wonder you should be so concerned over a mere title—a tolerably Byzantine title,' observed Stephen. 'After all, you are called Captain Aubrey now, and you would still only be called Captain Aubrey after that eventual elevation; for no man, as I understand it, ever says "Post-captain So-and-so". Surely it cannot be a peevish desire for symmetry—a longing to wear two epaulettes?'

   'That does occupy a great share of my heart, of course, along with eagerness for an extra eighteenpence a day. But you will allow me to point out, sir, that you are mistaken in everything you advance. At present I am called captain only by courtesy—I am dependent upon the courtesy of a parcel of damned scrubs, much as surgeons are by courtesy called Doctor. How should you like it if any cross-grained brute could call you
Mr
M the moment he chose to be uncivil? Whereas, was I to be made post some day, I should be captain by right; but even so I should only shift my swab from one shoulder to the other. I should not have the right to wear both until I had three years' seniority. No. The reason why every sea-officer in his right wits longs so ardently to be made post is this—once you are over that fence, why, there you are! My dear sir, you are there! What I mean is, that from then onwards all you have to do is to remain alive to be an admiral in time.'

   'And that is the summit of human felicity?'

   'Of course it is,' cried Jack, staring. 'Does it not seem plain to you?'

   'Oh, certainly.'

   'Well then,' said Jack, smiling at the prospect, 'well then, up the list you go, once you are there, whether you have a ship or no, all according to seniority, in perfect order—rear-admiral of the blue, rear-admiral of the white, rear-admiral of the red, vice-admiral of the blue, and so on, right up—no damned merit about it, no selection. That's what I like. Up until that point it is interest, or luck, or the approbation of your superiors—a pack of old women, for the most part. You must truckle to them—yes, sir; no, sir; by your leave, sir; your most humble servant . . . Do you smell that mutton? You will dine with me, will you not? I have asked the officer and midshipman of the watch.'

   The officer in question happened to be Dillon, and the acting midshipman young Ellis. Jack had very early determined that there should be no evident breach, no barbarous sullen inveteracy, and once a week he invited the officer (and sometimes the midshipman) of the forenoon watch to dinner, whoever he was; and once a week he in turn was invited to dine in the gun-room. Dillon had tacitly acquiesced in this arrangement, and on the surface there was a perfect civility between them—a state of affairs much helped in their daily life by the invariable presence of others.

   On this occasion Henry Ellis formed part of their protection. He had proved an ordinary boy, rather pleasant than otherwise: exceedingly timid and modest at first and outrageously made game of by Babbington and Ricketts, but now, having found his place, somewhat given to prating. Not at his captain's table, however: he sat rigid, mute, the tips of his fingers and the rims of his ears bleeding with cleanliness, his elbows pressed to his sides, eating wolf-like gulps of mutton, which he swallowed whole. Jack had always liked the young, and in any case he felt that a guest was entitled to consideration at his table, so having invited Ellis to drink a glass of wine with him, he smiled affably and said, 'You people were reciting some verses in the foretop this morning. Very capital verses, I dare say—Mr Mowett's verses? Mr Mowett turns a pretty line.' So he did. His piece on the bending of the new mainsail was admired throughout the sloop: but most unhappily he had also been inspired to write, as part of a general description:

  
White as the clouds beneath the blaze of noon

  
Her bottom through translucent waters shone.

   For the time being this couplet had quite destroyed his authority with the youngsters; and it was this couplet they had been reciting in the foretop, hoping thereby to provoke him still further.

   'Pray, will you not recite them to us? I am sure the Doctor would like to hear.'

   'Oh, yes, pray do,' said Stephen.

   The unhappy boy thrust a great lump of mutton into his cheek, turned a nasty yellow and gathered to his heart all the fortitude he could call upon. He said, 'Yes, sir,' fixed his eyes upon the stern-window and began,

   '
White as the clouds beneath the blaze of noon
Oh God don't let me die

   '
White as the clouds beneath the blaze of noon

  
Her b
—' His voice quavered, died, revived as a thin desperate ghost and squeaked out '
Her bottom'
; but could do no more.

   'A damned fine verse,' cried Jack, after a very slight pause. 'Edifying too. Dr Maturin, a glass of wine with you?'

   Mowett appeared, like a spirit a little late for its cue, and said, 'I beg your pardon, sir, for interrupting you, but there's a ship topsails up three points on the starboard bow.'

   In all this golden voyage they had seen almost nothing on the open sea, apart from a few caiques in Greek waters and a transport on her passage from Sicily to Malta, so when at length the newcomer had come close enough for her topsails. and a hint of her courses to be seen from the deck, she was stared at with an even greater intensity than usual. The
Sophie
had cleared the Sicilian Channel that morning and she was steering west-north-west, with Cape Teulada in Sardinia bearing north by east twenty-three leagues, a moderate breeze at north-east, and only some two hundred and fifty miles of sea between her and Port Mahon. The stranger appeared to be steering west-south-west or something south, as though for Gibraltar or perhaps Oran, and she bore north-west by north from the sloop. These courses, if persisted in, would intersect; but at present there was no telling which would cross the other's wake.

   A detached observer would have seen the
Sophie
heel slightly as all her people gathered along her starboard side, would have noticed the excited talk die away on the fo'c'sle and would have smiled to see two-thirds of the crew and all the officers simultaneously purse their lips as the distant ship set her topgallants. That meant she was almost certainly a man-of-war; almost certainly a frigate, if not a ship of the line. And those topgallants had not been sheeted home in a very seamanlike way—scarcely as the Royal Navy would have liked it.

   'Make the private signal, Mr Pullings. Mr Marshall, begin to edge away. Mr Day, stand by for the gun.'

   The red flag soared up the foremast in a neat ball and broke out smartly, streaming forwards, while the white flag and pendant Hacked overhead at the main and the single gun fired to windward.

   'Blue ensign, sir,' reported Pullings, glued to his telescope. 'Red pendant at the main. Blue Peter at the fore.'

   'Hands to the braces,' called Jack. 'South-west by south a half south,' he said to the man at the wheel, for that signal was the answer of six months ago. 'Royals, lower and tops'l stuns'ls. Mr Dillon, pray let me know what you make of her.'

   James hoisted himself into the crosstrees and trained his glass on the distant ship: as soon as the
Sophie
had steadied on her new course, bowing the long southern swell, he compensated for her movement with an even pendulum motion of his far hand and fixed the stranger in the shining round. The flash of her brass bow-chaser winked at him across the sea in the afternoon sun. She was a frigate sure enough: he could not count her gun-ports yet but she was a heavy frigate: of that there was no doubt. An elegant ship. She, too, was setting her lower studdingsails; and they were having difficulty in rigging out a boom.

   'Sir,' said the midshipman of the maintop as he made his way down, 'Andrews here thinks she's the
Dédaigneuse
.'

   'Look again with my glass,' said Dillon, passing his telescope, the best in the sloop.

   'Yes. She's the
Dédaigneuse
,' said the sailor, a middle-aged man with a greasy red waistcoat over his bare copper-brown upper half. 'You can see that new-fangled round bow. I was prisoner aboard of her a matter of three weeks and more: took out of a collier.'

   'What does she carry?'

   'Twenty-six eighteen-pounders on the main deck, sir, eighteen long eights on the quarter-deck and fo'c'sle, and a brass long twelve for a bow-chaser. They used to make me polish 'un.'

   'She is a frigate, sir, of course,' reported James. 'And Andrews of the maintop, a sensible man, says she is the
Dédaigneuse
. He was a prisoner in her.'

   'Well,' said Jack, smiling, 'how fortunate that the evenings are drawing in.' The sun would, in fact, set in about four hours' time, the twilight did not last long in these latitudes, and this was the dark of the moon. The
Dédaigneuse
would have to sail nearly two knots faster than the
Sophie
to catch her, and he did not think there was any likelihood of her doing so—she was heavily armed, but she was no famous sailer like the
Astrée
or the
Pomone
. Nevertheless, he turned the whole of his mind to urging his dear sloop to her very utmost speed. It was possible that he might not manage to slip away in the night—he had taken part in a thirty-two-hour chase over more than two hundred miles of sea on the West Indies station himself—and every yard might count. She had the breeze almost on her larboard quarter at present, not far from her best point of sailing, and she was running a good seven knots; indeed, so briskly had her numerous and well-trained crew set the royals and studdingsails that for the first quarter of an hour she appeared to be gaining on the frigate.

   'I wish it may last,' thought Jack, glancing up at the sun through the poor flimsy canvas of the topsail. The prodigious spring rains of the western Mediterranean, the Greek sun and piercing winds had removed every particle of the contractor's dressing as well as most of the body of the stuff, and the bunt and reefs, showed poor and baggy: well enough before the wind, but if they were to try a tacking-match with the frigate it could only end in tears—they would never lie so close.

   It did not last. Once the frigate's hull felt, the full effect of the sails she spread in her leisurely fashion, she made up her loss and began to overhaul the
Sophie
. It was difficult to be sure of this at first—a far-off triple flash on the horizon with a hint of darkness beneath at the top of the rise—but in three-quarters of an hour her hull was visible from the
Sophie's
quarter-deck most of the time, and Jack set their old-fashioned spritsail topsail, edging away another half point.

   At the taffrail Mowett was explaining the nature of this sail to Stephen, for the
Sophie
set it flying, with a jack-stay clinched round the end of the jib-boom, having an iron traveller on it, a curious state of affairs in a man-of-war, of course; and Jack was standing by the aftermost starboard four-pounder with his eyes recording every movement aboard the frigate and his mind taken up with the calculation of the risks involved in setting the topgallant studdingsails in this freshening breeze, when there was a confused bellowing forward and the cry of
man overboard
. Almost at the same moment, Henry Ellis swept by in the smooth curving stream beneath him, his face straining up out of the water, amazed. Mowett threw him the fall of the empty davit. Both arms reached up from the sea to catch the flying line: head went under—hands missed their hold. Then he was away behind, bobbing on the wake.

   Every face turned to Jack. His expression was terribly hard. His eyes darted from the boy to the frigate coming up at eight knots. Ten minutes would lose a mile and more: the havoc of studdingsails taken aback: the time to get way on her again. Ninety men endangered. These considerations and many others, including a knowledge of the extreme intensity of the eyes directed at him, a recollection of the odious nature of the parents, the status of the boy as a sort of guest, Molly Harte's protégé, flew through his racing mind before his stopped breath had begun to flow again.

   'Jolly-boat away,' he said harshly. 'Stand by, fore and aft. Stand by. Mr Marshall, bring her to.'

   The
Sophie
flew up into the wind: the jolly-boat splashed into the water. Very few orders were called for. The yards came round, her great spread of canvas shrank in, halliards, bunt-lines, clew-lines, brails racing through their blocks with scarcely a word; and even in his cold black fury Jack admired the smooth competence of the operation.

   Painfully the jolly-boat crept out over the sea to cut the curve of the
Sophie's
wake again: slowly, slowly. They were peering over the side of the boat, poking about with a boat-hook. Interminably. Now at last they had turned; they were a quarter of the way back; and in his glass Jack saw all the rowers fall violently into the bottom of the boat. Stroke had been pulling so hard that his oar had broken, flinging him backwards.