Book 8 - The Ionian Mission

by Patrick O'Brian

  'There were many sad brutish grobians among those I examined,' said Stephen, who was feeling disagreeable and contradictory: he loathed the whole business of impressment.

  'Oh, of course there are always some odd fish among the quota-men sent by the magistrates; but this time we have very few downright thieves: only one parricide, that was found incapable of pleading and sent to the Navy; and after all he will scarcely carry on his capers here—he will scarcely find another father aboard. And much the same applied to the poachers. Upon the whole, I am very pleased: what with the old leaven and the new, as it says in the Bible, I do not doubt but we shall have a tolerable brisk crew by the time we reach the flag. And to encourage 'em I have laid in a fine stock of private powder, the stock of a fireworks-maker lately deceased, a most prodigious bargain. It was the clerk of cheque that gave me wind of it—he means to marry the widow—and although it is a little mixed with red orpiment and so on the ordnance-master swears it is sound. The only thing between me and perfect felicity,' said Jack, thrusting the cloud of legal troubles still farther back into the recesses of his mind, 'is the threat of these parsons and the absence of the other lieutenants: manning always means a prodigious amount of work, and far too much of it falls on poor Pullings. We must have more lieutenants at once. Pullings is quite worn out, and the next few days will be rough going indeed.'

  'So he is too: and grown strangely snappish from want of repose. He rounded on me with inconceivable ferocity for turning a small paltry handful of men away: his appetite for hands is unmeasured, insatiable, inhuman. I must give him a comfortable dose tonight. Seventy-five drops of the tincture of laudanum, and tomorrow he will be the complaisant amiable obliging Thomas Pullings we have always known: otherwise it must be the blue pill for him. Blue pill and black draught.'

  'With any luck the others should appear tomorrow, and that will take some of the load off his shoulders: and the Commissioner has a plan for sending the parsons in a merchantman. Your mates came aboard this afternoon, I collect: I hope you are pleased with them?'

  'I have no doubt that they are as competent as their certificates state them to be, as competent as we have any right to expect in surgeons.' Stephen was a physician, and surgeons (though worthy souls often enough, taken individually) had not yet lived down their long, long association with barbers. 'But even if the one had been Podalirius and the other Machaon I should still have preferred to be alone.'

  'Are they not quite the thing?' asked Jack. 'I will try to arrange a transfer if you do not like them.'

  'You are very good; but it is not that I have taken any disgust either to the young man or to the old. It is only that I dislike the whole notion of subordination. The corporal lurks in almost every bosom, and each man tends to use authority when he has it, thus destroying his natural relationship with his fellows, a disastrous state of affairs for both sides. Do away with subordination and you do away with tyranny: without subordination we should have no Neros, no Tamerlanes, no Buonapartes.

  'Stuff,' said Jack. 'Subordination is the natural order: there is subordination in Heaven—Thrones and Dominions take precedence over Powers and Principalities, Archangels and ordinary foremast angels; and so it is in the Navy. You have come to the wrong shop for anarchy, brother.'

  'Be that as it may,' said Stephen, 'I had far rather sail alone; yet with some six hundred souls crammed into this insecure and mouldy wooden vessel, many verminous, many poxed, and some perhaps harbouring the seeds of the gaol-fever, I need some assistance even in the ordinary daily course, to say nothing of action, God forbid. And in point of fact, since I am likely to be absent some of the time, I have taken peculiar pains to come by an exceptionally well-qualified, well-recommended senior assistant. But listen, why are you so opposed to these clergymen? Surely you are no longer so weak as to set store by superstition?'

  'Of course not,' said Jack quickly. 'It is only for the sake of the hands,'—his invariable reply. 'Besides,' he said after a pause, 'you cannot talk bawdy with parsons. It ain't fitting.'

  'But you never do talk bawdy,' said Stephen. It was true, or at least almost true: although no kind of a prude, Jack Aubrey was a man who preferred action to talk, fact to phantasm, and although he did possess a small stock of lewd stories for the end of dinners when imaginations grew warm and often lubricious he usually forgot them, or left out the point.

  'Oh well,' said Jack: and then, 'Did you ever meet Bach?'

  'Which Bach?'

  'London Bach.'

  'Not I.'

  'I did. He wrote some pieces for my uncle Fisher, and his young man copied them out fair. But they were lost years and years ago, so last time I was in town I went to see whether I could find the originals: the young man has set up on his own, having inherited his master's music-library. We searched through the papers—such a disorder you would hardly credit, and I had always supposed publishers were as neat as bees—we searched for hours, and no uncle's pieces did we find. But the whole point is this: Bach had a father.'

  'Heavens, Jack, what things you tell me. Yet upon recollection I seem to have known other men in much the same case.'

  'And this father, this old Bach, you understand me, had written piles and piles of musical scores in the pantry.'

  'A whimsical place to compose in, perhaps; but then birds sing in trees, do they not? Why not antediluvian Germans in a pantry?'

  'I mean the piles were kept in the pantry. Mice and blackbeetles and cook-maids had played Old Harry with some cantatas and a vast great Passion according to St Mark, in High Dutch; but lower down all was well, and I brought away several pieces, 'cello for you, fiddle for me, and some for both together. It is strange stuff, fugues and suites of the last age, crabbed and knotted sometimes and not at all in the modern taste, but I do assure you, Stephen, there is meat in it. I have tried this partita in C a good many times, and the argument goes so deep, so close and deep, that I scarcely follow it yet, let alone make it sing. How I should love to hear it played really well—to hear Viotti dashing away.'

  Stephen studied the 'cello suite in his hand, booming and humming sotto voce. 'Tweedly-tweedly, tweedly tweedly, deedly deedly pom pom pom. Oh, this would call for the delicate hand of the world,' he said. 'Otherwise it would sound like boors dancing. Oh, the double-stopping . . . and how to bow it?'

  'Shall we make an attempt upon the D minor double sonata?' said Jack, 'and knit up the ravelled sleeve of care with sore labour's bath?'

  'By all means,' said Stephen. 'A better way of dealing with a sleeve cannot be imagined.'

  Neither had at any time been more than a fairly accomplished amateur: of recent years neither had had much leisure for practice, and various wounds (an American musket-ball in Jack's case, a French interrogation in Stephen's) had so slowed down their fingers that in places they were obliged to indicate the notes by hooting; and as they felt their way through the difficult sonata time after time they made the night so hideous that Killick's indignation broke out at last and he said to the Captain's cook, 'There they go again, tweedly-deedly, tweedly-deedly, belly-aching the whole bleeding night, and the toasted cheese seizing on to their plates like goddam glue, which I dursen't go in to fetch them; and never an honest tune from beginning to end.'

  Perhaps there was not: but after a particularly difficult, severe and abstract passage the last movement ended with a triumphant summing-up and resolution that they could both play at first sight and that they repeated again and again; and the grave happiness of the music was still with Captain Aubrey when he walked on to his quarterdeck in the bright morning to see his stump topgallantmasts and their attendant royals come aboard, followed almost immediately by the Tamar's barge bringing a score of glum but resigned and obviously competent Skates to the larboard side and by a Plymouth wherry with two pink-faced young men, very carefully shaved, wearing identical uniforms, their best, and solemn expressions. The wherry hooked on to the starboard mainchains: the young men ran up the side in order of seniority—two whole week
s lay between them—saluted the quarterdeck and looked quickly fore and aft for the officer of the watch. They saw no calm dignified figure pacing up and down with a telescope under his arm and an epaulette on his shoulder, but after a moment a very dirty tall thin man in tarry trousers and a round jacket stepped towards them from the busy crowd at the foot of the foremast; his eyes were rimmed with red, his expression stern, as well it might be, Pullings having been obliged to keep watch as well as carry out all his other duties since the Worcester left Portsmouth. The first young man took off his hat and said in a humble voice, 'Collins, sir, come on board, if you please.'

  'Whiting, sir, if you please: come on board,' said the other.

  'You are very welcome, gentlemen,' said Pullings. 'I will not give you my hand, it being covered with slush; but you are very welcome. There is a mortal deal of work to be done, if ever we are to put to sea. There is not a moment to lose.'

  Jack was speaking to the gunner at the time, explaining that the private powder in the kegs marked X was mixed with red orpiment, and XX with antimony or copper, while still others had lycoperdium or camphor or strontium, but he noticed with satisfaction that neither of the two young men did in fact lose a moment. Their sea-chests were scarcely aboard before they were out of their fine clothes, actively forwarding the work on the foretopgallantmast, as deep in slush as any of those concerned with easing its head through the awkward trestle-trees and cap. 'It may not be fighting-powder, Mr Borrell,' said Jack, 'but it will answer very well for practice. Let a dozen rounds be filled for each gun. I should like to see how the people shape as soon as we put to sea: perhaps tomorrow, on the evening tide.'

  'A dozen rounds it is, sir,' said the gunner with deep approval. Captain Aubrey belonged to the school of Douglas and Collingwood, men who believed that a ship's prime purpose was to bring cannon within range of the enemy and then to fire with extreme speed and accuracy, and Borrell supported this view with all his heart. He walked off to fill cartridge with his mates in the magazine and Jack looked up at the rising foretopgallantmast with a smile: there was order in that apparent chaos of men, spars and ropes, and Tom Pullings had the whole operation well in hand. He looked down, and his smile faded: a small boat crammed with parsons was approaching the ship, followed by another with a lady in mourning, a small boy by her side.

  'I had hoped to persuade her to put the boy to school,' said Jack to Stephen after supper, as they sat down to a comparatively simple Scarlatti piece that they both knew well. 'I had hoped to convince her that a voyage of this kind, a few months on the Toulon blockade, a relieving turn with no future in it—a mere parenthesis, as you said the other day—would be no use to her boy, and that there were many other captains, with schoolmasters and a long commission ahead of them: I named half a dozen. And I had hoped to ship no first-voyagers this time, no squeakers, no use to me and I no use to them. But she would not be denied—wept, upon my word; shed tears. I have never been so wretched in my life.'

  'Mrs Calamy is an officer's widow, I collect?'

  'Yes. Edward Calamy and I were shipmates in Theseus, before he was made post into the Atalante. Then they gave him the Rochester, 74, just such a ship as this: she was lost with all hands in the great autumn blow of the year eight. If I had told her that we came from the same yard, she might have taken the little brute away.'

  'Poor little brute. Pullings found him bathed in tears, and comforted him: the child led him downstairs, below, and gave him a large piece of plum-cake. This argues a grateful heart in Mr Calamy. I hope he may thrive, though he is so puny, so very puny.'

  'Oh, I dare say he will, if he is not drowned or knocked on the head. Mrs Borrell will look after him—the Navy is equipped to breed up squeakers, after all. But I tell you what, Stephen, I tell you what: the Navy is not equipped to deal with a whole God-damned—a whole blessed convocation of clergy. It is not six parsons that are come aboard but seven: seven, upon my sacred honour. How I hope this breeze holds true for three more tides, so that we may put to sea before they send us half the bench of bishops.'

  The wind did not hold true. The Worcester had barely shipped her new stumps, rattled down the shrouds, completed her water and received the port-admiral's visit before an ominous swell set in, causing her to pitch and roll even in the sheltered Hamoaze and foretelling the great grey swathes of rain driving in on a strong south-wester whose force steadily increased day after day, emptying the Sound, pinning the men-of-war to their moorings in Hamoaze and the merchant ships in Catwater, driving the Brest team off their blockade into Torbay, and scattering the shores with driftwood, much of it ancient wreckage, English, French, Spanish, Dutch, and neutral. But some was recent, and this was mostly English, for not only were there now far more English merchantmen than foreigners to be wrecked, but the Royal Navy, keeping the sea in all weathers, the whole year round, was fast wearing out, and although new ships were continually being built as fast as limited treasure and supplies would allow, many others had to be kept in active service when they were no longer seaworthy—thirteen had been lost this year, quite apart from those taken by the Americans or the French.

  Yet at least this delay gave the Worcester time for all kinds of last-minute arrangements, such as a provision of soap or blotting-paper, so often forgotten in even the best-ordered ships until they have sunk the land and with it all sources of supply: it also allowed still more people to put off with requests to Captain Aubrey, still more letters to come aboard for Admiral Thornton's squadron and for the Worcester herself. Some of these were addressed to her Captain; long, intricate and not particularly encouraging letters from his lawyer, letters that made Jack look careworn and old. 'How I do loathe this hanging about,' he said. 'It is a kind of enforced unpunctuality. And the damned thing about it is that Sophie could perfectly well have come down for a week or so: and Diana too I dare say. Yet at least it has brought you acquainted with your new messmates. You must be pretty crowded down there, but I hope you find them good company, learned and so on?'

  Jack had not yet dined with the wardroom and its new inhabitants: not only had he been extremely busy with a restowing of the hold, to improve the Worcester's trim, but partly out of custom and partly out of a desire to forget his legal worries he had also dined with other captains almost every day: fine hard-drinking parties, most of them, and a moderately good way of overlaying care for the while. He had also travelled quite far inland to pay his respects to Lady Thornton and to ask whether he might carry anything from home to the Admiral. 'Yet now I come to think of it,' he went on, 'one of them, the Scotchman, is not a parson at all, but a professor of moral philosophy, to be delivered to Port Mahon, where presumably they are in need of his services. Moral philosophy. How does that differ from your kind, Stephen?'

  'Why, natural philosophy is not concerned with ethics, virtues and vices, or metaphysics. The fact that the dodo has a keel to her breastbone whereas the ostrich and her kind have none presents no moral issue; nor does the dissolution of gold by aqua regia. We erect hypotheses, to be sure, some of us to a most stupendous height, but we always hope to sustain them by demonstrable facts in time: these are not the province of the moralist. Perhaps it might be said that your moral philosopher is in pursuit of wisdom rather than of knowledge; and indeed what he is concerned with is not so much the object of knowledge as of intuitive perception—is scarcely susceptible of being known. Yet whether wisdom can be any more profitably pursued than happiness is a question. Certainly the few moral philosophers I have known do not seem to have been outstandingly successful in either, whereas some natural philosophers, such as Sir Humphrey Davy . . .' Stephen carried on to the end of his long, his very long sentence, but a great while before he stopped it was apparent to him that Captain Aubrey was meditating a joke.

  'So I suppose,' he said, smiling so broadly that his blue eyes were not more than twinkling slits in his red face, 'that you and Sir Humphrey could be described as immoral philosophers?'

  'Sure there may be some poo
r thin barren minds that would catch at such a paltry clench,' said Stephen. 'Pothouse wits that might, if their beery genius soared so high, also call Professor Graham an unnatural philosopher.'

  Captain Aubrey heaved silently for a while—few men relished their own wit more than Jack—and then, smiling still, he said, 'Well, at all events, I hope he is good company. I can imagine an unnatural and an immoral philosopher arguing the toss for hours, to the admiration of all hands, ha, ha, ha.'

  'We have barely exchanged a dozen words; he seems a reserved gentleman, and perhaps a little deaf. I have hardly formed any opinion of him; though he must be widely read, sure, to occupy a chair in a respectable university. I believe I have seen his name to a recent edition of the Nicomachean Ethics.'

  'And what of the others, the parsons proper?'

  Ordinarily they did not exchange their views about Stephen's fellow-members of the wardroom mess; Jack, for example, had not said a word about his extreme displeasure at the arrival of Mr Somers rather than either of the lieutenants he had applied for, nor of his intimate conviction that the young man had been in Plymouth for several days, reporting aboard only when the hard labour of fitting the Worcester for sea was done. But the parsons were no part of the ship's company; they were passengers; they might be discussed, and Stephen described them briefly. One was a West Country rector, an invalid who hoped to find health in the Mediterranean, where his cousin commanded the Andromache. 'I wish he may get there, at all: such a cachexy I have rarely seen ambulant'—all the others were unbeneficed clergymen: two had been ushers in schools for young gentlemen, and thought any other life preferable to that, even on shipboard; two had tried long and hard and unsuccessfully to live by their pens—they were pitifully thin and shabby—and one, from the West Indies, had ruined himself by the invention of a double-bottomed defecator. 'It appears that the machine, which is designed to purify sugar, requires only the investment of a little more capital to sweep the board; and that any gentleman with a few hundreds to spare might set up his coach on the profits within a very short space of time. But come, joy, are we ever to attack Scarlatti, the poor soul, or are we to sit here until the crack of doom, as windbound as our unhappy argosy?'