Master & Commander a-1

by Patrick O'Brian

  'And perhaps I should reply "Everything, since he has a command and I have not,"' said James, smiling. 'But come, now, I can hardly criticize your friend to your face.'

  'Oh, he has faults, sure. I know he is intensely ambitious where his profession is at issue and impatient of any restraint. My concern was to know just what it was that offended you in him. Or is it merely non amo te, Sabidi?'

  'Perhaps so: it is hard to say. He can be a very agreeable companion, of course, but there are times when he shows that particular beefy arrogant English insensibility… and there is certainly one thing that jars on me – his great eagerness for prizes. The sloop's discipline and training is more like that of a starving privateer than a King's ship. When we were chasing that miserable polacre he could not bring himself to leave the deck all night long – anyone would have thought we were after a man-of-war, with some honour at the end of the chase. And this prize here was scarcely clear of the Sophie before he was exercising the great guns again, roaring away with both broadsides.'

  'Is a privateer a discreditable thing? I ask in pure ignorance.'

  'Well, a privateer is there for a different motive altogether. A privateer does not fight for honour, but for gain. It is a mercenary. Profit is its raison d'кtre.'

  'May not the exercising of the great guns have a more honourable end in view?'

  'Oh, certainly. I may very well be unjust – jealous -wanting in generosity. I beg your pardon if I have offended you. And I willingly confess he is an excellent seaman.'

  'Lord, James, we have known one another long enough to tell our minds freely, without any offence. Will you reach me the bottle?'

  'Well, then,' said James, 'if I may speak as freely as though I were in an empty room, I will tell you this: I think his encouragement of that fellow Marshall is indecent, not to use a grosser word.'

  'Do I follow you, now?'

  'You know about the man?'

  'What about the man?'

  'That he is a paederast?'

  'Maybe.'

  'I have proof positive. I had it in Cagliari, if it had been necessary. And he is enamoured of Captain Aubrey -toils like a galley-slave – would holystone the quarter-deck if allowed – hounds the men with far more zeal than the bosun – anything for a smile from him.'

  Stephen nodded. 'Yes,' he said. 'But surely you do not think Jack Aubrey shares his tastes?'

  'No. But I do think he is aware of them and that he encourages the man. Oh, this is a very foul, dirty way of speaking… I go too far. Perhaps I am drunk. We have nearly emptied the bottle.'

  Stephen shrugged. 'No. But you are quite mistaken, you know. I can assure you, speaking in all sober earnest, that he has no notion of it. He is not very sharp in some ways; and in his simple view of the world, paederasts are dangerous only to powder-monkeys and choir-boys, or to those epicene creatures that are to be found in Mediterranean brothels. I made a circuitous attempt at enlightening him a little, but he looked very knowing and said, "Don't tell me about rears and vices; I have been in the Navy all my life."'

  'Then surely he must be wanting a little in penetration?'

  'James, I trust there was no mens rea in that remark?'

  'I must go on deck,' said James, looking at his watch. He came back some time later, having seen the wheel relieved and having checked their course; he brought a gust of cool night air with him and sat in silence until it had dispersed in the gentle lamp-lit warmth. Stephen had opened another bottle.

  'There are times when I am not altogether just,' said James, reaching for his glass. 'I am too touchy, I know; but sometimes, when you are surrounded with Proddies and you hear their silly, underbred cant, you fly out. And since you cannot fly out in one direction, you fly out in another. It is a continual tension, as you ought to know, if anyone.'

  Stephen looked at him very attentively, but said nothing.

  'You knew I was a Catholic?' said James.

  'No,' said Stephen. 'I was aware that some of your family were, of course; but as for you… Do you not find it puts you in a difficult position?' he asked, hesitantly. 'With that oath… the penal laws…

  'Not in the least,' said James. 'My mind is perfectly at ease, as far as that is concerned.'

  'That is what you think, my poor friend,' said Stephen to himself, pouring out another glass to hide his expression.

  For a moment it seemed that James Dillon might take this further, but he did not: some delicate balance changed, and now the talk ran on and on to friends they had shared and to delightful days they had spent together in what seemed such a very distant past. How many people they had known! How valuable, or amusing, or respectable some of them had been!

  They talked their second bottle dry, and James went up on deck again.

  He came down in half an hour, and as he stepped into the cabin he said, as though he were catching straight on to an interrupted conversation, 'And then, of course, there is that whole question of promotion. I will tell you, just for your secret ear alone and although it sounds odious, that I thought I should be given a command after that affair in the Dart; and being passed over does rankle cruelly.' He paused, and then asked, 'Who was it who was said to have earned more by his prick than his practice?'

  'Selden. But in this instance I conceive the common gossip is altogether out; as I understand it, this was the ordinary operation of interest. Mark you, I make no claim of outstanding chastity – I merely say that in Jack Aubrey's case the consideration is irrelevant.'

  'Well, be that as it may, I look for promotion: like every other sailor I value it very highly, so I tell you in all simplicity; and being under a prize-hunting captain is not the quickest path to it.'

  'Well, I know nothing of nautical affairs: but I wonder, I wonder, James, whether it is not too easy for a rich man to despise money – to mistake the real motives… To pay too much attention to mere words, and -,

  'Surely to God you would never call me rich?'

  'I have ridden over your land.'

  'It's three-quarters of it mountain, and one quarter bog; and even if they were to pay their rent for the rest it would only be a few hundred a year – barely a thousand.'

  'My heart bleeds for you. I have never yet known a man admit that he was either rich or asleep: perhaps the poor man and the wakeful man have some great moral advantage. How does it arise? But to return – surely he is as brave a commander as you could wish, and as likely as any man to lead you to glorious and remarkable actions?'

  'Would you guarantee his courage?'

  'So here is the true gravamen at last,' thought Stephen, and he said, 'I would not; I do not know him well enough. But I should be astonished, astonished, if he were to prove shy. What makes you think he is?'

  'I do not say he is. I should be very sorry to say anything against any man's courage without proof. But we should have had that galley. In another twenty minutes we could have boarded and carried her.'

  'Oh? I know nothing of these things, and I was downstairs at the time; but I understood that the only prudent thing to do was to turn about, to protect the rest of the convoy.'

  'Prudence is a great virtue, of course,' said James.

  'Well. And promotion means a great deal to you, so?'

  'Of course it does. There never was an officer worth a farthing that did not long to succeed and hoist his flag at last. But I can see in your eye that you think me inconsistent. Understand my position: I want no republic – I stand by settled, established institutions, and by authority so long as it is not tyranny. All I ask is an independent parliament that represents the responsible men of the kingdom and not merely a squalid parcel of place-men and place-seekers. Given that, I am perfectly happy with the English connexion, perfectly happy with the two kingdoms: I can drink the loyal toast without choking, I do assure you.'

  'Why are you putting out the lamp?'

  James smiled. 'It is dawn,' he said, nodding towards the grey, severe light in the cabin window. 'Shall we go on deck? We may have raised th
e high land of Minora by now, or we shall very soon; and I think I can promise you some of those birds the sailors call shearwaters if we lay her in towards the cliff of Fornells.'

  Yet with one foot on the companion-ladder he turned and looked into Stephen's face. 'I cannot tell what possessed me to speak so rancorously,' he said, passing his hand over his forehead and looking both unhappy and bewildered. 'I do not think I have ever done so before. Have not expressed myself well – clumsy, inaccurate, not what I meant nor what I meant to say. We understood one another better before ever I opened my mouth.'

  Chapter Six

  Mr Florey the surgeon was a bachelor; he had a large house high up by Santa Maria's, and with the broad, easy conscience of an unmarried man he invited Dr Maturin to stay whenever the Sophie should come in for stores or repairs, putting a room at his disposal for his baggage and his collections – a room that already housed the hortus siccus that Mr Cleghorn, surgeon-major to the garrison for close on thirty years, had gathered in countless dusty volumes.

  It was an enchanting house for meditation, backing on to the very top of Mahon's cliff and overhanging the merchants' quay at a dizzy height – so high that the noise and business of the harbour was impersonal, no more than an accompaniment to thought. Stephen's room was at the back, on this cool northern side looking over the water; and he sat there just inside the open window with his feet in a basin of water, writing his diary while the swifts (common, pallid and Alpine) raced shrieking through the torrid, quivering air between him and the Sophie, a toy-like object far down on the other side of the harbour, tied up to the victualling-wharf.

  'So James Dillon is a Catholic,' he wrote in his minute and secret shorthand. 'He used not to be. That is to say, he was not a Catholic in the sense that it would have made any marked difference to his behaviour, or have rendered the taking of an oath intolerably painful. He was not in any way a religious man. Has there been some conversion, some Loyolan change? I hope not. How many crypto-Catholics are there in the service? I should like to ask him; but that would be indiscreet. I remember Colonel Despard's telling me that in England Bishop Challoner gave a dozen dispensations a year for the occasional taking of the sacrament according to the Anglican rite. Colonel T- , of the Gordon riots, was a Catholic. Did Despard's remark refer only to the army? I never thought to ask him at the time. Quaere: is this the cause for James Dillon's agitated state of mind? Yes, I think so. Some strong pressure is certainly at work. What is more, it appears to me that this is a critical time for him, a lesser climacteric – a time that will settle him in that particular course he will never leave again, but will persevere in for the rest of his life. It has often seemed to me that towards this period (in which we all three lie, more or less) men strike out their permanent characters; or have those characters struck into them. Merriment, roaring high spirits before this: then some chance concatenation, or some hidden predilection (or rather inherent bias) working through, and the man is in the road he cannot leave but must go on, making it deeper and deeper (a groove, or channel), until he is lost in his mere character – persona – no longer human, but an accretion of qualities belonging to this character. James Dillon was a delightful being. Now he is closing in. It is odd – will I say heart-breaking? – how cheerfulness goes: gaiety of mind, natural free-springing joy. Authority is its great enemy – the assumption of authority. I know few men over fifty that seem to me entirely human: virtually none who has long exercised authority. The senior post captains here; Admiral Warne. Shrivelled men (shrivelled in essence: not, alas, in belly). Pomp, an unwholesome diet, a cause of choler, a pleasure paid too late and at too high a price, like lying with a peppered paramour. Yet Ld Nelson, by Jack Aubrey's account, is as direct and unaffected and amiable a man as could be wished. So, indeed, in most ways is JA himself; though a certain careless arrogancy of power appears at times. His cheerfulness, at all events, is with him still. How long will it last? What woman, political cause, disappointment, wound, disease, untoward child, defeat, what strange surprising accident will take it all away? But I am concerned for James Dillon: he is as mercurial as ever he was – more so – only now it is all ten octaves lower down and in a darker key; and sometimes I am afraid in a black humour he will do himself a mischief. I would give so much to bring him cordially friends with Jack Aubrey. They are so alike in so many ways, and James is made for friendship: when he sees that he is mistaken about JA's conduct, surely he will come round? But will he ever find this out, or is JA to be the focus of his discontent? If so there is little hope; for the discontent, the inner contest, must at times be very severe in a man so humourless (on occasion) and so very exigent upon the point of honour. He is obliged to reconcile the irreconcilable more often than most men; and he is less qualified to do so. And whatever he may say he knows as well as I do that he is in danger of a horrible confrontation: suppose it had been he who took Wolfe Tone in Lough Swilly? What if Emmet persuades the French to invade again? And what if Bonaparte makes friends with the Pope? It is not impossible. But on the other hand, JD is a mercurial creature, and if once, on the upward rise, he comes to love JA as he should, he will not change – never was a more loyal affection. I would give a great deal to bring them friends.'

  He sighed and put down his pen. He put it down upon the cover of a jar in which there lay one of the finest asps he had ever seen, thick, venomous, snub-nosed, coiled down in spirits of wine, with its slit-pupilled eye looking at him through the glass. This asp was one of the fruits of the days they spent in Mahon before the Sophie came in, a third prize at her tail, a fair-sized Spanish tartan. And next to the asp lay two visible results of the Sophie's activity: a watch and a telescope. The watch pointed at twenty minutes to the hour, so he picked up the telescope and focused it upon the sloop. Jack was still aboard, conspicuous in his best uniform, fussing amidships with Dillon and the bosun over some point of the upper rigging: they were all pointing upwards, and inclining their persons from side to side in ludicrous unison.

  Leaning forward against the rail of the little balcony, he trained his glass along the quay towards the head of the harbour. Almost at once he saw the familiar scarlet face of

  George Pearce, ordinary seaman, thrown back skywards in an ecstasy of mirth: there was a little group of his shipmates with him, along by the huddle of one-storeyed wineshops that stretched out towards the tanneries; and they were passing their time at playing ducks and drakes on the still water. These men belonged to the two prize-crews and they had been allowed to stay ashore, whereas the other Sophies were still aboard. Both had shared in the first distribution of prize-money, however; and looking with closer attention at the silvery gleam of the skipping missiles and at the frenzied diving of the little naked boys out in the noisome shallows, Stephen saw that they were getting rid of their wealth in the most compendious manner known to man.

  Now a boat was putting off from the Sophie, and in his glass he saw the coxswain nursing Jack's fiddle-case with stiff, conscious dignity. He leant back, took one foot out of the water tepid now – and gazed at it for a while, musing upon the comparative anatomy of the lower members in the higher mammals – in horses – in apes – in the Pongo of the African travellers, or M. de Buffon's Jocko sportive and gregarious in youth, sullen, morose and withdrawn in age. Which was the true state of the Pongo? 'Who am I,' he thought, 'to affirm that the gay young ape is not merely the chrysalis, as it were, the pupa of the grim old solitary? That the second state is not the natural inevitable culmination -the Pongo's true condition, alas?'

  'I was contemplating on the Pongo,' he said aloud as the door opened and Jack walked in with a look of eager expectation, carrying a roll of music.

  'I am sure you were,' cried Jack. 'A damned creditable thing to be contemplating on, too. Now be a good fellow and take your other foot out of that basin – why on earth did you put it in? – and pull on your stockings, I beg. We have not a moment to lose. No, not blue stockings: we are going on to Mrs Harte's party – to her rout.'
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  'Must I put on silk stockings?'

  'Certainly you must put on silk stockings. And do show a leg, my dear chap: we shall be late, without you spread a little more canvas.'

  'You are always in such a hurry,' said Stephen peevishly, groping among his possessions. A Montpellier snake glided out with a dry rustling sound and traversed the room in a series of extraordinarily elegant curves, its head held up some eighteen inches above the ground.

  'Oh, oh, oh,' cried Jack, leaping on to a chair. 'A snake!'

  'Will these do?' asked Stephen. 'They have a hole in them.'

  'Is it poisonous?'

  'Extremely so. I dare say it will attack you, directly. I have very little doubt of it. Was I to put the silk stockings over my worsted stockings, sure the hole would not show: but then, I should stifle with heat. Do not you find it uncommonly hot?'

  'Oh, it must be two fathoms long. Tell me, is it really poisonous? On your oath now?'

  'If you thrust your hand down its throat as far as its back teeth you may meet a little venom; but not otherwise. Malpolon monspessulanus is a very innocent serpent. I think of carrying a dozen aboard, for the rats – ah, if only I had more time, and if it were not for this foolish, illiberal persecution of reptiles… What a pitiful figure you do cut upon that chair, to be sure. Barney, Barney, buck or doe, Has kept me out of Channel Row,' he sang to the serpent; and, deaf as an adder though it was, it looked happily into his face while he carried it away.

  Their first visit was to Mr Brown's, of the dockyard, where, after greetings, introductions and congratulations upon Jack's good fortune, they played the Mozart B flat quartet, hunting it along with great industry and good will, Miss playing a sweet-toned, though weak, viola. They had never played all together before, had never rehearsed this particular work, and the resulting sound was ragged in the extreme; but they took immense pleasure there in the heart of it, and their audience, Mrs Brown and a white cat, sat mildly knitting, perfectly satisfied with the performance.