Book 17 - The Commodore

by Patrick O'Brian

  'Oh,' said Jack, swallowing his coffee, 'forgive me, my dear. I shall be back in a moment. It is the weekly return, for sure.'

  But minutes went by, and the toast grew cold: clearly something more complex than weekly returns was in question.

  Sophie felt the second coffee-pot for warmth, nodded, and poured Stephen yet another cup. 'How pleasant to see you sitting there again,' she said. 'I have hardly had you to myself for five minutes, even after all this dreadfully long absence, thousands and thousands and thousands of miles. Nor Jack either. Always messages from the Admiral, or people coming to ask for appointments or to have their boy taken aboard one of the ships. And then although he is so delighted with this splendid command—it must lead to a flag, Stephen, must it not?—he is sadly worried too, above all with this perpetual chopping and changing. There are worries about Parliament as well, and the Woolcombe estate . . . Oh, Stephen, we were so much happier when we were poor. Now there is so much to do and so much to worry about and the loathsome bank that will not answer letters that there is no time even to talk as we used. Only next Thursday there is a dinner for all the captains, although it is our anniversary: and someone is sure to get drunk. Tell me, how do you find him, after all these weeks?'

  'More worn than I could wish,' said Stephen, looking at her.

  'Yes,' said Sophie, and she paused before going on, 'And there is something on his mind. He is not the same. It is not only the ships and all the business: besides, the invaluable Mr Adams takes a great deal of that off his hands. No. There is a sort of reserve . . . it is not that he is in the least unkind . . . but you might almost say a coldness. No. That would be an absurd exaggeration. But he often sleeps in his study because of the paper-work or because he is out late. And even when he does not he gets up at night and walks about until the morning.'

  In this most unpromising conversation Stephen could find nothing better to say than 'Perhaps he will be happier once he gets to sea,' which earned him a reproachful look. Both were poised to say something almost certainly unfortunate when Jack came in from seeing the flag-lieutenant off, the remains of a farewell smile still on his face. It died entirely as he said 'I am afraid I was right about Pyramus. She is to be taken away from the squadron, and we are to have the Thames instead. The Thames, a thirty-two gun twelve-pounder ship.'

  'Only four guns less than Pyramus,' observed Sophie, in one of those ill-fated attempts at comfort.

  'Certainly. But her two and thirty guns are only twelve-pounders, as against Pyramus's eighteens: and her broadside weight of metal is a mere three hundred pounds as against four hundred and sixty-seven. But whining will do no good. Come, Stephen, we must be away. Is there another cup of coffee?'

  'Oh dear,' cried Sophie, 'I am afraid there is not. But it will not take five minutes to make another pot.' She rang the bell: but she rang in vain. Jack was already on the wing, urging Stephen through the door before him. 'You will not forget that the Fanshaws and Miss Liza and Mr Hinksey are coming to dinner?' she called.

  'I shall try to be back in time,' replied Jack. 'But if the Admiral keeps me you will make my excuses, if you please. Fanshaw will certainly understand.'

  They rode down through what was now quite a respectable wood, Stephen on his neat little mare, Jack on a new and powerful bay gelding. He broke a longish silence to say, 'I was telling you about that parson, Hinksey, yesterday.'

  'You said you could not hate him, as I recall.'

  'Just so. But although I could not manage a full-blown hatred, now that I am so God-damned vexed at losing Pyramus I will tell you that I cannot like him neither. He comes far too often for my taste; and he walks about the house as though . . . once I found him sitting in my own particular chair, and although he jumped up directly with a very proper excuse it put me out amazingly. And he and Sophie talk about things that happened when I was at sea. There is your wariangle again, carrying a mouse, upon my word.'

  Stephen spoke of shrikes he had known, particularly the woodchat shrike of his boyhood, at some length; and he offered to show Jack the difference between the chiffchaff and the willow-wren, several of which were flitting about in the leaves just overhead. But finding that the Commodore was sunk in a grim reverie, perhaps on the subject of frigates, inferior ships of the line, and the criminal levity of those who sent some thousands of men to sea with no consistent plan, no intelligent preparation, no adequate forewarning, he refrained.

  They rode in silence as far as the bridge to Portsea Island, where Jack cried, 'Good Lord, we are at the bridge already. Stephen, you have lost your tongue, I find: you have been in a deep study: we are already at the bridge.' The discovery pleased him disproportionately; so did the proof of the gelding's remarkably easy pace. He had digested his ill-humour, and they rode through the familiar, squalid outskirts of the town, through the still more squalid streets quite cheerfully and so to the Keppel's Head, the favourite inn of Jack's days as a midshipman. Here they put up their horses and walked on to the Hard as the clocks were striking ten: Bonden was waiting for them, with many a well-known smiling face among Jack's bargemen, and they pulled with the exactly-dipped oars and the stately pace of a flag-officer's boat, scorning the smallcraft that threaded the great harbour in all directions.

  A long pull, since the Bellona was lying right over by Haslar, and Stephen's mind, lulled by the steady rhythm, swam far, far back to woodchat shrikes again, to the sunbaked CataIan side of his childhood; and he was thinking in the language when Jack, to his coxswain's disappointment, said 'Larboard.'

  This was no time to be worrying a busy ship, still taking in stores, still somewhat shorthanded, with a ceremonial arrival on the starboard side; but it grieved Bonden, who, like Killick, dearly loved pomp and ceremony where his officer was concerned, dearly relished the stamp and clash of the Marines presenting arms when Jack was piped aboard to a quarterdeck full of attentive officers and midshipmen, and who had hoped that Stephen might be shown the Commodore's present glory. Yet since he had no choice he brought the barge round, in order that Jack might join his ship discreetly.

  Discreetly, but not unnoticed. Of course the boat had been seen putting off, and of course Captain Pullings was there to receive him, and of course there were side-boys, scrubbed pink, offering man-ropes as he came nimbly up, which was just as well, since he was immediately followed by Dr Maturin, as impervious to sea-lore as Mr Aubrey was to elegant literature—more so, indeed, since Jack had read Macbeth aloud, enchanting his daughters, not long since, while Stephen had not thought of ships or the sea since he set foot on shore, and had contrived to forget almost all of what little he had ever acquired: furthermore, he had only been aroused from his dreamlike state a moment before, when the barge came alongside and the even motion stopped. Bonden and most of the bargemen were well acquainted with his occasional absences and perfectly aware of the weakness of his nautical acquirements; and although the sea was duck-pond calm they anxiously propped him from behind adjuring him 'to clap on to them man-ropes sir, them padded things' and placing his feet successively on the steps; and they got him aboard dryfoot—something of a triumph.

  Yet once there he stared about in a very simple, moon-struck fashion. For a great while now, and the whole breadth of the world, his ship had been a small frigate; and although, years before, he had been in a ship of the line for a short while the recollection had entirely faded: his scale was that of the Surprise, and the hugeness of the Bellona, the presence of a poop and of all these people quite bewildered him. He was at a disadvantage, and his face took on a cold, withdrawn expression; but his old friend Tom Pullings, now advancing to shake his hand and welcome him aboard, was even better acquainted with the Doctor's vagaries than the bargemen, and speaking very loud and clear, told him that two of his assistant surgeons had reported aboard last night and were now waiting for him in the sick-berth: perhaps he would like to see them before Tom named the officers to him. 'Mr Wetherby,' he said to a fresh-faced youngster in brand-new uniform, 'pray show the D
octor to the sick-berth.'

  Down to the upper deck with its long ranges of eighteen-pounders on either side; down again by the after-ladderway to the gundeck, dim at present with the gunports closed for painting—'That is where I live, sir,' said the youngster, pointing to the gun-room. Stephen was in civilian clothes; he presented no marks whatsoever of following the sea in any capacity, and the child explained things to him. 'I am not yet rated midshipman, you know, sir, so I mess with the gunner with half a dozen other coves, and the gunner's wife is very good to us. She shows us how to mend our clothes. Now, sir'—guiding Stephen forward—'Here—pray mind your step—beyond that piece of screen is where the people sleep, all of them jam-packed, chock-a-block, when hammocks are piped down. And the screened bit is what we call the sick-berth.'

  In the darkness stood two figures, dim themselves, but clearly nervous. 'Good morning, gentlemen,' said Stephen. 'I am the ship's surgeon, Maturin.'

  'Good morning, sir,' they replied, and the first assistant said, 'My name is Smith, sir, William Smith, formerly of the Serapis and of the hospital at Bridgetown.'

  The second, blushing, said that he was Alexander Macaulay, that after his apprenticeship he had studied at Guy's, where he was dresser to Mr Findlay for nearly five months: this was his first appointment.

  'And are we indeed in the Bellona's sick-berth?' asked Stephen, shocked. 'Mr Wetherby, be so good as to jump up to the quarterdeck and ask the officer of the watch if I may have a gunport open.'

  He had barely spoken before there was a creak, a heave, and the nearest port rose up, letting in a square flood of light and showing two beaming faces, Joe Plaice and Michael Kelly, both Jack Aubrey's followers since the time of his first command, the brig Sophie, and both very old friends of Stephen's.

  'Joe Plaice and Michael Kelly,' said Stephen, shaking their hands through the gunport, 'I rejoice to see you. Joe, how is the headpiece?'

  The seamen looked sharply up at some order from on high. 'Aye aye, sir,' they cried to the distant officer, winked privately at Stephen, and vanished.

  Stephen returned to the immediate abomination. 'Can such things be?' he cried, looking at the partially folded canvas screen, the few bare cots, a little more hanging sailcloth, ragged at the bottom, and then the vast cavern of the lower deck, empty now but for the rows of thirty-two-pounders and the mess tables hanging between them, but crammed at night with all the hundreds of seamen and Marines apart from the watch on deck, snoring and breathing, above all breathing the very small quantities of air and exhaling it in a vitiated condition pernicious to themselves and even more so to invalids. 'Can such things be? It is archaic: it belongs to the Dark Ages. This is the unhealthiest part of the ship—unbreathable air—impossible for a sick man to go to the head—hands trampling to and fro, shouting and bawling, at every meal, every change of the watch—and the present stench, although the deck has been cleaned: for it is still wet, another evil point.' He sniffed, sniffed again, and recognized both the scent and the distant hurdles: the ship's pigs, right forward, in their sty. He had heard of it in ships of the past and he had seen it once, at the very beginning of his career. 'This cannot be. Where are the men in the sick-list?'

  'I believe they were all removed to Haslar, sir, when the late surgeon died. An alcoholic coma, I am told.'

  'Infamous,' said Stephen, not so much at the alcoholic coma as at the monstrous surroundings. 'Let us look at the dispensary, and then I can make my report. Mr Wetherby, pray show the way.'

  The child led them forward to a ladderway, from which the sty was even clearer, the smell much stronger—the pigs looked up at them, their little intelligent eyes full of curiosity—down into the darkness of the orlop, beneath the water-line, where by the faint gleam of reflected light that filtered down through grating after grating and by an occasional lantern they groped aft to the cockpit, the midshipmen's berth, a noisy, noisome place. There were only four young gentlemen, one ape and a bulldog in it at present, but they could be heard a great way off, and the youngster said 'I should not dare go in, sir, if you was not with me. Mind your step, I beg.'

  'What would happen, were you to go in?' asked Stephen.

  'The oldsters and the master's mates would scrag me, sir, and feed me to the bulldog.' He opened the door and stood aside.

  'Gentlemen, good day,' said Stephen into the abrupt silence.

  They were disparate creatures: one a dark, fierce-looking man sitting on the deck trying to read by a purser's dip; two gangling youths with their wrists and ankles starting from their clothes; and a devilish little fourteen-year-old trying to show the ape how to stand on its head. But they instantly saw that it would not do to play off their humours on this visitor and they returned his greetings, standing up with what grace they could summon, while the devilish boy quite unnecessarily strangled the bulldog, advancing to pay its respects. Stephen looked round the cockpit, which was his action-station and which would be his operating-theatre in the event of a battle: a fine spacious theatre, since it ordinarily housed a score of young men—and walked on aft.

  'Oh sir,' cried Mr Wetherby again, 'pray mind your step.' And well might he cry: the hatch to the after powder-room was open, and the gunner's face framed in it, a foot above the deck. The face, ordinarily grave, spread in a smile and his right hand reached up. 'Why, Doctor,' he cried, 'we heard you was coming, and right glad we were. Rowley, gunner's mate in the old Worcester.'

  'Of course,' said Stephen, shaking his hand. 'A nasty splinter-wound in the gluteus maximus. How does it come along?'

  'You would never know it, sir. I showed it to my old woman when I came home. I showed her the scar, what there was of it, and I said "Kate, if you could sew as good as the Doctor, I should put you out to work, and live at my ease", ha, ha, ha!' With this he vanished like an inverted Jack-in-a-box, and the hatch clapped down over him.

  Smith opened the dispensary door, and a strong light came out, coming from the operating lantern that hung within. 'I hope you will not think me over-busy, sir,' said he. 'But last night the purser told me that some stores had come down from the Sick and Hurt Board, and rather than leave them lying in his steward's care I have been putting them in the medicine-chest. I was still at it when your boat came alongside, so I left things as they were. I am afraid they will not all go in.' The hatch opened abruptly: the gunner's beaming face reappeared. 'I said, "Kate, if you could sew as well as the Doctor, I should put you out to work and live at my ease," ' and clapped to again over his laughter.

  'You did perfectly well, Mr Smith,' said Stephen, looking into the miniature apothecary's shop with its drawers, bottle racks and recesses. 'But I am afraid you are in the right of it. These'—nodding at the powders, dried roots, drugs, ointments, bandages, dressings, tourniquets and the like that covered the floor—'will never go in. We shall be obliged to put—to stow—them in the starboard dispensary.'

  'By your leave, sir,' said Smith after a hesitation, 'there is no starboard dispensary.'

  'Jesus, Mary and Joseph,' cried Stephen. 'Five hundred and ninety souls to be dosed out of one miserable cupboard, four foot by three at the most! All, all of a piece throughout. Very well, gentlemen: be so good as to put them into my cabin here'—opening the door of a room measuring six foot by four—'while I go and make my report to the Captain. Oh such a report, by God.'

  'Why, Doctor, what's amiss?' cried Tom Pullings as he burst in upon them.

  'Stephen, have you had a fall?' asked Jack, starting up and taking him by the arm, for he was unnaturally pale, and his eyes glared extremely.

  He looked coldly at each in turn, and then in a carefully controlled voice he said, 'I have just discovered that this—this vessel, for I will not call it a vile hulk, has a sick-berth that would disgrace a Turk, a sick-berth that a parcel of Hottentots would blush for, so they would. It is a sick-berth so horrible that I cannot consent to be associated with it, and'—his voice now rising with passion—'if it cannot be converted into something less like Golgotha, mo
re designed to kill rather than to save, I wash my hands of it entirely.' He washed his hands, glaring at their shocked faces. 'I wash my hands, I say: the shame of the world.'

  'Pray, Stephen, sit down,' said Jack gently, leading him to a chair. 'Pray sit down and drink a glass of wine. Do not be cross with us, I beg.'

  Pullings was too upset to say anything, but he poured the madeira; and they both looked at Stephen with infinite concern. He was still pale, still furious. 'Have either of you ever been in this odious travesty of a sick-berth?' he asked, his glare piercing first the one and then the other. Oh, the moral force of that wholly unfeigned wholly disinterested and righteous anger!

  Jack slowly shook his head, his conscience clear on at least that point. Tom Pullings said 'I suppose I must have walked through, on my way to see the pig-sties; but since all the invalids were discharged to the hospital before ever I came aboard there was nobody there: so I did not notice it was so very wrong.'

  Stephen told them that a sick-berth with no peace, no light, no air, could not possibly be right in any particular whatsoever: he told them in vehement detail; and, his energy subsided a little, he told them that the only ship-of-the-line sick-berth he would consent to be associated with must of necessity banish the swine in favour of the Christian sick, must lie right forward under the forecastle, and must have light, air and access to the head according to the plan of the eminently ingenious and truly benevolent Admiral Markham.