Post Captain (26 page)

A ship that would not stay must wear - she must fall off from the wind, right round the way she came and much farther still, pivoting about her stern in a great leeward sweep until she had the wind aft, turning, turning until she could bring it astern and then at last on her other side, turning still until she was heading in the direction she desired - a long, long turn: and in this case, with this tide, swell and wind, the Polychrest would need a mile to accomplish it, a mile of leeway before she could brace up sharp and head out into the Channel. She was losing her headway; her sails were flapping dismally in the silence; with every thrust of the sea she was nearer the unseen shore. The alternatives flew through his mind: he could let her fall off, set the driver and try again; he could wear and risk it, coming to an anchor if he had cut it too fine - an ignominious, horribly time-wasting process, or he could box-haul her. But dared he box-haul her with this crew? While these possibilities ran past his inner scrutineer a remote corner of his mind called out shrilly against the injustice of missing stays - unknown in such conditions, monstrous, a malignancy designed to make him late on his station, to allow Harte to call him unofficerlike, no seaman, a dawdling Sybarite, a slow-arse. That was the danger: there was no peril in this sea, nothing but a consciousness of having misjudged things, and the likelihood of an ugly, unanswerable rebuke from a man he despised.

These thoughts had their being between the time he heard the splash of the lead and the cry By the deep eight' As the next cry came, A half less eight' he said to himself, 'I shall box-haul her.' And aloud, 'Haul up main and mizen tops'ls. Fore tops'l sheet hard a-weather.

Foretops'l sharp aback: clap on to that brace. Look alive on the fo'c'sle there. Lee bowlines, lee bowlines.'

As if she had run into a gentle cushion, the Polychrest's headway stopped - he felt her underfoot - and she began to move backwards, the headsails and her lee-helm paying her round as she went. 'Square main and mizen yards. Jump to those braces, now.'

She might not like turning up into the wind, but with her strange sharp stern she was very good at going backwards. He had never known such a sternway.

'And a half eight,' from the chains.

Round she went: the squared main and mizen yards lay parallel with the wind, the topsails shaking. Farther, farther; and now the wind was abaft her beam, and by rights her sternway should have stopped; but it did not; she was still travelling with remarkable speed in the wrong direction. He filled the topsails, gave her weather helm, and still she slid backwards in this insane contradiction of all known principles. For a moment all the certainties of his world quivered - he caught a dumbfounded, appalled glance from the master - and then with a sigh from the masts and stays, the strangest straining groan, the Polychrest's motion passed through a barely perceptible immobility to headway. She brought the wind right aft, then on to her larboard quarter; and hauling out the mizen and trimming all sharp, he set the course, dismissed the watch below, and walked into his cabin, relief flooding into him. The bases of the universe were firm again, the Polychrest was heading straight out into the offing with the wind one point free; the crew had not done very badly, no time worth mentioning had been lost; and with any luck his steward would have brewed a decent pot of coffee. He sat on a locker, wedging himself against the bulkhead as she rolled: over his head there was the hurrying of feet as ropes were coiled down and made trim, and then came the long-interrupted sounds of cleaning - a bear, a great padded, shot-laden block of stone, started growling on the deck eighteen inches from his ears: he blinked once or twice, smiled, and smiling went fast asleep.

He was still asleep when the hands were piped to dinner, sleeping still when the gun-room sat down to its gammon and spinach, and for the first time Stephen saw all the Polychrest's officers together - all except for Pullings, who had the watch, and who was walking the quarterdeck with his hands behind his back, pacing in as close an imitation of Captain Aubrey as his form could manage, and remembering, every now and then, to look stern, devilish, as like a right tartar as possible, in spite of his bubbling happiness. At the head of the table sat Mr Parker, an acquaintance of some days' standing, a tall, spare, disapproving man, rather good-looking, apart from the expression on his face; then the lieutenant of Marines in his scarlet coat, a black-haired Scotsman from the Hebrides whose face was so marked by the smallpox that it was difficult to make out what habitual expression it might wear; he had a very well-bred turn, however; and Macdonald was his name. Mr Jones the purser, his neighbour, was also a black man, but there the likeness stopped; the purser was a drooping little flaccid man with pendulous cheeks either side of a fleshy red mouth; his face was the colour of cheese, and this uniform pallor swept up his high forehead to a baldness that reached from ear to ear. His straight hair grew only in a fringe round this pool, hanging some way down his neck, and in whiskers; yet a strong beard showed blue on his waxy cheeks, a very powerful growth. His appearance was that of a small shopkeeper; but there was little time to judge of his conversation, for at the sight of his plate he started from the table with a watery belch, rushed staggering to the quarter-gallery, and was seen no more. Then there was the master, still yawning from his morning watch. He was a slight, elderly, grizzled man with bright blue eyes, and he said little as he set to his table at the beginning of the meal: Stephen was habitually silent; the others were feeling their way with their new messmates, and their knowledge that the surgeon was the captain's particular friend acted as a further check.

However, as Stephen's appetite waned, so his desire for information increased, and laying down his knife and fork he said to the master, 'Pray, sir, what is the function of the curious sloping metal-lined cylindrical place immediately in front of my store-room? What is its name?'

'Why, Doctor,' said Mr Goodridge, 'what to call it I do not rightly know, other than an abomination; but the ship-wrights spoke of it as the combustion-chamber, so I take it it was where the secret weapon was stowed. It used to lead out on deck where the fo'c'sle is now.'

'What kind of a secret weapon?' asked Macdonald.

'Something in the nature of a rocket, I believe.'

'Yes,' said the first lieutenant, 'a kind of enormous rocket without a stick. It was the ship that was to be the stick, and those levered chutes for shot were intended to bring her by the head or by the stern for elevation: the weapon was calculated to destroy a first-rate at the distance of a mile, but it had to be amidships, to counteract the roll, and that was the reason for the system of lateral keels and rudders.'

'If the rocket was the calibre of the chamber, then the recoil must have been prodigious,' said Macdonald.

'Prodigious,' said Mr Parker. 'That was why the sharp stern was imagined, to prevent the sudden thrust destroying her bottom - the whole ship recoiled, whereas a square stern, by resisting, would be crushed. Even so, they had to put a mass of timber where the stern-post should be, to take the first impact.' A very exalted personage had been present at the experimental firing that had cost the inventor his life, and he had told Mr Parker that the ship had darted back her whole length, at the same time being pressed down in the water as far as her wing-transoms. The exalted personage had been against it from the start; Mr Congreve, who went down with the party, had said it would never answer; and it had not answered - these innovations never did. Mr Parker was against any break with tradition; it would never answer in the Navy; he did not care for these flint-locks for the guns, for example; although indeed they took a fine polish, and looked well enough, for an inspection.

'How did the poor gentleman come to be killed?' asked the master.

'It seems that he would light the fuse himself, and as it hung fire, he put his head into the chamber to see what was amiss, when it exploded.'

'Well, I am sorry for him,' said Mr Goodridge. 'But if it had to be, it might have been as well if he had sent the ship to the bottom at the same time. A cranker, more unseaworthy craft I never saw, and I have seen a mort in my time. She made more leeway than a common raft between St Helen's and the Bill, for all the sharp floor and sliding keels, and she gripes like a man-trap. Then she goes and misses stays in a mill-pond. There is no pleasing her. She reminds me of Mrs Goodridge - whatever you do is wrong. If the captain had not box-hauled her in a flash, why, I don't know where we might have come to. A most seamanlike manoeuvre, I must say; though I should not have ventured it myself, not with such a ragamuffin crew. And indeed she had more sternway upon her than I should have thought possible. As you say, sir, she was built to recoil, and I thought she was going to go on recoiling until we were brought up all standing on the coast of France. A crinkum-crankum piece of work, in my opinion, and 'tis the Lord's blessing we have a right seaman in command; but what even he will do, or what the Archangel Gabriel would do, if it comes on to blow, I do not know, I am sure. The Channel is not so broad as all that; and in point of searoom, what this here craft requires, is the great Southern Ocean, at its widest part.'

The master's words were prompted by the Polychrest's increasing roll; it sent the bread-barge careering over the table, and a midshipman into Jack's cabin, with the news that the wind was shifting into the east, a little mouse-like child, stiff in his best uniform, with his dirk at his side -he had slept with it.

'Thank you, Mr - 'said Jack. 'I do not believe I remember your name.'

'Parslow, sir, if you please.'

Of course. The Commissioner's protégé, a naval widow's son. 'What have you been doing to your face, Mr Parslow?' he asked, looking at the red, gaping, lint-flecked wound that ran across that smooth oval cheek from ear to chin.

'I was shaving, sir,' said Mr Parslow with a pride he could not conceal. 'Shaving, sir, and a huge great wave came.'

'Show it to the doctor, and tell him, with my compliments, that I should be glad if he would drink tea with mc. Why arc you in your number one rig?'

'They said - it was thought I ought to show an example to the men, sir, this being my first day at sea.'

'Very proper. But I should put on some foul-weather clothes now. Tell me, did they send you for the key of the keelson?'

'Yes, sir; and I looked for it everywhere. Bonden told me he thought the gunner's daughter might have it, but when I asked Mr Rolfe, he said he was sorry, he was not a married man.'

'Well, well. You have foul-weather clothes?'

'Why, sir, there are a great many things in my chest, my sea-chest, that the shopman told Mama I should be equipped with. And I have my father's sou-wester.'

'Mr Babbington will show you what to put on. Tell him with my compliments, that he will show you what to put on,' he added, remembering that gentleman's inhuman barbarity. 'Do not wipe your nose upon your sleeve, Mr Parslow. It ain't genteel.'

'No, sir. Beg pardon, sir.'

'Cut along then,' said Jack irritably. 'Am I a Goddamned wet nurse?' he asked his pea-jacket.

On deck he was greeted by a squall of rain mixed with sleet and spray. The wind had increased to a fine fresh breeze, sweeping the fog away and replacing it by a low sky - bands of weeping cloud against a steely grey, black on the eastern horizon; a nasty short choppy sea was getting up against the tide, and although the Polychrest was holding her course well enough, she was shipping a good deal of water, and her very moderate spread of canvas laid her over as though she had topgallants abroad. So she was as crank as he had feared; and a wet ship into the bargain. There were two men at the wheel, and from the way they were cramped on to the spokes it was clear they were having to fight hard to keep her from flying up into the wind.

He studied the log-board, made a rough calculation of the position, adding a triple leeway, and decided to wear in half an hour, when both watches would be on deck. He had plenty of room, and there was no point in harassing the few good men he had aboard, particularly as the sky looked changeable, menacing, damned unpleasant - they might have a dirty night of it. And he would get the topgallantmasts down on deck before long. 'Mr Parker,' he said, 'we will take another reef in the foretopsail, if you please.'

The bosun's call, the rush of hands, the volley of orders through Parker's speaking-trumpet - 'Halliards let fly - clap on to that brace - Mr Malloch, touch up those hands at the brace.' The yards came round, the wind spilled from the sail and the Polychrest righted herself, at the same time making such a cruel gripe that the man at the con had to fling himself at the wheel to prevent her being taken aback 'Lay out - look alive, there - you, sir, you on the yardarm, are you asleep? Are you going to pass the weather earing? Damn your eyes, are you going to stow that bunt? Mr Rossall, take that man's name. Lay in.'

Through the clamour Jack watched the men aloft The man on the yardarm was young Haines, from the Lord Mornington, he knew his trade, might make a good captain of the foretop. He saw his foot slip as he scrambled in towards the mast - those horses wanted mousing.

'Send the last man off the yard aft,' called the first lieutenant, red in the face from shouting. 'Start him, Mr Malloch.'

This same old foolery - the last man off was the first man on, the man who went right out on to the yardarm. It was a hard service - it had to be a hard service - but there was no need to make it harder, discouraging the willing hands. The people were going to have plenty to do: it was a pity for them to waste their strength beating one another. And yet again it was easy to seek a cheap popularity by checking an officer in public - easy, and disastrous in the long run.

'Sail ho!' hailed the look-out.

'Where away?'

'Right astern, sir.'

She came up out of a dark smudge of half-frozen rain, a frigate hull-up already, on the same tack as the Polychrest and overhauling her very fast. French or English? He was no great way from Cherbourg. 'Make the private signal,' said Jack. 'Mr Parker, your glass, if you please.'