The Reverse of the Medal (13 page)

It was to the distant accompaniment of this sound that Jack and his guests ate their dinner. Shaved and shining after a cat-nap, Jack was in fine form; yesterday's intense frustration belonged to history; he had not felt so well or so alive since the horrible days of the court-martial, and he enjoyed his company. Neither Stephen nor Martin was a sailor nor indeed anything remotely like a sailor; neither believed in the sacred majesty of a post-captain and both talked quite freely - a great relief. Furthermore, the glass was sinking, a sure sign of wind; and throughout the meal the steady chipping of shot told him that all was well on deck. A chase in sight, his ship in perfect order, and a blow coming on: this was real sailoring - this was why men went to sea. It is true that the chaplain's presence was usually something of a constraint upon him, and that since the appearance of Sam his troubled conscience had made Jack almost mealy-mouthed when they conversed; but today an abundance of vitality thrust conscience to one side and they talked away in a very pleasant manner. He told them that he was now quite sure the privateer was running for Brest, which was one of her home ports; that he hoped they might come up with her long before Ushant and its tangle of inshore reefs and islands; but there was no certainty of it at all. The chase had shown no signs of distress; she had not started her water over the side, still less her boats and guns. But from the look in his bright-blue, cheerfully predatory eye both his listeners concluded that his unspoken mind was less reserved, less cautious towards fate. Martin said he supposed that the engine, pumping with such force upon the sails, striking them from behind, as it were, must urge the boat along, and so increase its speed.

'There cannot be the least doubt of it,' said Stephen.

'When virtue spooms before a prosperous gale

My heaving wishes help to fill the sail says Dryden, that prince of poets, and the dear knows we spoom in the most virtuous manner. I suggest we all go and blow into the mainsail; or that some blow while others tie a rope to the back of the ship and pull forwards as hard as ever can be, ha, ha, ha!' He cackled for a short while at his own wit, and in doing so (the exercise being unusual with him) choked on a crumb. When he recovered he found that Martin was telling Jack about the miseries of authors: Dryden had died in poverty - Spenser was poorer still - Agrippa ended his days in the workhouse. He might have gone on at very great length, for the material was not wanting, but that Mowett sent to report the appearance of a parcel of bankers on the starboard bow. They were of no great consequence from the warlike point of view, being fishermen from Biscay and the north of Portugal on their way to fish for cod on the Newfoundland banks, but even a single sail in mid-ocean was something of an event; Jack had often travelled five thousand miles in quite frequented sea-lanes without seeing another ship, and when dinner was over he suggested that they should take their coffee on to the forecastle to look at the spectacle.

Killick could not actually forbid the move, but with a pinched and shrewish look he poured the guests' coffee into villainous little tin mugs: he knew what they were capable of, if entrusted with porcelain, and he was quite right - each mug was dented when it came back, and the captain of the head had to deplore a trail of dark brown drops the whole length of his snowy deck. It was not that the wind had yet increased, but during dinner the beginning of a swell from the south had reached these waters, and the Surprise's skittish roll almost always caught them on the wrong foot.

By the time they reached the forecastle the foremost vessels of the straggling fleet of bankers was right ahead of the Spartan and in one view the eye could embrace the picture of peaceful, if rather slow and slovenly industry, and of striving war - of one set of ships creeping in a formless, talkative heap north-westward, while the other raced through them, running east with the utmost efficiency as fast as ever they could move, wholly taken up with mutual violence.

An hour or so later the Biscayans had vanished over the edge of the world, taking all philosophical reflections with them, and Stephen and Martin had retired below, but Jack Aubrey was still there on the forecastle, considering the chase, the frigate's magnificent spread of canvas, and the weather. He was also a little uneasy about her trim: she might be a trifle by the stern, and he was afraid she would resent it, if a full gale were to come on.

'Mr Mowett,' he said, returning aft, 'I believe we may ship rolling-tackles, strike the carronades down into the hold, and make ready to start maybe ten tons of water from the aftermost casks. And pray ask the bosun to have cablets and the like ready to his hand, in case it should come on to blow - the glass is sinking. I am just going to show the youngsters how to find whether the chase is gaining or not with a sextant and then I shall turn in for a while.'

It was as well that he did, for with the rising of, the moon the wind increased, blowing straight into her round, foolish face and across the growing swell. By the time he came on deck Mowett had already taken in the lower studdingsails, and as the night wore on more and more canvas came off until she was under little more than close-reefed fore and main topsails, reefed courses and trysails, yet each time the reefer of the watch cast the log he reported with mounting glee, 'Six and a half knots, if you please, sir. - Seven knots two fathoms.

Almost eight knots. - Eight knots and three fathoms. -Nine knots. - Ten knots! Oh sir, she's doing ten knots!'

With the courses reefed Jack could see his quarry from the quarterdeck, see her plain in the bright moon, for though the wind was in the west, backing a little south, there were few clouds in the sky, and those few were thin racing diaphanous veils, no more. The sea, though not yet really heavy - short and choppy rather than Atlantic-rough - had a torn white surface, and the Spartan showed up strangely black, even when the moon was well down the western sky and far astern. She had much the same sail as the Surprise, and though twice she tried a foretopgallant, each time she took it in.

From time to time Jack took the wheel. At this kind of speed the complex vibrations reaching him through the spokes, the heave of the wheel itself, and the creak of the raw-hide tiller-ropes told him a great deal about the ship: whether she was being overpressed or whether she would bear a reef shaking out, even an inner jib hauled half way up. He spoke little to the succession of officers who took the watch, Maitland, Honey and the master, yet even so the night seemed short. At first dawn he took his first breakfast: the barometer had continued its steady fall and although this could not yet be called a hard gale it was certainly a stiff one, and likely to grow stiffer; he decided to have his cablets sent up to the mastheads in good time, as soon as hammocks were piped up and he had both watches on deck.

'I beg pardon, sir, said Mowett in the doorway, 'but the privateer has taken a leaf out of our book and she has sent hawsers aloft.'

'Has she?' cried Jack. 'Oh, the wicked dog. Come, have a cup of coffee to keep your spirits up, Mowett; then we shall go on deck, where virtue spooms before the goddam gale, and our heaving wishes will help to fill the sail, ha, ha, ha! That is Dryden, you know.'

On deck he found that the privateer had indeed forestalled him in fortifying her masts and was now outstripping him in speed. With her full topsails she was already making something like eleven knots or even more to the Surprise's ten, and she was throwing a spectacular bow-wave as she did so, clearly to be seen some three miles away. 'All hands,' called Jack, and down below came the cry 'Rouse out, you sleepers. Rise and shine, there, rise and shine. Heave ho, heave ho, lash up and stow.'

This sending up of hawsers and cablets was a simple, even an obvious idea, and Jack had often wondered why so very few commanders resorted to it in heavy weather; but it was also time-consuming, and before the very powerful extra supports were made fast and heaved taut aboard the Surprise the Spartan had gained horribly. She was now hull-down except on the top of the roll, tearing along under an extraordinary press of sail. 'If a banker crossed her hawse at this moment,' reflected Jack, with his glass trained on her, 'she would sheer clean through.'

He sent the hands to breakfast watch by watch and began cautiously packing on, sail by sail. The ship's speed mounted; the whole sound, the whole vast chord of her motion changed, rising through two whole tones; and out of the corner of his busy eye he noticed all the reefers and many of the larboard watch along the weather rail and gangway, eating their biscuit and grinning with delight at the flying, swooping speed.

But he also noticed, and this was much more to the immediate point, that the wind was strengthening and backing farther still. This continued throughout the forenoon watch, and as the gale became more distinctly a south-wester so it brought racing cloud low across the sea. The dawn itself had been grey, but now really thick and dirty weather threatened, and although the Surprise had regained one of her lost miles by the end of the watch -she was indeed the faster ship in a heavy sea - Jack was very much afraid that if he did not come up with the Spartan before nightfall he would lose her in the murk.

Furthermore, as the wind backed so it blew in the same direction as the growing swell, and the seas grew heavier by far. Both wind and swell were right aft by the time the gunroom sat down to dinner with their guests, Captain Aubrey and Mr Midshipman Howard, and the ship was pitching through forty-one degrees. All those present had known a good deal worse far south of the Horn, but even so it took away from the splendour of the feast. The gunroom had meant to regale their Captain on fresh turtle to begin with and then a variety of other delights, but the early extinction of the galley fires, put out as soon as the men's salt beef had been boiled, had reduced them to a cold, or sometimes luke-warm, collation; however, it included soused pig's face, one of Jack's favourite dishes, and treacle pudding, which he always said ate better if it did not scald your gullet.

'You were speaking of the miseries of authors,' said Stephen across the table to Martin, 'but neither of us thought to mention poor Adanson. Do you know, sir,' -addressing himself to Jack - 'that Michael Adanson, the ingenious author of the Families naturelles des Plantes, to which we all of us owe so much, submitted twenty-seven large manuscript volumes relating to the natural classification of all known beings and substances, together with a hundred and fifty - I repeat, a hundred and fifty - others containing forty thousand species arranged alphabetically, and a completely separate vocabulary containing two hundred thousand words, and they explained, as well as detached memoirs and forty thousand figures and thirty thousand specimens of the three kingdoms of nature. He presented them, I say, to the Academy of Sciences in Paris, and they were received with the utmost applause and respect. Yet when this great man, after whom Linnaeus himself named the baobab tree Adansonia digitata, was invited to become a member of the Institute a little before I had the honour of addressing it, he did not possess a whole shirt nor yet an untorn pair of breeches in which he could attend, still less a coat, God rest his soul.'

'That was very bad, I am sure,' said Jack.

'And I might have remembered Robert Heron,' said Martin, 'the author of The Comforts of life, which he composed in Newgate, and many another more learned work. I wrote out his appeal to the Literary Fund, his hand being then too weak, and in it he truthfully stated that he worked from twelve to sixteen hours a day. When the physicians examined him they found him totally incapacitated by what they termed the indiscreet exertion of his mind in protracted and incessant literary labours

Jack's attention was, as to three parts, elsewhere, for the altered motion of the deck under his feet and the wine in his glass told him that the wind was backing farther still, backing fast with some nasty flaws and gusts; several of the miseries and calamities of authors therefore escaped him, but he returned in time to hear Stephen say, 'Smollett observed that had his friends told him what to expect in the capacity of an author "I should in all probability have spared myself the incredible labour and chagrin that I have undergone."'

'Think of Chatterton,' cried Martin.

'Nay, think of Ovid on the dank and fetid shores of the old cold Black Sea:

Omnia perdidimus, tantummodo vita relicta est,

Praebeat Ut sensum materiamque mali.'

'Yet perhaps, gentlemen,' said Mowett, beaming on them, 'there may be some happy authors.'

Both Martin and Stephen looked extremely doubtful, but before either could reply a fierce, savage, triumphant roar broke out overhead, drowning the powerful voice of the wind and the sea and just preceding the appearance of Calamy in his streaming tarpaulin jacket, reporting that the chase had split her foresail.

So she had, and although she set her close-reefed foretopsail in the most seamanlike fashion, the Surprise gained more than a mile before she was running at anything near her former pace.

Jack and Mowett stood there on the forecastle, studying the Spartan. 'I wonder, I wonder,' murmured Jack: if he could gain five or six hundred yards more he could fire his chaser with some hope of cutting up her rigging, knocking away a spar, or at least holing her drum-tight canvas: with that done he should certainly be able to lay her aboard before dark. The Surprise was now rolling heavily as well as pitching, but she carried her weather chaser so much the higher, and with very good gunners dangerous fire would still be possible for a while. A veil of small rain swept between them and the Spartan vanished. 'I believe she will wear it,' he said. 'Let the reefs be shaken out of the maintopsail. And tell the gunner to stand by to try for the range.'

A solid packet of water sweeping from aft soaked him as he hurried, bent low, along the gangway, but he hardly noticed it: the air was full of flying spindrift, and it looked as though they were in for a thoroughly dirty night. He had already shifted sail for the shift of wind, and she had a fine press of canvas: as the reefs came out of the maintopsail she heeled still farther, so that the deck sloped another five degrees, and his hand automatically reached out for the backstay: there was a pure keen delight in this flying speed, the rushing air, and the taste of sea in his mouth. He was not the only one to appreciate it, either: the four men at the wheel and the quartermaster at the con had the same expression of grave pleasure; and when two bells in the first dog-watch struck a few moments later the midshipman who heaved the log reported 'Eleven and a half knots exactly, sir, if you please,' with a look of perfect bliss. And certainly. although the difference between two knots and three was neither here nor there, at this pace even half a knot more made an immense change in the feeling of speed: it was also very hard to attain. But two bells already: that meant there was precious little daylight left; it would be a damned near-run thing, if indeed it could be done at all. And now in his glass he saw the Spartan starting her water over the side, two thick jets of it flying to leeward, relieving her of many tons.