Patrick O'Brian - The Hundred Days

‘I must either cut him and recover my hand or give him a very strong emetic: and if the emetic does not work, then it must be the knife.’

‘It was your own silly fault for leaving it about,’ cried Hobden. ‘You shall not touch my dog, you pragmatical bastard.’

‘Will you stand by those words, sir?’ asked Stephen after a short pause, his head cocked to one side.

‘Until my dying day,’ said Hobden, rather too loud. Stephen left the room, smiling. He found Somers, the second lieutenant, standing on the forecastle and gazing up at the beauty of the headsails, brilliant in the sun and scarcely less so in the white shadow. ‘Mr Somers,’ he said, ‘I beg pardon for interrupting you - a glorious sight, indeed - but I have had a disagreement with Captain Hobden, who used, and stood by, a very blackguardly insult, made in public - in the galley itself, for God’s sake. May I beg you to be my second?’

‘Of course you may, my dear Maturin. How very much I regret it. I shall wait upon him at once.’

‘Come in,’ cried Jack Aubrey, looking up from his desk.

‘I beg pardon for interrupting you, sir,’ said Harding, the frigate’s first lieutenant, ‘but I have some awkward, pressing things to tell you.’ He said this in a low voice, and Jack led him aft to the locker under the stern windows, where he could speak in perfect safety - in a ship a hundred and twenty feet long with two hundred men crammed into her, privacy was a rare commodity, as he knew from very long experience.

‘Well, sir,’ Harding went on, obviously disliking the role of informer, ‘Dr Maturin has challenged Hobden, Hobden’s dog having eaten a preserved hand; and Hobden, having been told that the hand must be recovered by knife or purge, gave Maturin the lie. I tell you this because the people are very much upset. I do not have to tell you, sir, that seamen or at least our seamen, are as superstitious as a parcel of old women: they looked upon the horn; sir, as the surest possible guarantee of luck: and next to the horn, or even before it, this Hand of Glory... you know about it, sir?’

‘Of course I do. Thank you for telling me all this, Harding: it was very proper in you. Now pray be so good as to tell Hobden that I wish to see him at once. He will waste no time with uniform.’

A minute later he called ‘Come in’ again, and a shirtsleeved, duck-trousered Hobden appeared.

‘Captain Hobden,’ said Jack in a tone of the deepest displeasure, ‘I understand that your dog ate Dr Maturin’s preserved hand, and that when he checked you with the fact you gave him the lie or something worse. You must either withdraw the insult and let him retrieve the hand as best he may, or you must leave this ship at Malta. I cannot give you more than five minutes to reflect, dogs’ powers of digestion being what they are. But while you are reflecting, remember this: in the heat of the moment any man may blurt out a blackguardly expression: yet after a while any man worth a groat knows he must unsay it. A note of apology would answer, if you find the spoken word stick in your gullet.’

Hobden changed colour once or twice - a variety of emotions appeared upon his face, all of them wretchedly unhappy.

‘If you choose to write it now, here are pens and paper, said Jack, nodding to his desk and chair.

For some time Jacob and Stephen Maturin had been talking about the pleasanter sides of their evening with Mr Wright as they sharpened their instruments on variety of hones and oilstones by the Argand light in the orlop. When they had finished discussing their dispassionate and geometrical treatment of the Locatelli, Jacob said, ‘Yet earlier on I fear I was somewhat too loquacious, with my examples of the Zeneta dialect and the double gutturals of the local Hebrew; but at least I did not bore the company with an account of what is perhaps the most curious thing about the Beni Mzab - curious, but difficult to explain in a few words.

I mean the fact that not only are the Moslems Ibadite heretics, but many of the Jews are Cainites, equally erroneous according to the orthodox.’

Stephen reflected, grinding still, and then said, ‘I do not think I know about Cainites.’

‘They derive their descent from the Kenites, who themselves have Abel’s brother Cain as their common ancestor: furthermore, the initiated still bear his mark; though discreetly, since they do not choose to have it generally known, there still being so many vulgar prejudices against him. This shared mark of Cain forms the strongest bond imaginable, far outdoing that between Freemasons, and of infinitely greater antiquity.’

‘So I should imagine.’

‘In early Christian times some of them formed a Gnostic sect; but those belonging to the Beni Mzab have returned to the ancient ways, maintaining that Cain was brought into being by a superior power and Abel by an inferior; and that he was the ancestor of Esau, Korah and the Sodomites.’

‘Come in,’ called Stephen.

Captain Hobden came stooping under the lintel. ‘I beg pardon for interrupting you, Doctor Maturin. I beg your pardon. Here is my apology’ - handing his letter - ‘and here is my dog.’

‘You are very good, sir,’ cried Stephen, starting up and shaking his hand. ‘Do not fear for Naseby: these are very simple operations, and I would not hurt him for the world.’

Seamen, according to Dr Maturin’s experience, were even fonder of remedies that could be seen and felt to work at once than most people; and the Surprise’s medicine-chest was well stocked with powerful emetics.

‘There is little hope,’ said Stephen as he slid the dose down Naseby’s unresisting throat. ‘At this late hour there is little hope, at all.’

‘On the other hand, the animal’s early detection and subsequent evident guilt may well have diminished or even arrested his digestive secretions.’

‘Hold the bucket and belay, there. Stand back.’

Sick, sick as a dog he was: but indeed it was too late. ‘Yet at least we have virtually all the bones,’ said Stephen, stirring with a pair of retractors. ‘And they are almost untouched. All the rest is now meaningless, but once the bones are boiled clean we can wire them together: the hand will be even more emphatically hand-like, and that will comfort the crew. Poll. Poll there! Be so good as to call for a couple of swabbers, and I will take this poor fellow back to his master.’

The wiring-together with the help of the carpenter’s finest drills, the very convincing wiring-together, which was completed before the end of the last dog-watch, did indeed comfort the crew. They waited in files to see the dead-white fingers rising tall and high from the neat pattern of carpalbones set in black-gleaming pitch, the whole enclosed in a stern-lantern glass. Each group, having gazed upon it for the regulation minute, hurried back to the beginning of the line to see it again; and it was universally agreed that a more Glorious Hand did not exist. No one was foolish enough to mention luck, but the Surprises wore a deeply satisfied look that said much more than any open exultation.

At quarters the next day they were still unusually lively and cheerful in spite of the falling breeze, backing so far easterly that it might come foul before the end of the exercise, and that also carried drifting swathes of mist, and sometimes rain. But even downright snow would neither have chilled or damped their spirits, and they ran their guns in and above all out with a fine hearty thump.

Then, just before the drum beat the retreat and hammocks were piped down, an extremely shrill and piercing voice from the foretopmast cried, ‘On deck, there. On deck, there. Two sail of ships, four points on the starboard beam. Standing south-east. Just about hull-up.’

‘Mr Daniel,’ called Jack to the master’s mate. ‘Follow me aloft with my night-glass from the cabin, will you?’ He was settled in the topgallant cross-trees by the time Daniel and the telescope reached him; but whereas the Commodore was puffing, Daniel, in spite of his recent hardships, was not.