Patrick O'Brian - The Hundred Days

‘No, no. It is only a prodigious spindrift worked up by this levanter - coming aboard in buckets.’

‘Beg pardon, sir,’ said Killick to Stephen (he rarely took notice of the assistant surgeon), ‘which Mr Daniel has taken a tumble and Poll thinks it may again be his collar-bone.’

His collar-bone it was, and he was stupid from having pitched from a skid-beam to the deck, hitting his head and shoulder on a gun and its carriage. Stephen strapped him up, eased his pain, and had him carried by two strong men of his division (he was well-liked, though a newcomer) to a cot where he could lie in what peace the ship allowed, which was not inconsiderable. She had settled down to running about two points free, very fast and, apart from the racing of water along her side, very quietly; and since she was both undermanned and healthy, Daniel had an empty corner of the sick-berth. But Stephen was not satisfied with his bone, still less with his confusion and his general appearance. He sat with him until the young man seemed easier, even dozing, and then told Poll to give him as much to drink as he wanted, soup with an egg beaten up in it at the changing of the watch, and no company to trouble him with advice of what he ought to have done.

Stephen returned to the gunroom, where he found Jacob watching Somers and Harding playing chess on a heavyweather board, the men pegging into holes. He drew him aside and said, ‘You knew Laennec much better than I, did you not?’

‘I believe so. We used to talk at great length about auscultation: I read his first treatise and made some suggestions that he was kind enough to adopt in the final version.’

‘Then pray come and look at one of our most recent patients.’

‘The scalded cook?’

‘No. Mr Daniel, a master’s mate. The Commodore brought him aboard at Mahon. I do not like the sound of his chest, and should like a second opinion.’

They tapped and listened, tapped and listened, trying to distinguish between the echoes they produced and the working of the ship. She was running even faster now, in the stronger wind, and the vibration of her taut rigging, transmitted to her hull by its various points of attachment, filled the sick-bay with a body of all-pervading sound, pierced by the squeak or rattle of countless blocks.

The second opinion was not much firmer than the first, but more foreboding. ‘That amiable young man of yours is in a bad way, as you know very well: undernourished, meagre. I cannot directly point to an inchoate phthisis; but if a pneumonia were to declare itself tomorrow or the next day, I should not be surprised. And that contusion may well turn very ugly. We have no leeches, I collect?’

‘The midshipmen stole them for bait.’

Four bells in the first watch, and Stephen remembered his traditional appointment with the Commodore and toasted cheese: he hurried up the various ladders, holding on with both hands and reflecting as he climbed that it came naturally to him now. And what was young Daniel going to do, in foul weather, with only one hand to cling by? The answer came at once: he would sit in the master’s day cabin, making all the calculations necessary for fine navigation. Mr Woodbine had already said that it was like pure dew from Heaven, having a mate as clever with numbers as Newton or Ahasuerus.

For once he was early, though no earlier than the scent of cheese toasting in its elegant silver dishes: Killick peered at him through a crack in the door. Stephen had had plenty of time to reflect upon the trifling interval between the perception of a grateful odour and active salivation and to make a variety of experiments, checked by his austerely beautiful and accurate Breguet repeater, before the door burst open and the Commodore strode in, sure-footed on the heaving deck and scattering seawater in most directions. ‘There you are, Stephen,’ he cried, his red face and bright blue eyes full of delight - he looked ten years younger - ‘I am so sorry to have kept you waiting: but I have never enjoyed a levanter half so much. It is admirably steady now, for a levanter, and we are under close-reefed topsails and courses, making close on fourteen knots! Fourteen knots! Should you not like to come on deck and see the bow-wave we are throwing?’

‘By your leave, sir,’ said Killick, in an obscurely injured or offended tone, ‘wittles is up.’ He walked in, stone-cold sober, as steady as a rock, bearing his elaborate toastedcheese affair with its spirit-lamps burning blue, and followed by his equally grave and sober mate Grimble, bearing a decanter of Romanée-Conti. ‘Which it wants eating this directly minute,’ said Killick, with the clear implication that the Commodore was late, and set the dish down with a certain ceremony.

It was indeed a splendid affair, half a dozen little covered rectangular dishes poised on a stand whose lower level held the spirit-lamps, the whole made with love by a Dublin silversmith not far from Stephen’s Green. But both were too hungry to admire until each had eaten two dishes, wiped them clean with what little Dalmatian soft-tack remained; then they gazed at the silver with some complacency and drank their capital wine, holding the glasses up so that candlelight shone through.

‘I do not like to boast about the qualities of the ship,’ said Jack, ‘but touching wood and barring all accidents, errors and omissions, we ought to log well over two hundred miles in four and twenty hours, as we sometimes did in the Trades, or even better; and if nothing carries away, and if this dear levanter don’t blow itself out in a single day, as they sometimes do, we should raise your Pantellaria on Friday, and the Cape Bon you mention so often. One, three, six or nine days is the rule for this wind.’

‘So it is for my homely tramontane. But, Jack, do you not fear the impervious horrors of a leeward shore?’

‘Lord, Stephen, what a fellow you are! Don’t you know we are in the lonian already, with Cape Santa Maria far astern and no lee-shore for a hundred sea-miles?’

‘What is the difference between a sea and a land mile, tell?’

‘Oh, nothing much, except that the sea-mile is rather longer, and very, very much wetter, ha, ha ha! Lord, what a wag I am,’ he said, wiping his eyes when he had had his laugh out. ‘Very much wetter. But leaving wit aside, another three days, do you see - if we do not waste our time stopping at Malta - should place us well west of Pantellaria.’

They were indeed west of Pantellaria before the levanter, in its turn, died in half a dozen sullen howls: the two surgeons contemplated the shore and the little fishing port from the taffrail. ‘After long reflexion,’ said Stephen Maturin, ‘it appears to me that there is no great point in knowing whether the messengers have passed or not: our mission is the same in either case - to dissuade the Dey from shipping that which he does not yet possess. And with this wind Mr Aubrey assures me that nothing could have left Algiers, even if the Dey had the treasure in his care - a most unlikely event. He also states that it is extremely improbable that a houario could have survived such a tempest: a houario is not a xebec. Yet conceivably it might have taken shelter in the harbour over there,’ - nodding towards Pantellaria - ‘and since I think we had rather know than not know, I shall beg you to accompany the boat, which the purser is taking in, ostensibly for the purchase of horsehide, tallow, scourges and things of that kind, and ask whether there is any news of a Durazzo houario - your Italian is better than mine. And then, richer in knowledge, we can push on, passing by Cape Bon, which I long to see at this time of the year. You have no objection to climbing down into the boat?’

‘None in the least, dear colleague. No one can say that my spirit is affected by six-foot waves: and by the way, what is the difference between a houario and a xebec?’