Patrick O'Brian - The Wine-Dark Sea

'Who could deny it?'

'I mean it was wonderfully well timed, since it meant we had a well-manned, well-equipped Navy to cope with the French when they declared war on us a little later. Bless the Spanish Disturbance.'

'By all means. But, Jack, I could have sworn your commission was dated 1792. Sophie showed it to me with such pride. Yet our wine is 1789.'

'Of course it is. That was when the Disturbance started - the very beginning, when those wicked dogs seized our ships. The talking and the rearmament went on until ninety-two, when the Spaniards pulled in their horns as they did over the Falklands some time before. But it all began in eighty-nine. A precious date for me: a wonderful year and I had great hopes of it as soon as the news came home.' He paused for a while, sipping his port and smiling at his recollections; then he said 'Tell me, Stephen, what were you doing in eighty-nine?'

'Oh,' said Stephen vaguely, 'I was studying medicine.' With this he set down his glass and walked into the quarter-gallery. He had been studying medicine, it was true, walking the wards of the Hotel-Dieu, but he had also spent a great deal of the time running about the streets of Paris in the headiest state of happy excitement that could be imagined, or rather exaltation, in the dawn of the Revolution, when every disinterested, generous idea of freedom seemed on the point of realization, the dawn of an infinitely finer age.

When he came back he found Jack arranging the score of their next duet on their music stands. Like many other heavy men Jack could be as sensitive as a cat on occasion: he knew that he had touched on some painful area - that in any case Stephen hated questions - and he was particularly attentive in laying out the sheets, pouring Stephen another glass of wine, and, when they began, in so playing that his violin helped the 'cello, yielding to it in those minute ways perceptible to those who are deep in their music if to few others.

They played on, and only once did Jack raise his head from the score: the ship was leaning half a strake, and beneath their strings the sound of the rigging could just be heard. At the end of the allegro he said, turning the page with his bow, 'She is making four knots.'

'I believe we may attack the adagio directly,' said Stephen. 'The wind is in our poop, and we have never played better.'

They swept into the next movement, the 'cello booming nobly, and carried straight on without a pause, separating, joining, answering one another, with never a hesitation nor a false note until the full satisfaction of the end.

'Well done, well done,' said Dutourd: he and Martin were standing in the warm darkness abaft the lit companion, alone on the quarterdeck apart from Grainger and the men at the wheel. 'I had no idea they could play so well - no contention, no striving for pre-eminence - pray which is the 'cello?'

'Dr Maturin.'

'And Captain Aubrey the violin, of course: admirable tone, admirable bowing.'

Martin did not care for Dutourd in the gunroom: he thought that the Frenchman talked far too much, that he tended to harangue the company, and that his ideas though no doubt well-intended were pernicious. But en tete-a-tete Dutourd was an agreeable companion and Martin quite often took a turn on deck with him. 'You play yourself, sir, I collect?' he said.

'Yes. I may be said to play. I am not of the Captain's standard, but with some practice I believe I could play second fiddle to him without too much discredit.'

'Have you a violin with you?'

'Yes, yes. It is in my sea-chest. The man who repaired your viola renewed the pegs just before we set off from Molokai. Do you often play in the cabin?'

'I have done so, though I am an indifferent performer. I have taken part in quartets.'

'Quartets! What joy! That is living in the very heart of music.'

Chapter Four

The next morning Jack Aubrey came up from a conference, a pursers' conference with Mr Adams: Jack, like Cook and many a far-ranging captain before him, was nominally his own purser, just as Adams was nominally the captain's clerk; but by dividing the work between them they accomplished both it and their own specific duties quite well, particularly as the anomalous status of the Surprise meant that her accounts would never have to pass the slow, circumspect eyes of the Victualling Office, for whom all persons in charge of His Majesty's stores were guilty of embezzlement until with countersigned dockets of every conceivable nature they could prove their innocence. At this conference they had weighed a number of sacks of dried peas, and Jack, taking advantage of the steelyard hanging from a convenient beam, had also weighed himself: to his shame he found that he had put on half a stone, and he meant to walk it off as soon as possible. He wished to hear no more flings about obesity, no more facetious remarks about letting out his waistcoats, no grave professional warnings about the price big heavy men of a sanguine temperament had so often to pay for taking too little exercise, too much food and too much drink: apoplexy, softening of the brain, impotence.

Fore and aft, fore and aft, pacing the windward side of the quarterdeck, his own private realm, a narrow unencumbered path on which he had travelled hundreds, even thousands of miles since he first commanded the Surprise; an utterly familiar terrain on which his mind could let itself run free. The breeze was too far before the beam for the ships, steering south-east, to set studdingsails, but they were wearing everything they possessed, including that uncommon object a middle staysail, and they were making four knots. They were an elegant sight indeed, from any distance; but from close to, a seaman's eye could still see many signs of the battering they had been through: some knots had yet to be replaced by splices or new cordage; the fine finish of the decks had not yet been restored - in some places what ordinarily resembled a ball-room floor still looked more like a bloody shambles; and clouds of hot volcanic ash and scoriae had played Old Harry with the paintwork and the blacking of the yards, to say nothing of the tar. An immense amount of small, unspectacular, highly-skilled work was going on from one end of the ship to the other, and Captain Aubrey's walk was accompanied by the steady thump of caulker's mallets. It was early in the day, and although the weather was as fair as could be wished, apart from the lack of wind, the quarterdeck had nobody upon it who was not called there by duty: Vidal and Reade, officer and midshipman of the watch; the men at the helm; the carpenter and two of his crew at the taffrail, putting the frigate's modest decorative carving, her gingerbread-work, to rights. The usual daily procession of Jemmy Ducks, Sarah and Emily, carrying hen-coops and leading the goat Amalthea, had come and gone; and as usual Jack, reflecting upon the rapid growth of the little girls, thought of his own daughters, their present height, weight and happiness, their possible but unlikely progress in deportment, French and the pianoforte under Miss O'Mara. But neither Stephen nor Martin had appeared, nor any of the ransomers. A mile and a half of steady pacing followed these reflexions about home, and then two distinct thoughts arose: 'I must ask Wilkins whether he will act as third lieutenant until we reach Callao: they say he was a master's mate in Agamemnon.' This second thought ran on into a consideration of those young men who, having passed the Navy's examination for a lieutenant, remained senior midshipmen or master's mates because they did not also 'pass for a gentleman', a mute, unwritten, unacknowledged examination whose result was announced only by the absence of a commission - a practice that was becoming more and more frequent. He considered the advantages often put forward - a more homogeneous mess, less friction, the hands' greater respect for gentlemen than for their own kind - and the disadvantages - the exclusion of such men as Cook, the unstated qualifications and the varying standards of those who did the choosing, the impossibility of appeal. He was still considering when, on reaching the rail and turning, he noticed that the young man in question, one of the ransomer mates, was now present, together with some others of those who were allowed to walk the quarterdeck.