Patrick O'Brian - The Letter of Marque

'Well, sir,' said Babbington unwillingly, 'I shall do what you say; but I wish to God I were going with you.'

During the short pull back to his ship Jack studied the sky with the closest attention: its veils of mist were still just to be made out, but they were dissipating fast and the high sky was almost clear, with a few streaks of lofty cirrus moving gently across the stars from the west-south-west.

'I wish it may not turn dirty before morning,' he said to Bonden, by way of averting ill-fortune.

'Not on your life, sir," said Bonden. 'I never seen a prettier night.'

Having given the orders that would take the Surprise northwest for a couple of hours, there to stand off and on for the rest of the night, Jack went below. The cabin was lit but empty; Stephen had already gone to bed, leaving some medical notes, three books with their places marked, a half-written score, and, lying next to a magnifying glass, three Naples biscuits, already attacked by rats. Jack tossed the biscuits out of the scuttle, took the glass and studied his hanging barometer: it had risen a tenth of an inch and the quicksilver showed a marked convexity, confirming his already set opinion. He opened his desk, where his serial letter to Sophie was still spread out from the day before, and sitting down he wrote 'My dear, I am just returned from Tartarus - William is made post! - He is so happy about it, and so am I - it is as pretty a night as ever I have seen, with the wind at WSW or a trifle S of it, and a gently rising glass. God bless you, my dear: I am just about to turn in - It was quite a busy day today and I hope it will be far busier tomorrow.' With this he lit his hand-lantern and went to bed. The lantern hooked into a slot within hand's reach of his cot and with its slide almost entirely closed it sent out no more than a very soft narrow beam that lit two feet of deckhead. He contemplated this beam for perhaps two minutes with an easy mind: it appeared to him that he had done everything that he ought to have done and that if the weather was kind he had a fair chance of success tomorrow - the enterprise was perfectly justifiable even if very much less depended on it; he would have undertaken it in any circumstances. He knew that his colleagues were fallible, that the simplest order could be misunderstood or disobeyed, and that grotesque ill-luck could always intervene; but now the dice were thrown, and he must abide by the result. Gazing at the beam he was dimly aware of the ship's living sound as she moved north-east with a slight following sea, the contented hum of the well-set-up rigging (taut, but not too taut), the occasional creak of the wheel, and of the complex aroma, made up of scrubbed plank, fresh sea-breeze, stale bilge-water, tarred cordage, paint and damp sailcloth.

By the later part of the forenoon on the twelfth, a grey peaceful day with the small breeze steady in the west-south-west, the only comfortable place in the Surprise was the mizentop. The decks were entirely filled with parties engaged in hoisting up the remaining carronades from the hold and striking down the long guns and with making all fast in preparation for the night's bombardment; for not only could carronades be fired much faster than long guns, thus making an even greater noise in the aggregate, but only a couple of hands were required to work them as opposed to the great gun's team of six or eight. The cabin was taken up by the captain, his officers and the boats' coxswains, settling a host of details. The medical men had therefore gone aloft quite early, with books, telescopes and chessmen. There was a draught-board neatly carved in the floor of the top and on this they had played a not very aggressive game, ending in a draw, and now they were reclining on the folded studdingsails.

From a scattered body of gulls, working slowly against the wind with angled wings, Stephen had picked out what was almost certainly Larus canus, usual enough in the Irish parts of his youth, some of which had been spent in the west, where they nested in quantities on the cliffs and the more lonely strands, but quite rare in these waters, and he was just about to say 'I believe I see a common gull' when Martin asked 'How would you render peripateia?

'Why surely a reverse. But no doubt you mean it in the dramatical sense: can you not say peripety in English? The French certainly have peripetie; though to be sure they use it loosely, in the sense of ordinary vicissitudes."

'I believe I have seen peripety. But it is scarcely current English, and I do not think it would leave Mowett much the wiser.' He passed Stephen a little slim book, Aristotle's Poetica, and said 'I promised to translate this for him.'

'That was benevolent in you.'

'It would have been more truly benevolent if I had realized the difficulty; but I did not. I had read it at the university with my tutor, an excellent man, bless him, a scholar with a great gift for making duller minds understand and even love a text. With his help I did grasp the essence and I have retained it; but now turning it into an English that is both accurate and tolerably fluent, an English that might be spoken by a Christian, is I am afraid a task beyond my powers.'

'From what I remember of the book's strange flitting nature and its many technicalities it would be beyond mine too.'

'Pride and precipitancy were my undoing. When Mowett told me he meant to write a very ambitious piece called The Sea-Officer's Tragedy, based on Captain Aubrey's career, his victories and his misfortunes, I told him I hoped he would make it end happy. "I cannot possibly do that," says he. "Since it is a tragedy, it must end in disaster." I begged his pardon for disagreeing, but I had the support of the greatest authority in the learned world, Aristotle himself, in saying that although tragedy necessarily dealt with the doings of great-minded men or women, in a high and serious manner, it by no means necessarily ended unhappy: and I quoted the lines I have ventured to render thus: The nature of the tragedy's action has always required that the scope should be as full as can be without obscuring the plot, and that the number of events making a probable or necessary sequence that will change a man's state from unhappiness to happiness or from happiness to unhappiness should be the smallest possible, and desired him to observe that not only was the change from evil to good eminently possible in tragedy, but that Aristotle put it first.'

Two bells. The Surprise had softened many of the rigours of naval life: no officers or bosun's mates started the hands into brisker motion with plaited canes or blows from a rope's end; the stowing of hammocks in the nettings each fine morning was not a breakneck race; no one was flogged for being last off the yard; and people walked about in a free and easy fashion, talking or chewing tobacco as they saw fit. But brahminical cleanliness remained; the watches and their exact relief-were still holy; and so was the ceremony of meals. During the later part of the game of chess, quite destroying their concentration, the pandemonium of all hands being piped to dinner had broken out below them, with the banging of mess-kids and plates as the salt beef came aft from the galley and the muffled thunder of blackjacks as the beer came forward from the hatchway butt - for the ship was not yet in grog waters and the people had to be content with their traditional gallon a day at twice, which the tradition-loving Surprise still served out in leather jugs. And now the drummer at the capstan - no longer a Marine, but a moderately gifted foremast jack - gave a preliminary thump and then launched upon his version of Roast Beef of Old England, the equivalent of the officers' dinner-bell, the warning that dinner would very soon be on the table.

They leapt to their feet, and as they gathered books, papers, chessmen, Stephen said, 'I am so glad to hear what you tell me, about Aristotle. I had forgotten those words or had skipped them - the whole book I read with a cross, superficial mind, having taken against him in those far-off days because of his weak remarks about birds and for his having brought up that showy brute-beast Alexander, as great a public nuisance as our Buonaparte - but of course he was the great learned man of the world.' He lowered himself through the lubber's hole, and as he hung there by his elbows with his feet searching for the shrouds below he said to himself, 'Tonight is perhaps Jack's true peripety. Dear Lord, how I pray that his tragedy may end happy and that ..." Here kindly hands seized his ankles, guiding them to a firm foothold.