Patrick O'Brian - The Ionian mission

He did of course invite his officers quite often, and although in the present anxious unsettled state of his affairs he dared not keep the lavish table of earlier, richer days, it was rare that Pullings and a midshipman did not breakfast with him, while the officer of the forenoon watch and a youngster or a Marine would often share his dinner: and the wardroom entertained him once a week. Breakfast and dinner, then, were reasonably companionable; but Jack dined at three, and since he was not a man who turned in early that left a great deal of time, far more than the concerns of a ship on blockade could fill, a ship with a thoroughly efficient first lieutenant, plying to and fro off Toulon, all decisions taken by the flag.

The familiar tedium of blockade made these spacious, lonely evenings lonelier and more spacious by far, but in one form or another they were the lot common to all captains who respected tradition and who wished to maintain their authority. Some dealt with the situation by having their wives aboard, in spite of the regulations, particularly on the longer, quieter passages, and some took mistresses; but neither would do in a squadron commanded by Admiral Thornton. Others sailed with friends, and although Jack had known this answer fairly well, generally speaking it seemed that few friendships could stand such close, enforced proximity for many weeks, let alone months or even years. There were also men who took to drinking too much, while some grew strange, crotchety and absolute; and although the great majority became neither confirmed drunkards nor eccentrics, nearly all captains with more than a few years' service were deeply marked by it.

So far Jack had been unusually lucky in this respect. From his first command he had nearly always sailed with Stephen Maturin, and it had proved the happiest arrangement. As her surgeon, Dr Maturin was very much part of the ship, having his own independent function and being, one no more than nominally subject to the captain; but since he was not an executive officer their intimacy caused no jealousy or ill-feeling in the wardroom: and although he and Jack Aubrey were almost as unlike as men could be, unlike in nationality, religion, education, size, shape, profession, habit of mind, they were united in a deep love of music, and many and many an evening had they played together, violin answering 'cello or both singing together far into the night.

Now when the fiddle sang at all it sang alone: but since Stephen's departure he had rarely been in a mood for music and in any case the partita that he was now engaged upon, one of the manuscript works that he had bought in London, grew more and more strange the deeper he went into it. The opening movements were full of technical difficulties and he doubted he would ever be able to do them anything like justice, but it was the great chaconne which followed that really disturbed him. On the face of it the statements made in the beginning were clear enough: their closely-argued variations, though complex, could certainly be followed with full acceptation, and they were not particularly hard to play; yet at one point, after a curiously insistent repetition of the second theme, the rhythm changed and with it the whole logic of the discourse. There was something dangerous about what followed, something not unlike the edge of madness or at least of a nightmare; and although Jack recognized that the whole sonata and particularly the chaconne was a most impressive composition he felt that if he were to go on playing it with all his heart it might lead him to very strange regions indeed.

During a pause in his evening letter Jack thought of telling Sophie of a notion that had come to him, a figure that might make the nature of the chaconne more understandable: it was as though he were fox-hunting, mounted on a powerful, spirited horse, and as though on leaping a bank, perfectly in hand, the animal changed foot. And with the change of foot came a change in its being so that it was no longer a horse he was sitting on but a great rough beast, far more powerful, that was swarming along at great speed over an unknown countryside in pursuit of a quarry - what quarry he could not tell, but it was no longer the simple fox. But it would be a difficult notion to express, he decided; and in any case Sophie did not really care much for music, while she positively disliked horses. On the other hand she dearly loved a play, so he told her about the Worcester's performance. 'Neither the oratorio nor Hamlet has come off yet, and I think that for beginners we aimed a little high, since both call for a world of preparation. I have no doubt we shall hear them in the end, but in the mean time we content ourselves with much less ambitious entertainments: we have them once a week, weather permitting, on the evenings of make-and-mend day - a surprisingly good band of ten performers, some dancers good enough for Sadler's Wells, short dramatic pieces, and a kind of farce that carries on from one week to the next - very popular - in which two old forecastle hands show a fat, stupid landsman the duties of a sailor and the customs of the Navy, banging him with bladders every time he does wrong.' He smiled again, remembering the massive laughter of five hundred close-packed men as the fool, beaten on both sides, fell into the bucket for the seventh time: then, as he brought his paragraph to a close, his mind drifted back to his sonata. It was not music that he would have chosen to play when he was alone and low in his spirits: but he was not allowed to change or give up once he had fairly started on a piece, so when he played at all it was this partita that he worked upon, playing in a non-committal way and attending chiefly to the technical aspect of the thing. 'At least I shall be word-perfect when Stephen comes back,' he said. 'And I shall ask his opinion of it.'

Upon the whole Jack Aubrey was not much given to lowness of spirits, and circumstances far more adverse than these had not disturbed his cheerful mind; but now a slowly-maturing cold, the monotony of the blockade, the unvarying sight of the Pompee ahead and the Boyne astern on the starboard tack and the other way about on the larboard, a long and most unseasonable, un-Mediterranean spell of dismal weather, combined with his loneliness and isolation to bring him down. He let his mind run over his complicated affairs at home - a very useless exercise, since the legal issues were obscure to experts, let alone to sailors, whose law was contained in the thirty-six Articles of War - and over his position here. On taking command of the Worcester he had known that she was bound for the Mediterranean and that Harte was second in command to Admiral Thornton on that station: but the Admiral Thornton he and all his friends had always known had so very strong and dominant a personality that his second would count for very little, particularly when he was so small a man as Harte. Had Jack known how likely it was that Harte might inherit the supreme command he would have pressed hard for another ship.

These reflections were running through his mind as he leant on the stern-gallery rail a few days later, holding a handkerchief to his streaming nose, looking sometimes at the Worcester's grey and turbid wake, sometimes at the Pompee's bows, a cable's length astern, and sometimes at the Dryad, Babbington's slab-sided tub, stationed well out to the leeward to repeat signals up and down the line. A diminished line, since the Admiral had run down to Palermo for a few days and the inshore squadron had been reinforced, but even so it covered a mile of sea as the squadron stood eastwards through the gloom and the task of repeating was no sinecure, particularly as they were hauled close to the wind - a wretched angle for a signal-lieutenant - and as Harte was perpetually fiddling with his flags.

By this time Jack was perfectly well acquainted with the numbers of all the ships in the squadron, and although from his place in taut-drawn line he could see little beyond the Pompee and odd glimpses of the Achilles directly in her wake, he caught all Harte's loquacity echoed from the Dryad and he saw the Culloden required to make more sail, the Boreas told to keep her station, and a distant frigate, the Clio, repeatedly ordered to alter course. And as he watched, nursing his red nose in a red-spotted handkerchief, he saw a number that he did not recognize together with a hoist requiring the ship in question to take a position astern of the Thetis. Some newcomer had joined the fleet. For a moment he had a wild hope that she might have come out from home, bringing letters and news, but then he realized that in such a case Pullings would certainly have sent to tell him. Still, he felt a curiosity about the stranger and he turned to go on deck: at the same moment Killick came out of the cabin with a bucket full of handkerchiefs to dry on his private line. 'Now sir, what's all this?' he cried angrily. 'No greatcoat, no cloak, no bleeding comforter even?'