Patrick O'Brian - The fortune of war

Stephen waved his wig - his hat had long been lost from sight - and watched her as the turn swept her aft and far astern; then he plunged below. It was worse than ever; the smell was like Gin Row, mingled with something of Billingsgate (many of the specimens being fish); the voices were louder; the fooling more evident. Two ship's boys were openly playing tug-of-war with a sealskin. By a violent exercise of authority, together with a few hearty kicks and blows, Stephen rescued the skin and a basket of albatross eggs that was within an ace of being trampled underfoot as La Fl�e, under topgallants now, heeled to the monsoon. Yet no sooner had he preserved one basket, one penguin, one blue-eyed shag but another was in danger, either from mere levity or from mistaken blundering goodwill; and now the ship was out of the sheltered anchorage - now she was taking the swell on her larboard bow, so that the forepeak and all within it was in a state of perpetual motion. In his anguish Stephen did not hear the tall master's mate say, 'The Captain's compliments, sir, and he begs the favour of your company at dinner.

'Silence, fore and aft,' roared the young man, and in the pause he repeated the invitation, adding, 'That will be in three and twenty minutes, sir.'

'I cannot conceivably leave my collections tossing to and fro; they cannot possibly be secured before nightfall. Pray tell the Captain, with my compliments, that I shall be glad to wait upon him at any other time. Honoured. Happy. You, sir!' - projecting his voice into the darkest corner - 'Put it down this minute.'

Five minutes later the grey lieutenant appeared. When he could command Dr Maturin's attention he said, 'There must be some mistake, sir. The Captain invites you to dinner. It is the Captain who invites you to dinner.' He had changed his fine coat for a round working jacket, and in the gloom Stephen did not recognize him. 'My dear sir,' he said. 'You see the state of affairs in this Bedlam, this Purgatory. Surely you must perceive that it is impossible for me to abandon even what is already here, let alone all that is still upstairs. First things must come first.'

Mr Warner remonstrated, spoke of 'an appearance of disrespect - unintentional, he was sure', and referred to 'natural curiosities' in an unfortunate manner. The tone rose, until Stephen, having himself cracked one of his very few whale-bird's eggs, turned on him and said, 'You are importunate, sir. You are indiscreet. You oppress me with your civilities. I beg you will go about your affairs, and leave me to mine.'

'Very good, sir. Very good, Mr - ,' said the first lieutenant, swelling and at the same time growing even more rigid. 'Your blood be upon your own head.'

'What blood, now, I wonder?' muttered Stephen, returning to his fragile crates. 'Double, double, toil and trouble. Oh, you infernal set of maniacs - brute-beasts.'

The next to interrupt his anxious busyness, his inefficient attempts at tying down cases, baskets, chests with string, and at controlling his helpers, was Captain Aubrey himself. Jack did not address him first, however: to the oldest seaman there he said, 'What is your name?'

'Jaggers, your honour, carpenter's crew, starboard watch.'

'Very well, Jaggers: jump up to the maindeck with your mates. Tell my coxswain and steward I want them here at once.'

'Aye aye, sir.'

The sailors vanished silently upwards, like bulky, inebriated mice, not a hoot nor a halloo until they were well out of sight.

'Stephen,' said Jack, quickly tricing a wandering basket to a stanchion, 'you are in a sad way, I see.'

'So I am too,' cried Stephen, 'with these bestial Goths, these drunken Huns all about me - I could weep from mere vexation - so much to be preserved, so much already lost - would you have another piece of string in your pocket, at all? - and there was a prating fellow that would insist on my dining with the captain of this vile machine. I sent him about his business; told him to go trim his sails.'

The vile machine took a lee-lurch and the female sea-elephant slid to starboard. Jack waited for the weather-roll, heaved it back, passed a line round its middle, made all fast, and said, 'Yes: that was Warner, their first lieutenant. Stephen, there is something about the Navy I should have told you before. A captain's invitation cannot be refused.'

'Why not, for all love? Oh, for a decent ball of string.'

'The immemorial custom of the service requires that it should be accepted. It is as who should say a royal command; and a refusal is near as a toucher mutiny.'

'What stuff, Jack. In its very nature an invitation implies an option, the possibility of refusal. You can no more compel a man to be your guest in the sense, the only valid sense, of a willing commensal, a glad partaker of your fare, than you can oblige a woman to love you. A prisoner is not a guest; a raped wench is not a wife; an invitation is not an ukase.'

Jack abandoned the immemorial custom of the service, though it had answered well before: there was only four minutes to go. 'Hold fast,' he called up the scuttle, and in a low voice he said, 'I should take it as a particular favour if you were to come. Yorke has asked you out of kindness to me. It would be a most unfortunate beginning to the voyage if there were any appearance of slighting him, unfortunate for me and all our shipmates.'

'But, Jack,' cried Stephen, waving hopelessly at his tumbled collections, most in uneasy movement, all threatening decisive motion, 'how can I leave all this?'

'Bonden and Killick will be below directly, both sober and both carrying any amount of cordage. And all the other Leopards will give you a hand as soon as dinner is over. Pray be a good fellow for once, Stephen.'

'Well,' - with an unwilling look at all he was leaving- 'I. will come so. But mark you, brother, it is only in compliment to you. I do not give a fig for your immemorial tyranny and oppression, nor for his Czarish Majesty back there.'

'Bonden, Killick,' called Jack.

They instantly dropped through the scuttle, Killick carrying what remnants of uniform Dr Maturin still possessed, a clean shirt and a comb, for he knew perfectly well what was afoot. Leopard's surgeon, mad with drink, had refused the Captain's invitation. It was confidently expected that Mr Warner would have him brought aft in irons, that his jaws would be prised open with a handspike and his dinner poured down his throat, whether or no; that he should be placed under close arrest, forbidden to move from his cabin for the remainder of the voyage and court-martialled the moment La Fl�e reached Pompey. It was with a certain feeling of disappointment, of anticlimax, therefore, that they saw him pass at a shambling run, square-ribbed and fairly trim, in his own captain's wake, at one minute to the hour.

'You will be civil?' Jack whispered in his ear at the cabin door.

Stephen's noncommittal sniff gave him no comfort, but immediately afterwards, he was relieved to see Stephen's courtly leg and bow, to hear his urbane 'Your servant, sir'. Stephen was, after all, a man of high breeding, though wonderfully ignorant of seafaring ways: once, when he was attending a levee, Jack had seen him walking about, perfectly at home, familiarly known and indeed caressed by a surprising number of people, some of them very grand.

Ignorant though he was of naval customs, Stephen did at least know that guests under the rank of captain were not expected to speak to the commander of the ship until they were spoken to; it was an extension of the court etiquette. He sat mute, therefore, looking amiable, while they drank a pint of sherry and ate up their fresh turtle soup: he looked round the cabin, the only book-lined cabin he had ever seen - row after row of books, and low down, built in among the quartos, the sheet-music, and the incongruous nine-pounder gun, a small square piano: Jack had said that Captain Yorke was a musician: and evidently he was a reader too - no man carried books to sea for show. He could make out some of the nearer titles: Woodes Rogers, Shelvocke, Anson, the immense Histoire G�rale des Voyages, Churchill, Harris, Bougainville, Cook, all natural enough in a sailor; then Gibbon, Johnson, and stretching away and away the Kehl edition of Voltaire. Above Voltaire an even greater number of small octavos and duodecimos whose labels he could not distinguish: novels, in all likelihood. He looked at their owner with greater interest. A dark man, rather plump, with a clever face; about Jack's age; by no means so obviously a sailor. He looked capable, but Stephen had the impression that he loved his ease.