Patrick O'Brian - H.M.S. Surprise

‘Why in God’s name would I shift my coat?’ cried Stephen. ‘What is more, I have no coat on, at all.’

‘Perhaps he thought you might like to put one on for Mr Stanhope’s dinner, sir: a genteel way of alluding to it. It is within minutes of three bells, sir: the sand is almost out. And he particularly begs you, sir, to come down through the - to come down the usual way.’

‘Mr Stanhope’s dinner,’ said Stephen in an undertone. He stood up and stared down at the quarterdeck, where, except for her captain, all the frigate’s officers were gathered in their full-​dress uniforms. Just so. He had forgotten the invitation. How remote it seemed, that quarterdeck, crowded with blue coats, red coats and half a dozen black, with the busy check-​shirted seamen moving among them:

no great distance vertically - fifty feet or so - but still how remote. He knew all the men there, liked several of them, loved young Babbington and Pullings; and yet he had the impression of living in a vacuum. It came to him strongly now, though some of the upturned faces were winking and nodding at him: he slid his legs through the lubber’s hole with a grave expression on his face and began his laborious descent.

‘So full a ship, so close-​packed a world, moving urgently along, surrounded by its own vacuum; each man bombinating in his own, no doubt. My journal, re-​read but yesterday, gives me this same impression: an egocentric man living amidst pale shades. It reflects none of the complex, vivid life of this crowded vessel. In its pages, my host (whom I esteem) and his people hardly exist, nor yet the gunroom,’ he reflected during intervals of conversation as he sat at the envoy’s left, stuffed rapidly into his best coat by Jack’s powerful hand, breeched and brushed in one minute twenty seconds flat while the Marine sentry, under penalty of death, held the half-​hour glass concealed in his hand to prevent the striking of the bell - as he sat there eating up the last long-​preserved delicacies from Mr Stanhope’s store and drinking milk-​warm claret in honour of the Duke of Cumberland’s birthday. But he was not without a social conscience, and aware that he had caused great uneasiness, that his very, very dirty face and hands reflected discredit upon the ship, he exerted himself to talk, to be agreeable; and even, after the port had gone round and round, to sing.

Mr Bowes, the purser, had obliged the company with an endless ballad on the battle of the First of June, in which he had served a gun: it was set to the tune of ‘I was, d’ye see, a Waterman,’ but he produced its slow length in an unvarying tone, neither shout nor cry but nearly allied to both, pitched in the neighbourhood of lower A, with his eyes fixed bravely on a knot in the deckhead above Mr Stanhope. The envoy smiled bravely, and in the thundering chorus of ‘To make ‘em strike or die’ his neighbours made out his piping treble.

The frigate could boast no high standard of musical accomplishment: Etherege had never really known the tune of his comic song; and now, bemused by Mr Stanhope’s port, he forgot the words too; but when at last he abandoned it, after three heavy falls, he assured them that well sung, by Kitty Pake for example, it was irresistibly droll - how they had laughed! But he was no hand at a song, he was sorry to say, though he loved music passionately; it was far more in the Doctor’s line -the Doctor could imitate cats on the ‘cello to perfection -would deceive any dog you cared to bring forward.

Mr Stanhope turned his worn, polite face towards Stephen, blinking in a shaft of sunlight that darted through a scuttle on the roll; and Stephen noticed, for the first time, that the faded blue eyes were showing the first signs of that whitish ring, the arcus senilis. But from the far end of the table Mr Atkins called out, ‘No, no, your Excellency; we must not trouble Dr Maturin; his mind is far above these simple joys.’

Stephen emptied his glass, set his eyes upon the appropriate knot, tapped the table and began,

‘The seas their wonders might reveal But Chloe’s eyes have more:

Nor all the treasure they conceal, Can equal mine on shore.’

His harsh, creaking voice, indicating rather than striking the note, did nothing to improve the ship’s reputation; but now Jack was accompanying him with a deep booming hum that made the glasses vibrate, and he went on with at least greater volume,

‘From native Ireland’s temp ‘rate coast

Remove me farther yet,

To shiver in eternal frost.

Or melt with India’s heat.’

At this point he saw that Mr Stanhope would not be able to outlast another verse: the heat, the want of air (the Surprise had the breeze directly aft and almost none came below), the tight-​packed cabin, the necessary toasts, the noise, had done their work; and the rapidly-​whitening face, the miserable fixed smile, meant a syncope within the next few bars.

‘Come, sir,’ he said, slipping from his place. ‘Come. A moment, if you please.’ He led him to his sleeping-​cabin, laid him down, loosened his neckcloth and waistband, and when some faint colour began to return, he left him in peace. Meanwhile the party had broken up, had tiptoed away; and unwilling to answer inquiries on the quarterdeck, Stephen made his way forward through the berth-​deck and the sickbay to the head of the ship, where he remained throughout the frigate’s evening activities, leaning on the bowsprit and watching the cutwater sheer through mile after mile of ocean, parting it with a sound like tearing silk, so that it streamed away in even curves along the Surprise’s side to join her wake, now eight thousand miles in length. The unfinished song ran in his head, and again and again he sang beneath his breath,

Her image shall my days beguile

And still my dream shall be…

Dream: that was the point. Little contact with reality, perhaps - a child of hope - a potentiality - infinitely better left unrealised. He had been most passionately attached to Diana Villiers, and he had felt a great affection for her, too, a strong affection as from one human being to another in something of the same case; and that, he thought, she had returned to some degree - all she was capable of returning. To what degree? She had treated him very badly both as a friend and a lover and he had welcomed what he called his liberation from her: a liberation that had not lasted, however. No great while after his last sight of her ‘prostituting herself in a box at the Opera’ - a warm expression by which he meant consciously using her charms to please other men - the unreasoning part of his mind evoked living images of these same charms, of that incredible grace of movement when it was truly spontaneous; and very soon his reasoning mind began to argue that this fault, too, was to be assimilated to the long catalogue of defects that he knew and accepted, defects that he felt to be outweighed if not cancelled by her qualities of wit and desperate courage: she was never dull, she was never cowardly. But moral considerations were irrelevant to Diana: in her, physical grace and dash took the place of virtue. The whole context was so different that an unchastity odious in another woman had what he could only call a purity in her: another purity: pagan, obviously - a purity from another code altogether. That grace had been somewhat blown upon to be sure, but there was enough and to spare; she had destroyed only the periphery; it was beyond her power to touch the essence of the thing, and that essence set her apart from any woman, any person, he had ever known.

This, at least, was his tentative conclusion and he had travelled these eight thousand miles with a continually mounting desire to see her again; and with an increasing dread of the event - desire exceeding dread, of course.