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

‘May you not find the men grow wilful and discontented? May they not, with a united mind, rush violently from the ship?’

‘They will not be pleased. But they know we must catch the monsoon with a well-​found ship; and they know they are in the Navy - they have chosen their cake, and must lie on it.’

‘You mean, they cannot have their bed and eat it.’

‘No, no, it is not quite that, neither. I mean - I wish you would not confuse my mind, Stephen. I mean it is only a week or so, to snap up everything that can be moved before Ethalion or Revenge come in, screeching for spars and cables; then I dare say we can take it easier, with native caulkers from the yard, and some liberty for our people. But there is a vast deal of work to be done -you saw her spirketing? - weeks and weeks of work; and we must hurry.’

From his earliest acquaintance with the Navy, Stephen had been oppressed by this sense of hurry - hurry to look over the next horizon, hurry to reach a certain port, hurry to get away from it in case something should be happening in a distant strait: and hurry now, not only to gather rose-​pods, but to catch the monsoon. If they did not set the envoy down in Kampong by a given date, Jack would be obliged to beat all the way back against head-​winds, losing months of valuable time, time that might be spent in active warfare. ‘Why,’ cried he, ‘the war might be over before we round the Cape, if we miss the north-​east monsoon: a pretty state of affairs.’

And in the immediate future there was this matchless opportunity for making the dear Surprise what she had been, and what she ought to be again. Stephen cared for none of these things; the fire that vainly urged Jack to go ashore burnt with a devouring, an irresistible force in him.

He left Jack caressing a massive baulk of timber, the finest teak in the island. He said, ‘My patients are in the hospital; Mr Stanhope is recovering with the Governor; there is no place for me here. I must devote, a certain amount of time to the shore - a variety of reasons require my presence on the shore.’

‘I dare say you must,’ said Jack absently. ‘Mr Babbington, Mr Babbington! Where is that infernal slowbelly of a carpenter? I dare say you must: but however busy you are, do not miss the getting out of our lower masts. We go alongside the sheer-​hulk, and they lift ‘em out like kiss my hand - it is the prettiest thing in the world. I shall send word the day before - you would be very sorry to miss the sheer-​hulk.’

Stephen came aboard from time to time, once with a mathematical Parsee who wished to see the frigate’s navigation tables; once with a child of unknown race who had found him lost among the blue buffaloes of the Aungier maidan, in danger of being trampled, and who had led him back by the hand, talking all the way in an Urdu adapted to the meanest understanding; and once with a Chinese master-​mariner, a Christian from Macao, a spoilt priest, with whom he conversed in Latin, showing him the working of the patent chain-​pump. And now and then he appeared at Jack’s lodgings, where in theory he, too, had his bed and board. Jack was too discreet to ask him where he slept when they did not meet, and too well-​bred to comment on the fact that sometimes he walked about in a towel, sometimes in European dress, and sometimes in a loose shirt, hanging over white pantaloons, but always with an expression of tireless secret delight.

As for sleeping, he lay where he chose, under trees, on verandas, in a caravanserai, on temple steps, in the dust among rows of other dust-​sleepers wrapped as it were in shrouds - wherever extreme bodily fatigue laid his down. Nowhere in the crowded city, accustomed to a hundred races and innumerable tongues, did he excite the least comment as he wandered through the bazaars, the Arab horse-​lines, among the toddy-​groves, in and out of temples, pagodas, churches, mosques, along the strand, among the Hindu funeral pyres, through and through the city, gazing at the Mahrattas, Bengalis, Rajputs, Persians, Sikhs, Malays, Siamese, Javans, Philippinoes, Khirgiz, Ethiopians, Parsees, Baghdad Jews, Sinhalese, Tibetans, they gazed back at him, when they were not otherwise employed, but with no particular curiosity, no undue attention, certainly with no kind of animosity. Sometimes his startling pale eyes, even more colourless now against his dusky skin, called for a second wondering glance; and sometimes he was taken for a holy man. Oil was poured on him more than once, and tepid cakes of a sweet vegetable substance were pressed into his hand with smiles; fruit, a bowl of yellow rice; and he was offered buttered tea, fresh toddy, the juice of sugar-​cane Before the partners of the mainmast were renewed he came home with a wreath of marigolds round his bare dusty shoulders, an offering from a company of whores: he hung the wreath on the right-​hand knob of his blackwood chair and sat down to his journal.

‘I had expected wonders from Bombay; but my heated expectations, founded upon the Arabian Nights, a glimpse of the Moorish towns in Africa, and books of travel, were poor thin insubstantial things compared with the reality. There is here a striving, avid and worldly civilisation, of course; these huge and eager markets, this incessant buying and selling, make that self-​evident; but I had no conception of the ubiquitous sense of the holy, no notion of how another world can permeate the secular. Filth, stench, disease, “gross superstition” as our people say, extreme poverty, promiscuous universal defecation, do not affect it: nor do they affect my sense of the humanity with which I am surrounded. What an agreeable city it is, where a man may walk naked in the heat if it pleases him! I was speaking today with an unclothed Hindu religious, a parama-​hamsa, on the steps of a Portuguese church, a true gymnosophist; and I remarked that in such a climate wisdom and clothing might bear an inverse proportion to one another. But measuring my garment with his hand he observed that there was not one single wisdom.

‘Never have I so blessed this facility for coming by a superficial knowledge of a language. My Fort William grammar, my trifle of Arabic, and above all my intercourse with Achmet and Butoo, bear such fruit! Had I been dumb, I might almost as well have been blind also: what is the sight of a violin, and the violin lying mute? This dear child Dil teaches me a great deal, talking indefatigably, a steady flow of comment and narrative, with incessant repetition where I do not understand - she insists on being understood, and no evasion deceives her: Though I do not believe Urdu is her mother-​tongue. She and the crone with whom she lives converse in quite a different language: not a familiar word. The ancient gentlewoman, offering me the child for twelve rupees, assured me she was a virgin and wished to show mc the fibula that guaranteed her state. It would have been quite superfluous: what could be more virginal than this tubular fearless creature that looks me directly in the face as though I were a not very intelligent tame animal, and that communicates her thoughts, views, the moment they are born as though I, too, were a child? She can throw a stone, leap, climb like a boy; and yet she is no garcon manquŽ neither, for in addition to this overflowing communicative affection she also has a kind of motherliness and wishes to rule my movements and my diet for my own good - disapproves my smoking bhang, eating opium, wearing trousers of more than a given length. Choleric, however: on Friday she beat a doe-​eyed boy who wished to join himself to us in the palm-​grove, threatening his companions with a brickbat and with oaths that made them stare. She eats voraciously: but how often in the week? She owns one piece of cotton cloth that she wears sometimes as a kilt, sometimes as a shawl; an oiled black stone that she worships perfunctorily; and her fibula. When fed she is, I believe, perfectly happy; longing only, but with no real hope, for a silver bangle. Almost all the