Patrick O'Brian - Master & Commander

'If it is fresh water you are wanting, I can show you a creek not far from here where you may fill all the barrels you choose.'

'Why did you never tell me?' cried Jack, shaking him by the hand and looking delighted – a disagreeable sight, for the left side of his face, head and neck was still seared a baboonish red and blue, it shone under Stephen's medicated grease, and through the grease rose a new frizz of yellow hair; all this, taken with his deep brown, shaved other cheek, gave him a wicked, degenerate, inverted look.

'You never asked.'

'Undefended? No batteries?'

'Never a house, far less a gun. Yet it was inhabited once, for there are the remains of a Roman villa on the top of the promontory, and you can just make out the road beneath the trees and the undergrowth cistus and lentisk. No doubt they used the spring: it is quite considerable, and it may, I conceive, have real medicinal qualities. The country people use it in cases of impotence.'

'And can you find it, do you think?'

'Yes,' said Stephen. He sat for a moment with his head down. 'Listen,' he said, 'will you do me a kindness?'

'With all my heart.'

'I have a friend who lives some two or three miles inland: I should Like you to land me and pick me up, say, twelve hours later.'

'Very well,' said Jack. It was fair enough. 'Very well,' he said again, looking aside to hide the knowing grin that would spread over his face. 'It is the night you would wish to spend ashore, I presume. We will stand in this evening you are sure we shall not be surprised?'

'Quite sure.'

'- send the cutter in again a little after sunrise. But what if I am forced off the land? What would you do then?'

'I should present myself the next morning, or the morning after that – a whole series of mornings, if need be. I must go,' he said, getting up at the sound of the bell, the still-feeble bell, that his new loblolly boy rang to signify that the sick might now assemble. 'I dare not trust that fellow alone with the drugs.' The sin-eater had discovered a malignance towards his shipmates: he had been found grinding creta alba into their gruel, under the persuasion that it was a far more active substance, far more sinister; and if ill-will had been enough, the sick-bay would have been swept clean days ago.

The cutter, followed by the launch, rowed attentively in through the warm darkness, with Dillon and Sergeant Quinn keeping watch on the sides of the high wooded inlet; and when the boats were two hundred yards from the cliff the exhalation of the stone-pines, mixed with the scent of the gum-cistus, met them it was like breathing another element.

'If you row a little more to the right,' said Stephen, 'you may avoid the rocks where the crayfish live.' In spite of the heat he had his black cloak over his shoulders, and sitting huddled there in the stern-sheets he stared into the narrowing cove with a singular intensity, looking deathly pale.

The stream, in times of spate, had formed a little bar,

and upon this the cutter grounded: everybody leapt out to float it over, and two seamen carried Stephen ashore. They put him down tenderly, well above the high-water mark, adjured him to take care of all them nasty sticks laying about and hurried back for his cloak. Falling and falling, the water had made a basin in the rock at the top of the beach, and here the sailors filled their barrels, while the marines stood guard at the outward extremities.

'What an agreeable dinner it was,' observed Dillon, sitting with Stephen upon a smooth rock, warm through and through, convenient to their hams.

'I have rarely eaten a better,' said Stephen. 'Never at sea.' Jack had acquired a French cook from the Santa Lucia, a royalist volunteer, and he was putting on weight like a prize ox. 'You were in a very copious flow of spirits, too.'

'That was clean against the naval etiquette. At a captain's table you speak when you are spoken to, and you agree; it makes for a tolerably dismal entertainment, but that is the custom. And after all, he does represent the King, I suppose. But I felt I should cast etiquette adrift and make a particular exertion – should try to do the civil thing far more than usual. I have not been altogether fair to himself, you know – far from it,' he added, nodding towards the Sophie, 'and it was handsome to invite me.'

'He does love a prize. But prize-taking is not his prime concern.'

'Just so. Though in passing I may say not everyone would know it – he does himself injustice. I do not think the men know it, for example. If they were not kept well in check by the steady officers, the bosun and the gunner, and I must admit that fellow Marshall too, I think there would be trouble with them. There may be still: prize-money is heady stuff. From prize-money to breaking bulk and plunder is no great step – there has been some already. And from plunder and drunkenness to breaking out entirely and even to mutiny itself is not a terrible long way further. Mutinies always happen in ships where the discipline is either too lax or too severe.'

'You are mistaken, sure, when you say they do not know him: unlearned men have a wonderful penetration in these matters – have you ever known a village reputation to be wrong? It is a penetration that seems to dissipate, with a little education, somewhat as the ability to remember poetry will go. I have known peasants who could recite two or three thousand verses. But would you indeed say our discipline is relaxed? It surprises me, but then I know so little of naval things.'

'No. What is commonly called discipline is quite strict with us. What I mean is something else – the intermediate terms, they might be called. A commander is obeyed by his officers because he is himself obeying; the thing is not in its essence personal; and so down. If he does not obey, the chain weakens. How grave I am, for all love. It was that poor unlucky soldier at Mahon I was thinking of brought all this morality into my mind. Do you not find it happens very often, that you are as gay as Garrick at dinner and then by supper-time you wonder why God made the world?'

'I do. Where is the connexion with the soldier?'

'It was prize-money we fought over. He said the whole thing was unfair – he was very angry and very poor. But he would have it we sea-officers were in the Navy for that reason alone. I told him he was mistaken, and he told me I lied. We walked to those long gardens at the top end of the quay – I had Jevons of the Implacable with me – and it was over in two passes. Poor, stupid, clumsy fellow: he came straight on to my point. What now, Shannahan?'

'Your honour, the casks are full.'

'Bung 'em up tight, then, and we will get 'em down to the water.'

'Goodbye,' said Stephen, standing up.

'We lose you, then?' said James.

'Yes. I am going up before it grows too dark.'

Yet it would have had to be strangely dark for his feet to have missed this path. It wound up, crossing and recrossing the stream, its steps kept open by the odd fisherman after crayfish, the impotent men going to bathe in the pool and by a few other travellers; and his hand reached out of itself for the branch that would help him over a deep place – a branch polished by many hands.

Up and up: and the warm air sighing through the pines. At one point he stepped out on to a bare rock and there, wonderfully far below already, rowed the boats with their train of almost sunken barrels, not unlike the spaced-out eggs of the common toad; then the path ran back under the trees and he did not emerge again until he was on the thyme and the short turf, the rounded top of the promontory jutting out bare from the sea of pines. Apart from a violet haze on the farther hills and a startling band of yellow in the sky, colour had all gone; but he saw white scuts bobbing away, and as he had expected there were the half-seen forms of shadowy nightjars wheeling and darting, turning like ghosts over his head. He sat down by a great stone that said Non fui non sum non curo, and gradually the rabbits came back, nearer and nearer, until on the windward side he could indeed hear their quick nibbling in the thyme. He meant to sit there until dawn, and to establish a continuity in his mind, if that could be done: the friend (though existent) was a mere pretext. Silence, darkness and these countless familiar scents and the warmth of the land had become (in their way) as necessary to him as air.