The Ionian Mission. Patrick O’Brian

Bible, I do not doubt but we shall have a tolerable brisk crew by the time we reach the flag. And to encourage ’em I have laid in a fine stock of private powder, the stock of a fireworks-maker lately deceased, a most prodigious bargain. It was the clerk of cheque that gave me wind of it – he means to marry the widow – and although it is a little mixed with red orpiment and so on the ordnance-master swears it is sound. The only thing between me and perfect felicity,’ said Jack, thrusting the cloud of legal troubles still farther back into the recesses of his mind, ‘is the threat of these parsons and the absence of the other lieutenants: manning always means a prodigious amount of work, and far too much of it falls on poor Pullings. We must have more lieutenants at once. Pullings is quite worn out, and the next few days will be rough going indeed.’

      ‘So he is too: and grown strangely snappish from want of repose. He rounded on me with inconceivable ferocity for turning a small paltry handful of men away: his appetite for hands is unmeasured, insatiable, inhuman. I must give him a comfortable dose tonight. Seventy-five drops of the tincture of laudanum, and tomorrow he will be the complaisant amiable obliging Thomas Pullings we have always known: otherwise it must be the blue pill for him. Blue pill and black draught.’

      ‘With any luck the others should appear tomorrow, and that will take some of the load off his shoulders: and the Commissioner has a plan for sending the parsons in a merchantman. Your mates came aboard this afternoon, I collect: I hope you are pleased with them?’

      ‘I have no doubt that they are as competent as their certificates state them to be, as competent as we have any right to expect in surgeons.’ Stephen was a physician, and surgeons (though worthy souls often enough, taken individually) had not yet lived down their long, long association with barbers. ‘But even if the one had been Podalirius and the other Machaon I should still have preferred to be alone.’

      ‘Are they not quite the thing?’ asked Jack. ‘I will try to arrange a transfer if you do not like them.’

      ‘You are very good; but it is not that I have taken any disgust either to the young man or to the old. It is only that I dislike the whole notion of subordination. The corporal lurks in almost every bosom, and each man tends to use authority when he has it, thus destroying his natural relationship with his fellows, a disastrous state of affairs for both sides. Do away with subordination and you do away with tyranny: without subordination we should have no Neros, no Tamerlanes, no Buonapartes.’

      ‘Stuff,’ said Jack. ‘Subordination is the natural order: there is subordination in Heaven – Thrones and Dominions take precedence over Powers and Principalities, Archangels and ordinary foremast angels; and so it is in the Navy. You have come to the wrong shop for anarchy, brother.’

      ‘Be that as it may,’ said Stephen, ‘I had far rather sail alone; yet with some six hundred souls crammed into this insecure and mouldy wooden vessel, many verminous, many poxed, and some perhaps harbouring the seeds of the gaol-fever, I need some assistance even in the ordinary daily course, to say nothing of action, God forbid. And in point of fact, since I am likely to be absent some of the time, I have taken peculiar pains to come by an exceptionally well-qualified, well-recommended senior assistant. But listen, why are you so opposed to these clergymen? Surely you are no longer so weak as to set store by superstition?’

      ‘Of course not,’ said Jack quickly. ‘It is only for the sake of the hands,’ – his invariable reply. ‘Besides,’ he said after a pause, ‘you cannot talk bawdy with parsons. It ain’t fitting.’

      ‘But you never do talk bawdy,’ said Stephen. It was true, or at least almost true: although no kind of a prude, Jack Aubrey was a man who preferred action to talk, fact to phantasm, and although he did possess a small stock of lewd stories for the end of dinners when imaginations grew warm and often lubricious he usually forgot them, or left out the point.

      ‘Oh well,’ said Jack: and then, ‘Did you ever meet Bach?’

      ‘Which Bach?’

      ‘London Bach.’

      ‘Not I.’

      ‘I did. He wrote some pieces for my uncle Fisher, and his young man copied them out fair. But they were lost years and years ago, so last time I was in town I went to see whether I could find the originals: the young man has set up on his own, having inherited his master’s music-library. We searched through the papers – such a disorder you would hardly credit, and I had always supposed publishers were as neat as bees – we searched for hours, and no uncle’s pieces did we find. But the whole point is this: Bach had a father.’

      ‘Heavens, Jack, what things you tell me. Yet upon recollection I seem to have known other men in much the same case.’

      ‘And this father, this old Bach, you understand me, had written piles and piles of musical scores in the pantry.’

      ‘A whimsical place to compose in, perhaps; but then birds sing in trees, do they not? Why not antediluvian Germans in a pantry?’

      ‘I mean the piles were kept in the pantry. Mice and black-beetles and cook-maids had played Old Harry with some cantatas and a vast great Passion according to St Mark, in High Dutch; but lower down all was well, and I brought away several pieces, ’cello for you, fiddle for me, and some for both together. It is strange stuff, fugues and suites of the last age, crabbed and knotted sometimes and not at all in the modern taste, but I do assure you, Stephen, there is meat in it. I have tried this partita in C a good many times, and the argument goes so deep, so close and deep, that I scarcely follow it yet, let alone make it sing. How I should love to hear it played really well – to hear Viotti dashing away.’

      Stephen studied the ’cello suite in his hand, booming and humming sotto voce. ‘Tweedly-tweedly, tweedly tweedly, deedly deedly pom pom pom. Oh, this would call for the delicate hand of the world,’ he said. ‘Otherwise it would sound like boors dancing. Oh, the double-stopping … and how to bow it?’

      ‘Shall we make an attempt upon the D minor double sonata?’ said Jack, ‘and knit up the ravelled sleeve of care with sore labour’s bath?’

      ‘By all means,’ said Stephen. ‘A better way of dealing with a sleeve cannot be imagined.’

      Neither had at any time been more than a fairly accomplished amateur: of recent years neither had had much leisure for practice, and various wounds (an American musket-ball in Jack’s case, a French interrogation in Stephen’s) had so slowed down their fingers that in places they were obliged to indicate the notes by hooting; and as they felt their way through the difficult sonata time after time they made the night so hideous that Killick’s indignation broke out at last and he said to the Captain’s cook, ‘There they go again, tweedly-deedly, tweedly-deedly, belly-aching the whole bleeding night, and the toasted cheese seizing on to their plates like goddam glue, which I dursen’t go in to fetch them; and never an honest tune from beginning to end.’

      Perhaps there was not: but after a particularly difficult, severe and abstract passage the last movement ended with a triumphant summing-up and resolution that they could both play at first sight and that they repeated again and again; and the grave happiness of the music was still with Captain Aubrey when he walked on to his quarterdeck in the bright morning to see his stump topgallantmasts and their attendant royals come aboard, followed almost immediately by the Tamar’s barge bringing a score of glum but resigned and obviously competent Skates to the larboard side and by a Plymouth wherry with two pink-faced young men, very carefully shaved, wearing identical uniforms, their best, and solemn expressions. The wherry hooked on to the starboard mainchains: the young men ran up the side in order of seniority – two whole weeks lay between them – saluted the quarterdeck and looked quickly fore and aft for the officer of the watch. They saw no calm dignified figure pacing up and down with a telescope under his arm and an epaulette on his shoulder, but after a moment a very dirty tall thin man in tarry trousers and a round jacket stepped towards them from the busy crowd at the foot of the foremast; his eyes were rimmed with red, his expression stern, as well it might be, Pullings having been obliged to keep watch as well as carry out all his other duties since the Worcester left Portsmouth. The first young man took off his hat and said in