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This page is for book one: Master and Commander!
Welcome to my commentary on book two! Strap on your slash goggles and enjoy!
Captain Aubrey was standing by the aftermost larboard carronade, with a completely abstracted, non-committal look upon his face. From that place, being tall, he could see the whole situation, the rapidly, smoothly changing triangle of three ships; and close beside him stood two shorter figures, the one Dr Maturin, formerly his surgeon in the Sophie, and the other a man in black [...]. They were talking in a language thought by some to be Latin. They were talking eagerly, and Jack Aubrey, intercepting a furious glance across the deck, leant down to whisper in his friend's ear, 'Stephen, will you not go below? They will be wanting you in the cockpit any moment now.
Their first appearance in the book and Jack is already leaning down to tell Stephen to stop looking so damn suspicious.
'It is charming to see how sensible the men are—how sensible of the blessings of peace,' said Stephen Maturin [...].
'Aye. The blessings of peace. Oh, certainly,' said the chaplain, who had no living to retire to, no private means, and who knew that the Charwell would be paid off as soon as she reached Portsmouth. He walked deliberately out of the wardroom, to pace the quarterdeck in a thoughtful silence, leaving Captain Aubrey and Dr Maturin alone.
'I thought he would have shown more pleasure,' observed Stephen Maturin.
'It's an odd thing about you, Stephen,' said Jack Aubrey, looking at him with affection. 'You have been at sea quite some time now, and no one could call you a fool, but you have no more notion of a sailor's life than a babe unborn. [...]'
And oh boy, chapter one, we've got our first use of "affection"! Yippie!
'Haven't you heard the old song? I'll tip you a stave.' [Jack] hummed the tune, and in a discreet rumble he sang.
'Says Jack, "There is very good news, there is peace both by land and by sea;
Great guns no more shall be used, for we all disbanded be,"
Says the Admiral, "That's very bad news;" says the captain, "My heart will break;"
The lieutenant cries, "What shall I do? For I know not what course for to take."
Says the doctor, "I'm a gentleman too, I'm a gentleman of the first rank; I will go to some country fair, and there I'll set up mountebank."
Ha, ha, that's for you, Stephen—ha, ha, ha— [...]'
Fuck, this really is funnier to me than it should be...
And of course Jack immediately gets caught singing it:
Mr Quarles looked in at the door, recognized the tune and drew in a sharp breath; but Jack was a guest, a superior officer—a master and commander, no less, with an epaulette on his shoulder—and he was broad as well as tall. Mr Quarles let his breath out in a sigh and closed the door.
'I should have sung softer,' said Jack, and drawing his chair closer to the table he went on in a low voice, 'No, those are the chaps I am sorry for. I'm sorry for myself too, naturally—no great likelihood of a ship, and of course no enemy to cruise against if I do get one. But it's nothing in comparison of them. We've had luck with prize-money, and if only it were not for this infernal delay over making me post I should be perfectly happy to have a six months' run ashore. Hunting. Hearing some decent music. The opera—we might even go to Vienna! Eh? What do you say, Stephen? [...]'
...And also immediately invites Stephen for a date to the opera once they're on land.
[Stephen] was calling out in a loud tone to his companion, [...] 'I tell you what it is, Jack,' he was saying, 'I tell you what it is . . .'
'You sir—you on the mule,' cried old Mr Savile's furious voice. 'Will you let the God-damned dogs get on with their work? Hey? Hey? Is this a God-damned coffee-house? I appeal to you, is this an infernal debating society?'
Captain Aubrey pursed his lips demurely and pushed his horse over the twenty yards that separated them. 'Tell me later, Stephen,' he said in a low voice, leading his friend round the covert out of the master's sight. 'Tell me later, when they have found their fox.'
The demure look did not sit naturally upon Jack Aubrey's face, which in this weather was as red as his coat, and as soon as they were round the corner, under the lee of a wind-blown thorn, his usual expectant cheerfulness returned [...].
'Looking for a fox, are they?' said Stephen Maturin, as though hippogriffs were the more usual quarry in England[...]
I had forgotten how much time they spend on land in book two! Stephen messing up in his naval etiquette on the Sophie was mostly fine--- everyone on the ship respected him as their ship's doctor and their Captain's particular friend, and was therefore happy to kindly correct him--- but watching him blunder into social mishaps on land is so much more embarrassing... Thankfully Jack is there to come to his aid, hehehe. Imagining Jack trying to purse his lips "demurely"... very demure, very mindful.
...Oh, and of course the hippogriff joke, lol.
The noise died away: a young hound came out and stared into the open. Stephen Maturin moved from behind the close-woven thorn to follow the flight of a falcon overhead, and at the sight of the mule the chestnut mare began to caper, flashing her white stockings and tossing her head.
'Get over, you—,' said the girl, in her pure clear young voice. Jack had never heard a girl say—before, and he turned to look at her with a particular interest. She was busy coping with the mare's excitement, but after a moment she caught his eye and frowned. He looked away, smiling, for she was the prettiest thing—indeed, beautiful, with her heightened colour and her fine straight back, sitting her horse with the unconscious grace of a midshipman at the tiller in a lively sea. She had black hair and blue eyes; a certain ram-you-damn-you air that was slightly comic and more than a little touching in so slim a creature. She was wearing a shabby blue habit with white cuffs and lapels, like a naval lieutenant's coat, and on top of it all a dashing tricorne with a tight curl of ostrich-feather. In some ingenious way, probably by the use of combs, she had drawn up her hair under this hat so as to leave one ear exposed; and this perfect ear, as Jack observed when the mare came crabwise towards him, was as pink as . . .
'There is that fox of theirs,' remarked Stephen, in a conversational tone. 'There is that fox we hear so much about. Though indeed, it is a vixen, sure.'
I do love "Jack had never heard a girl say—before". That's an extremely funny way to go about writing that. But also, no way in hell is it an accident to have Stephen commenting on a literal fox and vixen just as Jack is eyeing up a beautiful young woman, especially the beautiful young woman who will eventually be one of his (and Stephen's) love interests.
And also... is it just me, or is Jack's proclivity to compare her to various naval men a little...
Jack wheeled his horse, called out, 'Come on, Stephen,' and put it at the rail. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the chestnut flash between his friend and the crowd in the gate. As his horse rose Jack screwed round to see how the girl would get over, and the gelding instantly felt this change of balance. It took the rail flying high and fast, landed with its head low, and with a cunning twist of its shoulder and an upward thrust from behind it unseated its rider.
He did not fall at once. It was a slow, ignominious glide down that slippery near shoulder, with a fistful of mane in his right hand; but the horse was the master of the situation now, and in twenty yards the saddle was empty.
The horse's satisfaction did not last, however. Jack's boot was wedged in his near stirrup; it would not come free, and here was his heavy person jerking and thumping along at the gelding's side, roaring and swearing horribly. The horse began to grow alarmed—to lose its head—to snort—to stare wildly—and to run faster and faster across those dark, flint-strewn, unforgiving furrows.
[...] the mule, the last of the vanishing field, turned and raced back to cut the gelding off, swarming along in its inhuman way, very close to the ground. It outran the men, crossed the gelding's path, stood firm and took the shock: like a hero Stephen flung himself off, seized the reins and clung there [...].
[...] The ploughman was leading the shamefaced horse to the side of the field, while the other two propped raw bones and bloody head between them, listening gravely to his explanations. The mule walked behind.
In a rare reversal of the norm, Jack falls off of something and Stephen has to race in to help! I do like how brazen Jack is at times. His confidence is warranted at sea, maybe, but on land... Not so much, perhaps.
Sophia, the eldest, was a tall girl with wide-set grey eyes, a broad, smooth forehead, and a wonderful sweetness of expression—soft fair hair, inclining to gold: an exquisite skin. She was a reserved creature, living much in an inward dream whose nature she did not communicate to anyone. Perhaps it was her mother's unprincipled rectitude that had given her this early disgust for adult life; but whether or no, she seemed very young for her twenty-seven years. There was nothing in the least degree affected or kittenish about this: rather a kind of ethereal quality—the quality of a sacrificial object. [...] She spoke little, in company or out, but she was capable of a sudden dart of sharpness, of a remark that showed much more intelligence and reflection than would have been expected from her rudimentary education and her very quiet provincial life. These remarks had a much greater force, coming from an amiable, pliant, and as it were sleepy reserve, and before now they had startled men who did not know her well—men who had been prating away happily with the conscious superiority of their sex. They dimly grasped an underlying strength, and they connected it with her occasional expression of secret amusement, the relish of something that she did not choose to share.
Finally, Sophie's introduction! I really love her so much--- Spoilers, but her and Jack get married and have kids, lmao.
Usually the canon wife in this type of a story is a boring nothingness of a character; a perfect woman who only exists to be a prize for the main male character and to show that he's not incapable of loving women, but Sophie is nothing close to that. She really feels like a fully developed character just as much as any of the male characters do. And, as much as I ship Jack and Stephen, and as much as I am a staunch OTP-er and usually detest the "X has two hands" meme, this is the rare occasion for me where I do have to agree that Jack absolutely has two hands, and he can absolutely have a wife on land and a husband at sea.
'[...] And now, Admiral, what have you to tell us of the other gentleman at Melbury Lodge, Captain Aubrey's particular friend?' [said Mrs. Williams]
'Oh, him,' said Admiral Haddock. 'I do not know much about him. He was Captain Aubrey's surgeon in this sloop. And I believe I heard he was someone's natural son. His name is Maturin.'
[...]
'But now I come to think of it,' he went on, gazing round the room 'what a capital thing it is for you girls, to have a couple of sailors with their pockets full of guineas, turned ashore and pitched down on your very doorstep. Anyone in want of a husband has but to whistle, and they will come running, ha, ha, ha!'
The admiral's sally had a wretched reception; not one of the young ladies joined in his mirth. Sophia and Diana looked grave [...]
This last line is also especially funny with the knowledge that Sophie and Diana will end up as the canon love interests of Jack and Stephen, LOL.
On the way [Diana] saw Sophia coming along the path that led through the park [...]. Sophia was walking fast, swinging her arms and muttering 'Larboard, starboard,' as she came.
'Yo ho, shipmate,' called Diana over the hedge, and she was surprised to see her cousin blush cherry-pink. The chance shot had gone straight home, for Sophia had been browsing in the admiral's library, looking at Navy Lists, naval memoirs, Falconer's Dictionary of the Marine, and the Naval Chronicle [...]
I don't always find it funny when Diana pokes fun at her cousins, but this "chance shot" of teasing Sophie about studying naval terms for a better chance with Jack got me, lol.
[...] sometimes Mrs Williams wondered whether [Jack] really were quite the thing—whether those strange tales about sea-officers might possibly be true in his case. Was it not very odd that he should live with Dr Maturin?
...And they were roommates.
'Good morning, Villiers. You are late. You are very late.' [said Stephen]
'It is the one advantage there is in being a woman. You do know I am a woman, Maturin?' [said Diana]
'I am obliged to suppose it, since you affect to have no notion of time—cannot tell what o'clock it is. Though why the trifling accident of sex should induce a sentient being, let alone such an intelligent being as you, to waste half this beautiful clear morning, I cannot conceive. Come, let me help you to mount. Sex—sex . . .'
'Hush, Maturin. You must not use words like that here. It was bad enough yesterday.'
'Yesterday? Oh, yes. But I am not the first man to say that wit is the unexpected copulation of ideas. Far from it. It is a commonplace.'
'As far as my aunt is concerned you are certainly the first man who ever used such an expression in public.'
They rode up Heberden Down: a still, brilliant morning with a little frost; the creak of leather, the smell of horse, steaming breath. 'I am not in the least degree interested in women as such,' said Stephen. 'Only in persons. [...]'
I admit I'm much less of a fan of the canon Stephen/Diana than I am the canon Jack/Sophie, but exchanges like this make it more tolerable. Stephen really doesn't give too much of a fuck about acting proper in front of her, is more interested in treating men and women like equals than most people are (at least for the time period and setting), and that pretty much suits Diana just fine--- as long as it isn't to her detriment or in front of Mrs. Williams, lmao.
The horse slowed to a walk—the bean-fed horse, as it proved by a thunderous, long, long fart.
'I beg your pardon,' said [Babbington] in the silence.
'Oh, that's all right,' said Diana coldly. 'I thought it was the horse.'
This fucking Babbington comic relief. God.
Don't worry, now you can't be called pretentious for reading an age of sail period piece novel--- after all, it's got fart jokes!
Sophia had on a pink dress with a gold sash, and Diana said to Stephen Maturin, 'She is lovely. There is not another woman in the room to touch her. That is the most dangerous colour in the world, but with her complexion it is perfect. I would give my eye-teeth for such a skin.'
'The gold and the pearls help,' said Stephen. 'The one echoes her hair and the other her teeth. I will tell you a thing about women. They are superior to men in this, that they have an unfeigned, objective, candid admiration for good looks in other women—a real pleasure in their beauty. Yours, too, is a most elegant dress: other women admire it. I have remarked this. Not only from their glances, but most positively, by standing behind them and listening to their conversation.'
Diana/Stephen is also at its best when they sit in a corner and debrief their situation like a pair of old queens.
[Diana said,] '[Men] offer what they call friendship or some stuff of that kind—the name don't matter—and all they want in return for this great favour is your heart, your life, your future, your—I will not be coarse, but you know very well what I mean. There is no friendship in men: I know what I am talking about, believe me. There is not one round here [...] who has not tried it [...]. Who the devil do they think I am?' she exclaimed, drumming on the arm of her chair. '[...] What do you think my life is like, without a sou and under the thumb of a vulgar, pretentious, ignorant woman who detests me? What do you think it is like, looking into this sort of a future, with my looks going, the only thing I have? Listen, Maturin, I speak openly to you, because I like you; I like you very much, and I believe you have a kindness for me—you are almost the only man I have met in England I can treat as a friend—trust as a friend.'
'You have my friendship, sure,' said Stephen heavily.
And here we see the wild Stephenii Maturinicus immediately get friendzoned.
'Have you known [Jack] long? But I suppose all you naval people have known one another, or of one another, for ever.' [said Diana]
[Stephen said,] 'Oh, I am no seaman, at all. I first met him in Minorca, in the year one, in the spring of the year one. I had taken a patient there, for the Mediterranean climate—he died—and I met Jack at a concert. We took a liking to one another, and he asked me to sail with him as his surgeon. I agreed, being quite penniless at the time, and we have been together ever since. [...]'
I just always like when Jack or Stephen recount how they met each other... It almost reads like someone's matter-of-fact description of how they met their spouse, lolol.
We begin with an entry from Stephen's journaling:
'February 15 . . . then when she suddenly kissed me, the strength left my knees, quite ludicrously, and I could scarcely follow her into the ball-room with any countenance. I had sworn to allow no such thing again, no strong dolorous emotion ever again: my whole conduct of late proves how I lie. I have done everything in my power to get my heart under the harrow.
'February 21. I reflect upon Jack Aubrey. How helpless a man is, against direct attack by a woman. As soon as she leaves the schoolroom a girl learns to fend off, ward off wild love; it becomes second nature; it offends no code; it is commended not only by the world but even by those very men who are thus repulsed. How different for a man! He has no such accumulated depth of armour; and the more delicate, the more gallant, the more "honourable" he is the less he is able to withstand even a remote advance. He must not wound: and in this case there is little inclination to wound.
[...]
'JA is uneasy, discontented with himself, discontented with Sophia's reluctance—coyness is no word to use for that dear sweet pure affectionate young woman's hesitation. Speaks of wincing fillies and their nonsense: he has never been able to bear frustration. This in part is what Diana Villiers means by his immaturity. If he did but know it the evident mutual liking between him and DV is in fact good for his suit. Sophia is perhaps the most respectable girl I have known, but she is after all a woman. JA is not percipient in these matters. Yet on the other hand he is beginning to look at me with some doubt. This is the first time there has been any reserve in our friendship; it is painful to me and I believe to him. I cannot bring myself to look upon him with anything but affection; but when I think of the possibilities, the physical possibilities I say, why then—'
'DV insists upon my inviting her to Melbury to play billiards: she plays well, of course— can give either of us twenty in a hundred. Her insistence is accompanied by an ignoble bullying and an ignoble pretty pretty cajolery, to which I yield, both of us knowing exactly what we are about. This talk of friendship deceives neither of us; and yet it does exist, even on her side, I believe. My position would be the most humiliating in the world but for the fact that she is not so clever as she thinks: her theory is excellent, but she has not the control of her pride or her other passions to carry it into effect. She is cynical, but not nearly cynical enough, whatever she may say. If she were, I should not be obsessed.[...]'
And so begins the dreaded love quadrangle...
We've got:
Sophie <---> Jack <---> Diana <--- Stephen
...At least on land, anyway... For my money, at sea it'll seem closer to:
Sophie <---> Jack <---> Stephen ---> Diana
In any case, putting aside my whinging about being force-fed het, let's look at this line in particular: "This is the first time there has been any reserve in our friendship; it is painful to me and I believe to him. I cannot bring myself to look upon him with anything but affection" Ack. I'm of two minds about the times when Jack and Stephen aren't getting along as well as they usually do. On one hand it's captivating to read, but on the other, it makes me so sad...
'Stephen, Stephen, Stephen!' Jack's voice came along the corridor, growing louder and ending in a roar as he thrust his head into the room. 'Oh, there you are. I was afraid you had gone off to your stoats again. The carrier has brought you an ape.'
'What sort of an ape?' asked Stephen.
'A damned ill-conditioned sort of an ape. It had a can of ale at every pot-house on the road, and it is reeling drunk. It has been offering itself to Babbington.'
...Don't be too sad, though, because we've got another Babbington comic relief moment with a quite literally hysterical monkey.
Jack looked at his watch. 'What do you say to a hand of cards before we go?'
'With all my heart.' [said Stephen]
Piquet was their game. The cards flew fast, shuffled, cut, and dealt again: they had played together so long that each knew the other's style through and through. Jack's was a cunning alternation of risking everything for the triumphant point of eight, and of a steady, orthodox defence, fighting for every last trick. Stephen's was based upon Hoyle, Laplace, the theory of probabilities, and his knowledge of Jack's character.
[...]
They played. 'The rest are mine,' said Stephen, as the singleton king fell to his ace. 'Ten for cards, and capot. We must stop. Five guineas, if you please; you shall have your revenge in London.'
'If I had not thrown away my hearts,' said Jack, 'I should have had you on toast. What amazing cards you have held these last few weeks, Stephen.'
'Skill enters into this game.'
'It is luck, all luck! You have the most amazing luck with cards. I should be sorry, was you in love with anyone.'
The pause lasted no more than a second before the door opened and the horses were reported alongside, but its effect hung about them for miles as they trotted through the cold drizzle along the London road.
I was about to make another joke about metaphors, like I do when they play music together, but then that last line from Jack is just... Maybe even above my paygrade as a professional slash misinterpretor. Whew. I know it's meant to be about their shared interest in Diana, but it's so open to being interpreted in certain other ways...! In any case, yeah, the love quadrangle is quadrangling.
'It is a prodigious sum to pay for a fiddle, and I do not think I could square it with my conscience. I am not really a good enough player. But I should just like to handle it again, and tuck it under my chin.' [said Jack]
'A good fiddle would bring you into bloom, and you earned an Amati by every minute you spent on the deck of the Cacafuego. Certainly you must have your fiddle. Any innocent pleasure is a real good: there are not so many of them.'
'Must I? I have a great respect for your judgment, Stephen. If you are not long at the Admiralty, perhaps you would step round and give me your opinion of its tone.'
Do we think Stephen is encouraging Jack to buy another fiddle for Jack's sake, or for his own...? (And here we are, back on my playing-music-together-is-always-a-metaphor bullshit!)
Oh, and just after some important plot stuff, when Stephen comes back to where Jack is still deciding on the fiddle:
'I tell you what it is, Stephen,' [Jack] said. 'I do not know that I really like its tone. Listen—'
'If the day were a little warmer, air,' said the shopman, 'it would bring out its fruitiness. [...]'
'Well, I don't know,' said Jack. 'I think I shall leave it for today. Just put up these strings in a paper for me, will you, together with the rosin. Keep the fiddle, and I will let you know one way or the other by the end of the week. Stephen,' he said, taking his friend's arm and guiding him across the busy street, 'I must have been playing that fiddle a good hour and more, and I still don't know my own mind.'
I really love when they take each other by the arm or elbow, obviously. Ehehehehe. "Bring out its fruitiness", indeed.
'Let me look to your pistols,' said Jack, as the trees came closer to the road. 'You have no notion of hammering your flints.'
'They are very well,' said Stephen, unwilling to open his holsters (a teratoma in one, a bottled Arabian dormouse in the other). 'Do you apprehend any danger?'
'This is an ugly stretch of road, with all these disbanded soldiers turned loose. [...] Come, let me have your pistols. I thought as much: what is this?'
'A teratoma,' said Stephen sulkily.
'What is a teratoma?' asked Jack, holding the object in his hand. 'A kind of grenado?'
'It is an inward wen, a tumour we find, occasionally, in the abdominal cavity. Sometimes they contain long black hair, sometimes a set of teeth: this has both hair and teeth. It belonged to a Mr Elkins of the City, an eminent cheese-monger. I prize it much.'
'By God,' cried Jack, thrusting it back into the holster and wiping his hand vehemently upon the horse, 'I do wish you would leave people's bellies alone. So you have no pistols at all, I collect?'
'If you wish to be so absolute, no, I have not.'
'You will never make old bones, brother,' said Jack, [...]. 'There is an inn, not a bad inn, half a mile off the side-road: what do you say to lying there tonight?'
Firstly, Stephen having a fucking teratoma and a dormouse instead of pistols. I love him so much. There is so much wrong with him.
Secondly, let's all giggle at the pair of them spending the night at an inn together. We can only hope there will be a shortage of beds...
For Sophia brimstone was something to be mixed with treacle and given to children on Fridays: she could still feel the odious lumps between her teeth. This showed in her face, and Jack added, 'They have to have it to make gunpowder. [...]'
LOL. Not the brimstone and treacle! Someone get Mary Poppins on the case!
'Surely you cannot go today. You must lie down and rest.' [said Sophie]
'Today it must be, alas.' [said Jack]
'Then you must not ride. You must take a chaise and post up.'
'Yes. That is just what Stephen said. I will do it: I have ordered one from the Goat.'
'What a dear good man he is: he must be such a comfort to you. Such a good friend. [...]'
With lines like these, you can really see why simultaneously shipping Jack/Stephen and Jack/Sophie with a sort of a polycule dynamic (not that it'd be by that name) is such a popular way to go about it.
'The Cacafuego was a thirty-two gun xebec-frigate, my Lord.' [said Jack]
'She was a privateer, sir.' [said St. Vincent]
'Only by a damned lawyer's quibble,' said Jack, his voice rising.
'What the fucking hell is this language to me, sir? Do you know who you are talking to, sir? Do you know where you are?'
'I beg your pardon, my Lord.'
"What the fucking hell is this language to me, sir?" LMFAOOOO.
Sorry, sorry, I know, as much as I made a point of skewering the farting horse earlier, the first usage of fuck has gotten to me... Poor Jack's gotten all of his prize money taken away and I'm sitting here laughing at him getting cussed out.
'If you suppose you have the right to ask me for explanations,' said Diana, 'you are mistaken. [...] If you think that just because I have let you kiss me once or twice—if you think that just because you have come here when I have been ready to fling myself down the well or play the fool to get away from this odious daily round—nothing but a couple of toothless servants in the house—that you are my lover and I am your mistress, you are wrong. I never have been your mistress.'
'I know,' said Stephen. 'I desire no explanation; I assume no rights. Compulsion is the death of friendship, joy.' A pause. 'Will you give me something to drink, Villiers my dear?'
'Oh, I beg your pardon,' she cried, with a ludicrous automatic return of civility. 'What may I offer you? Port? Brandy?'
And this is a prime example of why the canon material of Stephen/Diana doesn't quite work for me as well as the canon Jack/Sophie does. I like Diana's character, but I'm just not interested in reading Stephen feeling sorry for himself over her. I only really like them together when they're getting along as friends and he's pining silently, not when she's outright making him feel like shit as he obsessively puts himself in that same situation again and again. Oh well.
[Stephen's] mule stood gleaming lead-coloured, waiting for him. It was gazing with a fixed, cunning expression down the alley beyond the stables, and following its eyes Stephen saw the postman stealing a pear from the kitchen-garden espalier.
'A double letter for you, sir,' said the postman, very stiff and official, with hurried pear-juice dribbling from the corner of his mouth. [...]
'Thankee, postman,' said Stephen, paying him. 'You have had a hot round.'
'Why, yes, sir,' said the postman, smiling with relief. [...]
'You are hot, thirsty: you must try a pear—it will keep the humours in motion.'
Another very appreciated moment of comic relief after all the quadrangling, lolol.
'Jack,' [Stephen] said at breakfast next morning, 'I think I must leave you: I shall see whether I can find a place on the mail.'
'Leave me!' cried Jack, perfectly aghast. 'Oh, surely not?'
'I am not entirely well, and conceive that my native air might set me up.'
'You do look miserably hipped,' said Jack, gazing at him now with attention and deep concern. 'I have been so wrapped up in my own damned unhappy business—and now this—that I have not been watching you. I am so sorry, Stephen. You must be damned uncomfortable here, with only Killick, and no company. How I hope you are not really ill. Now I recollect, you have been low, out of spirits, these last weeks—no heart for a jig.'
Gosh, Jack is so immediately concerned for poor Stephen... And "aghast" at Stephen saying he wants to leave him... Plus "gazing [...] with attention and deep concern" and that he hasn't been "watching" Stephen... They really are in love, I swear...
(also laughing at "with only Killick, and no company"... Poor Killick lmaooo)
[Jack said,] 'I happened to see Diana Villiers yesterday and she gave me this note to deliver—said such handsome things about you, Stephen. We said what a capital shipmate you were, and what a hand with a 'cello and a knife. She thinks the world of you . . .'
Perhaps: the note was kind, in its way.
My dear Stephen,
How shabbily you treat your friends—all these days without a sign of life. It is true I was horribly disagreeable when last you did me the pleasure of calling. Please forgive me. It was the east wind, or original sin, or the full moon, or something of that kind. But I have found some curious Indian butterflies—just their wings—in a book that belonged to my father. If you are not too tired, or bespoke, perhaps you might like to come and see them this evening.
D. V.
Nottttt Diana blaming her behavior on "the east wind" or "the full moon"... For fuck's sake, I'm eerily reminded of the tribulations of the modern day queer dating scene over here...
The road, pale in the darkness, Stephen riding deliberately along it, reciting an imagined dialogue.
Stephen my neurodivergent king doing some scripting, lmfao.
Stephen took off his shoes, sat deliberately on a small chair and said, 'I have come to pay my adieux. I leave the country very soon—next week, I believe.'
'Oh, Stephen . . . and will you abandon your friends? What will poor Aubrey do? Surely you cannot leave him now? He seems so very low. And what shall I do? I shall have no one to talk to, no one to misuse.'
'Will you not?'
'Have I made you very unhappy, Stephen?'
'You have treated me like a dog at times, Villiers.'
The way she tries to manipulate him by using Jack is just... Man. Sophie can see it, Diana can see it, and reader, I can see it.
'My dear Aubrey,' [Christy-Palliere] cried, folding Jack in his arms and kissing him on both cheeks, 'how very happy I am to see you! Dear Dr Maturin, be the very welcome. Allow me to present Captain of frigate Penhoët—Captain of frigate Aubrey, and Dr Maturin, at one time my guests aboard the Desaix.'
'Your servant, sir,' said Captain Penhoët.
'Domestique, monsieur,' said Jack, still blushing as far as his shirt. 'Penhoët? Je préserve—je ai—le plus vivid rémembrance de vos combatte a Ushant, à bord le Pong, en vingt-quatre neuf.' A second of attentive, polite but total blankness followed this, and turning to Christy-Pallière he said, 'How do you say I have the liveliest recollection of Captain Penhoët's gallant action off Ushant in '99?'
Captain Christy-Pallière said this in another kind of French—renewed, far warmer smiles, another British shake-hand—and observed, 'But we may all speak English. [...]'
[...]
'We had hoped you would dine with us,' cried Jack. 'We have livré une table—booked it.”
Firstly, I adore when Jack flounders while speaking other languages. "livré une table—booked it" fucking killed me. But also just that he blushes so hard from being kissed in greeting, lmao.
'Stephen had been carried off to Dr Ramis's healthier table, to drink gaseous water from a sulphurous spring [...]'
A big win for us seltzerheads to claim Stephen as a fellow mineral water enjoyer!
[Jack said,] 'Oh no, [Stephen] is the simplest fellow in the world. I give you my word of honour—unspeakably learned, knows every bug and beetle in the universe, and will have your leg off in an instant—but he should not be allowed out alone. And as for naval installations, he really cannot tell port from starboard, a bonnet from a drabbler, though I have explained a thousand times, and he does try to apply himself, poor fellow. I am sure it must be he, from what you tell me about his speaking to the Barcelona merchant. And in that language, I dare say? He lived in those parts for years, and speaks their lingo like a—like a—why, like a native. We are on our way down there now, to a property he has; and as soon as he has been across to Porquerolles to see some curious shrub that grows on the island and nowhere else, we shall move on. Ha, ha, ha,' he laughed, his big voice full of intense amusement, 'to think of poor good old Stephen being laid by the heels for a spy! Oh, ha, ha, ha!'
...Is this the second or third time Jack has said Stephen shouldn't be "allowed out alone?" That, and just the amusement that his "simple", innocent Doctor would be mistaken for a spy. Oh, boy... Hilarious, indeed... Yikes...!
'And believe me,' [Christy-Palliere] said very seriously, 'that girl can cook. Her coq au vin—! [...]'
Nothing much to say other than that this single line instantly gave me an absolutely brutal craving for coq au vin. Which means I'll have to clean a chicken. Fuck.
Stephen and Dr Ramis were closeted in a book-lined study.
Sorry, another useless bit of commentary--- but remember how I said I wouldn't be editing the quotes to the point of misrepresenting the original? Well, reader, you're very lucky I stick to that promise, because the urge to quote this line as "Stephen and Dr Ramis were closeted [...]" and make no other comment was a not insubstantial temptation.
[Stephen said,] 'I have a particularly interesting subject who was in the most robust health at sea—Hygeia's darling—in spite of every kind of excess and of the most untoward circumstances: a short while on land, with household cares, matrimonial fancies—always in the future, observe—and we have a loss of eleven pounds' weight; a retention of the urine; black, compact, meagre stools; an obstinate eczema.'
'And for you all this is the effect of solid earth beneath the subject's feet? No more?' [said Dr Ramis]
Stephen held up his hands. 'It is the foetus of a thought; but I cherish it.'
'You speak of loss of weight. But I find that you yourself are thin. Nay, cadaverous, if I may speak as one physician to another. You have a very ill breath; your hair, already meagre two years ago, is now extremely sparse; you belch frequently; your eyes are hollow and dim. This is not merely your ill-considered use of tobacco—a noxious substance that should be prohibited by government—and of laudanum. I should very much like to see your excrement.'
'You shall, my dear sir, you shall. [...]'
First of all, the fact that Stephen is so obviously talking about Jack... And his stools... And then being asked to present his own stools for judgement... And agreeing to it... God, I know a doctor can tell a lot by someone's stool, but there is really something deeply wrong with every medical man in this series...
'Why, Stephen, here you are at last,' cried Jack, starting straight out of his sleep. 'I sat talking with Christy-Pallière; I hope you did not wait for me.' The subject of their conversation flooded his mind and put out its gaiety; but having gazed at the floor for a moment he looked up with at least an expression of cheerfulness and said, 'You were very nearly taken up for a spy this morning.'
Stephen stopped in his movement towards the desk and stood motionless, unnaturally poised.
'How I laughed when Christy-Pallière read me out your description, looking uncomfortable and prodigious grave; but I assured him on my sacred honour that you were looking for your double-headed eagles, and he was quite satisfied. He made an odd remark, by the way: said, was he in our shoes he should push on for Spain and not go to Porquerolles.'
'Aye, aye? Did he, so?' said Stephen mildly. 'Go back to sleep now, my dear. I conceive he would not choose to traverse the street to see euphorbia praestans, let alone cross an arm of the sea. I have a few notes to write, but I shall not disturb you. Go to sleep: we have a long day head of us.'
Some hours later, in the first grey light, Jack awoke to a faint scratching on the door. [...] He opened his eyes and saw Stephen rise from his guttering candle, open the door, receive a bottle and a folded note. He went back to his table, opened the note, slowly deciphered it, burnt both scraps of paper in the candle flame; without turning round he said, 'Jack, you are awake, I believe?'
'Yes. These last five minutes. A good morning to you, Stephen. Is it going to be hot?'
'It is. And a good morning to you, my dear. Listen,' he said, sinking his voice to no more than a whisper, 'and do not call out or agitate yourself. Do you hear me now?'
'Yes.'
'War will be declared tomorrow. Bonaparte is seizing all British subjects.'
Quelle surprise! What intrigue!
...More importantly, Stephen calling Jack "my dear" twice! Hooray!
'What o, the bear,' cried a sailor [...]. 'Can he dance, mate?'
The bear-leader, an ill-looking brute with a patch over one eye and a fortnight's beard, took no notice. But the sailor was not to be put off by the sullenness of foreigners, and he was soon joined by an insistent group of friends, for he was the most popular and influential member of the crew of the pink Chastity, a merchantman that had had the unlucky idea of putting into Cette for water the day war was declared. One or two of them began shying stones at the great hairy mass to wake it up, or at least to have the pleasure of seeing it move.
[...]
The bear certainly looked hot. It was stretched out on what little grass it could find, strangely prostrate. But the clamour had spread; crews of other ships wanted to see it dance, and after some time the bear-leader came up and gave them to understand that the animal was indisposed—could only perform at night—'im ave airy coat, mister; im ate up whole goat for im dinner; im belly ache.'
It's finally time for my favorite characters, Flora the bear and the bear-leader! I'm sure they are completely and entirely unrelated to any of the other characters we've met so far!
'[...] Eh, bien: a led bear knows how to dance—that is logic. I have to have proof; it is my duty to see the bear perform.'
'Certainly, monsieur le sergent, at once. But the gentlemen will not expect too much from Flora; she is a female bear, and—' He whispered in the gendarme's ear. 'Ah, ah? Just so,' said the gendarme. 'Well, just a pace or two, to satisfy my sense of duty.'
Dragged up by its chain and beaten by its leader till the dust flew from its shaggy side the bear shuffled forward. The man took a little pipe from his bosom, and playing it with one hand while he held the chain with the other, he hoisted the bear on to its hind legs, where it stood, swaying, amidst a murmur of disapprobation from the sailors.
[...]
[The bear-leader] played a recognizable hornpipe, and the bear staggered through a few of the steps, crossing its arms, before sitting down again.
Poor Flora the bear, who is definitely a real bear!
'When one sea-officer is to be roasted, there is always another at hand to turn the spit,' said the bear. 'It is an old service proverb. I hope to God I have that fornicating young sod under my command one day. I'll make him dance a hornpipe—oh, such a hornpipe. Stephen, prop my jaws open a little more, will you? I think I shall die in five minutes if you don't. Could we not creep into a field and take it off?'
'No,' said Stephen. 'But I shall lead you to an inn as soon as the market has cleared, and lodge you in a cool damp cellar for the afternoon.
Stephen was leading the bear by the paw, for Jack could not see below his muzzle when his head was on, and in his other hand he had the broad spiked collar that covered the hole through which Jack breathed.
They finally hold hands and Jack is in a goddamn bear skin...
This is exactly like when you go to a convention and there's one person actually in the cosplay, and one person has to be their guide and bodyguard. Well, almost exactly--- usually cosplayers aren't in their costume to avoid becoming prisoners of war.
Lying in the deep cool fern with his collar off Jack felt the sweat still coursing down his chest, and the movement of ants, ticks, unidentified insects invading him; he smelt his own unwashed reek and the moist stench of the skin, imperfectly preserved in turpentine; but he minded none of it. He was too far gone to do anything but lie in the complete relaxation of utter weariness. It had of course been impossible to disguise him: a six-foot, yellow-haired Englishman would have stood out like a steeple in the south of France—a France alive with people tracking fugitives of one kind or another, foreign and domestic; but the price for this attempt was beyond anything he had believed possible. The torment of the ill-fitting, chafing hide, the incessantly-repeated small rasping wounds, the ooze of blood, the flayed soles of his feet, attached to the fur by court-plaster, the heat, the suffocation, the vile uncleanliness, had reached what he had thought the unendurable point ten days, two hundred miles ago, in the torrid waste of the Causse du Palan.
I never thought an age of sail period piece would give me a greater appreciation for what fursuiters go through...
For the last two or three days they had been in the Roussillon, in French Catalonia, and he had not been able to understand anything that Stephen and the peasants said to one another. Stephen was strangely reticent these days. Jack had supposed he knew him through and through in the old uncomplicated times, and he loved all he knew; but now there were new depths, an underlying hard ruthlessness, an unexpected Maturin; and Jack was quite out of his depth.
Stephen had gone on, leaving him. Stephen had a passport into Spain—could move about there, war or no . . . Jack's mind darkened still further and thoughts he dared not formulate came welling up, an ugly swarm.
'Dear God,' he said at last, twisting his head from side to side, 'could I have sweated all my courage out?' Courage gone, and generosity with it? He had seen courage go—men run down hatchways in battle, officers cower behind the capstan. He and Stephen had talked about it: was courage a fixed, permanent quality? An expendable substance, each man having just so much, with a possible end in sight?
[...]
The tune that Stephen always played on his bear-leader's pipe began to run through his head, mingling with Stephen's voice [...]
Even in the throes of being trapped inside the most uncomfortable fursuit in history, Jack's still concerned with Stephen rather than his own state— Where Stephen is, Stephen's odd behavior toward him, Stephen's opinions on courage, Stephen's voice...
It's obvious the "ugly swarm" of thoughts are 'what if Stephen left me behind?', and just the way Jack is so disgusted with himself after even thinking that... They're so devoted to each other that it makes me sick.
The roaring of a little girl in a white pinafore woke him; she and some unseen friend were looking for the summer mushrooms that were found in this wood, and she had come upon a fungoid growth.
[...]
[Jack thought,] 'Frighten the little beast and you will have a band of armed peasants round the wood in five minutes—slip away and you lose Stephen—out of touch, and all our papers sewed inside the skin.' The possibilities came racing one after another; and no solution.
'Come, come, child,' said Stephen. 'You will spoil your voice if you call out so. What have you there? It is a satanic boletus; you must not eat the satanic boletus, my dear. See how it turns blue when I break it with a twig. That is the devil blushing. But here we have a parasol. You may certainly eat the parasol. Have you seen my bear? I left him in the wood[...]; he was sadly fatigued. Bears cannot stand the sun.'
Have you seen my bear? #MyBear
...Sorry.
Anyway, another lovely moment with Stephen identifying mushrooms!
[...] they had to walk in single file; Jack saw Stephen's monstrous bundle—a dark shape, no more—moving steadily a pace or two in front of them, and something like hatred glowed around his stomach. He reasoned: 'The pack is heavy; it weighs fifty or sixty pounds—all our possessions; he too has been going on all these days, never a murmur; the straps wring his back and shoulders, a bloody welt on either side.' But the unwavering determination of that dim form, moving steadily on and on, effortlessly, it seemed, always too fast and never pausing—the impossibility of keeping up, of forcing himself another hundred yards, and the equal impossibility of calling for a rest, drowned his reason, leaving only the dull fire of resentment.
I wonder if Jack is more resentful of himself for complaining when Stephen's been saddled with his own painful burden of their bundle, or of Stephen for being in good enough shape to keep going without complaint...
After two or three minutes, right up there in the eye of the wind, Jack saw a movement. Leaning to Stephen he said 'Dog?' Soldiers who had had the sense to bring a dog? Loss, dead failure after all this?
Stephen took his head, and whispering right into the hairy ear he said 'Wolf. A young—a young female wolf.'
[...]
'Jack,' said he, leading him beyond the boundary mark, 'I bid you welcome to my land. We are in Spain. That is my house below—we are at home. Come, let me get your head off. Now you can breathe, my poor friend. There are two springs under the brow of the hill, by those chestnuts, where you can wash and take off the skin. How I rejoice at the sight of that wolf. Look, here is her dung, quite fresh. No doubt this is a wolf's pissing-post: like all the dogs, they have their regular . . .'
Jack sat heavily on the stone, gasping inwards, filling his starved lungs. Some reality other than general suffering returned. 'Wolf's pissing-post: oh, yes.'
This is such a tense moment when you think there may be soldiers with a dog, ready to foil their attempt at escape, and then you have to just laugh at 'Wolf's pissing-post: oh, yes.' LMAO.
'I am happy you were pleased with your wolf,' [Jack] said at last in a sleep-walker's voice. 'There are—they are uncommon rare, I dare say.'
'Not at all, my dear. We have them by the score—can never leave the sheep by night. No. Her presence means we are alone. That is why I rejoice. I rejoice. [...]'
And even in such an abysmal state, Jack is still congratulating Stephen on what he thinks is a chance to see a rare specimen. Could he be any more devoted to his doctor?!
The spring, Jack wallowing in it, cold water and grit sweeping off the grass, the stream running filthy, but coming fresh and fresh straight from the rock. Jack luxuriating, drying in the wind, plunging again and again. His body was dead white where it was not cruelly galled, bitten, rasped; his colourless face puffy, sweat-swollen, corpse-like, a tangled yellow beard covering his mouth; his eyes were red and pustulent. But there was life in them, brilliant delight blazing through the physical distress.
'You have lost between three and four stone,' observed Stephen, appraising his loins and belly.
'Why, Pullings!' [Jack] cried, all his ill-humour—a very slight ill-humour in any case—vanishing at once and the hard lines of his face dissolving into a delighted smile. 'How happy I am to see you! How do you do? How are you coming along, eh? Eh?'
'And this is our supercargo, Mr Jennings,' said Captain Spottiswood, not best pleased at having his regular sequence changed. 'Mr Bates. Mr Wand. Mr Pullings you already know, I see.'
'We were shipmates,' said Jack, shaking Pullings's hand with a force in direct proportion to his affection for the young man, a former master's mate and acting-lieutenant in the Sophie, who was now beaming over his shoulder at Dr Maturin.
Pullings is back!
I love when the description of the various characters' actions seem so cartoonish like this, lmao. I can just imagine Jack practically shaking Pullings' arm off while he peers around Jack's shoulder to grin at Stephen.
'They say the Spanish ladies are amazingly beautiful,' said Miss Lamb. 'Much more so than the French, though not so elegant. Pray, Captain Aubrey, is it so?'
'Why, upon my word,' said Jack, 'I can hardly tell you. I never saw any of 'em.'
'But was you not several months in Spain?' cried Miss Susan.
'Indeed I was, but nearly all the time I was laid up at Dr Maturin's place near Lérida—[...] a courtyard inside, and grilles, and orange-trees; but no ladies of Spain that I recall. There was a dear old biddy that fed me pap—would not be denied—and on Sundays she wore a high comb and a mantilla; but she was not what you would call a beauty.'
'Was you very ill, sir?' asked Miss Lamb respectfully.
'I believe I must have been,' said jack, 'for they shaved my head, clapped on their leeches twice a day, and made me drink warm goat's milk whenever I came to my senses; and by the time it was over I was so weak that I could scarcely sit my horse—we rode no more than fifteen or twenty miles a day for the first week.'
'How fortunate you were travelling with dear Dr Maturin,' said Miss Susan. 'I truly dote upon that man.'
'I have no doubt he pulled me through—quite lost, but for him,' said Jack. 'Always there, ready to bleed or dose me, night and day. Lord, such doses! I dare say I swallowed a moderate-sized apothecary's shop—Stephen, I was just telling Miss Susan how you tried to poison me with your experimental brews.'
'Do not believe him, Dr Maturin. He has been telling us how you certainly saved his life.' [said Miss Susan]
Jack's recollection of Stephen taking care of him is so cute--- even if the medical practices are outdated by our modern standards, you know Stephen was doing the very best he could for Jack with the information he had.
And "I have no doubt he pulled me through—quite lost, but for him" right into claiming he was complaining... Old married couple moment. Ahhh, I can picture the affectionate gleam in Jack's eye as he lies.
[Captain Spottiswood] found Jack on deck in his nightshirt. 'She means business,' he said, over the high beating of the eastern drum. The privateer had put up her helm. [...] her main and fore sails were dewed up, and it was clear that she meant to bear down under topsails alone—could do so with ease, a greyhound after a badger. 'But I have time to put my breeches on.'
Breeches, a pair of pistols. Stephen methodically laying out his instruments by the light of a farthing dip.
I like that as Jack prepares for a possible altercation with another ship, listing the essentials, his breeches and pistols, Stephen also makes that list.
[...] for the moment Jack's world was confined to his guns: there was a comfort in subordination, in small responsibility, no decisions.
I sent this line to a friend who has a special interest in BDSM theory. For no reason, really.
More than once, in a bid to get said friend to read these books, I have espoused on the potential for Jack to somehow be forced, by naval law and the need to save face and keep the continued respect of his crew, to have Stephen flogged, and then feel so bad about it that he demands Stephen return the favor privately. Which leads to... A repetition of this act, for less than noble reasons.
An enormous ringing crash inside [Jack's] head and filling the outside world. He was down. Blindly struggling away from number five's recoil, he tried to make out whether he was badly wounded or not—impossible to tell at once. He was not. Number seven had exploded, killing three of its servers, blowing its captain's head to pieces—it was his jaw that had gouged the wound across Jack's forearm—and scattering bits of iron in all directions, wounding men as far away as the mainmast—a splinter of iron had grazed his head, knocking him down. The face he was staring at so stupidly was Pullings's, repeating the words, 'You must go below, sir. Below. Let me give you a hand below.'
Imagine my shock while I'm still giggling about the idea of sub!Jack in the back of my mind, and then I'm hit with him being wounded by another man's exploded jawbone. Jesus fuck. How did I forget about this bit?!? Absolutely brutal.
Jack carried a boy down to the cockpit—both arms slashed to the bone as he flung them up to guard his face—and Stephen said, 'Keep your thumb pressed here till I can come to him. How do we stand?'
'We beat 'em off. Her boats are picking up her men. Two or three hundred she has. We'll be at it again directly. Hurry, Stephen, I cannot wait. We must knot and splice. How many have you here?'
'Thirty or forty,' said Stephen, fastening the tourniquet. 'Boy, you will do very well: lie quiet. Jack, show me your arm, your head.'
'Another time. A couple of lucky shots and we disabled him.'
Once again, I love the urgency and efficiency with which they can communicate during a battle, especially as they both help a wounded boy. Something about this one little interaction makes me so emotional.
The swinging lantern. [Jack] watched it: perhaps for hours. And gradually the world began to fall into place, memory coming back layer by layer, to reach the present. Or nearly so. He could not recall the sequence after the busting of poor Haynes's gun. [...] The rest was darkness: this often happened with a wound. Was he wounded? He was certainly in the cockpit, and that was Stephen moving about among the low, crowded, moaning bodies. 'Stephen,' he said, after a while.
'How then, my dear?' said Stephen. 'How do you find yourself? How are your intellectuals?'
'Pretty well, I thank you. I seem all of a piece.'
'I dare say you are. Limbs and trunk are sound. Coma was all I feared these last few days.[...]'
Even when they lose the fight, it's still a chance for me to read about Stephen worrying over and taking care of an injured Jack, so at least someone wins, here (other than the French).
A convoy of hay-wains came down the Hampstead Road, led by countrymen with long whips. The whips, the drivers' smocks, the horses' tails and manes were trimmed with ribbons, and the men's broad faces shone red, effulgent through the gloom. From Jack's remote and ineffectual schooldays sprang a tag: O fortunatos nimium, sua si bona norint, agricolas. 'Come, that is pretty good. How I wish Stephen had been by, to hear it. However, I shall flash it out at him presently.' There would be plenty of opportunity, since they were to travel down the same road that evening to Queenie's rout, and with any luck they would see some agricolas among that pitiable throng.
How adorable is it that Jack wanted to share his little Latin quip with Stephen? And that he decides to save it for later when they go down the same road!
(If you're curious, it's a quote from Georgics by Virgil, and it translates to "Farmers would count themselves lucky, if only they knew how good they had it.")
At present [Jack and Stephen] were lodging in an idyllic cottage [...] with green shutters and a honeysuckle over the door—idyllic in summer, that is to say. They were looking after themselves, living with rigid economy; and there was no greater proof of their friendship than the way their harmony withstood their very grave differences in domestic behaviour. In Jack's opinion Stephen was little better than a slut: his papers, odd bits of dry, garlic'd bread, his razors and small-clothes lay on and about his private table in a miserable squalor; and from the appearance of the grizzled wig that was now acting as a tea-cosy for his milk-saucepan, it was clear that he had breakfasted on marmalade.
Jack took off his coat, covered his waistcoat and breeches with an apron, and carried the dishes into the scullery. 'My plate and saucer will serve again,' said Stephen. 'I have blown upon them. I do wish, Jack,' he cried, 'that you would leave that milk-saucepan alone. It is perfectly clean. What more sanitary, what more wholesome, than scalded milk? Will I dry up?' he called through the open door.
'No, no,' cried Jack, who had seen him do so. 'There is no room—it is nearly done. Just attend to the fire, will you?'
Obviously I greatly enjoy this odd-couple description of their domestic life, but, damn, "little better than a slut"!? Jesus, Jack! Rude!
'We might have some music,' said Stephen. 'Your friend's piano is in tolerable tune, and I have found a German flute. What are you doing now?'
'Swabbing out the galley. Give me five minutes, and I am your man.'
'It sounds more like Noah's flood. This peevish attention to cleanliness, Jack, this busy preoccupation with dirt,' said Stephen, shaking his head at the fire, '[...] It is not very far removed from [...] cacothymia.'
'I am concerned to hear it,' said Jack. 'Pray, is it catching?' he added, with a private but sweet-natured leer.
"a private but sweet-natured leer"... Fuck, and I thought they were acting like an old married couple in the last few paragraphs!
'Now, sir,'—[said Jack,] appearing in the doorway with the apron rolled under his arm—'where is your flute? What shall we play?' He sat at the little square piano and ran his fingers up and down, singing [...]. He went on from one tune to another in an abstracted strumming while Stephen slowly screwed the flute together; and eventually from this strumming there emerged the adagio of the Hummel sonata.
'Is it modesty that makes him play like this?' wondered Stephen, worrying at a crossed thread. '[...] He takes pains; he is full of good-will and industry; and yet he cannot make even his fiddle utter anything but platitudes, except by mistake. On the piano it is worse, the notes being true. [...] His face is not set in an expression of sentimentality, however, but of suffering. He is suffering extremely, I am afraid. [...] Dear me, he is sadly moved. How I hope those tears will not fall. He is the best of creatures—I love him dearly—but he is an Englishman, no more—emotional, lachrymose. 'Jack, Jack!' he called out. 'You have mistook the second variation.'
'What? What?' Jack cried passionately. 'Why do you break in upon me, Stephen?'
'Listen. This is how it goes,' said Stephen, leaning over him and playing.
'No it ain't,' cried Jack. 'I had it right.' He took a turn up and down the room, filling it with his massive form, far larger now with emotion. He looked strangely at Stephen, but after another turn or two he smiled and said, 'Come, let's improvise, as we used to do off Crete. What tune shall we start with?'
I cut down Stephen's inner monologue by kind of a lot--- he spends like a full page just roasting the shit out of Jack's musical ability, lmfao. Though we do get a real, honest to goodness "I love him" out of it, and him watching Jack playing closely enough to wish his tears won't fall... Now that's the type of shit I'm after in these wartime epics.
It even dwarfs how cute the image of Stephen leaning over Jack to correct his playing is!
The music wove in and out, one ballad and its variations leading to another, the piano handing it to the flute and back again; and sometimes they sang as well, the forecastle songs they had heard so often at sea.
[...]
'The light is failing,' observed Stephen, taking his lips from the flute.
'[...] the rain has let up, thank God,' he said, bending to the window. 'The wind has veered into the east—a little north to east. We shall have a dry walk.' [said Jack]
'Where are we going?'
'To Queenie's rout, of course. To Lady Keith's.' Stephen looked doubtfully at his sleeve. 'Your coat will do very well by candlelight,' said Jack. 'And even better when the middle button is sewn on. Just ship it off, will you, and hand along that hussif? I will make all fast while you put on a neckcloth and a pair of stockings—silk stockings, mind. Queenie gave me this hussif when I first went to sea,' he observed, whipping the thread round the shank of the button and biting it off close to the stuff. 'Now let us set your wig to rights—a trifle of flour from the bread-bag as a bow to fashion—now let me brush your coat—splendid—fit for a levee, upon my word and honour.'
'Why are you putting on that blackguardly cloak?'
'By God,' cried Jack, laying his hand on Stephen's bosom. 'I never told you. [...]'
More of them arguing about getting properly dressed, as a treat for myself. And Jack "laying his hand on Stephen's bosom" is certainly welcome...
'Do you have to go? Is it worth running the risk of a sponging-house and the King's Bench for an evening's diversion?' [said Stephen]
[Jack said,] 'Yes. Lord Melville will be there; and I must see Queenie. [...] Come. I can explain as we walk. The rout-cake there is famous, too—'
'I hear the squeaking of a pipistrelle! Hark! Stand still. There, there again! So late in the year; it is a prodigy.'
'Does it mean good luck?' asked Jack, cocking his ear for the sound. 'A capital omen, I dare say. But shall we go on now? Gather just a little headway, perhaps?'
...As is Stephen once again interrupting an important conversation because he saw a bird--- and again, Jack's pleasant, accustomed reaction to him doing so.
'Yes, how is the worthy Dr Maturin?' said [Mrs Williams].
[Jack said,] 'He is very well, I thank you. [...] What a splendid fellow he is: he nursed me through a most devilish fever I caught in the mountains, and dosed me twice a day until we reached Gibraltar. Nothing else would have brought me home.'
[...]
'So you travelled right down through Spain,' said Cecilia. 'I dare say it was prodigiously romantic, with ruins, and monks?'
'There were some ruins and monks, to be sure,' said Jack, smiling at her. 'And hermits too. But the most romantic thing I saw was the Rock, rearing up there at the end of our road like a lion. That, and the orange-tree in Stephen's castle.'
'A castle in Spain!' cried Cecilia, clasping her hands.
'Castle!' cried Mrs Williams. 'Nonsense. Captain Aubrey means some cottage with a whimsical name, my love.'
'No, ma'am. A castle, with towers, battlements, and all that is proper. A marble roof, too. The only whimsical thing about it was the bath, which stood just off a spiral staircase, as bald as an egg: it was marble too, carved out of a single block—amazing. But this orange-tree was in a court with arches all round, a kind of cloister, and it bore oranges, lemons, and tangerines all at the same time! Green fruit, ripe fruit, and flowers, all at the same time and such a scent. There's romance for you! Not many oranges when I was there, but lemons fresh every day. I must have eaten—'
I know they mean "romantic" not as in relating to love, but more evoking the sensibilities of, say, the romantic movement--- so: idyllic, artful, and picturesque--- but I can indulge myself with a double-meaning and have fujoshi delusions that Jack and Stephen spent a romantic evening during Jack's recovery sitting together under Stephen's spliced citrus tree.
...To say nothing of that marble bath. "There's romance for you", indeed.
[...]the delicate pink flush in Diana's face, reaching her ears, was that of spontaneous open uncomplicated pleasure; Maturin's unaltered pallor, his somewhat absent expression, matched her directness. Furthermore, he was looking uncommonly plain—rusty, neglected, undarned.
Jack relaxed in his chair: he had got it wrong, he thought, with a warm and lively pleasure in his mistake: he often got things wrong.
I know this is written to mean that Jack is still playing both sides for Sophie and Diana, and is pleased that Stephen isn't interested in Diana for that reason, but again, I can have a little misinterpreted slash as a treat, and privately think that he's also happy for it because he wants Stephen to himself.
'[...]—ah, here comes the dear Doctor.' [said Mrs Williams]
Stephen's face rarely betrayed much emotion, but her effusive welcome made him stretch his eyes: her first question set him right, however, 'So I hear that you have a marble bath, Dr Maturin? That must be a great comfort to you, in such a climate.'
This made me snort--- Mrs Williams is so fucking insufferable, lmao.
Then a small vessel in the lower left-hand corner [of the painting] caught [Jack's] eye, something in the nature of a pink; she was beating up for the harbour, but it was obvious from the direction of the lady's [windswept] clothes that the pink would be taken aback the moment she rounded the headland. 'As soon as she catches the land-breeze she will be in trouble,' he said. 'She will never stay, not with those unhandy lateens, and there is no room to wear; so there she is on a lee-shore. Poor fellows. I am afraid there is no hope for them.'
'That is exactly what Maturin told me you would say,' cried Diana, squeezing his arm. 'How well he knows you, Aubrey.'
'Well, a man don't have to be a Nostradamus to tell what a sailor will say, when he sees an infernal tub like that laid by the lee. But Stephen is a very deep old file, to be sure,' he added, his good humour returning. 'And a great cognoscento, I make no doubt. For my part I know nothing about painting at all.'
I wish we'd seen this conversation between Diana and Stephen where he'd predicted what Jack would say, lololol. They know each other too well...
At last the women were handed in and stowed away, the carriage moved off, and Jack walked slowly back into the house with Stephen Maturin.
They went up the broad stairs, making their way against the increasing current of guests who had taken their leave; their conversation was fragmentary and unimportant—a few general remarks—but by the time they had reached the top each knew that their harmony was no longer what it had been these last few months.
Ahh, again the quadrangle quadrangles.
Yet there was something so very odious, so very grossly indecent, in making any sort of comparison [Between Sophie and Diana], in weighing up, setting side by side, evaluating. Stephen blamed him for being muddle-headed, wantonly muddle-headed, refusing to follow his ideas to their logical conclusion. 'You have all the English vices, my dear, including muddle-headed sentiment and hypocrisy.' Yet it was nonsense to drag in logic where logic did not apply. To think clearly in such a case was inexpressibly repugnant [...]
Look... This may be from two whole pages of Jack trying to decide between Sophie and Diana, but in the midst of it he still goes right back to thinking about Stephen and his opinions of him. That's all I'll say.
'Diana said [Jack] was looking quite thin, and not at all well. Diminished, was what she said.' [said Sophie]
'He has aged, maybe,' said Stephen. 'But he still eats for six; and although I should no longer call him grossly obese, he is far too fat. I wish I could say the same for you, my dear.' Sophia had indeed grown thinner; it suited her in that it took away that last hint of childishness and brought out the hidden strength of her features; but at the same time her removed, mysterious, sleepy look had disappeared, and now she was a young woman wide awake—an adult. 'If you had seen him last night at Lady Keith's, you would not have worried. To be sure, he lost the rest of his ear in the Indiaman—but that was nothing.'
'His ear!' cried Sophia, turning white and coming to a dead halt [...].
'You are standing in a puddle, my dear. Let me lead you to dry land. Yes, his ear, his right ear, or what there was left of it. But it was nothing. I sewed it on again; and as I say, if you had seen him last night, you would have been easy in your mind.'
'What a good friend you are to him, Dr Maturin. His other friends are so grateful to you.'
'I sew his ears on from time to time, sure.'
'[...] You must drive straight to the yard in a post-chaise and go aboard. I will attend to your dunnage and send it down by the wagon.' [said Stephen]
'Ain't you coming, Stephen?' cried Jack, pushing his plate away and staring across the table, perfectly aghast.
'I had not thought of going to sea at present,' said Stephen. 'Lord Keith offered me the flagship as physician, but I begged to be excused. I have many things that call for my attention here; and it is a long while since I was in Ireland—'
'But I had taken it absolutely for granted that we were to sail together, Stephen,' cried Jack. 'And I was so happy to bring you these orders. What shall I . . .' He checked himself, and then in a much lower tone he said, 'But of course, I had not the least right to make such an assumption. I do beg your pardon; and I will explain to the Admiralty at once—entirely my fault. A flagship, after all, by God! It is not more than you deserve. I am afraid I have been very presumptuous.'
'No, no, no, my dear,' cried Stephen. 'It is nothing to do with the flagship. I do not give a fig for a flagship. Put that clear out of your mind. I should far prefer a sloop or a frigate. No. It is that I had not quite made up my mind to a cruise just now. However, let us leave things as they stand for the moment. [...]' he said with a smile. 'Never be so put about, joy: it was only the abruptness that disturbed me—I am more deliberate in my motions than you sanguine, briny creatures. I am engaged until the end of the week, but then, unless I write, I will join you with my sea-chest on Monday. Come, drink up your wine—admirable stuff for a little small shebeen—and we will have another bottle.[...]'
How upset is Jack when Stephen first says he's not going to sea with him! And the way Stephen immediately changes his mind after seeing how yoset Jack is by it, and watching him try to backpedal so Stephen can save face, and how Stephen tries to reassure him...! How can you not ship it???
My dear Sir,
This is to tell you that I have reached Portsmouth a day earlier than I had proposed; to solicit the indulgence of not reporting aboard until this evening; and to beg for the pleasure of your company at dinner.
I am, my dear Sir,
Your affectionate humble servant,
Stephen Maturin
He folded the paper, wrote 'Captain Aubrey, RN, HM Sloop Polychrest', sealed it and rang the bell.
"Affectionate humble servant", huh? Laying it on a bit thick in this little love note dinner date invitation letter, eh Stephen?
[Stephen] turned back to the table, and opening his diary he wrote, 'I sign myself his affectionate humble servant; and affection it is that brings me here, no doubt. Even a frigid, self-sufficing man needs something of this interchange if he is not to die in his unmechanical part: natural philosophy, music, dead men's conversation, is not enough. I like to think, indeed I do think, that JA has as real an affection for me as is consonant with his unreflecting, jovial nature, and I know mine for him—I know how moved I was by his distress[...]'
Uh, I take those strikethroughs back--- It really was an affectionate love letter, apparently.
[Stephen wrote,] '[...]JA, though no Adonis by my measure, is well-looking, which I am not.[...]'
...I'm leaving this one to speak for itself.
[Stephen wrote,] 'It is as though [Jack's] ludicrous account of my wealth, passing through Mrs Williams and gathering force by the conviction in that block-head's tone, had turned me from an ally, a friend, even an accomplice, into an opponent. It is as though—oh, a thousand wild possibilities. I am lost, and I am disturbed. Yet I think I may be cured; this is a fever of the blood, and laudanum will cool it, distance will cool it, business and action will do the same. What I dread is the contrary heating effect of jealousy: I had never felt jealousy before this, and although all knowledge of the world, all experience, literature, history, common observation told me of its strength, I had no sense of its true nature at all. [...] This morning, when I was walking [...] up Ports Down Hill and I came to the top, with all Portsmouth harbour suddenly spread below me, and [...] perhaps half the Channel fleet glittering there—a powerful squadron moving out past Haslar in line ahead, all studdingsails abroad—I felt a longing for the sea. It has a great cleanliness. There are moments when everything on land seems to me tortuous, dark, and squalid [...]'
Is he longing for the sea, or longing for a way out of this damn oppressive quadrangle? It sure does seem a lot simpler out at sea with Jack, huh, Stephen?
'Stephen, what do you say to a drink? I spent the whole morning in the foretop, starved with cold.' [said Jack]
'A little brandy will answer the case, I think; a glass of right Nantes. Indeed, you look quite destroyed. Drink this up, and we will go straight to the dining-room. I have ordered a halibut with anchovy sauce, mutton, and a venison pasty—simple island fare.'
The worn lines eased out of Jack Aubrey's face, a rosy glow replaced the unhealthy grey; he seemed to fill his uniform again. 'How much better a man feels when he is mixed with halibut and leg of mutton and roebuck,' he said, toying with a piece of Stilton cheese. 'You are a much better host than I am, Stephen,' he observed. 'All the things I stood most in need of but hardly name. I remember a wretched dinner I invited you to in Mahon, the first we ever ate together, and they got it all wrong, being ignorant of Spanish, my sort of Spanish.'
'It was a very good meal, a very welcome meal,' said Stephen. 'I remember it perfectly. Shall we take our tea upstairs?[...]'
How many times is Jack going to reminisce on their first dinner date as they share a meal? It's getting a little disgusting. Get a room!
Jack, as he sat there, warm and comfortable by the fire, felt a delicious total relaxation creep over his person; it espoused the leather chair, sinking into its curves, no tension anywhere at all. He lost the thread of Stephen's remarks, answering oh and ah at the pauses, or smiling and moving his head with ambiguous appreciation. Sometimes his legs would give a violent twitch, jerking him out of this state of bliss; but each time he sank back, happier than before.
'I said "You do move with the utmost caution, I am sure?" ' said Stephen, now touching him on the knee.
If I compared them to an old married couple before, this is absolutely prime grandma and grandpa behavior.
'Truffles!' cried Stephen, deep in the monumental pie, Mrs Pullings's particular dish, her masterpiece (young hen pheasants, boned, stuffed tight with truffles, in a jelly of their own life's blood, Madeira and calves' foot). 'Truffles! My dear madam, where did you find these princely truffles?'—holding one up on his fork.
'The stuffing, sir? We call 'em yearth-grobbets; and Pullings has a little old spayed sow turns 'em up by the score along the edge of the forest.'
Truffles, morells, blewits, [wood ear] (perfectly wholesome if not indulged in to excess; and even then, only a few cases of convulsions, a certain rigidity of the neck over in two or three days—nonsense to complain) occupied Stephen and Mrs Pullings until the cloth disappeared [...]
Yet another fungiphillic Stephen moment, yay! Also laughed at the described effects of the wood ear... That's basically how any forager with years of experience picks wild mushrooms--- If it's tasty, and it only makes you sick when you eat too many, then it's still a choice edible! ...Just don't eat too many, then!
Oh--- and also, it's interesting that O'Brian chose the spelling of "morells" rather than "morels". I wonder if that is the historical spelling or if Stephen's actually using the historical scientific name, considering he does also call boletes "boletus", since perhaps the common name of morel as we know it wasn't in use at the time. ...Then again, though, my ebook copies of this series tend to have typos here and there (I've seen "car" where it's clearly talking about a man's "ear") from poor (machine?) transcription, so who knows.
The din was so great that Stephen alone noticed the door open just enough for Scriven's questing head: he placed a warning hand on Jack's elbow, but the rest were roaring still when it swung wide and the bailiffs rushed in.
'Pullings, pin that whore with the staff,' cried Stephen, tossing his chair under their legs and clasping Broken-nose round the middle.
Jack darted to the window, flung up the sash, jumped on to the sill and stood there poised while behind him the bailiffs struggled in the confusion, reaching out their staffs with ludicrous earnestness, trying to touch him, taking no notice of the clogging arms round their waists, knees and chests.
Ah, no more time for me to wax poetic about mushrooms--- Jack's escaping arrest again.
Unhappy for Jack, but happy for me in that Stephen touched Jack's elbow and then threw himself right into the fray!
...It's the little things.
'In the name of the law!' cried the tipstaff again, making a most desperate attempt to break through.
'—the law,' cried the seamen [...]
...Again, I do wonder why the self-censoring with emdashes is in the book at all, considering we already had a usage of "fuck". O'Brian's personal choice, I guess? It does make it a little funnier, in my opinion, so maybe it's just that? I really couldn't tell you.
'Thank you, Mr—' said Jack. 'I do not believe I remember your name.'
'Parslow, sir, if you please.'
Of course. The Commissioner's protégé, a naval widow's son. 'What have you been doing to your face, Mr Parslow?' he asked, looking at the red, gaping, lint-flecked wound that ran across that smooth oval cheek from ear to chin.
'I was shaving, sir,' said Mr Parslow with a pride he could not conceal. 'Shaving, sir, and a huge great wave came.'
'Show it to the doctor, and tell him, with my compliments, that I should be glad if he would drink tea with me. Why are you in your number one rig?'
'They said—it was thought I ought to show an example to the men, sir, this being my first day at sea.'
'Very proper. But I should put on some foul-weather clothes now. [...] Mr Babbington will show you what to put on. Tell him with my compliments, that he will show you what to put on,' he added, remembering that gentleman's inhuman barbarity. 'Do not wipe your nose upon your sleeve, Mr Parslow. It ain't genteel.'
'No, sir. Beg pardon, sir.'
'Cut along then,' said Jack irritably. 'Am I a Goddamned wet nurse?' he asked his pea-jacket.
A callback to the first book! Stephen gets another I-told-you-so about sailors cutting themselves shaving! (And an invite to tea, ehehe.) With that and the wet nurse comment this part made me giggle IRL.
Glancing at the Polychrest's wake to judge her leeway [Jack] noticed a little dark bird, fluttering weakly just over the water with its legs dangling; it vanished under the larboard quarter, and as he moved across to make sure of it, he tripped over something soft, about knee-height, something very like a limpet—the child Parslow, under his sou-wester.
'Why, Mr Parslow,' he said, picking him up, 'you are properly rigged now, I see. You will be glad of it. Run below to the doctor and tell him, if he chooses to see a stormy petrel, he has but to come on deck.'
It was not a stormy petrel, but a much rarer cousin with yellow feet—so rare that Stephen could not identify him until he pittered across a wave so close that those yellow feet showed clear.
Jack tripping over the kid in his single-mindedness to pick out a bird to show to Stephen. Fuck's sake, these two... And "very like a limpet", lmfao.
The feeling [of having no affection for the ship Jack was in command of] was so strange, the disloyalty so uncomfortable, that it was some time before [Jack] would acknowledge it; and when he did—he was pacing the quarterdeck after his solitary dinner at the time—it gave him such uneasiness of mind that he turned to the midshipman of the watch, who was clinging motionless to a stanchion, and said, 'Mr Parslow, you will find the Doctor in the sick-bay . . .'
'Find him yourself,' said Parslow.
Was it possible that these words had been uttered? Jack paused in his stride. From the rigid blankness of the quartermaster, the man at the wheel, and the gunner's mates busy with the aftermost port carronade, and from the mute writhing of the midshipmen on the gangway, it was clear that they had.
'I tell you what it is, Goldilocks,' went on Parslow, closing one eye, 'don't you try to come it high over me, for I've a spirit that won't brook it. Find him yourself.'
[...]
The young gentleman [...] was now lying on the deck, protesting that he should not be beaten, that he should dirk any man who presumed to lay a hand upon him—he was an officer. [...] A startled cry and then some treble oaths that made the grinning quarterdeck stretch its eyes, the whole punctuated by the measured thump of a rope's end; and then Mr Parslow, sobbing bitterly, was led out by the hand. [...] [Jack said,] 'Mr Pullings, Mr Pullings, the grog for the midshipmen's berth is stopped until further orders.'
Firstly, Jack trying to send for Stephen when he feels uneasy.
But Parslow calling Jack "Goldilocks" to his face... That just about stopped me in my tracks the same way it did Jack, lolol.
That evening in his cabin he said to Stephen, 'Do you know what those blackguards in the midshipmen's berth did to young Parslow?'
'Whether or no, you are going to tell me,' observed Stephen, helping himself to rum.
'They made him beastly drunk and then sent him on deck. Almost the first day they might have turned in for their watch below, the first time they are not up to their knees in water, they can think of nothing better to do than to make a youngster drunk. They shall not do it again, however. I have stopped their grog.'
'It would be as well if you were to stop the whole ship's grog. A most pernicious custom, a very gross abuse of animal appetite, a monstrous aberration—half a pint of rum, forsooth! I should not have a quarter of the men under my care, was it not for your vile rum. They are brought down with their limbs, ribs, collar-bones shattered, having fallen from the rigging drunk—diligent, stout, attentive men who would never fall when sober. Come, let us pour it secretly away.'
'And have a mutiny on our hands? Thank you very kindly. No: I should rather have them three sheets in the wind now and again, but willing to do their duty the rest of the time. Mutiny. It makes your blood run cold to think of it. Men you have worked with right through the commission and liked, growing cold and secret; no jokes, no singing out, no good wilt; the ship falling into two camps, with the undecided men puzzled and wretched in between. [...]'
[...]
'As for mutinies in general,' said Stephen, 'I am all in favour of 'em. You take men from their homes or their chosen occupations, you confine them in insalubrious conditions upon a wholly inadequate diet, you subject them to the tyranny of bosun's mates, you expose them to unimagined perils; what is more, you defraud them of their meagre food, pay and allowances—everything but this sacred rum of yours. [...]'
'Pray, Stephen, do not speak like this, nattering about the service; it makes me so very low. I know things are not perfect, but I cannot reform the world and run a man-of-war. In any case, be candid, and think of the Sophie—think of any happy ship.'
'There are such things, sure; but they depend upon the whim, the digestion and the virtue of one or two men, and that is iniquitous. I am opposed to authority, that egg of misery and oppression; I am opposed to it largely for what it does to those who exercise it.'
'Well,' said Jack, 'it has done me no good. This afternoon I was savaged by a midshipman, and now I am harassed by my own surgeon. Come, Stephen, drink up, and let us have some music.'
I love the moments where Stephen and Jack argue about the service like this... As a bonus, you can tell this inspired the scene in the movie where they have a nearly identical conversation about grog rations. And then Jack trying to ease their disagreement by suggesting music... (A metaphor?!!!!?!?11!!?!? /shot)
'What do you say to Parker's shoulder?' he asked. 'He will not be fit for duty for a great while, I dare say? Should lay up ashore, no doubt, and take the waters?'
'Not at all,' said Stephen. 'He is coming along admirably—Dr Ramis's thin water gruel has answered admirably, and the low diet. Properly slung, he may come on deck tomorrow.'
'Oh,' said Jack. 'No sick ticket? No long leave? You do not feel that the waters might help his deafness, too?' He looked wistfully into Stephen's face, but without much hope: in what he conceived to be his duty as a medical man, Stephen Maturin would not budge for man, God or beast. In such matters he was beyond the reach of reason or even of friendship. They never discussed the officers with whom Stephen messed, but Jack's desire to be shot of his first lieutenant, his opinion of Mr Parker, was clear enough to anyone who knew him well: yet Stephen merely looked dogged [...]
Ahh, even Jack's subtle hinting can't make Stephen fudge the numbers on forcing a man off the ship due to made-up medical reasons, lol.
Stephen [...] reached for [Jack's] fiddle and ran up and down the scale. 'Where did you get this?' he asked.
'I picked it up in a pawnshop near the Sally-Port. It cost twelve and six.' [said Jack]
'You were not cheated, my dear. I like its tone extremely warm, mellow. You are a great judge of a fiddle, to be sure. Come, come, there is not a moment to lose; I make my rounds at seven bells. One, two, three,' he cried, tapping his foot, and the cabin was filled with the opening movement of Boccherini's Corelli sonata, a glorious texture of sound, the violin sending up brilliant jets through the 'cello's involutions, and they soared up and away from the grind of pumps, the tireless barking, the problems of command, up, the one answering the other, joining, separating, twining, rising into their native air.
Uh, I know I just poked fun at myself for harping on my slash-brained "metaphors" again but... That last sentence... Hmmmm... Maybe there was more to playing music being a metaphor than I gave myself credit for...
A little after breakfast, while Jack was aboard the admiral, Stephen had come on deck: the first thing he had seen there was a man running aft with a bosun's mate beating him from behind—not an uncommon sight in a man-of-war. But this man had a heavy iron marline-spike between his teeth, held tight with spunyarn, and as he screamed, blood ran from either side of his mouth. He came to a dead halt at the break of the quarterdeck, and Stephen, taking a lancet from his waistcoat pocket, stepped up to him, cut the spunyarn, took the spike and threw it into the sea.
'I remonstrated with him—I told him that the punishment was inflicted upon my orders—and he attacked me with an extreme ferocity.' [said Parker]
'Physically?' [said Jack]
'No, sir. Verbally. He cast out reflections upon my courage and my fitness to command. I should have taken decided measures, but I knew that you were shortly to return, and I understood he was your friend. [...]'
'My friendship for Dr Maturin is neither here nor there, Mr Parker: I am surprised that you should have mentioned it. You must understand that he is an Irish gentleman of great eminence in his profession, that he knows very little, almost nothing, of the service, and that he is extremely impatient of being practised upon—being made game of. He does not always know when we are earnest and when we are not. [...]' [...] Jack did not raise his voice, but he was pale with anger, not only at Parker's stupid impertinence but even more at the whole situation, and at what must come. 'Let me tell you, sir, that your methods of discipline do not please me, I had wished to avoid this: [...] Let us understand one another. I am not a preachee-flogee captain: I will have a taut ship, by flogging if need be, but I will have no unnecessary brutality. [...] We shall deal with this later. Pass the word for Dr Maturin.'
This was a Jack Aubrey he had never seen before, larger than life, hard, cold, and strong with a hundred years of tradition behind him, utterly convinced that he was right. 'Good morning, Dr Maturin,' he said. 'There has been a misunderstanding between you and Mr Parker. You were not aware that gagging is a customary punishment in the Navy. No doubt you looked upon it as a piece of rough horseplay.'
'I looked upon it as a piece of extreme brutality. Edwards's teeth are in a state of advanced decay—he has been under my hands—and this iron bar had crushed two molars. I removed the bar at once, and . . .'
'You removed it on medical grounds. You were not aware that it was a customary punishment, awarded by an officer—you knew nothing of the reason for the punishment?'
'No, sir.'
'You did wrong, sir: you acted inconsiderately. And in your agitation, in the heat of the moment, you spoke hastily to Mr Parker. You must express your sense of regret that this misunderstanding should have arisen.'
'Mr Parker,' said Stephen, 'I regret that there has been this misunderstanding. I regret the remarks that passed between us; and if you wish I will repeat my apology on the quarterdeck, before those who heard them.'
Parker reddened, looked stiff and awkward; his right hand, the usual instrument for acknowledging such declarations, was immobilized in his sling. He bowed and said something about 'being entirely satisfied—more than enough—for his part he too regretted any disobliging expression that might have escaped him.'
There was a pause. 'I will not detain you, gentlemen,' said Jack coldly.
I find Jack's characterization in moments like this so fascinating... He'll defend so many of the wrongs of the service--- we've already seen he's entirely accustomed to doling out corporal punishment when he feels a particular infraction demands it--- yet he's still clearly upset by Parker's heavy-handedness, but knew he couldn't publicly tell him to ease up before this catastrophe without losing respect from the other members of the crew and appearing soft or lenient.
This is what makes the naval setting so interesting to me--- the layers and layers of unspoken rules and customs, the social setting that binds the characters to do things they otherwise wouldn't, the stifling inability to think and act freely in so many cases, and yet Stephen as a character is able to almost entirely flout this with his ignorance and lack of respect of authority; and in his existence by Jack's side, he often makes Jack get looser with his own naval disciplines, especially in how he treats Stephen like more of an equal than anyone else on the ship since Stephen's not actually in the service.
More to the point, the way Jack ---who more often than not is perfectly willing to begrudgingly follow along naval customs of punishment--- defends Stephen's actions here is just so fascinating, even after taking a step back from my inclination to read it in a slashy way. He won't step out of line to save a man from being unduly punished, but he'll of course jump to defend Stephen who chose to do so. I just find his lack of consistency once Stephen is introduced to the equation so fascinating to interrogate.
...And in any case, the bit that comes just after this has even more potential to be read as slashy:
'Jack, Jack,' said Stephen, when the lamp was lit, 'I fear I am a sad embarrassment to you. I think I shall pack my chest and go ashore.'
'No, soul, never say that,' said Jack wearily. 'This explanation with Parker had to come: I had hoped to avoid it, but he did not catch my drift; and really I am just as glad to have had it out.'
'Still and all, I think I will go ashore.'
'And desert your patients?'
'Sea-surgeons are ten a penny.'
'And your friends?'
'Why, upon my word, Jack, I think you would be better without me. I am not suited for a sea-life. You know far better than I, that discord among the officers is of no use to your ship; and I do not care to be a witness of this kind of brutality, or any party to it.'
'Ours is a hard service, I admit. But you will find as much brutality by land.'
'I am not a party to it by land.'
'Yet you did not so much mind the flogging in the Sophie?'
'No. The world in general, and even more your briny world, accepts flogging. It is this perpetual arbitrary harassing, bullying, hitting, brow-beating, starting—these capricious torments, spreadeagling, gagging—this general atmosphere of oppression. I should have told you earlier. But it is a delicate subject, between you and me.'
'I know. It is the devil . . . At the beginning of a commission a raw, ugly crew (and we have some precious hard bargains, you know)—has to be driven hard, and startled into prompt obedience; but this had gone too far. Parker and the bosun are not bad fellows—I did not give them a strong enough lead at the beginning—I was remiss. It will not be the same in the future.'
'You must forgive me, my dear. Those men are dropsical with authority, permanently deranged, I must go.'
'I say you shall not,' said Jack, with a smile.
'I say I shall.'
'Do you know, my dear Stephen, that you may not come and go as you please?' said Jack, leaning back in his chair and gazing at Stephen with placid triumph. 'Do not you know that you are under martial law? That if you was to stir without my leave, I should be obliged to put an R against your name, have you taken up, brought back in irons and most severely punished? What do you say to a flogging through the feet, ha? You have no notion of the powers of a captain of a man-of-war. He is dropsical with authority, if you like.'
'Must I not go ashore?'
'No, of course you must not, and that's the end to it. You must make your bed and lie on it.' He paused, with a feeling that this was not quite the epigram that he had wished. 'Now let me tell you of my interview with that scrub Harte . . .'
'If, then, as I understand you, we are to spend some time in this place, you will have no objection to granting me some days' leave of absence. Apart from all other considerations, I must get my dement and my compound fracture of the femur ashore: the hospital at Dover is at an inconsiderable distance—a most eligible port.'
'Certainly,' cried Jack, 'if you give me your word not to run, so that I have all the trouble of careering over the country after you with a posse—a posse navitatum. Certainly. Any time you like to name.'
'And when I am there,' said Stephen deliberately, 'I shall ride over to Mapes.'
Stephen so earnestly apologizing for being an embarrassment, Jack calling him "soul" and insisting Stephen won't go, even falling back on the threat of martial law and flogging to keep Stephen aboard! That whole "Do you know, my dear Stephen, [...]" speech is absolutely nuts! And only letting him go when he promises not to run...! What an end to the chapter... God damn...
'A gentleman to see Miss Williams,' said the maid.
'Who is it, Peggy?' cried Cecilia.
'I believe it is Dr Maturin, Miss.'
'I will come at once,' said Sophia, throwing her needlework into a corner and casting a distracted glance at the mirror.
[...]
'How happy I am to see you,' they said, both together, looking so pleased that a casual observer would have sworn they were lovers, or at least that there was a particular attachment between them.
'[...] How are you, and how is Captain Aubrey?' said Sophie]
'Blooming, blooming, thank you, my dear. That is to say, I am blooming: poor Jack is a little under the weather, what with his new command, and a crew of left-handed hedge-creepers from half the gaols in the kingdom.'
'Oh,' cried Sophie, clasping her hands, 'I am sure he works too hard. Do beg him not to work too hard, Dr Maturin. He will listen to you—I sometimes think you are the only person he will listen to. But surely the men must love him? I remember how the dear sailors at Melbury ran to do whatever he said, so cheerfully; and he was so good to them—never gruff or commanding, as some people are with their servants.'
'I dare say they will come to love him presently, when they appreciate his virtues,' said Stephen. 'But for the moment we are all at sixes and sevens. [...]'
[...]
'But tell me, is the Polychrest really so very—? Admiral Haddock says she can never swim, [...] but surely it is very wrong to [...] say she will certainly go to the bottom? It is not true, is it, Dr Maturin?'
'[...] We had a nine days' blow that took us far out into the chops of the Channel, with an ugly, pounding sea that partially submerged us, [...] and she survived that. I do not suppose Jack was off the deck more than three hours at a time—I remember seeing him lashed to the bitts, up to his middle in the water, bidding the helmsman ease her as the seas came in; and on catching sight of me said, "She'll live yet." So you may be quite easy.'
'Oh dear, oh dear,' said Sophia in a low voice. 'At least, I do hope he eats well, to keep up his strength.'
'No,' said Stephen, with great satisfaction, 'that he does not. I am glad to say he does not eat at all well. I used to tell him over and over again, when he had Louis Durand as his cook, that he was digging his grave with his teeth: he ate far, far too much three times a day. Now he has no cook; now he makes do with our common fare; and he is much the better for it [...]. He is very poor now, as you know, and cannot afford to poison himself; to ruin his constitution [...].
This chapter is off to a great start with Stephen and Sophie gossiping, lolol. I always appreciate the scenes where they have these pleasant little conversations. I could easily read several pages of just them talking about random shit, but it's especially cute when they talk about Jack--- It's always so clear how fond they both are of him, and how much they both know this about each other. Sophie asks about him like an infatuated schoolgirl and Stephen speaks about him like they're an old married couple, it's so entertaining to read.
[Stephen] had been watching [Sophie] all this time, and although that unbelievable complexion was as lovely as ever, it was lovely in a lower tone, once the pinkness of surprise had faded; there was tiredness, sorrow, a want of light in her eyes; and something of the straight spring had gone. 'Let me see your tongue, my dear,' he said taking her wrist. '[...] Yes, yes. Just as I thought. You are not eating enough. What do you weigh?'
'Eight stone and five pounds,' said Sophia, hanging her head.
'You are fine-boned, sure; but for an upstanding young woman like you it is not nearly enough. You must take porter with your dinner. I shall tell your mother. A pint of good stout will do all that is required: or almost all.'
Plus, I love how caring Stephen is with her about her health. When he gets like this with Jack, it reads more as comedic nagging, but when he behaves much the same with Sophie (if a little more polite about it), you can tell that in both cases it really does come from a place of actually caring about their health (even if, again, his advice is often very outdated by our modern standards).
'A gentleman to see Miss Williams,' said the maid. 'Mr Bowles,' she added, with a knowing look.
'I am not at home, Peggy,' said Sophie. [...] Now I have told a lie,' she said, catching her lip behind her teeth. 'How dreadful. Dr Maturin, would you mind coming for a walk in the park, and then it will be true?'
'With all the pleasure in life, lamb,' said Stephen.
She took his arm and led him quickly through the shrubbery. When they came to the wicket into the park she said, 'I am so wretchedly unhappy, you know.' Stephen pressed her arm, but said nothing. 'It is that Mr Bowles. They want me to marry him.'
'Is he disagreeable to you?'
'He is perfectly hateful to me. Oh, I don't mean he is rude or unkind or in the least disrespectful—no, no, he is the worthiest, most respectable young man. But he is such a bore, and he has moist hands. He sits and gasps—he thinks he ought to gasp, I believe—he sits with me for hours and hours, and sometimes I feel that if he gasps at me just once more, I shall run my scissors into him.' She was speaking very quick, and now indignation had given her colour again. 'I always try to keep Cissy in the room, but she slips away—Mama calls her—and he tries to get hold of my hand. We edge slowly round and round the table—it is really too ridiculous. Mama—nobody could mean to be kinder than my dear Mama, I am sure—makes me see him—she will be so vexed when she hears I was not at home to him today—and I have to teach Sunday school, with those odious little tracts. [...] visiting the cottagers makes me perfectly wretched and ashamed—teaching women twice my age, with families, who know a hundred times more about life than I do, how to be economical and clean, and not to buy the best cuts of meat for their husbands, because it is luxurious, and God meant them to be poor. And they are so polite and I know they must think me so conceited and stupid. I can sew a little, and I can make a chocolate mousse, but I could no more run a cottage with a husband and little children in it on ten shillings a week than I could sail a first rate. [...]'
I really do love moments like this that show the strength of writing in Sophie's character--- She's quiet and has been raised to be pretty chaste, obedient, and demure, but she isn't stupid or stuck up. She's sharp, she has a mind of her own, and even though she's forced into things she'd rather not do and often wishes she could do things differently, she goes along with what she's been told because she believes it's for the best to be what people want her to be... O'Brian really wrote her so sympathetically, I can't help but root for her to get together with Jack and be able to live more freely, having the ability to manage her own home beside him instead of being under the thumb of her mother.
'[...] I will not marry [Bowles], no, not if I have to lead apes in Hell. There is one man in the world I will ever marry, if he would have me—and I had him and I threw him away.' [said Sophie]
The tears that had been brimming now rolled down her cheeks, and silently Stephen passed her a clean pocket-handkerchief.
[...]
'And this is where Diana and I had our quarrel.' [said Sophie]
'I never heard you had quarrelled.'
'I should have thought we could have been heard all over the county, at least. It was my fault; I was horrid that day. [...] But she should not have taunted me with London, and how she could see him whenever she liked, and that he had not gone down to Portsmouth the next day at all. It was unkind, even if I had deserved it. So I told her she was an ill-natured woman, and she called me something worse, and suddenly there we were, calling names and shouting at one another like a couple of fishwives—oh, it is so humiliating to remember. Then she said something so cruel about letters and how she could marry him any moment she chose, but she had no notion of a half-pay captain nor any other woman's leavings that I quite lost my temper, and swore I should thrash her with my riding-crop if she spoke to me like that. I should have, too [...]'
'Sophie,' said Stephen, 'you have confided so much in me, and so trustingly . . .'
'I cannot tell you what a relief it has been, and what a comfort to me.'
'. . . that it would be monstrous not to be equally candid with you. I am very much attached to Diana.'
'Oh,' cried Sophia. 'Oh, how I hope I have not hurt you. I thought it was Jack—oh, what have I said?'
'Never be distressed, honey. I know her faults as well as any man.'
'Of course, she is very beautiful,' said Sophia, glancing at him timidly.
'Yes. Tell me, is Diana wholly in love with Jack?'
'I may be wrong,' she said, after a pause, 'I know very little about these things, or anything else; but I do not believe Diana knows what love is at all.'
This whole beginning of the chapter is yet another quadrangle quadrangling moment, but It really functions as fodder to get the reader to have even more of a soft spot for Sophie. Reading about how feisty she can get when pushed to her breaking point, that she'd actually go as far as threatening Diana with her riding crop, and then feeling horrible for it when she didn't get a chance to apologize once they'd both cooled down---! She's so endearing, even when I want to shake her for actually going along with the societal obligations/standards of the time as much as she does.
(And, okay, fine, I admit--- I giggled at Stephen calling her "honey" while they talked about Sophie's love life. It's sometimes hard not to occasionally read too far into certain phrasing choices with modern sensibilities, and all the implications they bring--- especially when it's so childishly amusing.)
'Did they tell you of my battle with Sophie?' [said Diana]
'I understood there had been a disagreement.' [said Stephen]
'She angered me with her mooning about the lake and her tragic airs—if she had wanted him, why did she not have him when she could? I do loathe and despise want of decision—shilly-shallying. And anyhow, she has a perfectly suitable admirer, an evangelical clergyman full of good works: good connections too, and plenty of money. I dare say he will be a bishop. But upon my word, Maturin, I never knew she had such spirit! She set about me like a tiger, all ablaze; and I had only quizzed her a little about Jack Aubrey. Such a set-to! There we were roaring away by the little stone bridge, with her mare hitched to the post, starting and wincing—oh, I don't know how long—a good fifteen rounds. How you would have laughed. We took ourselves so seriously; and such energy! I was hoarse for a week after. But she was worse than me—as loud as a hog in a gate, and her words tumbling over one another, in a most horrid passion. But I tell you what, Maturin, if you really want to frighten a woman, offer to slash her across the face with your riding whip, and look as if you meant it. [...] Will you drink some of his honour's sherry? You are looking quite glum, Maturin. Don't be mumchance, there's a good fellow. I have not said an unkind thing since you appeared: it is your duty to be gay and amusing. Though harking back, I was just as pleased to come away too, with my face intact: it is my fortune, you know. You have not paid it a single compliment, though I was liberal enough to you. Reassure me, Maturin—I shall be thirty soon, and I dare not trust my looking-glass.'
'It is a good face,' said Stephen, looking at it steadily.
LMAO at Diana's version of the events. Hmm, I sure do wonder which of the ladies is a more reliable source...!
Diana is certainly an interesting character, even if she isn't a very likable one. It's fascinating the way she'll go against societal standards that Sophie would never think proper to break, and yet she (at least outwardly) seems to have no qualms with her cousin being married off to a man she doesn't love just for the sake of money and status.
It seems like her mindset is closer to feeling a woman should just try to game the system somewhat by marrying a man clueless and rich enough that she could be set for life, all while cheating on him whenever possible with whatever other men she did like, no matter how low their status or social standing is.
'And after all,' she said, pouring out the wine, 'why do you pursue me like this? I give you no encouragement. I never have. I told you plainly at Bruton Street that I liked you as a friend but had no use for you as a lover. Why do you persecute me? What do you want of me? If you think to gain your point by wearing me out, you have reckoned short; and even if you were to succeed, you would only regret it. You do not know who I am at all; everything proves it.'
'I must go,' he said, getting up.
She was pacing nervously up and down the room. 'Go, then,' she cried, 'and tell your lord and master I never want to see him again, either. He is a coward.'
As much as I want to be a bigger fan of Diana's, scenes like this just make me roll my eyes. I know the point of her character is to be conflicted, to be at odds with herself, even--- But telling Stephen to compliment her, receiving him so warmly (and the gift he brought for her) and then immediately turning to insult him right after... It's so aggravating sometimes.
It's like she wants him to throw himself at her feet just so she can have the pleasure of telling him she's uninterested, and though she'll insist she doesn't want him to pursue her, when he does act more reserved she either berates him for it or says sweet things to goad him into saying something even slightly romantic just so she has the opportunity to turn him down again. Honestly, I end up getting even more frustrated with Stephen than I am with her, because he just keeps crawling back!
Augh, I like them so much more as bitchy sniping friends than as toxic love interests.
Dr. Maturin, I beg, just let yourself be friendzoned!
'[...] Stephen, chuck me my breeches, will you?' [Jack] was in working clothes—canvas trousers, a guernsey frock and a frieze jacket—and as he stripped the criss-cross of wounds showed plain: bullets, splinters, cutlasses, a boarding-axe; and the last, a raking thrust from a pike, still showed red about the edges. 'Half an inch to the left—if that pike had gone in half an inch to the left, you would have been a dead man,' observed Stephen.
'My God,' said Jack, 'there are times when I wish—however, I must not whine.' From under his clean white shirt he asked, 'How was Sophie?'
'Low in her spirits. She is subjected to the attentions of a moneyed parson.' No reply. No emergence of the head. He went on, '[...] I also bought your thread, music-paper, and strings: these I found at a shop in Folkestone.'
'Thank you, Stephen. I am very much obliged to you. You must have had a damned long ride of it. Indeed, you look dog-tired, quite done up. Just tie my hair for me, like a good fellow, and then you shall turn in. I must get you an assistant, a surgeon's mate: you work too hard.'
'You have some grey hairs,' said Stephen, tying the yellow queue.
'Do you wonder?' said Jack.
At the very least, after all that frustrating quadrangle business we get another cute domestic scene of Jack and Stephen. I was ready to just comment on Stephen's observations of Jack's wounds as he changed in front of him, but then Jack asking him to help tie his hair back, and Stephen commenting on his grays! It's just so much... And especially after they parted where Jack barely let Stephen ashore at all, making him promise he wouldn't run... I guess even those short meetings with the ladies has made Stephen realize exactly where his bread is buttered, LMFAO. (Though I'm sure it won't stop him the next time...)
[Jack said,] '[...] and that reminds me . . .' It reminded him of the fact that he had no money, and that he should like to borrow some. [...] Ordinarily he would have turned at once to Stephen, for although Stephen was an abstemious man, indifferent to money beyond the bare necessities of life, and strangely ill-informed, even unperceptive, about discipline, the finer points of ceremonial, the complexity of the service and the importance of entertaining, he would always give way at once when it was represented to him that tradition called for an outlay. He would produce money from the odd drawers and pots where it lay, disregarded, as though Jack were doing him a particular favour by borrowing it: in other hands he would have been the 'easiest touch' afloat. These reflections darted through Jack's mind as he sat there, stroking the worn lion's head on the pommel of his sword; but something in the atmosphere, some chill or reserve or inward scruple of his own, prevented him from completing his sentence before the Melpomène's barge was reported to be in the water.
Jack's inner thoughts of Stephen the wallet, lmaooo.
'[...] I may preach a sermon to the ship's company next Sunday.' [said Jack]
'You? Preach a sermon?' [said Stephen]
'Certainly. Captains often do, when no chaplain is carried. I always made do with the Articles of War in the Sophie, but now I think I shall give them a clear, well-reasoned—come, what's the matter? What is so very entertaining about my preaching a sermon? Damn your eyes, Stephen.' Stephen was doubled in his chair, rocking to and fro, uttering harsh spasmodic squeaks: tears ran down his face. 'What a spectacle you are, to be sure. Now I come to think of it, I do not believe I have ever heard you laugh before. It is a damned illiberal row, I can tell you—it don't suit you at all. Squeak, squeak. Very well: you shall laugh your bellyful.' He turned away with something about 'pragmatical apes—simpering, tittering' and affected to look into the Bible without the least concern; but there are not many who can find themselves the object of open, whole-hearted, sincere, prostrating laughter without being put out of countenance, and Jack was not one of these few. However, Stephen's mirth died away in time—a few last crowing whoops and it was over. He got to his feet, and dabbing his face with a handkerchief he took Jack by the hand. 'I am so sorry,' he said. 'I beg your pardon. I would not have vexed you for the world. But there is something so essentially ludicrous, so fundamentally comic . . . that is to say, I had so droll an association of ideas—pray do not take it personally at all. Of course you shall preach to the men; I am persuaded it will have a most striking effect.'
'Well,' said Jack, with a suspicious glance, 'I am glad it afforded you so much innocent merriment at all events. Though what you find . . .'
'What is your text, pray?'
'Are you making game of me, Stephen?'
'Never, upon my word: would scorn it.'
This part is way too funny. Stephen definitely needed a laugh after the first half of this book! And of course, he has a squeaking, crowing, ugly laugh, which I love so much. And poor Jack being actually put out by it! Oh man, these two... Then holding Jack's hand to say "I would not have vexed you for the world"... If that's the case, Stephen, then don't double over laughing!
Dinner began quietly enough with a dish of codlings caught over the side that morning and with little in the way of conversation apart from banalities [...] Parker, Macdonald and Pullings were mere dead weights, bound by the convention that equated their captain, at his own table, with royalty, and forbade anything but answers to proposals set up by him. However, Stephen had no notion of this convention—he gave them an account of nitrous oxide, the laughing gas, exhilaration in a bottle, [...]
Again, I always love all the asides describing how Stephen breaks the usual naval etiquette.
'Another roll like that, and we shall have no masts,' said Pullings, as the remaining crockery, the glasses and the inhabitants of the gun-room all shot over to the lee. 'We'll lose the mizzen first, Doctor,'—picking Stephen tenderly out of the wreckage—[...]
LOL. Pullings is so blase about helping Stephen back up, their little friendship is so fun.
'There's the Doctor,' said Nehemiah Lee, 'a-waving of his arms. Is he talking to hisself, or does he mean to hail us?'
'He's a-talking to hisself,' said John Lakes, an old Sophie. 'He often does. He's a very learned cove.'
'He'll get cut off, if he don't mind out,' said Arthur Simmons, an elderly, cross-grained forecastleman. 'He looks fair mazed, to me. Little better than a foreigner.'
'You can stow that, Art Simmons,' said Plaice. 'Or I'll stop your gob.'
'You and who to help you?' asked Simmons, moving his face close to his shipmate's.
'Ain't you got no respect for learning?' said Plaice. 'Four books at once I seen him read. Nay, with these very eyes, here in my head,'—pointing to them—'I seen him whip a man's skull off, rouse out his brains, set 'em to rights, stow 'em back again, clap on a silver plate, and sew up his scalp, which it was drooling over one ear, obscuring his dial, with a flat-seam needle and a pegging-awl, as neat as the sail-maker of a King's yacht.'
'And when did you bury the poor bugger?' asked Simmons, with an offensive knowingness.
'Which he's walking the deck of a seventy-four at this very moment, you fat slob,' cried Plaice. 'Mr Day, gunner of the Elephant, by name, better than new, and promoted. So you can stuff that up your arse, Art Simmons. Learning? Why, I seen him sew on a man's arm when it was hanging by a thread, passing remarks in Greek.'
'And my parts,' said Lakey, looking modestly at the gunwale.
'I remember the way he set about old Parker when he gagged that poor bugger in the larboard watch,' said Abraham Bates. 'Those was learned words: even I couldn't understand above the half of 'em.'
'Well,' said Simmons, vexed by their devotion, that deeply irritating quality, 'he's lost his boots now, for all his learning.'
This was true. Stephen retracted his footsteps towards the stump of a mast protruding from the sand where he had left his boots and stockings, and to his concern he found that these prints emerged fresh and clear directly from the sea. No boots: only spreading water, and one stocking afloat in a little scum a hundred yards away.
The way the other sailors talk about Stephen is always so fucking funny.
Jack was obviously in high spirits. 'I trust I do not disturb you,' he said. 'I said to Killick, "Do not disturb him on any account, if he is busy." But I thought that with such a damned unpleasant night outside, and the stove drawing so well in, that we might have some music. But first take a sup of this madeira and tell me what you think of it. Canning sent me a whole anker—so good-natured of him. I find it wonderfully grateful to the palate. Eh?'
Stephen had identified the smell that hung about Jack's person and that wafted towards him as he passed the wine. It was the French scent he had bought in Deal. He put down his glass composedly and said, 'You must excuse me this evening, I am not quite well, and I believe I shall turn in.'
'My dear fellow, I am so sorry,' cried Jack, with a look of concern. 'I do hope you have not caught a chill. Was there any truth in that nonsense they were telling me, about your swimming off the sands? You must certainly turn in at once. Should you not take physic? Allow me to mix you a strong . . .'
Shut firmly in his cabin, Stephen wrote. 'It is unspeakably childish to be upset by a whiff of scent; but I am upset, and I shall certainly exceed my allowance, to the extent of five hundred drops.' He poured himself out a wineglassful of laudanum, closed one eye, and drank it off.
...And the very next scene is not so funny.
God, poor Stephen... He comes back onto the boat only to find Jack smelling of the perfume he gifted Diana. You can hardly even blame the guy for self-medicating... After all, one of his unrequited loves is meeting with the other one...
Some days later [Stephen's] diary continued: 'Since Wednesday JA has been his own master; and I believe he is abusing his position. [...] He takes insensate risks, going ashore, and any observation of mine has the appearance of bad faith. This morning the devil suggested to me that I should have him laid by the heels; I could so with no difficulty at all. [...] To some extent JA is aware of my feelings, and when he brought [Diana's] renewed invitation to dinner he spoke of "happening to run into her again", and expatiated on the coincidence in a way that made me feel a surge of affection for him in spite of my animal jealousy. He is the most inept liar [...].'
Even when he's upset with Jack for taking unnecessary risk in his time ashore, and Jack is obviously lying to him about Diana, Stephen can't even find it in himself to be truly mad because he knows Jack is lying to try to prevent hurting Stephen even further... God, what a pitiful situation for my poor little laudanum-abusing sopping wet cat in a cardboard box over here...
'How pleasant it is to see the sun,' [Jack] called over the taffrail, later in the afternoon.
'Eh?' said Stephen, looking up from a tube thrust deep into the water.
'I said how pleasant it was to see the sun,' said Jack, smiling down at him there in the barge—smiling, too, with general benevolence. He was warm through and through after months of English drizzle; the mild wind caressed him through his open shirt and old canvas trousers [...]
'Yes,' said Stephen. 'It is. [...]There is a shark following up, a shark of the blue species, a carcharias. He revels in the warmth.'
'Where is he? Do you see him? Mr Parslow there, fetch me a couple of muskets.'
'He is under the dark belly of the ship. But no doubt he will come out presently. I give him gobbets of decayed flesh from time to time.'
Uh, wow--- that description of Jack is right out of a romance novel!
From the sky forward there was a guttural shriek—a man falling from the yard [...]. He hit a backstay. It bounced him clear of the side and he splashed into the sea by the mizzen-chains.
'Man overboard!' shouted a dozen hands, flinging things into the water and running about.
'Mr Goodridge, bring her to the wind, if you please,' said Jack, kicking off his shoes and diving from the rail. 'How fresh—perfect!' he thought as the bubbles rushed thundering past his ears and the good taste of clean sea filled his nose. [...] Jack was a powerful rather than a graceful swimmer, and he surged through the water with his head and shoulders out, like a questing dog, fixing the point in case the man should sink. He reached him [...]
[...]
Jack kept him afloat, and there they lay, rising and falling on the swell until the boat picked them up.
[...]
'Carry him below,' said Jack. 'You had better have a look at him, Doctor, if you would be so kind.'
'He has a contusion on his chest,' said Stephen, coming back to where Jack stood dripping on the quarterdeck, drying as he leaned on the rail [...] 'But no ribs are broken. May I congratulate you upon saving him? The boat would never have come up in time. Such promptitude of mind—such decision! I honour it.'
'It was pretty good, was it not?' said Jack.
[...]
Was you not afraid,' [Stephen] asked, 'when you reflected upon the shark—his notorious voracity?'
'Him? Oh, sharks are mostly gammon, you know: all cry and no wool. Unless there's blood about, they prefer galley leavings any day. On the West Indies station I once went in after a jolly and dived plump on to the back of a huge great brute: he never turned a hair.'
'Tell me, is this a matter of frequent occurrence with you? Does it in no way mark an epocha in your life, at all?'
'Epocha? Why, no; I can't say it does. Bolton here must make the twenty-second since I first went to sea: or maybe the twenty-third. The Humane chaps sent me a gold medal once. Very civil in them, too; with a most obliging letter. I pawned it in Gibraltar.'
'You never told me this.'
'You never asked. But there is nothing to it, you know, once you get used to their grappling. You feel good, and worthy—deserve well of the republic, and so on, for a while, which is agreeable, I don't deny; but there is really nothing to it—it don't signify. I should go in for a dog, let alone an able seaman [...]'
Another of my favorite parts of Jack's characterization--- He could totally be smug and proud of how many men he's saved, and yet he's completely casual about receiving a medal! Stephen's never even heard the story before, so clearly Jack's never bragged about it... He's so modest about the times when he's actually been genuinely heroic, and at other times is (maybe a little too) proud of things like his little quips and puns, or meeting Lord Nelson, or things of a more dutiful naval nature. And as we see it even more in the next bit--- to Jack, saving someone from drowning if you can is a bare-minimum good behavior:
In the evening, when it was too dark to work but too delightful to go below, Stephen observed, 'If you make it your study to depreciate rescues of this nature, will you not find that they are not valued? That you get no gratitude?'
'Now you come to mention it, I suppose it is so,' said Jack. 'It depends: some take it very kind. Bonden, for example. I pulled him out of the Mediterranean, as I dare say you remember, and no one could be more sensible of it. But most think it no great matter, I find. I can't say I should myself, unless it was a particular friend, who knew it was me, and who went in saying "Why, damn me, I shall pull Jack Aubrey out." No. Upon the whole,' he said, reflecting and looking wise, 'it seems to me, that in the article of pulling people out of the sea, virtue is its own reward.'
They lapsed into silence, their minds following different paths as the wake stretched out behind and the stars rose in procession over Portugal.
'I am determined at last,' cried Stephen, striking his hand upon his knee, 'I am at last determined—determined, I say—that I shall learn to swim.'
Thank god that guy almost drowned falling off the boat--- Otherwise we wouldn't get the scenes of Stephen going out to swim later on in the series!
In any case, I think the intended implication here is that Stephen, in his dedication to saving lives, realizes that if he learns to swim he can potentially help save even more people in the future, the same way Jack has just done. But I like to think that watching how easily Jack saved a drowning man (and how handsome and valiant he looked doing so) encouraged his decision a little bit, too, hehehe...
The bentincks draw, the bentincks draw, the bentincks draw fu' weel,' said Mr Macdonald.
'Is the Captain pleased?' asked Stephen.
'He is delighted. There is no great wind to try them, but she seems much improved. Have you not remarked her motion is far more easy? We may have the pleasure of the purser's company once more. I tell you, Doctor, if that man belches of set purpose just once again, or picks his teeth at table, I shall destroy him.'
'That is why you are cleaning your pistols, I presume. [...]'
LMAO. I also love how Stephen has found a friendship in Macdonald. He's a fun side character. I, too, have wanted to shoot people for belching.
'Those are elegant, elegant pistols. May I handle them?' [said Stephen]
'Pretty, are they not?' said Macdonald, passing the case. 'Joe Manton made them for me. Do these things interest you?'
'It is long since I had a pistol in my hand,' said Stephen. 'Or a small-sword. [During my first year of University] I attached a perhaps undue importance to staying alive, and I became moderately proficient with both the pistol and the small-sword. I have a childish longing to be at it again. Ha, ha—carte, tierce, tierce, sagoon, a hit!'
'Should you like to try a pass or two with me on deck?'
'Would that be quite regular? I have a horror of the least appearance of eccentricity.'
'Oh, yes, yes! It is perfectly usual. [...] Come, let us take the pistols too.'
On the quarterdeck they foined and lunged, stamping, crying 'Ha!' and the clash and hiss of steel upon steel seduced the midshipmen of the watch from their duty [...].
[...]
'Bless us all,' said Jack, 'I had no notion you were such a man of blood, dear Doctor.'
'[...] Do you choose to try the pistols?' [said Mcdonald]
Jack, watching from his side of the quarterdeck, was wholly amazed: he had no idea that Stephen could hold a sword, nor yet load a pistol, still less knock the pips out of a playing-card at twenty paces: yet he had known him intimately. He was pleased that his friend was doing so well; he was pleased at the respectful silence; but he was a little sad that he could not join in, that he stood necessarily aloof—the captain could not compete—and he was obscurely uneasy. There was something disagreeable, and somehow reptilian, about the cold, contained way Stephen took up his stance, raised his pistol, looked along the barrel with his pale eyes, and shot the head off the king of hearts. Jack's certainties wavered [...]
How voracious is Jack in his appetite of learning something new about Stephen, and how interesting is it to see him get so unnerved by this side of him he's never seen: the deadly proficiency he didn't realize Stephen possessed? (Oh boy, even I admit that sentence was way too close to the prose of the novel. O'Brian's style is rubbing off a little too quickly on me...) I like to think Jack was turned on enthralled by it at first, before it got a little too scary and alien, too unfamiliar a behavior coming from his dear, life-giving doctor... (This scene is also foreshadowing for a later, very unfortunate turn of events not too far away in this book...)
Turning, [Jack] saw Stephen watching him from the companion hatchway. 'Good morning, good morning!' he cried, smiling with great affection. 'Here's our old friend the Bellone just to leeward.'
'Ay. So Pullings tells me. Do you mean to fight with her?'
'I mean to sink, take, burn or destroy her,' said Jack, a smile flashing across his face.
Add another mark to the "affection" tally!
The post-chaise drove briskly forward over the Sussex downs, with Stephen Maturin and Diana Villiers sitting in it with the glasses down, very companionably eating bread and butter.
Let's hope these two continue to be "companionable" this chapter...
'So now you have seen your dew-pond,' [Diana] said comfortably. 'How did you like it?'
'It came up to my highest expectations,' said Stephen. 'And I had looked forward to it extremely.'
'And I look forward to Brighton extremely, too: I hope I may be as pleased as you are. Oh, I cannot fail to be delighted, can I, Maturin? [...] And even if it rains all the time, there is the Pavilion—how I long to see the Pavilion.'
'Was not candour the soul of friendship, I should say, "Why Villiers, I am sure it will delight you," affecting not to know that you were there last week.'
'Who told you?' she asked, her bread and butter poised.
'Babbington was there with his parents.'
'Well, I never said I had not been—it was just a flying visit—I did not see the Pavilion. That is what I meant. Do not be disagreeable, Maturin: we have been so pleasant all the way. Did he mention it in public?'
'He did. Jack was much concerned. He thinks Brighton a very dissolute town, full of male and female rakes—a great deal of temptation. [...] There is an ill-looking smear of butter on your chin.'
'Poor Jack,' said Diana, wiping it off. 'Do you remember—oh how long ago it seems—I told you he was little more than a huge boy? I was pretty severe about it: I preferred something more mature, a fully-grown man. But how I miss all that fun and laughter! What has happened to his gaiety? He is growing quite a bore. Preaching and moralizing. Maturin, could you not tell him to be less prosy? He would listen to you.'
'I could not. Men are perhaps less free with such recommendations than you imagine. In any case I am very sorry to say we are no longer on such terms that I could venture anything of the kind—if indeed we ever were. Certainly not since last Sunday's dinner. We still play a little music together now and then, but it is damnably out of tune.'
It's a relief to see these two being more or less friendly again... I much prefer the Stephen/Diana scenes where they can both hold their own and get into little petty disagreements and light gossip. (And Babbington and his big mouth, LOL.)
It's so amusing to read--- Diana flip-flopping, Stephen complaining about the little rift in their friendship... The two of them sniping back and forth is much more funny when it's not over the backdrop of Stephen being a sad-sack and Diana being needlessly cruel because she's frustrated with her life at home.
I particularly liked this next bit a little further down the page:
'[...] Oh, what is that bird?' [said Diana]
'It is a wheatear. We have seen between two and three hundred since we set out, and I have told your their name twice, nay, three times.' [said Stephen]
[...]
'[...] Do you think I may ask what this delightful smell is, without being abused?' [said Diana]
'Thyme,' said Stephen absently. 'Mother of thyme, crushed by our carriage-wheels.'
I always laugh at these sorts of jokes that O'Brian adds in--- he's great at capturing the flow of a real conversation and the small digressions that happen before getting back to a previous topic.
'So Aubrey is bound for the Baltic,' said Diana, after a while. 'He will not have this charming weather. I hate the cold.'
'The Baltic and northwards: just so,' said Stephen, recollecting himself. 'Lord, I wish I were going with him. The eider-duck, the phalarope, the narwhal! Ever since I was breeched I have pined to see a narwhal.'
Sure, Stephen. I'm sure it's just the wildlife that you're pining for...
'[...] I had imagined you had to go to Portsmouth, when you offered me a lift. Why have you come so far out of your way?' [said Diana]
'The dew-ponds, the wheatears, the pleasure of driving over grass.' [said Stephen]
'What a dogged brute you are, Maturin, upon my honour,' said Diana. 'I shall lay out for no more compliments.'
'No, but in all sadness,' said Stephen, 'I like sitting in a chaise with you; above all when you are like this. I could wish this road might go on for ever.'
There was a pause; the chaise was filled with waiting; but he did not go on, and after a moment she said with a forced laugh, 'Well done, Maturin. You are quite a courtier. But I am afraid I can see its end already. There is the sea, and this must be the beginning of the Devil's Punchbowl. And will you really drive me up to the door in style? [...] I am so grateful; and you shall certainly have your narwhal. Pray, where are they to be had? At the poulterer's, I suppose.'
'You are too good, my dear. Would you be prepared to reveal the address at which you are to be set down?'
God, how awkward. I do feel bad for Stephen and his pathetic little unrequited love, having to stifle himself in moments like this, but I might feel even worse for Diana who has to sit through it, knowing he's in love with her, and with the societal obligations of women of some status in a public setting. It makes me queasy to imagine myself in either of their places...
(At least we get a little laugh with the idea of finding a narwhal at a poulterer's.)
From the library window Stephen saw Sophia running across the lawn, holding up her skirt and trailing rose-petals. She took the steps up to the terrace three at a time: 'A deer might have taken them with such sweet grace,' he observed. He saw her stop dead and close her eyes for a second when she understood that the gentleman [who came to see her] was Dr Maturin; but she opened the door with hardly a pause and cried, 'What a delightful surprise! How kind to come to see us. Are you in Plymouth? I thought you were ordered for the Baltic.'
'The Polychrest is in the Baltic,' he said, kissing her heartily. 'I am on leave of absence.' He turned her to the light and observed, 'You are looking well—very well—quite a remarkable pink.'
'Dear, dear Dr Maturin,' she said, 'you really must not salute young ladies like that. Not in England. Of course I am pink—scarlet, I dare say. You kissed me!'
'Did I, my dear? Well, no great harm. [...]'
And another little bitter-sweet moment of Sophie thinking Jack had come to see her, the poor thing!
Also laughing at Stephen kissing Sophie in greeting... I'm sure he wouldn't have tried that with Diana! (Though I'm sure kissing Sophie is only out of an innocent, friendly affection.)
[Sophie] said, 'I am so glad. No one can be better company than Diana when she is in—' she quickly changed 'a good temper' to a weak 'in charming spirits.'
LOL. And Sophie sums up my feelings in one!
[Stephen said,] 'As for Jack, I am sorry to say I cannot congratulate him upon charming spirits; nor indeed upon any spirits at all. He is unhappy. His ship is a very miserable vessel; his admiral is a scrub; he has a great many worries ashore and afloat. And I tell you bluntly, my dear, he is jealous of me and I of him. I love him as much as I have loved any man, but often these last months I have wondered whether we can stay in the same ship without fighting. I am no longer what small comfort I was to him, but a present irritation and a constraint—our friendship is constrained. And the tension, cooped up in a little small ship day after day, is very great—covert words, the risk of misunderstanding, watching the things we say or even sing. It is well enough when we are far out in the ocean. But with Channel service, in and out of the Downs—no, it cannot last.'
'Does he know of your feelings for Diana? Surely not. Surely, to his best friend, he would never . . . He loves you dearly.' [said Sophie]
'Oh, as to that—yes, I believe he does, in his own way; and I believe if he had never been led into this by a series of unhappy misunderstandings, he would never have "crossed my hawse", as he would put it. As for his knowing the nature of my feelings, I like to think he does not. Certainly not with any sharp clarity, in the forefront of his mind. Jack is not quick in such matters; he is not in any way an analytical thinker, except aboard a ship in action: but light creeps in, from time to time.'
I can't believe Stephen literally went ashore to talk out his quadrangle woes with his girlies. Fucking Christ. And I know it's just a quirk of the antiquated language, and they are literally discussing how Jack and himself are quarreling over Diana, but god.
...Putting on our slash goggles for a moment... How casually Stephen says he loves Jack! And how Sophie insists he loves Stephen "dearly", too! Winning!
I'd also like to point out how Stephen himself has realized how much better they get along at sea; and then on land, when the 'real world' apart from naval life starts encroaching on their relationship, their love friendship becomes more and more "constrained" by the obligations land places on them! (And Stephen blames himself for it!)
WE LIVE IN A SOCIETY!!! I'm printing out and eating these paragraphs.
'Had you seen [Jack's] tears over your kindness, your hampers, you would not speak of refusal. He was all a-swim.' [said Stephen]
'Yes, you told me in your dear letter. But no, really, it is quite impossible—unthinkable. A man might do so, but for a woman it is quite impossible.' [said Sophie]
'There is much to be said for directness.'
'Oh, yes, yes! There is. Everything would be so much simpler if one only said what one thought, or felt. Tell me,' she said shyly, after a pause, 'may I say something to you, perhaps quite improper and wrong?'
'I should take it very friendly in you, my dear.' [said Stephen]
'Then if you were perfectly direct with Diana, and proposed marriage to her, might not we all be perfectly happy? Depend upon it, that is what she expects.'
'I? Make her an offer? My dearest Sophie, you know what kind of a match I am. A little ugly small man, with no name and no fortune. And you know her pride and ambition and connections.'
'You think too little of yourself, indeed you do. Far, far too little. You are much too humble. In your own way you are quite as good looking as Captain Aubrey—everybody says so. [...]'
Cryingggg. I love their friendship so damn much. Stephen and Sophie leaning on one another is always so goddamn sweet.
[...] [Stephen] saw Heneage Dundas stop on the pavement outside, shade his eyes, and peer in through the window, evidently looking for a friend. His nose came into contact with the glass, and its tip flattened into a pale disc. 'Not unlike the foot of a gasteropod,' observed Stephen [...]
LMFAO. I really, really hate that this is something I would think. Unfortunately there is a reason why Stephen is my favorite...
'You have a particular kindness for Jack Aubrey, Dr Maturin, I believe?' [said Dundas]
'I have a great liking for him, sure.' [said Stephen]
No comment.
'Jack,' said Stephen, 'may I come in?'
'Come in, come in, my dear fellow, come in,' cried Jack, springing forward and guiding him to a chair. 'I have scarcely seen—you how very pleasant this is! I cannot tell you how dreary the ship has been without you. How brown you are!'
In spite of an animal revulsion at the catch of the scent that hung about Jack's coat—never was there a more unlucky present—Stephen felt a warmth in his heart. His face displayed no more than a severe questioning, professional look, however, and he said, 'Jack, what have you been doing to yourself? You are thin, grey—costive, no doubt. You have lost another couple of stone: the skin under your eyes is a disagreeable yellow. Has the bullet-wound been giving trouble? Come, take off your shirt. I was never happy that I had extracted all the lead; my probe still seemed to grate on something.'
Reunited! It made me laugh that Jack instantly comments on Stephen's tan like it's the first day of school after summer break in a CGDCT anime (even if I do know it's actually because we're supposed to realize he couldn't have gotten a tan like that if he really was in Ireland). And even though Stephen's upset knowing Jack has been seeing Diana, he immediately goes into the loving physicing speil--- Okay, Jack, take off your shirt!! It's so obviously a form of affection...
'[...] That is another reason why I am so glad to see you: you will give me one of your treble shotted slime-draughts to get me to sleep. It's the devil, you know, not sleeping: no wonder a man looks like a ship's corporal. And these dreams—do you dream, Stephen?' [said Jack]
'No, sir.' [said Stephen]
'I thought not. You have a head-piece . . . however, I had one some nights ago, about your narwhal; and Sophie was mixed up with it in some way. It sounds nonsense, but it was so full of unhappiness that I woke blubbering like a child. Here it is, by the way.' He reached behind him and passed the long tapering spiral of ivory.
Stephen's eyes gleamed as he took it and turned it slowly round and round in his hands. 'Oh thank you, thank you, Jack,' he cried. 'It is perfect—the very apotheosis of a tooth.'
'There were some longer ones, well over a fathom, but they had lost their tips, and I thought you would like to get the point, ha, ha, ha.' It was a flash of his old idiot self, and he wheezed and chuckled for some time, his blue eyes as clear and delighted as they had been long ago: wild glee over an infinitesimal grain of merriment.
'It is a most prodigious phenomenon,' said Stephen, cherishing it. [...] Now how much do I owe you, my dear?'
'Oh, nothing, nothing. Do me the pleasure of accepting it as a present. Pray do. [...]'
And Jack has a present ready for him, pleaaaase! They're so damn cute!!!
'Dover,' said Stephen, and thought for a while, running the narwhal's horn through his fingers. 'Dover. Listen, Jack, you take insane risks, going ashore so often, particularly in Dover.'
'Why particularly in Dover?' [said Jack]
'Because your often presence there is notorious. If it is notorious to your friends, how much more so to your enemies? It is known in Whitehall; it must be known to your creditors in Mincing Lane. Do not look angerly now, Jack, but let me tell you three things: I must do so, as a friend. First, you will certainly be arrested for debt if you continue to go ashore. Second, it is said in the service that you cling to this station; and what harm that may do you professionally, you know better than I. No, let me finish. Third, have you considered how you expose Diana Villiers by your very open attentions, in circumstances of such known danger?'
'Has Diana Villiers put herself under your protection? Has she commissioned you to say this to me?'
'No, sir.'
'Then I do not see what right you have to speak to me in this way.'
'Sure, Jack, my dear, I have the right of a friend, have I not? I will not say duty, for that smells of cant.'
'A friend who wants a clear field, maybe. I may not be very clever, no God-damned Macchiavelli, but I believe I know a ruse de guerre when I see one. For a long time I did not know what to think about you and Diana Villiers—first one thing and then another—for you are a devilish sly fox, and break back upon your line. But now I see the reason for this standing off and on, this "not at home", and all this damned unkind treatment, and all this cracking-up of clever, amusing Stephen Maturin, who understands people and never preaches, whereas I am a heavy-handed fool that understands nothing. It is time we had a clear explanation about Diana Villiers, so that we may know where we stand.'
'I desire no explanations. They are never of any use, particularly in matters of this kind, where what one might term sexuality is concerned—reason, flies out of the window; all candour with it. In any case, even where this passion is not concerned, language is so imperfect, that . . .'
'Any bastard can cowardly evade the issue by a flood of words.'
'You have said enough, sir,' said Stephen, standing up. 'Too much by far: you must withdraw.'
'I shall not withdraw,' cried Jack, very pale. 'And I will add, that when a man comes back from leave [with a tan], and says he had delicate weather in Ireland, he lies. I will stand by that, and I am perfectly willing to give you any satisfaction you may choose to ask for.'
'It is odd enough,' said Stephen, in a low voice, 'that our acquaintance should have begun with a challenge, and that it should end with one.'
...Aaaand they're fighting again. To the point of an actual fucking duel. Stephen's final comment fucking kills me--- Don't bring up your meetcute at a time like this!!! Your acquaintance won't end!! I swear!! (...After all, you're in ~19 more books together!)
Argh, Jack's line, saying anyone can 'cowardly evade the issue by a flood of words', probably hits the hardest for me.
Honestly, this is kind of all Dundas' fault trying to get Stephen to save Jack's reputation... Man, this damn quadrangle is tearing me apart.
[...]—Captain Aubrey presents his compliments to Dr Maturin, and begs to say that an expression escaped him yesterday evening, a common expression to do with birth, that might have been taken to have a personal bearing. None was intended, and Captain Aubrey withdraws that word, at the same time regretting that, in the hurry of the moment, he made use of it. The other remarks he stands by—[...]
All that, and Jack only apologizes for calling him a bastard. God.
The news of their disagreement spread throughout the ship; the extent and the deadly nature of it were quite unknown, but so close an intimacy could not come to a sudden end without being noticed, and Stephen watched the reactions of his shipmates with a certain interest. He knew that in many ships the captain played the part of a monarch and the officers that of a court—that there was eager competition for Caesar's favour; but he had never thought of himself as the favourite; he had never known how much the respect paid to him was a reflection of the great man's power. Parker, who revered authority far more than he disliked his captain, drew away from Stephen; so did the featureless Jones; and Smithers did not attempt to conceal his animosity. Pullings behaved with marked kindness in the gun-room; but Pullings owed everything to Jack, and on the quarterdeck he seemed a little shy of Stephen's company. Not that he was often put to this trial, however, for convention required that the principals in a duel, like bride and bridegroom, should see nothing of one another before they reached the altar.
And now people are avoiding Stephen because they know about the breakup feud!
...Though I will put my goggles back on and emphasize that comment about "the principals in a duel" being "like bride and bridegroom"... Okay, then...
[...] [Stephen and Macdonald's] conversation drifted away to the likelihood of a French invasion, of a breach with Spain, and to the odd rumours of St Vincent impeaching Lord Melville for malversation, before it returned to Nelson.
'He is a hero of yours, I believe?' said Macdonald.
'Oh, I hardly know anything of the gentleman,' said Stephen. 'I have never even seen him. But from what I understand, he seems quite an active, zealous, enterprising officer. He is much loved in the service, surely? Captain Aubrey thinks the world of him.'
Stephen and Jack are literally awaiting a duel and yet Stephen STILL finds a way to bring up Jack and his naval heroes. They're fucking killing me.
From this point it was only a few steps to Diana's window, but half-way up, before ever [Jack] reached the parapet, he had recognized Canning's great delighted laugh, a crowing noise that rose from a deep bass, a particular laugh, that could not be mistaken. [...] For three deep breaths he might have burst through: it was extraordinarily vivid, the lit room, the faces, their expressions picked out by the candlelight, their intense life and their unconsciousness of a third person. Then shame, unhappiness, extreme weariness put out the rest, extinguished it utterly. No rage, no fire: all gone, and nothing to take their place. He moved some paces off to hear and see no more [...]
I hope Jack feels sorry about this whole fight he's having with Stephen over Diana after finding out she's spending the night with Canning anyway!
'Mr Parslow,' said Stephen, 'pray be so good as to ask the Captain if he is at leisure.'
'I'll go when I've finished this,' said Parslow coolly, without getting up.
Babbington dropped his fid, kicked Parslow vehemently down the ladder and said, 'I'll go, sir.' A later moment he came running back. [...]
Very happy was a conventional phrase, [...] Captain Aubrey had [...] a shattered, bludgeoned look on his face. He stood up, awkward, doubtful, embarrassed, his head bent under the beam.
'I am sorry to have to ask for this interview, sir,' said Stephen. 'But it is probable there will be a mutiny tomorrow night [...].'
Jack nodded. This confirmed his reading of the situation [...]. His ship was falling to pieces under his feet, his crew were falling away from their duty and their allegiance. 'Can you tell me who are the ringleaders?'
'I cannot. No, sir: you may call me many things, but not an informer. I have said enough, more than enough.'
[...]
'Thank you for having come to see me,' [Jack] said stiffly.
...And we start out the chapter with a heart wrenching display. Even aside from how awful it is to see Jack and Stephen speaking so stiffly with each other, the crew is planning a mutiny while mommy and daddy are fighting!
When the door had closed behind Stephen [Jack] sat down with his head in his hands and let himself go to total unhappiness—to something near despair—so many things together, and now this cold evil look: he reproached himself most bitterly for not having seized this chance for an apology. 'If only I could have got it out; but he spoke so quick, and he was so very cold. Though indeed, I should have looked the same if any man had given me the lie; it is not to be borne. What in God's name possessed me? So trivial, so beside the point—as gross as a schoolboy calling names—unmanly. However, he shall make a hole in me whenever he chooses. [...]'
They're both clearly miserable, but I think Jack might be taking it even worse... They're both being such stubborn idiots about the whole situation, even if it is par for the course in this setting. I mean, just imagine sitting around after a friendship breakup thinking about how your bestie has every right in the world to shoot you, and making no attempt to avoid that situation. So fucked up.
He stood up, walked as straight as he could to a ruined gun-port, made a feeble spring that just carried him to the Fanciulla, staggered, and turned to look at his ship. She did not sink for a good ten minutes, and by then the blood—what little he had left—had made a pool at his feet. She went very gently, with a sigh of air rushing through the hatches, and settled on the bottom, the tips of her broken masts showing a foot above the surface.
'Come, brother,' said Stephen in his ear, very like a dream. 'Come below. You must come below—here is too much blood altogether. Below, below. Here, Bonden, carry him with me.'
Jack prevents a mutiny with an epic badass speech that rallies the crew back behind him before they head into battle, has his ship get run aground, then fights to the last, even jumps into the water while bleeding out, and just as he's about to pass out from exhaustion and blood loss, there's Stephen to sheppard him to safety in the Fanciulla while calling him brother.
And that's how we end the chapter!!! No dwelling on 'oh well maybe we shouldn't duel after all', just a wordless acknowledgement from Stephen of 'I'm going to save your life and fuck the duel and let's forget we ever fought so badly'. My god. Once again, Absolute Fujobait Cinema.
(I demand five thousand missing-scene fics where they reconcile their almost-duel while Stephen tends to Jack's wounds.)
This chapter starts out with Jack writing a letter to Babbington's family:
My dear Sir,
By desire of your son William, my brave and respectable midshipman, I write a hasty line to inform you of our brush with the French last week. [...] He had the misfortune of being wounded a few minutes after boarding the Fanciulla, and his arm is so badly broken, that I fear it must suffer amputation. But as it is his left arm, and likely to do well under the great skill of Dr Maturin, I hope you will think it an honourable mark instead of a misfortune.
[...]
My best compliments wait on Mrs Babbington, and I am, my dear Sir,
With great truth, sincerely yours,
Jno. Aubrey
PS. Dr Maturin desires his compliments, and wishes me to say, that the arm may very well be saved. But, I may add, he is the best hand in the Fleet with a saw, if it comes to that; which I am sure will be a comfort to you and Mrs Babbington.
And here O'Brian lets us know that everything is back to normal, as Jack's writing his letters by complimenting Stephen and adding his thoughts in the postscript. Lovely.
(Poor Babbington's arm!)
'Killick,' [Jack] cried, folding and sealing [the letter]. 'That's for the post. Is the Doctor ready?'
'Ready and waiting these fourteen minutes,' said Stephen in a loud, sour voice. 'What a wretched tedious slow hand you are with a pen, upon my soul. Scratch-scratch, gasp-gasp. You might have written the Iliad in half the time, and a commentary upon it, too.'
'I am truly sorry, my dear fellow—I hate writing letters: it don't seem to come natural, somehow.'
'Non omnia possumus omnes,' said Stephen, 'but at least we can step into a boat at a stated time, can we not? Now here is your physic, and here is your bolus; and remember, a quart of porter with your breakfast, a quart at midday . . .'
...And Stephen, too, is back to his usual loving criticisms and concernedly nagging at Jack's health. It's such a relief to see them speaking to each other with their usual casual length, and not the curt brevity from the past couple chapters...!
'A little to the left—to the larboard,' said Stephen. 'Where was I? A quart of porter with your dinner: no wine, though you may take a glass or two of cold negus before retiring; no beef or mutton—fish, I say, chicken, a pair of rabbits; and, of course, Venerem omitte.'
'Eh? Oh, her. Yes. Certainly. Quite so. Very proper. Rowed of all—run her up.' The boat ground through the shingle. They ploughed across the beach, crossed the road into the dunes. 'Here?' asked Jack.
'Just past the gibbet—a little dell, a place I know, convenient in every way. Here we are.' They turned a dune and there was a dark-green post-chaise and its postillion eating his breakfast out of a cloth bag.
'I wish we could have worked the hearse,' muttered Jack.
'Stuff. Your own father would not recognize you in that bandage and in this dirty-yellow come-kiss-me-death exsanguine state: though indeed you look fitter for a hearse than many a subject I have cut up. Come, come, there is not a moment to lose. Get in. Mind the step. Preserved Killick, take good care of the Captain: his physic, well shaken, twice a day; the bolus thrice. He may offer to forget his bolus, Killick.'
'He'll take his nice bolus, sir, or my name's not Preserved.'
Firstly, Stephen using sailing terms is always so funny to me. Then he just keeps right on in giving Jack a whole list of doctor's orders, lolol. I love Killick assuring Stephen he'll make Jack take his medicine.
Then Jack wishing they could take a hearse as transport, and Stephen's fucking burn in reply, lmao! Telling Jack he looks more like a corpse than any actual cadaver he's cut up! Ouch!
He woke slowly, in a state of wholly relaxed comfort, blinking with ease; he had gone to bed at nine, as soon as he had swallowed his bolus and his tankard of porter, and be had slept the clock round, a sleep full of diffused happiness and a longing to impart it—a longing too oppressed by languor to have any effect. Some exquisite dreams: the Magdalene in Queenie's picture saying, 'Why do not you tune your fiddle to orange-tawny, yellow, green and this blue, instead of those old common notes?' It was so obvious: he and Stephen set to their tuning, the 'cello brown and full crimson, and they dashed away in colour alone—such colour! But he could not seize it again; it was fading into no more than words; it no longer made evident, luminous good sense.
After being made post-captain, Jack's joyful dreams are of him and Stephen playing music together in rainbow colors.
...Do I even need to say it...?
My dear Stephen, [Jack] wrote,
Oh wish me joy—I am made post! [...] How I wish you had been there! I celebrated with a quart of your vile porter and a bolus, and turned in at once, quite fagged out.
This morning I was very much better, however, and in the Savoy chapel I said the finest thing in my life. The parson was playing a Handel fugue, the organ-boy deserted his post, and I said 'it would be a pity to leave Handel up in the air, for want of wind,' and blew for him. It was the wittiest thing! I did not smoke it entirely all at once, however, only after. I had been pumping for some time; and then I could hardly keep from laughing aloud. It may be that post captains are a very witty set of men, and that I am coming to it.
But then you very nearly lost your patient. Like a fool I strayed out of bounds: a little chap heaves in sight, sings out, 'Captain A!' and I say, 'This claps a stopper over all: Jack, you are brought by the lee.' But, however, it was orders to join the Lively.
She is only a temporary command, and of course as acting-captain I do not take my friends with me; but I do beg you, my dear Stephen, to sail with me as my guest. [...] Pray come. I cannot tell you what pleasure it would give me. And to be even more egotistical in what I am afraid is a sadly egotistical letter, let me say, that having had your care, I should never trust my frame to a common sawbones again—my health is far from good, Stephen.
She is a crack frigate, with a good reputation, and I believe we shall have orders for the West Indies—think of the bonitoes, the bosun birds, the turtles, the palm-trees!
[...]
Yours most affectionately
[...]
Another letter by Jack, but this time to Stephen! I love how he feels it necessary to brag about his little witticisms to Stephen whenever he can. Plus the way Jack flatters im his ability as a doctor, all the while complaining about the regimen of porter and bolus! And of course the way Jack asks him to come aboard his new command so sincerely is so cute--- especially in reminding Stephen of the potential to see some interesting flora and fauna. I'm so glad they're friends again.
'[...] If the Doctor chooses to join the Lively, take his sea-chest and anything else he wants, no matter what—a stuffed whale or a double-headed ape got with child by the bosun. [...]' [Jack said to Killick]
LMAO. Honestly I wouldn't be shocked if Stephen tried to take something equally as nuts (but actually possible) aboard.
Stephen had been inspired to put off from the shore at about the same time [as Jack], though from a different place, and their courses converged some three furlongs from the frigate's side. Stephen's conveyance was one of the Lively's cutters, which saluted Jack by tossing oars, and which fell under his wherry's lee, so that they pulled in close company, Stephen calling out pleasantly all the way. [...] And as Stephen rose to wave and hoot, Jack saw that he was dressed from head to foot in a single tight dull-brown garment; it clung to him, and his pale, delighted face emerged from a woollen roll at the top, looking unnaturally large. His general appearance was something between that of an attenuated ape and a meagre heart; and he was carrying his narwhal horn. Captain Aubrey's back and shoulders went perfectly rigid: he adopted the features of one who is smiling; he even called out, 'Good morning to you—yes—no—ha, ha.' And as he recomposed them to a look of immovable gravity and unconcern, the thought darted through his mind, 'I believe the wicked old creature is drunk.'
You know its going to be a good scene when O'Brian starts describing the fuckass outfit Stephen's got on... I'm dying imagining him drunkenly waving and calling out to Jack from another boat! And Jack calling him 'the wicked old creature', pleaaaaase!!
Leaning over the side [of the ship, Jack] called, 'Dr Maturin, will you not come aboard?' Stephen was no more of a mariner now than he had been at the outset of his naval career, and it took him a long moment to clamber snorting up the frigate's side, propped by the agonized Killick, a moment that increased the attentive quarterdeck's sense of expectation. 'Mr Simmons,' said Jack, fixing him with a hard, savage eye, 'this is my friend Dr Maturin, who will be accompanying me. Dr Maturin, Mr Simmons, the first lieutenant of the Lively.'
Not Jack trying to intimidate everyone aboard into respecting Stephen...
'Your servant, sir,' said Stephen, making a leg: and this, thought Jack, was perhaps the most hideous action that a person in so subhuman a garment could perform. Hitherto the Lively's quarterdeck had taken the apparition nobly, with a vexing, remote perfection; but now, as Mr Simmons bowed stiffly, saying, 'Servant, sir,' and as Stephen, by way of being amiable, said, 'What a splendid vessel, to be sure—vast spacious decks: one might almost imagine oneself aboard an Indiaman,' there was a wild shriek of childish laughter—a quickly smothered shriek, followed by a howl that vanished sobbing down the companion-ladder.
...Make that failing to intimidate everyone aboard into respecting Stephen...
'Perhaps you would like to come into the cabin,' said Jack, taking Stephen's elbow in an iron grip. 'Your things will be brought aboard directly, never trouble yourself'—Stephen cast a look into the boat and seemed about to break away.
'I shall see to it myself at once, sir,' said the first lieutenant.
'Oh, Mr Simmons,' cried Stephen, 'pray bid them be very tender of my bees.'
Oh god, it's time for the bees...
And as always, I appreciate when one of them has to take a hold of the other's elbow to prevent him from embarrassing one or both of them.
Jack got [Stephen] into the after-cabin at last [...]. Here he sat on a locker and gazed at Stephen's garment. It had been horrible at a distance; it was worse near to—far worse. 'Stephen,' he said, 'I say, Stephen . . . Come in!'
[...]
'Listen, Jack,' [Stephen] said, smiling. 'Put your ear firmly to the top and listen while I tap.' The parcel gave a sudden momentary hum. 'Did you hear? That shows they are queen-right—that no harm has come to their queen. But we must open it at once; they must have air. There! A glass hive. Is it not ingenious, charming? I have always wanted to keep bees.'
'But how in God's name do you expect to keep bees in a man-of-war?' cried Jack. 'Where in God's name do you expect them to find flowers, at sea? How will they eat?'
'You can see their every motion,' said Stephen, close against the glass, entranced. 'Oh, as for their feeding, never fret your anxious mind; they will feed with us upon a saucer of sugar, at stated intervals. If the ingenious Monsieur Huber can keep bees, and he blind, the poor man, surely we can manage in a great spacious xebec?'
'This is a frigate.'
'Let us never split hairs, for all love. There is the queen! Come, look at the queen!'
'How many of those reptiles might there be?' asked Jack, holding pretty much aloof.
'Oh, sixty thousand or so, I dare say,' said Stephen carelessly. 'And when it comes on to blow, we will ship gimbals for the hive. This will preserve them from undue lateral motion.'
'You think of almost everything,' said Jack. 'Well, I will wear the bees, like Damon and Pythagoras—ho, a mere sixty thousand bees in the cabin don't signify, much. But I tell you what it is, Stephen: you don't always think of quite everything.'
'You refer to the queen's being a virgin?' said Stephen.
'Not really. No. What I really meant was, that this is a crack frigate.'
'I am delighted to hear it. There she goes—she lays an egg! You need not fear for her virginity, Jack.'
Nottt invoking the queen bee's virginity! He's so excited about these damn bees!
Jack really said they don't allow you to have bees in here...!
'And in this frigate they are very particular. Did not you remark the show of uniforms as you came aboard—an admiral's inspection—a royal review.' [said Jack]
'No. I cannot truthfully say that I did. Tell me, brother, is there some uneasiness on your mind?' [said Stephen]
'Stephen, will you for the love of God take off that thing?'
'My wool garment? You have noticed it, have you? I had forgot, or I should have pointed it out. Have you ever seen anything so deeply rational? See, I can withdraw my head entirely: the same applies to the feet and the hands. Warm, yet uncumbering; light; and above all healthy—no constriction anywhere! Paris, who was once a framework knitter, made it to my design; he is working on one for you at present.'
'Stephen, you would favour me deeply by taking it right off. It is unphilosophical of me, I know, but this is only an acting-command, and I cannot afford to be laughed at.'
'But you have often told me that it does not matter what one wears at sea. You yourself appear in nankeen trousers, a thing that I should never, never countenance. And this'—plucking at his bosom with a disappointed air—'partakes of the nature both of the Guernsey frock and of the free and easy pantaloon.'
Stephen in this whole bit is just so fucking much. Jack is entirely done with his bullshit! The lead-soled boots were one thing, but a woolen onesie? And poor Jack begging him to change into something normal that won't make them a laughingstock!
'Stephen,' [Jack] said, 'how are your bees?'
'They are very well, I thank you; they show great activity, even enthusiasm. But,' he added, with a slight hesitation, 'I seem to detect a certain reluctance to return to their hive.'
'Do you mean to say you let them out?' cried Jack. 'Do you mean that there are sixty thousand bees howling for blood in the cabin?'
'No, no. Oh no. Not above half that number; perhaps even less. And if you do not provoke them, I am persuaded you may go to and fro without the least concern; they are not froward bees. They will have gone home by morning, sure; I shall creep in during the middle watch and close their little wicket. But perhaps it might be as well, were we to sit together in this room tonight, just to let them get used to their surroundings. A certain initial agitation is understandable after all, and should not be discountenanced.'
Stephen: Jack, let's sit together in the cabin tonight--- just you, me, and my slightly less than 60,000 bees #mybees
[Jack knew he] must not be ridiculous; no captain could afford to be ridiculous. 'Stephen, oh my dear fellow,' he said to the tell-tale compass over his cot (for he was in his sleeping-cabin), 'what induced you to put on that vile thing? What a singular genius you have for hiding your talent under a bushel—a bushel that no one could possibly have foreseen.'
Jack speaking to the compass above his cot because Stephen isn't actually there in the room with him... Cute... Even if I wish Stephen had been in Jack's cot with him...
'[Killick is a] God-damned lubber, to forget our coffee,' [Jack] said to Stephen, with warm indignation.
'A little pause will make it all the more welcome when it comes, sure,' said Stephen, and to divert his friend's mind he took up a bee and said, 'Be so good as to watch my honey-bee.' He put it down on the edge of a saucer in which he had made a syrup of cocoa and sugar; the bee tasted to the syrup, pumped a reasonable quantity, took to the air, hovered before the saucer, and returned to the hive. 'Now, sir,' said Stephen, noting the time on his watch, 'now you will behold a prodigy.'
In twenty-five seconds two bees appeared, questing over the saucer with a particular high shrill buzz. They pitched, pumped syrup, and went home. After the same interval four bees came, then sixteen, then two hundred and fifty-six; but when four minutes had elapsed this simple progression was obscured by earlier bees who knew the way and who no longer had to fix either their hive or the syrup.
'Now,' cried Stephen, from out of the cloud, 'have you any doubt of their power to communicate a locus? How do they do it? What is their signal? Is it a compass-bearing? Jack, do not offer to molest that bee, I beg. For shame. It is only resting.'
'Beg pardon, sir, but there ain't a drop of coffee in the barky. Oh God almighty,' said Killick.
I love Stephen's excitement over the bees, of course, and him telling Jack not to poke at them, but, god--- Killick's line here made me burst out laughing!
'Oh God almighty,' right after his first sentence, LOL!
[...] this was not the Sophie, with her pop-guns: a single broadside from the Lively would burn well over a hundredweight of powder—a consideration. Dear Sophie, how she blazed away.
He identified the music that was running so insistently through his head. It was the piece of Hummel's that he and Stephen had played so often at Melbury Lodge, the adagio. And almost at once he had the clearest visual image of Sophia standing tall and willowy by the piano, looking confused, hanging her head.
He turned short in his stride and brought his mind to bear strongly on the question in hand. But it was no use; the music wove in among his calculations of powder and shot; he grew more agitated and unhappy [...]
It's a metaphooooor!!! Thinking about playing music with Stephen AND the image of Sophie back at Melbury Lodge! His two great loves, I'm telling you!!!
...No my goggles aren't just on too tight, what are you talking about?!
'Dogs,' said the chaplain, who was not one to leave his corner of the table silent long. 'That reminds me of a question I had meant to put to you gentlemen. This short watch that is about to come, or rather these two short watches—why are they called dog watches? Where, heu, heu, is the canine connection?'
'Why,' said Stephen, 'it is because they are curtailed, of course.'
A total blank. Stephen gave a faint inward sigh; but he was used to this. 'Mr Butler, the bottle stands by you,' said Jack. 'Mr Lydgate, allow me to help you to a little of the undercut.'
It was the midshipman who first reacted. He whispered to his neighbour Dashwood, 'He said, cur-tailed: the dog-watch is cur-tailed. Do you twig?'
It was the sort of wretched clench perfectly suited to the company. The spreading merriment, the relish, the thunderous mirth, reached the forecastle, causing amazement and conjecture: Jack leaned back in his chair, wiping the tears from his scarlet face, and cried, 'Oh, it is the best thing—the best thing. Bless you, Stephen—a glass of wine with you. Mr Simmons, if we dine with the admiral, you must ask me, and I will say, "Why, it is because they have been docked, of course." No, no. I am out. Cur-tailed—cur-tailed. But I doubt I should ever be able to get it out gravely enough.'
Jack's punning has rubbed off on Stephen!!! I love how pleased Jack is with the joke, even if it took a bit for everyone to catch on, lolol.
Stephen looked at [Jack] with his strange pale unblinking eyes. Had that old constraint returned, that curious misery? Jack was looking conscious—unnaturally, inappropriately gay: a wretched actor. 'Shall you not go, Jack?' he said.
'No, sir,' said Jack. 'I shall stay aboard. Between ourselves,' he added in a much lower tone, 'I do not believe I shall ever willingly set foot on shore again: indeed, I have sworn an oath never to risk arrest. But,' he cried, with that painful, jarring, artificial assumption of levity that Stephen knew so well, 'I must beg you to get some decent coffee when you go. [...]'
Not too much to say about this excerpt other than that I just really love the way they read each other in times like this. Acing the Broccoli Test with flying colors in these small moments of familiarity with each other's cadences and characters.
'Stephen,' said Jack, 'may I come in? I hope I have not woken you—was you asleep?'
'No,' said Stephen. 'Not at all.'
'Well, the gun-room is in rather a taking. It seems that a round million of your reptiles got into their cocoa-pot this morning—immolated themselves by the hundred, crawling in at the spout. They say that the wear and anxiety of such another breakfast would make them give up the service.'
'Did they note down the exact time?'
'Oh, I am sure they did. I am sure that in the intervals of avoiding attack, eating their breakfast, and navigating the ship, they hurried off to check the precise moment by the master's twin chronometers. Ha, ha.'
'You speak ironically, no doubt. But this is a striking instance of sagacity in bees. I feed them with a syrup of cocoa and sugar. They connect the scent of cocoa with their nourishment. They discover a new source of cocoa-scent; they busily communicate this discovery to their fellows [...]. Tomorrow I hope the gun-room will note down the time of their first appearance. I bet you a considerable sum of money that it will be within ten minutes either side of seven bells, the moment at which they were first fed.'
'Do you mean that they will rush in again?'
'So long as the gun-room continues to drink heavily-sugared cocoa, I see no reason why they should ever stop. It will be interesting to see whether this knowledge is passed on to all the subsequent generations of bees. I thank you, Jack, for telling me this: no discovery has given me so much satisfaction for years. [...].'
His waxy, tormented face had such a glow of pleasure that Jack could not find it in his heart to fulfil his promise to the gun-room. They might caulk their bulkheads, keyholes, skylights, drink tea or coffee, shroud themselves in mosquito netting for a day or so—what was a little discomfort, on active service?
I love how often Jack means to tell Stephen he can't do something or needs to put something to an end, and then can't bring himself to do so because he can tell how happy Stephen is! And especially when it's obvious Stephen had been in a bad mood previously--- ugh, he loves his doctor so much.
The patient [...] was led, or rather propelled, to the bench, stupefied with opium, dazed with rum, and buoyed up with accounts of the eminence of the hand that was going to deal with him [...].
'Gentlemen,' said Stephen, turning back his cuffs, 'you will observe that I take my point of departure from the iliac crest; I traverse thus, and so find my point of incision.'
So, in the fore-cabin, Jack held the point of his carver over a dimple in the venison pasty and said, 'Allow me to cut you a little of this pasty, ma'am. It is one of the few things I can carve. When we have a joint, I usually call upon my friend Dr Maturin, whom I hope to introduce to you this afternoon. He is such a hand at carving.'
LOL at the juxtaposition between Stephen about to make the first incision of a surgery, and Jack cutting into a pasty while lauding Stephen's 'carving' abilities!
There was a long, even swell from the south and a surface ripple that came lipping along [the Lively's] weather bow, sometimes sending a little shower of spray aft across the waist, with momentary rainbows in it. This would be a perfect afternoon and evening for gunnery.
Nothing shippy here, (unless I need to update my metaphor chart vis a vis the usage of rainbow imagery?!?!) but I just love these little parts of the book that show O'Brian's way with setting the scene in such a small amount of words. The narrative painting of a picture like this, the small showers of water causing 'momentary rainbows'--- I can practically smell the seawater. It really makes me long to be out on the water again. ...But not on an 1800's British naval ship. Just a ferry would be nice.
'Stephen,' [Jack] said [...], 'how did your operation go?'
'Very prettily, I thank you,' said Stephen. 'It was as charming a demonstration of my method as you could wish: a perfect case for immediate intervention, good light, plenty of elbow-room. And the patient survived.'
'Well done, well done! Tell me, Stephen, would you do me a kindness?'
'I might,' said Stephen, looking shrewish.
'It is just to shift your brutes into the quarter-gallery. The guns are to fire in the cabin, and perhaps the bang might be bad for them. Besides, I do not want another mutiny on my hands.'
'Oh, certainly. I shall carry the hive and you shall fix the gimbals. Let us do it at once.'
When Jack returned, still trembling and with the sweat running down the hollow of his spine, it was time for quarters.
First of all, the way Stephen's least prioritized statement of how well the surgery went is the fact that the patient lived, lmao.
But also the fact that Jack thought of the bees before starting with the cannons! Cute. I also like how often Jack calls them anything but "bees"--- instead he goes on about Stephen's 'reptiles' and 'brutes', lolol.
'[...] I hope we shall have a little more Channel duty before they send us foreign.' [said Jack]
He would not have formed this wish if he had known how surprisingly soon it was to be fulfilled. The Lively had not anchored in Spithead before orders came off desiring and directing him to proceed immediately to Plymouth to take charge of a north-bound convoy—Bermuda was off for the next few weeks, perhaps for good.
[...]
He would not have formed the wish, if he had known that it would mean depriving Stephen of the tropical delights he had promised [...].
Aww. I do like when Jack actually feels bad about denying Stephen his promised naturalist's excursions.
[Cecilia said,] '[...] Dear Dr Maturin, how do you do? How come you are here? Oh, I am amazed, I declare! What a splendid thing about Captain Aubrey, the dear man, and the Fanciulla: but to think of the poor Polychrest, all sunk beneath the wave—[...] Oh, how we wept—handkerchiefs all sopping, I do assure you—and of course it is very sad. But she might have thought of us. We shall never be able to hold up our heads again! I think it was very wrong of her—she might have waited until we were married. I think she is a—but I must not say that to you, because I believe you were quite smitten once, ages and ages ago, were you not?'
'What upset you so?' [said Stephen]
'Why, Diana, of course. Didn't you know? Oh, Lord.'
'Pray tell me now.'
'Mama said I was never to mention it. And I never will. But if you promise not to tell, I will whisper it. Di has gone into keeping with that Mr Canning. I thought that would surprise you. [...]'
Oh boy... We, the reader, saw this coming, and got to read about it from Jack's POV, but Jack never told Stephen! Makes sense, considering they were ready to duel at the time, but poor Stephen having to learn about it from Cissy of all people...
'Sophie, my dear,' [Stephen] said, kissing her, 'how do you do? I will answer your questions at once. Jack is made post. We came in that frigate by the little small island. He has an acting command.'
'Which frigate? Where? Where?' [said Sophie]
'Come,' said Stephen, swivelling the admiral's great brass telescope on its stand. 'There you have him, walking on the quarterdeck in his old nankeen trousers.'
There in the bright round paced Jack, from the hances to the aftermost carronade and back again.
[...]
'Is it out of focus?' asked Stephen.
'No, no. It is so prying to look like this—indecent. How is he? I am so very glad that—I am quite confused—everything is so sudden—I had no idea. How is he? And how are you? Dear Stephen, how are you?'
'I am very well, I thank you.'
'No, no, you are not. Come, come and sit down at once. Stephen, has Cissy been prattling?'
'Never mind,' said Stephen, looking aside. 'Tell me, is it true?'
She could not reply, but sat by him and took his hand.
At least he has the comfort of gazing longingly at Jack right along with Sophie, and giving her some sound advice:
'Now listen, honey,' [Stephen] said, returning the kindness of her clasp.
'Oh, I beg your pardon,' cried Admiral Haddock, putting his head in at the door and instantly withdrawing.
'Now listen, honey. The Lively, the frigate, is ordered up-Channel, to the Nore, with these foolish soldiers. She will sail the minute they are ready. You must go aboard this afternoon and ask him to give you a lift to the Downs.'
'Oh, I could never, never do such a thing. It would be very, very improper. Forward, pushing, bold, improper.'
'Not at all. With your sister, perfectly proper, the most usual thing in the world. Come now, my dear, start packing your things. It is now or never. He may be in the West Indies next month.'
'Never. I know you mean so very kindly—you are a darling, Stephen—but a young woman cannot, cannot do such things.'
'Now I have no time at all, none, acushla,' said Stephen, rising. 'So listen now. Do what I say. Pack your bonnet: go aboard. Now is the time. Now, or there will be three thousand miles of salt unhappy sea between you, and a waste of years.'
'I am so confused. But I cannot. No, I never will. I cannot. He might not want me.' The tears overflowed: she wrung her handkerchief desperately, shaking her head and murmuring, 'No, no, never.'
'Good day to you, now, Sophie,' he said. 'How can you be so simple. So missish? Fie Sophie. Where's your courage, girl? Sure, it is the one thing in the world he admires.'
He's so sweet in helping Sophie and Jack get together, he knows exactly what virtues Jack sees in her, and even calling Sophie 'acushla'! Ugh, I love their friendship so, so much.
[Stephen wrote in his journal:] '[...] I am not acute in my perceptions—my whole conduct with Diana proves it—but I would have sworn that Sophie had more bottom; was more straightforward, direct, courageous. Though to be sure, I know the depth of Jack's feeling for her, and perhaps she does not.' He looked up from his page again, straight into her face. It was outside the window, a few feet below him, moving from left to right as the boat pulled round the frigate's stern; [...]. Admiral Haddock sat beside her, and Cecilia.
When Stephen reached the quarterdeck the admiral was uttering his thoughts on manilla cordage, and Jack and Sophie were standing some distance apart, looking extraordinary conscious. 'His appearance,' reflected Stephen, 'is not so much that of concern as of consternation. His wits are overset: how very much at random he answers the admiral.'
[...]
'So I entrust the girls to you, Aubrey,' said the admiral. 'I shift the responsibility on to your shoulders—two great girls is a very shocking responsibility—and send 'em aboard on Thursday.'
'Upon my word, sir, you are very good—but not fit for a lady. That is to say, very fit for a lady; but cramped. Should be very happy, more than happy, to show Miss Williams any attention in my power.'
'Oh, never mind them. They are only girls, you know—they can rough it—don't put yourself out. [...] Stow them anywhere. Berth them with the Doctor, ha, ha! There you are, Dr Maturin. I am happy to see you. You would not mind it, eh? Eh? Ha, ha, ha. I saw you, you sly dog. Take care of him, Aubrey; he is a sly one.' The scattered officers on the quarterdeck frowned: the Admiral belonged to an older, coarser Navy [...].
LOL at Haddock thinking Stephen and Sophie had been flirting earlier, when in reality Stephen was telling her the best way to get together with Jack.
[...] [Jack] said to the waiting carpenter, 'come along with me and let us see what we can do to the cabin to make it fit for a lady. Mr Simmons, while we are settling this, pray let the sailmaker start making a sailcloth carpet: black and white squares, exactly like the Victory. There is not a moment to be lost. Stephen, my hero,' he said, in the comparative privacy of the fore-cabin, putting one arm round him in a bear-like hug. 'ain't you amazed, delighted and amazed? Lord, what luck I have some money! Come and give me your ideas on improving the cabin.'
'The cabin is very well as it is. Perfectly adequate. All that is needed is another hanging bed, a simple cot, with the proper blankets and pillows. A water-carafe, and a tumbler.'
'We can shift the bulkhead a good eighteen inches for'ard,' said Jack. 'By the bye, you will not object to the bees going ashore, just for a while?'
'[...] They are just growing used to their surroundings—they have started a queen-cell!'
'Brother, I insist. I should send my bees ashore for you, upon my sacred honour. Now there is a great favour I must ask you. I believe I have told you how I dined with Lord Nelson?'
'Not above two or three hundred times.'
'And I dare say I described those elegant silver plates he has? They were made here. Please would you go ashore and order me four, if it can be done with this? If not, two. They must have a hawser-laid rope-border. You will remember that? The border, the rim, must be in the form of a hawser-laid rope. [...]'
...Aaaand Jack immediately starts going nuts on improving the ship to impress Sophie.
Stephen's about to be very put-out, but at least he got a bear hug for his troubles.
The last days of Stephen's stay in the Lively were tedious and wearing to the spirit. The cabin was scrubbed and scrubbed again; it reeked of paint, beeswax and turpentine, sailcloth; its two cots were slung in different positions several times a day, with stork flowers in match-tubs arranged about them; the whole was shut up, forbidden ground, except for a space where he had to lie in disagreeable proximity to Jack, who tossed and snorted through the night.
Who would have guessed that Sophie coming aboard would cause Jack and Stephen to sleep next to each other? I just know she's fujoing out.
'What would [Jack] like to eat? A pudding, of course; and perhaps souse. And what would you like, Stephen? Something with mushrooms in it, I know.' [said Sophie]
Another win for all us fungiphilic Stephen fans!!!
[Stephen] sat by the fire, [...] with the letters balanced on his knee. Jack's strong hand, remarkably neat. Sophie's round, disconnected script: yet the down-strokes had determination in them.
'This will be all blotted with tears,' ran Sophie's, 'for although I shall try to make them fall to one side of my writing-desk, I am afraid some will drop on the paper, there are so many of them.' They had, indeed; the surface of the letter was mottled and uneven. 'Most of them are tears of pure undiluted happiness, for Captain Aubrey and I have come to an understanding—we are never to marry anyone else, ever! [...] How happy I am! And how very, very kind you have been to me . . .' 'Yes yes, my dear,' said Stephen, skipping some prettily-detailed expressions of gratitude, some particularly obliging remarks, and a highly-detailed account of the interesting occasion when [...] they came to their understanding in the cabin, 'yes, yes. Come to the point, I beg. Let us hear about these other tears.'
The point came on the back of page three. Mrs Williams had flown into a horrid passion on their return— [...] had Sophia no conception of her sacred duty to her mother—to a mother who had made such endless sacrifices? [...] What kind of a husband would such a man make, always wandering off into foreign parts whenever the whim took him, and attacking people in that rash way? [...] In any case, what did they know of Captain Aubrey? He might very well have liaisons in every port, and a large quantity of natural children.
The tears had fallen thicker here by far: spelling and syntax had gone astray: two lines were blotted out. 'But I shall wait for ever, if need be,' was legible, and so was 'and I am sure, quite sure, that he will too.' Stephen sniffed, glanced at the lines that said 'she must hurry now, to catch the post,' smiled at the 'yours, very affectionately, Sophie,' and picked up Jack's letter. With an overwhelming yawn he opened it, lay down on the bed with the candle near the pillow, and focused his drooping eyes on the paper, 'Lively, at sea. September 12, '04. My dear Stephen . . .' September 12: the day Mendoza was in El Ferrol. He forced his eyes wide open. The lines seemed to crackle with life and happiness, but still they swam. 'Wish me joy!' Well, so I do, too. 'You will never guess the news I have to tell you!' Oh yes I shall, brother: pray do not use so many points of admiration. 'I have the best part of a wife!! viz, her heart!!' Stephen sniffed again. [...] 'So direct—straightforward—nothing hole in the corner, if you understand me—no damned purser's tricks—must not swear, however,—like a 32 Iber.' Could he really have likened Sophie to a thirty-two pounder? It was quite possible. How the lines did swim. 'He must not speak disrespectfully of his putative mother-in-law, but . . .' What did Jack imagine putative to mean? 'Would be perfectly happy if only . . . ship . . . join me at Falmouth . . . [...] the Cape Verdes! Coconut-trees! . . . must hurry not to miss the post.'
Aww, Sophie crying onto her letters... That would absolutely be me if I ever had to write letters for my only choice of correspondence.
But Stephen reading Sophie's letter so thoroughly, then being able to compare it to Jack's, and doing a little running commentary as he reads Jack's letter, even while hes falling asleep! I love it, hahaha.
Plus, Jack's misuse of 'putative' (I wonder if he means something closer to a grammatically-bastardized version of 'pugnacious'? 'pugnative'? Or maybe closer to 'punitive'? Who knows with Jack...), and, if Stephen wasn't misreading from sleepiness, comparing Sophie to a 32 pounder! LOL.
[Stephen] awoke in daylight from a deep uninterrupted sleep, feeling happy, called for coffee, buns and a dram of whisky, read their letters again, smiling and nodding his head as he breakfasted, drank to their happiness, and took his papers from their oiled-silk roll. [...] In his diary he wrote, 'All happiness is a good: but if theirs is to be bought by years of waiting and perhaps disgrace, then even this may come too dear. JA is older than he was by far, perhaps as mature as it is in his nature to be; but he is only a man, and celibacy will never do for him. Ld Nelson said, Once past Gibraltar, every man is a bachelor. What will tropical warmth, unscrupulous young women, a fixed habit of eating too much, and high animal spirits accomplish? [...] NB I slept upwards of nine hours this night, without a single drop. This morning I saw my bottle on the chimneypiece, untouched: this is unparalleled.'
As worried as Stephen still is for his friends' successful relationship, the news of their planned future engagement and mutual happiness was still enough to get him to sleep without any laudanum... He really is a caring friend, despite how harsh he can be at times.
'If you please. Now, Sir Joseph, may I speak to you in an unofficial or at the most a semi-official way, about a naval friend of mine, in whom I am particularly interested?' [said Stephen]
'By all means. Pray do.' [said Sir Joseph]
'I refer to Captain Aubrey. Captain John Aubrey.'
'Lucky Jack Aubrey? Yes, yes: he cut out the Fanciulla—a very creditable little action. But you know that perfectly well, of course—you were there!'
'What I should like to ask is, whether he has good prospects of employment.'
'Well,' said Sir Joseph, leaning back and considering. 'Well. I do not have a great deal to do with patronage or appointments: that is not my department. But I do know that Lord Melville has a regard for him, and that he intended to advance his interests in time; possibly in the command of a vessel now on the stocks. His recent promotion, however, was intended as a full reward for his past services; and perhaps he would be well advised to expect nothing but the occasional acting, temporary command for some considerable period. [...] There are, I believe, a certain number of objections to set against his brilliant services: and he is unfortunate in his choice of a father. Are you acquainted with General Aubrey, my dear sir?'
'I have met the gentleman. He did not strike me as being very wise.'
'Every speech of his is said to be worth five votes to the other side; and he makes a surprising number of them. He has a tendency to address the House on subjects he does not quite understand.'
'It would be difficult for him to do otherwise, unless the Commons were to discuss the strategy of a fox-chase.'
'Exactly so. And naval affairs are his chief delight, alas. If there should be even a partial change of administration, his son is likely to be looked upon with a jaundiced eye.'
'You confirm all that I had supposed, Sir Joseph. I am obliged to you.'
[...]
'I have a request to make—I have a favour to beg. As you are aware, I have accepted nothing, at any time, for what services I may have been able to perform, in spite of the Admiralty's very obliging insistence.' [said Stephen]
Sir Joseph looked grave, but said he was sure that any request from Dr Maturin would receive the most sympathetic attention.
'My request is, that Captain Aubrey, in the Lively, should form part of the squadron.'
Sir Joseph's face cleared wonderfully. 'Certainly: I think I may promise that on my own responsibility,' he said. 'I believe Lord Melville would wish it: it may be the last thing he can do for his young friend. But is that all, sir? Surely, that cannot be all?'
'That is all, sir. You oblige me most extremely: I am deeply obliged to you, Sir Joseph.'
After all is said and done with Stephen's official business as an agent and the small talk is over, the first thing of importance Stephen asks is about is Jack. (Laughing at their dissing Jack's dad though.) And then, the fact that Stephen never asks for anything in return for being a fucking secret agent and just uses it to leverage more work for Jack...!
'Dear Stephen,' he said, 'thank you a thousand times for coming down so quick; I hardly hoped to see you before Falmouth. But I find I have lured you aboard on false pretences—Madeira and the West Indies are quite exploded. I am ordered to proceed to sea with the utmost possible dispatch—rendezvous off the Dodman.' He held the paper close to the light. 'Rendezvous with Indefatigable, Medusa and Amphion. Strange. And sealed orders not to be opened until so and so. What can they mean by that, Stephen?'
'I have no idea,' said Stephen.
'God damn and blast the Admiralty and all its lords,' cried Jack. 'Utmost dispatch—muck up all one's plans—I do apologize most humbly, Stephen.' He read on. 'Hey, hey, Stephen? I thought you had no idea: I thought you had just chanced to come down with the messenger. But in case of separation of one or more . . . certain eventualities and all that, I am requested and directed to avail myself of the counsels and advice of S. Maturin, esquire, MD etc., etc., appointed pro hac vice a captain in the Royal Navy . . . his knowledge and discretion.'
'It is possible that you may be required to undertake some negotiations, and that I may be of use in them.'
'Well, I must be discreet myself, I find,' said Jack, sitting down and looking wonderingly at Stephen. 'But you did say . . .'
'Now listen, Jack, will you? I am somewhat given to lying: my occasions require it from time to time. But I do not choose to have any man alive tell me of it.'
'Oh no, no, no,' cried Jack. 'I should never dream of doing such a thing. Not,' he added, recollecting himself and blushing, 'not when I am in my right mind. Quite apart from my love for you, it is far, far too dangerous. Hush: mum's the word. Tace is the Latin for a candle. I quite understand—am amazed I did not smoke it before: what a deep old file you are. But I twig it now.'
'Do you, my dear? Bless you.'
Jack apologizing for Stephen being there 'on false pretenses' because he knows there won't be any naturalist opportunities for Stephen, who immediately lies before being found out, and their little discussion about how Stephen hates to be caught in a lie. Gosh, and just the description of Jack blushing at the idea of calling him a liar, remembering their almost-duel... Ouch... It's adorable and heart wrenching all at the same time. (Does not help that I write this while listening to the subdued tones of Eight Pieces for Violin and Cello: 1. Tuning & Gavotte from the Musical Evenings With The Captain Aubrey-Maturin music collection album. It's even on Spotify! Go listen!)
Of course, I need to also comment on Jack outright saying he loves Stephen. A big win for us shippers here!
'But tell me, Jack, how did your journey go? How did Sophie withstand the motion of the vessel? Did she take her porter with her meals?' [said Stephen]
'Oh, admirably, admirably!' It had been the most perfect series of warm, gentle days, scarcely a fleck of white water [...] —and then there had been some charming dead calms, the whole day long—they had often talked of Stephen—how they had missed him! [...] —certainly Sophie had drunk her porter, and a glass of bosun's grog—had eaten splendidly: Jack loved a girl that tucked in hearty—and as for the future, they were full of hope, but . . . could do with very little . . . no horses . . . cottage . . . potatoes. 'Stephen,' he said, 'you are asleep.'
'I am not,' said Stephen. 'You just mentioned the last syllable of recorded time with evident approval. But I am weary, I confess. I travelled all night, and yesterday was something of a trial. I will turn in, if I may. Where must I sleep?'
'There's a question,' said Jack. 'Where should you berth, in fact? Of course you shall sleep in my cot; but officially where should you be? That would puzzle Solomon. What seniority did they give you?'
'I have no idea. I did not read the document; apart from the phrase. We, reposing especial trust and confidence in S.M., which pleased me.'
'Well, I suppose you are junior to me; so you shall have the leeward side of the cabin and I the windward, and every time we go about, we shall change sides, ha, ha, ha. Ain't I a rattle? But seriously, I suppose you should be read in to the ship's company—an amazing situation.'
This is also fucking adorable. I can just picture Jack telling Stephen all about how he and Sophie had a great time even though they missed him, talking away so pleasantly while Stephen starts to nod off... I love how often they seem to relax and doze to each others' ramblings.
...And of course for the slasher connoisseurs here we get Stephen sleeping in Jack's cot 'Of course'. Like, there's just no question about it at all. And, okay, I know it's obviously very normal for the setting to share sleeping quarters, and it means nothing beyond maybe a mild friendship, but just let me have this with my goggles. (...And this whole talk of 'changing sides'... 'Ain't I a rattle?' Yes, indeed, Jack, you are... With one's slash goggles tightened even further one could almost read that as Jack knowingly making a joke about other things they switch off on... If you 'twig' my meaning.)
At two bells in the middle watch the wind [...] backed suddenly into the north [...]—thunder just overhead, lightning, and [...] a deluge of rain [...]. Jack [...] came into the cabin, where Stephen lay swinging in his cot, to tell him that it was coming on to blow.
'How you do exaggerate, brother,' said Stephen. 'And how you drip! The best part of a quart of water has run off your person in this short space of time—see how it sweeps to and fro, defying gravity.'
'I love a good blow,' said Jack, 'and this is one of your genuine charmers; for, do you see, it must hold the Spaniards back, and the dear knows we are very short of time. Was they to slip into Cadiz before us, what flats we should look.'
'Jack, do you see that piece of string hanging down? Would you have the goodness to tie it to the hook over there, to reattach it? It came undone. Thank you. I pull upon it to moderate the motion of the cot, which exacerbates all my symptoms.'
'Are you unwell? Queasy? Sick?'
'No, no. Not at all. What a foolish suggestion. No. This may be the onset of a very serious malady. I was bitten by a tame bat a little while ago and I have reasons to doubt its sanity: it was a horseshoe bat, a female. It seems to me that I detect a likeness between my symptoms and the Ludolphus' description of his disease.'
'Should you like a glass of grog?' asked Jack. 'Or a ham sandwich, with luscious white fat?' he added, with a grin.
'No, no, no,' cried Stephen. 'Nothing of the kind. I tell you, this is a serious matter, calling for . . . there it goes again. Oh, this is a vile ship: the Sophie never behaved so—wild, unmeaning lurches. Would it be too much to ask you to turn down the lamp and to go away? Surely this is a situation that requires all your vigilance? Surely this is no time to stand idly smirking?'
'Are you sure there is nothing I can fetch you? A basin?'
'No, no, no.' Stephen's face assumed a pinched, mean expression: his beard showed black against the nacreous green. 'Does this sort of tempest last long?'
'Oh, three or four days, no more,' said jack, staggering with the lee-lurch. 'I will send Killick with a basin.'
'Jesus, Mary, Joseph,' said Stephen. 'There she goes again.'
I love their banter so much. 'Surely this is no time to stand idly smirking?' Be more married about it! Also, excerpts that make you want to go prepare 'a ham sandwich, with luscious white fat'...
'Do you remember Anson, Stephen?' said Jack, as they paced the quarterdeck. 'He did this for weeks and weeks off Paita. Did you ever read his book?'
'I did. How that man wasted his opportunities.'
'He went round the world, and worried the Spaniards out of their wits, and took the Manilla galleon—what more could you ask?'
'Some slight attention to the nature of the world round which he sailed so thoughtlessly. Apart from some very superficial remarks about the sea-elephant, there is barely a curious observation in the book. He should certainly have taken a naturalist.'
'If he had had you aboard, he might be godfather to half a dozen birds with curious beaks; but on the other hand, you would now be ninety-six. How he and his people ever stood this standing off and on, I do not know. However, it all ended happy.'
'Not a bird, not a plant, not a smell of geology . . . Shall we have some music after tea? I have written a piece I should like you to hear. It is a lament for the Tir nan Og.'
[...]
'Let us wait until the darkness falls, may we? Then I am your man: we will lament to your heart's content.'
If you're Post Captain and your main circle is not discussing George Anson's circumnavigation of the Earth and composing a lament for Tir nan Og, you need to elevate your circle.
(Also, we finally get another metaphor! I barely even needed to tighten my goggles for this one--- 'Let us wait until the darkness falls' 'Then I am your man'... I'm sure they will certainly 'lament' to Stephen's 'heart's content' indeed, eh, Jack?)
'Well, old Stephen,' cried Jack, hauling him inboard by main force, 'that was a hearty brush, eh? No bones broke, I trust? All sober and correct? Why, your face is black with powder-smoke. Go below—the gun-room will lend you a basin until the cabin is set to rights—wash, and we will go on with our breakfast as soon as the galley fire is lit again. I will be with you once we have knotted and spliced the worst of the danger.'
Stephen looked at him curiously. He was bolt upright, larger than life, and he seemed fairly to glow with light. 'It was a necessary stroke,' said Stephen.
'Indeed it was,' said Jack. 'I do not know much about politics, but it was a damned necessary stroke for me. No, I don't mean that,' he cried, seeing Stephen jut out his lower lip and look away. 'I mean she let fly at us, and if we had not replied, why truly, we should have been in a pretty mess. She dismounted two guns with her first broadside. Though to be sure,' he added with a delighted chuckle, 'it was necessary in the other meaning too. Come, go below, and I will join you presently. [...]'
Stephen pouting at Jack! Stephen, who is so often described as unemotive, actually fucking pouting. Just the fact that he would 'jut out his lower lip and look away' only for Jack to immediately start trying to win him back over. Ohhhh my god. Okay. Sorry, I just really need to fangirl for a moment over that little interaction...
In such a serious moment of attempted political negotiation between opposing ships, where fighting has just broken out, Jack still manages to be fucking jovial, and the two of them still manage to be talking to each other like they're the only two people on earth. I just love the way they converse in these small, strangely intimate moments. My god. O'Brian, your little age of sail guys are fucking killing me.
[The Fama] seems to be running extremely fast,' said Stephen.
'Yes. She is a flyer, certainly [...]. There! See, she's heaving her guns overboard. You see the splash? And another. She will be starting her water over the side presently. You remember how we pumped and pulled in the Sophie? Ha, ha. You heaved on your sweep like a hero, Stephen. She cannot sweep, however; no, no, she cannot sweep. There goes the last of her starboard guns. See how she draws away now—a charming sailer; one of the best they have.'
'Yet you mean to catch her? The Medusa is falling far behind.'
'I do not like to show away, Stephen, but I will bet you a dozen of any claret you choose to name against a can of ale that we lay her aboard before dinner. [...]'
'Will you not touch on wood when you say that? I take your wager, mind.'
Jack looked secretly at him. The dear creature's spirits were recovering a little: he must have been sadly shocked by that explosion. 'No,' he said. 'This time I shall defy fate [...]'
Firstly, I love when Jack's dialogue reads so natural and casual, especially as he describes things to Stephen, and by extension, the reader. But also, Jack privately thinking of Stephen as 'the dear creature' is for some reason just so fucking adorable to me. 'Jack looked secretly at him'... Augh, my heart...
'Gentlemen, I give you a toast. I beg you will drink Sophia.'
'Sophia!' cried the Spanish captains, holding up their glasses.
'Sophie,' said Stephen. 'God bless her.'
We'll end this page of commentary with the last lines of the book--- a toast to Sophie!
Once again, I hope you enjoyed reading my thoughts and commentary and stupid little jokes as much as I enjoyed writing them out while flailing with slash-induced glee at my keyboard. This sure was a long one! Stick around for HMS Surprise up next!
