Clarissa Oakes by Patrick O'Brian

  'My dear' wrote Stephen.

  'We are now in the realm of the trade wind and we fly along at an exhilarating pace; but sailing against the wind (or as nearly against it as lies within the abilities of a square-rigged ship) is very unlike sailing before it, very unlike those luxurious days of rolling down to St Helena when one sits under an awning admiring the sea or reading one's book and when the mariners are not required to touch the flowing sheet. Now we lean over to a dangerous degree, and the spray or even solid water comes sweeping back with uncommon vehemence. Jack comes down soaked: not that he comes down often, because sailing of this kind requires his presence on deck. It would be much, much easier for all concerned if he would spread fewer sails and keep the wind one point free; yet he means not only to reach Moahu as soon as ever he can but he also, and above all, wishes to deal with the present situation by recalling all hands to their duty; and he is doing so with a greater authority than I knew he possessed.

  'Whether he will succeed in his purpose I do not know. He sees the trouble as being caused by the enmity between the officers who are attracted to Mrs Oakes, and these officers being supported by their own men, so that there are rival clans in the ship. But there are complexities that escape him, and now that I have time and to spare and the cabin to myself I shall endeavour to set them out as well as I can. The divisions, if I may so call them, amount to at least half a dozen: there are those (the majority) who condemn Clarissa for lying with any member of the quarterdeck at all apart from her husband; those who condemn her for lying with any officer but their own; those who support Oakes without reserve (they belong for the most part to his division and they are known as the Oak-Apples); those who condemn him for having beaten his wife; those who support their divisional officer whatever his situation with regard to her; and those who still look upon Clarissa with affectionate esteem—the sailmaker, for example, has recently made her a tarpaulin cloak, in which she now sits by the taffrail.

  'Even if it were right for me to open my mind to Jack, I doubt it would be useful: I do not think I could ever make him understand that for her the sexual act is trivial, of no consequence. Our ordinary salute, the kiss, is held infamous among the Japanese if bestowed in public: with them, says Pinto, it is as much a deed of darkness or at least of total privacy as physical love-making is with us. For her, because of the particularity of her bringing-up, kiss and coition are much the same in insignificance; furthermore, she takes not the slightest pleasure in either. If therefore, through a variety of motives in which good nature and even compassion certainly have a part as well as a general desire to be liked, she has admitted some men to her bed, she has done so very innocently: "If an ill-looking pitiful fellow with say a thorn in his foot begged you to take it out, sure you would consent, even if doing so were rather unpleasant than otherwise." To her astonishment she had found herself loved and hated in various degrees, rather than merely liked, by those she obliged; and condemned by many who were in no way concerned.

  'At different times I had tried to explain the violent male desire for exclusive possession—the standard by which a wide variety of partners if not promiscuity is laudable in oneself, vile in women—the want of sequence or even common honesty of mind coupled with unshakable conviction—the unreasonable yet very strong and very painful emotions that arise from jealousy (a feeling to which she is almost entirely a stranger)—and the very great force of rivalry. I also told her, with authority, that nothing can be done aboard ship without its being known. I spoke each time at some length, with real concern for her; she listened attentively and I think she believed me. In any event she is determined to renounce fornication: though how she will fare I know not. She has lit a fire that will not easily be put out; and although for the moment Jack keeps all hands in such a state of perpetual activity that the members of the gun-room mess can hardly put one foot in front of the other when they come below, these passions, confined as they are in space, may burst out later with a shocking force.'

  He sat there, lost in his reflections, until Killick came in and said, as he had so often said before, 'Why, sir, you are sitting in the dark.' He brought a light, a lantern that swung in gimbals, and Stephen returned to his contemplation, holding his pen in the air.

  'Scribble, scribble, scribble, Dr Maturin,' said Jack.

  'You are not wet at all, I find,' said Stephen.

  'No,' said Jack. 'Not to put too fine a point on it, I am quite dry; and was you to put your nose above the coaming and look at the dog-vane, you would see why. The wind has veered a whole point, and the spray goes well away to leeward. In any case the sea has gone down. Could you do with a cup of coffee and a breadfruit biscuit?'

  'I could, too.'

  'Killick! Killick, there.'

  'Sir?' said Killick, still unnaturally meek, though a shade of the familiar shrewishness could now be detected. Indeed, he had recovered enough assurance to bring them only a meagre plate of the dried breadfruit slices, he being devoted to them himself.

  The coffee came; and when half had been drunk Jack said 'Do you remember that I spoke to you about a flying column?'

  'I remember it well; and I wondered at the time how and where it was to fly.'

  Jack took a sheet from his desk and said 'This is Wainwright's chart of Moahu, and I am particularly grateful to him for the soundings of the reef off Pabay here in the north, and the channel into the harbour: the same for Eeahu down in the south. This hatching across the neck of the hourglass—a damned wide neck for an hourglass, I may say—represents the mountains that separate the two lobes, Kalahua's country in the top half, Queen Puolani's in the bottom. Now my plan is to sail straight into Pabay, preferably in the evening, but that depends on tide and weather, to sail in looking as like a whaler as possible, and to lay the Franklin aboard directly, dealing with her out of hand as we did the Diane at St Martin's. But time and tide may not serve, and she may have thrown up batteries on either side of the narrows, using the Truelove's guns. I may have to lie off and deal with them first. So it seems to me that if things do not go as smooth as they did at St Martin's, we should land a body of men here'—pointing to a bay half a mile south of the harbour—'to make a diversion—to take them from behind while we are battering them from in front. That is my flying column; and what I should like you to do as a medical man is to help me choose the most active, intelligent and of course healthy of the twenty or thirty men we can afford. I do not want any poxed hands—and I know you have the usual crop after Annamooka—or bursten bellies, however brave they may be, nor any ancients, above thirty-five. They must be extremely nimble. So please look at the list Tom and I have drawn up and tell me if there is an objection to any of the names from a medical point of view.'

  'Very well,' said Stephen: and having run his eyes down the list he went on 'Tell me, are we far from Moahu?'

  'About four days sail. I mean to ease off tomorrow, and give them a quiet Sunday: then target-practice on Monday, to air their intellects; and in the evening I may tell them what is afoot.'

  'I see. Now as to your list, I have made a mark against the least medically sound: it is not necessarily discreditable at all.'

  'Many thanks. Then of course there is the command; but I hesitate to question you about your messmates . . .'

  Stephen's face closed: he said, 'Purely as the ship's surgeon, I should make no exception to any of them.'

  'I am happy to hear it.'

  There was a somewhat embarrassed silence, and to break it Stephen said 'Had we but world enough and time you could choose your band in the Irish manner. Did I ever tell you of Finn MacCool?'

  'The gentleman that was so fond of salmon?'

  'Himself. Now he commanded the forces of the nation, the Fianna Eirion, and none was accepted into any of the seven cohorts—I quote from a fallible memory, Jack, but at least I am sure of my figures—until he had learned the twelve Irish books of poetry and could say them without book: if the party to be accepted would defend himself with his ta
rget and sword from nine throws of the javelin from nine of the company that would stand but nine ridges from him at distance, and either cut the javelin with his sword or receive them all on his target without bleeding on him, he would be accepted; otherwise not. If the party running through the thickest wood of Ireland were overtaken by any of the seven cohorts and they pursuing him with all their might and main he would not be taken of them in their company. But if he had outrun them all without loss of any hair of his head, without breaking any old stick under his feet and he leaping over any tree that he should meet as high as the top of his head without impediment, and stooping under a tree as low as his knee and taking a thorn out of his foot (if it should chance to be in it) with his nail without impediment of his running, all which if he had done, he would be accepted as one of the company: otherwise not.'

  'Twelve books, did you say?'

  'Twelve, upon my soul.'

  'And all by heart? Alas, with a Sunday coming between, I doubt it can be accomplished.

  The Sunday in question was emphatically a day of rest, of as much rest as was feasible in a ship at sea. It is true that hammocks were piped up half an hour earlier than usual and that breakfast was swallowed fast so that the deck could be brought to a high state of perfection, with what little brass the frigate possessed blazing in the sun and all the ship's pigtails (the Surprise, rather old-fashioned in some respects, still had well over fifty, some of a most impressive length) untwined, often washed and always plaited afresh by the seaman's tie-mate, while all hands put on the clean clothes washed on Thursday and made themselves fine for divisions.

  Divisions passed off perfectly well: the wind, though less powerful than it had been for some days, was steady and dead true to its quarter, with never a gust or a flurry; and the Captain, though scarcely jovial, could be said to have lost his wickedness; while when church was rigged it was observed that he had abandoned the Articles, leaving the sermon to Mr Martin.

  Martin had no gift for preaching; he did not feel himself qualified to instruct others in moral, still less in spiritual, matters, and his few sermons in the Surprise, delivered long ago when he sailed as a chaplain rather than as surgeon's assistant, had been ill-received. He now therefore confined himself to reading the works of more able or at least more confident men; and as Stephen reached the half-deck on his way to the cabin from the sick-berth, where he had said a rosary with Padeen and some other Papists, he heard Martin's voice: 'Let no man say, I could not miss a fortune, for I have studied all my youth. How many men have studied more nights than he hath done hours, and studied themselves blind and mad in the mathematics, and yet wither in beggary in a corner? Let him never add, But I studied in a useful and gainful profession. How many have done so too, and yet never compassed the favour of a judge? And how many that have had all that, have struck upon a rock, even at full sea, and perished there?' And then some time later: 'What a dim vespers of a glorious festival, what a poor half-holiday, is Methusalem's nine hundred years to eternity! What a poor account hath that man that says, This land hath been in my name, and in my ancestors' from the conquest! What a yesterday is that? Not six hundred years. If I could believe the transmigration of souls and think that my soul had been successively in some creature or other since the Creation, what a yesterday is that? Not six thousand years. What a yesterday for the past, what a tomorrow for the future is any term that can be comprehended in cipher or counters?'

  Jack dined that day, and dined well, off Stephen's fish, last year's lamb, and a thumping great spotted dog, his guests being Stephen himself of course, Pullings, Martin and Reade. With the ship running fast and easy, the water racing down her side in a speaking stream, they could not but be happy—a subdued happiness however in Pullings and Reade, still oppressed by the shameful exhibition at Annamooka—and after dinner they moved up to the quarterdeck for their coffee.

  Mrs Oakes, who dined a little after twelve, had already been there for some time, her chair installed at the leeward end of the taffrail and her feet resting on a cheese of wads placed there by William Honey, an admirer still, like the rest of his mess. She was alone, her husband, West and even Adams being fast asleep, as indeed were almost all hands who were not actually on duty—the main and fore tops were filled with seamen asprawl on the folded studdingsails, their mouths open and their eyes shut, like Dutch boors in a harvest-field; and Davidge, the officer of the watch, had taken up his usual position by the weather hances. Jack led his troop aft and asked her how she did. 'Very well indeed, sir, I thank you,' she said. 'It would be an ungrateful woman that did not feel amazingly well, being carried over the sea in this splendid fashion. Driving fast on a turnpike in a well-hung carriage is charming, but it is nothing in comparison of this.'

  Jack poured her coffee and they talked about the disadvantages of travel by land—coaches overturning, horses running away, horses refusing to run at all, crowded inns. That is to say Jack, Clarissa and Stephen talked. The others stood holding their little delicate cups, looking as easy as they could and simpering from time to time, until at last Martin contributed an account of a very wretched journey across Dartmoor in a gig whose wheels came off as night was falling, a rainstorm beating in from the west, the linch-pin lost in a bottomless mire and the horses audibly weeping. Martin was not one of those few men who can speak naturally when they are in a false position, and Stephen observed that Clarissa was secretly amused: yet she helped him along with polite attention and timely cries of 'Heavens!' 'Dear me' and 'How very horrid it must have been.'

  From this, perhaps as an illustration of the greater ease of travel by sea, the conversation passed on to her foot-rest. 'Why is it called a wad of cheese?' she asked.

  'A cheese of wads, I believe, ma'am,' said Jack. 'Cheese because it is a cylinder like a tall thin Stilton, and wads because that is what the cloth is filled with. I dare say you have seen a man load his fowling-piece?' Clarissa bowed. 'First he puts in his powder, then his shot, and then with his ramrod he thrusts down a wad to hold everything in place until he wishes to fire. That is just what we do with the great guns; only of course the wads are much bigger.'

  Again Clarissa bent her head by way of agreement, and Stephen had the impression or rather the certainty that if she had spoken her voice would have been as unnatural as Martin's.

  'Now that I come to think of it,' said Jack, gazing amiably at the eastern horizon, upon which Christmas Island should soon appear if his two chronometers, his last lunars and his noonday observation were correct. 'Now that I reflect, I do not believe you have ever seen the operation: you have always been below. We mean to have target-practice tomorrow, and if it would amuse you to watch, pray come on deck. You could see everything quite well, was you to stand amidships, by the barricade. Though perhaps you may not like the explosions. I know that elegant females'—smiling—'do not always like it when one fires even a fowling-piece at anything like close quarters.'

  'Oh, sir,' said Clarissa, 'I am not so elegant a female as to mind the report of a gun: and I should very much like to see your target-practice tomorrow. But now I think I must go and rouse my husband; he particularly desired me to wake him well before his watch.'

  She rose; they bowed; and as she went down the companion-ladder the lookout at the masthead cried 'Land ho! On deck, there, land on the starboard bow. A low sort of long island,' he added in a subdued voice for the benefit of his friends in the maintops, 'with more of them fucking palm-trees.'

  Early on Monday morning, with the sun slanting low across the long even swell so that its rounded summits, a furlong apart, were visible, though very soon they would be quite lost in the little fret of superficial waves, Captain Aubrey spread top-gallantsails, and the hands racing aloft very nearly crushed Stephen and Martin as they crouched in the mizzen-top, training the glass aft over the rail, gazing back at the land and the cloud of birds over it.

  'I am persuaded that it is a vast atoll,' said Stephen. 'Vast; prodigiously extensive. Were we to climb higher sti
ll we might perhaps see across it, or at least make out a segment of the great circle.'

  'I should be sorry to disturb the men at their work,' said Martin.

  Stephen looked up as the hands came fleeting down, the outer men leaping in from the yardarm like so many gibbons, and did not press the point. He said 'We have been sailing past it almost all night: and though the rim of the lagoon may be no more than a musket-shot across at any given point, that still amounts to an enormous surface with no doubt a comparably enormous quantity of animals and vegetable life—the palms and the birds we have seen from afar, and some low bushes; but who knows what interesting predators, what wholly unexpected parasites they may have, to say nothing of undescribed forms of mollusc, insect, arachnid . . . there may even be some antediluvian mammals—a peculiar bat—that would confer immortality upon us. But shall we ever see it? No, sir. We shall not. Presently this ship will haul off, heave her wind, and spend hours, hours I say, bombarding the empty sea on the pretext of airing the mariners' intellects and in fact doing nothing but frighten the birds: yet she would never consider stopping for five minutes to let us pick up so much as an annelid.'

  Stephen knew that he had said all this before, off the many, many islands and remote uninhabited shores they had passed, irretrievably passed; he knew that he might be being a bore; yet the tolerant smile on Martin's face, though very slight indeed, vexed him extremely.