'It is my belief, brother, that your misogyny is largely theoretical.'
'Ay,' said Jack, shaking his head. 'I love a wench, it is true; but a wench in her right place. Come, Stephen, we must shift our clothes. Tom and Martin will be with us in five minutes.'
In five minutes Captain Pullings in all his glory and Mr Martin in a good black coat walked into the great cabin: they were at once offered drinks to whet their appetite (a wholly unnecessary form at this time of the day) and as the bell struck they took their places at table. For the first part of dinner both sailors tried to make both medical men understand, really understand, why a craft that came up to within five points of the wind must eventually overtake another, moving at the same speed but coming up only six points, it being understood that they were both sailing close-hauled. After the roast mutton had gone away, a very mere skeleton, Jack in desperation sent for Reade and told him to ask Mr Adams for some bristol card and to cut out two isosceles triangles, the one with an apex of 135°, the other of 112°30'.
By the time triangles came the cloth had been drawn and Jack would have traced lines showing the direction of the wind and the turning points in port on the gleaming mahogany had Killick not cried out 'Oh sir, no sir, if you please: let me stretch lengths of white marline.'
The marline stretched, Jack said 'Now, gentlemen, the wind is blowing right down the middle, from the Doctor's waistcoat to mine; the parallel lines on either side show approximately where the vessels go about, beating up into it, towards him. Now I lay the six-pointer's triangle on the left-hand line with its base at right angles to the wind: I trace the ship's course, close-hauled, as far as the right-hand line, where she goes about; and I mark the place with a piece of bread. I do the same for each leg until I reach the turning-point of the sixth leg, marked with this dead weevil. Now I take the cutter's five-point triangle; I do the same; and as you see the cutter's fourth leg coincides almost exactly with the frigate's sixth. The distance made good to windward is pretty well four to three in favour of the fore-and-aft rig.'
'It cannot be denied,' said Stephen, looking closely at the weevil. 'But my head is more fully convinced than my heart - such a fine tall ship, that has run down so many enemies of superior force.'
'Would a trigonometrical proof please you more?' asked Tom Pullings.
Stephen shook his head and privately drew the weevil towards his plate. 'I looked into a book on trigonometry once,' said Martin. 'It was called A Simple Way of Resolving All Triangles, invaluable for Gentlemen, Surveyors, and Manners, carefully adapted for the Meanest Understanding: but I had to give it up. Some understandings are even meaner than the author imagined, it appears.'
'At least we all understand this capital port,' said Stephen. 'A glass of wine with you, sir.'
'By all means,' said Martin, bowing over his plate. 'It is indeed capital port; but this must be my very last. I have a ceremony to perform within the hour, as you know, and I should not wish to mumble and stumble my way through it.'
After dinner Stephen, who attended no services but funerals, retired to the sick-berth where Owen told him about his voyages to the mainland and islands of north-western America for furs and thence across by the Sandwich Islands, particularly Hawaii, to Canton, or sometimes home by way of the Horn or the Straits, with perhaps a stop at Mas Afuera for seal skins. And about other parts of the South Seas he had been to, especially Easter Island, which Stephen found more interesting than the rest, above all because of the prodigious figures on their exactly-dressed stone platforms, set up by an unknown people who had also left records on wooden tablets, inscribed in an unknown script and an unknown tongue. Owen was an intelligent, clear-headed man, who took pleasure in measuring things and pacing out distances and who, though nearly sixty, still had quite a good memory. He was still talking, though rather hoarse by now, and Stephen was still questioning him, when Martin came down for the evening doses and dressings.
'How I long to see Easter Island,' said Stephen to him. 'Owen here has been telling me more about the place. Do you remember how far off it is?"
'I believe the Captain said five thousand miles; but really, the bottle passed with such insistence after the ceremony that I am scarcely to be relied upon, ha, ha, ha.'
Padeen of course was present, as loblolly-boy: he had been in a pitiful state of anxiety ever since the cutter was sighted, and now as they all walked into the dispensary he bent to whisper in Stephen's ear, 'For the Mother of God, your honour will never forget me, I beg and beseech.' 'I will not, Padeen, upon my souclass="underline" I have the Captain's word itself,' said Stephen, and partly by way of reassuring him he went on in an ordinary tone to Martin, 'How did the service go? Well, I hope?'
'Oh yes, I thank you. Apart from the pitching, which nearly had us over twice, it might have been a private wedding in a drawing-room. The Captain gave away the bride very properly; the armourer had made a ring out of a guinea piece; all the officers were present and everything was entered in the log and signed. The bride startled me by appearing in a scarlet dress, but she thanked me very prettily when I offered my congratulations afterwards.'
'Had you not seen her before?'
'Certainly I had. I went forward earlier in the day to speak to her about the nature of the ceremony and to make sure she understood it - I had supposed she was quite a different kind of woman, barely literate . . . She was still wearing the clothes she had come aboard in, and I must say that although she looked very well as a bride, she looked far better as a boy. Her slight but not unattractive form gave me if not an understanding of paederasty then something not unlike it.'
Stephen was surprised. He had never heard Martin make such an unreserved and almost licentious observation: perhaps he was now more a medical man than a parson. And perhaps, Stephen reflected as they rolled their pills and Padeen wound the bandages, this was one of the effects of bringing a woman into a celibate community. He was no chemist, but some of his friends were and he had seen a Swedish savant let a single catalysing drop fall into a clear untroubled liquid that instantly grew turbid, separated, and threw down fire-red crystals.
'Come,' said Martin. 'We must not be too late. There are to be great doings on the forecastle. Jack's Alive and hornpipes, of course, and some of the old dances, like Cuckolds All Awry and An Old Man's a Bed Full of Bones. We used to dance them when I was at school.'
'What could be more suitable?' said Stephen.
The Surprise had always been a tuneful ship and much given to dancing, but never to such a degree as this evening, when the crowded forecastle saw the ranks of country-dancers advance, retreat and caper in perfect time despite the swell, while fiddles, horns, Jew's harps and fifes played with barely a pause on the bitts and even perched on the windward cathead. Hornpipes, with several dancing at once, each encouraged by his own division; jigs; the strange evolutions of the Orkney-men, and their rhythmic howls.
'They are enjoying themselves, sir,' said Pullings.
'Let them gather their peasecods while they may,' said Jack. 'Old Monday he's a-dying. They will have a ducking before we muster the watch.' They both glanced up through the cloud of sails at the thickening sky - barely a star showing through. 'But I am just as glad of it. That damned cutter will throw up another blue light in a minute, but we shall not be able to see this one either.'
Indeed, as the current hornpipe was ending in feats of extraordinary agility, two faint blue glows appeared far astern, but the third, completing the conventional signal, could not be made out at all.