Post Captain (25 page)

'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, jew's ears (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, the ladies retired, and the port began to go round. By now rank had evened out: at least one young man was as grand, royal and spreading as an admiral, and in the vinous, candle-lit haze Jack's nagging anxiety about what the Polychrest would do in a capful of wind with all that tophamper, about her ballast, trim, construction, crew and stores dropped away, leaving him the cheerful lieutenant he had been not so very long ago.

They had drunk the King, the First Lord ('0 bless him, God bless him,' cried Pullings), Lord Nelson with three times three, wives and sweethearts, Miss Chubb (the pink child) and other young ladies; they had carried the elder Mr Pullings to his bed, and they were singing

We'll rant and we'll roar like true British sailors,

We'll range and we'll roam over all the salt seas,

Until we strike soundings in the Channel of old England:

From Ushant to Sally 'tis thirty-five leagues.

We hove our ship to when the wind was south-west, boys,

We hove our ship to for to strike soundings clear,

Then we filled our main-topsail and bore right away, boys,

And right up the Channel our course we did steer.

We'll rant and we'll roar...

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. They were powerful, determined fellows; the reward was high, and the mêlée surged towards the open window - one touch amounted to a lawful arrest.

A leap and he was away: but the head tipstaff was fly - he had posted a gang outside, and they were looking up eagerly, calling out 'jump for it, sir - we'll break your fall - it's only one storey.' Holding on to the window he craned out, looking down the lane towards the shore - he could see the gleam of water - towards the place where by rights the Polychrests should be drinking Pullings' beer, sent to them together with the second sucking-pig; and surely Bonden could be relied upon? He filled his lungs.

and hailed 'Polychrest' in a tone that echoed back from Portsmouth and stopped the mild gossip in the launch stone dead. 'Polychrest!'

'Sir?' came back Bonden's voice out of the dripping gloom.

'Double up to the inn, d'ye hear me? Up the lane. Bring your stretchers.'

'Aye-aye, sir.'

In a moment the launch was empty. Stretchers, the boat's long wooden footrests, meant a row. The captain was no doubt pressing some hands, and they, pressed men themselves, did not mean to miss a second of the fun.

The pounding of feet at the end of the lane, coming nearer: behind, the sway and crash of chairs, oaths, a doubtful battle. 'Here, here! Right under the window,' cried Jack, and there they were, a little wet mob, gasping, gaping up. 'Make a ring, now. Stand from under!' He jumped, picked himself up and cried, 'Down to the boat. Bear a hand, bear a hand!'

For the first moment the gang in the street hung back, but as the head tipstaff and his men came racing out of the inn shouting 'In the name of the law! Way there, in the name of the law!' they closed, and the narrow lane was filled with the sound of hard dry blows, grunts, the crash of wood upon wood. The sailors, with Jack in the middle, pushed fast in the direction of the sea.

'In the name of the law!' cried the tipstaff again, making a most desperate attempt to break through.

'- the law,' cried the seamen, and Bonden, grappling with the bailiff, wrenched the staff from him. He flung it right down the lane, fairly into the water, and said, 'You've lost your commission now, mate. I can hit you now, mate, so you watch out, I say. You watch out, cully, or you'll come home by Weeping Cross.'

The bailiff uttered a low growl, pulled out his hanger and hurled himself at Jack. 'Artful, eh?' said Bonden, and brought his stretcher down on his head. He fell in the mud, to be trampled upon by Pullings and his friends, pouring out of the inn. At this the gang broke and fled, calling out that they should fetch their friends, the watch, the military, and leaving two of their number stretched upon the ground.

'Mr Pullings, press those men, if you please,' cried Jack from the boat. 'And that fellow in the mud. Two more? Capital. All aboard? Where's the Doctor? Pass the word for the Doctor. Ah, there you are. Shove off. Altogether, now, give way. Give way cheerly. What a prime hand he will make, to be sure,' he added in an aside, 'once he's used to our ways - a proper bulldog of a man.'

At two bells that morning watch the Polychrest was slipping quietly through the cold grey sea, the cold grey air, for at midnight the wind had come a little east of south, and in order not to lose a minute (a ship could be windbound for weeks on end in the Channel at this season) Jack had given orders to unmoor, although the tide was making. A gentle breeze it was, not enough to dispel the fog or raise more than a ripple on the long oily swell, and the Polychrest could have carried a great spread of canvas; however, she was under little more than her topsails, and she ghosted along, with little more than a whisper of water the length of her side.

The tall dark form of her captain, much larger in his foul-weather clothes, stood over on the windward side of the quarterdeck. At the sound of the log being heaved, the cry of 'Turn' and 'stop' and the thump of its coming aboard again, he turned. 'Mr Babbington, what do you have?' he called.

'Two knots and a three fathom, if you please, sir.'

Jack nodded. Somewhere out there in the darkness on the larboard bow there would be Selsey Bill, and presently he might have to tack: for the moment he had plenty of room - the persistent howling under the lee came from the horns of the inshore fishing-boats, and they were a good mile away. To seaward there was the thump of a gun every few minutes - a man-of-war bound for Portsmouth, no doubt, on the opposite tack - and the Polychrest's bow carronade answered regularly with quarter charges.

'At least there will be four men who know how to handle one by morning,' he reflected.

In a way it was unfortunate that this first acquaintance with his ship should come at a time when there was no horizon, when sea and air could not be told apart; but he was not sorry for it, upon the whole - it gained him some hours at least, it sent Gosport, its squalors and its possible complications far astern, and in any case he had been on fire to know how she handled in the open sea ever since he had set eyes on the Polychrest. She had the strangest motion, a kind of nervous lift and shudder like a horse about to shy, as she rose to the swell, a kind of twist in her roll that he had never known before.

Mr Goodridge, the master, could be seen in the glow of the binnacle, standing by the quartermaster at the con. He was a reserved, elderly man of great experience, once the master of a ship of the line, but broken for fighting with the chaplain and only recently put on the list again; and he was as intent upon the Polychrest's behaviour as his captain.

'What do you make of her, Mr Goodridge?' asked Jack, walking over to the wheel.

'Why, sir, for ardent griping, I have never seen the like.' Jack took the wheel, and indeed, even at the rate of sailing, there was a steady, powerful thrust against him:

the Polychrest wanted to get her head right up into the eye of the wind. He let her have her way, and then, just before the sails began to shiver the griping stopped; the helm went dead under his hand, and her odd corkscrew motion changed its rhythm entirely. He could not make it out, but stood there puzzling as he gently eased the Polychrest back on to her course. It was as though she had two centres of rotation, two pivots: if not three... obviously jib, foresail and a reef in the mizen topsail would keep her off, but that was not the trouble - that would not account for this sluggish helm, this sudden lack of response.

'Three inches in the well, sir,' said the carpenter's mate, making his routine report.

'Three inches in the well, if you please, sir,' said the master.

'Ay,' said Jack. It was negligible: she had not had anything of a trial yet, no working in a heavy sea; but at least it proved that those strange sliding keels and the nameless peculiarity of her quickwork did not mean that the water poured straight in: a comfortable reflection, for he had misgivings. 'No doubt we shall find what trim suits her best,' he observed to the master and went back to the rail, half consciously trying to recreate his quarterdeck pacing in the little Sophie, while his mind, worn fine by Pullings' feast, by the prolonged turmoil of unmooring with a foul hawse and by the anxiety of getting under way in a crowded road, turned to the problem of the forces acting upon the vessel.

The new-lit galley stove sent a whiff of smoke eddying aft, together with the smell of burgoo, and at the same time he heard the head-pumps beginning to work. Up and down, up and down, with his hands behind his back and his chin tucked into his griego against the biting air: up and down. The figure of the Polychrest was as clear in his mind as if she had been a model held up to a lamp, and he studied her reaction to the creeping influence of the tide, and the lateral thrust of the wind, the eddies deep under her strangely placed rudders.

The after-guard were sprinkling the quarterdeck with their buckets, carefully avoiding his walk, and after them came the sand-men. The bosun was on deck: Malloch, a short, bull-like young fellow; had been bosun's mate in the crack Ixion. Jack heard his shout and the thwack of his cane as he started a man on the fo'c'sle. And all the time there was the measured thump of the carronade, the now distant gun of the man-of-war, the horns away to port, the steady chant of the man heaving the lead in the chains - 'by the mark nine... ho yo ho yo... and a quarter nine.'

The rake of the masts was a great consideration, of course. Jack was an intuitive rather than a scientific sailor, and in his mental image of the Polychrest her backstays tautened until the angle of her masts looked right and some inner voice said 'Belay there'. The holystones began their steady grinding: the decks could do with it, after the shambles of a hurried fitting-out. These were such familiar sounds and smells, these innumerable difficulties were so very much part of the world he had known from childhood, that he felt as though he had been returned to his own element. It was not that he did not like the land - capital place; such games, such fun - but the difficulties there, the complications, were so vague and imprecise, reaching one behind another, no end to them: nothing a man could get hold of. Here, although life was complex enough in all conscience, he could at least attempt to cope with anything that turned up. Life at sea had the great advantage that

something was amiss. He tried to place it, glancing sharply fore and aft in the greyness of approaching day. The fishing-boats that had been sailing on a parallel course were now astern: their melancholy wailing sounded almost from the Polychrest's wake. The Bill must be no great way ahead. It was time to go about. A damned foolish moment to choose, with the people busy, and he would have preferred to wait until the watch below was on deck; but she might have made even more leeway than he had allowed for, and only a fool would run any risk for the sake of neatness.

'We will put her about, Mr Goodridge,' he said.

The bosun started his call. Brooms, buckets, swabs, squeegees, holystones, prayer-books, brass rags flew into sheltered places as his mates roared down the hatches 'All hands, all hands 'bout ship' and then vanished below to drive the sleepers up - those few so worn with toil, seasickness and desolation, that they were unconscious in spite of the carronade and the echoing thunder of the holystones. The score or so of right seamen had been at their stations ten minutes - Pullings and the bosun on the fo'c'sle, the gunner and his mates at the maintack, the carpenter at the foresheet, the Marines at the mainsheet, the maintopmen and the after-guard on the quarterdeck, at the braces - before the last desperate half-clothed bewildered landsman was hunted up, shoved and beaten and cobbed into his place.

'Bear up,' said Jack to the timoneer, waiting for this Bartholomew Fair performance to come to an end - a bosun's mate was now belabouring the former tipstaff with his persuader, to help him understand the difference between a stay and a bowline. And when he felt a little more way on the sloop, saw something like order on deck, and judged the moment ripe, he called, 'Ready about.'

'Ready about, sir,' came the answer.

'Luff up handsomely, now,' he said quietly to the man at the wheel, and then loud and clear, 'Helm's a-lee. Fore topsheet, fore topbowline, stays'l sheet, let go.' The full-bellied curves of the headsails sagged and collapsed; the Polychrest moved in a long smooth curve up towards the direction of the wind.

'Off tacks and sheets.'

Everything was ready for the decisive order that would bring the yards flying round; everything was as calm and unhurried as the sloop's slow curve through this grey, heaving, formless world; there was time and to spare. And that was just as well, he thought, seeing the way they were shifting the sheets over the stays - something between cat's cradle and puss-in-the-corner.

Her curve was slower now; and now the swell was coming more and more on to her starboard bow, heaving against her course. Slowly up and up: within two points of the wind, a point and a half, and the words 'Mainsail haul' had been long formed in his mouth when he realized that the deep steady sound to port and astern, the sound that was coming so clear and loud through the intent, waiting silence, was that of the breakers on Selsey Bill. She had made twice and three times the leeway he and the master had reckoned for. At the same moment he felt an essential change in her motion, a dead sullenness: she was going to miss stays. She was not going to travel up into the eye of the wind and carry on beyond it, so that the sails, braced round, would fill on the larboard side and bear her out to sea.