aboard her with your right foot first – it is amazingly lucky.’
It was amazingly lucky, too, that the sea was so calm, so unusually calm; for many a landsman going aboard for the first time has been confronted with the towering ship’s side, rising and falling in nasty, cold, dangerous black water while the boat dances here and there in imminent peril of being crushed or sucked under, and he must make the journey, dry and undisgraced, over the varying gulf and up the appalling slippery height to the longed-for deck. But Tobias had merely to step from a well-behaved boat to a scarcely-moving ship and walk to the entering-port: which was just as well, for he stopped to ponder at the water-line, and had there been any hint of a swell he must inevitably have been ducked, if not washed off and drowned at the very moment in which his nautical career began.
It was perfectly evident to Jack as he went up the side and as he went from the entering-port to the quarter-deck that the Wager had had no intention of sailing that Saturday: she was half deserted, and although her decks were being quite briskly washed she had a comparatively somnolent air. These were momentary impressions, received as he approached the officer of the watch, with Toby just behind him, to report for duty, to announce his presence in a correct and official manner.
Mr Clerk, the master of the Wager, was a mild, elderly man, with a bleached, sea-washed appearance and watery blue eyes; he received them kindly, told Jack that the purser had been asking for him, told Tobias that Mr Eliot was in the cockpit at that very moment, and called one of his mates to show them the way. ‘Mr Jones,’ he said, in his nasal East Anglian voice, ‘you will take these gentlemen below, if you please, and see them properly bestowed.’
From the poop to the quarter-deck proper, and thence to the dim light of the upper deck, where Tobias, trying to see too much at once, tripped over the handle of a swab and measured his length (five feet five and a half inches): he brought his forehead against the unsympathetic surface of a gun, and jarred it till it rang again; the master’s mate picked him up, told him that he had fallen down, and that he should take care – that he should look where he was going. At the same time a fat man in a greasy black coat, a pale fat man with the face of a cellar-dweller, hurried down from the shadows and greeted them.
‘Mr Byron?’ he said. ‘The honourable Mr Byron?’
‘At your service, sir,’ said Jack coldly.
‘My name is Hervey – purser,’ said the fat man. ‘And I have saved you a cabin. May I have the pleasure – ?’
‘You are very good,’ said Jack. ‘Mr Hervey, this is Mr Barrow, the surgeon’s mate, who has just joined.’
‘Servant,’ said the purser with a distant nod, and hurrying Jack away by a moist grip of his elbow he continued, ‘I have the honour of being known to your grandfather …’
‘Old Greasy,’ muttered the master’s mate. ‘Come on, young Sawbones, and mind your step.’ Mr Jones spoke in this unceremonious manner not from any native moroseness or incivility of mind, but because he had taken a disgust at the purser’s obsequious tone. They went on a little circuitously towards the cockpit, for part of the gun-deck was at that time shut off, with its ports netted or closed, for the better retention of the lately pressed men, who would escape if ever they could: he led the way along the deck, up and down again, and so to a hatchway that vanished into the total darkness; his voice floated up, advising Tobias to mind the cascabel, with an odd reverberating hollowness, and Tobias, whose eyes were still filled with the yellow flashing coruscations of his fall, followed him by the sound, like a bat. Presently the darkness became a little less intense, and in addition to the smell of bilge, sea, pitch and hemp, Tobias caught the familiar odour of medicaments: they rounded a canvas screen, and there was Mr Eliot, standing in the middle of the cockpit with a farthing candle in his hand and an expression of marked discontent upon his face.
‘Here is your mate, doctor,’ said Mr Jones.
‘Thank you, Mr Jones,’ said the surgeon, looking a trifle less vexed. ‘And Mr Jones, if you should see that damned loblolly-boy, give him a great kick, will you, and send him to me? I sent him,’ he explained to Tobias, ‘I sent him half an hour ago to the bo’sun for a man to refashion your screen – a pretty simple message, I believe.’
Mr Eliot afloat was not altogether the same as Mr Eliot ashore: much more authoritative, less loquacious and companionable; and at this moment he was out of humour. His natural benignity had prompted him to come down to see to Tobias’ quarters, which (as he said) few surgeons would have done, but by now a large number of little irritations had mounted up, so that he felt distinctly aggrieved by Tobias. ‘Andrew!’ he shouted into the echoing cavern of the gun-deck, ‘Andrew! Blast that brute-beast to the nethermost bottom of Hell. Ah, there you are. Where have you been? Ah, lumpkin!’ cried the surgeon, sweeping his hand in the general direction of the boy’s head.
‘The bo’sun says it is the carpenter’s business,’ said the boy, ducking.
‘What a disobliging dog that bo’sun is,’ said the surgeon. ‘A shabby fellow – a Gosport truepenny. It is always the same, Mr Barrow: he knows the carpenter is ashore. I wished to have this screen arranged so, do you see?’ he said, holding up a piece of canvas. Tobias’ eyes were by now thoroughly accustomed to the murk, and he saw that he was in an enclosure about nine feet by twelve, made of canvas up to five feet high on two sides, while an immense chest with a prodigious number of small drawers closed the third side. Mr Eliot was holding a loose piece of canvas across the fourth. ‘This would give you a surprising degree of privacy, could we but fix it,’ he said. ‘It is a magnificent cockpit, upon my word – almost a standing cabin. And look at the head-room! Even I need hardly stoop, and you can stand quite upright, at least in the middle. You should have seen the hole I started my career in. Half the size, and there were three of us, one a very nauseating companion. But we might as well make it even better, and screen you from the view of our future patients: a little privacy is a wonderful thing at sea.’
‘Sir,’ said Tobias, ‘I am infinitely obliged to you, for your attention to my comfort.’
‘And well you may be,’ said Mr Eliot, ‘for there’s not another surgeon in the service who would do half as much.’ Then, feeling that this was a little more ungracious than he had meant, he showed Tobias the medicine-chest, and offered him a draught of medicinal brandy, or a spoonful of syrup of squills, and anything that he might fancy in the way of melissa balm, Venice treacle or aniseed julep. In the course of a lifetime spent among drugs he had acquired a taste for many of them, a taste shared, to some extent, by Tobias and the loblolly-boy, and for a while they browsed among the tinctures, linctuses and throches, mixing themselves small personal prescriptions – mandragora, opium, black hellebore. ‘We operate here,’ said Mr Eliot, ‘in time of action,’ and he showed Tobias the instruments.
‘This is a very fine trepan,’ said Tobias, holding up a wicked machine for boring holes in one’s skull.
‘Yes,’ said Mr Eliot. ‘The last time I used that was on the second lieutenant of the Sutherland, a very obstinate case of melancholy. I conceived that it would relieve him.’
‘Did it do so, sir?’
‘He was a most ungrateful patient.’
Tobias thought it as well to change the subject, and observed, ‘Here are bandages; here are needles and sutures. If we were to make a hole in this piece of wood with the trepanning-iron and pass a bandage through it, we could fasten the screen, by sewing the flaps as though it were a Gemelli’s prosection.’
‘Very good,’ said Mr Eliot, whose temper had been largely restored by a saline draught and a blue pill; and seizing the trepan he bored the standard with a skill and celerity that reflected much upon the gratitude of the second lieutenant of the Sutherland. Speed is of vital importance to those who must operate without anaesthetics, and Mr Eliot, seconded by Tobias, whipped up the canvas erection as if they were racing against a stop-watch.
‘It will do,’ said the surgeon, snipping the last suture and standing back, as if from a patient. ‘About two minutes, I believe. Now I will leave you,