'Maimomdes has an account of a lute-player who, required to perform upon some stated occasion, found that he had entirely forgot not only the piece but the whole art of playing, fingering, everything,' wrote Stephen 'I have some times had a dread of the same thing happening to me; a not irrational dread, since I once experienced a deprivation of a similar nature coming back to Aghamore when I was a boy, coming back after an eight years' absence, I went to see Bridie Coolan, and she spoke to me in Irish Her voice was intimately familiar (none more, my own wet-nurse), so were the intonations and even the very words, yet nothing could I understand – her words conveyed no meaning whatever. I was dumbfounded at my loss. What puts me in mind of this is my discovery that I no longer know what my friends feel, intend, or even mean. It is clear that JA met with a severe disappointment in Ciudadela, one that he feels more deeply than I should have supposed possible, in him; and it is clear that JD is still in a state of great unhappiness: but beyond that I know almost nothing – they do not speak and I can no longer look into them. My own testiness does not help, to be sure. I must guard against a strong and increasing tendency to indulge in dogged, sullen conduct – the conduct of vexation (much promoted by want of exercise); but I confess that much as I love them, I could wish them both to the Devil, with their high-flown, egocentrical points of honour and their purblind spurring one another on to remarkable exploits that may very well end in unnecessary death. In their death, which is their concern: but also in mine, to say nothing of the rest of the ship's company. A slaughtered crew, a sunken ship, and my collections destroyed – these do not weigh at all against their punctilios. There is a systematic fiocci-naucinihili-pilification of all other aspects of existence that angers me. I spend half my time purging them, bleeding them, prescribing low diet and soporifics. They both eat far too much, and drink far too much, especially JD. Sometimes I am afraid they have closed themselves to me because they have agreed upon a meeting next time we come ashore, and they know very well I should stop it. How they vex my very spirit! If they had the scrubbing of the decks, the hoisting of the sails, the cleaning of the heads, we should hear little enough of these fine vapourings. I have no patience with them. They are strangely immature for men of their age and their position: though, indeed, it is to be supposed that if they were not, they would not be here – the mature, the ponderate mind does not embark itself upon a man-of-war -is not to be found wandering about the face of the ocean in quest of violence. For all his sensibility (and he played his transcription of Deh vieni with a truly exquisite delicacy, just before we reached Ciudadela), JA is in many ways more suited to be a pirate chief in the Caribbean a hundred years ago: and for all his acumen JD is in danger of becoming an enthusiast – a latter-day Loyola, if he is not knocked on the head first, or run through the body. I am much exercised in my mind by that unfortunate conversation…'
The Sophie, to the astonishment of her people, had not headed for Barcelona after leaving Ciudadela, but west-north-west; and at daybreak, rounding Cape Salou within hail of the shore, she had picked up a richly-laden Spanish coaster of some two hundred tons, mounting (but not firing) six six-pounders – had picked her up from the landward side as neatly as though the rendezvous had been fixed weeks ahead and the Spanish captain had kept his hour to the minute. 'A very profitable commercial venture,' said James, watching the prize disappear in the east, bound with a favourable wind for Port Mahon, while they beat up, tack upon tack, to their northern cruising-ground, one of the busiest sea-lanes in the world. But that (though unhappy in itself) was not the conversation Stephen had in mind.
No. That came later, after dinner, when he was on the quarterdeck with James. They were talking, in an easy, off-hand manner, about differences in national habit – the Spaniards' late hours; the French way of all leaving the table together, men and women, and going directly into the drawing-room; the Irish habit of staying with the wine until one of the guests suggested moving; the English way of leaving this to the host; the remarkable difference in duelling habits.
'Rencounters are most uncommon in England,' observed James.
'Indeed they are,' said Stephen. 'I was astonished, when first I went to London, to find that a man might not go out from one year's end to the other.'
'Yes,' said James. 'Ideas upon matters of honour are altogether different in the two kingdoms. Before now I have given Englishmen provocation that would necessarily have called for a meeting in Ireland, with no result. We should call that remarkably timid; or is shy the word?' He shrugged, and he was about to continue when the cabin skylight in the surface of the quarter-deck opened and Jack's head and massive shoulders appeared. 'I should never have thought so ingenuous a face could look so black and wicked,' thought Stephen.
'Did JD say that on purpose?' he wrote. 'I do not know for sure, though I suspect he did – it would be all of a piece with the remarks he has been making recently, remarks that may be unintentional, merely tactless, but that all tend to present reasonable caution in an odious and, indeed, a contemptible light. I do not know. I should have known once. But all I know now is that when JA is in a rage with his superiors, irked by the subordination of the service, spurred on by his restless, uneasy temperament, or (as at present) lacerated by his mistress' infidelity, he flies to violence as a relief - to action. JD, urged on by entirely different furies, does the same. The difference is that whereas I believe JA merely longs for the shattering noise, immense activity of mind and body, and the all-embracing sense of the present moment, I am very much afraid that J D wants more.' He closed the book and stared at its cover for a long while, far, far away, until a knock recalled him to the Sophie.
'Mr Ricketts,' he said, 'what may I do for you?'
'Sir,' said the midshipman, 'the captain says, will you please to come on deck and view the coast?'
'To the left of the smoke, southwards, that is the hill of Montjuich, with the great castle; and the projection to the right is Barceloneta,' said Stephen. 'And rising there behind the city you can make out Tibidabo: I saw my first red-footed falcon there, when I was a boy. Then continuing the line from Tibidabo through the cathedral to the sea, there is the Moll de Santa Creu, with the great mercantile port: and to the left of it the basin where the King's ships and the gunboats lie.'
'Many gunboats?' asked Jack.
'I dare say: but I never made it my study.'
Jack nodded, looked keenly round the bay to fix its details in his mind once more and, leaning down, he called, 'Deck? Lower away: handsomely now. Babbington, look alive with that line.'
Stephen rose six inches from his perch at the masthead, and with his hands folded to prevent their involuntary clutching at passing ropes, yards, blocks, and with the ape-nimble Babbington keeping pace, heaving him in towards the weather backstay, he descended through the dizzy void to the deck, where they let him out of the cocoon in which they had hoisted him aloft; for no one on board had the least opinion of his abilities as a seaman.
He thanked them absently and went below, where the sailmaker's mates were sewing Tom Simmons into his hammock.
'We are just waiting for the shot, sir,' they said; and as they spoke Mr Day appeared, carrying a net of the Sophie's cannonballs.
'I thought I would pay him the attention myself,' said the gunner, arranging them at the young man's feet with a practised hand. 'He was shipmates with me in the Phoebe: though always unhealthy, even then,' he added, as a quick afterthought.
'Oh, yes: Tom was never strong,' said one of the sail-maker's mates, cutting the thread on his broken eye-tooth.
These words, and a certain unusual delicacy of regard, were intended to comfort Stephen, who had lost his patient: in spite of all his efforts the four-day coma had deepened to its ultimate point.
'Tell me, Mr Day,' he said, when the sailmakers had gone, 'just how much did he drink? I have asked his friends, but they give evasive answers – indeed, they lie.'
'Of course they do, sir: for it is against the law. How much did he drink? Why, now, Tom was a popular young chap, so I dare say he had the whole allowance, bating maybe a sip or two just to moisten their victuals. That would make it close on a quart.'
'A quart. Well, it is a great deal: but I am surprised it should kill a man. At an admixture of three to one, that amounts to six ounces or so – inebriating, but scarcely lethal.'
'Lord, Doctor,' said the gunner, looking at him with affectionate pity, 'that ain't the mixture. That's the rum.'
'A quart of rum? Of neat rum?' cried Stephen.
'That's right, sir. Each man has his half-pint a day, at twice, so that makes a quart for each mess for dinner and for supper: and that is what the water is added to. Oh dear me,' he said, laughing gently and patting the poor corpse on the deck between them, 'if they was only to get half a pint of three-water grog we should soon have a bloody mutiny on our hands. And quite right, too.'
'Half a pint of spirits a day for every man?' said Stephen, flushing with anger. 'A great tumbler? I shall tell the captain – shall insist upon its being poured over the side.'
'And so we commit his body to the deep,' said Jack, closing the book. Tom Simmons' messmates tilted the grating: there was the sound of sliding canvas, a gentle splash and a long train of bubbles rising up through the clear water.
'Now, Mr Dillon,' he said, with something of the formal tone of his reading still in his voice, 'I think we may carry on with the weapons and the painting.'
The sloop was lying to, well over the horizon from Barcelona; and a little while after Tom Simmons had reached the bottom in four hundred fathoms she was far on her way to becoming a white-painted snow with black top-sides, with a horse – a length of cable bowsed rigidly vertical – to stand for the trysail mast of that vessel; while at the same time the grindstone mounted on the fo'c'sle turned steadily, putting a keener edge, a sharper point, on cutlasses, pikes, boarding-axes, marines' bayonets, midshipmen's dirks, officers' swords.
The Sophie was as busy as she could well be, but there was a curious gravity with it all: it was natural that a man's messmates should be low after burying him, and even his whole watch. (for Tom Simmonds had been well liked – would never have had so deadly a birthday present otherwise); but this solemnity affected the whole ship's company and there was none of those odd bursts of song on the fo'c'sle, none of those ritual jokes called out. There was a quiet, brooding atmosphere, not at all angry or sullen, but – Stephen, lying in his cot (he had been up all night with poor Simmons) tried to hit upon the definition – oppressive? – fearful? – vaticinatory? But in spite of all the deeply shocking noise of Mr Day and his party overhauling the shot-lockers, scaling all the balls with any rust or irregularity upon them, and trundling them back down an echoing plane, hundreds and hundreds of four-pound cannon-balls clashing and growling and being beaten, he went to sleep before he could accomplish it.
He woke to the sound of his own name. 'Dr Maturin? No, certainly you may not see Dr Maturin,' said the master's voice in the gun-room. 'You may leave a message with me, and I will tell him at dinner-time, if he wakes up by then.'
'I was to ask him what physic would answer for a slack-going horse,' quavered Ellis, now filled with doubt.
'And who told you to ask him that? That villain Babbington, I swear. For shame, to be such a flat, after all these weeks at sea.'
This particular atmosphere had not reached the midshipmen's berth, then; or if so it had already dissipated. What private lives the young led, he reflected, how very much apart: their happiness how widely independent of circumstance. He was thinking of his own childhood – the then intensity of the present – happiness not then a matter of retrospection nor of undue moment – when the howling of the bosun's pipe for dinner caused his stomach to give a sharp sudden grinding wring and he swung his legs over the side. 'I am grown a naval animal,' he observed.
These were the fat days of the beginning of a cruise; there was still soft tack on the table, and Dillon, standing bowed under the beams to carve a noble saddle of mutton, said, 'You will find the most prodigious transformation when you go on deck. We are no longer a brig, but a snow.'
'With an extra mast,' explained the master, holding up three fingers.
'Indeed?' said Stephen, eagerly passing up his plate. 'Pray, why is this? For speed, for expediency, for comeliness?'
'To amuse the enemy.'
The meal continued with considerations on the art of war, the relative merits of Mahon cheese and Cheshire, and the surprising depth of the Mediterranean only a short way off the land; and once again Stephen noticed the curious skill (the outcome, no doubt, of many years at sea and the tradition of generations of tight-packed mariners) with which even so gross a man as the purser helped to keep the conversation going, smoothing over the dislikes and tensions – with platitudes, quite often, but with flow enough to make the dinner not only easy, but even mildly enjoyable.
'Take care, Doctor,' said the master, steadying him from behind on the companion ladder. 'She's beginning to roll.'
She was indeed, and although the Sophie's deck was only so trifling a height from what might be called her subaqueous gun-room, the motion up there was remarkably greater: Stephen staggered, took hold of a stanchion and gazed about him expectantly.
'Where is your prodigious great transformation?' he cried. 'Where is this third mast, that is to amuse the enemy? Where is the merriment in practising upon a landman, where the wit? Upon my honour, Mr Farcical Comic, any poteen-swilling shoneen off the bog would be more delicate. Are you not sensible it is very wrong?'
'Oh, sir,' cried Mr Marshall, shocked by the sudden extreme ferocity of Stephen's glare, 'upon my word – Mr Dillon, I appeal to you…'
'Dear shipmate, joy,' said James, leading Stephen to the horse, that stout rope running parallel to the mainmast and some six inches behind it, 'allow me to assure you that to a seaman's eye this is a mast, a third mast: and presently you will see something very like the old fore-and-aft mainsail set upon it as a trysail, at the same time as a cro'jack on the yard above our heads. No seaman afloat would ever take us for a brig.'
'Well,' said Stephen, 'I must believe you. Mr Marshall, I ask your pardon for speaking hastily.'
'Why, sir, you would have to speak more hasty by half to put me out,' said the master, who was aware of Stephen's liking for him and who valued it highly. 'It looks as though they had had a blow away to the south,' he remarked, nodding over the side.
The long swell was setting from the far-off African coast, and although the small surface-waves disguised it, the rise and fall of the horizon showed its long even intervals. Stephen could very well imagine it breaking high against the rocks of the Catalan shore, rushing up the shingle beaches and drawing back with a monstrous grating indraught. 'I hope it does not rain,' he said, for again and again, at the beginning of the fall, he had known this sea swelling up out of calmness to be followed by a south-eastern wind and a low yellow sky, pouring down warm beating rain on the grapes just as they were ready to be picked.
'Sail ho!' called the look-out.
She was a medium-sized tartan, deep in the water, beating up into the fresh easterly breeze, obviously from Barcelona; and she lay two points on their port bow.
'How lucky this did not happen an hour ago,' said James. 'Mr Pullings, my duty to the captain, and there is a strange sail two points on the larboard bow.' Before he had finished speaking Jack was on deck, his pen still in his hand, and a look of hard excitement kindling in his eye.
'Be so kind…' he said, handing Stephen the pen, and he ran up to the masthead like a boy. The deck was teeming with sailors clearing away the morning's work, trimming the sails as they surreptitiously changed course to cut the tart3n off from the land, and running about with very heavy loads; and after Stephen had been bumped into once or twice and had 'By your leave, sir,' and 'Way there – oh parding, sir' roared into his ear often enough, he walked composedly into the cabin, sat on Jack's locker and reflected upon the nature of a community its reality – its difference from every one of the individuals composing it – communication within it, how effected.
'Why, there you are,' said Jack returning. 'She is only a tub of a merchantman, I fear. I had hoped for something better.'
'Shall you catch her, do you suppose?'
'Oh, yes, I dare say we shall, even if she goes about this minute. But I had so hoped for a dust-up, as we say. I can't tell you how it stretches your mind – your black draughts and blood-letting are nothing to it. Rhubarb and senna. Tell me, if we are not prevented, shall we have some music this evening?'
'It would give me great pleasure,' said Stephen. Looking at Jack now he could see what his appearance might be when the fire of his youth had gone out: heavy, grey, authoritarian, if not savage and morose.
'Yes,' said Jack, and hesitated as though he were going to say much more. But he did not, and after a moment he went on deck.
The Sophie was slipping rapidly through the water, having set no more sail and showing no sort of inclination to close with the tartan – the steady, sober, mercantile course of a snow bound for Barcelona. In half an hour's time they could see that she carried four guns, that she was short-handed (the cook joined in the manoeuvres) and that she had a disagreeably careless, neutral air. However, when the tartan prepared to tack at the southern end of her board, the Sophie heaved out her staysails in a flash, set her topgallants and bore up with surprising speed – so surprising to the tartan, indeed, that she missed stays and fell off again on the larboard tack.
At half a mile Mr Day (he dearly loved to point a gun) put a shot across her forefoot, and she lay to with her yard lowered until the Sophie ranged alongside and Jack hailed her master to come aboard.
'He was sorry, gentleman, but he could not: if he could, he should with joy, gentleman, but he had burst the bottom of his launch,' he said, through the medium of a quite lovely young woman, presumably Mrs Tartan or the equivalent. 'And in any case he was only a neutral Ragusan, a neutral bound for Ragusa in ballast.' The little dark man beat on his boat to mark the point: and holed it was.
'What tartan?' called Jack again.
'Pola,' said the young woman.
He stood, considering: he was in an ugly mood. The two vessels rose and fell. Behind the tartan the land appeared with every upward heave, and to add to his irritation he saw a fishing-boat in the south, running before the wind, with another beyond it – sharp-eyed barca-longas. The Sophies stood silently gazing at the woman: they licked their lips and swallowed.
That tartan was not in ballast – a stupid lie. And he doubted it was Ragusan-built, too. But Pola was that the right name? 'Bring the cutter alongside,' he said. 'Mr Dillon,
who have we aboard that speaks Italian? John Baptist is an Italian.'
'And Abram Codpiece, sir a purser's name.'
'Mr Marshall, take Baptist and Codpiece and satisfy yourself as to that tartan look at her papers look into her hold – rummage her cabin if needs be.'
The cutter came alongside, the boat-keeper booming her off from the fresh paint with the utmost care, and the heavily-armed men dropped into her by a line from the main yardarm, far more willing to break their necks or drown than spoil their fine black paint, so fresh and trim.
They pulled across, boarded the tartan: Marshall, Cod-piece and John Baptist disappeared into the cabin: there was the sound of a female voice raised high in anger, then a piercing scream. The men on the fo'c'sle began to skip, and turned shining faces to one another.
Marshall reappeared. 'What did you do to that woman?' called Jack.
'Knocked her down, sir,' replied Marshall phlegmatically. 'Tartan's no more a Ragusan than I am. Captain only talks the lingua franca, says Codpiece, no right Italian at all; Missis has a Spanish set of papers in her pinny; hold's full of bales consigned to Genoa.'
'The infamous brute to strike a woman,' said James aloud. 'To think we have to mess with such a fellow.'
'You wait till you're married, Mr Dillon,' said the purser, with a chuckle.
'Very well done, Mr Marshall,' said Jack. 'Very good indeed. How many hands? What are they like?'
'Eight, sir, counting passengers: ugly, froward-looking buggars.'
'Send 'em over, then. Mr Dillon, steady men for the prize-crew, if you please.' As he spoke rain began to fall, and with the first drops came a sound that made every head aboard turn, so that in a moment each man's nose was pointing north-east. It was not thunder. It was gunfire.
'Light along those prisoners,' cried Jack. 'Mr Marshall, keep in company. It will not worry you, looking after the woman?'
'I do not mind it, sir,' said Marshall.
Five minutes later they were under way, running diagonally across the swell through the sweeping rain with a lithe corkscrewing motion. They had the wind on their beam now, and although they had handed the topgallants almost at once, they left the tartan behind in less than half an hour.
Stephen was gazing over the taffrail at the long wake, his mind a thousand miles away, when he became aware of a hand gently plucking at his coat. He turned and saw Mowett smiling at him, and some way beyond Mowett Ellis on his hands and knees being carefully, desperately sick through a small square hole in the bulwark, a scuttle. 'Sir, sir, said Mowett, 'you are getting wet.'
'Yes,' said Stephen; and after a pause he added, 'It is the rain.'
'That's right, sir,' said Mowett. 'Should not you like to step below, to get out of it? Or may I bring you a tarpaulin jacket?'
'No. No. No. You are very good. No… 'said Stephen, his attention wandering, and Mowett, having failed in the first part of his mission, went cheerfully on to the second: this was to stop Stephen's whistling, which made the afterguard and quarter-deckmen – the ciew in general – so very nervous and uneasy. 'May I tell you something nautical, sir – do you hear the guns again?'
'If you please,' said Stephen, unpursing his lips.
'Well then, sir,' said Mowett, pointing over the grey hissing sea to his right in the general direction of Barcelona, 'that is what we call a lee shore.'
'Ah?' said Stephen, with a certain interest lighting his eye. 'The phenomenon you dislike so much? It is not a mere prejudice – a weak superstitious traditional belief?'
'Oh, no, sir,' cried Mowett, and explained the nature of leeway, the loss of windward distance in wearing, the impossibility of tacking in a very great wind, the inevitability of leeward drift in the case of being embayed with a full gale blowing dead on short, and the impervious horror of this situation. His explanation was punctuated by the deep boom of gunfire, sometimes a continuous low roaring for half a minute together, sometimes a single sharp report. 'Oh, how I wonder what it is!' he cried, breaking off and craning up on tiptoe.
'You need not be afraid,' said Stephen. 'Soon the wind will blow in the direction of the waves – this often happens towards Michaelmas. If only one could protect the vines with a vast umbrella.'
Mowett was not alone in wondering what it was: the Sophie's captain and lieutenant, each burning for the uproar and the more than human liberation of a battle, stood side by side on the quarterdeck, infinitely remote from one another, all their senses straining towards the north-east. Almost all the other members of the crew were equally intent; and so were those of the Felipe V, a seven-gun Spanish privateer.
She came racing up out of the blinding rain, a dark squall a little way abaft the beam on the landward side, making for the sound of battle with all the canvas she could bear. They saw one another at the same moment: the Felipe fired, showed her colours, received the Sophie's broadside in reply, grasped her mistake, put up her helm and headed straight back to Barcelona with the strong wind on her larboard quarter and her big lateens bellying out and swaying wildly on the roll.
The Sophie's helm was over within a second of the privateer's: the tompions of the starboard guns were out: cupping hands sheltered the sputtering slow-match and the priming.
'All at her stern,' cried Jack, and the crows and handspikes heaved the guns through five degrees. 'On the roll. Fire as they bear.' He brought the wheel up two spokes and the guns went off three and four. Instantly the privateer yawed as though she meant to board; but then her flapping mizen came down on deck, she filled again and went off before the wind. A shot had struck the head of her rudder, and without it she could bear no sail aft. They were putting out a sweep to steer with and working furiously at the mizen-yard. Her two larboard guns fired, one hitting the Sophie with the strangest sound. But the sloop's next broadside, a careful, collected fire within pistol-range, together with a volley of musketry, put a stop to all resistance. Just twelve minutes after the first gun fired her colours came down and a fierce, delighted cheer broke out – men clapping one another on the back, shaking hands, laughing.
The rain had stopped and it was drifting westwards in a dense grey swathe, blotting out the port, very much nearer now. 'Take possession of her, Mr Dillon, if you please,' said Jack, looking up at the dog-vane. The wind was veering, as it so often did in these waters after rain, and presently it would be coming from well south of east.
'Any damage, Mr Lamb?' he asked, as the carpenter came up to report.
'Wish you joy of the capture, sir,' said the carpenter. 'No damage, rightly speaking; no struc-tur-al damage; but that one ball made a sad mess in the galley upset all the coppers and unshipped the smoke-funnel.'
'We will take a look at it presently,' said Jack. 'Mr Pullings, those for'ard guns are not properly secured. What the devil?' he cried. The gun-crews were strangely, even shockingly pied, and horrible imaginations flashed through his mind until he realized that they were covered with wet black paint and with the galley's soot: and now, in the exuberance of their hearts, those farthest forward were daubing their fellows. 'Avast that God-damned – foolery, God rot your – eyes,' he called out in an enormous line-of-battle voice. He rarely swore, apart from an habitual damn or an unmeaning blasphemy, and the men, who in any case had expected him to be far more pleased with the taking of a neat privateer, fell perfectly mute, with nothing more than the rolling of an eye or a wink to convey secret understanding and delight.
'Deck,' hailed Lucock from the top. 'There are gunboats coming out from Barcelona. Six. Eight – nine – eleven behind 'em. Maybe more.'
'Out launch and jolly-boat,' cried Jack. 'Mr Lamb, go across, if you please, and see what can be done to her steering.'
Getting the boats to the yardarms and launching them in this swell was no child's play, but the men were in tearing spirits and they heaved like maniacs – it was as though they had been filled with rum and yet had lost none of their ability. Muffled laughter kept bursting out: it was damped by the cry of a sail to windward – a sail that might place them between two fires then revived by the news that it was only their own prize, the tartan.
The boats plied to and fro; the glum or surly prisoners made their way down into the fore-hold, their bosoms swollen with personal possessions; the carpenter and his crew could be heard working away with their adzes to make a new tiller; Stephen caught Ellis as he darted by. 'Just when did you stop being sick, sir?' 'Almost the moment the guns began to go, sir,' said Ellis. Stephen nodded. 'I thought as much,' said he. 'I was watching you.'
The first shot sent up a white plume of water topmast high, right between the two vessels. Infernally good practice for a ranging shot, thought Jack, and a damned great heavy ball.
The gunboats were still over a mile away, but they were coming up surprisingly fast, straight into the eye of the wind. Each of the three foremost carried a long thirty-six-pounder and rowed thirty oars. Even at a mile a chance hit from one of these would pierce the Sophie through and through. He had to restrain a violent urge to tell the carpenter to hurry. 'If a thirty-six-pound ball does not hasten him, nothing I can say will do so,' he observed, pacing up and down, cocking an eye at the dog-vane and at the gunboats at each turn. All seven of the foremost had tried the range, and now there was a spasmodic firing, most falling short, but some howling right overhead.
'Mr Dillon,' he called over the water, after half a dozen turns, and the splash from a ball plunging into the swell just astern wetted the back of his neck. 'Mr Dillon, we will transfer the rest of the prisoners later, and make sail as soon as you can conveniently do so. Or should you like us to pass you a tow?'
'No, thank you, sir. The tiller will be shipped in two minutes.'
'In the meantime we might as well pepper them, for what it is worth,' reflected Jack, for the now silent Sophies were looking somewhat tense. 'At least the smoke will hide us a little. Mr Pullings, the larboard guns may fire at discretion.'
This was much more agreeable, with the banging, the rumble, the smoke, the immense intent activity; and he smiled to see the earnestness of every man at the brass gun nearest him as they glared out for the fall of their shot. The Sophie's fire stung the gunboats to a great burst of activity, and the dull grey western sea sparkled with their flashes over a front of a quarter of a mile.
Babbingion was in front of him, pointing: wheeling about, Jack saw Dillon hailing through the din the new tiller had been fitted.
'Make sail,' he said: the Sophie's backed foretopsail came round and filled. Speed was called for, and setting all her headsails he took her down with the wind well abaft her beam before hauling up into the north-north-west. This took the sloop nearer to the gunboats and across their front: the larboard guns were firing continuously, the enemies' shots were kicking up the water or passing overhead, and for a moment his spirits rose to a wild pitch of delight at the idea of dashing down among them – they were unwieldy brutes at close quarters. But then he reflected that he had the prizes with him and that Dillon still had a dangerous number of prisoners aboard; and he gave the order to brace the yards up sharp.
The prizes hauled their wind at the same time, and at a smooth five or six knots they ran out to sea. The gunboats followed for half an hour, but as the light faded and the range lengthened to impossibility, one by one they turned and went back to Barcelona.
'I played that very badly,' said Jack, putting down his bow.
'Your heart was not in it,' said Stephen. 'It has been an active day – a fatiguing day. A satisfactory day, however.'
'Why, yes,' said Jack, his face brightening somewhat. 'Yes, certainly. I am most uncommonly delighted.' A pause. 'Do you remember a fellow named Pitt we dined with one day at Mahon?'
'The soldier?'
'Yes. Now, would you call him good-looking – handsome?'
'No. Oh, no.'
'I am happy to hear you say so. I have a great regard for your opinion. Tell me,' he added, after a long pause, 'have you noticed how things return to your mind when you are hipped? It is like old wounds breaking out when you come down with scurvy. Not, indeed, that I have ever for a moment forgotten what Dillon said to me that day: but it has been rankling in my heart, and I have been turning it over this last day or so. I find that I must ask him for an explanation – I should certainly have done so before. I shall do so as soon as we go into port: unless, indeed, the next few days make it unnecessary.'
'Porn, porn, porn, porn,' went Stephen in unison with his 'cello, glancing at Jack: there was an exceedingly serious look on that darkened, heavy face, a kind of red light in his clouded eyes. 'I am coming to believe that laws are the prime cause of unhappiness. It is not merely a case of born under one law, required another to obey – you know the lines: I have no memory for verse. No, sir: it is born under half a dozen, required another fifty to obey. There are parallel sets of laws in different keys that have nothing to do with one another and that are even downright contradictory. You, now – you wish to do something that the Articles of War and (as you explained to me) the rules of generosity forbid, but that your present notion of the moral law and your present notion of the point of honour require. This is but one instance of what is as common as breathing. Buridan's ass died of misery between equidistant mangers, drawn first by one then by the other. Then again, with a slight difference, there are these double loyalties – another great source of torment.'
'Upon my word, I cannot see what you mean by double loyalty. You can only have one King. And a man's heart can only be in one place at a time, unless he is a scrub.'
'What nonsense you do talk, to be sure,' said Stephen. 'What "balls", as you sea-officers say: it is a matter of common observation that a man may be sincerely attached to two women at once – to three, to four, to a very surprising number of women. However,' he said, 'no doubt you know more of these things than I. No: what I had in mind were those wider loyalties, those more general conflicts – the candid American, for example, before the issue became envenomed; the unimpassioned Jacobite in '45; Catholic priests in France today – Frenchmen of many complexions,
in and out of France. So much pain; and the more honest the man the worse the pain. But there at least the conflict is direct: it seems to me that the greater mass of confusion and distress must arise from these less evident divergencies
The moral law, the civil, military, common laws, the code of honour, custom, the rules of practical life, of civility, of amorous conversation, gallantry, to say nothing of Christianity for those that practise it. All sometimes, indeed generally, at variance; none ever in an entirely harmonious relation to the rest; and a man is perpetually required to choose one rather than another, perhaps (in his particular case) its contrary. It is as though our strings were each tuned according to a completely separate system – it is as though the poor ass were surrounded by four and twenty mangers.'
'You are an antinomian,' said Jack.
'I am a pragmatist,' said Stephen. 'Come, let us drink up our wine, and I will compound you a dose – requies Nicholai. Perhaps tomorrow you should be let blood: it is three weeks since you was let blood.'
'Well, I will swallow your dose,' said Jack. 'But I tell you what – tomorrow night I shall be in among those gunboats and I shall do the blood-letting. And don't they wish they may relish it.'
The Sophie's allowance of fresh water for washing was very small, and she made no allowance of soap at all. Those men who had blackened themselves and one another with paint remained darker than was pleasant; and those who had worked in the wrecked galley, covering themselves with grease and soot from the coppers and the stove, looked, if anything, worse – they had a curiously bestial and savage appearance, worst of all in those that had fair hair.
'The only respectable-looking fellows are the black men,' said Jack. 'They are all still aboard, I believe?'
'Davies went with Mr Mowett in the privateer, sir,' said James, 'but the rest are still with us.'
'Counting the men left in Mahon and the prize-crews, how many are we short at the moment?'
'Thirty-six, sir. We are fifty-four all told.'
'Very good. That gives us elbow-room. Let them have as much sleep as possible, Mr Dillon: we shall stand in at midnight.'
Summer had come back after the rain – a gentle, steady tramontana, warm, clear air, and phosphorescence on the sea. The lights of Barcelona twinkled with uncommon brilliance, and over the middle part of the city floated a luminous cloud: the gunboats guarding the approaches to the port could be made out quite clearly against this background before ever they saw the darkened Sophie: they were farther out than usual, and they were obviously on the alert.
'As soon as they start to come for us,' reflected Jack, 'we will set topgallants, steer for the orange light, then haul our wind at the last moment and run between the two on the northern end of the line.' His heart was going with a steady, even beat, a little faster than usual. Stephen had drawn off ten ounces of blood, and he thought he felt much the better for it. At all events his mind was as clear and sharp as he could wish.
The moon's tip appeared above the sea. A gunboat fired: deep, booming note – the voice of an old solitary hound.
'The light, Mr Ellis,' said Jack, and a blue flare soared up, designed to confuse the enemy. It was answered with Spanish signals, hoists of coloured lights, and then another gun, far over to the right. 'Topgallants,' he said. 'jeffreys, steer for that orange mark.'
This was splendid: the Sophie was running in fast, prepared, confident and happy. But the gunboats were not coming on as he had hoped. Now one would spin about and fire, and now another; but on the whole they were falling back. To stir them up the sloop yawed and sent her broadside skipping among them – with some effect, to judge by a distant howl. Yet still the gunboats moved away. 'Damn this,' said Jack. 'They are trying to lead us on. Mr Dillon, trysail and staysails. We'll make a dash for that fellow farthest out.'
The Sophie came round fast and brought the wind on to her beam: heeling over so that the silk black water lapped at her port-sills, she raced towards the nearest gunboat. But now the others showed what they could do if they chose: they all faced about in a moment and kept up a continuous raking fire, while the chosen gunboat fled quartering away, keeping the Sophie's unprotected stern towards them. A glancing blow from a thirty-six-pounder made her whole hull ring again; another passed just above head-height the whole length of the deck; two neatly severed backstays fell across Babbington, Pullings and the man at the wheel, knocking them down; a heavy block clattered on to the wheel itself as James leapt for its spokes.
'We'll tack, Mr Dillon,' said Jack; and a few moments later the Sophie flew up into the wind.
The men working the sloop moved with the unthinking smoothness of long practice; but seen suddenly picked out by the flashes of the gunboats' fire they seemed to be jerking like so many puppets. Just after the order 'let go and haul' there were six shots in quick succession, and he saw the marines at the mainsheet in a rapid series of galvanic motions – a few inches between each illumination – but throughout they wore exactly the same concentrated diligent expressions of men tallying with all their might.
'Close hauled, sir?' asked James.
'One point free,' said Jack. 'But gently, gently: let us see if we can draw them out. Drop the maintopsailyard a couple of feet and slacken away the starboard lift – let us look as though we were winged. Mr Watt, the topgallant backstays are our first care.'
And so they all moved back again across the same miles of sea, the Sophie knotting and splicing, the gunboats following and firing steadily, the old left-handed moon climbing with her usual indifference.
There was not much conviction in the pursuit: but even so, a little while after James Dillon had reported the completion of the essential repairs, Jack said, 'If we go about and set all sail like lightning, I believe we can cut those heavy chaps off from the land.'
'All hands about ship,' said James. The bosun started his call, and racing to his post by the maintopsail bowline Isaac Isaacs said to John Lakev, 'We are going to cut those two heavy buggers off from the land,' with intense satisfaction.
So they might have, if an unlucky shot had not struck the Sophie's foretopgallant yard. They saved the sail, but her speed dropped at once and the gunboats pulled away ahead, away and away until they were safe behind their mole.
'Now, Mr Ellis,' said James, as the light of dawn showed just how much the sloop's rigging had suffered in the night, 'here is a most capital opportunity for learning your profession; why, I dare say there is enough to keep you busy until sunset, or even longer, with every variety of splice, knot, service and parcelling you could desire.' He was singularly gay, and from time to time, as he hurried about the deck, he hummed or chanted a sort of song.
There was the swaying up of the new yard, too, some shotholes to be repaired and the bowsprit to be new gammoned, for the strangest grazing ricochet had cut half the turns without ever touching the wood – something the oldest seamen aboard had never yet beheld, a wonder to be recorded in the log. The Sophie lay there unmolested, putting herself to rights all through that sunny gentle day, as busy as a hive, watchful, prepared, bristling with pugnicity. It was a curious atmosphere aboard her: the men knew very well they were going in again very soon, perhaps for some raid on the coast, perhaps for some cutting-out expedition; their mood was affected by many things – by their captures of yesterday and last Tuesday (the consensus was that each man was worth fourteen guineas more than when he sailed); by their captain's continuing gravity; by the strong conviction aboard that he had private intelligence of Spanish sailings; and by the sudden strange merriment or even levity of their lieutenant. He had found Michael and Joseph Kelly, Matthew Johnson and John Melsom busily pilfering aboard the Felipe V, between decks, a very serious court-martial offence (although custom winked at the taking of anything above hatches) and one that he particularly abhorred as being 'a damned privateer's trick'; yet he had not reported them. They kept peering at him from behind masts, spars, boats; and so did their guilty messmates, for the Sophies were much given to rapine The outcome of all these factors was an odd busy restrained quietly cheerful attentiveness, with a note of anxiety in it.
With all hands so busy, Stephen scrupled to go forward to his elm-tree pump, through whose unshipped head he daily observed the wonders of the deep and where his presence was now so usual that he might have been the pump itself for all the restraint he placed upon the men's conversation; but he caught this note and he shared the uneasiness that produced it.
James was in tearing spirits at dinner; he had invited Pullings and Babbington informally, and their presence, together with Marshall's absence, gave the meal something of the air of a festivity, in spite of the purser's brooding silence. Stephen watched him as he joined in the chorus of Rabbington's song, thundering out:
'Well done,' he cried, thumping the table. 'Now a glass of wine all round to whet our whistles, and then we must be on deck again, though that is a cursed thing for a host to say. What a relief it is, to be fighting with king's ships again, rather than these damned privateers,' he observed, a propos of nothing, when the young men and the purser had withdrawn.
'What a romantic creature you are, to be sure,' said Stephen. 'A ball fired from a privateer's cannon makes the same hole as a king's.'
'Me, romantic?' cried James with real indignation, an angry light coming into his green eyes.
'Yes, my dear,' said Stephen, taking snuff. 'You will be telling me next about their divine right.'
'Well, at least even you, with your wild enthusiastic levelling notions, will not deny that the King is the sole fount of honour?'
'Not I,' said Stephen. 'Not for a moment.'
'When I was last at home,' said James, filling Stephen's glass, 'we waked old Terence Healy. He had been my grandfather's tenant. And there was a song they sang there has been in the middle part of my mind all day – I cannot quite bring it to the front, to sing it.'
'Was it an Irish song or an English?'
'There were English words as well. One line went Oh the wild geese a-flying a-flying a-flying,
The wild geese a-swimming upon the grey sea.'
Stephen whistled a bar and then, in his disagreeable crake, he sang
'They will never return, for the white horse has scunnered
Has scunnered has scunnered
The white horse has scunnered upon the green lea.'
'That's it – that's it. Bless you,' cried James, and walked off, humming the air, to see that the Sophie was gathering the utmost of her strength.
She made her way out to sea at sunset, with a great show of farewell for ever and set her course soberly for Minorca; and some time before dawn she ran inshore again, still with the same good breeze a little east of north. But now there was a true autumnal nip in it, and a dampness that brought fungi in beech woods to Stephen's mind; and over the water lay impalpable wafting hazes, some of them a most uncommon brown.
The Sophie was standing in with her starboard tacks aboard, steering west-north-west; hammocks had been piped up and stowed in the nettings; the smell of coffee and frying bacon mingled together in the eddies that swirled on the weatherside of her taut trysail. Wide on the port bow the brown mist still hid the Llobregat valley and the mouth of the river, but farther up the coast towards the dim city looming there on the horizon, the rising sun had burnt off all but a few patches of haze – those that remained might have been headlands, islands, sandbanks.
'I know, I know, those gunboats were trying to lead us into some trap,' said Jack, 'and am with child to know what it was.' Jack was no great hand at dissembling, and Stephen was instantly persuaded that he knew the nature of the trap perfectly well, or at least had a very good notion of what it was likely to be.
The sun worked upon the surface of the water, doing wonderful things to its colour, raising new mists, dissolving others, sending exquisite patterns of shadow among the taut lines of the rigging and the pure curves of the sails and down on to the white deck, now being scrubbed whiter, to the steady grinding noise of holystones: with a swift yet imperceptible movement it breathed away a blue-grey cape and revealed a large ship three points on the starboard bow, running southwards under the land. The look-out called that she was there, but in a matter-of-fact voice, formally, for as the cloud-bank dissolved she was hull-up from the deck.
'Very well,' said Jack, clasping his glass to after a long stare. 'What do you make of her, Mr Dillon?'
'I rather think she is our old friend, sir,' said James.
'So do I. Set the mainstaysail and haul up to close her. Swabs aft, dry the deck. And let the hands go to breakfast at once, Mr Dillon. Should you care to take a cup of coffee with the Doctor and me? It would be a sad shame to waste it.'
'Very happy, sir.'
There was almost no conversation during their breakfast. Jack said, 'I suppose you would like us to put on silk stockings, Doctor?'
'Why silk stockings, for all love?'
'Oh, everyone says it is easier for the surgeon, if he has to cut one up.'
'Yes. Yes, certainly. Pray do by all means put on silk stockings.'
No conversation, but there was a remarkable feeling of easy companionship, and Jack, standing up to put on his uniform coat, said to James, 'You are certainly right, you know,' as though they had been talking about the identity of the stranger throughout the meal.
On deck again he saw that it was so, of course: the vessel over there was the Cacafuego; she had altered course to meet the Sophie, and she was in the act of setting her studdingsails. In his telescope he could see the vermilion gleam of her side in the sun.
'All hands aft,' he said, and as they waited for the crew to assemble Stephen could see that a smile kept spreading on his face – that he had to make a conscious effort to repress it and look grave.
'Men,' he said, looking over them with pleasure. 'That's the Cacafuego to windward, you know. Now some of you were not quite pleased when we let her go without a compliment last time; but now, with our gunnery the best in the fleet, why, it is another thing. So, Mr Dillon, we will clear for action, if you please.'
When he began to speak perhaps half the Sophies were gazing at him with uncomplicated pleasurable excitement; perhaps a quarter looked a little troubled; and the rest had downcast and anxious faces. But the self-possessed happiness radiating from their captain and his lieutenant, and the spontaneous delighted cheer from the first half of the crew, changed this wonderfully; and as they set about clearing the sloop there were not above four or five who looked glum -the others might have been going to the fair.
The Cacafuego, square-rigged at present, was running down, turning in a steady westward sweep to get to windward and seaward of the Sophie; and the Sophie was pointing up close into the wind; so that by the time they were a long half-mile apart she was directly open to a raking broadside from the frigate, the thirty-two-gun frigate.
'The pleasant thing about fighting with the Spaniards, Mr Ellis,' said Jack, smiling at his great round eyes and solemn face, 'is not that they are shy, for they are not, but that they are never, never ready.'
The Cacafuego had now almost reached the station that her captain had set his mind upon: she fired a gun and broke out the Spanish colours.
'The American flag, Mr Babbington,' said Jack. 'That will give them something to think about. Note down the time, Mr Richards.'
The distance was lessening very fast now. Second after second; not minute after minute. The Sophie was pointing astern of the Cacafuego, as though she meant to cut her wake; and not a gun could the sloop bring to bear. There was a total silence aboard as every man stood ready for the order to tack an order that might not come before the broadside.
'Stand by with the ensign,' said Jack in a low voice: and louder, 'Right, Mr Dillon.'
'Helm's a-lee,' and the bosun's call sounded almost at the same moment; the Sophie spun on her heel, ran up the English colours, steadied and filled on her new course and ran close-hauled straight for the Spaniard's side. The Cacafuego fired at once, a crashing broadside that shot over and among the Sophie's topgallants, making four holes, no more. The Sophies cheered to a man and stood tense and eager by their treble-shotted guns.
'Full elevation. Not a shot till we touch,' cried Jack in a tremendous voice, watching the hen-coops, boxes and lumber tossing overboard from the frigate. Through the smoke he could see ducks swimming away from one coop, and a panic-stricken cat on a box. The smell of powder-smoke reached them, and the dispersing mist. Closer, closer: they would be becalmed under the Spaniard's lee at the last moment, but they would have way enough… He could see the round blackness of her guns' mouths now, and as he watched so they erupted, the flashes brilliant in the smoke and a great white bank of it hiding the frigate's side. Too high again, he observed, but there was no room for any particular emotion as he searched through the faults in the smoke to put the sioop right up against the frigate's mainchains.
'Hard over,' he shouted; and as the grinding crash came, 'Fire!'
The xebec-frigate was low in the water, but the Sophie was lower still. With her yards locked in the Cacafuego's rigging she lay there, and her guns were below the level of the frigate's ports. She fired straight up through the Cacafuego's deck, and her first broadside, at a six-inch range, did shocking devastation. There was a momentary silence after the Sophie's cheer, and in that half-second's pause Jack could hear a confused screaming on the- Spaniard's quarter-deck. Then the Spanish guns spoke again, irregular now, but immensely loud, firing three feet above his head.
The Sophie's broadside was firing in a splendid roll, one-two-three-four-five-six-seven, with a half-beat at the end and a rumbling of the trucks; and in the fourth or fifth pause James seized his arm and shouted, 'They gave the order to board.'
'Mr Watt, boom her off,' cried Jack, directing his speaking trumpet forward. 'Sergeant, stand by.' One of the
Cacafuego's backstays had fallen aboard, fouling the carriage of a gun; he passed it round a stanchion and as he looked up a swarm of Spaniards appeared on the Cacafuego's side. The marines and small-arms men gave them a staggering volley, and they hesitated. The gap was widening as the bosun at the head and Dillon's party aft thrust on their spars. Amidst a crackling of pistols some Spaniards tried to jump, some tried to throw grapnels, some fell in and some fell back. The Sophie's guns, now ten feet from the frigate's side, struck right into the midst of the waverers, tore seven most dreadful holes.
The Cacafuego's head had fallen off she was pointing nearly south, and the Sophie had all the wind she needed to range alongside again. Again the thundering din roared and echoed round the sky, with the Spaniards trying to depress their guns, trying to fire down with muskets and blindly-held chance pistols over the side, to kill the gun-crews Their efforts were brave enough – one man balanced there to fire until he had been hit three times – but they seemed totaly disorganized Twice again they tried to board, and each time the sloop sheered off, cutting them up with terrible slaughter, lying off five or ten minutes, battering her upper-works, before coming in again to tear out her bowels. By now the guns were so hot that they could scarcely be touched; they were kicking furiously with every round. The sponges hissed and charred as they went in, and the guns were growing almost as dangerous to their crews as to their enemies.
And all this time the Spaniards fired on and on, irregularly, spasmodically, but never stopping. The Sophie's maintop had been hit again and again, and now it was coming to pieces – great lumps of timber falling down on deck, stanchions, hammocks. Her foresail yard was held only by its chains. Rigging hung in every direction and the sails had innumerable holes: burning wad was flying aboard all the time and the unengaged starboard crews were running to and fro with their fire-buckets. Yet within its confusion the Sophie's deck showed a beautiful pattern of movement -the powder passing up from the magazine and the shot, the gun-crews with their steady heave-crash-heave, a wounded man, a dead man carrying below, his place instantly taken without a word, every man intent, threading the dense smoke – no collisions, no jostling, almost no orders at all.
'We shall be a mere hull presently, however,' reflected Jack: it was unbelievable that no mast or yard had gone yet; but it could not last. Leaning down to Ellis he said in his ear, 'Cut along to the galley. Tell the cook to put all his dirty pans and coppers upside-down. Pullings, Babbington, stop the firing. Boom off, boom off. Back topsails. Mr Dillon, let the starboard watch black their faces in the galley as soon as I have spoken to them. Men, men,' he shouted as the Cacafuego slowly forged ahead, 'we must board and carry her. Now's the time – now or never – now or no quarter -now while she's staggering. Five minutes' hearty and she's ours. Axes and broadswords and away – starbowlines black their faces in the galley and forward with Mr Dillon – the rest aft along of me.'
He darted below. Stephen had four quiet wounded men, two corpses. 'We're boarding her,' said Jack. 'I must have your man – every man-jack aboard. Will you come?'
'I will not,' said Stephen. 'I will steer, if you choose.'
'Do – yes, do. Come on,' cried Jack.
On the littered deck and in the smoke Stephen saw the towering xebec's poop some twenty yards ahead on the port bow; the Sophie's crew in two parties, the one blackfaced and armed racing from the galley and gathering at the head, the other already aft, lining the rail – the purser pale and glaring, wild; the gunner blinking from the darkness below; the cook with his cleaver; Jack-in-the-dust; the ship's barber and his own loblolly boy were there. Stephen noticed his hare-lip grinning and he cherishing the curved spike of a boarding-axe, saying over and over again, 'I'll hit the buggers, I'll hit the buggers, I'll hit the buggers.' Some of the Spanish guns were still firing out into the vacancy.
'Braces,' called Jack, and the yards began to come round to fill the topsails. 'Dear Doctor, you know what to do?' Stephen nodded, taking over the spokes and feeling the life of the wheel. The quartermaster stepped away, picked up a cutlass with a grim look of delight. 'Doctor, what's the Spanish for fifty more men?'
'Otros cincuenta.'
'Otros cincuenta,' said Jack, looking into his face with a most affectionate smile. 'Now lay us alongside, I beg.' He nodded to him again, walked to the bulwark with his coxswain close behind and hoisted himself up, massive but lithe, and stood there holding the foremost shroud and swinging his sword, a long heavy cavalry sabre.
Holes and all, the topsails filled: the Sophie ranged up:
Stephen put the wheel hard over: the grinding crunch, the twang of some rope parting, a jerk, and they were fast together. With an enormous shrieking cheer fore and aft the Sophies leapt up the frigate's side.
Jack was over the shattered bulwark straight down on to a hot gun run in and smoking, and its swabber thrust at him with the pole. He cut sideways at the swabber's head; the swabber ducked fast and Jack leapt over his bowed shoulder onto the Cacafuego's deck. 'Come on, come on,' he roared, and rushed forwards striking furiously at the fleeing gun-crew and then at the pikes and swords opposing him -there were hundreds, hundreds of men crowding the deck, he noticed; and all the time he kept roaring 'Come on!'
For some moments the Spaniards gave way, as though amazed, and every one of the Sophie's men and boys came aboard, amidships and over the bow: the Spaniards gave way from abaft the mainmast, backing into the waist; but there they rallied. And now there was hard fighting, now there were cruel blows given and received – a dense mass of struggling men, tripping among the spars, scarcely room to fall, beating, hacking, pistolling one another; and detached fights of two or three men together round the edges, yelling like beasts. In the looser part of the main battle Jack had forced his way some three yards in: he had a soldier in front of him, and as their swords clashed high so a pikeman drove under his right arm, ripping the flesh outside his ribs and pulling out to stab again. Immediately behind him Bonden fired his pistol, blowing off the lower part of Jack's ear and killing the pikeman where he stood. Jack feinted at the soldier, a quick double slash, and brought his sword down on his shoulder with terrible force. The fight surged back: the soldier fell. Jack heaved out his sword, tight in bone, and glanced quickly fore and aft. 'This won't do,' he said.
Forward, under the fo'c'sle, the sheer weight and number of the three hundred Spaniards, now half recovered from their surprise, was pushing the Sophies back, driving a solid wedge between his band and Dillon's in the bows. Dillon must have been held up. The tide might turn at any second now. He leapt on to a gun and with a hail that ripped his throat he roared, 'Dillon, Dillon, the starboard gangway! Thrust for the starboard gangway!' For a fleeting moment, at the edge of his field of vision, he was aware of Stephen far below, on the deck of the Sophie, holding her wheel and gazing collectedly upwards. 'Otros cincuenta!' he shouted, for good measure: and as Stephen nodded, calling out something in Spanish, he raced back into the fight, his sword high and his pistol searching.
At this moment there was a frightful shrieking on the fo'c'sle, a most bitter, furious drive for the head of the gangway, a desperate struggle; something gave, and the dense mass of Spaniards in the waist turned to see these black faces rushing at them from behind. A confused milling round the frigate's bell, cries of every kind, the blackened Sophies cheering like madmen as they joined their friends, shots, the clash of arms, a trampling huddled retreat, all the Spaniards in the waist hampered, crowded in upon, unable to strike. The few on the quarter-deck ran forward along the larboard side to try to rally the people, to bring them into some order, at least to disengage the useless marines.
Jack's opponent, a little seaman, writhed away behind the capstan, and Jack heaved back out of the press. He looked up and down the clear run of deck. 'Bonden,' he shouted, plucking his arm, 'Go and strike those colours.'
Bonden ran aft, leaping over the dead Spanish captain. Jack hallooed and pointed. Hundreds of eyes, glancing or staring or suddenly looking back, half-comprehending, saw the Cacafuego's ensign race down her colours struck.
It was over. ' 'Vast fighting,' cried Jack, and the order ran round the deck. The Sophies backed away from the packed mob in the waist and the men there threw down their weapons, suddenly dispirited, frightened, cold and betrayed. The senior surviving Spanish officer struggled out of the crowd in which he had been penned and offered Jack his sword.
'Do you speak English, sir?' asked Jack.
'I understand it, sir,' said the officer.
'The men must go down into the hold, sir, at once,' said Jack. 'The officers on deck. The men down into the hold. Down into the hold.'
The Spaniard gave the order: the frigate's crew began to file down the hatchways. As they went so the dead and wounded were discovered – a tangled mass amidships, many more forward, single bodies everywhere – and so, too, the true number of the attackers grew clear.
'Quickly, quickly,' cried Jack, and his men urged the prisoners below, herded them fast, for they understood the danger as well as their captain. 'Mr Day, Mr Watt, get a couple of their guns – those carronades – pointing down the hatchways. Load with canister – there's plenty in the garlands aft. Where's Mr Dillon? Pass the word for Mr Dillon.'
The word passed, and no answer came. He was lying there near the starboard gangway, where the most desperate fighting had been, a couple of steps from little Ellis. When Jack picked him up he thought he was only hurt; but turning him he saw the great wound in his heart.