'Now that I come to think of it,' said Jack, 'I was regretting the absence of a chaplain only this morning. The people are grown horribly dissipated, and it occurred to me that. . .'He had been about to say 'that a thundering Hell-fire sermon might terrify them into good behaviour,' but on recollection it did not seem to him quite the thing to dictate his course to a parson and he went on 'that it would be as well to rig church, so that they might hear some suitable words. Against vice and dissipation, I mean. What now, Killick?'
'Which Mr Mowett asks may he disturb you, sir,' said Killick; and since he liked to be the first with any news going he added 'Don't know where to stow the foreign gent.'
'Beg him to come in: place a chair and fetch another glass.'
The foreign gent was the dragoman; and Mowett, sitting down and drinking a glass of port, asked whether he was to sling his hammock before the mast or aft? And where was he to mess?
'Where dragomans or dragomen mess in general I do not know,' said Jack. 'But the Commander-in-Chief spoke of this one as uncommon clever - particularly recommended by Mr Secretary Wray - so I think he must eat in the gunroom. I saw him for a moment when he came aboard, and although he is said to be so learned he looked a reasonably cheerful soul. I do not think you will regret it, and in any case I hope, I very much hope it will not be for much longer than a week. And it will not be, if only this blessed wind holds - Nelson's wind. Lord, I remember when we were after the French fleet in ninety-eight, and how we ran from the straits of Messina to Alexandria in seven days..." Those long urgent summer days shone clear in his mind, the blue white-flecked sea and fifteen men-of-war racing eastwards on that blessed wind, studdingsails aloft and alow on either side, royals and skysails, and Rear-Admiral Nelson pacing the Vanguard's deck from before sunrise until after sunset: all that, and the fury of the battle by night, with the darkness perpetually torn and lit by gunfire, and in the midst of it all the unbelievably vast explosion as L'Orient blew up, leaving nothing but silence and blackness for several minutes after. He described the search for the French, and had carried the fleet from Alexandria back to Sicily and from Syracuse to Alexandria again - '. . . and there we found them at last, moored in Aboukir Bay' - when the Dromedary gave a modest heave and pitched Stephen, fast asleep, from his chair. Jack made a nimble spring, creditable in a man of his weight but not quite nimble enough to prevent Stephen from striking his forehead on the edge of the table and splitting the skin a handsbreath across: a reasonably close imitation of Nelson's wound at the Nile, and almost as bloody.
'All this confusion and calling out,' said Stephen angrily. 'One would think you had never seen blood before, which is absurd in a band of hired assassins. Mome, capon, malt-horse, lobcock,' - this to Killick - 'hold the basin straight. Mr Mowett, in the top left-hand drawer of my medicine-chest you will find some curved needles with gut already to them; pray be so good as to bring me a pair, together with a phial of styptic in the midmost rack, and a handful of lint. My neckcloth will serve for a bandage: it is already in need of washing.'
'Should you not lie down?' said Jack. 'The loss of blood
'Nonsense. It is merely superficial, I tell you: mere hide, no more. Now, Mr Martin, I will thank you to apply the styptic and to place twelve neat sutures while I hold the lips of the wound.'
'I do not know how you can bear to do it," said Jack, looking away as the needle went deliberately in and through.
'I am accustomed to stuffing birds,' said Martin, working steadily on. 'And to sewing them up... much more delicate skin than this, very often . . . except in the case of old male swans . . . there: I flatter myself that is a tolerably fine seam.'
'The Chaplain says you are all right now, sir,' said Killick in a loud, officious voice, close to Stephen's ear.
'Sir, I am obliged to you,' said Stephen to Martin. 'And now I believe I shall retire. I had but a short night of it. Gentlemen, your servant. Mr Mowett, I beg you will leave my arm alone. I am neither drunk nor decrepit.'
He had but a short night of it again, since just before dawn an unknown very passionate voice not six inches from the cuddy scuttle cried 'Don't you know how to seize a cuckold's neck, you God-damned lubber? Where's the bleeding seizing?' with such force as to banish sleep. His forehead hurt, but not very much, and he lay there swinging with the long motion of the ship, watching the grey light grow and musing upon cuckoldry, cuckoldom, and the almost universal mirth excited by that state. When he was in Malta one of the few letters he received from England - the Mediterranean fleet had been extraordinarily unlucky in the matter of post these last two months - had told him that he was a cuckold: that his wife was deceiving him with a gentleman attached to the Swedish embassy. He did not believe it. The same bag had brought him a hurried, blotted, but most affectionate scrawl from Diana, and although he did not suppose than any ordinarily moral considerations would stop her from doing whatever she had a mind to do, he did know that she was a gentlemanly being and that a highly personal aesthetic sense would prevent her writing him such a note at a time when she was adorning his forehead with horns: he was persuaded that she would not disgrace him unprovoked. On the other hand she lived an active social life in London; she had many rich and fashionable friends; and since she had never given a damn for public opinion he had no doubt that she laid herself open to unkind or envious tattle.
Her cousin Sophie, Jack Aubrey's wife, was completely different. She was not a prude, and she cared no more for Mrs Grundy than Diana; and yet no one but a maniac would ever write to tell Jack that he was a cuckold, although on a basis of reciprocity he deserved a whole hall-full of antlers. He pondered upon this: was it a question of sexual appetite, or rather of potentiality, dimly yet accurately perceived by others? He pondered upon sexual appetite in elegant females as opposed to the freer products of nature; and he was pondering still when the cabin door quietly opened and Jack looked in. 'God and Mary be with you, Jack,' he said. 'I was just thinking about you. Pray what is a cuckold's neck, by sea?'
'Why, if you wish to make a rope fast to a spar, you cross its two parts the one over t'other and clap a seizing on 'em, and that is your cuckold's neck. But tell me, how do you do?'
'Very well, I thank you.'
'Perhaps you will take a little weak tea, and a lightly boiled egg?"
'I will not,' said Stephen in a strong, determined voice. 'I will take a large pot of strong coffee, like a Christian, and some kippered herrings.'
Jack considered for a moment and then said with a stern look, 'What the devil did you mean by saying, I was thinking about you - what is a cuckold's neck?'
'Someone hallooed the words outside my window: I wanted to know what they meant, so I asked you, as a nautical authority. I desire you will not top it the Othello, brother, for shame: suff on you. If any man so far forgot himself as to make a licentious suggestion to Sophie, she would not understand him for a week, and then she would instantly lay him dead with your double-barrelled fowling-piece.'
'It is kind to call me a nautical authority," said Jack, smiling at the idea of Sophie slowly coming to understand the hypothetical rake, and her polite attention changing to icy rage. 'And you may call me a nautical diplomat too, if you choose. I had a most satisfactory interview with the master of the Dromedary last night. It is a very, very delicate matter, telling a man how to conduct his ship or suggesting improvements, you know; and Mr Allen is in no way my subordinate. Besides, the masters of merchant ships often have a grudge against the Navy for pressing their men, and they resent the airs some officers give themselves. If I had offended him, he might, out of mere contrariness, have reduced sail to courses alone. But, do you see, he came below to ask what was afoot just after you had turned in - he had been told that you had attacked us in a drunken frenzy and that we had beaten you almost to death - and he stayed to drink a glass while I finished telling Mowett and the parson how the squadron cracked on like smoke and oakum, sailing over this very same tract of water before the battle of the Nile.'