Jack, following his lieutenant's significant look at the close of the ceremony with the flowers, seized the position at once. He kissed the little girl, passed the bouquet to his coxswain, and said, 'Bonden, lay aloft: make these fast to the maintruck, and on your way down show the Doctor the most convenient way of reaching the deck. My compliments, and should be glad to see him in the cabin.'
By the time Stephen reached the deck it was covered with smiling, gift-bearing Kutaliotes of one kind and another - Catholic, Orthodox, Muslim, Jew, Armenian, Copt- and more were coming in little boats. And by the time he reached the cabin it was deep in the fragrant smoke of Cephalonian tobacco; the hookah was bubbling away in the middle, and Captain Aubrey, Father Andros and Sciahan Bey were sitting about it on cushions, or to be more exact on all the Surprise's pillows hastily covered with signal flags, drinking coffee out of Wedgwood cups. They welcomed him cordially, even affectionately, and gave him an amber mouthpiece to smoke with. 'We have fallen wonderfully lucky,' said Jack. 'If I do not mistake, the Bey's people have found a monstrous fine bear, and we are going to hunt him tomorrow.'
'He was a monstrous fine bear indeed, my dear,' wrote Captain Aubrey in a letter dated Surprise, off Trieste, 'and if only we had been a little braver, you should have had his skin. He stood at bay, with his back to a rock, rearing up seven or eight feet tall - eyes flashing, red mouth foaming, hair on end - looking very like Admiral Duncan, and we could have shot him through and through. But no, no, cried Stephen - a bear is a gentleman, and must be dispatched with a spear. Very true, we said, and begged him to show us how. Not at all, said he: he was concerned only with seeing that the bear was not abused: the honour of killing him obviously belonged to a man of war, not to one of peace. This we could scarcely deny, but the question was, which man of war? I thought the Bey should certainly have the precedence, being of higher rank; he said that was great nonsense - common good manners required him to give way to a stranger. While we were arguing the toss the bear dropped down on all fours and walked quietly into a little bushy dell beside the rock, a most devilishly awkward place to tackle him in. Finally some meddling fellow suggested that both Sciahan and I should set about him together. We could not very well refuse, but I assure you we took our time about creeping in among those infernal bushes, crouching and grasping our spears and glaring into the deep shadows and expecting the brute to charge any second- he was as massive as a cart-horse, though lower on his pins. The only dogs left alive by this time were the cautious ones that kept well behind us, and we had them taken up, in case their silly din prevented us from hearing the bear. And so we minced along, listening with all our ears; and I have never been so frightened in all my life. Then there was Stephen screeching out "Gone away" and hallooing and waving his hat, and there was the bear a quarter of a mile off, going straight up the mountainside like a vast great hare. There we were obliged to leave him, I am afraid, since I had to get back to the ship; but Lord, sweetheart, how that day with even a very indifferent pack of hounds did lift my heart! So did a trifle of action the next night, when we were becalmed off Corfu, and the very enterprising Frenchman in command of the island, a General Donzelot, sent out a number of boats, trying to snap up one or two of the convoy. They did not succeed, and no one was seriously hurt, but we had a lively night of it, and in her agitation one of the merchantmen fell foul of us when a breeze got up, carrying away our jibboom; so we are quite glad to have reached the comparative peace of these waters, where there are plenty of our friends to protect us: three frigates and at least four sloops or brigs. We have only just arrived and I have not seen them all yet: Hervey, the senior naval officer, is looking into Venice until tomorrow. But Babbington is here in the Dryad, and he sent to ask me to dinner even before we had dropped our anchor. So is young Hoste. He has done wonders - a very active officer - and I wish I could like him better, yet there is something of Sidney Smith about him, something a trifle self-congratulatory and theatrical; and then he does burn a shocking number of small prizes, which does him no good and the French no harm, but which does ruin the poor unfortunate men that own and sail them. This is strictly between ourselves, my dear, not to be repeated to anyone. Henry Cotton is here too, in the Nymphe. He was on shore when we arrived, but his surgeon came over - you remember him, I am sure, Mr Thomas, the talkative gentleman that called on Stephen when he was staying with us - to beg that Dr Maturin would lend a hand in some particularly delicate operation; and he told me that there is now an overland post by way of Vienna that is fairly sure to get through, at least for the moment. The position in these parts is very confused: the local French commanders are able, energetic, resourceful men and sometimes I feel that our allies- but perhaps I had better leave that subject alone. Indeed, sweetheart, I must leave my letter alone too, for I have just heard Harry Cotton's barge come alongside, his hoarse old coxswain wheezing out "Nymphe, Nymphe", like an asthmatic grampus.'
Aboard the Nymphe herself, Dr Maturin leant over his patient's yellow, glistening, horror-filled face and said 'There: it is all over now. With the blessing you will do very well.' And to the man's messmates, almost as wan and horrified as their friend, 'You may untie him now; you may cast him off.'
'Thankee, sir,' said the patient in a whisper, as Stephen took the piece of padded leather from between his back teeth, 'thankee very kindly for your pains.'
'I have read your description of the operation, of course,' said the surgeon of the Cerberus, 'but I had not expected such dispatch. It might have been an act of presti - presti - legerdemain.'
'I admire your courage, sir,' said the surgeon of the Redwing.
'Come, gentlemen,' said Mr Thomas, 'I think we have all earned a little refreshment.'
They all walked off into the empty gunroom, where Mr Thomas treated them to a bottle of Tokay. 'My next case,' he said, after they had gossiped for a while about Malta and the Toulon blockade, 'is a perfectly commonplace wandering ball, a pistol ball received some years ago and now causing a certain amount of pain as the result of recent physical exertion. It is lodged just at the external edge of the levator anguli scapulae, and it presents no particular interest to the philosophical surgeon, but for the fact that it is lodged in a most romantic frame.'
'Indeed?' said Stephen, seeing that some remark was called for and that neither of the others felt inclined to make it.
'Yes, sir,' said Thomas with great satisfaction. 'Perhaps you will allow me to begin at the beginning?' This seemed a reasonable request, but his friends, who knew Mr Thomas, who had heard it all before, and who had seen Dr Maturin perform his suprapubic cystotomy, drank up their Tokay and took their leave; and even Maturin gave only the faintest smirk of assent.
'Well, now, some time ago we were off Pola, steering south-west with a light breeze at north or thereabouts, very early in the morning or perhaps I should say late at night- before the idlers had been called, in any case; and in passing I may observe that it is tolerably whimsical to speak of them as idlers, more whimsical if anything than calling the master, purser and surgeon noncombatants. I am sure that when I was surgeon's mate in the old Andromeda, or assistant-surgeon as we say nowadays, and indeed it is far more proper, mate having a certain colloquial, familiar connotation by no means suitable for a member of a learned profession- I am sure I went away in cutting-out expeditions or in sweeps along the coast in the yawl - twice I had command of the yawl! - or in the barge more often than the great majority of line-of-battle-ship mids. But as I was saying or at all events intended to say, this hour between night and day is the very best time, so long as there is no great wind, for believe me, anything more than a topgallantsail breeze will infallibly put them down, the very best time for catching those fish they call scombri in these parts which I take to be close kin to our mackerel, though they eat far more delicate; and there I was with my wand over the taffrail, fishing along the side of the wake with a piece of bacon-rind cut in the shape of a sand-eel - some say they can be catched in greater numbers with red flannel, but I swear by my bacon-rind. Mark you,' he said, raising one finger, 'it must be well soaked. But once it has spent four and twenty hours in the steep-tub, once it is really pliable, there is nothing to touch your lithe white unctuous rind for enticing the big fellows. So there I was with the lieutenant of Marines beside me, in full expectation of catching the gunroom's breakfast -simple broiling on a piping hot well-oiled gridiron is best, I assure you: elaborate sauces and Persian apparatus take away their true flavour- but, however, before I had had so much as a single bite Norton cried out "Hold" or perhaps "Hush" - something to that effect. Norton, I should have said, was the Marine: William Norton, of a Westmorland family, related to the Collingwoods. "Listen," he says, "Ain't that musketry?" '