The Unknown Shore by Patrick O’Brian Page A

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