Read Clarissa Oakes for Free Online Page B

tincture of opium, alas) in his medicine chest. Once laudanum had come aboard by the carboy, and indulgence in it under stress had very nearly wrecked his own life and Padeen's; now, although he was reasonably sure of himself he had not the same confidence in Padeen, and this single bottle, often disguised and sometimes filled with an emetic, was kept in an iron box, far from the ordinary drugs.
       A ship had to be provided with a certain amount, since there were cases in which the tincture alone would give relief; and the square bottle was the very smallest that could still be called reasonable—that could be reconciled with Stephen's medical conscience. 'It is a curious thing,' he said to Martin, turning the key in the iron box, 'that a man who knows perfectly well that in decency he must not practise on his friends has not the slightest hesitation in doing so when it comes to medicine. We give strongly-coloured, strongly-flavoured, physically inoperative draughts, pills, boluses in order to profit by the patient's belief that having been dosed he now feels much better—a belief whose invaluable physical effects you have often seen. In this case I exhibited the tincture in the unusually powerful dose of five and thirty drops, disguising it with asafetida and a little musk and suppressing its name, since the patient has a horror of opium, while at the same time, to deal with the initial stimulation that often accompanies the ingestion of narcotics by those unaccustomed to them, I provided four pills of our usual pink-tinted chalk, to be taken in the event of wakefulness. The patient, comforted by the thought of this resource, will pass the first ten minutes or so in placid contemplation, ignoring the slight excitement, and then he will plunge into an oblivion as deep as that of the Seven Sleepers, or deeper. I flatter myself that this deep peace, this absence of vexation and irascibility, will allow the organs to carry on with their usual task unhindered, responding to my cholagogues, eliminating the vicious humours and restoring the former equilibrium.'
       The Seven Sleepers however had not been brought up from boyhood with a ship's bell. At the second stroke in the morning watch Jack Aubrey flung himself from his cot on the leeward roll and staggered, dazed and half blind, to the starboard chain-pump, where the hands were gathering. He took his place, tall there in the twilight with the warm air wafting his nightshirt. He said 'Good morning' to his dimly-apprehended neighbours, spat on his hands and cried 'Way oh!'
       This horrid practice had begun long ago, well north of Capricorn, so long ago that the people no longer looked upon it as a grievance but rather as part of the nature of things, as inevitable and perhaps as necessary as dried peas—so long ago that Jack's hands were now as horny as his shipmates'. Stephen's would have been equally harsh and rough, for since he had unwittingly set the whole process in motion he felt morally obliged to rise and toil; and he did rise and toil; nearly destroying himself, until the Captain very kindly told him that it was his duty to keep his hands as smooth as a fine lady's, in order to be able to take a leg off like an artist rather than a butcher's boy.
       'Way oh!' he cried, and the water gushed along the pump-dales, shooting clear of the side. On and on, an exuberant flood; in half an hour he was dripping sweat on to the deck and his wits were gathering themselves together through the clouds of Stephen's five and thirty drops. He recalled the events of yesterday, but without much emotion; on the edge of his field of vision he noticed that the tide of wet, followed by sand, followed by holystones and then by swabs was coming steadily aft; at length he said 'Some zealous fool must have kept the sweetening-cock open half the watch', and he began to count his strokes. He had nearly reached four hundred when at last there came the welcome cry, 'She sucks'.
       They