The Fortune of War by Patrick O’Brian

tying down cases, baskets, chests with string, and at controlling his helpers, was Captain Aubrey himself. Jack did not address him first, however: to the oldest seaman there he said, 'What is your name?'
    'Jaggers, your honour, carpenter's crew, starboard watch.'
    'Very well, Jaggers: jump up to the maindeck with your mates. Tell my coxswain and steward I want them here at once.'
    'Aye aye, sir.'
    The sailors vanished silently upwards, like bulky, inebriated mice, not a hoot nor a halloo until they were well out of sight.
    'Stephen,' said Jack, quickly tricing a wandering basket to a stanchion, 'you are in a sad way, I see.'
    'So I am too,' cried Stephen, 'with these bestial Goths, these drunken Huns all about me - I could weep from mere vexation - so much to be preserved, so much already lost
    - would you have another piece of string in your pocket, at all? - and there was a prating fellow that would insist on my dining with the captain of this vile machine. I sent him about his business; told him to go trim his sails.'
    The vile machine took a lee-lurch and the female sea-elephant slid to starboard. Jack waited for the weather-roll, heaved it back, passed a line round its middle, made all fast, and said, 'Yes: that was Warner, their first lieutenant. Stephen, there is something about the Navy I should have told you before. A captain's invitation cannot be refused.'
    'Why not, for all love? Oh, for a decent ball of string.'
    'The immemorial custom of the service requires that it should be accepted. It is as who should say a royal command; and a refusal is near as a toucher mutiny.'
    'What stuff, Jack. In its very nature an invitation implies an option, the possibility of refusal. You can no more compel a man to be your guest in the sense, the only valid sense, of a willing commensal, a glad partaker of your fare, than you can oblige a woman to love you. A prisoner is not a guest; a raped wench is not a wife; an invitation is not an ukase.'
    Jack abandoned the immemorial custom of the service, though it had answered well before: there was only four minutes to go. 'Hold fast,' he called up the scuttle, and in a low voice he said, 'I should take it as a particular favour if you were to come. Yorke has asked you out of kindness to me. It would be a most unfortunate beginning to the voyage if there were any appearance of slighting him, unfortunate for me and all our shipmates.'
    'But, Jack,' cried Stephen, waving hopelessly at his tumbled collections, most in uneasy movement, all threatening decisive motion, 'how can I leave all this?'
    'Bonden and Killick will be below directly, both sober and both carrying any amount of cordage. And all the other Leopards will give you a hand as soon as dinner is over. Pray be a good fellow for once, Stephen.'
    'Well,' - with an unwilling look at all he was leaving
    - 'I. will come so. But mark you, brother, it is only in compliment to you. I do not give a fig for your immemorial tyranny and oppression, nor for his Czarish Majesty back there.'
    'Bonden, Killick,' called Jack.
    They instantly dropped through the scuttle, Killick carrying what remnants of uniform Dr Maturin still possessed, a clean shirt and a comb, for he knew perfectly well what was afoot. Leopard's surgeon, mad with drink, had refused the Captain's invitation. It was confidently expected that Mr Warner would have him brought aft in irons, that his jaws would be prised open with a handspike and his dinner poured down his throat, whether or no; that he should be placed under close arrest, forbidden to move from his cabin for the remainder of the voyage and court-martialled the moment La Flèche reached Pompey. It was with a certain feeling of disappointment, of anticlimax, therefore, that they saw him pass at a shambling run, square-ribbed and fairly trim, in his own captain's wake, at one minute to the hour.
    'You will be civil?' Jack whispered in his ear at the cabin door.
    Stephen's noncommittal sniff gave him no comfort, but