His horses were fine animals and he sold one for as much as he had given for it; this satisfied the immediate local duns, but it did not re-establish his credit, for although Champflower was willing to believe in any amount of cloudy wealth (and Jack’s fortune had been reckoned very high), it had poverty weighed up to within a pound or two.
Post Captain – Patrick O’Brian
‘Let me look to your pistols,’ said Jack, as the trees came closer to the road. ‘You have no notion of hammering your flints.’
‘They are very well,’ said Stephen, unwilling to open his holsters (a teratoma in one, a bottled Arabian dormouse in the other). ‘Do you apprehend any danger?’
‘This is an ugly stretch of road, with all these disbanded soldiers turned loose. They made an attempt upon the mail not far from Aker’s Cross. Come, let me have your pistols. I thought as much: what is this?’
‘A teratoma,’ said Stephen sulkily.
‘What is a teratoma?’ asked Jack, holding the object in his hand. ‘A kind of grenado?’
‘It is an inward wen, a tumour: we find them, occasionally, in the abdominal cavity. Sometimes they contain long black hair, sometimes a set of teeth: this has both hair and teeth. It belonged to a Mr Elkins of the City, an eminent cheese-monger. I prize it much.’
‘By God,’ cried Jack, thrusting it back into the holster and whiping his hand vehemently upon the horse, ‘I do wish you would leave people’s bellies alone. So you have no pistols at all, I collect?’
‘If you wish to be so absolute, no, I have not.’
‘You will never make old bones, brother,’ said Jack.
Post Captain – Patrick O’Brian
‘Stephen, Stephen, Stephen!’ Jack’s voice came along the corridor, growing louder and ending in a roar as he thrust his head into the room. ‘Oh, there you are. I was afraid you had gone off to your stoats again. The carrier has brought you an ape.’
‘What sort of an ape?’ asked Stephen.
‘A damned ill-conditioned sort of an ape. It had a can of ape at every pot-house on the road, and it is reeling drunk. It had been offering itself to Babbington.’
Post Captain – Patrick O’Brian
‘The gold and the pearls help,’ said Stephen. ‘The one echoes her hair and the other her teeth. I will tell you a thing about women. They are superior to men in this, that they have an unfeigned, objective, candid admiration for good looks in other women — a real pleasure in their beauty. Yours, too, is a most elegant dress: other women admire it. I have remarked this. Not only from their glances, but most positively, by standing behind them and listening to their conversation.’
Post Captain – Patrick O’Brian
‘Good morning, Maturin,’ said Diana, coming down the steps. ‘I hope I have not kept you waiting. What a neat cob you have there, upon my word! You never found him in this part of the world.’
‘Good morning, Villiers. You are late. You are very late.’
‘It is the one advantage there is in being a woman. You do know I am a woman, Maturin?’
‘I am obliged to suppose it, since you affect to have no notion of time — cannot tell what o’clock it is. Though why the trifling accident of sex should induce a sentient being, let alone such an intelligent being as you, to waste half this beautiful clear morning, I cannot conceive. Come, let me help you to mount. Sex — sex . . . ‘
‘Hush, Maturin. You must not use words like that here. It was bad enough yesterday.’
‘Yesterday? Oh, yes. But I am not the first man to say that wit is the unexpected copulation of ideas. Far from it. It is commonplace.’
‘As far as my aunt is concerned you are certainly the first man who ever used such an expression in public.
Post Captain – Patrick O’Brian
Sometimes Mrs Williams wondered whether he really were quite the thing — whether those strange tales about sea-officers might possibly be true in his case. Was it not very odd that he should live with Dr Maturin?
Post Captain – Patrick O’Brian
A deep and powerful voice the other side of the door was singing
You ladies of lubricity
That dwell in the bordello
Ha-ha ha-ha, ha-ha ha-her
For I am that kind of fellow,
but the ladies walked into the hall quite unmoved, since not one of them except Diana understood the words, and she was not easily upset.
– Post Captain – Patrick O’Brian
‘No future in the service for that kind of officer, above all with St Vincent at the Admiralty. And then I fear he may not attend to the fifth commandment quite as he should.’ The girls’ faces took on an inward look as they privately ran over the Decalogue: in order of intelligence a little frown appeared on each as its owner reached the part about Sunday travelling, and then cleared as they carried on to the commandment the Admiral had certainly intended.
Post Captain – Patrick O’Brian
She spoke little, in company or out, but she was capable of a sudden dart of sharpness, of a remark that showed much more intelligence and reflection than would have been expected from her rudimentary education and her very quiet provincial life. These remarks had a much greater force, coming from an amiable, pliant, and as it were sleepy reserve, and before now they had startled men who did not know her well — men who had been praying away happily with the conscious superiority of their sex. They dimly grasped an underlying strength, and they connected it with her occasional expression of secret amusement, the relish of something that she did not choose to share.
Post Captain – Patrick O’Brian
‘Get over, you bastard,’ said the girl, in her pure clear young voice. Jack had never heard a girl say bastard before, and he turned to look at her with particular interest. She was busy coping with the mare’s excitement, but after a moment she caught his eye and frowned. He looked away, smiling, for she was the prettiest thing — indeed beautiful with her heightened colour and her fine straight back, sitting her horse with the unconscious grace of a midshipman at the tiller in a lively sea. She had black hair and blue eyes; a certain ram-you-damn-you air that was slightly comic and more than a little touching in so slim a creature. She was wearing a shabby blue habit with white cuffs and lapels, like a naval lieutenant’s coat, and on top of it all a dashing tricorne with a tight curl of ostrich-feather. In some ingenious way, probably by the use of combs, she had drawn up her hair under this hat so as to leave one ear exposed; and this perfect ear, as Jack observed when the mare came crabwise towards him, was as pink as . . .
Post Captain – Patrick O’Brian
The Love Pirate 