Knock-knock on the door. ‘Beg pardon, your honour. Loblolly boy’s all in a mother, sir. Young Mr Ricketts has swallowed a musket-ball and they can’t get it out. Choking to death, sir, if you please.’

‘Forgive me,’ said Stephen, carefully putting down his glass and covering it with a red spotted handkerchief, a bandanna.

‘Is all well — did you manage . . .?’ asked Jack five minutes later.

‘We may not be able to do all we could wish in physic,’ said Stephen with quiet satisfaction, ‘but at least we can give an emetic that answers, I believe. You were saying, sir?’

Master and Commander – Patrick O’Brian

‘I say these damned things,’ Jack went on, musing as they drank their bottle, ‘and don’t quite understand at the time, though I see people looking black as hell, and frowning, and my friends going “Pst, pst”, and then I say to myself, “You’re brought by the lee again, Jack.” Usually I make out what’s amiss, given time, but by then it’s too late.’

Master and Commander – Patrick O’Brian

Ever since Stephen Maturin had grown rich with their first prize he had constantly laid in great quantities of asafetida, castoreum and other substances, to make his medicines more revolting in taste, smell and texture than any others in the fleet; and he found it answered — his hardy patients knew with their entire beings that they were being physicked.

Master and Commander – Patrick O’Brian

Stephen looked at him attentively, took his pulse, gazed at his tongue, asked squalid questions, examined him. ‘Is it a wound going bad?’ asked Jack, alarmed by his gravity.

‘It is a wound, if you wish,’ said Stephen. ‘But not from our battle with the Cacafuego. Some lady of your acquaintance has been too liberal with her favours, too universally kind.’

‘Oh, Lord,’ cried Jack, to whom this had never happened before.

Master and Commander – Patrick O’Brian

‘Do you follow me, Dr Maturin?’

‘I do indeed, sir, and am much obliged to you for your candor in telling me this: it confirms what was in my mind and I shall do all I can to make him conscious of the delicacy of his position. Though upon my word,’ he added with a sigh, ‘there are times when it seems to me that nothing short of a radical ablation of the membrum virile would answer, in this case.’

‘That is very generally the peccant part,’ said Mr Florey.

Master and Commander – Patrick O’Brian

‘I am coming to believe that laws are the prime cause of unhappiness. It is not merely a case of born under one law, required another to obey — you know the lines: I have no memory for verse. No, sir: it is born under half a dozen, required another fifty to obey. There are parallel sets of laws in different keys that have nothing to do with one another and that are even downright contradictory. You, now — you wish to do something that the Articles of War and (as you explained to me) the rules of generosity forbid, but that your present notion of the moral law and your present notion of the point of honour require. This is but one instance of what is as common as breathing. Buridan’s ass died of misery between equidistant mangers, drawn first by one and then by the other. Then again, with a slight difference, there are these double loyalties — another great source of torment.’

‘Upon my word, I cannot see what you mean by double loyalty. You can only have one King. And a mean’s heart can only be in one place at a time, unless he is a scrub.’

‘What nonsense you do talk, to be sure,’ said Stephen. ‘What “balls”, as you sea-officers say: it is a matter of common observation that a man may be sincerely attached to two women at once — to three, to four, to a surprising number of women. However,’ he said, ‘no doubt you know more of these things than I. No: what I had in mind were those wider loyalties, those more general conflicts — the candid American, for example, before the issue became envenomed; the unimpassioned Jacobite in ’45; Catholic priests in France today — Frenchmen of many complexions, in and out of France. So much pain; and the more honest the man the worse the pain. but there at least the conflict is direct: it seems to me that the greater mass of confusion and distress must arise from these less evident divergencies — the moral law, the civil, military, common laws, the code of honour, custom, the rules of practical life, of civility, of amorous conversation, gallantry, to say nothing of Christianity for those that practise it. All sometimes, indeed generally, at variance; none ever in an entirely harmonious relation to the rest; and a man is perpetually required to choose one rather than another, perhaps (in his particular case) its contrary. It is as though our strings were each tuned according to a completely separate system — it is as though the poor ass were surrounded by four and twenty mangers.’

‘You are an antinomian,’ said Jack.

‘I am a pragmatist,’ said Stephen.

Master and Commander – Patrick O’Brian