'I can have you put in irons, Bowen: one Marine can carry out that order, and the devil take any Regulations. As for protesting to the Admiral—well, you'll have been in irons for days before you get within a mile of the flagship. And even from a hundred yards away, you'll find it hard to deliver your protest if you're in irons. Now, get up on deck while someone clears the drink from your cabin!'
Bowen shambled out and Ramage, feeling like a man who'd been flogging a stray dog with a horse-whip, passed the word for Southwick, who came down with such alacrity he'd obviously been waiting anxiously to hear what had happened.
Nodding his head as Ramage related what had passed, he looked doubtful when he heard of the order, then nodded again when Ramage said the surgeon would be sharing his watch.
'Aye,' he said, 'it may work the cure. If it does, you'll have saved his life the same as fishing him out of the sea. It's the loneliness that'll be hard to bear. I think you've hit on it, sir: we've got to keep him occupied every moment he's awake. I've been told he's a great chess player.'
That remark seemed so irrelevant that Ramage snapped:
'That's a great help. Rum and checkmate in two moves.'
The Master grinned. 'No sir, I meant that perhaps a few games of chess would help. D'you play?'
'Badly. I just about know the moves.'
'I'm not much good either; but maybe it'd do his self-respect a bit o' good to beat the pair of us, because his self-respect's all he's got to save him.'
'Is there a set of chessmen on board?'
'Yes—I've a nice set I bought in the Levant years ago. Used to play a lot in my last ship—sorry, not the Kathleen, the one before that.'
'Very well, Mr Southwick. By the way, see that Bowen eats regular meals, even if they choke him. And we'll make it part of the treatment—or punishment—that he has to play a couple of games of chess with you every forenoon, and with me every evening. It may bore him; but who knows, it may make us chess champions of the Caribbean!'
Late in the afternoon four days later Southwick came up to Ramage on the quarterdeck and, indicating the men at the wheel within earshot, said, 'I'd like to have a word with you, sir.'
The Master looked worried: his usual cheerful face was— well, Ramage couldn't be sure. Not angry, not depressed— puzzled, perhaps. The two men walked aft to the taffrail and Ramage raised his eyebrows.
'It's Bowen, sir.'
'It's always Bowen,' Ramage said irritably, 'but I thought he was looking a lot better this morning.'
Southwick brightened up. 'That's just it, sir! He didn't come to me for his tot this morning, nor at four o'clock. I've just luffed up to leeward of him and his breath doesn't smell of drink. I think,' he said with something approaching awe in his voice, and pronouncing each word carefully in case Ramage missed the significance, 'I think he hasn't had a drink all day.'
Ramage stared at him; Southwick stared back. Both men seemed to be looking at some sea monster or ghost; at something they could hardly let themselves believe.
For a few moments Ramage wondered if this was the end of a nightmare which had begun three days ago. The day after his order to the surgeon, he, Southwick and the Marine sentry had ended up wrestling with a violent and screaming Bowen: a man temporarily insane. Even as they held him pinned to the deck in the wardroom he'd been screaming things which made Ramage's blood run cold: a telescope in a rack over the doorway to Southwick's cabin had become, in Bowen's frenzied mind, a Barbary pirate's sword which was whirling and twisting in the air without a hand to guide it but intent on disembowelling him. Then the moon-faced Marine had become a roaring lion and the wardroom a jungle in which Bowen was lost and about to be savaged. The deckhead and beams above had then suddenly become the upper part of a giant press that was slowly descending to crush him. The Marine's red jacket became tongues of flame setting the ship on fire. And so it had gone on.
By the time they managed to calm the man down they were all shaking, not only from the effort of holding him but because they were completely unnerved: Bowen's fears had been real enough to his tortured mind and his screams and frenzied yells of warning gave a terrible reality to his delusions. His shouts as the pirate's sword swooped and twisted, missing him each time by only an inch or so, almost made it visible in their own imaginations as well as his. As they glanced up at the deckhead on which Bowen's eyes had been focused, wide and staring, his hands fighting to get free to try to push it back up and prevent the press crushing him, to Ramage at least it seemed for a moment the deckhead was actually moving down.
That night two Marines had guarded Bowen in his cabin and for his own sake Ramage had him secured in a hurriedly-made strait-jacket. Next morning the delusions had gone and he remembered Southwick was to issue his drink and the Marines had to restrain him until the proper time.
After he'd had the drink he'd been all right for most of the afternoon, only becoming wild an hour before his evening tot was due. Later Southwick had made him march up and down the quarterdeck for the first part of the night and Ramage had kept him up for most of the rest, until the man was so physically exhausted he'd begged to be allowed to go down to his cabin to sleep.
Next morning he'd been ordered up on deck again and Southwick, with a dogged relentlessness, had made him talk.
Finally he'd brought the subject round to chess and, after provoking an argument about it, had made a contemptuous challenge that he'd beat Bowen at a game even giving him an advantage of a rook and a bishop.
That had made Bowen so angry he'd accepted the challenge —but only on condition Southwick gave him no advantage. At the change of watch both men had gone down to the wardroom for a meal without Bowen remembering his tot was due.
As Southwick related it to Ramage afterwards, the game had been vicious: the Master had found himself in difficulty within five moves. Faced with a disastrous defeat inside ten minutes, instead of the game lasting the intended hour or so, Southwick had used a trifling excuse to get up from the table, knocking over the chessmen as he did so. Bowen had been unruffled, started a new game, and within ten minutes Southwick was again facing checkmate.
Arguments, moves and counter-moves, mate and checkmates; games lost by Southwick with Bowen playing a rook and bishop short; successive games lost with Bowen not having a queen on the board either, had taken them up to supper-time. Then Bowen had demanded both his noon and evening tots together but received without argument only one.
That night Ramage sensed the chess victories had done something to Bowen and later heard him good-naturedly baiting Southwick, offering to play him with the Master using bishops as extra queens.
And now here Southwick was reporting—on a day when a succession of squalls had kept the watch on deck so busy furling and setting sail that there had been no time for chess— that not only had Bowen failed to demand his tots but apparently was not broaching a secret supply either__ 'I'd be glad of your company at supper, Mr Southwick, and Bowen, too. Perhaps you'd pass the invitation to him Put your chess set in my cabin, and warn Appleby he might be relieved late tonight.'
Southwick grinned and walked forward to find Bowen, leaving a puzzled Ramage pacing the deck. It was too quick for a cure; but instinctively he felt that at least Bowen was getting the right treatment.
That night, as the steward Douglas took away the plates and removed the cloth he did not, as he would have otherwise done, put down fresh glasses and a decanter. Instead, Ramage glanced up at Bowen and said innocently, 'I hear you have been giving Southwick a thrashing at chess.'