'They are', Pym announced to the dining officers, 'rotten with the corrupting disease of valetudinarianism.'
'What's that?' asked Wyatt, his mouth full.
'Malingering,' Metcalfe explained.
Pym made a mock bow to the first lieutenant for stealing his own thunder which Metcalfe, helping himself to another slice of roast snipe, did not see but which tickled Frey's sense of humour so that he first laughed and then choked.
Metcalfe looked up. 'What's so damned funny?'
Frey spluttered and went purple. 'God, he's not laughing!' Moncrieff rose and slammed a hearty palm between Frey's shoulder blades. The piece of wing dislodged itself and flew across the table on to Metcalfe's plate.
'God damn you for an insolent puppy,' Metcalfe exploded, and in the same instant Pym received inspiration and enlightenment. He knew Metcalfe had not seen his own rudeness for he had been looking at the first lieutenant when he produced his little sarcasm. He knew his own mood was due to his having run out of books. A vague idea was stirring that a sure cure to his problem was to write one of his own, though the thought of the necessary effort bothered him. Parallel with these undercurrents of thought had been a detached observation of the first lieutenant's conduct. In this as in much else, Pym was lazy, blind to the clinical opportunity the concupiscence of a frigate's wardroom gave him. He merely concluded Metcalfe would, like so many other naval officers of his era, end up raving in Haslar.
'Though he don't drink much,' he had observed to Wyatt when they had been gossiping.
'Perhaps he's poxed,' Wyatt had suggested in his own down-to-earth manner.
'Or has incipient mercurial nephritis,' Pym had humbugged elevatingly.
But now, watching Metcalfe while the others stared at Frey recovering his breath and his composure, Pym thought him mad from another source and the seed of an idea finally germinated in his mind.
'I say, Metcalfe,' Moncrieff growled as Frey exchanged near-asphixiation for indignation.
'I ... ain't... a ... damned ... puppy!' Frey gasped.
'You even talk like the man,' Metcalfe went on, and Pym realized Metcalfe's train of thought was somehow not normal. Here again was the recurrence of this obsessive disparagement of Captain Drinkwater, and Pym wondered at its root. Metcalfe's condemnation of the captain had become almost a ritual of his wardroom conversation, ignored by the others, tolerated only because he was the first lieutenant. Captains had a right to be eccentric, disobliging even, and first lieutenants an obligation to be unswervingly, silently loyal. That was how the writ ran in Pym's understanding.
Poor Frey, unaware of any irregularity in Metcalfe's personality beyond the generally unpleasant, thought the first lieutenant must have heard something about the confidences he and Drinkwater had exchanged earlier. He resolved to have words with Mullender, forgetting in his anger that Mullender had not been in the pantry, and disgusted that Metcalfe had such spies about the ship.
'Take that back, sir ...'
'Steady, Frey ...' Moncrieff advised.
'Stap me, you're all in this.' There was a bewildered wildness in Metcalfe's eyes. 'Why are you looking at me, Pym? Don't you think such insolence is intolerable?'
And so the patient delivered himself to the quack and Pym received the means by which he was to achieve fame. 'To a degree, yes, Mr Metcalfe. I concur you've been badly treated,' Pym went on, mentally rubbing his hands with glee and ignoring the astonishment of his messmates' faces. 'Come, sir, don't let your meat spoil. Afterwards you and I shall take a turn on deck.'
For a moment Metcalfe stared at the surgeon, something akin to disbelief upon his face. Pym, in a rare and perceptive moment, interpreted it as relief. Metcalfe bent to his dinner and over his head Pym winked at the others.
Pym was not objective enough to recognize the crisis Metcalfe had reached. He preened his self-esteem even while planning his therapy and probing his patient's mind. Overall lay a vague image of his discovery in print, a seminal work dislodging Brown's Elements of Medicine. He would complement Keil's Anatomy, Shaw's Practice of Physic; alongside Munro on the bones and Douglas on the muscles, they would set Pym's On the Mind. Yet amid this self-conceit and at the moment imperfectly glimpsed, Pym had caught sight of a great paradox. Within Metcalfe he sensed a twin existence ...
And already the opening words of his treatise came to him: Just as, in utero, a foetus may divide and produce two unique human beings, so in the skull, twin brains may develop, to dominate the conduct and produce responsive contrariness and a lack of logical direction ...
Pleased with the portentious ring of the phrases he abandoned them, setting the composition aside as Metcalfe, unsuspicious, soothed by Pym's solicitude, confirmed the growing certainty in Pym's ecstatic imagination.
'Damn the man, Mr Pym,' Metcalfe was saying, 'what is he about? The men have run and we know where they are.'
'Quite, quite, Mr Metcalfe, what do you propose, that we should take them by force and precipitate a crisis at this delicate juncture?' Their situation had been much rehearsed in the wardroom during the week and Pym laid out the logic to see where Metcalfe diverged from its uncompromising path, for he was familiar with a method used to cure the megrims by first rooting out their source.
'We should beat 'em, Pym', Metcalfe said fervently, 'blow 'em from the water, pound 'em to pieces ...' The wildness was back in Metcalfe's eyes now and Pym felt disappointment. This was a normal, naval, fire-eating madness after all.
'Perhaps,' he said disconsolately, 'we are to take our leave without raising the matter.' He paused, seeking to lead Metcalfe's thoughts along a different path. 'It is clear to me and all the others you dislike Captain Drinkwater, though he seems reasonable enough to me ...'
Metcalfe grunted but offered no more.
'Well, I suppose you require his good opinion for advancement...' the surgeon suggested slyly.
'Me, Pym? What the devil for? I may make my own opportunities, damn it.'
'Well,' said Pym shrugging, a sense of failure, of approaching boredom, of finding the task he had set himself too difficult making him lose interest. It had seemed a good idea earlier, but perhaps that was the wine. He failed to recognize Metcalfe's massive self-delusion and reverted to a clinical examination. Stopping his pacing, he compelled Metcalfe to do the same. The two turned inwards and Pym looked deliberately into Metcalfe's eyes, while saying with exaggerated and insincere concern, 'How can you be sure of that, Mr Metcalfe? It seems to me the war is a stalemate. All the opportunities seem to have evaporated.'
'If we were to fight them,' Metcalfe replied, jerking his head in the direction of the Stingray, 'then things would soon be different.'
'But,' said Pym frowning, suspending his clandestine examination of Metcalfe's pupils and rekindling his theory, 'I thought you once expressed a contrary opinion, or was that', he affected a conspiratorial expression, merely a matter of dissembling; of, shall we say, seeking the captain's good opinion?'
Metcalfe stared back at the surgeon. 'Good opinion?' he murmured, almost abstractedly, and Pym's heart leapt with enthusiasm again. 'Oh, yes, perhaps ... yes, perhaps it was.'
And Metcalfe, like a man who had suddenly remembered a forgotten appointment, abruptly walked away. Pym watched him go. 'It's not going to be easy,' he muttered to himself, but later that afternoon he fashioned a new quill-nib and began to write: I conducted my first series of clinical observations, engaging my patient in conversation designed to draw out certain convictions, simultaneously examining his eyes for luetic symptoms. He displayed a vehement conviction at first, which yielded to a meeker and contrary opinion when this was suggested, thus exhibiting a predisposition towards influence...