The Rendezvous and Other Stories

by Patrick O'Brian

  His faith in the day’s fishing had gone in three stages. At first, on the flat, easy stretches of the lower river, he had been keenly expectant, had made each cast with extreme care: he knew that some fair sea-trout, two- and three-pounders, had been caught within the week, and he hoped with each new cast that he should see the white flash of a turning fish and hear the scream of his reel. Then as the hours passed he had begun to hope rather desperately for just one fish, one, to save him from the wretchedness of having nothing at all. He pictured to himself the beauty of the fish, its gleaming sides, its black spots, the square tail and the fine, strong head, the heft of a good one dead in his hand. The vision grew clearer and more desirable still as he became more and more certain that he was going to catch nothing. It seemed, towards the end of the day, so very unlikely that any fish should want to take an artificial fly tied to a piece of gut; it was so improbable that there were any fish in that river, that if it had not been for some nagging persistence in the back of his mind he would have gone home about tea-time.

  The feathers were smoothed, the cast was tried; he stood up and worked out a good line, facing the falls at the top of the Goileadair. His arm was rested, and he cast well; the line shot handsomely through his fingers, and the new fly dropped into the eddy at the outer side of the right-hand fall. It settled for a moment while the current carried down the slack; Aislabie’s hand, as though it had an eye, took the line and drew it in, while he stared after the racing spot on the surface that should cover his fly. He was just about to lift his line off the water when some tiny variation stopped him. Was the cast moving a trifle across the current? It was, and the movement increased. With a quiet, smooth firmness it glided across and then upstream: there was a swirl under it that checked his quick strike. Aislabie stood there with the coiled line in his fingers.

  ‘Wait. Oh wait,’ he whispered, and he let a coil slip out through the rings.

  Then came the pull; a firm pull, rather than the jerk of a little fish. Aislabie struck, with a straight, tight line; he struck too hard from over-anxiety. He had not finished the lashing upward stroke before his rod sprang to violent life. The rod top whipped down to the water, and two coils of line shot from his detaining fingers, and the reel gave a flying screech. In the middle of a pool a huge fish flashed three-quarters of its length into the air: it shook its head, poised there for an instant and fell sideways. In that instant Aislabie had seen every spot on it – the impression burnt itself in as a flash of lightning does. A silver, fresh-run cock-salmon, the heaviest he had ever seen alive. He had even seen the gleam of his cast between the strong beaked jaws.

  Before the splash had settled it leapt again, clear of the water this time, and stood on its tail, worrying its head from side to side. Aislabie dropped his rod top: his hands were trembling so much that he could hardly find the knob of the reel, and his heart hammered in the back of his throat. His mind was devoid of coherent, conscious ideas: there was only a sort of cold exultation.

  Then came a period of short, frenzied rushes across and across the pool, while Aislabie did nothing but endeavour to keep a tight line. This was not too difficult, as the fish went to and fro across the middle water, keeping roughly the same distance from him. His sense returned, and with it the depressing certainty that he was going to lose his cast for sure and probably most of his line as well. His reason conscientiously told him that only a silly man would hope to land a thirty-pound salmon with a short trout rod and fifty yards of line, a 3X cast and a little fly that a salmon should never have touched.

  A salmon had no right to be there: only three, and small fish they were, had been taken in the river in the past twenty years. The top of his desire had been a two- or three-pound sea-trout, weighed by a friendly scale.

  His body and the rest of his mind fought the salmon with every particle of skill and resource he had. A wild hope began to glow there in his heart; he put a stronger check on the fish, and the salmon responded with a strength that made the running line bite into his fingers.

  So far the salmon had made no attempt to run up or down stream, and at present the only danger lay in the long, dividing finger of the bank of shingle between the incoming falls: if the run took the cast across one of its stones and then the fish were to turn, the cast would surely break. He became aware of this at the same moment that he saw the salmon turn just below the surface at the right-band side of the pool and rush directly at the spit of shingle. Its shoulders were barely covered and he could see the wake it made, curving away right-handed to cross the tip of the spit. Plainly the salmon meant to go up into the deep hole at the foot of the left-hand fall. This would do two things: first, the curving rush would carry the line, if not the cast, over the bare rocks; and second, it would in all probability run the line clean off his reel, in which case it would tauten, stretch to the breaking-point in an infinitesimal fragment of time, break at the weakest point – he had a fleeting vision of the knot joining cast and line – and leave him with a still, lifeless rod.

  As the wake neared the point, he leaned his rod out to the left horizontally and checked the racing line with all the force it could bear. The rod bent and quivered to the butt and the salmon’s curve flattened perceptibly; it cleared the point several feet below the bare stones, but still the fish bore up right-handed. Aislabie could check no more. Suddenly he let go altogether, and his reel ran out free and screaming. He felt the knot between line and backing pass up through the rings, knocking as it went, and a bitter wave of disappointment welled up around his heart. There was very little backing – he had been careless – and that little was frayed and stiff. He could not gain any distance by wading into the pool; it was neck-deep a foot from where he stood.

  The salmon took no notice of the slackened pressure; it sped on into the boil of the fall, to the topmost limit of the pool, and dived into the deep, slack water on the further side of the fall, the inward side under the falling water. There it lay, with its side and belly fins spread and its gills working violently: from time to time it worried, nuzzled against the water-worn rock, trying to dislodge the fly; but the hook was well home.

  Aislabie stood there with a couple of yards of backing still on his reel, and for the first time he felt a reasonable hope. He had little enough ground for it, since the line was angled about a rock, and the salmon, should it wish to stay where it was, could not be moved. Still, ambition swelled up and took entire possession of him, so that he could hardly breathe. He saw the fish dead on the shore and wiped the loose scales from his hand – he would have to tail the salmon, for he had neither gaff nor net: he settled in his mind how to attach it to his bicycle.

  The salmon, angered and disturbed by the thrumming that the taut line made in the fall, moved across the current and then quite slowly down into the quieter water. Aislabie left it alone until it was farther down than the shingle bed and then he bore gently on the line. The salmon, fiery as ever, hurled itself into the air twice, skittering along on its tail, and rushed straight across to the right-hand pool and back. It paused a moment, and then started a savage, exhausting series of short runs up and down the left-hand half of the pool. Had it not kept to the far side, right under the steep bank, the line would have crossed the middle bar every time, and it would certainly have parted. As it was, Aislabie, standing as high as ever he could, was just able to keep a straight line and a continual slight check on the salmon. Then, when the fish came over again to the hither side, he could bear more strongly against the pull, and now he felt that the salmon’s first splendid flush of strength had gone.

  His greatest fear was that if he should manage to tire the fish to a dangerous point, it would go downstream, through the pouring lip of the pool, down the strong column of water, and there, among the precipitous black rocks, he could not hope to hold it for a moment.

  Time rushed by, marked only by the passage of crises; twice he had slipped on a mossy piece of stone, once the salmon had bored into the only small patch of weed in the p
ool, and many times his line had dragged perilously over the bare rocks. Long ago he had noticed, with a hurried glance at his top ring, that the sun had left the trees. By now he felt that he knew the fish intimately well, could foretell its reactions, could think in front of it. It was a stupid, angry fish, he thought, with little of the sharp wit of a trout; a clever fish would have been off in less than five minutes. His own reactions, the working of the rod, the instant reeling-in, the varied check, were quite automatic by now; he did not think of them at all. As the fish began to tire in good earnest, to make shorter rushes, he pressed it harder and harder, allowing no moment of rest. Often as it turned he saw the white of its belly.

  ‘It will go down any minute now,’ he said, and with half an eye he marked three loose stones. He shuffled one between his feet, and when the salmon turned heavily down the current he had it there to throw with his free hand. It was his one chance, a remote chance, but his luck was with him. The salmon was near the surface, just above the very strong rush of current, and the stone splashed six inches from its nose. It turned and ran upstream.

  Quite soon after this the salmon began to tire so much that it was rolling in the water, and he could draw it towards him ten and twenty yards before it would run. At last he brought it into the side, curved with exhaustion and seeming half-dead. He towed it gently up the bank to the one place where the rock ran down to within a couple of feet of the surface. With slow, blundering haste he changed his rod to the other hand, knelt down, muttering ‘Calmly, calmly …’ and made a foolish, impetuous grasp at the salmon. His fingers slipped incapably on the scales, and the salmon shot away with enormous power. The rest and the touch of his hand had renewed its courage and strength. He had known it, he said, and a lowering premonition of failure had been upon him as he knelt.

  It was a weary battle now; his strength seemed to have gone into the fish. The consciousness of his own ineptitude tired him more than anything else. He realized now that his arms were as heavy as they could well be, that his reeling hand was about to be seized with a cramp, that he was going to make some last fatal error.

  With a headstrong wilfulness, he bore on the salmon, disregarding his frail, frayed cast. The fish sank in the depths, and he pumped it out with the force he would have used with tackle fit for a salmon. His foolishness answered; the salmon made a last flagging run, tried three leaps, each weaker than the last, and lay drifting on the surface.

  Now that he could see victory, Aislabie’s desperate courage left him; he wasted vital time gaping, tied in an agony of indecision. His body and mind were so tired that he could hardly think.

  The salmon came drifting down on the current on the near side of the pool. It was not going fast, for it was not in the main stream, but to one side of it. The fish passed him, and he stood impotently staring: it was downstream of him now, drifting towards the out-pouring fall, drifting faster. A queer eddy took the inert body, swirled it out of the current into the slack water of an overhung bay just to the one side of the fall’s top.

  With an awakening gasp he came out of his trance and ran heavily down the bank to the rock over the bay. He dared not draw the salmon along the bank now, so near the strong current, for he had left it so long that its strength might well be reviving, and one stroke of its tail would carry it into the run, over the edge and away. He knew that he must tail the fish there as it lay or lose it.

  The rock on which he stood overhung the water by four or five feet; three feet down, below the usual high-water mark, a narrow sloping ledge jutted out. The fish was on the top of the water, filling this little cut-off basin, a demi-lune made by a backward swirl from the fierce stream that ran at right-angles to its mouth. He put his left foot down to the water-polished ledge – there was not an honest sharp edge of rock anywhere – put his right leg out behind and knelt on the smooth rock, facing up the pool. His right hand, holding his rod, stretched as far as it could over the flat top on which he had been standing.

  He was oppressed by a sense of strong, present danger, and when he was in position he paused to collect himself. Peering down, he saw the fish from its dorsal fin to its tail; its head was under the rock and out of sight. It had sunk lower, and now lay in some two feet of water. Just above the tail fin he saw a faint band of lighter scales, the place where his hand had grasped before.

  Now he let his arm down to the water, and as he touched the surface he felt his left knee move. There was a patch of dark wet moss under it, and the rubber of his waders was slipping gently on it, downwards. The movement was very gradual, but the slightest motion of his body increased it. He brought his hand back to steady himself, but all his weight was on his left knee, and his hand found no resting place to thrust upon. He put his rod down, quite gently, for any abrupt movement would be fatal, and sought with terrible eagerness for a hand-hold; there was none anywhere in the compass of his reach. His right elbow stayed him for a moment, and by a huge muscular contraction he seemed almost to recover his poise. But his elbow could not grip on the mossy rock; the tuft of moss and grass on which it relied slid from under it, and he felt his weight swaying over on to his unsupported left side. He knew he was falling then. It was quite impossible to get his balance again, and even the smallest movement made him slide a minute, sickening, irrecoverable distance. His right hand, as though working by itself, still searched every inch of the smooth rock for a hold. There was none. He slid further. His whole body was tense to the extremity of its power, and the tension was unbearable. It was a relief when he fell at last – he no longer had to do anything now; it was decided for him now. He observed that his reason was working perfectly well although he was terrified and sweating with the fear of death.

  ‘Right,’ he said aloud, and let himself go. His hand, already under water and within a foot of the salmon’s tail, dropped right on to the lighter patch of scales: he gripped with a kind of furious reaction just as his face hit the water and his mouth and nose filled chokingly.

  The salmon gave a vast, galvanic lunge which momentarily checked his downward fall so that his body was asprawl when it hit the dark racing water. His face was set in a horrible grimace, but his fragmentary thought ‘Oh God, the speed …’ had no horror in it.

  It was like coming out of an anaesthetic. He was quite happy, and he was aware that he was conscious before he opened his eyes. As he had supposed, there were people around him, and they were talking, although at a great distance still. He looked placidly at the grey shingle alongside his cheek and somewhat out of focus because of its nearness, he saw the battered head of the salmon.

  They were wrangling softly about where the priest was to be found, and Dr Niel said again, ‘I tell you he will certainly be at Tobin’s – we sent for him – my own patient, for all love. Hurry now, Jack, will you? You can take the poor man’s bicycle from by the bridge … Surely to God it must be the biggest fish that ever ran up this river.’

  Aislabie smiled secretly: a voice said, ‘He has come to,’ and another, so anxious and kind, ‘Can we ease you, Mister, as you lie?’ The doctor was speaking too in a professional voice; but Aislabie could not bring himself away from his deep innermost glow; he smiled again, and drew in the smell of the fresh-run fish.

  The Handmaiden

  ‘SO IT IS SETTLED, THEN?’

  ‘Yes. It is settled,’ she said; and since she was a woman who liked to cope with difficulties at once she stood up and walked straight to the door.

  ‘You’re not going now, are you?’ cried Edward, in an unbelieving tone.

  She turned in the opening and smiled. ‘Never mind, Edward my dear,’ she said, to smooth away the unhappiness she thought he was concealing. ‘It really won’t be anything at all. I don’t mind it.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, and there was a pause. She stood looking back, for the oh still hung up in the air, inconclusive; but all he said was, ‘I was just wondering, in that case, whether you would mind coming back by the village. I am right out of tobacco. Since you will be in that
direction …’ The untimeliness of his request seemed to become more apparent as he uttered it and his voice trailed away, ending in something between a cough and a laugh, with the word ‘anticlimax’ thrown in.

  ‘Of course,’ she cried, keeping the surprise and disappointment out of her voice and nodding too vigorously. ‘A box of Henry Clays and a yellow tin of panatellas.’

  What an extraordinarily crass thing to produce, she thought, walking rapidly up the path: but perhaps he had meant to say something quite different. Perhaps this something else had turned out to be in the wrong key altogether while it was actually on its way – emotional or dramatic – and he had hurriedly substituted this awkward piece about cigars. That must certainly be the case, for no one could call Edward blockish. How stupid not to have thought of it at the time. But that had been altogether typical of the discussion: polite, oh so considerate, ham-handed. At the very moment when they most needed to be even closer than usual they had somehow flown miles apart and had found themselves obliged to make blundering, muddled signals across the painful gulf with no common language any more.

  How had it begun? And who had started it? She could not tell; but she felt the cold of loneliness and she walked faster up the hill. She had been married for more than ten years now, and she was no longer equipped for individuality: everything in what she thought of as her only genuine life had been doubled and made real by sharing, and this solitude was desolation itself. ‘Mrs Grattan,’ she murmured, emphasizing the Mrs: and a little later, ‘I am in a silly, silly flap.’