Post Captain

by Patrick O'Brian

  Jack's eyebrows shot into his bandage but he returned Parker's fervent grip and saw him to the gangway. He, was profoundly touched and he stood there looking after the boat as it pulled over to the beautiful little sloop until the first lieutenant came up to him and said, 'Mr Dashwood has a request to make, sir, if you please. He would like to take his sister down to Portsmouth: she is married to a Marine officer there.'

  'Oh, certainly, Mr Simmons. She will be very welcome. She may have the after-cabin. But stay, the after-cabin is filled with . . .'

  'No, no, sir. He would not hear of putting you out—it is only his sister. He will sling a hammock in the gun-room, and she shall have his cabin. That is how we always did these things when Captain Hamond was aboard. Shall you be going ashore, sir?'

  'No. Killick will go to pick up my coxswain and some stores and salve against bee-stings; but I shall stay aboard. Keep a boat for Dr Maturin, however: I believe he will wish to go. Good day to you, ma'am,' he said, moving aside and taking off his hat as Mrs Armstrong, the gunner's wife, shook the gangway with her bulk. 'Take care—hold on to the side-ropes with both hands.'

  'Bless you sir,' said Mrs Armstrong with a jolly wheeze, 'I been in and out of ships since I was a little maid.' She took one basket between her teeth, two more under her left arm, and dropped into the boat like a midshipman.

  'That is an excellent woman, sir,' said the first lieutenant, looking down into the hoveller. 'She nursed me through a fever in Java when Mr Floris and the Dutch surgeons had given me up.'

  'Well,' said Jack, 'there were women in the Ark, so I suppose there must be some good in 'em; but generally speaking I have never known anything but trouble come of shipping them on a voyage—quarrels, discussions, not enough to go round, jealousies. I do not even care for them in port—drunkenness, and a sick-list as long as your arm. Not that this has the least bearing on Mrs Gunner of course, or the other warrant officers' wives—still less to Mr Dashwood's sister. Ah, Stephen, there you are—'Simmons withdrew—'I was just telling the first lieutenant that you would probably be going ashore. You will take the barge, will you not? Two of the supernumeraries are not to report aboard until the morning, so you will have all the time in the world.'

  Stephen looked at him with his strange pale unblinking eyes. Had that old constraint returned, that curious misery? Jack was looking conscious—unnaturally, inappropriately gay: a wretched actor. 'Shall you not go, Jack?' he said.

  'No, sir,' said Jack. 'I shall stay aboard. Between ourselves,' he added in a much lower tone, 'I do not believe I shall ever willingly set foot on shore again: indeed, I have sworn an oath never to risk arrest. But,' he cried, with that painful, jarring, artificial assumption of levity that Stephen knew so well, 'I must beg you to get some decent coffee when you go. Killick is no judge. He can tell good wine from bad, as you would expect in a smuggler; but he is no judge of coffee.'

  Stephen nodded. 'I must also buy some issue-peas,' he said. 'I shall call at New Place, and I shall look into the hospital. Have you any messages?'

  'Compliments, of course, best compliments: and my very kindest wishes to Babbington and the other wounded Polychrests—this is for their comforts, if you please. Macdonald, too. Please tell Babbington I am particularly sorry not to be able to visit him—it is quite impossible.'

  Chapter Thirteen

  It was drawing towards evening when Stephen left the hospital: his patients were doing well—one shocking belly-wound had astonished him by living—and Babbington's arm was safe; his professional mind was easy and content as he walked up through the town towards New Place. His professional mind: but the whole of the rest of his spirit, feeling out with un-logical antennae, sensing the immaterial, was in such a state of preparedness that he was not in any way surprised to see the house boarded and shut up.

  It seemed that the mad gentleman had been driven away in a coach and four 'weeks and weeks ago' or 'some time last month, maybe' or 'before we got in the apples', bowing from the window and laughing fit to burst his sides; and that the coachman wore a black cockade. The servants followed in the waggon the next day, a week after, some time later, going to a little place in Sussex, to Brighton, to London town. His informants had not noticed the lady these last weeks. Mr Pope, the butler at New Place, was a proud, touch-me-not gentleman; all the servants were a stiff London lot, and kept themselves to themselves.

  Less downright in his approach than Jack, Stephen opened the simple lock of the garden gate with a piece of wire, and the kitchen door with a Morton's retractor. He walked composedly up the stairs, through the green-baize door and into the hail. A tall thirty-day clock was still going, its weight nearly touching the ground; a solemn tock-tock that echoed through the hail and followed him up into the drawing-room. Silence; a perfection of dustsheets, rolled carpets, ranged furniture; rays of light that came through the shutters, motes turning in them; moths; the first delicate cobwebs in unexpected places, such as the carved mantelpiece in the library, where Mr Lowndes had written some lines of Sappho large on the wall in chalk.

  'An elegant hand,' said Stephen, as he stood to consider it. 'The moon has set, and the Pleiades; midnight is gone; the hours wear by, and here I lie alone: alone. Perhaps and here I, Sappho, lie alone, to give the sex. No. The sex is immaterial. It is the same for both.'

  Silence; anonymous perfection; unstirring air—never a waft or a movement; silence. The smell of bare boards. A tailboy with its face turned to the wall.

  In her room the same trim bare sterility; even the looking-glass was shrouded. It was not so much severe, for the grey light was too soft, as meaningless. There was no waiting in this silence, no tension of any kind: the creaking of the boards under his feet contained no threat, no sort of passion: he could have leapt or shrieked without affecting the inhuman vacuum of sense. It was as meaningless as total death, a skull in a dim thicket, the future gone, its past wiped out. He had the strongest feeling of the déjà-vu that he had ever experienced, and yet it was familiar enough to him, that certain knowledge of the turn of a dream, the sequence of words that would be said by a stranger in a coach and of his reply, the disposition of a room he had never seen, even to the pattern of the paper on its walls.

  In the waste-paper-basket there were some balled-up sheets, the only imperfection, apart from the living clock, in this desert of negation, and the only exception to the completeness of his déjà-vu. 'What indeed am I looking for?' he said, and the sound of his voice ran through the open rooms. 'An out-of-date announcement of my death?' But they were lists in a servant's hand, quite meaningless, and one paper where a pen had been tried—spluttering lines of ink that might have had a meaning once, but none that could be understood. He tossed them back, stood for a long moment listening to his heart, and walked straight into her dressing-mom. Here he found what he had known he should find: the stark bareness, the pretty satinwood furniture huddled against the wall was of no importance, did not signify; but here, coming from no particular shelf or cupboard, there was the ghost of her scent, now a little stronger, now so tenuous that his most extreme attention could hardly catch it.

  'At least,' he said, 'this is not the horror of the last.'

  He closed the door with the greatest caution, walked down into the hall; stopped the clock, setting his mark upon the house, and let himself out into the garden. He turned the lock behind him, walked along the leaf-strewn, already neglected paths, out by the green door and so to the road along the coast. With his hands behind his back and his eyes on this road as it streamed evenly beneath him, watching its flow while there was still any day to see, he followed it until he reached the lights of Deal. Then, remembering that he had left his boat at Dover, he turned and paced the smooth miles back again. 'It is very well,' he said. 'I should have sat in the parlour of an inn, in any case, until I could return and go to bed without any conversation or civilities. This is better by far. I rejoice in this even, sandy road, stretching on and on for ever.'

  The morning was ric
h in such events as the introduction of Mr Floris, the surgeon, his invitation to view the sick-bay, equipped with his personally-invented wind-sail to bring fresh air below, and his flattering eagerness, his flattering deferential eagerness for Dr Maturin's opinion on Wallace—as clear a case for instant suprapubic cystotomy as Stephen had ever seen; and the appearance of Mrs Miller and her child, bright and early, for the Lively was at single anchor, with the blue peter flying.

  She was a pretty young woman with a decided air, and with a hint not of boldness but rather of that freedom which a wedding-ring and the protection of a child provides. Not that any of this was visible when Jack greeted her on the quarterdeck, however; all was demure gratitude and apologies for the intrusion. Little Brydges would be no trouble, she assured him—he was thoroughly accustomed to ships—had been to Gibraltar and back—was never sick, and never cried.

  'Why, ma'am,' said Jack, 'we are delighted to have the honour of your company, and wish it were for farther than Portsmouth. If a man cannot give a brother-officer's wife and sister a lift, things are in a sad way. Though I believe we may look forward to the pleasure of having you with us for quite a while, the wind is getting round into that God—that bothersome southerly quarter.'

  'Uncle John,' said young Brydges, 'why are you nodding and winking at Mama? She has not talked to the Captain too much, yet; and I dare say she will stop directly. And I have said nothing at all.'

  'Stephen,' said Jack, 'may I come in? I hope I have not woken you—was you asleep?'

  'No,' said Stephen. 'Not at all.'

  'Well, the gun-room is in rather a taking. It seems that a round million of your reptiles got into their cocoa-pot this morning—immolated themselves by the hundred, crawling in at the spout. They say that the wear and anxiety of such another breakfast would make them give up the service.'

  'Did they note down the exact time?'

  'Oh, I am sure they did. I am sure that in the intervals of avoiding attack, eating their breakfast, and navigating the ship, they hurried off to check the precise moment by the master's twin chronometers. Ha, ha.'

  'You speak ironically, no doubt. But this is a striking instance of sagacity in bees. I feed them with a syrup of cocoa and sugar. They connect the scent of cocoa with their nourishment. They discover a new source of cocoa-scent; they busily communicate this discovery to their fellows, together with its location, and there you have the whole situation—as satisfactory a proof as you could wish to see. Tomorrow I hope the gun-room will note down the time of their first appearance. I bet you a considerable sum of money that it will be within ten minutes either side of seven bells, the moment at which they were first fed.'

  'Do you mean that they will rush in again?'

  'So long as the gun-room continues to drink heavily-sugared cocoa, I see no reason why they should ever stop. It will be interesting to see whether this knowledge is passed on to all the subsequent generations of bees. I thank you, Jack, for telling me this: no discovery has given me so much satisfaction for years. Once it has been thoroughly tested—a sequence of some weeks or months—I shall communicate it to Monsieur Huber.'

  His waxy, tormented face had such a glow of pleasure that Jack could not find it in his heart to fulfil his promise to the gun-room. They might caulk their bulkheads, keyholes, skylights, drink tea or coffee, shroud themselves in mosquito netting for a day or so—what was a little discomfort, on active service? He said, 'I have a treat for you today, Stephen—a pretty young woman for dinner! Dashwood's sister came aboard this morning, a very fine young woman indeed. A pleasure to look at, and very well behaved—went straight below and has never been seen since.'

  'Alas, I must beg to be excused. I am only waiting for my opiates to have their effect, and then I shall operate. Mr Floris is waiting for me, and his mates are sharpening the bistouries at this very moment. I should have preferred to wait until we reached Haslar, but with this wind I presume it will take a couple of days or so; and the patient cannot wait. They are eager to see the operation; I am equally eager to gratify them. That is why I am resting my limbs at present; it would never do to make a blunder in such a demonstration. Besides, we must consider our patient. Oh, certainly. He must feel assured of a steady hand, when we are groping in his vitals with our instrument, for it will be some little while before we tally and belay.'

  The patient, the unhappy Wallace, might feel assured of a steady hand as he was led, or rather propelled, to the bench, stupefied with opium, dazed with rum, and buoyed up with accounts of the eminence of the hand that was going to deal with him; but he was assured of little else, to judge by his staring pallor. His messmates led him to his place and made him fast in a seamanlike manner: one seized his pigtail to a ring-bolt, another gave him a bullet to bite upon, and a third told him he was saving at least a hundred guineas by being there—no physical gent with a gold-headed stick would think of opening him for less.

  'Gentlemen,' said Stephen, turning back his cuffs, 'you will observe that I take my point of departure from the iliac crest; I traverse thus, and so find my point of incision.'

  So, in the fore-cabin, Jack held the point of his carver over a dimple in the venison pasty and said, 'Allow me to cut you a little of this pasty, ma'am. It is one of the few things I can carve. When we have a joint, I usually call upon my friend Dr Maturin, whom I hope to introduce to you this afternoon. He is such a hand at carving.'

  'If you please, sir,' said Mrs Miller. 'It looks so very good. But I cannot quite believe what you say about carving. You cut out the Fanciulla only the other day, and surely that was a very pretty piece of carving.'

  While these delights were going forward, the Lively stood across the Channel, close-hauled to the freshening south-west breeze with her starboard tacks aboard, under topgallants and a fine spread of staysails.

  'Now, Mr Simmons,' said Jack, appearing upon deck, 'this is very capital, is it not? How she does love to sail upon a bowline.' It was a warm, bright afternoon, with patches of cloud moving across the sky, and her brilliant canvas, her white rigging, shone splendid against them as she. heeled to the wind. There was nothing. of the yacht about her; her paintwork was strictly utilitarian and even ugly;, but this one point of snowy cordage, the rare manilla she had brought back from the Philippines, raised her to an uncommon height of beauty—that, and of course, her lovely, supple command of the sea. There was a long, even swell from the south and a surface ripple that came lipping along her weather bow, sometimes sending a little shower of spray aft across the waist, with momentary rainbows in it. This would be a perfect afternoon and evening for gunnery.

  'Tell me, Mr Simmons,' he said, 'what has been your practice in exercising the great guns?'

  'Well, sir,' said the first lieutenant, 'we used to fire once a week at the beginning of the commission, but Captain Hamond was so checked by the Navy Board for expenditure of powder and ball that he grew discouraged.' Jack nodded: he too had received those querulous, righteous, indignant letters that ended so strangely with 'your affectionate friends'. 'So now we only fire by divisions once a month. Though of course we run them in and out at least once a week at quarters.'

  Jack paced the windward side of the quarterdeck. Rattling the guns in and out was very well, but it was not the same thing as firing them. Nothing like it at all. Yet a broadside from the Lively would cost ten guineas. He considered, turning it over in his mind; stepped into the master's cabin to look at the charts, and sent for the gunner, who gave him a statement of cartridge filled, powder at hand, and an appreciation of each gun. The four long nine-pounders were his darlings, and they did most of the firing in the Lively, worked by him, his mates and the quarter-gunners.

  The horizon beyond the larboard bow was broken now by the irregular line of the French coast, and the Lively heaved about on the other tack. How beautifully she handled! She came smoothly up into the wind, paid off and filled in a cable's length, hardly losing any way at all. In spite of her spread of canvas, with all the staysail sheets
to be passed over, scarcely a quarter of an hour passed between the pipe of All hands about ship and the moment when the mastmen began flemishing their ropes and making pretty, while France dropped out of sight astern.

  What a ship to handle—no noise, no fuss, no shadow of a doubt as to whether she would stay. And she was making eight knots already: he could eat the wind out of any square-rigged craft afloat. But what was the good of that, if he could not hit his enemy when he came up with him?

  'We will make a short board, Mr Norrey,' he said to the master, who now had the watch. 'And then you will be so good as to lay her in half a mile from Balbec, under topsails.'

  'Stephen,' he said, some minutes later, 'how did your operation go?'

  'Very prettily, I thank you,' said Stephen. 'It was as charming a demonstration of my method as you could wish: a perfect case for immediate intervention, good light, plenty of elbow-room. And the patient survived.'