by Sten Nadolny
‘Yes, homecoming,’ sounded the voice of old Ayscough, who had followed him. ‘When it happens, all one can do is sit down.’ Midshipman Franklin got up, brushed the dust off his trousers. He wondered whether love of one’s country was more of a duty or something one was born into. This, of course, was not the sort of thing one could ask an old soldier.
* * *
The house in the narrow passage now belonged to a strange fat man who always said ‘Ha – hm’ as a greeting, an explanation, a farewell.
His parents lived in a smaller house. Mother’s eyes sparkled gaily, and she called out John’s name. It was quiet, for Father said little. He seemed sad, and John felt pity. Was there no money any more? Father used to have means. John preferred not to ask. He had heard, after all, that the good times were over. About Thomas, Father said only brusquely that he now commanded a volunteer regiment. They would punish Napoleon if he allowed himself to be seen in these parts.
Grandfather had meanwhile become stone deaf. To anyone who talked at length he gave a long look saying, ‘You don’t have to shout. I don’t understand you anyway. Anything important I notice on my own. Nobody needs to tell me.’
Walking toward Ann’s house, John tried to recall Mary’s face. But he couldn’t get it together, and this made him wonder. Did one forget the outside of a person if one loved her? Perhaps one did, just for that reason.
Ann Flinders née Chapell had become a bit plumper. She was pleased to see John. She had heard about Matthew’s misfortune some time ago. ‘First the admirals, then the French – and he hasn’t done anybody any harm.’ She was sad, but she did not cry. She wanted to hear all about the voyage. At last she said only, ‘The French will have to atone for all that.’
Then he visited Sherard’s parents, the Lounds.
Since getting Sherard’s letter from Sheerness, they had heard nothing more from him. The letter Matthew had taken along had surely been confiscated. And he hadn’t written a line from Port Jackson. John thought of the part of the world where his friend had decided to establish himself – beyond the blue mountains, where all rivers flowed toward the west and where convicts from Botany Bay were making their way if they were able to break out.
‘He’s in a green land where there’s lots of fine weather,’ said John, ‘but the postal service is poor there.’
Conditions in Ing Ming had worsened. More people, less food. The Lounds still owned their cow, but the common had become much too small for the cattle of the poor. ‘The big folks simply shift the fences. And the common has been grazed so much that not a single blade of grass dares to peek out.’ Father Lound was a thresher. One shilling and sixpence per day during harvest time. His wife might have spun flax, if the spinning-wheel had not long since joined the tea kettle at the pawnbroker’s. He was the man who always said ‘Ha – hm’ to everything.
‘Our younger ones are still all at home,’ said Father Lound. ‘The wages are much higher in the fens. Or we can also go to the spinning-mill. There the children can earn, too, even in the winter. Perhaps things will be better after we win the war.’
They showed him Sherard’s last letter. He read about himself: ‘At night he dreams of the dead.’
The village seemed deserted. Tom Barker had become an apprentice apothecary in London. Others were serving in the army; many had gone away. In the church stood Peregrine Bertie, Lord of Willoughby, surveying an assembly of empty pews.
The shepherd was still around, the slugabed and rebel. He stood at the bar of the White Hart Inn and didn’t allow anything to pass unscathed. ‘Getting around in the world? For that I don’t need a ship,’ he said. ‘The earth turns of its own, you know.’
John took this in patiently. ‘But you turn along with it,’ he answered. ‘So you’ll always stay where you are.’
The shepherd giggled. ‘Well, just lift your feet.’
Then they talked about the common. ‘Do you know what a miracle it is? A common that grows smaller and smaller the more mouths feed on it.’
‘I don’t believe in miracles,’ remarked John. ‘That’s for children.’
The shepherd drank up and became rebellious again. ‘Wrong! In economics, amazement begins only when you start thinking. But you’ve become a hero, haven’t you? Do you at least send some money home?’
9
Trafalgar
Dr Orme looked at John thunderstruck without saying a word. Then he got up and was very pleased. ‘John!’ he exclaimed, and his eyelashes seemed to fan air toward his brain. ‘I’ve been waiting for you. But I hardly had any hope.’
John himself wondered about the sober way in which he now regarded his old teacher. I mean something to him, he thought. That suits me; I think I like him, too.
They sat down at the garden table behind the house on Breakneck Lane. A pause ensued, for they didn’t quite know how to start. Dr Orme told ‘a little story to loosen up’. He was simply always a teacher.
‘Achilles, the fastest runner in the world, was so slow that he couldn’t overtake a tortoise.’ He waited until John had fully grasped the madness of this assertion. ‘Achilles gave the tortoise a head start. They started at the same time. Then he ran to where the tortoise had been, but it had already reached a new point. When he ran to the next point the tortoise had crawled on again. And so it went, innumerable times. The distance between them lessened, but he never caught up with the tortoise.’ John squeezed his eyes shut and considered this. Tortoise? he thought, and looked at the ground. He observed Dr Orme’s shoes. Achilles? That was something made up. The teacher had to laugh. One of his small, crooked incisors was now missing.
‘Let’s go in,’ he said. ‘Meanwhile, I’ve made some progress with my investigations of nature.’ Inside he unlocked the door to a small room.
Now John grabbed his arm: ‘The story of that race – only the tortoise could have told it!’
Inside the little room stood a small, carefully constructed apparatus, a disc which rotated around a cross-axle when one turned a crank. On each side, front and back, a face had been painted – a man on the front left side disc, a woman on the back of the right side. When the disc turned, they appeared alternately. ‘I know this from a fair,’ John said, ‘on Jubilate Sunday six years ago.’
‘The wheelwright built the crank for me,’ explained Dr Orme, ‘and the watchmaker did the counter. When you turn the crank rapidly. HarlequinandColumbineareunitedandbecomeacouple.’ He looked in a little notebook and read out to him: ‘“My own eyes are deceived already after 710 rotations. For the deacon Sexton Reed, this occurred after 780; 630 for Sir Joseph, the High Sheriff; 440 for my laziest Latin pupil; and for my quick housekeeper, 830 rotations.”’ John saw a little hourglass attached to the lever of the counter. ‘In how much time?’ ‘Within sixty seconds. Please sit down. I’ll turn the disc faster and faster, until you can see the little couple clearly. Then I’ll hold the speed and reverse the hourglass, and with that I’ll switch on the counter.’
Carefully the teacher began to crank. He looked at John eagerly. The mechanism began to burr, the tone became lighter and lighter. ‘Now,’ said John. The tiny cogs began to turn. With each turn the cog counting single units activated the cog counting tens by means of a nodule, and that cog similarly activated the cog counting hundreds. When the last grains of sand had dropped, Dr Orme reversed the hourglass again, and the counter stood still. Solemnly he said: ‘Three hundred and thirty! You’re the slowest.’ John was pleased. His uniqueness was assured.
‘This indicates a very important difference among people,’ said Dr Orme. ‘This discovery will bring great benefits.’
In the afternoon Dr Orme went across to the school building to teach. John didn’t go with him. He was afraid he might have to tell the pupils about his adventures. What moved him personally they wouldn’t have understood, and he didn’t want to tell anyone simply what he knew they wanted to hear. He preferred to go to his old tree. But even the tree had become a stranger to him. Now he no
longer needed a tree; he had ships’ masts. He stopped and stood beneath it, looked up one more time, and went on. He wandered through the town and pondered man’s speeds. If it was true that some people were slow by nature, this should remain so. It was probably not given to them to be like others.
He sat down happily at Dr Orme’s supper table. The world should stay as it was. Now there should have been head cheese. But how could the quick housekeeper divine that?
John wanted to ask Dr Orme whether there would be no more wars in the future. So far it didn’t look like it. But perhaps there might be eternal peace after the victory over Napoleon? John kept on postponing the question; he didn’t know why.
Dr Orme mentioned other gadgets he planned to have built. ‘I can’t tell you anything more specific yet. It’s got to be thought about some more.’ In passing, he reported on an Irish bishop, the Bishop of Cloyne, who had established a theory of perception: ‘He thought of the whole world, with all its people, things and motions, as an appearance only. It was therefore a story which God told to minds by means of artificial sense impressions – perhaps only to one mind, that of the Bishop of Cloyne. In the end there was only his mind, his eyes and nerves, and the images God sent him.’
‘Why should He do that?’ asked John.
‘The meaning of creation is not known to man,’ answered the teacher. ‘Besides, a good story doesn’t need a purpose.’
‘If He can create illusions of everything,’ John mused, ‘why is He so stingy with miracles?’
That question was more than Dr Orme could answer. He told John what interested him in this problem: if the Bishop was right, with what sort of apparatus did God infuse the human mind with such pictures? ‘Of course, this is only a working hypothesis,’ he said. ‘God’s ways are inscrutable.’
Uneasiness still kept John from asking about peace. He loved Dr Orme as a person who didn’t fall back on God when he had to explain something. John wanted it to stay that way.
Dr Orme himself brought up the subject. Mankind will learn, he suggested. They learn a little more slowly than He had assumed. ‘That’s because the most competent among them will always try to change that small part of the world which they know. One of these days they’ll discover the world instead of improving it, and not forget what they already discovered.’
Lengthy phrases about the world were not to John’s liking, but he found it quite in order when clever people like Dr Orme or Westall came to formulate them in conversation.
He hoped Dr Orme would write this down.
‘Something occurs to me about forgetting,’ said John. ‘I fell in love with a woman and slept with her, but even now her face escapes me completely.’
There followed a brief interruption, because Dr Orme had inadvertently placed his cup on the edge of the saucer.
No time left for Mary Rose. John was ordered to report to the Bellerophon, lying in the Thames estuary far away from Portsmouth. On the boat to Sheerness he talked to a lieutenant wearing the insignia of a commander – a haggard man with dark eyes and a long, pointed nose. It looked as if a second nose had been planted on top of the normal one as a kind of extension. The lieutenant’s name was Lapenotie ‘re and he talked extraordinarily fast. He commanded the schooner Pickle, one of the smallest ships in the navy, mostly deployed in spy missions along the French coast. The crew of the Pickle reconnoitred fortifications and caught boats on patrol. The commander was famous for his skill in interrogating prisoners. ‘As a Frenchman, you have a great deal to offer,’ said another officer.
‘I’m English,’ Lapenotie ‘re countered aggressively. ‘I fight for the good passions of man against the bad passions.’
‘What are the good passions?’ the other officer asked.
‘Faith and love.’
‘And the bad ones?’ asked John.
‘The same freedom for everyone, megalomania of logic, and – Bonaparte.’
‘That’s true, by the deuce! God bless you!’ shouted the officer, leaping up and bumping his head against the deck plank.
John found this excessive. He disapproved.
The French should stay out of England. That was all.
* * *
Judging by her crew, the Bellerophon was an Irish, not an English, vessel. With her seventy-four guns she had produced noise and death in many battles – a celebrated ship. Why so many of her sailors were Irish nobody knew. Among seamen the ship was known as the ‘Ruffian’ or ‘Brute’. In the year 1786 she had been recalcitrant enough to launch herself on her own before the official date, her emergency baptism being conferred with half a bottle of port. The Bellerophon was exactly John’s age to the year. Matthew, too, had served on her as a midshipman. Her figurehead was a devil baring his teeth. Surely it was another Greek, like that one-eyed figure on the prow of the Polyphemus, which had also been without arms.
This was truly a different ship from the Investigator. Thick wood everywhere, heavy rigging, wide passages, countless men, soldiers in red coats, and even some in blue who had to do with field-guns. Blue as well as red soldiers drilled on deck daily, the poor fellows. Pitying them, as well as feeling some contempt, the crew watched as they marched in cadence, responding rhythmically to commands like ‘Load and lock Safety!’ and ‘Right turn!’ and ‘About turn!’ Only the Australian natives had really been able to find pleasure in drums and marching. In the end, they had drilled along with the English, using their canes and soon making a dance out of those many turns and abrupt movements. John resolved to observe mankind. If mankind had learned anything, it should have something to show for it.
There was hardly anyone in the crew and among the common soldiers who had not been pressed into service with alcohol and beating. A few women were on board who were there voluntarily, or forced by their men. They lived below deck, wore trousers, and looked like any other sailor. Nobody talked about it, and something not talked about didn’t exist. On an Irish vessel disguised as an English ship, this surprised no one.
Where were they going? To Brest, they said. Harbour blockade – an interminable job. Everyone was in a bad mood, not to mention those who had been pressed into service. The midshipmen’s mess was located way down on the orlop, below the waterline. On the table were cigars, grog, cake, cheese, pipes, knives and forks, a flute, hymn books, teacups, the remains of roast pork, and a slate. All around it: boredom and scuffles from boredom; in addition the sayings of nineteen-year-old Bant, who thought he knew everything: ‘Women around thirty are the best.’ He used to proclaim such things. He came from a village near Devonport, where they were surely happy that he had decided to join the navy. ‘Those of around thirty know their stuff. They’ve got everything twenty-year-olds have, too, but you don’t waste your time. Those of around forty are better still.’ Walford, the oldest member of the mess, blew smoke into the air. ‘Shut your mouth!’ And after a while: ‘Somebody has told you this tale; probably a seventy-year-old.’ Bant became furious, but before he could say or do anything he was rapped across the fingers with the flute, so that he sat paralysed with pain. So fast was Walford! Besides, the older man was always right. That was one of the principles they were to defend against Napoleon.
John’s misery began with the others’ boredom. If you hadn’t learned to be cruel, you at least had to know how to be insolent. During the early weeks hardly anyone respected John. But he didn’t lose his confidence. He knew the situation would change. One person now and then asked for his advice: Simmonds, the youngest, who had come directly from home.
Sometimes John thought of the future. What would a man like himself do when the war was over? A midshipman without a ship didn’t even get half-pay. Settle in Australia with Sherard? But where should he look for him? John was one of the older men by now. Simmonds was fourteen; Henry Walker sixteen years old.
Cruising before Brest throughout the entire autumn and winter. A person like John could bear that. He learned the new signal codes and read all the books he could lay his hands on.<
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The war would be over some day. He would try to join the East India Company.
He felt pity for Simmonds. When in the evening Walford rammed his fork solemnly into the table, as was the custom, the younger men had to leave the mess and go to their bunks. They were told they were still growing and so needed more sleep, but that was only a pretext. The true purpose was to humiliate them. If Simmonds overslept and was late on watch – it happened easily, because he slept on the lower deck with the gunner – Bant would find him out and push his hammock from below until he fell out. The little fellow was covered with bruises and scratches, as John had once been. He also attracted teasing in other ways. He still had to learn the simplest things. He didn’t even know how to tie a rope end onto a hawser. That was partly his own doing; he lacked seriousness. Instead of learning, he told of his dog in Berkshire. He was a friendly, easygoing fellow, always agreeable and self-confident. But he’d look for a windlass to brace the mainyard near the foremast. John stopped him: ‘You’ve simply got to think. It can only be at the mizzen.’ He also explained more complex things. In the course of time, John learned that even the older men knew less than he did. He had never forgotten a thing; his head was like a well-stocked barn. At first this annoyed them. But he wouldn’t be kept from passing on his knowledge, for he considered it his duty to do so if others lacked it. After six months they all knew him well enough. As he had anticipated, he was now respected. He was consulted on important matters and was given time to respond. One can’t accomplish more, he thought. Only one error remained: the war.
Winter was over. At last away from Brest. A new captain took command. John Cooke, a bald, slender man with a cleft chin. He looked almost as noble as Burnaby and smiled a lot. Cooke was Nelson’s man through and through and knew something about inspiring the men. Nelson was still far away, chasing part of the French fleet. But Cooke had already transformed the ship, as though the admiral were standing next to him on the poop. He made speeches about death, glory and duty, and combined all this with great friendliness. He listened closely to everyone without reacting explicitly. Perhaps he only made believe he was listening, but they all felt he acknowledged their presence in a higher sense. It seemed as if an era of freedom and goodness were about to dawn: Bant no longer sulked; Walford became helpful and encouraging; all of them were striving to improve. The captain’s words alone had accomplished this. Only John listened in vain for his inner voice. ‘I don’t notice anything yet.’ He had especially strong doubts about the word ‘glory’. Glory: one wanted to be on the better side, but there was no certainty who in a battle was on the better side. In general, nothing could be reliably proved by death. John composed his own speech in his mind. His tongue moved behind closed lips. He was soon clear about glory. At the word ‘honour’, however, his tongue stopped and stood still and his thoughts went back and forth. There was such a thing as honour. What precisely it was he still had to explore.