The Unknown Shore

by Patrick O'Brian

  ‘You’re pretty shocked, an’t you?’ he said at last.

  ‘No,’ said Tobias. ‘I had always read that the world was like that. What I was thinking about was your poem which begins Historic Muse, awake’

  ‘Were you indeed?’ said Jack, very pleased.

  ‘Yes. I was wondering whether “Spain’s proud nation, dreaded now no more” was quite right: “now” could mean now, and thus confuse the reader’s mind.’

  ‘Oh no, Toby. Think of what goes before –

  ‘Twas in Eliza’s memorable reign

  When Britain’s fleet, acknowledged, ruled the main,

  When Heav’n and it repelled from Albion’s shore

  Spain’s – and so on.

  It was then that it was not dreaded now, do you see? I have composed a great deal more of it, Toby.’

  Oh.’

  ‘Should you like to hear it?’

  ‘If you please.’

  ‘I will begin at the beginning, so that you lose none of the effect.’ ‘I know the beginning, Jack,’ said Toby piteously, ‘by heart.’ ‘Never mind,’ said Jack hurriedly, and in a very particular chant he began,

  ‘Historic Muse awake! And from the shade

  Where long forgotten sleep the noble dead (I am sorry that

  don’t rhyme better)

  Some worthy chief select, whose martial flame

  May rouse Britannia’s sons to love of fame …’

  The verse lasted until they were so close to London that the increased traffic made declamation impossible; but still the rain fell with the same steadiness, and Jack said, as they climbed Highgate Hill, ‘I am very sorry that it has not cleared up: I wanted to show you London from here – you can see it all spread out, and the river winding, and millions of lights in the evening. Besides, I thought that you would like to hear some lines I wrote about the prospect while we were actually looking at it. It is in praise of London, considered as a nest of singing-birds – poets, you know.’

  ‘A pretty wet nest, Jack?’

  ‘Of course, it was not like this in the poem,’ said Jack, reining in and peering through the darkening veils of drizzle, ‘but flowery, with meads and zephyrs. Nymphs, too. But I dare say you would like to hear it anyhow, and take the view on trust.’

  As Jack reached the last few lines he quietly loosened the flaps on his saddle-bow and brought out a long pistol, which he cocked: at the sound a lurking pair of shadows in the trees behind them walked briskly off.

  ‘We had better look to our priming,’ he said, sheltering his pistol as well as he could from the rain. ‘There are a terrible lot of thieves about. We don’t run much risk, being mounted, particularly as the rain usually keeps the poor devils indoors; but Cousin Charles got into a by-lane when he was trying to avoid the Holloway turnpike – you can just see it from here, right ahead – and half a dozen of them got about him and pulled him off his horse. They dragged him off towards Black Mary’s Hole, over the way there’ – pointing through the soaking twilight – ‘and used him most barbarously.’

  It was completely dark by the time they reached the town, and it must be confessed that Tobias was sadly disappointed with it; he had expected something splendid, definite and comprehensible, not perhaps so distinct as a walled city with light and splendour inside the gates and open country outside, but something not unlike it. As it was, they rode through a vague and indeterminate region of incompleted new building interspersed with scrubby fields and then (seeing that Jack always took the most direct line possible) through a series of narrow, dirty, ill-lit back streets.

  ‘Here we are,’ said Jack, as his horse stopped in the narrowest, dirtiest and smelliest of them all, with no light whatever. ‘Jedediah! Jedediah!’ he shouted, banging on the door.

  After a long pause, while the rain dripped perpetually from the eaves and somewhere a broken gutter poured a solid cascade into the street, there came a slow shuffling noise from within and a gleam of light under the door.

  ‘Who’s there?’ asked a voice.

  ‘Hurry up, Jedediah, damn your eyes,’ called Jack, beating impatiently.

  ‘Oh, it’s Master Jack,’ said the voice to itself, and with a rumble of bolts and chains the door opened. He had been expected all day, but as usual Jedediah was amazed to see him, and holding the lantern high he exclaimed, ‘Why, bless my soul, it’s Master Jack. And Master Jack, you’re wet. You’re as wet as a drowned rat.’

  ‘It is because of the rain,’ said Jack. ‘Now take the horses in and rub them down, and tell Mrs Raffald I shall be back to sleep. We are going round to Mrs Fuller’s now. Come on, Toby, climb down.’

  ‘The other young gentleman is wet, too,’ said Jedediah, taking the horses.

  At the beginning of the journey Jack had assumed that Tobias would stay at his family’s house, but he had run up against his friend’s delicacy, and knowing Tobias’ immovable obstinacy in such matters, he had proposed a very simple alternative. Mrs Fuller, who had been in the family for a great many years, now let lodgings for single gentlemen in Little Windmill Street, just round the corner from Marlborough Street: she received Jack with a hearty kiss (having been his nurse at one time) and told him that he was wet, disgracefully wet.

  ‘Wet through and through,’ she said, tweaking his coat open and plucking at his shirt with that strong authority that belongs to her age and sex. ‘Come now, take it off this minute, or you will catch your death. You too, young gentleman: come into the kitchen at once. Nan, come and pull the gentlemen’s boots off. Good Lord preserve us all alive! he has come out in his slippers.’ Mrs Fuller gazed upon Tobias with unfeigned horror. ‘Where is his cloak-bag?’ she asked Jack, as if Tobias could not be trusted to give a sensible answer.

  ‘He forgot it,’ said Jack.

  ‘He left it behind, and came in his slippers? Was there ever such wickedness?’ cried Mrs Fuller, who considered it a Christian’s duty to wear wool next the skin in all seasons, and to keep dry. ‘However will he change?’

  Jedediah came into the kitchen with the valise and a white packet: he said, ‘I brought the young gentleman’s cloak-bag and this here: under the saddle-flap it was, and might have fallen out any minute of the day or night.’ He put the folded parchment down with some severity.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Tobias; ‘I forgot it. It is my indenture, Jack, with my plan of the alimentary tract of moles on the back of it.’

  It was clear to Mrs Fuller that they were both demented. The rain had soaked into their wits, and the only way to drive it out again was with warmth, dry clothes, soup, a boiled fowl, a leg of Welsh mutton and the better part of a quart of mixed cordials.

  Thacker’s coffee-house was the meeting-place for naval officers, just as Will’s was for poets and literary men; and Jack, whenever he was free and in London, divided his time between the two. He had seen Admiral Vernon, the hero of Porto Bello, in the first and Mr Pope in the second, and it was difficult to say which had caused him the livelier delight.

  He was at Thacker’s at this moment, with Tobias by his side, waiting for Keppel: at present his face had no lively delight upon it, however, but rather the traces of fatigue, alarm and apprehension. The fatigue was caused by having shown Tobias the sights of London, or at least all those that could be crammed into seven uninterrupted hours of very slow creeping about shop-lined streets, tomb-lined churches, the danker monuments of antiquity and the never-ending alleys of the booksellers’ booths around St Paul’s: Tobias was not used to anything much larger than Mangonell Bagpize, and his amazement was now, in a fine (if muddy) summer’s day, as great as ever he could have wished; but he was utterly careless of the London traffic, and the effort of keeping him alive among the carts, drays, coaches and waggons had perceptibly aged his friend. Jack had known London from his earliest days, and it was difficult for him to marvel, to stand stock-still in the mainstream of impatient crowds to marvel for ten minutes on end, at a perfectly ordinary pastry-cook’s window – ‘What unheard-of luxury, Jack;
what more than Persian magnificence – Lucullus – Apicius – Heliogabalus.’ He did marvel, of course, in order not to damp Tobias’ pleasure; but it too was an ageing process. The itinerant bookseller who visited Mangonell market always gratified Tobias with a sight of his wares, although Tobias never bought any of them (this was not from sordid avarice, but because Tobias had never possessed one farthing piece in all his life) and Tobias unquestioningly assumed that London booksellers were equally good-natured: and then again, Tobias, until Jack begged him to stop, said ‘Good day’ to every soul they met, in a manner that would have passed without comment in the country, but which in London was another thing altogether.

  But sight-seeing with Tobias, though it left its mark, was as nothing, nothing whatsoever, compared with taking Tobias to see his patron.

  The Navy, apart from its administrative side, is a tolerably brisk service; those members of it who go to sea have it impressed upon their minds, both by circumstances and by the kindly insistence of their superior officers, that time and tide wait for no man; and Jack was a true sailor in his appreciation of this interesting truth. Within minutes of waking up he had sent a note to his influential cousin; the answer had come back appointing a given hour, and tearing Tobias from the belfry of St Paul’s in Covent Garden, which he had penetrated in order to view the mechanism of the clock (he asserted that it was the earliest illustration of the isochronic principle) and in which he had lingered to look into the ecclesiastical bats. Jack had brushed him, thrust him into a presentable pair of shoes and had conducted him to Mr Brocas Byron’s house. The head of the family was not quite as wise as the Byrons and Chaworths could have wished; indeed, he was what Jack, in an excess of poetical imagery, had termed ‘potty'; and his relatives had persuaded him to leave all matters of political judgment, voting and patronage, to Cousin Brocas.

  Cousin Brocas was no phoenix himself, but at that time the family was not particularly well-to-do in the matter of brains, and at least Cousin Brocas was always on the spot: he was the member for Piddletrenthide (a convenient little borough with only three voters, all of them kin to Mrs Brocas) and he never left London for a moment during the sessions of Parliament. He was rather pompous, and he stood more upon his rank than his noble cousins, but he and Jack had always got along very well together, and, having performed the introductions, Jack left Tobias with Cousin Brocas in entire confidence that they would spend half an hour in agreeable conversation while he stepped round to see whether Keppel had arrived yet, and to leave a message if he had not.

  Judge, then, of his perturbation when upon his return the footman told him that ‘they was a-carrying on something cruel in the libery,’ and the sound of further disagreement fell upon his ears, accompanied by the rumbling of heavy furniture. He darted upstairs: he was in time to prevent Tobias and his patron – or perhaps one should say his intended patron, or his ex-patron – from coming to actual blows, but only just; and Tobias was obliged to be dragged away, foaming and vociferating to the last.

  This accounted well enough for Jack’s depressed appearance; but his mind was filled with apprehension, too. He had a haunting certainty that Keppel would have met with some comparable disaster in his designs upon the vacancies in the Centurion; and while upon the one hand he assured himself that it was better to remain in a state of hopeful ignorance, upon the other he watched the clock and the door with increasing impatience.

  The great hand of Thacker’s clock – a wonderfully accurate clock – crept to the appointed minute, and Keppel walked in, accompanied by his particular friend Mr Midshipman Ransome. Keppel was small, neat and compact; he had been to a wedding and he was dressed with surprising magnificence in a gold-laced hat, an embroidered waistcoat with jewelled buttons and a crimson coat encrusted with gold plait wherever it could be conveniently sewn, and cascades of Mechlin lace at his throat and wrists: Ransome was a big, leonine fellow with a bright blue eye, not unlike Jack, but heavier and older; his kind-looking face was much marked by disagreements with the King’s enemies and his own, as well as the small-pox; and he wore a plain blue coat.

  They stood for a moment in the doorway, looking over the big room with its many boxes: they saw Mr Saunders, the first lieutenant of their own ship, the Centurion, pulled off their hats and bowed very humbly; they saw a lieutenant of the Gloucester, a Marine captain belonging to the Severn and a group of black coats which included Mr Eliot, the surgeon of the Wager and the chaplain of the Pearl; to all of these they bowed with suitable degrees of humility, and then advanced to Jack and Tobias.

  It took some little time to make Tobias understand that he was being introduced: and as he had the unfortunate habit of closing one eye and screwing his pursed mouth violently to one side whenever he was roused from a train of reflection, he did not make quite as favourable an impression as he might have done otherwise. Ransome moved perceptibly backwards, and Keppel said, ‘Your servant, sir,’ in a reserved and distant tone.

  Keppel, in any case, was far from easy. ‘I am very sorry to bring you the news,’ he said. ‘Upon my word, I regret it extremely. But the fact is – the fact is, my dear Byron, the vacancies have gone to a couple of – Irishmen. ‘

  ‘Wery nasty undeserving swabs, I dare say,’ said Ransome, with the intention of bringing comfort, ‘if not Papists, too.’ He spoke in a hoarse whisper, having no other voice left, other than a penetrating bellow, for use only at sea.

  ‘Oh,’ said Jack, horribly disappointed, but smiling with what appearance of nonchalance he could summon. ‘Well, it was prodigious kind to try; and I am much obliged to you.’

  ‘But that ain’t all,’ said Keppel, with still greater embarrassment, after a long and awkward pause. ‘My father, d’ye see, being only a soldier, and not thoroughly understanding these things, although I have told him these many times the difference between one class of ship and another – and really you would think it plain enough to the meanest understanding; I mean, even a landsman can see that a pink is not a first-rate.’

  Far from it,’ said Ransome.

  ‘Nor even a second,’ said Keppel.

  Jack turned pale, and gazed from one to the other.

  ‘Not that some pinks ain’t pretty little vessels,’ said Ransome reflectively, after a prolonged silence.

  ‘But the fact is,’ said Keppel, who appeared to derive some comfort from this expression, ‘the fact is, my dear Byron, that my father, having once got into the matter, thought he could not come off handsomely without doing something: so when he found that he could not do what I asked, instead of waiting for my advice, he went blundering about like a horse in a hen-coop and had you – I beg you’ll not take it amiss – nominated to the Wager.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Jack again; and then with a slowly spreading grin he said, ‘While you were talking I had imagined something much worse. After all, Keppel, it does get me to St Helen’s; and I am sure we can manage some kind of a transfer. I must wait upon Lord Albemarle and thank him.’

  ‘You can’t do that,’ said Keppel, ‘for he went off in a passion - ’

  ‘And a coach and six,’ said Ransome.

  ‘What?’

  ‘He went off in a passion and a coach and six. Hor, hor.’

  ‘– to Aunt Grooby, and he won’t be back until the end of the month: and’ – Keppel lowered his voice – ‘we sail on Saturday sennight.’

  ‘Saturday week?’ cried Jack, whistling.

  ‘Hush,’ said Keppel, looking round.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ said Jack, ‘but it leaves so precious little time.’

  They fell into a low-voiced, highly confidential discussion of the means at their disposal for coping with the situation. This lasted for some considerable time, and they were roused from it only by the repeated cries and nudges of Ransome and Tobias: these gentlemen had, after an unpromising start, taken to one another wonderfully, and Ransome, having learnt that Tobias’ sight-seeing had not yet included the lions at the Tower, now proposed taking him to see them. N
othing could have been calculated to cause Tobias more pleasure, and his eyes shone with anticipation; but for the moment he was pinned and immobilised, for they were on the inside of the box, and Jack and Keppel, lost in the depths of their planning, blocked the way to these simple joys.

  ‘What is it?’ said Jack impatiently.

  ‘The lions at the Tower,’ said Tobias, ‘ha, ha, the lions, eh, Jack?’

  ‘Which your friend ain’t seen ‘em,’ said Ransome. ‘Won’t you come?’

  ‘Bah,’ said Jack and Keppel, who scorned the lions in the Tower.

  ‘That fellow, Keppel,’ said Jack, looking after their departing backs, ‘that friend of mine, Tobias Barrow, causes me more anxiety than – worries me more than I can give you any conception of.’ He outlined the situation, and went on, ‘… so I left him with Cousin Brocas, and somehow they came to be talking about the government, and parliament, and the House of Lords and all that. Heaven knows why. And I think Cousin B. must have dropped some graceful hints of what an important, high-born, clever cove he was, and what an unimportant fellow Toby was: something of the “beggars can’t be choosers” nature – you know Cousin B’s little ways. Not that he means any harm; but it vexes people, sometimes. Anyhow, Tobias turned upon him. “Never been so roughly handled in all my life,” says Cousin B. “This dreadful creature of yours, Jack,” says he, “said things to me in Latin and Greek, and attacked the constitution in the most hellish way: a most hellish Whig – nay, a republican, God help us. A democratical visionary.” It seems that they fell out over the hereditary principle. “Would you employ an hereditary surgeon?” says Tobias, “A fellow who is to cut off your leg, not because he is an eminent anatomist, not because he is profoundly learned and highly skilled, but because he is merely the eldest son of a surgeon, or the eldest son of a man whose great-great-grandfather was a surgeon? And do you think the laws of the land less important than your infernal leg,” says he, “that they are to be made and unmade by a parcel of men whose only qualification is that their fathers were lords?” ’