Book 5 - Desolation Island

by Patrick O'Brian

  'Bonden,' he said, 'pray remind me: where is the bowsprit netting?'

  'Why, sir,' said Bonden, smiling, ' 'tis where we stow the foretopmast staysail and the jib.'

  'I shall desire you to carry me there, after quarters and the exercise.'

  Bonden smiled no more. 'Oh sir, it will be dark by then,' he said.

  'Never mind. You will procure a little lantern. Mr Benton will he happy to lend you a little lantern.'

  'I doubt it would ever do, sir. 'Tis right out there, beyond the head, right plumb over the sea, if you understand me, with nothing to clap on to, bar the horses. It would be far too dangerous for you, sir: you would surely slip. The most dangerous place in the barky, with all them old sharks, a-ravening just below.'

  'Stuff, Bonden. I am an old sea-hand, a quadrimane. We shall meet here, by this—what is its name?'

  'The knighthead, sir,' said Bonden, in a low, despondent voice.

  'Exactly so—the knighthead. Do not forget the lantern, if you please. I must rejoin my colleague.'

  In fact neither Bonden nor Dr Maturin was at the rendezvous, let alone the lantern. The coxswain sent his respectful duty by a boy: the state of the Captain's gig was such that Bonden could not be allowed the least liberty. And Stephen's interview with his colleague Herapath lasted far into the night.

  'Mr Herapath,' he began, 'the Captain invites us both to dine with him tomorrow, to meet Mr Byron and Captain Moore—come, we must run. There is not a minute to be lost.'

  The urgent beating of the drum for quarters made him utter the last words in a shriek, and they hurried aft to their action station in the cockpit. There they sat while the ritual went on far above their heads, and they sat in silence. Herapath made one or two attempts at a remark, but affected nothing. Stephen looked at him from behind a shading hand; even by the light of the single purser's dip, the young man was very pale: pale and woe-begone. His hair lank and dispirited, his eyes quite sunk.

  'There go the great guns,' said Stephen at last. 'I believe we may walk off. Come and take a glass in my abode: I have some whiskey from my own country.'

  He sat Herapath in one corner of his triangular cabin, among the jars of squids in alcohol, and observed, 'Littleton, the hernia in the starboard watch, caught a fine coryphene this afternoon; I mean to spend all the daylight hours dissecting it, so that the flesh may still be palatable when I am done. I will therefore beg you to look after our fair prisoner again.'

  Stephen had his own curious limits. He had had no intention of inviting the young man in order to loosen his tongue with drink, nor of provoking his confidence. Yet had that been his design, he could not have succeeded better. Having choked over the unaccustomed drink—'it was very good—as grateful as the finest Cognac—but if he might be allowed a little water, he would find it even better'—Herapath said, 'Dr Maturin, quite apart from my regard and esteem, I am under great obligations to you, and I find it painful to be uncandid—systematically disingenuous. I must tell you that I have long been acquainted with Mrs Wogan. I stowed away to follow her.'

  'Did you so? I am happy to learn that she has a friend aboard: it would be a dismal voyage, all alone; and a more dismal landing, too. But, Mr Herapath, is it wise to tell the world of your connection? Does it not perhaps compromise the lady, and risk making her position more difficult still?'

  Herapath entirely agreed: Mrs Wogan herself had urged him to take the utmost care that it should not be known, and she would be furious if she knew he had told Dr Maturin. Dr Maturin, however, was the only person in the ship in whom he would ever confide; and he did so now, partly because the continual dissimulation sickened him, and partly because he wished to be excused from attending her at present; they had had a very painful disagreement, and she thought he was forcing himself upon her, using his position to that end. 'And yet at first,' he said, 'she was so very glad to see me. It was like our first days together, long, long ago.'

  'So yours is an acquaintance of some standing, I collect?'

  'Oh yes, indeed. We first met during the peace, aboard the Dover packet from Calais. I had finished my work with the Père Bourgeois—'

  'Père Bourgeois the sinologist? The China missionary?'

  'Yes, sir. And I was returning to England, meaning to take ship for the States after a week or two in Oxford. I saw that she was alone and in some distress—impertinent fellows all about her—and she was so good as to accept my protection. Very soon we found that we were both Americans, and that we knew several of the same families; that we had both been educated mainly in France and England, and that we were neither of us rich. She had recently disagreed with Mr Wogan—I believe he had gone to bed to her maid—and she was travelling with no very clear end in mind, a few jewels, and very little money. Fortunately my half-yearly allowance was waiting for me at my father's agent in London, so we set up house in a cottage some way out of the town, at Chelsea. Those were days of a happiness I cannot hope to describe, nor shall I attempt to do so, for fear of spoiling it. The cottage had a garden, and we calculated that if we were to plant it, we could hold out, in spite of the cost of the furniture, at least until we heard from my father, in whose generosity I placed all my hopes. My books followed me from Paris, and in the evenings, after my gardening, I taught Louisa the elements of literary Chinese. But our calculations proved mistaken, for although the market-gardeners all around the cottage were very kind, giving us plants and even showing me the right way to dig, we had not harvested our first crop of beans, and Louisa had not learnt about a hundred radicals, before men came and took away her small spinet. I do not know how it was, but money seemed to vanish away, in spite of all our care. Mr Wogan had been an expansive man, in the lavish southern way and perhaps Louisa had never learnt to keep house on very little: she too was born in Maryland, with a troop of blacks about her; and in those states they do not look upon a shilling as we do in Massachusetts, and there is not the same almost religious dread of debt. Then again, having some friends in London, both English and American, she was obliged to have clothes to receive them in—she had left everything behind. They came more and more often, and they brought their friends to what they called our bower; interesting men like the Coulsons, and Mr Lodge of Boston, and Horne Tooke, whose conversation was a delight. But even a simple dinner is a costly affair in England, compared with France or America, and our difficulties grew and grew.

  'And I am afraid I was a dull companion. I had seen very little of the world; my life had always been very quiet; and although she was sensible of the beauty of my poets' work, she could not share my pleasure in the China of the T'ang emperors. Nor could I share her passionate eagerness for republican doctrines. My father was a Loyalist during the War of Independence, while my mother took the other side, being kin to General Washington; they lived uneasily together, each trying to convince the other, and I heard so much talk of politics when I was a child, that being unable to reconcile their views, I dismissed both. It seemed to me that a king and a president were equally disagreeable and remote and unimportant and I conceived an aversion for all political discourse. At all events, she took to seeing more and more of her radical friends in London: some of them were wealthy and high-placed, and she told me candidly that she loved their train of life.

  'By the time I heard from my father our affairs were very near their crisis: I could not have withstood the tradesmen's importunities another week, and indeed, if it had not been for the good forbearing baker, we must have gone hungrier than in fact we did. But my father's letter brought no more than a draught on his agent to bear my charges to America, and a direct order to return at once. I had laid the position fairly before him, and he replied with a frankness equal to my own. I had flattered myself that my description of the feelings I entertained for Louisa, and their everlasting nature, might overcome the rigour of his Episcopalian principles: I was mistaken. He disapproved the whole connection: first on moral grounds; secondly because the lady was a Romanist; and thirdly because of her polit
ical views, which were abhorrent to him. He was surprisingly well informed by his London correspondents, and he had made enquiries in Baltimore among our common friends. Even if the lady were not married, he would never consent to such a match. Upon the duty I owed him, I was to return at once. And in a postscript he added that when I called upon his agent to present the draught, the agent would hand me a packet that I was to bring to the States with me, taking the utmost care of it.

  'I knew what the packet would contain. As a Loyalist, my father had suffered heavy losses through his support of King George: he had been obliged to retire to Canada for some years, and it was only because of my mother's convictions and her connection with General Washington that he was allowed to return. The British government had undertaken to indemnify the Loyalists, and after very, very long delays my father's claim was, in part, admitted. From time to time I had heard of the progress of the case from his agent; and now the payment was become due. I opened the packet, discounted the bills, and we removed to London itself, taking furnished apartments in Bolton Street.

  'My father's money lasted little more than half a year: we lived very cheerfully in the style that Louisa liked, and we entertained. Louisa's circle of acquaintance grew wider still. When no more than a hundred pounds was left, she wrote two pieces and some verse, which I copied for the playhouses and the booksellers. She had a pretty turn that way, and they had some success. At the time I had hopes of being admitted to a mission to Canton as interpreter: a knowledge of Chinese was my only qualification for earning a living, yet it was an unusual one, and I was told that I should be highly paid. But the mission was abandoned and literary success scarcely finds a couple in the necessities of life; our last guinea melted; and Louisa vanished. She had often told me that for literary and political reasons it was necessary for her to cultivate and indeed to visit some men whom neither she nor I particularly esteemed: she had often paid these visits, sometimes of a week or more; and now I heard that she was living under the protection of one of these men, a Mr Hammond.

  'I did not attempt to describe my happiness; nor shall I say anything of my extreme distress. But she was not unkind; settled unkindness or rancour is not in Louisa's nature. After some time she learnt where I was living, and she sent me money. During that year and the next she travelled a great deal, but when she was in London she would find me out and sometimes give me a meeting in the park, or even in my room. She told me of her various liaisons with the candour of a friend—she always, except at that moment of parting, treated me as a friend, and we were very well together. On one of these occasions, when she found me extremely ill, she said I might accompany her as a secretary: I was, however, to say nothing of our intimacy. She was then living in a small, discreet, but perfectly elegant house behind Berkeley Street, and she had a salon where I saw numbers of men remarkable for their understanding, their rank, or their wealth, or sometimes all three. The conversation was sprightly, more nearly in the French manner than anything I had heard in England: it was rarely improper, but upon the whole they were, I gathered, a loose-living set. Mr Burdett, I recall; a fat melancholy duke; Lord Breadalbane. But there were others: I remember Mr Coleridge and Mr Godwin—they were outside the usual set, however. It was not only men that came, for Mrs Standish used often to be there, and Lady Jersey, with quite a band of her friends. Yet men predominated, and it was in her boudoir that she used to receive those who were closest to her such as John Harrod, the banker, John Aspen of Philadelphia, whom Mr Jay had left behind, and the elder Coulson—he was their chief. They used to come in through a door from another house beyond the garden.

  'You are the most wretched companion for a conspirator that ever yet was seen,' thought Stephen, pouring out more whiskey, 'unless, indeed, you are a prodigy of depth and cunning.' Aloud he said, 'I knew a Mr Joseph Coulson, an American, in London. He talked to me of politics, and of Irish feelings on independence, of the Irish in the States, and of Irish officers serving the British crown. But mostly of politics, of European politics.'

  'That is the man, and he had a much younger brother Zachary, who was at school with me. Joseph would perpetually be talking politics: I could not listen. And he often asked me too about the state of feeling in the country; he said it affected stocks and shares. But I could never tell him, although he asked me to pay attention to what people said. A most intelligent man, apart from his politics: I came to know him very well, because he gave me endless papers to copy, and letters to carry about the town. From his airs of mystery, and from his telling me to make sure I was not followed, I assumed he must be a man of pleasure, like so many who frequented the house.'

  He stared into his glass, and Stephen said, 'I am afraid that your position must have been painful beyond expression.'

  'It had its distressing sides. But my chief purpose was accomplished: I was often in the same room with Louisa, and I asked little more. What is called possession was not unimportant to me, but her friendship was of infinitely more account. Her friendship and her presence. I sometimes wondered that she should choose such protectors as those I saw about her, but apart from a few rare exceptions in the early days, I never hated them; nor could I ever find it in my heart to condemn her, whatever she might do. Perhaps it was base in me: I think I should despise it in another man. Yet I have little doubt that if still further baseness were required of me, I should commit it.'

  Stephen said, 'I should rather speak of fortitude. May I take it, then, that you are not disturbed by the rumours connecting Mrs Wogan and myself? You must have heard them, in the midshipmen's berth.'

  'No. Partly because I do not believe them, but even more because the word possession is so very foolish when it is applied to a woman as entire as Louisa. As for fortitude . . . yes, it did call for some fortitude at first, in spite of all my reasoning: but I had a friend with—with heavier guns, shall I say, than philosophy. Early in my study of Chinese, I met a man who introduced me to the pleasures of opium, to the pleasure and the consolation of opium. I was thoroughly acquainted with its powers before I met Louisa, and when my distress pressed very heavily upon me, I had but to smoke two or three pipes for it to grow much lighter, for my troubled mind to admit philosophy, and for a calm, comprehensive understanding to pervade my being. My opium also allayed both sexual and physical hunger: with my pipe and lamp at hand, it was easy for me to be a Stoic.'

  'Did not you find any inconvenience? We read of loss of appetite, emaciation, want of the vital spark, habituation, and even a most degrading slavery.'

  'In general I did not; but then in general I indulged no more than once or twice a week, like my initiator and most practised smokers I have known—once or twice a week, as a man might go to a concert or the play, except that I believe my concerts and my plays were richer, deeper by far, and more various than any that are to he found in objective life: dreams, phantasms, and such an accession of apparent wisdom as no words of mine can encompass. As for the vital spark, I would work twelve or fourteen hours at a stretch without inconvenience; and as for want of virility, why, sir, if it were not disrespectful to you, I should laugh. Yet on the other hand, in the extremity of my unhappiness I abused my pipe, and then all that you have spoken of falls far below the truth, for in addition to the slavery and the degradation the whole of life becomes a waking horror. The dreams invade the day, and from enchanting, they turn horrible: they do so by some minute, subtle variation in tone that appalls one's mind. And the same happens to the colours—for I should have told you that my dreams were infinitely full of colour, and colour also invested the characters that I read or wrote, filling them with a far greater significance, one that I could apprehend but could not name. Yet now these colours, by a quarter-tone of difference, grew more and more sinister, threatening, and evil. They terrified me. For instance, my window looked out on to a blank wall, and on the cracked plaster a little flicker of violet would grow and glow with such a hellish significance that I cowered on the floor. I was in this state of lucid horror wh
en Louisa took me home to be her secretary. There, with her at hand almost every day, I recovered. That did call for a certain constancy: for a while my need seemed almost intolerably great. But happily there were at that time no exacerbating circumstances, and I held firm. At present I can look upon my pipe with a mild, affectionate regard; it is no longer the malignant, evil, necessary monster that once it was; and I take it—or should I say I took it, since it is now some five thousand miles away—from its place perhaps once a week, like the mechanic with his beer-can, for mere pleasure, or when I needed strong waking endurance for some unusual task or relief in a rare emergency.'

  'Do you tell me, Mr Herapath, that having broke the habit you were able to return to a moderate, and pleasurable, use of the drug?'

  'Yes, sir.'

  'And in the intervals, did not you crave? The craving did not return?'

  'No, sir, after the clean break it did not. The opium was my old accustomed friend again. I could address myself to it when I chose, or refrain. Had I a supply at present, I should use it as a Sunday indulgence and to endure the tedium of Mr Fisher's sermons; they would pass in an agreeable and coloured waft, for as no doubt you are aware, opium plays the strangest tricks with time, or rather with one's perception of its passage. I should also use it at this present juncture, to mitigate my distress at the misunderstanding between Louisa and myself. It gives me very great pain to think she should suspect me of such indelicacy of mind, as to force myself upon her; and it gives me even greater pain to remember that in a sudden heat I broke out with vehement reproaches, accusing her, quite falsely, of want of common kindness and affection, and that I left her in tears. How she will ever be brought to endure my company again, I cannot tell.'