H.M.S. Surprise (41 page)

'Dear Maturin,' she said, 'how glad I am to see you sitting up. Here are some mangosteens; they are the very thing for a fever. But are you sure you are well enough to see visitors? They frighten me so, Aubrey, Pullings, Mr M'Alister, and now even Bonden, telling mc not to tire you or vex you, that I think I should go almost at once.'

'I am as strong as an ox, my dear,' said he, 'and infinitely recovered by the sight of you.'

'At all events, I shall try not to upset you or cross you in any way. First let mc thank you for your dear note. It was a great comfort, and I am following your directions.'

He smiled, and said in a low voice. 'How happy you make me. But Diana, there is the sordid aspect - common requirements - bread and butter. In this envelope -'

'Stephen, dear, you are the best of creatures. But I have bread and butter, and jam too, for the moment. I sold a thumping great emerald the Nizam gave mc, and I have booked the only decent cabin in the Lushington. I shall leave everything else behind - just abandon it where it lies. The underbred frumps of Calcutta may call me names, but they shall not say I am interested.'

'No. No indeed,' said Stephen. 'The Lushington: roomy, comfortable, twice our size, the best sherry I have ever drunk. Yet I wish - you know, I wish you could have come home in the Surprise. It would have meant waiting another month or so, but... You did not think to ask Jack?'

'No, my dear,' she said tenderly. 'I did not: how stupid of me. But then there are the maids, you know; and I should hate you to see me seasick, green, squalid and selfish. It will make little odds in the long run, however. I dare say you will catch us up - we shall see one another at Madeira; or at all events in London. It will not be long. I low parched you look. Let me give you something to drink. Is this barley-water?'

They talked quietly - barley-water, mangosteens, eggs, the tigers of the Sunderbands - or rather she talked and he lay there looking grave, transparent, but deeply happy, uttering a word or two. She said, 'Aubrey will certainly take great care of you. Will he make as good a husband as he does a friend, I wonder? I doubt it; he knows nothing whatsoever about women. Stephen, you are growing very tired. I shall go now. The Lushington sails at some impossible hour of the morning- at high tide. Thank you for my ring. Good-bye, my dear.' She kissed him, and her tears dropped on his face.

The fetid ooze of the Hooghly gave way to the clearer sea of the Bay of Bengal, to the right dark blue of the Indian Ocean; the Surprise, homeward-bound at last, spread her wings to the monsoon and raced away south-westwards in the track of the Lushington, now two thousand miles ahead.

She carried a sodden, disgruntled, flabby crew, a steel box filled with rubies, sapphires, and pearls in chamois bags, a raving surgeon, and an anxious commander.

He sat the night-watches through by Stephen's cot ever since the fever had reached its present shocking height: M'Alister would have spelled him, or any one of the gunroom, but delirium had unlocked Stephen's secret mind and although much of what he said was in French or Catalan, or meaningless except in the context of his private nightmare, much was direct, clear and specific. A less secret man might not have been so communicative: it poured out of Stephen's unconscious mouth in a torrent.

Quite apart from official secrets, there were things Jack did not want any other man to hear. He was ashamed to hear them himself - for a man as proud as Stephen (and Lucifer could not hold a candle to him) it would be death to know that even the closest friend had heard his naked statements of desire and all his weaknesses laid as bare as Judgment Day. Discourses on adultery and fornication; imagined conversations with Richard Canning on the nature of the marriage-bond; sudden apostrophes -'Jack Aubrey, you, too, will pierce yourself with your own weapon, I fear. A bottle of wine inside you, and you will go to bed to the next wench that shows a gleam, quit with regretting it all your days. You do not know chastity.' Embarrassing words: 'Jew is an unearned distinction; bastard is another. They should be brothers: both at least are difficult friends, if not impossible, since both are sensitive to pricks unknown to the general.'

So there Jack sat, sponging him from time to time, and the watches changed and the ship ran on and on, and he thanked God he had officers he could trust to see to her routine, He sat sponging him, fanning him, and listening against his will, distressed, anxious, wounded at times, bored.

He was no great hand at sitting mute and still hour after hour, and the stress of hearing painful words was wearing - the stimulus lost its point in time - and a jaded weariness supervened: a longing for Stephen to be quiet. But Stephen, so taciturn in life, was loquacious in delirium, and his subject was the human state as a whole. He also had an inexhaustible memory: Jack heard whole chapters of Molina, and the greater part of the Nicomachean Ethics.

Embarrassment and shame at his unfair advantage were bad enough, but even worse was the confusion of all his views: he had looked upon Stephen as the type of philosopher, strong, hardly touched by common feelings, sure of himself and rightly so; he had respected no landsman more. This Stephen, so passionate, so wholly subjugated by Diana, and so filled with doubt of every kind, left him aghast; he would not have been more at a loss if he had found the Surprise deprived of her anchors, ballast and compass.

'Arma virumque cano,' began the-harsh voice in the darkness, as some recollection of Diana's mad cousin set Stephen's memory in motion.

'Well, thank God we are in Latin again,' said Jack.

'Long may it last.'

Long indeed; it lasted until the Equatorial Channel itself, when the morning watch heard the ominus words.'. ast illi solvuntur frigore membra vitaque cum gemitu fugit indignata sub umbras',

followed by an indignant cry for tea - for 'green tea, there. Is there no one in this vile ship that knows how to look after a calenture? I have been calling and calling.'

Green tea, or a change in the wind (it was now a little west or north), on the intercession of St Stephen, lowered the fever from one hour to the next, and M'Alister kept it down with bark; but it was succeeded by a period of querulous peevishness that Jack found as trying as the Aeneid; and even he, with his experience of the seaman's long-suffering kindliness to a shipmate, wondered to see how they bore it: the surly, spoilt, consequential Killick called 'that infamous double-poxed baboon' and yet running with all his might to bring a spoon; Bonden submitting patiently to assault with a kidney-dish; elderly, ferocious forecastlemen soothing him as they gently carried his chair to favoured points on deck, only to be cursed for every breeze, and every choice.

Stephen was a wretched patient; sometimes he looked to M'Alister as an omniscient being who would certainly produce the one true physic; sometimes the ship resounded to the cry of 'Charlatan', and drugs would be seen hurtling through the scuttle. The chaplain suffered more than the rest: most of the officers haunted other parts of the ship when the convalescent Maturin was on the quarterdeck, but Mr White could not climb and in any case his duty required him to visit the sick - even to play chess with them. Once, goaded by a fling about Erastianism, be concentrated all his powers and won: he had to bear not only the reproachful looks of the helmsman, the quartermaster at the con, and the whole gunroom, but a semi-official rebuke from his captain, who thought it 'a poor shabby thing to set back an invalid's recovery for the satisfaction of the moment', and the strokes of his own conscience. Mr White was in a hopeless position, for if he lost, Dr Maturin was quite as likely to cry out that he did not attend; and fly into a passion.

Stephen's iron constitution prevailed, however, and a week later, when the frigate lay off a remote uninhabited island in the Indian Ocean whose longitude was set down differently in every chart he went ashore; and there, on a day to be marked with a white stone, a white boulder indeed, he made the most important discovery of his life.

The boat pulled through a gap in the coral reef to a strand with mangroves on the left and a palm-capped headland to the right; a strand upon which Jack had set up his instruments and where he and his officers were gazing at the pale moon, with Venus clear above her, like a band of noon-day necromancers.

Choles and M'Alister lifted him out and set him on the dry sand; he staggered a little, and they led him up the beach to the shade of an immense unnamed ancient tree whose roots formed a comfortable ferny seat and whose branches offered fourteen different kinds of orchids to the view. There they left him with a book and a paper of cigars while the surveying of the anchorage and the astronomical observations went forward, a work of some hours.

The instruments stood on a carefully levelled patch of sand, and as the great moment approached the tension could be felt even from the tree. A deadly hush fell over the group, broken only by Jack's voice reading off figures to his clerk-

'Two seven four,' he said, straightening his back at last. 'Mr Stourton, what do you find?'

'Two seven four, sir, exactly.'

'The most satisfactory observation I - have ever made,' said Jack. He clapped the eyepiece to and cast an affectionate glance at Venus, sailing away up there, distinct in the perfect blue once one knew where to look. 'Now we can stow all this gear and go aboard.'

He strolled up the beach. 'Such a charming observation, Stephen,' he called out as he came near the tree. 'I am sorry to have kept you so long, but it was worth it. All our calculations tally, and the chronometers were out by twenty-seven mile. We have laid down the island as exactly- my God, what is that monstrous thing?'

'It is a tortoise, my dear. The great land-tortoise of the world: a new genus. He is unknown to science, and in comparison of him, your giants of Rodriguez and Aldabra are inconsiderable reptiles. He must weight a ton. I do not know that I have ever been so happy. I am in such spirits, Jack! How you will ever get him aboard, I cannot tell; but nothing is impossible to the Navy.'

'Must we get him aboard?'

'Oh, no question about it. He is to immortalise your name. This is Testudo aubreii for all eternity; when the I hero of the Nile is forgotten, Captain Aubrey will live on in his tortoise. There's glory for you.'

'Why, I am much obliged, Stephen, I am sure. I suppose we might parbuckle him down the beach. [low did you come by him?'

'I wandered a little way inland, looking for specimens -that box is filled with 'em: such wealth! Enough for half a dozen monographs - and there he was in an open space, eating Ficus religiosa. I plucked some high shoots he was straining for, and he followed me down here, eating them. He is the most confiding creature, wholly without distrust. God help him and his kind when other men find out this island. See his gleaming eye! He would like another leaf. It does me good to see him. This tortoise has quite recovered me,' he cried, putting his arm round the enormous carapace.

The tortoise turned the scale, as M'Alister said, his wit heated by the tropical sun; its presence had a more tonic effect than all the bark, steel and bezoar in the frigate's

medicine-chest. Stephen sat with Testudo aubreii by the hen-coops day after day as the Surprise ran down her southing; he increased in weight; his temper grew mild,

equable, benevolent.

On her outward voyage the Surprise had done well enough, when she was neither crippled nor headed by foul winds; and it might have been thought that zeal had done all it could. But now she was homeward-bound. The words were magic to her people, many of whom had wives or sweethearts; even more so to her captain, who was (he hoped) to be married, and who was heading not only for a bride but also for the real theatre of war, for the possibility of distinction, of a Gazette to himself, and indeed of prizes, too. Then again the Company had done her proud - no royal dockyard's niggling over a halfpennyworth of tar - and her sumptuous refit, her new sails, new copper, beautiful Manilla cordage, had brought back much of her youth: it had not dealt with certain deep-seated structural defects, the result of age and the Marengo's handling of her, but for the moment all was well, and she raced southwards as though she had a galleon in chase.

The ship's company was in the highest training now: their action had had its great cementing effect, but long before that the hands had settled down to a solid understanding, and an order was hardly given before it was carried out. The wind stood fair until they were far below Capricorn; day after day she logged her two hundred miles; pure, urgent sailing, all hands getting the last ounce out of her - the beautiful way of naval life that half-pay officers in their dim lodgings remember as their natural existence.

Outward-bound they had not seen a sail from the height of the Cape to the Laccadives; this time they sighted five and spoke three, an English bark-rigged privateer, an American bound for the China seas, and a storeship for Ceylon; each gave them news of the Lushington, whose lead, according to the storeship, was now little more than seven hundred miles.

The warm sea grew cooler, almost cold; waistcoats appeared in the night-watches, and the northern constellations were no longer to be seen. Then, in fifty fathom water not far from the Otter shoal, they were startled by the barking of penguins in the mist, and the next day they reached the perpetual westerlies and the true change of climate.

Now it was pea-jackets and fur caps as the Surprise beat up, tack upon tack, boring into the wind under storm-canvas, or flanked away southwards in search of a kinder gale, or lay a-try, fighting for every mile of westing against the barrier of violent air. The petrels and the albatrosses joined company: the midshipmen's berth, then the gunroom, and then the cabin itself was down to salt beef and ship's bread again - the lower deck had never left it - and still the wind held in the west, with such thick weather that there was no observation for days on end.

The tortoise had been struck down into the hold long since; he slept on a padded sack through the long, long rounding of the Cape; his master did much the same, eating, gaining strength, and sorting his respectable Bombay collections, and his scraps - alas, too hurried - from other lands. He had little to do: the inevitable sailors' diseases the men had brought with them from Calcutta had been dealt with by M'Allister before he was recovered, and since then the ship, awash with the pure juice of limes, had been remarkably healthy: hope, eagerness and merriment had their usual effect - and the Surprise was not only a happy ship but a merry one. He had dealt with the coleoptera and he was deep in the vascular cryptogams before the frigate turned her head north at last.