Post Captain (18 page)

'Swabbing out the galley. Give me five minutes, and I am your man.'

'It sounds more like Noah's flood. This peevish attention to cleanliness, Jack, this busy preoccupation with dirt,' said Stephen, shaking his head at the fire, 'has something of the Brahminical superstition about it. It is not very far removed from nastiness, Jack - from cacothymia.'

'I am concerned to hear it,' said Jack. 'Pray, is it catching?' he added, with a private but sweet-natured leer. 'Now, sir,' - appearing in the doorway with the apron rolled under his arm - 'where is your flute? What shall we play?' He sat at the little square piano and ran his fingers up and down, singing,

'Those Spanish dogs would gladly own Both Gibraltar and Port Mahon

and don't they wish they may have it? Gibraltar, I mean.'

He went on from one tune to another in an abstracted strumming while Stephen slowly screwed the flute together; and eventually from this strumming there emerged the adagio of the Hummel sonata.

'Is it modesty that makes him play like this?' wondered Stephen, worrying at a crossed thread. 'I could swear he knows what music is - prizes high music beyond almost anything. But here he is, playing this as sweetly as milk, like an anecdote: Jesus, Mary and Joseph. And the inversion will be worse... It is worse - a sentimental indulgence. He takes pains; he is full of good-will and industry; and yet he cannot make even his fiddle utter anything but platitudes, except by mistake. On the piano it is worse, the notes being true. You would say it was a girl playing, a sixteen-stone girl His face is not set in an expression of sentimentality, however, but of suffering He is suffering extremely, I am afraid. This playing is very like Sophia's. Is he aware of it? Is he consciously imitating her? I do not know: their styles are much the same in any case - their absence of style. Perhaps it is diffidence, a feeling that they may not go beyond certain modest limits. They are much alike. And since Jack, knowing what real music is, can play like a simpleton, may not Sophia, playing like a ninny-hammer... ? Perhaps I misjudge her. Perhaps it

is a case of the man filled with true poetic feeling who can only come out with ye flowery meads again - the channels blocked. Dear me, he is sadly moved. How I hope those tears will not fall. He is the best of creatures - I love him dearly - but he is an Englishman, no more - emotional, lachrymose. Jack, Jack!' he called out. 'You have mistook the second variation.'

'What? What?' he cried passionately. 'Why do you break in upon me, Stephen?' -

'Listen. This is how it goes,' said Stephen, leaning over him and playing.

'No it ain't,' cried Jack. 'I had it right.' He took a turn up and down the room, filling it with his massive form, far larger now with emotion. He looked strangely at Stephen, but after another turn or two he smiled and said, 'Come, let's improvise, as we used to do off Crete. What tune shall we start with?'

'Do you know St Patrick's Day?'

'How does it go?' Stephen played.

'Oh, that? Of course I know it: we call it Bacon and Greens.'

'I must decline to improve on Bacon and Greens. Let us start with Hosier's Ghost, and see where we get to.'

The music wove in and out, one ballad and its variations leading to another, the piano handing it to the flute and back again; and sometimes they sang as well, the forecastle songs they had heard so often at sea.

Come all you brave seamen that ploughs on the main

Give ear to my story i'm true to maintain,

Concerning the Litchfield that was cast away

On the Barbary shore by the dawn of the day.

'The light is failing,' observed Stephen, taking his lips from the flute.

'On the Barbary shore by the dawn of the day,' sang Jack again. 'Oh, such a dying fall. So it is but the rain has let up, thank God,' he said, bending to the window. 'The wind has veered into the east - a little north to east. We shall have a dry walk.'

'Where are we going?'

'To Queenie's rout, of course. To Lady Keith's.' Stephen looked doubtfully at his sleeve. 'Your coat will do very well by candlelight,' said Jack. 'And even better when the middle button is sewn on. Just ship it off, will you, and hand along that hussif? I will make all fast while you put on a neckcloth and a pair of stockings - silk stockings, mind. Queenie gave me this hussif when I first went to sea,' he observed, whipping the thread round the shank of the button and biting it off close to the stuff. 'Now let us set your wig to rights - a trifle of flour from the bread-bag as a bow to fashion - now let me brush your coat - splendid - fit for a levee, upon my word and honour.'

'Why are you putting on that blackguardly cloak?'

'By God,' cried Jack, laying his hand on Stephen's bosom. 'I never told you. One of the Miss Lambs wrote to her family - her letter is in the paper - I am mentioned by name - and that fornicating brute of an attorney will have his men out after me. I shall muffle myself up and slouch my hat, and perhaps we may stand ourselves a coach once we get well into the town.'

'Do you have to go? Is it worth running the risk of a sponging-house and the King's Bench for an evening's diversion?'

'Yes. Lord Melville will be there; and I must see Queenie. Even if I did not love her so, I have to keep all my naval interest in play - there will be the admiral and half a dozen other great men. Come. I can explain as we walk. The rout-cake there is famous, too -,

'I hear the squeaking of a pipistrelle! Hark! Stand still. There, there again! So late in the year; it is a prodigy.'

'Does it mean good luck?' asked Jack, cocking his ear for the sound.

'A capital omen, I dare say. But shall we go on now? Gather just a little headway, perhaps?'

They reached Upper Brook Street at the height of the flood - flambeaux, links, a tide of carriages waiting to set down at number three and a counter-current trying to reach number eight, where Mrs Darner was receiving her friends, a dense crowd on the pavements to see the guests and pass remarks upon their clothes, officious unnecessary barefoot boys opening doors or springing up behind, darting and hooting among the horses in a spirit of fun, wonderfully tedious to the anxious or despondent. Jack had meant to fly straight from the coach up the steps, but slow groups of fools, either coming on foot or abandoning their carriages at the corner of Grosvenor Square, clustered like summer bees in the entrance and blocked the way.

He sat there on the edge of his seat, watching for a gap. Arrest for debt was very common - he had always been aware of it - had had several friends carried off to sponging-houses, from which they wrote the most piteous appeals - but it had never happened to him personally and his knowledge of the process and of the law was vague. Sundays were safe, he was sure, and perhaps the King's birthday; he knew that peers could not be seized, that some places such as the Savoy and Whitefriars were sanctuaries, and he hoped that Lord Keith's house might therefore share these qualities: his longing eyes were fixed upon the open door, the lights within.

'Come on, governor,' cried the driver.

'Mind the step, your honour,' said a boy, holding the door.

'Come on, slow-arse,' shouted the coachman behind. 'You ain't going to plant a tree, are you?'

There was no help for it. Jack stepped out on to the pavement and stood by Stephen in the scarcely-moving throng, hitching his cloak even higher round his face.

'It's the Emperor of Morocco,' said a light brightly-painted whore.

'It's the Polish giant from Astley's.'

'Show us your face, sweetheart.'

'Hold your head up, cock.'

Some thought he was a foreigner, French dog of a Turk, others Old Moore, or Mother Shipton in disguise. He shuffled wretchedly towards the lighted doors, and when a hand clapped down on his shoulder he turned with a ferocity that pleased the crowd more than anything they had seen hitherto, except for Miss Rankin treading on her petticoat and coming down full length. 'Aubrey!

Jack Aubrey!' cried Dundas, his old shipmate Heneage Dundas. 'I recognized your back at once - should have recognized you anywhere. How do you do? You have a touch of fever, I dare say? Dr Maturin, how do you do? Are you going in here? So am I, ha, ha, ha. How do you get along?' Dundas had recently been made post into the Franchise, 36; he loved the world in general, and his cheerful, affectionate flow of talk carried them across the pavement, up the steps and into the hall.

The gathering had a strong naval flavour, but Lady Keith was also a political hostess and the friend of a great many interesting people: Jack left Stephen in conversation with a gentleman who had discovered the adamantine boron and moved through the great drawing-room, through the less crowded gallery and to a little domed room with a buffet in it: Constantia wine, little pies, rout-cakes, more Constantia. Here Lady Keith found him; she was leading a big man in a sky-blue coat with silver buttons and she said, 'Jack, dear, may I introduce Mr Canning? Captain Aubrey, of the Navy.'

Jack liked the hook of this man at once, and during the first meaningless civilities this feeling grew: Canning was a broad-shouldered fellow, and although he was not quite so tall as Jack, his way of holding his small round head up and tilted back, with his chin in the air, made him look bigger, more commanding. He wore his own hair - what there was left of it: short tight curls round a shining calvity, though he was in his thirties, no more - and he looked like one of the fatter, more jovial Roman emperors; a humorous, good-natured face, but one that conveyed an impression of great latent strength. 'An ugly customer to have against you,' thought Jack, earnestly recommending 'one of these voluptuous little pies' and a glass of Constantia.

Mr Canning was a Bristol merchant. The news quite astonished Jack. He had never met a merchant before, out of the way of business. A few bankers and money-men, yes; and a poor thin bloodless set of creatures they seemed- a lower order; but it was impossible to feel superior to Mr Canning. 'I am so particularly happy to be introduced to you, Captain Aubrey,' he said, quickly eating two more little pies, 'because I have known you by reputation for years and because I was reading about you in the paper only yesterday. I wrote you a letter to express my sense of your action with the Cacafuego back in '01, and I very nearly posted it: indeed I should have done so, with the least excuse of a nodding acquaintance or a common friend. But it would have been too great a liberty in a complete stranger, alas; and after all, what does my praise amount to? The mere noise of uninformed admiration.'

Jack made the noises of acknowledgment. 'Too kind- an excellent crew - the Spaniard was unlucky in his dispositions.'

'And yet not so wholly uninformed, neither,' went on Canning. 'I fitted out some privateers in the last war, and I took a cruise in one as far as Goree and in another to Bermuda, so I have at least some notion of the sea. No conceivable comparison, of course; but some slight notion of what such an action means.'

'Was you ever in the Service, sir?' asked Jack.

'I? Why, no. I am a Jew,' said Canning, with a look of deep amusement.

'Oh,' said Jack. 'Ah?' He turned, going through the motions of blowing his nose, saw Lord Melville looking at him from the doorway, bowed and called out 'Good evening.'

'And this war I have fitted out seven, with the eighth on the stocks. Now, sir, this brings me to the Bellone, of Bordeaux. She snapped up two of my merchantmen the moment war broke out again, and she took the Nereid, my heaviest privateer - eighteen twelve-pounders - the cruise before she took you and your Indiaman. She is a splendid sailer, sir, is she not?'

'Prodigious, sir, prodigious. Close-hauled, with light airs, she ran away from the Blanche as easy as kiss my hand: and spilling her wind by way of a ruse, she still made six knots for Blanche's four, though close-hauled is Blanche's best point of sailing. Very well handled, too: her captain was a former King's officer.'

'Yes. Dumanoir - Dumanoir de Plessy. I have her draught,' said Canning, leaning over the buffet, fairly ablaze with overflowing life and enthusiasm, 'and I am building my eighth on her lines exactly.'

'Are you, by God!' cried Jack. Frigate-sized privateers were not uncommon in France, but they were unknown this side of the Channel.

'But with twenty-four-pounder carronades in place of her long guns, and eighteen-pounder chasers. Do you think she will bear 'em?'

'I should have to look at her draught,' said Jack, considering deeply. 'I believe she would, and to spare: but I should have to look at her draught.'

'But that is a detail,' said Canning, waving his hand. 'The real crux is the command. Everything depends on her commander, of course; and here I should value your advice and guidance beyond anything. I should do a great deal to come by the services of a bold, enterprising captain- a thorough-going seaman, of course. A letter-of-marque is not a King's ship, I admit; but I try to run mine in a way no King's officer would dislike - taut discipline, regularity, cleanliness. But no black lists, no hazing, and very little cat. You are no great believer in the cat, sir, I believe?'

'Not I,' said Jack. 'I find it don't answer the purpose, with fighting-men.'

'Fighting-men: just so. That is another thing I can offer- prime fighting-men, prime seamen. They are mostly smugglers' crews, west-countrymen, born to the sea and up to anything: I have more volunteers than I can find room for; I can pick and choose; and those I choose will follow the right man anywhere, put up with all reasonable discipline and behave like lambs. A right privateer's man is no blackguard when he is led by the right captain. I believe I am right there, sir?'

'I dare say you are, sir,' said Jack slowly.

'And to get the right commander I offer a post-captain's pay and allowances for a seventy-four and I guarantee a thousand a year in prize-money. Not one of my captains has made less, and this new ship will certainly do very much better; she will be more than twice the burden of the others and she will have between two and three hundred men aboard. For when you consider, sir, that a private ship of war spends no time blockading, running messages or carrying troops,. but only destroying the enemy's commerce, and when you consider that this frigate can cruise for six months at a time, why, the potentialities are enormous... enormous.' Jack nodded: they were, indeed. 'But where can I find my commander?' asked Canning.