Post Captain (30 page)

'She angered me with her mooning about the lake and her tragic airs - if she had wanted him, why did she not have him when she could? I do loathe and despise want of decision - shilly-shallying. And anyhow, she has a perfectly suitable admirer, an evangelical clergyman full of good works: good connections too, and plenty of money. I dare say he will be a bishop. But upon my word, Maturin, I never knew she had such spirit! She set about me like a tiger, all ablaze; and I had only quizzed her a little about Jack Aubrey. Such a set-to! There we were roaring away by the little stone bridge, with her mare hitched to the post, starting and wincing - oh, I don't know how long -a good fifteen rounds. How you would have laughed. We took ourselves so seriously; and such energy! I was hoarse for a week after. But she was worse than me - as loud as a hog in a gate, and her words tumbling over one another, in a most horrid passion But I tell you what, Maturin, if you really want to frighten a woman, offer to slash her across the face with your riding whip, and look as if you meant it I was quite glad when my aunt Williams came up, screeching and hallooing loud enough to drown the both of us. And for her part she was just as glad to send me packing, because she was afraid for the parson; not that I would ever have laid a finger on him, the greasy oaf. So here I am again, a sort of keeper or upper-servant to the Teapot. Will you drink some of his honour's sherry? You are looking quite glum, Maturin. Don't be mumchance, there's a good fellow. I have not said an unkind thing since you appeared: it is your duty to be gay and amusing. Though harking back, I was just as pleased to come away too, with my face intact: it is my fortune, you know. You have not paid it a single compliment, though I was liberal enough to you. Reassure me, Maturin - I shall be thirty soon, and I dare not trust my looking-glass.'

'It is a good face,' said Stephen, looking at it steadily. She held her head up in the hard cold light of the winter sun and now for the first time he saw the middle-aged woman: India had not been kind to her complexion: it was good, but nothing to Sophia's; that faintest of lines by her eyes would reach out; the hint of drawn strength would grow more pronounced - haggard; in a few years other people would see that Sophie had slashed it deep. He hid his discovery behind all the command and dissimulation that he was master of and went on, 'An astonishing face. A damned good figurehead, as we say in the Navy. And it has launched one ship, at least.'

'A good damned figurehead,' she said bitterly.

'Now for the harrow,' he reflected.

'And after all,' she said, pouring out the wine, 'why do you pursue me like this? I give you no encouragement. I never have. I told you plainly at Bruton Street that I liked you as a friend but had no use for you as a lover. Why do you persecute me? What do you want of me? If you think to gain your point by wearing me out, you have reckoned short; and even if you were to succeed, you would only regret it. You do not know who I am at all; everything proves it.' -

'I must go,' he said, getting up.

She was pacing nervously up and down the room. 'Go, then,' she cried, 'and tell your lord and master I never want to see him again, either. He is a coward.'

Mr Lowndes walked into the parlour. He was a tall, stout, cheerful gentleman of about sixty, wearing a flowered silk dressing-gown, breeches unbuckled at the knees, and a tea-cosy in lieu of a wig, or nightcap: he raised the cosy and bowed.

'Dr Maturin - Mr Lowndes,' said Diana, with a quick beseeching look at Stephen - deprecation combined with concern, vexation, and the remains of anger.

'I am very happy to see you, sir, most honoured: I do not believe I have had the pleasure,' said Mr Lowndes, gazing at Stephen with extreme intensity. 'I see from your coat that you are not a mad-doctor, sir. Unless, indeed, this is an innocent deception?'

'Not at all, sir. I am a naval surgeon.'

'Very good - you are upon the sea but not in it: you are not an advocate for cold baths. The sea, the sea! Where should we be without it? Frizzled to a mere toast, sir; parched, desiccated by the simoom, the dread simoom. Dr Maturin would like a cup of tea, my dear, against the desiccation. I can offer you a superlative cup of tea, sir.'

'Dr Maturin is drinking sherry, Cousin Edward.'

'He would do better to drink a cup of tea,' said Mr Lowndes, with a look of keen disappointment. 'However, I do not presume to dictate to my guests,' he added, hanging down his head.

'I shall be very happy to take a cup of tea, sir, as soon as I have drunk up my wine,' said Stephen.

'Yes, yes!' cried Mr Lowndes, brightening at once. 'And you shall have the pot to take with you on your voyages. Molly, Sue, Diana, pray make it in the little round pot Queen Anne gave my grandmama; it makes the best tea in the house. And while it is making, sir, I will tell you a little poem; you are a literary man, I know,' he said, dancing a few paces and bowing right and left.

The butler brought in the tray, looked sharply from Mr Lowndes to Diana: she shook her head slightly, eased her cousin into a wing-chair, tidied him, tied a napkin round his neck, and, as the spirit-lamp brought the kettle to the boil, measured out the tea and brewed it.

'Now for my poem,' said Mr Lowndes. 'Attend! Attend! Anna virumque cano, etc. There, ain't it capital?'

'Admirable, sir. Thank you very much.'

'Ha, ha, ha!' cried Mr Lowndes, cramming his mouth with cake, red with sudden pleasure. 'I knew you were a man of exquisite sensibilities. Take the bun!' He flung a little round cake at Stephen's head, and added, 'I have a turn for verse. Sometimes my fancy runs to Sapphics, sometimes to catalectic Glyconics and Pherecrateans - the Priapic metre, my dear sir. Are you a Grecian? Should you like to hear some of my Priapean odes?'

'In Greek, sir?'

'No, sir, in English.'

'Perhaps at another time, sir, when we are alone - when no ladies are present, it would give me great pleasure.'

'You have noticed that young woman; have you? You are a sharp one. But then you are a young man, sir. I too was a young man. As a physical gentleman, sir, do you really

think incest so very undesirable?'

'Cousin Edward, it is time for your bath,' said Diana; but he grew confused and unhappy - he was sure it would not do to let that fellow alone with a valuable teapot, but he was too polite to say so; his oblique references to it as 'the dread simoom' were not understood, and it took her five minutes of coaxing to get him out of the room.

'What news from Mapes, shipmate?' asked Jack.

'What? I cannot hear a word with all this screeching and bawling overhead.'

'You are as bad as Parker,' said Jack, and poking his head out of the cabin he called, "Vast heaving the after carronades. Mr Pullings, let these hands reef tops'ls. I said "What news from Mapes?"'

'A miscellaneous bag. I saw Sophie alone: she and Diana have parted brass-rags. Diana is looking after her cousin in Dover. I called on her. She asked us both to dinner on Friday, to eat a dish of Dover soles. I accepted for myself, but said I could not answer for you: you might not find it possible to go ashore.'

'She asked me?' cried Jack. 'Are you sure? What is it, Babbington?'

'I beg your pardon, sir, but the flagship is signalling all captains.'

'Very well. Let me know the moment Melpomène's barge touches the water. Stephen, chuck me my breeches, will you?' He was in working clothes - canvas trousers, a guernsey frock and a frieze jacket - and as he stripped the criss-cross of wounds showed plain: bullets, splinters, cutlasses, a boarding-axe; and the last, a raking thrust from a pike, still showed red about the edges. 'Half an inch to the left - if that pike had gone in half an inch to the left, you would have been a dead man,' observed Stephen.

'My God,' said Jack, 'there are times when I wish -however, I must not whine.' From under his clean white shirt he asked, 'How was Sophie?'

'Low in her spirits. She is subjected to the attentions of a moneyed parson.' No reply. No emergence of the head. He went on, 'I also saw to everything at Melbury: all is well there, though the lawyer's men have been hanging about. Preserved Killick asks may he join the ship? I took it upon myself to say that he should come and ask you himself. You will be happy to have the skilled attendance of Preserved Killick. I reduced my femur at the hospital -the leg may be saved - and wished my dement on to them, with a slime-draught to make him easy. I also bought your thread, music-paper, and strings: these I found at a shop in Folkestone.'

'Thank you, Stephen. I am very much obliged to you. You must have had a damned long ride of it. Indeed, you look dog-tired, quite done up. Just tie my hair for me, like a good fellow, and then you shall turn in. I must get you an assistant, a surgeon's mate: you work too hard.'

'You have some grey hairs,' said Stephen, tying the yellow queue.

'Do you wonder?' said Jack. He buckled on his sword, sat down on the locker, and said, 'I had almost forgot. I had a pleasant surprise today. Canning came aboard! You remember Canning, that admirable chap I liked so much in town, and who offered me his privateer? He has a couple of merchantmen in the road and he came round from the Note to see them off. I have asked him to dinner tomorrow; and that reminds me...' It reminded him of the fact that he had no money, and that he should like to borrow some. He had drawn three lunar months' pay on joining his ship, but his expenses in Portsmouth - customary presents, vails, a bare minimum of equipment - had swallowed twenty-five guineas and more in a week, quite apart from Stephen's loan.

It had not allowed him to lay in stores, and that was another thing that was wrong with the running of the Polychrest - he hardly knew his officers except on duty. He had invited Parker and he had dined once with the gun-room during their long calm, tiding up the Channel, but he had barely exchanged half a dozen words with Macdonald or Allen, for example, outside the line of duty; yet they were men upon whom the ship, and his own life and reputation, might depend. Parker and Macdonald had private means and they had entertained him well: he had scarcely entertained them at all. He was not keeping up the dignity of a captain: a captain's dignity depended in some degree upon the state of his store-room - a captain must not look a scrub - and as his silly, talkative, consequential temporary steward kept telling him so officiously, his was empty apart from a hundredweight of orange marmalade, a present from Mrs Babbington. 'Where shall I stow the wine, sir? -What shall I do about the live-stock? - When are the sheep coming? - What does your Honour wish me to do about the hen-coops?' Furthermore, he would soon have to invite the admiral and the other captains of the squadron; and tomorrow there would be Canning. Ordinarily he would have turned at once to Stephen, for although Stephen was an abstemious man, indifferent to money beyond the bare necessities of life, and strangely ill-informed, even unperceptive, about discipline, the finer points of ceremonial, the complexity of the service and the importance of entertaining, he would always give way at once when it was represented to him that tradition called for an outlay. He would produce money from the odd drawers and pots where it lay, disregarded, as though Jack were doing him a particular favour by borrowing it: in other hands he would have been the 'easiest touch' afloat. These reflections darted through Jack's mind as he sat there, stroking the worn lion's head on the pommel of his sword; but something in the atmosphere, some chill or reserve or inward scruple of his own, prevented him from completing his sentence before the Melpomène's barge was reported to be in the water.

This was not a Sunday afternoon, with ship-visiting and liberty boats plying to and fro in the squadron; it was an ordinary working day, with all hands creeping up and down the rigging or exercising at the great guns; nothing but a Dover bumboat and a Deal hoveller came anywhere near the Polychrest; and yet long before Jack's return it was known throughout the ship that she was on the wing. Where bound, no one could tell, though many tried (to the westward, to Botany Bay, the Mediterranean to carry presents to the Dey of Algiers and redeem Christian slaves). But the rumour was so strong that Mr Parker cleared her hawse, heaved short, and, with a hideous memory of unmooring at Spithead, sent the crew to their stations for this manoeuvre again and again, until even the dullest could find the capstan and his place on the bar. He received Jack back aboard with a look of discreet but earnest inquiry, and Jack, who had seen his preparations, said, 'No, no, Mr Parker, you may veer away astern; it is not for today. Desire Mr Babbington to come into the cabin, if you please.'

'Mr Babbington,' he said, 'you are in a very repellent state of filth.'

'Yes, sir,' said Babbington, who had spent the first dog-watch in the maintop with two buckets of flush from the galley, showing a framework-knitter, two thatchers

(brothers: much given to poaching), and a monoglot Finn how to grease the masts, sheets and running-rigging generally, and who was liberally plastered with condemned butter and skimmings from the coppers in which salt pork had been boiled. 'Beg pardon, sir.'

'Be so good as to scrub yourself from clew to earring, to shave - you may borrow Mr Parslow's razor, I dare say - to put on your best uniform and report back here. My compliments to Mr Parker and you are to take the blue cutter to Dover with Bonden and six reliable men who deserve liberty until the evening gun. The same to Dr Maturin, and I should be glad to see him.'

'Aye, aye, sir. Oh thank you, sir.'

He turned to his desk:

Polychrest in the Downs

Captain Aubrey presents his best compliments to Mrs Villiers and much regrets that duty prevents him from accepting her very kind invitation to dine on Friday. However, he hopes to have the honour, and the pleasure, of waiting on her when he returns.

'Stephen,' he said, looking up, 'I am writing to decline Diana's invitation - we are ordered to sea tomorrow night.

Should you wish to add a word or send a message?

Babbington is making our excuses.'

'Let Babbington bear mine by word of mouth, if you please. I am so glad you are not going ashore. It would have been the extreme of folly, with the Polychrest known to be on the station.'