Post Captain (41 page)

'I have: we may go now, if you wish.'

'I will be with you in two minutes.' There were some papers that must not be seen, a few manuscripts and letters that he prized; but these were almost ready, and his necessary bag was at hand. In two minutes he followed Dundas up the companion-ladder and they rowed away over the calm sea to Deal. Speaking in such a way as to be clear to Stephen alone, Dundas gave him to understand that Jack's second, a Colonel Rankin, could not get down until tomorrow night - Friday; that he had seen Rankin earlier in the week, and that they had decided on an excellent spot near the castle often used for this purpose and convenient in every way. 'You are provided, I suppose?' he asked, just before the boat touched.

'I think so,' said Stephen. 'If not, I will call on you.'

'Goodbye, then,' said Dundas, shaking his hand. 'I must go back to my ship. If I do not see you before, then at the time we agreed.'

Stephen settled in at the Rose and Crown, called for a horse, and rode slowly towards Dover, reflecting upon the nature of dunes; upon the extraordinary loneliness surrounding each man; and on the inadequacy of language - a thought that he would have developed to Jack if he had been given time. 'And yet for all its inadequacy, how marvellously well it allows them to deal with material things,' he said, looking at the ships in the roadstead, the unbelievable complexity of named ropes, blocks, sails that would carry the crowd of isolated individuals to the Bosphorus, the West Indies, Sumatra, or the South Sea whaling grounds. And as he looked, his eyes running along the odd cocked-hat form of the Polychrest he saw her captain's gig pull away from the side, set its lugsail, and head for Dover.

'Knowing them both, as I do,' he observed, 'I should be surprised if there were much liking between them. It is a perverse relationship. That, indeed, may be the source of its violence.'

Reaching Dover, he went directly to the hospital and examined his patients: his lunatic was motionless, crouched in a ball, sunk even below tears; but Macdonald's stump was healing well. The flaps were as neat as a parcel, and he noted with pleasure that the hair on them continued to grow in its former direction.

'You will soon be quite well,' he said, pointing this out to the Marine. 'I congratulate you upon an excellent healthy constitution. In a few weeks' time you will rival Nelson, spring one-handed from ship to ship - happier than the Admiral in that you have your sword-arm still.'

'How you relieve my mind,' said Macdonald. 'I had been mortally afraid of gangrene. I owe you a great deal, Doctor: believe me, I am sensible of it.' Stephen protested that any butcher, any butcher's boy, could have done as much - a simple operation - a real pleasure to cut into such healthy flesh - and their conversation drifted away to the likelihood of a French invasion, of a breach with Spain, and to the odd rumours of St Vincent impeaching Lord Melville for malversation, before it returned to Nelson.

'He is a hero of yours, I believe?' said Macdonald.

'Oh, I hardly know anything of the gentleman,' said Stephen. 'I have never even seen him. But from what I understand, he seems quite an active, zealous, enterprising officer. He is much loved in the service, surely? Captain Aubrey thinks the world of him.'

'Maybe,' said Macdonald. 'But he is no hero of mine. Caracciolo sticks in my gullet. And then there is his example.'

'Could there be a better example, for a sea-officer?'

'I have been thinking, as I lie here in bed,' said Macdonald. 'I have been thinking of justification.' Stephen's heart sank: he knew the reputation of the Scots for theological discussion, and he dreaded an outpouring of Calvinistical views, flavoured, perhaps, with some doctrines peculiar to the Royal Marines. 'Men, particularly Lowlanders, are never content with taking their sins upon their own heads, or with making their own law; a young fellow will play the blackguard, not because he is satisfied that his other parts will outweigh the fact, but because Tom Jones was paid for lying with a woman - and since Tom Jones was a hero, it is quite in order for him to do the same. It might have been better for the Navy if Nelson had been put to a stable bucket when he was a wee bairn. If the justification that a fellow in a play or a tale can provide, is enough to confirm a blackguard, think what a live hero can do! Whoremongering - lingering in port - hanging officers who surrender on terms. A pretty example!' Stephen looked at him attentively for signs of fever; they were certainly there, but to no dangerous degree at present. Macdonald stared out of the window, and whatever he may have seen there, apart from the blank wall, prompted him to say, 'I hate women. They are entirely destructive. They drain a man, sap him, take away all his good: and none the better for it themselves.' After a pause, 'Nasty, nasty queans.'

Stephen said, 'I have a service to beg of you, Mr Macdonald.'

'Name it, sir, I beg: nothing could give me greater pleasure.'

'The loan of your pistols, if you please.'

'For any purpose but to shoot a Marine officer, they are yours and welcome. In my canteen there, under the window, if you would be so good.'

'Thank you, I will bring them back, or cause them to be brought, as soon as they have served their purpose.'

The evening, as he rode back, was as sweet as an early autumn evening could be, still, intensely humid, a royal blue sea on the right hand, pure dunes on the left, and a benign warmth rising from the ground. The mild horse, a good-natured creature, had a comfortable walk; it knew its way, but it seemed to be in no hurry to reach its stable

- indeed, it paused from time to time to take leaves from a shrub that he could not identify; and Stephen sank into an agreeable languor, almost separated from his body: a pair of eyes, no more, floating above the white road, looking from left to right. 'There are days - good evening to you, sir' - a parson went by, walking with his cat, the smoke from his pipe keeping him company as he walked - 'there are days,' he reflected, 'when one sees as though one had been blind the rest of one's life. Such clarity - perfection in everything, not merely in the extraordinary. One lives in the very present moment; lives intently. There is no urge to be doing: being is the highest good. However,' he said, guiding the horse left-handed into the dunes, 'doing of some kind there must be.' He slid from the saddle and said to the horse, 'Now how can I be sure of your company, my dear?' The horse gazed at him with glistening, intelligent eyes, and brought its ears to bear. 'Yes, yes, you are an honest fellow, no doubt. But you may not like the bangs; and I may be longer than you choose to wait. Come, let me hobble you with this small convenient strap. [how little I know about dunes,' he said, pacing out his distance and placing a folded handkerchief at the proper height on a sandy slope. 'A most curious study - a flora and a fauna entirely of its own, no doubt.' He spread his coat to preserve the pistols from the sand and loaded them carefully. 'What one is bound to do, one usually does with little acknowledged feeling; a vague desperation, no more,' he said, taking up his stance. Yet as he did so his face assumed a cold, dangerous aspect and his body moved with the easy precision of a machine. The sand spat up from the edge of the handkerchief; the smoke lay hardly stirring; the horse was little affected by the noise, but it watched idly for the first dozen shots or so.

'I have never known such consistently accurate weapons,' he said aloud. 'I wonder, can I still do Dillon's old trick?' He took a coin from his pocket, tossed it high, and shot it fair and square on the top of its rise, between climbing and falling. 'Charming instruments indeed: I must cover them from the dew.' The sun had set; the light had so far diminished that the red tongue of flame lit up the misty hollow at each discharge; the handkerchief was long ago reduced to its component threads. 'Lord, I shall sleep tonight. Oh, what a prodigious dew.'

In Dover, sheltered by the western heights, the darkness fell earlier. Jack Aubrey, having done what little business he had to do, and having called in vain at New Place - 'Mr Lowndes was indisposed: Mrs Villiers was not at home' -sat drinking beer in an ale-house near the Castle. It was a sad, dirty, squalid little booth - a knocking-shop for the soldiers upstairs - but it had two ways out, and with Bonden and Lakey in the front room he felt reasonably safe from surprise. He was as low as he had ever been in his life, a dull, savage lowness; and the stupidity that came from the two pots he had drunk did nothing to raise it. Anger and indignation were his only refuge, and although they were foreign to his nature, he was steadily angry and indignant.

An ensign and his flimsy little wench came in, hesitated on seeing Jack, and settled in the far corner, slapping and pushing each other for want of words. The woman of the house brought candles and asked whether he should like anything more; he looked out of the window at the gathering twilight and said no - what did he owe her, and for the men in the tap?

'One and nine pence,' said the woman; and while he felt in his pockets she stared him full in the face with an open, ignorant, suspicious, avid curiosity, her eyes screwed close and her upper lip drawn back over her three yellow teeth. She did not like the cloak he wore over his uniform; she did not like the sobriety of his men, nor the way they kept themselves to themselves; again, gentlemen as were gentlemen called for wine, not beer; he had made no response to Betty's advances nor to her own modest proposal of accommodation; she wanted no pouffes in her house, and she should rather have his room than his company.

He looked into the tap, told Bonden to wait for him at the boat, and walked out by the back way, straight into a company of whores and soldiers. Two of the whores were fighting there in the alley, tearing one another's hair and clothes, but the rest were cheerful enough, and two of the women called to him, coming alongside to whisper their talents, their prices, and their clean bill of health.

He walked up to New Place. The demure look that accompanied the 'not at home' had convinced him that he should see Diana's light. A faint glow between the drawn curtains up there: he checked it twice, walking up and down the road, and then fetched a long cast round the houses to reach a lane that led behind New Place. The palings of the wilderness were no great obstacle, but the walled inner garden needed his cloak over the broken glass on top and then a most determined run and leap. Down in the garden the noise of the sea was suddenly cut off -a total, listening silence and the falling dew as he stood there amongst the crown imperials. Gradually the silence listened less; there were sounds inside the house - talking from various windows, somebody locking doors, closing the lower shutters. Then a quick heavy thudding on the path, the deep wuff-wuff of dog Fred, the mastiff, who was free of the garden and the yard by night, and who slept in the summerhouse. But dog Fred was a mute creature; he knew Captain Aubrey - thrust his wet nose into his hand -and said no more. He was not altogether easy in his mind, however, and when at last Jack gained the mossy path he followed him to the house, grumbling, pushing the back of his knees. Jack took off his coat, folded it on the ground, and then his sword: Fred at once lay on the coat, guarding both it and the sword.

For months and months past a builder had been replacing the roof-tiles of New Place; his improvised crane, with its pulley, projecting from the parapet and its rope hung there still, hooked to a bucket. Jack quickly made the ends fast, tried it, took the strain, and swung himself up. Up, hand over hand, past the library, where Mr Lowndes was writing at his desk, past a window giving on to the stairs, up to the parapet. From this point it was only a few steps to Diana's window, but half-way up, before ever he reached the parapet, he had recognized Canning's great delighted laugh, a crowing noise that rose from a deep bass, a particular laugh, that could not be mistaken. For all that he went the whole way, until he was there, sitting on the parapet with a sharp-angled view of all of the room that mattered. For three deep breaths he might have burst through: it was extraordinarily vivid, the lit room, the faces, their expressions picked out by the candlelight, their intense life and their unconsciousness of a third person. Then shame, unhappiness, extreme weariness put out the rest, extinguished it utterly. No rage, no fire: all gone, and nothing to take their place. He moved some paces off to hear and see no more, and after a while he reached out to the end of the crane for the rope; automatically he frapped the two strands, took a sailor's grip on it, swung himself out into the darkness, and went down, down and down, pursued by that intensely amused laughter.

Stephen spent Friday morning writing, coding and decoding; he had rarely worked so fast or so well, and he had the agreeable feeling that he had produced a clear statement of a complex situation. From a moral scruple he had refrained from his habitual dose, and he had spent the greater part of the night in a state of lucid consideration. When he had tied up all the ends, sealed his papers in a double cover and addressed the outer to Captain Dundas, he turned to his diary. 'This is perhaps the final detachment; and this is perhaps the only way to live - free, surprisingly light and well, no diminution of interest but no commitment: a liberty I have hardly ever known. Life in its purest form - admirable in every way, only for the fact that it is not living, as I have ever understood the word. How it changes the nature of time! The minutes and the hours stretch out; there is leisure to see the movement of the present. I shall walk out beyond Walmer Castle, by way of the sand-dunes: there is a wilderness of time in that arenaceous world.'

Jack also took a spell at his writing-table, but in the forenoon he was called away to the flagship.

'I have worn you down a trifle, my spark,' thought Admiral Harte, looking at him with satisfaction. 'Captain Aubrey, I have orders for you. You are to look into Chaulieu. Thetis and Andromeda chased a corvette into the harbour. She is believed to be the Fanciulla. There are also said to be a number of gunboats and prams preparing to move up the coast. You are to take all possible measures, consistent with the safety of your ship, to disable the one and to destroy the others. And the utmost despatch is essential, do you hear me?'