Book 7 - The Surgeon's Mate Page 10

  The wind held true; Dalgleish cracked on; the packet logged 269 sea-miles from one noon to the next; on the seventeenth day out of Halifax they struck soundings; and in the chops of the Channel he told his news to a homeward-bound Guineaman, bawling 'Shannon has taken Chesapeake' through the driving western rain as he passed to windward, leaving her cheering like a ship of fools. He told it to a Cornish pilchard-boat and a pilot-cutter off the Dodman, to a frigate near the Eddystone, and to some others, mostly outward-bound.

  By all sound reasoning the news, if it had reached England at all, should have been confined to the south-western tip of that damp island; and in any case the Diligence, racing up the Channel with a screeching south-wester and a following tide for the last stretch to Portsmouth, should certainly have outpaced it. But not at all. She was standing in with the signal for dispatches flying, Haslar on her larboard bow, Southsea Castle on her starboard beam, when the Admiral's barge, double-banked and pulling hard, came out to meet her. 'Is it true?' cried the flag-lieutenant.

  'Yes it is,' answered Humphreys, one foot already on the quarterladder, the dispatch buttoned into his bosom. The barge rounded to, he made a spring, lost his hat in the breeze, landed asprawl, and was borne off laughing to the post-chaise and four that was to whirl him up to the Admiralty at ten miles an hour—a post-chaise hastily adorned with oak-branches, laurel having been in short supply since the beginning of the American war, for want of demand.

  Yet even now that the news was public the packet did not moor in any atmosphere of anticlimax: the rumour's confirmation rather served to heighten the excitement, to strengthen the furious desire to know every detail. The passengers had to endure the eager questioning, though not the inspection, of the customs officers; and when at last they came ashore they were surrounded by people who begged to be told how, where, and when. The streets were crowded; work was at a stand, with all Portsmouth hurrying out of doors; and on the Common Hard liberty-men and dockyard mateys were already piling up the material for an enormous bonfire. Shopkeepers and their apprentices pushed through the mob to add crates, barrels, and strange offerings such as a three-legged sofa and a one-wheeled gig to the heap; there was cheering in every public-house—it was as though Portsmouth had just heard the news of a great fleet-action, a victorious fleet-action.

  It was of course a measure of the country's profound dismay, of its painful astonishment, frustration and resentment at the series of defeats inflicted by the Americans, and perhaps of its love for the Royal Navy; yet even so Jack found it somewhat excessive. For one thing, it delayed him in the tedious round of formalities that he had to make before he was his own master: he was all alive with a lover's desire to see his wife, he longed to be in his own house and to see his children and his horses, and these obstacles brought a superficial annoyance over his deep happiness. The spirit of contradiction formed no great part of his character, but what there was of it came to life as he shouldered his way along to the port-admiral's office: the sailors might bawl and roar as much as ever they pleased—they knew what such a battle meant—but the triumphant civilians did not please him, nor did their shouting about the 'Yankees—we'll thump them again and again.' As he passed the Blue Posts a band of excited girls obliged him to step into the gutter, and there he found himself face to face with a pawnbroker by the name of Abse, a greasy acquaintance from very early days, when first Mr Midshipman Aubrey had anything worth pawning. Abse had scarcely changed; still the same pendulous cheeks like ill-shaved Bath chaps, still the same bulbous nose; and now both cheeks and nose had an unnatural purple flush. He recognized his old customer at once and cried 'Captain, have you heard the news? The Shannon has taken the Chesapeake.' They were borne past one another, but Jack still heard him call out 'We'll thump them again and again!'

  By the time he came out of the office, having reported himself and having recounted the action in detail for the hundredth time, the bonfire was blazing high and the general din of rejoicing had grown louder still. 'I did not mind the hullaballoo in Halifax,' he reflected. 'Indeed, I enjoyed it—I thought it natural: right and proper. But then they were on the spot; they suffered from the Americans; their ships were taken; and they actually saw the Shannon and the Chesapeake.' It also occurred to him that when first he went ashore in Halifax he had not missed his dinner: now in the extreme excitement of reaching land, of telling the glorious news, and of seeing his sweetheart again (a Gosport woman), the packet's cook had completely lost his head. There had been no dinner, and Jack's empty stomach cleaved to his backbone: the case was altered. He made his way across the road to the Crown and called for bread and cheese and a quart of beer. 'And harkee,' he said to the waiter, 'send a sharp boy round to Davis's for a horse, a weight-carrying horse. He is to say it is for Captain Aubrey, and if he is here before I have finished my beer he shall have half a crown. There is not a moment to lose.'

  No common boy could have earned the half-crown, the crowd being so thick and Captain Aubrey's thirst for beer so great—his first honest English stingo for a long, long while—but the Crown's boy, fed on heel-taps and nips of gin and what he could pick up, was preternaturally sharp, though wizened. He brought Davis's big mare by back ways, leapt the gate into Parker's Close and the other gate out of it, at infinite peril, left the huge snorting beast staring in the stable-yard and walked casually in to announce its presence just as Jack raised his tankard for the last time.

  'You will excuse me, gentlemen,' said Jack to the group of officers who had already gathered round him, 'I have dispatches for home, and must not linger.'

  Davis's mare had carried a good many heavy sea-officers in a hurry—the task had aged her before her time, spoiling her temper entirely—but none so heavy nor so urgent as Captain Aubrey, and by the time they had climbed Portsdown Hill she was thoroughly discontented; her ears were braced hard aft, there was a nasty look in her eye, and she was sweating profusely. He paused for a moment to let her draw breath while he admired the telegraph, its arms whirling twenty to the dozen, no doubt sending further details of the victory along the chain to London. The mare chose this moment to get rid of him by a surprisingly nimble caper in a creature of her size, a frisk, a twist, and a lively imitation of the rocking-horse; but although Jack was not an elegant horseman he was a determined one. The enormous pressure of his knees drove most of the breath and some of the wickedness out of her; her iron mouth yielded to his ever stronger heave; she returned to her duty, and he rode her hard over the green down. Then, turning right-handed from the high-road, he galloped her along grassy lanes, the short-cuts he knew so well. Up hill and down dale, until on the last rise he came to his own land, his own plantations—how the trees had shot up!—and on through Delderwood, that lovely copse, on by Kimber's new road, where the mare nearly stumbled, on, holding her hard, past raw mine-workings, a tall, gaunt chimney, stark buildings, all uninhabited. But he had no eyes for them as he flew along, guiding his horse as instinctively as he would have steered a cutter through an intricate tideway: for there, through a gap in the trees, was the roof of his house, and his heart was pounding like a boy's.

  He had approached Ashgrove Cottage from the back, the quickest way, and now he rode into the broad stable-yard, unfinished when he had left it but now already quite mature, established, and even elegant with its clock-tower over the coach-house, its rosy brick, its rows of whitewashed boxes, and its archway leading into the garden. As he reined in a quick glance all round showed the same pleasant mellowing on every hand: the new wings (the reward of a successful campaign in the Mascarenes and the recapture of several East-Indiamen) that had transformed the cottage into a fair-sized country house now merged with the older building; the creepers that he had planted as miserable straggling wisps now made a brave show above the lower windows; and his apples topped the orchard wall. Yet everything was as still and silent as a dream. No horses' heads peered out of the half-doors—in any case, the half-doors were all shut—and no groom, no living soul moved about the s
potless yard nor yet behind the shining windows of the house: not a sound but for a distant cuckoo, changing his tune far beyond the apple-trees. For a moment a strange premonition checked his joy, a hint of another world in which he did not belong; but then the stable clock gave a click and a whirr as it prepared to strike the quarter. There was life here, and he was sitting on a horse in a muck-sweat that must be looked to at once. He raised his voice and hailed the house: 'Ahoy, there!' the echo came back from Delderwood, 'Ahoy, there,' faint but clear.

  Again the strangest pause, as though either he or this visible world were an illusion: his look of excitement and happiness faded, and he was just about to dismount when two little girls, with a small fat boy between them, marched past the archway in file, carrying flags and crying 'Wilkes and liberty, huzzay, huzzay. Right wheel, huzza, huzza.'

  They were long-legged girls with ringlets, quite remarkably pretty; but Jack's loving eye could still make out traces of the turnip-faced, sparse-haired, stumpy little creatures he had left, his twin daughters: they were still remarkably alike, but the slightly taller one, the leader, was almost certainly Charlotte; and in all likelihood the fat boy was his son George, last seen as a pink baby, much the same as all others. His heart gave him a most unaccustomed wring and he called out 'Hey, there.'

  It was an entirely one-sided wave of affection, however. Charlotte only glanced round and cried 'Come back tomorrow. They are all gone to Pompey,' and continued her pompous, fanatical march, followed by the others, all chanting 'Wilkes and liberty.'

  He slipped from his horse and tried several boxes, all of them swept clean, scrubbed and bare, until he found one in use; there he unsaddled the mare, rubbed her down and covered her with a rug. The clock struck the quarter, and he walked across the yard, into the house through the kitchen door, through the empty kitchen with its gleaming copper pans, and into the white corridor beyond. In the silence, the clean, light-filled silence, he hardly liked to call, although the house was so familiar, so intimately well known that his hand found the doorknobs of itself: he was not an imaginative man, yet it was as though he had returned from the dead only to find still, sunlit death waiting for him. He looked into the dining-room: silence there, no more. The breakfast-room: neatness, clarity, no sound, no movement at all: automatically his eye glanced at the regulator, the austere clock by which he checked his astronomical observations. It had stopped. His own room, and there was Sophie sitting at his desk with a sea of papers in front of her; and in the second before she looked up from her sum he saw that her face was sad, worried, thinner than before.

  Radiant joy, a delight as great as his own—innumerable questions, almost all unanswered, incoherent fragmentary accounts on either side, interrupted by kisses, exclamations, enraptured or amazed. 'And is it true?' she cried as she led him into the kitchen, for somehow it had become apparent that he had not dined. 'Oh, Jack, I am so glad to have you home.'

  'Is what true, sweetheart?' said he, sitting at the white-scrubbed table and looking eagerly at the ham.

  'That the Shannon took the Chesapeake. There was a rumour this morning—the postman stopped to repeat it—and Bonden and Killick begged to go to Portsmouth; so I let them take the cart, with the others. I wonder they are not back yet: they have been gone for hours.'

  'Yes, perfectly true, thank God. That is what I was trying to tell you. Stephen and Diana and I were aboard—as neat an action as you could wish, fifteen minutes from the first gun to the last—and we all came home in the packet together. Such a passage, once we had got rid of the privateers! Is there any more bread, my love?'

  'Dear Stephen,' cried Sophie, 'how is he? Why is he not here? Do eat some more ham, my darling. You are dreadfully thin. I am so sorry there was none of the pasty left: the children ate it up for supper. Where is he?'

  'He is still in Portsmouth, but he is to post up to town tomorrow, and he may look in. There was some difficulty about Diana, about her nationality, and she is not to move until they hear from the Secretary of State's office. She is staying with the Fortescues; and Fortescue, Stephen and I have gone bail in five thousand apiece that she don't wander off. Not that she will. She and Stephen are to be married at last.'

  'Married?' cried Sophie.

  'Yes. I was astonished too. The first I heard of it was when he asked Philip Broke to perform the ceremony—a captain can marry people, you know, aboard his own ship—and although Broke could not very well do so that day, seeing that Chesapeake was standing out of Nantasket roads, I know he would have done so after the action, if he had not been so badly wounded he could not even write his own dispatch. Yes, they are to be married, and perhaps it is all for the best: he has longed for her these many, many years. And certainly she behaved very well during our escape and then after the action—a rare plucked 'un, upon my word. Diana has never wanted for spirit; and I shall always be grateful to her for having sent you news of the Leopard.'

  'So shall I,' said Sophie. 'And I shall call on her first thing tomorrow. Dear Diana: how I hope they will be happy.' She spoke with real feeling, and if Jack had reflected he would have applauded her heart's victory over what might be called her moral judgement or perhaps her principles: Sophie belonged to a quiet, staid, provincial family untouched by scandal of an amorous nature as far as it could trace its origins, a family that had been rigidly Puritan in Cromwell's time and that even now regarded the least irregularity with extreme abhorrence. In spite of her mother's upbringing she was too kind and too good-natured to be a prude; but on the other hand she had not the least intuitive understanding or sympathy for those who strayed on to the wilder shores of love—in its physical aspects even the domesticated strand was of no great interest to her—and Diana's irregularities had not been of the least, far from it. They had excited comment even in the very liberal society of London, where she had maintained a certain position only by her beauty, her spirit, and the friendship of some of the Prince of Wales's circle. But Jack did not reflect; his mind, in its delightful whirl, had caught up on the mention of Bonden, his former coxswain, and of Killick, his steward. He said, 'How in God's—how on earth did Bonden and Killick come here?'

  'Captain Kerr sent them with a very polite note. He said since he was to have Acasta instead of you, it was but fair you should have your own people for your next command.'

  'That was handsome in Robert Kerr, upon my word, very handsome indeed. My next command . . . ha, ha, Sophie. I tell you what—before I go to sea again, I shall fill the house with clocks. There is no life in a room, without there is a clock ticking away in it. There are some that go a twelve-month without winding.'

  'Your next command,' began Sophie: but she knew she must not go on to wish that he might never have a next command, that he might never, never go away from home again, nor be exposed to storms, battles, shipwrecks or imprisonment; she knew that an implied condition of their marriage was that she should sit there waiting while he was exposed to all these things; so she ended, 'but I hope, dear Jack, that the clocks will not have to go a year, not a whole year. I am so sorry about the regulator: Charlotte's dormouse got into it, and is having babies.'

  'Oh, as for a ship,' said Jack, 'I am in no great hurry unless they offer me Belvidera or Egyptienne on the North American station. What I hope for is one of the new twenty-four pounder frigates now building; and I do not think it would be asking too much—after all, it is not every day a fourth-rate sinks a seventy-four. That would give me some months ashore, seeing that she is ordered just to my liking and dealing with things at home.' A cloud came over their happiness, for things at home must necessarily include the wretched Mr Kimber: they understood one another perfectly, however; Kimber might mean endless complications and perhaps very heavy financial loss, but for the present Charlotte's dormouse was more important by far. He went on, 'Yet my time in frigates is pretty well over. A ship of the line is much more likely, and I shall be in no hurry for that.'

  There was so much to say, so many crossed letters to disentan
gle, such news of the jasmin and the wonderful success of the espaliered apricot-tree, that after a while they lapsed into a delighted silence, holding hands over the kitchen-table like a pair of simpletons, looking at one another with infinite pleasure. Through this silence came the sound of Wilkes and liberty, often repeated and coming nearer. 'That is the children,' said Sophia.

  'Yes,' said Jack, 'I saw them marching about like thrones and dominions. But what are they at?'

  'They are playing Westminster elections. Your father is standing.' She hesitated for a moment and added apologetically, 'In the Radical interest.'

  'Good God!' cried Jack. General Aubrey's snipe-like political career, now seeking to expose corruption, now to participate in it, had often carried him into opposition to Government, but never so far as this. Ever since the General had first been returned for the rotten borough of Gripe, the property of a friend, he had contrived to be a Tory when the First Lord of the Admiralty was a Whig, and some one of the many varieties of Whig when the First Lord was a Tory. The General, a man of demoniac energy that increased with age, with an unquenchable flow of soldierly, unpolished eloquence in the House, had been a thorn in the ministry's side as an opponent and a cruel embarrassment as a supporter. His occasional efforts at helping his son by political influence had always been ill-judged and sometimes nearly disastrous; it is true that the General rarely thought of him, but even so Jack would have reached post rank far earlier if it had not been for his father.

  'Shall I call them in?' asked Sophie.

  'Yes, do, my dear,' said Jack. 'I should like to make George's acquaintance.'

  'Children,' called Sophie, dreading a want of recognition, 'come in and bid your father welcome home. He is come back from America.'

  For all her precautions, they stared at him without the least knowledge and looked about the room for some other, more recognizable man: for a moment it was exquisitely painful, but then they remembered their manners, advanced gravely side by side, curtsied, and said 'Good afternoon, sir. Welcome home,' with a quick glance at their mother to see if that were adequate.