The Truelove Read online

  They did not look into the gunroom, though it would have borne the severest, most hostile inspection, even the stretchers of the officers' table having been polished above and below, but went down towards the sick-berth, which Stephen preferred to the traditional bay, airier but far more noisy, a place where affectionate messmates found it easier to make his patients drunk.

  'And another thing that would please you gentlemen,' said Owen, 'is the noddies, or terns as some say. They arrive when the stars and the moon are just so, and the people know it to a day; they arrive in thousands and thousands, all screaming, and make their nests on an island just off shore, rising like the Bass Rock, only much more so.'

  'On Norfolk Island there are millions and millions of mutton-birds,' cried Philips. 'They come in at dusk, dropping out of the sky and going to their burrows; for they live in burrows. And if you go to the mouth of the burrow and call ke ke ke he answers ke ke ke and pokes his head out. We used to kill twelve or fourteen hundred a night.'

  'You and your mutton-birds,' began Owen: then he stopped, his ear cocked.

  Jack opened the door: Stephen, Martin and Padeen stood up: the invalids assumed a rigid posture.

  'Well, Doctor,' said the Captain, 'I hope you find our pumping has answered?' Ever since Stephen had spoken of the Surprise's stench below as compared with the Nutmeg's purity, sea-water had been let into her hold every night and pumped out in the morning, to purify her bilges.

  'Tolerably sweet, sir,' said Dr Maturin. 'But it must be confessed that this is not the Nutmeg; and sometimes, when I recall that the ship was originally French, and that the French bury their dead in the ballast, I wonder whether there may not still be something of a charnel-house down there.'

  'Quite impossible. The ballast has been changed again and again: scores of times.'

  'So much the better. Yet even so I should be grateful for another ventilating pump. In this heavy breathless air the patients have a tendency to grow fractious, even to quarrel.'

  'Make it so, Captain Pullings,' said Jack. 'And if any hand should presume to quarrel, let his name be entered in the defaulters' list.'

  'Here, sir,' said Stephen, 'are the men I was speaking about: Philips, who knows Norfolk Island well, and Owen, who spent several months among the Easter Islanders.'

  'Ah yes. Well, Philips, how are you coming along?'

  'Wery indifferent, sir, I am sorry to say,' said Philips in a weak, gasping voice.

  'And Owen, how are you?'

  'I do not complain, sir; but the burning pain is something cruel.'

  'Then why the Devil don't you keep out of brothels, you damned fool? A man of your age! Low knocking-shops in Sydney Cove of all places, where the pox is the worst in the world. Of course you burn. And you are always at it: every goddam port ... if your pay were docked for venereals as it is in the regular service you would not have a penny coming to you when we pay off, not a brass farthing.'

  Captain Aubrey, still breathing hard, asked the other patients how they did -they were all much better, thank you, sir - and returning he said to Philips, 'So you were in Sirius when she was heaved ashore: was there no good holding-ground near the island?'

  'No, sir,' said Philips, speaking like a Christian now. 'It was terrible: coral rock everywhere inshore."

  'It was far worse off of Easter Island, sir: coral rock far offshore too, then no bottom with the deep-sea line; and an almighty surf,' said Owen, but in an undertone.

  'We could not land on the south side of the island, sir, so we went round to the north-east: and there we were lying to with a light breeze off the shore and all hands fishing for gropers when the Supply brig, who was laying outside of us, hailed Captain Hunt that we was being heaved inshore.

  Which was true. It was all hands make sail, and make sail we did; but then the flood set in - it sets from the north on that side of the island, sir - and what with that and the swell we could not make head against it, not even with the breeze on our quarter. We let go both bowers, but the coral cut their cables directly; we let go the sheet-anchor and the spare and they parted too; and at one bell in the afternoon watch we struck, drove farther over the reef, and cut away our masts. Our captain gave orders to open the after hatchway and stave all the liquor ..." All this Philips had delivered with barely a pause; now he drew breath, and in the interval Owen said, 'On Easter Island, sir...'

  'Doctor,' said Jack, 'I shall ask Mr Adams to see these men separately and take notes of what they have to say. Now I am going forward to see what your pumping has done about our rats as well as our smell. Colman, the lantern, there.'

  In his hurry Padeen dropped the lantern, lit it again, dropped it once more, and was cursed for an unhandy grass-combing lubber in a tone of much greater severity and exasperation than was usual in Captain Aubrey, who left a disapproving silence behind him, and a certain consternation.

  Stephen did not discuss the ship's captain with anyone, nor obviously did he discuss his friend Jack in the gunroom; but he could perfectly well speak of the patient Aubrey with Martin, a man of strong good sense and exceptionally wide reading. Reverting to Latin he said 'I have rarely, perhaps never, seen such a high degree of irascibility, so continuous and as it were cumulative irritation in this particular subject. It is clear that there has been no good effect from either my enemata or my cholagogue; and this steady and increasing exacerbation makes me fear that this is not an ordinary congestion of the hepatic ducts but some disease acquired in New South Wales.'

  In his medical capacity Martin had nothing to do with moral values and he replied 'When you say disease, do you refer to that which is so usual among seafaring men, high or low?'

  'Not in this case. I put the question directly: had there been any commerce with Venus? No, said he with surprising vehemence, there had most certainly not, adding a remark that I did not catch. There is something strange here; and it is with real concern that I recall dear Dr Redfern's account of the various forms of hepatitis he has seen in the colony, sometimes associated with hydatic cysts ... he showed me one from a person who had lived entirely on kangaroo and rum, and there was an unparallelled degree of cirrhosis. But worse than that for our purposes was his case-book showing long-drawn-out histories of general bilious indisposition, melancholy, taedium vitae sometimes reaching mere despair, extreme irascibility: all this with no known agent, though autopsy showed an enlarged quadrate lobe studded with yellow nodules the size of a pea. He calls it Botany Bay liver, and it is this or some one of the other New Holland diseases that I fear our patient may have caught. The vexation and more than vexation of spirit is certainly present.'

  'It is deeply saddening to see what disease can do to a whole cast of mind, to a settled character,' said Martin. 'And sometimes our remedies are just as bad. How it appears to draw in the boundaries of free-will.'

  'The Doctor may say what he likes, Tom,' said Captain Aubrey, 'but I think the Surprise smells as sweet as the Nutmeg, or sweeter.' They were approaching the cable-tier now -for the Surprise had a cat-walk that allowed uninterrupted progress from the after-platform right forward - the cable-tier where the great ropes lay coiled, together with the hawsers and cablets. These always came aboard sodden, often stinking and covered with slime, there to lie dripping through spaces between the planks down into the hold, but now, since the Surprise had lain at moorings in Sydney Cove or had tied up to bollards, they were warm and dry: Jack remembered luxuriating in their folds when he was young, sleepy from the morning watch and willing to escape from the din of the reefers' berth.

  'Sweet to be sure, sir,' said Pullings, 'but there are still vermin about for all our pumping. I have seen a score since the sick-berth.' He made a nimble kick at one far-travelled and particularly audacious Norway rat that had come aboard at Sydney and sent it flying over the nearest coil to the lattice bulwark behind. With a shrill screech a figure darted from behind the cables, brushing the rat away.

  'What the Devil are you doing here, boy?' cried Jack. 'Did you not hea
r the drum beat for divisions? Who the Devil are you?' Then relaxing his iron grip and standing back a little, 'What is this, Mr Pullings?'

  Pullings held up the lantern and said in a neutral voice 'It is a young woman, I believe, sir."

  'He is wearing a reefer's uniform." Jack took the lantern, and looking even bigger than usual in its light he studied her for a moment: Pullings was obviously right. 'Who brought you here?' he asked with cold displeasure.

  'I came of myself, sir,' said the girl in a trembling voice.

  This was utter nonsense. It could be demolished in a minute, but he did not wish to make her lie and lie until she was driven into a corner and forced to bring out the name -obvious enough, in all conscience.

  'Let us carry on, Mr Pullings,' he said.

  'What, and leave her here?'

  'You heard me, sir. Take the lantern.'

  They silently inspected the sail-rooms, the bosun's, gunner's, carpenter's store-rooms, the pitch-room and so returned to the open air, where all hats came off once more and where all faces changed at the sight of Captain Aubrey's pale severity.

  'We shall not rig church, Captain Pullings,' he said. 'The Articles will do very well for this occasion.'

  The parade, such as it was, dissolved and the hands moved aft, lining the quarterdeck as far as the companion hatchway and sitting on benches or stools or capstan-bars poised between two match-tubs, or on the belaying-bitts round the mainmast: chairs were placed for the Captain and the officers on the windward side, for the midshipmen and the warrant-officers to the lee.

  A sword-rack covered with an ensign and holding the Articles of War stood in front of Captain Aubrey; and all this time the sun shone from a clear sky, the warm air breathed across the deck, slanting from forward with just enough strength to fill her great array of canvas: there was very little sound from the breeze, the rigging or the blocks, and the water only whispered down the side. Norfolk Island, rising and falling on the long even swell beyond the larboard bow, was perceptibly nearer. Nobody spoke.

  'Silence fore and aft,' called Pullings; and after a moment Jack stood up, opened the thin boards that held the Articles and began: there were thirty-six of them, and nineteen of the offences named carried the death sentence, sometimes qualified by the words 'or such other punishment as the nature and degree of the offence shall deserve, and the court-martial shall impose'. He read them deliberately, with a powerful voice; and the Articles, already inimical, took on a darker, more threatening tone. When he had finished the silence was still quite as profound, and now there was a greater uneasiness in it.

  He closed the boards, looked coldly fore and aft, and said 'Captain Pullings, we will take in the royals and haul down the flying jib. When they are stowed, hands may be piped to dinner.'

  It was a quiet meal, with little or none of the shouting and banging of mess-kids that usually greeted the Sunday plum-duff and the grog; and while it was being eaten Jack walked his quarterdeck as he had so very often walked it before: seventeen paces forward, seventeen paces aft, turning on a ring-bolt long since polished silver by his shoe.

  Now of course the half-heard jokes, the covert allusions to Mr Oakes's weariness, his need for a sustaining diet and so on, were perfectly clear. He turned the situation over and over in his mind; flushes of pure exasperation interrupted his judgment from time to time, but he felt in perfect command of his temper when he went below and sent for the midshipman.

  'Well, Mr Oakes,' he said, 'what have you to say?'

  'I have nothing to say, sir,' replied Oakes, turning his oddly mottled face aside. 'Nothing at all, and I throw myself on your mercy. Only we hoped - I hoped - you would carry us away from that horrible place. She was so very unhappy.'

  'I am to take it she was a convict?'

  'Yes, sir; but unjustly condemned, I am sure.'

  'You know perfectly well that I have turned away dozens, scores of others.'

  'Yet you let Padeen come aboard, sir,' said Oakes, and then clasped his hands in a hopeless, stupid attempt at unsaying the words, doing utterly away with them.

  'Get away forward,' said Jack. 'I shall take no action, make no decision today, this being Sunday: but you had better pack your chest.'

  When he had gone Jack rang for his steward and asked whether the gunroom had finished their dinner. 'No, sir,' said Killick. 'I doubt they are even at their pudding yet.'

  'Then when they have finished - when they have quite finished, mind - I should like to see Captain Pullings. My compliments, and I should like to see Captain Pullings.'

  He looked doggedly through the sheets of physical observations he had made for Humboldt, temperature and salinity of the sea at various depths, barometric pressure, temperature of the air by wet and dry bulb thermometer, a chain of observations more than half way round the world, and he derived a certain satisfaction from them. Eventually he heard Pullings' steps.

  'Sit down, Tom,' he said, waving to a chair. 'I have seen Oakes, and the only explanation he could bring out was that she was very unhappy: then the damn fool threw Padeen in my teeth.'

  'You did not know, sir?'

  'Of course I did not. Did you?'

  'I believe it was common knowledge in the ship, but I had no certainty. Nor did I enquire. My impression was that the situation being so delicate you did not choose to have it brought to your attention or for there to be any question of returning to Botany Bay.'

  'Was it not your duty as first lieutenant to let me know?'

  'Perhaps it was, sir; and if I have done wrong I am very sorry for it. In a regular King's ship with a pennant, a party of Marines, a master-at-arms and ship's corporals I could not have avoided knowing it officially, and then in duty bound I should have been obliged to inform you. But here, with no Marines, no master-at-arms and no snip's corporals I should have had to listen at doors to be certain. No, sir: nobody wanted to tell either me or you, so that you, officially in the dark until it was too late, could not be blamed - could sail on for Easter Island with an easy conscience.'

  'You think it is too late now, do you?'

  'Wittles is up, sir, if you please,' said Killick at the door of the dining-cabin.

  'Tom,' said Jack, 'we left that odious wench in the starboard cable-tier. I dare say Oakes has fed her, but she cannot stay there watch after watch: she had better be stowed forward with the little girls until I have made up my mind what to do with her.'

  This was one of the few Sundays when no guests had been invited to the cabin, the Captain feeling so out of sorts, one of the few Sundays when Dr Maturin dined in the gunroom, and Aubrey sat in the solitary splendour usual in some captains but rare in him - he liked seeing his officers and midshipmen at his table and particularly his surgeon. Not that Stephen could in any way be called a guest, since they had shared the cabin these many years, and until recently he had actually owned the ship.

  He might have been expected for coffee, but in fact Jack saw nothing of him until the evening, when he walked in with a dose and a clyster: he and Martin had spent the intervening hours describing the more perishable specimens from their tour in the bush, and writing to their wives.

  'Here's a pretty kettle of fish,' cried Jack. 'An elegant Goddamned kettle, upon my word.' Solitude and a heavy afternoon sleep had increased his ill-humour, and Stephen did not at all like the colour of his face. 'What's afoot?' he asked.

  'What's afoot? Why, the ship is turned into a bawdy-house - Oakes has had a girl in the cable-tier ever since we left Sydney Cove - everybody knew, and I have been made a fool of in my own command.'

  'Oh, that? It is of no great consequence, brother. And as for being made a fool of, it is no such matter but rather a mark of the people's affection, since they wished to avoid your being placed in a disagreeable posture.'

  'You knew, and you did not tell me?'

  'Of course I did not. I could not tell my friend Jack without at the same time telling Captain Aubrey, authority incarnate; and you are to observe that I am not and never
have been an informer.'

  'Everyone knows how I hate a woman aboard. They are worse than cats or parsons for bad luck. But quite apart from that, quite rationally, no good ever came of women aboard -perpetual trouble, as you saw yourself at Juan Fernandez. She is an odious wench, and he is an ungrateful scrub.'

  'Have you seen her, at all?'

  'I caught a glimpse of her in the cable-tier just after leaving you this morning. Have you?'

  'I have, too. I went along to ask the little girls how they did and to hear them their piece of catechism and there I found a midshipman with them, a young midshipman I did not know, a handsome youth: then I perceived that he was a young woman and I begged her to sit down. We exchanged a few words - her name is Clarissa Harvill - and she spoke with a becoming modesty. She is clearly a woman of some family and education: what is ordinarily called a gentlewoman.'

  'Gentlewomen do not get sent to Botany Bay.'

  'Nonsense. Think of Louisa Wogan.'

  Jack gave the unanswerable Louisa a passing glance and returned to his fury. 'Bawdy-house,' he cried. 'It will be the lower deck full of Portsmouth brutes next, and a Miss in every other cabin - discipline all to pieces - Sodom and Gomorrah.'

  'Dear Jack,' said Stephen, 'if I did not know that your liver was speaking rather than your head or God preserve us your heart this righteous indignation and solemnity would grieve me, to say nothing of your broadside of first stones, for shame. As you told me yourself long ago the service is a sounding-box in which tales echo for ever, and it is perfectly well known throughout the ship that when you were about Oakes' age you were disrated and turned before the mast for hiding a girl in that very part of the ship. Surely you must see that this pope-holy sanctimonious attitude has a ludicrous as well as a most unamiable side?'