Book 9 - Treason's Harbour Page 7

Very early in their recapitulation of the imperfect subjunctive of the irregular verb stare Mrs Fielding saw with alarm that her pupil's conduct was likely to grow even more irregular than her verb. She was aware of his motions rather before they were quite clear in his own mind, for she had been brought up in the free and easy atmosphere of the Neapolitan court, and she had been accustomed to gallantry from a very early age; ancient counsellors, beardless pages, and a large variety of gentlemen in between had attacked her virtue, and although she had repulsed the great majority it was a subject that interested her—she could detect the earliest symptoms of an amorous inclination, and upon the whole she found they did not differ very much, from man to man. But none of her former suitors had been so massive as this, none had had so bright and formidable an eye, and although some had sighed none had ever chuckled in this disturbing way. The poor lady, worried by her lack of progress with Dr Maturin and vexed by the rumours of her misconduct with Captain Aubrey, was in no mood for fooling: she very much regretted the absence of her maid, since Ponto, her usual guardian, was of no use whatsoever in these circumstances. He sat there, smiling at them and beating the ground with his tail every time Captain Aubrey moved his chair a little nearer.

  They dismissed the imperfect subjunctive with perfect indifference on either side, and Jack, his imagination now somewhat heated, was speaking of the gossip that concerned them. In spite of her imperfect knowledge of English and his want of perfect coherence she caught the general drift of his remarks and before he could reach the point of expressing his earnest desire that these rumours should be given a solid foundation—his view that natural justice required such a course, since they had suffered innocently—she cut him short. 'Oh, Captain Aubrey,' cried she, 'I have a service to beg of you.'

  Mrs Fielding had but to command, said Jack, smiling at her with great affection; he was at her orders entirely—very happy—delighted—could not be more so.

  'Why then,' she said, 'you know I am a little talkative—the dear Doctor has often said so, desiring me to peep down—but alas I am not at all writative, at least not in English. English spelling! Corpo di Baccho, English spelling! Now if I give you a dictation and you write it down in good English, I can use the words when I write to my husband.'

  'Very well,' said Jack, his smile fading.

  It was just as he had feared: and he must have been quite mistaken about the signals. Mr Fielding was to understand that the excellent Captain Aubrey had saved Ponto from being drowned: Ponto now doted upon Captain Aubrey and ran up to him in the street. Wicked people therefore said that Captain Aubrey was Laura's lover. Should these rumours reach Mr Fielding he was to pay no attention. On the contrary. Captain Aubrey was an honourable man, who would scorn to insult a brother-officer's wife with dishonest proposals; indeed she had such confidence in his perfect rectitude that she could visit him without even the protection of a maid. Captain Aubrey knew very well that she would not ply the oar.

  'Ply the oar, ma'am?' said Jack, looking up from his paper, his pen poised.

  'Is it not right? I was so proud of it.'

  'Oh yes,' said Jack. 'Only the word is spelt rather odd, you know,' and he wrote she would not play the whore very carefully, so that the letters could not be mistaken, smiling secretly as he did so, his frustration and disappointment entirely overcome by his sense of the ridiculous.

  They parted on excellent terms, and she gave him a particularly friendly look as she said 'You will not forget my party, will you? I have Count Muratori coming, with his lovely flute.'

  'Nothing shall keep me away,' said Jack, 'short of the loss of both legs. And even then there is always a stretcher.'

  'And you will remember it to the Doctor?' she said.

  'He will remember it to himself, I am sure,' said Jack, holding the door open for her. 'And if he don't . . . but there he is,' he said, cocking his ear to the stairs. 'He often comes up more like a herd of mad sheep than a Christian, when he is in a hurry.'

  Dr Maturin it was, and his face, ordinarily pale, grave, and withdrawn, shone pink with haste and happiness. 'Why, you are all wet,' they both cried; and indeed a little pool was fast gathering at his feet as he stood there before them. Jack was on the point of asking 'Did you fall in?', but he did not like to expose his friend, since the answer must necessarily be yes: Dr Maturin was wonderfully unhandy at sea, and very often, in clambering from boat to ship or even in stepping from a solid, stone-built quay into a motionless dghaisa, a local craft expressly designed for the safe, dry transport of landlubbers, he would contrive to miss his footing and plunge into the sea—so much so that his smallclothes and the skirts of his coat ordinarily showed whitish tide-marks, where the salt had dried.

  Laura Fielding had no such inhibitions however and her 'Did you fall in?' came out as naturally as the day.

  'Your most devoted, ma'am,' said Stephen, absent-mindedly kissing her hand. 'Jack, give me joy. The Dromedary is come in!'

  'What of it?' said Jack, who had seen the slab-sided transport beating up, tack upon tack, since early dawn.

  'She has my diving-bell aboard!'

  'What diving-bell?'

  'My long-awaited Halley's diving-bell. I had almost lost hope of it, so I had. It has a window in the top! I am with child to plunge. You must come and see it at once—I have a dghaisa at the waterside.'

  'Gentlemen, good day,' said Mrs Fielding, who was not accustomed to being slighted for a diving-bell.

  They begged her pardon. They were extremely sorry: they had meant no disrespect, and Stephen handed her down the stairs with Jack and Ponto following solemnly. 'It is Halley's model, you know,' said Stephen as the long, lean dghaisa shoved off and began to skim across the Grand Harbour towards the Dromedary, urged by the promise of double fare. 'How briskly these worthy creatures do propel the bark, to be sure; and have you noticed that they stand up to do so, that they face the direction they are going, like the gondoliers of Venice? Surely this is a laudable practice that should be introduced into the Navy.'

  Stephen often put forward ideas for the improvement of the service. In his time he had advocated the serving out of a modest allowance of soap, the cutting of the monstrous rum-ration, the provision of free, warm, serviceable uniform clothes for the lower deck, particularly for the ship's boys and new hands, and the abolition of such punishments as flogging round the fleet: these proposals had met with little more success than his present suggestion that in defiance of all tradition the Navy should look where it was going—Jack swept straight past it, saying eagerly 'Halley? Comet Halley, the Astronomer Royal?'

  'Just so.'

  'I knew he commanded the Paramour pink, when he was working on the southern stars and the Atlantic chart,' said Jack, 'and I have an amazing respect for him, of course. Such an observer! Such a calculator! But I had no idea he was concerned with diving-bells.'

  'Yet I told you of his paper, the Art of Living under Water, in the Philosophical Transactions, and you commended my desire to walk upon the bottom of the sea. You said it would be a better way of finding lost anchors and cables than creeping for them with a grapnel.'

  'I remember it perfectly. But you did not mention Dr Halley's name, and you spoke of some kind of a helmet with tubes, no more.'

  'I certainly mentioned Dr Halley's name, so I did, and I treated the bell at some length; but you did not attend. You were playing cricket at the time: you were watching out, and I came and stood by you.'

  'That was on another occasion, when we were playing the gentlemen of Hampshire: I had to desire Babbington to lead you away. I have never been able to make you understand how seriously we take the game in England. However, pray tell me again. What is the principle of the bell?'

  'It is beautiful in its simplicity! Imagine a truncated cone, open at the bottom, furnished with a stout glass window at the top, and so weighted that on being lowered into the sea it sinks perpendicularly—a commodious bell whose occupant sits at his ease upon a bench diametrically placed a little above th
e lower rim, enjoying the light that shines upon him from the glass above, and revelling in the wonders of the deep. You will object that as the bell sinks, the air within becomes compressed and the water rises proportionably,' said Stephen, holding up his hand, 'and in ordinary circumstances this is profoundly true, so that at thirty-three feet the bell would be half full. But you are also to imagine a barrel, similarly weighted and provided with a hole at the bottom and another at the top. The top hole has a leathern hose fitted to it, an air-tight, water-tight leathern hose, well dressed with oil and beeswax, while the bottom hole is open, to let the sea in as the barrel sinks.'

  'What is the good of that?'

  'Why, do you not see? It replenishes the bell with air.'

  'Not at all. The air has rushed out by way of your leathern hose.'

  The remark struck Stephen dumb. He opened his mouth, then closed it; and for some minutes, as the slim boat ran fast through the ships and small craft in the Grand Harbour, with the noble mass of the Three Cities ahead and Valletta astern, the air itself blue from the high and brilliant sky, he puzzled over the problem. Then his face cleared; the delight came back, and he cried, 'Why, of course, of course: what a brute-beast I am! I had quite forgot to say that the leathern hose is kept below the lower bung-hole by an appended weight. It is kept down during the barrel's descent—that is of the essence—and the man inside the bell grasps it, pulls it in, and raises it. As soon as he has raised it above the surface of the water in the barrel, the confined air rushes into the bell with great force, refreshing him and repelling the sea in the lower part of the machine. He then gives a signal, and as the first barrel is hauled up, so another comes down. Dr Halley says—and these, Jack, are his very words—"an alternate succession furnished air so quick, and in so great plenty, that I have myself been one of five who have been together at the bottom, in nine or ten fathom water, for above an hour and a half at a time, without any ill effects".'

  'Five people!' cried Jack. 'God love me, it must be a most enormous affair. Pray what are its dimensions?'

  'Oh,' said Stephen, 'mine is only a modest bell, a small little bell indeed. I doubt you could get into it.'

  'What does it weigh?'

  'Sure, I forget the exact figure; but very little at all—only just enough to make it sink, and sink slowly at that. Will you look at that bird, almost directly ahead, at some thirty-five degrees of elevation? I believe it to be a hangi. They are said to be peculiar to this island.'

  It was clear that the Dromedary's people were already used to Dr Maturin: they lowered a quarter-ladder as soon as the dghaisa came alongside, and when he came labouring up it two powerful seamen took him by the arms and lifted him bodily over the rail. They also seemed quite attached to him, for in spite of their more urgent official tasks they had already cleared away his bell and its appurtenances, and the transport's master, accompanied by several of the crew, all smiling, led the visitors forward to see it. 'There she lays,' said the master, nodding at the main hatchway, 'all ready to be hoisted out. You will see, sir, that I have followed Dr Halley's instructions to the letter: there is the sprit, stayed to the masthead, and there are the braces, to carry her without-board and within, according; and Joe here has given the brass a rub, so she will not look paltry.'

  She looked very far indeed from paltry. The broad brass ring surrounding the bell's glass top was over a yard across, and it gazed up at them like the eye of an enormous expectant cheerful simple-minded god: Jack returned its gaze with a sinking heart.

  'It seems quite large, in that confined space,' said Stephen. 'But that is an optical illusion. When it is pulled up you will see that it is remarkably small.'

  'Three foot six across the top, five foot across the bottom, eight foot deep,' said the master with great satisfaction. 'Holds nigh on sixty cubic foot, and weighs thirty-nine hundredweight odd pounds.'

  Jack had meant to take his friend aside and tell him privately that it would not do; that the machine would be obliged to be set ashore or sent home; that Jack was tolerably fly, not having been born yesterday, and was not to be taken in by a fait accompli; but these very shocking figures so startled him that he cried 'God help us! Five foot across—eight foot high—close on two ton! How can you ever have supposed that room could be attempted to be made for such a monstrous thing on the deck of a frigate?' All around him the smiling faces turned grave and closed and he was aware of a strong current of moral disapproval: the Dromedaries were obviously on Stephen's side.

  'To tell the truth,' said Stephen, 'I engaged for it when you had the Worcester.'

  'But even in a seventy-four, where could it conceivably go?'

  Stephen had thought that it might prove an acceptable ornament upon the poop, where it would be ready to be launched, or rather roused, over the side whenever the ship was not actively engaged.

  'The poop, the poop . . .' began Jack; but this was no time for a description of the horrid effects of a wind-resistant two tons perched so far aft and so high above the centre of gravity, and he went on 'But there is no question of a ship of the line: we are speaking of a frigate, and a small frigate at that; and perhaps I may be permitted to observe, that no frigate yet built has ever had a poop.'

  'Why, that being so,' said Stephen, 'what do you say to the convenient little space between the foremast and the front rail?'

  'Two tons right over her forefoot, pressing on her narrow entry? It would make an angel gripe: it would cut two knots off her rate of sailing on a bowline. Besides, there is the mainstay, you know, and the downhauls; and how should I ever win my anchors? No, no, Doctor, I am sorry to say it will never do. I regret it; but had you spoken of it earlier, I should have advised against it directly; I should have told you at once that it would never do in a man-of-war, except perhaps in a first-rate, that might just find room for it on the skids.'

  'It is Dr Halley's model,' said Stephen in a low voice.

  'But on the other hand,' said Jack with an unconvincing cheerfulness, 'think what a boon it would be to a shore establishment! Lost cables, hawsers, anchors . . . and I am sure the port-admiral would lend you a broad-bottomed scow from time to time, to look at the bottom with.'

  'For my part I shall always acknowledge a great debt to Dr Halley, whenever I take the altitude of a star,' said the master of the Dromedary.

  'All mariners must be grateful to Dr Halley,' said his mate; and this seemed to be the general opinion aboard.

  'Well, sir,' said the master, turning to Stephen with a most compassionate air, 'What am I to do with your poor bell—with poor Dr Halley's bell? Set it ashore as it stands, or take it to pieces and strike it down into the hold until you have considered in your mind? One or the other I must do to clear my hatchway, and double-quick, do you see, for the lighters will be putting off the moment the Clerk of the Cheque reaches Admiralty Creek. There he is, just by Edinburgh over there, nattering with her skipper.'

  'Pray take it to pieces, Captain, if that should not be too laborious,' said Stephen. 'I have some friends in Malta upon whose attachment I believe I can rely.'

  'No trouble at all, sir. A dozen bolts, and Bob's your uncle, if you will excuse the expression.'

  'If it takes to pieces,' said Jack, 'the case is altered. If it takes to pieces it may come aboard and travel below, being put together on suitable occasions—during dead calms, or in port, or when the ship is lying to. I shall send my barge at once.'

  'It is an odd thing,' he reflected as their dghaisa skimmed towards the dockyard, 'but if I had been standing on my own quarterdeck they would never have presumed to prate about Dr Halley. I felt like Julian the Apostate in the midst of a bench of bishops—should have dismissed it out of hand aboard my own ship—authority very much a matter of place—meek in my father's house—most people are, I dare say.' Yet his own daughters were not outstandingly meek: he thought of their shrill bawling 'Oh Papa, Papa, do come on, Papa. We shall never get up the hill at this rate. Pray, Papa, do not be such a slug.' Early it would
have been 'goddam slug', they having caught a free way of speaking from the seamen who formed part of the household, but since the last voyage or two Sophie had taken the matter in hand, and now girlish cries of 'infernal swab' or 'short-arsed cullion' were to be heard only in the remoter parts of Ashgrove wood.

  'I wonder what Graham will give us,' said Stephen, speaking suddenly from the silence.

  'Something good, I am sure,' said Jack, smiling. Professor Graham was known to be careful of his pennies, but those who called him parsimonious illiberal avaricious niggardly penurious near close or mean were mistaken, and when he gave a feast—in this case a farewell dinner to his former shipmates of the Worcester and the Surprise and to some friends and relations in the Highland regiments—he did so very handsomely indeed.

  'It will be strange if you do not get a spotted dog. He particularly asked me to tell him your favourite dishes.'

  'I shall look forward to that'—his voice rose effortlessly to an enormous volume as he called out 'Come athwart my hawse and I shall ride you down, you half-baked son of an Egyptian fart,' to a wool-gathering jolly-boat; and art echoed from either shore. 'But now I come to think of it,' he went on, 'I have a mind to pull over to the Edinburgh and borrow Dundas's launch. It is remarkably beamy, much more suitable than our barge and since he is lying in ten fathom water, much more suitable than Surprise's fetid puddle, I make no doubt he will clap a tackle on to your bell and give you a dip: though it might be as well to let a ship's boy or a midshipman go down first to make sure it works.'

  'Professor Graham, sir, a good evening to you,' said Dr Maturin, walking into his colleague's room. 'I am come from walking on the bottom of the sea.'

  'Aye,' said Graham, looking up from his papers. 'So I understand. They were watching you from the Baracca with perspective glasses, bubbling away in your inverted cauldron: Colonel Veale laid two and a half to one you would never corne up again.'

  'I trust with all my heart he lost, the inhuman wretch.'