Book 2 - Post Captain

by Patrick O'Brian

  Was this attempt going to succeed? At the bottom of his heart he had never doubted it to begin with—so long as he did his part (barring some act of God or unaccountable misfortune) neither he nor Stephen Maturin would pass the rest of the war as prisoners, cut off from all possibility of service, promotion, a lucky cruise, cut off from Sophia; cut off, indeed, from Diana. A long war, he made no doubt, for Bonaparte was strong—Jack had been astonished by the state of forwardness of everything he had seen in Toulon: three ships of the line almost ready for launching, a huge quantity of stores, unexampled zeal. Any man bred to the sea, any born sailor, could tell within an hour of being aboard whether a ship was an efficient, happy co-ordinated whole; it was the same with a naval port, and in Toulon his quick, professional eye had seen a great machine running very fast, very smoothly. France was strong; France owned the fine Dutch navy, controlled huge areas of western Europe; England was weak and alone—no allies left at all, as far as he could tell from the fragmentary, partial news they had picked up. Certainly the Royal Navy was weak; he had no doubt of that at all. St Vincent had tried to reform the dockyards rather than build ships, and now there were fewer that could stand in the line of battle than there had been in '93, in spite of all the building and all the captures during the ten years of war: and that again was a reason—quite apart from the obligations of the treaty—why Spain should come in on the side of France—another reason why they should find the frontier closed and Stephen's refuge lost to them, the attempt a failure after all. Had Spain declared? For the last two or three days they had been in the Roussillon, in French Catalonia, and he had not been able to understand anything that Stephen and the peasants said to one another. Stephen was strangely reticent these days. Jack had supposed he knew him through and through in the old uncomplicated times, and he loved all he knew; but now there were new depths, an underlying hard ruthlessness, an unexpected Maturin; and Jack was quite out of his depth.

  Stephen had gone on, leaving him. Stephen had a passport into Spain—could move about there, war or no . . . Jack's mind darkened still further and thoughts he dared not formulate came welling up, an ugly swarm.

  'Dear God,' he said at last, twisting his head from side to side, 'could I have sweated all my courage out?' Courage gone, and generosity with it? He had seen courage go—men run down hatchways in battle, officers cower behind the capstan. He and Stephen had talked about it: was courage a fixed, permanent quality? An expendable substance, each man having just so much, with a possible end in sight? Stephen had put forward views on courage varying and relative—dependent upon diet, circumstances, the functioning of the bowels—the costive frequently timid—upon use, upon physical and spiritual freshness or exhaustion—the aged proverbially cautious—courage not an entity, but to be regarded as belonging to different, though related, systems, moral, physical, sexual—courage in brutes, in the castrated—complete integrity, unqualified courage or puerile fiction-jealousy, its effect upon courage—Stoics—the satietas vitae and the supreme courage of indifference—indifference, indifference.

  The tune that Stephen always played on his bear-leader's pipe began to run through his head, mingling with Stephen's voice and half-remembered instances of courage from Plutarch, Nicholas of Pisa and Boethius, a curious little air with archaic intervals, limited to what four fingers and overblowing could do, but subtle, complicated . . .

  The roaring of a little girl in a white pinafore woke him; she and some unseen friend were looking for the summer mushrooms that were found in this wood, and she had come upon a fungoid growth.

  'Ramón,' she bellowed, and the hollow echoed with the sound, 'Ramón, Ramón, Ramón. Come and see what I have found. Come and see what I have found. Come and see . . .'

  On and on and on. She was turned three-quarters from him; but presently, since her companion did not answer, she pivoted, directing her strong voice to the different quarters of the wood.

  Jack had already shrunk as far as he could, and now as the child's face veered towards him he closed his eyes, in case she should sense their savage glare. His mind was now all alive; no trace of indifference now, but a passionate desire to succeed in this immediate step, to carry the whole undertaking through, come Hell or high water. 'Frighten the little beast and you will have a band of armed peasants round the wood in five minutes—slip away and you lose Stephen—out of touch, and all our papers sewed inside the skin.' The possibilities came racing one after another; and no solution.

  'Come, come, child,' said Stephen. 'You will spoil your voice if you call out so. What have you there? It is a satanic boletus; you must not eat the satanic boletus, my dear. See how it turns blue when I break it with a twig. That is the devil blushing. But here we have a parasol. You may certainly eat the parasol. Have you seen my bear? I left him in the wood when I went to see En Jaume; he was sadly fatigued. Bears cannot stand the sun.'

  'En Jaume is my godfather's uncle,' said the child. 'My godfather is En Pere. What is the name of your bear?'

  'Flora,' said Stephen; and called, 'Flora!'

  'You said him just now,' said the child with a frown, and began to roar 'Flora, Flora, Flora, Flora! Oh, Mother of God, what a huge great bear.' She put her hand in Stephen's and murmured, 'Aie, my—in the face of God what a bear.' But her courage returned, and she set to bellowing 'Ramón, Ramón, Ramón! Come and see my bear.'

  'Good-bye, poppets,' said Stephen, in time. 'May God go with you.' And waving still to the little figures he said, 'I have firm news at last; mixed news. Spain has not declared war: but the Mediterranean ports are closed to English ships. We must go down to Gibraltar.'

  'What about the frontier?'

  Stephen pursed his lips. 'The village is filled with police and soldiers: two intelligence men are in charge, searching everything. They have arrested one English agent.'

  'How do you know?'

  'The priest who confessed him told me. But sure I have never thought of the road itself. I know, I did know, another way. Stand over—stand over more this way. The pink roof, and behind it a peak? And to the right of that, beyond the forest, a bare mountain? That is the frontier, joy, and in the dip there is a pass, a path down to Recasens and Cantallops. We will slip across the road after dusk and be there at dawn.'

  'May I take off the skin?'

  'You may not. I regret it extremely, Jack; but I do not know the path well—there are patrols out, not only for the smugglers but for the fugitives, and we may blunder into one or even two. It is a smugglers' path, a dangerous path indeed, for while the French may shoot you for walking upon it as a man, the smugglers may do the same for looking like a bear. But the second is the proper choice; your smuggler is open to reason, and your patrol is not.'

  Half an hour in the bushes by the road, waiting for the long slow train of a battery to pass by—guns, waggons, camp-followers—several coaches, one pulled by eight mules in crimson harness, some isolated horsemen; for now that they could see the frontier-line their caution grew to superstitious lengths.

  Half an hour, and then across to the cart-track up to Saint-Jean de l'Albère. Up and up, the moon clearing the forest ahead of them after the first hour; and with the coming of the moon the first breaths of a sirocco from the Spanish plains, a waft from an opened oven-door.

  Up and still up. After the last barn the track dwindled to a ribbon and they had to walk in single file; Jack saw Stephen's monstrous bundle—a dark shape, no more—moving steadily a pace or two in front of them, and something like hatred glowed around his stomach. He reasoned: 'The pack is heavy; it weighs fifty or sixty pounds—all our possessions; he too has been going on all these days, never a murmur; the straps wring his back and shoulders, a bloody welt on either side.' But the unwavering determination of that dim form, moving steadily on and on, effortlessly, it seemed, always too fast and never pausing—the impossibility of keeping up, of forcing himself another hundred yards, and the equal impossibility of calling for a rest, drowned his reason, leaving only the dull fire
of resentment.

  The path meandered, branching and sometimes disappearing among huge ancient widespread beeches, their trunks silver in the moon, and at last Stephen stopped. Jack blundered into him, stood still, and felt a hand gripping him hard through the skin: Stephen guided him into the black velvet shadow of a fallen tree. Over the soughing of the wind he heard a repeated metallic sound, and as he recognized the regular beat—a patrol making too much noise—all notion of the unbreathable air and the intolerable state of his body left him. Low voices now and then, a cough, still the clink-clink-clink of someone's musket against a buckle, and presently the soldiers passed within twenty yards of them, moving down the mountain-side.

  The same strong hand pulling him, and they were on the path again. Always this eternal climb, sometimes across the leaf-filled bed of a stream, sometimes up an open slope so steep that it was hands and knees: and the sirocco. 'Can this be real?' he wondered. 'Must it go on for ever?'

  The beech-trees gave way to pines: pine-needles under foot, oh the pain. Endless pines on an endless mountain, their roaring tops bowing northwards in the wind.

  The shape in front had stopped, muttering 'It should be about here—the second fork—there was a charcoal burner's lay—an uprooted larch, bees in the hollow trunk.'

  Jack closed his eyes for a great swimming pause, a respite, and when he opened them again he saw that the sky ahead was lightening. Behind them the moon had sunk into a haze, far down in the deep veiled complicated valleys.

  The pines. Then suddenly no more pines—a few stunted bushes, heather, and the open turf. They were on the upper edge of the forest, a forest ruled off sharp, as though by a line; and they stood, silently looking out. After two or three minutes, right up there in the eye of the wind, Jack saw a movement. Leaning to Stephen he said 'Dog?' Soldiers who had had the sense to bring a dog? Loss, dead failure after all this?

  Stephen took his head, and whispering right into the hairy ear he said 'Wolf. A young—a young female wolf.'

  Still Stephen waited, searching the bushes, the bare rocks, from the far left to the far right, before he walked out, paced over the short grass to a stone set on the very top of the slope, a squared stone with a red-painted cross cut into it.

  'Jack,' said he, leading him beyond the boundary mark, 'I bid you welcome to my land. We are in Spain. That is my house below—we are at home. Come, let me get your head off. Now you can breathe, my poor friend. There are two springs under the brow of the hill, by those chestnuts, where you can wash and take off the skin. How I rejoice at the sight of that wolf. Look, here is her dung, quite fresh. No doubt this is a wolf's pissing-post: like all the dogs, they have their regular . . .'

  Jack sat heavily on the stone, gasping inwards, filling his starved lungs. Some reality other than general suffering returned. 'Wolf's pissing-post: oh, yes.' In front of him the ground fell suddenly—almost a precipice—two thousand feet below there was Spanish Catalonia spread out in the morning light. A high-towered castle just below them on a jutting rock—a lobbed stone would reach it; the Pyrenees folded away and away in long fingers to the plain; square distant fields, vineyards green; a shining river winding left-handed towards the great sweep of the sea; the Bay of Rosas with Cap Creus at the far northern end—home water, and now the hot wind smelt of salt.

  'I am happy you were pleased with your wolf,' he said at last in a sleep-walker's voice. 'There are—they are uncommon rare, I dare say.'

  'Not at all, my dear. We have them by the score—can never leave the sheep by night. No. Her presence means we are alone. That is why I rejoice. I rejoice. Even so, I think we should go down to the spring: it is under the chestnuts, those chestnuts not two minutes down. That wolfess may be a fool—see her now, moving among the junipers—and I should not wish to fail, just when we have succeeded. Some chance cross-patrol, douaniers rather than soldiers, some zealous sergeant with a carabine . . . Can you get up? God help me, I hardly can.'

  The spring, Jack wallowing in it, cold water and grit sweeping off the crass, the stream running filthy, but coming fresh and fresh straight from the rock. Jack luxuriating, drying in the wind, plunging again and again. His body was dead white where it was not cruelly galled, bitten, rasped; his colourless face puffy, sweat-swollen, corpse-like, a tangled yellow beard covering his mouth; his eyes were red and pustulent. But there was life in them, brilliant delight blazing through the physical distress.

  'You have lost between three and four stone,' observed Stephen, appraising his loins and belly.

  'I am sure you are right,' said Jack. 'And nine parts of it is in this vile skin, a good three stone of human grease.' He kicked the limp bear with his bleeding foot, damned it once or twice for a son of a bitch, and observed he must take the papers out before setting it alight. 'How it will stink—how it does stink, by God. Just hand me along the scissors, Stephen, pray.'

  'The bear may serve again,' said Stephen. 'Let us roll it up and thrust it under the bush. I will send for it from the house.'

  'Is the house a great way off?'

  'Why no,' said Stephen, pointing to the castle. 'It is just there below us, a thousand feet or so—to the right of the white scar, the marble quarry. Though I am afraid it will take us an hour to get there—an hour to breakfast.'

  'Is that castle yours, Stephen?'

  'It is. And this is my sheepwalk. What is more,' he said, looking sharply at the cowpats, 'I believe those French dogs from La Vaill have been sending their cattle over to eat my grass.'

  Chapter Five

  Three days after crossing the tropic the Lord Nelson East-Indiaman, Captain Spottiswood, homeward-bound from Bombay, broached to in a westerly gale; the ship survived, but she lost her maintopmast and its topgallant, carried away her mizzen just above the cap, sprang her fore and main masts, and damaged her rigging to an extraordinary extent. She also lost her boats upon the booms and most of the booms themselves; so, the wind being foul for Madeira, the passengers in a state of panic and the crew near mutiny after a very long and uniformly disagreeable voyage, Mr Spottiswood bore away for Gibraltar, right under his lee, although like all homeward-bound captains he was very unwilling to put into a naval port. As he had expected, he lost many of his English-born sailormen to the press, all prime hands; but he did repair his ship, and as some meagre consolation he did embark a few passengers.

  The first to come aboard were Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin; they were received by the captain at the head of his officers in some style, for the Company possessed, or at least arrogated to itself, a particular status, and its ships adopted many of the ways of the Royal Navy. There were sensible reasons for some of these—the chequered gun-ports, for instance, and the general appearance of regularity had persuaded many an enemy cruiser that he had to do with a man-of-war and that he had better look elsewhere—but there were many little pretensions that vexed the real Navy, and King's officers aboard a Company ship were apt to look about them with a carping eye. In this case a critic could have found fault straight away: in spite of the black side-boys in their white gloves, the reception was incorrect—that vague huddle of figures would never have done aboard the Superb, for example, in which Jack had dined, and whose hospitality was still ringing in his head, although he could walk straight. Furthermore, he was conscious of a huge grin from the midst of that same huddle, a kind of half-determined nodding and becking, a bashfulness accompanied by familiarity that brought a hint of stiffness into his expression. He spoke with particular civility to Captain Spottiswood, who privately damned him for his condescension, and then turning he recognized the stare.

  'Why, Pullings!' he cried, all his ill-humour—a very slight ill-humour in any case—vanishing at once and the hard lines of his face dissolving into a delighted smile. 'How happy I am to see you! How do you do? How are you coming along, eh? Eh?'

  'And this is our supercargo, Mr Jennings,' said Captain Spottiswood, not best pleased at having his regular sequence changed. 'Mr Bates. Mr Wand. Mr Pullings you
already know, I see.'

  'We were shipmates,' said Jack, shaking Pullings's hand with a force in direct proportion to his affection for the young man, a former master's mate and acting-lieutenant in the Sophie, who was now beaming over his shoulder at Dr Maturin.

  The Lord Nelson had never been a happy or a fortunate ship, but within an hour of taking her passengers on board a brisk Levanter sprang up to carry her right out through the strong current of the Gut and into the full Atlantic; and poor Captain Spottiswood, in the innocence of his heart, reckoned this a great stroke of luck—a good omen at last, perhaps. She was not a very comely ship, either, nor much of a sailer: comfortable for the passengers, roomy for her cargo, certainly; but crank, slow in stays, and near the end of her useful life. This was, in fact, to be her last voyage, and even for her trip in 1801 the underwriters had insisted upon an extra thirty shillings per cent.

  It also happened that she was the first Indiaman Jack had ever sailed in, and as he walked about with Pullings during his watch below he gazed with astonishment at the general lumber of the deck and at the casks and water-butts lashed between the guns. Twenty eighteen-pounders and six twelves: an imposing show of force for a merchantman. 'And how many people have you aboard?' he asked.