Blue at the Mizzen (26 page)

'Not that I know of. Its effects can be seen and measured, but apart from that and some pretty wild unsubstantiated statements I do not think we yet know the ABC. Though Lankester may - he has done a great deal of work recently with copper wire in coils. Mr. Lankester..."

'Well, Aubrey,' cried Mr. Dobson, 'welcome ashore. All we need now is Noah, Neptune, and a couple of tritons, ha, ha, ha,' and he called for another bowl of punch.

Punch or no, they listened very attentively to Jack's brief play-by-play account of boarding the privateer from the landward side while Surprise's few mortars, briskly served, pooped up various lights into the seaward sky, varied with flashes and shattering bangs.

This really finished the day. After a somewhat rambling and hazy supper, three or four Fellows were led up to bed, and the rest sat under the starlit sky, sobering themselves with the iced juice of various fruits.

'What was the damage aboard?' asked Stephen as they walked back to the mare's agreeable inn.

'Extraordinarily little,' said Jack. 'Nothing that dear Poll could not deal with. Those fellows, those Chiloe privateers, knew nothing about action: they sailed their ship quite well, but as for fighting her... On the other hand, our young fellows really pleased me - our Chileans, I mean. They handled their craft quite well on the way over, and they boarded her like good 'uns, cutlass in hand."

'Shall you ride back tomorrow? I have two men to see, and then I am away.'

'I do not think so. Since I speak no Spanish, I am not much use in Santiago, now that I have done the civil thing, with your help, by all the proper authorities. No. Down here I can really accomplish something, according to our agreement with the Supreme Director: they have good yards, decent craft up to a hundred tons or so, and at this time of year the breezes are reasonably steady and kind; and above all the eager young men learn very quick. Harding and Whewell speak a little Spanish, so do a few of the petty officers and hands, but the great thing is that most of them grasp the idea from good will and example. A rolling hitch is not all that simple, the first time: but I only had to show Pedro once, and he did it again and again, laughing with pleasure and asking my pardon for laughing.' 'I am heartily glad to hear what you say, my dear. We may have great need of young men that can tie a hitch... but as for laughter, open, audible laughter, I quite agree with your Pedro. There is something curiously offensive about it: above all when it is not truly amused, deeply amused. A parcel of excited young women screeching aloud and agitating their persons and limbs is enough to make one retire to a monastery. Our Fellows did not present a very elevating spectacle.'

'I did notice some of the Spaniards looking rather grave, and I did regret the last bowl of punch. Yet on the other hand, ours is an eminently respectable society: the Proceedings are known all over the learned world, and the men of the Isaac Newton, however bibulous on occasion, carry recommendations to the government, foreign office and universities of whatever country they visit. I do assure you, Stephen, that our connexion with them, with the Society as a whole in its most sober and learned mood, is a singular advantage to us.'

'My dear, I am entirely in agreement with you, no other Fellow more: yet even so, I could wish they would not laugh; or at the least, if they are truly amused, that they would laugh like men rather than eunuchs.'

'Oh, dear Jack,' he said, pausing at the door, 'I had almost forgot a note for you in Sir Joseph's packet.' He passed it over, a more substantial letter than his own, and written very small.

It was some time before Stephen came back to their inn, for he had found the small Catalan colony in Valparaiso dancing their native sardana in the square outside St Vincent's and he walked in smiling, the familiar music still running in his head.

But the smile was wiped clean away by the sight of Jack so reduced with sorrow, deeply unhappy, red-eyed and bent.

Stephen had often deplored the tendency of the English to display their feelings - their emotional weakness - but now looking sharply at his friend he saw something quite out of the common run: and indeed Jack stood up, blew his nose, and said, 'Forgive me, Stephen: I do beg pardon for this disgraceful exhibition: but Sophie's letter quite bowled me over.' He held up the almost transparent pages. 'She is so brave and good - never a harsh word, nor a hint of complaint, even though the girls have been really ill and Heneage Dundas is not quite pleased with George's conduct in Lion. She brought the whole place so alive, Stephen - I could see it all, courtyard, stables, library, farm-land and common. And she said such kind things about Christine and your Brigid:... Lord, it quite unmanned me. Strutting about on the other side of the world, leaving everything to them... I had no idea how attached I was.'

Stephen took his pulse, pulled down his eyelid, and said, 'It is very, very hard: but in the first place you are to consider that the dear west wind will waft us through the Strait, and then, which is not improbable, if you accompany the squadron, it will almost take us to the Cape. And there with the liberation of Chile behind you, you may bring Sophie down and any others you choose, to a delightful healthy country, new sights and admirable wine - Sophie dearly loves her glass, God bless her. And as a physician I do assure you, Jack, that we must sup extremely well, on thick beef-steaks, with a large amount of burgundy (I know where Chambertin is to be had), and then a soothing draught to take to bed.'

The next morning, having fondly visited both men-of-war - how very much at home he felt in either - having greeted all his old shipmates, and they reminding one another of cruel hard times - how the Doctor had declined a gravid seal's burden - and having conferred with Poll and Maggie about their cheerful, well-bandaged patients, he rode away.

With the dusty town behind him he struck into the main Santiago road, almost deserted that day. Up and up on the fine-pacing mare, and quite soon he reached that stretch of fissured, apparently soil-less shoulder of rock so remarkably studded with the small, extraordinarily spiny cactus locally called the lion's cub. It took them an hour and more to round this vast mass and reach the farther stretches where the winding road rose and fell through almost barren ground - barren, except for some botanical wonders; and, for so bare a countryside, remarkably well populated by birds of prey, ranging from a minute shrike to the inevitable condor. The rise took up at least nine tenths of the way, a steady, inevitable rise with every now and then a descent so steep that he dismounted and took the bridle. And all the way along this prodigious highway through the mountains, whether he rode or whether he walked, there before him, at various distances, sometimes diaphanous, occasionally sharply focused and clear, he saw not indeed Christine but various aspects of her: and the miles went by unnoticed, until the mare stopped at the usual resting-place and turned her mild gaze upon him, with a hint of reproof.

On the next stretch they passed through an invisible barrier into a thinner, cooler air, and there were his - not illusions: perceptions might be the better word - of Christine again, clearer and sharper now, particularly as she moved across a dark wall of rock. A tall, straight, lithe figure, walking easily and well: he remembered with the utmost clarity how, when she was reading or playing music or training her glass on a bird, or merely reflecting, she would be entirely apart, remote, self-contained; and then how she would be wholly with him when he moved or spoke. Two strikingly different beings; and the delight in her company, as he delighted even in the memory of it, seemed to him essential happiness, fulfillment. Of course he was a man, quite markedly so, and he would have liked to know her physically: but that was secondary, a very remote stirring compared with gazing at this phantasm - this now remarkably clear and sharply-defined phantasm against the rock-face.

He had gathered that she was respected but not particularly liked in the colony, where her most uncommon beauty seemed to pass if not unnoticed then at least sometimes unadmired. In a crowded gathering he had heard a conventionally pretty woman say 'I can't think what they see in her', referring to the group of young and middle-aged men who rarely moved far from where she was standing.

In Stephen's long-considered opinion the most striking thing about her was the change from a perfectly well-bred woman, little given to personalities or colonial chit-chat, reserved but not at all woundingly so - the remarkable transition to warmth and sympathetic exchange with someone she liked. When this took place her whole physical attitude altered with it: at no time did she ever hold herself stiffly, but now there was a suppleness in her whole stance; and Stephen, who had watched her more closely than he had watched the rarest of birds, could tell by a minute change in her complexion whether she was going to like her companion or not. 'Besotted I may be,' he said aloud, 'but that spontaneous confidentiality...'

He did not finish even the thought, because at a corner immediately ahead appeared the leader of a mule-train, an aged animal with a hat on her head, accompanied by a man who in an enormous roaring voice that echoed in the chasm, desired Stephen and his mare to step aside into the appointed nook.

Isobel, the mare, knew exactly what to do, which was just as well, since Stephen was so deep in his own discourse, so intent on his wonderfully convincing (though distant) illusion, he had not noticed for the last quarter of a mile that they had been walking on the edge of a sheer, a truly appalling, precipice, the road having been cut across the face of a cliff.

'Go with God,' called the man at the head of the train as he passed, and those at the end blessed Stephen too -comforting in so very lonely and inhuman a spot. But when they were round the corner and plodding steadily upwards in the fading light through the now much narrower valley, his illusion, (always a perfectly silent illusion), was no longer there. No searching, no effort of the imagination could call it up: what is more, the nature of the landscape had changed. One more sharp turn and directly before them there was the dip in the skyline that showed the high pass, and well below it, on a smooth, almost domestic slope, the lanterns of their inn.

A frosty morning, and they crossed the pass, coming to a much more populated road, somewhat tedious and commonplace: another inn, with even poorer food. Up and down: up and down: no illusions, alas; but towards the end of a weary day, Santiago. Isobel, rubbed down and filled with a fine warm mash, could go to sleep in her accustomed stable, her head drooping: and Stephen returned to his hotel, where he found Jacob in an unusual state of agitation. 'So you have come back,' he cried.

'I could not agree more,' said Stephen. 'Pray help me off with these boots.'

The boots off, with a final gasping heave, Jacob said, 'Unless these two new agents lie in their teeth - and I could swear they are independent, each ignorant of the other's enquiries - there is anxious news from both Lima and Callao. The viceroy has decided on invasion, to be preceded, with the full consent and approval of the naval staff, by an attack on Valparaiso.'

Stephen nodded, and Jacob went on, 'But this, above all the naval part, requires more stores than they possess, and the people concerned - the various boards - are running up and down buying rope, canvas, gunpowder and so on. Fortunately for us, many of those involved, the manufacturers of rope, canvas and gunpowder, have either, as you may well imagine, raised their prices or concealed their wares until the prices shall have reached to what they suppose their limit.'

'Can such things be?' asked Stephen. 'But in any case, before sending off post-haste to warn poor Captain Aubrey, I must be fed. I smelt the homely scent of an olla podrida as I came up the stairs. I have eaten my fill of fried guinea-pigs between here and Valparaiso and back again and I tell you most solemnly that I absolutely must be fed.'

'Well, if your god is your belly, I suppose you must worship it,' said Jacob; but he did touch the bell.

Within moments the fragrant olla, which stood perpetually simmering, perpetually renewed, on the rim of the kitchen hearth, reached the eager table.

Repletion came at last, and Stephen pushed back his chair: from an inner pocket he drew the pouch in which he kept his coca leaves, the lime and the necessary outer wrapping. He had no particular urge to chew coca at this moment, but he knew how a meal as substantial as that which he had just eaten dulled the mind. He desired that his wits should be as sharp as possible, and while he carefully dosed his proportions he said to his friend, 'Amos, when you used coca in considerable quantities, did you observe a difference in reaction according to altitude? I know that porters in the Peruvian Andes, when they have to carry a heavy burden over a very high pass, will increase the dose to a surprising degree. They seemed to take no harm and I supposed that physical energy, physical endurance and freedom from hunger was all they sought and all they derived. But have any other effects come to your attention?'

'Not in the north: no - apart from compulsive habituation, of course. But as you know there are many sorts of coca: down here they use the Tia Juana. And here, in the case of asthmatic patients or those afflicted with migraine there have been reports of hallucinations, their strength and frequency varying with the height - not with exertion, but with altitude.'

Stephen separated the ingredients of his little packet into their different compartments, and said, 'Thank you, dear colleague; but I do not like the notion of a vegetable providing my beatific vision: if it chooses to sharpen my intelligence, to allow me to multiply seven by twelve, well and good: but the sacred emotions, no. Amos, we must go down to Valparaiso directly, though I quite dread seeing that road again.'

'If only you could overcome your prejudice against the mules, as I have said many times before, I could show you a quicker, easier road. True, there are a few very steep passages that only a goat or a mule could venture upon without dread, but you can always leap down after they have shown you the way.'