The Fortune of War (25 page)

The secretary wrote down the explanation: he and Brenton looked at one another and sniffed. 'Captain Aubrey,' said Brenton, 'do you expect me to believe that the Leopard consumed one million eighty-five thousand two hundred and sixty-six pounds of meat and one million one hundred and sixty-seven thousand nine hundred and ninety-five pounds of biscuits in a year?'

'Who the devil is talking about Leopard? And what the devil do you mean, sir, with your "do you expect me to believe"?' began Jack, then he broke off, his face turned to the window, listening intently. Was that distant gunfire, or thunder, or the rolling of a dray down there on the quays? He was absolutely unconscious of the officials, and his tense, remote expression impressed them strangely. Mr Brenton's eye fell on the razor, close by the Captain's hand; he checked his hasty answer and continued in an even voice, 'Well, we will leave that for the present. Now what have you to say to this?' holding out another paper. 'And pray what is the significance of kicky-wicky?'

Jack took it and his face grew paler still with anger: this was obviously, very obviously, a most private letter - he recognized that as soon as he recognized Admiral Drury's hand. 'Do you mean to tell me,' he said in a voice that filled the room, 'that you have broken the seal of a private letter, and that you have read what was clearly addressed to the lady alone? As God's my salvation..

From this point on the tone rose higher and still higher. Stephen heard them hard at it when he was on the stairs and when he opened the door the volume of sound was very great indeed. They fell silent as he paced across the room and took Jack's pulse: then, 'You must leave at once, sir,' he said to Brenton. 'That is doctor's orders.' But Brenton had been called a miserable scrub-faced swab of a civilian and many other things; he had been compelled by sheer moral force to sit silent for minutes on end while Captain Aubrey listened for the guns; he had been humiliated in the presence of his secretary and the useless bailiff's man; and breathing hard he cried that he would not move a step until he had that document, pointing to the Admiral's letter in Jack's hand. Then he let fly a series of passionate and sometimes coherent remarks about his importance in the Department, the Department's unlimited authority over prisoners, and his powers of coercion.

'Leave the room, sir,' said Stephen. 'You are doing the patient serious harm.'

'I shall not,' said Brenton, stamping.

Stephen pulled the bell and desired Bridey to tell the porter to step up: a moment later, without a sound, the immense Indian appeared in the door, filling it entirely. 'Be so good as to show these gentlemen out,' said Stephen.

The Indian's cold eye, quite expressionless, moved over them; they were already standing, and now they walked out. But Brenton turned on the threshold and shaking his fist at Jack he cried out, 'You have not heard the last of me.'

'Oh go to the devil, you silly little man,' said Jack, wearily; and then, when the door had closed, 'Officials are much the same all over the world. That reptile might have come straight from the Navy Office to badger me about dockets I had forgotten to countersign in the year one. But I tell you what, Stephen, President and Congress have slipped out on the ebb, and I am very much afraid they have got clean away.'

'I really cannot have you worried like this,' said Stephen, to whom the sailing of the frigates was, at this moment, a matter of complete indifference. He was also very much afraid that in common civility Jack would ask after Diana, and in his present state of mind or rather of confusion he did not wish to speak of her. 'I shall go and have a word with Dr Choate,' he said.

He walked slowly down the stairs and stepped into the porter's booth to thank the Indian for his services. The Indian listened with something like approval on his face. 'It was a pleasure to me,' he said, when Stephen had finished. 'They were government officials, and I hate government officials.'

'All government officials?'

'All American government officials.'

'You astonish me.'

'You would not be astonished if you were a native of this country, an aboriginal native. Here is a letter for you; it came after you had gone this morning.' Stephen saw that the direction was in Diana's bold dashing hand and he put the note into his pocket; if he could as easily have put it out of his mind he would have been relieved, for although he knew very well that presently he should have to clarify his thoughts and resolve a number of conflicts and apparent contradictions, he did long for a period of calm before doing so. Fortunately the Indian seemed to be in a mood for conversation: he asked, 'Why do you say Ugh to me?'

'I looked upon it as a usual greeting in the language of your nation - the Huron is represented as saying Ugh to the paleface in many authors, French and English. But if I am mistaken, sir, I ask your pardon: my intent was civil, though perhaps inept.'

'Most of the Hurons I know have every reason to say Ugh to the paleface, French, English or American: in the language that I speak - and I must tell you, sir, that there is an infinity of languages spoken by the original possessors of this continent - Ugh is an expression of disgust, repulsion, dislike. I had thought of resenting it, but it appeared to me that you meant no offence; and then I have a certain fellow-feeling for you; we are, after all, both defeated, both victims of the Americans.'

'Dr Choate has told me something of the unhappy Indian wars. He, at least, is very much opposed to them.'

'Dr Choate, yes: there are some good Americans, I admit. My grandfathers, who were at Harvard, at the Indian College, spoke of a Mr Adams as an excellent man. His mother, however, was a Shawnee - of the same nation, I may add, as the chief Tecumseh who is at present helping your people on the Canadian border. Here is Dr Choate.'

'Have you seen Dr Maturin?' asked Choate. 'I am looking for him.'

'And I was looking for you, colleague,' said Stephen from the darkness of the booth.

'I have an urgent cystotomy,' said Choate, 'and as we were speaking of it at our Sunday supper, I am come to beg for your assistance.'

'I shall be delighted,' said Stephen, and in fact nothing could have been more timely: an exceedingly delicate operation, but one that he had often carried out - the intense concentration of mind and hand, the moral preoccupation with the bound patient, only too conscious of the knife - these would entirely absorb his spirit, giving it that inner tranquillity where it could work without being thrust and pulled by his reason and his wishes. Yet there was also the night, the unoccupied night, to be considered, and after he had spoken to Dr Choate abut the necessity for keeping the Navy Department away from Jack Aubrey, he asked him for a pint of laudanum.

'The laudanum by all means,' said Choate, 'you will find it by the hogshead in the dispensary. As to the Navy Department, I shall do what I can, but these officials have very extensive powers in war-time. I have had notes from them, sharp, peremptory and authoritative, not to say hectoring.'

The operation, performed on an immensely obese, timid patient, was far more intricate than they had expected; yet finally it was done, and not only was it successful in itself, but there was a real likelihood that the man might live.

Stephen went to Jack's room to wash his hands, and found him asleep, lying on his back with his injured arm across his chest, and still with that set look of physical suffering and moral shock, not unlike the fainting, earth-coloured patient who had so recently been wheeled away. Stephen knew that nothing but a change of wind would wake him, and having washed he took the whisky-bottle from its hiding-place and drank off half a glass, neat and fierce. No alcohol was allowed in the Asciepia, but the Constitution's officers, particularly Mr Evans, were aware of this, and the space behind Captain Aubrey's books was filled with rye whisky, bourbon, and a thin, intensely acrid native wine.

He put the whisky back, dropped the glass - no change in that stern sleeping face - and withdrew, carrying his own laudanum bottle, green and labelled Poison. He had a small room on the inner courtyard, and here he found his lamp already lit and a fire glowing in the hearth: a greenshaded lamp that shone on his table and the papers spread over it, leaving the rest of the room in deep shadow. It was comfortable, the very picture of comfort; and he felt cold, desolate, extraordinarily lonely. Groping in his pocket he found Diana's note, tossed it on to the table, set his green bottle by it, threw his coat on the bed, and sat down, his chair turned half to the table and half to the fire.

For many, many years he had been unable to open his mind fully to any man or woman at all, and at times it seemed to him that candour was as essential as food or affection: during most of this period he had used his diary as a kind of surrogate for the non-existent loving ear - a very poor surrogate indeed, but one that had become so habitual as to be almost necessary. He missed it now, the close-written coded book, and having stared at the fire for a while he turned full to the table. His indifferent eye fell on the note, addressed in that familiar hand, and he drew a sheet of paper towards him.

'If I no longer love Diana,' he wrote, 'what shall I do?' What could he do, with his mainspring, his prime mover gone? He had known that he would love her for ever - to the last syllable of recorded time. He had not sworn it, any more than he had sworn that the sun would rise every morning: it was too certain, too evident: no one swears that he will continue to breathe nor that twice two is four. Indeed, in such a case an oath would imply the possibility of doubt. Yet now it seemed that perpetuity meant eight years, nine months and some odd days, while the last syllable of recorded time was Wednesday, the seventeenth of May. 'Can such things be?' he asked. He knew from examples that this had often happened to other men; and that other men also lost their minds or contracted cancer. Could it be that he was not, as he had implicitly supposed, exceptionally immune?

'Perhaps it is only an intermittence du coeur, no more.' That was extremely probable - a quasi-physical condition, allied to air and diet, anxiety, over-wrought anticipation, and a hundred other conspiring causes. He wrote another paragraph, with instances of strange, apparently inexplicable changes of set purpose, abdications, temporary loss of faith, that could in fact be set down to a vicious habit of body, mere body, the mind's dwelling-place - cowardice in brave men whose liver was disordered, the passing mental derangement of parturient women. He added some reflections on the effect of mind upon body too, such as eczemas, false pregnancies, and the actual production of milk, carefully sanded his last sheet, gathered the others, put them all into the dying fire, watched it flare up, turn and writhe, and fall into black, unmeaning ashes. He was not entirely convinced, and the contradictor in his mind observed that there were many men, and medical men at that, who palpated their tumours and pronounced them benign; but still it was a comfort to his undecided willing mind and with it he went to his bed. In the lower part of the building a man was singing 'Oh oh the mourning dove' as if his heart would break: Stephen listened to the song, until the rising tide of laudanum-sleep engulfed him.

The morning broke bright and clear, with a fine breeze in the north-north-west. Jack had been watching since dawn, and before breakfast he saw the expected sail stand into the bay; the light was exceptionally pure, the air transparent, and he soon identified the Shannon. She stood on and on, closer in than he had ever seen any of the blockading squadron, so close that he could see the officer up there with his telescope at the foretopgallant jacks. He could not swear to it, but he was almost sure that he recognized Philip Broke, who had had the Shannon these last five years. Closer still, until at last the gunners on Castle Island threw a high-pitched mortar-bomb right over her: at this she wore, but the little figure reappeared on her quarterdeck and mounted to the mizen cross-trees, the gleaming brass still levelled upon Boston harbour and the American men-of-war. A little later she filled and stood out into the offing on the larboard tack, while two hoists of signals broke out high above her topsails. Jack could not read them, but he knew very well what they had to say, and shifting his glass to the horizon he saw the Shannon's consort bear up, crowd sail and run fast away east-southeast, right out into the Atlantic.

'Where is the doctor?' he asked, when breakfast appeared.

'Sure he's sleeping yet,' said Bridey, 'and we will let him lie. He had the cruel hard bloody operation yesterday, and is quite destroyed.'

Stephen was lying still when Mr Evans called on Jack, bringing a friend. 'I will not sit down,' said Mr Evans. 'Dr Choate says you are not allowed visitors. But I could not resist coming up just for five minutes with Captain Lawrence, who has a message for you. Allow me to name Captain Lawrence, formerly of the Hornet, now of the Chesapeake. Captain Aubrey, of the Royal Navy.'

The captains expressed their pleasure, but it was difficult to see much of it on Lawrence's shy, embarrassed face, and the name of Hornet struck all cheerfulness from Jack's. However, he assumed a decent appearance of cordiality and in spite of their protests called for coffee and sweet biscuits - 'or cookies, as I should say', looking at Lawrence with a smile. He liked the look of him, a big, open-faced man in a white coat, a man with a modest, well-bred air, and obviously a sailor. Lawrence returned the smile - there was clearly a mutual liking in spite of the awkwardness of the situation - and said, 'A little while ago, sir, I had the pleasure of meeting Lieutenant Mowett of your service, and he particularly desired me to wait on you, to bring his respects, to ask how you did, and to tell you that he was coming along very well in the hospital at New York.'

Mowett had been one of Jack's midshipmen many years before, and Lawrence had met him in the course of the murderous action in which the Hornet sank the Peacock. As they talked of the young man, who had had three ribs stove in by a splinter of the Peacock's rail, it became clear that Lawrence and he had gone along very well together during their long voyage from the Demerara river and that Lawrence had been kind to the wounded lieutenant; Jack's heart warmed to him - he was much attached to Mowett.