The Mauritius Command (3 page)

Stephen resumed his professional role. He had delivered some scores of babies at the Rotunda in his student days, but since then his practice had lain among adults, particularly among seafaring adults, and few men of his professional standing could have been worse qualified for this task; however, he picked them up, listened to their hearts and lungs, opened their mouths and peered within, bent their limbs, and made motions before their eyes.

"How old are they?" he asked.

"Why, they must be quite old by now," said Jack. "They seem to have been here for ever. Sophie will know exactly."

Sophie came in, and to his pleasure Stephen saw both the little creatures lose their eternal, ancient look; they smiled, wriggled and jerked themselves convulsively with joy, mere human larvae.

"You need not be afraid for them," he said, as he and Jack walked over the fields towards their dinner. "They will do very well; they may even turn out a pair of phoenixes, in time. But I do beg you will not countenance that thoughtless way people have of flinging them up into the air. It is liable to do great harm, to confuse their intellects; and a girl, when grown into a woman, has greater need of her intellect than a man. It is a grievous error to fling them to the ceiling."

"God's my life!" cried Jack, pausing in his stride. "You don't tell me so? I thought they liked being tossed up--they laugh and crow and so on, almost human. But I shall never do it again, although they are only girls, poor little swabs."

It is curious, the way you dwell upon their sex. They are your own children, for all love, your very flesh; and yet I could almost suppose, and not only from your referring to them as swabs, a disobliging term, that you were disappointed in them, merely for being girls. It is, to be sure, a misfortune for them--the orthodox Jew daily thanks his Maker for not having been born a woman, and we might well echo his gratitude--but I cannot for the life of me see how it affects you, your aim being, as I take it, posterity, a vicarious immortality: and for that a girl is if anything a better assurance than a boy."

"Perhaps it is a foolish prejudice," said Jack, "but to tell you the truth, Stephen, I had longed for a boy. And to have not one girl but two--well, I would not have Sophie know it for the world, but it is a disappointment, reason how I may. My heart was set on a boy: I had it all worked out in my mind. I should have taken him to sea at seven or eight, with a good schoolmaster aboard to give him a thorough grounding in mathematics and even perhaps a parson for the frills, Latin and morality and so on. He should have spoken French and Spanish as well as you do, Stephen; and I could have taught him a deal of seamanship. Even if I could get no ship for years and years, I knew just what admirals and captains to place him with; he would not have lacked for friends in the service; and if he had not been knocked on the head first, I should have seen him made post by twenty-one or -two. Maybe I should have seen him hoist his flag at last. I could help a boy along, at sea; and the sea is the only thing I know. What use can I possibly be to a parcel of girls? I cannot even give them portions."

"By the law of averages the next is very likely to be a boy," said Stephen, "and then you will carry out your benevolent scheme."

"There is no likelihood of another. None at all," said Jack. "You have not been married, Stephen--but I cannot explain--should never have mentioned it. This is the stile to the turnpike: you can see the Crown from here."

They said nothing as they walked along the road. Stephen reflected upon Sophie's confinement: he had not been present, but he understood from his colleagues that it had been unusually difficult and prolonged--a bad presentation--yet there had been no essential lesion. He also reflected upon Jack's life at Ashgrove Cottage; and standing before the fire in the Crown, a fine great, posting-inn on the main Portsmouth road, he said, "Were we to speak generally, we might say that upon the whole sailors, after many years of their unnatural, cloistered life, tend to regard the land as Fiddler's Green, a perpetual holiday; and that their expectations cannot be attempted to be fulfilled. What the ordinary landsman accepts as the common lot, the daily round of domestic ills, children, responsibilities, the ordinary seaman is apt to look upon as a disappointment of his hopes, an altogether exceptional trial, and an invasion of his liberty."

"I catch your drift, old Stephen," said Jack with a smile, "and there is a great deal in what you say. But not every ordinary seaman has Mrs Williams to live with him. I am not complaining, mark you. She is not a bad sort of a woman at all; she does her best according to her own lights, and she is truly devoted to the children. The trouble is that I had somehow got the wrong notion of marriage. I had thought there was more friendship and confidence and unreserve in it than the case allows. I am not criticizing Sophie in the least degree, you understand -

"Certainly not."

"--but in the nature of things... The fault is entirely on my side, I am sure. When you are in command, you get so sick of the loneliness, of playing the great man and so on, that you long to break out of it; but in the nature of things it don't seem possible." He relapsed into silence.

After a while Stephen said, "So if you were ordered to sea, brother, I collect you would not rage and curse, as being snatched away from domestic felicity--the felicity, I mean, of a parent guiding his daughters" first interesting steps?"

"I should kiss the messenger," said Jack.

"This I had supposed for some time now," murmured Stephen.

"For one thing, I should be on full pay," continued Jack, land for another, there would be a chance of prize-money, and I might be able to give them portions." At the word prize-money the old piratical look gleamed in his bright blue eye and he straightened to his full height. "And indeed I have some hopes of a ship. I pepper the Admiralty with letters, of course, and some days ago I wrote to Bromley: there is a frigate fitting out in the Dockyard, the old Diane, doubled and braced with Snodgrass's diagonals. I even pester Old Jarvie from time to time, though he don't love me. Oh, I have half a dozen irons in the fire--I suppose you have not been up to anything, Stephen? Not another Surprise, with an envoy for the East Indies?"

"How come you to ask such a simple question, Jack? Hush: do not gape, but look privily towards the stair. There is a most strikingly handsome woman."

Jack glanced round, and there in fact was a most strikingly handsome woman, young, spry, a lady very much alive, wearing a green riding-habit; she was aware of being looked at, and she moved with even more grace than nature had provided.

He turned heavily back to the fire. "I have no use for your women," he said. "Handsome or otherwise."

"I never expected you to utter so weak a remark," said Stephen. "To lump all women together in one undiscriminated heap is as unphilosophical as to say... "

"Gentlemen," said the host of the Crown, "your dinner is on the table, if you please to walk in."

It was a good dinner, but even the soused hog's face did not restore Captain Aubrey's philosophy, nor give his expression the old degree of cheerfulness that Stephen had known outlast privation, defeat, imprisonment and even the loss of his ship.

After the first remove, which had been entirely taken up with memories of earlier commissions and former shipmates, they spoke of Mrs Williams's affairs. That lady, having lost her man of business by death, had been unfortunate in her choice of a new one, a gentleman with a scheme of investment that must infallibly yield seventeen and a half per cent. Her capital had been engulfed and with it her estate, though up until the present she still retained the house whose rent paid the interest on the mortgage. "I cannot blame her," said Jack. "I dare say I should have done the same myself: even ten per cent would have been wonderfully tempting. But I wish she had not lost Sophie's dowry too. She did not choose to transfer it until the Michaelmas dividends were due, and in decency we could hardly press her, so it all went, being in her name. I mind the money, of course, but even more than that I mind its making Sophie unhappy. She feels she is a burden, which is the greatest nonsense. But what can I say? I might as well talk to the cathead."

"Allow me to pour you another glass of this port," said Stephen. "It is an innocent wine, neither sophisticated nor muddy, which is rare in these parts. Tell me, who is the Miss Herschel of whom you spoke with such warm approbation?"

"Ah, now, that is another case altogether: there is a woman who bears out all you say about heaps," cried Jack. "There is a woman you can talk to as one rational being to another. Ask her the measure of an arc whose cosine is nought, and instantly she replies pi upon two: it is all there, in her head. She is sister to the great Mr. Herschel."

"The astronomer?"

"Just so. He honoured me with some most Judicious remarks on refraction when I addressed the Royal Society, and that is how I came to know her. She had already read my paper on the Jovian moons, was more than civil about it, and suggested a quicker way of working my heliocentric longitudes. I go to see her every time she comes down to Newman's observatory, which is pretty often, and we sit there either sweeping for comets all night or talking about instruments. She and her brother must have made some hundreds in their time. She understands telescopes from clew to earring, and it was she who showed me how to figure a speculum, and where to get my superfine Pomeranian sludge. And it is not mere theory: I have seen her walking round and round a post in Newman's stable yard for a good three hours without a break, putting the last touches to a six-inch mirror--it will never do to take your hand from the surface at that stage, you know--taking snuff from a saucer every hundred paces. An admirable woman; you would love her, Stephen. And she sings, too--hits the note plumb in the middle, as pure as the Carlotta."

"If she is Mr. Herschel's sister, I presume she is a lady of a certain age?"

"Oh, yes, she must be sixty or so: she could never have come by such a knowledge of double stars in less. Sixty at least. Yet it is all one. Whenever I come home from a night with Miss Herschel there are wry looks, a tolerably frigid welcome."

"Since it has physical effects, the sorrow and woe that is in marriage no doubt belongs to the province of the physician," said Stephen. "But I am as little acquainted with it as I am with gardening, or domestic economy."

He was brought nearer acquainted the next morning, when he walked up to breakfast at the cottage. He was far too early, and the first sight that met his eye was the twins flinging their pap about and shrieking as they did so, while their grandmother, protected by a coarse canvas bib and apron, endeavoured to feed them with a spoon and little Cecilia wallowed in the bowl itself; he recoiled into the arms of the servant-girl carrying a basket of malodorous cloths, and worse might have happened if Sophie, suddenly appearing from above, had not whipped him away into the garden.

After a little general conversation from which it appeared that Jack had enjoyed his dinner, had come home singing, and was now grinding the coffee himself, she said, "Oh, Stephen, how I wish you could help him to a ship. He is so unhappy here. He spends hours up on the hill, looking at the sea through his telescope, and it breaks my heart. Even if it were only for a short cruise -the winter is coming on, and the damp is so bad for his wound--any sort of ship at all, even if it were only a transport, like dear Mr. Pullings."

"How I wish I could, my dear; but what is the voice of a ship's surgeon in the councils of the great said Stephen, with a veiled though piercing glance to see whether any of her husband's knowledge of his double character had been sacrificed to marital confidence. Her next words and her totally unconscious air reassured him: she said, "We saw in the paper that you were called in when the Duke of Clarence was ill, and I thought that perhaps a word from you... ,

He said, "Honey, the duke knows Jack very well, by reputation--we spoke of his action with the Cacafuego--but he also knows that recommending Jack for a command would be the worst service he could do him. His Highness is in bad odour with the Admiralty."

"But surely they could not refuse the King's own son?"

"They are terrible men at the Admiralty, my dear."

Before she could reply the church clock of Chilton Admiral told the hour, and on the third stroke Jack's hall of "Coffee's up" followed by his manly form and some remarks about the wind having backed two points in the night- heavy rain for sure--broke up their conference.

Breakfast was spread in the parlour, and they walked into a fine smell of coffee, toast and wood-smoke: the ham stood on the table, flanked by Jack's own radishes, each the size of a moderate pippin, and a solitary egg. "There is the great advantage of living in the country," he said. "You get your vegetables really fresh. And that is our own egg, Stephen! Do help yourself. Sophie's crab-apple jelly is by your side. Damn that chimney; it will not draw when the air is anything south of west. Stephen, let me pass you an egg.

Mrs Williams brought Cecilia in, so starched that she held her arms from her sides, like an imperfectly-articulated doll. She came and stood by Stephen's chair, and while the others were busily wondering why there was no news from the rectory, where the birth of a child had been hourly expected these many days past, she told him loud and clear that they never had coffee except on birthdays and when there had been a victory, and that her uncle Aubrey usually drank small beer, whereas her " aunt and grandmama drank milk: if he liked, she would butter his toast for him. She had buttered a good deal of his coat too before Mrs Williams, with a delighted shriek, plucked her away, remarking that there never was such a forward child for her years; Cecilia, her mother, could never have buttered a piece of toast so prettily at that age.

Jack's attention was elsewhere; his ear was cocked; his cup was poised; several times he looked at his watch. "The post!" exclaimed Mrs Williams at the thundering double knock on the door, and Jack made a visible effort to sit still in his chair until the servant appeared, saying" A letter and a book, sir, if you please, and a shilling to pay."