The Unknown Shore
Authors: Patrick O'Brian
THE UNKNOWN SHORE
Patrick O’Brian
For Mary, With Love
M
R
E
DWARD
C
HAWORTH
of Medenham was a well-disposed, good-natured man with an adequate fortune, an amiable wife and a numerous family: he thought the world an excellent place, and he could suggest no way in which it could be improved, except for the poachers and the Whigs – they would be abolished in an ideal world, and the trout in his stream would be a trifle larger.
Yet in the present state of things, Whigs abounded, and whenever Mr Chaworth thought of them, his cheerfulness was clouded. Sir Robert Walpole’s name always made him frown, and he would happily have seen the prime minister hanged, drawn and quartered: he could not bear the sound of a Whig. How much more obnoxious, then, was Mr Elwes, who was not only a Whig but also Mr Chaworth’s nearest neighbour? The thought of Mr Elwes luxuriating in Whiggery not half a mile beyond the kitchen-garden filled Mr Chaworth with indignation. The earliest symptoms of this indignation were a straightening of his back and a tightening of his lips: he had served under the Duke of Marlborough, and this martial stiffening was associated in his mind with carnage, the thunder of guns, blood and the general unpleasantness of battle. Mrs Chaworth, upon seeing the beginnings of it, glanced anxiously round the breakfast table.
It was so very large a table, there were so many children round it and so many things upon it that obstructed her view – a ham, a round of cold beef, an unusually tall pork-pie, chafing-dishes with mutton-chops, eggs, bacon, kippered trout, kidneys and mushrooms, apart from the tea and coffee urns and the host of minor objects such as marmalade, toast, rolls, potted char and Sophia’s bowl of ass’s milk – that it took her some time to survey the whole. Anne, Charles and Sophia were behaving perfectly well, and so was little Dormer, the youngest to be allowed downstairs; but she saw with
regret that Georgiana was balancing her spoon and causing its bowl to float, in imitation of her cousin Jack, who was partially concealed by the raised pie: she coughed significantly, but they were too engrossed to hear and it was obvious, from her fascinated stare, that Isabella, Jack’s sister, was going to join in.
Mr Chaworth grew more and more upright in his chair as he turned the page of the letter that he was reading, and Mrs Chaworth knew that unless he found something agreeable on this new page, his right hand would go up to clutch his wig, his left thump the letter on to the table and he would cry, ‘Lard, Lard,
Lard,
Mrs Chaworth!’
It was very thoughtless of Jack: he knew that Mr Chaworth was easily vexed in the morning. But perhaps Jack thought that he was no longer subject to reproof, having been away from home. She peered round the pie at her younger cousin, who, with his head barbarously near the cloth and his rapidly growing form bulging from his blue midshipman’s coat, was now engaged in making a storm in his tea-cup, by blowing. Jack Byron and his sister were cousins of the Chaworths, but they had lived at Medenham from their youngest days, ever since Lady Byron had died, and they were entirely part of the household: even now that Jack’s elder brother, the present Lord Byron, was living at Newstead Abbey again, there was no question of their going back there.
‘Lard, Lard,
Lard,
Mrs Chaworth!’ cried the master of the house, grasping his wig. She automatically put out her hand to steady the tea-urn, which was apt to fall over, parboiling her knees: but the expected thump did not come. Mr Chaworth arrested his descending hand and pointed its index finger at Jack. ‘What the devil do you think you are doing?’ he exclaimed. But his words were prompted less by a spirit of inquiry than by a momentary urge to be disagreeable, and without waiting for an answer he went on, ‘If these are naval manners – ha,
manners,
forsooth – they were best kept for sea.’
‘What is it, my dear?’ asked Mrs Chaworth, waving a lace handkerchief by way of distracting his attention from Jack, whom she loved dearly.
‘The stream,’ cried Mr Chaworth. ‘The stream. He’s going to turn the stream into his top field to make an enormous vast loathsome fountain for his wedding-day.’
‘Well, my dear,’ said Mrs Chaworth, who had expected something very much more shocking than this, ‘I am sure Mr Elwes will turn it back again afterwards, when he is married.’
‘And what do you suppose the trout will do in the meantime?’ cried Mr Chaworth with all the agony of a devoted fisherman. ‘What do you suppose will happen to the trout, Mrs Chaworth?’
Mrs Chaworth really did not mind; she never fished, or hunted, or shot, and she secretly disliked all these creatures that were so laboriously pursued; if it were not for them the family would spend most of the year in London – a much more agreeable kind of life. However, she did not say this, but soothingly replied, ‘But in that case, surely it would be much easier to take them up, my dear? You could use a little net, in the puddles that are left.’
Mr Chaworth uttered a desolate howl, but made no further reply: in twenty years of an otherwise happy marriage he had never been able to make his wife understand the sanctity of game, and now, rather than persist in the hopeless task, he seized upon the ham, and silently carved it, with as much ferocity as if Mr Elwes had been under his knife.
It cannot be denied that Mr Elwes was a troublesome neighbour: his eccentricity was the delight of the countryside; yet it is one thing to have an amusing eccentric two or three parishes away, and quite another to have him as your next-door neighbour. The person in classical mythology who fitted his guests to the bed in his spare room by means of an axe or a rack was a source of endless gossip and diversion to the neighbourhood in general, but he must have been a sad bore to those who lived within the range of his victims’ cries. Mr Elwes, then, was a troublesome neighbour; and this menace to the stream was but the latest of a series of outrages. He lived at Plashey, whose venerable roof could be seen from the terrace at Medenham in the winter, when the leaves were off the trees. Plashey was the other big house in the parish, and it was much older than Medenham; its most recent parts were Tudor, and the kitchens were Saxon; it was built facing north, in the bottom of a watery dell. Mr Elwes, however, had not inherited Plashey; he had only bought it, and although he had lived there some twenty years he was still considered a newcomer. For most of these years, that is to say, until he took up politics, he had lived a retired, secluded existence, with
a household consisting of no more than a few vague, shiftless servants and a boy, Tobias Barrow, who was usually called his nephew.
Jack Byron and Tobias Barrow were very close friends; their friendship dated from long ago, when there had still been a fair amount of visiting and acquaintance between Medenham and Plashey, and as soon as breakfast was over Jack hurried away to find Tobias. He knew that Mr Elwes was capable of any villainy, but he also knew that rumour delighted in exaggeration (Mr Elwes’ ape, at its first arrival, had been confidently reported as the Devil in person) and he hoped to learn that this appalling news was ill-founded.
He crossed the bowling-green, hurried through the kitchen-garden into the park and along his private path towards the outer paling. During his absence at sea the path had almost vanished in the grass, but he knew it so well that he could follow it at midnight without a moon. He came to the pollard hornbeam that had always served as his ladder to get out of the park: there were rounded knobs on its gnarled old trunk that allowed one to reach the pointed ends of the pales, there to poise for the downward leap over the ditch and on to the soft bank that ran along the side of the lane below – the lane that separated Plashey’s land from Medenham’s. Jack and his nearest cousin Georgiana had used this route from their most tender infancy; in those days the ascent of the tree had been a matter of tears, blood, barked shins and childish oaths, but now Jack swung up it with the ease of one to whom the maintopgallant masthead of a man-of-war is as easy and familiar as a pulpit to a parson, and he was just about to spring down when he saw Mr Elwes in the meadow over the way, gathering simples in a sky-blue coat and scarlet breeches. He was a man past the middle age, with a large yellow-grey face; he had a very great deal of energy, and as he sprang about the field he sang odd snatches, gesticulated, and harangued the yak that stood in the far corner. Jack shrank back into the leaves. Mr Elwes picked dittander, middle confound and stinking arrach; he picked nigwort, figwort and liriconfancy, adding thereto polypody of the oak, pellitory of Spain and herb true-love, and he offered a blade of the last to the yak as it stood panting in the shade of the ragged hedge. This monolithic beast had been imported by Mr Elwes, at vast expense, under the impression that it was the aurochs of antiquity – it was supposed to improve the local breed of cattle out of all recognition,
but it did nothing but lurk in the shade, gasping, and it was evident that the race of Nottinghamshire aurochs would soon die out. This was not the case with all his importations, however, and it was almost impossible to keep servants at Plashey, because of the salamanders. Salamanders in the library, salamanders that had to be rescued from the ashes of the drawing-room grate, the gentle plop of salamanders falling from stair to stair as they tried to mount to the attic to hibernate in the servants’ beds, but above all, salamanders multiplying in their thousands in the cellars that were Mr Elwes’ pride and joy. It was not as cellars that they delighted him, because he drank no wine, but as Saxon relics: he was a virtuoso, for whom anything old was better than anything new – anything to do with the arts, that is to say, for in other respects he was wonderfully advanced, and he farmed his land upon the newest philosophical principles, designed great schemes for the improvement of mankind, and had invented several machines, including a musical treadmill and a hydraulic rack.
But it was in the matter of education that his theories and his energy appeared in their brightest light. ‘You have no conception,’ he said to one of his learned friends – ‘you have no conception of the amount that an infant mind can learn, if it be subjected to it for twelve or fourteen hours a day, with none of your foolish holidays. Take a boy …’ he said, and went on to describe how the boy would learn Latin and Greek by ear, thus absorbing them unconsciously; the time saved would be devoted to logic, mathematics and physical studies; when these had been acquired the ornamental arts of rhetoric, poetry, music, dancing and singing would follow, and in a surprisingly short time there would be loosed upon the world a new wonder, an even more Admirable Crichton. The prodigy would be brought up by a dumb nurse so that it should hear nothing but the classical tongues, which its tutors would speak from morning to … here Mr Elwes’ learned friend interrupted him and said that the plan was vain, chimerical and, in short, a mere vapour – the more so as no child’s mother would ever allow it to be carried out.
‘Vapour?’ cried Mr Elwes, with a furious glare. ‘We shall see.’
‘I dare say we shall,’ replied the friend, walking away.
Within the hour Mr Elwes, fired by contradiction, had begun negotiations for the purchase of a suitable male child, for this conversation
took place in London, not far from the scene of his earlier activities. Mr Elwes had begun life as a surgeon, and his practice had lain on the borders of the richest part of the City and the poorest slums that adjoined it. The first accounted for his wealth (grateful patients had helped him to South Sea stock, and he had sold out the week before the South Sea Bubble burst), and the second made him familiar with whole streets of people who had far, far too many children and no money. It was not a matter of searching for a child to buy, but rather of turning away the crowds that hurried up with surplus offspring, washed and even combed for the occasion.
Before the week was out Tobias Barrow arrived by post-chaise at Plashey, done up in an old, old shawl. He was given a small bowl of black broth, for Mr Elwes intended that he should be brought up in the Spartan manner, and the Spartans liked their soup black; these dismal people also slept hard, without any bedclothes, and so therefore did Tobias, weeping sadly. The next morning his education began.
It was a remarkable education, and one that only a wealthy man could afford; but Mr Elwes
was a
wealthy man, and even if he had paid the usual price for the tutors’ services he could have done so easily; like many other wealthy men, however, he was exceedingly near with his money, particularly where small sums were concerned, and his experiment was conducted on the most economical principles. He employed very poor and unworldly scholars, and he often took them for a term or so upon approval, without any definite arrangement about their salaries. They came and went: sometimes, when Mr Elwes was engrossed in some other experiment and had little time to quarrel or interfere, a tutor might stay for a year or more – Mr Buchanan did, a sad, gentle, unbeneficed clergyman who probably knew more about birds than any man in England – but usually they went away much sooner, and nearly always on foot. One young man took a horse from the stable to help him on his way, and he had almost reached the shelter of Cambridge before he was overtaken. Mr Elwes prosecuted, of course, and it was rumoured that after the unhappy youth had been hanged he bought the body from the executioner for dissection.
This was untrue, as it happened, but Mr Elwes was in fact a most accomplished dissector: whatever his character may have been in
other respects, he was an unusually learned and skilful surgeon, and he taught Tobias anatomy with great success. He had a real love for his profession (apart from anything else it gave him unrivalled opportunities for experiment on his fellow men), and he never abandoned it: after he came to Plashey he formed a small practice among his tenants and servants and the local poor; and this enabled him, in due course, to bind Tobias as his apprentice and to teach him the work of a general practitioner in medicine – for at that period, and for more than a hundred years afterwards, all surgeons began as apprentices: though to be sure few began quite so young as Tobias.
