The Nutmeg of Consolation (29 page)

'You may say they are stupid,' said Martin, at dinner in the cabin, 'but have you observed that already they speak with a broad West-Country burr on the forecastle and in quite another English on the quarterdeck?'

'Certainly there is an uncommon linguistic ability,' said Stephen. 'And I have the strong impression that in their own island they used one language or at least vocabulary to their family, another to adults outside the family, and a third for sacred places or beings: perhaps only variations of the same speech, but very strongly marked variations for sure.'

'It seems to me that they are forgetting their own language,' said Jack. 'You never hear them hallooing to one another in foreign as they used.'

'Could you ever forget your own language?' asked Pullings. 'Languages you have learnt, like Latin and Greek, yes; but your own? Though I speak under correction, sir. A post-captain knows more than a commander, in the nature of things.'

Stephen drank wine. At one time he had very nearly forgotten his native Irish, the first language he ever spoke, he being fostered in the County Clare; and although it had surged up from the depths these last years when he spoke it with Padeen, his almost monoglot servant, there were still words, and quite commonplace ones too, whose sounds were perfectly familiar hut whose meaning escaped him entirely.

Padeen Colman, wholly illiterate, incapable of innocently giving away any information he might have picked up, for not only did he know very little English but that little was barely comprehensible even to friends because of a defect in his speech, was a perfect servant for one so deeply engaged in political and naval intelligence as Stephen: yet he was much more than that, a kind, gentle, deeply affectionate man to whom Stephen was much attached and whom he intended to find in New South Wales, in the penal settlement to which he had been transported, and to do whatever could be done.

He became aware of a silence round the table, and looking up he saw that they were all smiling at him. 'I ask your pardon,' he cried. 'My mind was far away, a-gathering wool, merino wool: forgive me, I beg. Did anyone ask me a question?'

'Not at all,' said Jack, filling his glass. 'I was just telling Tom that now the time was come to reduce sail; and when the deck is less like the side of a house, you and Mr Martin might like to take off your fine coats and carry your glasses up. These reefs, rocks and islands often have birds for fifty miles around them. Norfolk Island had some prodigious curious birds that made burrows, flying home at night.'

It was not until a little before the Surprise crossed the tropic of Capricorn that the trade wind had really started to blow, but since then, close-hauled or with the wind one point free, she had been showing what she could really do, with topgallants over reefed topsails and a glorious series of jibs and staysails, white and sometimes green water sweeping over her weather-bow, the little girls, soaked through and through and shrieking with delight, her lively deck at an angle that made it impossible to fix a bird in one's glass unless one were lashed to a solid support, when one might well have one's valuable achromatic telescope of more than extra power smothered in foam. She reeled off her twelve and even thirteen knots throughout the sunlit hours and seven or eight by night, with the topgallantsails taken in and in spite of her foul bottom; and all this through a hugely rolling sea that varied from the deepest indigo to pale aquamarine but that always (apart from the broken water) remained glass-clear, as though it had been created yesterday. Her pace slackened only at sunrise and sunset, when Jack and Mr Adams, who dearly loved statistics, took their readings of the temperature at various depths, thc salinity, and the atmospheric pressure.

But these were also days during which high white clouds passed in flocks across the sky, while others, higher still by far, moved in the opposite direction on the anti-trade, an interesting phenomenon and one rarely seen to such perfection; yet it had the disadvantage of shutting out the stars and even, for fine observation, the sun; and as Jack did not choose to rely on dead reckoning, above all in these waters, he had decided to proceed at a moderate pace that afternoon, so that his lookouts might catch sight of one of the notorious reefs in these latitudes, the Angerich Shoal, which with rollers of this kind showed as a white boil even at spring tides, and was used by many commanders as a sea mark.

Jack called for coffee. It came in an elegant silver pot protected by white manila fenders, beautifully plaited by Bonden in the form of robands; and as they drank it the sail came off the ship, the rushing sound of the water along her side diminished, and they no longer sat braced in their chairs.

'When you come on deck,' said Jack, 'do not scruple to walk the windward side. That is where my reef should be if it has any sense of what is right,' and he pushed civility so far as to ask Mr Martin to sup in the cabin that evening and play music, although his execution was indifferent, his sense of pitch and time imperfect, and he always played rather sharp.

They stood by the windward rail of the quarterdeck, discreetly aft; and a fine waste of blue water did they command, an unending series of wide-spaced rounded crests, sometimes topped with white, all crossed with a transverse ripple from the local current. They leant there in their shirtsleeves, spattered by spindrift on occasion, but comfortable in the sun, warm though veiled. 'You met Macmillan, my assistant in the Nutmeg, I believe?' said Stephen.

'Just for a moment. A tall thin young Scotchman, very much concerned at being left in charge.'

'An amiable youth, diligent, conscientious, but necessarily inexperienced. I remember telling him of the miseries of human life, particularly as they affect medical men. I spoke of that continual, insistent demand for sympathy and personal concern that exhausts all but the most saintly man's supply before the end of the day, leaving him openly hard in a hospital or a poor practice, secretly hard in a rich one, and ashamed of his hardness in either case until he comes to what terms he can with the situation. But I omitted another aspect, trifling in itself, yet one that can become disproportionately irritating: there is a good example,' - glancing forward to where Awkward Davis was packing a mended shirt into his bag. The massive, lowering creature was sometimes possessed by an elfin gaiety, and now he seized Emily, hoisted her on to the back of his neck, bade her 'clap on tight, now,' and raced up the foremast shrouds, over the top-rim and right up to the crosstrees, the child hooting with joy all the way. - 'That great hulking fellow, for whom I may say I have a real liking, is as you know very well growing madder, and I give him a weekly draught of hellebore to prevent him doing any of his shipmates an injury: he is irascible and exceedingly strong. And every single time he presents himself for his dose with a poor face, a mincing, shuffling gait, a pursed mouth, his great head inclined to one side, and answers my questions in a weak, gasping tone like an old ewe. I should kick him if I dared.'

'Shoal, ho!' from the masthead.

The usual question, the bearing as usual, the usual hurrying up and down; and in time the unmistakable turmoil of white water could be seen from the deck, broad on the larboard beam.

'It is very well,' said Martin when he had looked at it for some time through his telescope. 'And I should be ungrateful to repine: but I could wish that Captain Aubrey had given us as clear a view of the Great Barrier Reef.'

'I had hoped above all for that Lizard Island from which Cook and Sir Joseph surveyed the passages. Yet I can well understand the Captain's reluctance. The Endeavour at last got outside the reef by means of these passages, but then the breeze failed them, as it will close to the land, and the huge swell heaved them in, slowly, inevitably, and they helpless, towards the great wall of coral and the mountainous surf. At the very last moment a hint of breeze moved them just far enough for the making tide to sweep them through a channel to the inner side of the reef. I remember Sir Joseph telling us of it, and the horror of those last heaves before apparent destruction were with him still. It was much the same with us in the Diane, off Tristan, as I have told you: I was below at the time, but she was within ten yards of the cliff, the precipitous cliff of the island Inaccessible, before just such a providential waft of air edged her aside. And the Captain is absolutely determined not to call upon Providence in that way again: he has nothing whatsoever to say to any reef, coral or otherwise.'

Martin digested this for some time, and then said in a low voice, 'The little girls have quite a family of pet rats now.'

'Indeed? I knew they had one apiece, but not several.'

'Half a dozen at least,' said Martin. 'Do you think that might be a Norfolk Island petrel?'

'It might be, too. There is a group of them somewhat to the east. No, my dear Martin: the east is to the right.'

'Surely not in the southern hemisphere?'

'We will ask Captain Aubrey. He will probably know. But to the right, for all love. Ah, they are vanished and gone.'

They returned to the rats, how mild in temper they were, and placid, and how they were to be seen wandering about in the day, well above the hold and even the cable-tier: the hands put it down to the unnatural cleanliness of the ballast, flooded every night and pumped clear every day. It was known that rats fattened on the smell; and now, with the barky tossed about so that her ballast was fairly scoured, as clean as Deal beach, there was no smell.

'Sail ho!' cried the masthead, and this time in answer to Jack's 'Where away?' the lookout answered 'Right ahead, sir. As right ahead as ever could be. Square rigged, but ship or brig I cannot tell.'

The Surprise had been making sail methodically ever since she had obtained her fix with the Angerich Shoal, and now she was making a good ten knots. The sail ahead was travelling faster, and presently Oakes at the jack called down that she was 'certainly a ship, weather studdingsails aloft and alow.'

Then later, 'Man-of-war pennant, sir.' And later still, when she was hull-up on the rise, 'Two-decker, sir.'

'Ha, ha,' said Jack to Pullings, 'she must be the old Tromp, fifty-four. Billy Holroyd has her now. Did you ever meet Captain Holroyd, Tom?'

'I don't think so, sir. I know him by name, of course.'

'We were shipmates in the Sylph when we were boys.' Then louder, Pass the word for Killick.'

'Sir?' cried Killick, appearing like a jack-in-the-box.

'Turn over my pantry and see what we can manage in the way of a feast.'

'She has thrown out the private signal, sir,' said Reade to Mr Davidge, the officer of the watch. Davidge repeated the news to Pullings, now serving as first lieutenant again, and Pullings told Jack, who ordered the usual reply, to be followed immediately by Heave to and come to supper, while at the same time the Surprise bore up to make the signal more perfectly legible and Jack called 'Stand by to reduce sail and heave to.'

The Tromp's response could not be made out for some moments, she being head on with the wind two points on the quarter, but then Reade, who had grown wonderfully adroit at managing a telescope with the far end on some support in the rigging, reported 'It is Charged with dispatches, sir.'

'He cannot stop,' said Stephen to Martin. 'I doubt he would be allowed to pause even if we were beset by ravening sharks, rather than by ravening curiosity.'

Nor did he stop; but he modified the strict rule by easing his sheets as his ship, a slab-sided, Dutch-built vessel on her way to India by Torres Strait swept past the stationary, wallowing Surprise within twenty yards, both captains standing on the hammock-netting.

'How do you do, Billy?' called Jack, waving his hat.

'Jack, how do you do?' replied Billy.

'What news?'

'In India they say Boney has done it again, somewhere in Germany - Silesia, I think. Two hundred and twenty guns taken, the Prussian right wing cut to pieces.'

'What news from home?'

'None when I left Sydney Cove. Amelia four months overdue and no...'

The rest of his words were lost, the strong wind sweeping them along with the ship. All the Surprise's people had been listening openly, without shame: all faces showed the same disappointment; and when Jack gave the order 'Brace up and haul aft,' they carried it out with less than their usual zest and spring.

'I am so sorry you will not see Captain Holroyd this bout,' said Jack as they gathered for supper. 'You would like him, I am sure. He has a very pure sweet voice, a true tenor, which is a rare thing in a service that requires you to roar like a bull in a basin. But still, I hope we shall profit from Killick's thorough search of the pantry. There may be some Java delicacies that Mrs Raffles was so kind as to put up for us.'

By this time the watch had been set, topgallants taken in long since and topsails double-reefed; and when three bells in the first watch struck they could be heard in the great cabin, remote but clear, the last note hanging up unpaired. Automatically Jack glanced at the dining-cabin door, which ordinarily opened as regularly as that of a cuckoo-clock, with Killick in the place of the bird saying 'Supper is on table, sir, if you please,' or 'Wittles is up,' according to the company.

It did not open, though there appeared to be a scrabbling behind it, and Jack poured more madeira. 'But now I come to think of it, Mr Martin,' he said, 'I believe you prefer sherry as a whet. Pray forgive me...' He reached for the other decanter.

'Not at all, sir, not at all,' cried Martin. 'I had far rather drink madeira. I should not change this madeira for any kind of sherry. It is dry but full of body; it has given me the appetite of a lion.'

Stephen walked over to his 'cello and sitting on the stern-window locker he played over the Rakes of Kerry in pizzicato. 'You should hear that at some far grassy crossroads on a fine Beltane night with the fire on the hill and the pipes playing and five fiddles and the young men dancing as though they were possessed and the young women as demure as mice but never missing a step.'

'Pray play it again,' said Jack. He did; then again with variations and even some thoughts of his own. At length the door opened and Killick stood there in the opening, pale and apparently demented. 'Is supper ready?' asked Jack.