The Nutmeg of Consolation (6 page)

Then again there were all the ugly things to be done after a victory; and the sad ones too. He looked round for a midshipman, for by now most of the people had come up the hill again; but seeing none he called Bonden, the invulnerable Bonden, and told him to ask the Doctor whether a visit would be convenient. 'Aye aye, sir,' said Bonden, and hesitated. 'Which you have a nasty trough up there' - tapping his scalp - 'that did ought to be looked to at the same time.'

'So I have,' said Jack, feeling his head, 'but it don't signify. Cut along now.'

Before Bonden could come back Richardson limped up to say that the Dyaks had taken the heads not only of the carpenter and his mate but of all those killed on the lower or middle ground. Some could not be identified: should the bodies be brought up? Were our own dead by the camp to be separated by religion? What was to be done with the dead natives?

'Sir,' said Bonden, with a queer look on his face, 'Doctor's compliments and in five minutes, if you please.'

Every man has his own five minutes: Jack's was shorter than Stephen's and he came into the tent too early. Stephen was carrying a slender arm to a heap of amputated limbs and the bodies of patients who had already died; he put it down on a shattered foot and said 'Show me your scalp, will you now? Sit on this barrel.'

'Whose was that arm?' asked Jack.

'Reade's,' said Stephen. 'I have just taken it off at the shoulder.'

'How is he? May I speak to him? Will he be all right?'

'With the blessing, he may do well,' said Stephen. 'With the blessing. That swivel-gun flung him down with his head against a rock and he is still stunned entirely. Sit on the barrel. Mr Macmillan, hot water and the coarse shears, if you please.' As he mopped and snipped he said 'Of course I have not a full list for you since not all the dead have been counted and there are still some wounded to be brought up the hill; but I am afraid it will be a long one. The midshipmen's berth has suffered very heavily. Your clerk was killed in the charge; so was little Harper; Bennett was virtually disembowelled and though we have sewn him up I doubt he sees tomorrow.'

Butcher, Harper, Bennett, Reade: dead or maimed. As Jack sat there with his head bowed to the swab, the shears and the probe, tears fell steadily on his folded hands.

The first sad, weary days of mass burial - more dead men, both sides taken together, than living - and the visiting of the wounded, seeing faces he had known all this commission, good, decent faces almost all of them, yellow and thin with pain, sometimes with fatal infection, lying there in the heat and the dreadful familiar smell. Then the later funerals as the worst cases dropped off, one, two and even three a day. And all this with extremely little food. Stephen had shot only one small babirussa; the apes were no longer worth his remaining charges; and of the few fishes caught by casting from the rocks or hauling the seine most were scaleless lead-coloured things that even the gulls would not eat.

On the morning after the last patient on the danger-list died - a young Dyak who had borne resection after resection of his gangrenous leg with admirable fortitude - Stephen was late in obeying the pipe of All hands on deck - all hands aft that preceded the Captain's address to the ship's company. By the time he slipped into his place Jack was still dealing with naval law, the perennity of commissions, the Articles of War and so on: all hands listened attentively, with grave, judicial expressions as he repeated his main points once again, particularly that which had to do with the continuance of their pay, each according to his rating, and the compensation in lieu of spirits not served out. They stood there close-packed, confined between imaginary rails, exactly as though they were still aboard the Diane, and they weighed every word. Stephen, who had heard the essence before, paid little attention; in any case his mind was elsewhere. He had been attached to the Dyak, who showed unlimited trust in his skill and benevolent intent, who would take food only from him, and whom he really thought he had saved as he had in fact saved young Reade, now sitting there wraith-like on a carronade-slide, his empty sleeve pinned across his chest, and as he had saved Edwards, who stood alone, there where the envoy and his suite had always had their place.

'But now, shipmates,' said Jack in his strong deep voice, 'I come to another point. You have all heard of the widow's cruse.' No single officer, seaman or Marine showed the least sign of having heard of the widow's cruse, nor any sign whatsoever of intelligence. 'Well,' continued Captain Aubrey, 'Diane shipped no widow's cruse. And by that I mean tomorrow is St Famine's Day.' Comprehension, alarm, despondency, extreme displeasure showed in the faces of all the old man-of-war's men present; and the hum of whispered explanation kept Jack silent for a long moment. 'But it is not the worst St Famine I have ever known,' he went on. 'Although it is true that today's is the last issue of grog and the last cheese-paring scrap of tobacco, we still have a little biscuit and a cask of Dublin horse not very badly spoilt and there is always the chance the Doctor may knock down another of the island gazelles. And there is this point too. The officers and I are not going to sit on silk cushions swilling wine and brandy. The gunroom steward and Killick are going to put all our stores into a general pool, under double guard, and as long as it lasts each mess will draw its share by lot. That is what the gunroom steward and Killick are going to do, whether they like it or not.' This was very well received. Killick's extreme jealousy of the Captain's stores, even the oldest heel-taps of his wine, had always been notorious, and the gunroom steward's hardly less so. Both looked pinched and intensely disapproving, but the ship's company in general laughed as they had not laughed since before the battle. 'Then again,' said Jack, 'God helps those that help themselves. We still have Ned Walker and two others who were rated carpenter's crew. We still have plenty of sailcloth and a fair amount of cordage. We can save many of the nails and spikes from the schooner's ashes, and my plan is to run up a six-oared cutter to replace the one they burnt, pick a crew of our best seamen with an officer to navigate and send them off to Batavia for help. I shall stay here, of course.'

All these things coming at once confused his audience. Upon the whole there was a hum of agreement, even of very strong approval, but one man called out 'Two hundred mile in an open boat, with the monsoon like to change?'

'Bligh sailed four thousand in a twenty-three foot launch crammed with people. Besides, the monsoon does not change for close on a fortnight, and even a parcel of grass-combing lubbers can put a seaworthy cutter together in that length of time. In any case, what is the alternative? Sit here and watch the sun go down on the last of the ring-tailed apes? No, no. Better a dead dog than a lead lion. That is to say...'

'Three cheers for Captain Aubrey's plan,' cried a perfectly unexpected voice, a taciturn, highly-respected, middle-aged forecastleman named Nicholl. 'Hip, hip, hip...

The cheering was still going on when Stephen, with his rifle in the crook of his arm, walked down past the blackened wreckage in the slip; the skeleton with its elegant curves was still recognizable, and as heavy rain had fallen in the night the whole gave off something of the desolate acrid smell he had caught the first day.

He walked out along the strand westwards, meaning to climb by his usual path behind the cricket-pitch, but after he had been going for some time he saw a moving object in the sea. At this point he was well above the ordinary high-tide mark, in a region where the most uncommon storms, like that which had destroyed the Diane, cast up massive debris, among which there grew interesting plants, sometimes with surprising speed. He sat, pleasantly shaded by ferns, on the trunk of a medang and drew out his pocket-glass. As soon as it was focused his first opinion was confirmed: he was gazing into the large insipid kindly square-nosed face of a dugong. It was not the first he had seen, but it was the first in these waters, and certainly he had never had a finer view at any time. A young female dugong, about eight feet long, with her child. Sometimes she held it to her bosom with her flipper, both of them poised upright in the sea, staring straight before them in a very vacant manner; and sometimes she browsed on the seaweed that grew on the rocks out there; but at all times she showed the utmost solicitude for her child, occasionally going so far as to wash its face, which seemed a pointless task in so limpid a sea. Was her presence, and that of some fellow-mermaidens much farther out, a sign of the coming change of season? 'How glad I am that the boat is still only a hypothesis,' he said, having pondered on the question. 'Otherwise it would have been my duty to pursue the innocent dugong. They are said to be excellent eating, like poor Steller's sea-cow: or rather Steller's poor sea-cow, the creature.'

Presently the dugong dived and swam away to join her friends browsing on the far side of the reef and Stephen was thinking of getting up when a strangely familiar sound caught his ear. 'You would swear it was a pig rooting,' he said, moving his head slowly to the right. It was in fact a pig rooting, as fine a babirussa as he had ever seen: the animal was snorting and grunting at a great rate, wholly intent upon a wealth of tubers. It presented a perfect target and Stephen very gently brought up his gun. The babirussa was as innocent as the dugong; he shot it dead without the least compunction.

When at last he had hoisted the boar into a tree with his tackle he said 'Twenty-two score if he weighs an ounce. Mother of God, how happy they will be. I shall follow the back-track as far as I can - never was such a day for tracks - to see where he came from, and then I believe I shall indulge myself with a view of the swifts. I feel no resentment against them now, I find, none at all, and I wish to see the state of the vacated nests. Poor little Reade, alas, will never climb down to take them for me. But Heavens, what youth and stamina and a cheerful mind will do in the face of a shocking injury! He will be running about in a fortnight, whereas the bosun, middle-aged and sunk in gloom, will take a great while to recover from a far less serious wound.' His mind ran on in this way as he followed the clear track as far as a much-favoured wallow in the upper part of the island. In earlier days he would have seen a dozen tracks or more, new or old, converging upon this shallow pool of mud; now there was but this single line, coming from the north-east.

'I shall branch off here,' he said by the tree from which he had shot an earlier boar, and he walked uphill to the edge of the northern cliffs. But he was still quite far from the precipice when he skirted what had been a puddle in the night and was now a broad patch of mud, soft mud. On its farther edge, as clear as well could be, he saw a child's footprint: nothing leading to it, nothing leading from it. 'Either that child is preternaturally agile and leapt a clear eight feet, or it was an angel setting one foot on earth,' he said, his search in the low scrub on either side having revealed nothing. 'We have no ship's boy anything like so small.'

Another hundred yards resolved the puzzle. Near the edge of the precipice, where he had lain with his head down the narrow cleft, the same cleft down which Reade was to have been lowered, stood seven baskets, filled with the finest nests and carefully wedged with stones. And if that was not clear enough there was a junk lying off shore, with boats going to and from the little sandy cove.

When he had sat there for some minutes, his mind turning over the various possibilities he heard children's voices down among the trees. They were raised in anger, mockery, challenge and defiance, in Malay or Chinese indifferently; they rose in a shrill crescendo that ended with a distinct thump, a scream of pain, and a concerted wail.

Stephen walked down and found four children under a tall medang, three little girls howling with woe, one little boy groaning with pain and grasping his bloody leg. They were all Chinese, all dressed in much the same way, with pads on their knees and elbows for cave-climbing.

They turned to him and stopped howling. 'Li Po said we could go and play when we had gathered seven baskets,' said one girl in Malay.

'We never meant him to go right up to the top,' said another. 'It is not our fault.'

'Li Po will whip us past all bearing,' said the third. 'We are only girls.' And she began grizzling again.

Stephen's appearance did not astonish or alarm them - he too was dressed in wide short trousers, an open jacket and a broad hat, while his face, so long exposed to the sun, was now a disagreeable yellow - and the little boy, who in any case was partly stunned, let him examine the leg without resistance.

Having more or less staunched the blood with his handkerchief and made his diagnosis Stephen said 'Lie quite still, and I will cut you seven splints.' This he did with his hunting knife, and although time pressed with very great urgency, professional conscience obliged him to trim them before cutting his thin cloth jacket into strips for pads and bandages. He worked as fast as ever he could, but the little girls, calmed by his grown-up, competent presence, talked faster still. The eldest, Mai-mai, was the boy's sister and their father was Li Po, the owner of the junk. They had come from Batavia to fetch a cargo of ore from Ketapan in Borneo, and as they did every season when the wind was favourable and the sea calm, they had deviated from their course for the bird's-nest island. When they were very young they had had ropes lowered from above, but now they did not need them. They came right up from the bottom, using pegs driven in here and there in the bad places; but generally it was quite easy to creep along the ledges and slopes, carrying a small basket in one's teeth and filling the large ones at the top. Only thin people could get through in some places. Li Po's brother, the one who was killed by Dyak pirates, had grown too fat by the time he was fifteen.

'There,' said Stephen, gently tying a final knot, 'I believe that will answer. Now, Mai-mai, my dear, you must go down at once and tell your father what has happened. Tell him I am a medical man, that I have treated the wound, and that I am going to carry your brother to our camp on the south side. He cannot possibly be lowered to the junk in this state. Tell Li Po there are a hundred Englishmen in a fortified camp nearly opposite the reef, and that we shall be happy to see him as soon as he can bring the junk round. Now run along like a good child and tell him all will be well. The others may go with you or come with me, just as they choose.'