The Mauritius Command (15 page)

"Amen," said a forecastleman automatically, glancing at the Commodore with horror as soon as the word was out of his mouth.

"... perhaps I might be allowed a party," continued Stephen, "a very small party, consisting only of ambulant cases... " He would have added "to look for bones', if the Commodore's eager determined expression had not convinced him that he might as well have pleaded with the ship's figurehead.

The barge splashed down into the calm waters of the lagoon, its crew stretched out as they were bid, and this same eager determined expression advanced with long strides up the coral beach to meet Colonel Keating. They exchanged salutes, shook hands, and the soldier said, "You will not remember me, sir, but I was at a dinner given in your honour at Calcutta after your magnificent defence of the China fleet."

"Certainly I remember you, sir," said Jack, who had indeed some recollection of this tall, lean figure--a longnosed, capable face that raised his hopes, "and am very happy to see you again."

The Colonel looked pleased, and as he led Jack through a double hedge of his men, Englishmen of the 56th Foot on the one side, turbaned sepoys of the 2nd regiment of Bombay Infantry on the other, he observed, "How delighted we were to see you coming in. We have been so cruelly bored on this dismal rock, these last few months--reduced to tortoise-races--nothing to look forward to except the arrival of the main body next year--nothing to shoot except guinea-fowl." Jack instantly seized upon the opening and said, "If we are of the same mind, Colonel, I believe I can do away with your boredom. I can offer you something better than guinea-fowl to shoot at."

"Can you, by God?" cried the soldier, with a look as keen as Jack's. "I rather hoped something might be afoot, when I saw you come ashore so quick."

In the tents, drinking tepid sherbet, Jack stated the case: he felt almost certain that the Colonel, though mute, was with him, but even so his heart thumped strangely as he spoke the words that must bring the answer, positive, negative, or temporizing: "And so, sir, I should value your appreciation of the position."

"Sure, I am of your mind entirely," said Keating straight away. "There are only two things that make me hesitate--hesitate as the officer commanding the troops on Rodriguez, I mean, not as Harry Keating. The first is that I have barely four hundred men here, a mere advanceparty to build the fort and prepare the lines. It was never imagined that I should move until the arrival of the main body with the next monsoon, and I might be broke for stirring, for leaving my command. Yet as against that, I know the Company loves you like a son, so I might equally well be broke for not falling in with your plan of campaign. As far as that goes, then, I should choose to follow my own inclination, which is the same as yours, sir. The second is this question of landing through the surf--the choice of our disembarkation. As you pointed out so candidly, there lies the crux. For with no more than your Marines and what seamen you can spare--say six hundred men with my few companies--it must necessarily be nip and tuck. My men, and particularly the sepoys, are not clever in boats: if we do not land cleanly and carry their works out of hand, a neat coup de main, there will be the Devil to pay, once their columns start coming in from Saint-Denis and the other places. If I could be satisfied on that point, I should cry done directly."

"I cannot pretend to be well acquainted with the western side of the island myself," said Jack, "but I have two captains here with a vast deal of local knowledge. Let us hear what they have to say."

Colonel Keating's conscience longed to be satisfied, and it would have taken far less to do so than Corbett's vehement assertion that landing on the west side, north of St Paul's, so long as the wind stayed in the south-east, which it did three hundred days in the year, was as easy as kiss my hand, particularly when this was reinforced by Clonfert's still more positive statement that even with a westerly wind he would undertake to set a thousand men ashore in a sheltered cove accessible through gaps in the reef known to his black pilot. But the Colonel was less pleased when the two captains disagreed violently upon the best place for the landing, Clonfert maintaining that the St Giles inlet was the obvious choice, Corbett that no one but a blockhead would attempt anything but the Pointe des Galets, adding, in reply to Clonfert's objection that it was seven miles from St Paul's, that he conceived the opinion of a post-captain with a real knowledge of these waters, acquired over many years of service on the station during this war and the last, was likely to carry more weight than that of a very young commander. The Colonel retired into a grave, formal absence while the captains wrangled, the veiled personalities growing more naked until the Commodore called both to order, not without asperity. And somewhat later Keating's delight in the company of the sailors was damped again when Lord Clonfert abruptly excused himself before the end of dinner and left the tent as pale as he had been red at the beginning of the meal--a redness attributable to the Commodore's words, delivered in what was meant to be the privacy of the nascent fort: "Lord Clonfert, I am exceedingly concerned that this display of ill- feeling should have taken place, above all that it should have taken place in the presence of Colonel Keating. You forget the respect due to senior officers, sir. This must not occur again."

"Lord, Stephen," cried Jack as he came into the sterngallery of the Raisonable, where Dr Maturin sat gazing wistfully at the land, "what a capital fellow that Keating is! You might almost think he was a sailor. "When do you wish my men to be aboard?" says he. "Would six o'clock suit?" says I. "Perfectly, sir," says he; turns about, says to Major O'Neil, "Strike camp," and the tents vanish--the thing is done, with no more words bar a request that his Hindus should be given no salt beef and his Mahometans no salt pork. That is the kind of soldier I love! In three hours we shall be at sea! Nereide is preparing to receive them at this minute. Are you not delighted, Stephen?"

"Oh, excessively delighted; delighted beyond measure. But Jack, am I to understand that no shore-leave is to be allowed--that we are to be hurried from this place as we were hurried from the parturient whale off Cape Agulhas? I begged Mr Lloyd for a boat, a small boat, but he declared that it was as much as his skin was worth to suffer me to go without an order from you, adding, with an inhuman leer, that he thought the Commodore would have anchors atrip before the ebb. Yet surely it would be of immeasurable benefit to all hands, to be indulged in running about and frolicking, if no farther than the strand?"

"Bless you, Stephen," said Jack, "you shall have your boat, for what bugs you may gather in two hours and a half; for two hours and a half it is, mark you well, not a minute more; and I shall send Bonden with you."

Stephen was making his laborious way down the sternladder, his searching foot was already poised over the boat itself, when the Otter's yawl pulled alongside and a midshipman said, "Dr Maturin, sir?"

Stephen writhed his neck round, directing a grim look at the young man: all his professional life ashore had been haunted by these vile messengers; innumerable concerts, theatres, operas, dinners, promised treats had been wrecked or interrupted by fools, mooncalves, who, to gain some private end, had broken a leg, had fits, or fallen into a catalepsy. "Go and see my mate, Mr Carol," he said.

"Dr McAdam's particular compliments to Dr Maturin," went on the midshipman, "and would be most grateful for his present advice."

"Hell and death," said Stephen. He crept up the ladder, flung some medical objects into a bag, and crept down again, holding the bag in his teeth.

A worried, perfectly sober McAdam received him aboard the Otter. "You wished to see this case in its crisis, Doctor: pray step below," he said in public; and in private, "This is the crisis, God damn me, and a tear-my-guts out crisis too. I am relieved to have you to consult with, colleague--am in three minds at the least." He led him into the captain's cabin, and there, on the sofa, lay Lord Clonfert, doubled up with pain. He made a real attempt at mastering it to greet Stephen and to thank him for coming -'Most benevolent--vastly obliged--desole to receive him in these conditions'- but the strong gripes cut him very short.

Stephen examined him carefully, asked questions, examined him again, and the doctors withdrew. The attentive ears that hung about the neighbourhood could make precious little of their Latin, but it was understood that Dr Maturin would have nothing to do with Dr McAdam's iliac passion, still less his Lucatellus" balsam; that he slightly inclined to a colonic spasm; that he believed Dr McAdam might do well to exhibit helleborus niger in the heroic dose of twenty minims, together with forty drops of thebaic tincture and sixty of antimonial wine, accompanied, naturally, with a little Armenian bole, as a temporary expedient; he had known it answer in tormina of much the same kind (though less intense) that afflicted a purser, a wealthy purser who dreaded detection when the ship paid off; but this was a particularly difficult, interesting case, and one that called for a more prolonged consultation. Dr Maturin would send for the other lenitives he had mentioned, and when the enemata had had their effect, Dr McAdam might choose to walk on the island to discuss the matter at greater length: Dr Maturin always thought more clearly, when walking. The ears dispersed during the coming and going of the messenger; they made nothing of the administration of the drugs other than the fact that the groans in the cabin stopped; but they did catch some words about "delighted to attend the opening of the body, in the event of a contrary result" that earned Dr Maturin some brooding glances as the two medical men went over the side, for the Otters loved their captain.

Up and down they strolled among the hurrying soldiers, then through the tortoise-park, where the disconsolate French superintendent stood thigh deep among some hundreds of his charges, and so towards the interior, until at last the rollers crashing on the reef were no more than a continuous, half- heard thunder. Stephen had seen a flight of parrots that he could not identify, some francolins, a kind of banyan tree which, rooting from its branches, made dark arcades that sheltered countless fruit bats the size of a moderate dove: and some promising caves; yet his professional mind had also followed McAdam's long and detailed account of his patient's habit of body, his diet, and his mind. He agreed with his colleague in rejecting physical causes. "This is where the trouble lies," repeated McAdam, striking the dome of his head, bald, naked and disagreeably blotched with ochre against the pallid, sweating scalp.

"You were not so sure of your diagnosis a little while ago, my friend, with your iliac passion and your strangulation," said Stephen inwardly; and outwardly, "You have known him a great while, I collect?"

"Sure, I knew him as a boy--I treated his father--and I have sailed with him these many years."

"And peccatum Mud horribile inter Christianos non nominandum, can you speak to that? I have known it produce strange sufferings, though mostly of a cutaneous nature; and none as extreme as this."

"Buggery? No. I should certainly know it. There is repeated venereal commerce with the other sex, and always has been. Though indeed," he said, standing while Stephen grubbed up a plant and wrapped it in his handkerchief, "it is the wise man that can always separate male and female. Certainly men affect him far more than women; he has more women than he can do with--they pursue him in bands--they cause him much concern--but it is the men he really minds: I have seen it again and again. This crisis, now: I know it was brought on by your Captain Aubrey's checking him. Corbett is bad enough, but Aubrey... I had heard of him often and often, long before he ever came out to the Cape--every mention of him or of Cochrane in the Gazette, every piece of service gossip, analysed, diminished, magnified, praised, decried, compared with his own doings--cannot leave them alone, any more than a man can leave a wound in peace... Och, be damned to his whimsies--why does he have to be Alexander? Do you want a drink?" asked McAdam, in a different voice, pulling out a case-bottle.

"I do not," said Stephen. Until now the decent conventions of medical conversation had restrained McAdam's language and even his harsh, barbarous dialect; but spirits worked very quickly upon his sodden frame, and Stephen found the liberated McAdam tedious. In any event, the sun was no more than a hand's-breadth above the horizon. He turned, walked quickly through the almost deserted camp, down the now empty beach with McAdam blundering after him, and into the boat.

"I beg you will take notice, Commodore," he said, darting on to the poop, "that I am come aboard seven minutes before my time, and desire it may be made up, whenever the requirements of the service next permit."

For the time being the service required Stephen, his shipmates, and three hundred and sixty-eight soldiers to bowl along the twentieth parallel, and to cover the hundred leagues between Rodriguez and the rest of the squadron as briskly as ever the Nereide, with her heavy load, could be induced to pass through the sea. It would have been far more convenient to stow the troops in the spacious Raisonable, but here everything depended upon speed, and Jack dreaded the loss of time in transferring them to the Nereide, perhaps with the sea running high: for he had fixed upon Corbett's landing-place, and the Nereide, replete with local knowledge and drawing little water, was to set them ashore at the Pointe des Galets; she therefore ran westward horribly crowded and trailing a smell of Oriental cooking.

Cracking on as though yards, booms, gaffs and even topmasts were to be had for the asking in the nearest port, they ran off the distance in two days, and on the evening of the second they found the Boadicea and Sirius north east of Mauritius, exact to the rendezvous and, as far as could be told, undetected from the land. This Jack learnt from the soaking Captain Pym, whom he summoned aboard the Raisonable in the most pitiless way through an ugly crosssea, with a close-reef topsail wind sending warm green water over the waist of the two-decker. Pym had some solid intelligence, gained from two separate fishing- boats taken far off shore: the Canonniare, condemned by the surveyors as a man-of-war, had had all her guns but fourteen taken out and was refitting to carry a commercial cargo back to France in a month or so; on the other hand, only one of the powerful new frigates, the Bellone, was in Port-Louis, the Manche and the Vinus having sailed north-eastwards some time before, with six months provisions aboard.