The Mauritius Command (36 page)

"There is no one so welcome as the postman, Mr Pullings," said Jack, inviting him into the cabin. "Whence come ye, Tom?" he asked, once they were there.

"Straight from the Admiral, sir," said Pullings, as though this were the best news that could ever be brought.

"From Mr Bertie?" asked Jack, whose protesting mind had faintly offered a hypothetical force bound for Java, perhaps, under a different vice-admiral, one with no responsibility for the Cape--an admiral who was merely passing by.

"That's right, sir," said Pullings cheerfully. "And he gave me this for you." He took a dog-eared Naval Chronicle from his pocket and plucked an official letter from among its pages, marking the place with his thumb; but holding the letter aloft, not quite delivering it, he said, "So no post, sir, since I last saw you?"

"Not a word, Tom," said Jack. "Not a word since the Cape; and that was out of order. Not a word for the best part of a year."

"Then I am the first," cried Pullings with infinite satisfaction. "Let me wish you and Mrs Aubrey all the joy in the world." He grasped Jack's limp, wondering hand, wrung it numb, and showed the printed page, reading aloud, "At Ashgrove Cottage, Chilton Admiral, in Hants, the lady of Captain Aubrey, of the Boadicea, of a son and heir," following the words with his finger.

"Give it here," said Jack. He grasped the magazine, sloped the page to the light and pored over it intently.

"At Ashgrove Cottage, Chilton Admiral, in Hants, the lady of Captain Aubrey, of the Boadicea, of a son.

Well, I'll be damned. God bless me. Lord, Lord... upon my word and honour... I'll be damned to Hell and back again... strike me down. Killick, Killick, rouse out a bottle of champagne--pass the word for the Doctor--here, Killick, there's for you--God love us all--ha, ha, ha."

Killick took the handful of money, put it slowly into his pocket with a look of extreme suspicion and walked out of the cabin, his lips pursed in disapproval. Jack leapt from his seat, took several turns fore and aft, chuckling from time to time, his mind filled with mingled love, happiness, fulfilment, and a most piercing nostalgia. "I thank you, Pullings, I thank you with all my heart for your news," he said.

"I thought you would be pleased, sir," said Pullings. "We always knew, Mrs P. and I, how you wanted a boy. Girls are very well, in course, but they are not quite the same; you could not wish them about all the time. And then you never know what they will be at. But a boy!--Our nipper, sir, if ever I get a settled command of my own, shall come to sea the minute he is out of coats, and properly breeched."

"I trust Mrs Pullings and young John are quite well?" said Jack; but before he could learn much of them, Stephen walked in, followed by the sack of mail. "Stephen," said Jack, "Sophie is brought to bed of a boy."

"Aye? I dare say," said Stephen. "Poor thing. But it must be a great relief to your mind."

"Why," said Jack, with a blush, "I never had wind of it, you know." Calculation had already established the fact that the distant nameless wonder was conceived the night of his leaving, and this made him bashful, even confused.

"Well, I give you joy of your son," said Stephen. "And I hope with all my heart that dear Sophie does well? At least," he observed, as he watched Jack busy with the mail-sack, "this will make a baronetcy more welcome: will give it more point."

"Lord, what am I at?" cried Jack. "Orders come first." He dropped the sack, broke the seal of the Admiral's letter, found the expected words directing and requiring him to proceed with all possible dispatch to the flag at or off Rodriguez immediately upon receipt of these orders. He laughed, and said, "If there is any baronetcy in the wind, it don't come this way. I am superseded."

He went on deck, gave one order for the signal that should set the squadron on its new course, away from Mauritius, and another to splice the mainbrace. To Seymour's astonished expression he replied, in a voice as offhand as he could make it, that he had just learnt of the birth of a son. He received the congratulations of the quarterdeck and many a kind look from the seamen nearby, invited Colonel Keating to take a glass in the cabin, and so returned. The bottle was soon out, the letters distributed; and Jack, giving Keating his packet, said, "I hope, Colonel, that your news may be as pleasant as mine, to offset the rest; because you were too good a prophet by half, and I fear there may be a general waiting for you at Rodriguez, just as there is an admiral waiting for me." With these words he retired with his letters to the quarter-gallery, his own private place of ease, leaving the soldier transfixed, pale and even trembling, with indignation.

A little before dinner he came out and found Stephen alone in the great cabin. Pullings had now, for the first time, learnt of the squadron's destination; and realizing that a little tactful delay on his part would have allowed the Commodore to carry out his plans and to reap honour and glory, had withdrawn to the taffrail, where he stood by the ensign-staff, cursing his untimely zeal. "I wish you too may have had very good news, Stephen?" said Jack, nodding at the pile of open letters at Stephen's side.

"Tolerably so in parts, I thank you; but nothing that causes me a joy comparable with yours. You are still in a glow, brother, a roseate glow. Pray tell me of Sophie's condition."

"She says she has never felt better in her life--swears it passed off as easy as a letter in the post finds the little chap a great comfort, and excellent company. Now I know you are about as partial to children as old Herod, Stephen, but--"

"No, no. I am not doggedly, mechanically set against them, though I freely admit I find most babies superfluous, and unnecessary. I-

"Without there were babies, we should have no next generation."

"So much the better, when you consider the state to which we have reduced the world they must live in, the bloody-minded wolfish stock from which they spring, and the wicked, inhuman society that will form them. Yet I do admit of exceptions: the replication of such a creature as Sophie, and even I may say of yourself, can be seen as a good. But I am afraid I interrupt you."

"I was only going to say, that you might like to hear Sophie's description of him. It appears that he is a most unusual, exceptional child." Stephen listened with a decent show of complaisance: the smell of roasting meat drifted aft, and that of fried onions; he heard the drum beat "Heart of Oak" for the gunroom's dinner; his stomach called out for his own; and still the tale ran on.

"You cannot conceive, Stephen, how it extends a man's future, having a son," said Jack. "Now it is worth while planting a walnut-tree! Why, I may even lay down a whole plantation of oaks."

"The girls would have gathered your walnuts. The girls would have sported under the oaks; and their grandchildren would have felled them."

"No, no. It is not the same thing at all. Now, thank God, they have portions; and so eventually they will marry some greasy fellow called Snooks--you must admit, Stephen, that it is not the same thing at all."

Just before five bells Jack was cut short by the arrival of Pullings, still sadly reduced, and of the Colonel, still trembling with rage; and at five bells itself Killick announced, "Wittles is up," with a courtly jerk of his thumb, and they moved into the dining-cabin.

Pullings ate his mutton silently, with little appetite; Colonel Keating, though allowed by convention to speak freely at the Commodore's table, remained almost equally mute, not wishing to spoil a happy occasion by giving vent to the words he longed to utter; Stephen was lost in reflection, though from time to time he did respond to pauses in Jack's cheerful flow. When the long meal was over, when the King, Mrs Aubrey and young Stupor Mundi had been drunk in bumpers of luke-warm port, and when the guests had moved into the open air to dissipate the fumes of their wine, he said to Jack, "I scarcely know which I most admire, the strength of your philoprogenitive instinct, or your magnanimity in the face of this disappointment. Not many years ago you would have clapped your telescope to your blind eye; you would have evaded these orders; and you would have taken the Mauritius before Mr Bertie knew what you were at."

"Well, I am disappointed," said Jack, "I must confess; and when first I smoked the Admiral's intentions I had a month's mind to steer due west for a while. But it would not do, you know. Orders is orders, bar one case in a million; and this is not one of those cases. The Mauritius must fall in the next week or so, whoever is in command, or whoever takes the glory."

"Keating does not take it so philosophically."

"Keating has not just heard he has a son. Ha, ha, ha: there's for you, Stephen."

"Keating already has five, and a sad expense they are to him, as well as a grave disappointment. The news of a sixth boy would not have mollified his indignation, unless indeed it had been a daughter, the one thing he longs for. Strange, strange: it is a passion to which I cannot find the least echo, when I peer into my bosom."

Colonel Keating's indignation was shared throughout the Boadicea and her companions. It was universally held that the Commodore had been done out of his rights, cheated of his due, and wiped in the eye if not stabbed in the back: and there was not a man in the squadron who did not know that two captured Indiamen lay in Port-Louis, together with a large number of only slightly less magnificent prizes, and that the appearance--the totally unnecessary appearance--of a seventy-four, eight frigates, four sloops, and maybe a dozen regiments of lobsters, would reduce the share of all who had done the real work to half a pint of small beer, if that.

The indignation increased with brooding, and as the two bodies slowly converged, meeting at Rodriguez, it grew to such a pitch that when the Boadicea's salute to the flag roared out, the gunner said, "And I wish they was loaded with grape, you old--"without a word of reproach from the officers near at hand. When the last gun had been fired, and before the flagship began her reply, Jack said, "Strike the pendant. Hoist out my barge." Then, a mere post-captain again, he stepped into the cabin and called for his breeches, cocked hat and number one coat to go aboard the Admiral. It had been a hard moment, the striking of his pendant--for a pendant could not fly in the presence of a flag without the unusual compliment of a direct invitation--but little comfort did he meet with below. Killick's sense of injustice had been inflamed by the extra ration of grog served out to all hands. It now overflowed on to the principal victim, and in his old shrewish voice he said, "You ain't got no number one coat, sir. All bloody and mucked up, with figuring away aboard the Venus, when two minutes would of changed it. The scraper will pass with a shove'- spitting on the lace of the cocked hat and rubbing it with his sleeve "but you'll have to wear it athwartships, on account of the rats. As for coats and breeches, this is the best I can do--I've shipped the old epaulettes--and if any jumped up new-come son of a Gosport fart don't like it, he may--"

"Bear a hand, bear a hand," cried Jack. "Give me my stockings and that packet, and don't stand muttering there all day."

The same sullen resentment was obvious in the bargemen who pulled Captain Aubrey across to the Illustrious; it was evident in his coxswain's rigour, in the vicious stab of the boathook that clamped on to the two-decker's chains, removing a good hand's-breadth of paint, and in the expressionless reserve that met the friendly advances of the seamen peering out of her lowerdeck ports.

Admiral Bertie expected it; he knew very well what he was doing, and he was fully armoured against all reaction except cheerfulness. From the outset he adopted an attitude of jovial bonhomie, with a good deal of laughter: he spoke as though it were the most natural thing in the world to find a ready and willing compliance, no trace of ill-feeling or resentment; and to his astonishment he did find it. The Naval Instructions clearly laid down that he must find it, and that anything less than total abnegation, total perfection of conduct, would render a subordinate liable to punishment; but his whole service life had proved that there was a world of difference between the Navy in print and the Navy in practice, and that although in theory a senior post-captain must be as submissive to an admiral as a newly-joined midshipman, in fact an oppressed commodore, growing froward under ill usage, might make things extremely awkward for his oppressor and still keep the right side of the law: he had himself used obstruction in all its refinements often enough to know what it could accomplish. He had been prepared to meet the cunningest ploys or the most violent expressions of dissent (his secretary was there to note down any choleric word): none appeared: he was taken aback, rendered uneasy. He probed a little deeper, asking whether Aubrey was not surprised to see so many ships coming to queer his pitch? And when Jack, with equal joviality, replied that he was not, that the greater the number the less the bloodshed (so repugnant to him, as to all right-feeling men), and that the more the merrier was his motto, the Admiral glanced at his secretary, to see whether Mr Shepherd shared his suspicion that Captain Aubrey was somewhat disguised, cheerfully disguised, in wine.

The suspicion could not be maintained. As soon as the captains of the fleet were assembled aboard the flagship, at the Admiral's request Jack Aubrey delivered to them a singularly lucid, cogent account of the situation, with all the facts, all the figures at instant command. To the anxious words about the notorious difficulty of the reefs surrounding Mauritius, the wicked surf that beat upon them, and the paucity of harbours, he replied with a chart, a little masterpiece of hydrography, showing Flat Island and the Grande Baie, exactly surveyed by himself, with triple-sextant-bearings and doubled checked soundings showing plenty of room and clean anchorage for seventy ships, as well as sheltered beaches for a very great number of men. He ended his exposition by observing that in view of the lateness of the season he would respectfully suggest an immediate descent.

The Admiral was by no means so sure of that: long before Captain Aubrey was born the Admiral's old nurse had told him "The more hurry, the less speed." He would take the matter under consideration urgent consideration- and advise with General Abercrombie and the gentlemen of his staff.