H.M.S. Surprise (21 page)

This, at least, was his tentative conclusion and he had travelled these eight thousand miles with a continually mounting desire to see her again; and with an increasing dread of the event - desire exceeding dread, of course.

But Lord, the infinite possibilities of self-deception - the difficulty of disentangling the countless strands of emotion and calling each by its proper name - of separating business from pleasure. At times, whatever he might say, he was surely lost in a cloud of unknowing; but at least it was a peaceful cloud at present and sailing through a milky sea towards a possible though unlikely ecstasy at an indefinite remove was, if not the fulness of life, then something like its shadow.

Peace, still deeper peace. The languid peace of the Arabian Sea in the south-west monsoon; a wind as steady as the trades but gentler, so gentle that the battered Surprise had her topgallants abroad and even her lower studdingsails, for she was in an even greater hurry than usual. Her stores were so low now that for weeks past the gunroom had been living on ship's provisions, salt beef, salt pork, biscuit and dried peas, and the midshipmen's berth reported no single rat left alive: what was worse, Stephen and M'Alister had cases of scurvy on their hands once more.

But the lean years were thought to be almost over. At one time Harrowby had wished to steer for the Nine Degree Channel and the Laccadives; but Harrowby was an indifferent, timid navigator and Jack, overruling him, had laid her head for Bombay itself; and now they had been running north-east by east so long that by dead reckoning the Surprise should have been a hundred miles east of the Western Ghauts, another Ark stranded in the hills of Poona. But consulting with Pullings, working his lunars again and again, dragging his brighter midshipmen repeatedly through the calculations in search of an error, worshipping his chronometers, and making the necessary corrections, Jack was almost certain of his position. Sea-birds, native craft far off, a single merchantman that fled, crowding sail on the horizon without waiting to learn if they were French or English - the first sail they had seen in four months - and above all, soundings in eleven fathoms, a bottom of shelly white sand like Direction Bank, strengthened him in his persuasion that he was in 18°34' N, 72°29'E, and that he should make his landfall the next day. He stood on the quarterdeck, glancing now over the side, now up at the masthead, where the sharpest eyes and the best glasses in the ship were trained steadily eastwards.

Stephen's confidence in Captain Aubrey's seamanship was as entire, as blind, as Jack's in the medical omniscience of Dr Maturin; and untroubled by the cares that now oppressed his friend he sat in the mainchains, as naked as Adam and much the same colour, trailing a purse-net in the sea.

The chains, broad planks jutting horizontally from the outside of the ship to spread the shrouds wider than her extreme breadth, provided the most comfortable seat imaginable; he had all the advantage of the sun, of solitude (for the chains were well below the rail), and of the sea, which ran curving past under his feet, sometimes touching them with a warm caress, sometimes sending an agreeable shower of spray over his person; and as he sat he sang 'Asperges me, Domine, hyssopo - but those qualities were of course most apparent when she was poor lonely and oppressed what shall I find now? what, what development? if indeed I call? hyssopo et super nivem dealbabor.

Asperges me...'

A passing sea-snake broke his song, one of the many he had seen and failed to catch: he veered out his line, willing the creature to enter the purse. But an empty purse had no charm for the serpent; it swam on with scarcely a hesitation in its beautiful proud easy glide.

Above and behind him he could hear Mr Hervey's usually conciliating voice raised in passion, wanting to know whether those sweepers were ever coming aft -whether this bloody shambles was ever going to look like the deck of a man-of-war. Another voice, low, inward and confidential, was that of Babbington, who had borrowed Stephen's Hindustani phrasebook: over and over again he was repeating 'Woman, wilt thou lie with me?' in that language, staring impatiently north-eastwards. Like many sailors he could sense the loom of the land, a land with thousands of women upon it, every one of whom might perhaps lie with him.

'No great guns this evening, Doctor,' said Pullings, leaning over the rail. 'We are priddying for tomorrow. I reckon we shall raise Malabar Hill before it's dark, and the Admiral lays there in Bombay. We must be shipshape for the Admiral.' Bombay: fresh fruit for his invalids, iced sherbets for all hands, enormous meals; the marvels of the East; marble palaces no doubt; the Parsees' silent towers; the offices of the Commissioners for the former French settlements, counters and factories on the Malabar coast: the residence of Mr Commissioner Canning.

'How happy you make me, Mr Pullings,' said Stephen. 'This will be the first evening since thirty south that we shall be spared that inhuman - hush, hush! Do not stir. I have it! Ha, ha, my friend: at last!' He hauled in his line, and there in the net lay a sea-snake, a slender animal, shining black and brilliant yellow, quite amazing.

'Don't ee touch her, Doctor,' cried Pullings. 'She's a sea-serpent.'

'Of course she is a sea-serpent. That has been the whole purpose of my fishing ever since we reached these waters. Oh what a lovely creature.'

'Don't cc touch her,' cried Pullings again. 'She's deadly poison. I seen a man die in twenty minutes -,

'Land ho,' hailed the lookout. 'Land broad on the starboard beam.'

'Jump up to the masthead, Mr Pullings, if you please,' said Jack, 'and let me know what you see.'

A thunder of feet as the whole ship's company rushed to stare at the horizon, and the Surprise took on a list to starboard. Stephen held his close-meshed net at a prudent distance; the serpent writhed furiously, coiled and struck like a powerful spring released.

'On deck there,' roared Pullings. 'It's Malabar Hill itself, sir; and I see the island plain.'

The serpent, blind out of its own element, bit itself repeatedly, and presently it died. Before Stephen could bring it inboard, to its waiting jar of spirit, its colours were already fading: but as he climbed in over the rail, so a waft of air took the frigate's sails aback, a breath of heavy air off the land, with a thousand unknown scents, the green smell of damp vegetation, palms, close-packed humanity, another world.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Fresh fruit for the invalids, to be sure, and enormous meals for those who had time to eat them; but apart from the omnipresent smell and a little arrack that came aboard by stealth, the wonders of the East, the marble palaces, remained distant, half-guessed objects for the Surprise. She was taken straight into the naval yard, and there they stripped her to the bone; they took out her guns and cleared her holds to come to her bottom, and what they found there made the master-attendant clear the dry-dock as fast as ever he could, to bring her in before she sank at her moorings.

The Admiral visited her in state; he was a jolly, rose-pink admiral and he said the kindest things about the Surprise; but he instantly deprived Jack of his first lieutenant, appointing Mr Hervey to an eighteen-gun sloop as master and commander, thereby throwing all the labour of refitting on to the captain's shoulders.

The Admiral had a conscience, however; and he knew that Mr Stanhope was of some importance. He spoke the good word to the master-attendant, and all the resources of a well-equipped yard lay open to the Surprise. The daughter of the horse-leech was moderation made flesh compared to Captain Aubrey let loose in a Tom Tiddler's ground strewn with pitch, hemp, tow, cordage, sailcloth by the acre, copper in gleaming sheets, spars, blocks, boats and natural-grown knees; and although he, too, was afire to wander on the coral strand beneath the coconut-palms, he said, 'While this lasts, not a man shall leave the ship. Gather ye rose-pods while ye may, as dear Christy-Pallière used to say.'

'May you not find the men grow wilful and discontented? May they not, with a united mind, rush violently from the ship?'

'They will not be pleased. But they know we must catch the monsoon with a well-found ship; and they know they are in the Navy - they have chosen their cake, and must lie on it.'

'You mean, they cannot have their bed and eat it.'

'No, no, it is not quite that, neither. I mean - I wish you would not confuse my mind, Stephen. I mean it is only a week or so, to snap up everything that can be moved before Ethalion or Revenge come in, screeching for spars and cables; then I dare say we can take it easier, with native caulkers from the yard, and some liberty for our people. But there is a vast deal of work to be done -you saw her spirketing? - weeks and weeks of work; and we must hurry.'

From his earliest acquaintance with the Navy, Stephen had been oppressed by this sense of hurry - hurry to look over the next horizon, hurry to reach a certain port, hurry to get away from it in case something should be happening in a distant strait: and hurry now, not only to gather rose-pods, but to catch the monsoon. If they did not set the envoy down in Kampong by a given date, Jack would be obliged to beat all the way back against head-winds, losing months of valuable time, time that might be spent in active warfare. 'Why,' cried he, 'the war might be over before we round the Cape, if we miss the north-east monsoon: a pretty state of affairs.'

And in the immediate future there was this matchless opportunity for making the dear Surprise what she had been, and what she ought to be again. Stephen cared for none of these things; the fire that vainly urged Jack to go ashore burnt with a devouring, an irresistible force in him.

He left Jack caressing a massive baulk of timber, the finest teak in the island. He said, 'My patients are in the hospital; Mr Stanhope is recovering with the Governor; there is no place for me here. I must devote, a certain amount of time to the shore - a variety of reasons require my presence on the shore.'

'I dare say you must,' said Jack absently. 'Mr Babbington, Mr Babbington! Where is that infernal slowbelly of a carpenter? I dare say you must: but however busy you are, do not miss the getting out of our lower masts. We go alongside the sheer-hulk, and they lift 'em out like kiss my hand - it is the prettiest thing in the world. I shall send word the day before - you would be very sorry to miss the sheer-hulk.'

Stephen came aboard from time to time, once with a mathematical Parsee who wished to see the frigate's navigation tables; once with a child of unknown race who had found him lost among the blue buffaloes of the Aungier maidan, in danger of being trampled, and who had led him back by the hand, talking all the way in an Urdu adapted to the meanest understanding; and once with a Chinese master-mariner, a Christian from Macao, a spoilt priest, with whom he conversed in Latin, showing him the working of the patent chain-pump. And now and then he appeared at Jack's lodgings, where in theory he, too, had his bed and board. Jack was too discreet to ask him where he slept when they did not meet, and too well-bred to comment on the fact that sometimes he walked about in a towel, sometimes in European dress, and sometimes in a loose shirt, hanging over white pantaloons, but always with an expression of tireless secret delight.

As for sleeping, he lay where he chose, under trees, on verandas, in a caravanserai, on temple steps, in the dust among rows of other dust-sleepers wrapped as it were in shrouds - wherever extreme bodily fatigue laid his down. Nowhere in the crowded city, accustomed to a hundred races and innumerable tongues, did he excite the least comment as he wandered through the bazaars, the Arab horse-lines, among the toddy-groves, in and out of temples, pagodas, churches, mosques, along the strand, among the Hindu funeral pyres, through and through the city, gazing at the Mahrattas, Bengalis, Rajputs, Persians, Sikhs, Malays, Siamese, Javans, Philippinoes, Khirgiz, Ethiopians, Parsees, Baghdad Jews, Sinhalese, Tibetans, they gazed back at him, when they were not otherwise employed, but with no particular curiosity, no undue attention, certainly with no kind of animosity. Sometimes his startling pale eyes, even more colourless now against his dusky skin, called for a second wondering glance; and sometimes he was taken for a holy man. Oil was poured on him more than once, and tepid cakes of a sweet vegetable substance were pressed into his hand with smiles; fruit, a bowl of yellow rice; and he was offered buttered tea, fresh toddy, the juice of sugar-cane Before the partners of the mainmast were renewed he came home with a wreath of marigolds round his bare dusty shoulders, an offering from a company of whores: he hung the wreath on the right-hand knob of his blackwood chair and sat down to his journal.

'I had expected wonders from Bombay; but my heated expectations, founded upon the Arabian Nights, a glimpse of the Moorish towns in Africa, and books of travel, were poor thin insubstantial things compared with the reality. There is here a striving, avid and worldly civilisation, of course; these huge and eager markets, this incessant buying and selling, make that self-evident; but I had no conception of the ubiquitous sense of the holy, no notion of how another world can permeate the secular. Filth, stench, disease, "gross superstition" as our people say, extreme poverty, promiscuous universal defecation, do not affect it: nor do they affect my sense of the humanity with which I am surrounded. What an agreeable city it is, where a man may walk naked in the heat if it pleases him! I was speaking today with an unclothed Hindu religious, a parama-hamsa, on the steps of a Portuguese church, a true gymnosophist; and I remarked that in such a climate wisdom and clothing might bear an inverse proportion to one another. But measuring my garment with his hand he observed that there was not one single wisdom.

'Never have I so blessed this facility for coming by a superficial knowledge of a language. My Fort William grammar, my trifle of Arabic, and above all my intercourse with Achmet and Butoo, bear such fruit! Had I been dumb, I might almost as well have been blind also: what is the sight of a violin, and the violin lying mute? This dear child Dil teaches me a great deal, talking indefatigably, a steady flow of comment and narrative, with incessant repetition where I do not understand - she insists on being understood, and no evasion deceives her: Though I do not believe Urdu is her mother-tongue. She and the crone with whom she lives converse in quite a different language: not a familiar word. The ancient gentlewoman, offering me the child for twelve rupees, assured me she was a virgin and wished to show mc the fibula that guaranteed her state. It would have been quite superfluous: what could be more virginal than this tubular fearless creature that looks me directly in the face as though I were a not very intelligent tame animal, and that communicates her thoughts, views, the moment they are born as though I, too, were a child? She can throw a stone, leap, climb like a boy; and yet she is no garcon manqué neither, for in addition to this overflowing communicative affection she also has a kind of motherliness and wishes to rule my movements and my diet for my own good - disapproves my smoking bhang, eating opium, wearing trousers of more than a given length. Choleric, however: on Friday she beat a doe-eyed boy who wished to join himself to us in the palm-grove, threatening his companions with a brickbat and with oaths that made them stare. She eats voraciously: but how often in the week? She owns one piece of cotton cloth that she wears sometimes as a kilt, sometimes as a shawl; an oiled black stone that she worships perfunctorily; and her fibula. When fed she is, I believe, perfectly happy; longing only, but with no real hope, for a silver bangle. Almost all the

children here are encumbered with them, and clank as they go. How old is she? Nine? Ten? The menarche is not far off - a hint of a bosom, poor child. I am tempted to purchase her: above all I should wish to preserve her in this present state, not sexless, but unaware of her sex, free of her person and of all the gutters and bazaars of Bombay, wholly and immediately human: wise, too. But only Joshua could halt the sun. In a year's time or less she will be in a brothel. Would a European house be better? A servant, washed and confined? Could I keep her as a pet? For how long? Endow her? It is hard to think of her lively young spirit sinking, vanishing in the common lot. I shall advise with Diana: I have a groping notion of some unidentified common quality.

'This city has immense piety, but old Adam walks about; bodies I have seen, some starved to death, some clubbed, stabbed, or strangled; and in any mercantile city one man's evil is another's good. Yet a materialism that would excite no comment in Dublin or Barcelona shocks the stranger in Bombay. I was sitting under the towers of silence on Malabar hill, watching the vultures - such a view! I had taken Jack's glass, but I did not need it, they were so very tame, even the yellow-billed Pharaoh's hen, which, Mr Norton tells me, is most uncommon west of Hyderabad - and collecting some anomalous bones when Khowasjee Undertaker spoke to me, a Parsee in a plum-coloured hat. Having come from Mr Stanhope, I was in European clothes, and he addressed me in English - did not I know it was forbidden to take up bones? I replied that I was ignorant of the customs of his country, but that I understood the bodies of the dead were exposed upon these towers to be devoured, or taken away piecemeal, by vultures - that the bodies thus became bonus nullius - that if property in the flesh could be conceived, then it was vested in the vulture; and that the vulture, relinquishing its title, surely in natural justice gave me a right to this femur, this curiously distorted hyoid? But that I was unwilling to offend any man's opinions, and that I should content myself with contemplating the remains rather than taking them away: my interest was not that of a ghoul, still less that of a glue-merchant; but of a natural philosopher.

'He, too, was a philosopher, he said: the philosophy of number. Should I like to hear him extract a cube root? I might name any figure I pleased. A surprising performance: the answers came as quick as my piece of rib could write them in the dust. He was enchanted, and he would have gone on for ever, if I had not mentioned Napier's bones, Gunter's scales - the applied mathematics of navigation - lunars - the necessary tables. Here I ventured out of my depth; was unable to satisfy him as to their nature, and therefore proposed carrying him to the ship. His curiosity overcame his evident alarm: he was gratified by the attention, pleased with the instrument; and on returning to land he invited me to drink tea at his counting-house - he is a considerable merchant. Here, at my request, he gave mc a succinct account of his life; and I was disappointed but not surprised to find him a complacent pragmatical worldly fellow. Little do I know of the mathematics or the law; but the few mathematicians and lawyers I have met seem to me to partake of this sterility in direct proportion to their eminence: it may be that they are satisfied with an insufficient or in the case of lawyers almost wholly factitious order. However that may be, this man appears to have turned his benevolent ancient creed into an arid system of mechanical observances: so many hours devoted to stated ceremonies, so much of acknowledged income set aside for alms (no question of charity here, I believe), and a rancorous hatred for the Khadmees, who disagree with his sect, the Shenshahees, not on any point of doctrine, out over the dating of their era. I might have been in Seething Lane. I do not imagine he is a typical Parsee, however, in anything but his alert, painstaking attention to business. Among other things, he is an insurer, a maritime insurer, and he spoke of the rise in premiums, plotting them against the movements, or the rumoured movements, of Linois's squadron, an armament that fills not only the Company with alarm, but also all the country ships: premiums are now higher than they were in Suffren's time. His family has innumerable commercial interests: Tibetan borax, Bencoolen nutmeg, Tuticorin pearls' my memory retains. A cousin's banking-house is closely connected with the office of the Commissioners for the former French Settlements. He could have told me a great deal about them, if it had not been for his sense of caution; even so, he spoke with some freedom of Richard Canning, for whom he expressed respect and esteem. He told me little I did not already know, but he did confirm that their return is set for the seventeenth.

'He could tell me nothing about the Hindu ceremony on the shores of the bay this coming moon: neither cared nor knew. For this I must turn once again to Dil; though indeed her notions of religion are so eclectic as to lead her into confusion. God will not be merciful to him who through vanity wears long trousers, she tells me (a Muslim teaching); and at the same time she takes it for an acknowledged truth that I am a were-bear, a decayed were-bear out of a place, an inept rustic demon that has strayed into the city; and that I can certainly fly if I choose, but with a blundering flight, neither efficient nor in the right direction - a belief she must have taken from the Tibetans. She is right in supposing that I need guidance, however.