HMS Surprise (Aubrey & Maturin, #3)

by Patrick O'Brian

‘It is terrible how people suffer,’ she thought.

I am sure there are quantities of young women who know where Pappenburg is, and Batavia, and this Ligurian Republic; but we never did such places with Miss Blake. And this Kingdom of the Two Sicilies: I can find one on the map, but not the other. Stephen, pray tell me the present state of the world.’ ‘Is it the state of the world, my dear?’ said Stephen, with a grin – no professional look left at all.

‘Oh, Stephen, must you go?’ cried Sophie. ‘Let me brush you a little. Will you not stay supper? Pray, do stay supper – I will make you toasted cheese.’ ‘I will not, my dear, though you are very kind,’ said Stephen, standing like a horse as she brushed at him,

Gently, gently down through the open streets, Stephen staring up at the stars and the clean air reaching deep into his lungs.

The black water slipping by faster, faster, lipping along her side.

‘Stephen,’ he cried, with a meretricious affectation of gaiety, ‘just toss this off, will you, and we will get under way. Is your great-coat warming?’ ‘I will not,’ said Stephen. ‘It is another of your damned possets. Am I in childbed, for all love, that I should be plagued, smothered, destroyed with caudle?’ ‘Just a sip,’ said Jack. ‘It will set you up for the journey. Mrs Moss does not quite like your travelling; and I must say I agree with her. However, I have bought you a bottle of Dr Mead’s Instant Invigorator; it contains iron. Now just a drop, mixed with the posset.’ ‘Mrs Moss – Mrs Moss – Dr Mead – iron, forsooth,’ cried Stephen. ‘There is a very vicious inclination in the present age, to – ’ ‘Great-coat, sir,’ said Killick. ‘Warm as toast. Now step into it before it gets cold.’ They buttoned him up, tweaked him into shape, and carried him downstairs, one at each elbow, so that his feet skimmed the steps, to where Bonden was waiting by the chaise. They packed him into the stifling warmth with understanding smiles over his head as he cried out that they were stifling him with their God-damned rugs and sheepskins – did they mean to bury him alive?

do you not find that a spoken language wafts in and out of your mind, leaving little trace unless you anchor it with print?’

the higher birds were still in the sun, flashing pink as they dived through the fiery light.

more details of yards sprung, bowsprit struck by lightning, great exertions day and night

although he had had no hand in their cutting-out – indeed, would have prevented it, having the greatest love for the Doctor, so much so that he had fought Braithwaite over a chest for calling the Doctor ‘a Dutch-built quizz’ – yet, the rats being already dead, and dressed with onion-sauce, and he so hungry after rattling down the shrouds, he had thought it a pity to let the others scoff the lot. Had lived with a troubled conscience ever since: had in fact expected a summons to the cabin. ‘You would have been living with a troubled stomach if you had known what was in ’em; the Doctor had – ’ ‘I tell you what it is, Jack,’ said Stephen, walking quickly in. ‘Oh, I beg your pardon.’ ‘No, stay, Doctor. Stay, if you please,’ cried Jack. Babbington looked wretchedly from one to the other, licked his lips and said, ‘I ate your rat, sir. I am very sorry, and I ask your pardon.’ ‘Did you so?’ said Stephen mildly. ‘Well, I hope you enjoyed it. Listen, Jack, will you look at my list, now?’ ‘He only ate it when it was dead,’ said Jack. ‘It would have been a strangely hasty, agitated meal, had he ate it before,’ said Stephen, looking attentively at his list. ‘Tell me, sir, did you happen to keep any of the bones?’ ‘No, sir. I am very sorry, but we usually crunch ’em up, like larks. Some of the chaps said they looked uncommon dark, however.’ ‘Poor fellows, poor fellows,’ said Stephen in a low, inward voice. ‘Do you wish me to take notice of this theft, Dr Maturin?’ asked Jack. ‘No, my de...

He had voluntarily sworn to have no truck with vampires, and there, attached to his bosom, spread over it and enfolded by one arm, was a greenish hairy thing, like a mat – a loathsome great vampire of the most poisonous kind, no doubt. ‘I should never have believed it of him: his sacred oath in the morning watch and now he stuffs the ship with vampires; and God knows what is in that bag. No doubt he was tempted, but surely he might blush for his fall?’

Jack glanced up, and there against the Southern Cross, high on the humming topgallant forestay, was the sloth, rocking easy with the rhythm of the ship. ‘I doubt you have too much starlight,’ he said. At this speed the frigate’s bow-wave rose high, washing the lee head-rails with an unearthly blue-green light and sending phosphorescent drops over them, even more brilliant than the wake that tore out straight behind them, a ruled line three miles long gleaming like a flow of metal.

Stephen opened the book, and holding it with the page to the bow-wave he read, ‘Speed the soft intercourse from soul to soul And waft a sigh from Indus to the Pole. Mr White, I exult, I triumph. I claim my bottle; and Lord, Lord, how I shall enjoy it – such a thirst! Captain Aubrey, I beg you will share our bottle. Come, Lethargy,’ he called directing his voice into the velvet sky.

‘Oh, oh!’ cried the chaplain, staggering into the booms. ‘A fish – a fish has hit me! A flying-fish hit me in the face.’ ‘There is another,’ said Stephen, picking it up. ‘You notice that your high fishes fly paradoxically with the wind. I conceive there must be an upward draught. How they gleam – a whole flight, see, see! Here is a third. I shall offer it, lightly fried, to my sloth.’

A little before dawn the wind veered a point, two points, blowing with sudden flaws, vacuums that hurt his ears; it reached a screaming note more savage than anything he had heard and his heart hurt him for the staysail, for the ship – an edge of sentiment and self-pity, with Sophia’s name hovering on the edge of utterance aloud. Then slowly, slowly, the shriek dropped half a tone, another, and another: a low buffeting roar at last, when the faint straggling light showed a sea white from rim to rim, with the steady procession of great rollers in their due solemn ordered ranks once again – vast indeed, but no longer maniac.

‘What I know, and what you don’t know,’ cried Jack, ‘is that I have not so much as a single ten-inch spike left aboard.’ ‘God set a flower upon you, my dear, with your ten-inch spike,’ said Stephen. ‘Of course I know it: you have mentioned them daily these last two hundred leagues, together with your hanging-ends and double-sister-blocks; and nightly too, prattling in your sleep. Bow, bow to predestination or at least confine yourself to silent prayer.’

‘The seas their wonders might reveal But Chloe’s eyes have more: Nor all the treasure they conceal, Can equal mine on shore.’

the unreasoning part of his mind evoked living images of these same charms, of that incredible grace of movement when it was truly spontaneous; and very soon his reasoning mind began to argue that this fault, too, was to be assimilated to the long catalogue of defects that he knew and accepted, defects that he felt to be outweighed if not cancelled by her qualities of wit and desperate courage: she was never dull, she was never cowardly. But moral considerations were irrelevant to Diana: in her, physical grace and dash took the place of virtue. The whole context was so different that an unchastity odious in another woman had what he could only call a purity in her: another purity: pagan, obviously – a purity from another code altogether. That grace had been somewhat blown upon to be sure, but there was enough and to spare; she had destroyed only the periphery; it was beyond her power to touch the essence of the thing, and that essence set her apart from any woman, any person, he had ever known.

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;

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.

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 me 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 garçon 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 s...

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.

Few had much room to cast stones, but hypocrisy has never failed the English middle class in any latitude, and they flung them in plenty with delighted, shocked abandon – rocks, boulders, limited in size only by fear for their husband’s advancement.

Then ten minutes later, while she was still shattered, her mother’s return, the scene, the cries, tears, swooning, bed, extreme pallor, reproaches.

‘It may be that someone has fabricated – it may be that someone has told her that you have come to India to see Diana Villiers,’ said Stephen, hiding his face with shame as he spoke. This was a direct attempt at keeping them apart, for his own purposes – partly for his own purposes. It was wholly uncandid, of course, and he had never been uncandid with Jack before. It filled him with anger; but still he went on, ‘or that you may see her here.’

Consent unreasonably withheld may justifiably be compelled. I am concerned with Sophie’s happiness and yours, rather than with pandering to Mrs Williams’s sordid whims. You must write that letter, Jack; for you are to consider, Sophie is the beauty of the world; whereas although you are tolerably well-looking in your honest tarpaulin way, you are rather old and likely to grow older; too fat, and likely to grow even fatter – nay, obese.’ Jack looked at his belly and shook his head. ‘Horribly knocked about, earless, scarred: brother, you are no Adonis. Do not be wounded,’ he said, laying his hand on Aubrey’s knee, ‘when I say you are no Adonis.’ ‘I never thought I was,’ said Jack. ‘Nor when I add that you are no Fox either: no flashing wit to counterbalance want of looks, wealth, grace and youth.’ ‘Sure I never set up for a wit,’ said Jack. ‘Though I can bring out a good thing on occasion, given time.’

I long for the seventeenth. Already I am beginning to murder time,

A warm hand slipped into his, and looking down Stephen saw Dil smiling up at him. ‘Art very strangely clothed, Stephen,’ she said. ‘I almost took thee for a topi-wallah. I have a whole leaf of pondoo: come and eat it before it spills. Mind thy good bazaar shirt in the dung – it is far too long, thy shirt.’ She led him across the trampled grass to the rising glacis of the fort, and there, finding an empty place, they sat down. ‘Lean thy head forward,’ she said, unfolding the leaf and setting the turgid mess between them. ‘Nay, nay, forward, more forward. Dost not see thy shirt all slobbered, oh for shame. Where wast thou brought up? What mother bore thee? Forward.’ Despairing of making him eat like a human being, she stood up, licked his shirt clean, and then, folding her brown jointless legs under her she squatted close in front of him. ‘Open thy mouth.’ With an expert hand she moulded the pondoo into little balls and fed him. ‘Close thy mouth, Stephen. Swallow. Open. There, maharaj. Another. There, my garden of nightingales. Open. Close.’ The sweet, gritty unctuous mass flowed into him, and all the time Dil’s voice rose and fell. ‘Thou canst not eat much better than a bear. Swallow. Pause now and belch. Dost not know how to belch? Thus. I can belch whenever I choose. Belch twice. Look, look; the Mahratta chiefs.’ A splendid group of horsemen in crimson with gold-embroidered turbans and saddle-cloths. ‘That is the Peshwa in the middle: and there the Bhonsli rajah – har, ha...

‘What is amiss with thee?’ asked Dil, breaking off and looking up at him. ‘Nothing,’ said Stephen, staring still. ‘Art sick?’ she cried, standing up and spreading her hands upon his heart. ‘No,’ said Stephen. He smiled at her and shook his head: he was quite composed. She squatted, still staring up; and Diana, looking quickly from side to side, made some mechanical smiling reply to her neighbour’s remark. Her eyes swept along the glacis, passed over Stephen, suddenly returned and paused, with a growing look of doubt and then the most extreme astonishment, and all at once her face changed to frank delight: it flushed, turned pale; she opened the door and sprang to the ground, leaving astonishment behind her. She ran up the slope, and Stephen, rising, stepped over Dil and took her by her outstretched hands. ‘Stephen, upon my soul and honour!’ she cried. ‘Stephen, how glad I am to see you!’ ‘I am glad to see you too, my dear,’ he said, grinning like a boy. ‘But in God’s name how come you to be here?’ By sea, by ship – the usual way – brief explanations cut again and again by amazement – ten thousand miles – health, looks, mutual civilities – unabashed staring, smiles – how very, very brown you are! ‘Your skin is fairer than I saw it last,’ he said. ‘Stephen,’ muttered Dil again. ‘Who is your sweet companion?’ asked Diana. ‘Allow me to name Dil, my particular friend and guide.’ ‘Stephen, tell the woman to take her foot from off my khatta,’ said Dil, with a stony look. ‘Oh daug...

Stephen felt the weight of Dil’s unwinking scrutiny: he scratched himself in silence and listened to the now violent pounding of his heart. ‘Oh, oh, oh,’ she cried at last, rising and placing her thin hands together like a temple-dancer. ‘Oh, oh, I understand it now.’ She writhed and stamped and swayed, chanting, ‘Oh Krishna, Krishnaji, oh Stephen bahadur, Sivaji, oh melter of hearts – ha, ha, ha!’ her mirth overcame her dancing and she fell to the ground. ‘Dost thou understand?’ ‘Perhaps not quite as well as thou.’ ‘I shall explain, make clear. She is wooing thee – she wishes to see thee by night, oh shameless, ha, ha, ha! But why, when she has three husbands? Because she must have a fourth, like the Tibetans: they have four husbands, and the Frank women are very like Tibetans – strange, strange ways. The three have not given her a child, so a fourth there must be, and she has chosen thee because thou art so unlike them. She was warned in a dream, no doubt: told where to find thee, so unlike the rest.’ ‘Wholly unlike?’ ‘Oh yes, yes! They are fools – it is written on their foreheads. And they are rich and thou art poor; they are young and thou art ancient; they are handsome red-faced men, and thou – most holy men are hideous, though more or less innocent. Horns and trumpets! Hurry, come hurry: we must run down to the sea.’

She reached forward a hesitant hand and touched them lightly; her fearless and cheerful expression was now timid, very grave. She held one for a moment; put it solemnly down; looked at Stephen gazing at the island in the bay. Put it silently on and squatted there amazed, staring at her arm and the gleaming band of silver: put on another and another; and the rapture of possession seized her. She burst into wild laughter, slipped them all on, all off, all on in a different order, patting them, talking to them, giving them each a name. She leapt up and spun, jerking her thin arms to make the bracelets clink. Then suddenly she dropped in front of Stephen and worshipped him for a while, patting his feet – earnest, loving thanks broken by exclamations – how had he known? – preternatural wisdom nothing to him, of course – did he think them better this way round or that? – such a blaze of light! – might she have the cloth they were wrapped in? She took them off, comforting them, put them on again – how smoothly they slipped! – and sat there pressed against his knee, gazing at the silver on her arms. ‘Child,’ he said, ‘the sun has set. It is the dark of the moon and we must go.’ ‘Instantly,’ she cried. ‘Give me the chit and I fly to the ship; straight to the ship, ha, ha, ha!’ She ran skipping down the hill: he watched her until she vanished in the twilight, her gleaming arms held out like wings and the letter grasped in her mouth.

‘Oh well: damn Aubrey. But I cannot tell you how glad I am to see you, Stephen. I have been so lonely, and you were in my mind, as clear as a bell, just before I saw you.

Tell me, Stephen, what can I show you? This is my country, after all, and I should love to lead you about. I am my own mistress for the next few days.’

the essence is your spirit, courage, intelligence, and gaiety; they are unaffected; and it is they that form your face – you are responsible for your face.’

I do not think it a pretty thing, to seduce a friend’s wife.’ ‘I am sure you are right,’ said Stephen. ‘But is it indeed a possible offence? A booby girl may be led away by a wicked fellow, to be sure, but a woman, a married woman? For my part I do not believe that any marriage was ever yet broken by an outside force. Let us suppose that Mrs Norton is confronted with a choice between claret and port; she decides that she does not care for claret but that she does care for port. From that moment she is wedded to her muddy brew; and it is impertinent to assure her that claret is her true delight. Nor does it seem to me that any great blame attaches to the bottle she prefers.’

‘Here is no one of her caste,’ said the man next to Stephen; and other people murmured that that was the cruel pity of the thing – her own people would have seen to the fire. But with a famine coming, no man dared look beyond the caste he belonged to. ‘I am of her caste,’ said Stephen to the man in front of him, touching his shoulder. ‘Tell the woman I will buy the child. Friend, tell the woman I will buy the child and take it down. I will attend to the fire.’

Stephen’s eyes were remote; his cheeks hollow, lined and dirty; his hair straggled over his face: he might well have been mad, or in another state – removed. The man glanced at his grave neighbours, felt their qualified approval, and called out, ‘Grandmother, here is a holy man of thy caste who from piety will buy the child and take it down: he will also provide the wood.’ More conversation – cries – and a dead silence. Stephen felt the man thrust the purse back into his bosom, patting and arranging his shirt round the string. After a moment he stood up. Dil’s face was infinitely calm; the wavering flame made it seem to smile mysteriously at times, but the steady light showed a face as far from emotion as the sea: contained and utterly detached. Her arms showed the marks where the bracelets had been torn off, but the marks were slight: there had been no struggle, no desperate resistance. He picked her up, and followed by the old woman, a few friends and the Brahmin, he carried her to the strand, her head lolling against his shoulder. The dawn broke as they went down through the bazaar: three parties were already there before them, at the edge of the calm sea beyond the wood-sellers. Prayers, lustration; chanting, lustration: he laid her on the pyre. Pale flames in the sunlight, the fierce rush of blazing sandalwood, and the column of smoke rising, rising, inclining gently away as the breeze from the sea set in. ‘ . . . nunc et in hora mortis nostrae,’ he repeated yet again...

Stephen smiling at him. ‘Will you tell me what you were musing upon, now?’ said Stephen. ‘It must have been rarely pleasant.’ ‘I was thinking about marriage,’ said Jack, ‘and the garden that goes with it.’ ‘Must you have a garden when you are married?’ cried Stephen. ‘I was not aware.’

pray do not encumber me with your needless solicitude.’

The frigate had no headsails set, the wind being aft, and the taut lines of the forestays plunged slanting down in a clean, satisfying geometry; below them the ship’s head with its curving rails, and then the long questing bowsprit, reaching far out into the infinity of ocean: with a steady, measured, living rhythm her bows plunged into the dark blue water, splitting it, shouldering it aside in dazzling foam.

‘But I am truly grateful to you, my dear,’ he said, ‘for having brought me to this proud perilous eminency, this quasi-apex, this apogee; you have indeed lifted my heart, in the spirit and in the flesh; and I am now resolved to mount up daily. I now despise the mizzentop, once my ultima Thule; and I even aspire to that knob up there,’ – nodding to the truck of the royal. ‘What an ape, or even I may say an obese post-captain can accomplish, that also I can do.’