Post Captain (12 page)

'Papers,' he said. 'A Spanish passport, eh? A very greasy passport too, my friend; do you sleep with your bear? Joan Margall, born in - what's this place?'

'Lérida, monsieur le sergent,' said the man, with the cringing humility of the poor.

'Lérida. Profession, bear-leader. Eh, bien: a led bear knows how to dance - that is logic. I have to have proof; it is my duty to see the bear perform.'

'Certainly, monsieur le sergent, at once. But the gentlemen will not expect too much from Flora; she is a female bear, and - 'He whispered in the gendarme's ear. 'Ah, ah? Just so,' said the gendarme. 'Well, just a pace or two, to satisfy my sense of duty.'

Dragged up by its chain and beaten by its leader till the dust flew from its shaggy side the bear shuffled forward. The man took a little pipe from his bosom, and playing it with one hand while he held the chain with the other, he hoisted the bear on to its hind legs, where it stood, swaying, amidst a murmur of disapprobation from the sailors. 'Crool buggers, these foringers,' said George. 'Look at his poor nose, with that great ring.'

'English gents,' said the man, with an ingratiating leer. 'Ornpip.'

He played a recognizable hornpipe, and the bear staggered through a few of the steps, crossing its arms, before sitting down again. Trumpets sounded from the citadel behind the walls, the guard on the Narbonne gate changed, and the sergeant began to bawl 'En route, en route, les prisonniers.'

With avid and shamelessly persistent busyness, the bear-leader hurried up and down the line. 'Remember the bear, gents. Remember the bear. N'oubliez pas l'ours, messieurs-dames.'

Silence. The convoy's dust settled on the empty road. The inhabitants of Carcassonne all went to sleep; even the small boys who had been dropping mortar and clods of earth from the battlements on to the bear disappeared. Silence at last, and the chink of coins.

'Two livres four sous,' said the bear-leader. 'One maravedi, two Levantine coins of whose exact provenance I am uncertain, a Scotch groat.'

'When one sea-officer is to be roasted, there is always another at hand to turn the spit,' said the bear. 'It is an old service proverb. I hope to God I have that fornicating young sod under my command one day. i'll make him dance a hornpipe - oh, such a hornpipe. Stephen, prop my jaws open a little more, will you? I think I shall die in five minutes if you don't. Could we not creep into a field and take it off?'

'No,' said Stephen. 'But I shall lead you to an inn as soon as the market has cleared, and lodge you in a cool damp cellar for the afternoon. I will also get you a collar, to enable you to breathe. We must reach Couiza by dawn.'

The white road winding, winding, up and up the French side of the Pyrenees, the afternoon sun - the June sun now - beating straight down on the dusty slope: the bear and its leader plodding on. Scorned by carts, feared by horses, they had already walked three hundred and fifty miles, taking a zigzag route to avoid most large towns and the dangerous zone of the coast, and to stay two nights in houses belonging to sure friends. Stephen was leading the bear by the paw, for Jack could not see below his muzzle when his head was on, and in his other hand he had the broad spiked collar that covered the hole through which Jack breathed. He was obliged to put it on for the best part of the day, however, for although this was a remote valley there were houses every few hundred yards, hamlets not three or four miles apart, and fools that kept accompanying them on their way. 'Was it a wise bear? How much did it eat a week? Was it ever wicked? Could he buckle the two ends of his month by exhibiting it?' And the nearer they came to the mountains, the more anecdotes of the bears that had been heard of, actually seen, and even killed. Bears, wolves, smugglers and mountain bandits, the Trabucayres and the Migueletes. Communicative fools, cheerful villagers, all eager for a treat, and dogs. Every hamlet, every farmhouse had its swarm of dogs that came out, amazed, howling, yapping and barking, haunting the bear's heels sometimes as far as the next vile swarm; for the dogs, if not the men, knew that there was something unnatural in the bear.

'It will not be long now,' said Stephen. 'At the far end, beyond the trees, I can see the turning of the main Le Perthus road. You can lie in the wood while I walk to the village to find out what is afoot. Should you like to sit down for a moment on this milestone? There is water in the ditch, and you could soak your feet.'

'Oh, I do not mind it,' said Jack, staggering as Stephen altered the rhythm of his walk to peer into the ditch. 'And I dare not soak them again, in any case.' The massive, hairy

shape writhed a little - a mechanical attempt at seeing its tattered buttocks, legs and lower paws, dog-lacerated. 'The wood is not very far off, I dare say?'

'Oh, not above an hour or so. It is a beech-wood with an old marle-pit; and you may - I do not assert it, but I say you may see the purple helleborine growing there!'

Lying in the deep cool fern with his collar off Jack felt the sweat still coursing down his chest, and the movement of ants, ticks, unidentified insects invading him; he smelt his own unwashed reek and the moist stench of the skin, imperfectly preserved in turpentine; but he minded none of it. He was too far gone to do anything but lie in the complete relaxation of utter weariness. It had of course been impossible to disguise him: a six-foot, yellow-haired Englishman would have stood out like a steeple in the south of France - a France alive with people tracking fugitives of one kind or another, foreign and domestic; but the price for this attempt was beyond anything he had believed possible. The torment of the ill-fitting, chafing hide, the incessantly-repeated small rasping wounds, the ooze of blood, the flayed soles of his feet, attached to the fur by court-plaster, the heat, the suffocation, the vile uncleanliness, had reached what he had thought the unendurable point ten days, two hundred miles, ago, in the torrid waste of the Causse du Palan.

Was this attempt going to succeed? At the bottom of his heart he had never doubted it to begin with - so long as he did his part (barring some act of God or unaccountable misfortune) neither he nor Stephen Maturin would pass the rest of the war as prisoners, cut off from all possibility of service, promotion, a lucky cruise, cut off from Sophia; cut off, indeed, from Diana. A long war, he made no doubt, for Bonaparte was strong - Jack had been astonished by the state of forwardness of everything he had seen in Toulon: three ships of the line almost ready for launching, a huge quantity of stores, unexampled zeal. Any man bred to the sea, any born sailor, could tell within an hour of being aboard whether a ship was an efficient, happy co-ordinated whole; it was the same with a naval port, and in Toulon his quick, professional eye had seen a great machine running very fast, very smoothly. France was strong; France owned the fine Dutch navy, controlled huge areas of western Europe; England was weak and alone - no allies left at all, as far as he could tell from the fragmentary, partial news they had picked up. Certainly the Royal Navy was weak; he had no doubt of that at all. St Vincent had tried to reform the dockyards rather than build ships, and now there were fewer that could stand in the line of battle than there had been in '93, in spite of all the building and all the captures during the ten years of war: and that again was a reason - quite apart from the obligations of the treaty - why Spain should come in on the side of France - another reason why they should find the frontier closed and Stephen's refuge lost to them, the attempt a failure after all. Had Spain declared? For the last two or three days they had been in the Roussillon, in French Catalonia, and he had not been able to understand anything that Stephen and the peasants said to one another. Stephen was strangely reticent these days. Jack had supposed he knew him through and through in the old uncomplicated times, and he loved all he knew; but now there were new depths, an underlying hard ruthlessness, an unexpected Maturin; and Jack was quite out of his depth.

Stephen had gone on, leaving him. Stephen had a passport into Spain - could move about there, war or no... Jack's mind darkened still further and thoughts he dared not formulate came welling up, an ugly swarm.

'Dear God,' he said at last, twisting his head from side to side, 'could I have sweated all my courage out?' Courage gone, and generosity with it? He had seen courage go - men run down hatchways in battle, officers cower behind the capstan. He and Stephen had talked about it: was courage a fixed, permanent quality? An expendable substance, each man having just so much, with a possible end in sight? Stephen had put forward views on courage -varying and relative - dependent upon diet, circumstances, the functioning of the bowels - the costive frequently timid - upon use, upon physical and spiritual freshness or exhaustion the aged proverbially cautious - courage not an entity, but to be regarded as belonging to different, though related, systems, moral, physical, sexual - courage in brutes, in the castrated - complete integrity, unqualified courage or puerile fiction-jealousy, its effect upon courage - Stoics - the satietas vitae and the supreme courage of indifference - indifference, indifference.

The tune that Stephen always played on his bear-leader's pipe began to run through his head, mingling with Stephen's voice and half-remembered instances of courage from Plutarch, Nicholas of Pisa and Boethius, a curious little air with archaic intervals, limited to what four fingers and overblowing could do, but subtle, complicated.

The roaring of a little girl in a white pinafore woke him; she and some unseen friend were looking for the summer mushrooms that were found in this wood, and she had come upon a fungoid growth.

'Ramón,' she bellowed, and the hollow echoed with the sound, 'Ramón, Ramón, Ramón. Come and see what I have found. Come and see what I have found. Come and see..

On and on and on. She was turned three-quarters from him; but presently, since her companion did not answer, she pivoted, directing her strong voice to the different quarters of the wood.

Jack had already shrunk as far as he could, and now as the child's face veered towards him he closed his eyes, in case she should sense their savage glare. His mind was now all alive; no trace of indifference now, but a passionate desire to succeed in this immediate step, to carry the whole undertaking through, come Hell or high water. 'Frighten the little beast and you will have a band of armed peasants round the wood in five minutes - slip away and you lose Stephen - out of touch, and all our papers sewed inside the skin.' The possibilities came racing one after another; and no solution.

'Come, come, child,' said Stephen. 'You will spoil your voice if you call out so. What have you there? It is a satanic boletus; you must not eat the satanic boletus, my dear. See how it turns blue when I break it with a twig. That is the devil blushing. But here we have a parasol. You may certainly eat the parasol. Have you seen my bear? I left him in the wood when I went to see En Jaume; he was sadly fatigued. Bears cannot stand the sun.'

'En Jaume is my godfather's uncle,' said the child. 'My godfather is En Pere. What is the name of your bear?'

'Flora,' said Stephen; and called, 'Flora!'

'You said him just now,' said the child with a frown, and began to roar 'Flora, Flora, Flora, Floral Oh, Mother of God, what a huge great bear.' She put her hand in Stephen's and murmured, 'Aie, my - in the face of God what a bear.' But her courage returned, and she set to bellowing 'Ramón, Ramón, Ramón! Come and see my bear.'

'Good-bye, poppets,' said Stephen, in time. 'May God go with you.' And waving still to the little figures he said, 'I have firm news at last; mixed news. Spain has not declared war: but the Mediterranean ports are closed to English ships. We must go down to Gibraltar.'

'What about the frontier?'

Stephen pursed his lips. 'The village is filled with police and soldiers: two intelligence men are in charge, searching everything. They have arrested one English agent.'

'How do you know?'

'The priest who confessed him told me. But sure I have never thought of the road itself. I know, I did know, another way. Stand over - stand over more this way. The pink roof, and behind it a peak? And to the right of that, beyond the forest, a bare mountain? That is the frontier, joy, and in the dip there is a pass, a path down to Recasens and Cantallops. We will slip across the road after dusk and be there at dawn.'

'May I take off the skin?'

'You may not. I regret it extremely, Jack; but I do not know the path well - there are patrols out, not only for the smugglers but for the fugitives, and we may blunder into one or even two. It is a smugglers' path, a dangerous path indeed, for while the French may shoot you for walking upon it as a man, the smugglers may do the same for looking like a bear. But the second is the proper choice; your smuggler is open to reason, and your patrol is not.'

Half an hour in the bushes by the road, waiting for the long slow train of a battery to pass by - guns, waggons, camp-followers - several coaches, one pulled by eight mules in crimson harness, some isolated horsemen; for now that they could see the frontier-line their caution grew to superstitious lengths.

Half an hour, and then across to the cart-track up to Saint-Jean de l'Albère. Up and up, the moon clearing the forest ahead of them after the first hour; and with the coming of the moon the first breaths of a sirocco from the Spanish plains, a waft from an opened oven-door.

Up and still up. After the last barn the track dwindled to a ribbon and they had to walk in single file; Jack saw Stephen's monstrous bundle - a dark shape, no more -moving steadily a pace or two in front of them, and something like hatred glowed around his stomach. He reasoned: 'The pack is heavy; it weighs fifty or sixty pounds - all our possessions; he too has been going on all these days, never a murmur; the straps wring his back and shoulders, a bloody welt on either side.' But the unwavering determination of that dim form, moving steadily on and on, effortlessly, it seemed, always too fast and never pausing - the impossibility of keeping up, of forcing himself another hundred yards, and the equal impossibility of calling for a rest, drowned his reason, leaving only the dull fire of resentment.