The Fortune of War (17 page)

'Certainly,' said Stephen. 'Pray, sir, did you find your turkeys?'

'Yes, yes!' cried Pontet-Canet. 'And some grey squirrels. I was the one that shot them all, ha, ha, ha! I was the best fusil of the party; and, I allow myself to say without forfantery, the best cook.'

'How did you dress them?'

'Sir?'

'How did you cook them?'

'The squirrels in madeira; the turkey roast. And all round the table was heard "Very good! Exceedingly good! Oh, dear sir, what a glorious bit!"'

'Please to describe the turkey's flight.'

Pontet-Canet spread his arms, but before he could take to the air Mr Evans appeared: the other Monsieur, in conference with the commodore, needed an interpreter.

'I hope Mr Bainbridge is well?' said Stephen.

'Oh yes, yes, yes,' said Mr Evans. 'A little laudable pus, no more. The wound is healing very prettily. Some pain, of course, and some discomfort; but we must learn to put up with that without growing mean or snappish.' A pause.

'They tell me we are nearing the edge of the stream,' said the surgeon, 'and that presently we shall see green water to larboard, and Cape Fear.'

'Ha,' said Stephen, 'the green water in with the land. How I hope that we shall also see a skimmer.'

'What is a skimmer?'

'It is one of your sea-birds. It has a singular beak, the lower mandible being longer than the upper: with this it skims the surface of the sea. I have always longed to see a skimmer.'

'I guess you must be a considerable ornithologist, Dr Maturin. You made some uncommon drawings of the far southern birds in your journal, I recall.' There were no birds on the pages Stephen had exhibited: clearly the book had been studied for some time. Mr Evans seemed quite unaware of his slip, however, and he now proposed that they should finish their game of chess, a match that had reached a desperately congested middle-game with almost all the pieces on the board, not one of which could be moved without the utmost peril.

'By all means,' said Stephen. 'But do you think it would be possible to play on deck? Then, while you attempt to delay your inevitable defeat, I may keep my eye upon the sea. I should be loath to miss my skimmer.'

Mr Evans looked doubtful, but said he would have a word with the officer of the watch. 'All is well,' he said, coming back. 'Mr Heath has every sympathy with your wish: if you want to see a skimmer, you may play chess in any part of the ship, he says; and he will give orders that you be told if skimmers appear. He thinks there is a fair chance, once we are close in with the cape, and out of the blue water.'

Some minutes later he brought the board, saying, 'I love this game. Apart from anything else, it is agreeable to my sentiments as a citizen of a republic, since it always ends with the discomfiture of a king.'

'I too was a republican in the frothy pride of my youth,' said Stephen, inspecting the position, while an awning was being stretched to protect them from the sun. 'And had I been out of coats at the time, I should have joined you at Bunker Hill and Valley Forge and those other interesting spots. As it was, I cheered the taking of the Bastille. But with age, I have come to think that after all a monarchy is best.'

'When you look about the world, and view the monarchs in it - I do not refer to your own, of course - can you really maintain that the hereditary king cuts a very shining figure?'

'I cannot. Nor is that to the point: the person, unless he be extraordinarily good or extraordinarily bad, is of no importance. It is the living, moving, procreating, sometimes speaking symbol that counts.'

'But surely mere birth without any necessary merit is illogical?'

'Certainly, and that is its great merit. Man is a deeply illogical being, and must be ruled illogically. Whatever that frigid prig Bentham may say, there are innumerable motives that have nothing to do with utility. In good utilitarian logic a man does not sell all his goods to go crusading, nor does he build cathedrals; still less does he write verse. There are countless pieties without a name that find their focus in a crown. It is as well, I grant you, that the family should have worn it beyond the memory of man; for your recent creations do not answer - they are nothing in comparison of your priest-king, whose merit is irrelevant, whose place cannot be disputed, nor made the subject of a recurring vote.'

Six bells struck; the awning was finished; Mr Evans said, 'Good Dr Maturin, you will not take it amiss, if I point out that your priest-king is on the wrong square.'

'So he is, too,' said Stephen; and having put it right he fell to studying the position again. While he did so, a shadow crossed the board. He made his move and looked up: it was Pontet-Canet, surveying the game with pursed lips and narrowed eyes. The oblique sunlight fell on his black whiskers, showing an odd rusty tinge beneath the dye: or perhaps caused by the dye? Where had he seen the man before?

His eyes wandered beyond the whiskers, beyond Mr Evans's bowed cogitating head, swept the sea for skimmers, and returning beheld Jack Aubrey. Jack kept out of the way of his captors as much as he decently could - the necessary cheerfulness was burdensome to him, far more burdensome than the truly shocking pain in his shattered arm; but now that he was well enough to come on deck he could not decently sit moping in his cabin. He paused at the top of the ladder, and Stephen saw his keen gaze run round the horizon in search of a British man-of-war, preferably an exact match for the Constitution, ideally his own Acasta (though she only carried eighteen-pounders). Having searched in vain he cast an automatic glance at the sails and the sky to windward, and walked aft to watch the game.

'I have moved, sir,' said Mr Evans, disguising his triumph in a tone of false meekness.

He had indeed. Stephen, intent upon his own attack, had overlooked that odious knight. Whatever he did he must lose a piece, and against a player as strong as Mr Evans that must mean losing the game: unless... He advanced a pawn.

'No, no,' cried Pontet-Canet. 'You must -'

'Hush,' cried Evans, Jack and Stephen.

Pontet-Canet glared, particularly at Jack, sniffed, and walked away; but presently he was back, his fingers fairly itching to put the chessmen right.

The pieces fell, a brisk massacre; the board was almost clear, and Evans, one piece and two pawns up, fell plump into the trap. 'Oh,' cried he, striking his forehead, 'a stalemate!'

'Morally you won,' said Stephen. 'But at least this time my king was not discomfited.'

'What you should have done,' cried Pontet-Canet, 'was to take the fool.'

Evans and Stephen were too busy telling one another how they had contrived to lose, each having an impregnable position, an invincible plan of attack, to pay much attention to the others; but they were soon obliged to do so. The tone had risen far beyond that of ordinary disagreement; it had risen to acrimony; and at the same time it had so increased in volume that the American officers who were on the quarterdeck looked round in surprise.

'I must insist that you have placed the pieces wrongly,' said Jack again in a strong voice, unaccustomed these many years to contradiction from any but admirals and his wife. 'The queen's rook was here.' He tweaked the piece from the Frenchman's hand, and firmly leaning across him, put it down, not without some emphasis.

'Do you believe to bully me?' cried Pontet-Canet. 'You damned rogue. By God, it will not be so... I'll overboard you like a dead cat... if I find you too heavy, I'll cling to you with hands, legs, nails, everything; my life is nothing to send such a dog to hell,. Now, just now..

Fortunately his words came tumbling so fast, and in so very strange an accent, that Jack did not understand much of what he said; and fortunately, as Stephen and Mr Evans interposed, the quarterdeck filled for the solemn noonday observation of the sun - a ceremony as grave here as it was in the Royal Navy - and the moment Commodore Bainbridge decreed that the hour was twelve the uproar of All hands to dinner drowned all private dissension. Stephen and Evans led Jack below for the dressing of his arm, and made him lie down to rest before dining with the Commodore.

'Shall we save it, do you suppose?' asked Evans as they returned to the open air.

'I doubt it,' said Stephen, 'and sometimes I am much tempted to cut. It is this clammy heat that does so weigh against him. And of course the mental agitation: he will accept Mr Bainbridge's invitations, his very kindly-intended invitations, though it kill him.'

'As for the heat,' said Mr Evans, 'once we round Cape Hatteras and stand inshore for the stream, there will be no more of that. And as for the agitation, might not we add the inspissated juice of lettuce to our present measures? The pulse is light, quick, and irregular; and there is an uncommon degree of nervous excitement and irascibility, in spite of the apparent stoicism. Another such scene as this morning's may have very grave effects. Obnoxious fellow, with his "what you ought to have done"! I would not lose a game of chess to that man for the world. With no fever, no pain, no weakness, I found it hard enough to govern my tongue. In peacetime I should have kicked him; but war makes strange bedfellows.'

'A ludicrous exhibition,' said Stephen. Too ludicrous, perhaps: perhaps too much of the excitable passionate Frenchman, whom no one would take seriously. With his foot on the top of the ladder, Stephen remembered where he had seen him before: it was at a little inn high above Toulon, much frequented by the greedier part of the French navy. A French officer, Captain Christie-Pallière, had taken Jack and Stephen to dinner there, during the peace of Amiens, and this man, passing by their table, had spoken to Christie-Pallière. Stephen remembered his Dijon accent: he was about to eat a 'coôôôq au yin' and the rest of his party a 'rrâââble de lièvre'; and he had taken particular notice of Jack, who was speaking English.

'Do you see a skimmer, sir?' asked Mr Evans, blocked behind him.

'I doubt it,' said Stephen.

They took several turns, up and down past the repairing parties and the line of carronades, a neat line now, although two had broken trunnions and one had received a ball full in the muzzle, while many of their slides were deeply scored and wounded. If an English man-of-war were to appear, she would find that the Constitution already had several of her teeth drawn. But it was too early for much hope of that: the cruisers were much more likely to be off the Chesapeake, or Sandy Hook, or in Massachusetts Bay, at the entrance to Boston itself; for Boston was their destination. The Java may have been destroyed, but at least she had prevented the Constitution from going on to cruise in the Pacific as she had intended, and obliged her to return to her home port to be overhauled. Boston was her port, and at Boston, unless the blockading squadron captured her, the future would begin: for this voyage was no more than a transition, a curious long-continued present.

'That is Cape Fear,' observed Mr Evans, pointing. 'And now you can see the division between the Gulf Stream and the ocean clearly. There, do you see, the line running parallel with our course, about a quarter of a mile away.'

'A noble headland,' said Stephen. 'And a most remarkably clear division: thank you, sir, for pointing it out.'

They paced on in silence. No skimmers: no birds of any kind. With his mind reverting to chess, Stephen said, 'Your republic, now, Mr Evans: do you look upon it as one and indivisible, or rather as a voluntary association of sovereign states?'

'Well, sir, for my part I come from Boston, and I am a Federalist: that is to say I look upon the Union as the sovereign power. I may not like Mr Madison, nor Mr Madison's war - indeed, I deplore it: I deplore this connection with the French, with their Emperor Napoleon, to say nothing of the alienation of our English friends

- but I see him as the President of the whole nation, and I concede his right to declare it, however mistakenly, in my name; though I may add that by no means all of my Federalist friends in New England agree with me, particularly those whose trade is being ruined. Most of the other officers aboard, however, are Republicans, and they cry up the sovereign rights of the individual states. Nearly all of them come from the South.'

'From the South? Do they, indeed? Now that may account for a difference I have noticed in their manner of speech, a certain languor - what I might almost term a lisping deliberation in delivery, not unmelodious, but sometimes difficult for the unaccustomed ear. Whereas all that you say, sir, is instantly comprehensible.'

'Why sure,' said Evans, in his harsh nasal metallic bray, 'the right American English is spoke in Boston, and even as far as Watertown. You will find no corruption there, I believe, no colonial expressions, other than those that arise naturally from our intercourse with the Indians. Boston, sir, is a well of English, pure and undefiled.'

'I am fully persuaded of it,' said Stephen. 'Yet at breakfast this morning Mr Adams, who was also riz in Boston, stated that hominy grits cut no ice with him. I have been puzzling over his words ever since. I am acquainted with the grits, a grateful pap that might with advantage be exhibited in cases of duodenal debility, and I at once perceived that the expression was figurative. But in what does the figure consist? Is it desirable that ice should be cut? And if so, why? And what is the force of with?'

After barely a moment's pause, Mr Evans said, 'Ah, there now, you have an Indian expression. It is a variant upon the Iroquois katno aiss' vizmi - I am unmoved, unimpressed. Yes, sir. But speaking of ice, Dr Maturin, have you any conception of the cold in Boston during the winter months? It may well do good to our patient's arm, but on the other hand, it may carry off the rest of him. Has he no other clothing but what I see? And you, my dear sir, have you cold-weather garments?'

'I have not; nor has Captain Aubrey. In our earlier mishap we lost all our possessions that we did not carry in our hands. All of them,' said Stephen, looking down as the piercing memory of his collection filled his mind. 'But it is of no great consequence. In a few days we shall be exchanged, and for a few days Captain Aubrey and I can very well brave the northern blizzard in the manner of the Iroquois, or the noble Huron, wrapped in a blanket. And in Halifax, I understand, there is every commodity to be had, from fur hats to the ingenious paddles used for walking on the snow.'