Treason's Harbour (6 page)

'Lowestoffe is to be the man,' said Ball, 'and quite right too: he is used to dealing with Turks and Arabs, he is on the spot, and he has no ship. But Lord, to think of him sweating over the desert, ha, ha, ha! They are to walk across to Suez: oh Lord!' He laughed again, and all the others grinned. Lord Lowestoffe was one of the best-liked men in the Navy, but he was short-legged and exceedingly fat - his red, round, jolly face perpetually shone - and the idea of his marching across a sandy waste under the African sun was irresistibly comic.

'I feel for him,' said Jack. 'He complained of the heat even when we were in the Baltic. He would be much happier on the North American station, where I hope to be very soon. Poor Lowestoffe: I have not seen him this great while.'

'He has been out of order,' said Hanmer. 'I do assure you he looked almost pale when he came to see me the other day, asking about the Red Sea, wanting to know about the winds, shoals, reefs and so on and writing it all down most conscientiously, wheezing like a bulldog, poor fellow.'

'Are you a Red Sea pilot, sir?' asked Pullings, speaking for the first time: he asked in all good faith, being interested in the subject, but his wound changed his civil smile into an offensively incredulous leer, and his nervous tone did little to contradict it.

'I do not suppose my knowledge of those parts can compete with yours, sir,' said Captain Hanmer. 'Far from it, no doubt. Yet I do have a certain superficial acquaintance with them, and I did have the honour of leading the squadron all the way from Perim right up to Suez itself when we were turning the French out of the place in the year one.' Hanmer was much given to strange romantic tales, but he happened to be keeping to the exact truth and this made him more sensitive to disbelief than usual.

'Oh sir,' cried Pullings, 'I have never been there at all - the Indian Ocean, no more - but I have always heard tell that the navigation is uncommon difficult, the tides and currents up at the north end uncommon deceptive, and the heat almost uncommon hot, as one might say; and I should very much like to know more.'

Hanmer looked more attentively at Pullings' face, saw the perfect candour beneath the wound, and said, 'Well, sir, the navigation is uncommon difficult, to be sure, especially if you come in, as we had to come in, through the devilish eastern channel round Perim, which is only two miles wide and nowhere more than sixteen fathom deep in the fairway, with never a buoy, never a buoy from one end to the other; but that is nothing to the excessive hellfire heat, the excessive hellfire humid heat -perpetual God-damned sun, no refreshment in the breeze, tar dripping from the rigging, pitch bubbling from the seams, hands running mad, washing never dry. Meares here,' - nodding towards his neighbour - 'very nearly went out of his wits, and was obliged to be dipped in the sea twice an hour: dipped in an iron basket, because of the sharks.' Hanmer gave Meares a thoughtful look, and reflecting that although he had been in a sad way he was still perfectly capable of detecting any deviation from the truth, continued his plain, factual account.

Jack, listening with what attention he could spare from his tankard of iced lemonade heightened with marsala, heard of coral reefs running out as much as twenty miles on the east coast but keeping closer inshore in the northern waters, of the volcanic islands, the dangerous shoals in the latitude of Hodeida, the prevailing north and north-west winds in the hither regions, the sand-storms in the Gulf of Suez and the wind called the Egyptian. He was glad that Hanmer was not vapouring away about sea-serpents and phoenixes - in spite of years and years of practice Hanmer was still a most indifferent liar, and his want of skill was often embarrassing - but he was sorry to hear so much loose talk about what was meant to be kept quiet - Stephen had always preached a tomb-like discretion - and in any case he felt that Hanmer was going on far, far too long. He was now talking about the Red Sea sharks.

'Most sharks are gammon,' said Jack in one of the rare pauses. 'They look fierce and throw out their chests, but it is all my eye and Betty Martin, you know, all cry and no wool. I dived plump on to an enormous hammerhead off the Morocco coast - just south of the Timgad shoal, to be exact - and all he did was to ask my pardon and hurry away. Most sharks are gammon.'

'Not in the Red Sea they ain't,' said Hanmer. 'I had a ship's boy called Thwaites, a little stunted fellow from the Marine Society, and he was sitting in the lee mainchains, trying to keep cool by trailing his feet in the water: the ship heeled a strake or two with a puff of wind and a shark had his legs off at the knee before you could say knife.'

This struck a chord in the mind of Captain Ball, whose attention had wandered long ago. 'I am going to have such a fish for dinner,' he cried. 'They showed him to me when I arrived - a lupo. Very like a bass, but more so. Aubrey, you and Captain Pullings must share him; he is quite big enough for three.'

'You are very good, Ball, and indeed there is nothing like a lupo,' said Jack, 'but for my part I must hurry away. I am going to wait on Admiral Hartley, and it will be strange if he don't make me stay to dinner.'

Captain Hartley, as he was then, was not perhaps the most estimable of naval characters, but he had been kind to Jack as a midshipman, and he had particularly mentioned his name, with strong commendation, in his dispatch when the Fortitude's boats cut out a Spanish corvette from under the guns of San Felipe. He had also been one of the examining captains on that dread Wednesday when Mr Midshipman Aubrey presented himself together with many others at Somerset House, furnished with a paper falsely certifying that he was nineteen years of age, and with others from his various captains stating with perfect truth that he had served the requisite six years at sea and that he could hand, reef and steer, work his tides and take double altitudes; and it was Captain Hartley who spoke up when Jack, already so flustered by a malignant hungry ill-tempered mathematical captain that he could hardly tell latitude from longitude, was brought up all standing by the sudden, unfair, and totally unexpected question 'how does it come about that Captain Douglas disrated you, turned you out of the midshipmen's berth and sent you forward to serve as a common foremast-hand when you was in Resolution at the Cape?'

Jack was horribly puzzled to find an answer that should make him seem reasonably innocent while at the same time it did not reflect upon his then commanding officer; he called upon his intelligence (for his usual candour did not seem appropriate on this occasion) and upon all the subtlety he possessed, but he called in vain, and he was infinitely relieved to hear Captain Hartley say 'Oh, it was only a question of a girl hidden in the cable-tier, nothing to do with his seamanship at all: Douglas told me when I took him on to my own quarterdeck. Now, Mr Aubrey, let us suppose you are in command of a transport: she is in ballast, light and crank, heading south under topgallantsails, the breeze due west, and a sudden squall lays her on her beam-ends. How do you deal with the situation without cutting away her masts?'

Mr Aubrey dealt with the situation by veering away a good scope of hawser, made fast to water-stops such as spars and hen-coops, from the lee quarter and then hauling upon it until the ship wore, with a last hearty heave by all hands to bring the wind on to what had been her lee quarter, when she must infallibly right herself and save her hawser too.

A little later he left the Navy Office with a beaming face and another certificate, a beautiful paper that said he had been found fit to serve as a lieutenant; and it was in this rank that he shipped with Captain Hartley during a commission in the West Indies, a commission cut short by the captain's elevation to flag-rank. Although Hartley was not a popular man in the service, being an odd combination of profligacy and avarice - the mistresses he sailed with were of the cheapest kind, and they were turned off in foreign ports with no great regard for their convenience, while his rare dinners were sad, shabby affairs - they got along quite well together, partly because they were used to one another, partly because they were both keenly interested in gunnery, and partly because Jack pulled Hartley out of the water when his gig overturned off St Kitts. Jack was a powerful swimmer and he had saved a surprising number of sailors: those few who had had time to realize how disagreeable it was to drown and how much the world they were leaving still had to offer were sometimes touchingly grateful: but most were so taken up with gasping and calling out and suffocating, sinking and rising, that they had no leisure for reflection; and those who, like Captain Hartley, were snatched directly from the sea would often maintain that they could have managed perfectly well by themselves - meaning, it is to be presumed, that they would suddenly have learnt how to swim or to walk upon the water. Yet however grudging their reactions might be, Jack nearly always retained a private fondness for those he had rescued, even the most bitterly ungrateful; and Hartley was by no means one of these.

Jack was thinking of him quite affectionately as he walked inland along the white, dusty road among the olive-trees: they had not met for many years, although Jack had quite often been able to carry barrels of wine and crates of books and furniture for him, dropping them at the nearest port, nor had Jack seen his house in Gozo; but he had a clear picture of the Admiral in his mind's eye, and he looked forward to their meeting. It was an unfrequented road: one ox-cart, one ass, one peasant in the last half hour. Unfrequented by men, that is to say; but in the olive-trees on either hand the cicadas kept up a metallic strident din, sometimes rising to such a pitch that conversation would have been difficult had he not been alone; and once he left the small fields and the groves, walking over stony, goat-grazing country, the highway was very much used by reptiles. Small dun lizards flickered in the scorched grass at the edge and big green ones as long as his forearm scuttled away at his approach, while occasional serpents brought him up all standing: he had an ignorant, superstitious horror of snakes. On a walk of this kind in the Mediterranean islands he usually saw tortoises, which he did not dislike at all - far from it -but they seemed rare on Gozo, and it was not until he had been going for some time that he heard a curious tock-tock-tock and he saw a small one running, positively running across the road, perched high on its legs; it was being pursued by a larger tortoise, who, catching it up, butted it three times in quick succession: it was the clap of the shells that produced the tock-tock-tock. 'Tyranny,' said Jack, meaning to intervene: but either the last blows had subdued the smaller tortoise - a female, or she felt that she had shown all the reluctance that was called for; in any case she stopped. The male covered her, and maintaining himself precariously on her domed back with his ancient folded leathery legs he raised his face to the sun, stretched up his neck, opened his mouth wide and uttered the strangest dying cry.

'Bless me,' said Jack, 'I had no notion... how I wish Stephen were here.' Unwilling to disturb them, he fetched a cast quite round the pair and walked on, trying to recall some lines of Shakespeare that had to do not exactly with tortoises but with wrens until he reached a wayside shrine dedicated to St Sebastian, the martyr's blood recently renewed with startling brilliance and profusion. Beyond the shrine there was a high stone wall, partly fallen, with an ornate wrought-iron gate, once gilded, leaning unhinged against the masonry. 'This must be it,' he said, calling his directions to mind.

'But perhaps I am mistaken,' he said some minutes later. The drive, the arid sort of park or rather enclosed scrubland on either side and the gaunt yellow house in sight ahead were unlike anything he could remotely connect with the Navy. He had seen the same kind of nonchalance in Ireland; the overgrown paths, the shutters hanging half off their hinges, the broken window-panes, but in Ireland it had usually been veiled by gentle rain, and softened by moss. Here the sun beat down from a cloudless wind-swept sky; there was nothing green apart from a few dusty holm-oaks, and the sawing of the countless cicadas made it all harsher still, harsher by far. 'That fellow will tell me,' he observed.

The gaunt yellow house was built around a court; an arched gateway led into it, and against the left-hand pillar leant a man, half-groom, half-peasant, picking his nose. 'Pray does Admiral Hartley live here?' asked Jack.

The man did not answer, but gave him a sly, knowing look and slipped inside the door. Jack heard him speaking to a woman: it was Italian, not Maltese, that they were talking, and he caught the words 'officer - pension - take care'. He was conscious of being looked at through a small window, and presently the woman came out, a hard-faced slattern in a dirty white dress. She had assumed a genteel expression, and in quite good English she said 'Yes, this was the Admiral's palace - was the gentleman come on official business?' Jack explained that he was there as a friend, and he was surprised to see disbelief in her small, close-set eyes: she retained her smile however and asked him to walk in; she would tell the Admiral he was there. He was led up dim stairs and shown into a splendid room: splendid, that is to say, in its proportions, its pale green marble floor with white bands, its lofty carved plaster ceiling, and its chimney-piece, which enclosed a hearth larger than many of the cabins Lieutenant Aubrey had lived in; less so in its furniture, which amounted to a couple of upright chairs with leather seats and backs, looking lost in all that light-filled space, and a little round table. There seemed to be nothing else at all, but when Jack, having reached the middle window in a noble flight of seven, turned towards the fireplace he found himself looking straight at the likeness of his former captain at the age of thirty-five or forty, a brilliant portrait, wonderfully fresh and clear. He contemplated it, standing there with his hands behind his back; and the minutes dropped by in the silence. He did not know the artist: it was not Beechey, nor Lawrence, nor Abbott, nor any of the usual painters of the Navy; probably not an Englishman at all. But a very able fellow in any case: he had caught Hartley's strong, masterful, dominating air exactly, and his energy; but, reflected Jack after a long communing with the portrait, he had certainly not liked his sitter. There was a cold hardness in that painted face, and although the portrait was truthful enough in its way it took no account of Hartley's good nature - rarely expressed, to be sure, but real enough upon occasion. The picture was not unlike a statement made by an enemy: and Jack remembered how a brother-officer had said that even Hartley's undoubted courage had a grasping quality about it, that he attacked the enemy in a state of furious indignation and personal hatred, as though the other side were trying to do him out of some advantage - prize-money, praise, employment.