The Nutmeg of Consolation, page 23
Their minds were stunned not so much by terror or grief but more by utter bewilderment and incomprehension; and to this was added extreme thirst - no rain these many days past. But there was still sense enough to understand the tone and gesture and the first child handed her nut. Stephen pierced the soft eye with his lancet and she drank with extraordinary application. Martin did the same for the second child.
They could speak now, and they said the same word over and over again, pointing to the great stone and pulling them by the hand. With the slab removed they plunged their faces right in and drank immoderately, their hollow bellies swelling like melons.
'As far as I can see,' said Stephen as he watched them eating the now-broken coconut with dreadful avidity, 'we must take them back to the ship, feed them and put them to bed. While the yams, taro and bananas are gathering a party can search the island for other survivors.'
'Clearly, we cannot leave them here to starve,' said Martin. 'But Lord, Maturin, if only they had been our nondescript apes, how we should have amazed London, Paris, Petersburg
Come, child.'
Down the path quite peaceably, hand in hand; but when they came to the highest enclosure the little girls set up a roaring and had to be lifted over the wall. They ran straight to a familiar banana and ate all within their reach. The same happened at the second, but by the third both were too tired and weak to go on and Stephen and Martin reached the edge of the sea carrying them, fast asleep.
'We cannot hail the boat without waking them,' observed Martin.
'Oh what a quandary,' said Stephen, whose child was infested with parasites. 'Perhaps I can put it down.' But at his first attempt the black fingers clung to his shirt with such force that he stood up again, abandoning the notion altogether.
There was no need to hail the boat, however. A far less keen-sighted man than Jack Aubrey could tell from half a mile that they were carrying not antiscorbutics but some such creature as a sloth or a wombat; yet even he looked a little blank when he saw them close and heard what was to be done.
'Well, pass them over,' he said. 'Pollack, lay them on the sacks by the mast-thwart.'
'But that will wake them,' said Martin. 'Let me walk gently in by the gang-plank.'
'Nonsense,' said Jack. 'Anyone can see you are not a father, Mr Martin.' He took the child, passed it over, its head lolling, and Pollack eased it down on to the sacks in a competent, husbandlike manner. 'When they are as sleepy as that, when they drool and hang loose,' said Jack in a more kindly tone, 'you can tie them in knots without they wake or complain.'
This was eminently true. The children were handed up the side as limp as rag dolls; nor did they stir when they were put down on a paunch-mat by the break of the forecastle.
'Pass the word for Jemmy Ducks,' said Jack Aubrey.
'Sir?' said Jemmy Ducks, whose name was John Thurlow and whose office was the care of the ship's poultry, a term sometimes held to include rabbits and even larger animals.
'Jemmy Ducks, you are a family man, I believe?' At the Captain's wholly unusual ingratiating tone and smile Jemmy Ducks' eyes narrowed and his face took on a reserved, suspicious expression; but after some hesitation he admitted that he had seven or eight of the little buggers over to Flicken, south by east of Shelmerston.
'Are any of them girls?'
'Three, sir. No, I tell a lie. Four.'
'Then I dare say you are used to their ways?'
'Well you may say so, sir. Howling and screeching, teething and croup, thrust, red-gum, measles and the belly-ache, and poor old Thurlow walking up and down rocking them in his arms all night and wondering dare he toss 'em out of window
Chamber-pots, pap-boats, swaddling clouts drying in the kitchen... That's why I signed on for a long, long voyage, sir.'
'In that case I am sorry to inflict this task upon you. Look at the paunch in the shade of the starboard gangway: those are two children brought back from the island. They are asleep. A party is going to look for any other survivors, but in the meantime they are to be washed all over with warm water and soap as soon as they wake up, and when they are dry the loblolly boy will rub them over with an ointment the Doctor is preparing.'
'Lousy as well as poxed and filthy, sir?'
'Of course. And I dare say he will have their hair off too. When that is done you will feed them in a seamanlike manner and stow them where the lambs were: you may ask Chips or the bosun for anything you need. Carry on, Jemmy Ducks.'
'Aye aye, sir.'
'And if it lasts, you shall have a mate, watch and watch.'
'Thank you kindly, sir: just like by land. Well, they say no man can escape his fate.'
'And if there are no survivors, you shall have two shillings a month hardship money.'
There were no survivors. The Surprise sailed away, sailed away, in search of the south-east trades; but they were elusive, far south of the line this year, and to reach them at all she had to contend both with the equatorial current and with faint, sometimes contrary breezes, so that half a degree of southing between noon and noon was something to celebrate.
It was pleasant sailing, however, with blue skies, a darker sea, occasional squalls of warm rain that freshened the air, and the water cool enough to be refreshing when Jack bathed in the morning, diving from the mizen-chains; the ship was still well supplied with bosun's, carpenter's and gunner's stores from her first lavish fitting-out; the hint of scurvy had receded - Hayes' arm had knit, Brampton's spirits had risen - and she was stocked with long-keeping fresh food.
Long-keeping, which was just as well, since the weeks span out before they found the south-east trades, and even then the languid capricious breezes scarcely deserved their name, still less their reputation for undeviating regularity. She sailed gently on, almost always on an even keel, and the weeks established a steady pattern of her people's life. In the morning they pumped the ship clear of the eighteen inches of sea-water that had been let in through the sweetening-cock, a task in which Stephen and Martin shared, taking their places at the breaks from an obscure feeling that they were responsible for the standing order - a task that was at first looked upon with strong disapproval by the morning watch, but that was carried on out of habit, without thought of complaint, even now that the Surprise was as sweet as the Nutmeg. Then in the forenoon, their few patients having been dealt with, they returned to the gunroom; and the long even swell from the south-east being so easy and predictable, they did not scruple to lay out even their most fragile specimens on the dining-table. That part of the afternoon watch which was not taken up with dining they usually spent in the mizentop, relating their experiences and observations in turn: Stephen had reached that part of his voyage in which he had walked up the side of an immense extinct volcano whose crater contained an isolated paradise in which the animals, protected by religion (Buddhist monks lived there), piety, superstition and plain remoteness, had never been hunted or killed or in any way molested, so that a man could walk about among them, exciting no more than a mild curiosity - a country where he had pushed his way through grazing herds of deer and had sat with orang-utangs.
Martin had no such glories to offer in the cold bare Patagonian steppes to which his narrative had brought the Surprise, but he did his best with the three-toed American ostrich, the long-tailed green parakeet, seen flying as far south as the entrance of the dreadful Strait itself - flying, to the utter confusion of all accepted notions, over tight-packed bands of penguins lining that grim shore - the austral humming-bird, an eagle-owl exactly like the one they had seen in the Sinai desert, and the flightless duck of Tierra del Fuego, whose nest he alone of all Western ornithologists had discovered under a tangle of snow-covered wintergreen not far from Port Famine.
His matter was less, but his delivery was far better, he being used to public speaking; and as he was a tall, deep-chested man his voice carried much farther than meagre Stephen's. When he was speaking of these wonderful eggs it carried right through the open skylight of the great cabin, in which Jack Aubrey was writing home.
'As I said, we had intended to pass between the Solomons and the Queen Charlotte Islands, but we may have to put in at one group or the other in the hope of buying some hogs, our progress has been so slow.' He paused, and having chewed the end of his pen for a while (a quill from one of the smaller albatrosses) he went on, 'I know you do not like it when I speak ill of any man, but I shall just say that there are moments when I wish Mr Martin at the Devil. It is not that he is not the most obliging gentlemanly fellow, as you know very well, but he does take up so much of Stephen's time that I scarcely see anything of him. I should have liked to run through the score of this evening's piece with him, but they are gnattering away in the mizentop twenty to the dozen and I do not like to break in. To be sure, it is the usual fate of the captain of a man-of-war to live in solitary splendour, relieved only by some more or less obligatory and formal entertainment on one side or the other; but I have grown so used to the luxury of having a particular friend aboard these many commissions past that I feel quite bereft when it is taken from me.'
The ship's progress was slow, and although her bottom had been cleaned in Callao, in these warm seas it was growing dirty again in spite of her copper, so dirty that it cut half a knot from her speed in light airs. The little girls' progress in learning English, on the other hand, was extraordinarily rapid, and would have been even more so if some of the hands had not talked to them in the jargon used on the west coast of Africa.
They were called Sarah and Emily, Stephen having set his face against Thursday and Behemoth; and since he had discovered them and brought them down to the shore he was unquestionably their owner, with a right to name them. He usually spent some time with them every day. When they first came aboard they were amazed and bewildered, and they clung to one another almost in silence in their dim and sheltered quarters; but presently, dressed in the simplest of poldavy shifts, they were to be seen running about on the forecastle, particularly during the afternoon watch, sometimes chanting in an odd guttural way as they hopped from plank to plank, never touching the seams, sometimes imitating the songs the seamen sang. They were good little girls, upon the whole, though rather stupid; and Emily could sometimes be both stubborn and passionate. They remained skinny however much they ate; and they had no claims to beauty. Jemmy Ducks had little difficulty in teaching them cleanliness. They were naturally given to washing when they were in health and their lousiness arose from the nature of their hair, which was coarse and crinkled and stood straight out for six inches from their heads until the ship's barber clipped them bald, and from the fact that in those parts the comb had not yet been invented. And he had not much more in teaching them punctuality, for they quite soon grasped the meaning of the ship's bells. They had obviously acquired a sense of the holy long before they came aboard, and when Jemmy Ducks led them aft, clean and brushed, they looked grave and fell silent as soon as they set foot on the quarterdeck, while at divisions they stood at his side like images for the whole length of the ceremony.
Once communication was established they seemed uneasy if they were asked about their former existence; it was as though the whole of it had been a dream, and that they had now awoken from the dream to natural life, which consisted of sailing for ever, always south-west by south, to the unchanging rhythm of bells, wearing poldavy shifts washed twice a week, speaking a sort of English, drinking the thin milkless porridge called skillygallee for breakfast (cocoa was considered too rich for little girls), eating lobscouse or sea-pie and ship's biscuit (in which they delighted) for dinner, and more biscuit and broth for supper. So much was this the case, so much was this their life, that they were exceedingly distressed when at length a canoe full of Solomon islanders came alongside. 'Black boogers,' they cried in horror and ran below, although they never showed any signs of disliking the Surprise's Negroes, indeed rather the reverse. And when they were brought on deck, Stephen holding Emily by the hand and Jemmy Ducks Sarah, to see whether they could understand the chief of a village that visibly possessed hogs, they protested that they could not make out a word, would not, and sobbed so bitterly that they were obliged to be led away.
'You may say they are stupid,' said Martin, at dinner in the cabin, 'but have you observed that already they speak with a broad West-Country burr on the forecastle and in quite another English on the quarterdeck?'
'Certainly there is an uncommon linguistic ability,' said Stephen. 'And I have the strong impression that in their own island they used one language or at least vocabulary to their family, another to adults outside the family, and a third for sacred places or beings: perhaps only variations of the same speech, but very strongly marked variations for sure.'
'It seems to me that they are forgetting their own language,' said Jack. 'You never hear them hallooing to one another in foreign as they used.'
'Could you ever forget your own language?' asked Pullings. 'Languages you have learnt, like Latin and Greek, yes; but your own? Though I speak under correction, sir. A post-captain knows more than a commander, in the nature of things.'
Stephen drank wine. At one time he had very nearly forgotten his native Irish, the first language he ever spoke, he being fostered in the County Clare; and although it had surged up from the depths these last years when he spoke it with Padeen, his almost monoglot servant, there were still words, and quite commonplace ones too, whose sounds were perfectly familiar hut whose meaning escaped him entirely.
Padeen Colman, wholly illiterate, incapable of innocently giving away any information he might have picked up, for not only did he know very little English but that little was barely comprehensible even to friends because of a defect in his speech, was a perfect servant for one so deeply engaged in political and naval intelligence as Stephen: yet he was much more than that, a kind, gentle, deeply affectionate man to whom Stephen was much attached and whom he intended to find in New South Wales, in the penal settlement to which he had been transported, and to do whatever could be done.
He became aware of a silence round the table, and looking up he saw that they were all smiling at him. 'I ask your pardon,' he cried. 'My mind was far away, a-gathering wool, merino wool: forgive me, I beg. Did anyone ask me a question?'
'Not at all,' said Jack, filling his glass. 'I was just telling Tom that now the time was come to reduce sail; and when the deck is less like the side of a house, you and Mr Martin might like to take off your fine coats and carry your glasses up. These reefs, rocks and islands often have birds for fifty miles around them. Norfolk Island had some prodigious curious birds that made burrows, flying home at night.'
It was not until a little before the Surprise crossed the tropic of Capricorn that the trade wind had really started to blow, but since then, close-hauled or with the wind one point free, she had been showing what she could really do, with topgallants over reefed topsails and a glorious series of jibs and staysails, white and sometimes green water sweeping over her weather-bow, the little girls, soaked through and through and shrieking with delight, her lively deck at an angle that made it impossible to fix a bird in one's glass unless one were lashed to a solid support, when one might well have one's valuable achromatic telescope of more than extra power smothered in foam. She reeled off her twelve and even thirteen knots throughout the sunlit hours and seven or eight by night, with the topgallantsails taken in and in spite of her foul bottom; and all this through a hugely rolling sea that varied from the deepest indigo to pale aquamarine but that always (apart from the broken water) remained glass-clear, as though it had been created yesterday. Her pace slackened only at sunrise and sunset, when Jack and Mr Adams, who dearly loved statistics, took their readings of the temperature at various depths, thc salinity, and the atmospheric pressure.
But these were also days during which high white clouds passed in flocks across the sky, while others, higher still by far, moved in the opposite direction on the anti-trade, an interesting phenomenon and one rarely seen to such perfection; yet it had the disadvantage of shutting out the stars and even, for fine observation, the sun; and as Jack did not choose to rely on dead reckoning, above all in these waters, he had decided to proceed at a moderate pace that afternoon, so that his lookouts might catch sight of one of the notorious reefs in these latitudes, the Angerich Shoal, which with rollers of this kind showed as a white boil even at spring tides, and was used by many commanders as a sea mark.
Jack called for coffee. It came in an elegant silver pot protected by white manila fenders, beautifully plaited by Bonden in the form of robands; and as they drank it the sail came off the ship, the rushing sound of the water along her side diminished, and they no longer sat braced in their chairs.
'When you come on deck,' said Jack, 'do not scruple to walk the windward side. That is where my reef should be if it has any sense of what is right,' and he pushed civility so far as to ask Mr Martin to sup in the cabin that evening and play music, although his execution was indifferent, his sense of pitch and time imperfect, and he always played rather sharp.
They stood by the windward rail of the quarterdeck, discreetly aft; and a fine waste of blue water did they command, an unending series of wide-spaced rounded crests, sometimes topped with white, all crossed with a transverse ripple from the local current. They leant there in their shirtsleeves, spattered by spindrift on occasion, but comfortable in the sun, warm though veiled. 'You met Macmillan, my assistant in the Nutmeg, I believe?' said Stephen.
'Just for a moment. A tall thin young Scotchman, very much concerned at being left in charge.'
'An amiable youth, diligent, conscientious, but necessarily inexperienced. I remember telling him of the miseries of human life, particularly as they affect medical men. I spoke of that continual, insistent demand for sympathy and personal concern that exhausts all but the most saintly man's supply before the end of the day, leaving him openly hard in a hospital or a poor practice, secretly hard in a rich one, and ashamed of his hardness in either case until he comes to what terms he can with the situation. But I omitted another aspect, trifling in itself, yet one that can become disproportionately irritating: there is a good example,' - glancing forward to where Awkward Davis was packing a mended shirt into his bag. The massive, lowering creature was sometimes possessed by an elfin gaiety, and now he seized Emily, hoisted her on to the back of his neck, bade her 'clap on tight, now,' and raced up the foremast shrouds, over the top-rim and right up to the crosstrees, the child hooting with joy all the way. - 'That great hulking fellow, for whom I may say I have a real liking, is as you know very well growing madder, and I give him a weekly draught of hellebore to prevent him doing any of his shipmates an injury: he is irascible and exceedingly strong. And every single time he presents himself for his dose with a poor face, a mincing, shuffling gait, a pursed mouth, his great head inclined to one side, and answers my questions in a weak, gasping tone like an old ewe. I should kick him if I dared.'
