The Mauritius Command

  He had had a shrewd knock, and although the weather was so kind, the sun so warm, an inflammation of the lungs kept him pinned to his cot for days. Or rather to the captain's cot, for Lord Clonfert moved from his own sleeping cabin and slung a hammock in the coach.

  Stephen therefore missed their rapid voyage north, the meeting of the ships off Port-Louis, and their return southwards through heavy seas to carry out the Commodore's plan of attack on the Ile de la Passe; he missed all but the sounds of their first abortive attempt at gathering the boats for the assault in a pitch-black night with the wind blowing a close-reef topsail gale, when even the Néréide's pilot could not find the channel and when the weather forced them back to Port-Louis; but on the other hand, in these circumstances of particular intimacy he did grow more closely acquainted with Clonfert and McAdam.

  The captain spent many hours at Stephen's bedside: their conversation was desultory and for most part of no great consequence; but Clonfert was capable of an almost female delicacy—he could be quiet without constraint, and he always knew when Stephen would like a cooling drink or the skylight opened—and they talked about novels, the more recent romantic poetry, and Jack Aubrey, or rather Jack Aubrey's actions, in a most companionable way; and at times Stephen saw, among the various persons that made up his host, a gentle, vulnerable creature, one that excited his affection. 'His intuition, however,' reflected Stephen, 'though so nice in a tete-e-tete, does not serve him when three or more are gathered in a room, nor when he is anxious. Jack has never seen him in his quasi-domestic character. His women have, no doubt; and it may be this that accounts for his notorious success among them.'

  These reflections were prompted by the visit of his old shipmate Narborough, before whom Clonfert pranced away, monopolizing the talk with anecdotes of Sir Sydney Smith, and to whom he behaved with such an aggressive affectation of superiority that the commander of the Staunch soon returned aboard her, thoroughly displeased. Yet that same evening, as the Néréide and Staunch approached the Ile de la Passe once more, coming south about while the Sirius took the northern route, to avoid suspicion, Clonfert was as quiet and agreeable and well-bred as ever he had been: particularly conciliating, indeed, as though he were aware of his lapse. And when, at his request, Stephen had once again related Jack's taking of the Cacafuego, shot by shot, Clonfert said with a sigh, 'Well, I honour him for it, upon my word. I should die happy, with such a victory behind me.'

  With McAdam Stephen's relationship was by no means so pleasant. Like most medical men Stephen was an indifferent patient; and like most medical men McAdam had an authoritative attitude towards those under his care. As soon as the patient had recovered his wits they fell out over the advisability of a cingulum, a black draught, and phlebotomy, all of which Stephen rejected in a weak, hoarse, but passionate voice as 'utterly exploded, fit for Paracelsus, or a quicksalver at the fair of Ballinasloe,' together with a fling about McAdam's fondness for a strait-waistcoat. Yet this, even when it was coupled with Stephen's recovery without any treatment but bark administered by himself, would not have caused real animosity if McAdam had not also taken to resenting Clonfert's attention to Stephen, Stephen's ascendancy over Clonfert, and their pleasure in one another's company.

  He came into the cabin, only half-drunk, the evening before the Néréide and the Staunch, though delayed by head-winds, hoped to rendezvous with the Sirius off the Ile de la Passe for the assault, took Stephen's pulse, said, 'There is still a wee smidgeon of fever that bleeding would certainly have cured before this; but I shall allow you to take the air on deck again tomorrow, if the action leaves you any deck to take it upon,' drew his case bottle from his pocket, poured himself a liberal dram in Stephen's physic glass, and bending, picked up a paper that had slipped beneath the cot, a single printed sheet. 'What language is this?' he asked, holding it to the light.

  'It is Irish,' said Stephen calmly: he was extremely vexed with himself for letting it be seen, for although there was no kind of remaining secrecy about his activities, his ingrained sense of caution was deeply wounded: he was determined not to let this appear, however.

  ' 'Tis not the Irish character,' said McAdam.

  'Irish type is rarely to be found in the French colonies, I believe.'

  'I suppose it is meant for those papisher blackguards on the Mauritius,' said McAdam, referring to the Irishmen who were known to have enlisted in the French service. Stephen made no reply, and McAdam went on, 'What does it say?'

  'Do you not understand Irish?'

  'Of course not. What would a civilized man want with Irish?'

  'Perhaps that depends upon your idea of a civilized man.'

  'I'll just give you my idea of a civilized man: it is one thot makes croppies Ile down, thot drinks to King Billy, and thot cries—the Pope.' With this McAdam began to sing 'Croppies lie down', and the grating, triumphant noise wounded Stephen's still fevered and over-acute hearing. Stephen was fairly sure that McAdam did not know he was a Catholic, but even so his irritation, increased by the heat, the din, the smell, and his present inability to smoke, rose to such a pitch that against all his principles he said, 'It is the pity of the world, Dr McAdam, to see a man of your parts obnubilate his mind with the juice of the grape.'

  McAdam instantly collected his faculties and replied, 'It is the pity of the world, Dr Maturin, to see a man of your parts obnubilate his mind with the juice of the poppy.'

  In his journal that night Stephen wrote ' . . . and his blotched face clearing on a sudden, he checked me with my laudanum. I am amazed at his perspicacity. Yet do I indeed obnubilate my mind? Surely not: looking back in this very book, I detect no diminution of activity, mental or physical. The pamphlet on Buonaparte's real conduct towards this Pope and the last is as good as anything I have ever written: I wish it may be as well translated. I rarely take a thousand drops, a trifle compared with your true opium-eater's dose or with my own in Diana's day: I can refrain whenever I choose: and I take it only when my disgust is so great that it threatens to impede my work. One day, when he is sober, I shall ask McAdam whether disgust for oneself, for one's fellows, and for the whole process of living was common among his patients in Belfast—whether it incapacitated them. My own seems to grow; and it is perhaps significant that I can feel no gratitude towards the man who took me from the water: I make the gestures that humanity requires but I feet no real kindness for him: surely this is inhuman? Humanity drained away by disgust? It grows; and although my loathing for Buonaparte and his evil system is an efficient stimulant, hatred alone is a poor sterile kind of a basis. And, laudanum or not, the disgust seems to persist even through my sleep, since frequently it is there, ready to envelop me when I wake.'

  The next morning was not one of those occasions, frequent though they were. Having listened in vain at intervals throughout the night for sounds that might herald an action or even a meeting with the other ships, Stephen awoke from a long comfortable dozing state, a wholly relaxed well-being, aware that his fever was gone and that he was being looked at through the crack of the partly open door. 'Hola,' he cried, and a nervous midshipman, opening wider, said, 'The Captain's compliments to Dr Maturin, and should he be awake and well enough, there is a mermaid on the starboard bow.'

  She was abaft the beam before Stephen reached the rail, a vast greyish creature with a round snout and thick lips, upright in the sea, staring at the ship with her minute beady eyes. If she was indeed a maid, then she must have had a friend who was none, for in her left flipper she held a huge grey baby. She was going fast astern, staring steadily, but he had time to see her opulent bosom, her absence of neck, hair, and external ears, and to estimate her weight at forty stone, before she dived, showing her broad tail above the wave. He made the fullest acknowledgments for such a treat—had always longed to see one—had searched the Rodriguez lagoons and those of an island near Sumatra but had always been disappointed until this happy moment—and now he found the realization of his wishes even more gratifying than he had ho
ped.

  'I am glad you was pleased,' said Lord Clonfert, 'and I hope it may be some lay-off against my wretched news. Sirius has queered our pitch: see where she lays.'

  Stephen took his bearings. Four or five miles away on his right hand rose the south-east coast of Mauritius, with the Pointe du Diable running into the sea: also on his right hand, but within a hundred yards, the long reef stretched out fore and aft, sometimes dry, sometimes buried under the white rollers, with the occasional island standing on it or rising from the paler shallow water inside; and at the far end, where Clonfert was pointing, there lay the Sirius, close to a fortified island from whose walls, clear in the telescope, flew the union jack.

  In spite of his pleasure at Stephen's delight, it was clear that Clonfert was profoundly disappointed and put out. 'They must have gained twenty leagues on us, while we were beating up off the cape,' he said. 'But if Pym had had any bowels he would have waited for tonight: after all, I did lend him my pilot.' However, as an attentive host he checked any bitter reflections that might have occurred to him, and asked Stephen whether he would like his breakfast.

  'You are very good, my lord,' said Stephen, 'but I believe I shall stay here in the hope of seeing another siren. They are usually found in the shallow water by a reef, I am told; and I should not miss one for a dozen breakfasts.'

  'Clarges will bring it to you here, if you are quite sure you are strong enough,' said Clonfert. 'But I must send for McAdam to survey you first.'

  McAdam looked singularly unappetizing in the morning light, ill-conditioned and surly: apprehensive too, for he had some confused recollection of harsh words having passed the night before. But, having beheld the mermaid, Stephen was in charity with all men, and he called out, 'You missed the mermaid, my dear colleague; but perhaps, if we sit quietly here, we may see another.'

  'I did not,' said McAdam, 'I saw the brute out of the quarter-gallery scuttle; and it was only a manatee.'

  Stephen mused for a while, and then he said, 'A dugong, surely. The dentition of the dugong is quite distinct from that of the manatee: the manatee, as I recall, has no incisors. Furthermore, the whole breadth of Africa separates their respective realms.'

  'Manatee or dugong, 'tis all one,' said McAdam. 'As far as my studies are concerned, the brute is of consequence only in that it is the perfect illustration of the strength, the irresistible strength, of suggestion. Have you been listening to their gab, down there in the waist?'

  'Not I,' said Stephen. There had been much talk among the men working just out of sight forward of the quarterdeck rail, cross, contentious talk; but the Néréide was always a surprisingly chatty ship, and apart from putting this outburst down to vexation at their late arrival, he had not attended to it. 'They seem displeased, however,' he added.

  'Of course they are displeased: everyone knows the ill-luck a mermaid brings. But that is not the point. Listen now, will you? That is John Matthews, a truthful, sober, well-judging man; and the other is old Lemon, was bred a lawyer's clerk, and understands evidence.'

  Stephen listened, sorted out the voices, caught the thread of the argument: the dispute between Matthews and Lemon, the spokesmen of two rival factions, turned upon the question of whether the mermaid had held a comb in her hand or a glass.

  'They saw the flash of that wet flipper,' said McAdam, 'and have translated it, with total Gospel-oath conviction, into one or other of these objects. Matthews offers to fight Lemon and any two of his followers over a chest in support of his belief.'

  'Men have gone to the stake for less,' said Stephen: and walking forward to the rail he called down, 'You are both of you out entirely: it was a hairbrush.'

  Dead silence in the waist. The seamen looked at one another doubtfully, and moved quietly away among the boats on the booms with many a backward glance, thoroughly disturbed by this new element.

  'Sirius signalling, sir, if you please,' said a midshipman to the officer of the watch, who had been picking his teeth with a pertinacity so great that it had rendered him deaf to the dispute. 'Captain to come aboard.'

  'I am anxious to see whether the Sirius has any prisoners,' said Stephen, when the Captain appeared, 'and if I may, I will accompany you.'

  Pym welcomed them with less than his usual cheerfulness: it had been a bloody little action, one in which he had lost a young cousin, and although the frigate's decks were now as trim as though she were lying at St Helen's, there was a row of hammocks awaiting burial at sea, while her boats still lay about her in disorder, all more or less battered and one with a dismounted carronade lying in a red pool. The anxiety of the night had told on Pym and now that the stimulus of the victory was dying he looked very tired. Furthermore, the Iphigenia had sent an aviso with word that the three frigates in Port-Louis were ready for sea, and the Sirius was extremely busy, preparing her return. Her captain found time to be affable to Stephen, but his preoccupation made his words to Clonfert seem particularly curt and official. When Clonfert, having offered his congratulations, began to say that the Néréide felt she might have been allowed to take part, Pym cut him short: 'I really cannot go into all that now. First come first served is the rule in these matters. Here are the French commandant's signals; he did not have time to destroy them. As for your orders, they are very simple: you will garrison the island with a suitable force—the French had about a hundred men and two officers—and hold it until you receive further instructions; and in the meantime you will carry out such operations ashore as seem appropriate after consultation with Dr Maturin, whose advice is to be followed in all political matters. Doctor, if you choose to see the French commandant, my dining-cabin is at your disposition.'

  When Stephen returned after questioning poor Captain Duvallier, he gained the impression that Clonfert had been rebuked for his tardiness or for some professional fault to do with the Néréide's sailing; and this impression was strengthened as they pulled back in the barge, together with the black Mauritian pilot; for Clonfert was silent, his handsome face ugly with resentment.

  Yet Clonfert's moods were as changeable as a weatherglass, and very shortly after the Sirius and Staunch had vanished over the western horizon, with Pym flying back to blockade the French frigates in Port-Louis, he blossomed out in a fine flow of spirits. They had cleared up the bloody mess in the fort, blasting holes in the coral rock for the dead soldiers; they had installed the Bombay gunners and fifty grenadiers of the 69th, reordering the heavy guns so that one battery commanded the narrow channel and the other all the inner anchorage that was within their range; they had taken the Néréide through the narrow channel into a snug berth behind the fort; and now he was a free man, his own master, with the whole of the nearby coast upon which to distinguish himself. No doubt he was directed to advise with Dr Maturin; but Dr Maturin, having required him to harangue the men on the absolute necessity for good relations with all civilians, black or white, male or female, was quite happy to fall in with his military views, such as an assault upon the battery on the Pointe du Diable and indeed upon any other batteries that might catch his fancy. Dr Maturin's attitude towards these forays was so far remote from the killjoy disapproval Clonfert had at one time feared that he even accompanied the flotilla which crossed the wide lagoon by night to carry the Pointe du Diable in great style at dawn, without the loss of a man. He watched the destruction of the guns, the carrying-off of a beautiful brass mortar, and the prodigious jet of fire as the powder-magazine blew up, with evident complacency, and then walked off into the country to make a variety of contacts and to spread his subversive literature.

  Day after day the raids on military installations continued, in spite of the opposition of the French regulars and of the far more numerous militia; for the French had no cavalry, and boats guided by a pilot who knew every creek and passage could reach their goal far sooner than the infantry. Moreover, as Stephen's printed sheets attained a wider circulation, it became apparent that the militia was growing less and less inclined to fight: in fact, after about a we
ek in which the Néréides had traversed the country in all directions, doing no harm to private property, paying for whatever they needed, treating the private Mauritians civilly, and routing all the meagre troops that the southern commander could bring against them, the attitude of the militia came more to resemble a neutrality, and a benevolent neutrality at that. Day after day the soldiers, Marines, and seamen went ashore: the frigate grew steadily more infested with monkeys and parrots, bought in the villages or captured in the woods; and Stephen, though busy with his own warfare, had an interview with an ancient gentlewoman whose grandfather had not only seen, run down and devoured a dodo, perhaps the last dodo to tread the earth, but had stuffed a bolster with its feathers.

  Although there was no loot, this was a pleasant Interval for all hands, with plenty of excitement and charming weather to say nothing of fresh fruit, fresh vegetables, fresh meat and soft tack: yet Clonfert exultant was a less agreeable companion than Clonfert oppressed. Stephen found his boisterous energy wearisome, his appetite for destruction distasteful, and his continual dashing about the country, often in full dress with his diamond-hilted sword and his foolish star, as tedious as the dinners he gave to celebrate the sometimes important, sometimes trivial conquests of his little force. They were conquests in which Stephen could detect no coherent plan: to him they seemed no more than a series of raids determined by the whim of the day; though on the other hand their want of logical sequence puzzled the French commander extremely.