The Unknown Shore. Patrick O’Brian

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СКАЧАТЬ to have him as your next-door neighbour. The person in classical mythology who fitted his guests to the bed in his spare room by means of an axe or a rack was a source of endless gossip and diversion to the neighbourhood in general, but he must have been a sad bore to those who lived within the range of his victims’ cries. Mr Elwes, then, was a troublesome neighbour; and this menace to the stream was but the latest of a series of outrages. He lived at Plashey, whose venerable roof could be seen from the terrace at Medenham in the winter, when the leaves were off the trees. Plashey was the other big house in the parish, and it was much older than Medenham; its most recent parts were Tudor, and the kitchens were Saxon; it was built facing north, in the bottom of a watery dell. Mr Elwes, however, had not inherited Plashey; he had only bought it, and although he had lived there some twenty years he was still considered a newcomer. For most of these years, that is to say, until he took up politics, he had lived a retired, secluded existence, with a household consisting of no more than a few vague, shiftless servants and a boy, Tobias Barrow, who was usually called his nephew.

      Jack Byron and Tobias Barrow were very close friends; their friendship dated from long ago, when there had still been a fair amount of visiting and acquaintance between Medenham and Plashey, and as soon as breakfast was over Jack hurried away to find Tobias. He knew that Mr Elwes was capable of any villainy, but he also knew that rumour delighted in exaggeration (Mr Elwes’ ape, at its first arrival, had been confidently reported as the Devil in person) and he hoped to learn that this appalling news was ill-founded.

      He crossed the bowling-green, hurried through the kitchen-garden into the park and along his private path towards the outer paling. During his absence at sea the path had almost vanished in the grass, but he knew it so well that he could follow it at midnight without a moon. He came to the pollard hornbeam that had always served as his ladder to get out of the park: there were rounded knobs on its gnarled old trunk that allowed one to reach the pointed ends of the pales, there to poise for the downward leap over the ditch and on to the soft bank that ran along the side of the lane below – the lane that separated Plashey’s land from Medenham’s. Jack and his nearest cousin Georgiana had used this route from their most tender infancy; in those days the ascent of the tree had been a matter of tears, blood, barked shins and childish oaths, but now Jack swung up it with the ease of one to whom the maintopgallant masthead of a man-of-war is as easy and familiar as a pulpit to a parson, and he was just about to spring down when he saw Mr Elwes in the meadow over the way, gathering simples in a sky-blue coat and scarlet breeches. He was a man past the middle age, with a large yellow-grey face; he had a very great deal of energy, and as he sprang about the field he sang odd snatches, gesticulated, and harangued the yak that stood in the far corner. Jack shrank back into the leaves. Mr Elwes picked dittander, middle confound and stinking arrach; he picked nigwort, figwort and liriconfancy, adding thereto polypody of the oak, pellitory of Spain and herb true-love, and he offered a blade of the last to the yak as it stood panting in the shade of the ragged hedge. This monolithic beast had been imported by Mr Elwes, at vast expense, under the impression that it was the aurochs of antiquity – it was supposed to improve the local breed of cattle out of all recognition, but it did nothing but lurk in the shade, gasping, and it was evident that the race of Nottinghamshire aurochs would soon die out. This was not the case with all his importations, however, and it was almost impossible to keep servants at Plashey, because of the salamanders. Salamanders in the library, salamanders that had to be rescued from the ashes of the drawing-room grate, the gentle plop of salamanders falling from stair to stair as they tried to mount to the attic to hibernate in the servants’ beds, but above all, salamanders multiplying in their thousands in the cellars that were Mr Elwes’ pride and joy. It was not as cellars that they delighted him, because he drank no wine, but as Saxon relics: he was a virtuoso, for whom anything old was better than anything new – anything to do with the arts, that is to say, for in other respects he was wonderfully advanced, and he farmed his land upon the newest philosophical principles, designed great schemes for the improvement of mankind, and had invented several machines, including a musical treadmill and a hydraulic rack.

      But it was in the matter of education that his theories and his energy appeared in their brightest light. ‘You have no conception,’ he said to one of his learned friends – ‘you have no conception of the amount that an infant mind can learn, if it be subjected to it for twelve or fourteen hours a day, with none of your foolish holidays. Take a boy …’ he said, and went on to describe how the boy would learn Latin and Greek by ear, thus absorbing them unconsciously; the time saved would be devoted to logic, mathematics and physical studies; when these had been acquired the ornamental arts of rhetoric, poetry, music, dancing and singing would follow, and in a surprisingly short time there would be loosed upon the world a new wonder, an even more Admirable Crichton. The prodigy would be brought up by a dumb nurse so that it should hear nothing but the classical tongues, which its tutors would speak from morning to … here Mr Elwes’ learned friend interrupted him and said that the plan was vain, chimerical and, in short, a mere vapour – the more so as no child’s mother would ever allow it to be carried out.

      ‘Vapour?’ cried Mr Elwes, with a furious glare. ‘We shall see.’

      ‘I dare say we shall,’ replied the friend, walking away.

      Within the hour Mr Elwes, fired by contradiction, had begun negotiations for the purchase of a suitable male child, for this conversation took place in London, not far from the scene of his earlier activities. Mr Elwes had begun life as a surgeon, and his practice had lain on the borders of the richest part of the City and the poorest slums that adjoined it. The first accounted for his wealth (grateful patients had helped him to South Sea stock, and he had sold out the week before the South Sea Bubble burst), and the second made him familiar with whole streets of people who had far, far too many children and no money. It was not a matter of searching for a child to buy, but rather of turning away the crowds that hurried up with surplus offspring, washed and even combed for the occasion.

      Before the week was out Tobias Barrow arrived by post-chaise at Plashey, done up in an old, old shawl. He was given a small bowl of black broth, for Mr Elwes intended that he should be brought up in the Spartan manner, and the Spartans liked their soup black; these dismal people also slept hard, without any bedclothes, and so therefore did Tobias, weeping sadly. The next morning his education began.

      It was a remarkable education, and one that only a wealthy man could afford; but Mr Elwes was a wealthy man, and even if he had paid the usual price for the tutors’ services he could have done so easily; like many other wealthy men, however, he was exceedingly near with his money, particularly where small sums were concerned, and his experiment was conducted on the most economical principles. He employed very poor and unworldly scholars, and he often took them for a term or so upon approval, without any definite arrangement about their salaries. They came and went: sometimes, when Mr Elwes was engrossed in some other experiment and had little time to quarrel or interfere, a tutor might stay for a year or more – Mr Buchanan did, a sad, gentle, unbeneficed clergyman who probably knew more about birds than any man in England – but usually they went away much sooner, and nearly always on foot. One young man took a horse from the stable to help him on his way, and he had almost reached the shelter of Cambridge before he was overtaken. Mr Elwes prosecuted, of course, and it was rumoured that after the unhappy youth had been hanged he bought the body from the executioner for dissection.

      This was untrue, as it happened, but Mr Elwes was in fact a most accomplished dissector: whatever his character may have been in other respects, he was an unusually learned and skilful surgeon, and he taught Tobias anatomy with great success. He had a real love for his profession (apart from anything else it gave him unrivalled opportunities for experiment on his fellow men), and he never abandoned it: after he came to Plashey he formed a small practice among his tenants and servants and the local poor; and this enabled him, in due course, to bind Tobias as his apprentice and to teach him the work of a general practitioner in medicine – for at that period, and for more than a hundred years afterwards, all surgeons began as apprentices: though to be sure few began quite so young as Tobias.

      By the time the first part of the experiment СКАЧАТЬ