Treason’s Harbour. Patrick O’Brian

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

      He was reflecting upon this and upon the true function of painting when the door opened and a very cruel caricature of the portrait walked in. Admiral Hartley was wearing an old yellow dressing-gown, its front stained with snuff, loose pantaloons, and down-at-heel shoes by way of slippers; the bones of his nose and jaw had grown and his face was much bigger; it had lost its fierce distinction, its authority, and of course its weather-beaten tan; it was ugly and even ludicrous; and its large clay-pale surface now expressed no more than a settled commonplace sour discontent. He looked at Jack with an inhuman absence of interest or pleasure and asked him why he had come. Jack said that being in Gozo he thought he would pay his respects to his former captain and ask whether he had any commands for Valletta. The Admiral made no clear reply and they stood there with Jack’s voice echoing in the empty room as he spoke of the weather for the last few days, the changes in Valletta, and his hopes of a breeze for tomorrow.

      ‘Well, sit down for a minute,’ said Admiral Hartley: and then, making an effort, he asked whether Aubrey had a ship at present. But without waiting for a reply he said, ‘What’s o’clock? It is time for my goat’s milk. Always late, these buggers. It is essential that I should have my goat’s milk regular,’ and he looked eagerly at the door.

      ‘I hope you keep well, sir, in this climate?’ said Jack. ‘It is reckoned very healthy, I believe.’

      ‘There ain’t no such thing as health when you’re old,’ said the Admiral. ‘Health to what end?’

      The milk came in, brought by a man-servant remarkably like the woman Jack had seen, apart from the blue-black stubble of a five-days beard. ‘Where is the signora?’ asked Hartley. ‘Coming,’ said the servant; and indeed she appeared in the doorway as he left, carrying a tray with a wine-bottle and some biscuits and a glass upon it: she had changed her dirty white dress for another, perceptibly cleaner and cut remarkably low. Jack saw Hartley’s dead face come to life: yet in spite of his animation his first words were a protest – ‘Aubrey don’t want wine at this time of day.’

      Before anything could be decided on this point a bawling broke out in the courtyard and the Admiral and the woman hurried over to look out. He fondled her bosom, but she brushed him off and began shouting through the window in a flawed metallic voice that must have carried a mile and a half. This went on for some time. Jack had not much more penetration than the next man yet it was perfectly evident to him that Hartley had fallen unlucky; but that mixed with his obvious lechery there was what might be called love or infatuation or at any rate a strong attachment.

      ‘A splendid temperament,’ said the Admiral when she had run out of the room to carry on the argument at close quarters. ‘You can always tell a fine spirited girl by the jut of her bum.’ There was a slight flush on his face and in a much more human tone he said, ‘Pour yourself a glass of wine and then one for me – I’ll hob and nob with you. They don’t let me drink anything but milk, you know.’ A pause in which he took snuff from a screw of paper, and he said, ‘I go over to Valletta now and then to see about my half-pay; I was there not a fortnight ago and Brocas mentioned your name. Yes, yes: I remember perfectly well. He talked about you. It seems you still have not learnt to keep your breeches on. So much the better. Play the man while you still can, I always say. I wish I had not lost so many opportunities in the past; I could weep blood when I think of some of them – splendid women. Play the man while you can; you are a gelding long enough in your grave. And some of us are geldings before we get there,’ he added, with something between a laugh and a sob.

      As Jack walked back towards the sea the heat was greater, the glare of the white road more blinding, and the harsh clamour of the cicadas louder still. He had rarely been so sad. The black thoughts flooded in, one upon another: Admiral Hartley, of course; and the perpetual rushing passage of time; inevitable decay; the most unimaginable evil of impotence … Instinctively he jerked back as something shot past his face like a block hurtling from high aloft in action: it struck the stony ground just in front of his feet and burst apart – a tortoise, probably one of the amorous reptiles of a little while ago, since this was the very place. And looking up he saw the huge dark bird that had dropped it: the bird looked down at him, circling, circling as it stared. ‘Good Lord above,’ he said. ‘Good Lord above…’ And after a moment’s consideration, ‘How I wish Stephen had been here.’

      Stephen Maturin was in fact sitting on a bench in the abbey church of St Simon’s, listening to the monks singing vespers. He too was dinnerless, but in this case it was voluntary and prudential, a penance for lusting after Laura Fielding and (he hoped) a means of reducing his concupiscence: to begin with his pagan stomach had cried out against this treatment, and indeed it had gone on grumbling until the end of the first antiphon. Yet for some time now Stephen had been in what might almost have been called a state of grace, stomach, break-back bench, carnal desire all forgotten, he being wafted along on the rise and fall of the ancient, intimately familiar plainchant.

      During their stay in Valletta the French had been more than usually unkind to the monastery: not СКАЧАТЬ