The Ionian Mission. Patrick O’Brian

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СКАЧАТЬ why are you so opposed to these clergymen? Surely you are no longer so weak as to set store by superstition?’

      ‘Of course not,’ said Jack quickly. ‘It is only for the sake of the hands,’ – his invariable reply. ‘Besides,’ he said after a pause, ‘you cannot talk bawdy with parsons. It ain’t fitting.’

      ‘But you never do talk bawdy,’ said Stephen. It was true, or at least almost true: although no kind of a prude, Jack Aubrey was a man who preferred action to talk, fact to phantasm, and although he did possess a small stock of lewd stories for the end of dinners when imaginations grew warm and often lubricious he usually forgot them, or left out the point.

      ‘Oh well,’ said Jack: and then, ‘Did you ever meet Bach?’

      ‘Which Bach?’

      ‘London Bach.’

      ‘Not I.’

      ‘I did. He wrote some pieces for my uncle Fisher, and his young man copied them out fair. But they were lost years and years ago, so last time I was in town I went to see whether I could find the originals: the young man has set up on his own, having inherited his master’s music-library. We searched through the papers – such a disorder you would hardly credit, and I had always supposed publishers were as neat as bees – we searched for hours, and no uncle’s pieces did we find. But the whole point is this: Bach had a father.’

      ‘Heavens, Jack, what things you tell me. Yet upon recollection I seem to have known other men in much the same case.’

      ‘And this father, this old Bach, you understand me, had written piles and piles of musical scores in the pantry.’

      ‘A whimsical place to compose in, perhaps; but then birds sing in trees, do they not? Why not antediluvian Germans in a pantry?’

      ‘I mean the piles were kept in the pantry. Mice and black-beetles and cook-maids had played Old Harry with some cantatas and a vast great Passion according to St Mark, in High Dutch; but lower down all was well, and I brought away several pieces, ’cello for you, fiddle for me, and some for both together. It is strange stuff, fugues and suites of the last age, crabbed and knotted sometimes and not at all in the modern taste, but I do assure you, Stephen, there is meat in it. I have tried this partita in C a good many times, and the argument goes so deep, so close and deep, that I scarcely follow it yet, let alone make it sing. How I should love to hear it played really well – to hear Viotti dashing away.’

      Stephen studied the ’cello suite in his hand, booming and humming sotto voce. ‘Tweedly-tweedly, tweedly tweedly, deedly deedly pom pom pom. Oh, this would call for the delicate hand of the world,’ he said. ‘Otherwise it would sound like boors dancing. Oh, the double-stopping … and how to bow it?’

      ‘Shall we make an attempt upon the D minor double sonata?’ said Jack, ‘and knit up the ravelled sleeve of care with sore labour’s bath?’

      ‘By all means,’ said Stephen. ‘A better way of dealing with a sleeve cannot be imagined.’

      Neither had at any time been more than a fairly accomplished amateur: of recent years neither had had much leisure for practice, and various wounds (an American musket-ball in Jack’s case, a French interrogation in Stephen’s) had so slowed down their fingers that in places they were obliged to indicate the notes by hooting; and as they felt their way through the difficult sonata time after time they made the night so hideous that Killick’s indignation broke out at last and he said to the Captain’s cook, ‘There they go again, tweedly-deedly, tweedly-deedly, belly-aching the whole bleeding night, and the toasted cheese seizing on to their plates like goddam glue, which I dursen’t go in to fetch them; and never an honest tune from beginning to end.’

      Perhaps there was not: but after a particularly difficult, severe and abstract passage the last movement ended with a triumphant summing-up and resolution that they could both play at first sight and that they repeated again and again; and the grave happiness of the music was still with Captain Aubrey when he walked on to his quarterdeck in the bright morning to see his stump topgallantmasts and their attendant royals come aboard, followed almost immediately by the Tamar’s barge bringing a score of glum but resigned and obviously competent Skates to the larboard side and by a Plymouth wherry with two pink-faced young men, very carefully shaved, wearing identical uniforms, their best, and solemn expressions. The wherry hooked on to the starboard mainchains: the young men ran up the side in order of seniority – two whole weeks lay between them – saluted the quarterdeck and looked quickly fore and aft for the officer of the watch. They saw no calm dignified figure pacing up and down with a telescope under his arm and an epaulette on his shoulder, but after a moment a very dirty tall thin man in tarry trousers and a round jacket stepped towards them from the busy crowd at the foot of the foremast; his eyes were rimmed with red, his expression stern, as well it might be, Pullings having been obliged to keep watch as well as carry out all his other duties since the Worcester left Portsmouth. The first young man took off his hat and said in a humble voice, ‘Collins, sir, come on board, if you please.’

      ‘Whiting, sir, if you please: come on board,’ said the other.

      ‘You are very welcome, gentlemen,’ said Pullings. ‘I will not give you my hand, it being covered with slush; but you are very welcome. There is a mortal deal of work to be done, if ever we are to put to sea. There is not a moment to lose.’

      Jack was speaking to the gunner at the time, explaining that the private powder in the kegs marked X was mixed with red orpiment, and XX with antimony or copper, while still others had lycoperdium or camphor or strontium, but he noticed with satisfaction that neither of the two young men did in fact lose a moment. Their sea-chests were scarcely aboard before they were out of their fine clothes, actively forwarding the work on the foretopgallantmast, as deep in slush as any of those concerned with easing its head through the awkward trestle-trees and cap. ‘It may not be fighting-powder, Mr Borrell,’ said Jack, ‘but it will answer very well for practice. Let a dozen rounds be filled for each gun. I should like to see how the people shape as soon as we put to sea: perhaps tomorrow, on the evening tide.’

      ‘A dozen rounds it is, sir,’ said the gunner with deep approval. Captain Aubrey belonged to the school of Douglas and Collingwood, men who believed that a ship’s prime purpose was to bring cannon within range of the enemy and then to fire with extreme speed and accuracy, and Borrell supported this view with all his heart. He walked off to fill cartridge with his mates in the magazine and Jack looked up at the rising foretopgallantmast with a smile: there was order in that apparent chaos of men, spars and ropes, and Tom Pullings had the whole operation well in hand. He looked down, and his smile faded: a small boat crammed with parsons was approaching the ship, followed by another with a lady in mourning, a small boy by her side.

      ‘I had hoped to persuade her to put the boy to school,’ said Jack to Stephen after supper, as they sat down to a comparatively simple Scarlatti piece that they both knew well. ‘I had hoped to convince her that a voyage of this kind, a few months on the Toulon blockade, a relieving turn with no future in it – a mere parenthesis, as you said the other day – would be no use to her boy, and that there were many other captains, with schoolmasters and a long commission ahead of them: I named half a dozen. And I had hoped to ship no first-voyagers this time, no squeakers, no use to me and I no use to them. But she would not be denied – wept, upon my word; shed tears. I have never been so wretched in my life.’

      ‘Mrs Calamy is an officer’s widow, I collect?’

      ‘Yes. Edward Calamy and I were shipmates in Theseus, before he was made post into the Atalante. Then they gave him the Rochester, 74, just such a ship as this: she was lost with all СКАЧАТЬ