O'Brian Patrick - Aub-Mat 15 - The Truelove (Clarissan Oakes)

VIP免费

2024-12-22 0 0 770.47KB 148 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

PATRICK O'BRIAN

The Truelove (Clarissa Oakes)

For Mary, with love and

most particular gratitude

Chapter One

Standing at the frigate's taffrail, and indeed leaning upon it, Jack Aubrey considered her

wake, stretching away neither very far nor emphatically over the smooth pure green-blue

sea: a creditable furrow, however, in these light airs. She had just come about, with her

larboard tacks aboard, and as he expected her wake showed that curious nick where,

when the sheets were hauled aft, tallied and belayed, she made a little wanton gripe

whatever the helmsman might do.

He knew the Surprise better than any other ship he had served in: he had been laid

across a gun in the cabin just below him and beaten for misconduct when he was a

midshipman, and as her captain he too had used brute force to teach reefers the

difference between naval right and naval wrong. He had served in her for many years, and

he loved her even more than his first command: it was not so much as a man-of-war, a

fighting-machine, that he loved her, for even when he first set foot aboard so long ago

neither her size nor her force had been in any way remarkable, and now that the war had

been going on for twenty years and more, now that the usual frigate carried thirty-eight or

thirty-six eighteen-pounders and gauged a thousand tons the Surprise, with her twenty-

eight nine-pounders and her less than six hundred tons, had been left far behind; in fact

she and the rest of her class had been sold out of the service or broken up and not one

remained in commission, although both French and American yards were building fast,

shockingly fast: no, it was primarily as a ship that he loved her, a fast, eminently

responsive ship that, well handled, could outsail any square-rigged vessel he had ever

seen, above all on a bowline. She had also repaired his shattered fortunes when they

were both out of the Navy - himself struck off the list and she sold at the block - and he

sailed her as a letter of marque; but although that may have added a certain immediate

fervour to his love, its true basis was a disinterested delight in her sailing and all those

innumerable traits that make up the character of a ship. Furthermore, he was now her

owner as well as her captain, for Stephen Maturin, the frigate's surgeon, who bought her

when she was put up for sale, had recently agreed to let him have her. And what was of

even greater importance, both man and ship were back in the Navy, Jack Aubrey

reinstated after an exceptionally brilliant cutting-out expedition (and after his election to

Parliament), and the frigate as His Majesty's hired vessel Surprise - not quite a full

reinstatement for her, but near enough for present happiness. Her first task in this

particular voyage had been to carry Aubrey and Maturin, who was an intelligence-agent as

well as a medical man, to the west coast of South America, there to frustrate French

attempts at forming an alliance with the Peruvians and Chileans who led the movement for

independence from Spain and to transfer their affections to England. Yet since Spain was

then at least nominally allied to Great Britain the enterprise had to be carried out under the

cover of privateering, of attacking United States South-Sea whalers and merchantmen

and any French vessels she might chance to meet in the east Pacific. This plan had been

betrayed by a highly-placed, a very highly-placed but as yet unidentified traitor in Whitehall

and it had had to be postponed, Aubrey and Maturin going off on quite a different mission

in the South China Sea, eventually keeping a discreet rendezvous with the Surprise on the

other side of the world, in about 4° N and 127° E, at the mouth of the Salibabu Passage,

the frigate in the meantime having been commanded by Tom Pullings, Jack's first

lieutenant, and manned, of course, by her old privateering crew. Here they sent her more

recent prizes away for Canton under the escort of the Nutmeg of Consolation, a charming

little post-ship lent to Captain Aubrey by the Lieutenant-Governor of Java, and so

proceeded to New South Wales, to Sydney Cove itself, where Jack hoped to have his

stores renewed and several important repairs carried out against their eastward voyage to

South America and beyond, and where Stephen Maturin hoped to see the natural

wonders of the Antipodes, particularly Ornithorhynchus paradoxus, the duck-billed

platypus.

Unfortunately the Governor was away and Jack's hopes were disappointed because of the

ill-will of the colonial officials; and the fulfillment of Stephen's very nearly killed him, for the

outraged platypus, seized in the midst of his courting-display, plunged both poison-spurs

deep into the incautious arm. It was an unhappy visit to an unhappy, desolate land.

But now the odious penal shores had sunk in the west; now the horizon ran clean round

the sky and Jack was in his old world again, aboard his own beloved ship. Stephen had

recovered from his distressing state (immensely swollen, dumb, blind and rigid) with

extraordinary speed; the bluish leaden colour of his face had returned to its usual pale

yellow; and he could now be heard playing his 'cello in the cabin, a remarkably happy

piece he had composed for the birth of his daughter. Jack smiled - he was very deeply

attached to his friend - but after a couple of bars he said 'Why Stephen should be so

pleased with a baby I cannot tell. He was born to be a bachelor - no notion of domestic

comforts, family life - quite unsuited for marriage, above all for marriage with Diana, a

dashing brilliant creature to be sure, a fine horsewoman and a capital hand at billiards and

whist, but given to high play and something of a rake - quite often shows her wine - in any

case quite improper for Stephen - has nothing to say to books - much more concerned

with breeding horses. Yet between them they have produced this baby; and a girl at that.'

The wake stretched away, as true as a taut line now, and after a while he said 'He longed

for a daughter, I know, and it is very well that he should have one; but I wish she may not

prove a platypus to him,' and he might have added some considerations on marriage and

the relations, so often unsatisfactory, between men and women, parents and children, had

not Davidge's voice called out 'Every rope an-end' cutting the thread of his thought.

'Every rope an-end.' The cry was automatic, perfunctory, and superfluous: for having put

the ship about (with rather more conversation than was usual in a regular man-of-war but

even more neatly than in most) the Surprises, in the nature of things, were rapidly coiling

down the running rigging, braces and bowlines, just as they had done thousands of times

before. Yet without the cry something would have been missing, some minute part of that

naval ritual which did so uphold sea-going life.

'Sea-going life: none better,' reflected Jack; and certainly at this point in time he had

something like the cream of it, with a good, tolerably well-found ship (for the returning

Governor had done all he could in the few days left), an excellent crew of former Royal

Navy hands, privateersmen and smugglers, professional from clew to earing, with his

course set for Easter Island, and many thousand miles of blue-water sailing before him.

Above all there was his restoration to the list, and though the Surprise was no longer in

the full sense a King's ship both her future as a yacht and his as a sea-officer were as

nearly assured as anything could be on such a fickle element. In all likelihood he would be

offered a command as soon as he came home: not a frigate alas, since he was now so

senior, but probably a ship of the line. Possibly a small detached squadron, as

commodore. In any event a flag, being a matter of seniority and survival rather than merit,

was not so very far distant; and the fact that he was member of parliament for Milport (a

rotten borough, in the gift of his cousin Edward) meant that independently of his deserts

this flag would almost certainly be hoisted at sea, for rotten borough or not, a vote was a

vote.

This certain knowledge had been with him ever since the Gazette printed the words

Captain John Aubrey, Royal Navy, is restored to the List with his former rank and seniority

and is appointed to the Diane of thirty-two guns, filling his massive frame with a deep

abiding happiness; and now he had another, more immediate reason for joy, his friend

having made this astonishing recovery. 'Then why am I so cursed snappish?' he asked.

Five bells. Little Reade, the midshipman of the watch, skipped aft to the rail, followed by

the quartermaster with the log-ship and reel. The log splashed down, the stray-line ran

gently astern; 'Turn' said the quartermaster in a hoarse tobacco-chewing whisper, and

Reade held the twenty-eight second glass to his eye. 'Stop,' he cried at last, clear and

shrill, and the quartermaster wheezed 'Three one and a half, mate.'

Reade gave his captain an arch look, but seeing his grim, closed expression he walked

forward and said to Davidge 'Three knots one and a half fathoms, sir, if you please,'

directing his voice aft and speaking rather loud.

The wake span out, rather faster now than Jack had foretold - hence the arch look. 'Cross

in the morning and bloody-minded with it, like an old and ill-conditioned man. It is

discreditable in the last degree,' he said, and his thoughts ran on.

Profound attachment to Stephen Maturin did not preclude profound dissatisfaction at

times: even lasting dissatisfaction. For a quick and efficient refitting of the ship, good

relations with the colonial administration had been of the first importance; but in that very

strongly anti-Irish and anti-Catholic atmosphere (Botany Bay had been filled with United

Irishmen after the '97 rising) the presence of Stephen, irascible, more or less Irish and

entirely Catholic, rendered them impossible. Or to put it more fairly not just his presence

but the fact that he had resented an insult after a Government House dinner on his very

first day in the penal colony - blood all over the bath-stoned steps. Jack had had to endure

weeks of official obstruction and harassment - the vexatious searching the ship for

convicts trying to escape, the stopping of her boats, the arrest of mildly drunken liberty-

men ashore - and it was only when the Governor returned that Jack had been able to put

a stop to all this by promising him that the Surprise should carry no absconder from Port

Jackson.

Stephen, poor fellow, could not really be blamed for the misfortunes of his birth, nor for

having resented so very gross an insult; but he could be blamed, and Jack did blame him,

for having, without the least consultation, planned the escape of his former servant

Padeen Colman, equally Popish and even more Irish (virtually monoglot), whose sentence

of death for robbing an apothecary of the laudanum to which, as Stephen's loblolly-boy, he

had become addicted, had been commuted to transportation to New South Wales. The

matter had been presented to Jack when he was exhausted with work and last-minute

preparations, frustrated beyond description by a light forward conscienceless woman,

liverish from official dinners in the extreme heat; and their difference of opinion was so

strong that it endangered their friendship. The escape did in fact take place in the

confusion that followed Maturin's encounter with the platypus and Padeen was now on

board: it took place with the consent of Padeen's master and of the entire crew; and it

could be said that Captain Aubrey's word was unbroken, since the absconder came not

from Port Jackson but from Woolloo-Woolloo, a day's journey to the north. Yet for his own

part Jack dismissed this as a mere quibble; and in any event he felt that he had been

manipulated, which he disliked extremely.

That was not the only time he had been manipulated, either. Throughout the voyage from

Batavia to Sydney Jack Aubrey had been chaste: necessarily so, given the absence of

anyone to be unchaste with. And throughout his anxious, frustrating negotiations in

Sydney he had been chaste, because of total exhaustion by the end of the day. But after

Governor Mac-quarie's return all this changed. At several official and unofficial gatherings

he met Selina Wesley, a fine plump young woman with a prominent bosom, an indifferent

reputation and a roving eye. Twice they were neighbours at dinner, twice at supper-

parties; she had naval connexions, an extensive knowledge of the world, and a very free

way of speaking; they got along famously. She had no patience with Romish monks or

nuns, she said; celibacy was great nonsense - quite unnatural; and when during the

interval in an evening concert given in some gardens outside Sydney she asked him to

walk with her down to the tree-fern dell he found himself in such a boyish state of desire

that his voice was scarcely at his command. She took his arm and they moved discreetly

out of the lantern-light, walked behind a summer-house and down the path. 'We have

escaped Mrs Macarthur's eye,' she said with a gurgle of laughter, and her grasp tightened

for a moment.

Down through the tree-ferns, down; and at the bottom a man stepped out of the shadows.

'There you are, Kendrick,' cried Mrs Wesley. 'I was not sure I should find you. Thank you

so much, Captain Aubrey. You will find your way back easily enough, I am sure, steering

by the stars. Kendrick, Captain Aubrey was so kind as to give me his arm down the path in

the dark.'

He had other causes for discontent, such as the faint and even dead contrary airs that had

kept Bird Island in sight for so long and then the curious falsity of the trade wind that

obliged the ship to beat up close-hauled day after day, wearing every four hours. Other

causes, some of them trivial: he had taken only two midshipmen from the Nutmeg into the

Surprise, two for whom he felt a particular responsibility; and both of them were extremely

irritating. Reade, a pretty boy who had lost an arm in their battle against sea Dyaks, was

over-indulged by the Surprises and was now much above himself; while Oakes, his

companion, a hairy youth of seventeen or eighteen, went about singing in a most

unofficer-like manner -a kind of bull-calf joy. Jack skipped over the matter of Nathaniel

Martin, the Reverend Nathaniel Martin, an unbeneficed clergyman, a well-read man and

an eager natural philosopher who had joined the Surprise as assistant surgeon to see the

world in Maturin's company. It was impossible to dislike Martin, a deeply respectable man,

though his playing of the viola would never have recommended him anywhere; yet Jack

could not love him either. Martin was of course a more suitable companion for Stephen in

certain respects, but it seemed to Jack that he took up altogether too much of his time,

prating away about primates in the mizen-top or endlessly turning over his collections of

beetles and mummified toads in the gunroom. Jack passed quickly on - he did not choose

to dwell on the subject - and came to the strange, unaccountable behaviour of the frigate's

people. Obviously they were not like a Royal Navy crew, being much more talkative,

independent, undeferential, partners rather than subordinates; but Jack did not dislike that

at all; he was used to it, and he had thought he knew them intimately well from his cruises

with them as a privateer and from this long run from Salibabu to New South Wales. Yet

something seemed to have happened to them in Sydney. Now they were fuller of mirth

than before; now they had private expressions that caused gales of laughter in the

forecastle; and now he often saw them look at him with a knowing smile. In any other ship

this might have meant mischief, but here even the officers had something of the same

oddness. At times even Tom Pullings, whom he had known since his first command,

seemed to be watching him with a considering eye, hesitant, quizzical.

Causes for discontent, vexations, of course he had them; and none rankled like that caper

in the tree-ferns nor came more insistently into his humiliated mind, so full of unsatisfied

desire. Yet all these put together, he thought, could not account for this growing

crossness, this waking up ready to be displeased, this incipient ill-humour - anything likely

to set it off. He had never felt like this when he was young - had never been made game

of by a young woman either.

'Perhaps I shall ask Stephen for a blue pill,' he said. 'For a couple of blue pills. I have not

been to the head this age.'

He walked forward, the windward side of the quarterdeck emptying at his approach; and

as he passed the wheel both the quartermaster at the con and the helmsman turned their

heads to look at him. The Surprise instantly came up half a point, the windward leaches of

the topsails gave a warning flutter and Jack roared 'Mind your helm, you infernal lubbers.

What in Hell's name do you mean by leering at me like a couple of moonsick cowherds?

Mind your helm, d'ye hear me there? Mr Davidge, no grog for Krantz or Webber today.'

The quarterdeck looked suitably shocked and grave, but as Jack went down the

companion-ladder towards the cabin he heard a gale of laughter from the forecastle.

Stephen was still playing and Jack walked in on tiptoe, with a finger to his lips, making

those gestures that people use to show that they are immaterial beings, silent, invisible.

Stephen nodded to him in an absent way, brought his phrase to a full close and said 'You

have come below, I find.'

'Yes,' said Jack. 'Not to put too fine a point on it, I have. I know this is not your time for

such things, but I should like to consult you if I may.'

'By all means. I was only working out a few foolish variations on a worthless theme. If what

you have to say is of an intimate nature at all let us close the skylight and sit upon the

locker at the back.' Most consultations shortly after a ship had left port were for venereal

diseases: some seamen were ashamed of their malady, some were not: in general the

officers preferred their state not to be known.

'It is not really of an intimate nature,' said Jack, closing the companion nevertheless and

sitting on the stern-window locker. 'But I am most damnably hipped . . . cross even in the

morning and much ill-used. Is there a medicine for good temper and general

benevolence? A delight in one's blessings? I had thought of a blue pill, with perhaps a

touch of rhubarb.'

'Show me your tongue,' said Stephen; and then, shaking his head, 'Lie flat on your back.'

After a while he said 'As I thought, it is your liver that is the peccant part; or at least the

most peccant of your parts. It is turgid, readily palpable. I have disliked your liver for some

time now. Dr Redfern disliked your liver. You have the bilious facies to a marked degree:

the whites of the eyes a dirty yellow, greyish-purple half-moons below them, a look of

settled discontent. Of course, as I have told you these many years, you eat too much, you

drink too much, and you do not take enough exercise. And this bout I have noticed that

although the water has been charmingly smooth ever since we left New South Wales,

although the boat has rarely exceeded a walking pace, and although we have been

attended by no sharks, no sharks at all, in spite of Martin's sedulous watch and mine, you

have abandoned your sea-bathing.'

'Mr Harris said it was bad in my particular case: he said it closed the pores, and would

throw the yellow bile upon the black.'

'Who is Mr Harris?'

'He is a man with singular powers, recommended to me by Colonel Graham when you

were away on your tour of the bush. He gives you nothing but what grows in his own

garden or in the countryside, and he rubs your spine with a certain oil; he has performed

some wonderful cures, and he is very much cried up in Sydney.'

Stephen made no comment. He had seen too many quite well educated people run after

men with singular powers to cry out, to argue or even to feel anything but a faint despair. 'I

shall bleed you,' he said, 'and mix a gentle cholagogue. And since we are now quite clear

of New South Wales and of your thaumaturge's territory, I advise you to resume both your

sea-bathing and your practice of climbing briskly to the topmost pinnacle.'

'Very well. But you do not mean me to take medicine today, Stephen? Tomorrow is

divisions, you remember.'

Stephen knew that for Jack Aubrey, as for so many other captains and admirals of his

acquaintance, taking medicine meant swallowing improbable quantities of calomel,

sulphur, Turkey rhubarb (often added to their own surgeon's prescription) and spending

the whole of the next day on the seat of ease, gasping, straining, sweating, ruining their

lower alimentary tract. 'I do not,' he said. 'It is only a mixture, to be followed by a series of

comfortable enemata.'

Jack watched the steady flow of his blood into the bowl: he cleared his throat and said 'I

suppose you have patients with, well, desires?'

'It would be strange if I had not.'

'I mean, if you will forgive a gross expression, with importunate pricks?'

'Sure, I understand you. There is little in the pharmacopoeia to help them. Sometimes' -

waving his lancet - 'I propose a simple little operation - a moment's pang, perhaps a sigh,

then freedom for life, a mild sailing on an even keel, tossed by no storms of passion,

untempted, untroubled, sinless- but when they decline, which they invariably do, though

they may have protested that they would give anything to be free of their torments, why

then unless there is some evident physical anomaly, all I can suggest is that they should

learn to control their emotions. Few succeed; and some, I am afraid, are driven to strange

wild extremes. But were the case to apply to you, brother, where there is a distinct

physical anomaly, I should point out that Plato and the ancients in general made the liver

the seat of love: Cogit amare jecur, said the Romans. And so I should reiterate my plea for

more sea-bathing, more going aloft, more pumping of an early morning, to say nothing of

a fitting sobriety at table, to preserve the organ from ill-considered freaks.' He closed the

vein, and having washed his bowl in the quarter-gallery he went on, 'As for the blue devils

of which you complain, my dear, do not expect too much from my remedies: youth and

unthinking happiness are not to be had in a bottle, alas. You are to consider that a certain

melancholy and often a certain irascibility accompany advancing age: indeed, it might be

said that advancing age equals ill-temper. On reaching the middle years a man perceives

that he is no longer able to do certain things, that what looks he may have had are

deserting him, that he has a ponderous great belly, and that however he may yet burn he

is no longer attractive to women; and he rebels. Fortitude, resignation and philosophy are

of more value than any pills, red, white or blue.'

'Stephen, surely you would never consider me middle-aged, would you?'

'Navigators are notoriously short-lived, and for them middle-age comes sooner than for

quiet abstemious country gentlemen. Jack, you have led as unhealthy a life as can well be

imagined, perpetually exposed to the falling damps, often wet to the skin, called up at all

hours of the night by that infernal bell. You have been wounded the Dear knows how

many times, and you have been cruelly overworked. No wonder your hair is grey.'

'My hair is not grey. It is a very becoming buttercup-yellow.'

Jack wore his hair long, clubbed and tied with a broad black bow. Stephen plucked the

bow loose and brought the far end of plait round before his eyes.

'Well I'm damned,' said Jack, looking at it in the sunlight.

'Well I'm damned; you are quite right. There are several grey hairs . . . scores of grey

hairs. It is positively grizzled, like a badger-pie. I had never noticed.'

Six bells.

'Will I tell you something more cheerful?" asked Stephen.

'Please do,' said Jack, looking up from his queue with that singularly sweet smile Stephen

had known from their earliest acquaintance.

'Two of our patients have been to the two islands you mean to pass. That is to say Philips

has been to Norfolk Island and Owen has been to Easter Island. Philips knew the place

before it was abandoned as a penal station, and he knew it extremely well, having spent -

I believe Martin said a year, for it was to him that Philips spoke about the place - in any

event a great while after the ship to which he belonged was wrecked. I forget her name: a

frigate.'

'That must have been the Sirius, Captain Hunt, heaved on to a coral reef by the swell in

the year ninety, much as we were so very nearly heaved on to the rocks of Inaccessible

on the way out. Lord, I have never been so terrified in my life. Was you not terrified,

Stephen?"

'I was not. I do not suppose there is my equal for courage in the service: but then, you

recall, I was downstairs, playing chess with poor Fox, and knew nothing of it until we were

delivered. But as I was saying, Martin was delighted to hear that the mutton-birds would

be there by now. He loves a petrel even more than I do; and the mutton-bird, my dear,

belongs to that interesting group. He very much hopes that we may go ashore.'

'Certainly. I should be happy to oblige him, if landing is possible: sometimes the surf runs

very high, by all accounts. I shall have a word with Philips; and I shall ask Owen to tell me

all he knows about Easter Island. If this breeze holds, we should raise Mount Pitt on

Norfolk tomorrow morning."

'I hope we shall be able to go ashore. Apart from anything else there is the famous Norfolk

Island pine."

'Alas, I am afraid it was exploded years ago. The enormous great spars would not stand

even a moderate strain."

'To be sure: I remember Mr Seppings reading us an excellent paper at Somerset House.

But what I really meant was that so prodigious and curious a vegetable as the Norfolk pine

may well harbour equally prodigious and curious beetles, as little known to the world in

general as their host.'

'Speaking of Martin," said Jack, who did not give a pinch of snuff for beetles, however

singular, 'I thought of him twice yesterday. Once because while I was going through the

mass of estate-papers with Adams, trying to get them in some kind of order - they came

from seven different lawyers after I had paid off my father's mortgages, and the children

had tumbled them about to get at the stamps - he pointed out that I had three advowsons

and part of a fourth, with the right of presenting every third turn. I wondered whether they

would interest Martin.'

'Are they of any value?'

'I have no idea. When I was a boy, Parson Russell of Wool-combe kept his carriage; but

then he had private means and he had married a wife with a handsome dowry. I have no

notion of the others, except that the vicarage at Compton was a sad shabby little place. I

went to sea when I was no bigger than Reade, you know, and hardly ever went back. I

had hoped that Withers' general statement of the position would reach me in Sydney: that

would give all the details, I am sure."

'What was the second circumstance that brought Martin to your mind?"

'I was restringing my fiddle when it occurred to me that love of music and the ability to play

well had nothing to do with character: neither here nor there, if you follow me. Martin's two

Oxford friends, Standish and Paulton, were perfect examples. Standish played better than

any amateur I had ever heard, but he was not really quite the thing, you know. I do not say

that because he was perpetually seasick or because he ratted on us; nor do I mean he

was wicked; but he was not quite the thing. Whereas John Paulton, who played even

better, was the kind of man you could sail round the world with and never a harsh word or

a wry look all the way. What astonished me is that Martin should have played with two

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

PATRICKO'BRIANTheTruelove(ClarissaOakes)ForMary,withloveandmostparticulargratitudeChapterOneStandingatthefrigate'staffrail,andindeedleaninguponit,JackAubreyconsideredherwake,stretchingawayneitherveryfarnoremphaticallyoverthesmoothpuregreen-bluesea:acreditablefurrow,however,intheselightairs.Shehadjus...

展开>> 收起<<

O'Brian Patrick - Aub-Mat 15 - The Truelove (Clarissan Oakes).pdf

共148页,预览30页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

O'Brian Patrick - Aub-Mat 15 - The Truelove (Clarissan Oakes)

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: