Stephen said, ‘I have a service to beg of you, Mr Macdonald.’
‘Name it, sir, I beg: nothing could give me greater pleasure.’
‘The loan of your pistols, if you please.’
‘For any purpose but to shoot a Marine officer, they are yours and welcome. In my canteen there, under the window, if you would be so good.’
‘Thank you, I will bring them back, or cause them to be brought, as soon as they have served their purpose.’
The evening, as he rode back, was as sweet as an early autumn evening could be, still, intensely humid, a royal blue sea on the right hand, pure dunes on the left, and a benign warmth rising from the ground. The mild horse, a good-natured creature, had a comfortable walk; it knew its way, but it seemed to be in no hurry to reach its stable
– indeed, it paused from time to time to take leaves from a shrub that he could not identify; and Stephen sank into an agreeable languor, almost separated from his body: a pair of eyes, no more, floating above the white road, looking from left to right. ‘There are days –
good evening to you, sir’ – a parson went by, walking with his cat, the smoke from his pipe keeping him company as he walked – ‘there are days,’ he reflected, ‘when one sees as though one had
been blind the rest of one’s life. Such clarity – perfection in everything, not merely in the extraordinary. One lives in the very present moment; lives intently. There is no urge to be doing: being is the highest good. However,’ he said, guiding the horse left-handed into the dunes, ‘doing of some kind there must be.’ He slid from the saddle and said to the horse,
‘Now how can I be sure of your company, my dear?’ The horse gazed at him with glistening, intelligent eyes, and brought its ears to bear. ‘Yes, yes, you are an honest fellow, no doubt. But you may not like the bangs; and I may be longer than you choose to wait. Come, let me hobble you with this small convenient strap. [low little I know about dunes,’ he said, pacing out his distance and placing a folded handkerchief at the proper height on a sandy slope. ‘A most curious study – a flora and a fauna entirely of its own, no doubt.’ He spread his coat to preserve the pistols from the sand and loaded them carefully. ‘What one is bound to do, one usually does with little acknowledged feeling; a vague desperation, no more,’ he said, taking up his stance. Yet as he did so his face assumed a cold, dangerous aspect and his body moved with the easy precision of a machine. The sand spat up from the edge of the handkerchief; the smoke lay hardly stirring; the horse was little affected by the noise, but it watched idly for the first dozen shots or so.
‘I have never known such consistently accurate weapons,’ he said aloud. ‘I wonder, can I still do Dillon’s old trick?’ He took a coin from his pocket, tossed it high, and shot it fair and
square on the top of its rise, between climbing and falling. ‘Charming instruments indeed: I must cover them from the dew.’ The sun had set; the light had so far diminished that the red tongue of flame lit up the misty hollow at each discharge; the handkerchief was long ago reduced to its component threads. ‘Lord, I shall sleep tonight. Oh, what a prodigious dew.’
In Dover, sheltered by the western heights, the darkness fell earlier. Jack Aubrey, having done what little business
he had to do, and having called in vain at New Place – ‘Mr Lowndes was indisposed: Mrs Villiers was not at home’ -sat drinking beer in an ale-house near the Castle. It was a sad, dirty, squalid little booth – a knocking-shop for the soldiers upstairs – but it had two ways out, and with Bonden and Lakey in the front room he felt reasonably safe from surprise.
He was as low as he had ever been in his life, a dull, savage lowness; and the stupidity that came from the two pots he had drunk did nothing to raise it. Anger and indignation were his only refuge, and although they were foreign to his nature, he was steadily angry and indignant.
An ensign and his flimsy little wench came in, hesitated on seeing Jack, and settled in the far corner, slapping and pushing each other for want of words. The woman of the house brought candles and asked whether he should like anything more; he looked out of the window at the gathering twilight and said no – what did he owe her, and for the men in the tap?
‘One and nine pence,’ said the woman; and while he felt in his pockets she stared him full in the face with an open, ignorant, suspicious, avid curiosity, her eyes screwed close and her upper lip drawn back over her three yellow teeth. She did not like the cloak he wore over his uniform; she did not like the sobriety of his men, nor the way they kept themselves to themselves; again, gentlemen as were gentlemen called for wine, not beer; he had made no response to Betty’s advances nor to her own modest proposal of accommodation; she wanted no pouffes in her house, and she should rather have his room than his company.
He looked into the tap, told Bonden to wait for him at the boat, and walked out by the back way, straight into a company of whores and soldiers. Two of the whores were fighting there in the alley, tearing one another’s hair and clothes, but the rest were cheerful enough, and two of the women called to him, coming alongside to
whisper their talents, their prices, and their clean bill of health.
He walked up to New Place. The demure look that accompanied the ‘not at home’ had convinced him that he should see Diana’s light. A faint glow between the drawn curtains up there: he checked it twice, walking up and down the road, and then fetched a long cast round the houses to reach a lane that led behind New Place. The palings of the wilderness were no great obstacle, but the walled inner garden needed his cloak over the broken glass on top and then a most determined run and leap. Down in the garden the noise of the sea was suddenly cut off -a total, listening silence and the falling dew as he stood there amongst the crown imperials. Gradually the silence listened less; there were
sounds inside the house – talking from various windows, somebody locking doors, closing the lower shutters. Then a quick heavy thudding on the path, the deep wuff-wuff of dog Fred, the mastiff, who was free of the garden and the yard by night, and who slept in the summerhouse. But dog Fred was a mute creature; he knew Captain Aubrey – thrust his wet nose into his hand -and said no more. He was not altogether easy in his mind, however, and when at last Jack gained the mossy path he followed him to the house, grumbling, pushing the back of his knees. Jack took off his coat, folded it on the ground, and then his sword: Fred at once lay on the coat, guarding both it and the sword.
For months and months past a builder had been replacing the roof-tiles of New Place; his improvised crane, with its pulley, projecting from the parapet and its rope hung there still, hooked to a bucket. Jack quickly made the ends fast, tried it, took the strain, and swung himself up. Up, hand over hand, past the library, where Mr Lowndes was writing at his desk, past a window giving on to the stairs, up to the parapet. From this point it was only a few steps to Diana’s window, but half-way up, before ever he reached the parapet, he had recognized Canning’s great
delighted laugh, a crowing noise that rose from a deep bass, a particular laugh, that could not be mistaken. For all that he went the whole way, until he was there, sitting on the parapet with a sharp-angled view of all of the room that mattered. For three deep breaths he might have burst through: it was extraordinarily vivid, the lit room, the faces, their expressions picked out by the candlelight, their intense life and their unconsciousness of a third person. Then shame, unhappiness, extreme weariness put out the rest, extinguished it utterly. No rage, no fire: all gone, and nothing to take their place. He moved some paces off to hear and see no more, and after a while he reached out to the end of the crane for the rope; automatically he frapped the two strands, took a sailor’s grip on it, swung himself out into the darkness, and went down, down and down, pursued by that intensely amused laughter.