by the number of nocturnal animals he heard and occasionally saw in the faint moonlight, and they so near the settlement:
phalangers, bandicoots, a koala, wombats. ‘As for Jack,’ he said, ‘his hero Nelson would not have acted so: but Nelson was not a righteous man; he had no sudden rush of virtue to the head. Middle age has come upon Jack Aubrey at last, the creature. I never thought it would.’ He said this without rancour, as one stating a fact; but he also said ‘One of the great advantages of wealth is that you are not obliged to eat toads. You can do what you think right.’
The question of what he thought right in these circumstances was not solved by the time the moon set and he turned back. His consideration of the problem was often interrupted by actions of grace, one of which, a plain-chant thanksgiving he had often heard at Montserrat before the French sacked, desecrated and destroyed the monastery, took him a mile and a half to sing. It was not solved by the time he reached the ship, footsore and wet from a shower out of the south-east; nor yet when after a troubled waking night he heard Bonden’s discreet voice in his ear, telling him the cutter was alongside.
Joy revived, and sorrow with it. He dressed, tiptoed into the gunroom not to wake the other officers, murmured a good morning to Martin, and drank a cup of coffee.
The cutter’s masts were already stepped; and as he made his way down into it Stephen noticed with satisfaction that the crew were all old shipmates, men-of-war’s men. Bonden, who had no notion of the Doctor’s common sense, whatever his book-learning might be, nor of Mr Martin’s, had provided boat-cloaks against the keen night air; and he said ‘Now where away, sir, if you please?’
‘Do you know Bird Island?’
‘Yes, sir: saw it as we were coming in, and Captain Pullings took a fix on it.’
‘Well now, before that island there is a point, two or three miles to the south; and south again of that point, on the flat coast there is the entrance to a lagoon, marked by a flagstaff and a cairn. That is where we must go. How long do you think it will take?’
‘With this breeze on the quarter, sir, we should be there by noon, easy. Shove off afore, Joe.’
By the time they had sailed down the long harbour dawn was just beginning to break, a dawn so pure and exquisite that even Joe Plaice, who had seen ten thousand of them at sea, looked at it with mild approval, and Martin clasped his hands. Stephen saw nothing of it: he was asleep, wrapped in the boat-cloak. The cutter passed the headlands, met the wide-spaced waves of the open sea, made a little offing close-hauled and then steered north-east, which changed the boat’s motion to a corkscrew roll of the kind that may make even hardened seamen uneasy if they have been ashore for some while. Stephen slept on: he slept on when the surface ripple caused by the changing tide brought spray sweeping diagonally across. Martin arranged the cloak to cover Stephen’s head, and seeing that he was not easily to be woken said to Bonden in a low tone, ‘We are going at a fine pace.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Bonden. ‘We shall have time and to spare, and I should stand off the shore to keep the Doctor a little drier, only I am afraid of missing the flagstaff.’
‘Do you think we are near?’ asked Stephen, suddenly awake.
‘Well, sir, I reckon we can’t be a great way off.’
‘Then as soon as we raise Bird Island I shall watch the shore with my glass; and as for getting wet, the sun will soon dry us. It is much higher than I had expected, and exceptionally warm.’
So they sailed on, the hands forward talking quietly, the boat all alive with the breeze, the sun climbing until cool spray was welcome and cloaks were laid aside.
‘There is your island, sir,’ said Bonden; and on the rise Stephen saw it clear, nicking the horizon beyond the point.
‘So it is,’ he said, and both he and Martin took out their telescopes. Steadily the low sandy coast filed by; and presently they agreed that this part or that might be familiar. Yet from the sea one dune or even one clump of stunted trees looks very like another and there was no certainty until once again, and with something of the same relief, they saw the flagstaff and its cairn.
‘And it is not yet eleven o’clock,’ said Stephen. ‘I am afraid I have roused you men from your hammocks too early.’
‘Never you mind us, sir,’ said Plaice with a chuckle. ‘We should have been swabbing decks else. This is more like a picnic, as they say.’
Bonden steered for the opening. To his surprise Stephen was able to tell him that there was a fathom of water over the bar at the lowest tide, and a deeper passage with the cairn and the flagstaff in a line, bearing due east. He took the cutter through the moderate flurry of breaking waves, along the entrance, into the quiet waters of the lagoon, and so to the stage where the Woolloo-Woolloo harvest was brought down to the brig.
‘Now, Bonden,’ said Stephen, ‘make a fire – you have brought your dinners, sure?’
‘Yes, sir; and Killick put up this parcel of sandwiches for you and Mr Martin.’
‘Very good. Make a fire, then, eat your dinner, and go to sleep in the sun if you like. The ship is to pick us up off Bird Island this evening. I may not come down, but Mr Martin will, not later than two or half past. And let nobody stray. There may be venomous creatures in these reeds.’
There were certainly butterflies, some of the same kinds that they had seen before, others larger and still more spectacular; and as they walked up along the stream through the reeds and bushes they netted several. But the extreme contradiction of spirit was still as strong on Stephen as ever, the ebullient joy and the wound; and his heart was not in it.
Nor was Martin’s:
Stephen, though never loquacious, was rarely as silent as this
– the mood was catching.
They passed through the reed-bed to the firm ground and the open air, the vast sky, of the meadow. The stream was on their left hand, whereas on their first visit it had been on their right and they had crossed it much higher up. ‘We are in a new part of the pasture,’
observed Stephen. ‘I can just make out the cabin, a good half-mile farther off than I had expected.’ Lambs; a flight of whiter cockatoos; far over a drift of smoke.
‘We might walk a furlong or so along the stream,’ he went on. ‘We are much too early.’
In time of flood the stream was clearly ten or fifteen yards in breadth, with deep-cut banks; but there had been no flood for some years and now they were covered with a fair number of bushes and tall soft grass growing between them, while the stream itself, winding through the meadow, was no more than a stride across, a rivulet connecting a series of pools. The first of these pools had some interesting plants, which they collected, and a millepede; at the second Martin, who was ahead on the path, whispered ‘Oh my God!’, stopped, stepped cautiously back. ‘There they are,’ he whispered in Stephen’s ear.
They crept along the top of the bank foot by foot, bent, so that when they raised their heads and peered through the fringe of leaves and reed-plumes they could just command the surface of the pool. The platypuses took no notice: they had been swimming round and round when first Martin saw them. They went on swimming round and round, one after the other, in a broad ring, lost and absorbed in their ritual. They both swam low, surprisingly low, in the water, but the light struck the surface at such an angle that for the watchers there was no reflection: they could see everything below, from that scarcely believable duck’s bill to the broad flattened tail, with the four webbed feet between them.
Presently Stephen whispered ‘I believe we can creep nearer still.’ Martin nodded, and with infinite caution they edged slanting down the side, Stephen steadying himself with the handle of the net. It was inch by inch now, each bush, each young tree, each tuft of grass very carefully negotiated. At water-level the going was easier and they carried on their serpentine approach to the soft damp mud of the pool-shore itself, each behind a clump of rushes, peering through the shaded gap between them. As he had done when he was a boy, reaching a point within hand’s touch of a cock capercaillie calling and displaying in the spring, Stephen closed his mouth, so that the sound of his heart, loud in his throat like a hoarse old clock, should not be heard.