‘Nothing,’ said Emily, beginning to grizzle.
‘Put it out, put it out: would you shame us all by chewing tobacco before the King of the Friendly Islands himself?’ He held out a waste-paper basket and slowly, unwillingly, Emily let drop her quid. “There, there,’ he said, kissing them, ‘blow your nose and run along. You must not keep Mr Martin waiting: there is not a moment to be lost.’
‘You will come along, sir, won’t – will not – you, if ever you can?’ asked Sarah.
‘. . . I saw him in Holland House,’ wrote Stephen; and leaning back for a fresh vision of the scene he heard Jack, in another world, address the crowded deck; to starboard the liberty men, who had somehow, after a day of strenuous toil, found time and energy to put on their shore-going clothes of brass-buttoned light-blue jackets, white duck trousers, embroidered shirts, broad-brimmed ribboned hats, neat little shoes with bows; to larboard those now jaded souls who had had their fun the night before and a cruel hard day on top of it. Those who were to go ashore – and already the fires were burning for the feast –
could hardly wait for their Captain to be done: they jigged up and down as they stood, as they jigged so the stolen nails, bolts, pieces of old iron for trading, jangled in their places of concealment. ‘I repeat, shipmates,’ he said loud and clear, ‘we weigh with the first of the ebb. All hands are to repair to the boats the moment the second rocket goes up; they will have five minutes from the first in which to take their leave. And there are to be no women aboard the ship. No women at all, d’ye hear me there?’
‘What about Mrs Oakes?’ called a half-drunk voice from the sullen larboard.
‘Take that man’s name, Mr West,’ said Jack, and those who had been close to the butcher moved away from him with expressionless faces, leaving him isolated. ‘Gig’s crew away,’
called Jack: a few moments later he went down the side in some state and Stephen returned to his letter.
‘I saw him in Holland House during the peace, when he had just come back from the Paris embassy. As the door opened Lady Holland was saying in that loud metallic voice of hers
“How I worship that Napoleon”. Some people looked embarrassed but for a moment he stood there in the shadow of the doorway with his hands clasped and his face shining as though he had been granted the beatific vision; then he composed himself and walked in with the ordinary commonplace remarks. Lady Holland ran to meet him: “What news from Paris? Tell us all about your dinner with the divine First Consul.”
‘Now this man shared in Ledward’s and Wray’s dirtiest parties, but although he had been to school with Ledward he never acknowledged him in public; nor of course Wray. But the point that carried total conviction with me was that their code for him was Pillywinks, and the name we found so often but could not interpret in Wray’s criminally negligent papers.
‘To carry the same conviction to your mind, let me tell you about my source: she is the lady who blew Mr Caley’s head off with a double-barrelled gun some years ago; and as you will recall (which I did not at the time) our fellow-member Harry Essex had her sentence commuted to transportation. It was therefore in New South Wales that she joined our company.’
There followed a succinct account of their voyage, its interruption and its present aims: a more detailed account of his walk with Clarissa in which he could not refrain from the briefest notice of Sir Joseph’s beetles; and then as detailed an account as he could remember of their conversation about Led ward, Wray and the lame man, both at the first mention of their names and during the walk down to the strand, a long walk, and made longer by the blister. The exact sequence was not always easy, and to fix it he sometimes gazed out of the window. The frigate lay stern-on to the shore, a shore lined with fires and as brilliant as could be: no moon to interfere: leaping flames above an incandescent heart, white sand, dark green looming behind, a blue-black sky; the whaler clearly lit upon his right; and all along the line straight young brown bodies dancing to the sound of rhythmic song and drums. But dancing in a series of exact, perfect evolutions that would have put the Brigade of Guards to shame. Advance, retreat and twirl; twirl, retreat, advance; a half turn and so back again, the close ranks and files interchanging, all with a perfect simultaneity of pace and waving arms. In the middle, beyond the fire, a temporary roof of palm fronds had been set up, and here by the chiefs’ side sat Jack: then other notables: to their right Clarissa and her husband, then Wainwright and Dr Falconer, Reade, Martin and the little girls, now hung with wreaths of flowers, staring with amazement and delight. They were all slowly, absently sipping kava in coconut cups from the ancestral bowl in front of the chief.
Back to his coding, the fires dazzling in his eyes, and he struck out several lines in which the sequence was mistaken. To convey the perfectly convincing, ingenuous, nature of her words was, he feared, beyond his powers; but certainly their exact, inconsequential train might do something towards it.
When next he looked up he realized that for some time he had been hearing neither song nor drums but a confused din not unlike the roar of a bull-fight: it was in fact a boxing-match. He had heard of the sport for ever, but curiously enough he had never seen a formal contest – nothing more than scuffles among the boys in earlier commissions or dockside brawls. Yet this appeared to be a singular battle. He took up his small spyglass, never far from hand, and his first astonished impression was confirmed. There were two fine upstanding young women setting about one another with bare fists. Violent, wholehearted blows, and judging from the cries of the onlookers, well given and well received. Clarissa was laughing; the little girls hardly knew how they liked it; some of the seamen and all of the islanders backed one girl or the other with the greatest zeal. Yet at the very climax, and for no reason that Stephen could see, when neither was giving an inch, the old chief beat the kava-bowl, an attendant blew on a conch, the chief’s sister intervened, the two young women fell back and walked off, one rubbing her cheek, the other her bosom: there was a cry of disappointment from the seamen who had enjoyed it,
but almost immediately afterwards, from one end of the line to the other, came baked hogs, baked dogs, fishes and fowls wrapped in leaves, yams, plantains, breadfruit.
Stephen’s watch uttered its tiny silver chime, and looking at the pile of sheets he had so inconsiderately filled he said ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God, I shall never get all this receded in time: and already my poor boiled eyes are dropping out of my head.’ He put on his green shade, wiped away his tears, changed his spectacles and opened the new code-book.
He did not look up again until a great howl plucked him from his task, his mechanical work. There was Awkward Davies flat on his face with a burly islander sitting on him, pinning him down with an arm-breaking hold. Davies presumably gave some sign, uttered some word, for the islander got off, helped him up, and led him back to his friends in the kindest way.
Again Stephen’s watch struck and while it was still striking the first rocket soared up.
‘Oooh,’ cried all the people, and ‘Aah!’ followed by cheers as it burst.
The second rocket, not a quarter of a page later, was followed by nautical cries and then by the arrival of the boats. Some few hands had contrived to get drunk on the chief’s kava, but most came aboard very quietly, welcomed in a low voice by the harbour-watch.
When his sheep had been counted Jack looked into the cabin. ‘Am I interrupting you?’ he asked from the doorway.
‘Never in life, my dear. I am only copying: let me finish my group and I am with you.’ Many years before this Jack, no fool at sea, had perceived that Stephen was more than a ship’s surgeon, more even than a man whose political advice would be sought by a captain where relations with foreigners were concerned; and gradually his close connexion with intelligence had become so evident that there was nothing strange about his coding messages, sometimes of surprising length.
The group finished, Stephen put a small lead weight upon the place and said ‘I trust you had an agreeable evening.’