Читать книгу The Unknown Shore - Patrick O’Brian - Страница 5

MR EDWARD CHAWORTH of Medenham was a well-disposed, good-natured man with an adequate fortune, an amiable wife and a numerous family: he thought the world an excellent place, and he could suggest no way in which it could be improved, except for the poachers and the Whigs – they would be abolished in an ideal world, and the trout in his stream would be a trifle larger.

Yet in the present state of things, Whigs abounded, and whenever Mr Chaworth thought of them, his cheerfulness was clouded. Sir Robert Walpole’s name always made him frown, and he would happily have seen the prime minister hanged, drawn and quartered: he could not bear the sound of a Whig. How much more obnoxious, then, was Mr Elwes, who was not only a Whig but also Mr Chaworth’s nearest neighbour? The thought of Mr Elwes luxuriating in Whiggery not half a mile beyond the kitchen-garden filled Mr Chaworth with indignation. The earliest symptoms of this indignation were a straightening of his back and a tightening of his lips: he had served under the Duke of Marlborough, and this martial stiffening was associated in his mind with carnage, the thunder of guns, blood and the general unpleasantness of battle. Mrs Chaworth, upon seeing the beginnings of it, glanced anxiously round the breakfast table.

It was so very large a table, there were so many children round it and so many things upon it that obstructed her view – a ham, a round of cold beef, an unusually tall pork-pie, chafing-dishes with mutton-chops, eggs, bacon, kippered trout, kidneys and mushrooms, apart from the tea and coffee urns and the host of minor objects such as marmalade, toast, rolls, potted char and Sophia’s bowl of ass’s milk – that it took her some time to survey the whole. Anne, Charles and Sophia were behaving perfectly well, and so was little Dormer, the youngest to be allowed downstairs; but she saw with regret that Georgiana was balancing her spoon and causing its bowl to float, in imitation of her cousin Jack, who was partially concealed by the raised pie: she coughed significantly, but they were too engrossed to hear and it was obvious, from her fascinated stare, that Isabella, Jack’s sister, was going to join in.

Mr Chaworth grew more and more upright in his chair as he turned the page of the letter that he was reading, and Mrs Chaworth knew that unless he found something agreeable on this new page, his right hand would go up to clutch his wig, his left thump the letter on to the table and he would cry, ‘Lard, Lard, Lard, Mrs Chaworth!’

It was very thoughtless of Jack: he knew that Mr Chaworth was easily vexed in the morning. But perhaps Jack thought that he was no longer subject to reproof, having been away from home. She peered round the pie at her younger cousin, who, with his head barbarously near the cloth and his rapidly growing form bulging from his blue midshipman’s coat, was now engaged in making a storm in his tea-cup, by blowing. Jack Byron and his sister were cousins of the Chaworths, but they had lived at Medenham from their youngest days, ever since Lady Byron had died, and they were entirely part of the household: even now that Jack’s elder brother, the present Lord Byron, was living at Newstead Abbey again, there was no question of their going back there.

‘Lard, Lard, Lard, Mrs Chaworth!’ cried the master of the house, grasping his wig. She automatically put out her hand to steady the tea-urn, which was apt to fall over, parboiling her knees: but the expected thump did not come. Mr Chaworth arrested his descending hand and pointed its index finger at Jack. ‘What the devil do you think you are doing?’ he exclaimed. But his words were prompted less by a spirit of inquiry than by a momentary urge to be disagreeable, and without waiting for an answer he went on, ‘If these are naval manners – ha, manners, forsooth – they were best kept for sea.’

‘What is it, my dear?’ asked Mrs Chaworth, waving a lace handkerchief by way of distracting his attention from Jack, whom she loved dearly.

‘The stream,’ cried Mr Chaworth. ‘The stream. He’s going to turn the stream into his top field to make an enormous vast loathsome fountain for his wedding-day.’

‘Well, my dear,’ said Mrs Chaworth, who had expected something very much more shocking than this, ‘I am sure Mr Elwes will turn it back again afterwards, when he is married.’

‘And what do you suppose the trout will do in the meantime?’ cried Mr Chaworth with all the agony of a devoted fisherman. ‘What do you suppose will happen to the trout, Mrs Chaworth?’

Mrs Chaworth really did not mind; she never fished, or hunted, or shot, and she secretly disliked all these creatures that were so laboriously pursued; if it were not for them the family would spend most of the year in London – a much more agreeable kind of life. However, she did not say this, but soothingly replied, ‘But in that case, surely it would be much easier to take them up, my dear? You could use a little net, in the puddles that are left.’

Mr Chaworth uttered a desolate howl, but made no further reply: in twenty years of an otherwise happy marriage he had never been able to make his wife understand the sanctity of game, and now, rather than persist in the hopeless task, he seized upon the ham, and silently carved it, with as much ferocity as if Mr Elwes had been under his knife.

It cannot be denied that Mr Elwes was a troublesome neighbour: his eccentricity was the delight of the countryside; yet it is one thing to have an amusing eccentric two or three parishes away, and quite another to have him as your next-door neighbour. The person in classical mythology who fitted his guests to the bed in his spare room by means of an axe or a rack was a source of endless gossip and diversion to the neighbourhood in general, but he must have been a sad bore to those who lived within the range of his victims’ cries. Mr Elwes, then, was a troublesome neighbour; and this menace to the stream was but the latest of a series of outrages. He lived at Plashey, whose venerable roof could be seen from the terrace at Medenham in the winter, when the leaves were off the trees. Plashey was the other big house in the parish, and it was much older than Medenham; its most recent parts were Tudor, and the kitchens were Saxon; it was built facing north, in the bottom of a watery dell. Mr Elwes, however, had not inherited Plashey; he had only bought it, and although he had lived there some twenty years he was still considered a newcomer. For most of these years, that is to say, until he took up politics, he had lived a retired, secluded existence, with a household consisting of no more than a few vague, shiftless servants and a boy, Tobias Barrow, who was usually called his nephew.

Jack Byron and Tobias Barrow were very close friends; their friendship dated from long ago, when there had still been a fair amount of visiting and acquaintance between Medenham and Plashey, and as soon as breakfast was over Jack hurried away to find Tobias. He knew that Mr Elwes was capable of any villainy, but he also knew that rumour delighted in exaggeration (Mr Elwes’ ape, at its first arrival, had been confidently reported as the Devil in person) and he hoped to learn that this appalling news was ill-founded.

He crossed the bowling-green, hurried through the kitchen-garden into the park and along his private path towards the outer paling. During his absence at sea the path had almost vanished in the grass, but he knew it so well that he could follow it at midnight without a moon. He came to the pollard hornbeam that had always served as his ladder to get out of the park: there were rounded knobs on its gnarled old trunk that allowed one to reach the pointed ends of the pales, there to poise for the downward leap over the ditch and on to the soft bank that ran along the side of the lane below – the lane that separated Plashey’s land from Medenham’s. Jack and his nearest cousin Georgiana had used this route from their most tender infancy; in those days the ascent of the tree had been a matter of tears, blood, barked shins and childish oaths, but now Jack swung up it with the ease of one to whom the maintopgallant masthead of a man-of-war is as easy and familiar as a pulpit to a parson, and he was just about to spring down when he saw Mr Elwes in the meadow over the way, gathering simples in a sky-blue coat and scarlet breeches. He was a man past the middle age, with a large yellow-grey face; he had a very great deal of energy, and as he sprang about the field he sang odd snatches, gesticulated, and harangued the yak that stood in the far corner. Jack shrank back into the leaves. Mr Elwes picked dittander, middle confound and stinking arrach; he picked nigwort, figwort and liriconfancy, adding thereto polypody of the oak, pellitory of Spain and herb true-love, and he offered a blade of the last to the yak as it stood panting in the shade of the ragged hedge. This monolithic beast had been imported by Mr Elwes, at vast expense, under the impression that it was the aurochs of antiquity – it was supposed to improve the local breed of cattle out of all recognition, but it did nothing but lurk in the shade, gasping, and it was evident that the race of Nottinghamshire aurochs would soon die out. This was not the case with all his importations, however, and it was almost impossible to keep servants at Plashey, because of the salamanders. Salamanders in the library, salamanders that had to be rescued from the ashes of the drawing-room grate, the gentle plop of salamanders falling from stair to stair as they tried to mount to the attic to hibernate in the servants’ beds, but above all, salamanders multiplying in their thousands in the cellars that were Mr Elwes’ pride and joy. It was not as cellars that they delighted him, because he drank no wine, but as Saxon relics: he was a virtuoso, for whom anything old was better than anything new – anything to do with the arts, that is to say, for in other respects he was wonderfully advanced, and he farmed his land upon the newest philosophical principles, designed great schemes for the improvement of mankind, and had invented several machines, including a musical treadmill and a hydraulic rack.

But it was in the matter of education that his theories and his energy appeared in their brightest light. ‘You have no conception,’ he said to one of his learned friends – ‘you have no conception of the amount that an infant mind can learn, if it be subjected to it for twelve or fourteen hours a day, with none of your foolish holidays. Take a boy …’ he said, and went on to describe how the boy would learn Latin and Greek by ear, thus absorbing them unconsciously; the time saved would be devoted to logic, mathematics and physical studies; when these had been acquired the ornamental arts of rhetoric, poetry, music, dancing and singing would follow, and in a surprisingly short time there would be loosed upon the world a new wonder, an even more Admirable Crichton. The prodigy would be brought up by a dumb nurse so that it should hear nothing but the classical tongues, which its tutors would speak from morning to … here Mr Elwes’ learned friend interrupted him and said that the plan was vain, chimerical and, in short, a mere vapour – the more so as no child’s mother would ever allow it to be carried out.

‘Vapour?’ cried Mr Elwes, with a furious glare. ‘We shall see.’

‘I dare say we shall,’ replied the friend, walking away.

Within the hour Mr Elwes, fired by contradiction, had begun negotiations for the purchase of a suitable male child, for this conversation took place in London, not far from the scene of his earlier activities. Mr Elwes had begun life as a surgeon, and his practice had lain on the borders of the richest part of the City and the poorest slums that adjoined it. The first accounted for his wealth (grateful patients had helped him to South Sea stock, and he had sold out the week before the South Sea Bubble burst), and the second made him familiar with whole streets of people who had far, far too many children and no money. It was not a matter of searching for a child to buy, but rather of turning away the crowds that hurried up with surplus offspring, washed and even combed for the occasion.

Before the week was out Tobias Barrow arrived by post-chaise at Plashey, done up in an old, old shawl. He was given a small bowl of black broth, for Mr Elwes intended that he should be brought up in the Spartan manner, and the Spartans liked their soup black; these dismal people also slept hard, without any bedclothes, and so therefore did Tobias, weeping sadly. The next morning his education began.

It was a remarkable education, and one that only a wealthy man could afford; but Mr Elwes was a wealthy man, and even if he had paid the usual price for the tutors’ services he could have done so easily; like many other wealthy men, however, he was exceedingly near with his money, particularly where small sums were concerned, and his experiment was conducted on the most economical principles. He employed very poor and unworldly scholars, and he often took them for a term or so upon approval, without any definite arrangement about their salaries. They came and went: sometimes, when Mr Elwes was engrossed in some other experiment and had little time to quarrel or interfere, a tutor might stay for a year or more – Mr Buchanan did, a sad, gentle, unbeneficed clergyman who probably knew more about birds than any man in England – but usually they went away much sooner, and nearly always on foot. One young man took a horse from the stable to help him on his way, and he had almost reached the shelter of Cambridge before he was overtaken. Mr Elwes prosecuted, of course, and it was rumoured that after the unhappy youth had been hanged he bought the body from the executioner for dissection.

This was untrue, as it happened, but Mr Elwes was in fact a most accomplished dissector: whatever his character may have been in other respects, he was an unusually learned and skilful surgeon, and he taught Tobias anatomy with great success. He had a real love for his profession (apart from anything else it gave him unrivalled opportunities for experiment on his fellow men), and he never abandoned it: after he came to Plashey he formed a small practice among his tenants and servants and the local poor; and this enabled him, in due course, to bind Tobias as his apprentice and to teach him the work of a general practitioner in medicine – for at that period, and for more than a hundred years afterwards, all surgeons began as apprentices: though to be sure few began quite so young as Tobias.

By the time the first part of the experiment was over – the part devoted to useful knowledge – Tobias had absorbed a great deal of information; he was not the all-knowing marvel that he ought to have been, however, for although his physical knowledge was beyond expectation and his Latin and Greek prodigiously fluent, he was distinctly weak in metaphysics, and in spite of the most severe whipping he could never be brought to understand the infinitesimal calculus. But when the second part was to begin Mr Elwes found that he no longer cared about it: he did make a determined attempt, but by now Tobias had an entirely scientific cast of mind, and he showed a very shocking, if not brutish, indifference to the graces, as professed by Mr Elwes. From natural inclination as well as training he was entirely devoted to natural history: it had been his comfort in adversity, his solace in loneliness, his delight at all times, and he was barbarously indifferent to Mr Elwes’ poetry, music, rhetoric and song. His naturally stoical temperament and his Spartan upbringing made him almost insensible to the beating and starving with which Mr Elwes endeavoured to open his mind to beauty, and in the end Mr Elwes admitted that it was useless to continue. Tobias joined the yak as one of his disappointments: the last tutor was turned off, Tobias started the first holiday of his life, and the house lapsed into a grey, damp silence from which it was roused only by the terrifying visits of the widow Ellis.

The widow Ellis was the chief reason why Mr Elwes had lost interest in his experiment – the widow Ellis and Whig politics. He had discovered politics at the end of the first stage in Tobias’ progress, and he had thrown himself into them with great enthusiasm. He had joined the Whigs, to their dismay, and he had done so through a sneaking attorney named Ellis – a fellow whom he employed very often, for he was perpetually at law. And when this person was killed and partially eaten by a performing bear at Mangonell Bagpize, Mr Elwes fell madly in love with his widow. She was an odious woman with a dark red face, black eyebrows that joined across her nose, and seven daughters. She hated Tobias at first sight, and she was determined that her first step in reforming and renovating Plashey would be to put him out of doors.

‘Oh the happy wedding day,’ sang Mr Elwes, adding a final stalk of bugwort to the dank swathe under his arm. ‘Happy, happy wedding day.’ His voice died away behind the hedge.

Jack came out of his leaves and dropped into the lane. He gave the yak an affectionate thump as he passed, asked it how it did, and hurried through the meadow to the temple of Fame, a crumbling plaster-and-rubble edifice hastily run up by Mr Elwes in a spinney to shelter the busts of Galen, Aristotle and Mr Elwes, but now forgotten and taken over by Tobias for his bats.

Tobias was not there, but Jack knew that he would come, and he sat down cautiously on the steps of the temple to wait. He sat down cautiously and with a meek, dutiful expression, because of Tobias’ bees; they lived in a row of hives in front of the building, and in spite of many sad proofs to the contrary Jack still believed that if he did not provoke them they would not sting him.

Behind him and above his head Tobias’ bats scratched and rustled in the darkness of their dome, faintly, shrilly gibbering as they quarrelled among themselves. A steady, good-tempered hum came from the hives, and in the sunlight that now came slanting through the spinney the bees could be seen rising and shooting away with surprising speed: Jack gazed at them with detached respect, and wondered vaguely what was keeping his friend.

It was difficult to account for their friendship. Apart from their age they had nothing at all in common, or at least nothing that appeared at first sight. Nothing could have been more different than their appearance, education and family; nothing could have been more unlike than their pursuits; but they were happy when they were together and they missed one another very much when they were apart. Jack’s education had been completely normal – he had done tolerably well at school and had come away with a certain amount of Latin, a reasonable acquaintance with mathematics, and nothing more. The education of Tobias, on the other hand, might have been calculated to produce a monster, and the fact that it had not done so was rather a proof of the resilience of the human spirit than any evidence of judgment on the part of Mr Elwes.

Yet one can avoid being a monster without necessarily being ordinary: Tobias was far from ordinary. He had never been to school, and he had never known anyone of his own age except Jack Byron and Georgiana Chaworth; he had spent all his days in that strange, dark, unsocial house, with odd, unsatisfactory servants perpetually coming and going; he had been kept to his book with inhuman persistence; and he was a strange young creature, very strange indeed.

‘But he is so very strange, my dear,’ said Mrs Chaworth. ‘So very strange. He assured me that toads were capable of gratitude.’

‘Are they not, ma’am?’ asked Jack.

‘Perhaps they are, my dear,’ said Mrs Chaworth, closing her eyes, ‘but with these words he passed a very large toad to Mrs Jerningham – Mrs Charles Jerningham – and desired her to caress it. Mrs Jerningham was obliged to be led away and recovered with sal volatile in the small drawing-room. My dear, unequal friendships never answer, as your grandfather often used to say.’

Mrs Chaworth did not forbid the association, but she dropped a gentle drizzle of disapproval upon it, and she would have been happy to see it die away, particularly on Georgiana’s account. This young creature, the prettiest of her daughters, was passionately attached to her cousin Jack and even more so to Tobias: she played cricket with them, tirelessly fielding while Tobias bowled and Jack batted, and a primitive kind of baseball; she climbed trees, whistled and shouted in a manner that distressed her elegant mother, and cherished hedgepigs (presents from Tobias) in her bedroom.

When Mrs Chaworth objected to his strangeness she referred not only to qualities that were produced by his nurture but also to some that were born in him; for example, he had a strange power with animals, however wild, and sometimes (though not always) he could call them to him over great distances; he had always handled bees without any protection, and since his earliest days he had been reputed a horse-witch. Clearly a budding horse-witch, however fluent in Greek, was not an ideal playmate for Georgiana: the family intended to marry Georgiana to Lord Carlisle, and Mrs Chaworth did not wish to hear any adverse criticism from the young man’s mother about Georgiana’s bringing-up: she often said to her daughter, ‘Lard, Georgiana, what an ill-looking fellow poor Toby has become; and will grow even worse, alas.’

And however Georgiana might snort and cry ‘I do not mind it,’ not even she could claim that Tobias Barrow was in any way a beauty. He was meagre, narrow-chested and stooping; his dull black hair made his white face even paler, while at the same time it made a startling contrast with his almost colourless light green eyes. To an unaccustomed eye it was a face so strange as to be almost sinister – Mrs Ellis, upon contemplating it for the first time, had been struck dumb; which is saying a great deal. It was in no way a boy’s face, and no one, looking at it, would ever have expected to see it moved by a boyish spirit. And then he had so early grown accustomed to loneliness and learning that he had slipped into odd, graceless habits; he would make sudden untoward gestures, forgetting his company – he would distort his face in thought, grind his teeth, and sometimes utter a low hooting noise. He washed only when he felt need of it, shifted his linen rarely, and always wore black clothes.

Jack could see him now, a slight dark figure running towards him through the trees. Jack smiled to see him coming, put up his hand after the fashion of sailors, and hailed him very loud and clear, ‘Ahoy.’

The bats instantly fell into a petrified silence. ‘There you are, Toby,’ said Jack; and to this valuable observation he added, ‘Why are you running?’ For it was a rare thing to see Tobias running.

‘Jack,’ said Tobias, ‘I am very happy to see you. I am very glad you have come.’

‘Why, what’s the matter?’ asked Jack, staring. It was clear to him that his friend was strongly moved: he was flushed, and he was breathing hard.

‘I tell you what it is, Jack,’ said Tobias, gripping his arm and looking up into his face with great anxiety. ‘You must give me your advice. I am going to run away to sea.’