Читать книгу The Unknown Shore - Patrick O’Brian - Страница 6

WHEN THE LONDON ROAD leaves Mangonell Bagpize it plunges down a hill so steep that horses must be led. The bottom of the hill was a favourite place with highwaymen, because coaches coming or going were obliged to be almost at a standstill there – highwaymen with strong nerves, that is, for the more timid or fanciful were put off and discouraged by the sight of the gallows at the top of the hill, where their unsuccessful brother Medical Dick (a former apothecary’s boy) swung as a silent warning in chains, carefully tarred against the weather.

Tobias had eyed Medical Dick with a professional interest that could not possibly be shared by his companion, but he had not stopped talking; and still, as they walked down the hill with their horses stepping carefully behind them, they talked on with the same eagerness.

‘… but the final thing, the thing I could not stand, was her sending her servant to destroy my animals. That woman, that termagant, if termagant be not too warm an expression – do you consider termagant too warm an expression, Jack?’

‘No,’ said Jack. ‘I should have called her a termagant myself, if I had thought of it.’

‘– always disliked me, and I know she told Mr Elwes that my presence was an obstacle to their union. It gave me a great deal of uneasiness, I assure you; yet I felt that I was bound to stay, because of my indenture – when Mr Buchanan wrote, offering to take me to Jamaica as his assistant – to study the West Indian birds, you know – I felt obliged to refuse, on those grounds.’

‘And yet my cousin said he was trying to have it put aside. My cousin was there when Mr Elwes came in front of the magistrates to have your articles undone, but they would not. Could not, I think he said.’

‘I know. I heard him discussing it with the new lawyer, that very morning.’

‘Well, at least it means that he won’t be sending people in chase of you.’

‘No,’ said Toby: and after a pause he added, ‘It was the knowledge that he was willing to be rid of me that did away with my last scruples.’

‘He is an infernal scrub,’ said Jack; and when Tobias made no answer he went on, ‘And for that matter, I am not very well pleased with Cousin Edward, either. I thought he would have come out of it with more credit. “Hark ‘ee, Jack,” says he. “I can’t have anything to do with it: I know Elwes is an infernal scrub,” he says, looking rather like a pickpocket, as well he might, with me looking damnably scornful and Georgiana roaring and bawling, “but I can’t be seen in the affair. I’m a magistrate, an’t I? I can’t give any countenance to such goings-on, damn it. You ought never to have told me before the event, Jack. I mean, if it was all over now – if he had run off a week ago, and if he was in London now, why then, that would be a fait accompli, as they say. It would be quite different; and then a man might do something friendly. But I can’t have it said that I induced Elwes’ young fellow to run away. Here’s a present for thee, Jack,” says he, looking at me very hard and giving me fifteen guineas in my hand – he would only have given me five ordinarily, at the best of times. It was pretty handsome, and I knew well enough what he meant; but I think he might not have shuffled so.’

Jack,’ cried Tobias, suddenly stopping, ‘did you remember the lesser pettichaps?’

‘Yes,’ said Jack, ‘I did. I opened the door of her cage before I went up with Georgiana’s bat. She gave me a note for you. But don’t you think we look a pretty couple of fools, with our horses in our hands?’

They had, in fact, walked right down Gallows Hill and half a mile beyond; they were now in perfectly level open country, still leading their horses with anxious care. ‘Thankee,’ said Tobias, taking the note and mounting. Dear Toby, read the note, I shall take extreame great Care of the dear Batt. Yr affct. G. Chaworth. ‘That is an excellent girl,’ he said, folding the paper carefully into his pocket. ‘It does me good to think of her.’

Here the road ran wide over a common, and the horses began to dance a little with the grass under their feet. ‘Come on,’ cried Jack. ‘If we are to get there tomorrow, we must canter whenever we can.’

There is nothing like a long sweet gallop on a well-paced horse for changing a melancholy state of mind: Jack’s horse was a high-blooded dashing chestnut, the property of his elder brother, and Toby’s was a grey cob that belonged to Cousin Charles. The Chaworths and the Byrons formed a large, closely interrelated tribe, and there was always some of them coming or going between Medenham and Newstead and London, sometimes with a servant, sometimes without; the result of this restlessness was that the horses tended to accumulate at one end or the other, in droves – the grey, for example, had been left by Cousin Charles when he had gone back to London from Newstead in Uncle Norwood’s chariot – and long ago a tradition had arisen in the family, a tradition of employing any means whatsoever to maintain a reasonable balance of horses in each place. It is almost certain that if a neighbour had been going up to London to receive a sentence of death, he would have been asked to ride thither on one of the Medenham horses, and to be so obliging as to leave it at Marlborough Street before he was hanged.

Mr Chaworth would not – in all decency could not – acknowledge Tobias’ flight; but the opportunity was too good to be missed, and the grey made a silent appearance beside Jack’s horse in the morning, tacitly understood by one and all. The two of them, then, being mounted far above their stations, had the good sense to make the most of it while it lasted, and they flew along over the smooth green miles with their spirits rising like larks in the sky. When the going grew hard again, and they reined in, Jack observed that his friend was more than usually elated; this being so he permitted himself to say, ‘Toby,’ said he, ‘you will not be offended, will you?’

‘No,’ said Toby.

‘I mean, you are an amazing good horseman, of course.’

Just so,’ said Toby.

‘I don’t mean to imply that you ride badly. But people tend to stare so – very foolish in them – and it would oblige me uncommonly if you would sit like a Christian.’

Tobias had an entirely personal way of riding upon a horse: he would sit upon various pieces of his mount, facing whichever view pleased him most, and from time to time he would stretch himself at length, to the amazement of all beholders. At this moment he was kneeling upright on the cob’s broad bottom, staring fixedly backwards into a waving meadow.

‘I believe it was a spotted crake,’ he said. ‘What did you say, Jack?’

Jack patiently repeated his request, and Tobias received it so well, promising amendment and desiring to be reminded if he should forget, that Jack added, ‘And would you mind changing your slippers, before we come into Melton Mowbray?’

‘Slippers?’ cried Tobias, gazing first at one foot and then at the other.

‘You cannot conceive how barbarous they look,’ said Jack. ‘List slippers.’

‘I am heartily sorry for it, if they offend you,’ said Tobias, ‘but I have nothing else to put on.’

‘Why then,’ cried Jack, ‘it don’t signify.’ But from time to time he looked wistfully at his friend’s stirrups.

‘Do you see that farmhouse?’ cried Toby, after they had trotted another mile. ‘Over there beyond the turnips. I went there once: Mr Elwes took me to see a remarkable case of hydrophobia. But I have never been farther. You could make a pretty verse upon that, Jack, could you not?’

‘Hydrophobia?’

‘No. I mean the passing of childish limits – launching into the great world unknown. Is that not poetic?’

‘Oh yes, devilish poetic. Wait a minute …

What lies beyond, Muse tell us truly,

Beyond Tobias’ Ultima Thule?

(That’s rather neat)

The wealth of Spain? The gallows, or the grave?

The frequent guerdon of the sea-borne brave.’

‘What is a guerdon?’

‘It is a sort of thing – a reward. It means that you may be drowned; but I only put it in for the metre.’

Here a coach-and-four went by, jingling and rumbling and covering them with dust, and when they had spurred out of the cloud Jack said, ‘Toby, if we meet any of my naval friends, I beg you will not mention my verse-making.’

‘Very well,’ said Tobias, in a wondering voice.

‘They might not understand, you see: and I do not think it would answer at all, to have it generally known in the service.’

They rode into the wide main street of Melton Mowbray while Tobias was digesting this, and Jack led the way to a splendid inn.

‘Good morning, Admiral,’ said the ostler, beaming.

‘Good morning, Joe,’ said Jack.

‘Is that Mr Edward’s …’ The ostler was going to say ‘horse’ when his eye, which had been travelling down Tobias’ person, reached his slippers, and the word died in his throat.

‘Yes, it is,’ said Jack, and guiding Tobias by the elbow he walked into the inn. Men will go through fire and water for their friends; they will lend them money, if there is no help for it; but to lead an exceedingly shabby friend, who is known to have rather peculiar table manners, into a grand place of public entertainment, is little short of heroic, above all when the friend is shod with list slippers: not many would do it – you may search all Plutarch without finding a single case. List slippers are now so little worn (we have seen but one pair in our earthly pilgrimage) that it may be necessary to state that list is the edge of cloth in the piece, the selvedge, and it is woven in a particular manner to prevent its fraying; frugal minds, unable to throw the list away when the cloth was used, would form it into hard-wearing slippers, often very horrible, because of the strongly contrasting colours of the strips.

Tobias was totally unaware of what he owed his friend on this occasion, for he was as unconscious of his appearance as he could possibly be: a more unaffected creature never breathed.

‘Eat hearty,’ said Jack, pushing the enormous pie across the table. ‘You won’t get any more until we pull up this evening. And even then it won’t be much – just an alehouse.’

‘May I put a piece in my bosom?’ asked Tobias.

‘No,’ said Jack. ‘You may not.’

From Melton to Burton Lazars and on to Oakham and Uppingham and Rockingham, where they baited their horses, and Barton Seagrave and Burton Latimer they rode steadily, while the sun rose higher and higher on their left hand, crossed over the road before them and crept down the sky on their right. They talked all the way, and this most unaccustomed flood of words caused Tobias to grow hoarse and, by the border of Rutlandshire, inaudible; he was usually as silent as a carp, but before he lost his voice altogether he told Jack how very much he looked forward to seeing London, how infinitely agreeable a maritime life must be, with its unrivalled opportunities for seeing seabirds and foreign countries, with wholly different flora and fauna, to say nothing of the creatures of the sea itself, and how nearly it had broken his heart to refuse his former tutor’s offer. ‘Though indeed,’ he added, ‘the assistant he did take died within a fortnight of getting there, of the yellow fever.’

Jack was by nature far from taciturn, and he had never been deprived of practice: his voice held out perfectly well all the way, and he told Tobias a great many things about his life in the Navy, his views on the conduct of the present war with Spain, and his hopes of seeing active service within a very short time. He was telling Tobias of a somewhat mysterious plan for ensuring this when he pulled up very suddenly by a lop-sided grey haystack. ‘I nearly missed it,’ he said, pointing with his whip. In the silence they heard a partridge assembling her chicks, and from behind the sagging rick a little darting of rabbits ran back into the hedge: the evening was coming on. Tobias looked closely at the rick, but said nothing. ‘It is the lane I mean,’ said Jack, ‘not the haystack. If we go down there, we can take the cross road to Milton Earnest, and leave Higham Ferrers on our left. It saves two miles, and you come out on the main road again by the Fox. Cousin Charles found it, when he was looking for a way round the Irthlingborough toll-gate: and it cuts out the Westwood turnpike, too. He won’t pay turnpike tolls, you know, on principle. There’s something in the Bible, he says: but I think it is meanness.’

He pushed his horse down the muddy lane, and very soon they were in deep country. The trees met over their heads, the road varied from a broad green ride to a mere track between high banks, and sometimes, when it went over open fields, it vanished altogether; but most of the way it was narrow, dirty and comfortless – only the fanatical zeal of Cousin Charles (who was quite rich, and perfectly generous in all other respects; but like nearly all the Byrons he had his private mania – his mother, for example, collected little bits of string) would ever have found it out. They were obliged to ride one behind the other, which impeded conversation; moreover, Jack had reached a particularly private piece of his plan – one which had to do with confidential information, and even in the remote fields and ditches of Irthlingborough parish he could not very well bellow out the secrets of the Lords of the Admiralty.

‘I’ll tell you about it when we get to the Fox,’ he said over his shoulder, and they rode in silence through the sweet evening, sometimes along the narrow paths through the wheat, sometimes wide over the new stubble of the earliest oats, sometimes through coppice in the twilight of the leaves, and once for half a mile over a stretch of bracken where nightjars turned and wheeled half-seen. The sky changed to a deeper, unlit blue; the colours left the fields and the trees, and were replaced by a violet haze, much darker than the sky: there was no sound but the creak of harness, the horses’ breath and the soft churring of the nightjars. And now, plunging into a wood, they found themselves in the full darkness of the night, with a slippery, wet and stony path under them. ‘I think we are right,’ said Jack, ‘because I believe this was the place where I fell with Miss Bailey’s mare.’

This recollection did not cheer him very much, however, and he looked so anxiously forward for the main road into which this short cut should fall that when it appeared, ghostly in the night, he did not believe it, but took it for a stream. Yet no sooner were they on the highway, with its hard surface underfoot, than the lantern of the Fox appeared – a little, low and rather squalid ale-house, but more welcome at this time than the grandest stage-coach inn on the road.

‘Well,’ said Jack, pushing away his empty plate and gasping with repletion, ‘that went down very well: Toby, what do you say to a bowl of punch?’

Toby was about to say ‘What is punch?’ when he found that his voice was completely gone: he smiled secretly, and Jack called for the landlord.

‘There,’ said Jack, wielding the ladle through the fragrant cloud that rose from the punch-bowl, ‘that will do you all the good in the world. Now, as I was saying, the position of the fleet is this …’

Toby drank up his punch: he hoped that it would help him keep awake and to pay attention, and indeed it did seem to have some such effect, in that it made him gasp and sneeze: he refilled his glass.

‘… so there they still are at St Helen’s and I am still at the Nore, which is a very great shame. I protest, Toby, that it is quite disgusting …’

Toby was very sorry to hear that it was a disgusting shame; but he had ridden sixty-two miles that day, after a sleepless night of the greatest emotional agitation that he had ever known, and now, for the first time in his life, he had nearly a pint of strong punch glowing inside him. He was almost entirely taken up with watching the strange coming and going of Jack’s face the other side of the candle – sometimes it was large and distinct and sometimes it was small, blurred and remote – but by taking laborious care he could make out sentences of Jack’s discourse, now and then.

‘… and so, my dear Toby,’ said Jack’s voice through the thickening haze, ‘that is what I meant in the very first place, when I said “Come with me, and I will make your fortune.” If all goes well, and upon my word I don’t see how it can fail, we shall come back amazingly rich.’

Tobias allowed his eyes to close upon these encouraging words, and at once an exquisitely comfortable darkness engulfed him. He heard no more, except an unknown, distant voice saying, ‘I will take his feet. Why, bless my soul, Mr Byron, sir, your friend has got a pair of list slippers on.’

These slippers were the first things that met his eye in the morning. Somebody had put them on the window-seat, where they caught the first light of the sun in all their violent glory, and Jack was sitting by them, looking pink and cheerful.

‘Lard, Toby, how you do sleep,’ he said. ‘It’s nearly five o’clock.’

Slowly Tobias looked from the slippers to Jack, and from Jack to the slippers. He had been very deeply asleep, and it was some moments before he could remember where he was and how he came to be there. ‘I have run away: we are half-way to London,’ he observed to himself. ‘And I dreamt that Jack had put me into the way of making my fortune.’

‘I dreamt that you said that we should make our fortunes presently,’ he said to Jack, as they rode away from the ale-house.

Jack looked at him with a very knowing air, and said, ‘I don’t believe you remember much of what I told you last night.’

‘No, truly I do not,’ said Tobias. ‘It is much confused in my memory – not unlike a series of dreams.’

‘Well,’ said Jack, laughing with wonderful good humour for so early in the morning, ‘I shall tell you again. You know I am in the guard-ship at the Nore, although I was promised to be posted to the Burford: and the Burford was the flagship at Porto Bello?’

‘Yes, I remember you told me that before; and it was a great disappointment to you not to be at the battle.’

‘It was indeed: Admiral Vernon had promised it to my uncle, or at least practically promised it; and it was a horribly shabby thing to sail off in that manner, leaving his best friend’s nephew languishing between a guard-ship and a press-smack at the Nore. The Nore is a very disgusting station, Toby.’

‘I am much concerned to hear it, Jack.’

‘But, however, it is probably all for the best. It is perfectly obvious that the Admiralty owes me some reparation – no reasonable being could deny that for a moment – and this secret expedition gives them a perfect chance of making all square.’

‘What secret expedition?’

‘The one I was telling you about – but you did not take it in, I find. It is an expedition,’ he said, lowering his voice, ‘that is fitting out for the South Sea, to attack the Spaniards there, where they least expect it. Lard, Toby,’ he cried, ‘think of Chile and Peru, and all the treasure there. Think of Acapulco and Panama and the Philippines. Pieces of eight,’ he cried, in a transport of greed and enthusiasm, throwing his arms out to indicate the immensity of the wealth. He was a fairly good horseman, but his fervour for prize money was too much for him, and he fell slowly over the chesnut’s shoulder.

‘Never mind,’ he said, as Tobias dusted him. ‘It was all in a good cause. The whole point is, that I must be posted to one of these ships. And if I had gone off to the West Indies in the Burford I could not have been here to join this expedition, could I? Everybody who has any interest is trying to get into it, of course, but it is plain enough that I have much more right than most, having been so very ill-used.’

‘Did you say it was a secret expedition?’

Oh yes. You must not speak of it, you know.’

‘Then how is it that people are trying to get into it?’

‘Well, it is secret in a certain sense; I mean, it is officially secret. That is to say, everybody in the know knows about it, but nobody else.’

A single magpie crossed the road, and Jack paused to see if another would follow: but the bird was alone. ‘I wish that damned bird had chosen another moment to go over,’ he said. ‘But as I was saying, I have a perfect right to the appointment; and what is much more important, I have got just about twice as much interest as I need to get aboard. So, do you see, I shall be able to get in with half, and use the rest to draw you in after me. Lard, Toby, I don’t know how a fellow with your simple tastes will spend all the money.’

‘How very kind you are, Jack: I am very much obliged to your goodness. As for a great deal of money, I don’t know that I want it; but when you consider, Jack, that not one single sentient being has even remotely glimpsed the birds of the Pacific Ocean and its shores -’

‘But, my poor Toby, people have been sailing round the Horn and into the South Sea these hundred years and more.’

‘Only mariners, Jack: and, with respect, your mariner is but a shallow creature. I have read Narborough and Dampier and the few other voyages into those regions, and the unhappy men might as well have been blind. They saw nothing, nothing.’

‘They saw noddies and boobies. I particularly remember that Woods Rogers said, “Boobies and noddies.”’

‘They saw birds that they called noddies and boobies; but do we know that they were noddies and boobies? May they not merely have resembled noddies and boobies? It is no good coming to me and saying, “Ha, ha, I have seen noddies and boobies in the Great South Sea,” unless you can support your statement with the measurements and weights, and preferably the skins, of your noddies and boobies.’

This seemed a frivolous objection to Jack, and he only replied, ‘Still, you would find it prodigiously agreeable to have a fortune, you know. You could lay it out in sending fellows off to Kamschatka, or Crim Tartary, to gaze at the boobies there, and measure ‘em, too.’

They wrangled about the disposition of the money for some miles, and then Jack said, ‘Well, you shall do whatever you please with it, Toby, if only you will sit the right way round.’

‘I beg pardon,’ said Tobias, loosening his grip on the grey cob’s tail and swarming back into the saddle: the cob was not the steadiest mount in the world, and a tenth part of this behaviour in anyone else would have sent it into a foaming fit; but it trotted placidly along the road to Bedford, and Jack resumed his account of the secret expedition.

‘There are to be five ships. The Gloucester and the Severn are both fifties, and the Centurion – she’s the flagship – is a sixty; then there is the old Pearl, a forty-gun ship, a very pretty sailer and quick in her stays.’

‘Five ships, you said.’

‘Oh yes, there’s the Wager – she’s the fifth. Centurion, Gloucester, Severn, Pearl and Wager, that makes five. But the Wager don’t count. She’s only an old Indiaman, bought into the service as a storeship, because there is some ridiculous plan of trading with the Indians, and they need a ship for their bolts of cloth and beads and so on. In my opinion it is a vile job – a mere trick to get a vast deal of money into the pocket of a pack of merchants and politicians. Politics are monstrous dirty, you know, and everything is done by backstairs influence. Anyhow, it is quite absurd to call the Wager a man-of-war; and she only mounts twenty guns. Then there is a sloop, the Tryall, and that is all the King’s ships; though there will probably be a victualler or two to carry things some of the way – some little merchantman or other,’ he said with kindly patronage. ‘Now the Severn and the Gloucester have their full complement of officers, because they were already in commission, you see; but the Centurion has not, and that is what we must aim for. I know some of her people -excellent creatures – and my friend Keppel is very anxious that I should join him there. I told you about him, did I not? We were shipmates in the Royal Sovereign.’

‘The one who set fire to you, and thrust you into the North Sea?’

‘Yes. Augustus Keppel: he is only quite a young fellow, but he can be amazingly good company.’

The white gate of a turnpike appeared as they turned a corner and Jack observed, ‘This is the Clapham pike already.’ He looked at his watch and said, ‘We are doing very well.’

‘Jack,’ said Tobias, when the gate was far behind them, ‘when you paid the man at the turnpike before this, he gave you some money. He said, “Here’s your change, your honour.” This one not.’

‘Why, no,’ replied Jack. ‘I hadn’t any change at the first one, so I gave him half a crown; but then of course for this one I already had a pocketful of change.’

Tobias was pondering upon this, when very suddenly he whipped his leg over the saddle, passed the cob’s reins into Jack’s hand and slipped to the ground. He tripped from the speed, but recovered himself and vanished into the tall reeds that stood about a marsh on the low side of the road. The horses saw fit to indulge in a good deal of capering, and Jack dropped his hat and his whip before he brought them to a sense of their duty.

He was waiting with them by the side of the road when Tobias reappeared, and he exclaimed, with something less than his usual good humour, ‘Why, damn your blood, Toby, what do you mean by plunging off in that wild manner? How can you be so strange? You have been in the water,’ he added, seeing that Tobias’ lower half was soaked and his stockings and slippers were masked with greenish mud. ‘You look as pleased as if you had found a guinea.’

Tobias rarely showed any emotion, but now his face displayed a private gleam; and when he was mounted he showed Jack a brown, speckled feather, saying, ‘Do you know what that is?’

‘A phoenix?’

‘No,’ said Tobias, with inward triumph. ‘A bittern. I never saw a bittern before.’ He munched silently and nodded, remembering the bittern in vivid detail: but recollecting himself he cried, ‘I beg your pardon, Jack! I do indeed. You were telling me …’ He hesitated.

Jack was never one to take umbrage; he laughed, and said, ‘I was telling you about Keppel, before we passed the toll-house.’

‘Yes, yes, Keppel; your excellent good friend Mr Keppel,’ said Tobias, with the most concentrated attention, but secretly fondling his bittern’s feather.

‘Well, Keppel, you know, has a prodigious great deal of interest, and seeing that there are two vacancies in the Centurion – two midshipmen unprovided – he has already started stirring up his relatives on my behalf. That is one of the reasons why I am in such a hurry to be in London, because I have appointed to meet him tomorrow.’ They were coming into Bedford at this time, under a threatening sky, and when they had baited their horses and set off again, the first drops were falling.

‘There is another short cut of Charles’s between Cotton End and Deadman’s Green,’ said Jack doubtfully. ‘But seeing that we are in a hurry, perhaps we had better keep to the high road. It looks quite dirty,’ he said, looking up at the towering light-grey clouds. Behind the clouds the sky showed black, and as he spoke a flash of lightning ripped across: the thunder followed close behind, and so loud as to drown his words. He grinned as he calmed the nervous chestnut, and told Tobias, in a nautical bellow, that it looked as though it might come on something prodigious. He dearly loved a storm; rain alone satisfied him, provided there was enough of it, but if it were accompanied by a very great deal of wind, then it raised his spirits to a very high pitch.

‘Have you brought your greatcoat?’ he asked Tobias. Tobias shook his head. ‘What’s in that valise?’ asked Jack, shouting over the double peal.

‘Nothing,’ said Tobias, and as far as he knew this was true – he had put nothing in the valise: it had been there, strapped behind the saddle, as much part of the harness as the big horse-pistols in front, when he had mounted, and he had paid no attention to it. But in point of fact it was filled with necessaries. ‘The poor boy cannot go out into the world without so much as a clean shirt,’ had been Mrs Chaworth’s instant reply on hearing that Tobias was on the wing. She might disapprove of Tobias in some ways, but she had a real affection for him, and she anxiously rummaged the house for things of a suitable size – Jack’s were all far too big – and Georgiana, guided by who knows what unhappy chance, crowned the whole valise-full with another pair of strong list slippers, all bedewed with tears. But Tobias was unaware of this, and the excellent greatcoat behind him remained untouched: Jack therefore left his alone, and very soon both of them were so exceedingly wet that the water ran down inside their clothes, filled their shoes, and poured from them in a stream that contended with the water and mud flung up from the road. The extreme fury of the storm was soon over: the thunder and the lightning moved away to terrify Huntingdon, Rutland and Nottingham, but the rain had set in for the day and it fell without the least respite from that moment onwards. However, Tobias was wonderfully indifferent to foul weather, and Jack, though he preferred a dry back, could put up with a wet one as well as anybody, so they rode steadily through the downpour, conversing as soon as the thunder would let them.

‘You have often mentioned interest,’ said Tobias. ‘What is this interest, I beg?’

‘Well,’ said Jack, considering, ‘it is interest, you know. That is to say, influence, if you understand me – very much the same thing as influence. Everything goes by interest, more or less. It is really a matter of doing favours: I mean, suppose you are in Parliament, and there is a fellow, a minister or a private member, who wants a bill to be passed – if he comes to you and says, “You would oblige me extremely by voting for my bill,” and you do vote for his bill, why then the fellow is bound to do as much for you, if he is a man of honour. And if you do not happen to want to do anything in the parliamentary line, but prefer to get a place under Government for one of your friends, then the fellow with the bill must do what he can to gratify you. Besides, if he don’t, he will never have your vote again, ha, ha. That is, he must do what he can within reason: if you want a thundering good place, like being the Warden of the Stannaries with a thousand a year and all the work done by the deputy-warden, you must do a great deal more for it than just vote once or twice; but if it is just a matter of having someone let into a place where he will have to work very hard every day and get precious little pay for it, which is the case in the Navy, why then there is no great difficulty.’

‘I do not understand how a private member can help you to a place.’

‘Why, don’t you see? You have two votes for the time being, your own and this other man’s: so when you go and ask your favour of the minister – the First Lord of the Admiralty, if it is the Navy – he knows that you are twice as important as if you were alone, so he is twice as willing to oblige you. And of course if you have a good many friends and relatives in the House, you are more important still, because if you were all to vote against the administration together you might bring them down and turn the ministers out. And then it is even better to be in the House of Lords, if you can manage it, because, do you see, a minister might decide that it was worth while offending a member of the Commons’ house, for at the next election he may not come in again, but a peer, once he is in, is in for the rest of his life, and he could do you an ill turn for years and years. But it is all pretty complicated, and not at all as simple as that.’

‘How do the people without interest get along?’

‘They have to rely on merit.’

‘Does that answer?’

‘Well,’ said Jack slowly, ‘valour and virtue are very good things, I am sure: but I should be sorry to have to rely upon them alone, for my part.’

Tobias made no reply, and they rode for a long way in silence through the rain. Jack looked at him from time to time, and regretted that he had been quite so talkative about the squalid side of political life.

‘You’re pretty shocked, an’t you?’ he said at last.

‘No,’ said Tobias. ‘I had always read that the world was like that. What I was thinking about was your poem which begins Historic Muse, awake’

‘Were you indeed?’ said Jack, very pleased.

‘Yes. I was wondering whether “Spain’s proud nation, dreaded now no more” was quite right: “now” could mean now, and thus confuse the reader’s mind.’

‘Oh no, Toby. Think of what goes before –

‘Twas in Eliza’s memorable reign

When Britain’s fleet, acknowledged, ruled the main,

When Heav’n and it repelled from Albion’s shore

Spain’s – and so on.

It was then that it was not dreaded now, do you see? I have composed a great deal more of it, Toby.’

Oh.’

‘Should you like to hear it?’

‘If you please.’

‘I will begin at the beginning, so that you lose none of the effect.’ ‘I know the beginning, Jack,’ said Toby piteously, ‘by heart.’ ‘Never mind,’ said Jack hurriedly, and in a very particular chant he began,

‘Historic Muse awake! And from the shade

Where long forgotten sleep the noble dead (I am sorry that

don’t rhyme better)

Some worthy chief select, whose martial flame

May rouse Britannia’s sons to love of fame …’

The verse lasted until they were so close to London that the increased traffic made declamation impossible; but still the rain fell with the same steadiness, and Jack said, as they climbed Highgate Hill, ‘I am very sorry that it has not cleared up: I wanted to show you London from here – you can see it all spread out, and the river winding, and millions of lights in the evening. Besides, I thought that you would like to hear some lines I wrote about the prospect while we were actually looking at it. It is in praise of London, considered as a nest of singing-birds – poets, you know.’

‘A pretty wet nest, Jack?’

‘Of course, it was not like this in the poem,’ said Jack, reining in and peering through the darkening veils of drizzle, ‘but flowery, with meads and zephyrs. Nymphs, too. But I dare say you would like to hear it anyhow, and take the view on trust.’

As Jack reached the last few lines he quietly loosened the flaps on his saddle-bow and brought out a long pistol, which he cocked: at the sound a lurking pair of shadows in the trees behind them walked briskly off.

‘We had better look to our priming,’ he said, sheltering his pistol as well as he could from the rain. ‘There are a terrible lot of thieves about. We don’t run much risk, being mounted, particularly as the rain usually keeps the poor devils indoors; but Cousin Charles got into a by-lane when he was trying to avoid the Holloway turnpike – you can just see it from here, right ahead – and half a dozen of them got about him and pulled him off his horse. They dragged him off towards Black Mary’s Hole, over the way there’ – pointing through the soaking twilight – ‘and used him most barbarously.’

It was completely dark by the time they reached the town, and it must be confessed that Tobias was sadly disappointed with it; he had expected something splendid, definite and comprehensible, not perhaps so distinct as a walled city with light and splendour inside the gates and open country outside, but something not unlike it. As it was, they rode through a vague and indeterminate region of incompleted new building interspersed with scrubby fields and then (seeing that Jack always took the most direct line possible) through a series of narrow, dirty, ill-lit back streets.

‘Here we are,’ said Jack, as his horse stopped in the narrowest, dirtiest and smelliest of them all, with no light whatever. ‘Jedediah! Jedediah!’ he shouted, banging on the door.

After a long pause, while the rain dripped perpetually from the eaves and somewhere a broken gutter poured a solid cascade into the street, there came a slow shuffling noise from within and a gleam of light under the door.

‘Who’s there?’ asked a voice.

‘Hurry up, Jedediah, damn your eyes,’ called Jack, beating impatiently.

‘Oh, it’s Master Jack,’ said the voice to itself, and with a rumble of bolts and chains the door opened. He had been expected all day, but as usual Jedediah was amazed to see him, and holding the lantern high he exclaimed, ‘Why, bless my soul, it’s Master Jack. And Master Jack, you’re wet. You’re as wet as a drowned rat.’

‘It is because of the rain,’ said Jack. ‘Now take the horses in and rub them down, and tell Mrs Raffald I shall be back to sleep. We are going round to Mrs Fuller’s now. Come on, Toby, climb down.’

‘The other young gentleman is wet, too,’ said Jedediah, taking the horses.

At the beginning of the journey Jack had assumed that Tobias would stay at his family’s house, but he had run up against his friend’s delicacy, and knowing Tobias’ immovable obstinacy in such matters, he had proposed a very simple alternative. Mrs Fuller, who had been in the family for a great many years, now let lodgings for single gentlemen in Little Windmill Street, just round the corner from Marlborough Street: she received Jack with a hearty kiss (having been his nurse at one time) and told him that he was wet, disgracefully wet.

‘Wet through and through,’ she said, tweaking his coat open and plucking at his shirt with that strong authority that belongs to her age and sex. ‘Come now, take it off this minute, or you will catch your death. You too, young gentleman: come into the kitchen at once. Nan, come and pull the gentlemen’s boots off. Good Lord preserve us all alive! he has come out in his slippers.’ Mrs Fuller gazed upon Tobias with unfeigned horror. ‘Where is his cloak-bag?’ she asked Jack, as if Tobias could not be trusted to give a sensible answer.

‘He forgot it,’ said Jack.

‘He left it behind, and came in his slippers? Was there ever such wickedness?’ cried Mrs Fuller, who considered it a Christian’s duty to wear wool next the skin in all seasons, and to keep dry. ‘However will he change?’

Jedediah came into the kitchen with the valise and a white packet: he said, ‘I brought the young gentleman’s cloak-bag and this here: under the saddle-flap it was, and might have fallen out any minute of the day or night.’ He put the folded parchment down with some severity.

‘Oh yes,’ said Tobias; ‘I forgot it. It is my indenture, Jack, with my plan of the alimentary tract of moles on the back of it.’

It was clear to Mrs Fuller that they were both demented. The rain had soaked into their wits, and the only way to drive it out again was with warmth, dry clothes, soup, a boiled fowl, a leg of Welsh mutton and the better part of a quart of mixed cordials.

Thacker’s coffee-house was the meeting-place for naval officers, just as Will’s was for poets and literary men; and Jack, whenever he was free and in London, divided his time between the two. He had seen Admiral Vernon, the hero of Porto Bello, in the first and Mr Pope in the second, and it was difficult to say which had caused him the livelier delight.

He was at Thacker’s at this moment, with Tobias by his side, waiting for Keppel: at present his face had no lively delight upon it, however, but rather the traces of fatigue, alarm and apprehension. The fatigue was caused by having shown Tobias the sights of London, or at least all those that could be crammed into seven uninterrupted hours of very slow creeping about shop-lined streets, tomb-lined churches, the danker monuments of antiquity and the never-ending alleys of the booksellers’ booths around St Paul’s: Tobias was not used to anything much larger than Mangonell Bagpize, and his amazement was now, in a fine (if muddy) summer’s day, as great as ever he could have wished; but he was utterly careless of the London traffic, and the effort of keeping him alive among the carts, drays, coaches and waggons had perceptibly aged his friend. Jack had known London from his earliest days, and it was difficult for him to marvel, to stand stock-still in the mainstream of impatient crowds to marvel for ten minutes on end, at a perfectly ordinary pastry-cook’s window – ‘What unheard-of luxury, Jack; what more than Persian magnificence – Lucullus – Apicius – Heliogabalus.’ He did marvel, of course, in order not to damp Tobias’ pleasure; but it too was an ageing process. The itinerant bookseller who visited Mangonell market always gratified Tobias with a sight of his wares, although Tobias never bought any of them (this was not from sordid avarice, but because Tobias had never possessed one farthing piece in all his life) and Tobias unquestioningly assumed that London booksellers were equally good-natured: and then again, Tobias, until Jack begged him to stop, said ‘Good day’ to every soul they met, in a manner that would have passed without comment in the country, but which in London was another thing altogether.

But sight-seeing with Tobias, though it left its mark, was as nothing, nothing whatsoever, compared with taking Tobias to see his patron.

The Navy, apart from its administrative side, is a tolerably brisk service; those members of it who go to sea have it impressed upon their minds, both by circumstances and by the kindly insistence of their superior officers, that time and tide wait for no man; and Jack was a true sailor in his appreciation of this interesting truth. Within minutes of waking up he had sent a note to his influential cousin; the answer had come back appointing a given hour, and tearing Tobias from the belfry of St Paul’s in Covent Garden, which he had penetrated in order to view the mechanism of the clock (he asserted that it was the earliest illustration of the isochronic principle) and in which he had lingered to look into the ecclesiastical bats. Jack had brushed him, thrust him into a presentable pair of shoes and had conducted him to Mr Brocas Byron’s house. The head of the family was not quite as wise as the Byrons and Chaworths could have wished; indeed, he was what Jack, in an excess of poetical imagery, had termed ‘potty'; and his relatives had persuaded him to leave all matters of political judgment, voting and patronage, to Cousin Brocas.

Cousin Brocas was no phoenix himself, but at that time the family was not particularly well-to-do in the matter of brains, and at least Cousin Brocas was always on the spot: he was the member for Piddletrenthide (a convenient little borough with only three voters, all of them kin to Mrs Brocas) and he never left London for a moment during the sessions of Parliament. He was rather pompous, and he stood more upon his rank than his noble cousins, but he and Jack had always got along very well together, and, having performed the introductions, Jack left Tobias with Cousin Brocas in entire confidence that they would spend half an hour in agreeable conversation while he stepped round to see whether Keppel had arrived yet, and to leave a message if he had not.

Judge, then, of his perturbation when upon his return the footman told him that ‘they was a-carrying on something cruel in the libery,’ and the sound of further disagreement fell upon his ears, accompanied by the rumbling of heavy furniture. He darted upstairs: he was in time to prevent Tobias and his patron – or perhaps one should say his intended patron, or his ex-patron – from coming to actual blows, but only just; and Tobias was obliged to be dragged away, foaming and vociferating to the last.

This accounted well enough for Jack’s depressed appearance; but his mind was filled with apprehension, too. He had a haunting certainty that Keppel would have met with some comparable disaster in his designs upon the vacancies in the Centurion; and while upon the one hand he assured himself that it was better to remain in a state of hopeful ignorance, upon the other he watched the clock and the door with increasing impatience.

The great hand of Thacker’s clock – a wonderfully accurate clock – crept to the appointed minute, and Keppel walked in, accompanied by his particular friend Mr Midshipman Ransome. Keppel was small, neat and compact; he had been to a wedding and he was dressed with surprising magnificence in a gold-laced hat, an embroidered waistcoat with jewelled buttons and a crimson coat encrusted with gold plait wherever it could be conveniently sewn, and cascades of Mechlin lace at his throat and wrists: Ransome was a big, leonine fellow with a bright blue eye, not unlike Jack, but heavier and older; his kind-looking face was much marked by disagreements with the King’s enemies and his own, as well as the small-pox; and he wore a plain blue coat.

They stood for a moment in the doorway, looking over the big room with its many boxes: they saw Mr Saunders, the first lieutenant of their own ship, the Centurion, pulled off their hats and bowed very humbly; they saw a lieutenant of the Gloucester, a Marine captain belonging to the Severn and a group of black coats which included Mr Eliot, the surgeon of the Wager and the chaplain of the Pearl; to all of these they bowed with suitable degrees of humility, and then advanced to Jack and Tobias.

It took some little time to make Tobias understand that he was being introduced: and as he had the unfortunate habit of closing one eye and screwing his pursed mouth violently to one side whenever he was roused from a train of reflection, he did not make quite as favourable an impression as he might have done otherwise. Ransome moved perceptibly backwards, and Keppel said, ‘Your servant, sir,’ in a reserved and distant tone.

Keppel, in any case, was far from easy. ‘I am very sorry to bring you the news,’ he said. ‘Upon my word, I regret it extremely. But the fact is – the fact is, my dear Byron, the vacancies have gone to a couple of – Irishmen. ‘

‘Wery nasty undeserving swabs, I dare say,’ said Ransome, with the intention of bringing comfort, ‘if not Papists, too.’ He spoke in a hoarse whisper, having no other voice left, other than a penetrating bellow, for use only at sea.

‘Oh,’ said Jack, horribly disappointed, but smiling with what appearance of nonchalance he could summon. ‘Well, it was prodigious kind to try; and I am much obliged to you.’

‘But that ain’t all,’ said Keppel, with still greater embarrassment, after a long and awkward pause. ‘My father, d’ye see, being only a soldier, and not thoroughly understanding these things, although I have told him these many times the difference between one class of ship and another – and really you would think it plain enough to the meanest understanding; I mean, even a landsman can see that a pink is not a first-rate.’

Far from it,’ said Ransome.

‘Nor even a second,’ said Keppel.

Jack turned pale, and gazed from one to the other.

‘Not that some pinks ain’t pretty little vessels,’ said Ransome reflectively, after a prolonged silence.

‘But the fact is,’ said Keppel, who appeared to derive some comfort from this expression, ‘the fact is, my dear Byron, that my father, having once got into the matter, thought he could not come off handsomely without doing something: so when he found that he could not do what I asked, instead of waiting for my advice, he went blundering about like a horse in a hen-coop and had you – I beg you’ll not take it amiss – nominated to the Wager.’

‘Oh,’ said Jack again; and then with a slowly spreading grin he said, ‘While you were talking I had imagined something much worse. After all, Keppel, it does get me to St Helen’s; and I am sure we can manage some kind of a transfer. I must wait upon Lord Albemarle and thank him.’

‘You can’t do that,’ said Keppel, ‘for he went off in a passion - ’

‘And a coach and six,’ said Ransome.

‘What?’

‘He went off in a passion and a coach and six. Hor, hor.’

‘– to Aunt Grooby, and he won’t be back until the end of the month: and’ – Keppel lowered his voice – ‘we sail on Saturday sennight.’

‘Saturday week?’ cried Jack, whistling.

‘Hush,’ said Keppel, looking round.

‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ said Jack, ‘but it leaves so precious little time.’

They fell into a low-voiced, highly confidential discussion of the means at their disposal for coping with the situation. This lasted for some considerable time, and they were roused from it only by the repeated cries and nudges of Ransome and Tobias: these gentlemen had, after an unpromising start, taken to one another wonderfully, and Ransome, having learnt that Tobias’ sight-seeing had not yet included the lions at the Tower, now proposed taking him to see them. Nothing could have been calculated to cause Tobias more pleasure, and his eyes shone with anticipation; but for the moment he was pinned and immobilised, for they were on the inside of the box, and Jack and Keppel, lost in the depths of their planning, blocked the way to these simple joys.

‘What is it?’ said Jack impatiently.

‘The lions at the Tower,’ said Tobias, ‘ha, ha, the lions, eh, Jack?’

‘Which your friend ain’t seen ‘em,’ said Ransome. ‘Won’t you come?’

‘Bah,’ said Jack and Keppel, who scorned the lions in the Tower.

‘That fellow, Keppel,’ said Jack, looking after their departing backs, ‘that friend of mine, Tobias Barrow, causes me more anxiety than – worries me more than I can give you any conception of.’ He outlined the situation, and went on, ‘… so I left him with Cousin Brocas, and somehow they came to be talking about the government, and parliament, and the House of Lords and all that. Heaven knows why. And I think Cousin B. must have dropped some graceful hints of what an important, high-born, clever cove he was, and what an unimportant fellow Toby was: something of the “beggars can’t be choosers” nature – you know Cousin B’s little ways. Not that he means any harm; but it vexes people, sometimes. Anyhow, Tobias turned upon him. “Never been so roughly handled in all my life,” says Cousin B. “This dreadful creature of yours, Jack,” says he, “said things to me in Latin and Greek, and attacked the constitution in the most hellish way: a most hellish Whig – nay, a republican, God help us. A democratical visionary.” It seems that they fell out over the hereditary principle. “Would you employ an hereditary surgeon?” says Tobias, “A fellow who is to cut off your leg, not because he is an eminent anatomist, not because he is profoundly learned and highly skilled, but because he is merely the eldest son of a surgeon, or the eldest son of a man whose great-great-grandfather was a surgeon? And do you think the laws of the land less important than your infernal leg,” says he, “that they are to be made and unmade by a parcel of men whose only qualification is that their fathers were lords?” ’

‘What did he say to that?’ asked Keppel, with a kind of awful glee.

‘Why, truly,’ said Jack, ‘I think they gave up argument at that point, and took to calling names. They were hard at it when I came in, and Tobias had a long round ruler in his hand, and Cousin B. was backed up into a corner behind the celestial globe. By the time I had got Tobias away and down the stairs, Cousin B. had recovered his wits to some degree, for he Rings up the library window and bawls out “Miserane …” but he can’t remember the rest, and claps the window to. Tobias as near as dammit breaks the tow in order to dart back and make a reply, but I get him round the corner into Sackville Street: and there, strike me down, is Cousin Brocas again, at the billiard–room window. “Mis …Mis …” he holloes, but it escapes him again, which must have been very vexing, you know, Keppel, for I make no doubt that it was a stunning quotation – and he has to content himself with shaking his fist. Which he does, very hearty, purple in the face. Well, when they had gnashed their teeth at one another for a while – through the glass, you understand – I managed to get him under way again, and brought him fairly into Piccadilly, where he calmed down, sitting on a white doorstep, while I told the people that it was quite all right – only a passing fit. But I do assure you that some of the things he said made my blood run cold. “The House of Lords is an infamous place,” he cries, “and exists to reward toad-eaters and to depress ingenuous merit. I will rise,” he says, very shrill and high, “upon my own worth or not at all.” Now, that is all very well, and Roman and virtuous, but I appeal to you, Keppel, is it sensible language to address to a patron?’

‘No,’ said Keppel, with total conviction, ‘it is not.’

‘And to think,’ said Jack, ‘that I had proposed taking him to the House to present him to your father.’

‘I wish you had,’ said Keppel, writhing in his seat. ‘Oh strike me down, I wish you had. But tell me,’ he added, ‘did you not expect him to blow up all republican?’

‘No,’ cried Jack. ‘I was amazed. Lard, Keppel, I have known him all my life, and have always considered him the meekest creature breathing. I have known him take the most savage treatment from his guardian without ever complaining. Besides, when we were riding to Town I explained the nature of the world to him, and he never jibbed then – said he had always understood that it was tolerably corrupt. Though it is true,’ he said, after a pause for reflection, ‘that he never had much in the way of what you might call natural awe – was always amazingly self-possessed.’

At this moment Tobias’ self-possession was as shrunk and puckered as his shabby old rained-upon black coat, for the boat in which he and Ransome had embarked for the Tower was in the very act of shooting London Bridge. The tide was on the ebb – it was at half-ebb, to be precise – and when Tobias moved his fascinated gaze from the houses which packed the bridge and leant out over the edge in a vertiginous, not to say horrifying manner, he found that the boat was engaged in a current that raced curling towards a narrow arch, and there, to his horror, he saw the silent black water slide with appalling nightmare rapidity downhill into the darkness, while the rower and Ransome sat poised and motionless. He had time to utter no more than the cry “Ark", or “Gark", expressive of unprepared alarm, before they shot out of the fading light of day. A few damp, reverberating seconds passed, and they were restored to it. The rower pulled hard; in a moment they were out of the thundering fall below the bridge; and all around them were vessels of one kind or another, rowing, sculling, paddling and sailing down and across the Thames, or waiting very placidly for the tide in order to go up. All these people seemed perfectly at their ease – in the innumerable masts that lined the river or lay out in the Pool no single man stood on high to warn the populace of the danger, and even as Tobias gazed back in horror he saw another boat shoot the central arch, and another, full of soldiers who shouted and waved their hats, while a woman, leaning out of her kitchen window on the bridge, strewed apple peelings impartially upon the soldiers and the raging flood: apparently this passage was quite usual. But Tobias was unable to repress his emotion entirely, and he said, ‘That is a surprising current, sir. That is a very surprising piece of water, indeed.’

‘I thought you was surprised,’ said Ransome, with a grin; and the waterman closed one eye.

‘I was never so frightened before,’ said Tobias, ‘and I find that my heart is still beating violently.’

‘Why, it’s a question of use,’ said Ransome, wishing that his companion would be a little less candid in public. ‘I dare say you never was in a rip-tide or an overfall?’

‘I have never been in a boat in my life.’

‘Nor ever seen the sea?’

‘Nor yet the Thames, until today.’

‘The gentleman has never set foot in a boat before,’ said Ransome to the waterman, ‘nor ever shot the bridge: so he was surprised.’

‘Never set foot in a boat before?’ exclaimed the waterman, resting on his oars.

‘Not once: not so much as a farden skiff,’ said Ransome, who was a waterman’s son himself, from Frying-pan Stairs in Wapping, and who had been nourished and bred on the water, fresh or salt, since first he drew breath. They stared at Tobias, and eventually the waterman said, ‘Then how do they get about, where he comes from?’

‘They walk,’ said Tobias. ‘It is all dry land.’

‘Well, I don’t know, I’m sure,’ said the waterman, dipping his oars and edging his boat across to the Tower stairs. He would take no further notice of Tobias: considered him a dangerous precedent, and was seen, as they went away, to dust Tobias’ seat over the running water, with particular vehemence.

It was a still evening as they walked into the Tower, and although the day had been tolerably warm, the mist was already forming over the water; two or three hundred thousand coal-fires were alight or lighting, and the smoke, mingling with the mist, promised, as Ransome said, ‘to grow as slab as burgoo’ before long.

They walked briskly in past the spur-guard, past a faded representation of a lion and up to a door with another lion painted above it: a tiny black-haired man with a white face, the under-keeper, was renewing the ghastliness of this lion’s maw with vermilion paint. ‘There is horror, look you,’ he said, putting his head on one side and surveying his work through narrowed eyes. ‘There is gore and alarm, isn’t it?’ He was unwilling to leave his brush; but the prospect of immediate gain will always seduce an artist, and pocketing Ransome’s shilling the under-keeper opened the door.

‘I am infinitely obliged to you, sir,’ said Tobias, when they were outside again and walking down to the river.

‘Haw,’ said Ransome, with a lurch of his head to acknowledge this civility. ‘That’s all right, mate: but I wish you had not a-done it. It makes me feel right poorly, only to think on it,’ he said, leaning against the rail of the Tower stairs and reflecting upon the sight of Tobias in the lions’ den, peering down the throat of an enormous beast that was stated to be ‘a very saucy lion, the same that is eating the young gentlewoman’s arm last Bartholomew Fair.’

‘Up or down, gents?’ cried the waterman. ‘Oars, sir? Pair of oars?’

‘Up or down, mate?’ asked Ransome, recovering from his reverie and thumping Tobias on the back.

‘Do you see that bird?’ asked Tobias, pointing to the Customs House, where a number of kites were coming in to roost upon the cornucopias and reclining goddesses (or perhaps nymphs) that decorated the pediment.

‘Ar,’ said Ransome, looking through the misty dusk in the general direction of a flight of pigeons.

‘I believe – I do not assert it, but I believe that it is a black kite,’ said Tobias.

‘All right, mate,’ said Ransome, with cheerful indifference, ‘I dare say it is. Up or down?’

‘The tail was so much less forked. Up or down? I think, if you will excuse me, that I will stay a little longer.’

‘If you want to see ‘em go to roost,’ said Ransome, ‘you should go round behind: there’s millions of ‘em there. But I must drop down now, or I shall lose my tide.’

‘Good-bye, then,’ said Tobias, ‘and thank you very much indeed for showing me the lions.’

‘You’ll take boat directly?’ called Ransome, turning as he stood in the skiff. ‘You’ll know your way all right?’ Tobias waved.

The boat pushed out into the stream, where it was lost in the crowd and the evening, and Tobias leant musing against the rail. Dozens of people came down the steps to take to the water or mounted them as they were landed, and perpetually the boatmen bawled ‘Up or down?’

A thin, sharp child brushed against him and stole the handkerchief from his coat pocket. ‘Up or down?’ cried a waterman in his ear. ‘Come, make up your mind.’

‘Why, truly,’ said Tobias, ‘I believe that I shall walk.’

‘And the devil go with you,’ cried the waterman passionately.

‘What did he mean by “round behind"?’ asked Tobias in a gentle mutter as he walked away. He looked at St Dunstan’s in the East, the Coal-meters’ Office and the Bakers’ Hall; there were pigeons and starlings, but nothing more, for kites were already growing uncommon in London, and Ransome had quite misunderstood Tobias’ remark. They were coming in to roost in their thousands, and while the day lasted Tobias searched among them for black kites; but very soon there was not a bird abroad, black or white, and Tobias stopped under a newly-lit street-lantern to consider his bearings. He had a good natural sense of direction, and with an easy mind he set out and walked through the crowded Mark Lane, crossed quite mistakenly into Crutched Friars by way of Hart Street, and tried to correct his error by going north-westward along Shoemaker Row and Bevis Marks to Camomile Street and Bishopsgate. A good natural sense of direction is a charming possession, and it is very useful in the country; but in a London fog, and even more particularly in the crowded, narrow, winding streets and alleys of the City, it is worse than useless; for the countryman, confident of his ability, will go for miles and miles in the wrong direction before he can bring himself to ask a native for guidance. This state of affairs is not without its advantages, however; the countryman, in his winding course, is made intimately aware of the monstrous extent of London; and by the time Tobias had passed the parish churches of Allhallows Barking, Allhallows the Great, Allhallows the Less, Allhallows in Bread Street, Allhallows in Honey Lane, Allhallows in Lombard Street, Allhallows Staining and Allhallows on London Wall, he found his ideas of London much enlarged. He went on patiently by St Andrew Hubbard, St Andrew Undershaft and St Andrew by the Wardrobe, St Bennet Fink, St Bennet Gracechurch and St Bennet Sherehog, St Dionis Backchurch, St Laurence Jewry, St Laurence Pountney and St Clement near Eastcheap, St Margaret Moses, St Margaret Pattens and St Martin Outwich, St Mary Woolchurch, St Mary Somerset, St Mary Mountshaw, St Mary Woolnoth, St Michael-le-Quern, St Michael Royal, St Nicholas Acons and St Helen’s, which brought him back to Bishopsgate again, with at least sixty parish churches as yet unseen, to say nothing of chapels.

Here, by an unhappy fatality, Tobias turned to his right, hoping to find the river, but he found Bedlam instead, and the broad dark open space of Moorfields. He looked with respectful wonder at the vast lunatic asylum, but the new shoes that Jack and he had bought earlier in the day (it seemed more like several months ago) were now causing him a very highly-wrought agony, and he wandered into Moorfields, now deserted by all prudent honest men, to sit on the grass and take them off. After this he went on much more briskly, and determined to ask his way of the next citizen he should meet: it was some time, however, before he met anyone who would stop, and by then he had walked clean out of Moorfields northwards.

‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ he said to one of a group who were crossing the vague field with a lantern, ‘but can you tell me …’ With a thrill of horror he found that he did not know the name of the street where he lodged, nor Jack’s street either.

‘Tell you what?’ said the lantern, suspiciously.

‘Knock him down,’ said the lantern’s friend, adding, ‘We’ve got pistols, you rogue.’

‘Tell me where I am?’ asked Tobias, with unusual presence of mind.

‘Where you are?’

‘If you please.’

‘Don’t you know where you are?’

‘No, I do not.’

‘He doesn’t know where he is,’ said the lantern.

‘He will cut your throat in a minute,’ said the lantern’s friend. ‘Why don’t you knock him down?’

‘So you want to know where you are?’

‘Yes, sir, I should like to know very much.’

‘Why, then, you’re in Farthing Piehouse Field,’ said the lantern, and by way of proof waved towards a dirty glimmer a hundred yards away, saying, ‘And there’s the Farthing Piehouse itself, in all its charming lustre.’

‘Sir, I am obliged to you,’ said Tobias.

‘At your service, sir,’ said the lantern, with a bow.

‘You could still knock him down,’ said the friend, wistfully. ‘It’s not too late.’

The door of the Farthing Piehouse opened easily, letting out the odour of farthing pies: it was a crowded room, and when Tobias walked in holding his shoes, they all looked up; but the farthing pie-eaters were thieves to a man, and as it was obvious to them that Tobias had just stolen these shoes – that he too was a thief – they took no more notice of him.

‘When I have eaten a pie, I shall ask the way back to the river,’ thought Tobias, ‘and from there I shall be able to find the house, no doubt. It is most likely, too, that I shall remember the name of the street quite suddenly, if I do not force my mind to it. The mind is saturated with new ideas, but it is starved for material sustenance, and must be fed. House,’ he cried, ‘House, a pie here, if you please.’

‘A pie for the gentleman,’ called the man of the house into the kitchen, adding, in a voice meant only for his spouse, ‘A rum cully what I never set my glimmers on before.’

Tobias, by way of keeping his mind from searching too hard (it was a mind that would remember almost anything if it were not worried and if it were given time, but it was apt to grow stupid if it were overpressed), turned his attention and his anatomical knowledge to his pie. But this was a most discouraging course of study, and he abandoned it in favour of recalling the events of the day: he dwelt with pleasure upon Ransome, not only as a most amiable companion, but also as a living proof that unaided merit could rise, for Ransome had entered the Navy as an ordinary pressed seaman. ‘I wish I had been able to find a moment to ask him about money, however,’ said Tobias, yawning: he had intended to do so, but what with their voyage on the river, the lions and the other beasts in the Tower, there had not been time. Jack had shared his purse with Tobias, and these were the first coins that Tobias had ever owned; but Tobias’ education had been such that although he could have dealt in the market places of Athens or Rome with ease, he did not know a farthing when he saw one, and he was sadly perplexed by the whole system of modern coinage. The English currency, even now, is the most complicated in the world, with its twelve pence to the shilling and its twenty shillings to the pound; but it is child’s play to the time when there were broad pieces, reckoned at twenty-three and twenty-five shillings, half and quarter pieces, ninepenny and fourpence-halfpenny pieces, as well as tin, brass and copper small change, and when the shilling passed for thirteen pence halfpenny and the guinea for anything between a pound and twenty-five shillings.

To distract his mind, which would revert with a touch of panic to the question of his lost address, Tobias turned his fortune on to the table, with the intention of making what sense he could of the inscriptions. At the sound of money all the farthing pie-eaters stopped talking, eating or drinking; and when Tobias, paying his host with a four-shilling piece, asked for a direction to the river, he spoke in the midst of a profound and attentive silence. The man slowly paid out a mountain of small coins, talking as he dribbled them out, and from his questions the hearers learnt that Tobias was lost, unknown and unarmed, and that this was his first day in London.

The pie-man scratched his head: he had a certain pity for his guest – even a very ill-natured brute will stop a blind man from walking into an open pit – but he also had a duty towards his regular customers. In the end he satisfied his conscience by giving Tobias an exact route for the Thames, by telling him that he ought to take care, great care, and by winking with all the significance in his power.

The door closed behind Tobias: the pie-man said to his wife, ‘He never did ought to of been let out alone,’ and shook his head.

There was a pause of some few listening minutes, then the door opened, and all the regular customers hurried in again.

‘They never left him so much as his shirt,’ said the pieman to his wife, coming back into the kitchen.

‘Well, my dear,’ said she, placidly wiping her hands upon her apron and looking through the door to where the regular customers were making their division, ‘I hope they have not cut his throat, that’s all. Or if they have, that they done it at a decent distance from the house, poor wandering soul.’