Treason’s Harbour. Patrick O’Brian
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no answer to his knock. He waited a decent interval, then pushed the door; and as it opened he caught a great heady waft from her lemon-tree. It was an enormous tree, certainly as old as Valletta, if not older, and it had some flowers all the year round. Jack sat on the low surrounding wall, rather like a well-head, and gasped for a while; the bed had had its enormous quarterly watering that very day, and the damp earth gave out a grateful freshness.
He had quite recovered his good humour during his walk – it rarely deserted him for long – and now, opening his coat and taking off his hat, he contemplated the lemons in the gathering twilight with the utmost satisfaction, the cool air wafting about him. He had stopped puffing and he was about to take his fiddle out of its case when he took notice of a sound that had been vaguely present for some time but that now seemed to increase – a desperate unearthly wailing, fairly regular.
‘It is scarcely human,’ he said, cocking his ear and trying to think of possible origins – a windmill turning with no tallow on its shaft, a lathe of some kind, a man run melancholy-mad and shut up behind the wall on the left. ‘Yet sound is the strangest thing for reverberation,’ he reflected, standing up. Beyond the lemon-tree there stood the little house, and from its right-hand corner ran an elegant flight of arches, screening another courtyard at an angle to the first: he walked through, and at once the sound grew very much louder – it was coming from a broad, deep cistern sunk in the corner to receive rain-water from the roofs.
‘God help us,’ said Jack, running towards it with a vague but very horrible notion of the maniac’s having flung himself in out of despair. And when he leant over the edge of the dark water some four or five feet below, the notion seemed to be confirmed – a dim hairy form was swimming there, straining up its huge lamentable head and uttering a hoarse wow wow wow of extraordinary volume. Another glance, however, showed him that it was Ponto.
The cistern had been more than half emptied to water the lemon-tree (buckets stood by it still): the wretched dog, impelled by some unknown inquisitiveness and betrayed by some unknown blunder, had fallen in. There was still enough water for him to be out of his depth but enough had been taken to make it impossible for him to reach the rim and heave himself out. He had been in the water a great while, and all round the walls there were the bloody marks of his paws where he had tried to scrabble up. He looked quite mad with terror and despair and at first he took no notice of Jack at all, howling on and on without a pause.
‘If he is out of his wits he will have my hand off, maybe,’ said Jack, having spoken to the dog with no effect. ‘I must get hold of his collar: a damned long lean.’ He took off his coat and sword and reached down, far down, but not far enough although he felt his breeches complain. He straightened, took off his waistcoat, loosened his neckcloth and the band of his breeches and leant over again, down into the dimness and the howling that filled the air. This time his hand just touched the water: he saw the dog surge across, called out, ‘Hey there, Ponto, give us your scruff,’ and poised his hand to seize the collar. To his vexation the animal merely swam heavily to the other side, where it tried to climb the hopeless wall with its flayed, clawless paws, howling steadily.
‘Oh you God-damned fool,’ he cried. ‘You silly calf-headed bitch. Give us your scruff: bear a hand now, you infernal bugger.’
The familiar naval sounds, uttered very loud and echoing in the cistern, pierced through the dog’s distress, bringing sense and comfort. He swam over: Jack’s hand brushed the hairy head, whipped down to the collar, the damned awkward spiked collar, and took what grip it could. ‘Hold fast,’ he said, slipping his fingers farther under. ‘Stand by.’ He drew breath, and with his left hand gripping the cistern-rim and his right hooked under the collar, the two as far apart as they could be, he heaved. He had the dog half way out of the water – a very great weight with such a poor grip, but just possible – when the edge of the cistern gave way and he fell bodily in. Two thoughts flashed into his plunging mind: ‘There go my breeches’ and ‘I must keep clear of his jaws’, and then he was standing on the bottom of the cistern with the water up to his chest and the dog round his neck, its forelegs gripping him in an almost human embrace and its strangled breath in his ear. Strangled, but not demented: Ponto had clearly recovered what wits he possessed. Jack let go the collar, turned the dog about, grasped his middle, and crying ‘Away aloft’ thrust him up towards the rim. Ponto got his paws on to it, then his chin; Jack gave his rump one last powerful heave and he was gone: the mouth of the cistern overhead was empty, but for the pale sky and three stars.
Chapter Two
Malta was a gossiping place, and the news of Captain Aubrey’s liaison with Mrs Fielding soon spread through Valletta and even beyond, to the outlying villas where the more settled service people lived. Many officers envied Jack his good fortune, but not unkindly, and he sometimes caught knowing, conniving smiles and veiled congratulatory expressions that he could not make out, he being, in the natural course of events, one of the last to know what was said on these occasions. It would in any case have astonished him, since he had always regarded fellow-sailors’ wives as sacred: unless, that is to say, they threw out clear signals to the contrary effect.
He therefore experienced only the inconveniences of the situation – a certain disapproval on the part of a few officers, some wry looks and pursed lips on the part of some naval wives who knew Mrs Aubrey, and the ludicrous persecution that had given rise to the whole tale.
He and Dr Maturin, followed by Killick, were walking along the Strada Reale in the brilliant sunshine when his face clouded and he cried, ‘Stephen, pray step in here for a moment,’ urging his friend into the nearest shop, one kept by Moses Maimonides, a dealer in Murano glass. But it was too late. Jack had barely time to reach the farthest corner before Ponto was upon him, roaring with delight. Ponto was a clumsy great brute at the best of times and now that he wore cloth boots to protect his injured paws he was clumsier still; he scattered two ranges of bottles as he came bounding in, and as he stood there with his fore-paws on Jack’s shoulder, eagerly licking his face, his tail, waving from side to side, scattered chandeliers, sweetmeat jars, crystal bells.
It was a horrid scene, a scene repeated as often as three times a day on occasion, the only variety being the kind of shop, tavern, club or mess in which Jack took refuge, and it lasted long enough to do a great deal of damage. In decency Jack could not positively maim the dog, and nothing short of serious injury would answer, for Ponto was thick-witted as well as clumsy. Eventually Killick and Maimonides hauled him backwards into the street, and once there he proudly led Jack up to his mistress, giving an ungainly bound or two, and stepping high, reuniting them with an evident and very public approval that was observed and commented upon once again by a number of sea-officers, land-officers, civilians, and their wives.
‘I do hope he has not been a nuisance,’ said Mrs Fielding. ‘He saw you a hundred yards away, and nothing would stop him, but he must wish you good-day again. He is so grateful. And so am I,’ she added, with such an affectionate look that Jack wondered whether it were not perhaps one of these signals. He was the more inclined to think so since he had breakfasted on a pound or two of fresh sardines, which act as an aphrodisiac upon those of a sanguine complexion.
‘Not at all, ma’am,’ said he. ‘I am very happy to see you both once more.’ The voices of Killick and the glass-merchant behind him grew shriller and louder – on these occasions Killick paid for the breakage; but he paid not a Maltese grain, not a tenth of a penny too much, insisting upon seeing all the pieces and fitting them together, and then demanding wholesale rates – and he moved Mrs Fielding out of hearing. ‘Very happy to see you both,’ he repeated, ‘but just at this moment may I beg you to hold him in? I am expected at the dockyard, and to tell you the truth I have not a minute to lose. The Doctor here will be delighted to lend you a hand, I am sure.’
Expected he was, and not only by the cynical shipwrights labouring at enormous cost upon the worthless Worcester and by those who were not working at all upon the Surprise, which stood, deserted and gunless, perilously shored-up in a pool of stinking mud, but also by what was left of his ship’s company. He had started out from England in the Worcester with some six hundred men: on being temporarily transferred to the Surprise he picked two hundred of the best, and with these he had hoped to return to England