Patrick O'Brian - H.M.S. Surprise

them. In the bazaars there were small lamps everywhere, and the glow of braziers - a general stirring: people picking up their beds and carrying them indoors or turning them into stalls. On through the Gharwal caravanserai, past the Franciscan church, past the Jain temple to the alley where Dil lived.

The alley was unusually crowded; already there were people filling in from side to side, and it was only by urging a Brahmin bull in front of him that he was able to reach the triangular booth made of planks and wedged against a buttress. The old woman was sitting in front of it, with a wavering lamp on her right side, a white-​robed man on

the other, Dil’s body in front of her, partly covered with a piece of cloth. On the ground, a bowl with some marigolds in it and four brass coins. The people pressed in a half circle facing her, listening gravely to her harsh, angry voice.

He sat down in the second rank - went down with a grunt, as though his legs had been cut from under him -and he felt an intolerable pain rising in his heart. He had seen so much death that he could not be mistaken: but after some time the hard acceptance he had learnt cleared his mind at least. The old woman was calling upon the crowd for money: breaking off to tell the Brahmin that a very little wood would do - wrangling with him, insisting. The people were kind: many words of comfort, sympathy and praise, small offerings added to the bowl; but it was a desperately poor neighbourhood and the coins did not amount to half a dozen logs.

‘Here is no one of her caste,’ said the man next to Stephen; and other people murmured that that was the cruel pity of the thing - her own people would have seen to the fire. But with a famine coming, no man dared look beyond the caste he belonged to. ‘I am of her caste,’ said Stephen to the man in front of him, touching his shoulder. ‘Tell the woman I will buy the child. Friend, tell the woman I will buy the child and take it down. I will attend to the fire.’

The man looked round at him. Stephen’s eyes were remote; his cheeks hollow, lined and dirty; his hair straggled over his face: he might well have been mad, or in another state - removed. The man glanced at his grave neighbours, felt their qualified approval, and called out, ‘Grandmother, here is a holy man of thy caste who from piety will buy the child and take it down: he will also provide the wood.’

More conversation - cries - and a dead silence. Stephen felt the man thrust the purse back into his bosom, patting and arranging his shirt round the string.

After a moment he stood up. Dil’s face was infinitely calm; the wavering flame made it seem to smile mysteriously at times, but the steady light showed a face as far from emotion as the sea: contained and utterly detached. 11cr arms showed the marks where the bracelets had been torn off, but the marks were slight: there had been no struggle, no desperate resistance.

He picked her up, and followed by the old woman, a few friends and the Brahmin, he carried her to the strand, her head lolling against his shoulder. The dawn broke as they went down through the bazaar: three parties were already there before them, at the edge of the calm sea beyond the wood-​sellers.

Prayers, lustration; chanting, lustration: he laid her on the pyre. Pale flames in the sunlight, the fierce rush of blazing sandalwood, and the column of smoke rising, rising, inclining gently away as the breeze from the sea set in.

‘nunc et in hora mortis nostrae,’ he repeated yet again, and felt the lap of water on his foot. He looked up. The people had gone; the pyre was no more than a dark patch with the sea hissing in its embers; and he was alone. The tide was rising fast.

The Surprise lay at single anchor, well out in the channel: the wind was fair, the tide near the height of flood, and her captain stood at the rail, staring at the distant land with a grim look on his face. His hands were clasped behind his back: they clenched a little from time to time. Young Church came bounding up from the midshipmen’s berth into the expectant silence, filled with some unreasoning delight of his own, and he met the warning eye of his mess-​mate Callow, who murmured, ‘Watch out for squalls.’

Jack had already seen the boat pulling away from the flagship, but this was not the boat he was waiting for; it was a man-​of-​war’s cutter, with an officer and his sea-​chest in the stern sheets - his new first lieutenant sent by the facetious admiral the moment he returned from a shooting-​expedition up country. The boat that Jack was looking for would be a native craft, probably filthy, and he was still looking for it when the cutter hooked on to the chains and the officer ran up the side.

‘Stourton, sir,’ he said, taking off his hat. ‘Come aboard to join, sir, if you please.’

‘I am happy to see you at last, Mr Stourton,’ said Jack with a constrained smile on his lowering face. ‘Let us go into the coach.’ He cast another glance shoreward before leading the way, but nothing did he see.

They sat in silence while Jack read the Admiral’s letter, and Stourton looked covertly at his new captain. His last had been a gloomy, withdrawn, hard-​drinking man, at war with his officers, perpetually finding fault, and flogging six days a week. Stourton, and every other officer aboard who did not wish to be broke, had been forced into tyranny:

between them they had made the Narcissus the prettiest ship, to look at, east of Greenwich, and they could cross over yards in twenty-​two seconds - a true spit-​and-​polish frigate, with the highest rate of punishment and desertion in the fleet.

Stourton’s reputation was that of the hard-​horse first lieutenant of the Narcissus. he did not look like a slave-​driver, but like a decent, pink, very close-​shaved, conscientious, brisk young man: however, Jack knew what the habit of power could do, and putting the Admiral’s letter away he said, ‘Different ships have different ways, sir, as you are aware. I do not mean to criticise any other commander, but I desire to have things done my way in Surprise. Some people like their deck to look like a ball-​room: so do I, but it must be a fighting ball-​room. Gunnery and seamanship come first, and there never was a ship that fought well without she was a happy ship. If every crew can ply their gun brisk and hit the mark, and if we can make sail promptly, I do not give a damn for an occasional heap of shakings pushed under a carronade. I tell you this privately, for I should not wish to have it publicly known; but I do not think a man deserves flogging for a handful of tow. Indeed, in Surprise we do not much care for rigging the grating, either. Once the men understand their duty and have been brought to a proper state of discipline, officers who cannot keep them to it without perpetually starting them or flogging them do not know their business. I hate dirt and slovenliness, but I hate a flash ship, all spit and polish and no fighting spirit, even worse. You will say a slovenly ship cannot fight either, which is very true: so you will please to ensure the pure ideal, Mr Stourton. Another thing that I should like to say, so that we may understand one another from the beginning, is that I hate unpunctuality.’ Stourton’s face fell still further: through no fault of his own he had been abominably late reporting aboard. ‘I do not say this for you, but the young gentlemen are blackguards in the middle and morning watches; they are late in relieving

the deck. Indeed, there is little sense of time in this ship; and at this very moment, at top of flood, I am kept waiting. .

There was the sound of a boat coming alongside, then a thin, high wrangling about the fare. Jack cocked his ear and shot upon deck with a face of thunder.