The Unknown Shore. Patrick O’Brian
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.’