make less of a din.’
The infernal swabs were a party of midshipmen in the box behind him: they had been roving about all night, in a greater or less degree of intoxication, and they were still inclined to be troublesome and obnoxious. They were arguing now, interminably and without the least hope of reaching a conclusion, about the identity of certain monstrous birds that had been seen upon the Monument the day before. Storks, pelicans and frigate-birds were suggested, rocs, phoenixes and tabernacles: here they drifted off on to a profitless discussion of tabernacles, whether birds or no, and Jack began to sink down into his nap. He had heard of these birds several times already: they had perched up there on the gilt ball of the Monument for an hour or more, during the time he was coming up from the Nore in the press smack; they had attracted an immense crowd and a great deal of speculation. They were universally held to be portents; but what they portended was less certain.
‘In my opinion,’ said a milk-faced midshipman (whose mother would have wept to see him, unwashed, slobbered with brandy that he could scarcely drink and smelling of tobacco that he could scarcely smoke) ‘in my opinion those fowl mean a frightful prodigious ghastly disaster, which would probably be a very bad thing.’
Jack leapt to his feet as if he had been stung and ran with astonishing speed to the door, where he cannoned from a rear-admiral into a post-captain and fell heavily over Ransome’s feet. They asked him what he thought he was doing, and where he thought he was going, and the admiral struck him repeatedly with a gold-headed cane from the Malacca Straits; ordinarily Jack would have resented this, admiral or no, but now he scrambled to his feet, seized Ransome by the hand and ran furiously down the street, crying out, ‘Come on,’ in a very vehement tone.
Coming to the river stairs, he bawled for a pair of oars. ‘Give way,’ he said, thrusting Ransome into the boat, and he exhorted the rowers to pull with all the force and eloquence that ever he had learnt at sea, directing them to pass straight down the river to the press tender in the Pool. At the sound of the words ‘press tender’ the watermen paused, and Jack cried, ‘Give way, can’t you? You have got your infernal certificates, han’t you?’ The watermen certainly had, and they could not be taken by the press-gang nor kept aboard the press tender; but, as the bow oar explained, ‘It makes the blood go thin as gin in my arteries.’
‘Veins,’ said stroke.
‘Arteries,’ said bow.
‘Ransome,’ said Jack, ‘you have heard about these birds on the Monument? Well, don’t you see that they would bring Toby out of his grave, if they were to appear again? You must go ashore at Old Swan stairs, buy a couple of turkeys – turkeys, mind you, Ransome; none of your common geese – and hoist them at the top of the Monument. And I will go down to the tender – Dick Penn is in command – and bring up a thundering great party to stop every alley, once the crowd has gathered. Do you understand? Have you any money?’
Ransome struck the side of his nose with his finger to indicate comprehension, jingled his pocket to show his wealth, and remarking that Jack was a credit to his Ma, stepped on to a lighter that was moving in to the shore, and thence, in order to lose no valuable seconds, to a wherry, adjuring it ‘to shove in, cully, and do the handsome thing for once in its – life,’ words which the wherry recognised as its native tongue, and which it complied with, wafting the intruder ashore with all the elegance that a wherry is capable of.
Some hours earlier than this the first lieutenant of the guard-ship had told Mr Richard Penn, the fifth lieutenant (and until recently a midshipman and a colleague of Jack’s) that what he, the first lieutenant, wanted was a little zeal, initiative and mother-wit on the part of Mr Penn. The first lieutenant freely acknowledged that it would be vain to look for seamanship, intelligence or beauty in Mr Penn; but at least the first lieutenant had a right, he hoped he had a right, to expect Mr Penn, when in command of the press smack, to bring back something better than crippled half-wits with certificates of exemption. Were there no idle apprentices left in the City of London, no stout, able-bodied young men? Did the entire uncertificated population resemble Mr Penn?
These harsh words were still rankling in the bosom of the press-tender’s captain when Jack appeared on the river, and crying, ‘Hoy, Dick,’ darted up the side.
‘Good morning, Mr Byron,’ said Dick coldly.
‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ said Jack, saluting and growing quite red. ‘May I have a word with you?’
‘I am going below, Mr Hape,’ said the captain to a dwarfish midshipman, and led the way into a kind of moist cupboard.
‘Now, Jack?’ he said, sitting down and waving to an empty locker.
‘I am very sorry I forgot myself just now,’ said Jack earnestly, ‘but I am in a great taking, Dick, and I rely upon you absolutely. Do you know about those birds at the Monument?’
At the Monument itself Ransome was having difficulties that he had not allowed for: he had bought his turkeys easily enough, and although the poultryman had foisted the oldest, stringiest birds in the market upon him – birds that had proved unnaturally strong, cunning, malignant and resourceful – he had them under control by now, and he had reached the door of the Monument, only to be told that he might not bring them in.
‘No turkeys. No fowls whatsoever,’ said the keeper of the Monument, who, seeing that Ransome was a sailor, supposed that he was drunk. ‘And no tarpaulins, either,’ he added, with offensive sobriety.
‘In the King’s name,’ cried Ransome, in a hoarse wheeze.
The keeper hesitated for a moment; but the turkeys, who were peering at him inquisitively with their little beady eyes, were too preposterous to have been brought on his Majesty’s service, and the keeper turned his back. How unwise was this, how imprudent a move, and how sincerely the keeper regretted his temerity when he felt an iron hand upon his neck and found himself dashed with appalling force into the Monument.
The Monument, as the world in general knows, is a hollow column, with a spiral staircase inside it: for a brief interval this tube was filled with a whirling mass of keeper, turkey and enraged sailorman, a confused mass that ascended to emerge crimson and breathless on the square parapet under the brass knob that tops the edifice.
Ransome always carried a knife and a piece of line; he would have felt indecently naked without them. ‘Now, brother,’ he said, showing them to the keeper, ‘you must bear a hand. Because why? Because it’s in the King’s name, that’s why; and I swear I’ll have the quivering liver out of you, else.’ He tapped the keeper pleasantly in the region of his liver, and passed him the turkeys.
‘Do you swear it’s in the King’s name?’ asked the keeper in gasps, when he could fetch his breath.
‘Yus,’ said Ransome, spitting on his hands and eyeing the brass flames that sprang from the upper part of the Monument.
‘I wouldn’t give no countenance otherwise,’ said the keeper. ‘Have you got a wipe?’
Ransome passed him the powerful square of canvas that served him for a handkerchief, and the keeper neatly hooded the turkeys with it; the birds at once become docile and motionless. ‘You don’t know nothing about fowls,’ he said, with surly self-approbation.
‘Now listen, cock,’ said Ransome from amidst the flames, ‘I shall let you down this line, and you must make ‘em fast when I’m atop. And then, do you see, I shall haul ‘em up: and a flaming multitude will turn out: and we shall press a tidy few.’ He spoke slowly, for the top of the Monument is quite unlike the rigging of a ship, and although the two-hundred-foot drop did not worry him, the arrangement of the flames did; for whereas the rigging of a ship is based upon utility, monumental brass flames are there for architectural effect – a wholly different principle.
‘If you had said you was the press earlier, we could of walked up like Christians,’ said the keeper sulkily. ‘Three hundred and forty-five steps, run up like Barbary apes.’
‘What?’ called Ransome, round the curve, and perilously engaged with some artistic flames.
‘Three