It was a diminished company that reached the port; a still smaller one that joined Mrs Raffles and the two other ladies for coffee and tea; and only Jack, Stephen and Fielding survived to walk into the library with the Governor. Jack had already made his acknowledgments, his most heartfelt acknowledgments, for Raffles' kindness in offering him the Dutch ship, the Gelijkheid, and now the Governor gave him a portfolio of her plans, sheer draught, deck draught, profile and everything else capable of exact measurement and representation, and over these the sailors pored with close professional attention while Ahmed brought the surviving botanical specimens from the voyage. Before opening the packet Stephen gave Raffles a succinct account of Kumai, that other Eden, its orang-utangs, its tarsiers, its tree-shrews. 'If I could foresee a fortnight's peace, I should go there tomorrow,' said Raffles. 'A visit of courtesy to the Sultan, confirming the alliance, would be a perfect excuse; and the sloop Plover, due from Colombo at the end of the month, would give me pomp enough. But you can have no idea of how uneasy rests a head with even a hemi-demi-semi crown upon it. Java and its dependencies have a vast population of rajas and sultans and great feudatories, and they are all given to parricide, fratricide and coups d'etat; and then there is the enmity between the Javanese, Madurese, ordinary Malays of course, Kalangs, Baduwis, Amboynese,
Bugis, Hindus, Armenians and the rest; they all hate one another but they are all ready to combine against the Chinese, and quite a small riot can spread with extraordinary speed.' He looked attentively at the packet. 'Should you like a knife?' he asked.
'I believe I can manage the knot,' said Stephen, seizing it with his canine teeth. 'Sailors do so hate to see one cut cords, ropes or even string,' he added in a muffled voice. 'There: I have it. Now this first packet is a more or less promiscuous collection of what was growing in the boreen behind van Buren's house. I make no doubt that most are familiar to you.'
'By no means all,' said Raffles: and as he sorted them into two heaps he observed 'There is a man coming this evening who knows a great deal about these epiphytic plants. Jacob Sowerby. He has published in the Transactions, and he has been recommended to me for the post of government naturalist. I have seen one or two others, but... Now this' - holding up a limp object that could have appealed only to a devoted botanist - 'is something I have never seen, nor anything remotely like it.'
'Your Excellency,' said a secretary, 'Major Bushel sends to beg you to come to the Chinese market: your presence would deal with the trouble at once. Captain West has already turned out the guard in case you see fit to go. And Mr Sowerby is here.'
'I am so sorry,' said the Governor to Stephen, and to the secretary, 'Very well, Mr Akers; I shall go by the Lion Court. Pray make my excuses to Mr Sowerby: I hope to be back in half an hour. You may as well show him up,' he called back from the farther door.
Mr Sowerby walked in, a tall thin man of perhaps forty: from his tense expression it was clear that he was nervous, and from his first words it was clear that his uneasiness had made him aggressive.
Stephen bowed and said 'Mr Sowerby, I believe? My name is Maturin.'
'You are a botanist, I suppose?' said Sowerby, glancing at the specimens.
'I should scarcely call myself a botanist,' said Stephen, 'though I did publish a little work on the phanerogams of Upper Ossory.'
'A naturalist, then?'
'I think I might fairly describe myself as a naturalist,' said Stephen.
Sowerby made no reply for some time but sat there biting his nails; it was clear to Stephen that the man regarded him as a rival, but his manner was so disobliging that Stephen did not undeceive him. Eventually Sowerby, looking at his bitten nails, said 'A very small book would deal with the phanerogams of Ossory. Ossory is in Ireland; and no great work would be required to deal with the whole country, except perhaps for the very low forms of life in the bogs. I have been there. I have been there, and although I hadbeen told of its poverty I was astonished to find how very poor it was in fact, flora, fauna and populace.'
'Oh, come; it is not every island that can boast the arbutus and the phalarope.'
'It is not every island that can boast the Iceland moss, or such hordes of barefoot savage children in the capital city itself. Extreme poverty...
Although the poverty of which Sowerby was speaking in the present instance referred to birds - no woodpeckers, no shrikes, no nightingale - the word suddenly brought Stephen's realization of Smith and Clowes's bankruptcy to life, and this added a fresh dimension to his already complex feelings. He was determined not to show how Sowerby's reflections wounded and angered him, but it was difficult to support the comparison of Trinity College in Dublin 'and its pinched brick lodgings for the students with the splendid courts of my own Trinity at Cambridge, itself but part of a far greater university: but the entire difference between the two islands is on the same scale,' and almost impossible to listen with any appearance of equanimity to the long tirade about 'the disgraceful events of 1798, when a numerous band of traitors rose against their natural sovereign, burnt my uncle's rectory and stole three of his cows' or the statement that this poverty and this ignorance had always been and would always be the lot of that unfortunate priestridden community as long as they persisted in the Romish superstition.
'Oh Governor,' said Stephen, turning as the far door opened and Raffles came in with a mission accomplished look on his face, 'I am so glad you are come just at this moment, to hear me crush my - I will not say opponent but rather interlocutor- with a singularly apt quotation that has just floated into my mind. Mr Sowerby here maintains that the Irish have always been poor and ignorant. I maintain that this has not always been the case and I support my statement not out of any annals such as those of the Four Masters which might be looked upon as biased but out of a purely English authority, that of your own Venerable Bede himself, God be with him. 'In the year 664,' he says in his Ecclesiastical History, 'a sudden pestilence' - which in Irish we call the Buidhe Connail, the Yellow Plague - 'depopulated the southern coasts of England, and soon afterwards, extending into the province of the Northumbrians, ravaged the country far and near, and destroyed a great multitude of men... It did no less harm in the island of Ireland, where many of the nobility and of the lower ranks of the English nation...' He coughed and went on, 'Where many of the nobility and of the lower ranks of the English nation were, at the time, studying theology or leading monastic lives, the Irishmen supplying them with food, and furnishing them with books and their teaching gratis pro Deo.'
Jack had been watching him closely, and with great anxiety; he knew that Stephen was furiously angry and he knew what Stephen was capable of. Now as his friend sat down, his hands no longer trembling, Jack cried 'Well quoted, Doctor! Well quoted upon my honour. I could not have done half so well, without it had been the Articles of War.'
'It was indeed a knock-down blow, my dear Maturin,' said Raffles. 'One of those replies one usually makes the day after the event. What have you to say, Mr Sowerby?'
Mr Sowerby had only to say that he meant no national reflexion, was unaware that the gentleman came from
