The complete short stori.., p.1
The Complete Short Stories, page 1
THE COMPLETE SHORT STORIES
Patrick O’Brian
Copyright
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street,
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2023
Copyright © The Estate of the late Patrick O’Brian CBE 2023
Introduction copyright © Nikolai Tolstoy 2023
Patrick O’Brian asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
Cover design by Claire Ward/HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2023
Cover photographs: Shutterstock.com
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
These stories were mostly written in the first half of the twentieth century and characters sometimes use offensive language or otherwise are described or behave in ways that reflect the prejudices and insensitivities of the period.
These short stories are entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008525439
eBook Edition © April 2023 ISBN: 9780008525453
Version: 2023-03-16
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Foreword
The Complete Short Stories
The Return
The Last Pool
The Green Creature
The Happy Despatch
The Virtuous Peleg
The Curranwood Badgers
It Must Have Been a Branch, They Said
The Slope of the High Mountain
The Long Day Running
Naming Calls
The Dawn Flighting
The Trap
The Little Death
Samphire
The Clockmender
Not Liking to Pass the Road Again
The Voluntary Patient
Billabillian
The Soul
On the Bog
The Passeur
Nicolas
Hans Brueckner on the Edge of the Sea
The Lemon
A Journey to Cannes
The Tunnel at the Frontier
Lying in the Sun
The Path
A Minor Operation
The Walker
The Flower Pot
The Party in the Cave
The Overcoat
The Stag at Bay
The Falling Star
The Handmaiden
The Thermometer
The Centurion’s Gig
The Rendezvous
The Chian Wine
A Passage of the Frontier
On the Wolfsberg
Simon
Children’s Stories
Skogula – the Sperm Whale
A Peregrine Falcon
Wang Khan of the Elephants
The White Cobra
Shark No. 206
Python
The Condor of Quetzalcoatl
Old Cronk
Gorilla
Rhino
Jehangir Bahadur
Jellaludin
The Salmon
Cheetah
The Snow Leopard
Giant Panda
Noughts and Crosses
Two’s Company
No Pirates Nowadays
One Arctic Summer
Publication History
The Works of Patrick O’Brian
About the Publisher
Foreword
My introduction to Patrick O’Brian’s short stories occurred during my first visit to my parents’ home at Collioure in 1955. My stepfather Patrick and my mother lived in fairly dire but happy poverty in an upstairs flat (actually a room – I slept in a sort of cupboard) close to the harbour. Patrick was little known as an author in those days save to the cognoscenti, but never allowed disappointment to deter him.
At that time I had read none of his published work, despite the fact that much of it was written for young people. Fortunately our tastes in many respects followed similar courses, particularly an intense love of the long eighteenth century. However, the only one of his published works I recall his sharing with me at the time was his first collection of short stories, The Last Pool (1950). I read them with avidity, and particularly enjoyed his affectionate parodies of early Irish saga and hagiography, ‘The Green Creature’ and ‘The Virtuous Peleg’. Especially charming were delightful touches, like the angel whose neat agility saves the worldly Peleg from tumbling into the pit of Hell:
And the angel at the bottom of the chasm peered up through the shifting fog and altered his feet, and as he caught Peleg he said, ‘There, easy now, Peleg …’
Although I had at that time yet to visit Ireland, Patrick’s stories’ vivacity, humour and touches of brogue rang true. No reviewer then suspected that he was not Irish, and he possessed a wonderful innate capacity for absorbing other cultures at an imaginative remove.
Patrick acquired his skill in writing short tales at a very early stage of his literary career. Having completed his first novel Caesar (1930)at the precocious age of twelve, he turned his hand to short stories. Initially they were aimed at the flourishing children’s market and were published in collections such as The Oxford Annual for Children, which made ideal Christmas presents. These early tales often featured brave but doomed wild animals, and in 1934 he published his first collection Beasts Royal. I suspect that his largely lonely and to some extent harsh childhood propelled him into identification with the graceful creatures of his imagination. However, there is nothing mawkish or sentimental about his animals, birds and even a whale (‘Skogula’), who all too often come to a grisly and unjust end.
During his teenage years in his family home at Lewes, Patrick developed a keen eye for the majestic landscape of the South Downs and lofty sea-cliffs beyond. Later, when he and my mother decamped after the War to their tiny cottage refuge in Snowdonia, Patrick took up fishing, shooting and following the local hunt. Several of his early stories were drawn from these experiences, as was much of his evocative novel Three Bear Witness (1952).
Other tales include characteristically magical passages reflecting Patrick’s love of the landscape and the natural order. He had paid an extended visit to Ireland in 1937, from which stemmed his deep love of the country, its people, and scenery.
There was no clear line of demarcation between the sea and the land: they merged vaguely to an indeterminate region, a flat and sodden country, flat, flat and limitless as far as sight could reach. Through the mud of this country three old rivers slowly ebbed and flowed, losing their nature of land streams without ever gaining the character of inlets of the sea; they were joined by a thousand outfalls from the bog, and all this water crept secretly through a pale vegetation of fat-leaved plants and unnatural grass (‘On the Bog’).
It was largely the grim Welsh winters that made Patrick and my mother seek refuge beside the warm Mediterranean in the summer of 1949. Seven years later he published a further collection of short stories, under the telling title Lying in the Sun (1956). These too were in large part autobiographical. When I came to investigate them for the first volume of Patrick’s biography, I was delighted to find that they not only reflected Collioure, its environs and its people, but included forays into his own fears and wish-fulfilment. ‘The Lemon’ recounts the protagonist’s destruction with a hand-grenade of a noisy night-club beneath their flat in the Rue Arago. I recall the offensive night-club and can imagine the therapeutic effect of the tale’s climax:
It went off with a great orange flower of light that blossomed momentarily in the whole street. I pushed back the electric fuse and went silently upstairs, pursued by the familiar smell of dust.
There was no possibility of detection. All the neighbours would be at their windows, not looking down the stairs.
Before the rapturous reception of Master and Commander in 1970 and its successors in the series, Patrick often found it easier to place his short stories in newspapers and journals. A sudden flash of inspiration could not always be absorbed into a pending novel but might be satisfactorily employed as the basis of a succinct tale. Thus his short story ‘The Walker’ begins with the unnamed protagonist’s vividly-evoked stroll along an unidentified stretch of cliff and seaside, which after some pages leads into a dramatic episode in the lives of some nearby inhabitants. Every step of this stroll is familiar to me from retracing the itinerary on the outskirts of Collioure. I have little doubt that it was during one of these walks that Patrick gained his inspiration for the tale, which he then blended with his routine stroll. Much the same procedure can be detected in others of his short stories, and there may well be additional instances unknown to me.
‘Samphire’ recounts deteriorating relations between a newly-marr ied young couple, in whom I recognise my mother and unfortunate father. Again, Patrick’s regular bouts of ill-health inspired ‘A Minor Operation’, while ‘The Voluntary Patient’ describes the mental suffering of a psychiatric patient tortured with remorse for an unspecified crime. I wonder who that could have been?
It is curious that Patrick did not publish more short stories set in the historical past, given his unrivalled skill in that genre. The only exception, ‘The Centurion’s Gig’, published in 1968 among Christmas tales in Winter’s Tales for Children, was in fact a skilfully-concocted extension to his early children’s naval novel The Unknown Shore (1959), which could fit seamlessly between chapters five and six of that work.
Among Patrick’s unpublished works (now held in the British Library) are a couple of historical tales. They might have sprung from the Boy’s Own Paper, for which they were possibly intended. The first is a stirring tale of the crusades, in which the valiant hero is accompanied by a gallant comrade ‘Sir Padraig of Kerry’, in whom may be recognised the youthful author. The other, also untitled, concerns a young poacher and wicked eighteenth-century squire. There is no indication that he ever sought a publisher for the two stories, and I suspect Patrick was conscious of their juvenile inadequacy. He was clearly finding his feet in the historical genre of fiction, and it was only later that his wonderful skill in recreating an authentic historical past came to fruition.
It is clear that Patrick loved the delicate skill involved in short story writing, just as he enjoyed composing poetry, both of which seem quite often to have been written for his own and my mother’s delectation, without any necessary move towards publication.
It is good to see the entire collection of Patrick’s short stories, bound here in a single volume for the very first time, which I fancy would elicit a wry smile of satisfaction from their devoted author.
Nikolai Tolstoy, 2023
The Complete Short Stories
1
The Return
All day the fly had been hatching, and where the stream broadened into a deep pool between two falls the surface was continually broken by the rising of fish, broken with rings spreading perpetually, crossing and counter-crossing. It was a perfect day for the hatch, mild, gentle and full of life. Under the willows on the far side of the pool ephemerids drifted in their thousands, and the trout jostled one another in the shade of the willows, drunk with excitement and greed. Great heavy-headed cannibals with harsh, jutting under-jaws came from their stony fastnesses beneath the fall to rise at the fly; tender young trout rose beside them and took no harm.
All down the length of the stream the trout made holiday: they added a fresh, water-borne note to the incessant, imperceptible noise of the country, a note quite distinct from the purl of the water over the big pebbles above the fall, and from the sharp punctuation of the splash of the diving kingfisher, who flashed up and down his beat, darting ever and again on some minnow or tittlebat, some half-transparent fishlet that strayed up into danger from the green, waving forests in the stream’s bed.
The best part of the stream lay between the ruined mill and the bridge: a path, some little way from the water, but roughly parallel with it, ran through the grass from the mill to the bridge. On the other side the woods came down to the water’s edge, where huge pollard willows stood knee-deep in the stream making deep quiet bays for chub and quiet-loving fish. Formerly the underbrush had been cut back for the comfort of fishermen, but now it was overgrown, and the riot of young fresh green was brave in the sun.
Immediately below the pool the stream ran with a deeper note, flowing faster through a more narrow course, being constricted by worn rocks, which it could surmount only when the winter rains came down. Here the bridge spanned it in one leap; an ancient stone bridge it was, exquisitely lichened and its lines all rounded with age. There was an appearance of vast solidity about the bridge; it was massive and immovably firm, but it had a wonderful grace. A few self-sown wallflowers, tawny yellow, grew in its sides, and the sun was upon it now. The road that the bridge carried on its back ran clean a little way into the wood, but after the first bend it was lost and overgrown, for it was quite neglected.
The kingfisher perched on a stump close by the bridge to preen itself in the sunlight. It took no heed of the trout, nor of any of the innumerable sounds that came from hidden places all around it, but all at once it froze motionless on the stump, with its head raised questioningly. Then it sped down the stream in a blur of blue-green light, low over the water.
A little while after a man came down the lost road through the wood. At the bridge-head he paused, blinking in the sudden light. The trout stopped rising; a dabchick dived silently and swam fast away under the water. The pool held still to listen. Treading softly over the encroaching moss, the man came on to the bridge: he leaned over the coping and stared upstream. He was a tall, thick man, with a red face and black hair, quite gross to look at, and urbanized now: on his shoulders he carried a knapsack and a rod. After some minutes he looked down at the stones on which he leaned: initials and dates were scratched and cut into them. He knew almost to an inch where his own should be. They were there, J.S.B. in bold, swaggering letters, deeply carved, with a date of many years ago and a girl’s initials in the same hand coming after them. Mary Adams: how very clearly he remembered her. A glaze of sentiment came over his eyes. A pace along the bridge there was J.S.B. and E.R.L., more discreetly this time, and, lower down, J.S.B. and T.M. There was a little cushion of moss spreading over the T.M.: he flicked it off and stood up. She had always called him Jeremy in full.
At the far end of the pool a trout rose, with a clear, round plop. The kingfisher flashed under the bridge and vanished upstream. The man walked on over the bridge to the path that led to the mill. From the path in the meadow he could see the stream, but from far enough away that he would not put the fish down.
He sat down in the sweet, dry grass and threw off his knapsack. He put the joints of his rod together, and it quivered pleasantly in his hand: from the pockets of his knapsack he drew old tobacco tins, a reel with an agate ring, his fly box; his fingers seemed too coarse for the tiny, delicate knots in the translucent cast, but the knots formed and the fly was on – a grannom. At last he stood up and whipped the rod in the air: he worked the line out loop by loop; it whistled and sang. He cast his fly at a dandelion clock, and after a few casts the fly floated down and broke the white ball. Satisfied, he walked gently towards the stream; for some time there had been a recurrent heavy swirl under the alders on the far side. Kneeling down – for the day was bright and the water scarcely ruffled – he worked his line out across the stream and cast a little above the rise. His fly landed clumsily in a coil of the cast; the trout ignored it, but did not take fright. When it had floated down, Jeremy twitched it from the surface and cast again. This time it landed handsomely, well cocked on the surface, and as it came down his hand was tense with anticipation; but the trout took another fly immediately in front of it. The third cast was too short, and the next began to drag, and the fly was half-drowned. He switched tiny specks of water from the grannom and cast again; still the trout let the fly go by, and a snag bore it over to a sunken branch. Delicately he tweaked and manœuvred with his outstretched rod, but the barb sank into the wood and held firm.
Will it give? he said, or will I go round and free it? Come now, handsomely does it. He lowered the top of his rod and pulled through the rings. The line stretched and the branch stirred: all around the trout were rising. He gave it a sudden, brutal jerk and the fly shot back across the stream, carrying a white sliver of wood on its point.
I did not deserve that, he said, taking the little piece off, I did not, indeed. He walked some way up the pool, waving his rod as he went. At haphazard, he cast to a small rise by the near bank, hardly pausing in his stride. At once the trout took the fly and went fast away with it in the corner of his mouth. The little fish was game enough, but he was finished in two mad rushes: he played himself, and came rolling in on his side, still defying the hook, but with no more power to fight it. The fisherman took another like the first a little higher up, beyond the pool. They were both about half a pound – small for that stream – cleanly run and game, but stupid.
