Читать книгу The Dean's Elbow - A.E.W. Mason - Страница 4

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The miracle of yesterday! Incredible—yet proved true now by every sound and sight and physical sensation. Mona Lightfoot uttered a little crow of delight; took her hands from the tiller to clap them together, and the small cutter slipped up into the wind and hung, her great sail flapping and all the life gone out of her.

The young man in the bows, who was fishing his spinnaker out of the sail-locker, hooted his derision and, running over the crown of the cabin roof, sprang down into the cockpit.

"Have I done wrong?" Mona asked with a penitence which was more than half mockery.

"So much wrong that if this ship carried a yard arm we should be making at once for the three-mile limit."

He brought the cutter on her course again with the sails full and bye.

"Keep her so with the leach of the sail just quiver ing and between the buoys and the beacon." The young man was very nautical in his talk on this first morning of his holiday, and Mona Lightfoot laughed with pleasure. He had the boyishness of other young men; and for every sign that he was really like other young men her mind was eagerly alert.

The cutter slid down the long channel of Poole Harbour; the dingy little yellow tavern, "The Margate Hoy," was no longer distinguishable upon the quay, and the cluster of deserted buildings which in those far-off days of the early nineties was Poole, dwindled over the counter into a blur. It was seven o'clock on a cool, silver morning in the first week of September, England's month. In a gap of land on the western side Corfe Castle black upon its pyramid stood out from the wall of the Purbeck Hills; on the east the pine trees and white sand of Canford Cliffs struck a milder and more modern note of history. The smooth lagoon of the harbour had the soft gleam of a mirror and split before the stem of the cutter with the tinkle of breaking glass. The sky spread dappled overhead, and the earth still very silent below it; and the air, fresh and lively, held the sure promise of a mellow sunlit day.

The fairway curved in the midst of a little fleet of fishing boats and pleasure yachts towards the narrows between the big hotel upon the point and Brownsea Island. It seemed to Mona Lightfoot that she was passing through a gateway into a new and magical world. The kick of the tiller in her unpractised hands was a sheer delight.

"I have the loveliest feeling that I am playing truant," she cried to the young man, who was now polishing the shining brass of his little ship with the care of a good groom for his horse. He looked at her with a quick smile of appreciation, which lit up a face of quite commonplace looks with a surprising grace.

"I, too," he answered, and gazed about him, smell ing the sea. The yellow sand cliffs of Bournemouth, and a steamer smoking alongside the pier, dropped away upon their left. Studland's prettiness, the chalk arches and Old Harry, the chalk pillar, were deployed upon their right. And, white calling to white, in a diagonal line with Old Harry, the towering chalk down of the Isle of Wight caught the first of the sun light, spilt some of it upon the jagged Needles at its feet and tossed the rest across the bay to warm Old Harry.

"Keep her straight, Mona, now between the striped buoys and the black cones," he cried. "I'll have finished in a minute or two. Then I'll relieve you at the tiller and you can cook our breakfasts."

The Sea Flower was at once treasure and romance to young Mark Thewliss. Each increase in a steadily rising salary had been set aside for years against her building; the enthralling library of small boats and their adventures and their equipment had been studied as though each one of them was a classic, so that the exquisite creature might have no tiny omission or faulty taste to reproach him with; and when she at last took the sea from a slip at Salcombe in Devonshire, Thewliss passed his examination as master-mariner rather that she might be fitly commanded than to gratify any aspiration of his own. Sea Flower was now in her second year, a cutter of nine tons by Thames measurement, built of oak, coppered below the water line, with a teak deck, a lead keel—nothing but lead would satisfy Mark Thewliss, though the expense of it cramped him for a whole year of his working life—and a set of sails dainty enough for any racer in the Solent. He had had her built with a spoon bow, a broad beam and a long counter so that she might be safe in a heavy sea with a strong following wind; and since she was meant for single-handed cruising, every sheet was brought aft to the cockpit. She was painted black with a gold line, and she answered to her tiller as a polo pony to a touch of the snaffle.

Sea Flower had this great merit too. Being built for single-handed work, she had no forecastle. She could afford an unexpectedly spacious saloon with a cambered roof and two little doors at the forward end of it, that on the left opening into a tiny kitchen and pan try, that on the right into a lavatory. There was even a bath under the floor. Two steps led down from the cockpit, giving thus six feet of headroom in the saloon; and the mahogany doors were edged with rubber and watertight. She had a small tank of drinking water at the back of one side of the cockpit, and she carried a couple of beakers besides in rockers on her deck. Her larder for fresh meat was arranged after the fashion of the North Sea fishing trawlers—a cask with a lid, screwed to the deck behind the main-mast and ventilated with holes made by a large auger. But on the Sea Flower, the cask was a super-cask—a barrel of ripe oak bound with hoops of brass.

Thewliss stowed his spinnaker sail ready to his hand before he came aft to the cockpit. He was still, indeed, on the camber of the cabin roof when he stopped suddenly with a look of surprise upon his face.

"Have I done wrong again?" Mona Lightfoot asked.

"No," he answered, and again his smile gave life and illumination to his face. "I was remembering that last year I sailed to Cherbourg and Guernsey and the Scilly Isles. And I never realised to this moment what a lonely business it must have been."

He sprang down into the cockpit as he spoke, and so did not see the colour spread over the girl's face and the sudden blossom of tenderness in her eyes.

"That's Durlstone Head," he said with the broad accent of all the longshoremen who had ever lived. He pointed to the great promontory beyond Swanage Bay where a huge stone ball hung poised upon a green shoulder. He told her the legend of that stone ball as it is known to all hands in coasting craft; how the owner of the house upon the head had spent his life having the map of the world and its oceans carved in an exact proportion upon it, and how he had blown out his brains in despair when the work was done, because a tiny islet in the Red Sea was half an inch out of its proper place. "Now cook the breakfast, Mona, or we shall find ourselves in the Race before it's ready. Crisp bacon and coffee hot enough to scald the mouth. You'll find fresh rolls and butter in the cupboard by the settee." He took the tiller from her and added with a laugh:

"We have got the best wind we could wish for. I put it all down to your yachting cap. Run along!"

Mona Lightfoot took a look at herself in the mirror of the saloon before she set about preparing breakfast. She was a tall girl with copper coloured hair and big dark eyes clear as the morning set wide apart under a low broad forehead. She had a straight delicately chiselled nose, a mouth rather large, a short upper lip and a rounded chin. There was too much of character in her face for prettiness; but there were moments when it was lovely; and always it had a curiously appealing look as of one destined somehow for great unhappiness. Even now, as her eyes danced and she set the yachting cap still more jauntily to the thick waves of hair, it was there for those who had eyes to see. A moment later and the blind could almost have seen it. For she caught her breath and stood with her lips parted and a hand upon her heart, like someone on the edge of a perilous dive into dark and unknown waters.

She had planned to sit quietly down somewhere apart—forward for choice, above the hiss and sparkle of the water at the bows—and fix each instant of the miraculous yesterday, with its burnish still upon it, for ever in her memories. A golden pattern which must throw some glimmer of light ahead of her even if the thread of her life led her deep into the catacombs. But there was too much to do. Breakfast had to be cooked—and such a breakfast as would make one sorry for the angels. It had to be eaten and cleared away, and the plates washed and stored safely in their racks—all before some mysterious and hostile thing called "The Race" enveloped them.

Sea Flower was full of gadgets. A small folding table could be set into slots in the floor of the cockpit, and upon this, covered with a fine white cloth, break fast was laid. Coffee of a fragrance unknown within the four walls of a room; bacon in thin crisp slices fried in its fat with eggs, just tinged with brown, lolling on the top of them; hot rolls and fresh butter in a big wedge instead of mean little meagre pats; marmalade with thick cubes of brown peel; and honey in the comb, with Ribston Pippins from Hereford and Cape plums for dessert.

Mona Lightfoot was to see in use now another contrivance of which Mark Thewliss was inordinately vain. From the combing of the cockpit underneath the tiller a long curved steel bar hung down with a hinge at each end. Thewliss lifted the bar until it stood out horizontally, a segment of a circle where springs at the hinges caught it and held it firm. On the inside of this segment there was a steel plate, shaped and fixed to the curve of the bar and notched like the parapet of a castle wall. Thewliss raised this plate until it stood perpendicularly on the bar and clamped it in that position with a couple of strong screws.

"There!" he said proudly when he had finished He was contemplating an arc of steel with grooves like the rowlocks of a boat reaching side by side across the radius of the tiller's movements. He now dropped the long wooden arm into one of these grooves. "You see, she'll sail herself now. Unless the wind changes, she'll keep her course. It's handier than lashing your helm if you are alone and want to go to bed."

He moved to a seat opposite to Mona Lightfoot, and they breakfasted in comfort as the little ship ran past Swanage with the wind fair on her quarter. Mona lifted her eyes to the curve of the parade, where already the visitors were astir. She snuggled her shoulders against the cushions:

"Poor people! I am sorry for them."

"Better than Bexhill, eh?" Thewliss asked with a laugh.

"Oh! A million times!"

Yet but for the wonder of yesterday, Bexhill it would have been for her. The parade and the band, the boarding house and its chance acquaintances, the pier and the cinema—she shut her eyes, as the mere thought of these seaside joys brought upon her a sense of listlessness and fatigue; and opened them with an anxious start to make sure that meanwhile the bay and Durlstone Point, the little ship and its captain had not vanished into space.

"Dreaming?"

"Yes," she answered.

"No time for that! Look!"

He pointed forward; and Mona, gazing out beneath the boom of the big sail, saw a towering and stately promontory slide out beyond Durlstone Point and a jumble of dark water stream in a line from it seawards.

"St. Alban's Head," he cried.

Mona could clap her hands together now, and with a laugh of merriment she did.

"Where England begins," she answered mockingly.

"You'll see. Meanwhile—I hate to mention it, my dear—but if we get into the Race like this, there won't be much of our crockery left when we get out of it."

Mona Lightfoot jumped up in remorse, and carried the breakfast table and its equipment into the cabin. By the time the plates were stowed in their racks, the cups hung up upon their hooks, and she herself out again in the cockpit, the great cliff overhung them, the waves were breaking viciously ahead of them and the roar of tumbling waters was in their ears.

"It won't be so bad," Thewliss shouted. "We're well in shore for one thing. For another the wind must be off shore for the Race to be really up."

But even as he spoke, Sea Flower drove in among the breakers; and Mona had to clutch the combing of the cockpit and set the rubber soles of her shoes firmly upon the floor to keep herself from being thrown across the boat. Thewliss, with the tiller in his hand, did his best. He guided his cutter so far as he could without risking a gybe to the little valleys and passes in the crests of those changing ridges. But from every side they attacked the cutter, slapping it as though it were a wayward urchin, rolling it as though it were a barrel. One moment Mona Lightfoot had an impression of a puppy fighting with a slipper; the next, as the stem dipped into the sea and flung back a sparkling cloud of spray which spattered on the deck, of a horse that drops its head and then tosses a silver mane. Every now and then the big main sail swung inboard and out again with a rattle of its blocks and a jerk upon the sheets which shook the ship; and then in a second the roar and jostle fell away behind them and the cutter was running over a smoothly rippling sea.

Thewliss set the spinnaker now and resumed his seat at the tiller. Far away to the south-west the black mass of Portland lay brooding high over the sun lit passage to the oceans. To the north of it the little wooded pinnacle of the Nothe rose from the smooth mirror of Weymouth Bay with the curious effect of a mirage in the desert. And beside them flitted the Dorset Coast: white cliffs like a chain of pyramids, backed by high slopes of downland, with here and there a mustard field yellow amongst the green, and here and there little villages gleaming like children's toys. And in every small upland dell between the pyramids, thick coppices of trees clustered to the very edge of the cliffs like animals going down to water at a river. To Mona Lightfoot it seemed that she breathed a different air. There was a difference in the very quality of the country's beauty. She sat in an ecstasy, her hands clasped upon her knees, her eyes wide with delight, and a feeling of pity stealing over her now and then for all those poor people to whom the coast line of western England was no more than a succession of names upon a map.

That marvellous yesterday was, after all, only the blossom of which to-day was the opening flower.