Читать книгу The Dean's Elbow - A.E.W. Mason - Страница 9

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At six o'clock of the morning the Sea Flower passed the central entrance to Portland Harbour on the last of the flow. Overhead stretched a cool milky sky, split here and there by bars of a tender unfathomable blue. She had the wind on her port quarter, and her little punt bobbing behind in her wash at the end of a rope. Thewliss himself held the tiller; and, keeping well inshore under the white mark, he sailed his cutter along the flank of the tremendous rock to the Bill. Low on the point stood a small white round lighthouse, with a broad chocolate band round its middle; and from the foot of it streamed out to sea a line of tumbled water, black and straight like a line drawn by a lead pencil.

"It's going to be a bit more troublesome than St. Alban's Head," said Thewliss with a laugh of rather fierce enjoyment. "When the wind's on shore, Portland Race is up." He was more than ever nautical in his talk. "However, the tide's slackening off against us; and once we're through, we shall have it for three good hours with us to help us across the Bay."

"Three?" asked Mona Lightfoot in surprise. She had always understood that, counting in the slack water, the tide ran for six hours in and six hours out.

"It's in the perversity of things," Mark explained, "that along this coast, at this time of the year, the tide runs westward for three hours and eastward for nine."

"Oh!"

Mona Lightfoot uttered an involuntary cry, and pointed. "Look! Look!"

For once, it seemed, the captain was careless of his ship. The Sea Flower's bowsprit was thrusting towards the lighthouse like a lance, and already Mona could have tossed her yachting-cap on shore. But Thewliss smiled and raised his voice above the roar of breaking water.

"You can't run ashore on the Bill in a little sailing boat, you'll see;" and the next moment, with a great lift of her bows and a shudder of all her sails, the cutter took the first waves of the Race as a horse takes a fence. For a few moments the air about them was opaque with spray. It whipped their faces and left a taste of salt in their mouths, and blew landward off the crests of the waves, low and swift and silvery-white like snow. The bows dipped into the breakers and the water ran hissing along the deck to the combing of the cock-pit. Behind them the punt splashed and jumped and yawed at the end of its hawser; and then with an unexpected abruptness they were out of the smother of sea-spume and the welter of breaking waves.

The roar and clatter was all behind them; they were no longer battered and cuffed; they were enclosed in the silence of a lagoon. But they were not out of the Race. The surf through which they had struggled was but its edge and rich embroidery. The sea swept at them now in flat sheets, marked out from each other in accidental patterns of arcs and straight lines. It gave Mona Lightfoot the impression of a crazy pavement moving forward under the cutter with an irresistible velocity. The sheets were of a pale green in colour and glimmered with a viscous sheen. They hissed and rustled like silk against silk in a lady's dress; and as they raced by, bubbles like little bright beads continually formed and burst upon their surface and tiny whirlpools span and disappeared, so that Mona no longer thought of crazy pavements in a vast garden, but in a more homely fashion of water on the boil in some fabulous cauldron.

She climbed out of the cockpit, and holding on to a stay stretched herself out upon the deck, so that she could see far down into the depths of this green water at once violent and smooth. There was something curiously relentless in its onsweep; it ran so fast that she grew dizzy watching it. It seemed to her that the Sea Flower must be travelling with the speed of some magical ship like the Flying Dutchman. She glanced towards the shore to take her bearings for the first time since the Sea Flower had plunged into the Race, and cried out in her amazement. The round white lighthouse with the chocolate band was still ahead of them, almost as far ahead as when she had last looked at it. But it was a tiny thing now, a coloured toy set up on a distant coast; so far had the Race pushed the small cutter out to sea.

"I told you we couldn't hit the Bill even if we tried," Thewliss shouted at her. "But the tide's beginning to ebb. We shall make headway in a minute."

He was sitting crouched up by the tiller, holding the long arm with a grip of iron, keeping the cutter to her course against eddy and current, and measuring by the shore-marks each foot gained with an enjoyment which Mona had never seen in his face before.

Gradually the lighthouse dropped behind them; the great bluff of cliff at the far edge of the Race moved forward into view; the roar of water became audible again. For a few moments the Sea Flower tossed again in a jumble of surf and then slipped out into the shining freedom of the Bay. Over the high yellow wall of the Chesil Beach a town came into view on their right hand.

"What's that place?" Mona asked.

"Weymouth."

She could hardly believe her eyes. That was the town—just there, just across that high barrier of pebbles—from which they had sailed so long ago in the cool of the grey morning. Then she saw the lofty down open out far back between Portland and the cliffs of the Bay; a long straight road run like a chalk line to a solitary tree on the down's crest; the slender pillar set up to Nelson's captain; and the famous White Horseman riding away eternally and covering even less distance than a little cutter in the Race.

"Breakfast," cried Thewliss.

By the time when it was eaten and cleared away, there was nothing visible but sky and sea and the dark brow of England's Gibraltar astern of them. Mona took the tiller whilst Thewliss set himself to the never completed task of burnishing and polishing; and when she looked astern again the last of Portland had vanished into the September haze.

"I have waited for this all the morning," she whispered, gazing about her with eyes shining as though she looked upon some miraculous vision. "Do you know that I have never been out of sight of land before?"

"We should see Bury Head if we were a little higher out of the water," said Mark Thewliss, still the practical sailor with a chart of the coastline in his head.

But Mona took no notice of his words, for she did not hear them. She was absorbed heart and brain in this new and entrancing experience; the great bowl of blue sky, the wide expanse of shining sea and the little exquisite ship alone in this glorious immensity.

"I may never see this again in all my life," she said in a low voice which had, even to the man who heard her, an appealing sadness. A wondrous holiday—yes. A holiday to be noted and stored up, so that every moment might at some later day be unwrapped from its overlay of time and minister as a solace like a jewel of soft deep fire. But ever present also was the recognition that in all her years to come not one moment of it, not even a moment to match it might once recur. Thewliss was constrained to an uneasy silence. In the girl's frank, ungrudging acceptance of the limitations which were likely to subdue the whole of her life to something little, he discovered a bravery quite foreign to himself, he suspected a nobility in which he had no share. He was conscious of discomfort. He was a little ashamed.

Throughout that morning and the earlier hours of the afternoon the wind blew steadily from the south-east. They took their spells at the tiller. Now far out some big steamer would trail a ribbon of black smoke across the sky. Now close at hand for Mona's enchantment a school of porpoises would rise from the depths and escort the Sea Flower on her way, crossing and recrossing in the clear water beneath her keel, leaping up to shake the spray from a black glistening fin, then cart-wheeling with a splash of water like urchins let loose from a class. But towards four o'clock the wind fell light—at five the great boom of the mainsail swung inboard and swung out with a great rattle of blocks, and the little ship shivered. As far as the eye could reach there was not a flaw upon the water.

"A—little—check," said Thewliss with a curious intonation half mincing, half guttural. "We shall get the wind again before nightfall. Meanwhile it's—a little check."

He was misquoting the catch-phrase from a popular comedy of those days. Mona, sitting upon the roof of the cabin and swinging her legs in the cockpit, laughed and took up his allusion.

"Digby Grant in the 'Two Roses,'" she cried. "When he pays back the sums he has borrowed from his humble friends;" and she too tried to imitate the great protagonist who had made Digby Grant his own. "A—little—cheque."

"Do you know I once—once? twenty times—had more than half a mind to kick chemistry out of the door and take a header on to the stage?"

"You? You, Mark?" and with a joyousness he did not understand, she pressed for a reason.

"Why? Why?"

But Mark Thewliss was in full flight. He had only an audience of one, it was true, but that one was very fit and satisfying. Her eyes so shone with so starry a pleasure, her laughter hit full-throated the exact moment when laughter should round off the phrase.

Speech after speech from the "Two Roses." Then followed extracts from "The Corsican Brothers," noble sentiments from "Charles I" and all the ironical humilities of Shylock. And each delivery was uttered with the same curious intonation, and was accompanied with the strange gurgling growls one might expect to hear from a wounded panther. Nor did gestures fail to point the words; but they were unusual gestures, tossings of the head, pawing of feet upon the floor of the cockpit, sudden outreachings of the arms and hands with the long sensitive fingers quivering like springs. And all the time Mona, swinging her legs over the cockpit, applauded enraptured, and cried:

"Why? Why, Mark, did you want to go on to the stage?"

Mark was flattered by her eagerness, he did not bother to seek a reason for it. He recited. The failure of the wind, the sea, even the little boat—all were forgotten. "Why, Mark, why?" Oh, there was a reason for her question. It sprang from a heart made over subtle by a passionate and almost despairing love.