Читать книгу By Dim and Flaring Lamps - Alan Le May - Страница 11

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Julie Delorme had not known Shep was aboard the Royal Oaks when she unexpectedly ran into him upon the promenade. She greeted him with astonishment and an open delight that dumbfounded him, considering that she had forgotten to so much as wave to him when she went ashore at Ash Landing. She went through a soundless clapping of hands, and even a small, token jumping up and down, as if she were a little girl. For a moment he hopefully thought she was about to throw her arms around his neck, but she wasn’t that glad to see him.

The hundred or so passengers travelling south from St. Louis included few eligible young men—those would come aboard farther south; and now Shep and Julie picked up where they had left off before Ash Landing. They settled at once into a happy familiarity, in which she hung upon his arm at the least excuse, or with none, much as if they had known each other all their lives instead of during only one slow trip up the Missouri. Oddly, Shep found himself continually humbled, rather than exalted, by Julie’s treatment of him as her best and oldest friend ... most of the time.

He was daunted, at first, by the Royal Oaks itself, for he supposed it to be Julie’s natural setting, in contrast to which the Tealwing was a scrubby fish-box on a raft. The Royal Oaks wasn’t the biggest packet on the river; her 328-foot length was thirty-five feet under that of the vast Eclipse. But she had three decks, not counting the unroofed hurricane, or the texas, half a deck higher, with the gold-leafed pilothouse towering above that. She had carpets so thick that waves were said to run across them if a breeze got in, and an oil-painting of Victoria Falls, or something, on every stateroom door. During dinner an orchestra played, and a brass band serenaded the important landings. Thirty stewards were carried to work the dinner tables alone.

The Royal Oaks could probably make her upstream run, from New Orleans to St. Louis, in five days if called on. But Captain Delorme never put speed ahead of business, and took anywhere from three to four weeks for the round trip.

Shep made inquiries for Pap at Cape Girardeau, where they sometimes left messages, and at their bank in Cairo, but the Missouri wilderness had swallowed Pap and Trapper without trace. Shep was relieved, rather than bothered; his feeling about it, this time, was that it could keep them from him a while, and give him a little time to himself right where he was.

Now that he was with Julie again he couldn’t remember how he had ever thought he could get her out of his mind. He would have been dumbfounded had he known how many nights she lay awake worrying for fear she wasn’t pretty enough. Middle-aged women of the deckchair brigade usually placed her as “a lovely girl,” by which they meant she had the lucency of youth in her favour, if not much else. Words like “pretty,” “beautiful,” “lovely,” never came into Shep’s mind in relation to Julie. He found it equally difficult to keep his eyes off her whether she was biting a hangnail or romping out a reel; and he was certain no other girl on earth could ever replace her.

He had trouble keeping his eyes from drifting to her when she was nearby, yet politeness prevented his staring at her. It had been different in the days when he was confined to the cargo deck. Sometimes, then, he had studied her from no great distance, making blunt-minded speculations he was ashamed of now, secure in the conviction that a mule-boy in butternuts was invisible to the likes of her. But he wasn’t invisible any more, so instead developed an acute awareness of where she was whether he could see her or not. He might be in the stockpens on the main deck, drenching an ailing horse, and she might be three and a half decks above, in her cabin in the texas, yet he would be as clearly conscious of her there as if the decks had been glass. If the notion came to him that she was brushing her hair, it carried such conviction that he seemed to see her brushing her hair.

South of Cairo an occasional rival began to come aboard, and from Memphis on down they appeared in numbers. Probably there were not more than half a dozen of any significance, but to Shep they seemed to swarm. They were planters’ sons, mostly, easygoing young men, who laughed a good deal. Why shouldn’t they, without a care in the world? Among them Shep remained a loner, neither snubbed nor cultivated. He had nothing they wanted, nothing they could fear. Main thing they all had in common was their interest in Julie. Still, Shep managed to spend his share of time with her, and considerably more. Plainly, she was helping him to manœuvre this. Sometimes she might seem to forget him for half a day; but mostly she kept up his illusion of being her best, her closest friend. As when something struck the two of them as ridiculous, unnoticed by anybody else, their eyes would seek each other’s, and hold for a moment, expressionlessly sharing the joke.

And there were times when she had a special magic, not to be expected in any human being. The Royal Oaks had dancing every night; but though Julie sometimes dragged him out to dance with her, and coached him when she had a chance, he didn’t take much part in it, there were so many to cut in who were better at it. So he often watched from the shadows, seeing nobody but her. Caleese, who made most of Julie’s clothes, must have spent the entire winter copying everything in New Orleans. In her off-shoulder ball gowns Julie was two things at once, like a mermaid. Above the so-called neckline, which was below the armpits, her bare shoulders were flesh and blood, but where Julie left off and the dress began she became something else. Caleese had a trick by which the outer layers of the hooped and swirling skirts were made of gauze, so that below the armour-bearing bodice there was no girl at all, but something like a pearly vapour. Like a butterfly, he thought. No, butterflies flap. She kind of sails along the way a pie tin goes spinning downcurrent. Maybe like a little hunk of river mist, when rays of sunlight strike in, and get lost in it. With about as much rainbow through all as one dewdrop has. Yes, that’s more like it. Some living thing, made out of mist.... But whenever he tried to tell her how magical she seemed—“That’s a right purty dress” was all he could make out to say.

Long before Natchez all those eligible, well-fixed young men had shown him the immediacy of his danger. At eighteen Julie was already beginning to think of herself as an old maid. She can marry anybody she wants, by no more than lifting a finger. She’ll do it, too, and mighty soon—never mind how her old man hollers. Only hope is to marry her myself. Some way or another.

He had to admit to himself, though, that it couldn’t very well be done at once, or anything like it. Here in Julie’s world he was no more in command of his fate than a minnow in a butter churn. Where would he put her?

The Danielses’ home base was at Paducah, only some thirty miles up the Ohio on the Kentucky shore. Here, behind the pretty river town, they kept up a small farm, rich-soiled but not big enough to be used for much more than a holding yard. The house was pinched and flimsy; they had never got around to replacing its peeling paint, and probably never would, for it didn’t seem to matter any more, now that Ma was dead. But the barns were magnificent, and the land itself was cut up into paddocks by an expensive amount of white-painted fence. To run it they had a distant relative named Henry Hazen, called Cousin Henry by both Pap and the boys, though he wasn’t as closely related as that. Cousin Henry was a plump, rosy-cheeked, white-whiskered old fuddy-duddy, full of benevolent intentions, and without an enemy in the world. He thought of himself as a lawyer, or sometimes as a storekeeper, having failed in both professions. Actually he was a back-country farmer, of the type very likely to leave a rake lying around, tines up, and later step on it in the dark. Still, with a couple of ageing Negroes to do the actual work, he was capable of taking care of whatever livestock happened to be on hand.

The little old paint-scaled house was dear to Shep, as any place where you were born and raised is bound to be, but he could not imagine leaving Julie there. He needed time, time to make a deal with Pap, and time to implement it. So he said nothing to Julie yet. He told himself he was holding back lest Jim Sam get wind of his intentions and bulljine the stage plank out from under him before he was set. But in the back of his mind he must have known he was trying to hide a different fear, a fear of putting Julie herself to the test.

From Memphis on down he got to work. What time he was not with Julie he spent talking to every male of consequence on board, endlessly repeating Ashland’s description of the horses wanted, though without using the name. The South was not having a good year; every year had been bad in the South for quite some time. Shep got plenty of promises to bring a number of head to one or another of the boat’s scheduled landings, on her upstream trip. Most of these prospective suppliers would forget to come, of course, or not get around to it; he could pretty well tell by talking to a man what was to be expected of him. As, when he told a big planter that anything over fifty dollars better come with gold shoes. “Gold shoes? Why, suh, my magnificent animals weah the golden wings of Icarus!” Hopes to saw off a string of crocks, Shep interpreted this.

This activity, as much as Julie herself, kept Pap and Trapper well towards the back of his mind. A dim spook was haunting him back there, a dark shadow of uncertainty, of anxiety, tinged with some sense of guilt, but he was able to avoid thinking about it much. The Royal Oaks ran singing down the greatest of all rivers, loitering at Helena, Rosedale, Arkansas City, Vicksburg and Port Gibson, besides touching at twenty-five or thirty plantation landings; and tied up at Natchez with her band ablasting.

It was at Natchez that the whole relationship between Shep and Julie changed again; for here Rodger Ashland came aboard.