Читать книгу Swallows & Amazons - Boxed Set - Arthur Ransome - Страница 93

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Everyone had grown accustomed to Peter Duck. He seemed, somehow, to be part of the ship, and they themselves seemed to have lived in the Wild Cat for a long time. They would have been startled if anyone had suddenly reminded them that the Swallows had come aboard for the first time only three days before, and the Amazons less than a week before them. But now, as they waited for the old sailor to begin, and he sat there on the edge of his bunk, pushing the dottle of tobacco into his pipe with a horny thumb, he seemed different. The light of the lantern hanging under the beam fell on the same old kindly wrinkled face, but it was as if those shrewd old eyes of his were looking at them out of another world. This, perhaps, was because he was remembering things that had happened a very long time ago.

“By my thinking,” he said at last, “there’s nothing there to make much of a do about. A little money maybe, and if any man were to have it in his own pocket he’d find it burning a hole there, and he’d spend it likely on what he’d be sorry for, and in the end he’d be worse off than if he’d never had the handling of it. By my thinking that’s what it is, and I’ve been sorry enough that ever I tell that yarn to my wife that’s dead now, and my three daughters when they was little girls, thirty year ago maybe or more. It’s been a plague to me ever since, not but what most folk know by now that I’m not going to do a thing about it. . . .”

“About what?” said Roger.

“Treasure?” said Captain Flint.

“About whatever it is,” said Peter Duck. “Whatever it is I saw buried down at the foot of a coco-nut palm, fifty, sixty, or maybe seventy years ago.”

“But where were you?” asked Roger.

“In the coco-nut tree, of course,” said Peter Duck, “in the coco-nut tree, just waking out of my night’s sleep.”

Another idea struck Roger. “Did you snore then, too?” he asked.

“Roger,” said Susan severely.

“He does now,” said Roger. “Beautifully.”

“I reckon I didn’t then,” said Peter Duck slowly, “or they’d have heard me and buried it in some other place. And maybe they’d have buried me too,” he added after a pause.

“Who?”

“Shut up, Roger,” said Captain Flint. “You’ll hear if you keep your ears open and your mouth shut.”

“I’d better begin at the beginning,” said Peter Duck, “and tell you how it all come about. You see I’d slipped my cable out of Lowestoft, and gone to London in a coaster. And I’d run away from her at Greenhithe, and then in the docks I shipped aboard a fine vessel trading to the Brazils, shipped as cabin-boy I had, when I was no bigger than this ship’s boy that keeps wanting me to crowd on topsails before my anchor’s fair out of the ground. We’d a fair passage across the Western Ocean but it ended over soon. Struck a pampero or a Sugar Coast hurricane or one of them other big winds she did, and lost both her sticks and broke her back, and we took to the boats and she smashed one of them, and the other one, the one that I was in, didn’t last long, but a seaman in her lashed me to a spar, and the next I knew was that I was washed up, beached good and proper on a bit of an island. There was a big surf roaring along that shore, and if I’d chosen any other place I’d have had the life pounded out of me at once, but I’d had no choosing in it, being lashed to the spar and half drowned anyways, and I was washed up between some rocks into a narrow little hole of a place where the surf didn’t run though the spray was spouting over from the swell that was rolling in against the rocks outside. I never see any of the others again off that ship. The first thing I did see was crabs.”

“Big ones?” asked Roger, and Titty nudged him with her elbow.

“All sizes,” said Peter Duck, “but mostly small. And these crabs they wasn’t the sort of crabs you know. They look at me greedy-like, and come on, waving them clippers of theirs and opening and shutting them. It wasn’t above a minute or so before one of them crabs was taking a hold of the calf of my leg. Well, you may lay to it, I wasted no more time than I could help in getting free from that spar, and then I fetched that crab a kick and threw a stone at the others. I got one, too, and he fell over. And his friends was on him in a minute, and their clippers clacking like a watermill, and waving over him, and then they had him to pieces and into their mouths and crunch, crunch . . . horrible sight it was . . . and them crabs looking greedy at me all the time.

“And then when I walk up that beach to have a look about me and to see if there was any others of us saved, I might have been a drum-major, the way that regiment of crabs come following after, running sideways, and lifting themselves, and clapping their clippers, and goggling at me with them eyes of theirs, set on their faces like them martello towers you see along the south coast. I hadn’t the tonnage of Roger there, and I didn’t like the look of them crabs.

“But in the end I was glad of them. I couldn’t find a thing to eat, not at first. And then, after I’d killed a few more of them crabs, I was listening to the others cracking them and crunching them, and I didn’t see why I shouldn’t have a share. So the next one of them crabs that come too close to me, I killed him with a stone and grabbed him up before them others could get at him, and pulled his clippers off, and smashed his shell with the stone, and found him pretty good eating, particularly the handle end of them clippers of his. The stuff I sucked out of them was good and tasty and there was a bit in there that was decent chewing too. I was hungry, of course, to begin, but the taste of them crabs was a long ways better than what you might think it might be. I ate three or four of them right away.

“And my eating them crabs seemed to do me a bit of good with the others, for pretty soon they’d slither away in a hurry if I stepped sharply, and I had only to pick up a stone to send them scuttling all ways at once. But the worst as you might say was to come. For them crabs that was running about in the daytime was as harmless as lambs beside them that showed up at night. Just as night come down these other crabs come up, and they was the sort that if I threw a stone at one of them he’d just think nothing of catching it in them clippers of his and heaving it back. That was the sort of crabs these was, and they seemed to think as I was just what they was wanting. They was tired of eating them small crabs and I reckon they think I was something new, with a softer kind of shell.

PRACTICE WITH THE HALYARDS

“I legged it just in time, and the biggest of them had a clipper full of the starn of my breeches and I hope it choked him. Them breeches was no good after, no protection at all. But, as I was saying, I legged it, and swarmed up one of them young coco-nut palms as was growing along that shore a bit above high-water marks. And up in the top of that tree there was some young coco-nuts, and I cut a hole in one with my knife, and the milk come trickling out, and I found just a little meat in it too. And I slept up in the tree all that night and come down in the morning and took it out of them smaller crabs, and did well enough what with them and the coco-nuts. But when night come there was them bigger crabs again, and I knew enough now not to let one get a hold of me. I was shinning up that tree with time and to spare.

“And so it went on, day after day and night after night, and I got into a regular way of living, always shinning up that tree at fall of night and coming down again when I felt hungry and the sun was up. It was a lazy kind of life, and the winds used to rock them coco-nut palms. It was like sleeping in a cradle, or a hammock, an easy kind of motion. It wasn’t no kind of blame to me that I come to sleep long hours. There wasn’t no bells striking, and there wasn’t no bosun after me with a rope’s end. It all come as a kind of a holiday. And then one day when I’d slept maybe longer than usual, I waked up in a hurry with the sound of folk talking under my tree.”

“Who was it?” asked Titty breathlessly, and Roger might have nudged her with his elbow, but he didn’t think of it.

“Lucky for me I looked to see before shouting out,” said Peter Duck. “I looked down through them palm leaves, and there was two men at the foot of my tree, digging a hole in the ground with a long knife.”

“Pirates?” said Titty.

“They looked all that to me,” said Peter Duck. “And they sounded all that, the way they was talking. One of them was crouching and digging, while t’other one of them was looking round. And then that one would dig away and the one that had been digging before would stretch his arms and take a turn at looking round.

“ ‘I’d be sorry for the one that sees us at this,’ says one of them.

“ ‘There’s not one will have thought of following us, not with that keg I let them take ashore,’ says the other.

“No boy gets brought up at a rope’s end, as you might say, without knowing when to keep his mouth shut, and I see quick enough this was no time for talking. So I kept still up there among the leaves at the top of that palm and looking down on them and watching what they was doing. Pretty soon one says he reckons the hole’s deep enough, and the other one says there’s none likely to come seeking for it on this side of the island where there’s no shelter for ships. ‘And it isn’t as if we was going to leave it for long,’ says the other. And with that they takes a sort of a square bag they had from right under the tree where I hadn’t seed it before. . . . Square all ways that bag was . . .”

“Couldn’t it have been a box that they’d put in the bag for easy carrying?” asked Captain Flint. He dropped a match that had burnt all the way to his fingers. He had lit it meaning to light his pipe but had somehow forgotten about it.

“That’s just what it likely was,” said Peter Duck. “You could see the corners of it sticking through the canvas. Well, they took this square bag and lowered it down into their hole, and then they scraped the sand and earth in again with their knives and their hands and stamped it down and smoothed it over till they was satisfied, and with that they slapped each other on the back and went walking off again among the trees.

“I was down out of my bedroom quick enough after that. You see, it come to me clear that pirates was humans, which crabs is not, and that them two had a ship somewheres, and that maybe I’d see Lowestoft again, which I’d given up all thought of. So I went legging it away through the trees after them two. And they went clean across the island, with me not so far from them among the trees, over the shoulder of the big hill there is there, and sure enough, looking down the other side, I see a smart brig lying to her anchor. So I hurried me on down on that side of the island, and there was a boat drawn up there by a stream I’d known nothing of, me not daring to go in among the trees before. And there was a fire burning, and half a dozen men singing and laughing round a keg they had there chocked up between a couple of stones. I had sense enough to slip away through the trees till I could come at the men from along the shore, and then I set up yelling and shouting till they see me.”

“What happened then?” said Peggy.

“Shut up, you galoot,” said Nancy. “He’s just going to tell you.”

“They ask me how I come there, and I told them about the shipwreck and how I’d been eating crabs and drinking coco-nut milk, and one of them give me a hunk of bread and another give me the first swig of rum that ever I had in my life, which near took the skin off my gullet. ‘You’re all right now,’ says one. ‘Captain’s luck holds. You’ll be welcome. It’s as if you knowed we was short of a cabin-boy since the old man threw the last one overboard to teach him swimming one day when he was playful like.’ I can tell you I begin to think I’d have done better to stay by them crabs.

“But just then them other two come, the two that buried that square bag under my bedroom. That’s what I used to call that tree of mine. They was the captain and the mate. They asked me sharp enough where I’d come from, and I told them I didn’t know, but I’d been wrecked out of a London ship and wanted to get home to Lowestoft where I belonged. They took me aboard in the end. Sailing for London they was, and a rare passage they made of it. All the way home across the Western Ocean they kept me on the run fetching tots of rum for them to the state-room aft. I’ve often wondered since how we got as far as we did. And all the time while they was drinking they’d be talking one to t’other and t’other back again, secret-like, about something they’d left, which I took to be that square bag. But likely it wasn’t. . . .”

“It couldn’t have been anything else,” said Captain Flint.

“ ‘Let ’em lie,’ they’d say, ‘let ’em lie. And then when all’s clear, and they’ve no line on us about the ship, we’ll call for ’em and bring ’em home and sell ’em gradual, and ride in carriages we will and nod to princes when they lifts their hats to us.’ ”

“What was the name of the ship?” asked Captain Flint suddenly.

“The Mary Cahoun,” said Peter Duck. “But that wasn’t the vessel they was talking of. They’d but new got the Mary and they’d come up from round the Horn in some other ship. I knew that from their talk, for when they was meaning this other ship they’d call her ‘the old packet,’ and they called the Mary by her name. And from what I heard, the captain and the mate of that other ship had died something sudden, and it’s come to me since that this precious pair I was with had taken their papers and their names at the same time. Captain Jonas Fielder they called one of them, the one that was skipper, but he’d R. C. B. tattooed on his forearm. Many’s the time I see it when he was sitting there in his shirt-sleeves lifting his glass of grog. There was something wrong most ways, it seem to me. They knew it too. The nearer we come to England the more they’d drink. They kept on lifting their glasses and swilling their grog and choking with it, and banging each other on the back as if they was afraid of something and wanted to think of something else. And then other times they would pull out a chart and look at it, and wore a hole in it they did, marking one of the islands with pencil and then rubbing the marks out. And when they’d swigged an extra lot of rum they’d just sit and wink at each other and show each other bits of paper where they’d written down some figures. And then in the morning when they was sober, more or less, they would go hunting round the cabin floor for them scraps of paper and wondering how many they’d left there, and if the crew had found them. And if they found one of them scraps of paper they’d lay into me with a rope’s end for not tidying it overboard. And if they didn’t find one they’d lay into me and say I’d picked it up for myself. Well naturally in the end I come to know those scraps of paper pretty well, and I see they all had the same figures, and I sewed up one of them in the inside of my jacket thinking whatever it was I’d paid for it in rope’s-ending anyways.”

“And those were the bearings of the island?” Captain Flint dropped another burnt but unused match on the floor and put his foot on it.

“Longitude and latitude they was. No more. Them two reckoned to find that island again, and needed no more to help them find their square bag, for they’d buried it themselves, and I dare say they’d taken all the bearings they needed. They knew those figures by heart, did them two, and before we come to the end of the voyage I knew them too, with seeing them so often. Anyhow the figures was no good to either of them chaps, for they come home with a westerly gale and a full skin of rum apiece, and they piled the Mary Cahoun on Ushant rocks. There was nobody saved out of her but the bosun and me, and the bosun had his ribs stove in and his skull cracked, and he was dead when some of them French fishermen come by and take us off the rock we was on just before the tide rose high enough to sweep us off. Another ten minutes and they’d have been too late for me. They was too late for the bosun anyway.

“That’s the yarn. That’s all there was to it, and you never would have thought it’d have sent half the young lads of Lowestoft crazy when I come to tell it thirty years after, and maybe more than that.”

“But I don’t see what all this has to do with Black Jake,” said Captain Flint.

“I’m coming to that,” said Peter Duck.