Читать книгу Claire Ambler - Booth Tarkington - Страница 7

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ALMOST any body of water with a depth of a few feet, even an inland creek, will afford the means to those desirous of taking such a risk; but an ocean is unquestionably the handiest thing for the purpose. The North Atlantic, in particular, offers opportunity during the glassiest calm of a summer day as well as when distorted by winter tumults; it is necessary only to reduce to the proper degree the staunchness of the craft in which one goes to sea. Upon this point there have been arguments; many coastwise seafarers holding that no canoe whatever is an appropriate vehicle for these waters; while, on the other hand, there are records of notable ocean voyages made in canoes. But not in such a canoe, all will agree, as that selected by young Nelson for his gesture of indifference to Miss Ambler.

It was a dainty slip of a boat, pretty in pea-green and gold, fourteen feet long, with green-and-white cushions: it belonged to the youngest of Nelson’s sisters, and she kept it upon an inlet to be used there as an adjunct to moonlight and a banjo. Upon its bows, in gold letters, twinkled the unromantic name, Peanut, never intended for salty incrustations; but salt already dimmed the gold leaf, that morning, when the Peanut spanked itself through the harbour mouth and fantastically stood out to sea. The breeze was from the east, and Nelson knew that Platter Thomas would take the Caliph—the Reek and Thomas motorboat—straight into the breeze, because thus the consequent splashing would be more impressive to a passenger. This was the canoeist’s unhesitating cynical conviction, and therefore, desiring to prove to Claire his utter indifference to herself, he paddled straight into the wind and was two miles off shore before the Caliph came in sight.

Of course he expected to show her more than his indifference; he meant her to see a greater man than either of the owners of the Caliph. And here a little mystery is reached. It is difficult to understand why he felt that going to sea in a fourteen-foot canoe proved his indifference to her in particular; though his thought that the voyage would show her his superiority to Platter and Bill is more comprehensible. If she admired daring, his position, compared to that of people in a forty-foot vessel, was admirably perilous; but to explain his feeling that a special indifference to her was thus exhibited, it can only be supposed that she was to understand herself included as a part of his life, and he was certainly proving his indifference to that.

For the morning sea had become lively. That is, it was pleasantly choppy for a forty-foot boat, heavy in mahogany and brass, but rather showily rough for a canoe; and the roughness increased with the freshening breeze. In fact, long before he heard the powerful exhaust of the Caliph behind him, Nelson knew he was committed to the eastward course, which took him always farther off shore; he was committed to it because he didn’t dare to turn round. He knew that he couldn’t trust the Peanut broadside in the trough, which was growing deeper and deeper, richly green and crested with sparkling white; and, since he had no choice but to go on, though the farther he went the more threatening was the sea, his situation began to present an aspect dishearteningly like the realization of a nightmare. He had intended his gesture to be magnificent, but not suicidal; and now, as more and more it bore the latter appearance, he heard with relief the exhaust of the Caliph growing rapidly louder. The glittering motorboat overhauled him; then slowed down and came to its lowest speed, moving alongside the Peanut and not ten feet away. Platter Thomas and Claire sat side by side in the control cockpit, and she was laughing merrily.

Nelson, paddling with tired arms, gave them only a cold and hasty side glance; but there was more than one reason for him to keep his eyes strictly ahead.

“Nelson!” Claire called. “You haven’t any idea how funny you look! All you need is a pussy cat and plenty of honey wrapped up in a five-pound note! Where on earth’d you find that ridiculous little boat? Oh, look!” She grasped her host’s arm, and Nelson was well aware of this impulsive friendliness of hers, even though he perceived it with the tail of his eye. “Do see its name?” she cried. “It’s called the Peanut.” And, thoroughly comprehending that she was the reason for the Peanut’s present voyage, she uttered peal on peal of girlish laughter.

Platter Thomas was more serious. “Yes,” he said. “A peanut’s about all it is too.” He addressed Nelson sternly. “Look here; you ought to know a thing like that hasn’t got any business outside the harbour. You ought to know that much, anyhow.”

Nelson did know that much; he knew it poignantly; but when Claire laughed at him and grasped Platter’s arm, his bitterness became more acute than his anxiety. “Run along!” he said. “That old gas-tub’ll blow up if you ever get a back fire. Run along!”

“Look here!” Platter said. “You go on back where you belong. That canoe’s about a quarter full o’ water right now, and if you stopped heading her up long enough to bail, she’d capsize on you. Haven’t you got any sense?”

“Run along,” Nelson said. “Run along and play you’re a sailor!”

Platter was irritated. “Look out or I will!” he retorted; but, disturbed by his more humane impulses, he made a magnanimous offer. “Listen! On account of your not having any more sense than to come out here on that shingle, I’ll let you climb into my after cockpit; and then Claire and I’ll take you back inside the harbour, where you belong. You can stay there and pretend you’re out in the real ocean and have just as good a time as you think you’re having now. Hurry up and climb aboard; I can’t fool with you all morning.”

“Run along!” Nelson said. “When you want to really learn something about boats come around and ask me; I’ll give you beginners’ lessons free.”

His tone, like Platter’s, was not one of good-natured badinage, though it assumed to be that; there was a goading superiority in it, intended to exasperate. Small boys often take this tone with one another; and older boys, even of eighteen or twenty, are so little older that sometimes they use it, too—most frequently, no doubt, in the presence of a courted, pretty young creature like Claire. Nelson and Platter were really insulting each other, though affecting to engage in casual raillery.

The fact that they did affect at least the air of raillery is an indication that civilization is progressing: two young sprigs, rivals for a maiden’s favour in the sixteenth-century, would have made no such pretense; daggers would have been tapped, but in spite of our increasing civilization, young rivals still sometimes go to life-and-death lengths; and Nelson deliberately went to that length now. He profoundly desired the security—indeed, the salvation—of the Caliph’s after cockpit; he knew that if he rejected it and the motorboat departed, his position would be critical; yet he did reject it. Flopping wildly upon the rushing seas, into which he kept the Peanut headed by only the most watchful effort, he nevertheless successfully concealed his real desperation. “Run along!” he said. “Run along and pretend you’re scarin’ the jellyfishes to death!”

Platter, stung, looked down upon him darkly. “All right,” he said. “Don’t blame me if you drown!” With that, he slid forward a strip of brass upon the wheel; the Caliph’s exhaust again began to roar and the boat slapped forward into the chop. A moment later it was tossing the foam from its risen bows and beginning to speed; Nelson and the Peanut receded quickly as Claire looked back at them.

“Dear me!” she said, still laughing. “He certainly thought he was razzing us, didn’t he? How funny he does look—exactly like a grasshopper on a cucumber rind! Such splashing and lurching! You’d almost think he was going to upset.”

“He will if he isn’t careful,” Platter said crossly. “Well, it’d be his own fault. When you offer to help people at sea and they won’t take it, you’re supposed to let ’em alone; it’s a kind of an unwritten law or something; but anyhow he’s prob’ly all right. That’s his sister’s canoe and he ought to know how much it’ll stand. He’ll turn around and go back as soon as we’re out of sight and he can’t show off any more.”

“I guess so,” she returned; then she pointed to three small black triangles lifted at the moment from the surface of the water. “Aren’t those sharks?”

“Yes, they are.”

“They’re going the other way, aren’t they, Platter?”

“Yes, toward shore.”

She laughed delightedly. “How thrilling! If they keep on they’ll pass right by Nelson. You s’pose he’ll see them? You s’pose it’ll make him nervous?”

“Do him good if they did,” Platter said severely, and then added, with little hope for his former friend’s chances of improvement: “But they never do hurt anybody and I guess he knows it.”

Here his surmise was correct. To the best of Nelson’s information the sharks in these waters had never attacked a living person and were not maneaters; nevertheless there is a striking difference between knowing such a thing on shore, or on a staunch vessel, and knowing it in a fourteen-foot canoe undecided between swamping and capsizing. For the three sharks did indeed hold their course toward the coast; Nelson did indeed see them; and they did indeed make him nervous, though without doing him the “good” so securely prophesied for him by young Mr. Thomas.

“You get away from here!” Nelson said angrily to the three triangles when they were revealed to his view almost directly ahead of him, and only a few short waves distant.

They continued to approach, placidly sinister.

The Caliph was now so far away that the two figures in the cockpit were indistinguishable. The boat appeared to be no more than a small brown arrowhead, flying upon two little white wings of spume; and Nelson knew that he himself and the Peanut had become invisible to the Caliph. His human loneliness upon the vast water all at once seemed a dreadful thing; and the next moment, when he saw the three dark fins close together and shining wetly in the dip of the wave just beyond the Peanut’s bow, uncontrollable panic seized upon him suddenly and completely.

“I told you to get away from here!” he shouted fiercely.

Then, forgetting his urgent need to keep his paddle every instant to its proper service, he swept it forward through the air in a gesture threatening the three ominous triangles. The bow of the Peanut immediately swung round into the trough and the little boat, caught upon its side, received a cargo of water and half capsized, half sank. Nelson went down into the cold salt water, gasping, “Oh, my gosh!”

Mentally, he had an insufferably crowded moment beneath the surface. He felt excruciating annoyance, hatred, and an anguish of revulsion. The annoyance was with his own folly, which he had the pain of realizing fully, under water; the hatred was for Claire; the revulsion was from his own recent dramatic emotions—from all that had led him to offer himself as a drowning breakfast for three sharks.