Читать книгу American Captain - Эдисон Маршалл - Страница 11

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In the next year, the Vindictive scurried about as though the ocean had the itch and we were his hand. Having passed my twentieth birthday, I got so close on twenty-one that I let it go at that, a notable number pleasant in my ears.

A ship at sea is a good place to study human nature. Men’s strengths and weaknesses show plain, and while bound together to fight the sea, their separate identities stand forth. Of human generosity, fortitude, and especially bravery, I had seen an abundance. There was sin to be found at every waterfront—often to enjoy, occasionally to repent—and it seemed natural as breathing. It was in the knowledge of evil that I remained an ignoramus. Our fellowship under Captain Phillips had held it at bay.

What I had learned heretofore of ships and sailing was being expanded and better ordered and more deeply entrenched. As for learning navigation, I could not have picked a better school than the Vindictive. Captain Phillips was an old octant man, still awkward with Captain Campbell’s sextant that came into general use about the time of our war with King George. Mate Hedric could shoot the sun as straight as old Chief Baldpate of the Kennebec, with his ceremonial arrow at a time of drouth; and with not much more consequence, since he was too thick-headed to chart a course. Our second mate, Mr. Tyler, was an excellent navigator, but when he went off watch, more and more of the figuring fell to me. The schooling I had had at Hanover no doubt proved useful to me, though I would have been hard put to it to say how; and my desire to please Captain Phillips and to get on drove me to study the science in my spare time. So by the spring of 1801 I was as fit for second mate’s papers as most who held the post.

In all truth, the second mate of a 200-ton schooner is no great shakes. This last sounds like a Vermont expression, and since the Green Mountains grow folk of lively imagination, I wonder now if “great sheiks,” pronounced the same, and of the same comic grandeur as “high Mogul,” was not the original meaning. The sailors put it best by the saying that a second mate must still get his hands in the tar bucket. The fact remained that he was an officer, quartered aft the mast, and a long step up from a bosun. Even so, I could not take it now if it required my leaving the Vindictive.

This was my secret. I could not stand the thought of parting with her yet; as I had stood on the beach that late afternoon before Captain Phillips had spoken to me, I had drunk a cup of loneliness that I wished never to taste again. Time might heal the wound—time is the gentleman, say the wise Chinese—or when we brought the vessel home for an overhaul, I might find me a blue-water sailor’s daughter, comely and shapely, who would banish the blue devils forevermore.

My best quick chance lay in Mr. Tyler getting a ship of his own. He was of quarter-deck size, and being considered for the captaincy of a sloop being built at Mr. Derby’s yards in Salem. In March, when we touched at Lisbon, bound again for the Mediterranean, the harbor master brought him letters, the contents of which he had not divulged. He was patently cheerful over their reading, and our master somewhat glum.

We were fetching a cargo of Nantucket whale oil consigned to an English merchant in Naples. Again an English frigate undertook to convoy us and some other merchantmen through the Strait—and on this occasion she did not lose us in the fog. Moreover, her manner was more polite. Yankee clippers turned privateer had shown their mettle once more in our huggermugger war with France, and one of these days even England might need our help. It was true that Napoleon talked of peace, but the sailors said his treaties were only fit for Josephine’s commode. Also, the Barbary seahawks, rifer than ever and more bold, pulled the whiskers of the British lion unless he gave them meat.

We raised no lateen sail on our voyage up and along the instep of the boot. When we had discharged, we took our empty bottom into the harbor of Marsala. Here we would lade the pale sweet wine of the same name, to fetch to Copenhagen.

Marsala lay on a low spit on the west coast of Sicily. We liked the look of her as we ran in, and I think of this and the whole scene as kind of a prelude of some events to come. Prelude means usually an introductory strain of music. There was a kind of music on the deck that morning, expressed not so much in sound as in men’s harmony with one another and their surroundings. The sun was bright, the weather warm, and every face was cheerful at the prospect of going to shore, seeing new sights, eating spaghetti with grated goat cheese washed down with sweet wine, and larking somewhat when the evening lamps were lighted. Every one of us felt in close bond with the rest. We were happy in the strength of our body.

We were making toward our intended anchorage under close sail. Captain Phillips stood on his quarter-deck on the weather side; four hands waited about the 400-pound anchor on the fo’c’sle head; and its 4-inch cable was bighted to run out.

It must be that our master, too, was daydreaming of the port and good ground beneath his feet, because we had run in farther than he had at first intended. I saw him start, glance at the shore, then bawl his order.

“Heave your iron.”

The urgency in his voice was transmitted to the minds and muscles of the four sailors. They made haste to lift the big hook, two grasping the flukes and two the stocks. “O-heave-O,” they chanted in quick rhythm; but their grunt as they let go was cut from our hearing by a sharp cry. George Greenough, a fine six-footer from Falmouth, had got out of balance in the heavy heaving, so that one of the stocks had rammed under his belt and caught in his clothes. As the black shape plunged down, it looked like some sea beast that had snatched human prey from our deck and was bearing it to its weedy lair.

A thrill of horror passed through me the same as every soul aboard. In the ensuing instant there was no sound on the deck, and only one man left his place. George Greenough’s brother Will, one of the steadiest men in our company, was thrown off another kind of balance by the sight. With his arms shooting out before him and his hands meeting to cleave water, he sprang to the rail. But before he reached there, our master had drawn his breath. Forth it came in a clear command.

“Will Greenough, hold your post.”

I sensed a slight pause as his mind worked. Meanwhile I had raised my head and stood squarely with my eyes fixed on his. This was to attract his attention and make him remember what he knew about me germane to the present pass. Instantly he responded.

“Bosun Whitman, if you think you might help him, go down.”

I had deemed the chance fair, and perhaps good. The depth here was three and a half fathoms—I had looked at the charts before we ran in—and the bottom well-packed silt. In respect to the warm weather, I was already barefoot. Before Captain Phillips could complete his orders to Mate Hedric, I had shed my shirt and kicked out of my breeches. Then I ran aft to the point where the running cable slid hissing into the water and dived in.

In one gasp I had filled my lungs with air. Aye, they were brimming with it as casks with water, when men must abandon ship in mid-ocean. Grabbing the cable, I climbed down it hand under hand, my feet kicking to give me every possible jot of speed. But the slanting course seemed heartbreakingly slow. George had not buoyed up and was pinned down by the ponderous shackle. Perhaps it had wounded him to death. If not, how soon would it lurch forward over him?

I could be sure that the same horror lay on Captain Phillips. Every sailor finds out at last the power of a ship’s headway—how she lunges on, making mock of wind or tide, despite dropped sails and hard-set helm. Now he must stop her before the cable could run out and come taut. Otherwise the anchor would be dragged a distance, its great flukes plowing the harbor bottom, and tearing to pieces any soft thing in its way.

But the terrible prospect soon faded from my mind. All other fear passed with it, driven off by a kind of elation I was never to understand or which folk can hardly believe. Truly, it was like that which rises to the brain from drinking wine. I fought the sea and the danger with devilish joy. Worse yet, I had not the least feeling of pity for George Greenough, dead or insensible or mangled or struggling feebly. Getting him out alive would be only a token of victory, proof of my own powers.

My ears throbbed, my head swam, my heart thumped my side. It seemed that many minutes had passed since my plunge; actually it was little more than one minute, for I was still holding my breath. And now I made out through the milky waters a weird shape that I knew was the anchor. Half under it, I saw a dark form.

At that instant my breath gave out. It was suck air or take in water, so I let myself buoy up fast as in a children’s swing. My lungs filled with a sobbing sound, then I fought the hardest battle of my life so far—whether to go down again, or to give up.

The fresh air had sobered me instantly, and gone was my fool’s glory, and I was afraid the soon-lurching anchor would catch me too. Surely George Greenough had died in all this while. I could not believe what my best mind tried to tell me—that he had been under less than five minutes, and perhaps no more than three. I might have known it, could I reason that far, by the still-slack cable. Perhaps by some counting deep within my brain, I did know it.

It was a hard fight, but short. I could not keep this place in the slow tidal current, and any life left in George was ebbing fast. I never knew what moved me, but I turned over like a striking fish and went down head first. Most likely I was still obeying Captain Phillips.

I found the anchor in the deep dusk. Laying hold of it, I turned it on its side. This task required great strength, although the iron had lost part of its weight in the heavy water; then my heart fainted to see George’s form still hanging from its stock. God help me, I feared the iron knob had entered his body. A numbing terror gripped me now, for I knew, I know not how, that the captain had paid out all his cable with his ship still lurching on.

An instant later I received the warning. Although the length that I could see remained slack, I felt a stir of water close by, maybe a hissing, creaking sound. Lying belly down close to the bottom, kicking backward to keep down, I laid hold of the captive. My frantic hands could not loose his belt, but my tugging forced the stock’s end from beneath it, and he was free.

I had barely caught him by one arm when the slack cable sprang taut. It was as though life were in it, the life of a sea snake wakened from his sleep, and the iron, too, looked like a living thing as it lurched forward. One of the flukes struck me just below the knee. Although floating free, I was not spared a cruel blow, racking me with pain and knocking out of me the little air remaining in my lungs. It seemed too that I heard a faint crack, such a sound as I had never heard before.

When I tried to kick backward with that leg, it floated out from me like a frond of seaweed. But now I held George Greenough’s wrist in a firm grip as I thrust strongly against the bottom with my sound leg.

The anchor was lurching forward again. Just in time to avoid its clutch, I and my silent companion wafted upward. In brief seconds we had gained the surface and the blinding light of day; and I took a great gulp of air. Stroking lightly with one arm and one leg, I drew him along side, his head on my shoulder; and for the first time since I saw him heaving on the iron, I looked into his face.

It was ghastly pale where it was not blue, and his eyes were wide open and staring, but a boat made toward us now—the long oars flashing in the sun and the stern cleaving the gentle ripple—and the thrilling inkling came to me that he could be brought back from the darkness to life and light.