Читать книгу They Seek a Country - Francis Brett Young - Страница 22

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He was free. At first his legs, unaccustomed to liberty, seemed useless, deterred by the habit of being frustrated, from moving. When he came to examine his ankles he found that the shackle had rubbed and inflamed the skin, though in this he had got off more lightly than others who had ulcers to show: but indeed, in the exhilaration of this astonishing freedom and in the new joy of light and of air, which, now that a wind-sail had been set in the hatchway, swept the length of the prisoners’ pen and dried the newly-swabbed decks, such trifles were not to be dwelt on, and life, by contrast, seemed tolerable.

It appeared even more so when, on the following day, the order was given that convicts were to take two hours’ exercise, in three equal batches, in the waist of the ship on the main-deck. John Oakley and Dicketts, both of whom were berthed aft, found themselves in the same detachment. John waited with his friend till the last to give him a hand up the ladder—unnecessarily, for the one-legged man swung himself up with surprising agility. As he reached the companion top his unaccustomed eyes blinked; he was dismayed and almost blinded by the fierceness of light beating down from the flawless sky and reflected from the sun-bleached deck and surrounding sea. No such crystalline brightness had ever pierced the soft canopy of the Midland skies that he knew; he had never known that the glory of light could be cruel. For a time, unable to bear its assaults, he sat on the coaming of the main-hatch, his head in his hands. The sun pierced the texture of his shoddy grey uniform and warmed his back.

At length, daring to open his eyes, he perceived that the pen in which he would now be permitted to breathe fresh air twice a day resembled in shape—apart from the ranges of berths and the impending main-deck—the prison below. Here, as there, the enclosure was bounded, fore and aft and on either side above the level of the bulwarks, by wooden barricades that separated it from the fo’c’sle, the quarter-deck and the sea. For’ard and aft those members of the crew and of the guard who were not on duty diverted themselves. Beyond the quarter-deck, in inaccessible grandeur, rose the poop, from whose railing the master of the ship and the captain commanding the detachment of redcoats looked down on the forty-odd convicts who had emerged from the ’tween-decks with the interested remoteness of spectators on the brink of a bear-pit.

John Oakley was not aware of their scrutiny. When he lifted his light-blinded eyes from the deck he was overwhelmed by the dizzy height of the Minerva’s tapering masts; her towers of crowded canvas bellying against the blue sky; the white wings of birds that soared and wheeled or seemed to float without effort on the dazzling air; by the immensity of the surrounding sea disclosed on either hand as the vessel lifted and solemnly rolled this way and that on the long Atlantic swell; and above all by a sense of the smallness, the loneliness, the helplessness—not only of himself and of his unhappy comrades in exile but of the ship and all her company afloat and detached from all human-kind and all familiar sights on that trackless waste of waters.

Though it had used him so savagely, this was the first time he had actually set eyes on the ocean; and somehow this vast expanse of indigo translucent deep-sea sweeping slowly, rhythmically eastward in an endless succession of summits and troughs, on whose glassy surface the great ship rose and sank like a floating spar, seemed more terrible, in its implications of strength unexerted, in its sinister quietude, than the thunderous fury into which it had lately been lashed. In the evening, when he came on deck for his second turn of exercise, its aspect was even more solemn; for then the declining sun swept the great swell abeam. It burnished the crests of the waves with lurid light and magnified the depth of the troughs between with gigantic shadows; until, as the spent sun reached the horizon and sank into layers of vapour that took from its contact the semblance of mountainous land dissolved in a fiery flux of their molten substance, the whole waste grew black as ebony and cold and threatening, and the small floating speck of hapless life of which he made part seemed so feeble and pitiable that he was thankful when the bugle sounded and the guard, with their bayoneted muskets, drove him and his shivering comrades below.

That night, for the first time John Oakley slept soundly. Even the cramped berth irked him less, for two of its occupants had removed themselves with their blankets and dossed down on the deck, and the wind-sail set in the main-hatch brought into the prison-pen not merely a constant flood of soft, sweet air, but the soothing whisper of the bow-wave rippling along the Minerva’s sides. Indeed, now that the turmoil had subsided, he found that the ship (like all other ships) had, apart from such gross sounds as her bell’s clapper notes, the tread of the sentry and the pattering bare feet of the watch, a voice of her own, compact of a multitude of minute sounds: the singing note of taut shrouds and standing-ropes; the creaking of blocks; the dull flap of a filling sail; the seething and slapping of wavelets; and, beneath all these, in a sort of continuous bourdon, a complex sound that was even more integral and proper to herself, in which every component timber of her structure responded in turn to the strains the movement of the waves imposed on it. Sometimes, when the rhythm was set, the Minerva creaked like an enormous basket; sometimes the note gathered impetus and deepened to a monstrous snoring with which were mingled strange overtones that resembled the ringing of chimes or the solemn clangour of great bells tolling and humming in caverns under the sea. When, at times, in the middle of the night the relief of the guard or the change of watch aroused him, John would lie and listen to this strange concert until he fell asleep.

It was no stranger than all the rest of the circumstances in which he so incredibly found himself. Yet youth is adaptable and hardships are relative; and when once the convict-ship had escaped the region of storms the condition of life aboard her was hardly more brutal than that to which he had been used as a child in Dulston. It was its unfamiliarity rather than its harshness that at first had bewildered him; and now that the geography of the ship and the routine in which life proceeded to the call of bugles and striking of bells had become familiar, there was not much—apart from the loss of freedom which the crew and the soldiers shared—to grumble about. The very narrowness of his surroundings made them comprehensible. Though the food had, so far, been abominable, it was sufficient. The quarters, though overcrowded, were now moderately clean. His human relationships, of which his solitary upbringing had made him instinctively chary, were all that he needed.

His principal companion, naturally enough, was George Dicketts, who, after their happy re-discovery of each other, clung to him. At home, before common misfortune threw them together, they had been no more than acquaintances. Now friendship soon ripened between them. At first John had felt the appeal of the maimed man’s physical handicap: it was not long before he realized that in spite of it Dicketts was hardier and more adaptable than himself. This short, sturdy, broad-faced man with his blond beard and wide-set merry blue eyes had not marched with the Duke’s battalions in Flanders for nothing. His body, maimed though it might be, was that of an athlete, combining with huge physical strength and iron muscles an agility that matched the quickness of a shrewd, untutored mind whose reactions were swift and determined. It was no wonder that poor Aaron Sheldon, long since hanged outside Worcester jail, had chosen Dicketts as a companion in his poaching exploits. The man, though he joked and made himself out a buffoon, was as full of ready instincts and apprehensions as any wild creature with an equal share of cunning, courage and resource. Though Dicketts affected to give him credit for his superior intelligence and generally deferred to him, John Oakley knew that the lame man’s experience of rough living was wider and his fibre tougher than his own. He guessed that in any physical emergency involving both of them, George Dicketts would probably treat him as a child and take the lead and endure to the end, never losing for one moment the resolute cheerfulness which puckered his smiling eyes and widened his mouth with dry humour. Indeed, any man who could find matter for joking in the ghastly earlier days of the Minerva’s passage was well worth cultivating as a friend.

A third convict soon attached himself to them: in the beginning by reason of mere proximity, for now that the berth had happily been vacated by two of its original occupants, he was John’s nearest bed-fellow; but later by the natural attraction of like to like. He, too, was a countryman and another victim of the Game Law’s savagery. His name was Job Radway, and he came from a Warwickshire village on the northern edge of Cotswold, where he had worked as a ploughman like his father before him. It was no wonder that John had felt cramped in his berth and that two others had left it: Job Radway’s bulk was enough to fill half of it. He was an enormous fair-haired man, at least six feet three in height, with a vast spread of shoulder and unwieldy, ponderous limbs. He had a large craggy face with rough-hewn features that would have been noble but for a contradictory softness which gave them the look of a child’s. All his bodily movements were cumbrous and slow and ungainly. His great hands had no purpose; he lifted his feet as though the weight of the furrow’s clay still burdened them. His speech—and he spoke but rarely—had a rustic ponderousness; and his eyes, deep-set beneath shaggy blond eyebrows, were large and hurt and puzzled, yet so gentle in their bewildered solemnity that John could not help likening him in his secret mind to the pair of great shire horses, Bloom and Vic (named after the heir-apparent, the little princess), which, together with Katie his wife and a dog called Flash (that was a terror on rabbits), and his five small children, were the staple subjects of his talk, to judge from it, the only other inhabitants of the minute, sequestered world from which he had been torn.

His story, as he told it clumsily, lying by John’s side at night, was pitiful in its simplicity. He had worked, from the age of six when he was set to pick stones and scare crows, on the same farm near Moreton-in-the-Marsh, and risen by degrees to the proud position of carter; but the farmer who employed him had died and his horses had been sold, and the man who succeeded him had brought with him a carter of his own. Week after week Job Radway had tramped the countryside and offered himself for work of any kind. There was none, as he knew, to be had in his parish; if he went to a distance, he was told to go back, since a man with five young children—one at the breast and another on the way—might burden the rates. So back he came to the village where he had been born, and there the parish gave him eleven shillings a week to spend his huge strength on road-work from light till dark, out of which he must pay three guineas a year for the hovel he dwelt in. He spoke of this misery without any resentment, accepting it patiently, it seemed, as man’s natural lot. It had been a prime year for potatoes, he said, and the children never went short; and sometimes he picked up a turnip or two that had fallen in the road from an overloaded cart. It was his wife rather than he who suffered. She was expecting her sixth, and worried herself, as women did, with fancies. Then, one evening, on his way homeward, he came on a wounded pheasant fluttering in the road. It was well-nigh dead, its plumage plastered with blood and dust; so he picked it up and wrung its neck and carried it home to make a soup for his wife.

“I didn’t reckon there was no harm in that,” he said. “If I hadn’t a’picked ’en up the fox would have had ’en. And none would a’been the worse or the wiser, mark you, if so be that just as I stood there a’wiping the blood off the poor varmint on the grass of the verge, that new farmer what turned me off hadn’t happened to ride by. ‘What have you got there, then, Job Radway?’ he says. It was a cock pheasant, I told him, as I’d picked up out of the road well-nigh blown to bits. ‘In the road?’ he says. ‘So that’s it, is it? Not off my land? How does it happen,’ he says, ‘that I never see’d him when I came past just now? And whose do you reckon it be?’ You could tell by the way he talked he were turning wicked. ‘Well, farmer,’ I says, ‘if so be as you want him, you take him and welcome. Whoever it was as fired that shot made a mortal mess of him.’ At this he jumps down from his horse in a fret. ‘Less of your “farmer,” ’ he says. ‘My name’s Mr. Burman,’ he says, ‘and I’ll see as you don’t forget it! I’ve had my eye on you this long while, Job Radway. You and your litter of brats are naught but a damned lot of poaching vermin, but I’ve catched you red-handed now. I’ve been waiting for this. You come quiet along with me to the village,’ he says, ‘and we’ll see what constable have to say about it.’ ” The big man sighed. “It’ld have been all right,” he went on, “if so be as farmer had’na lifted his whip to me. I reckon he got scared on a sudden, being a small, feeble body himself and seeing the size of me. When I felt the sting of the whip, I loses myself like—only a moment it were—and ups with my fist and dropped him one on the jaw, and down the poor beggar went like a bullock, he did! At the go off I reckoned I must ha’ killed him, not knowing my own strength, as you might say. If I had, they’ld ha’ strung me up for a murderer, and there would have been an end of it. But after a bit he comes round and I hoists him up on the back of his horse and leads him home quiet as any lamb to the farm. ‘Thank you, Radway,’ he says, ‘for bringing me home like this’; and you’ld have thought as that was the end of it, him knowing how he’d tormented me. But it warn’t. The next I knew was the constable come with a warrant when we was abed. And the next was Warwick Jail, and the next the ‘Sizes. And now here I be ...”

He still gave the impression of not quite knowing where he was or how he had come there. It was this helpless bewilderment, this abrupt and arbitrary, this almost surgical severance of a huge and patient body from the native earth to which it was so near and from the minute and dear familiarities of a life governed more by instinct than by thought, that made Oakley and Dicketts feel kindly towards him. And Job Radway clung to them with a pitiful eagerness because he knew they were country folk like himself, because they understood his uncouth speech and listened, without impatience, when he spoke to them endlessly of his horses, Bloom and Vic, his dog, Flash, and his wife and children. “There’ll be six on ’em now, bless their poor little hearts,” he said.