Читать книгу The Story of Jack Ballister's Fortunes - Говард Пайл - Страница 9

ON a long sea voyage you come to lose all sense of time. One day melts and blends into the other so that you can hardly tell them apart. They stretch along into weeks, and the weeks, perhaps, into months which can neither be called long nor short, but only just a monotonous reach of time.

The only thing that brings its change to the ceaseless monotony are the changes that happen in the weather. Twice they had a spell of heavy weather during the voyage; the first time, a few days after Jack had become well enough to be about on deck, Jack was very seasick, and so were nearly all of the transports.

It was quite a heavy storm, lasting for three or four days, and at one time Jack thought that the brig must really be in danger. As he lay prone in his bunk his heart quaked with every tumultuous lift of the vessel. Some of the crew were in the forecastle beyond, and the deep sound of their talk and now and then a burst of laughter came to him where he lay. He did not see how they could be so indifferent to the loud and incessant creaking and groaning of the ship’s timbers, alternated now and then with the noise of distant thumping and bumping, and always the gurgling rush of water, as though it were bursting through the straining timbers and streaming into the hold. It seemed to him sometimes as though the vessel must capsize, so tremendous was the mountainous lift and fall of the fabric, and so strenuous the straining of its timbers. Sometimes he would clutch tight hold of the box-like side of his bunk to save himself from being pitched out bodily upon the deck. The steerage became a horrible pit, where the transports rolled about stupefied with sickness, and when, by and by, he himself began to recover, it became impossible for him to bear it.

So the afternoon of the second day of the storm he crawled up to the decks above. The level stretch lay shining with sheets of drifting wet. Jack stood clinging dizzily to the shrouds looking about him. A number of the crew were strung out along the yard-arm high aloft, reefing the fore-topsail, clinging with feet and hands to the lines and apparently indifferent to the vast rush of the wet wind and the gigantic sweep of the uncertain foothold to which they clung. The hubbub of roaring wind and thundering waters almost stunned Jack as he stood clinging there. The voice of Dyce shouting his orders through a trumpet from the quarter-deck seemed to be upborne like a straw on that vast and tremendous sweep of uproar. One of the crew came running along the wet and slippery deck in his bare feet, cursing and swearing at Jack and waving to him to go below. The next moment, and before Jack could move to obey, the vessel plunged down into a wave, with a thunder-clap of sound and a cataract of salt water that nearly swept him off his feet and wet him to the skin.

Perhaps of all the actual events of the voyage, this episode and the two or three minutes’ spectacle of the storm lingered most vividly of all in Jack’s memory.

It was at this time that he first began to get better acquainted with the crew. When, at the bidding of the sailor, he went down below, wet and dripping, he could not bear to go back into the steerage, and the crew let him lie out in the forecastle. They laughed at him and his plight, but they did not drive him back into the steerage.

Then there were many other days of bright sunlight and of smooth breezy sailing; and still other times of windy, starry nights, when the watch would sit smoking up under the lee sail, and Jack would sit or maybe lie stretched at length listening to them as they spun their yarns – yarns, which, if the truth must be told, were not always fit for the ears of a boy like Jack.

So the days came and went without any distinct definition of time, as they always do in a long voyage such as this, and then, one soft warm afternoon, Jack saw that there were sea-gulls hovering and circling around the wake of the brig. One of the crew told him that they had come within soundings again, and when he looked over the side of the vessel he saw that the clear, tranquil green of the profounder depths of the ocean had changed to the cloudy, opalescent gray of shoaler waters.

Then it was the next morning and Jack felt some one shaking him awake. “What is it?” said he, opening his eyes heavily and looking up into the lean face of Sim Tucker that was bent over him.

The little man was all in a quiver of excitement. “’Tis land!” he cried in a shrill, exultant voice – “’tis land! We’re in sight of land! Don’t you want to get up and see it? You can see it from the deck.” His voice piped shriller and shriller with the straining of his excitement.

Jack was out of his berth in an instant; and, almost before he knew it, up on deck, barefoot, in the cool brightness of the early day.

The deck was wet and chill with the dew of the early morning. The sun had not yet risen, but the day was bright, and as clear as crystal. The land lay stretched out sharp and clear-cut in the early morning light – a pure white, thread-like strip of sandy beach, a level strip of green marsh, and, in the far distance, a dark, ragged line of woodland standing against the horizon.

Jack had seen nothing but the water for so long, and his eyes had become so used to the measureless stretch of ocean all around him, that the land looked very near, although it must have been quite a league away. He stood gazing and gazing at it. The New World! The wonderful new world of which he had heard so much! And now he was really looking at it with his very living eyes. Virginia! That, then, was the New World. He stood gazing and gazing. In the long line of the horizon there was an open space free of trees. He wondered whether that was a tobacco-plantation. There was a single tree standing by itself – a straight, thin trunk, and a spread of foliage at the top. He wondered if it was a palm-tree. He did not then know that there were no palm-trees in Virginia, and that single, solitary tree seemed to him to be very wonderful in its suggestion of a strange and foreign country.

Then, as he stood gazing, a sudden recollection of the fate that now, in a little while, awaited him in this new world – of his five years of coming servitude. The recollection of this came upon him, gripping him with an almost poignant pang; and he bent suddenly over, clutching the rail tightly with both hands. How would it be with him then? What was in store for him in this new world upon which he was looking? Was it hope or despair, happiness or misery?

Captain Butts and Mr. Dyce were standing on the poop-deck, the Captain with a glass held to his eye looking out at the land. By and by he lowered the glass, and said something to the mate. Then he handed the glass to the other, who also took a long, steady look at the distant thread of shore.

Some of the crew were standing in a little group forward. Among the others was Dred, the red bandana handkerchief around his head blazing like a flame in the crystal brightness of the morning. As Jack, still possessed by that poignant remembrance of his coming fate, went up to where they stood, Dred turned and looked at him, almost smiling. The light of the rising sun glinted in his narrow black eyes, and cut in a sharp seam the crooked, jagged scar that ran down his cheek. He nodded at Jack ever so slightly; but he did not say anything, and then he turned and looked out again toward the land. Just then the mate shouted an order, and then the group of sailors broke asunder, some of them running across the deck in their bare feet, throwing loose the ropes from the belaying-pins, others scrambling up the ratlines higher and higher, until they looked like little blots in the mazy rigging against the blue, shining sky overhead.

It was after sunset when the brig, half sailing, half drifting, floated with the insweep of the tide up into the York River. Jack stood with the other redemption servants gazing silently and intently at the high bluff shores. Above the crest of the bluff they could see the roofs and brick chimneys of the little town. A half-dozen vessels of various sorts were riding at anchor in the harbor, looming darkly against the bright face of the water, just ruffled by the light breeze. The line of a long, straggling wharf reached some distance out across the water to a frame shed at the end. Along the shore toward the bluff were two or three small frame-houses and a couple of big brick buildings. Somebody had told Jack that they were the tobacco warehouses, and they appeared very wonderful to him. A boat was pulling off from the wharf – it was the custom officer’s boat. Other boats were following it, and a sail-boat came fluttering out from the shore into the bright stretch of water. Suddenly there was a thunderous splash. It was the anchor dropped. There was a quick rattling of the cable and a creaking as it drew taut. Then the Arundel swung slowly around with the sweep of the tide, and the voyage was ended.

A minute later the boat with the custom officer came alongside. Captain Butts met him at the gangway and took him into the cabin. In a little while boats, canoes, and dug-outs came clustering about the Arundel. They all seemed strange and foreign to Jack. Nearly everybody wanted to come aboard, but the mate, who stood at the gangway, allowed only a few to come up on deck. These he directed to the cabin, whither Captain Butts had taken the custom officer. The others remained in their boats below, looking up at the redemption servants who stood crowded at the rail, staring down at them. A ceaseless volley of questions and answers was called back and forth from those below to those above. “Where d’ye come from?” “Gravesend and Southampton.” “What craft is this?” “The Arundel of Bristol.” “Comes from Gravesend, d’ye say?” “Be there any man aboard that comes from Southwark?” “Hey, Johnnie Stivins, here be a man asks of Southwark.” “Hi, there! what are ye doin’, d’ye want to stave us in?” – a babel of a dozen voices at a time.

Jack stood looking down through the now falling twilight to the figures below, dim and shadowless in the pallid light. Just beneath where he stood was a dug-out that had come off from the shore among the first. It was rowed by a negro naked to the waist. A white man sat in the stern. He appeared to have a kind of hat of woven grasses upon his head. He wore loose cotton trousers and was smoking a leaf of tobacco rolled into a cigarro, the lighted tip of which alternately glowed and faded in the dimming light. How strange and wonderful it all was!

Just then Captain Butts came out of the cabin with the custom officer. He did not then pay any attention to the group of redemptioners gathered at the rail. He stood looking at the custom officer as he climbed down into the boat. Then he turned sharply around. “Here, Dyce!” he roared to the mate, “send those men down into the steerage. We’ll have half on ‘em running away in the dark next we knows on.”

The transports grumbled and growled among themselves as they were driven below. One or two of them were disposed to joke, but the others swore as they climbed stumblingly down the forecastle ladder.

The day had been warm, and the steerage was close and hot; a lantern hung from the deck above, and in the dim, dusky light the men stood crowded together. Presently one of them began singing a snatch of a scurrilous song. Other voices joined in the refrain, and gradually the muttering and grumbling began to change into a noisy and rebellious turbulence. The singing grew louder and louder, breaking now and then into a shout or yell.

Jack had crept into his berth. It was close and stuffy and it smelt heavy and musty after the fresh air above. He felt very dull and numb, and the noises and tumult in the close confines of the steerage stunned and deafened him.

Suddenly Captain Butts’s voice sounded from the open scuttle of the forecastle companion way. “What d’ ye mean below there?” he roared; “are ye all gone drunk or crazy? Stop that there noise or I’ll put a stopper on ye that’ll be little enough to your liking! D’ ye hear?”

A moment’s lull followed his voice; then one of the men gave a shrill cat-call. It was, as a signal, instantly followed by a burst of yells and whistles and jeers. Jack expected to see Captain Butts down among them bodily, but he did not come, and for a while the transports whistled and yelled and shouted unchecked. Presently there was the noise of some one coming down into the forecastle beyond. It was Joe Barkley – one of the sailors. He came into the steerage, and at his coming an expectant lull fell upon the tumult. He carried a cocked and loaded pistol in his hand. His face was stolid and expressionless, and he looked neither to the right nor to the left. “What be ye going to do, Joe,” called out one of the redemptioners. He did not answer; he went straight up to the lantern, opened it, blew out the light, closed it again, and then turned away without saying a word. He went into the forecastle and blew out the lantern there, and then everything was instantly engulfed in an impenetrable and pitchy darkness. A burst of derisive yells followed Joe as he climbed clattering up the forecastle ladder again, but he paid no attention to the jibes and jeers, and the next moment Jack heard the rattling of the slide of the scuttle as it was closed, and then the snapping of the lock. For a while after the lights were put out the uproar was louder than ever. The men thumped and banged and kicked. But in time the pitchy darkness quelled their spirits in spite of themselves, and little by little the turmoil ceased. It broke out intermittently, it quieted again, and then at last it subsided into a muffled grumbling.

Jack lay in his berth staring into the darkness; his ears seemed to hum and tingle with the black stillness that surrounded him. He felt intensely wide awake as though he could never sleep again. Teeming thoughts passed vividly through his brain. Visions of all he had seen during the day – the sandy shore, the distant strip of pine woods, the restless, crawling waters between – he could almost see the water. But gradually thoughts and visions intermingled, and almost before he knew it he had drifted off into the ocean of sleep.