Читать книгу The Garden of God (Romance Classic) - Henry De Vere Stacpoole - Страница 11

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Morning was coming into the lagoon, where a nautilus fleet was putting out on the land wind that breezed the sea to broken gold.

The tide was at half-full and the Ranatonga, swinging to it, showed a ripple at her stern and a ripple where the anchor chain broke the luminous blue of the water.

On the sunlit deck Stanistreet, with his back to some fellows who were cleaning brass-work, was talking to Bowers. He had explained the position, and the bo’sun, as he had expected, was ready, though not very willing, to stay.

“I’m not botherin’ about myself so much as the gentleman,” said Bowers. “If he’s fixed on staying, well, there’s no more to be said, but supposin’ he took sick—and it isn’t as if his mind was as right as it might be—then there’s the kid.”

“I know—I know—” replied the other. “It’s crazy—but there’s some sense in it all the same. His mind is sick, but he’s happy here; if he went back to Frisco wouldn’t he always be troubling over these children? He doesn’t trouble here—I’ve lain awake half the night thinking it out. I can’t leave you, can’t run the old hooker without you, unless”—he paused for a moment and looked over the water—“unless none of the others will take the job on—which is the most likely of them, do you think?”

“Well, sir,” said the bo’sun, “they’re a tough lot, but there’s no harm among them. Jim’s the ablest and he’s took a fancy to the kid, but God help it if he ever had the handlin’ of it; wanted to give it a chunk of beef when you were off the ship yesterday—no sense in his head. But, whether or no, he wouldn’t stop, he’s a long sight too fond of his pleasures ashore.”

“Well, I’ll get the chaps aft and put it to them,” said Stanistreet. “Tell Jenkins to hurry along with the breakfast, and we’ll muster them then.”

An hour later, led by Bowers, they came trooping aft, a coloured crowd in striped shirts or plain, open at the chest, canvas breeches, and not a shoe amongst them. One fellow had a red handkerchief tied round his head, Spanish fashion, and several wore the big buckled belts seen now only in the pictures adorning pirate stories and in melodrama.

They shuffled along, halted, swayed uneasily and then stood whilst Bowers ran them over with his eye as if counting them.

The fellow by the starboard rail sent a squirt of tobacco juice overside and then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand apologetically whilst Stanistreet, who had been standing talking to Lestrange, wheeled on them.

“Got them all here, Bowers?” said the captain of the Ranatonga. “Good. Now, you chaps, I’ve called you aft just to have a word with you. It’s soon said. Mr. Lestrange here is staying behind on the island for his health, him and the child. I’m taking the ship back to port, and I want a man to stick here with him till my return.

“I want a chap to sign up for a year on this job, double pay and fifty dollars bonus when the time’s up. That’s good pay, but I’m not deceiving you; there’ll be no drink or strikes for the fellow that takes the job on, but he’ll have a good time. You all know Mr. Lestrange, and you can see for yourself what the island is like, plenty of grub, fishing, and nothing to do. Now then, step aft, one of you.”

Dead silence, and eyes cast everywhere but at the after-guard.

“Lots of time,” said Stanistreet. “Get a bit more forward and talk it over together.”

He turned and paced the deck with his hands behind his back, whilst the crowd shifted forward and broke into several groups, the grumble of their voices coming on the wind.

The fellow with the red handkerchief broke away from the others and came aft touching his forehead.

“Ax your pardon, sir,” said he, “but the chaps wants to know what’s a bolus?”

“A present,” said Stanistreet, “fifty dollars for nothing into the hand of the chap that stays.”

The meeting resumed, but, it was plain to be seen, without enthusiasm. Then, at last, all in one group they came aft and halted, whilst the spokesman gave their decision to the skipper.

“The chaps ain’t unwillin’ to oblige you or the gentleman, sir, but it’s the lonesomeness.”

“None of you will stay?”

“Well, sir, it’s not the stayin’, but the keepin’ here.”

“Of course you’d have to keep here—but that’s enough—get forward.”

Then, suddenly, came a voice of mockery, the voice of Jim. Jim had taken little part in the discussion, leaving to abler speakers the handling of the affair, but he had made no objection to the general verdict. It was a characteristic that, whilst one with the others, he was always a bit apart; illiterate as any of them, his mind was of a different stamp.

“Lonesomeness be sugared, it’s the booze they’re thinkin’ of, sir.”

For a moment the presence of the after-guard was forgotten and voices were raised.

“You’re thinkin’ of, you mean, or why don’t you stay yourself?” enquired the man with the red handkerchief.

“And who says I won’t?” asked Jim.

That is how it happened, all of a sudden. I doubt if a moment before he had made up his mind or whether the necessity of answering back smart had done the business. At all events it was done, and Jim Kearney, long, red-headed, lantern-jawed and trailing behind him his tattered past, was enlisted the third inhabitant of the Garden of God.

Stanistreet had pointed out to Lestrange the impossibility of the schooner putting out that day: stores had to be landed, and not only landed, but brought round to the house away at the other side of the lagoon.

Lestrange did not want stores, and Jim Kearney, who was a small eater for all his size and strength, and who in these latitudes was indifferent to meat, despite his advocacy of beef as a food for children, only wanted tobacco. All the same, the captain of the Ranatonga had his own ideas on the subject. A cask of flour was broken out of the hold, the medicine chest was ransacked of pain-killer, opium and Epsom salts; needles, thread, scissors, carpenter’s tools, lines and fish-hooks—nothing was forgotten.

A shack had to be run up in the trees behind the house to hold the stores, and it was not till the morning of the third day that all was finished.

The old dinghy was overhauled and condemned, but Lestrange wished to keep it, so it was left, together with the dinghy of the Ranatonga, for practical purposes, and they were towed round by the whale boat to the sward by the house and tied up to the bank.

It was eleven o’clock in the morning when all was finished. Dick was playing about in the sun under the eye of Kearney, pipe in mouth and hands in pockets, and Lestrange was saying good-bye to his skipper.

Stanistreet was downcast. The very beauty of the morning, the loveliness of the sward with its protecting trees, the lagoon with its coloured shadows and depths, the remote reef and the perfect sky above it, all this only served to deepen the depression that had come upon him.

Now, at the moment of parting, the feeling came to him that he would never see Lestrange again, that on the child playing on the sward, Kearney, and the grey-haired man with those strange eyes that seemed fixed upon another world, Fate was preparing to drop a curtain that it would never be his part to lift.

For a moment and to his plain, simple mind the tragedy of the lost children seemed part of this new happening and the hand that had shaped their fate not yet finished with its work.

The fellows in the whale boat that was hanging onto the bank ready to take him round the lagoon back to the ship, seemed under the same blanket; Jim, for all his rating them over the drink business, had been a favourite, and here they were leaving him, marooned, so to speak. Bowers, who had left the boat to give some last instructions to Jim, returned to his place in the stern sheets, and Stanistreet cast his eye over the house with its open doorway, over the child, over Jim.

“Well, sir,” said he, “I don’t think we’ve forgotten anything, and I’ve got your orders safe in mind and pocket—and—” He held out his hand and gripped that of the other.

“Good luck,” said Lestrange.

The boat shoved off, some of the fellows shouting, “Bye, Jim!” others nodding their heads at him.

Then, just before rounding the cape to the right, the oars came in and the crew, scrambling to their feet, gave a cheer that roused the echoes in the trees. Then the boat passed away for ever beyond the cape.

“Kearney,” said Lestrange, “those are good men—would that there were more like them in this strange world.”

“Yes, sir,” said Kearney. “They ain’t bad—off the wharfside.”

But Lestrange, fallen into a dream, scarce heard, and hearing would not have understood this profound and comprehensive summary of the ethical condition of the departed ones.

He cared for nothing. He was at peace. The presence of Stanistreet, the very decks of the Ranatonga were ties connecting him with the misery of the last twelve years, things disturbing that perfect new mood of mind, born of his vision and the surety that here in this paradise, at their own good time, his children would come to him, be with him.

Leaving the child to Kearney, he turned to the house and began to put things in order. This dreamer was no idler; he had brought all his books with him, some dozen volumes or so, and he arranged them on the shelf already prepared for him by the children, taking care that none of the other objects were disturbed.

He examined the walls, still incomplete in parts, and the roof all but finished, but not quite; the thought that the children had left it for him to complete came to him suddenly and made him pause in his work. It was only a fancy, yet his mind held it and dwelt on it as though it had been a fact of the first importance. It was to be his house as well as theirs.

As he stood like this, idle for a moment and gazing out across the sunlit sward, his eyes fell on Kearney and the child. The sailor’s hands were out of his pockets and he was standing, knife in one hand and a bit of stick in the other, whittling away and evidently making some sort of toy. Dick, seated on the ground, naked as the sun, was looking up at the work in progress.

Bowers had decided not to force clothes upon the child, firstly, because Dick, like some form of insane people, fought against any covering, even a blanket; secondly, because the child’s skin was already clothed, covered with a lovely golden brown tinge, a suit given him by the sea. He didn’t look naked, and the simple and logical mind of the sailor decided to let him be, and there he sat, perhaps the most beautiful object on earth, whilst above him stood Kearney whittling his stick—and Lestrange, casting his benevolent eye upon them, saw nothing but a little child waiting for a toy at the hands of a sailor man.

For Dick was almost nothing to Lestrange, he had no part in his obsession. Stanistreet had reckoned him half crazy partly because of his indifference to this grandchild—but he had forgotten that the forms for ever in the mind of the “poor gentleman” were the forms of the children of the past, that the vision that had brought him what seemed the peace of madness was the vision of two little children of six and seven. “Dick and Emmeline, just as they were long years ago, pure and sweet and happy and childlike, but knowing all things.” The fact that they had mated in life, the very fact of Dick, were alien to the consuming dream that here at their own chosen time little hands would push the leaves aside and that in some twilight he would see again the forms of the lost ones.

Poor gentleman!

“There you are and play about,” said Mr. Kearney, delivering up the finished article to the chubby hand reaching for it. “Yes, sir.” He came to Lestrange, who had called him, and between them they set about the work of making things shipshape. Some bunk bedding had been brought ashore, and Jim’s scanty wardrobe that had never been increased out of the slop chest lay in a bundle by the shack amongst the trees.

Stanistreet had wanted to leave a tent, but Jim said the shack was good enough for him. There was lots of room for him besides the stores; Lestrange and the child would have the house.

They worked away at the little jobs to be finished and then came dinner, a sort of picnic on cold stuff brought from the Ranatonga and eaten seated on the sward, Dick sharing with them in the way of bananas and scraps just as a dog might have done.

In some extraordinary way the common sailor and the sensitive, super-civilised Lestrange had almost at once become companions, yet without any alteration in status.

It was always “Yes, sir,” with Jim, with Lestrange it was always “Kearney,” and the power of little things was never more evidenced than in the case of Jim relabelled by the gentle-voiced Lestrange in the first hours of this island life. He had always been “Jim” to himself and others. “Jim” had placer-mined on the hills of California, drunk himself blind, killed a “Chink” in a tong dust-up he had joined in for the fun of the thing, worked for the sandalwood traders and always had come out, to use his own expression, at the little end of the horn. There were rare moments of heart-searching with Jim when he accused himself not of crimes committed but of opportunities let slip, opportunities with women and with Fortune. In those rare moments which yet tinged in some manner his conscious life, the man he knew was “Jim”; the inconsiderable name summoned up his failures. “Kearney” was something new, didn’t seem to fit, yet in some way was not distasteful—almost a title.

Towards evening that day Kearney, who had been prospecting about in the woods and who with his island-trained eye had discovered and noted the places of all sorts of fruit-bearing trees, to say nothing of a patch of yams that showed evidence of cultivation—Kearney, chewing a long straw of maya grass, appeared before Lestrange, who was seated in front of the house reading a book.

“The old hooker was due out at the half ebb, sir,” said he. “She’ll be well to sea by this and bearing north, and I was thinking you’d maybe like to go over to the reefs to have a last look at her.”

“The schooner?” said Lestrange, closing his book. “Yes, I would like to see her on her way. Can you row me over?”

“Yes, sir,” said Kearney, with a half smile, “I can row you all right.” He took a glance into the house where Dick in a corner was asleep under a half kicked off blanket. “And the kid won’t take no harm, he’s sleepin’ like a Dutchman. Ain’t you goin’ to take your coat, sir? It’s breezin’ up out there an’ fresher than here.”

“Yes, Kearney,” replied Lestrange, putting the book and his reading glasses away on a little shelf by the door, a quaint little shelf that the lost ones had put up for who knows what purpose. “Yes, perhaps I had better take my coat.” He put it on and they went down to the water’s edge, where Kearney pulled the new dinghy close up whilst he got in.

Then they pushed off, the sailor sculling with his eye over his shoulder for the reefs.

As I have said, the lagoon here was very broad and broken by coral ridges that made navigation difficult; great ponds and narrow passages of diamond-bright water showed a floor ablaze with live or dingy dead and rotten coral. Coloured fish, haliotis shells, crabs and jellyfish showed as clearly as seen through air, and as they rowed, Lestrange, leaning over, gazed as interested as a child.

“Oh, them,” said Jim, his attention being called to a school of jellyfish, disc-shaped, adorned with purple buttons and projecting themselves through the water by the simple act of opening and closing like umbrellas. “Them’s pikers, seen ’em as big as a ship’s tops’l in the waters over by Howland—Howland, sir, it’s one of them line islands, east of the Gilberts.—Yes, sir, there’s fish to feed the fleet in this lagoon and I’ll be getting busy with the lines to-morrow. Fond o’ fishin’, are you, sir? Well, you’ll have your choice and plenty when we get the lines rigged. Step careful.”

He held the boat up to the reef coral whilst Lestrange got out. Then, having fastened her by tying the painter to a spike of rock, they stood looking.

The sound of the surf had been loudening as they crossed from the land. Here, facing the fresh sea breeze, the full roar of the breakers came to them, whilst to right and left the great low-tide outer beach lay bombarded by the ocean, flown across by gulls and showing in the golden light of early evening the rock pools left like bits of mirror by the retreating sea. Coral sings, and mixed with the voices of the waves the inner voice of the reef could be heard, a vague, chanting sound, remote and bell-like.

Here, standing with the sound of the sea and the reef in one’s ears, the island world took a new colour and a new atmosphere, altering according to the time of day from the gaiety of morning to the loneliness of evening.

“Look!” cried the sailor. “That’s her.”

He pointed away to where far at sea the white sails of the Ranatonga showed the sun full on them. There was a lump of coral worn smooth by weather just here. Lestrange took his seat on it and whilst Kearney pottered about examining the contents of the rock pools, the cuttle-fish bones and reef debris, he sat, his eyes fixed on the distant sail and his thoughts travelling far beyond.

A long time passed till footsteps roused him from his reverie. It was Kearney, a vast and edible crab—its claws bound with seaweed—in one hand, a crawfish in the other.

“Look!” said Lestrange, as he rose to his feet. “She is nearly gone.”

The sailor looked. Hull down, almost washed from sight by evening and distance, the Ranatonga showed her canvas to the sunset like a flake of golden spar. Less and less it grew, till at last the eye that chanced to lose it failed to find it again.

“Kearney,” said Lestrange, as he turned to the boat, and speaking without any sadness in his tone, “I may be wrong, but it has just come to me that I will never see that ship any more.”

The sailor, taking advantage of the fact that the dinghy had slipped her moorings in the last few minutes and had to be captured where she had grounded against a spur further along, made no reply.

Bowers, instructed by Stanistreet, had given him the hint that Lestrange’s compasses wanted correcting, and that he wasn’t to be “crossed” if he put up strange ideas about things, more especially if those ideas had anything to do with his lost children.

“Which children are you meanin’?” had asked Kearney.

“Them two in the boat we found,” replied Bowers.

“Children! What are you talkin’ about?” had asked the other.

“Maybe you’ll get it into your thick head he’s always seein’ them same as when they were little,” replied Bowers, “and he’s got it fixed in his nut he’s to find them again, that they’re somewhere hid on the island, not them but their sperrits; that’s how the land lays with him, and now you know.”

Kearney had thought a good deal on this matter. He had a fair charge of superstition in his make-up and no wish to increase his education in psychic affairs, reckoning bad luck, ghosts, omens, and all such things on the same string and to be avoided.