Читать книгу Golden Ballast - Henry De Vere Stacpoole - Страница 4

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Outside in the April sunshine Dicky Sebright made for the National Provincial Bank, cashed his check and turned his steps toward Cox’s. With plenty of will of his own and more than enough obstinacy, he was, still, carrying out old Forsythe’s orders with the straightforward simplicity of a child, and if the lawyer had told him to turn three times round on leaving the bank, shut his eyes and say “Abracadabra” he might have done it.

Dicky was no pup, sure of himself and disdainful of his elders; he had known himself to be as an airman not so much a man helping to win the war as a midge buzzing in the dreams of Foch, and though he had seen more of life and death than the dusty lawyer he had not seen more of the world. He reckoned Forsythe a “downy bird” and a likable one and a useful man to appeal to if ever in difficulties, also a pilot whose sailing directions were worth following.

He banked the whole of his fifty pounds, having enough money to carry on with, went to the residential club where he was staying, paid his bill, obtained his portmanteau and deposited it at Liverpool Street Station. Then he made for the docks.

Have you ever thought when standing, say, in Piccadilly Circus, that you are in a seaport town; that a ’bus ride for a few pence will take you to where the great deep-sea ships are lying, miles and miles of them, fluttering to the breeze all the flags of the world, ships from Japan, ships from India, Australia and China, tea ships from the Canton River and grain ships from the Golden Gate?

Dicky had often come down here to the docks urged by a craving for that romance which in West End literary circles is said to be dying; but he was not seeking romance to-day, only a suit of oilskins which he obtained at Hart & Wiseman’s off the West India Dock Road.

He caught the twelve-fifty-six train from Liverpool Street to Hildersditch, the home of his childhood, and at three o’clock of a perfect early spring day was seated in front of the Anchor Inn smoking a pipe, talking to the landlord and looking again at a picture which he had known from his earliest youth.

It was low tide and the uncovered mud banks, showing a glimpse of the blue-gray North Sea beyond, filled the air with a scent better by far than the smell of roses. Gulls’ voices came on the wind across the pool where a few small yachts lay, still dressed in their winter outfit, and where a “house boat to let” had not yet found her tenant. On the foreshore an old scow drawn up beyond tide mark was the only hint of the varnished rowboats that June would lay out for the summer visitors—and yet amidst all that not-too-likely prospect, unseen, hidden, Fortune warm and rosy, wealth beyond a plain man’s dreams of riches, and love enduring and constant, lay, all three waiting for the adventurer lucky enough to seize them.

That adventurer wasn’t Bone, the landlord of the Anchor, an old salt who had taken to inn keeping and pig raising for a living, a true-blue pessimist who still carried the weight of the fo’c’s’le hatch on his back.

“I’m not sayin’,” said Bone, “that you won’t be able to get a boat down Mersea way or Britlinsea; I’m only sayin’ there ain’t no boat here that’ll suit you. A ten tonner, you want. Well, there ain’t no ten tonner to buy or hire, not here. There ain’t no life in this place nor no money, and,” concluded this amazing innkeeper, “it’s my ’pinion you’d be better fixed down Mersea way.”

“What’s that big ketch out there?” asked Dicky, indicating a ketch-rigged boat from which a dinghy was pushing off.

“Oh, she—well, she ain’t so much a ketch as a bloomin’ mystery. That’s what she is. Old Captain Dennis, he was an Irishman, died at Christmas. He took her over from Captain Salt—he’s the board-of-trade man. That ketch she come in last October with two chaps on her, Frenchies they said they was, and they dropped their hook and they must have had a quarrel or somethin’, for they was found dead in the cabin, both of them, shot through, and there she lay with no papers to show where she’d come from—nothin’ but the stiffs and they couldn’t speak.

“Captain Dennis, he was an Irishman, died last Christmas. He came up here last September in a fifteen-ton yawl, him and his darter and a man to help work the boat. Then he sold the yawl off to Bright of Mersea Island for three hundred and fifty pounds and came ashore to live for the winter, and couldn’t stick it with the rheumatism. He said if he couldn’t get on the water again he’d die, so Captain Salt he gave him leave to take up his quarters on the Baltrum, that’s the name of the ketch, and there he stuck the winter, dyin’ at Christmas, as I was tellin’ you.”

“And who’s on her now?”

“Miss Dennis and the chap, Larry they call him, an old navy quartermaster they tell me he was, that served under Captain Dennis. And there they stick, him and she, livin’ on charity, you may say, and too proud to speak to the likes of us—likes of us! Why, they reckons themselves above the visitors. Captain Salt is the only man good enough for them, because he was in the navy.”

“How do you mean, living on charity?” asked Dicky.

Mr. Bone expectorated, took a pipe from his pocket and accepted a fill of tobacco.

“Well, they ain’t payin’ no rent for the Baltrum and what’s that but livin’ on charity? They don’t deal with no shops here, but gets their goods from the stores up in Lun’on on the cheap, and Strudwick the inkim-tax collector put off last March to see if he couldn’t tax them, and the girl said she’d no inkim and Larry said he’d lay for him with a stretcher if he put a foot on board. That’s them, proud as Punch an’ poor as Lazurus and livin’ on canned meat an’ charity and maybe worse.”

“How do you mean worse?”

“Well, I’d like to know where that strayed pig of mine went to,” burst out Mr. Bone, “and what his innards were doin’ lyin’ on the sand spit with the birds peckin’ at them, and what them big parcels was that Larry fetched from the post office, if they wasn’t sugar and saltpeter for saltin’ him down. I’m not sayin’ they was, but I’m just askin’, what was they? And there’s more than that. Ducks has gone from this place, I’m not sayin’ no one’s took them, I’m just sayin’ ducks has gone. I’m not the man to let myself in for no axions for slander, but I often lies awake at nights thinkin’ what’s to happen to the oyster beds when the season comes if that chap Larry is still loose and about.”

“Well, I’m hanged,” said Dicky, half laughing, yet half sharing the indignation of the other. “Why don’t you clear them out?”

“Clear them out?” said Bone. “That’s easy said. You don’t know them Irish. They’ve got leave to stay there till the hooker’s sold—and who’s to buy her? She’s no yacht. If she ever was one she’s been so knocked to pieces it’d take the better part of two hundred pounds to make her look respectable, and Salt he’s fixed three hundred as the goviment price for her. Salt, he’s the coast-guard capt’in, as I was tellin’ you. She’s salvage, and you know what the goviment is.”

Mr. Sebright, having relit his pipe, sat for a moment smoking and looking across the water at the Baltrum.

She interested him. Despite her unkempt look she had lines that appealed even to his untrained eye. He could handle a boat and the passion for the sea was on him. The bother was he had never had the opportunity to acquire firsthand knowledge of cruising. He had always been the guest of some more fortunate small-yacht owner. His idea on coming to Hildersditch had been to hire a ten tonner and a knowledgeable man and work out his own education and salvation. The Baltrum was distinctly fascinating, but she was too big for him. Yet was she?

He had Knight’s “Small Boat Sailing,” published the year before, in his pocket. He had bought it at the bookshop opposite Liverpool Street Station and he had been studying it in the train, and the passage about ketch-rigged boats recurred to him. The Alerte was a yawl so handy that Knight and a single companion worked her off Trinidad and even cruised as far as Bahia and back, a distance of fourteen hundred miles, and Knight reckoned the ketch as handy to work as a yawl, perhaps handier.

“Where does Captain Salt live?” he asked, suddenly turning to the other.

“The captain? Why, he lives away back in the village,” replied Bone. “First house on the right along out on the Mersea Road. You ain’t thinkin’ of takin’ the Baltrum, are you?”

“I don’t know,” replied the other. “If I were, do you think I could get a man to help me work her?”

“Oh, you’d get a man easy enough,” said Bone, “if there was anythin’ of him left after Larry had done with him, and the girl. I’m tellin’ you. It’s not the buyin’ of the boat that’s the trouble; it’s the lot on board her, and the chap that buys her will have to smoke them out like horneys, or hell get stung—b’gosh.”

“I’ll see,” said Dicky.