Читать книгу The Vultures - Henry Seton Merriman - Страница 6

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Where Gravesend merges into Northfleet—where the spicy odors of chemical-fertilizing works mingle with the dry dust of the cement manufactories which throw their tall chimneys into an ever-gray sky—there stands a house known as the Signal House. Why it is so called no one knows and very few care to inquire. It is presumably a square house of the Jacobean period—presumably because it is so hidden by trees, so wrapped in grimy ivy, so dust-laden and so impossible to get at, that its outward form is no longer to be perceived.

It is within sound of the bells that jingle dismally on the heads of the tram-car horses, plying their trade on the high-road, and yet it is haunted. Its two great iron gates stand on the very pavement, and they are never opened. Indeed, a generation or two of painters have painted them shut, and grime and dirt have laid their seals upon the hinges. A side gate gives entrance to such as come on foot. A door in the wall, up an alley, is labelled “Tradesman's Entrance,” but the tradesmen never linger there. No merry milkman leaves the latest gossip with his thin, blue milk on that threshold. The butcher's chariot wheels never tarry at the corner of that alley. Indeed, the local butcher has no chariot. His clients mostly come in a shawl, and take their purchases away with them wrapped in a doubtful newspaper beneath its folds. The better-class buyers wear a cloth cricketing cap, coquettishly attached to a knob of hair by a hat-pin.

The milkman, moreover, is not a merry man, hurrying on his rounds. He goes slowly and pessimistically, and likes to see the halfpenny before he tips his measure.

This, in a word, is a poor district, where no one would live if he could live elsewhere, with the Signal House stranded in the midst of it—a noble wreck on a barren, social shore. For the Signal House was once a family mansion; later it was described as a riverside residence, then as a quaint and interesting demesne. Finally its price fell with a crash, and an elderly lady of weak intellect was sent by her relations to live in it, with two servants, who were frequently to be met in Gravesend in the evening hours, at which time, it is to be presumed, the elderly lady of weak intellect was locked in the Signal House alone. But the house never had a ghost. Haunted houses very seldom have. The ghost was the mere invention of some kitchen-maid.

Haunted or not, the house stood empty for years, until suddenly a foreigner took it—a Russian banker, it was understood. A very nice, pleasant-spoken little gentleman this foreigner, who liked quiet and the river view. He was quite as broad as he was long, though he was not preposterously stout. There was nothing mysterious about him. He was well known in the City. He had merely mistaken an undesirable suburb for a desirable one, a very easy mistake for a foreigner to make; and he was delighted at the cheapness of the house, the greenness of the old lawn, the height of the grimy trees within the red brick wall.

He lived there all one summer, and the cement smoke got into his throat in the autumn and gave him asthma, for which complaint he had obviously been designed by Providence, for he had no neck. He used the Signal House occasionally from Saturday till Monday. Then he gave it up altogether, and tried to sell it. It stood empty for some years, while the Russian banker extended his business and lived virtuously elsewhere. Then he suddenly began using the house again as a house of recreation, and brought his foreign servants, and his foreign friends and their foreign servants, to stay from Saturday till Monday.

And all these persons behaved in an odd, Continental way, and played bowls on the lawn at the back of the house on Sundays. The neighbors could hear them but could see nothing, owing to the thickness of the grimy trees and the height of the old brick wall. But no one worried much about the Signal House; for they were a busy people who lived all around, and had to earn their living, in addition to the steady and persistent assuagement of a thirst begotten of cement dust and the pungent smell of bone manure. One or two local amateurs had made sure of the fact that there was nothing in the house that would repay a burglarious investigation, which, added to the fact that the police station is only a few doors off, tended to allay a natural curiosity as to the foreign gentleman's possessions.

When he came he drove in a close cab from Gravesend Station, and usually told the cabman when his services would again be required. He came thus with three friends one summer afternoon, some years ago, and came without luggage. The servants, who followed in a second cab, carried some parcels, presumably of refreshments. These grave gentlemen were, it appeared, about to enjoy a picnic at the Signal House—possibly a tea-picnic in the Russian fashion.

The afternoon was fine, and the gentlemen walked in the garden at the back of the house. They were walking thus when another cab stopped at the closed iron gate, and the banker hurried, as fast as his build would allow, to open the side door and admit a seafaring man, who seemed to know his bearings.

“Well, mister,” he said, in a Northern voice, “another of your little jobs?”

The two men shook hands, and the banker paid the cabman. When the vehicle had gone the host turned to his guest and replied to the question.

“Yes, my fren',” he said, “another of my little jobs. I hope you are well, Captain Cable?”

But Captain Cable was not a man to waste words over the social conventions. He was obviously well—as well as a hard, seafaring life will make a man who lives simply and works hard. He was a short man, with a red face washed very clean, and very well shaven, except for a little piece of beard left fantastically at the base of his chin. His eyes were blue and bright, like gimlets. He may have had a soft heart, but it was certainly hidden beneath a hard exterior. He wore a thick coat of blue pilot-cloth, not because the July day was cold, but because it was his best coat. His hat was carefully brushed and of hard, black felt. It had perhaps been the height of fashion in Sunderland five years earlier. He wore no gloves—Captain Cable drew the line there. As for the rest, he had put on that which he called his shore-going rig.

“And yourself?” he answered, mechanically.

“I am very well, thank you,” replied the polite banker, who, it will have been perceived, was nameless to Captain Cable, as he is to the reader. The truth being that his name was so absurdly and egregiously Russian that the plain English tongue never embarked on that sea of consonants. “It is an affair, as usual. My friends are here to meet you, but I think they do not speak English, except your colleague, the other captain, who speaks a little—a very little.”

As he spoke he led the way to the garden, where three gentlemen were awaiting them.

“This is Captain Cable,” he said, and the three gentlemen raised their hats, much to the captain's discomfiture. He did not hold by foreign ways; but he dragged his hat off and then expectorated on the lawn, just to show that he felt quite at home. He even took the lead in the conversation.

“Tell 'em,” he said, “that I'm a plain man from Sun'land that has a speciality, an' that's transshipping cargo at sea, but me hands are clean.”

He held them out and they were not, so he must have spoken metaphorically.

The banker translated, addressing himself to one of his companions, rather markedly and with much deference.

“You're speakin' French,” interrupted Captain Cable.

“Yes, my fren', I am. Do you know French?”

“Not me,” returned Captain Cable, affably. “They're all one to me. They're all damn nonsense.”

He was, it seemed, that which is called in these days of blatant patriotism a thorough Englishman, or a true Blue, according to the social station of the speaker.

The gentleman to whom the translation had been addressed smiled. He was a tall and rather distinguished-looking man, with bushy white hair and mustache. His features were square-cut and strong. His eyes were dark, and he had an easy smile. He led the way to some chairs which had been placed near a table at the far end of the lawn beneath a cedar-tree, and his manner had something faintly regal in it, as if in his daily life he had always been looked up to and obeyed without question.

“Tell him that we also are plain men with clean hands,” he said.

And the banker replied:

“Oui, mon Prince.”

But the interpretation was taken out of his mouth by one of the others, the youngest of the group—a merry-eyed youth, with a fluffy, fair mustache and close-cropped, flaxen hair.

“My father,” he said, in perfect English, “says that we also are plain men, and that your hands will not be hurt by touching ours.”

He held out his hand as he spoke, and refused to withdraw it until it had been grasped, rather shame-facedly, by Captain Cable, who did not like these effusive foreign ways, but, nevertheless, rather liked the young man.

The banker ranged the chairs round the table, and the oddly assorted group seated themselves. The man who had not yet spoken, and who sat down last, was obviously a sailor. His face was burned a deep brown, and was mostly hidden by a closely cut beard. He had the slow ways of a Northerner, the abashed manner of a merchant skipper on shore. The mark of the other element was so plainly written upon him that Captain Cable looked at him hard and then nodded. Without being invited to do so they sat next to each other at one side of the table, and faced the three landsmen. Again Captain Cable spoke first.

“Provided it's nothing underhand,” he said, “I'm ready and willing. Or'nary risks of the sea, Queen's enemies, act o' God—them's my risks! I am uninsured. Ship's my own. I don't mind explosives—”

“There are explosives,” admitted the banker.

“Then they must be honest explosives, or they don't go below my hatches. Explosives that's to blow a man up honest, before his face.”

“There are cartridges,” said the young man who had shaken hands.

“That'll do,” said the masterful sailor. And pointing a thick finger towards the banker, added, “Now, mister,” and sat back in his chair.

“It is a very simple matter,” explained the banker, in a thick, suave voice. “We have a cargo—a greater part of it weight, though there is some measurement—a few cases of light goods, clothing and such. You will load in the river, and all will be sent to you in lighters. There is nothing heavy, nothing large. There is also no insurance, you understand. What falls out of the slings and is lost overside is lost.”

The banker paused for breath.

“I understand,” said Captain Cable. “It's the same with me and my ship. There is no insurance, no tricking underwriters into unusual risks. It's neck or nothing with me.”

And he looked hard at the breathless banker, with whom it was, in this respect, nothing.

“I understand right enough,” he added, with an affable nod to the three foreigners.

“You will sail from London with a full general cargo for Malmo or Stockholm, or somewhere where officials are not wide-awake. You meet in the North Sea, at a point to be fixed between yourselves, the Olaf, Captain Petersen—sitting by your side.”

Captain Cable turned and gravely shook hands with Captain Petersen.

“Thought you was a seafaring man,” he said. And Captain Petersen replied that he was “Vair pleased.”

“The cargo is to be transshipped at sea, out of sight of land or lightship. But that we can safely leave to you, Captain Cable.”

“I don't deny,” replied the mariner, who was measuring Captain Petersen out of the corner of his eye, “that I have been there before.”

“You can then go up the Baltic in ballast to some small port—just a sawmill, at the head of a fjord—where I shall have a cargo of timber waiting for you to bring back to London. When can you begin loading, captain?”

“To-morrow,” replied the captain. “Ship's lying in the river now, and if these gentlemen would like to see her, she's as handy a—”

“No, I do not think we shall have time for that!” put in the banker, hastily. “And now we must leave you and Captain Petersen to settle your meeting-place. You have your charts?”

By way of response the captain produced from his pocket sundry folded papers, which he laid tenderly on the table. For the last ten years he had been postponing the necessity of buying new charts of certain sections of the North Sea. He looked round at the high walls and the overhanging trees.

“Hope the wind don't come blustering in here much,” he said, apprehensively, as he unfolded the ragged papers with great caution.

The fair-haired young man drew forward his chair, and Cable, seeing the action, looked at him sharply.

“Seafaring man?” he inquired, with a weight of doubt and distrust in his voice.

“Not by profession, only for fun.”

“Fun? Man and boy, I've used the sea forty years, and I haven't yet found out where the fun comes in!”

“This gentleman,” explained the banker, “his Ex—Mr.—” He paused, and looked inquiringly at the white-haired gentleman.

“Mr. Martin.”

“Mr. Martin will be on board the Olaf when you meet Captain Petersen in the North Sea. He will act as interpreter. You remember that Captain Petersen speaks no English, and you do not know his language. The two crews, I understand, will be similarly placed. Captain Peterson undertakes to have no one on board speaking English. And your crew, my fren'?”

“My crew comes from Sun'land. Men that only speak English, and precious little of that,” replied Captain Cable.

He had his finger on the chart, but paused and looked up, fixing his bright glance on the face of the white-haired gentleman.

“There's one thing—I'm a plain-spoken man myself—what is there for us two—us seafaring men?”

“There is five hundred pounds for each of you,” replied the white-haired gentleman for himself, in slow and careful English.

Captain Cable nodded his grizzled head over the chart.

“I like to deal with a gentleman,” he said, gruffly.

“And so do I,” replied the white-haired foreigner, with a bow.

Captain Cable grunted audibly.