Читать книгу The Vultures - Henry Seton Merriman - Страница 8

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A muddy sea and a dirty gray sky, a cold rain and a moaning wind. Short-capped waves breaking to leeward in a little hiss of spray. The water itself sandy and discolored. Far away to the east, where the green-gray and the dirty gray merge into one, a windmill spinning in the breeze—Holland. Near at hand, standing in the sea, the picture of wet and disconsolate solitude, a little beacon, erect on three legs, like a bandbox affixed to a giant easel. It is alight, although it is broad daylight; for it is always alight, always gravely revolving, night and day, alone on this sandbank in the North Sea. It is tended once in three weeks. The lamp is filled; the wick is trimmed; the screen, which is ingeniously made to revolve by the heat of the lamp, is lubricated, and the beacon is left to its solitude and its work.

There must be land to the eastward, though nothing but the spinning mill is visible. The land is below the level of the sea. There is probably an entrance to some canal behind the moving sandbank. This is one of the waste-places of the world—a place left clean on sailors' charts; no one passes that way. These banks are as deadly as many rocks which have earned for themselves a dreaded name in maritime story. For they never relinquish anything that touches them. They are soft and gentle in their embrace; they slowly suck in the ship that comes within their grasp. Their story is a long, grim tale of disaster. Their treasure is vast and stored beneath a weight, half sand, half water, which must ever baffle the ingenuity of man. Fog, the sailors' deadliest foe, has its home on these waters, rising on the low-lying lands and creeping out to sea, where it blows to and fro for weeks and weeks together. When all the world is blue and sunny, fog-banks lie like a sheet of cotton-wool on these coasts.

“Barrin' fogs—always barrin' fogs!” Captain Cable had said as his last word on leaving the Signal House. “If ye wait a month, never move in a fog in these waters, or ye'll move straight to Davy Jones!”

And chance favored him, for a gale of wind came instead of a fog, one of those May gales that sweep down from the northwest without warning or reason.

At sunset the Olaf had crept cautiously in from the west—a high-prowed, well-decked, square-rigged steamer of the old school, with her name written large amidships and her side-lights set aft. Captain Petersen was a cautious man, and came on with the leadsman working like a clock. He was a man who moved slowly. And at sea, as in life, he who moves slowly often runs many dangers which a greater confidence and a little dash would avoid. He who moves slowly is the prey of every current.

Captain Petersen steamed in behind the beacon. He sighted the windmill very carefully, very correctly, very cautiously. He described a half-circle round the bank hidden a few feet below the muddy water. Then he steamed slowly seawards, keeping the windmill full astern and the beacon on his port quarter. When the beacon was bearing southeast he rang the engine-room bell. The steamer, hardly moving before, stopped dead, its bluff nose turned to the wind and the rustling waves. Then Captain Petersen held up his hand to the first mate, who was on the high forecastle, and the anchor splashed over. The Olaf was anchored at the head of a submarine bay. She had shoal water all round her, and no vessel could get at her unless it came as she had come. The sun went down, and the red-gray clouds in the stormy west slowly faded into night. There was no land in sight. Even the whirligig windmill was below the horizon now. Only the three-legged beacon stood near, turning its winking, wondering eye round the waste of waters.

Here the Olaf rode out the gale that raged all through the night, and in the morning there was no peace, for it still rained and the northwest wind still blew hard. There was no depth of water, however, to make a sea big enough to affect large vessels. The Olaf rode easily enough, and only pitched her nose into the yellow sea from time to time, throwing a cloud of spray over the length of her decks, like a bird at its bath.

Soon after daylight the Prince Martin Bukaty came on deck, gay and lively in his borrowed oilskins. His blue eyes laughed in the shadow of the black sou'wester tied down over his eyes, his slight form was lost in the ample folds of Captain Petersen's best oilskin coat.

“It remains to be seen,” he said, peering out into the rain and spray, “whether that little man will come to us in this.”

“He will come,” said Captain Petersen.

Prince Martin Bukaty laughed. He laughed at most things—at the timidity and caution of this Norse captain, at good weather, at bad weather, at life as he found it. He was one of those few and happy people who find life a joy and his fellow-being a huge joke. Some will say that it is easy enough to be gay at the threshold of life; but experience tells that gayety is an inward sun which shines through all the changes and chances of a journey which has assuredly more bad weather than good. The gayest are not those who can be pointed out as the happiest. Indeed, the happiest are those who appear to have nothing to make them happy. Martin Bukaty might, for instance, have chosen a better abode than the stuffy cabin of a Scandinavian cargo-boat and cheerier companions than a grim pair of Norse seamen. He might have sought a bluer sky and a bluer sea, and yet he stood on the dripping deck and laughed. He clapped Captain Petersen on the back.

“Well, we have got here and we have ridden out the worst of it, and we haven't dragged our anchors and nobody has seen us, and that exceedingly amusing little captain will be here in a few hours. Why look so gloomy, my friend?”

Captain Petersen shook the rain from the brim of his sou'wester.

“We are putting our necks within a rope,” he said.

“Not your neck—only mine,” replied Martin. “It is a necktie that one gets accustomed to. Look at my father! One rarely sees an old man so free from care. How he laughs! How he enjoys his dinner and his wine! The wine runs down a man's throat none the less pleasantly because there is a loose rope around it. And he has played a dangerous game all his life—that old man, eh?”

“It is all very well for you,” said Captain Petersen, gravely, turning his gloomy eyes towards his companion. “A prince does not get shot or hanged or sent to the bottom in the high seas.”

“Ah! you think that,” said Prince Martin, momentarily grave. “One can never tell.”

Then he broke into a laugh.

“Come!” he said, “I am going aloft to look for that English boat. Come on to the fore-yard. We can watch him come in—that little bulldog of a man.”

“If he has any sense he will wait in the open until this gale is over,” grumbled Petersen, nevertheless following his companion forward.

“He has only one sense, that man—a sense of infinite fearlessness.”

“He is probably afraid—” Captain Petersen paused to hoist himself laboriously on to the rail.

“Of what?” inquired Martin, looking through the ratlines.

“Of a woman.”

And Martin Bukaty's answer was lost in the roar of the wind as he went aloft.

They lay on the fore-yard for half an hour, talking from time to time in breathless monosyllables, for the wind was gathering itself together for that last effort which usually denotes the end of a gale. Then Captain Petersen pointed his steady hand almost straight ahead. On the gray horizon a little column of smoke rose like a pillar. It was a steamer approaching before the wind.

Captain Cable came on at a great pace. His ship was very low in the water, and kicked up awkwardly on a following sea. He swung round the beacon on the shoulder of a great wave that turned him over till the rounded wet sides of the steamer gleamed like a whale's back. He disappeared into the haze nearer the land, and presently emerged again astern of the Olaf, a black nozzle of iron and an intermittent fan of spray. He was crashing into the seas at full speed—a very different kind of sailor to the careful captain of the Olaf. His low decks were clear, and each sea leaped over the bow and washed aft—green and white. As the little steamer came down he suddenly slackened speed, and waved his hand as he stood alone on the high bridge.

Then two or three oilskin-clad figures crept forward into the spray that still broke over the bows. The crew of the Olaf, crowding to the rail, looked down on the deeply laden little vessel from the height of their dry and steady deck. They watched the men working quickly almost under water on the low forecastle, and saw that it was good. Captain Cable stood swaying on the bridge—a little, square figure in gleaming oilskins—and said no word. He had a picked crew.

He passed ahead of the Olaf and anchored there, paying out cable as if he were going to ride out a cyclone. The steamer had no name visible, a sail hanging carelessly over the stern completely hid name and port of registry. Her forward name-boards had been removed. Whatever his business was, this seaman knew it well.

No sooner was his anchor down than Captain Cable began to lower a boat, and Petersen, seeing the action, broke into mild Scandinavian profanity. “He is going to try and get to us!” he said, pessimistically, and went forward to give the necessary orders. He knew his business, too, this Northern sailor, and when, after a long struggle, the boat containing Captain Cable and two men came within reach, a rope—cleverly thrown—coiled out into the flying scud and fell across the captain's face.

A few minutes later he scrambled on to the deck of the Olaf and shook hands with Captain Petersen. He did not at once recognize Prince Martin, who held out his hand.

“Glad to see you, Captain Cable,” he said. Cable finished drying the salt water from his face with a blue cotton handkerchief before he shook hands.

“Suppose you thought I wasn't coming,” he said, suspiciously.

“No, I knew you would.”

“Glad to see me for my own sake?” suggested the captain, grimly smiling.

“Yes, it always does one good to see a man,” answered Prince Martin.

“They tell me you're a prince.”

“That is all.”

The captain measured him slowly with his eyes.

“Makings of a man as well, perhaps,” he said, doubtfully. Then he turned to cast an eye over the Olaf.

“Tin-kettle of a thing!” he observed, after a pause.

“My little cargo won't be much in her great hold. Hatches are too small. Now, I'm all hatch. Can't open up in this weather. We can turn to and get our running tackle bent. It'll moderate before the evening, and if it does we can work all night. Will your Rile Highnes' be ready to work all night?”

“I shall be ready whenever your High Mightiness is.”

The captain gave a gruff laugh.

“Dammy, you're the right sort!” he muttered, looking aloft at the rigging with that contempt for foreign tackle which is essentially the privilege of the British sailor.

Cable gave certain orders, announced that he would send four men on board in the afternoon to bend the running tackle “ship-shape and Bristol fashion,” and refused to remain on board the Olaf for luncheon.

“We've got a bit of steak,” he said, conclusively, and clambered over the side into his boat. In confirmation of this statement the odor of fried onions was borne on the breeze a few minutes later from the small steamer to the large one.

The men from Sunderland came on board during the afternoon—men who, as Captain Cable had stated, had only one language and made singularly small use of that. Music and seamanship are two arts daily practised in harmony by men who have no common language. For a man is a seaman or a musician quite independently of speech. So the running tackle was successfully bent, and in the evening the weather moderated.

There was a half-moon, which struggled through the clouds soon after dark, and by its light the little English steamer sidled almost noiselessly under the shadow of her large companion. Captain Cable's crew worked quickly and quietly, and by nine o'clock that work was begun which was to throw a noose round the necks of Prince Bukaty, Prince Martin, Captain Petersen, and several others.

Captain Cable divided the watches so that the work might proceed continuously. The dawn found the smaller steamer considerably lightened, and her captain bright and wakeful at his post. All through the day the transshipping went on. Cases of all sizes and all weights were slung out of the capacious hatches of the one to sink into the dark hold of the other vessel, and there was no mishap. Through the second night the creaking of the blocks never ceased, and soon after daylight the three men who had superintended the work without resting took a cup of coffee together in the cabin of the Olaf.

“Likely as not,” said Captain Cable, setting down his empty cup, “we three'll not meet again. I have had dealings with many that I've never seen again, and with some that have been careful not to know me if they did see me.”

“We can never tell,” said Martin, optimistically.

“Of course,” the captain went on, “I can hold me tongue. That's agreed—we all hold our tongues, whatever the newspapers may be likely to pay for a word or two. Often enough I've read things in the newspaper that I could put a different name to. And that little ship of mine has had a hand in some queer political pies.”

“Yes,” answered Martin, with his gay laugh, “and kept it clean all the same.”

“That's as may be. And now I'll say good-bye. I'll be calling on your father for my money in three days' time—barrin' fogs. And I'll tell him I left you well. Good-bye, Petersen; you're a handy man. Tell him he's a handy man in his own langwidge, and I'll take it kindly.”

Captain Cable shook hands, and clattered out of the cabin in his great sea-boots.

Half an hour later the Olaf was alone on that shallow sea, which seemed lonelier and more silent than ever; for when a strong man quits a room he often bequeaths a sudden silence to those he leaves behind.