Читать книгу The Master; a Novel - Israel Zangwill - Страница 8

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The death of his father—of whom he had seen so little—gave Matt a haunting sense of the unsubstantiality of things. What! that strong, wiry man, with the shrewd, weather-beaten face and the great tanned hands and tattooed arms, was only a log swirling in the currents of unknown waters! In vain he strove to figure him as a nebulous spirit—the conception would not stay. Nay, the incongruity seemed to him to touch blasphemy. His father belonged to the earth and the seas; had no kinship with clouds. How well he remembered the day, nearly three years ago, when they had parted forever, and, indeed, it had been sufficiently stamped upon his memory without this final blow.

It is a day of burning August—so torrid that they have left their coats on the beach. They are out on the sand flats, wading for salmon among the giant saucers of salt water, the miniature lakes left by the tide, for this is one of the rare spots in the Province where the fish may be taken thus. What fun it is spearing them in a joyous rivalry that makes the fishers wellnigh jab each otherâs toes with their pitchforks, and completely tear each otherâs shirt-sleeves away in the friendly tussle for a darting monster, so that the heat blisters their arms with great white blobs that stand out against the brown of the boyâs skin and the ornamental coloring of the manâs. Now and then in their early course, when tiny threads of water spurt from holes in the sand, they pause to dig up the delicate clam, with savory anticipations of chowder. Farther and farther they wander till their backs are bowed with the spoil, the shell-fish in a little basket, the scaly fish strung together by a small rope passing through their gills. The boy carries the shad and the man the heavier salmon. At last, as they are turning homeward, late in the afternoon, Matt stands still suddenly, rapt by the poetry of the scene, the shimmering pools, the stretch of brown sand, strewn with sea-weeds, the background of red head-lands, crowned with scattered yellow farms embosomed in sombre green spruces, and, brooding over all, the windless circle of the horizon, its cold blue veiled and warmed and softened by a palpitating, luminous, diaphanous haze of pale amethyst tinged with rose. He knows no word for what he sees; he only feels the beauty.

âCome along, sonny,â says his father, looking back.

But the boy lingers still till the man rejoins him, puzzled.

âWhatâs in the wind?â he asks. âIs Farmer Wadeâs barn on fire?â

âEverythinâs on faar,â says the boy, waving his pitchfork comprehensively. His dialect differs a whit from his more-travelled fatherâs. In his little God-forsaken corner of Acadia the variously-proportioned mixture of English and American which, with local variations of Lowland and Highland Scotch, North of Ireland brogue and French patois, loosely constitutes a Nova-Scotian idiom, is further tinged with the specific peculiarities that spring from illiteracy and rusticity.

David Strang smiles. âWhy, you are like brother Matt,â he says, in amused astonishment. All day his sonâs prattle has amused the stranger, but this is a revelation.

âLike your wicked brother Matt?â queries the boy in amaze. Davidâs smile gleams droller.

âAvast there, you mustnât hearken to the mother. She knows naught oâ Matt âcept what I told her. She is Halifax bred, and we lived âway up country. I ran away to sea, and left him anchored on dadâs farm. When I made port again dad was gone to glory, and Matt to England with a petticoat in tow.â

âBut mother said he sold the farm, anâ your share, too.â

âAnd if he didnât itâs a pity. He had improved the land, hadnât he? and I might have been sarved up at fish dinners for all he knew. I donât hold with this Frenchy law that says all the bairns must share and share alike. The good old Scotch fashion is good ânough for me—Mattâs the heir, and God bless him.â

âThen why didnât you marry a Scotchwoman?â asked Matt, with childish irrelevance.

â âTwas your motherâs fault,â answers David, with a half-whimsical, half-pathetic expression.

âAnd why didnât you take her to sea with you?â

âNay, nay; the mother has no stomach for it, nor I either. And then there was Harriet—a little body in long clothes. And the land was pretty nigh cleared,â he adds, with a suspicion of apology in his accent, âand we couldnât grow ânough to pay the mortgage if I hadnât shipped again.â

âAnd why am I like uncle?â

âOh, he used to be allus lookinâ at the sky—not to find out whether to git the hay in, mind you, but to make little picturs on the sly in the hay-mow on Sundays, and at last he sold the farm and went to London to make âem.â

Mattâs heart begins to throb—a strange new sense of kinship stirs within him.

âHev you got any of them thar picturs?â he inquires, eagerly.

âNot one,â says David, shaking his head contemptuously. âHis clouds were all right, because clouds may be anything; but when he came to cows, their own dams wouldnât know âem; and as for his ships—why, he used to hoist every inch oâ canvas in a hurâcane. I wouldnât trust him to tattoo a galley-boy. But he had a power of industry, dear old Matt; and I guess heâs larnt better now, for when I writ to him tellinâ him I was alive and goinâ to get spliced, he writ back he was settled in London in the pictur line, and makinâ money at it, and good-luck to him.â

Mattâs heart swells. That one can actually make money by making pictures is a new idea. He has never imagined that money can be made so easily. Why, he might help to pay off the mortgage! He does not see the need of going to London to make them—he can make them quite well here in his odd moments, and one day he will send them all to this wonderful kinsman of his and ask him to sell them. Five hundred at sixpence each—why, it sounds like one of those faëry calculations with which McTavit sometimes dazzles the school-room. He wonders vaguely whether pictures are equally vendible at that other mighty city whence his mother came, and, if so, whether he may not perhaps help her to accomplish the dream of her married life—the dream of going back there.

âAnâ uncleâs got the same name as me!â he cries, in ecstasy.

âI should put it tâother way, sonny,â says his father, dryly; âthough when I give it you in his honor I didnât calcâlate it âud make you take arter him. But donât you git it into your figurehead that youâre goinâ to London—youâve jest got to stay right here and look arter the farm for mother. See? The picturs that Godâs made are good ânough for me—thatâs so.â

âOh yes, dad, I shall allus stay on here,â answers Matt, readily. âItâs Billy who allus wants to be a pirate. Silly Billy! He says—â

His father silences him with a sudden âDamn!â

âWhatâs the matter?â he asks, startled.

âI guess youâre the silly Billy, standinâ jabberinâ when the tideâs a-rushinâ in. Weâll have to run for it.â

Matt gives a hasty glance to the left, then takes to his heels straight across the sands in pace with his father. The famous âboreâ of the Bay of Fundy, in a northerly inlet of which they have been fishing, is racing towards them from the left, and to get to shore they must shoot straight across the galloping current. They are at the head of the bay, where the tide reaches a maximum speed of ten miles an hour, and the sailor, so rarely at home, has forgotten its idiosyncrasy.

âYou might haâ kepâ your weather-eye open,â he growls. âI wonder youâve never been drownded afore.â

âWe shall never do it, father,â pants Matt, taking no notice of the reproach, for the waves are already lapping the rim of the little sand island (cut out by fresh-water rivulets) on which they find themselves, and the pools in which they had waded are filling up rapidly.

âThrow âem away,â jerks the father; and Matt, with a sigh of regret, unstrings his piscine treasures, and, economically putting the string into his pocket, speeds on with renewed strength. But the sun flares mercilessly through the fulgent haze; and when they reach the end of their island they step into three feet of water, with the safe shore a quarter of a mile off. David Strang, a human revolver in oaths, goes off in a favorite sequence of shots, but hangs fire in the middle, as if damped.

âStrikes me the mother âll quote Scripture,â he says, grimly, instead.

âI suppose you canât swim, sonny?â he adds.

âNot so fur nor thet,â says Matt, meekly.

David grunts in triumphant anger, and, shifting his pitchfork to his left hand, he grasps Matt with his right, and lifts him back on to the burning sand, already soddened by a thin frothy wash.

âNow then, hanâ us your fork,â he says, crossly. He knocks out the iron prongs of both the pitchforks, ties the wooden handles securely together by the string from Mattâs discarded fish, and fixes the apparatus across the boyâs breast and under his arms. To finish the job easily he has to climb back on the sand island; for, though he stands in a little eddy, it is impossible to keep his feet against the fierce swirl of the waters; and even on the island, where there are as yet only a few inches of sea, the less sturdy Matt is almost swept away to the right by the mad cavalry charge of the tide on his left flank.

âNow then,â cries David, âitâs about time we were home to supper. Iâll swim ye for your flapjacks.â

âBut, father,â says Matt, âyouâre not going to carry the fish on your back?â

âThey wonât carry me on theirs,â David laughs, regaining his good-humor as the critical moment arrives. âWhat would the mother think if we came home without a prize in tow! Avast there! Iâll larn you how Iâll get out of carryinâ âem on my back.â

And with a chuckle he launches himself into the eddy, and shoots forward with a vigorous side-stroke. âThis side up with care,â he cries cheerily. âJump, sonny, straight forâards.â And in a moment the man and the boy are swimming hard for the strip of shore directly opposite the sand island, the spot where they had left their coats hours before; but neither has the slightest expectation of reaching it, for the tide is sweeping them with fearful velocity to the right of it, so that their course is diagonal; and if they make land at all, it will be very far from their original starting-point. David keeps the boy to port, and adjusts his stroke to his. After a while, feeling himself well buoyed up by the handles, Matt breathes more easily, and gradually becomes quite happy, for the water is calm on the surface, and of the warmth and color of tepid café au lait, quite a refreshing coolness after the tropical air, and he watches with pleasure the rosy haze deepening into purple without losing its transparency. They pass sea-gulls fighting over the dead fish which Matt left behind, and which have been carried ahead of him in their unresisting course.

âWeâre drifting powerful from them thar coats,â grumbles David. â âTwill be a tiresome walk back. If it warnât for them we could cut across country when we make port.â

Matt strains his vision to the left, but sees only the purple outline of Five Islands, and in the far background the faint peaks of the Cobequid Hills.

âWaal, Iâm darned!â exclaims his father, suddenly. âIf them thar coats ainât cominâ to meet us, itâs a pity.â

And presently, sure enough, Matt catches sight of the coats hastening along near the shore.

âWe must cut âem off afore they pass by,â cries his father, hilariously. âSpurt, sonny, spurt. âTis a race âtwixt them and us.â

Sea-birds begin to circle low over their heads, scenting Davidâs fish; but he pushes steadily on, animating his son with playful racing cries.

âWe oughter back the coats,â he observes. âTheyâve backed us many a time. Just a leetle quicker,â he says, at last, âor theyâll git past yonder pâint, and then theyâre off to Truro.â

Matt kicks out more lustily, then his heart almost stops as he suddenly sees Death beneath the lovely purple haze. It is the human swimmers who are in danger of being carried off to Truro if they do not make the shore earlier than âyonder pâint,â for Matt remembers all at once that it is the last point for miles, the shore curving deeply inward. Even if they reach the point in time, they will be thrown back by the centrifugal swirl; they must touch the shore earlier to get in safely. He perceives his father has been aware of the danger from the start, and has been disguising his anxiety under the pretext of racing the coats. He feels proud of this strong, brave man, the cold terror passes from his limbs, and he spurts bravely.

âThatâs a little man,â says David; âweâll catch âem yet. Lucky itâs sandstone yonder âstead oâ sand—no fear oâ gettinâ sucked in.â

Now it is the shore that seems racing to meet them—the red reef sticks out a friendly finger, and in another five minutes they are perched upon it, like Gulliver on the Brobdingnagianâs thumb; and what is more, they tie with their coats, meeting them just at the landing-place.

David laughs a long Homeric laugh at the queerness of the incident, quivering like a dog that shakes himself after a swim, and Matt smiles too.

âThem thar sea-birds air a bit off their feed, thatâs a fact,â chuckles David, as he surveys his fish; and then the two cut across the forest, drying and steaming in the sun, the elder exhorting the younger to silence, and hiding the prongless pitchforks in the hay-mow before they enter the house, all smiles and salmon.

At the early tea-supper they sit in dual isolation at one end of the table, their chairs close. But lo! Mrs. Strang, passing the hot flapjacks, or âcorn-dodgers,â with the superfluous perambulations of an excitable temperament, brushes the back of her hand against Mattâs shoulder, starts, pauses, and brushes it with her palm.

âWhy, the boyâs wringinâ wet!â she cries.

âWe went wadinâ,â David reminds her, meekly.

âYes, but you donât wade on your heads,â she retorts.

âI sorter tumbled,â Matt puts in, anxious to exonerate his father.

Mrs. Strang passes her hand down her husbandâs jacket.

âAnâ father kinder stooped to pick me up,â adds Matt.

âYouâre a nice Moloch to trust with oneâs children!â she exclaims in terrible accents.

David shrinks before the blaze of her eyes, almost feeling his coat drying under it.

âAnâ when you kinât manage to drownd âem you try to kill âem with rheumatics, and then I hev all the responsibility. Itâs ânough to make a body throw up the position. Take off your clothes, both oâ you.â

Both of them look at each other, feeling vaguely the indelicacy of stripping at table. They put their hands to their jackets as if to compromise, then a simultaneous recollection crimsons their faces—their shirt-sleeves are gone. So David rises solemnly and leads the way up-stairs, and Matt follows, and Mrs. Strangâs voice brings up the rear, and goes with them into the bedroom, stinging and excoriating. They shut the door, but it comes through the key-hole and winds itself about their naked limbs (Mrs. Strang distributing flapjacks to her brood all the while); and David, biting his lips to block the muzzle of his oath-repeater—for he never swears before mother and the children except when he is not angry—suddenly remembers that if he is to join his ship at St. Johnâs by Thursday he must take the packet from Partridge Island to-morrow. His honey-moon is over; he has this honey-moon every two or three years, and his beautiful beloved is all amorousness and amiability, and the best room with the cane-bottomed chairs is thrown open for occupation; but after a few weeks Mrs. Strang is repossessed of her demon, and then it is David who throws up the position, and goes down to the sea in a ship, and does more business—of a mysterious sort—in the great waters. And so on the morrow of the adventure he kisses his bairns and his wife—all amorousness and amiability again—and passes with wavings of his stick along the dusty road, under the red hemlocks over the brow of the hill, and so—into the great Beyond. Passes, and with him all that savor of strange, romantic seas, all that flavor of bustling, foreign ports, that he brings to the lonely farm, and that cling about it even in his absence, exhaling from envelopes with picturesque stamps and letters with exotic headings; passes, narrowing the universe for his little ones, and making their own bit of soil sterner and their winter colder. He is dead, this brawny, sun-tanned father, incredibly dead, and the dead face haunts Matt—no vaporous mask, but stonily substantial, bobbing grewsomely in a green, sickly light, fathoms down, with froth on its lips, and slimy things of the sea twining in its hair. He looks questioningly at his own face in the fragment of mirror, trying to realize that it, too, will undergo petrifaction, and wondering how and when. He looks at his motherâs face furtively, and wonders if the volcano beneath it will ever really sleep; he pictures her rigid underground, the long, black eyelashes neatly drawn down, and is momentarily pleased with the piquant contrast they make with the waxen skin. Is it possible the freshness and beauty of Harrietâs face can decay too? Can Billy sink to a painless rest, with his leg perhaps growing straight again? Ah! mayhap in Billyâs case Death were no such grisly mystery.

Morbid thoughts enough for a boy who should be profiting by the goodness of the northwester towards boykind. But even before this greater tragedy last yearâs accident had taken the zest out of Mattâs enjoyment of the ice; in former good years he had been the first to cut fancy figures on the ponds and frozen marshes, or to coast down the slopes in a barrel-stave fitted with an upright and a cross-piece—a machine of his own invention worthy of the race of craftsmen from which he sprang. But this year the glow of the skaterâs blood became the heat of remorse when he saw or remembered Billyâs wistful eyes; he gave up skating and contented himself with modelling the annual man of snow for the school at Cobequid Village.

In the which far-straggling village (to take time a little by the forelock) his fatherâs death did not remain a wonder for the proverbial nine days. For a week the young men chewing their evening quid round the glowing maple-wood of the store stove, or on milder nights tapping their toes under the verandas of the one village road as they gazed up vacantly at the female shadows flitting across the gabled dormer-windows of the snow-roofed wooden houses, spoke in their slightly nasal accent (with an emphasis on the ârâ) of the âpearâls of the watter,â and calling for their nightâs letters held converse with the postmistress on âthe watter and its pearâls,â and expectorated copiously, presumably in lieu of weeping. And the outlying farmers who dashed up with a lively jingle of sleigh-bells to tether their horses to the hitching-posts outside the stores, or to the picket-fence surrounding the little wooden meeting-house (for the most combined business with religion), were regaled with the news ere they had finished swathing their beasts in their buffalo robes and âbootsâ; and it lent an added solemnity to the appeal of the little snow-crusted spire standing out ghostly against the indigo sky, and of the frosty windows glowing mystically with blood in the gleam of the chandelier lamps, and, mayhap, wrought more than the drawling exposition of the fusty, frock-coated minister. And the old grannies, smoking their clay pipes as they crouched nid-nodding over the winter hearth, their wizened faces ruddy with firelight, mumbled and grunted contentedly over the tidbit, and sighed through snuff-clogged nostrils as they spread their gnarled, skinny hands to the dancing, balsamic blaze. But after everybody had mourned and moralized and expectorated for seven days a new death came to oust David Strangâs from popular favor; a death which had not only novelty, but equal sensationalism, combined with a more genuinely local tang, for it involved a funeral at home. Handsome Susan Hailey, driving her horses recklessly, her black feather waving gallantly in the wind, had dashed her sleigh upon a trunk, uprooted by the storm and hidden by the snow. She was flung forward, her head striking the tree, so that the brave feather dribbled blood, while the horses bolted off to Cobequid Village to bear the tragic news in the empty sleigh. And so the young men, with the carbuncles of tobacco in their cheek, expectorated more and spoke of the âpearâls of the land,â and walking home from the singing-class the sopranos discussed it with the basses, and in the sewing-circles, where the matrons met to make undergarments for the heathen, there was much shaking of the head, with retrospective prophesyings and whispers of drink, and commiseration for âOle Hey,â and all the adjacent villages went to the sermon at the house, the deceased lady being, as the minister (to whose salary she annually contributed two kegs of rum) remarked in his nasal address, âuniversally respected.â And everybody, including the Strangs and their collie, went on to the lonesome graveyard—some on horse and some on foot and some in sleighs, the coffin leading the way in a pung, or long box-sleigh—a far-stretching, black, nondescript procession, crawling dismally over the white, moaning landscape, between the zigzag ridges of snow marking the buried fences, past the trailing disconsolate firs, and under the white funereal plumes of the pines.