Читать книгу Murderer’s Trail - J. Farjeon Jefferson - Страница 7

The ship you know is probably a very pleasant affair. It has scrupulously scrubbed decks, luxuriously carpeted stairways, palatial dining-rooms, and snug cabins. In these surroundings you meet clean, trim officers, talk with some of them on polite subjects, stretch, yawn and play shovel-board. But the ship you probably do not know—the ship that provides the real service for which you pay—is a very different matter.

It is dark, and it is hot. It is honeycombed with narrow passages and iron ladders. You go up the ladders or down the ladders or along the ladders. Some are fixed at an angle, some are vertical, and their only object seems to be to lead to other ladders. Your Mecca may be the scorching side of a huge boiler, or a little gap in the blackness through which hell peeps, or a metal excrescence bristling with a thousand nuts, or a mountain of coal. None invite you to stop, unless economic pressure has forced them upon you, or some other strange necessity has brought you to seek their ambiguous consolation. On you go, sweating, through the bewildering labyrinth, from ladder to ladder, from passage to passage, from dimness to dimness, from heat to heat. A germ in the ship’s stomach.

And so Ben went on. When he had first entered the black hole in the ship’s side he had shot across a dark space in a panic, and then, striking something—whether human or not he had no notion—he had shot across another dark space in another panic. He had stopped dead on the edge of a dip. He had heard a movement near him. Human, this time, he swore. He had shot down the dip, fallen, clutched, and discovered a rail. Thus he had arrived at the first of the interminable ladders.

Now he was in a maze of ladders. A metallic city of descents. But he did not always descend. Sometimes he went up. The main thing was to keep moving, and to move in the least impossible direction. Presently one would come to a dead end, and then one would stop because one had to.

It is probable that if Ben had never been in a ship’s stomach before he would have been killed or caught during the early stages of his journey. A ship’s interior is not designed for the speed of those who dwell in it. In his zenith, however, Ben had stoked with the best of them, and a long-dormant instinct was now reasserting itself and leading him towards coal.

But it was the simple law of gravitation that finally brought him there. He was descending a particularly precipitous ladder, a ladder that seemed to be hanging down sheerly into space, and all at once something caught his eye between the rungs. He became conscious of a sudden flutter. A small shape, like a detached hand, loomed momentarily, and it gave him a shock that loosened his grip. ‘Oi!’ he gulped. The rung he had been grasping shot upwards, while he shot downwards. A short, swift flight through space, and he landed on the coal

He was oblivious to the impact. As his long-suffering frame rebelled at last against the indignity of consciousness, he swam into a velvet blackness, and this time the blackness was utterly obliterating.

Thud-thud! Thud-thud! Thud-thud!

Ben opened his eyes. He came out of the greater blackness into the lesser. Cosmos was replaced by coal.

Coal was all about him. Under him, beside him, on top of him. He could understand the coal that was under him and the coal that was beside him, but he couldn’t understand the coal that was on top of him. When you fall upon coal, it doesn’t usually get up and lay itself over you like a counterpane.

But that wasn’t the only thing that puzzled him. There was something else. Something new. Something …

Thud-thud! Thud-thud! Thud-thud!

‘Gawd—we’re movin’!’ thought Ben.

Yes, undoubtedly, the boat was moving. The engines were thudding rhythmically, like great pulses, and although there was nothing visible by which to gauge movement, Ben’s body felt a sense of progress. How long had he been unconscious, then? More than the minute it seemed, obviously. Was it ten minutes, or an hour, or twelve hours, since he had seen the little waving hand and had pitched down here from the ladder? Or … even longer?

He moved cautiously. Very cautiously. This surprising roof of coal must be treated with respect, or it would cave in. As he moved, his foot came into contact with something that, surely, was not coal. Something soft. Something warm. Then he remembered the last warm, soft thing he had touched, and he stiffened.

The fellow he had tripped over in the dockyard! Was he here, beside him?

No, of course not! Steady, Ben! There was that splash, don’t you remember? That fellow had been pitched into the water. And, anyhow, this soft thing was different, somehow. Quite different. Ah, a cat! That was it! The ship’s cat, come to see him, and to give him a friendly lick!

Now Ben moved his hand, groping carefully through the cavern towards the cat’s body. ‘Puss, puss!’ he muttered. ‘’Ow’s yer mother?’ He opened his fingers, and prepared to stroke whatever they made contact with. His fingers met other fingers. The other fingers closed over his.

‘That’s funny!’ thought Ben. ‘Why ain’t I shriekin’?’

It wasn’t because he wasn’t trying. He was doing all he could to shriek. Well, wouldn’t you, if you were lying in a cavern of coal, and somebody else’s hand closed over yours? But the shriek would not come. It was merely his thought that bawled. P’r’aps he had a bit of coal in his throat? That might be it! How did you get a bit of coal out of your throat when one hand was under you, and the other was being held, and your nose was pressing against another bit of coal?

Then Ben realised why he wasn’t screaming. The other person’s hand, in some queer way, was ordering him not to. It kept on pressing his, at first in long, determined grasps, but afterwards in quick, spasmodic ones. ‘Don’t scream—don’t scream—don’t scream!’ urged each pressure. ‘Wait!’

What for?

A moment later, he knew. Voices were approaching.

At first they were merely an indistinguishable accompaniment to the thudding of the engines, but gradually they drew out of throb and became separate and individual. One voice was slow and rough. The other was sharp and curt. Ben had never heard either of them before, yet he had an odd sensation that he had done so, and instinctively he visualised the speakers. The first, tall; the second, short, thick-set and stumpy.

‘This the spot?’ drawled the first speaker.

‘Yes. Charming, isn’t it?’ said the second.

There was a pause. When the first speaker answered he had drawn nearer, and seemed so close that Ben nearly jumped. He might have jumped but for another little pressure of the fingers still closed over his.

‘Can’t say I’d choose to live in it,’ came the slow voice.

‘Well, no one’s asking you to live in it,’ came the curt one. ‘It’ll do, anyway. That is, if we’re driven to it. But there may be another way.’

‘Seems to’ve been made for us.’

‘P’r’aps it was! Old Papa Fate hands one a prize once and again, doesn’t he? He handed you to me, for instance!’

‘And he handed you to me!’

A short laugh followed. Then the curt voice said:

‘Well, it’s fifty-fifty. Only, don’t forget, son of a gun, you don’t get your fifty unless I get mine!’

‘I’m not forgetting anything,’ retorted the slow voice; ‘and if there’s any damned double-crossing, I sha’n’t forget that, either! What’s beyond there?’

‘Water.’

‘Don’t be funny. Is all this coal?’

‘Ay.’

‘Just coal?’

‘Of course, just coal! D’you suppose we feed the fires with diamonds? Have a feel!’

Ben bared his teeth to bite. God spared him the necessity.

‘What’s all this curiosity, anyhow?’ demanded the curt voice abruptly.

‘Nothing special,’ responded the slow voice. ‘But there’s no harm in knowing, is there?’

‘None at all. And you can trust me with the knowing! I expect I know my own ship, and—hallo! What’s that?’

The curt voice broke off suddenly. Four pairs of ears listened tensely. Two pairs by the coal, two under it.

‘I didn’t hear anything,’ growled the slow voice.

‘P’r’aps I didn’t either,’ muttered the other.

‘Getting nervy, eh?’

‘Nerves your hat!’

‘Then what was it?’

‘A blankety rat, probably, running across the coal. Oh, shut your mug and let’s get back to it! Do you think you can find your way here all right? That is, supposing you have to?’

‘I suppose so. But wouldn’t you be coming with me?’

A contemptuous snort followed the question.

‘Bit of a darned fool, aren’t you?’ said the curt voice. ‘How am I going to manage that?’

‘How am I going to manage fourteen ladders and seventeen corners and ninety-six passages?’ came the retort, delivered with warmth.

‘You may have to!’ The warmth was reciprocated. ‘Anyway, Sims would manage the first half of the journey for you.’

‘What! With that load?’

‘Yes, with that load! Sims has muscles. And d’you expect I’d have taken you on board if I hadn’t seen yours?’

‘Maybe one of these fine days you’ll feel ’em!’

‘Maybe elephants grow grass on their heads! You’re a useful sort of a tyke, aren’t you? How the blazes could I get away? It’ll be all hands on deck if this little business comes along, don’t you worry!’

‘Yes, but s’pose—’

‘Do you suppose an officer can afford to be missing during an affair of that sort?’ cried the officer under consideration. ‘God, you used your brains at Hammersmith, didn’t you?’

Hammersmith! Ben stopped breathing. Hammersmith …

‘I used something else, as well, at Hammersmith,’ snarled the other; ‘and you’re going the right way to get a taste of it.’

‘Say—have you ever been at a murder trial, and seen the old man put on his black cap?’ asked the curt voice, after a momentary pause. ‘I reckon you’re going the right way to get something too. Now, listen! We’ve been here long enough. Get back to your quarters, Mr Hammersmith Stoker, and lie low till you’re wanted. And if you think of using that pretty little spanner I see in your hand, just remember the black cap.’

There was a silence, and the sound of moving feet. Then the slow voice observed, contemplatively:

‘We’ve all got to die some time, you know.’

‘Like hell, we have,’ agreed the curt man. ‘But there’s ways and ways. I prefer a bed to a rope.’

The voices were farther off. Now they ceased altogether. But Ben did not move. His spirit was lying, frozen, in Hammersmith.

A whisper close to his ear brought him back to coal.

‘For God’s sake, let’s get out of this before we suffocate!’ it said. ‘You and I’ve got to talk!’

Thud-thud! Thud-thud! Thud-thud!