Читать книгу The High Barbaree - James Norman Hall - Страница 5

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Uncle Thad Vail was my boyhood hero; I all but worshiped him. The Vails had been New Englanders, an old seafaring family from Nantucket. My great-grandfather, Alexander Vail, was the first member to turn his back on salt water. The story was that he’d had some bad luck on a whaling voyage, and, as a result, he vowed to go as far inland as the continent would let him and stay there. He was one of the founders of Westview.

“My guess is that he was a homesick New Englander for the rest of his life, but he was never known to admit it. His love for the sea was, certainly, passed down to some of his descendants, myself among them, but I’m speaking now of my Uncle Thad. He was never cut out for an inlander, and at seventeen yearning for the sea sent him to Boston, and that was the last Westview saw of him except for the rare visits at our house. He was in sail, at first; then he entered the merchant service, worked his way up, and, at the time I’m speaking of he was a first mate in the Atlantic trade.

“My mother thought the world of her brother, although she never quite forgave him for deserting Iowa, and her hope was that he would some day tire of the sea, marry a good sensible woman from Westview or thereabout, and settle down to farming. An upstairs room in our house was known as ‘Uncle Thad’s room,’ and Mother always kept it ready, as though he were expected to return next week or the next day. It was a large sunny room looking out on the plum and cherry trees and the strawberry beds of the back garden. I loved this room. There were all kinds of souvenirs and knick-knacks in it that Uncle Thad had sent or brought home from his voyages. A New Englander who didn’t love sea shells wouldn’t be a New Englander and Uncle Thad had a superb collection gathered in all parts of the world. Among them was a matchbox filled with shells so tiny that I thought at first they were nothing but grains of coarse sand. On rainy days I used to spread them out on a sheet of white paper and examine them under my dad’s reading glass.

“The most important piece of furniture in the room was a tall ‘secretary,’ as they called them, that had belonged to my Grandfather Vail. It was half desk, half bookcase, with drawers below and glassed-in bookshelves above. Here my uncle kept his favorite volumes, mostly narratives of travel and exploration. He had Drake’s The World Encompassed, Hawkesworth’s Voyages—which included Wallis’s, Cook’s, Byron’s, and Carteret’s—in three volumes bound in scuffed and powdery calfskin; Anson’s Voyages, Commodore Porter’s Journal of a Cruise made to the Pacific Ocean in the U. S. Frigate “Essex,” Ellis’s Polynesian Researches, and dozens more. It was a first-rate collection and I’d read the lot before I was through high school, some of them two or three times. I can’t imagine a better education for a kid than to be turned loose in such a library, though it’s not the kind to fit him for living in the cockeyed world we know. Of course, in those days I’d not yet come to the reading stage. I merely leafed through the pages to look at the old foxed engravings of heathen lands and people and the charts of bays and coves and landlocked harbors.

“On the wall, on either side of the secretary, were two large charts showing both hemispheres, with particular reference to the oceans. On these my uncle kept a record of his voyages, adding the latest ones whenever he came to Westview. Each was beautifully marked in, showing the ports touched at both outward and homeward bound. I used to climb on a chair and study these charts. In this way I followed my uncle all over the world, and I could string off the names of ports as easy as A B C.

“Two portraits on the opposite wall had an endless fascination for me. One was an oil painting of my great-great-uncle, Oliphant Vail, lost with his ship on a whaling voyage to the Pacific in 1836. The portrait shows him standing on the deck of his ship, the Harriet, holding in his right hand a harpoon attached to a line beautifully coiled in its tub. The figure is that of a man of thirty or around that, the face bold and determined looking; the eyes seem to be gazing through or past you to a school of cachalots far out to sea.

“The other was an engraving—from a drawing by Webber, who was Captain Cook’s artist—of an old Polynesian chief. He is bare-chested and bare-legged, a man of lean but powerful frame, with snow-white hair, and dressed in a kirtle of white tapa cloth. Beyond is an idyllic background of coconut palms reflected in the still waters of a lagoon. That old native became almost as real to me as my dad.

“I used to study these portraits by the hour. Mother could tell me little of my great-great-uncle, Oliphant, and nothing at all of the Polynesian chief. She would say: ‘You must wait till your Uncle Thad comes home again.’ She had letters from him once or twice a year, but never knew when we might expect him at Westview.

“You will understand what a romantic figure my uncle became, in my eyes. I thought about him, dreamed about him, boasted about him to kids of my own age. I was the only boy in Westview who had a seafaring uncle, and this gave me an importance I made the most of. I would show my friends Uncle Thad’s room, and many a rainy Saturday was spent examining his charts and the engravings in Hawkesworth’s Voyages.

“I was between three and four when I first saw my uncle and barely remembered that visit. He came again when I was ten. I remember what a shock it was to see that he was not a big man. We had no photographs of Uncle Thad, and I’d pictured him as standing head and shoulders above other men; but he was no taller than my mother, and weighed around one hundred and forty-five pounds. He had a deep resonant voice and eyes of a deep blue that flashed and burned with energy.

“My disappointment at his size wore off in about ten minutes. When my uncle stepped into his upstairs room, with me at his heels, he was right back on his pedestal. He treated me as an equal, a companion, and that flattered me a lot. He had enough of the boy left in him to make him a comrade in the best sense of the word.

“The moment we were in the room, with the door closed behind us, he said: ‘Sit you down, Alec. I want your advice about something right now. I’ve come prepared to stay two weeks. Will it be okay to make such a long visit?’

“I didn’t realize it then, but he was pulling my leg. It pleased him to see how upset I was at the thought that he might shorten the visit.

“I blurted out: ‘Okay? Gosh, Uncle Thad! I should say it will be!’

“ ‘You’re sure?’

“ ‘Yes, sir.’

“ ‘Good! That’s settled. I’ll stay the full time. ... Now there’s one other thing. I’ll need your help in this; you must back me up. Every time I come to Westview your mother starts to work on me to get me to stay. She wants me to leave the sea and take to farming. What do you think about it?’

“ ‘Why ... you couldn’t do that, Uncle Thad,’ I said.

“ ‘That’s the ticket!’ he said, heartily. ‘You’re a true Vail; got salt water in your blood. Now your mother loves the land the way you and I do the sea. So does your dad. It’s all right. Nothing against ’em, and Iowa’s a beautiful state. But there’s no water, to say nothing of salt water, and how’s a man to live without it?’

“ ‘Oh yes there is!’ I replied, eagerly. ‘You’ve come at the wrong time of year, Uncle Thad. You ought to have been here in April when we had the heavy rains. The Chaquaqua River went right out of its banks. It flooded the bottom lands for miles, out north.’

“ ‘That’s right. I remember. There used to be those bottom-land floods when I was a kid, and how I loved ’em! Got a skiff?’

“I shook my head, glumly.

“ ‘Dad won’t let me have one till I’m twelve.’

“ ‘I’ll bet that’s your mother’s doing,’ said Uncle Thad. ‘Twelve ... well, that ain’t so long to wait, if you don’t think about it too much. Tell you what, Alec. On your twelfth birthday I’ll give you something that’s got a skiff beat a thousand miles. I’ll get you a canoe like they use in New England and there ain’t none better. And I’ll come with it if that’s possible. You fix things up with the weather man that year. Tell him to send plenty of spring rain so’s we can roam all over the bottom lands. Is that a bargain?’

“ ‘Yes, sir,’ I replied, eagerly. ‘You won’t forget?’

“He gave me a stern look, but the expression softened immediately after.

“ ‘I want you to remember this, Alec: the Vails don’t forget their promises. When’s your birthday?’

“ ‘April twenty-second,’ I said.

“ ‘Okay. Two years from now, on or about April twenty-second, you can count on having your canoe.’

“My uncle stayed the promised two weeks but it seemed more like two days. I lost some of the pleasure in having him in worry about losing him again so soon. He loved to loaf when ashore. He would sit on the back porch, his chair tipped back against the wall, watching the summer clouds drift across the sky. On these loafing days I couldn’t get him to budge, but it was not time wasted. As a storyteller he was in a class by himself. He had an odd way of beginning without any preliminaries. He told his stories with the minute, circumstantial detail all boys love, skipping from one experience to another, from one part of the world to another, picking out the plums and high spots of his adventures, and I never tired of listening. Sometimes we’d be sitting in his room, with Great-great-uncle Oliphant Vail gazing down at us. ‘Look at him, Alec,’ my uncle would remark. ‘Ain’t you proud to stem from a line of whalers like that one?’ And then he would give me a funny sidelong glance. ‘Of course, I know you’re goin’ to be a doctor. Your mother’s got her heart set on that. I keep forgettin’, so don’t pay no mind to me when I get to talkin’ about the sea.’

“One morning I reminded him that he’d not yet plotted on his wall charts the voyages he’d made since last coming to Westview.

“ ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘Come up to my room. We’ll get it done straight off.’

“We rolled back the rug and laid the charts out on the floor. He had half-a-dozen voyages to mark in and he began with those farthest back. I lay on the floor, my chin propped on my hands, watching him as he worked. One of the voyages had been across the Pacific, and as he laid out his course from port to port he kept up a running commentary that was better than a year of geography lessons at school. ‘The Vail’s ocean’ he called it. ‘That’s our old home, Alec. Room enough there even for Vails to move around in.’ He used a special kind of blue ink, the color of the sea when you’re well inside the tropics, he said. Then he changed his mind about that.

“ ‘No, I’m wrong. There’s no such color, in ink. They couldn’t get that shade of blue in a thousand years. Even if they did get it, it wouldn’t be the same. No sir, Alec. You’ve got to see that particular blue to believe in it.’

“ ‘I’m going to see it someday,’ I said.

“ ‘Sure you are. You wouldn’t be a Vail if you didn’t hanker now and again for the tropical Pacific.’ He glanced up at the portrait of Oliphant Vail. ‘Ain’t that a speakin’ likeness?’ he said. ‘If only he could speak he’d have something to tell us about whalin’ a hundred years ago.’

“ ‘Were all the Vails whalers?’ I asked.

“ ‘There’s an old saying about our family:—

As long as ships have masts and sails

There’ll be Vails to hunt the whales.

But there’s none of ’em left in Nantucket now, to follow the old trade.’

“ ‘Would they follow it if there were any left?’ I asked.

“My uncle sat back on his heels and looked at me, an angry light in his eyes.

“ ‘Nantucketers? No, sir! They’d think shame to hunt ’em the way it’s done now. These what-you-may-call-’em whalers go out in big 10,000-ton ships, all the way to the Antarctic, and they take a flock of seagoin’ tugs along. Then the mother ship waits while the tugs go in amongst the whales and explode shells in ’em, shot from guns on deck. The whales ain’t got a ghost of a chance. Belly-up they come, dozens, scores of ’em. The tugs tow ’em to the mother ship to strip the blubber and render the oil. Mark my words! If they keep this up there won’t be a whale left in any of the seven seas in a few more years.’

“My uncle was so burned up at the thought of these modern methods of whaling that he could speak of nothing else for a good five minutes; then he cooled off and went back to the charts. It was while he was pointing out some of the old whaling grounds in the Pacific that I asked about a mere speck of an island I’d noticed. This particular dot lay almost on the Line and was marked, ‘Turnbull’s Island.’ Beneath it were the letters ‘E-D.’

“ ‘It’s queer, your noticin’ that,’ said Uncle Thad. ‘You’ve got bright eyes, sonny.’

“ ‘What does E-D mean?’ I asked.

“ ‘Existence Doubtful.’

“ ‘They don’t know whether the island’s there or not?’

“ ‘That’s right.’

“ ‘Why doesn’t some ship go and find out?’

“ ‘That’s a lonely part of the Pacific even in these days,’ said Uncle Thad. ‘It’s away off the sea lanes.’

“ ‘Haven’t you ever passed near it?’

“He shook his head and pointed to the track of one of his earlier voyages.

“ ‘That’s the nearest, and it’s a good thousand miles off Turnbull’s Island.’

“He went to the bookcase and took down a heavy cloth-bound volume. It was Yardley’s Pacific Directory. I’d glanced at it, but was too young at that time to pay much attention to it; there were no pictures. My uncle turned to the index and thumbed the pages until he found what he was looking for.

“ ‘It’s queer your spottin’ Turnbull’s Island,’ he said. ‘Guess it’s because you’re a Vail. That part of the Pacific is what they called the Line Grounds in the old days of whaling. Nantucketers and New Bedford men cruised there a lot back in the eighteen-forties and fifties. Your Great-great-uncle Oliphant was lost somewhere in that region. I’ll read you what it says about the island in Yardley’s Directory.’

“Then he read me the passage I’ve already quoted to you, and from that day Turnbull’s Island became a place to dream about. I felt that an island that had been twice reported must really be there. You know how it is; not much is needed to set a young kid’s imagination to work, and I had my uncle’s books with their engravings of scenes on tropical islands to set me to wondering about Turnbull’s Island. It burned me up that the editor of Yardley’s Directory should have doubted the reports of two old whaling captains. What could he know about the matter? Captain Turnbull’s reference to the two volcanic spires with the great eastern cliff between them stuck in my mind. I could see the place looming through the mists of a rainy day, cliff and spires looking immensely high as they appeared dimly through the clouds. Or I would imagine a ship approaching it toward sunset, under a cloudless sky, the wall of cliff changing color as the light faded until it showed the deepest purple in the dusk of evening. The ship, of course, was always my Uncle Thad’s, with me on board.

“So it was from that time on. Of an evening as I looked toward the hills west of town, with the last faint light of day streaming up from behind them, I would imagine that the sea lay just beyond, and that the light was reflected from the highest mountains of Turnbull’s Island.”

Brooke halted in his narrative to peer at his companion who was lying on his back, staring into the sky.

“Sleepy, Gene?”

“No.”

“Want me to go on?”

“Of course. I’m glad you got wound up on this story. It’s a life-saver. Makes the time pass.”

“That’s kind of a backhanded compliment.”

“No; I’m interested, Alec. No kidding.”

“How much time has passed so far?”

Mauriac glanced at the luminous dial of his wrist watch.

“It’s a quarter to ten.”

“No later than that? ... Gene, there’s one thing we’ve got to get used to: minutes as long as hours.”

“The story’s a big help; they pass a lot faster while you’re talking.”

“Pretty quiet out here, isn’t it?”

“I was thinking of that. Remember how sick we got of the perpetual sound of engines, back at Guadal? Sometimes I’d have given a month’s pay for a quarter of an hour of pure silence.”

“And now we’ve got nothing else but.”

“Would the sound of a pair of Pratt and Whitneys be celestial music right now!”

“Lay off that! We’ll never hear it when we’re expecting to, that’s sure.”

“I know, but this waiting’s getting me down. You get so damned impatient wanting to make something happen.... If only we knew whether Meyers got our position through to Henderson before he was killed!”

“Yes, it is pretty rough, not being sure. What do you suppose they’re doing back at Guadal?”

“Shut up, Alec! I’m at Westview, or I was. Go back there and straighten me out.”

“Okay, but you’re putting another nickel in me. Get me started on boyhood and my Uncle Thad and I don’t know when to stop.”

“You’ve got me guessing ... about the High Barbaree, I mean. How does that come in?”

“Keep your shirt on. I’m coming to it. First, I want to tell you a little more about Nancy Fraser.”