Читать книгу The High Barbaree - James Norman Hall - Страница 6

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Nancy meant a lot to me all through those early years. The Frasers had no son and my parents no daughter, so the pair of us lived between the two homes and were members of both families. I was two years older than Nancy, and she sort of took the place of a sister. She hero-worshiped Uncle Thad, the same as I did, and he thought the world and all of her.

“She was an independent little thing; I couldn’t get away with bossing her around. She wasn’t a tomboy, but she had any amount of guts. She would ‘take a dare’ without thinking twice about it. Once I got into an awful mess with both sets of parents by daring her to climb with me up the narrow iron ladder to the top of the standpipe, as we called it—the town water tower which is one hundred and ten feet high. I went first, and before we were halfway up I was sorry I’d given the dare. The top of the standpipe was a long way off, and as I glanced down I had a sick feeling at the pit of my stomach. Nancy looked like a little doll against the great column of riveted steel, but she was climbing on, slow but sure. We reached the railed platform on top, but I can’t say that we got much kick out of the view spread out beneath us. We were too scared. At last Nancy said, very quietly: ‘I’m going to start down now, Alec.’ That was real pluck.

“We’d not been seen going up, but someone had spotted us on top, and now a crowd of terrified parents and neighbors had gathered at the foot of the ladder. They were afraid to call out for fear they’d rattle us, but we could see their white faces turned toward us. Nancy’s father climbed up for her and she had barely strength enough left to clasp her arms around his neck as he carried her down the last thirty or forty feet. I made it all the way, but my arms and legs felt numb by the time I reached the ground. I deserved a good hiding, but I guess my dad thought I’d learned a lesson that would stick, and so it did. I never again gave Nancy that kind of a dare.

“She had the good sense not to butt into boys’ games, but at most other times I liked having her around better than any boy. In summer I spent more time on the Fraser farm than I did at home. We both had horses to ride. I still like to remember the times when we helped drive cattle from the farm to the loading pens by the Westview depot. But I’m off the course again: I’ll get back to why this old Dumbo wears her high-sounding name, and that’s connected with my Uncle Thad.

“He was lousy at writing letters. Mother would hear from him two or three times a year from some faraway port, when, I suppose, he would have a real touch of homesickness for Iowa and his own flesh and blood. And now that he’d come to know Nancy and me, he would send us gifts that made us popeyed. Once, from a Norwegian port, he sent me a model of a Viking ship, with a striped silk sail, a carved prow—everything as it should be, even to the Vikings’ shields ranged along the gunwales. Maybe you can imagine what that meant to me. But he said nothing about coming home and he never mentioned the canoe promised for my twelfth birthday. How I longed for that canoe! The thought of it was always in the back of my mind, particularly in the spring of my eleventh year when the Chaquaqua River overflowed its banks again.

“I call it a river, but the Chaquaqua was little more than a prairie slough that winds in loops and turns in a general south-easterly direction. In a dry summer there was little water in it; even our old swimming hole would be no more than chin-deep. But it was all the river we had, and to say that it meant a lot to us kids is putting it mildly. A fringe of timber land follows it most of the way through our part of the country and this was a wonderful place for spring flowers. Hepaticas, violets, Dutchman’s-breeches, bloodroots, May-apple blossoms, jack-in-the-pulpits grew all through those bottom lands and the bordering hills south of the river. But best of all were the lady-slippers because they were so hard to find. It was a real event to stumble across one. I always gave mine to Nancy.

“She looked forward to my twelfth birthday as much as I did. We counted the weeks, then the days. Mother tried to break it to me that I might be disappointed. ‘Now don’t be too sure, Alec,’ she said. ‘You know how it is with your Uncle Thad: he may not be able to come just when he said he would.’ But he’d promised, and I was dead certain that he’d show up on April twenty-second. Nancy and I met both westbound passenger trains that day but there was no Uncle Thad, and no canoe. There was a disappointment that topped any I’d known, and to make it worse, heavy spring rains had again flooded the bottom lands for miles, out north. There could have been no sadder pair of kids in the State of Iowa than Nancy and me. The Frasers, to relieve a little the awful ache in my heart, invited me out to their farm to spend the spring vacation. I passed the first few days of it there; then, early one morning, my father called for me in the car. He said that Nancy and I were wanted at home, but he didn’t explain why.

“We were a bit puzzled by Father’s manner, but we didn’t suspect anything. Instead of taking the direct road home, Dad turned off toward the river; he said he had a call to make on the way. Between two wooded hills bordering the river where the Chaquaqua makes a wide bend there is an enchanting little valley we called ‘the cove,’ carpeted with wild flowers at that time of year. Dad halted the car at this spot.

“ ‘Alec,’ he said, ‘what about you and Nancy and me picking some hepaticas and violets to take home to your mothers? It won’t take us ten minutes.’

“The road was no more than a hundred yards from the cove. Dad led the way down the slope and disappeared among the trees. Nancy and I followed, gathering wild flowers as we went. And then I spotted a lady-slipper, and you’d have to know how rare they are in our woods to understand the thrill it was to find one. I called Nancy and gave it to her. I still remember how she handled it as though she couldn’t believe it was real. Then we heard my dad calling from the cove. We hurried down, and, as we came within view of the river, there was Uncle Thad, sitting in my canoe with a paddle laid across his knees.

“The picture I then saw has been stamped in memory since that day, to stick there as long as I have memory. There was a faint mist in the air, and the April sunshine slanting through the branches of the trees, just coming into leaf, had a golden quality. With hepaticas growing so thickly, the air was filled with their fragrance which is the very breath of spring. I’ve seen Maxfield Parrish landscapes that have in them the same quality of ideal beauty that belongs to my recollection of the cove on that April day.

“ ‘Alec,’ said Uncle Thad, ‘you’ll have to excuse me for bein’ a bit late. Couldn’t be helped, but it looks like I’ve come at the right time after all. Come aboard, you and Nancy, and we’ll make a day of it. I’ve got sea stores laid in for a long voyage.’

“The day was perfection itself, the Mount Everest of my boyhood peaks of happy days. I can still see the changing lights and colors of the sky reflected from the glassy water, and the canoe, with the three of us, mirrored against it. There was a little wicker seat for Nancy amidships, and Uncle Thad and I paddled from the bow and stern. He did the steering to begin with, but later we changed places, and I soon got the hang of it.

“We explored the flooded lands for miles; the water lay over them to a depth of three or four feet in the level tracts, with bits of higher ground making widely scattered islands and peninsulas to be coasted around and visited. Uncle Thad entered into the spirit of the day as though he himself were twelve years old. He had made such voyages many a time when he was a kid.

“ ‘But never in a canoe, Alec,’ he said; ‘and that’s what I always wanted: a real Indian canoe, made out of birch bark. I couldn’t get you one of those, but this Old Town, Maine, canoe comes pretty close to it.’

“We had our lunch on an island miles down the river, and the sea stores my mother provided were just what they should have been. Then, about midafternoon, we started back.

“Uncle Thad had a fine bass voice and he loved to sing. He knew any number of sea songs. As we were paddling along in the mellow misty light he started singing one that made an impression on me I’ll never forget. The air is a haunting one, in a minor key, and the way he sang it gave it the kind of magic to stir a boy’s blood and make a few miles of flooded bottom lands seem as wide as the sea. He didn’t sing the whole of the song; only the first two stanzas. I’ll try to sing them for you, Gene, but you’ll have to imagine my uncle’s really fine voice and the expression he put into it. This is how it goes:—

There were two lofty merchantmen

From Plymouth town set sail.

Blow high! Blow low!

And so sailed we.

One was called Prince Rupert

And the other Laird of Dee ...

Rolling down the coast of the High Barbaree.

‘Aloft, there! Aloft, there!’

Our jolly bosun cried.

Blow high! Blow low!

And so sailed we.

‘Look ahead, look astern,

Look aweather, look alee!’

Rolling down the coast of the High Barbaree.”

The sound of Brooke’s voice seemed to linger in the wide air of mid-ocean, as though it were reverberating more and more faintly against the vault of the sky itself. Presently Mauriac said:—

“You’re right, Alec. It’s got something—that song. I don’t wonder you remembered it.”

“You’ll understand the impression it made upon a twelve-year-old with an inherited love and longing for the sea. It sank right down into my subconscious mind to remain there, for good and all.

“My uncle broke off at the end of the second stanza. We’d tangled with some snags and half-drowned trees. ‘Keep a sharp lookout forward,’ he said. ‘Mustn’t let her scrape on any of these snags.’

“ ‘Sing some more of it,’ Nancy said.

“ ‘Some more of what?’ said Uncle Thad, for, sometimes, he didn’t know that he’d been singing.

“ ‘About the High Barbaree.’

“ ‘Nancy, don’t get me started on that song! There’s a lot of verses to it.’

“ ‘Well, sing some of them,’ said Nancy. ‘What is the High Barbaree? Is it an island?’

“ ‘Might be.’

“ ‘Have you been there?’

“My uncle shook his head.

“ ‘You can’t go every place, Nancy. Too many of ’em.’

“ ‘Well, I want to,’ said Nancy. ‘I want to see every country in the whole world, and Alec does, too. And we’re going to, aren’t we, Alec?’

“I was responsible for Nancy’s attack of world-wandering fever, but Uncle Thad was the indirect cause. I’d been showing her his charts and the illustrations in some of his books of travel.

“ ‘Tell you what, Nancy,’ said my uncle. ‘When you and Alec grow up we’ll go, the three of us, to visit the High Barbaree. That is, if I’m not too old then.’

“ ‘Sing some more of the song about it,’ Nancy said, and I was as eager to hear it as she was.

“ ‘Wait till we get home,’ said Uncle Thad. ‘I’ll ask Alec’s mother to play the accompaniment for me on the piano.’

“ ‘Will you sing it tonight?’

“ ‘Sure I will, right after supper, if you want me to.’

“Dad was waiting for us at the cove. I couldn’t leave the canoe there, of course, so we hoisted it on top of the car and took it home. There was no room in our garage, so we left it on the Frasers’ back porch. I still couldn’t leave it and had my supper with the Frasers. I bolted my food and hurried out to give the canoe a polishing with a flannel cloth. While I was at this I noticed a little scratch on the paint near the bow, and that simply had to be fixed. Nancy was impatient. She reminded me that Uncle Thad had promised to sing all of ‘The High Barbaree’ and that he’d be waiting for us. But the canoe came first, so Nancy ran out to their garage to bring me a little can of green paint and a brush. I painted over the scratch with the greatest care, and Nancy was saying: ‘Hurry up, Alec! I’m getting sleepy, and I want to hear the song. Why are you so fussy about a tiny little scratch?’ At last I was ready and we hurried along the street in the spring twilight, so magical to me on that particular evening. The breath of lilacs was in the air, and lights were just beginning to appear in the windows.

“Our living room opens right off the front porch. When we got there Mother was already trying over the accompaniment to ‘The High Barbaree,’ and Uncle Thad was standing beside her, ready to sing. Dad was seated in his easy chair near by, holding the bowl of wild flowers we’d picked and breathing in their fragrance. There was a contented expression on his face—that of a country doctor who is able to hope for an evening at home. As we came in Mother glanced over her shoulder and smiled. Uncle Thad gave us a wink, but said nothing; his mind was on the song. Then he began.

“Nancy and I were good and tired, for we’d been up since daybreak, and the excitement of the day and the long canoe voyage had made us so drowsy that we could hardly keep our eyes open. Nancy’s head began to nod before he was halfway through, and about a minute later she was asleep, snuggled against my shoulder. I tried hard to keep awake till the end, but I heard the words dying away until I was dead to the world, too. But it was a wonderful song for two tired kids to go to sleep on. I don’t remember how I got into bed that night. I must have walked upstairs still sleeping.”