Читать книгу The Sailor - Snaith John Collis - Страница 21

After the young man from the sea had drunk his second tankard of mild, he sat on the high stool silent and embarrassed. He was hoping that the gorgeous creature opposite would continue the conversation, but he didn't seem to know how to encourage her. However, as soon as a powerful feminine intelligence had told her the state of the case, she said abruptly, "Well, and what are you going to do for a living now you've retired from the sea?"

He gave his head a wistful shake.

The gesture, rather pathetic in its hopelessness, touched Miss Burton.

"Well, you can't live on air, you know."

"No, lady."

"Well, what are you going to do?"

Another shake of the head was the only answer, but as he met her sympathetic eyes, an inspiration came to him.

"Lady," he said humbly, "you don't happen to know of a shack?"

"Know of a what!" The touch of acerbity froze him at once. "Shack!" Coming to his assistance, "What on earth's that?"

"Lodgings, clean and decent, for a single man." The phrase was Klondyke's, and it came to him quite oddly at that moment in all its native purity. His mentor had a private collection of such phrases which he used to roll out for his own amusement when he went ashore. This was one. Henry Harper could see him now, pointing to a dingy card in a dingy window in a dingy street, in some miserable seaboard suburb, and he could hear him saying, "There you are, Sailor, lodgings, clean and decent, for a single man."

Miss Burton pondered. And then the slow smile came again.

"Well, if you really want lodgings clean and decent for a single man I suppose I must try and help you," she said graciously. "But I'm afraid I shan't be much use. They are not quite in my line."

"No, lady."

"Still, Fore Street is full of them. That's the second turn to the left and then the first on the right, and then the first on the right again."

"Yes, lady."

"You might try No. 5 – or No. 7 – or No. 9 – but Fore Street's full of them."

Miss Burton was really trying to be helpful, and the young seaman was very grateful to her, but Klondyke would have known at once that "she was talking out of the back of her neck."

Armed with this valuable information, the young man got off his high stool at last, raised his fur cap once more, with a little of the unconscious grace of its original owner, said, "So long, lady," collected his bundle and went out by the side door. And in the meantime, the bar-lady, who had marked every detail of his going, hardly knew whether to laugh or to shed tears. This was the queerest being she had ever seen in her life.

The Sailor managed to find Fore Street after taking several wrong turnings and asking his way three times. And then his difficulties really began.

Fore Street was very narrow, very long, very gloomy, very dirty. In each of these qualities it seemed well able to compare with any street he had seen in Frisco, in Sydney, in Liverpool, or even in Port Said. But it didn't discourage him. After all he had never been used to anything else.

The first house in Fore Street had a grimy card in a grimier window, exactly in the manner to rejoice the heart of Klondyke. Sailor, who had forgotten almost every syllable of "book-learning" he ever possessed – and at no time had he been the possessor of many – leaped at once to the conclusion that the legend on the card was, "Lodgings, clean and decent, for a single man." Unfortunately it was, "Dressmaking done here."

A very modest knock was answered by a large female of truculent aspect, to whom he took off his cap, while she stood looking at him with surprise, wonder and inveterate distrust of mankind in general and of him in particular spreading over her like a pall.

"Lodgings, clean and decent, for a single man!"

The door of No. 1, Fore Street, was slammed violently in the face of the applicant.

The Sailor nearly shed tears. He was absurdly sensitive in dealing with the other sex and prone to be affected by its hazards and vicissitudes. However, Auntie of the long ago surged into his mind, and the recollection seemed to soften the rebuff. All, even of that sex, were not bar-ladies, sympathetic, smiling, and magnificent. Therefore he took courage to knock at the door of the next house which also had a card in the window. But, unfortunately, that again was not to proclaim lodgings, clean and decent, for a single man, but merely, "A horse and cart for hire."

Here the blow, again from the quarter which knows how to deal them, was equally decisive. A creature, blowsy and unkempt, told him, after a single glance at his fur cap and his bundle and his deep-sea-going gear, "that if he didn't take hisself off and look sharp about it she'd set the pleece on him."

At this second rebuff the Sailor stood at the edge of the curb for some little time, trying to pluck up spirit to grapple with the problem of the next card-bearing domicile, which happened to be the third house in the street. He felt he had begun to lose his bearings a bit. It had come upon him all at once with great force that he was a stranger in a strange land whose language he didn't know.

He had just made up his mind to tackle the next card in the window, let the consequences be what they might, when he felt his sleeve plucked by a small urchin of nine with a preternaturally sharp and racial countenance.

This promising product of the world's greatest race, one Moses Gerothwohl by name, had had an eye fixed on the fur cap ever since he had heard its owner ask at the first house in the street for lodgings, clean and decent, for a single man. This was undoubtedly one of those foreign sailors, perhaps a Rooshian – a Rooshian was the very highest flight of which the imagination of Moses Gerothwohl was at present capable – who, even if they were apt to get drunk on queer fluids and sometimes went a bit free with their knives, were yet very good-natured, and as a rule were pretty well off for money.

"Did yer sye, mate, yer wanted a shakedown?" said Moses Gerothwohl, plucking at the sleeve of the Sailor.

The Sailor looked down at the urchin and nodded.

"Come with me, then," said Moses, stoutly. "And I'll take yer to my grandma's."

He led the Sailor through a perfect maze of by-streets, and through a nest of foul courts and alleys, until at last he came to the house of his grandmother, to whom he presented the foreign seaman.

She was not very prepossessing to look at, nor was her abode enticing, but she had a small room to offer which, if not over clean and decidedly airless, contained a bed of which he could have the sole use for the reasonable sum of sixpence a night.

The young man accepted the terms at once and laid his bundle on the bed. But the old woman did not accept him with equal alacrity. There was a little formality to be gone through before the transaction could be looked upon as "firm." It was usual for the sixpence to be paid in advance.

Grandma was one-fifth tact, three-fifths determination, one-fifth truculence, and the whole of her was will power of a very concentrated kind. She was as tough as wire, and in the course of several tense and vital minutes, during which her wolf's eyes never left Henry Harper's face, that fact came home to him.

It took nearly five minutes for the Sailor to realize that Grandma was waiting for something, but as soon as he did, the way in which he bowed to fate impressed her right down to the depths of her soul. He took an immense handful of silver out of his pocket, the hoarded savings of six years of bitter toil, chose one modest English "tanner" after a search among many values and nationalities, and handed it over with a polite smile.

The old woman was a very hard nut of the true waterside variety, but the sight of such affluence was almost too much for her. Money was her ruling passion. She went downstairs breathing hard, and with a deep conviction that Rothschild himself was in occupation of her first floor front.

In the meantime, the Sailor had seated himself on the bed at the side of his bundle, and had started to think things out a bit. This was a long and tough job. Hours passed. The small, stuffy, evil-smelling bedroom grew as black as pitch; a heavy October darkness had descended upon the strange land of Wapping, but the Sailor was still thinking very hard; also he was wondering what he should do next.

He hadn't a friend on the wide earth. There was nothing to which he could turn his hand. He could neither read nor write. And in his heart he had a subtle fear of these queer longshore people, although he had sense enough to know that it was a Sailor's duty to trample that feeling under foot. One who six long years had sailed before the mast aboard the Margaret Carey had nothing to fear in human shape.

As Henry Harper sat on that patched counterpane in the growing October darkness, unloosing that strange and terrible thing, the mind of man, he was not merely lonely, he was afraid. Afraid of what? He didn't know. But as the darkness grew there came an uncanny feeling under his jersey. It seemed to stick him in the pit of the stomach like the icy blade of a knife. He had tasted fear in many forms, but this kind of stealing coldness was something new and something different.

It grew darker and darker in the room. The sense of loneliness was upon him now like a living presence. There was not a soul in the world to whom he could turn, to whom he might speak, unless it was the old woman downstairs. Yet lonely and rather terrified as he was, his odd intuition told him it would be better to converse with no one than to converse with her.

At last, shivering and supperless, although his pockets were heavy with silver untold, he made up his mind to turn in. It was a counsel of desperation. He was sick to nausea with the business of thinking about nothing, a process which began in nothing and ended in nothing; and at last with a groan of misery, he pulled off his boots and leggings, but without removing his clothes stretched himself on the bed.

If he could have had his wish he would have gone to sleep, never to awake again. But he could only lie shivering in the darkness without any hope of rest. Presently a clock struck two. And then he thought he heard a creak on the stairs and shortly afterwards a stealthy footfall outside his door.

He had never been anything but broad awake. But these creeping noises of the night seemed to string up every sense he had to a point that was uncanny. He held his breath in order to listen – to listen like a frightened animal in a primeval forest that has begun to sense the approach of a secret and deadly foe.

The door of the room came very softly open. It was at the side of the bed, and he could not see it; but he felt an almost imperceptible vibration in the airless stuffiness in which he lay. Moreover, a breathing, catlike thing had entered the room; a thing he could neither hear nor see. It was a presence of which he was made aware by the incandescent forces of a living imagination.

It was too dark to see, there was not a sound to hear, but he knew there was a breathing shape within reach of his left hand.

Suddenly his hand shot out and closed upon it.

He caught something electric, quivering, alive. But whatever it was, a deadly silence contained it. There was not a sound, except a gasp, as of one who has made a sudden plunge into icy water. The Sailor lay inert, but now that live thing was in his hand he was not afraid.

He expected a knife. Realizing that he must defend his face or his ribs or whatever part might be open to attack, he knew he must be ready for the blow.

But a queer thing happened. The attack was not made by a knife. It was made by a human will. As he lay grappling in the darkness with his visitor, slowly but surely he felt himself enfolded by an unknown power. Such a force was beyond his experience. His own will was in a vice; there was a deadly struggle, yet neither moved. Not a sound was uttered, but in the end the Sailor nearly screamed with the overmastering tension which seemed to be pressing out his life. And then he realized that his hand was no longer holding the thing upon which it had closed.

The room was empty again. The darkness was too great for his eyes to tell him, but every sense he had, and at this moment he had more than five, seemed to say that whatever his peril, it had now passed.

He sat up and listened tensely through the still open door. He thought he could hear the creak of a foot on the stairs. Then he began to search his pockets for a box of matches, and suddenly remembered that he hadn't one. But the sense of physical danger had given him a new power over his mind. He was now terribly alert.

His instinct was to get out of that house at once. But a very little reflection showed that such a course was not necessary. It was only an old woman after all.