Читать книгу List, Ye Landsmen! - William Clark Russell - Страница 4

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The boat was swept to the beach, and I sprang on the shingle. I paid the men their charges, and paused a moment to realize the thrilling, inscrutable, memorable sensation which visits a man who, after a long absence, treads his native soil for the first time.

After the chocolate faces of the West, and the yellow faces of the East, and the copper-colored faces of the South; after two years of mosquitoes, of cathedral-like forests, of spacious roasting bays, of sharks and alligators, and league-broad rivers, and songless birds angelically plumed, and endless miles of ocean; after—but I should need a volume to catalogue all that follows this after—after the Royal Brunswicker, in a word, how exquisite was my happiness on feeling the Deal shingle under my foot; how rejoiced was I to be in a land of white men and women, who spoke my own native tongue with its jolly, hearty, round, old Kentish accent, and who lived in a kingdom of roast beef and Welsh mutton and the best ales which were ever brewed in this world!

While I paused, full of happy thought, the men who had brought me ashore dragged their boat up the shingle. Two or three others joined them, and the little company rushed the boat up in thunder. They then went rolling silently into Beach Street and disappeared. I was struck by the absence of animation fore and aft the beach. Many luggers and galley-punts lay high and dry, but only here and there did I observe the figure of a man, and, as well as I could make out in the evening dusk, the figure was commonly that of an old man. Here and there also a few children were playing, and here and there at an open door stood a woman gossiping with another. But though I saw lights in the public houses, no sounds of singing, of voices growling in argument, of maudlin calls, such as had been familiar to my ear in old times, issued from the doors or windows. I was surprised by this apparent lifelessness. A fleet of two hundred sail in the Downs should have filled the little town with bustle and business, with riotous sailors and clamorous wenches, and a coming and going of boats.

There were two ways by which my uncle’s house was to be reached—the one by the road, the other by the sand hills, a desolate waste of hummocky sand, stretching for some miles from the north end of Deal toward the town of Sandwich and the River Stour. I chose the road because I wanted to taste the country air, to sniff the aromas of the fields and the hedges as I marched along, and because I wished to put as much distance as the highway permitted between me and the sea. The sky overhead was clear; there was no moon as yet, but the stars shone in a showering of light, and there was much lightning, which glanced to the zenith and fell upon the white road I was stepping along; and now and again I caught a low hum of thunder—an odd, vibratory note, like the sound of an organ played in a church and heard at a distance on a still evening. The atmosphere was breathless, and I was mighty thankful; but sometimes I would catch myself whistling for an easterly wind, for I knew not from what quarter a breeze might come on such a still night, and if the first of it moved out of the south or west, then, even though my hands should be upon the knocker of my uncle’s door, I must make a bolt of it to the beach or lose my ship.

My Uncle Joe’s house was a sturdy, tidy structure of flint, massively roofed and fitted to outweather a century of hurricanes. He had designed and built it himself. It stood at about two miles from Deal, withdrawn from the road, snug, among a number of trees, elm and oak. Rooks cawed in those trees, and their black nests hung in them; and in winter the Channel gales, hoary with snow, shrieked through the hissing skeleton branches with a furious noise of tempest, that reminded Uncle Joe of being hove-to off the Horn.

He had been a sailor. Uncle Joe had been more than a sailor—he had been pilot and smuggler. He had commanded ships of eight hundred tons burthen, full of East Indian commodities, and he had commanded luggers of twenty tons burthen, deep with contraband goods, gunwale flush with teas, brandies, laces, tobacco, and hollands. Uncle Joe had been a good friend to me when I was a lad and an orphan. He and his wife were as father and mother to me, and I loved them both with all the love that was in my heart. It was Uncle Joe who had educated me, who had bred me to the sea, who saw when I started on a voyage that I embarked with plenty of clothes in my chest and plenty of money in my pocket; and to Uncle Joe’s influence it was that I looked for a valuable East or West Indian command in the next or the following year.

I pulled the house-bell and hammered with the knocker. It was dark among the trees; the house stood black, with a dim red square of window, where some crimson curtains shut out the lamplight. Until the door was opened I listened to the weather. All was hushed save the thunder. I could hear the faint, remote beat of the surf upon the shingle, that was all. Not a leaf rustled overhead; but though there was not more lightning, the thunder was more frequent down in the south, as though the clouds over France were blazing bravely.

A middle-aged man, clad somewhat after the manner of the longshoremen of those days—clearly a decayed or retired mariner—pulled open the door, and, as this was done, I heard my uncle call out:

“Is it Bill?”

“It is,” said I, delighted to hear his voice; and I pushed past the sailor who held open the door.

My uncle came out of the parlor into the passage, looked up and down me a moment or two, and extending his hand, greeted me thus:

“Well, I’m junked!”

He then shook my hand at least a minute, and bidding me fling my cap on to a hall chair, he dragged me into the parlor—the snuggest room in world, as I have often thought; full of good paintings of ships and the sea, of valuable curiosities, and fine oak furniture.

Every age has faces of its own, countenances which exactly fit the civilization of the particular time they belong to. It is no question of the fashion of the beard or the wearing of the hair. There was a type of face in my young day which I rarely behold now, and I dare say the type which I am every day seeing will be as extinct fifty years hence as is the type that I recollect when I was a young man. How is this, and why is this? It matters not. It may be due to frequent new infusions of blood; to the modifications—do not call it the progress—of intellect; it may be due—but to whatever it may be due it is true; and equally true it is that my Uncle Joe had one of those faces—I may indeed say one of those heads—which as peculiarly belong to their time as the fashions of garments belong to theirs.

He was clean shaven; his temples were overshot; they set his little black eyes back deep, and his baldness, co-operating with these thatched and overhanging eaves, provided him with so broad a surface of forehead that he might have sat for the portrait of a great wit. My uncle had a wide and firm mouth; the lips were slightly blue: but this color was not due to the use of ardent spirits—oh, no! A teetotaler he was not, but never would the mugs he emptied have changed the color of his lips. They were blue because his heart was not strong, and the few who remember him know that he died of heart disease.

He was the jolliest, heartiest figure of a man that a convivial soul could yearn to embrace; a shape molded by the ocean, as the Deal beach pebble is molded by the ceaseless heave of the breakers. He thrust me into a capacious armchair and stood on rounded shanks, staring at me with his face flushed and working with pleasure.

“And how are you, uncle?”

“Well.”

“And Aunt Elizabeth?”

“Well.”

“And Bessie?”

“Well.”

“Where are they?”

“Coming downstairs.”

And this was true; a moment later my aunt and cousin entered—my aunt a grave, pale gentlewoman in a black gown, black being her only wear for these twenty years past, ever since the death of her only son at the age of four; my cousin a handsome, well-shaped girl of seventeen with cherry-ripe lips and large flashing black eyes, and abundance of dark hair with a tinge of rusty red upon it—they entered, I say, and they had fifty questions to ask, as I had. But in half an hour’s time the greetings were over, and I was sitting at a most hospitably laden supper table, having satisfied myself, by going out of doors, that the night was quiet, that there was still no stir of wind, and that nothing more was happening roundabout than a vivid play of violet lightning low down in the sky, with frequent cracklings and groanings of distant thunder.

I was not surprised that Uncle Joe and his family had not heard of the arrival of the Royal Brunswicker in the Downs; though I had been somewhat astonished by his guessing it was I, when I knocked.

“So you’re chief mate of the ship?” he exclaimed.

“I am.”

“How has Spalding used ye, Bill?”

“Handsomely. As a father. I shall love Spalding till the end of my days, and until I get command I shall never wish to go afloat with another man.”

“Well,” said my uncle, “it is not every skipper, as you know, that would allow his first mate a run ashore, himself waiting aboard the while for a slant of wind to get his anchor. No. Don’t let us forget the weather. Bess, my daisy, there’s no call for Bill to keep all on looking out o’ doors; get ye forth now and again and report any sigh of wind you may hear. I’ll find out its quarter, and Bill shall not fail his captain.”

“What’s the news?” said I.

“News enough,” he said; and I sat and listened to news, much of which was extraordinary.

I heard of the Yankees thrashing us by land and sea, of fierce and desperate fighting on the Canadian lakes, of the landing of the Prince of Orange in Holland, and of his being proclaimed King of the United Netherlands, of Murat proving a renegade and suing for peace with this country, of gallant seafights down Toulon way and in the Adriatic and elsewhere, of the investment of Bayonne by the British army, of the entry of the Allies into Paris, of peace between England and France, of Louis XVIII. in the room of Bonaparte, and—which almost took my breath away—of Bonaparte himself at Elba, dethroned, his talons pared, his teeth drawn, but with his head still on his shoulders, and in full possession of his bloody reason.

“And so he was quietly shipped to Porto Ferraro,” said I, “in a comfortable thirty-eight gun British frigate, instead of being hanged at the yardarm of that same craft.”

“He is too splendid a character to hang,” said my aunt mildly.

“Junked if I wouldn’t make dog’s meat of him,” cried Uncle Joe.

“They should have hanged him,” said I.

“They have hanged a better man instead,” exclaimed my cousin Bess.

“A king?”

“No, Bill, he was not a king,” said my uncle, “he was the master of a ship and part owner, a young chap, too—a mighty pity. They had him up at Sandwich on a charge of casting the vessel away. He was found guilty and hanged, and he’s hanging now.”

“Where does he hang?” said I.

“Down on the Sandhills.”

“A time will come, I hope,” said I, “when this beastly trick of beaconing the sea-coast, and the river’s bank, and the high-ways with gibbets will have been mended. Spalding was telling me that up in his part of the country traveling has grown twice as far as it used to be, by the gibbets forcing people to go out of their way to avoid the sight of them.”

“I am sorry for the hanged man,” said my uncle, “but willfully casting a ship away, Bill, is a fearful thing—so fearful that the gibbet at which I’d dangle the fellow that did it should be as high as the royal mast head of the craft he foundered! What d’ye think of that drop of rum?”

“Is that wind?” said my aunt.

“Thunder,” said Uncle Joe.

Bess went to the house door: I followed. We stood listening; the noise was thunder; there was not a breath of air, but all the stars were gone. A sort of film of storm had drawn over them, and I guessed I was in for a drenching walk to the beach. But Lord! rain to a man whose lifetime is spent in the eye of the weather!

“Bess,” said I, “you’ve grown a fine girl, d’ye know.”

“No compliments, William, dear. I am going to be married.”

“If I had known that before!” said I, kissing her now for the first time, for congratulation.

This was fresh news, and we talked about the coming son-in-law, who, to be sure, must be in the seafaring line too, for once inject salt water into the veins of a family, and it takes a power of posterity to flush the pipes clear.

“What’s wrong with Deal town?” said I. “Is it the neighborhood of the gibbet that damps the spirits of the place?”

“What d’ye mean, Bill?”

“Why, there’s nothing stirring along the beach. There are some two hundred craft off the town and the bench is as though it were in mourning; your luggers lie grim as a row of coffins, nothing moving amongst them but some shadow of old age—like old Jimmy Files, for example.”

“It’ll be the press,” said my aunt.

“Ho!” said I. “Is the king short-handed once more?”

“There’s not only what’s called deficiency, but what’s termed disaffection,” said my uncle. “The vote this year was for a hundred and forty thousand Johnnys and Joeys. They vote, and Jack says be d—d to ye.”

“Any men nabbed out of Deal?” said I.

“Five boatmen last month,” answered Uncle Joe. “I should think they’d be glad to set them ashore wherever they be. Put a pressed Deal man into your forecastle and then fire your magazine.”

“I’m a mate; they’ll not take me,” said I.

“There’s been no press for some days that I’ve heard of,” said my uncle, “but you’d better get to the beach by way of the sand hills. The Johnnys don’t hunt rabbits. They beat the alleys out of Beach Street, and you hear of them Walmer way and down by the Dockyard.”

He sat deep in an armchair, smoking a long clay pipe. His face shone, his little shining eyes followed the smoke that rose from his lips. His posture, his appearance as he sat with a stout leg across his knee and a shining silver buckle on his square-toed shoe, seemed to say: “What I’ve got is mine, and what I’ve got is enough. The Lord is good; and good too is this house and all that’s in it.” A small fire burnt briskly in the grate, and on the hob was a bright copper kettle with steam shooting from its split lip. The dance of the fire-flames ran feeble shadows through the steady radiance of the oil lamp, and the colors of the room were made warmer and richer by the delicate twinkling. My aunt knitted, and cousin Bess, with her chin in her hand, listened to the conversation. Upon the table was a large silver tray with glasses, decanters of rum and brandy, and silver bowl and ladle for the brewing of punch. These things supplied a completing and satisfying detail of liberal and handsome comfort. What happiness, thought I, to settle down ashore in such a house as this, with as many thousands as would keep me going just as Uncle Joe is kept going! When are those fine times coming for me? thought I; and there now happening a pause in the talk, whilst my uncle, lifting the kettle off the hob, brewed with skillful hand a small quantity of rum punch—the most fragrant and supporting of hot drinks, and loved a great deal too well in my time by skippers and mates whose conscience blushed only in their noses—I pulled from my pocket the boatman’s newspaper, and turned the sheet about, not reckoning, however, upon now coming across anything fresh.

“What have you there, William?” said Bess.

“A north country rag,” said I, “some weeks old. The gift of a Geordie, no doubt, to the waterman who gave it to me.”

Such news as it contained related largely to shipping. There was a column of items of maritime intelligence. My eye naturally dwelt upon this column, and I read some passages aloud. At last I came to this paragraph: