Читать книгу List, Ye Landsmen! - William Clark Russell - Страница 9

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Presently it fell dark; but hardly had the last of the red, wet light faded off the scuttle when the youth Jim re-entered the berth and lighted the coffee-pot-shaped lamp, and as he went out Captain Greaves came in.

He asked me how I felt. I told him that I was almost well, that I hoped to be quite well by the morning, in which case I would beg him to transfer me to the first homeward bound craft that passed, though she should be no bigger than a ship’s longboat. He viewed me, I thought, somewhat strangely, smiled slightly, was silent long enough to render silence somewhat significant, and then said: “A beast of a frigate showing no colors has kept me anxious this afternoon. We have run her hull down, but she has only just thought proper to shift her helm. Possibly an Englishman who took us for a Yankee.” Saying this he pulled off his fur cap and exhibited a fine head with a quantity of thick, black hair curling upon it; he next produced and filled a pipe of tobacco and, removing his pea-coat, he lighted his pipe at the lamp and seated himself on the locker in the attitude of a seaman who intends to enjoy a yarn and a smoke.

I was strong enough to hold my head over the edge of the hammock; thus we kept each other in view.

“D’ye feel able to talk, Mr. Fielding?” said Greaves.

“Very able, indeed,” I answered. “Your madeira has made a new man of me.”

“How happened it,” said he, “that you should be washing about on the oar of a man-of-war’s boat off Ramsgate, the other morning, when we fell in with you?”

I begged him to put a pinch of tobacco into the bowl of my pipe and to hold the lamp to me, and when I had lighted my pipe and he had resumed his seat I began my story; and I told him everything that had befallen me from the time of my arrival in the Downs in the ship Royal Brunswicker down to the hour when I found myself afloat on an oar, heading a straight course east by north with the stream of the tide. He listened with earnest attention, smoking very hard at some parts of my narrative, and emitting several dense clouds, which almost obscured him when I told him how the lightning had liberated the corpse and how, as it might seem, the fiery hand of God himself had delivered the body of the malefactor to the weeping, praying mother.

“It was an evil moment for me when I fell in with that gibbet,” said I. “I had not the heart to leave the wretched mother, though my first instinct on catching sight of her was to run for my life. But I thank God for my wonderful preservation; I thank Him first and you next, Captain Greaves.”

“No more of that. We’re quits.”

“It is clear that you keep a bright lookout aboard this brig.”

“Had your life depended upon the eyes of my men, the perishable part of you would have been by this time concocted into cod and crab. I’ll introduce you to the individual to whom you owe your life.”

He opened the door of the cabin and putting a silver whistle to his lips blew, and in a moment a fine retriever bounded in.

“Galloon, Mr. Fielding; Mr. Fielding, Galloon.”

The dog wagged his tail and looked up at me.

“Did he go overboard after me?” said I.

“You shall hear. It was break of day, the water quiet, the brig under all plain sail, the speed some five knots. I was walking the quarter-deck, and there was a man on the forecastle keeping a lookout. Suddenly that chap Galloon there”—here the “chap” wagged his tail and looked up at me again as though perfectly sensible that we were talking about him—“sprang on to the taffrail and barked loudly. I ran aft and looked over, but not having a dog’s eye saw nothing. ‘What is it, Galloon?’ said I. He barked again, and then with a short but most piercing and lamentable howl he sprang overboard. I love that dog as I love the light of day, Mr. Fielding, much better than I love dollars, and better than I love many ladies with whom I am acquainted. The brig was brought to the wind, a boat lowered, and the people found Galloon with his teeth in the jacket of a man who was laying over an oar.”

“The noble fellow!” said I, looking down at the dog.

Greaves picked him up and put his head over the edge of the hammock, and I kissed the creature’s nose, receiving in return a caressing lick of the tongue that swept my face.

“Why do you call him Galloon?” said I.

“I have been dreaming of galleons all my life,” he answered.

He relighted his pipe and resumed his seat, and the dog lay at his feet, gazing up at me.

“I took the liberty,” said I, “of asking the youth called Jimmy to tell me what port this brig was bound to. He answered that he did not know.”

“He does not know,” said Captain Greaves. “No man on board the Black Watch, saving myself, knows where we are bound to.”

“I recollect reading in that newspaper paragraph I have spoken of that the brig is owned by a merchant of Amsterdam. I recollect this the better because it led me to ask my uncle, Captain Round, whether a British letter of marque would be issued to a foreigner despite his sending his ship a-privateering under English colors.”

“We are not a letter of marque. It is perfectly true that this brig is owned by an Amsterdam merchant. His name is, Bartholomew Tulp, and he is my stepfather.”

I asked no more questions. I would not seem curious, though there was something in Captain Greaves’ reserve, and something in the enigmatic character of this ocean errand, which made me very thirsty to hear all that he might be willing to tell. Never had I heard of a ship manned by a crew who knew not whither they were going. I speak of the merchant service. As to the Royal Navy, the obligation of sealed orders must always exist; but when a man enters as a sailor aboard a merchantman, the first and most natural inquiry he wishes his captain to answer is, “Where are you bound to?”

Greaves sat watching me, as did his dog. The captain smoked, with a countenance of abstraction and an air of deep musing, whilst he lightly stroked his dog’s back with his foot.

“My mate is a devil of a fool!” he exclaimed, breaking the silence that had lasted some minutes. “He is a Dutchman, and his name is Van Laar. He speaks English very well, but he is no sailor. The wind headed us after leaving Amsterdam, and, having my doubts of Van Laar, I told him to put the brig about, and she missed stays in his hands. Worse—when she was in irons, he did not know what to do with her. I abominate the rogue who misses stays; but can villainy in a sailor go much further than not knowing what to do when a ship has missed stays?”

“I have met,” said I, “with some fine seamen among Dutchmen.”

“Van Laar is not one of them,” he answered. “Van Laar is no more to be trusted with a ship than he is with a bottle of hollands. He does not scruple to own that he hates the English, and I do not like to sail in company with a man who hates my countrymen. I took him on Mynheer Tulp’s recommendation. I was opposed to shipping a Dutchman in the capacity of mate, but I could not very well object to a man as a Dutchman,” said he, laughing, “to Mynheer Tulp.”

“Does the mate know where the brig is bound to?” I inquired.

“No.”

“How very extraordinary!”

He looked at me gravely; his face then relaxed. Finding his pipe out, he arose, put on his coat and cap, and said:

“I will leave you for the night. What do you fancy for your supper—what, I mean, that you, as a sailor, will suppose my brig’s larder can supply?”

I answered that a basin of broth with a glass of brandy-and-water would make me an abundant supper.

“But before you leave me,” said I, “will you tell me where my clothes are? I must hope to be transhipped to-morrow, and to step ashore with nothing on but a blanket——”

“Your clothes have been dried and are in the cabin,” said he. “When Jimmy brings your supper ask him for your clothes. And now good-night, and pleasant dreams to you, Mr. Fielding, when it shall please you to fall asleep.”

The dog sprang through the door, and I lay with my eyes fixed upon the flame of the lamp, diverting myself with inventing schemes of a voyage, one of which should fit this expedition of the Black Watch.

Early next morning I awoke after a sound, refreshing night of rest, and, dropping out of my hammock, found that I was pretty nigh as hearty as ever I had been in my life. Greatly rejoiced by this discovery, I attired myself in my clothes, which had been thoroughly dried. A razor, a brush, and one or two other conveniences were in the cabin. I was struck by Greaves’ kindness. I seemed to find in it something more than an expression of charitable attention and grateful memory. Now being dressed, and now testing myself on my legs, and finding all ship-shape aboard, from the loftiest flying pennant of hair down to the soles of my shoes, I opened the door of the berth and stood awhile looking in upon the cabin. It was a small snug sea-interior, well lighted, and breezy just now with the cordial gushing of wind down the companion-hatch. A table and a few seats comprised the furniture; those things, and a lamp, and a stand of small-arms, and some cutlasses.

While I viewed this interior I heard Greaves’ voice in a cabin on the starboard side forward.

“Not coffee, but cocoa!” on which another voice, which I recognized as the lad Jimmy’s, shouted out, to the accompaniment of the howling of a dog:

“Not coffee, but cocoa!”

“Again,” said the voice of Captain Greaves.

“Not coffee, but cocoa,” yelled the lad, and again the dog delivered a long howl.

“For the third time, if you please.”

“Not coffee, but cocoa!” shrieked the lad, and the accompanying howl of the dog rose to the key in which the boy pitched his voice, as though in excessive sympathy with the shouter.

A door forward was then opened, and the youth Jimmy came out. He stopped on seeing me, and cried out, “’Ere’s Mr. Fielding,” and then went on deck. Galloon bounded up to me, and while I caressed him Greaves, with his shirt sleeves turned up, and holding a hair-brush, looked out of his door, saw me, approached, and shook me heartily by the hand. I answered a few kind questions, and asked if there was anything in sight from the deck.

“Yes,” said he, “but nothing to be of any use to you. You can feel the heave. It blows fresh.”

“It is a very buoyant heave,” said I; “I should imagine you are at sea with a swept hold.”

He continued to brush his hair.

“Excuse me, is your lad Jimmy an idiot?”

“Not at all. Perhaps I know why you ask. You heard me and Galloon giving him a lesson just now. Jimmy Vinten is no idiot, but he wants a faculty, and Galloon and I are endeavoring to create it. He cannot distinguish dishes. He will put a bit of beef on the table and call it pudding. He’ll knock on my door and sing out, ‘The pork’s sarved,’ when he means pease soup. His memory is remarkable in other ways. Wait a minute, and we’ll go on deck together.”

I sat upon a locker to talk to Galloon, to kiss the beast’s cold snout, and with his paw in my hand, while his tail swayed like the naked mast of an oysterman in a quick sea, I thanked him with many loving words for having saved my life. His eye languished up at me. Oh! if ever there was an expression of serene and heartfelt satisfaction in the eye of a dog that for some noble action is being thanked with caresses, it shone in Galloon’s eyes while he seemed to listen to me. After a few minutes Greaves joined me, equipped in his pea coat, fur cap, and top boots—a massive privateering figure of a man, handsome, determined of gaze, yet with something of softness in his looks, and intimations of gentleness in the motions of his lips and in his occasional smile. He led the way up the companion steps, and I stood upon the deck of the brig looking about me.

Seasoned as I was to the life which the ocean puts into the shipwright’s plank, I should not have suspected, from the motion of the vessel only, that so considerable a sea was running. The wind was two or three points abaft the beam; it was blowing half a gale—a clear gale. The clouds were flying in bales and rags of wool toward the pouring southern verge of the ocean; the dark blue brine, sparkling with the flying eastern sunshine, swelled in hills to the brig’s counter, and the foam swept in sheets backward from each rushing head. The brig was under whole topsails and a topgallant sail, but abreast, to leeward, was another brig heading north, stripped to a single band of main topsail and a double-reefed forecourse—ay, Jack, the square foresail and mainsail in my time carried two and sometimes three reefs—and the beat of the head seas obscured her in frequent snowstorms as she struggled wildly aslant amid the dark blue billows. We were roaring through the water at ten or eleven knots. To every stoop of the bows the foam rose boiling above the catheads, with a mighty, thunderous bursting away of the parted seas on either hand. Ships in those times made a great noise when they went through the water. They were all bow and beam, and anything that was over took the form of stern, immensely square, and as clamorous when in motion as any other part of the ship. The Black Watch would be laughed at as a cask in these days, but as vessels then went she was a clipper. Her lines were tolerably fine at the entry; then her bulk rolled whale-like aft, with the copper showing two feet above the water-line, and then she narrowed into a clipper run to the deadwood and the sternpost. Her sheer forward gave her a bold bow. I watched her for a few minutes as she rolled over the seas—and I was sensible that Captain Greaves’ eye was upon me as I watched—and I thought her a very smart, handsome, powerful vessel, the sort of ship a freebooter would instantly fall in love with, and furiously determine to possess himself of, yea, though a pennant shook at her masthead.

She was armed on the forecastle with a long brass eighteen-pounder, pivoted; on the main deck with four nine-pound carronades, two of a side; and aft with a second long brass eighteen-pounder, likewise pivoted. She carried three boats—one stowed in another abaft the caboose, and a big boat chocked and lashed abreast of the other two boats. Her decks were very white; the brass pieces flashed, and there was a sparkle of glass over the cabin, and a frosty brilliancy of brine all about her planks as you see in white sand with sunshine upon it. Her sails soared square with a great hoist of topsail, and the cloths might have been stitched for a man-of-war, so perfect was the sit and spread of the heads, the fit of the clews to the yardarms.

I took notice of the men; half the crew were on deck cleaning paint-work, coiling down, differently occupied. They were big, burly fellows for the most part, variously attired, and as I watched, one of them, a vast, square, carrotty man, called out to another in a deep, roaring voice; I did not know Dutch, but what that man said sounded very much like Dutch, and the other man answered him in the same tongue.

And now, having looked at the sea, and at the brig, and at such of the crew as were visible forward, I directed my eyes at the figure of an individual who was walking to and fro in the gangway. He was the mate, Van Laar; as burly as the burliest of the figures forward, his eyes small, black, and fierce, his face a mass of flesh, in the midst of which was set an aquiline nose, whose outline in profile was hidden by the swell of the cheek as you lose sight of the line of a ship’s sail past some knoll of brine. He had not the least appearance of a sailor: was not even dressed as a sailor; looked as though he had just arrived out of the country in a cart to buy or sell eggs and butter in Amsterdam market.

I observed that his behavior grew uneasy while I gazed about me, Greaves at my side receiving from me from moment to moment with a countenance of complacency some morsel of appreciative criticism. That Dutch mate, Van Laar, I say grew uneasy. He darted glances of suspicion at me. I never would have supposed that any human eyes set in so much fat should have possessed the monkey-like nimbleness of that man’s. At the same time I noticed that he seemed to pull himself together after the captain had stepped on deck. He shook the laziness out of his step, directed frequent looks aloft, eyed the men as though to make sure there was no skulking, and in several ways discovered a little life. But his heart was not in it; his business was not here.

The captain and I paced the deck. Even as we started to walk, the boatswain, one of the burliest of the Dutchmen, piped the hands to breakfast. The silver notes rang cheerily through the little ship and wonderfully heightened to the fancy the airy, saucy, free-born look of the timber witch as she thundered along with foam to her figure-head; her white pinions beat time to the organ melodies of the ocean wind; smoke hospitably blew from the chimney of her little caboose; Dutch and English sailors entered and departed from that sea kitchen, carrying cans of steaming tea with them into their forecastle; there was a pleasant noise of the chuckling of hens; the sun shone brightly among the wool-white clouds; splendid was the spacious scene of sea rolling in sparkling deeply-blue heights, and every surge, as it ran, magnificently draped itself in a flashing veil of froth.

“I like your little ship, Captain Greaves,” said I.

“I have been watching you, and I see that you like her,” he answered.

“You carry two formidable pieces in those brass guns.”

“We may pick up something worth defending.”

He then asked me how long I had been at sea, and put many questions which at the time of his asking them struck me as entirely conversational: that is to say, he led me to talk about myself, and the impression produced was that we chatted as a couple of men would who talked to kill time; but, afterward, in thinking of this conversation, I found that it had been adroitly, but absolutely inquisitional—on his part. In fact, I not only related the simple story of my career; I acquainted him with other matters, such as my attainments as a navigator, my ignorance as a linguist, my qualifications as a seaman—and all, forsooth, as though, instead of killing the time till breakfast with idle chat, I was very earnestly submitting my claims to him for some post aboard his brig.

While we walked and talked I remarked that he kept the Dutch mate in the corner of his eye, but he never addressed him. Once he found the brig half a point, perhaps more than half a point, off her course. He spoke strongly and sternly to the man at the helm, but never a word did he say to Van Laar, whom to be sure he should have reprimanded for not conning the brig. I thought this silence very significant.

Presently the lad Jimmy—I called him a lad; his age was about seventeen—this lad came out of the caboose with the cabin breakfast. His knock-kneed legs seemed to have been created for the carriage of a tray full of crockery and eatables along a sharply heaving deck. Galloon trotted out of the caboose at the youth’s heels, and they descended into the cabin together. Presently Jimmy arrived to announce breakfast, and with him was Galloon.

“What is there for breakfast?” inquired Captain Greaves.

“There’s sausage and ’am and tea,” answered the lad.

“Nothing of the sort,” said Greaves. “There is no sausage aboard this ship, and I ordered neither ‘’am,’ as you call it, nor tea. Say eggs and bacon and coffee.”

The lad put himself in the position of a soldier at attention.

“Say eggs and bacon and coffee,” he shouted; and the dog howled in company with the youth.

“Again, if you please.”

“Say eggs and bacon and coffee,” roared the lad; and the dog increased its volume of howl as though to encourage the youth to support this trial.

“A third time, if you please.”

The dog began before the lad and howled horribly while Jimmy yelled, “Say eggs and bacon and coffee.”

The four of us then entered the cabin, where I found an excellent breakfast prepared. Galloon sat upon a chair opposite me, and he was waited upon by Jimmy as the captain and I were.

“You are treating me very hospitably, Captain Greaves,” said I.

“I am happy to have found a companion,” he answered. “After Van Laar”—he stopped with a look at the skylight—“Dern Mynheer Tulp, though he is my step-father and the one merchant adventurer in this undertaking. How sullen and obstinate is the Dutch intellect! Yet who but Dutchmen could have reclaimed a bog from the sea, dried it, settled it, and flourished on it?”

“I hope this weather will soon moderate,” said I. “I am anxious to get to England.”

“Of course you are. And so shall I be anxious presently.”

“Where do you touch, captain?”

“Nowhere. An empty ship has plenty of stowage room, and there are provisions enough aboard to last such a crew as my people number as long a time as would make two or three of Anson’s voyages.”

“Ah!” thought I with a short laugh, with the velocity of thought founding a fancy of his errand upon his mention of the name of Anson, and upon my recollection of his saying that he had been all his life dreaming of galleons.

“What amuses you?” said he.

“Galloon there,” said I, laughing again and looking at the dog.