The Road to Samarcand. Patrick O’Brian

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СКАЧАТЬ And everyone knows that you are the best master mariner in the Yellow Sea.’

      ‘Weel, lad, that’s as may be. Humph. But that’s another case altogether. Days were different then. And let me tell you this, when I was a wee laddie I was a great headstrong fule: I did not know the wisdom of my elders. But when I had been first mate of the Indus just three years, I saved my pay and I went to Saint Andrew’s. I realised that my elders were not so stupid as I had thought when I could walk under a table without bending my head, and so I took my degree.’

      ‘Couldn’t I do the same, sir? Look, Uncle Terry, just let me stay aboard the Wanderer until I’m old enough to go to college, and I promise you I’ll –’

      ‘No, no, my poor boy. School it must be, so pipe down and make up your mind to it. You must go and learn how to parse, and the Kings of Israel, and how many beans make five. Besides, the matter is not entirely in my hands – there’s your English cousin, and he has a big say in the affair.’

      ‘That would be Professor Ayrton, I suppose,’ said Derrick, gloomily. ‘My father often talked about him. He was coming out to see us this year.’

      ‘Yes, that’s the one. He’s a great authority on oriental archaeology, a very learned man, and I don’t suppose that you will be able to escape the advantages of a liberal education with him on your track. We shall be seeing him a few days after we reach Tchao-King, and we’ll have another talk about it then. Now cut along and give Li Han a hand at checking over the stores.’

      Derrick left the saloon with a heavy heart and made his way to the galley. The idea of being a schoolboy again after the freedom of the schooner was not a pleasant one.

      In the saloon Sullivan leaned back and lit his pipe. ‘I sympathise with the boy,’ he said. ‘I’d feel just the same myself in his place. And there’s a lot in early training: nothing like it for a deep-sea sailor. Still, I suppose he must be educated.’

      ‘Aye,’ said Ross, ‘though I don’t know anything to beat an apprenticeship under sail to make a sailorman. But this Professor Ayrton probably will not see eye to eye with us there.’

      Derrick found Li Han counting piles of bags and tins, trying to make them tally with the total in the store-book.

      ‘They want to send me to school, Li Han,’ said Derrick, sitting on a tea-chest.

      ‘Thirty-nine piculs of rice: exactitude only approximate,’ said the Chinese cook. ‘Do they? Very proper too. Thereby you will have inestimable privilege of becoming first-chop scholar.’

      ‘I don’t want to be a first-chop scholar. A master mariner is good enough for me.’

      ‘You are talking jestily. Who wishes to be a meagre sailorman if he can be a learned and enter the government service? Why, in time you might be an official and never do anything for remainder of earthly existence. You could grow long fingernails, and become obese and dignified.’

      ‘I don’t want to be obese and dignified. I’d rather be a meagre sailorman.’

      ‘Ah, but think of the excessive perils and discomforts of seafaring life. Very often sea is unnecessarily agitated by heavenly blasts, and seafaring persons are plunged beneath surface. It is much better to be the meanest official with firm chair under seat. And maritime persons enjoy no prestige, no face, while government officials are very dignified. You should go to school with rejoicement, labour with unremitting zeal, and become pensionable civil servant. Please excuse.’ He stowed away the chest on which Derrick had been sitting, and went on, ‘Observe the classics: in the Shih King it says, “It is the business of scribes and scholars to correct the government of the people.” You pursue ancient advisement, and correct the government. What face! What daily bribes! What squeeze!’

      ‘Yes, there’s glory for you,’ said Derrick. ‘But as for me, I’d rather be master of a schooner like the Wanderer.’

      ‘You like some lichees now?’ asked Li Han. ‘Just one or two?’

      ‘As many as you like, Li Han. There won’t be any at school, I dare say.’

      Li Han piled the fruit on a plate. ‘Exceedingly peculiar thing,’ he said, ‘I run after learning all the time, chasing it in adverse circumstance, and you run away from it when it comes on a tray.’ He lit a cigarette. ‘This morning I reach the letter S in my dictionary.’

      ‘Gee, Li Han,’ said Derrick, finishing the lichees, ‘you thought it would take you another week to work through R, didn’t you? At this rate you’ll come to Z and the abbreviations before the end of the year. That’s swell. Is there anything I can do to help, apart from eating the lichees? Because if not, I think I’ll vamoose.’

      ‘Vamoose?’

      ‘I shall move my person with distinguished agility from this place to another,’ explained Derrick, slipping into the Chinese that he had learned before ever he spoke English.

      ‘Vamoose – to skip away. Thank you. Will make instantaneous note – colloquial knowledge of English most valuable.’

      Derrick came on deck and stood watching the Wanderer’s wake for some time. The wind had dropped with the sun, and in the calmer sea he could see the schooner’s trail stretching far behind her. He looked down, and there, sure enough, was the great dark, torpedo-shaped form of the tiger-shark that had been following since the ship left port. Li Han came up with a bucket of rubbish: he threw it over the side, and at once Derrick saw the little pilot-fish dart forward and follow a lump of spoiled salt pork as it sank. The shark shot out from the shadow of the schooner, and Derrick saw the white gleam of its belly as it turned; there was a swirl in the water, and it was gone. The pilot-fish snapped up the scrap that remained and joined the shark under the stern. Derrick shuddered: sharks were the only things in the sea that he hated. There was something appallingly sinister about the great fish’s silent voracious rush.

      He looked away and searched the sky and the horizon for the albatross that was nearly always there, a particularly fine one, with such a vast wing-span that it seemed impossible that it should ever be able to fold them and walk on the ground. But it was not there: nor were the gulls which usually appeared to swoop on the scraps that Li Han threw overboard.

      Presently he went along to have a word with Olaf. ‘I say, Olaf,’ he began, ‘if you wanted to be a sailor, would you go to school?’

      ‘Well, I am a sailor, ain’t I?’ said Olaf. ‘What do you think Ay look like? A film-star, maybe, or a guy that dances on a tight-rope?’

      ‘No, I mean do you think school is a good thing?’

      ‘A good thing?’ said the Swede, watching the compass and considering. ‘Well, Ay reckon they wouldn’t teach me much out of a book, eh? Ay can’t read only big print, see? And Ay don’t want to be squinting down my nose at a lot of words Ay can’t understand.’

      ‘I mean if you were young and wanted to be a ship’s captain.’

      ‘Hum. That’s another thing. You got to know how to navigate, of course: but Ay don’t know that anything else ban much use to a sailor, except the nautical almanac.’

      ‘I think you’re right, Olaf. They want to send me to school.’

      ‘What for, eh? You can read and write and figure, can’t you? Ay never was a one for falals and doodads. My old man, he was СКАЧАТЬ