A Son Of The Sun. Джек Лондон

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      “What have you had? – an earthquake?” Griffiths called out. “The bottom’s all changed. I’ve anchored here a hundred times in thirteen fathoms. Is that you, Wilson?”

      A whaleboat came alongside, and a man climbed over the rail. In the faint light Griffiths found an automatic Colt’s thrust into his face, and, looking up, saw David Grief.

      “No, you never anchored here before,” Grief laughed. “Gabera’s just around the point, where I’ll be as soon as I’ve collected that little sum of twelve hundred pounds. We won’t bother for the receipt. I’ve your note here, and I’ll just return it.”

      “You did this!” Griffiths cried, springing to his feet in a sudden gust of rage. “You faked those leading lights! You’ve wrecked me, and by – ”

      “Steady! Steady!” Grief’s voice was cool and menacing. “I’ll trouble you for that twelve hundred, please.”

      To Griffiths, a vast impotence seemed to descend upon him. He was overwhelmed by a profound disgust – disgust for the sunlands and the sun-sickness, for the futility of all his endeavour, for this blue-eyed, golden-tinted, superior man who defeated him on all his ways.

      “Jacobsen,” he said, “will you open the cash-box and pay this – this bloodsucker – twelve hundred pounds?”

      Chapter Two – THE PROUD GOAT OF ALOYSIUS PANKBURN

I

      Quick eye that he had for the promise of adventure, prepared always for the unexpected to leap out at him from behind the nearest cocoanut tree, nevertheless David Grief received no warning when he laid eyes on Aloysius Pankburn. It was on the little steamer Berthe. Leaving his schooner to follow, Grief had taken passage for the short run across from Raiatea to Papeete. When he first saw Aloysius Pankburn, that somewhat fuddled gentleman was drinking a lonely cocktail at the tiny bar between decks next to the barber shop. And when Grief left the barber’s hands half an hour later Aloysius Pankburn was still hanging over the bar still drinking by himself.

      Now it is not good for man to drink alone, and Grief threw sharp scrutiny into his pass-ing glance. He saw a well-built young man of thirty, well-featured, well-dressed, and evidently, in the world’s catalogue, a gentleman. But in the faint hint of slovenliness, in the shaking, eager hand that spilled the liquor, and in the nervous, vacillating eyes, Grief read the unmistakable marks of the chronic alcoholic.

      After dinner he chanced upon Pankburn again. This time it was on deck, and the young man, clinging to the rail and peering into the distance at the dim forms of a man and woman in two steamer chairs drawn closely together, was crying, drunkenly. Grief noted that the man’s arm was around the woman’s waist. Aloysius Pankburn looked on and cried.

      “Nothing to weep about,” Grief said genially.

      Pankburn looked at him, and gushed tears of profound self-pity.

      “It’s hard,” he sobbed. “Hard. Hard. That man’s my business manager. I employ him. I pay him a good screw. And that’s how he earns it.”

      “In that case, why don’t you put a stop to it?” Grief advised.

      “I can’t. She’d shut off my whiskey. She’s my trained nurse.”

      “Fire her, then, and drink your head off.”

      “I can’t. He’s got all my money. If I did, he wouldn’t give me sixpence to buy a drink with.”

      This woful possibility brought a fresh wash of tears. Grief was interested. Of all unique situations he could never have imagined such a one as this.

      “They were engaged to take care of me,” Pankburn was blubbering, “to keep me away from the drink. And that’s the way they do it, lollygagging all about the ship and letting me drink myself to death. It isn’t right, I tell you. It isn’t right. They were sent along with me for the express purpose of not letting me drink, and they let me drink to swinishness as long as I leave them alone. If I complain they threaten not to let me have another drop. What can a poor devil do? My death will be on their heads, that’s all. Come on down and join me.”

      He released his clutch on the rail, and would have fallen had Grief not caught his arm. He seemed to undergo a transformation, to stiffen physically, to thrust his chin forward aggressively, and to glint harshly in his eyes.

      “I won’t let them kill me. And they’ll be sorry. I’ve offered them fifty thousand – later on, of course. They laughed. They don’t know. But I know.” He fumbled in his coat pocket and drew forth an object that flashed in the faint light. “They don’t know the meaning of that. But I do.” He looked at Grief with abrupt suspicion. “What do you make out of it, eh? What do you make out of it?”

      David Grief caught a swift vision of an alcoholic degenerate putting a very loving young couple to death with a copper spike, for a copper spike was what he held in his hand, an evident old-fashioned ship-fastening.

      “My mother thinks I’m up here to get cured of the booze habit. She doesn’t know. I bribed the doctor to prescribe a voyage. When we get to Papeete my manager is going to charter a schooner and away we’ll sail. But they don’t dream. They think it’s the booze. I know. I only know. Good night, sir. I’m going to bed – unless – er – you’ll join me in a night cap. One last drink, you know.”

II

      In the week that followed at Papeete Grief caught numerous and bizarre glimpses of Aloysius Pankburn. So did everybody else in the little island capital; for neither the beach nor Lavina’s boarding house had been so scandalized in years. In midday, bareheaded, clad only in swimming trunks, Aloysius Pankburn ran down the main street from Lavina’s to the water front. He put on the gloves with a fireman from the Berthe in a scheduled four-round bout at the Folies Bergères, and was knocked out in the second round. He tried insanely to drown himself in a two-foot pool of water, dived drunkenly and splendidly from fifty feet up in the rigging of the Mariposa lying at the wharf, and chartered the cutter Toerau at more than her purchase price and was only saved by his manager’s refusal financially to ratify the agreement. He bought out the old blind leper at the market, and sold breadfruit, plantains, and sweet potatoes at such cut-rates that the gendarmes were called out to break the rush of bargain-hunting natives. For that matter, three times the gendarmes arrested him for riotous behaviour, and three times his manager ceased from love-making long enough to pay the fines imposed by a needy colonial administration.

      Then the Mariposa sailed for San Francisco, and in the bridal suite were the manager and the trained nurse, fresh-married. Before departing, the manager had thoughtfully bestowed eight five-pound banknotes on Aloysius, with the foreseen result that Aloysius awoke several days later to find himself broke and perilously near to delirium tremens. Lavina, famed for her good heart even among the driftage of South Pacific rogues and scamps, nursed him around and never let it filter into his returning intelligence that there was neither manager nor money to pay his board.

      It was several evenings after this that David Grief, lounging under the after deck awning of the Kittiwake and idly scanning the meagre columns of the Papeete Avant-Coureur, sat suddenly up and almost rubbed his eyes. It was unbelievable, but there it was. The old South Seas Romance was not dead. He read:

      WANTED – To exchange a half interest in buried treasure,

      worth five million francs, for transportation for one to an

      unknown island in the Pacific and facilities for carrying

      away СКАЧАТЬ