Michael, Brother of Jerry. Джек Лондон

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СКАЧАТЬ of ten shillings, he journeyed up the harbour to Jackson Bay, where lay the lofty-poled, sweet-lined, three-topmast American schooner, the Mary Turner.

      Once on board, explaining his errand, he was taken below into the main cabin, where he interviewed, and was interviewed by, a quartette of men whom Daughtry qualified to himself as “a rum bunch.”

      It was because he had talked long with the steward who had left the ship, that Dag Daughtry recognized and identified each of the four men. That, surely, was the “Ancient Mariner,” sitting back and apart with washed eyes of such palest blue that they seemed a faded white. Long thin wisps of silvery, unkempt hair framed his face like an aureole. He was slender to emaciation, cavernously checked, roll after roll of skin, no longer encasing flesh or muscle, hanging grotesquely down his neck and swathing the Adam’s apple so that only occasionally, with queer swallowing motions, did it peep out of the mummy-wrappings of skin and sink back again from view.

      A proper ancient mariner, thought Daughtry. Might be seventy-five, might just as well be a hundred and five, or a hundred and seventy-five.

      Beginning at the right temple, a ghastly scar split the cheek-bone, sank into the depths of the hollow cheek, notched across the lower jaw, and plunged to disappearance among the prodigious skin-folds of the neck. The withered lobes of both ears were perforated by tiny gypsy-like circles of gold. On the skeleton fingers of his right hand were no less than five rings – not men’s rings, nor women’s, but foppish rings – “that would fetch a price,” Daughtry adjudged. On the left hand were no rings, for there were no fingers to wear them. Only was there a thumb; and, for that matter, most of the hand was missing as well, as if it had been cut off by the same slicing edge that had cleaved him from temple to jaw and heaven alone knew how far down that skin-draped neck.

      The Ancient Mariner’s washed eyes seemed to bore right through Daughtry (or at least so Daughtry felt), and rendered him so uncomfortable as to make him casually step to the side for the matter of a yard. This was possible, because, a servant seeking a servant’s billet, he was expected to stand and face the four seated ones as if they were judges on the bench and he the felon in the dock. Nevertheless, the gaze of the ancient one pursued him, until, studying it more closely, he decided that it did not reach to him at all. He got the impression that those washed pale eyes were filmed with dreams, and that the intelligence, the thing, that dwelt within the skull, fluttered and beat against the dream-films and no farther.

      “How much would you expect?” the captain was asking, – a most unsealike captain, in Daughtry’s opinion; rather, a spick-and-span, brisk little business-man or floor-walker just out of a bandbox.

      “He shall not share,” spoke up another of the four, huge, raw-boned, middle-aged, whom Daughtry identified by his ham-like hands as the California wheat-farmer described by the departed steward.

      “Plenty for all,” the Ancient Mariner startled Daughtry by cackling shrilly. “Oodles and oodles of it, my gentlemen, in cask and chest, in cask and chest, a fathom under the sand.”

      “Share —what, sir?” Daughtry queried, though well he knew, the other steward having cursed to him the day he sailed from San Francisco on a blind lay instead of straight wages. “Not that it matters, sir,” he hastened to add. “I spent a whalin’ voyage once, three years of it, an’ paid off with a dollar. Wages for mine, an’ sixty gold a month, seein’ there’s only four of you.”

      “And a mate,” the captain added.

      “And a mate,” Daughtry repeated. “Very good, sir. An’ no share.”

      “But yourself?” spoke up the fourth man, a huge-bulking, colossal-bodied, greasy-seeming grossness of flesh – the Armenian Jew and San Francisco pawnbroker the previous steward had warned Daughtry about. “Have you papers – letters of recommendation, the documents you receive when you are paid off before the shipping commissioners?”

      “I might ask, sir,” Dag Daughtry brazened it, “for your own papers. This ain’t no regular cargo-carrier or passenger-carrier, no more than you gentlemen are a regular company of ship-owners, with regular offices, doin’ business in a regular way. How do I know if you own the ship even, or that the charter ain’t busted long ago, or that you’re being libelled ashore right now, or that you won’t dump me on any old beach anywheres without a soo-markee of what’s comin’ to me? Howsoever” – he anticipated by a bluff of his own the show of wrath from the Jew that he knew would be wind and bluff – “howsoever, here’s my papers.. ”

      With a swift dip of his hand into his inside coat-pocket he scattered out in a wealth of profusion on the cabin table all the papers, sealed and stamped, that he had collected in forty-five years of voyaging, the latest date of which was five years back.

      “I don’t ask your papers,” he went on. “What I ask is, cash payment in full the first of each month, sixty dollars a month gold – ”

      “Oodles and oodles of it, gold and gold and better than gold, in cask and chest, in cask and chest, a fathom under the sand,” the Ancient Mariner assured him in beneficent cackles. “Kings, principalities and powers! – all of us, the least of us. And plenty more, my gentlemen, plenty more. The latitude and longitude are mine, and the bearings from the oak ribs on the shoal to Lion’s Head, and the cross-bearings from the points unnamable, I only know. I only still live of all that brave, mad, scallywag ship’s company.. ”

      “Will you sign the articles to that?” the Jew demanded, cutting in on the ancient’s maunderings.

      “What port do you wind up the cruise in?” Daughtry asked.

      “San Francisco.”

      “I’ll sign the articles that I’m to sign off in San Francisco then.”

      The Jew, the captain, and the farmer nodded.

      “But there’s several other things to be agreed upon,” Daughtry continued. “In the first place, I want my six quarts a day. I’m used to it, and I’m too old a stager to change my habits.”

      “Of spirits, I suppose?” the Jew asked sarcastically.

      “No; of beer, good English beer. It must be understood beforehand, no matter what long stretches we may be at sea, that a sufficient supply is taken along.”

      “Anything else?” the captain queried.

      “Yes, sir,” Daughtry answered. “I got a dog that must come along.”

      “Anything else? – a wife or family maybe?” the farmer asked.

      “No wife or family, sir. But I got a nigger, a perfectly good nigger, that’s got to come along. He can sign on for ten dollars a month if he works for the ship all his time. But if he works for me all the time, I’ll let him sign on for two an’ a half a month.”

      “Eighteen days in the longboat,” the Ancient Mariner shrilled, to Daughtry’s startlement. “Eighteen days in the longboat, eighteen days of scorching hell.”

      “My word,” quoth Daughtry, “the old gentleman’d give one the jumps. There’ll sure have to be plenty of beer.”

      “Sea stewards put on some style, I must say,” commented the wheat-farmer, oblivious to the Ancient Mariner, who still declaimed of the heat of the longboat.

      “Suppose we don’t see our way to signing on a steward who travels in such style?” the Jew asked, mopping the inside of his collar-band with a coloured silk handkerchief.

      “Then СКАЧАТЬ