The Golden Age of Pulp Fiction MEGAPACK ™, Vol. 1: George Allan England. George Allan England

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ an’ I makes ob­jections. ’Cause, you see, what Gash told me, that time, about misjudgin’ me an’ all—an’ sayin’ I was square—sort of stuck in my gills. But—well—well—”

      “You give in?”

      Shifty groaned.

      “I done that same,” he hiccups. “An’ that night—”

      “That night? Yes?”

      “That night, that very same night, just after two bells o’ the middle watch, I—”

      He coughs somethin’ fierce, an’ I sees blood onta his lips.

      “Shifty! Shifty!” I calls. “Out with it now! You’re ’most to port, old man! Let’s have it, quick, now—you’re ’most saved.”

      “Cargo o’ lumber,” he just barely manages to stammer. “I knowed she couldn’t sink, nohow—”

      “What—what about it?”

      “Carpenter’s chest—bit an’ brace—forehold, out o’ sight—six holes—”

      He kind o’ stiffens out, makes a grab at somethin’ I can’t see, an’ tips over the long-necker. My hair just rises up, as it falls on the floor an’ rolls bump-bump-bump—the bottle, I mean.

      The wind bangs a blind. A puff o’ smoke an’ ashes shoots out o’ the stove inta the room.

      Shifty lets out a bubblin’ yell.

      “I—I bored—bored—”

      Then he falls back, twisted half round.

      VI.

      Come a rap-rap-rappin’ at the door.

      I hauls the patchwork quilt over him, an’ goes to open. As I looks back I sees one bony hand hanging down side o’ the bed. In that grip the Book’s a danglin’.

      “Hello! What the—”

      “Any drinks up here? You ci­der?” It’s Mrs. Hannaford, smiling’.

      “Drinks? No, darn you!” I roars. “Say, you send, git a doctor, coroner, or something quick’s the Lord’ll let you! Shifty, he—”

      She lets out a kind of squeal, an’ skitters off down the hall.

      As I turns back, thinks I to myself, thinks I:

      “Lucky fer you, Sal Hannaford, you don’t know what I know! ’Cause if you did—if you did—!”

AFRICA

      Originally published in The Cavalier, November 1908.

      I.

      “See there? That’s Africa!”

      Dr. Paul Willard gestured far across the night to where, in the vast dark, a spurt of flame glowed like a blood-ruby, died, then trembled forth again.

      “Africa?” the girl questioned vaguely. A nameless awe crept round her heart, in presence of that unseen emptiness looming away to the inverted bowl of sky—a fathomless sky, spattered with great refulgent stars, among which, overhead, the funnels of the Sutherland traced smoky patterns. “Africa?”

      “A little corner of it, anyway,” the doctor answered, smiling at her tone. “Cape Roxo light. By two bells of the middle watch we’ll be off the coast of Guinea, running through Bissagos Islands—a bad place at best. I never liked it, and I’ve surgeoned on ‘old Suth’ for more than seven years. Don’t like it now, its reefs and cannibal wreckers and all, even with Captain Lockhart on the bridge.”

      The girl made no answer, but she leaned her arms across the rail, swaying as the ship rolled, and gazed out into the unknown. Steadily the Strathglass liner clove the fugitive seas, creaming them astern in surges that hissed away into the black.

      He risked a side glance at her.

      Never had she seemed quite so beautiful to him as under the lantern light which gleamed upon her heavy yellow braids of hair, her frost-white gown. At sight of her delicate, somewhat pale face, his smile waned. No living man—least of all Willard, in the passion which had obsessed him ever since Ethel Armstrong and her crippled uncle had set foot upon the Sutherland’s deck—could have felt amusement in presence of that gentle, earnest seriousness.

      “Somehow, do you know,” she mused at length, “I feel a bit afraid? It’s all so empty! And just to know that Africa is over there.” A gesture rounded out the thought. “I sha’n’t quite like it till we’re at the quay in Cape Town.”

      “When you’ll immediately forget the trip, the boat, and—every­one on board?” he led along; but she ignored the opening. Her mood was far from banter. The doctor, too, repented of his speech, the clumsiness of which jarred upon the majesty and wonder of that tropic night. “Oh, well, you’ll see things differently tomorrow,” he retrieved himself. “Quite differently, when the big red sun rolls up over the coast and splashes gold across the sea.”

      “Perhaps,” she half assented. “But tomorrow is so far away. I think I’ll go below. This air stifles me.”

      He nodded.

      “Yes; I understand. I used to feel it so myself, before I got quite used to it.” His powers of speech had never seemed more pitifully crude.

      He helped her down the steep companionway. Then, after a perfunctory good night from her, came up again to the quarterdeck.

      “Great guns, what gloom!” he muttered. “Why, India ink is pale beside it. I don’t half like the way these offshore swells are running, either—with Bissagos still ahead of us. Can’t say I’m used to this particular bit of Africa even now. No wonder that she—Ethel—feels so shuddery.”

      A moment he pondered in silence.

      “That’s an upper-class privilege, anxiety is. A mere proletarian like me has no right to it. No, nor yet to look at an upper-class woman. For such, we aren’t real men—just official objects.”

      He leaned upon the railing where her arms had lain, and for a long time stared off across the dark where, on Cape Roxo, winked that dim, retreating eye of flame.

      II.

      The doctor found no sleep till long past midnight. Even with his cabin window slid far back, the tepid land breeze choked him, and his thoughts were weft of hot rebellion, longings, and misery. He tossed wide-eyed in his berth, heard the ship’s bell dole out the eternal hours, then the halves, torturing himself with images of Cape Town and the approaching separation, which (only too well he knew) must be forever. Midnight was long gone, when he lost himself in troublous dreams of distant inaccessible things, never to be reached by him.

      Toward early morning something flung him back to consciousness—a grinding, raking craunch that shivered the whole fabric of the ship, and roused him to the knowledge he was struggling on his cabin floor, which slanted dizzily. He clambered up, mazed and wit-struck for a moment, groped for the electric-button, and snapped on the light.

      As СКАЧАТЬ