The Rescue. Джозеф Конрад

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СКАЧАТЬ to run by itself in the darkness before the rounded form of his head. Above the masts of the brig the dome of the clear heaven was full of lights that flickered, as if some mighty breathings high up there had been swaying about the flame of the stars. There was no sound along the brig's decks, and the heavy shadows that lay on it had the aspect, in that silence, of secret places concealing crouching forms that waited in perfect stillness for some decisive event. Lingard struck a match to light his cheroot, and his powerful face with narrowed eyes stood out for a moment in the night and vanished suddenly. Then two shadowy forms and two red sparks moved backward and forward on the poop. A larger, but a paler and oval patch of light from the compass lamps lay on the brasses of the wheel and on the breast of the Malay standing by the helm. Lingard's voice, as if unable altogether to master the enormous silence of the sea, sounded muffled, very calm—without the usual deep ring in it.

      “Not much change, Shaw,” he said.

      “No, sir, not much. I can just see the island—the big one—still in the same place. It strikes me, sir, that, for calms, this here sea is a devil of locality.”

      He cut “locality” in two with an emphatic pause. It was a good word. He was pleased with himself for thinking of it. He went on again:

      “Now—since noon, this big island—”

      “Carimata, Shaw,” interrupted Lingard.

      “Aye, sir; Carimata—I mean. I must say—being a stranger hereabouts—I haven't got the run of those—”

      He was going to say “names” but checked himself and said, “appellations,” instead, sounding every syllable lovingly.

      “Having for these last fifteen years,” he continued, “sailed regularly from London in East-Indiamen, I am more at home over there—in the Bay.”

      He pointed into the night toward the northwest and stared as if he could see from where he stood that Bay of Bengal where—as he affirmed—he would be so much more at home.

      “You'll soon get used—” muttered Lingard, swinging in his rapid walk past his mate. Then he turned round, came back, and asked sharply.

      “You said there was nothing afloat in sight before dark? Hey?”

      “Not that I could see, sir. When I took the deck again at eight, I asked that serang whether there was anything about; and I understood him to say there was no more as when I went below at six. This is a lonely sea at times—ain't it, sir? Now, one would think at this time of the year the homeward-bounders from China would be pretty thick here.”

      “Yes,” said Lingard, “we have met very few ships since we left Pedra Branca over the stern. Yes; it has been a lonely sea. But for all that, Shaw, this sea, if lonely, is not blind. Every island in it is an eye. And now, since our squadron has left for the China waters—”

      He did not finish his sentence. Shaw put his hands in his pockets, and propped his back against the sky-light, comfortably.

      “They say there is going to be a war with China,” he said in a gossiping tone, “and the French are going along with us as they did in the Crimea five years ago. It seems to me we're getting mighty good friends with the French. I've not much of an opinion about that. What do you think, Captain Lingard?”

      “I have met their men-of-war in the Pacific,” said Lingard, slowly. “The ships were fine and the fellows in them were civil enough to me—and very curious about my business,” he added with a laugh. “However, I wasn't there to make war on them. I had a rotten old cutter then, for trade, Shaw,” he went on with animation.

      “Had you, sir?” said Shaw without any enthusiasm. “Now give me a big ship—a ship, I say, that one may—”

      “And later on, some years ago,” interrupted Lingard, “I chummed with a French skipper in Ampanam—being the only two white men in the whole place. He was a good fellow, and free with his red wine. His English was difficult to understand, but he could sing songs in his own language about ah-moor—Ah-moor means love, in French—Shaw.”

      “So it does, sir—so it does. When I was second mate of a Sunderland barque, in forty-one, in the Mediterranean, I could pay out their lingo as easy as you would a five-inch warp over a ship's side—”

      “Yes, he was a proper man,” pursued Lingard, meditatively, as if for himself only. “You could not find a better fellow for company ashore. He had an affair with a Bali girl, who one evening threw a red blossom at him from within a doorway, as we were going together to pay our respects to the Rajah's nephew. He was a good-looking Frenchman, he was—but the girl belonged to the Rajah's nephew, and it was a serious matter. The old Rajah got angry and said the girl must die. I don't think the nephew cared particularly to have her krissed; but the old fellow made a great fuss and sent one of his own chief men to see the thing done—and the girl had enemies—her own relations approved! We could do nothing. Mind, Shaw, there was absolutely nothing else between them but that unlucky flower which the Frenchman pinned to his coat—and afterward, when the girl was dead, wore under his shirt, hung round his neck in a small box. I suppose he had nothing else to put it into.”

      “Would those savages kill a woman for that?” asked Shaw, incredulously.

      “Aye! They are pretty moral there. That was the first time in my life I nearly went to war on my own account, Shaw. We couldn't talk those fellows over. We couldn't bribe them, though the Frenchman offered the best he had, and I was ready to back him to the last dollar, to the last rag of cotton, Shaw! No use—they were that blamed respectable. So, says the Frenchman to me: 'My friend, if they won't take our gunpowder for a gift let us burn it to give them lead.' I was armed as you see now; six eight-pounders on the main deck and a long eighteen on the forecastle—and I wanted to try 'em. You may believe me! However, the Frenchman had nothing but a few old muskets; and the beggars got to windward of us by fair words, till one morning a boat's crew from the Frenchman's ship found the girl lying dead on the beach. That put an end to our plans. She was out of her trouble anyhow, and no reasonable man will fight for a dead woman. I was never vengeful, Shaw, and—after all—she didn't throw that flower at me. But it broke the Frenchman up altogether. He began to mope, did no business, and shortly afterward sailed away. I cleared a good many pence out of that trip, I remember.”

      With these words he seemed to come to the end of his memories of that trip. Shaw stifled a yawn.

      “Women are the cause of a lot of trouble,” he said, dispassionately. “In the Morayshire, I remember, we had once a passenger—an old gentleman—who was telling us a yarn about them old-time Greeks fighting for ten years about some woman. The Turks kidnapped her, or something. Anyway, they fought in Turkey; which I may well believe. Them Greeks and Turks were always fighting. My father was master's mate on board one of the three-deckers at the battle of Navarino—and that was when we went to help those Greeks. But this affair about a woman was long before that time.”

      “I should think so,” muttered Lingard, hanging over the rail, and watching the fleeting gleams that passed deep down in the water, along the ship's bottom.

      “Yes. Times are changed. They were unenlightened in those old days. My grandfather was a preacher and, though my father served in the navy, I don't hold with war. Sinful the old gentleman called it—and I think so, too. Unless with Chinamen, or niggers, or such people as must be kept in order and won't listen to reason; having not sense enough to know what's good for them, when it's explained to them by their betters—missionaries, and such like au-tho-ri-ties. But to fight ten years. And for a woman!”

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