Rudyard Kipling : The Complete Novels and Stories. Редьярд Джозеф Киплинг

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      dories came alongside with letters for home.

      The last letters pitched on deck wrapped round pieces of coal, and the Gloucester men shouted messages to their wives and womenfolk and owners, while the We’re Here finished the musical ride through the fleet, her headsails quivering like a man’s hand when he raises it to say good-bye.

      Harvey very soon discovered that the We’re Here with her riding-sail, strolling from berth to berth, and the We’re Here headed west by south under home canvas, were two very different boats. There was a bite and kick to the wheel even in ‘boy’s’ weather; he could feel the dead weight in the hold flung forward mightily across the surges, and the streaming line of bubbles overside made his eyes dizzy.

      Disko kept them busy fiddling with the sails; and when those were flattened like a racing yacht’s, Dan had to wait on the big topsail, which was put over by hand every time she went about. In spare moments they pumped, for the packed fish dripped brine, which does not improve a cargo. But since there was no fishing, Harvey had time to look at the sea from another point of view. The low-sided schooner was naturally on most intimate terms with her surroundings. They saw little of the horizon save when she topped a swell; and usually she was elbowing, fidgeting, and coaxing her steadfast way through gray, gray-blue, or black hollows laced across and across with streaks of shivering foam; or rubbing herself caressingly along the flank of some bigger water-hill. It was as if she said: ‘You wouldn’t hurt me, surely? I’m only the little We’re Here.’ Then she would slide away chuckling softly to herself till she was brought up by some fresh obstacle. The dullest of folk cannot see this kind of thing hour after hour through long days without noticing it; and Harvey, being anything but dull, began to comprehend and enjoy the dry chorus of wave-tops turning over with a sound of incessant tearing; the hurry of the winds working across open spaces and herding the purple-blue cloud-shadows; the splendid upheaval of the red sunrise; the folding and packing away of the morning mists, wall after wall withdrawn across the white floors; the salty glare and blaze of noon; the kiss of rain falling over thousands of dead, flat square miles; the chilly blackening of everything at the day’s end; and the million wrinkles of the sea under the moonlight, when the jib-boom solemnly poked at the low stars, and Harvey went down to get a doughnut from the cook.

      But the best fun was when the boys were put on the wheel together, Tom Platt within hail, and she cuddled her lee-rail down to the crashing blue, and kept a little home-made rainbow arching unbroken over her windlass. Then the jaws of the booms whined against the mast, and the sheets creaked, and the sails filled with roaring; and when she slid into a hollow she trampled like a woman tripped in her own silk dress, and came out, her jib wet half-way up, yearning and peering for the tall twin lights of Thatcher’s Island.

      They left the cold gray of the Bank sea, saw the lumber ships making for Quebec by the Straits of St. Lawrence, with the Jersey salt-brigs from Spain and Sicily; found a friendly north-easter off Artimon Bank that drove them within view of the East light of Sable Island—a sight Disko did not linger over—and stayed with them past Western and Le Have, to the northern fringe of Georges. From there they picked up the deeper water, and let her go merrily.

      ‘Hattie’s pulling on the string,’ Dan confided to Harvey. ‘Hattie an’ ma. Next Sunday you’ll be hirin’ a boy to throw water on the windows to make ye go to sleep. Guess you’ll keep with us till your folks come. Do you know the best of gettin’ ashore again?’

      ‘Hot bath?’ said Harvey. His eyebrows were all white with dried spray.

      ‘That’s good, but a night-shirt’s better. I’ve been dreamin’ o’ night-shirts ever since we bent our mainsail. Ye can wiggle your toes then. Ma’ll hev a new one fer me, all washed soft. It’s home, Harve. It’s home! Ye can sense it in the air. We’re runnin’ into the aidge of a hot wave naow, an’ I can smell the bay-berries. Wonder if we’ll get in fer supper. Port a trifle.’

      The hesitating sails flapped and lurched in the close air as the deep smoothed out, blue and oily, round them. When they whistled for a wind only the rain came in spiky rods, bubbling and drumming, and behind the rain the thunder and the lightning of mid-August. They lay on the deck with bare feet and arms, telling one another what they would order at their first meal ashore; for now the land was in plain sight. A Gloucester sword-fish boat drifted alongside, a man in the little pulpit on the bowsprit flourishing his harpoon, his bare head plastered down with the wet. ‘And all’s well!’ he sang cheerily, as though he were watch on a big liner. ‘Wouverman’s waiting fer you, Disko. What’s the news o’ the fleet?’

      Disko shouted it and passed on, while the wild summer storm pounded overhead and the lightning flickered along the capes from four different quarters at once. It gave the low circle of hills round Gloucester Harbour, Ten Pound Island, the fish-sheds, with the broken line of house-roofs, and each spar and buoy on the water, in blinding photographs that came and went a dozen times to the minute as the We’re Here crawled in on half-flood, and the whistling-buoy moaned and mourned behind her. Then the storm died out in long, separated, vicious dags of blue-white flame, followed by a single roar like the roar of a mortar-battery, and the shaken air tingled under the stars, as it got back to silence.

      ‘The flag, the flag,’ said Disko suddenly, pointing upward.

      ‘What is ut?’ said Long Jack.

      ‘Otto! Ha’af mast. They can see us frum shore now.’

      ‘I’d clean forgot. He’s no folk to Gloucester, has he?’

      ‘Girl he was goin’ to be married to this fall.’

      ‘Mary pity her!’ said Long Jack, and lowered the little flag half-mast for the sake of Otto, swept overboard in a gale off Le Have three months before.

      Disko wiped the wet from his eyes and led the We’re СКАЧАТЬ