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

staggering around the cluttered decks of a seventy-ton schooner, while behind him, waving a knotted rope, walked, after the manner of an executioner, a boy who yawned and nodded between the blows he dealt.

      The lashed wheel groaned and kicked softly, the riding-sail slatted a little in the shifts of the light wind, the windlass creaked, and the miserable procession continued. Harvey expostulated, threatened, whimpered, and at last wept outright, while Dan, the words clotting on his tongue, spoke of the beauty of watchfulness and slashed away with the rope’s end, punishing the dories as often as he hit Harvey. At last the clock in the cabin struck ten, and upon the tenth stroke little Penn crept on deck. He found two boys in two tumbled heaps side by side on the main hatch, so deeply asleep that he actually rolled them to their berths.

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Chapter 3

      It was the forty-fathom slumber that clears the soul and eye and heart, and sends you to breakfast ravening. They emptied a big tin dish of juicy fragments of fish—the blood-ends the cook had collected overnight. They cleaned up the plates and pans of the elder mess, who were out fishing, sliced pork for the mid-day meal, swabbed down the foc’sle, filled the lamps, drew coal and water for the cook, and investigated the fore-hold, where the boat’s stores were stacked. It was another perfect day—soft, mild, and clear; and Harvey breathed to the very bottom of his lungs.

      More schooners had crept up in the night, and the long blue seas were full of sails and dories. Far away on the horizon, the smoke of some liner, her hull invisible, smudged the blue, and to eastward a big ship’s top-gallant sails, just lifting, made a square nick in it. Disko Troop was smoking by the roof of the cabin—one eye on the craft around, and the other on the little fly at the mainmast-head.

      ‘When dad kerflummoxes that way,’ said Dan in a whisper, ‘he’s doin’ some high-line thinkin’ fer all hands. I’ll lay my wage an’ share we’ll make berth soon. Dad he knows the cod, an’ the fleet they know dad knows. See ’em comin’ up one by one, lookin’ fer nothin’ in particular, o’ course, but scrowgin’ on us all the time? There’s the Prince Leboo; she’s a Chat-ham boat. She’s crep’ up sence last night. An’ see that big one with a patch in her foresail an’ a new jib? She’s the Carrie Pitman from West Chat-ham. She won’t keep her canvas long onless her luck’s changed since last season. She don’t do much ’cep’ drift. There ain’t an anchor made ’ll hold her…. When the smoke puffs up in little rings like that, dad’s studyin’ the fish. Ef we speak to him now, he’ll git mad. Las’ time I did, he jest took an’ hove a boot at me.’

      Disko Troop stared forward, the pipe between his teeth, with eyes that saw nothing. As his son said, he was studying the fish—pitting his knowledge and experience on the Banks against the roving cod in his own sea. He accepted the presence of the inquisitive schooners on the horizon as a compliment to his powers. But now that it was paid, he wished to draw away and make his berth alone, till it was time to go up to the Virgin and fish in the streets of that roaring town upon the waters. So Disko Troop thought of recent weather, and gales, currents, food supplies, and other domestic arrangements, from the point of view of a twenty-pound cod; was, in fact, for an hour, a cod himself, and looked remarkably like one. Then he removed the pipe from his teeth.

      ‘Dad,’ said Dan, ‘we’ve done our chores. Can’t we go overside a piece? It’s good catchin’ weather.’

      ‘Not in that cherry-coloured rig ner them ha’af-baked brown shoes. Give him suthin’ fit to wear.’

      ‘Dad’s pleased—that settles it,’ said Dan delightedly, dragging Harvey into the cabin, while Troop pitched a key down the steps. ‘Dad keeps my spare rig where he kin overhaul it, ’cause ma sez I’m keerless.’ He rummaged through a locker, and in less than three minutes Harvey was adorned with fisherman’s rubber boots that came half up his thigh, a heavy blue jersey well darned at the elbows, a pair of nippers, and a sou’wester.

      ‘Naow ye look somethin’ like,’ said Dan. ‘Hurry!’

      ‘Keep nigh an’ handy,’ said Troop, ‘an’ don’t go visitin’ raound the fleet. Ef any one asks you what I’m cal’latin’ to do, speak the truth, fer ye don’t know.’

      A little red dory, labelled Hattie S., lay astern of the schooner. Dan hauled in the painter, and dropped lightly on to the bottom boards, while Harvey tumbled clumsily after.

      ‘That’s no way o’ gettin’ into a boat,’ said Dan. ‘Ef there was any sea you’d go to the bottom, sure. You got to learn to meet her.’

      Dan fitted the thole-pins, took the forward thwart, and watched Harvey’s work. The boy had rowed, in a lady-like fashion, on the Adirondack ponds; but there is a difference between squeaking pins and well-balanced rullocks—light sculls and stubby, eight-foot sea-oars. They stuck in the gentle swell, and Harvey grunted.

      ‘Short! Row short!’ said Dan. ‘Ef you cramp your oar in any kind o’ sea you’re liable to turn her over. Ain’t she a daisy? Mine, too.’

      The little dory was specklessly clean. In her bows lay a tiny anchor, two jugs of water, and some seventy fathoms of thin brown dory-roding. A tin dinner-horn rested in cleats just under Harvey’s right hand, beside an ugly-looking maul, a short gaff, and a shorter wooden stick. A couple of lines, with very heavy leads and double cod-hooks, all neatly coiled on square reels, were stuck in their place by the gunwale.

      ‘Where’s the sail and mast?’ said Harvey, for his hands were beginning to blister.

      Dan chuckled. ‘Ye don’t sail fishin’-dories much. Ye pull; but ye needn’t pull so hard. Don’t you wish you owned her?’

      ‘Well, I guess my father might give me one or two if I asked ’em,’ Harvey replied. He had been too busy to think much of his family till then.

      ‘That’s so. I forgot your dad’s a millionaire. You don’t act millionary any, naow. But a dory an’ craft an’ gear’—Dan spoke as though she were a whaleboat—‘costs a heap. Think your dad ’u’d give you one fer—fer a pet like?’

      ‘Shouldn’t wonder. It would be ’most the only thing I haven’t stuck him for yet.’

      ‘Must be an expensive kinder kid to home. Don’t slitheroo thet way, Harve. Short’s the trick, because no sea’s ever dead still, an’ the swells ’ll——’

      Crack! The loom of the oar kicked Harvey under the chin and knocked him backwards.

      ‘That was what I was goin’ to say. I hed to learn too, but I wasn’t more than eight years old when I got my schoolin’.’

      Harvey regained his seat with aching jaws and a frown.

      ‘No good gettin’ mad at things, dad says. It’s our own fault ef we can’t handle ’em, he says. Le’s try here. Manuel ’ll give us the water.’

      The ‘Portugee’ was rocking fully a mile away, but when Dan up-ended an oar, he waved his left arm three times.

      ‘Thirty fathom,’ said Dan, stringing a salt clam on to the hook. ‘Over with the doughboys. Bait same’s I do, Harve, an’ don’t snarl your reel.’

      Dan’s line was out long before Harvey had mastered the mystery of baiting and heaving out the leads. The dory drifted along easily. It was not worth while to anchor till they were sure of good ground.

      ‘Here we come!’ Dan shouted, and a shower of spray rattled on Harvey’s shoulders as a big cod flapped and kicked alongside. ‘Muckle, Harvey, muckle! Under your hand! Quick!’

      Evidently ‘muckle’ could not be the dinner-horn, so Harvey passed over the maul, and Dan scientifically stunned the fish before he pulled it inboard, and wrenched out the hook with the short wooden stick he called a ‘gob-stick.’ Then Harvey felt a tug, and pulled up zealously.

      ‘Why,