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

to the fort to try again. And he told tales of blockade—long weeks of swaying at anchor, varied only by the departure and return of steamers that had used up their coal (there was no change for the sailing-ships); of gales and cold—cold that kept two hundred men, night and day, pounding and chopping at the ice on cable, blocks, and rigging, when the galley was as red-hot as the fort’s shot, and men drank cocoa by the bucket. Tom Platt had no use for steam. His service closed when that thing was comparatively new. He admitted that it was a specious invention in time of peace, but looked hopefully for the day when sails should come back again on ten-thousand-ton frigates with hundred-and-ninety-foot booms.

      Manuel’s talk was slow and gentle—all about pretty girls in Madeira washing clothes in the dry beds of streams, by moonlight, under waving bananas; legends of saints, and tales of queer dances or fights away in the cold Newfoundland baiting-ports. Salters was mainly agricultural, for, though he read Josephus and expounded it, his mission in life was to prove the value of green manures, and specially of clover, against every form of phosphate whatsoever. He grew libellous about phosphates; he dragged greasy ‘Orange Judd’ books from his bunk and intoned them, wagging his finger at Harvey, to whom it was all Greek. Little Penn was so genuinely pained when Harvey made fun of Salters’s lectures that the boy gave it up, and suffered in polite silence. That was very good for Harvey.

      The cook naturally did not join in these conversations. As a rule, he spoke only when it was absolutely necessary; but at times a queer gift of speech descended on him, and he held forth, half in Gaelic, half in broken English, an hour at a time. He was specially communicative with the boys, and he never withdrew his prophecy that one day Harvey would be Dan’s master, and that he would see it. He told them of mail-carrying in the winter up Cape Breton way, of the dog-train that goes to Coudray, and of the ram-steamer Arctic that breaks the ice between the mainland and Prince Edward Island. Then he told them stories that his mother had told him, of life far to the southward where water never froze; and he said that when he died his soul would go to lie down on a warm white beach of sand with palm-trees waving above. That seemed to the boys a very odd idea for a man who had never seen a palm in his life. Then, too, regularly at each meal, he would ask Harvey, and Harvey alone, whether the cooking was to his taste; and this always made the ‘second half’ laugh. Yet they had a great respect for the cook’s judgment, and in their hearts considered Harvey something of a mascot by consequence.

      And while Harvey was taking in knowledge of new things at each pore and hard health with every gulp of the good air, the We’re Here went her ways and did her business on the Bank, and the silvery-gray kenches of well-pressed fish mounted higher and higher in the hold. No one day’s work was out of the common, but the average days were many and close together.

      Naturally a man of Disko’s reputation was closely watched—‘scrowged upon,’ Dan called it—by his neighbours, but he had a very pretty knack of giving them the slip through the curdling, glidy fog-banks. Disko avoided company for two reasons. He wished to make his own experiments, in the first place; and in the second, he objected to the mixed gatherings of a fleet of all nations. The bulk of them were mainly Gloucester boats, with a scattering from Provincetown, Harwich, Chatham, and some of the Maine ports, but the crews drew from goodness knows where. Risk breeds recklessness, and when greed is added, there are fine chances for every kind of accident in the crowded fleet, which, like a mob of sheep, is huddled round some unrecognised leader. ‘Let the two Jeraulds lead ’em,’ said Disko. ‘We’re baound to lay among ’em fer a spell on the Eastern Shoals, though, ef luck holds, we won’t hev to lay long. Where we are naow, Harve, ain’t considered noways good graound.’

      ‘Ain’t it?’ said Harvey, who was drawing water (he had learned just how to wiggle the bucket), after an unusually long dressing-down. ‘Shouldn’t mind striking some poor ground for a change, then.’

      ‘All the graound I want to see—don’t want to strike her—is Eastern Point,’ said Dan. ‘Say, dad, it looks ’s if we wouldn’t hev to lay more’n two weeks on the Shoals. You’ll meet all the comp’ny you want then, Harve. That’s the time we begin to work. No reg’lar meals fer no one then. ‘Mug-up when ye’re hungry, an’ sleep when ye can’t keep awake. Good job you wasn’t picked up a month later than you was, or we’d never ha’ had you dressed in shape fer the Old Virgin.’

      Harvey understood from the Eldridge chart that the Old Virgin and a nest of curiously-named shoals were the turning-point of the cruise, and that with good luck they would wet the balance of their salt there; but seeing the size of the Virgin (it was one tiny dot), he wondered how even Disko with the hog-yoke and the lead could find her. He learned later that Disko was entirely equal to that and any other business, and could even help others. A big four-by-five blackboard hung in the cabin, and Harvey never understood the need of it till, after some blinding thick days, they heard the unmelodious tooting of a foot-power fog-horn—a machine whose note is as that of a consumptive elephant.

      They were making a short berth, towing the anchor under their foot to save trouble. ‘Squarerigger bellowin’ fer his latitude,’ said Long Jack. The dripping red headsails of a bark glided out of the fog, and the We’re Here rang her bell thrice, using sea shorthand.

      The larger boat backed her topsail, with shrieks and shoutings.

      ‘Frenchman,’ said Uncle Salters scornfully. ‘Miquelon boat from St. Malo.’ The farmer had a weatherly sea-eye. ‘I’m most outer ’baccy, too, Disko.’

      ‘Same here,’ said Tom Platt. ‘Hi! backez vous—backez vous! Standez awayez, you butt-ended mucho bono! Where you from—St. Malo, eh?’

      ‘Ah, ha! mucho bono! Oui! oui! Clos Poulet—St. Malo! St. Pierre et Miquelon,’ cried the other crowd, waving woollen caps and laughing. Then all together, ‘Bord! Bord!’

      ‘Bring up the board, Danny. Beats me how them Frenchmen fetch anywheres, exceptin’ America’s fairish broadly. Forty-six forty-nine’s good enough fer them; an’ I guess it’s abaout right, too.’

      Dan chalked the figures on the board, and they hung it in the main-rigging to a chorus of Mercis from the bark.

      ‘Seems kinder unneighbourly to let ’em swedge off like this,’ Salters suggested, feeling in his pockets.

      ‘Hev ye learned French then sence last trip?’ said Disko. ‘I don’t want no more stone-ballast hove at us ’long o’ your callin’ Miquelon boats “footy cochins” same’s you did off Le Have.’

      ‘Harmon Rush he said that was the way to rise ’em. Plain United States is good enough fer me. We’re all dretful short on terbakker. Young feller, don’t you speak French?’

      ‘Oh yes,’ said Harvey valiantly; and he bawled: ‘Hi! Say! Arrêtez vous! Attendez! Nous sommes venant pour tabac.’

      ‘Ah, tabac, tabac!’ they cried, and laughed again.

      ‘hi! say! arrêtez vous! attendez! nous sommes venant pour tabac.’ ‘ah, tabac, tabac!’

      ‘That hit ’em. Let’s heave a dory over, anyway,’ said Tom Platt. ‘I don’t exactly hold no certificates on French, but I know another lingo that goes, I guess. Come on, Harve, an’ interpret.’

      The raffle and confusion when he and Harvey were hauled up the bark’s black side was indescribable. Her cabin was all stuck round with glaring coloured prints of the Virgin—the Virgin of Newfoundland, they called her. Harvey found his French of no recognised Bank brand, and his conversation was limited to nods and grins. But Tom Platt waved his arms and got along swimmingly. The captain gave him a drink of unspeakable gin, and the opera-comique crew, with their hairy throats, red caps, and long knives, greeted him as a brother. Then the trade began. They had tobacco, plenty of it—American, that had never paid duty to France. They wanted chocolate and crackers. Harvey rowed back to arrange with the cook and Disko, who owned the stores, and on his return the cocoa-tins and cracker-bags