THE COMPLETE SHORT STORIES OF JOSEPH CONRAD. Джозеф Конрад
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made no sound for a while; then brusquely: "They were so afraid I would turn out badly that they fairly drove me away. Mother nagged at me for being idle, and the old man said he would cut my soul out of my body rather than let me go to sea. Well, it looked as if he would do it too—so I went. It looks to me sometimes as if I had been born to them by a mistake—in that other hutch of a house."
"Where ought you to have been born by rights?" Bessie Carvil interrupted him, defiantly.
"In the open, upon a beach, on a windy night," he said, quick as lightning. Then he mused slowly. "They were characters, both of them, by George; and the old man keeps it up well—don't he? A damned shovel on the—Hark! who's that making that row? 'Bessie, Bessie.' It's in your house."
"It's for me," she said, with indifference.
He stepped aside, out of the streak of light. "Your husband?" he inquired, with the tone of a man accustomed to unlawful trysts. "Fine voice for a ship's deck in a thundering squall."
"No; my father. I am not married."
"You seem a fine girl, Miss Bessie, dear," he said at once.
She turned her face away.
"Oh, I say,—what's up? Who's murdering him?"
"He wants his tea." She faced him, still and tall, with averted head, with her hands hanging clasped before her.
"Hadn't you better go in?" he suggested, after watching for a while the nape of her neck, a patch of dazzling white skin and soft shadow above the sombre line of her shoulders. Her wrap had slipped down to her elbows. "You'll have all the town coming out presently. I'll wait here a bit."
Her wrap fell to the ground, and he stooped to pick it up; she had vanished. He threw it over his arm, and approaching the window squarely he saw a monstrous form of a fat man in an armchair, an unshaded lamp, the yawning of an enormous mouth in a big flat face encircled by a ragged halo of hair—Miss Bessie's head and bust. The shouting stopped; the blind ran down. He lost himself in thinking how awkward it was. Father mad; no getting into the house. No money to get back; a hungry chum in London who would begin to think he had been given the go-by. "Damn!" he muttered. He could break the door in, certainly; but they would perhaps bundle him into chokey for that without asking questions—no great matter, only he was confoundedly afraid of being locked up, even in mistake. He turned cold at the thought. He stamped his feet on the sodden grass.
"What are you?—a sailor?" said an agitated voice.
She had flitted out, a shadow herself, attracted by the reckless shadow waiting under the wall of her home.
"Anything. Enough of a sailor to be worth my salt before the mast. Came home that way this time."
"Where do you come from?" she asked.
"Right away from a jolly good spree," he said, "by the London train—see? Ough! I hate being shut up in a train. I don't mind a house so much."
"Ah," she said; "that's lucky."
"Because in a house you can at any time open the blamed door and walk away straight before you."
"And never come back?"
"Not for sixteen years at least," he laughed. "To a rabbit hutch, and get a confounded old shovel..."
"A ship is not so very big," she taunted.
"No, but the sea is great."
She dropped her head, and as if her ears had been opened to the voices of the world, she heard, beyond the rampart of sea-wall, the swell of yesterday's gale breaking on the beach with monotonous and solemn vibrations, as if all the earth had been a tolling bell.
"And then, why, a ship's a ship. You love her and leave her; and a voyage isn't a marriage." He quoted the sailor's saying lightly.
"It is not a marriage," she whispered.
"I never took a false name, and I've never yet told a lie to a woman. What lie? Why, the lie—. Take me or leave me, I say: and if you take me, then it is..." He hummed a snatch very low, leaning against the wall.
"Oh, ho, ho Rio!
And fare thee well,
My bonnie young girl,
We're bound to Rio Grande."
"Capstan song," he explained. Her teeth chattered.
"You are cold," he said. "Here's that affair of yours I picked up." She felt his hands about her, wrapping her closely. "Hold the ends together in front," he commanded.
"What did you come here for?" she asked, repressing a shudder.
"Five quid," he answered, promptly. "We let our spree go on a little too long and got hard up."
"You've been drinking?" she said.
"Blind three days; on purpose. I am not given that way—don't you think. There's nothing and nobody that can get over me unless I like. I can be as steady as a rock. My chum sees the paper this morning, and says he to me: 'Go on, Harry: loving parent. That's five quid sure.' So we scraped all our pockets for the fare. Devil of a lark!"
"You have a hard heart, I am afraid," she sighed.
"What for? For running away? Why! he wanted to make a lawyer's clerk of me—just to please himself. Master in his own house; and my poor mother egged him on—for my good, I suppose. Well, then—so long; and I went. No, I tell you: the day I cleared out, I was all black and blue from his great fondness for me. Ah! he was always a bit of a character. Look at that shovel now. Off his chump? Not much. That's just exactly like my dad. He wants me here just to have somebody to order about. However, we two were hard up; and what's five quid to him—once in sixteen hard years?"
"Oh, but I am sorry for you. Did you never want to come back home?"
"Be a lawyer's clerk and rot here—in some such place as this?" he cried in contempt. "What! if the old man set me up in a home to-day, I would kick it down about my ears—or else die there before the third day was out."
"And where else is it that you hope to die?"
"In the bush somewhere; in the sea; on a blamed mountain-top for choice. At home? Yes! the world's my home; but I expect I'll die in a hospital some day. What of that? Any place is good enough, as long as I've lived; and I've been everything you can think of almost but a tailor or a soldier. I've been a boundary rider; I've sheared sheep; and humped my swag; and harpooned a whale. I've rigged ships, and prospected for gold, and skinned dead bullocks,—and turned my back on more money than the old man would have scraped in his whole life. Ha, ha!"
He overwhelmed her. She pulled herself together and managed to utter, "Time to rest now."
He straightened himself up, away from the wall, and in a severe voice said, "Time to go."
But he did not move. He leaned back again, and hummed thoughtfully a bar or two of an outlandish tune.
She felt as if she were about to cry. "That's another of your cruel songs," she said.
"Learned it in Mexico—in Sonora." He talked easily. "It is the song of the Gambucinos. You don't know? The song of restless men. Nothing could hold them in one place—not even a woman. You used to meet one of them now and again, in the old days, on the edge of the gold country, away north there beyond the Rio Gila. I've seen it. A prospecting engineer in Mazatlan took me along with him to help look after the waggons. A sailor's a handy chap to have about you anyhow. It's all a desert: cracks in the earth that you can't see the bottom of; and mountains—sheer rocks standing up high like walls and church spires, only a hundred times bigger. The valleys are full of boulders and black stones. There's not a blade of grass to see; and the sun sets more red over that country than I have seen it anywhere—blood-red and angry. It is fine."
"You do not want to go back there again?" she stammered out.
He laughed a little. "No. That's the blamed gold country. It gave me the shivers sometimes to look at it—and we were a big lot