came the slatting of the half-lowered mainsail[103], the shrill voices of the boat’s crew, a curse of Borckman’s, and, dominating all, Skipper’s voice, shouting:
“Grab the leech[104], you fella boys! Hang on! Drag down strong fella! Come in mainsheet two blocks! Jump, damn you, jump!”
Chapter VI
At recognition of Skipper’s voice, Jerry, floundering in the stiff and crisping sea that sprang up with the easement of the wind, yelped eagerly and yearningly, all his love for his new-found beloved eloquent in his throat. But quickly all sounds died away as the Arangi drifted from him. And then, in the loneliness of the dark, on the heaving breast of the sea that he recognized as one more of the eternal enemies, he began to whimper and cry plaintively like a lost child.
Further, by the dim, shadowy ways of intuition, he knew his weakness in that merciless sea with no heart of warmth, that threatened the unknowable thing, vaguely but terribly guessed, namely, death. As regarded himself, he did not comprehend death. He, who had never known the time when he was not alive, could not conceive of the time when he would cease to be alive.
Yet it was there, shouting its message of warning through every tissue cell, every nerve quickness and brain sensitivity of him – a totality of sensation that foreboded the ultimate catastrophe of life about which he knew nothing at all, but which, nevertheless, he felt to be the conclusive supreme disaster. Although he did not comprehend it, he apprehended it no less poignantly than do men who know and generalize far more deeply and widely than mere four-legged dogs.
As a man struggles in the throes of nightmare, so Jerry struggled in the vexed, salt-suffocating sea. And so he whimpered and cried, lost child, lost puppy-dog that he was, only half a year existent in the fair world sharp with joy and suffering. And he wanted Skipper. Skipper was a god.
On board the Arangi, relieved by the lowering of her mainsail, as the fierceness went out of the wind and the cloudburst of tropic rain began to fall, Van Horn and Borckman lurched toward each other in the blackness.
“A double squall,” said Van Horn. “Hit us to starboard and to port.[105]”
“Must a-split in half just before she hit us,” the mate concurred.
“And kept all the rain in the second half – ”
Van Horn broke off with an oath.
“Hey! What’s the matter along you fella boy?” he shouted to the man at the wheel.
For the ketch, under her spanker which had just then been flat-hauled, had come into the wind, emptying her after-sail and permitting her headsails to fill on the other tack. The Arangi was beginning to work back approximately over the course she had just traversed. And this meant that she was going back toward Jerry floundering in the sea. Thus, the balance, on which his life titubated, was inclined in his favour by the blunder of a black steersman.
Keeping the Arangi on the new tack, Van Horn set Borckman clearing the mess of ropes on deck, himself, squatting in the rain, undertaking to long-splice the tackle he had cut[106]. As the rain thinned, so that the crackle of it on deck became less noisy, he was attracted by a sound from out over the water. He suspended the work of his hands to listen, and, when he recognized Jerry’s wailing, sprang to his feet, galvanized into action.
“The pup’s overboard![107]” he shouted to Borckman. “Back your jib to wind’ard![108]”
He sprang aft, scattering a cluster of return boys right and left.
“Hey! You fella boat’s crew! Come in spanker sheet! Flatten her down good fella!”
He darted a look into the binnacle and took a hurried compass bearing of the sounds Jerry was making.
“Hard down your wheel!” he ordered the helmsman, then leaped to the wheel and put it down himself, repeating over and over aloud, “Nor’east by east a quarter, nor’east by east a quarter.”
Back and peering into the binnacle, he listened vainly for another wail from Jerry in the hope of verifying his first hasty bearing. But not long he waited. Despite the fact that by his manoeuvre the Arangi had been hove to[109], he knew that windage and sea-driftage would quickly send her away from the swimming puppy. He shouted Borckman to come aft and haul in the whaleboat, while he hurried below for his electric torch and a boat compass.
The ketch was so small that she was compelled to tow her one whaleboat astern on long double painters[110], and by the time the mate had it hauled in under the stern, Van Horn was back. He was undeterred by the barbed wire, lifting boy after boy of the boat’s crew over it and dropping them sprawling into the boat, following himself, as the last, by swinging over on the spanker boom, and calling his last instructions as the painters were cast off.
“Get a riding light on deck, Borckman. Keep her hove to. Don’t hoist the mainsail.[111] Clean up the decks and bend the watch tackle on the main boom.”
He took the steering-sweep and encouraged the rowers with: “Washee-washee, good fella, washee-washee!” – which is the bêche-de-mer for “row hard.”
As he steered, he kept flashing the torch on the boat compass so that he could keep headed northeast by east a quarter east. Then he remembered that the boat compass, on such course, deviated two whole points from the Arangi’s compass, and altered his own course accordingly.
Occasionally he bade the rowers cease, while he listened and called for Jerry. He had them row in circles, and work back and forth, up to windward and down to leeward[112], over the area of dark sea that he reasoned must contain the puppy.
“Now you fella boy listen ear belong you,” he said, toward the first. “Maybe one fella boy hear ’m pickaninny dog sing out, I give ’m that fella boy five fathom calico, two ten sticks tobacco.”
At the end of half an hour he was offering “Two ten fathoms calico and ten ten sticks tobacco” to the boy who first heard “pickaninny dog sing out.”
Jerry was in bad shape. Not accustomed to swimming, strangled by the salt water that lapped into his open mouth, he was getting loggy when first he chanced to see the flash of the captain’s torch. This, however, he did not connect with Skipper, and so took no more notice of it than he did of the first stars showing in the sky. It never entered his mind that it might be a star nor even that it might not be a star. He continued to wail and to strangle with more salt water. But when he at length heard Skipper’s voice he went immediately wild. He attempted to stand up and to rest his forepaws on Skipper’s voice coming out of the darkness, as he would have rested his forepaws on Skipper’s leg had he been near. The result was disastrous. Out of the horizontal, he sank down and under, coming up with a new spasm of strangling.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или