Cup of Gold [Золотая чаша] Read online

  “See these restless ones,” the man said. “Like questing souls they are indeed, and some say they are the souls of sailors drowned, souls so thick with sins that they never rest from one year to another. Others swear that these birds lay their eggs in floating nests built on planks of lost ships; and others, still, that they have no nests at all but are born full grown of the white lip of a wave and instantly start their lifelong flight.

  Ay! the restless ones.”

  The ship started a school of fliers that skipped along the wave tops like shining silver coins.

  “These are the ghosts or treasures lost at sea,” the cook went on, “the murder things, emeralds and diamonds and gold; the sins of men, committed for them, stick to them and make them haunt the ocean.

  Ay! it’s a poor thing if a sailor will not make a grand tale about it.”

  Henry pointed to a great tortoise asleep on the surface. “And what is the tale of the turtles?” he asked.

  “Nothing; only food. It is not likely that a man will be making romances about the thing he eats. Such things are too close to him, and the romance contaminated out of them. But these same beasts have been the saving of a number of ships, and the means of making flesh on some that might otherwise be white bones on the deck of a derelict The meat of turtles is sweet and good. Sometimes when the buccaneers are not in the way of getting wild beef, they stock their ships with these and so sail.”

  The sun had rushed below the water as they spoke. Far off, one black cloud whipped out tongue after tongue of dazzling lightning, but all the sky save that one spot was silken blue-black, littered with swarm of stars.

  “You promised to speak with me of those same buccaneers,” Henry begged; “they whom you call the Brethren of the Coast. Tell me, did you ever sail with them?”

  The cook shifted uneasily. “There’s peace between Spain and England,” he said. “I would not be breaking the King’s peace. No, I never sailed with them; no. But I have heard things which may be true.

  I have heard that the buccaneers are great fools. They plunder rich prizes and then throw their gains to the tavern hosts and brothel keepers of Tortuga and Goaves, like children throwing sand from them when they are tired of playing. Oh! great fools, I think.”

  “But did none of them ever take a town?” Henry asked.

  “A village or so has fallen to them, but they have no leaders for such a thing. “

  “But a great town with a treasury?” Henry persisted.

  “No, they have never done it. They are children, I tell you-strong, brave children. “

  “Could not a man who thought and planned carefully take a Spanish town? “

  “Ho!” the cook laughed; “and are you going to be a buccaneer? “

  “But if a man planned carefully? “

  “Why, if there were a buccaneer who could plan at all, carefully or otherwise, it might be done; but there are no such buccaneers. They are little children who can fight like hell and die very nicely-but fools.

  They will sink a ship for a cup of wine, when they might sell the ship. “

  “If a man considered carefully and weighed his chances and the men he had, he might- “

  “Yes, I suppose he might. “

  “There was one called Pierre le Grand who was no fool. “

  “Ah, but Pierre took one rich ship and then ran home to France! He was a fearful gambler, not a wise man. And he may yet come back to the Coast and lose it all and his head too. “

  “Still,” said Henry with a grown finality, “still, I think it could be done, so only a man thought about it and considered it.”

  In a few days they were coming close to land. One morning the pale ghost of a mountain was sitting on the edge of the circle. Logs and branches of trees went floating by now and again, and land birds flew out to them and rested in the rigging.

  They were come to the home of Summer, whence it goes yearly to the northern places. In the day the sun was a glaring brass cymbal, the sky washed out and livid around it, and at night the big fishes swam about the ship with curving rivers of pale fire flowing behind them. From off the forepeak were hurled millions of flying diamonds by the raging prow. The sea was a round lake of quiet undulation, spread with a silken skin. Slowly, slowly, passing to rearward, the water set up a pleasant hypnosis in the brain. It was like looking into a fire. One saw nothing, yet only with infinite struggle could he move his eyes; and finally his brain dreamed off, though he was not sleeping.

  There is a peace in the tropic oceans which passes a desire for understanding. Destination is no longer an end, but only to be sailing, sailing, out of the kingdom of time. For months and years they seemed to slip onward, but, there was no impatience in the crew. They did their work, and lay about the deck all in a strange, happy lethargy.

  One day there was a little island floating in the sea, shaped like a haycock and green as the first spears of barley. It was thickly covered with a tangling, fierce growth, vines and creepers and a few dark trees.

  Henry saw it with eyes that looked out on enchantment. They passed that island, and another and another, until, at last, in the blackness of a tropic early morning, the ship came in to Barbados. Its anchors splashed into the sea and went tugging down with the hawser flying behind them.

  On the shores there was lettuce green jungle as on the little islands, and farther back, plantations with straight laid rows and white houses with red roofs; farther still, the red soil showing like wounds through the jungle of the hills; and far behind, mountains that rose sharp and hard with the appearance of strong gray teeth.

  Small dug-out boats came to them, bearing rich fruits and piles of trussed up fowls. They came to sell, and to buy or steal that which the ship carried. Shining black men sang rich cadenced chants as they pulled at the oars, and Henry, close against the rail, was overjoyed with the new land. It was more than he had hoped. The sight brought happy, silly tears to his eyes.

  Tim was standing near, looking crestfallen and sad. At length he came and stood in front of Henry.

  “It’s grieving me to be hurting a fine boy that bought mybrea kfast,” he said. “It’s grieving me so I can’t sleep.”

  “But you have not hurt me,” cried Henry. “You’ve brought me to the Indies where I wanted to be so badly.”

  “Ah!” said Tim sorrowfully, “if only I had a religion to me like the master, I might say, ‘

  ‘Tis God’s will,’-and then be forgetting about it. And if I had a business or position I might be talking how a man must live. But I have no religion in me at all, save only an Ave Mary or amiserere dominie in storms; and as to position, why, I’m only a poor sailor out of Cork, and it does be grieving me to hurt a boy that bought my breakfast, and me a stranger.” He was watching a long canoe that drew near to them, six strong Caribs rowing it. In the stern sat a little, nervous Englishman, whose face had not tanned with the years but had grown redder and redder until the tiny veins seemed to be running on the outside of his skin. In the little man’s pale eyes there was the light of perpetual indecision and perplexity. His canoe bumped the ship’s side and he climbed slowly aboard and went directly to the master.

  “These it is, now,” cried Tim; “and you will not be thinking too badly about me, will you, Henry-seeing the grief it does me?”

  The captain was shouting, “Galley boy! Oh, galley boy! Morgan! Aft!”

  Henry went back to where the Englishman and the captain were standing. He was amazed when the little colonist gingerly felt his arms and shoulders.

  “I might give ten,” he said to the captain.

  “Twelve!” the captain snapped.

  “But do you really think he is worth it? I’m not a rich man, you see, and I just thought that ten-”

  “Well, you may have him for eleven, but, as God sees me, he’s worth more. Look at the knit of him and the broad shoulders. He won’t die like so many. No, sir, he’s worth more, but you may have him for eleven.”

  “Well, if you really thi
nk so,” the planter said hesitantly; and he began pulling money out of his pockets, money that was mixed with tangled string, and pieces of chalk, and a bit of a quill pen, and a broken key.

  The master drew a paper from his pocket and showed it to the boy-an order of indenture for five years, with the name Henry Morgan nicely filled in, and the British seal at the bottom.

  “But I don’t want to be sold,” cried Henry. “I didn’t come to be sold. I want to make my fortune and be a sailor.”

  “So you shall,” the master answered kindly, as though he gave permission, “after five years. Now go along with the gentleman and let us have no caterwauling. Do you think I could run this ship just bringing out boys that want to come to the Indies? You do your work and trust in God, and it may be a very good thing for you. Experience is never wasted on the sharp albeit humble soul.” He pushed Henry soothingly along the deck in front of him.

  At last the boy found his voice. “Tim,” he cried, “Tim. They’re selling me, Tim. Oh, Tim, come to me!”

  But there was no answer. Tim heard, and he was sobbing in his hammock like a small, whipped child.

  And Henry, as he climbed over the side ahead of his new master, felt nothing at all. But for a little catching in his throat, there was no sharp feeling in him-only a heavy, sodden dullness.

  So Henry Morgan came to be living in Barbados by authority of a white paper which forced his life and soul and body to kneel before the pleasure of one James Flower, planter.

  James Flower was not a hard man, and certainly he was not a very brilliant man. His whole life had been a hunger for ideas-any ideas-the creation of them. He wanted to conceive ideas, to warm them to throbbing life, then to hurl them on an astonished world. They would go bobbing like stones started down a long hill, awakening an avalanche of admiration. But no ideas came to him.

  His father had been a stolid English curate who wrote stout sermons which were actually published, though very few ever bought them. His mother wrote poetry which was a kind of summary of the sermons. Her verses were appended to the volume of rugged orthodoxy. And both his father and mother had ideas. Both were creators in a small way.

  James Flower bad been reared in an atmosphere of- “I must be walking to my publisher’s now, Helen!”

  “But William, a glorious thing burst upon me this morning as I was doing my hair-such a conception! It must surely have come from God. It will be done in couplets I think. Oh! glorious! And it just fits in with those delightful words of yours on humility.”

  “Ah, well; I must be walking to my publisher’s now, to see how the sermons are going. I sent a copy to the Archbishop, and he may have been talking about them. Such a thing would start a great sale I think.”

  Yes, they were people with ideas, and often they shook their heads over their dull son. He had held them in awe, had been frightened at their greatness and ashamed of himself. And so, early in his life, he had made a determination to have ideas. His reading had been tremendous. King James’ “Defense of Witchcraft” came into his hands, and he set about to prove it true. With the aid of ancient incantations and a black lotion which contained a number of filthy ingredients together with a large amount of hashish, he attempted to fly from the roof of his house. It was while his two broken legs were healing that he came on Scot’s “Discoverie of Witchcraft.”

  The system of Descartes was causing a stir among learned men, and James Flower, too, determined to reduce all philosophy to a basic postulate. He laid out paper and a number of fine pens at his side, but he could never come on his postulate. “I think, therefore I am,” he said; “at least, I think I am.” But this led in a circle and got him nowhere. Then he joined the new-foundedschoolof Bacon. With persistent experiments he burned his fingers, and tried to cross clover with barley, and pulled the legs from numberless insects, striving to discover something-almost anything; but he never did. As he had a moderate income from money left him by an uncle, his experiments were varied and extensive.

  A Separatist of fanatic intensity had written a violent book of the best scientific manner-The Effects of Alcoholic Spirits, Momentary and Perpetual. This work fell into the hands of James Flower, and he set out one evening to verify some of its more fantastic theories. In the midst of his investigation the spirit of induction left him, and, without cause or warning, he assaulted one of His Majesty’s guardsmen with a potted plant. Had he only known it, this was the one spontaneous idea of his life. The matter was hushed up by an archdeacon who was related to his mother. James Flower’s small fortune was invested in a plantation in Barbados, and he was sent to live there. Clearly, he did not fit in with orthodoxy and pentameters.

  And so he had grown wistfully old, on the island. His library was the finest in the Indies, and, as far as information went, he was the most learned man anywhere about. But his learning formed no design of the whole. He had learned without absorbing, remembered without assimilating. His mind was a sad mass of unrelated facts and theories. In his brain, as on his shelves, Caesar’s Commentaries stood shoulder to shoulder with Democritus and a treatise on spontaneous generation. James Flower, who had cried to be a creator, became a quiet, kindly little gentleman, somewhat ineffectual and very inefficient. In his later years he had begun to mistake convictions for ideas. If a man stated any belief loudly enough he frightened James Flower, for, he said to himself, “Here is one of those divinely endowed creatures who control the fire I lack altogether.”

  There were few white men on the great green plantation, and those who did grub there were sullen, tattered wretches, serving for some forgotten felony against the Crown. Within their bodies the fever lay like a light sleeper who wakes and snarls, then sleeps again with one malicious eye unclosed. They kneaded the soil in the fields with their fingers, and as their years of servitude crawled on their eyes deadened, their shoulders slumped, and a tired, dull imbecility stretched cloying webs in their brain. Their language was a bastard argot of London, with a few words from the Guinea Negroes and a few clattering Carib phrases. When these men were loosed from their slavery, they wandered listlessly about for a time, and watched the others go to work with something of longing. Then, after a little, they either signed new papers of indenture, or went marauding like tigers from a broken cage.

  The overseer had been one of them, and now that he commanded those who had been his fellows, he inflicted suffering in memory of his own pain.

  James Flower brought Henry to the shore, and something in the boy’s silent misery touched the planter.

  He had never been able to think of his slaves as men before. He had blindly followed the injunctions of the shrewd elder Cato in dealing with his slaves. But here was one who was very obviously a human, and possibly a gentleman. This boy had cried that he didn’t want to be a slave. The others always landed knowing their lot, and displaying a sullen rancor which must be beaten out of them on the cross.

  “Do not be so hurt, child,” the planter said. “You are very young to be coming to the islands. In a few years you will be a man, and strong.”

  “But it was on me to be a buccaneer,” said Henry dully. “I came out to the sea to make my fortune and a name. And how can I do these things if I am a slave toiling in the fields?”

  “I do not intend that you shall toil in the fields. I wanted you-I wanted a boy to be about the house now I am growing old. I wanted a-a kind of companion who would talk with me and hear me talk. The other planters come to the house and drink my wine, but when they leave I think they laugh at me and laugh at my books-my lovely books. And so you will sit with me in the evenings, perhaps, and we will talk of the things in books. Your father was a gentleman, I think. You have the look.

  “Now, today,” James Flower went on mildly, “we have a hanging, and you and I must hurry to be there.

  I don’t just know what the fellow did, but it was enough. And what says-oh! what’s his name? I have read it, anyway-‘The chief value of violent punishment lies with those on whom the same might fall.’<
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  Yes, I think it is well to have some one hanged every now and then. It is expensive, but very conducive to good behavior among the rest. But my overseer attends to all that. Do you know, I think he really enjoys ii.”

  He led the boy to a square of thatched mud huts, built close together, each with its door opening out into a kind of plaza. And in the center of the square, like a horrible fetish, rose a tall gallows made of black wood and polished with oil until it shone dully in the sunlight. It was so placed that no slave could look out of his hovel without seeing the black horror that might be his end. This was the overseer’s work. With his own hands he had rubbed the dark wood until it glowed. He was accustomed to stand and gaze at it, head cocked to one side, as an artist might look at his new finished work.

  The planter and the boy seated themselves. The slaves were herded into the square. And Henry saw a naked black figure squirm and writhe at the end of a rope while the Negroes rocked themselves back and forth on the ground and moaned; while the white slaves gritted their teeth and cursed harshly to keep from shrieking. The Caribs squatted on their hams and watched with no particular interest and no fear.

  Thus they might squat and watch the fire which cooked their food.

  When it was all over, and the black victim hung limply by his crooked neck, the planter looked down and saw that Henry was crying nervously.

  “I know it is bad the first time,” lie said gently “When I first saw it, I did not sleep for a good while. But after a little, when you have seen five-ten-a dozen-go out in this way, you will come to have no feeling about it, and no more thought of it than of a chicken flopping about with a wrung neck.”

  Henry’s breath still came in little miserable chokes.

  “I can show you in the works of Holmaron on the practices of the Inquisition, a dissertation on this very thing you feel. ‘The first time one sees human suffering,’ he says, ‘it is an unnatural thing, because, within one’s experience, placid, comfortable people are the rule. But, after a number of such experiences, the sight of torture becomes a normal thing, and normal humans come to relish it to various extents.’ Remind me to show you the passage sometime; though I must say I have never come to relish the matter.”