The Sword and the Net полностью

The man, an arm about Otto’s shoulders, sang cheerfully all the while. He was even bigger than Otto had thought, and he stank vilely of Bino which was from Bom. From his round, greasy blue-jowled face to his scarred and shapeless yellow shoes, he was as native to the peculiar town of Lisbon as his shapeless, bile-green suit. He looked as if he might be (as indeed he partially was) the fairly prosperous owner of a large and cheap and dirty restaurant.

It was in a small and windowless and fly-blown office behind this restaurant, now closed and shuttered for the night, that he eventually faced Otto across a desk and abandoned all pretence of drunkenness and became cold-eyed and distant and impersonally authoritative. He told Otto, clearly and concisely, several things—and the first of them was that the immediate future of Nils Jorgensen lay in the United States, to which a country he would go as part of the ship’s company of the Vulcania. He did not allow any pause, even the slightest, in which Otto might properly digest this tremendous surprise, but went on with further instructions. He told Otto what to do when the Vulcania docked, and how to ensure that the right person should find him easily. And, very particularly, he told Otto several things which he must not do after reaching America—for the Americans, he explained, were a strange, childish and altogether irrational people.

The interview took the better part of an hour, and they both talked in German, because Otto had neither Spanish nor Portuguese, and could not make headway with the other’s English. It gave Otto a strange sensation, this quick, low-voiced talk in his mother tongue: it made him vividly alive to the deadly reality of his work and yet, in these odd surroundings and talking to this most unlikely person, tinted everything with a dreamlike quality highly disconcerting. So disconcerting, in fact, that he was guilty of a lapse which, when he came to recall it later, made him flush with shame and wonder miserably whether it would be recorded as a mark against him. After the orders had been given and Otto had twice repeated them faultlessly, he asked a question which was not germane to the field which had been covered. He asked of what specific nature his work in America would be—and was abashed by the stony stare which his words evoked and by the three curt words in which he was told that orders would be given him when necessary. . . .

So here he was—a carpenter’s mate aboard the British ship Vulcania, and already forty-three hours out from Lisbon. And he was very busy. There was a great amount of work for the ship’s carpenter and his help; work caused by the unusual nature of the Vulcania’s cargo. He had not known the nature of this cargo before going aboard, partly by reason of the haste in which arrangements were made, and partly, no doubt, by reason of his inability to read the Portuguese newspapers. He had known, of course, that she was a British ship—but what he had not known was that she was carrying to America an oversize shipload of women and children; four hundred and fifty-three of them, to be exact.

When he found out, as of course he had to within two minutes of setting his foot aboard, his first reaction was one of distaste. He examined himself about this and found what seemed to be an answer: surrounded by an ordinary ship’s company of Englishmen he would have felt happy and proud—a lone and daring soldier in an enemy encampment. But this way, with the vast preponderance of the surrounding foe being women and children, he felt uneasy and, in some vague, unspecified way, ill-used. Although it would not have occurred to him to put it this way, he felt, perhaps, as Tristan might have felt at being compelled by the sudden and unexpected presence of Guinevere to desist from planning to overthrow Lancelot.

He consoled himself by the thought that the state of things in Britain must be even more precarious than he had imagined—and went on with his work. He did not see much of the crew, save for the ship’s carpenter himself and two other assistants. One of these was a Scotsman, big and dour and unhappy; the other a brisk, cheerful and talkative Cockney. Otto had as little to do with them as he might and, indeed, only spoke at all in order to oil his English. He found it difficult to understand the Scot and, at first, well-nigh impossible to understand the Cockney, who insisted upon keeping up a running fire of talk whenever he and Otto were together. He was a cheerful, malicious little person called Bates, and most of the talk he poured upon Otto was derisive chaff based upon the obvious fact that Nils Jorgensen was a ‘foreigner.’