"Conrad, Josph - Youth" - читать интересную книгу автора (Conrad Joseph)

bleeding. I had lost my cap, one of my slippers, and
my shirt was torn to rags. Of all this I was not aware.
I was amazed to see the ship still afloat, the poop-deck
whole--and, most of all, to see anybody alive. Also
the peace of the sky and the serenity of the sea were
istinctly surprising. I suppose I expected to see them
convulsed with horror. . . . Pass the bottle.

"There was a voice hailing the ship from somewhere
--in the air, in the sky--I couldn't tell. Presently I
saw the captain--and he was mad. He asked me eagerly,
'Where's the cabin-table?' and to hear such a question
was a frightful shock. I had just been blown up, you
understand, and vibrated with that experience,--I wasn't
quite sure whether I was alive. Mahon began to stamp
with both feet and yelled at him, 'Good God! don't you
see the deck's blown out of her?' I found my voice, and
stammered out as if conscious of some gross neglect of
duty, 'I don't know where the cabin-table is.' It was
like an absurd dream.

"Do you know what he wanted next? Well, he
wanted to trim the yards. Very placidly, and as if lost
in thought, he insisted on having the foreyard squared.
'I don't know if there's anybody alive,' said Mahon,
almost tearfully. 'Surely,' he said gently, 'there will
be enough left to square the foreyard.'

"The old chap, it seems, was in his own berth, wind-
ing up the chronometers, when the shock sent him spin-
ning. Immediately it occurred to him--as he said after-
wards--that the ship had struck something, and he ran
out into the cabin. There, he saw, the cabin-table had
vanished somewhere. The deck being blown up, it had
fallen down into the lazarette of course. Where we had
our breakfast that morning he saw only a great hole in
the floor. This appeared to him so awfully mysterious,
and impressed him so immensely, that what he saw and
heard after he got on deck were mere trifles in com-
parison. And, mark, he noticed directly the wheel de-
serted and his bark off her course--and his only
thought was to get that miserable, stripped, undecked,
smoldering shell of a ship back again with her head
pointing at her port of destination. Bankok! That's
what he was after. I tell you this quiet, bowed, bandy-
legged, almost deformed little man was immense in the
singleness of his idea and in his placid ignorance of
our agitation. He motioned us forward with a com-
manding gesture, and went to take the wheel him-
self.