"Robert Stevenson, Lloyd Osbourne. The Wrecker (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

mind would take no account of these familiar features; as he dodged in and
out along the frontier line of sleep and waking, memory would serve him
with broken fragments of the past: brown faces and white, of skipper and
shipmate, king and chief, would arise before his mind and vanish; he would
recall old voyages, old landfalls in the hour of dawn; he would hear again
the drums beat for a man-eating festival; perhaps he would summon up the
form of that island princess for the love of whom he had submitted his body
to the cruel hands of the tattooer, and now sat on the lumber, at the
pier-end of Tai-o-hae, so strange a figure of a European. Or perhaps from
yet further back, sounds and scents of England and his childhood might
assail him: the merry clamour of cathedral bells, the broom upon the
foreland, the song of the river on the weir.

It is bold water at the mouth of the bay; you can steer a ship about either
sentinel, close enough to toss a biscuit on the rocks. Thus it chanced
that, as the tattooed man sat dozing and dreaming, he was startled into
wakefulness and animation by the appearance of a flying jib beyond the
western islet. Two more headsails followed; and before the tattooed man had
scrambled to his feet, a topsail schooner, of some hundred tons, had luffed
about the sentinel and was standing up the bay, close-hauled.

The sleeping city awakened by enchantment. Natives appeared upon all sides,
hailing each other with the magic cry "Ehippy" -ship; the Queen stepped
forth on her verandah, shading her eyes under a hand that was a miracle of
the fine art of tattooing; the commandant broke from his domestic convicts
and ran into the residency for his glass; the harbour master, who was also
the gaoler, came speeding down the Prison Hill; the seventeen brown Kanakas
and the French boatswain's mate, that make up the complement of the
war-schooner, crowded on the forward deck; and the various English,
Americans, Germans, Poles, Corsicans, and Scots-the merchants and the
clerks of Tai-o-hae-deserted their places of business, and gathered,
according to invariable custom, on the road before the club.

So quickly did these dozen whites collect, so short are the distances in
Tai-o-hae, that they were already exchanging guesses as to the nationality
and business of the strange vessel, before she had gone about upon her
second board towards the anchorage. A moment after, English colours were
broken out at the main truck.

"I told you she was a Johnny Bull-knew it by her headsails," said an
evergreen old salt, still qualified (if he could anywhere have found an
owner unacquainted with his story) to adorn another quarter-deck and lose
another ship.

"She has American lines, anyway," said the astute Scots engineer of the
gin-mill; "it's my belief she's a yacht."

"That's it," said the old salt, "a yacht! look at her davits, and the boat
over the stern."