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

presented; by all (since he was a man of pleasing exterior, smooth ways,
and an unexceptionable flow of talk, whether in French or English) he was
excellently well received; and presently, with one of the last eight
bottles of beer on a table at his elbow, found himself the rather silent
centre-piece of a voluble group on the verandah.

Talk in the South Seas is all upon one pattern; it is a wide ocean, indeed,
but a narrow world: you shall never talk long and not hear the name of
Bully Hayes, a naval hero whose exploits and deserved extinction left
Europe cold; commerce will be touched on, copra, shell, perhaps cotton or
fungus; but in a far-away, dilettante fashion, as by men not deeply
interested; through all, the names of schooners and their captains, will
keep coming and going, thick as may-flies; and news of the last shipwreck
will be placidly exchanged and debated. To a stranger, this conversation
will at first seem scarcely brilliant; but he will soon catch the tone; and
by the time he shall have moved a year or so in the island world, and come
across a good number of the schooners so that every captain's name calls up
a figure in pyjamas or white duck, and becomes used to a certain laxity of
moral tone which prevails (as in memory of Mr. Hayes) on smuggling,
ship-scuttling, barratry, piracy, the labour trade, and other kindred
fields of human activity, he will find Polynesia no less amusing and no
less instructive than Pall Mall or Paris.

Mr. Loudon Dodd, though he was new to the group of the Marquesas, was
already an old, salted trader; he knew the ships and the captains; he had
assisted, in other islands, at the first steps of some career of which he
now heard the culmination, or (vice versa) he had brought with him from
further south the end of some story which had begun in Tai-o-hae. Among
other matter of interest, like other arrivals in the South Seas, he had a
wreck to announce. The John T. Richards, it appeared, had met the fate of
other island schooners.

"Dickinson piled her up on Palmerston Island," Dodd announced.

"Who were the owners?" inquired one of the club men.

"O, the usual parties!" returned Loudon,-"Capsicum & Co."

A smile and a glance of intelligence went round the group; and perhaps
Loudon gave voice to the general sentiment by remarking, "Talk of good
business! I know nothing better than a schooner, a competent captain, and a
sound, reliable reef."

"Good business! There's no such a thing!" said the Glasgow man. "Nobody
makes anything but the missionaries-dash it!"

"I don't know," said another. "There's a good deal in opium."

"It's a good job to strike a tabooed pearl-island, say, about the fourth
year," remarked a third; "skim the whole lagoon on the sly, and up stick