Read Online The Wooden Shepherdess by Richard Hughes - Free Book Online

recollection was often so strong that even here—cooped up in his inland shack—he would hear the slatting of sails. The morning after that fairy-palace fiasco, while waiting for Ree to appear (for he took re-appearance for granted in spite of yesterday’s tantrum), he sat on his only chair with nothing to read but a Sears-Roebuck catalogue someone had left—for use—in the jakes. Thumbing the leaves, he came on a page of sou’-westers and oilskins.... The air smelled suddenly salt in his nose, the floor began to heave and he found himself seized with a terrible longing for ships and for adult masculine company. Clank of the pawl as you heaved on the winch: the smell of Stockholm tar as you worked it into the dead-eyes, of linseed oil as you rubbed it into the mast: monkeying up the ratlines to spend a misty hour aloft on watch at the masthead....
    Suppose he up-anchored from here, went down to the coast and hung about waterfronts? So many seamen these days jumped ship in American ports that there might be a chance of a berth and no questions asked, in spite of no seaman’s card! Other men did it.... Arthur Golightly, that ox-like American found at a café table in Paris reading Macpherson’s Ossian : when Arthur wanted to cross the Atlantic he always worked his passage—if “working” was ever the word to apply to Arthur, who boasted he’d lost on merit alone more jobs than anyone else in Montmartre (he had just succeeded in losing a night-watchman’s job in a graveyard: or else, as he grandly invited, Augustine was welcome to doss in his canvas booth any time). At sea, said Arthur, once out of port you could only be “sacked” in the literal sense (i.e. with a weight in the bottom and string drawn tight round the neck). But it never quite came to that, even if once the pilot was dropped you did no work whatever as usual. Signing of course for the whole round voyage, once the ship docked on the other side if Arthur wandered ashore and never came back the skipper was only too glad.
    Monumental American Arthur, the son of a Great War General, only taking to this way of life as a means of avoiding West Point himself! But his rough-hewn face was the face of the norm-busting proletarian worker on Bolshevik posters (apart from his pimples): the muscles he never used were those of an elephant.... There of course was the rub: for if Arthur put in for a job as a stoker he looked it, whereas Augustine’s all-too-obvious Oxford-and-upper-class skin was something he wasn’t yet snake-like enough to know how to slough. Who would ever believe he could work with his hands? And once they began asking questions the risk of arrest was appalling. Still, if things went on much longer this way he would bloody well have a try: it was better than sitting around like a mesmerised rabbit, awaiting the coup-de-grâce....
    But where on earth was Ree? She had never before been as late as this in arriving to claim him.
    Even a job in the galley’d be better than nothing, if all else failed.
    Alice May ’s galley was built on the deck, amidships: once, he’d been put on to cook while the schooner was bowling along with half-a-gale on the beam (somewhere off Chesapeake Bay, but a long way out to keep the Gulf Stream under her). Somehow the cowl on the chimney which ought to swivel was jammed so the wind blew down it, and sulphurous almost invisible smoke blew out of the ash-pit. In order to breathe at all the galley door had to be open, so every wave which swept the deck as she rolled had flooded him up to the knees and hissed into clouds of scalding steam on the stove—but he’d had to stop in there with his eyes tight shut and coughing his lungs out in order to hold the great iron stewpot on to the top of the stove whenever it tried to dance....
    How he wished he was back there now!
    From earliest childhood, most of Augustine’s happiest memories seemed to be