Dombey and Son - Dickens Charles (книги онлайн полностью .txt) 📗

'Cap'en,' in a deep hoarse whisper.

'Yes,' said Mr Perch, keeping time with his head.

'Cuttle.'

'Oh!' said Mr Perch, in the same tone, for he caught it, and couldn't help it; the Captain, in his diplomacy, was so impressive.

'I'll see if he's disengaged now. I don't know. Perhaps he may be for a minute.'

'Ay, ay, my lad, I won't detain him longer than a minute,' said the Captain, nodding with all the weighty importance that he felt within him. Perch, soon returning, said, 'Will Captain Cuttle walk this way?'

Mr Carker the Manager, standing on the hearth-rug before the empty fireplace, which was ornamented with a castellated sheet of brown paper, looked at the Captain as he came in, with no very special encouragement.

'Mr Carker?' said Captain Cuttle.

'I believe so,' said Mr Carker, showing all his teeth.

The Captain liked his answering with a smile; it looked pleasant.

'You see,' began the Captain, rolling his eyes slowly round the little room, and taking in as much of it as his shirt-collar permitted; 'I'm a seafaring man myself, Mr Carker, and Wal'r, as is on your books here, is almost a son of mine.'

'Walter Gay?' said Mr Carker, showing all his teeth again.

'Wal'r Gay it is,' replied the Captain, 'right!' The Captain's manner expressed a warm approval of Mr Carker's quickness of perception. 'I'm a intimate friend of his and his Uncle's. Perhaps,' said the Captain, 'you may have heard your head Governor mention my name? — Captain Cuttle.'

'No!' said Mr Carker, with a still wider demonstration than before.

'Well,' resumed the Captain, 'I've the pleasure of his acquaintance. I waited upon him down on the Sussex coast there, with my young friend Wal'r, when — in short, when there was a little accommodation wanted.' The Captain nodded his head in a manner that was at once comfortable, easy, and expressive. 'You remember, I daresay?'

'I think,' said Mr Carker, 'I had the honour of arranging the business.'

'To be sure!' returned the Captain. 'Right again! you had. Now I've took the liberty of coming here — 'Won't you sit down?' said Mr Carker, smiling.

'Thank'ee,' returned the Captain, availing himself of the offer. 'A man does get more way upon himself, perhaps, in his conversation, when he sits down. Won't you take a cheer yourself?'

'No thank you,' said the Manager, standing, perhaps from the force of winter habit, with his back against the chimney-piece, and looking down upon the Captain with an eye in every tooth and gum. 'You have taken the liberty, you were going to say — though it's none — '

'Thank'ee kindly, my lad,' returned the Captain: 'of coming here, on account of my friend Wal'r. Sol Gills, his Uncle, is a man of science, and in science he may be considered a clipper; but he ain't what I should altogether call a able seaman — not man of practice.

Wal'r is as trim a lad as ever stepped; but he's a little down by the head in one respect, and that is, modesty. Now what I should wish to put to you,' said the Captain, lowering his voice, and speaking in a kind of confidential growl, 'in a friendly way, entirely between you and me, and for my own private reckoning, 'till your head Governor has wore round a bit, and I can come alongside of him, is this — Is everything right and comfortable here, and is Wal'r out'ard bound with a pretty fair wind?'

'What do you think now, Captain Cuttle?' returned Carker, gathering up his skirts and settling himself in his position. 'You are a practical man; what do you think?'

The acuteness and the significance of the Captain's eye as he cocked it in reply, no words short of those unutterable Chinese words before referred to could describe.

'Come!' said the Captain, unspeakably encouraged, 'what do you say?

Am I right or wrong?'

So much had the Captain expressed in his eye, emboldened and incited by Mr Carker's smiling urbanity, that he felt himself in as fair a condition to put the question, as if he had expressed his sentiments with the utmost elaboration.

'Right,' said Mr Carker, 'I have no doubt.'

'Out'ard bound with fair weather, then, I say,' cried Captain Cuttle.

Mr Carker smiled assent.

'Wind right astarn, and plenty of it,' pursued the Captain.

Mr Carker smiled assent again.

'Ay, ay!' said Captain Cuttle, greatly relieved and pleased. 'I know'd how she headed, well enough; I told Wal'r so. Thank'ee, thank'ee.'

'Gay has brilliant prospects,' observed Mr Carker, stretching his mouth wider yet: 'all the world before him.'

'All the world and his wife too, as the saying is,' returned the delighted Captain.

At the word 'wife' (which he had uttered without design), the Captain stopped, cocked his eye again, and putting the glazed hat on the top of the knobby stick, gave it a twirl, and looked sideways at his always smiling friend.

'I'd bet a gill of old Jamaica,' said the Captain, eyeing him attentively, 'that I know what you're a smiling at.'

Mr Carker took his cue, and smiled the more.

'It goes no farther?' said the Captain, making a poke at the door with the knobby stick to assure himself that it was shut.

'Not an inch,' said Mr Carker.

'You're thinking of a capital F perhaps?' said the Captain.

Mr Carker didn't deny it.

'Anything about a L,' said the Captain, 'or a O?'

Mr Carker still smiled.

'Am I right, again?' inquired the Captain in a whisper, with the scarlet circle on his forehead swelling in his triumphant joy.

Mr Carker, in reply, still smiling, and now nodding assent, Captain Cuttle rose and squeezed him by the hand, assuring him, warmly, that they were on the same tack, and that as for him (Cuttle) he had laid his course that way all along. 'He know'd her first,' said the Captain, with all the secrecy and gravity that the subject demanded, 'in an uncommon manner — you remember his finding her in the street when she was a'most a babby — he has liked her ever since, and she him, as much as two youngsters can. We've always said, Sol Gills and me, that they was cut out for each other.'

A cat, or a monkey, or a hyena, or a death's-head, could not have shown the Captain more teeth at one time, than Mr Carker showed him at this period of their interview.

'There's a general indraught that way,' observed the happy Captain.

'Wind and water sets in that direction, you see. Look at his being present t'other day!'

'Most favourable to his hopes,' said Mr Carker.

'Look at his being towed along in the wake of that day!' pursued the Captain. 'Why what can cut him adrift now?'

'Nothing,' replied Mr Carker.

'You're right again,' returned the Captain, giving his hand another squeeze. 'Nothing it is. So! steady! There's a son gone: pretty little creetur. Ain't there?'

'Yes, there's a son gone,' said the acquiescent Carker.

'Pass the word, and there's another ready for you,' quoth the Captain. 'Nevy of a scientific Uncle! Nevy of Sol Gills! Wal'r! Wal'r, as is already in your business! And' — said the Captain, rising gradually to a quotation he was preparing for a final burst, 'who — comes from Sol Gills's daily, to your business, and your buzzums.' The Captain's complacency as he gently jogged Mr Carker with his elbow, on concluding each of the foregoing short sentences, could be surpassed by nothing but the exultation with which he fell back and eyed him when he had finished this brilliant display of eloquence and sagacity; his great blue waistcoat heaving with the throes of such a masterpiece, and his nose in a state of violent inflammation from the same cause.

'Am I right?' said the Captain.

'Captain Cuttle,' said Mr Carker, bending down at the knees, for a moment, in an odd manner, as if he were falling together to hug the whole of himself at once, 'your views in reference to Walter Gay are thoroughly and accurately right. I understand that we speak together in confidence.