"Conrad, Joseph - Tomorrow" - читать интересную книгу автора (Conrad Joseph)

must have been a hard one at first: he had never
taken to it; his affection turned to the land, with
its innumerable houses, with its quiet lives gathered
round its firesides. Many sailors feel and profess
a rational dislike for the sea, but his was a pro-
found and emotional animosity--as if the love of
the stabler element had been bred into him through
many generations.

"People did not know what they let their boys in
for when they let them go to sea," he expounded to
Bessie. "As soon make convicts of them at once."
He did not believe you ever got used to it. The
weariness of such a life got worse as you got older.
What sort of trade was it in which more than half
your time you did not put your foot inside your
house? Directly you got out to sea you had no
means of knowing what went on at home. One
might have thought him weary of distant voyages;
and the longest he had ever made had lasted a fort-
night, of which the most part had been spent at
anchor, sheltering from the weather. As soon as
his wife had inherited a house and enough to live on
(from a bachelor uncle who had made some money
in the coal business) he threw up his command of
an East-coast collier with a feeling as though he
had escaped from the galleys. After all these years
he might have counted on the fingers of his two
hands all the days he had been out of sight of Eng-
land. He had never known what it was to be out
of soundings. "I have never been further than
eighty fathoms from the land," was one of his
boasts.

Bessie Carvil heard all these things. In front of
their cottage grew an under-sized ash; and on sum-
mer afternoons she would bring out a chair on the
grass-plot and sit down with her sewing. Captain
Hagberd, in his canvas suit, leaned on a spade. He
dug every day in his front plot. He turned it over
and over several times every year, but was not go-
ing to plant anything "just at present."

To Bessie Carvil he would state more explicitly:
"Not till our Harry comes home to-morrow." And
she had heard this formula of hope so often that it
only awakened the vaguest pity in her heart for
that hopeful old man.

Everything was put off in that way, and every-