Читать книгу Mutiny on the Bounty. Historical Novel онлайн

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When both men were mustered from the service I saw them again on a memorable occasion. Each wrote to me without the other’s knowledge, asking for advice. Both had lived with intensity lives high above the conflict, and to both the stridency and (as they felt) the vulgarity of post-war civilization was past endurance. Each had ambitions, talents, and memories of great price. To transmute these intangibles into three meals per diem was the prosaic problem put up to me. How well I remember the day they came to Boston. Reticent and illusive, there was something in each of them that in its pure essence I have not known elsewhere. Conrad called it Romance. When Romance and Chivalry come to refresh my cumbered mind, I see those two young men just as I saw them then.

We talked and we talked, and then we adjourned for counsel to a little Italian restaurant. Those were days when vino rosso was a legitimate dressing for a salad to be eaten with an omelette. We ate, drank, and speculated of those places in the world where the dollar or its equivalent is not the sole essential medium of exchange. I called for a geography. We opened it at Mercator’s projection, and hardly were the pages pinned down by twin cruets of oil and vinegar, when both the adventurers with a single swoop pointed to the route which Stevenson had taken. I called up Cook for information on prices, and while my companions chatted of palm trees and hibiscus—Loti seasoned with Conrad—I did several sums in addition and multiplication.