Silver Read Free Page B

while he could certainly seem fierce he also understood the need for human beings to live in the world – which I saw in his determination that I should have a better education than any he had received himself. The school he chose for me was in Enfield; I was dispatched there at the age of seven, and remained a ‘boarder’ for a large part of every year until I was sixteen.
    This establishment, which was proud to describe itself as a Dissenting Academy, was managed by a liberal-minded gentleman whose good qualities deserve great praise. But I do not propose to divert myself from my story in order to dwell on this part of my existence. Suffice it to say that when I eventually returned home again I had ‘the tastes of a gentleman’ in reading and writing, and a clear idea of what it means to behave with decent concern for others. Also, and in spite of the influences to which I had been exposed, I had a quickened appetite for what had always pleased me most: my own company, and the life of the river and marshes.
    I must mention one further thing before I continue any further – and that is another paradox. In his sadness after my mother’s death, my father often seemed the opposite of grieving. This wasthanks to his habit of reliving the adventures of his youth, as I have already mentioned. Sometimes this was done at the request of new customers who knew his reputation and wanted to share a part of his history. But when no such requests were forthcoming, he was inclined to tell the stories anyway, pausing sometimes to expand on a moment of particular danger, or to digress into the background of an especially striking individual or event.
    Indeed, it would be fair to say that long before my boyhood was over, the story of Treasure Island had become almost the whole of my father’s conversation. Its inhabitants were more companionable to him than the customers he served, and more vivid to me. They were not quite inventions, and not quite figures from history, but a blend of these things. This almost persuaded me I might have met them myself, and had seen with my own eyes the wickedness of John Silver the sea-cook; and glimpsed the Black Spot passing into the hand of Billy Bones; and even watched my father himself when he was a child, climbing the mast of the
Hispaniola
to escape Israel Hands, then firing his pistols so that Hands fell into the clear blue water, and finally sank onto its sandy bed, where he lay with the little fishes rippling to and fro across his body.
    With the mention of these ghosts, I am ready to begin my story. I will therefore ask you to remember where we stood a moment ago – on the marshes behind the Hispaniola – and then to jump forward a few hours. My solitary day had ended and I was reluctantly wandering home. Darkness had fallen. The moon had risen. Mist crawled along the river. When I stepped indoors from the towpath, candle flames burned still and straight in the warm air of the taproom, where my father’s adventures were once again approaching their crisis before an audience of visitors. I kept in the background of the scene, slipping upstairs to my bedroom so that I did not have to follow him through the final windings of his tale.
    A moment later I had reached my own space under the roof. This was the least comfortable room in the house – hardly a room at all, but infinitely precious to me because it was like a cabinet of curiosities. Every wall was covered with shelves, on which I had arranged the feathers, shells, eggs, pieces of twisted wood, rope, skulls, curious knots and other trophies I had collected from the marsh in the course of my short but busy life. And in the middle of this cabinet, my crow’s-nest – which I might properly call my bed, where I lay every night to survey the rolling universe. Here it was that I lay down at last. And here it was that I turned my face to the window.
    The towpath was deserted, patched by a large square of yellow light falling from the