Signals of Distress Read Online Free PDF

modest as her hair was grand. ‘I’m happy to meet you,
sir.’
    ‘A pity that our acquaintance will be so short.’
    ‘Well, not so short,’ said Robert Norris. ‘I must suppose that we are trapped here for a few days now. I can’t be sure if that is happy news or not.’
    ‘Don’t be so doubting, Robert.’ His wife was the teasing not the bashful sort. ‘They’ll not want dismals like yourself in Canada.’
    ‘It’s not the colonies that bother me, but what we might endure on the passage there. I’ve not the constitution for the sea.’
    ‘And nor have I,’ said Aymer. ‘But I have taken passage here by sea and I have ridden out the worst of storms.’ He remembered now the bruising to his shoulder which,
truth be told, had stopped hurting the moment Katie had come in. ‘I tumbled from my berth and took a blow. But here you see me, well set up and only disembarked today. The observations to be
made are these: on ship a passenger should have no fear of nausea if he stays off the deck and is not tempted by the portholes. Stay in your quarters. Let the wooden walls be the furthest horizons
you allow. Let the deck above you be the sky. Take all your orientations from the space allotted you, and as the ship tips and rolls so you do too. Your body and your eye are in concord. But think
to walk on deck to witness what a storm can do first-hand, and you will feel your body bucking like the ship. Your eye will sway between the still horizon or the stiller stars and battle with the
masts and rigging of the boat so that your every step is like that of a drunken man. And thus seasickness will set in.’ A pleasing and a helpful lecture, Aymer thought.
    ‘It seems a pity to go so far and see so little,’ commented Katie.
    ‘The sickness is the price you pay for seeing,’ said Aymer. ‘I think there might be some general truth in that philosophy. To learn is to suffer. To suffer is to learn.’
He chuckled at his observation. And Robert and Katie Norris beamed at him with such indulgence and such attention that he felt glad to be in Wherrytown. Normally he didn’t welcome scrutiny.
Not that he was the kind of man to command the stares of strangers. He liked to think of himself as a plain man, plainly spoken. He didn’t care for adjectives, or anything that was too
ornamented. He liked the force of facts and objects, and he endeavoured to make his conversation instructional. ‘Still, such observations will not warm you from your walk,’ he
concluded. ‘Our landlady is not at hand, it seems.’ He stepped across to the parlour sideboard, lifted the inn handbell and shook it. ‘That should bring our Mrs Yapp
running.’
    Mrs Yapp was not the sort to run. Anyway, she didn’t hear the bell. She wasn’t in earshot. She and George were in her sitting room with Aymer’s letters open on her table. Mrs
Yapp had read them both out loud.
    ‘So that explains the soap,’ said George. ‘Take care he doesn’t pay for his lodgings here in bars of soap.’
    ‘And you take care to pay the gentleman some respect, George. He’s Smith & Sons. We’ll have to treat him sweet. I’d better see if I can find some bed
sheets.’
    ‘What brings a man like that down here?’
    ‘To talk with Walter Howells, that’s what it said. Go on now, George. You’d better do as you’ve been bid and take these letters round.’ She shook her skirt and
pinafore. She checked her stays and laces in the glass. She primped the jug-loops in her hair. ‘I’ll go and see if there is anything he wants.’
    ‘He’ll have no need of soap.’
    When Alice Yapp and George came into the parlour, Aymer Smith and the Norris couple were sitting round the cold grate in happy conversation, or at least the Soap Man was in conversation and the
other two were listening politely to his remarks about the beneficial freedoms of the colonies. Katie had loosed her hair and let it hang in one long bunch across her chest. Her husband had removed