Tramping on Life
by Harry Kemp · English · Gutenberg #15415 · 921,187 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Tramping on Life
Author: Harry Kemp
Release date: March 19, 2005 [eBook #15415]
Most recently updated: December 14, 2020
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TRAMPING ON LIFE ***
Produced by Audrey Longhurst, Martin Pettit and the PG
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[Illustration: THE AUTHOR OF _Tramping on Life_]
TRAMPING ON LIFE
AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE
HARRY KEMP
GARDEN CITY NEW YORK
GARDEN CITY PUBLISHING COMPANY, Inc.
_Copyright, 1922, by_
BONI AND LIVERIGHT, INC.
First Printing, September, 1922
Second Printing, November, 1922
Third Printing, January, 1923
Fourth Printing, April, 1923
Fifth Printing, July, 1923
Sixth Printing, September, 1923
Seventh Printing, November, 1923
Eighth Printing, May, 1924
Ninth Printing, November, 1924
Tenth Printing, July, 1925
Eleventh Printing, March, 1926
Twelfth Printing, February, 1927
_Printed in the United States of America_
All in this book that is good and enduring
and worth while for humanity, I
dedicate to the memory of my wife,
MARY PYNE
_Waterbury, Connecticut,
May 20, 1922._
TRAMPING ON LIFE
Now I am writing these things just as I was told them by my grandmother.
For I have utterly no remembrance of my mother. Consumption ran in her
family. And bearing and giving birth to me woke the inherited weakness
in her. She was not even strong enough to suckle me.
* * * * *
I was born in the early eighties, in Mornington, Ohio, in a section of
that great, steel-manufacturing city which was neither city, suburb, nor
country,--but a muddy, green-splashed, murky mixture of all three.
* * * * *
They told me, when I was old enough to understand, that my mother was
English, that her folks lived in Cleveland and owned a millinery and
drygoods store there ... and that my father met my mother one day in
Mornington. She was visiting an uncle who ran a candy store on Main
Street, and, she girl-like, laughed and stood behind the counter, ready
for a flirtation....
My father was young, too. And he was employed there in the store,
apprenticed to the candy-maker's trade. And, on this day, as he passed
through, carrying a trayful of fresh-dipped chocolates, he winked at my
mother and joked with her in an impudent way ... and she rebuffed him,
not really meaning a rebuff, of course ... and he startled her by
pulling off his hat and grotesquely showing himself to be entirely bald
... for he had grown bald very young--at the age of sixteen ... both
because of scarlet fever, and because baldness for the men ran in his
family ... and he was tall, and dark, and walked with rather a military
carriage.
* * * * *
I was four years old when my mother died.
When she fell sick, they tell me, my grandfather did one of the few
decent acts of his life--he let my father have a farm he owned in
central Kansas, near Hutchinson. But my father did not try to work it.
He was possessed of neither the capital nor knowledge necessary for
farming.
He went to work as clerk in a local hotel, in the rapidly growing town.
Crazy with grief, he watched my mother drop out of his life a little
more each day.
* * * * *
My father and mother both had tempers that flared up and sank as
suddenly.
* * * * *
I had lung fever when I was a baby. That was what they called it then. I
nearly died of it. It left me very frail in body.
* * * * *
As soon as I could walk and talk my mother made a great companion of me.
She didn't treat me as if I were only a child. She treated me like a
grown-up companion. I am told that I would follow her about the house
from room to room, clutching at her skirts, while she was dusting and
sweeping and working. And to hear us two talking with each other, you
would have imagined there was a houseful of people.
* * * * *
My father's anguish over my mother's death caused him to break loose
from all ties. His grief goaded him so that he went about aimlessly. He
roamed from state to state, haunted by her memory. He worked at all
sorts of jobs. Once he even dug ditches for seventy-five cents a day. He
had all sorts of adventures, roaming about.
As for me, I was left alone with my grandmother, his mother,--in the big
house which stood back under the trees, aloof from the wide, dusty road
that led to the mills.
With us lived my young, unmarried aunt, Millie....
My grandmother had no education. She could barely read and write.
And she believed in everybody.
She was stout ... sparse-haired ... wore a switch ... had kindly,
confiding, blue eyes.
Beggars, tramps, pack-peddlers, book-agents, fortune-tellers,--she lent
a credulous ear to all,--helped others when we ourselves needed help,
signed up for preposterous articles on "easy" monthly payments,--gave
away food, starving her appetite and ours.
When, child though I was, even I protested, she would say, "well,
Johnnie, you might be a tramp some day, and how would I feel if I
thought some one was turning you away hungry?"
* * * * *
My Grandfather Gregory was a little, alert, erect, suave man,--he was a
man whose nature was such that he would rather gain a dollar by some
cheeky, brazen, off-colour practice than earn a hundred by honest
methods.
He had keen grey eyes that looked you in the face in utter, disarming
frankness. He was always immaculately dressed. He talked continually
about money, and about how people abused his confidence and his trust in
men. But there was a sharpness like pointed needles in the pupils of his
eyes that betrayed his true nature.
Coming to Mornington as one of the city's pioneers, at first he had kept
neck to neck in social prestige with the Babsons, Guelders, and the
rest, and had built the big house that my grandmother, my aunt, and
myself now lived in, on Mansion avenue....
When the Civil War broke out, that streak of adventure and daring in my
grandfather which in peace times turned him to shady financial
transactions, now caused him to enlist. And before the end of the war he
had gone far up in the ranks.
After the war he came into still more money by a manufacturing business
which he set up. But the secret process of the special kind of material
which he manufactured he inveigled out of a comrade in arms. The latter
never derived a cent from it. My grandfather stole the patent, taking it
out in his own name. The other man had trusted him, remembering the
times they had fought shoulder to shoulder, and had bivouacked
together....
My grandfather, though so small as to be almost diminutive, was spry and
brave as an aroused wasp when anyone insulted him. Several times he
faced down burly-bodied men who had threatened to kill him for his
getting the better of them in some doubtful business transaction.
For a long time his meanness and sharp dealings were reserved for
outsiders and he was generous with his family. And my sweet, simple, old
grandmother belonged to all the societies, charitable and otherwise, in
town ... but she was not, never could be "smart." She was always saying
and doing naïve things from the heart. And soon she began to disapprove
of my grandfather's slick business ways.
I don't know just what tricks he put over ... but he became _persona non
grata_ in local business circles ... and he took to running about the
country, putting through various projects here and there ... this
little, dressy, hard-faced man ... like a cross between a weasel and a
bird!
He dropped into Mornington, and out again, each time with a wild,
restless story of fortunes to be made or in the making!
Once he came home and stayed for a longer time than usual. During this
stay he received many letters. My grandmother noticed a furtiveness in
his manner when he received them. My grandmother noticed that her
husband always repaired immediately to the outhouse when he received a
letter.
She followed after him one day, and found fragments of a torn letter
cast below ... she performed the disagreeable task of retrieving the
fragments, of laboriously piecing them together and spelling them out.
She procured a divorce as quietly as possible. Then my grandfather made
his final disappearance. I did not see him again till I was quite grown
up.
All support of his numerous family ceased. His sons and daughters had to
go to work while still children, or marry.
My Aunt Alice married a country doctor whom I came to know as "Uncle
Beck." My Uncle Joe, who inherited my grandfather's business-sense, with
none of his crookedness, started out as a newsboy, worked his way up to
half-proprietorship in a Mornington paper ... the last I heard of him he
had money invested in nearly every enterprise in town, and had become a
substantial citizen.
My father still pursued his nomadic way of living, sending, very seldom,
driblets of money to my grandmother for my support ... my uncle Jim went
East to work ... of my uncle Landon I shall tell you later on.
* * * * *
The big house in which my grandmother, my Aunt Millie, and I lived was
looking rather seedy by this time. The receding tide of fashion and
wealth had withdrawn far off to another section of the rapidly growing
city ... and, below and above, the Steel Mills, with their great,
flaring furnaces, rose, it seemed, over night, one after one ... and a
welter of strange people we then called the "low Irish" came to work in
them, and our Mansion Avenue became "Kilkenny Row." And a gang of tough
kids sprang up called the "Kilkenny Cats," with which my gang used to
fight.
After the "Low Irish" came the "Dagoes" ... and after them the "Hunkies"
... each wilder and more poverty-stricken than the former.
* * * * *
The Industrial Panic of '95 (it was '95, I think) was on ... always very
poor since the breaking up of our family, now at times even bread was
scarce in the house.
I was going to school, scrawny and freckle-faced and ill-nourished. I
had a pet chicken that fortunately grew up to be a hen. It used to lay
an egg for me nearly every morning during that hard time.
* * * * *
My early remembrances of school are chiefly olfactory. I didn't like the
dirty boy who sat next to me and spit on his slate, rubbing it clean
with his sleeve. I loved the use of my yellow, new sponge, especially
after the teacher had taught me all about how it had grown on the bottom
of the ocean, where divers had to swim far down to bring it up, slanting
through the green waters. But the slates of most of the boys stunk
vilely with their spittle.
I didn't like the smell of the pig-tailed little girls, either. There
was a close soapiness about them that offended me. And yet they
attracted me. For I liked them in their funny, kilt-like, swinging
dresses. I liked the pudginess of their noses, the shiny apple-glow of
their cheeks.
It was wonderful to learn to make letters on a slate. To learn to put
down rows of figures and find that one and one, cabalistically, made
two, and two and two, four!
It always seemed an age to recess. And the school day was as long as a
month is now.
We were ready to laugh at anything ... a grind-organ in the street, a
passing huckster crying "potatoes," etc.
I have few distinct memories of my school days. I never went to
kindergarten. I entered common school at the age of eight.
My grandfather, after his hegira from Mornington, left behind his
library of travels, lives of famous American Statesmen and Business
Men, and his Civil War books. Among these books were four treasure
troves that set my boy's imagination on fire. They were _Stanley's
Adventures in Africa_, Dr. Kane's Book of _Polar Explorations_, _Mungo
Park_, and, most amazing of all, a huge, sensational book called _Savage
Races of the World_ ... this title was followed by a score of harrowing
and sensational sub-titles in rubric. I revelled and rolled in this book
like a colt let out to first pasture. For days and nights, summer and
winter, I fought, hunted, was native to all the world's savage regions
in turn, partook gleefully of strange and barbarous customs, naked and
skin-painted. I pushed dug-outs and canoes along tropic water-ways where
at any moment an enraged hippopotamus might thrust up his snout and
overturn me, crunching the boat in two and leaving me a prey to
crocodiles ... I killed birds of paradise with poison darts which I blew
out of a reed with my nostrils ... I burned the houses of white settlers
... even indulged shudderingly in cannibal feasts.
The one thing that pre-eminently seized my imagination in _Savage Races
of the World_ was the frontispiece,--a naked black rushing full-tilt
through a tropical forest, his head of hair on fire, a huge
feather-duster of dishevelled flame ... somehow this appealed to me as
especially romantic. I dreamed of myself as that savage, rushing
gloriously through a forest, naked, and crowned with fire like some
primitive sun-god. It never once occurred to me how it would hurt to
have my hair burning!
* * * * *
When Aunt Millie was taken down with St. Vitus's dance, it afforded me
endless amusement. She could hardly lift herself a drink out of a full
dipper without spilling two-thirds of the contents on the ground.
Uncle Beck, the Pennsylvania Dutch country doctor who married Aunt
Alice, came driving in from Antonville, five miles away, once or twice a
week to tend to Millie, free, as we were too poor to pay for a doctor. I
remember how Uncle Beck caught me and whipped me with a switch. For I
constantly teased Aunt Millie to make her scream and cry.
* * * * *
"Granma," I used to call out, on waking in the morning....
"Yes, Johnnie darling, what is it?"
"Granma, yesterday ... in the woods back of Babson's barn, I killed
three Indians, one after the other." (The funny part of it was that I
believed this, actually, as soon as the words left my mouth.)
A silence....
"Granma, don't you believe me?"
"Yes, of course, I believe you."
Aunt Millie would strike in with--"Ma, why do you go on humouring
Johnnie while he tells such lies? You ought to give him a good
whipping."
"The poor little chap ain't got no mother!"
"Poor little devil! If you keep on encouraging him this way he'll become
one of the greatest liars in the country."
A colloquy after this sort took place more than once. It gave me
indescribable pleasure to narrate an absurd adventure, believe it myself
in the telling of it, and think others believed me. Aunt Millie's scorn
stung me like a nettle, and I hated her.
In many ways I tasted practical revenge. Though a grown girl of
nineteen, she still kept three or four dolls. And I would steal her
dolls, pull their dresses for shame over their heads, and set them
straddle the banisters.
* * * * *
We took in boarders. We had better food. It was good to have meat to eat
every day.
Among the boarders was a bridge builder named Elton Reeves. Elton had a
pleasant, sun-burnt face and a little choppy moustache beneath which his
teeth glistened when he smiled.
He fell, or pretended to fall, in love with gaunt, raw-boned Millie.
At night, after his day's work, he and Millie would sit silently for
hours in the darkened parlour,--silent, except for an occasional murmur
of voices. I was curious. Several times I peeked in. But all I could see
was the form of my tall aunt couched half-moonwise in Elton Reeve's lap.
I used to wonder why they sat so long and still, there in the
darkness....
* * * * *
Once a grown girl of fourteen named Minnie came to visit a sweet little
girl named Martha Hanson, whose consumptive widower-father rented two
rooms from my grandmother. They put Minnie to sleep in the same bed with
me....
After a while I ran out of the bedroom into the parlour where the
courting was going on.
"Aunt Millie, Minnie won't let me sleep."
Millie did not answer. Elton guffawed lustily.
I returned to bed and found Minnie lying stiff and mute with fury.
* * * * *
Elton left, the bridge-work brought to completion. He had a job waiting
for him in another part of the country.
It hurt even my savage, young, vindictive heart to see Millie daily
running to the gate, full of eagerness, as the mail-man came....
"No, no letters for you this morning, Millie!"
Or more often he would go past, saying nothing. And Millie would weep
bitterly.
* * * * *
I have a vision of a very old woman walking over the top of a hill. She
leans on a knobby cane. She smokes a corn-cob pipe. Her face is
corrugated with wrinkles and as tough as leather. She comes out of a
high background of sky. The wind whips her skirts about her thin shanks.
Her legs are like broomsticks.
This is a vision of my great-grandmother's entrance into my boyhood.
I had often heard of her. She had lived near Halton with my Great-aunt
Rachel for a long time ... and now, since we were taking in boarders and
could keep her, she was coming to spend the rest of her days with us.
At first I was afraid of this eerie, ancient being. But when she dug out
a set of fish-hooks, large and small, from her tobacco pouch, and gave
them to me, I began to think there might be something human in the old
lady.
She established her regular place in a rocker by the kitchen stove. She
had already reached the age of ninety-five. But there was a constant,
sharp, youthful glint in her eye that belied her age.
She chewed tobacco vigorously like any backwoodsman (had chewed it
originally because she'd heard it cured toothache, then had kept up the
habit because she liked it).
Her corncob pipe--it was as rank a thing as ditch digger ever poisoned
the clean air with.
Granma Wandon was as spry as a yearling calf. She taught me how to
drown out groundhogs and chipmunks from their holes. She went fishing
with me and taught me to spit on the bait for luck, or rub a certain
root on the hook, which she said made the fish bite better.
And solemnly that spring of her arrival, and that following summer, did
we lay out a fair-sized garden and carefully plant each kind of
vegetable in just the right time and phase of the moon and, however it
may be, her garden grew beyond the garden of anyone else in the
neighbourhood.
* * * * *
The following winter--and her last winter on earth--was a time of wonder
and marvel for me ... sitting with her at the red-heated kitchen stove,
I listened eagerly to her while she related tales to me of old settlers
in Pennsylvania ... stories of Indians ... ghost stories ... she curdled
my blood with tales of catamounts and mountain lions crying like women,
and babies in the dark, to lure travellers where they could pounce down
from branches on them.
And she told me the story of the gambler whom the Devil took when he
swore falsely, avowing, "may the Devil take me if I cheated."
She boasted of my pioneer ancestors ... strapping six-footers in their
stocking feet ... men who carried one hundred pound bags of salt from
Pittsburgh to Slippery Rock in a single journey.
The effect of these stories on me--?
I dreamed of skeleton hands that reached out from the clothes closet for
me. Often at night I woke, yelling with nightmare.
With a curious touch of folk lore Granma Gregory advised me to "look for
the harness under the bed, if it was a nightmare." But she upbraided
Granma Wandon, her mother, for retailing me such tales.
"Nonsense, it'll do him good, my sweet little Johnnie," she assured her
daughter, knocking her corncob pipe over the coal scuttle like a man.
* * * * *
There was a story of Granma Wandon's that cut deep into my memory. It
was the story of the man who died cursing God, and who brought, by his
cursing, the dancing of the very flames of Hell, red-licking and
serrate, in a hideous cluster, like an infernal bed of flowers, just
outside the window, for all around his death-bed to see!
In the fall of the next year Granma Wandon took sick. We knew it was
all over for her. She faded painlessly into death. She knew she was
going, said so calmly and happily. She made Millie and Granma Gregory
promise they'd be good to me. I wept and wept. I kissed her leathery,
leaf-like hand with utter devotion ... she could hardly lift it. Almost
of itself it sought my face and flickered there for a moment.
* * * * *
She seemed to be listening to something far off.
"Can't you hear it, Maggie?" she asked her daughter.
"Hear what, mother?"
"Music ... that beautiful music!"
"Do you see anything, mother?"
"Yes ... heaven!"
Then the fine old pioneer soul passed on. I'll bet she still clings
grimly to an astral corncob pipe somewhere in space.
* * * * *
A week before she died, Aunt Millie told us she was sure the end was
near. For Millie had waked up in the night and had seen the old lady
come into her room, reach under the bed, take the pot forth, use
it,--and glide silently upstairs to her room again.
Millie spoke to the figure and received no answer. Then, frightened, she
knew she had seen a "token" of Granma Wandon's approaching death.
* * * * *
In the parlour stood the black coffin on trestles; the door open, for we
had a fear of cats getting at the body,--we could glimpse the ominous
black object as we sat down to breakfast. And I laid my head on the
table and wept as much because of that sight as over the loss of my old
comrade and playmate.
Something vivid had gone out of my life. And for the first time I felt
and knew the actuality of death. Like a universe-filling, soft,
impalpable dust it slowly sifted over me, bearing me under. I saw for
the first time into all the full graves of the world.
* * * * *
To my great-grandmother's funeral came many distant relatives I had
never rested eye on before ... especially there came my Great-aunt
Rachel, Granma Gregory's sister,--a woman just as sweet-natured as she,
and almost her twin even to the blue rupture of a vein in the middle of
the lower lip. She, too, had a slightly protrusive stomach over which
she had the habit of folding her hard-working hands restfully, when she
talked ... and also there came with her my Great-uncle Joshua, her
husband ... and my second cousins, Paul and Phoebe, their children. The
other children, two girls, were off studying in a nurses' college ...
working their way there.
After the burial Josh and Paul went on back to Halton, where they worked
in the Steel Mills. They left Aunt Rachel and Phoebe to stay on and pay
us a visit.
Paul and Josh were "puddlers"--when they worked ... in the open furnaces
that were in use in those days ... when you saw huge, magnificent men,
naked to the belt, whose muscles rippled in coils as they toiled away in
the midst of the living red of flowing metal.
* * * * *
Phoebe was wild and beautiful in a frail way. She wore a pea green skirt
and a waist of filmy, feminine texture. We instantly took to each other.
She was always up and off, skimming swallow-like in all directions, now
this way, now that, as if seeking for some new flavour in life, some
excitement that had not come to her yet.
We made expeditions together over the country. She joined me in my
imaginary battles with Indians ... my sanguinary hunts for big game....
It was she who first taught me to beg hand-outs at back doors--one day
when we went fishing together and found ourselves a long way off from
home.
Once Phoebe fell into a millpond from a springboard ... with all her
clothes on ... we were seeing who dared "teeter" nearest the end.... I
had difficulty in saving her. It was by the hair, with a chance clutch,
that I drew her ashore.
The picture of her, shivering forlornly before the kitchen stove! She
was beautiful, even in her long, wet, red-flannel drawers that came down
to her slim, white ankles. She was weeping over the licking her mother
had given her.
* * * * *
"I'm afraid your cousin Phoebe will come to no good end some day, if she
don't watch out," said my grandmother to me, "and I don't like you to
play with her much.... I'm going to have Aunt Rachel take her home
soon" ... after a pause, "as sure as I have ten fingers she'll grow up
to be a bad woman."
* * * * *
"Granma, what is a bad woman?"
* * * * *
Aunt Rachel and Cousin Phoebe returned home. Uncle Josh, that slack old
vagabond with his furtive, kindly eye-glances, came for them with a
livery rig.
* * * * *
I think I read every dime novel published, during those years of my
childhood ... across the bridge that Elton had helped build, the new
bridge that spanned the Hickory River, and over the railroad tracks,
stood a news-stand, that was run by an old, near-sighted woman. As she
sat tending counter and knitting, I bought her books ... but for each
dime laid down before her, I stole three extra thrillers from under her
very eye.
From my grandfather's library I dug up a book on the Hawaiian Islands,
written by some missionary. In it I found a story of how the natives
speared fish off the edges of reefs. Straightway I procured a pitchfork.
I searched the shallows and ripples of Hickory River for miles ... I
followed Babson's brook over the hills nearly to its source.
One day, peering through reeds into a shallow cove, I saw a fish-fin
thrust up out of the water. I crept cautiously forward.
It was a big fish that lay there. Trembling all over with excitement, I
made a mad thrust. Then I yelled, and stamped on the fish, getting all
wet in doing so. I beat its head in with the haft of the fork. It rolled
over, its white belly glinting in the sun. On picking it up, I was
disappointed. It had been dead for a long time; had probably swam in
there to die ... and its gills were a withered brown-black in colour,
like a desiccated mushroom ... not healthy red.
But I was not to be frustrated of my glory. I tore the tell-tale gills
out ... then I beat the fish's head to a pulp, and I carried my capture
home and proudly strutted in at the kitchen door.
"Look, Granma, at what a big fish I've caught."
"Oh, Millie, he's really got one," and Granma straightened up from the
wash-tub. Millie came out snickering scornfully.
"My Gawd, Ma, can't you see it's been dead a week?"
"You're a liar, it ain't!" I cried. And I began to sob because Aunt
Millie was trying to push me back into ignominy as I stood at the very
threshold of glory.
"Honest-to-God, it's--fresh--Granma!" I gulped, "didn't I just kill it
with the pitchfork?" Then I stopped crying, absorbed entirely in the
fine story I was inventing of the big fish's capture and death. I stood
aside, so to speak, amazed at myself, and proud, as my tongue ran on as
if of its own will.
Even Aunt Millie was charmed.
* * * * *
But she soon came out from under the spell with, "Ma, Johnnie means well
enough, but surely you ain't going to feed that fish to the boarders?"
"Yes, I am. I believe in the little fellow."
"All right, Ma ... but I won't eat a mouthful of it, and you'd better
drop a note right away for Uncle Beck to drive in, so's he'll be here on
time for the cases of poison that are sure to develop."
* * * * *
Cleaned and baked, the fish looked good, dripping with sauce and basted
to an appetizing brown.
As I drew my chair up to the table and a smoking portion was heaped on
my plate, Aunt Millie watched me with bright, malicious eyes.
"Granma, I want another cup o' coffee," I delayed.
But the big, fine, grey-haired mill boss, our star boarder, who liked me
because I always listened to his stories--he sailed into his helping
nose-first. That gave me courage and I ate, too ... and we all ate.
"Say, but this fish is good! Where did it come from?"
"The kid here caught it."
"Never tasted better in my life."
None of us were ever any the worse for our rotten fish. And I was
vindicated, believed in, even by Aunt Millie.
* * * * *
Summer vacation again, after a winter and spring's weary grind in
school.
Aunt Rachel wrote to Granma that they would be glad to have me come over
to Halton for a visit.
Granma let me, after I had pleaded for a long while,--but it was with
great reluctance, warning me of Phoebe.
* * * * *
Aunt Rachel, Uncle Joshua, Cousin Phoebe and cousin Paul lived in a big,
square barn-like structure. Its unpainted, barren bulk sat uneasily on
top of a bare hill where the clay lay so close to the top-soil that in
wet weather you could hardly labour up the precipitous path that led to
their house, it was so slippery.
As I floundered upward in the late spring rain, gaining the bare summit
under the drizzly sky, a rush of dogs met me. They leaped and slavered
and jumped and flopped and tumbled and whined all about me and over me
... ten of them ... hound dogs with flop-ears and small, red-rimmed eyes
... skinny creatures ... there was no danger from them; but they planted
their mud-sticky paws everywhere in a frenzy of welcome.
"A hound ain't got no sense onless he's a-huntin'," drawled Paul, as his
great boot caught them dextrously under their bellies and lifted them
gently, assiduously, severally, in different directions from me....
Aunt Rachel's face, ineffably ignorant and ineffably sweet, lit up with
a smile of welcome. She met me in the doorway, kissed me.
And she made me a great batch of pancakes to eat, with bacon dripping
and New Orleans molasses ... but first--
"Josh, where on earth is them carpet slippers o' yourn?"
Josh yawned. He knocked the tobacco out of his pipe leisurely ... then,
silent, he began scraping the black, foul inside of the bowl ... then at
last he drawled.
"Don't know, Ma!"
But Phoebe knew, and soon, a mile too wide, the carpet slippers hung on
my feet, while my shoes were drying in the oven and sending out that
peculiar, close smell that wet leather emanates when subjected to heat.
Also, I put on Phoebe's pea-green cotton skirt, while my knee britches
hung behind the stove, drying. The men chaffed me.
* * * * *
In the industrial Middle West of those days, when the steel kings'
fortunes were in bloom of growth, these distantly related kinsfolk of
mine still lived the precarious life of pioneer days. Through the bare
boards of the uneven floor whistled the wind. Here and there lay a
sparse, grey, homemade rag rug. And here and there a window pane,
broken, had not been replaced. And an old pair of pants, a ragged shirt,
a worn out skirt stuffed in, kept out the draft,--of which everybody but
Phoebe seemed mortally afraid. Incidentally these window-stuffings kept
out much of the daylight.
Aunt Rachel, near-sighted, with her rather pathetic stoop, was
ceaselessly sewing, knitting, scrubbing, washing, and cooking. She took
care of her "two men" as she phrased it proudly--her husband and her
great-bodied son--as if they were helpless children.
* * * * *
"We're going a-huntin' to-day, Johnny,--wan' ter come along?"
"Sure!"
"Wall, git ready, then!"
But first Paul fed the hounds out in the yard ... huge slabs of white
bread spread generously with lard. This was all they ever got, except
the scraps from the table, which were few. They made a loud, slathering
noise, gulping and bolting their food.
* * * * *
But we started off without the hounds.
"Ain't you going to take the dogs along?"
"Nope."
"Why not--ain't we going to hunt rabbits?"
"Yep."
"Then why not take them?"
"Put your hand in my right hand pocket an' find out!"
I stuck my hand down, and it was given a vicious bite by a white,
pink-eyed ferret Paul was carrying there. I yelled with pain and
surprise. I pulled my hand up in the air, the ferret hanging to a
finger. The ferret dropped to the ground. Paul stooped and picked it up,
guffawing. It didn't bite him. It knew and feared him. That was his idea
of a joke, the trick he played on me!
"Yew might git blood-pisen from that bite!" teased Josh, to scare me.
But I remained unscared. I sucked the blood from the tiny punctures,
feeling secure, after I had done it. I remembered how Queen Eleanore had
saved the life of Richard Coeur de Lion in the Holy Land, when he had
been bitten by an adder, by sucking out the venom. I enjoyed the thrill
of a repeated historic act.
"If we got ketched we'd be put in jail fer this!" remarked Josh with
that sly, slow smile of his; "it ain't the proper season to hunt
rabbits in, an' it's agin the law, in season or out, to hunt 'em with
ferrets," and he chuckled with relish over the outlawry of it.
We came to a hole under a hollow tree. Paul let the ferret go down,
giving him a preliminary smack.
"Mind you, Jim,--God damn you,--don't you stay down that hole too long."
"Think he understands you?"
"In course he does: jest the same es you do."
"And why would Jim stay down?"
"He might corner the rabbit, kill him, an' stay to suck his blood ...
but Jim knows me ... I've given him many's the ungodly whipping for
playing me that trick ... but he's always so greedy and hongry that
sometimes the little beggar fergits."
"And then how do you get him out again?"
"Jest set an' wait till he comes out ... which he must do, sometime ...
an' then you kin jest bet I _give_ it to him."
We waited a long time.
"Damn Jim, he's up to his old tricks again, I'll bet," swore Josh,
shifting his face-deforming quid of tobacco from one protuberant cheek
to the other, meditatively....
The ferret appeared, or, rather, a big grey rabbit ... squealing with
terror ... coming up backward ... the ferret clinging angrily to his
nose ... and tugging like a playing pup.
Paul took Jim off and put him back in his pocket ... he had to smack him
smartly to make him let go--"hongry little devil!" he remarked fondly.
A crack of the hand, brought down edgewise, broke the rabbit's neck, and
he was thrust into a bag which Josh carried slung over his shoulder.
We caught fifteen rabbits that afternoon.
We had a big rabbit stew for supper. Afterward the two men sat about in
their socks, chairs tilted back, sucking their teeth and picking them
with broom straws ... and they told yarns of dogs, and hunting, and
fishing, till bed-time.
* * * * *
The morning sun shone brightly over me through three panes of glass in
the window, the fourth of which was stopped up with an old petticoat.
I woke with Phoebe's warm kiss on my mouth. We had slept together, for
the older folks considered us too young for it to make any difference.
We lay side by side all night ... and like a little man and woman we lay
together, talking, in the morning.
We could smell the cooking of eggs and bacon below ... an early
breakfast for Paul, for he had been taken by a whim that he must work in
the mine over the hill for a few weeks in order to earn some money ...
for he was a miner, as well as a puddler in the mills ... he worked in
coal mines privately run, not yet taken into the trust. He often had to
lie on his side in a shallow place, working the coal loose with his
pick--where the roof was so close he couldn't sit up straight....
* * * * *
"What shall we do to-day?" asked Phoebe of me, as we lay there, side by
side, "I say let's go swimming?"
"You and me together?" I demurred.
"In course!"
"And you a girl?"
"Can't I swim jest as well as you can?"
"Phoebe, git up, you lazy-bones," called Aunt Rachel, from the bottom of
the stairs.
"All right, Ma!"
"Johnnie, you git up, too!"
"Coming down right now, Aunt Rachel!"
"Hurry up, or your breakfast'll git cold ... the idea of you children
laying in bed like this ... what on earth are you doing up there,
talking and talking? I kin hear you buzzing away clear down here!"
I had been rapt in telling Phoebe how, when I grew to be a man, I was
going to become a great adventurer, traveller, explorer.
Phoebe sat up on the edge of the bed, lazily stretching for a moment, as
a pretty bird stretches its leg along its wing. Then, her slim, nubile
body outlined sharply in the brilliant day, she stood up, slipped off
her flannel nightgown with a natural, unaffected movement, and stood
naked before me.
* * * * *
It was a custom of mine to swing my feet as I ate; "just like a little
calf wags its tail when it sucks its mother's tit," my grandmother would
say. I swung my feet vigorously that morning, but did not eat noisily,
as my uncles, all my male relatives, in fact, did. I never made a noise
when I ate. I handled my food delicately by instinct. If I found a fly
in anything it generally made me sick to my stomach.
Feeling warm, I suppose, in her heart toward me, because I was different
in my ways, and frail-looking, and spoke a sort of book-English and not
the _lingua franca_ that obtained as speech in the Middle West, my Aunt
Rachel heaped my plate with griddle cakes, which she made specially for
me.
"You're goin' to be diff'rent from the rest, the way you read books and
newspapers," she remarked half-reverentially.
* * * * *
A foamy bend in a racing brook where an elbow of rock made a swirling
pool about four-foot deep. Phoebe took me there.
We undressed.
How smooth-bodied she was, how different from me! I studied her with
abashed, veiled glances. The way she wound her hair on the top of her
head, to put it out of the way, made her look like a woman in miniature.
She dove first, like a water-rat. I followed on her heels.
We both shot to the surface immediately. For all the warmth of the day,
the water was deceptively icy. We crawled out. We lay on the bank, in
the good sun, gasping....
* * * * *
As we lay there, I spoke to her of her difference ... a thing which was
for the first time brought home to me in clear eyesight.
Phoebe proceeded to blaze her way into my imagination with quaint,
direct, explanatory talk ... things she had picked up God knows where
... grotesque details ... Rabelaisan concentrations on seldom-expressed
particulars....
I learned many things at once from Phoebe ... twisted and childish, but
at least more fundamental than the silly stories about storks and
rabbits that brought babies down chimneys, or hid them in hollow stumps
... about benevolent doctors, who, when desired by the mothers and
fathers, brought additions to the family, from nowhere!...
The house-cat ... kittens and the way they came ... surely I knew, but
had not lifted the analogy up the scale....
A furtive hand touched mine, interwove itself, finger with thrilling
finger ... close together, we laughed into each other's eyes, over-joyed
that we knew more than our elders thought we knew....
Girls, just at the gate of adolescence, possess a directness of purpose
which, afterwards, is looked upon as a distinct, masculine
prerogative....
Phoebe drew closer to me, pressing against me ... but a fierce, battling
reluctance rose in my breast....
* * * * *
She was astonished, stunned by my negation.
Silently I dressed,--she, with a sullen pout on her fresh, childish
mouth.
"You fool! I hate you! You're no damn good!" she cried passionately.
With a cruel pleasure in the action, I beat her on the back. She began
to sob.
Then we walked on a space. And we sat down together on the crest of a
hill. My mood changed, and I held her close to me, with one arm flung
about her, till she quietened down from her sobbing. I was full of a
power I had never known before.
* * * * *
I have told of the big, double house my grandmother had for renting, and
how she might have made a good living renting it out, if she had used a
little business sense ... but now she let the whole of it to a caravan
of gypsies for their winter quarters,--who, instead of paying rent,
actually held her and Millie in _their_ debt by reading their palms,
sometimes twice a day ... I think it was my Uncle Joe who at last ousted
them....
* * * * *
When I came back from Aunt Rachel's I found a voluble, fat, dirty, old,
yellow-haired tramp established in the ground floor of the same house.
He had, in the first place, come to our back door to beg a hand-out.
And, sitting on the doorstep and eating, and drinking coffee, he had
persuaded my grandmother that if she would give him a place to locate on
credit he knew a way to clear a whole lot of money. His project for
making money was the selling of home-made hominy to the restaurants up
in town.
* * * * *
I found him squatted on the bare floor, with no furniture in the room.
He had a couple of dingy wash-boilers which he had picked up from the
big garbage-dump near the race-track.
Day in, day out, I spent my time with this tramp, listening to his
stories of the pleasures and adventures of tramp-life.
I see him still, wiping his nose on his ragged coat-sleeve as he
vociferates....
When one day he disappeared, leaving boilers, hominy and all, behind, I
missed his yarns as much as my grandmother missed her unpaid rent.
* * * * *
It appears that at this time my grandfather had a manufacturing plant
for the terra cotta invention he had stolen from his comrade-in-arms, in
Virginia somewhere, and that, during all these years, he had had Landon
working with him,--and now word had come to us that Landon was leaving
for Mornington again.
My grandmother was mad about him, her youngest ... always spoke of him
as "her baby" ... informed me again and again that he was the most
accomplished, the handsomest man the Gregory family had ever produced.
* * * * *
Landon arrived. He walked up to the front porch from the road. He came
in with a long, free stride ... he gave an eager, boyish laugh ... he
plumped down his big, bulged-to-bursting grip with a bang.
"Hello, Ma!... hello, Millie!... well, well, so this is Duncan's kid?...
how big he's grown!"
Landon's fine, even, white teeth gleamed a smile at me.
Granma couldn't say a word ... she just looked at him ... and looked at
him ... and looked at him ... after a long while she began saying his
name over and over again....
"Landon, Landon, Landon,"--holding him close.
Landon began living with us regularly as one of the family. He went to
work in the steel mills, and was energetic and tireless when he worked,
which he did, enough to pay his way and not be a burden on others. He
performed the hardest kinds of labour in the mills.
But often he laid off for long stretches at a time and travelled about
with a wild gang of young men and women, attending dances, drinking,
gambling.
Nothing seemed to hurt him, he was so strong.
At most of the drinking bouts, where the object was to see who could
take down the most beer, Landon would win by drinking all he could
hold, then stepping outside on another pretext ... where he would push
his finger down his throat and spout out all he had drunk. Then he would
go back and drink more.
Sunday afternoons were the big gambling and card-playing times in our
semi-rural neighbourhood.
The "boys" spent the day till dusk in the woods back of Babson's Hill.
They drank and played cards. Landon taught me every card game there was.
He could play the mouth-organ famously, too ... and the guitar and
banjo. And he had a good strong voice with a rollick in it. And he was
also a great mimic ... one of his stunts he called "the barnyard," in
which he imitated with astonishing likeness the sounds every farm-animal
or bird makes ... and by drumming on his guitar as he played, and by the
energetic use of his mouth-organ at the same time, he could also make
you think a circus band was swinging up the street, with clowns and
camels and elephants.
* * * * *
His great fault was that he must have someone to bully and domineer. And
he began picking on me, trying to force me to model my life on his
pattern of what he thought it should be.
One day I saw him eating raw steak with vinegar. I told him it made me
sick to see it.
"Well, you'll have to eat some, too, for saying that." And he chased me
around and 'round the table and room till he caught me. He held me,
while I kicked and protested. He compelled me, by forcing his finger and
thumb painfully against my jaws, to open my mouth and eat. He struck me
to make me swallow.
Everything I didn't want to do he made me do ... he took to beating me
on every pretext. When my grandmother protested, he said he was only
educating me the way I should go ... that I had been let run wild too
long without a mastering hand, and with only women in the house. He must
make a man out of me....
My reading meant more to me than anything else. I was never so happy as
when I was sitting humped up over a book, in some obscure corner of the
house, where Uncle Landon, now grown the incarnate demon of my life,
could not find me.
It was a trick of his, when he surprised me stooping over a book, to hit
me a terrific thwack between the shoulder-blades, a blow that made my
backbone tingle with pain.
"Set up straight! Do you want to be a hump-back when you grow big?"
His pursuit drove me from corner to corner, till I lost my mischievous
boldness and began to act timid and fearful.
Whenever I failed to obey Granma, that was his opportunity. (Millie
would cry triumphantly, "_Now_ you have someone to make you be good!")
The veins on his handsome, curly forehead would swell with delight, as
he caught me and whipped me ... till Granma would step in and make him
stop ... but often he would over-rule her, and keep it up till his right
arm was actually tired. And he would leave me to crawl off, sobbing dry
sobs, incapable of more tears.
A black hatred of him began to gnaw at my heart ... I dreamed still of
what I would do when I had grown to be a man ... but now it was not any
more to be a great traveller or explorer, but to grow into a strong man
and kill my uncle, first putting him to some savage form of torture ...
torture that would last a long, long while.
He would often see it in my eyes.
"Don't you look at me that way!" with a swipe of the hand.
* * * * *
Out in the woods I caught a dozen big yellow spiders, the kind that make
pretty silver traceries, like handwriting with a flourish--on their
morning webs.
I brought these spiders home in a tin can and transferred them to some
empty fruit jars in the cellar, keeping them for some boyish reason or
other, in pairs, and putting in flies for them.
Aunt Millie came upon them and set up a scream that brought Uncle "Lan,"
as we called him, down to see what was the matter....
I took my beating in silence. I would no longer beg and plead for mercy.
After he had finished, I lay across the sloping cellar door, lumpish and
still, inwardly a shaking jelly of horror.
I was wanting to die ... these successive humiliations seemed too great
to live through.
* * * * *
The grey light of morning filtering in.
Lan stood over my bed.
"--want to go hunting with me to-day?... shootin' blackbirds?"
"Yes, Uncle Lan," I assented, my mind divided between fear of him and
eagerness to go.
In the kitchen we ate some fried eggs and drank our coffee in silence.
Then we trudged on through the dew-wet fields, drenched to the knees as
if having waded through a brook.
Lan bore his double-barrelled shotgun over his shoulder. He shot into a
tree-top full of bickering blackbirds and brought three down, torn,
flopping, bleeding. He thrust them into his sack, which reddened
through, and we went on ... still in silence. The silence began to make
me tremble but I was glad, anyhow, that I had gone with him. I
conjectured that he had brought me a-field to give me a final
whipping--"to teach me to mind Granma."
"--had to bring you out here ... the women are too chicken-hearted--they
stop me too soon...."
"--Pity your pa's away ... don't do to leave a kid alone with women
folks ... they don't make him walk the chalk enough!"
It was about an hour after sunrise. We had come to an open field among
trees. Lan set down his gun against a tree-trunk.
"--needn't make to run ... I can catch you, no matter how fast you go."
He cut a heavy stick from a hickory.
"Come on and take your medicine ... I'm goin' away to-morrow to Halton,
and I want to leave you something to remember me by--so that you'll obey
Ma and Millie while I'm gone. If you don't, when I come back, you'll
catch it all over again."
My heart was going like a steam engine. At the last moment I started to
run, my legs sinking beneath me. He was upon me with my first few steps,
and had me by the scruff of the neck, and brought down the cudgel over
me.
Then an amazing thing happened inside me. It seemed that the blows were
descending on someone else, not me. The pain of them was a dull,
far-away thing. Weak, fragile child that I was (known among the other
children as "Skinny Gregory" and "Spider-Legs") a man's slow fury was
kindling in me ... let Lan beat me for a year. It didn't matter. When I
grew up I would kill him for this.
I began to curse boldly at him, calling him by all the obscene terms I
had ever learned or heard. This, and the astounding fact that I no
longer squirmed nor cried out, but physically yielded to him, as limp as
an empty sack, brought him to a puzzled stop. But he sent me an extra
blow for good measure as he flung me aside. That blow rattled about my
head, missing my shoulders at which it had been aimed. I saw a shower
of hot sparks soaring upward into a black void.
I woke with water trickling down my face and all over me. I heard, far
off, my uncle's voice calling, cajoling, coaxing, with great fright
sounding through it....
"Johnnie, Johnnie ... I'm so sorry ... Johnnie, only speak to me!" He
was behaving exactly like Aunt Millie when she had St. Vitus' dance.
He began tending me gently like a woman. He built a fire and made some
coffee over it--he had brought coffee and some lunch. I crouched white
and still, saying not a word.
Landon squatted with his back turned, watching the coffee. His shotgun,
leaning against the tree-trunk, caught my eye. I crept toward that
shotgun. I trembled with anticipatory pleasure. God, but now I would pay
him back!...
But it was too heavy. I had struggled and brought it up, however, half
to my shoulder, when that uncanny instinct that sometimes comes to
people in mortal danger, came to Uncle Lan. He looked about.
He went as pale as a sheet of paper.
"--God, Johnnie!" he almost screamed my name.
I dropped the gun in the grass, sullenly, never speaking.
"Johnnie, were you--were you?" he faltered, unnerved.
"Yes, I was going to give you both barrels ... and I'm sorry I didn't."
All his desire to whip me had gone up like smoke.
"Yes, and I'll tell you what, you big, dirty ----, I'll kill you yet,
when I grow big."
* * * * *
That night I fainted at supper. When Granma put me to bed she saw how
bruised and wealed I was all over ... for the first time she went after
Uncle Lan--turned into a furious thing.
* * * * *
Shortly after, I was taken sick with typhoid fever. They used the
starvation cure for it, in those days. When they began to give me solid
food, I chased single grains of rice that fell out of the plate, about
the quilt, just as a jeweller would pearls, if a necklace of them broke.
* * * * *
With my recovery came news, after many days, of my father.
The Hunkies were pushing out the Irish from the mills--cheaper labour.
My grandmother could not afford to board the Hunkies, they lived so
cheaply. Renewed poverty was breaking our household up.
My grandmother was about to begin her living about from house to house
with her married sons and daughters.
My father was sending for me to come East. He had a good job there in
the Composite Works at Haberford. He was at last able to take care of
his son--his only child.
* * * * *
My grandmother and my aunt Millie took me to the railroad station. I
tried to be brave and not cry. I succeeded, till the train began to pull
out. Then I cried very much.
The face of my grandmother pulled awry with grief and flowing tears.
Aunt Millie wept, too.
No, I wouldn't leave them. I would stay with them, work till I was rich
and prosperous, never marry, give all my life to taking care of them, to
saving them from the bitter grinding poverty we had shared together.
I ran into the vestibule. But the train was gathering speed so rapidly
that I did not dare jump off.
I took my seat again. Soon my tears dried.
The trees flapped by. The telegraph poles danced off in irregular lines.
I became acquainted with my fellow passengers. I was happy.
I made romance out of every red and green lamp in the railroad yards we
passed through, out of the dingy little restaurants in which I ate....
The mysterious swaying to and fro of the curtains in the sleeper
thrilled me, as I looked out from my narrow berth.
In the smoker I listened till late to the talk of the drummers who
clenched big black cigars between their teeth, or slender Pittsburgh
stogies, expertly flicking off the grey ash with their little fingers,
as they yarned.
I wore a tag on my coat lapel with my name and destination written on
it. My grandmother had put it there in a painful, scrawling hand.
* * * * *
The swing out over wide, salt-bitten marshes, the Jersey marshes grey
and smoky before dawn!... then, far off, on the horizon line, New York,
serrate, mountainous, going upward great and shining in the still dawn!
* * * * *
Beneath a high, vast, clamorous roof of glass....
As I stepped down to the platform my father met me.
I knew him instantly though it had been years since I had seen him.
* * * * *
My father whisked me once more across the long Jersey marshes. To
Haberford. There, on the edge of the town, composed of a multitude of
stone-built, separate, tin-roofed houses, stood the Composite Works. My
father was foreman of the drying department, in which the highly
inflammable sheets of composite were hung to dry....
My father rented a large, front room, with a closet for clothes, of a
commuting feed merchant named Jenkins ... whose house stood three or
four blocks distant from the works.
So we, my father and I, lived in that one room. But I had it to myself
most of the time, excepting at night, when we shared the big double bed.
* * * * *
Still only a child, I was affectionate toward him. And, till he
discouraged me, I kissed him good night every night, I liked the smell
of the cigars he smoked.
I wanted my father to be more affectionate to me, to notice me more. I
thought that a father should be something intuitively understanding and
sympathetic. And mine was offish ... of a different species.. wearing
his trousers always neatly pressed ... and his neckties--he had them
hanging in a neat, perfect row, never disarranged. The ends of them were
always pulled even over the smooth stick on which they hung.
I can see my father yet, as he stands before the mirror, painstakingly
adjusting the tie he had chosen for the day's wear.
I was not at all like him. Where I took my knee britches off, there I
dropped them. They sprawled, as if half-alive, on the floor ... my
shirt, clinging with one arm over a chair, as if to keep from falling to
the floor.. my cap, flung hurriedly into a corner.
* * * * *
"Christ, Johnnie, won't you ever learn to be neat or civilised? What
kind of a boy are you, anyhow?"
He thought I was stubborn, was determined not to obey him, for again and
again I flung things about in the same disorder for which I was rebuked.
But a grey chaos was settling over me. I trembled often like a person
under a strange seizure. My mind did not readily respond to questions.
It went here and there in a welter. Day dreams chased through my mind
one after another in hurried heaps of confusion. I was lost ... groping
... in a curious new world of growing emotions leavened with grievous,
shapeless thoughts.
Strange involuntary rhythms swung through my spirit and body. Fantastic
imaginations took possession of me.
And I prayed at night, kneeling, great waves of religious emotion going
over me. And when my father saw me praying by the bedside, I felt
awkwardly, shamefully happy that he saw me. And I took to posing a
childishness, an innocence toward him.
Jenkins, the little stringy feed merchant, had two daughters, one
thirteen, Alva, and another Silvia, who was fifteen or sixteen.. and a
son, Jimmy, about seven....
It was over Alva and Silvia that my father and Jenkins used to come
together, teasing me. And, though the girls drew me with an enchanting
curiosity, I would protest that I didn't like girls ... that when I
became full-grown I would never marry, but would study books and mind my
business, single....
After this close, crafty, lascivious joking between them, my father
would end proudly with--
"Johnnie's a strange boy, he really doesn't care about such things. All
he cares about is books."
So I succeeded in completely fooling my father as to the changes going
on within me.
* * * * *
Though I had not an atom of belief left in orthodox Christianity (or
thought I had not) I still possessed this all-pervasive need to pray to
God. A need as strong as physical hunger.
Torn with these curious, new, sweet tumults, I turned to Him. And I
prayed to be pure ... like Sir Galahad, or any of the old knights who
wore their lady's favour in chastity, a male maiden,--and yet achieved
great quests and were manly in their deeds....
* * * * *
The crying and singing of the multitudinous life of insects and animals
in the spring marshes under the stars almost made me weep, as I roamed
about, distracted yet exalted, alone, at night.
I was studying the stars, locating the constellations with a little book
of star-maps I possessed.
I wanted, was in search of, something ... something ... maybe other
worlds could give this something to me ... what vistas of infinite
imagination I saw about me in the wide-stretching, star-sprinkled sky!
Dreaming of other worlds swinging around other suns, seething with
strange millions of inhabitants, through all space, I took to reading
books on astronomy ... Newcomb ... Proctor's _Other Worlds_ ... Camille
Flammarion ... Garret Serviss as he wrote in the daily papers ... and
novels and romances dealing with life on the moon, on Mars, on Venus....
During my night-rovings I lay down in dark hollows, sometimes, and
prayed to God as fervently as if the next moment I might expect His
shining face to look down at me out of the velvet, far-reaching
blackness of night:
"O God, make me pure, and wonderful ... let me do great things for
humanity ... make me handsome, too, O God, so that girls and women will
love me, and wonder at me, in awe, while I pass by unperturbed--till one
day, having kept myself wholly for _her_ as she has kept herself for
me,--give me then the one wonderful and beautiful white maiden who will
be mine ... mine ... all and alone and altogether, as I shall be all and
alone and altogether hers. And let me do things to be wondered at by
watching multitudes, while bands play and people applaud."
Such was my mad, adolescent prayer, while the stars seemed to answer in
sympathetic silence. And I would both laugh and weep, thrilled to the
core with ineffable, enormous joy because of things I could not
understand ... and I would want to shout and dance extravagantly.
* * * * *
The Jenkins girls were curious about me, and while they, together with
the rest of the feed merchant's family, thought me slightly "touched,"
still they liked the unusual things I said about the stars ... and about
great men whose biographies I was reading ... and about Steele's Zoology
I was studying, committing all the Latin nomenclature of classification
to heart, with a curious hunger for even the husks and impedimenta of
learning....
Silvia was a rose, half-opened ... an exquisite young creature. Alva was
gawky and younger. She was callow and moulting, flat-footed and
long-shanked. Her face was sallow and full of freckles.
In the long Winter evenings we sat together by the warmth of the kitchen
stove, alone, studying our lessons,--the place given over entirely to us
for our school work.
A touch of the hand with either of them, but with Silvia especially, was
a superb intoxication, an ecstasy I have never since known. When all my
power of feeling fluttered into my fingers ... and when we kissed, each
night, good-night (the girls kissed me because I pretended to be
embarrassed, to object to it) our homework somehow done,--the thought of
their kisses was a memory to lie and roll in, for hours, after going to
bed.
I would pull away as far as I could from my father, and think
luxuriously, awake sometimes till dawn.
* * * * *
I hated school so that I ran away. For the first time in my life, but by
no means my last, I hopped a freight.
I was absent several weeks.
When I returned, weary, and dirty from riding in coal cars, my father
was so glad to see me he didn't whip me. He was, in fact, a little proud
of me. For he was always boastful of the many miles he had travelled
through the various states, as salesman, not many years before. And
after I had bathed, and had put on the new suit which he bought me, I
grew talkative about my adventures, too.
I now informed my father that I wanted to go to work. Which I didn't so
very much. But anything, if only it was not going to school. He was not
averse to my getting a job. He took out papers for me, and gave me work
under him, in the drying department of the Composite Works. My wage was
three dollars a week. My task, to hang the thin sheets of composite, cut
from three to fifteen hundredths of an inch in thickness, on metal clips
to dry.
In the Composite Works I discovered a new world--the world of factory
life.
I liked to be sent to the other departments on errands. There were
whirling wheels and steadily recurring, ever-lapsing belts ... and men
and women working and working in thin fine dust, or among a strong smell
as of rubbed amber--the characteristic smell of composite when subjected
to friction....
And these men and women were continually joking and jesting and making
horse-play at one another's expense, as rough people in their social
unease do.
They seemed part and adjunct to the machines, the workers! Strong,
sturdy, bared forearms flashed regularly like moving, rhythmic shafts
... deft hands clasped and reached, making only necessary movements.
Each department housed a different kind of worker. In the grinding,
squealing, squeaking, buzzing machine shop the men were not mixed with
women.
They were alert, well-muscled; their faces were streaked with paleness
and a black smutch like dancers made up for a masquerade. Always they
were seeking for a vigorous joke to play on someone. And, if the trick
were perpetrated within the code, the foreman himself enjoyed it,
laughing grimly with the "boys."
Once I was sent to the machine shop for "strap oil." I was thrown over a
greasy bench and was given it--the laying on of a heavy strap not at all
gently! I ran away, outraged, to tell my father; as I left, the men
seemed more attentive to their work than ever. They smiled quietly to
themselves.
In the comb department the throwing of chunks of composite was the
workers' chief diversion. And if you were strange there, you were sure
to be hit as you passed through.
The acid house was a gruesome place. Everything in it and for yards
around it, was covered with a yellow blight, as if the slight beard of
some pestilential fungous were sprouting ... the only people the company
could induce to work there were foreigners who knew little of
America.... Swedes mostly ... attentive churchgoers on Sunday,--who on
week-days, and overtime at nights, laboured their lives out among the
pungent, lung-eating vats of acid. The fumes rose in yellow clouds. Each
man wore something over his nose and mouth resembling a sponge. But
many, grown careless, or through a silly code of mistaken manliness,
dispensed with this safeguard part of the time. And whether they
dispensed with it or not, the lives of the workers in the acid house was
not much more than a matter of a few years ... big, hulking, healthy
Swedes, newly arrived, with roses in their cheeks like fair, young
girls, faded perceptibly from day to day, into hollow-cheeked,
jaundice-coloured death's-heads. They went about, soon, with eyes that
had grey gaunt hollows about them--pits already cavernous like the
eye-pits of a skull.
* * * * *
"Well, they don't _have_ to work in there unless they want to, do they?"
"Ah, they're only a lot of foreigners anyhow."
* * * * *
Three dollars a week was a lot of money for me ... a fortune, because I
had never owned anything higher than nickles and dimes before.
And my father, for the first few weeks, allowed me to have all I earned,
to do with as I wished. Later on he made me save two dollars a week.
Each Saturday I went down to Newark and bought books ... very cheap,
second hand ones, at Breasted's book store.
Every decisive influence in life has been a book, every vital change in
my life, I might say, has been brought about by a book.
My father owned a copy of Lord Byron in one volume. It was the only book
he cared for, outside of Shakespeare's _Hamlet_, together with, of
course, his own various books on Free Masonry and other secret
societies.
At first, oddly enough, it was my instinct for pedantry and linguistic
learning that drew me to Byron. I became enamoured of the Latin and
Greek quotations with which he headed his lyrics in _Hours of Idleness_,
and laboriously I copied them, lying on my belly on the floor, under the
lamp light. And under these quotations I indited boyish rhymes of my
own.
Then I began to read--_Manfred, Marino Faliero, Sardanapalus_--the
Deformed Transformed ... The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair, Lara, The
Prisoner of Chillon_.
The frontispiece to the book was a portrait of Byron with flowing tie
and open shirt. Much as a devout Catholic wears a gold cross around his
neck to signify his belief, with a like devoutness I took to wearing my
shirt open at the neck, and a loose, flowing black tie. And I ruffled my
hair in the Byronic style.
"I see you're discovering Byron," my father laughed.
Then he slyly intimated that the best of the poet's works I had
evidently overlooked, _Childe Harold_ and _Don Juan_. And he quoted me
the passage about the lifted skirt above the peeking ankle. And he
reinforced his observation by grinning salaciously.
From that time on I searched with all the fever of adolescence through
Byron for every passage which bore on sex, the mystery of which was
beginning to devour my days.
I read and pondered, shaking with eagerness, the stories of Haidee, of
Antonia and Julia--the tale of the dream of Dudu. I dwelt in a
musk-scented room of imagination. Silver fountains played about me.
Light forms flowed and undulated in white draperies over mosaiced
pavements ... flashing dark eyes shone mysteriously and amorously,
starry through curtains and veils.
My every thought was alert with naïve, speculative curiosity concerning
the mystery of woman.
Through Byron I learned about Moore. I procured the latter's _Lalla
Rookh_, his odes of Anacreon.
From Byron and Moore I built up an adolescent ideal of
woman,--exquisitely sensual and sexual, and yet an angel, superior to
men: an ideal of a fellow creature who was both a living, breathing
mystery and a walking sweetmeat ... a white creation moved and actuated
by instinct and intuition--a perpetually inexplicable ecstasy and
madness to man.
I drew more and more apart to myself. Always looked upon as queer by the
good, bourgeois families that surrounded us, I was now considered madder
still.
* * * * *
How wonderful it would be to become a hermit on some far mountain side,
wearing a grey robe, clear-browed and calmly speculative under the
stars--or, maybe,--more wonderful: a singer for men, a travelling
minstrel--in each case, whether minstrel or hermit, whether teaching
great doctrines or singing great songs for all the world--to have come
to me, as a pilgrim seeking enlightenment, the most beautiful maiden in
the world, one who was innocent of what man meant. And together we would
learn the mystery of life, and live in mutual purity and innocence.
* * * * *
The strangeness of my physical person lured me. I marvelled at,
scrutinised intimately the wonder of myself. I was insatiable in my
curiosities.
* * * * *
My discovery of my body, and my books, held me in equal bondage. I
neglected my work in the drying room. My father was vexed. He'd hunt me
out of the obscure corners back of the hanging sheets of composite where
I hid, absorbed in myself and the book I held, and would run me back to
work.
* * * * *
One day, in the factory, two other boys on an errand from another
department, came back where I sat, in a hidden nook, reading Thompson's
_Seasons_. One of them spit over my shoulder, between the leaves. I
leaped to my feet, infuriated, and a fight began. The desecration of my
beloved poetry gave me such angry strength that I struck out lustily and
dropped both of them....
Rushing in on the uproar and blaming me for it, my father seized me by
the collar. He booted the other boys off, who were by this time on their
feet again, took me up into the water-tower, and beat me with one of the
heavy sticks, with metal clips on it, that was used for hanging the
composite on.
Still trembling with the fight, I shook with a superadded ague of fear.
My father's chastisement brought back to me with a chill the remembrance
of the beatings Uncle Landon had given me.
* * * * *
"By God, Johnnie, this is the only thing there's left to do with you."
He flung me aside. I lay there sobbing.
"Tell me, my boy, what _is_ the matter with you?" he asked, softening.
Unlike Landon, he was usually gentle with me. He seldom treated me
harshly.
"Father, I don't want to work any more."
"Don't want to work?... but you quit school just to _go_ to work, at
your own wish!"
"I want to go back to school!"
"Back to school?... you'll be behind the rest by now."
"I've been studying a lot by myself," I replied, forgetting the feel of
the stick already and absorbed in the new idea.
By this time we were down the stairs again, and I was sitting by my
father's desk. He took up the unlighted cigar he always carried in his
mouth (for smoking was not allowed among such inflammable material as
composite). He sucked at it thoughtfully from habit, as if he were
smoking.
"Look here, my son, what _is_ the matter with you ... won't you tell
your daddy?"
"Nothing's the matter with me, Pop!"
"You're getting thin as a shadow ... are you feeling sick?"
"No, Pop!"
"You're a queer little duck."
There was a long silence.
"You're always reading ... good books too ... yet you're no more good in
school than you are at work ... I can't make you out, by the living God,
I can't ... what is it you want to be?"
"I don't know, only I want to go back to school again."
"But what did you leave for?"
"I hated arithmetic."
"What do you want to study, then?"
"Languages."
"Would you like a special course in the high school?
"Principal Balling of the Keeley Heights High School might be able to
work you in. He is a brother Mason of mine."
"I know some Latin and Greek and Ancient History already. I have been
teaching myself."
"Well, you _are_ a queer fish ... there never was anyone like you in the
family, except your mother. She used to read and read, and read. And
once or twice she wrote a short story ... had one accepted, even, by the
_Youth's Companion_ once, but never printed."
* * * * *
Though it was some months off till the Fall term began, on the strength
of my desire to return to school my father let me throw up my job....
But we soon found out that, brother in the bond, or not, Principal
Balling could not get me into high school because I was not well enough
prepared. My studying and reading by myself, though it had been quite
wide, had also been too desultory. The principal advised a winter in the
night school where men and boys who had been delayed in their education
went to learn.
I ran about that summer, with a gang of fellow adolescents; our
headquarters, strange to say, being the front room and outside steps of
an undertaker's establishment. This was because our leader was the
undertaker's boy-of-all-work. Harry Mitchell was his name. Harry, a sort
of young tramp, fat and pimply-faced, had jaunted into our town one day
from New York, and had found work with the undertaker. Harry had watery
blue eyes and a round, moon face. He was a whirlwind fighter but he
never fought with us. It was only with the leaders of other gangs or
with strangers that he fought.
Harry continued our education in the secrets and mysteries of life, in
the stable-boy and gutter way,--by passing about among us books from a
sort of underground library ... vile things, fluently conceived and made
even more vivid and animal with obscene and unimaginable illustrations.
And our minds were trailed black with slime.
And whole afternoons we stood about on the sidewalk jeering and
fleering, jigging and singing, talking loud, horse-laughing, and
hungrily eyeing the girls and women that passed by, who tried hard to
seem, as they went, not self-conscious and stiff-stepping because of our
observation ... and sometimes we whistled after them or called out to
them in falsetto voices.
* * * * *
As a child my play had been strenuous and absorbing, like work that one
is happy at, so that at night I fell asleep with all the pleasant
fatigue of a labourer.
It is the adolescent who loafs and dawdles on street corners. For the
cruel and fearful urge of sex stirs so powerfully in him, that he hardly
knows what to do, and all his days and nights he writhes in the grip of
terrible instincts.
* * * * *
Yet, in the midst of the turbidness of adolescence, I was still two
distinct personalities. With my underground library of filth hidden
away where my father could not find it, at the same time I kept and
read my other books. The first were for the moments of madness and
curious ecstasy I had learned how to induce.
But my better self periodically revolted. And I took oath that I would
never again spew a filthy expression from my mouth or do an ill thing. I
suffered all the agonies of the damned in hell. I believe hell to be the
invention of adolescence.
Always, inevitably, I returned to my wallow and the gang.
* * * * *
We were not always loafing in front of the undertaker's shop. Sometimes
we were quite active. Many windows and street lamps were smashed. And we
derived great joy from being pursued by the "cops"--especially by a
certain fat one, for whom we made life a continual burden.
Once we went in a body to the outskirts of the town and stoned a
greenhouse. Its owner chased us across ploughed fields. We flung stones
back at him. One hit him with a dull thud and made him cry out with
pain, and he left off pursuing us. It was so dark we could not be
identified.
One of our favourite diversions was to follow mature lovers as they
strolled a-field, hoping to catch them in the midst of intimate
endearments.
* * * * *
My father received a raise of a few dollars in salary. As it was they
paid him too little, because he was easy-going. The additional weekly
money warranted our leaving the Jenkinses and renting four rooms all our
own, over the main street. This meant that I was to have a whole room to
myself, and I was glad ... a whole room where I could stand a small
writing desk and set up my books in rows. With an extreme effort I
burned my underground books.
* * * * *
All the women liked my father. He dressed neatly and well. His trousers
were never without their fresh crease. He was very vain of his neat
appearance, even to the wearing of a fresh-cut flower in his buttonhole.
This vanity made him also wear his derby indoors and out, because of his
entirely bald head.
Every time he could devise an excuse for going to the departments where
the women worked, he would do so, and flirt with them. He, for this
reason I am sure, made special friends with Schlegel, foreman of the
collar department. I never saw a man derive a keener pleasure out of
just standing and talking with women.
Though, like most men, he enjoyed a smutty story, yet I never heard him
say a really gross thing about any woman. And his language was always in
good English, with few curses and oaths in it.
* * * * *
Our new place was a bit of heaven to me. I procured a copy of Whitman's
_Leaves of Grass_, of Darwin's _Origin of Species_ and _Descent of Man_.
Laboriously I delved through these last two books, my knowledge of
elementary zoology helping me to the explication of their meaning.
The theory of evolution came as a natural thing to me. It seemed that I
knew it all, before,--as I did, because, in my own way, I had thought
out the problem of the growth of the varying forms of animal life,
exactly to the Darwinian conclusion.
Whitman's _Leaves of Grass_ became my Bible.
* * * * *
It was at this time that I made the harrowing discovery that I had been
working evil on myself ... through an advertisement of a quack in a
daily paper.
And now I became an anchorite battling to save myself from the newly
discovered monstrosity of the flesh.... For several days I would be the
victor, but the thing I hugged to my bosom would finally win. Then would
follow a terror beyond comprehension, a horror of remorse and
degradation that human nature seemed too frail to bear. I grew thinner
still. I fell into a hacking cough.
And, at the same time, I became more perverse in my affectation of
innocence and purity--saying always to my father that I never could care
for girls, and that what people married for was beyond my comprehension.
Thus I threw his alarmed inquisitiveness off the track....
I procured books about sexual life. My most cherished volume was an old
family medical book with charred covers, smelling of smoke and water,
that I had dug out of the ruins of a neighbouring fire.
In the book was a picture of a nude woman, entitled _The Female Form
Divine_. I tore this from the body of the book and kept it under my
pillow.
I would draw it forth, press it against myself, speak soft words of
affection to it, caress and kiss it, fix my mind on it as if it were a
living presence. Often the grey light of dawn would put its ashen hand
across my sunken cheeks before dead-heavy, exhausted sleep proved kind
to me....
* * * * *
Again: my imagination grew to be all graveyards, sepulchral urns,
skeletons. How beautiful it would be to die young and a poet, to die
like the young English poet, Henry Kirke White, whose works I was so
enamoured of. The wan consumptive glamour of his career led me, as he
had done, to stay up all night, night after night, studying....
* * * * *
After the surging and mounting of that in me which I could not resist,
several hours of strange, abnormal calm would ensue and for that space I
would swing calm and detached from myself, like a luminous, disembodied
entity. And then it was that I would write and write. The verses would
come rushing from my pen. I must hurry with them before my early death
overtook me.
* * * * *
There were two visions I saw continually in my sleep:
One was of myself walking with a proud step down a vast hall, the usual
wreath of fame on my head. I wore a sort of toga. And of course a great
concourse of people stood apart in silent reverence on either side,
gazing at me admiringly. With the thunder of their hand-clapping I would
wake.
The other dream was of being buried alive.
I lay there, smelling the dark earth, and not being able to stir so much
as the last joint of my little finger. Yet every nerve of me ached with
sentience.. and I woke gasping, my face bathed with tears and the
moisture of terror.
* * * * *
From head to foot hot flushes swept over me. And I was stung with the
pricking of a million needles, going in sharply at every pore!... was
bathed in cold sweats. And I hoped I was dying.
* * * * *
"Johnnie, what are you doing to yourself?" And my father fixed his eyes
on me.
"Nothing, Father!"
"If you weren't such a good boy, I'd--" and he halted, to continue,
"as it is, you're a clean boy, and I'm proud of you."
I struggled hard to speak with him, to make a confidant of him, but I
could not.
"I wonder," he added with alarm in his voice, "I wonder if you're
catching consumption, the disease your mother died of ... you must be
careful of yourself."
I told him I would be careful....
"I think I'll send you back home to visit the folks this fall."
* * * * *
There was a restaurant just around the corner from where we lived in our
second story flat--a restaurant which bore the legend stuck up in the
window, "Home Cooking." The sign itself was of a dull, dirty,
fly-specked white which ought to have been a sufficient warning to the
nice palate.
The place was run by a family of three ... there was Mister Brown, the
man, a huge-built, blotch-faced, retired stone-mason, his meagre little
wife, Mrs. Brown, and their grass-widow daughter, Flora.... Flora did
but little work, except to lean familiarly and with an air of unspoken
intimacy, over the tables of the men, as she slouched up with their food
... and she liked to sit outside in the back yard when there was
sunshine ... in the hammock for more comfort ... shelling peas or
languidly peeling potatoes.
Flora's vibrant, little, wasplike mother whose nose was so sharp and red
that it made me think of Paul's ferret--she bustled and buzzed about,
doing most of the work.
* * * * *
Looking out from our back window, I could see Flora lolling, and I would
read or write a little and then the unrest would become too strong and I
would go down to her. Soon two potato knives would be working.
"Come and sit by me in the hammock."
I liked that invitation ... she was plump to heaviness and sitting in
the hammock crushed us pleasantly together.
This almost daily propinquity goaded my adolescent hunger into an
infatuation for her,--I thought I was in love with her,--though I never
quite reconciled myself to the cowlikeness with which she chewed gum.
She was as free and frank of herself as I was curious and timid.
"Johnnie, what small feet and little hands you have ... you're a
regular aristocrat."
* * * * *
A pause.
I give her a poem written to her. She reads it, letting her knife stick
in a half-peeled potato. She looks up at me out of heavy-lidded eyes.
* * * * *
"I believe you're falling in love with me."
I trembled, answered nothing, was silent.
"Kiss me!"
Seeing me so a-tremble, she obeyed her own injunction. With slow
deliberation she crushed her lips, full and voluptuous, into mine. The
warmth of them seemed to catch hold of something deep down in me, and,
with exquisite painfulness, draw it out. Blinded with emotion, I
clutched close to her. She laughed. I put one hand over her full breast
as infants do. She pushed me back.
"There, that's enough for one day--a promise of sweets to come!" and she
laughed again, with a hearty purr like a cat that has a mouse at its
mercy.
She rose and carried in the pan of potatoes we had just finished
peeling. And I saw her sturdy, but not unshapely ankles going from me as
she went up the steps from the yard, her legs gleaming white through her
half-silk hose (that were always coming down, and that she was always
twisting up, just under her knees, before my abashed eyes). She wore
shoes much too little for her plump feet ... and, when not abroad, let
them yawn open unbuttoned. And her plump body was alive and bursting
through her careless, half-fastened clothes.
She sang with a deep sultriness of voice as she walked away with the pan
of potatoes.
* * * * *
"You ought to see my Florrie read books!" exclaimed the mother.
Flora did read a lot ... but chiefly the erotic near-society novels that
Belford used to print....
"Yes, she's a smart girl, she is."
And the father....
"I won't work till the unions get better conditions for a man. I won't
be no slave to no man."
* * * * *
One sultry afternoon I went into the restaurant and found Flora away.
Poignantly disappointed, I asked where she was.
"--Gone on a trip!" her mother explained, without explaining.
From time to time Flora went on "trips."
* * * * *
And one morning, several mornings, Flora was not there to serve at the
breakfast table ... and I was hurt when I learned that she had gone back
to Newark to live, and had left no word for me. Her father told me she
"had gone back to George," meaning her never-seen husband from whom she
evidently enjoyed intervals of separation and grass-widowhood.
I was puzzled and hurt indeed, because she had not even said good-bye
to me. But soon came this brief note from her:
"Dearest Boy:--
Do come up to Newark and see me some afternoon. And come more than
once. Bring your Tennyson that you was reading aloud to me. I love
to hear you read poetry. I think you are a dear and want to see
more of you. But I suppose you have already forgotten
Your loving
FLORA."
In the absurd and pitiful folly of youth I lifted the letter to my lips
and kissed it. I trembled with eagerness till the paper rattled as I
read it again and again. It seemed like some precious holy script.
I bolted my lunch nervously and it stuck half way down in a hard lump. I
would go to her that very afternoon.
* * * * *
The car on which I rode was subject to too frequent stoppage for me. I
leaped out and walked along with brisk strides. But the car sailed forth
ahead of me now on a long stretch of roadway and I ran after it to catch
it again. The conductor looked back at me in derisive scorn and made a
significant whirling motion near his temple with his index finger,
indicating that I had wheels there....
At last I found the street where Flora lived. I trailed from door to
door till the number she had given me met my eye. It made my heart jump
and my knees give in, to be so near the quarry. For the first time I was
to be alone with a woman I desired.
At the bell, it took me a long time to gain courage to pull. But at last
I reached out my hand. I had to stand my ground. I couldn't run away
now. The bell made a tinkling sound far within.
* * * * *
The door opened cautiously. A head of touseled black hair crept out.
"Johnnie, dear! _You_!... you _are_ a surprise!"
Did I really detect an echo of disappointment in her deep, contralto
voice?
Frightened in my heart like a trapped animal, I went in. Down a long,
dusk, musty-smelling corridor and into a back-apartment on the first
floor; she led me into a room which was bed-and-sitting room combined.
In one part of it stood several upholstered chairs with covers on,
cluttered about a plain table. In the other part stood a bureau heaped
with promiscuous toilette articles, and a huge, brass-knobbed bed with a
spread of lace over its great, semi-upright pillows.
"Shall I let in a little more light, dear?"
"Do."
For the blinds were two-thirds down.
"I like to sit and think in the dark," she explained, and her one dimple
broke in a rich, brown-faced animal smile.
"Yes, but I--I want to see your lovely face," I stuttered, with much
effort at gallantry....
* * * * *
"He's not at home ... he's off at Wilmington, on a job" (meaning her
husband, though I had not asked about him). "But what made you come so
soon? You must of just got my letter!"
"I--I wanted you," I blurted ... in the next moment I was at her feet in
approved romantic fashion, following up my declaration of desire. Calmly
she let me kneel there ... I put my arms about her plump legs ... I was
almost fainting....
After a while she took me by the hair with both hands. She slowly bent
my head back as I knelt. Leaning over, she kissed deliberately, deeply
into my mouth ... then, gazing into my eyes with a puzzled expression,
as I relaxed to her--almost like something inanimate....
"Why, you dear boy, I believe you're innocent like a child. And yet you
know so much about books ... and you're so wise, too!"
As she spoke she pushed back my mad hands from their clutching and
reaching. She held both of them in hers, and closed them in against her
half-uncovered, full breasts, pressing them there.
"Do you mean to tell me that you've never gone out with the boys for a
good time?... how old are you?"
I told her I was just sixteen.
"Do you think I'm ... I'm too young?" I asked.
"I feel as if I was your mother ... and I'm not much over twenty ... but
do sit up on a chair, dear!"
She stood on her feet, shook out her dress, smiled curiously, and
started out of the room. I was up and after her, my arms around her
waist, desperate. She slid around in my arms, laughing quietly to
herself till the back of her head was against my mouth. I kissed and
kissed the top of her head. Then she turned slowly to face me, pressing
all the contours of her body into me ... she crushed her bosom to mine.
Already I was quite tall; and she was stocky and short ... she lifted
her face up to me, a curious kindling light in her eyes ... of a
phosphorescent, greenish lustre, like those chance gleams in a cat's
eyes you catch at night....
She took my little finger and deliberately bit it ... then she leaned
away from my seeking mouth, my convulsive arms....
"You want too much, all at once," she said, and, whirling about broke
away....
With the table between me and her....
"Wouldn't you like a little beer, and some sandwiches? I have some in
the ice box.... _Do_ let's have some beer and sandwiches."
I assented, though hating the bitter taste of beer, and hungry for her
instead of sandwiches. And soon we were sitting down calmly at the
table, or rather, she was sitting down calmly ... baffled, I pretended
to be calm.
As she rose for something or other, I sprang around the table and caught
her close to me once more, marvelling, at the same time, at my loss of
shyness, my new-found audacity. Again she snuggled in close to me, her
flesh like a warm, palpitating cushion.
"Flora, my darling ... help me!" I cried, half-sobbing.
"What do you mean?" laughing.
"I love you!"
"I know all _you_ want!"
"But I do love you ... see...."
And I prostrated myself, in a frenzy, at her feet.
"Say, you're the queerest kid I've ever known."
And she walked out of the room abruptly, while I rose to my feet and sat
in a chair, dejected. She came in again, a twinkle in her eye.
"Don't torture me, Flora!" I pleaded, "either send me away, or--"
"Stop pestering me ... let's talk ... read me some of that Tennyson you
gave me...." and I began reading aloud, for there was nothing else she
would for the moment, have me do....
* * * * *
"You're a poet," whimsically, "I want you to write some letters to me
because I know you must write beautiful."
"--if you will only let me love you!"
"Well, ain't I lettin' you love me?"
A perverse look came into her face, a thought, an idea that pleased
her--
"I've lots and lots of letters from men," she began, "men that have been
in love with me."
"Oh!" I exclaimed weakly ... she had just expressed a desire to add some
of mine to the pack ... the next thing that she followed up with gave me
a start--
"Your father--"
"My father?--" I echoed.
"He's written me the best letters of all ... wait a minute ... I'll read
a little here and there to you." And, gloating and triumphant, and
either not seeing or, in her vulgarity, not caring what effect the
reading of my father's love letters would have on me, she began reading
ardent passages aloud. "See!" She showed me a page to prove that it was
in his handwriting. The letters told a tale easy to understand. She was
so eager in her vanity that she read on and on without seeing in my
face what, seen, would have made her stop.
A frightful trembling seized me, a loathing, a horror. This was my
father's woman ... and ... I!...
I sat on, dumbfounded, paralysed. I remembered his stories of trips to
T---- and other places on supposed lodge business ... unluckily, I also
remembered that several times Flora had been off on trips at the same
time.
"Just listen to this, will you!" and she began at another passage.
She was so absorbed in her reading that she did not see how I was on my
feet ... had seized my hat ... was going.
"I'm sorry, Flora, but I've got to go!"
"What?" looking up and surprised, "--got to go?"
"Yes ... Yes ... I must--must go!" my lips trembled.
"Why, we're just getting acquainted ... I didn't mean for you to go
yet."
She rose, dropping the letters all in a heap.
She was the aggressive one now. She drew me to her quickly, "Stay ...
and I'll promise to be good to you!"
I pushed back, loathing ... loathing her and myself, but myself more,
because in spite of all my disgust, my pulses leaped quick again to
hers.
"Sit down again."
I did not listen, but stood.
"I was thinking that you would stay for supper and then we could go to
some show and after come back here and I would give you a good time."
* * * * *
I staggered out, shocked beyond belief, the last animal flush had died
out of me. All my body was ice-cold.
"Promise me you'll come again this day next week," she called after me
persistently.
She drew the door softly shut and left me reeling down the dark
corridor.
* * * * *
I could hardly speak to my father that night. I avoided him.
* * * * *
At the creeping edge of dawn I woke from a dream with a jerk as I slid
down an endless black abyss. The abyss was my bed's edge and I found
myself on the floor. When I went to rise again, I had to clutch things
to stand up. I was so weak I sat on the bed breathing heavily. I tumbled
backward into bed again and lay in a daze during which dream-objects
mixed with reality and my room walked full of people from all the books
I had read--all to evaporate as my father's face grew, from a cluster of
white foreheads and myriads of eyes, into _him_.
"Johnnie, wake up ... are you sick?"
"Please go away from me and let me alone." I turned my face to the wall
in loathing.
"I'll call a doctor."
* * * * *
The doctor came. He felt my pulse. Put something under my tongue.
Whispered my father in a room, apart. Left.
My father returned, dejected, yet trying to act light and merry.
"What did the doctor say?" I forced myself to ask of him.
"To be frank, Johnnie ... you're old enough to learn the truth ... he
thinks you're taken down with consumption."
"That's what my mother died of."
My father shuddered and put his face down in his hands. I felt a little
sorry for him, then.
"Well you've got to go West now ... and work on a farm ... or
something."
* * * * *
I began to get ready for my trip West. Surely enough, I had consumption,
if symptoms counted ... pains under the shoulder blades ... spitting of
blood ... night-sweats....
But my mind was quickened: I read Morley's _History of English
Literature_ ... Chaucer all through ... Spenser ... even Gower's
_Confessio Amantis_ and Lydgate's ballads ... my recent discovery of
Chatterton having made me Old English-mad.
As I read the life of young Chatterton I envied him, his fame and his
early death and more than ever, I too desired to die young.
* * * * *
The week before I was to set out my father calmly discovered to me that
he intended I should work on a farm as a hand for the next four years,
when I reached Ohio ... was even willing to pay the farmer something to
employ me. This is what the doctor had prescribed as the only thing that
would save my life--work in the open air. My father had written Uncle
Beck to see that this program was inaugurated.
"I won't become a clod-hopper," I exclaimed, seeing the dreary, endless
monotony of such a life.
"But it will do you good. It will be a fine experience for you."
"If it's such a fine experience why don't you go and do it?"
"I won't stand any nonsense."
"I'd rather die.... I'm going to die anyhow."
"Yes, if you don't do what I tell you."
"I won't."
"We'll see."
"Very well, father, we _will_ see."
"If you weren't such a sick kid I'd trounce you."
* * * * *
You could approach Antonville by surrey, buggy or foot ... along a
winding length of dusty road ... or muddy ... according to rain or
shine.
My Uncle Beck drove me out in a buggy.
Aunt Alice, so patient-faced and pretty and sweet-eyed in her neat
poverty--greeted me with a warm kiss.
"Well, you'll soon be well now."
"But I won't work on a farm."
"Never mind, dear ... don't worry about that just yet."
* * * * *
That afternoon I sat with Aunt Alice in the kitchen, watching her make
bread. Everyone else was out: Uncle Beck, on a case ... Cousin Anders,
over helping with the harvest on a neighbouring farm ... Cousin Anna was
also with the harvesters, helping cook for the hands ... for the
Doctor's family needed all the outside money they could earn.
For Uncle Beck was a dreamer. He thought more of his variorum
Shakespeare than he did of his medical practice. And he was slow-going
and slow-speaking and so conscientious that he told patients the truth
... all which did not help him toward success and solid emolument. He
would take eggs in payment for his visits ... or jars of preserves ...
or fresh meat, if the farmer happened to be slaughtering.
* * * * *
"Where's Granma?" I asked Aunt Alice, as she shoved a batch of bread in
the oven.
"She's out Halton way ... she'll go crazy with joy when she gets word
you're back home. She'll start for here right off as soon as she hears
the news. She's visiting with Lan and his folks."
When I heard Lan mentioned I couldn't help giving a savage look.
Aunt Alice misinterpreted.
"What, Johnnie--won't you be glad to see her!... you ought to ... she's
said over and over again that she loved you more than she did any of her
own children."
"It isn't that--I hate Landon. I wish he was dead or someone would kill
him for me."
"Johnnie, you ought to forgive and forget. It ain't Christian."
"I don't care. I'm not a Christian."
"O Johnnie!" shocked ... then, after a pause of reproach which I
enjoyed--"your Uncle Lan's toned down a lot since then ... married ...
has four children ... one every year." And Alice laughed whimsically.
"--and he's stopped gambling and drinking, and he's got a good job as
master-mechanic in a factory....
"He was young ... he was only a boy in the days when he whipped you."
"Yes, and I suppose I was old?... I tell you, Aunt Alice, it's something
I can't forget ... the dirty coward," and I swore violently, forgetting
myself.
At that moment Uncle Beck appeared suddenly at the door, back from a
case.
"Here, here, that won't do! I don't allow that kind of language in my
household." And he gave me a severe and admonishing look before going
off on another and more urgent call that waited him.
* * * * *
"And how's Granma been getting on?"
"--aging rapidly ... " a pause, " ... hasn't got either of the two
houses on Mansion Avenue now ... sold them and divided the money among
her children ... gave us some ... and Millie ... and Lan ... wouldn't
hear of 'no' ... " parenthetically, "Uncle Joe didn't need any; he's
always prospered since the early days, you know."
"And what's Granma up to these days?" For she was always doing sweet,
ignorant, childish, impractical things.
"--spirit-rapping is it? or palmistry? or magnetic healing? or what?"
"You'll laugh!"
"Tell me!"
"She's got a beau."
"What? a beau? and she eighty if a day!"
"Yes, we--all her children--think it's absurd. And we're all trying to
advise her against it ... but she vows she's going to get married to him
anyhow."
"And who is her 'fellow'"?
"--a one-legged Civil War veteran ... a Pennsylvania Dutchman named
Snyder ... owns a house near Beaver Falls ... draws a pension ... he's a
jolly old apple-cheeked fellow ... there's no doubt they love each other
... only--only it seems rather horrible for two people as old as they
are to go and get married like two young things ... and really fall in
love, too!"
I was silent ... amused ... interested ... then--"well, Granma'll tell
me all about it when she comes ... and I can judge for myself, and," I
added whimsically, "I suppose if they love each other it ought to be all
right."
And we both laughed.
* * * * *
When Granma heard I was West she couldn't reach Antonville fast enough.
She was the same dear childlike woman, only incredibly older-looking.
Age seemed to have fallen on her like an invading army, all at once. Her
hair was, every shred of it, not only grey, but almost white. There
shone the same patient, sweet, ignorant, too-trusting eyes ... there was
the blue burst of vein on her lower lip.
After she had kissed and kissed me, stroked and stroked my head and face
in speechless love, I looked at her intently and lied to please her:
"Why, Granma, you don't look a day older."
"But I am, Johnnie, I am. I've been working hard since you left." As if
she had not worked hard _before_ I left ... she informed me that, giving
away to her children what she had received for the sale of her two
houses (that never brought her anything because of her simplicity, while
they were in her possession) she had grown tired of "being a burden to
them," as she phrased it, and had hired herself out here and there as
scrubwoman, washerwoman, housekeeper, and what not....
Later I learned that nothing could be done with her, she was so
obstinate. She had broken away despite the solicitude of all her
children--who all loved her and wanted her to stay with them.
At last she had answered an advertisement for a housekeeper ... that
appeared in a farm journal ... and so she had met her old cork-legged
veteran, whom she now had her mind set on marrying.
"But Granma, to get married at your age?"
"I'd like to ask why not?" she answered sweetly, "I feel as young as
ever when it comes to men ... and the man ... you wait till you see him
... you'll like him ... he's such a good provider, Johnnie; he draws a
steady pension of sixty dollars a month from the Government, and he'll
give me a good home."
"But any of my aunts and uncles would do the same."
"Yes, Johnnie, but it ain't the same as having a man of your own around
... there's nothing like that, Johnnie, for a woman."
"But your own children welcome you and treat you well?"
"Oh, yes, Johnnie, my little boy, but in spite of that, I feel in the
way. And, no matter how much they love me, it's better for me to have a
home of my own and a man of my own."
"Besides, Billy loves me so much," she continued, wistfully, "and even
though he's seventy whereas I'm eighty past, he says his being younger
don't make no difference ... and he's always so jolly ... always
laughing and joking."
* * * * *
"We must begin to allow for Granma," Aunt Alice told me, "she's coming
into her second childhood."
* * * * *
Granma believed thoroughly in my aspirations to become a poet. With
great delight she retailed incidents of my childhood, reminding me of a
thousand youthful escapades of which she constituted me the hero,
drawing therefrom auguries of my future greatness.
One of the incidents which alone sticks in my memory:
"Do you 'mind,'" she would say, "how you used to follow Millie about
when she papered the pantry shelves with newspapers with scalloped
edges? and how you would turn the papers and read them, right after her,
as she laid them down, and make her frantic?"
"Yes," I would respond, highly gratified with the anecdote, "and you
would say, Oh, Millie, don't get mad at the little codger, some day he
might turn out to be a great man!'"
* * * * *
Uncle Beck had a fine collection of American Letters. I found a complete
set of Hawthorne and straightway became a moody and sombre Puritan ...
and I wrote in Hawthornian prose, quaint essays and stories. And I lived
in a world of old lace and lavender, of crinoline and brocade.
And then I discovered my uncle's books on gynecology and obstetrics ...
full of guilty fevers I waited until he had gone out on a call and then
slunk into his office to read....
One afternoon my doctor-uncle came suddenly upon me, taking me unaware.
* * * * *
"Johnnie, what are you up to?"
"--was just reading your medical books."
"Come over here," already seated at his desk, on his swivel-chair, he
motioned me to a seat.
"Sit down!"
I obeyed him in humiliated silence.
He rose and closed the door, hanging the sign "Busy" outside.
* * * * *
At last I learned about myself and about life.
* * * * *
The harvesting over, Anders began to chum with me. We took long walks
together, talking of many things ... but, chiefly, of course, of those
things that take up the minds of adolescents ... of the mysteries of
creation, of life at its source ... of why men and women are so ... and
I took it for granted, after he confessed that he had fallen into the
same mistakes as I, suffering similar agonies, that he had been set
right by his father, the doctor, as I just had. I was surprised to find
he had not. So I shared with him the recent knowledge I had acquired.
* * * * *
"And you mean to tell me that Uncle Beck has said nothing to you?"
"Not a single word ... never."
"But why didn't you ask him then ... him being a doctor?"
"How can a fellow talk with his father about such things?"
"It's funny to me he didn't inform you, anyhow."
"I was his son, you see!"
* * * * *
Anders had a girl, he told me, confidingly. She was off on a visit to
Mornington, at present ... a mighty pretty little girl and the best
there was....
* * * * *
"By the way, Anders, do you know second cousin Phoebe at all?"
"Sure thing I know her ... the last time I heard of her ... which was
almost a year ago--she was wilder than ever."
"How do you mean, Anders?"
"Her folks couldn't keep her in of nights ... a gang of boys and girls
would come and whistle for her, and she'd get out, sooner or later, and
join them."
"I tell you what," I began, in an unpremeditated burst of invention,
which I straightway believed, it so appealed to my imagination, "I've
never told anybody before, but all these years I've been desperately in
love with Phoebe."
Anders scrutinised me quizzically, then the enthusiasm of the actor in
my face made him believe me....
"Well, no matter how bad she is, she certainly was a beaut, the last
time I saw her."
"I'm going," I continued "(you mustn't tell anybody), I'm going down to
Aunt Rachel's, after I leave here, and _get_ Phoebe." And eagerly and
naïvely we discussed the possibilities as we walked homeward....
* * * * *
After my talk with Uncle Beck all my morbidity began to melt away, and,
growing better in mind, my body grew stronger ... he wrote to my father
that it was not consumption ... so now I was turning my coming West into
a passing visit, instead of a long enforced sojourn there for the good
of my health.
* * * * *
I found different household arrangements on revisiting Aunt Rachel and
her household.
For one thing, the family had moved into town ... Newcastle ... and they
had a fine house to live in, neat and comfortable. Gone was that
atmosphere of picturesque, pioneer poverty. Though, to be sure, there
sat Josh close up against the kitchen stove, as of old. For the first
sharp days of fall were come ... he was spitting streams of tobacco, as
usual.
"I hate cities," was his first greeting to me. He squirted a brown
parabola of tobacco juice, parenthetically, into the wood-box behind the
stove, right on top of the cat that had some kittens in there.
Aunt Rachel caught him at it.
"Josh, how often have I told you you mustn't spit on that cat."
"'Scuse me, Ma, I'm kind o' absint-minded."
The incident seemed to me so funny that I laughed hard. Aunt Rachel gave
me a quiet smile.
"Drat the boy, he's allus findin' somethin' funny about things!"
This made me laugh more. But I had brought Uncle Josh a big plug of
tobacco, and he was placated, ripping off a huge chew as soon as he held
it in his hands.
The great change I have just spoken of came over the family because
Phoebe's two sisters, Jessie and Mona--who had been off studying to be
nurses, now had come back, and, taking cases in town, they were making a
good living both for themselves and the two old folks....
I had learned from Uncle Beck, as he drove me in to Mornington, that,
the last he heard of Phoebe, she was working out as a maid to "some
swells," in that city.
* * * * *
"Damme, ef I don't hate cities an' big towns," ejaculated Uncle Josh,
breaking out of a long, meditative silence, "you kain't keep no dogs
there ... onless they're muzzled ... and no ferrets, neither ... and
what 'ud be the use if you could?... there ain't nothin' to hunt anyhow
... wisht we lived back on thet old muddy hilltop agin."
* * * * *
Supper almost ready ... the appetizing smell of frying ham--there's
nothing, being cooked, smells better....
Paul came in from work ... was working steady in the mills now, Aunt
Rachel had informed me.
Paul came in without a word, his face a mask of such empty hopelessness
that I was moved by it deeply.
"Paul, you mustn't take on so. It ain't right nor religious," said Uncle
Josh, knocking the ashes out of his pipe ... he smoked and chewed in
relays. Paul replied nothing.
"Come on, folks," put in Rachel, "supper's ready ... draw your chairs
up to the table."
We ate our supper under a quiet, grey mood. An air of tragedy seemed to
hang over us ... for the life of me I couldn't understand what had
become of Paul's good-natured, rude jocosity. Why he had grown into a
silent, sorrowful man....
* * * * *
"You kin bunk up with Paul to-night, Johnnie," announced Rachel, when it
came bedtime.
Paul had already slunk off to bed right after supper. It was dark in the
room when I got there.
"Paul, where's the light?"
"--put it out ... like to lie in the dark an' think," answered a deep,
sepulchral voice.
"Whatever _is_ the matter with you, Paul?"
"Ain't you heered? Ain't Ma told you?"
"No!"
Paul struck a match and lit the lamp. I sat on the side of the bed and
talked with him.
"Ain't you heered how I been married?" he began.
"So that's it, is it?" I anticipated prematurely, "and you weren't happy
... and she went off and left you!"
"Yes, she's left me all right, Johnnie, but not that way ... she's
dead!"
And Paul stopped with a sob in his throat. I didn't know what to say to
his sudden declaration, so I just repeated foolishly, "why, I never knew
you got married!" twice.
"Christ, Johnnie, she was the best little woman in the world--such a
little creature, Johnnie ... her head didn't more'n come up to under my
armpits."
There followed a long silence, to me an awkward one; I didn't know what
to do or say. Then I perceived the best thing was to let him ease his
hurt by just talking on ... and he talked ... on and on ... in his slow,
drawling monotone ... and ever so often came the refrain, "Christ, but
she was a good woman, Johnnie ... I wish you'd 'a' knowed her."
At last I ventured, "and how--how did she come to die?"
"--baby killed her, she was that small ... she was like a little girl
... she oughtn't to of had no baby at all, doctor said...."
"I killed her, Johnnie," he cried in agony, "and that's the God's truth
of it."
Another long silence.
The lamp guttered but didn't go out. A moth had flown down its chimney,
was sizzling, charring, inside ... Paul lifted off the globe. Burnt his
hands, but said nothing ... flicked the wingless, blackened body to the
floor....
"But the baby?--it lived?"
"Yes, it lived ... a girl ... if it hadn't of lived ... if it had gone,
too, I wouldn't of wanted to live, either!..."
"That's why I'm workin' so hard, these days, with no lay-offs fer
huntin' or fishin' or anything."
* * * * *
The next day I learned more from Rachel of how Paul had agonized over
the death of his tiny wife ... "'she was that small you had a'most to
shake out the sheets to find her,' as Josh useter say," said Rachel
gravely and unhumorously ... and she told how the bereaved husband
savagely fought off all his womenfolk and insisted on mothering, for a
year, the baby whose birth had killed its mother.
"At last he's gittin' a little cheer in his face. But every so often the
gloomy fit comes over him like it did last night at supper. I keep
tellin' him it ain't Christian, with her dead two years a'ready--but he
won't listen ... he's got to have his fit out each time."
* * * * *
As if this had not been enough of the tragic, the next day when I asked
about Phoebe, Aunt Rachel started crying.
"Phoebe's gone, too," she sobbed.
"O, Aunt Rachel, I'm so sorry ... but I didn't know ... nobody told me."
"That's all right, Johnnie. Somehow it relieves me to talk about
Phoebe." She rose from her rocker, laid down her darning, and went to a
dresser in the next room. She came out again, holding forth to me a
picture ... Phoebe's picture....
A shy, small, oval, half-wild face like that of a dryad's. Her chin
lifted as if she were some wood-creature listening to the approaching
tread of the hunter and ready on the instant to spring forth and run
along the wind....
An outdoor picture, a mere snapshot, but an accidental work of art.
Voluminous leafage blew behind and above her head, splashed with the
white of sunlight and the gloom of swaying shadow.
"Why, she's--she's beautiful!"
"Yes--got prettier and prettier every time you looked at her...."
"But," and Aunt Rachel sighed, "I couldn't do nothin' with her at all.
An' scoldin' an' whippin' done no good, neither. Josh useter whip her
till he was blue in the face, an' she wouldn't budge. Only made her more
sot and stubborner....
"--guess she was born the way she was ... she never could stay still a
minute ... always fidgettin' ... when she was a little girl, even--I
used to say, 'Now, look here, Phoebe,' I'd say, 'your ma 'ull give you a
whole dime all at once if you'll set still jest for five minutes in that
chair.' An' she'd try ... and, before sixty seconds was ticked off she'd
be on her feet, sayin', 'Ma, I guess you kin keep that dime.'
"When she took to runnin' out at nights," my great-aunt continued, in a
low voice, "yes, an' swearin' back at her pa when he gave her a bit of
his mind, it nigh broke my heart ... and sometimes she'd see me cryin',
and that would make her feel bad an' she'd quiet down fer a few days ...
an' she'd say, 'Ma, I'm goin' to be a good girl now,' an' fer maybe two
or three nights she'd help clean up the supper-things--an' then--" with
a breaking voice, "an' then all at once she'd scare me by clappin' both
hands to that pretty brown head o' hers, in sech a crazy way, an'
sayin', 'Honest, Ma, I can't stand it any longer ... this life's too
slow.... I've gotta go out where there's some life n' fun!'
"It was only toward the last that she took to sneakin' out after she
pretended to go to bed.. gangs of boys an' girls, mixed, would come an'
whistle soft fer her, under the window ... an' strange men would
sometimes hang aroun' the house ... till Josh went out an' licked a
couple.
"It drove Josh nigh crazy.
"One evenin', after this had gone on a long time, Josh ups an' says,
'Ma, Phoebe's run complete out o' hand ... she'll hafta be broke o' this
right now ... when she comes back to-night I'm going to give her the
lickin' of her life.'
"'Josh, you mustn't whip her. Let's both have a long talk with her. (I
knowed Josh 'ud hurt her bad if he whipped her. He has a bad temper when
he is het up.) Maybe goin' down on our knees with her an' prayin' might
do some good.'"
"'No, Ma, talkin' nor prayin' won't do no good ... the only thing left's
a good whippin' to straighten her out.'"
"O Aunt Rachel," I cried, all my desire of Phoebe breaking but into
tenderness. I looked at the lovely face, crossed with sunlight, full of
such quick intelligence, such mischievousness....
You can catch a wild animal in a trap, but to whip it would be sacrilege
... that might do for domesticated animals.
"Josh never laid a hand on her, though, that night ... she never came
home ... men are so awful in their pride, Johnnie ... don't you be like
that when you grow to be a man...."
Then Aunt Rachel said no more, as Paul came in at that moment. Nor did
she resume the subject.
* * * * *
Next morning I packed away to visit Uncle Lan. I might as well go, even
if I hated him. It would be too noticeable, not to go.
He was at the train, waiting for me. He proffered me his hand. To my
surprise, I took it. He seized my grip from me, put his other hand
affectionately on my shoulder.
"I've often wondered whether you'd ever forgive me for the way I beat
you.... I've learned better since."
Before I knew it my voice played me the trick of saying yes, I forgave
him.
"That's a good boy!" and Lan gave my hand such a squeeze that it almost
made me cry out with the pain of it.
* * * * *
"Lan," as we walked along, "can you tell me more about Phoebe.... Aunt
Rachel told me some, but--"
"Oh, she ended up by running away with a drummer ... she hadn't been
gone long when her ma got word from her asking her to forgive her ...
that she'd run off with a man she loved, and was to be married to him
pretty soon.... Phoebe gave no address, but the letter had a Pittsburgh
postmark....
"A month ... six months went by. Then a letter came in a strange hand.
The girl that wrote it said that she was Phoebe's 'Roommate.'" Lan
paused here, and gave me a significant look, then resumed:
"Paul went down to bring the body home, and found she'd been buried
already. They were too poor to have it dug up and brought home."
"It seems that the man that took Phoebe off was nothing but a pimp!"
* * * * *
Suicide: early one Sunday morning; early, for girls of their profession,
the two girls, Phoebe and her roommate were sitting in their bedrooms in
kimonos.
"What a nice Sunday," Phoebe had said, looking out at the window.
"Jenny," she continued to her roommate, "I have a feeling I'd like to go
to church this morning...."
Jenny had thought _that_ was rather a queer thing for Phoebe to say....
Jenny went out to go to the delicatessen around the corner, to buy a
snack for them to eat, private, away from the rest of the girls, it
being Sunday morning. She'd bring in a Sunday paper, too.
When she returned, Phoebe didn't seem to be in the room. Jenny felt that
something was wrong, had felt it all along, anyhow....
She heard a sort of gasping and gurgling....
She found Phoebe on the floor, two-thirds under the bed. Her eyes were
rolled back to the whites from agony. A creamy froth was on her mouth.
And all her mouth and chin and pretty white neck were burned brown with
the carbolic acid she had drunk.. a whole damn bottle of it.
Jenny dropped on her knees by Phoebe and called out her name--loud....
"Phoebe, why don't you speak to me!" Took her head in her lap and it
only lolled. Then she began screaming, did Jenny, and brought the whole
house up. And the madame had shouted:
"Shut up, you bitch, do you want people to think someone's gettin'
killed? Ain't we in bad enough already?"
"So Phoebe came to a bad end," commented Lan, "as we always thought she
would."
* * * * *
The nearest I came to having my long-cherished revenge on Landon:
Once, in the night, during my week's stay with him, I stepped from bed,
sleep-walking, moving toward the room where he and Aunt Emily lay.
Imagining I held a knife in my left hand (I am left-handed) to stick him
through the heart with.
But I bumped terrifically into a door half ajar, and received such a
crash between the eyes that it not only brought me broad awake, but gave
me a bump as big as a hen's egg, into the bargain.
The dream of my revenge had been so strong in my brain that still I
could feel the butcher-knife in my hand ... and I looked into the empty
palm to verify the sensation, still there, of clasping the handle.
"--that you, Johnnie?" called my uncle.
"Yep!"
"What's the matter? can't you sleep?"
"No!--got up to take a drink of water."
"You'll find a bucketful on the kitchen table, and the dipper floating
in it ... and there's matches on the stand by your bed." A pause. He
continued: "You must of run into something. I heard a bang."
"I did. I bumped my head into the door."
* * * * *
I visited Aunt Millie last.
I found her a giantess of a woman, not fat, but raw-boned and tall. Her
cheeks were still as pitted with hollows, her breath as catarrhal as
ever. But she had become a different woman since she had married.
Her husband was a widower with three children already before he took her
in marriage. He was a railroad engineer who drove a switch engine in the
yards. He was as short as she was tall ... a diminutive man, but virile
... with a deep, hoarse voice resonant like a foghorn. The little man
had an enormous chest matted with dense, black hair. It would almost
have made a whole head of hair for an average man. One could always see
this hair because he was proud of its possession, thought it denoted
virility and strength, and wore his shirt open at the neck, and several
buttons lower, in order to reveal his full hirsuteness.
Millie had already given birth to two children of her own, by him. And
she toiled about the house at endless duties, day and night, happy with
him, and loving his children and hers with an equal love. And being
adored in turn by them.
It was "Ma!" here and "Ma!" there ... the voices of the children ever
calling for her.... And she, running about, waiting on the youngsters,
baking ovensful of bread, sewing, scrubbing, dusting ... and talking,
talking, talking all the time she flew about at her ceaseless work....
Uncle Dick loved his joke, and the broader the better. As I sat across
the table from him, at mealtimes, and looked into his amused, small
twinkling eyes, I thought continually of the Miller in Chaucer's
_Canterbury Tales_....
Millie, too, was not slow at having her joke. She was roughly
affectionate of me, in memory of old days. And she continually asked me,
with loud, enjoying laughter, if I remembered this, that, and the other
bad (Rabelaisan) trick I had played on her back in Mornington....
* * * * *
But I was glad to see Haberford and the East again. I was all over my
desire to die a poet, and young.... Principal Balling had me come to see
him. He examined me in Latin and in English and History. He found that,
from study by myself, I had prepared so that I was more than able to
pass in these subjects. But when it came to mathematics I was no less
than an idiot. He informed my father that he had been mistaken in me,
before ... that he had given me a too cursory look-over, judging me
after the usual run ... he announced that he would admit me as special
student at the Keeley Heights High School.
The one thing High School gave me--my Winter there--was Shelley. In
English we touched on him briefly, mainly emphasising his _Skylark_. It
was his _Ode to the West Wind_ that made me want more of him ... with
his complete works I made myself a nuisance in class, never paying
attention to what anyone said or did, but sitting there like a man in a
trance, and, with Shelley, dreaming beautiful dreams of revolutionising
the world.
I awoke only for English Composition. But there, inevitably, I
quarrelled with the teacher over her ideas of the way English prose was
to be written. She tried to make us write after the Addisonian model. I
pointed out that the better style was the nervous, short-sentenced,
modern one--as Kipling wrote, at his best, in his prose. We had
altercation after altercation, and the little dumpy woman's eyes raged
behind her glasses at me--to the laughter of the rest of the class. Who
really did not care for anything but a lark, while I was all the while
convinced with the belief that they sat up nights, dreaming over great
books as I did.
Even yet, though now I know better, I cannot accept the fact that the
vast majority find their only poetry in a good bellyful of food, as I do
in the _Ode to the Nightingale_ and in the _Epipsychidion_....
Dissatisfied and disillusioned, it was again a book that lifted me out
of the stupidity in which I found myself enmeshed. Josiah Flynt's
_Tramping With Tramps_,--and one other--_Two Years Before the Mast_, by
Dana. And I lay back, mixing my dreams of humanity's liberation, with
visions of big American cities, fields of wheat and corn, forests,
little towns on river-bends.
A tramp or sailor--which?
First, the sea ... why not start out adventuring around the world and
back again?
Land ... sea ... everything ... become a great adventurer like my
favourite heroes in the picaresque novels of Le Sage, Defoe, Smollett
and Fielding?
It took me days of talk with the gang--boasting--and nights of dreaming,
to screw myself up to the right pitch.
Then, one afternoon, in high disgust over my usual quarrel with the
English teacher, I returned to my room determined to leave for the New
York waterfront that same afternoon....
I left a note for my father informing him that I had made up my mind to
go to sea, and that he needn't try to find me in order to fetch me home
again. I wished him good luck and good-bye.
Into my grip I cast a change of clothes, and a few books: my Cæsar and
Vergil in the Latin, Young's _Night Thoughts_, and Shelley.
* * * * *
South Street ... here were ships ... great tall fellows, their masts
dizzy things to look up at.
I came to a pier where two three-masted barks lay, one on either side.
First I turned to the one on the right because I saw two men up aloft.
And there was a boy passing down the deck, carrying a pot of coffee aft.
I could smell the good aroma of that coffee. Ever since, the smell of
coffee makes me wish to set out on a trip somewhere.
"Hey, Jimmy," I shouted to the boy.
"Hey, yourself!" he replied, coming belligerently to the side. Then,
"what do ye want?"
"To go to sea. Do you need anybody aboard for the voyage?"
He looked scornfully at me, as I stood there, skinny, shadow-thin.
"You go to hell!" he cried. Then he resumed his way to the cabin,
whistling.
The ship opposite, I inspected her next. It was grand with the
figurehead of a long, wooden lady leaning out obliquely with
ever-staring eyes, her hands crossed over her breasts.
Aboard I went, down the solitude of the deck. I stopped at the cook's
galley. I had gone there because I had seen smoke coming out of the
little crooked pipe that stood akimbo.
I looked in at the door. A dim figure developed within, moving about
among pots and pans. It was the cook, I could tell by the white cap he
wore ... an old, very old man. He wore a sleeveless shirt. His long
skinny, hairy arms were bare. His long silvery-grey beard gave him an
appearance like an ancient prophet. But where the beard left off there
was the anomaly of an almost smooth, ruddy face, and very young,
straight-seeing, blue eyes.
When I told the old cook what I wanted, he invited me in to the galley
and reached me a stool to sit on.
"The captain isn't up yet. He was ashore on a jamboree last night.
You'll see him walking up and down the poop when he's hopped out of his
bunk and eaten his breakfast."
The cook talked about himself, while I waited there. I helped him peel a
pail of potatoes....
Though I heard much of strange lands and far-away ports, he talked
mostly of the women who had been in love with him ... slews of them ...
"and even yet, sixty-five years old, I can make a good impression when I
want to ... I had a girl not yet twenty down in Buenos Ayres. She was
crazy about me ... that was only two years ago."
He showed me pictures of the various women, in all parts of the world,
that had "gone mad about him" ... obviously, they were all prostitutes.
He brought out a batch of obscene photographs, chuckling over them.
It was a German ship--the _Valkyrie_. But the cook spoke excellent
English, as did, I later found out, the captain, both the mates, and all
but one or two of the crew.
Before the captain came up from below the cook changed the subject from
women to history. In senile fashion, to show off, he recited the names
of the Roman emperors, in chronological sequence. And, drawing a curtain
aside from a shelf he himself had built over his bunk, he showed me
Momsen's complete history of Rome, in a row of formidable volumes.
* * * * *
"There's the captain now!"
A great hulk of a man was lounging over the rail of the poop-deck,
looking down over the dock.
I started aft.
"Hist!" the cook motioned me back mysteriously. "Be sure you say 'Sir'
to him frequently."
* * * * *
"Beg pardon, sir. But are you Captain Schantze, sir?" (the cook had told
me the captain's name).
"Yes. What do you want?"
"I've heard you needed a cabin boy."
"Are you of German descent?"
"No, sir."
"What nationality are you, then?"
"American, sir."
"That means nothing, what were your people?"
"Straight English on my mother's side ... Pennsylvania Dutch on my
father's."
"What a mixture!"
He began walking up and down in seaman fashion. After spending several
minutes in silence I ventured to speak to him again.
"Do you think you could use me, sir?"
He swung on me abruptly.
"In what capacity?"
"As anything ... I'm willing to go as able seaman before the mast, if
necessary."
He stopped and looked me over and laughed explosively.
"Able seaman! you're so thin you have to stand twice in one place to
make a shadow ... you've got the romantic boy's idea of the sea ...
but, are you willing to do hard work from four o'clock in the morning
till nine or ten at night?"
"Anything, to get to sea, sir!"
"--sure you haven't run away from home?"
"No-no, sir!"
"Then why in the devil do you want to go to sea? isn't the land good
enough?"
I took a chance and told the captain all about my romantic notions of
sea-life, travel, and adventure.
"You talk just like one of our German poets."
"I _am_ a poet," I ventured further.
The captain gave an amused whistle. But I could see that he liked me.
"To-morrow morning at four o'clock ... come back, then, and Karl, the
cabin boy, will start you in at his job. I'll promote him to boy before
the mast."
* * * * *
I spent the night at Uncle Jim's house ... he was the uncle that had
come east, years before. He was married ... a head-bookkeeper ... lived
in a flat in the Bronx.
He thought it was queer that I was over in New York, alone ... when he
came home from work, that evening....
I could keep my adventure to myself no longer. I told him all about my
going to sea. But did Duncan (my father) approve of it? Yes, I replied.
But when I refused to locate the ship I was sailing on, at first Jim
tried to bully me into telling. I didn't want my father to learn where I
was, in case he came over to find me ... and went up to Uncle Jim's....
Then he began laughing at me.
"You've always been known for your big imagination and the things you
make up ... I suppose this is one of them."
"Let the boy alone," my aunt put in, a little dark woman of French and
English ancestry, "you ought to thank God that he has enough imagination
to make up stories ... he might be a great writer some day."
* * * * *
"Imagination's all right. I'm not quarrelling with Johnnie for that. But
you can't be all balloon and no ballast."
They made me up a bed on a sofa in the parlour ... among all the
bizarre chairs and tables that Uncle Jim had made from spools ... Aunt
Lottie still made dresses now and again ... before she married Jim she
had run a dressmaking establishment.
Uncle Jim set a Big Ben alarm clock down on one of the spool tables for
me.
"I've set the clock for half-past three. That will give you half an hour
to make your hypothetical ship in ... you'll have to jump up and stop
the clock, anyhow. It'll keep on ringing till you do."
* * * * *
My first morning on shipboard was spent scrubbing cabin floors, washing
down the walls, washing dishes, waiting on the captain and mates' mess
... the afternoon, polishing brass on the poop and officers' bridge,
under the supervision of Karl, the former cabin boy.
"Well, how do you like it?" asked the cook, as he stirred something in a
pot, with a big wooden ladle.
"Fine! but when are we sailing?"
"In about three days we drop down to Bayonne for a cargo of White Rose
oil and then we make a clean jump for Sydney, Australia."
"Around Cape Horn?" I asked, stirred romantically at the thought.
"No. Around the Cape of Good Hope."
* * * * *
Early in the afternoon of the day before we left the dock, as I was
polishing brass on deck, my father appeared before me, as abruptly as a
spirit.
"Well, here he is, as big as life!"
"Hello, Pop!"
I straightened up to ease a kink in my back.
"You had no need to hide this from me, son; I envy you, that's all, I
wish I wasn't too old to do it, myself ... this beats travelling about
the country, selling goods as a salesman. It knocks my dream of having a
chicken farm all hollow, too...."
He drew in a deep breath of the good, sunny harbour air. Sailors were up
aloft, they were singing. The cook was in his galley, singing too. There
were gulls glinting about in the sun.
"Of course you know I almost made West Point once ... had the
appointment ... if it hadn't been for a slight touch of rheumatism in
the joints ..." he trailed off wistfully.
"We've never really got to know each other, Johnnie."
I looked at him. "No, we haven't."
"I'm going to start you out right. Will the captain let you off for a
while?"
"The cook's my boss ... as far as my time is concerned. I'm cabin boy."
My father gave the cook a couple of big, black cigars. I was allowed
shore leave till four o'clock that afternoon....
"--you need a little outfitting," explained my father, as we walked
along the dock to the street....
"I've saved up a couple of hundred dollars, which I drew out before I
came over."
"But, Father...."
"You need a lot of things. I'm going to start you off right. While you
were up in the cabin getting ready to go ashore I had a talk with the
cook.... I sort o' left you in his charge--"
"But I don't want to be left in anyone's charge."
"--found out from him just what you'd need and now we're going to do a
little shopping."
I accompanied my father to a seamen's outfitting place, and he spent a
good part of his two hundred buying needful things for me ... shirts of
strong material ... heavy underwear ... oilskins ... boots ... strong
thread and needles ... and a dunnage bag to pack it all away in....
* * * * *
We stood together on the after-deck again, my father and I.
"Now I must be going," he remarked, trying to be casual. He put a ten
dollar bill in my hand.
"--to give the boys a treat with," he explained ... "there's nothing
like standing in good with an outfit you're to travel with ... and
here," he was rummaging in his inside pocket ... "put these in your
pocket and keep them there ... a bunch of Masonic cards of the lodge
your daddy belongs to ... if you ever get into straits, you'll stand a
better chance of being helped, as son of a Mason."
"No, Father," I replied, seriously and unhumorously, "I can't keep
them."
"I'd like to know why not?"
"I want to belong to the brotherhood of man, not the brotherhood of the
Masons."
He looked puzzled for a moment, then his countenance cleared.
"That's all right, Son ... you just keep those cards. They might come in
handy if you find yourself stranded anywhere."
When my father turned his back, with a thought almost prayerful to the
spirit of Shelley, I flung the Masonic cards overboard.
* * * * *
After dusk, the crew poured _en masse_ to the nearest waterfront saloon
with me. The ten dollars didn't last long.
* * * * *
"His old man has lots of money."
* * * * *
Our last night at the pier was a night of a million stars.
The sailmaker, with whom I had become well acquainted, waddled up to me.
He was bow-legged. He waddled instead of walked. We sat talking on the
foreward hatch....
"I'm glad we're getting off to-morrow," I remarked.
"--we might not. We lack a man for the crew yet."
"--thought we had the full number?"
"We did. But one of the boys in your party strayed away ... went to
another saloon and had a few more drinks ... and someone stuck him with
a knife in the short ribs ... he's in the hospital."
"But can't Captain Schantze pick up another man right away?"
"The consulate's closed till ten to-morrow morning. We're to sail at
five ... so he can't sign on a new sailor before ... of course he might
shanghai someone ... but the law's too severe these days ... and the
Sailors' Aid Society is always on the job ... it isn't like it used to
be."
* * * * *
But in spite of what the sailmaker had told me, the captain decided to
take his chance, rather than delay the time of putting forth to sea.
Around ten o'clock, in the full of the moon, a night-hawk cab drew up
alongside the ship where she lay docked, and out of it jumped the first
mate and the captain with a lad who was so drunk or drugged, or both,
that his legs went down under him when they tried to set him on his
feet.
They tumbled him aboard, where he lay in an insensate heap, drooling
spit and making incoherent, bubbling noises.
Without lifting an eyebrow in surprise, the sailmaker stepped forward
and joined the mate in jerking the man to his feet. The captain went aft
as if it was all in the day's work.
The mate and the sailmaker jerked the shanghaied man forward and bundled
him into a locker where bits of rope and nautical odds and-ends were
piled, just forward of the galley.
* * * * *
In the sharp but misty dawn we cast our moorings loose. A
busy little tug nuzzled up to take us in tow for open sea.
We were all intent on putting forth, when a cry came from the port side.
The shanghaied man had broken out, and came running aft ... he stopped a
moment, like a trapped animal, to survey the distance between the dock
and the side ... measuring the possibilities of a successful leap.
By this time the first and second mates were after him, with some of the
men ... he ran forward again, doubled in his tracks like a schoolboy
playing tag ... we laughed at that, it was so funny the way he went
under the mate's arm ... the look of surprise on the mate's face was
funny ... Then the man who was pursued, in a flash, did a hazardous
thing ... he flung himself in the air, over the starboard side, and took
a long headlong tumble into the tugboat....
* * * * *
He was tied like a hog, and hauled up by a couple of ropes, the
sailmaker singing a humorous chantey that made the boys laugh, as they
pulled away.
* * * * *
This delayed the sailing anyhow. The mist had lifted like magic,
and we were not far toward Staten Island before we knew a fine,
blowing, clear day, presided over, in the still, upper spaces, by
great, leaning cumulus clouds. They toppled huge over the great-clustered
buildings as we trod outward toward the harbour mouth....
The pilot swung aboard. The voyage was begun.
The coast of America now looked more like a low-lying fringe of
insubstantial cloud than solid land.
My heart sank. I had committed myself definitely to a three-months'
sea-trip ... there was no backing out, it was too far to swim ashore.
"What's wrong, Johann," asked the captain, "are you sea-sick already?"
He had noticed my expression as he walked by.
"No, sir!"
"If you are, it isn't anything to be ashamed of. I've known old
sea-captains who got sea-sick every time they put out of port."
* * * * *
There was a running forward. The shanghaied man hove in sight, on the
rampage again. He came racing aft. "I must speak with the captain."
There was a scuffle. He broke away. Again the two mates were close upon
him. Suddenly he flung himself down and both the mates tripped over him
and went headlong.
The captain couldn't help laughing. Then he began to swear ... "that
fellow's going to give us a lot of trouble," he prophesied.
Several sailors, grinning, had joined in the chase. They had caught the
fellow and were dragging him forward by the back and scruff of the neck,
while he deliberately hung limp and let his feet drag as if paralysed
from the waist down.
The captain stood over the group, that had come to a halt below. The
captain was in good humour.
"Bring him up here."
The shanghaied man stood facing Schantze, with all the deference of a
sailor, yet subtly defiant.
The captain began to talk in German.
"I don't speak German," responded the sailor stubbornly.
Yet it was in German that he had called out he must see the captain.
This did not make the captain angry. Instead, like a vain boy, he began
in French....
"I don't speak French ..." again objected the sailor, still in English.
"Very well, we'll speak in English, then ... bring him down into the
cabin ..." to the men and mates ... To the sailor again, "Come on,
Englishman! (in derision), and we'll sign you on in the ship's
articles."
They haled him below. The captain dismissed the sailors. The captain,
the two mates and I, were alone with the mutineer.... I stepped into the
pantry, pretending to be busy with the dishes. I didn't want to miss
anything.
"Now," explained the captain, "what's happened has happened ... it's up
to you to make the best of it ... we had to shanghai you," and he
explained the case in full ... and if he would behave and do his share
of the work with the rest of the crew, he would be treated decently and
be paid ... and let go, if he wished, when the _Valkyrie_ reached
Sydney....
"Now sign," commanded the mate, "I never heard of a man in your fix ever
being treated so good before."
"But I won't sign."
"Damme, but you will," returned Miller, the first mate, who, though
German, spoke English in real English fashion--a result, he later told
me, of fifteen years' service on English boats....
"Take hold of him, Stanger," this to the second mate, a lithe,
sun-browned, handsome lad who knew English but hated to speak it.
They wrestled about the cabin at a great rate ... finally they succeeded
in forcing a pen into the mutineer's hand....
Then the man calmed down, apparently whipped.
"Very well, where shall I sign?"
"Da," pointed the captain triumphantly, pointing the line out, with his
great, hairy forefinger ... and, with victory near, relapsing into
German.
But, just as it reached the designated spot, the fellow gave a violent
swish with the pen. The mates made a grab for his hand, but too late. He
tore a great, ink-smeared rent through the paper....
_Whang!_ Captain Schantze caught him with the full force of his big,
open right hand on the left side of his face.... _Whish!_ Captain
Schantze caught him with the full force of his open left, on the other
cheek!
The shanghaied man stiffened. He trembled violently.
"Do it a thousand times, my dear captain. I won't sign till you kill
me."
"Take him forward. He'll work, and work hard, without signing on.... No,
wait ... tie him up to the rail on the poop ... twenty-four hours of
that, my man, since you must speak English--will make you change your
mind."
He was tied, with his hands behind him.
The captain paced up and down beside him.
Then Franz (as I afterward learned his name) boldly began chaffing the
"old man" ... first in English.
"I don't understand," replied Schantze; he was playful now, as a cat is
with a mouse ... or rather, like a big boy with a smaller boy whom he
can bully.
After all, Schantze was only a big, good-natured "kid" of thirty.
Then Franz ran through one language after another ... Spanish, Italian,
French....
The captain noticed me out of the tail of his eye. His big, broad face
kindled into a grin.
"What are you doing here on deck, you rascal!" He gave me an
affectionate, rough pull of the ear.
"Polishing the brass, sir!"
"And taking everything in at the same time, eh? so you can write a poem
about it?"
His vanity flattered, Schantze began answering Franz back, and, to and
fro they shuttled their tongues, each showing off to the other--and to
me, a mere cabin boy. And Franz, for the moment, seemed to have
forgotten how he had been dragged aboard ... and the captain--that Franz
was a mutineer, tied to the taffrail for insubordination!
* * * * *
Sea-sickness never came near me. Only it was queer to feel the footing
beneath my feet rhythmically rising and falling ... for that's the way
it seemed to my land-legs. But then I never was very sturdy on my legs
... which were then like brittle pipestems.... I sprawled about,
spreading and sliding, as I went to and from the galley, bringing, in
the huge basket, the breakfast, dinner and supper for the cabin....
The sailors called me "Albatross" (from the way an albatross acts when
sprawling on shipdeck). They laughed and poked fun at me.
* * * * *
"Look here, you Yankee rascal," said the captain, when I told him I
never drank ... "I think it would do you good if you got a little smear
of beer-froth on your mouth once in a while ... you'd stop looking
leathery like a mummy ... you've already got some wrinkles on your face
... a few good drinks would plump you out, make a man of you.
"In Germany mothers give their babies a sip from their steins before
they are weaned ... that's what makes us such a great nation."
* * * * *
If I didn't drink, at least the two mates and the sailmaker made up for
me ... we had on board many cases of beer stowed away down in the
afterhold, where the sails were stored. And next to the dining room
there was the space where provisions were kept--together with kegs of
kümmel, and French and Rhine wines and claret....
And before we had been to sea three days I detected a conspiracy on the
part of the first and second mates, the cook, and the sailmaker--the
object of the conspiracy being, apparently, to drink half the liquor out
of each receptacle, then fill the depleted cask with hot water, shaking
it up thoroughly, and so mixing it.
As far as I could judge, the old, bow-legged sailmaker had taken out a
monopoly on the cases of beer aft. Never were sails kept in better
condition. He was always down there, singing and sewing.
Several times I saw him coming up whistling softly with a lush air of
subdued and happy reminiscence.
* * * * *
Several mornings out ... and I couldn't believe my ears ... I heard a
sound of music. It sounded like a grind-organ on a city street....
_The Sunshine of Paradise Alley_.
And the captain's voice was booming along with the melody.
I peeked into Schantze's cabin to announce breakfast.
He had a huge music box there. And he was singing to its playing, and
dancing clumsily about like a happy young mammoth.
"Spying on the 'old man,' eh?"
He came over and caught me by an ear roughly but playfully.
"No, Captain, I was only saying breakfast is ready."
"You're a sly one ... do you like that tune? _The Sunshine of Paradise
Alley?_ It's my favorite Yankee hymn."
And it must have been; every morning for eighty-nine days the gaudy
music box faithfully played the tune over and over again.
* * * * *
The ship drifted slowly through the Sargasso Sea--that dead, sweltering
area of smooth waters and endless leagues of drifting seaweed.... Or we
lifted and sank on great, smooth swells ... the last disturbance of a
storm far off where there were honest winds that blew.
* * * * *
The prickly heat assailed us ... hundreds of little red, biting pimples
on our bodies ... the cook's fresh-baked bread grew fuzz in twenty-four
hours after baking ... the forecastle and cabin jangled and snarled
irritably, like tortured animals....
* * * * *
It was with a shout, one day, that we welcomed a good wind, and shot
clear of this dead sea of vegetable matter.
* * * * *
As we crossed the equator Father Neptune came on board ... a curious
sea-ceremony that must hark back to the Greeks and Romans....
The bow-legged sailmaker played Neptune.
He combed out a beard of rope, wrapped a sheet around his shoulders,
procured a trident of wood....
"Come," shouted one of the sailors to me, running up like a happy boy,
"come, see Neptune climbing on board."
The sail-maker pretended to mount up out of the sea, climbing over the
forecastle head--just as if he had left his car of enormous,
pearl-tinted sea-shell, with the spouting dolphins still hitched to it,
waiting for him, while he paid his respects to our captain.
Captain Schantze, First Mate Miller, Second Mate Stange, stood waiting
the ceremonial on the officers' bridge, an amused smile playing over
their faces.
A big, boy-faced sailor named Klaus, and the ship's blacksmith, a
grey-eyed, sandy-haired fellow named Klumpf, followed the sailmaker
close behind, as he swept along in his regalia, solemnly and
majestically. And Klaus beat a triangle. And Klumpf played an accordion.
"Sailmaker" (the only name he was called by on the ship) made a
grandiose speech to the Captain.
Schantze replied in the same vein, beginning,
"Euer Majestät--"
* * * * *
The sailors marched forward again, to their music, like pleased
children. For custom was that they should have plum duff this day, and
plenty of hot grog....
Before I was aware, I was caught up by several arms.
For I had never before crossed the line. So I must be initiated.
They set me on a board, over a great barrel of sea-water.
Klumpf gave me a mock-shave with a vile mixture of tar and soap. He used
a great wooden razor about three feet long. The officers shouted and
laughed, looking on from the bridge.
"What's your name, my boy?" asked Father Neptune.
"John Greg--" Before I could articulate fully the blacksmith thrust a
gob of the vile lather into my mouth. As I spluttered and spit everyone
gave shouts of laughter. One or two sailors rolled on the deck,
laughing, as savages are said to do when overtaken with humour.
The board on which I sat was jerked from under me. Once, two times,
three times, I was pushed, almost bent double, far down into the barrel
of sea-water. It was warm, at least.
Then a hue and cry went up for Franz. He was caught. He swore that he
had crossed the line before, as doubtless he had. But there was now a
sort of quiet feud between him and the rest aboard. So in a tumbling
heap, they at last bore him over. He fought and shrieked. And because he
did not submit and take the ceremony good-naturedly, he was treated
rather roughly.
* * * * *
My certificate of initiation was handed me formally and solemnly. It was
a semi-legal florid document, sealed with a bit of rope and tar. It
certified that I had crossed the line. The witnesses were "The
Mainmast," "The Mizzen Mast," and other inanimate ship's parts and
objects....
"Keep this," said Sailmaker, as he handed it to me, "as evidence that
you have already crossed the line, and you will never be shaved with tar
and a wooden razor again. You are now a full-fledged son of Neptune."
* * * * *
On a ship at sea where the work to do never ends, it is a serious matter
if one of the crew does not know his work, or fails to hold up his end.
That means that there is so much more work to be done by the others.
Franz deliberately shirked. And, as far as I could see, he purposely
got in bad with the mates, under whom he had approximately sixty days
more of pulling and hauling, going up aloft, scrubbing, and chipping to
do. I was puzzled at the steadfast, deliberate malingering of the man.
The crew all hated him, too. I have seen the man at the wheel
deliberately deflect the ship from its course, in order to bring the
wind against the mutineer's belly, hoping to have him blown overboard
while he was running aloft....
And one night, in the forecastle, someone hurled a shoe at him. A blow
so savagely well-aimed, that when he came running aft, howling with pain
(for, for all his obstinacy, he seemed to lack courage)--to complain of
the outrage, to Schantze--his eye popped out so far that it seemed as if
leaping out of its socket! It was ghastly and bloody like a butchered
heart.
Later, I asked the sailors why this had been done to Franz. And Klumpf
said--
"We had a scuffle over something. We were all taking it friendly ... and
Franz bit Klaus through the hand, almost ... then someone threw a shoe
and hit him in the eye"....
* * * * *
In about a week, after his eye had healed just a little, I drew Franz
apart. We sat down together on the main hatch. I was worried about him.
I did not understand him. I was sorry for him.
"Look here, Franz ... don't you know you might get put clean out of
business if you keep this mutiny of one up much longer? You can't whip a
whole ship's crew."
"I don't want to whip a whole ship's crew."
"The captain had to have another man in a hurry, you know ... but he's
really willing to give you decent treatment."
"Did the captain send you to tell me this?"
"Of course not ... only I'm sorry for you."
Franz gave me a broad, inexplicable wink. He smiled grotesquely--from
swollen lips made more grotesque because of a recent punch in the mouth
"Sailmaker" had fetched him....
"Don't trouble yourself about me. I know what I'm doing, my boy."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean that, as soon as I came out of my drunk, and found myself
shanghaied, I _wanted_ them to ill-treat me ... there's a Sailors' Aid
Society at Sydney, you know!"
"What good will the Sailors' Aid Society do you?"
"You just wait and see what good it will do me!"
"Nonsense, Franz! The captain's willing to pay you off at Sydney."
"Pay me off, eh? Yes, and the old boy will pay me handsome damages,
too!... the sentimental old ladies that have nothing else to do but
befriend the poor abused sailor, will see to it that I find justice in
the courts there."
"You have a good case against the captain as it is, then. Why don't you
turn to and behave and be treated decently?"
"No," he replied, with a curious note of strength in his voice, "the
worse I'm treated the more damages I can collect. I'm going to make it a
real case of brutal treatment before I leave this old tub."
"But they--they'll--they might kill you!"
"Not much ... those days are about gone ... for a man who knows how to
handle himself, as I do....
"Well, let us thank God," he finished, "for the Sailors' Aid Society and
the dear old maids at Sydney!"
I walked off, thinking. Franz had sworn me not to tell. Yet I was
tempted to. It would get me in right with Captain Schantze.
* * * * *
We shaped to the Cape of Good Hope with great, southern jumps. We were
striking far south for the strong, steady winds.
* * * * *
"There was a damned English ship, the _Lord Summerville_, that left New
York about the same time we did ... she's a sky-sailer ... we mustn't
let her beat us into Sydney."
"Why not, Captain?"
"An Englishman beat a German!" the captain spat, "fui! We're going to
beat England yet at everything ... already we're taking their
world-trade away from them ... and some day we'll beat them at sea and
on land, both."
"In a war, sir?"
"Yes, in a war ... in a great, big war! It will have to come to that,
Johann, my boy."
* * * * *
The cook's opinion on the same subject was illuminating.
He told me many anecdotes which tended to prove that even England's
colonies were growing tired of her arrogance: he related droll stories
told him by Colonials about the Queen ... obscene and nasty they were,
too.
"Catch a German talking that way about the Kaiserin!"
The old cook couldn't realize a peculiarity of the Anglo-Saxon
temperament--that those they rail against and jibe at they love the
most!
* * * * *
Off the Tristan da Cunha Islands we ran head-on into a terrific storm
... one that lasted forty-eight hours or more, with rushing, screaming
winds, and steady, stinging blasts of sleet that came thick in
successions of driving, grey cloud.
It was then that we lost overboard a fine, handsome young Saxon, one
Gottlieb Kampke:
Five men aloft ... only four came down ... Kampke was blown overboard
off the footrope that ran under the yard, as he stood there hauling in
on the sail. For he was like a young bull in strength; and, scorning, in
his strength, the tearing wind, he used to heave in with both hands ...
not holding fast at all, no matter how hard the wind tore.
* * * * *
It was all that the ship herself could do, to live. Already two
lifeboats had been bashed in. And the compass stanchioned on the bridge
had gone along with a wave, stanchions and all.
* * * * *
There was no use trying to rescue Gottlieb Kampke. Besides, he would be
dead as soon as he reached the water, in such a boiling sea, the captain
said to me.
The melancholy cry, "Man overboard!" ...
I took oath that if I ever reached home alive, I would never go to sea
again. If I just got home, alive, I would be willing even to tie up
brown parcels in grocery cord, for the rest of my life, to sweep out a
store day after day, regularly and monotonously, in safety!...
The captain saw me trembling with a nausea of fear. And, with the winds
booming from all sides, the deck as slippery as the body of a live eel,
he gave me a shove far out on the slant of the poop. I sped in the grey
drive of sleet clear to the rail. The ship dipped under as a huge wave
smashed over, all fury and foam, overwhelming the helmsman and bearing
down on me....
It was miraculous that I was not swept overboard.
After that, strangely, I no longer feared, but enjoyed a quickening of
pulse. And I gladly took in the turns in the rope as the men sang and
heaved away ... waves would heap up over us. We would hold tight till we
emerged again. Then again we would shout and haul away.
* * * * *
"It's all according to what you grow used to," commented the captain.
* * * * *
By the time I was beginning to look into the face of danger as into a
mother's face, the weather wore down. The ocean was still heavy with
running seas, but we rode high and dry.
* * * * *
Unlucky Kampke!
His shipmates bore his dunnage aft, for the captain to take in charge.
And, just as in melodramas and popular novels, a picture of a
fair-haired girl was found at the bottom of his sea-chest, together with
one of his mother ... his sweetheart and his mother....
Depositions were taken down from his forecastle mates, as to his going
overboard, and duly entered into the log ... and the captain wrote a
letter to his mother, to be mailed to her from Sydney.
* * * * *
For a day we were sad. An imminent sense of mortality hung over us.
But there broke, the next morning, a clear sky of sunshine and an open
though still yesty sea--and we sang, and became thoughtless and gay
again.
* * * * *
"Yes," sighed the cook, "I wish it had been Franz instead of Gottlieb.
Gottlieb was such a fine fellow, and Franz is such a son of a----."
* * * * *
... I have left something out.
At the beginning of the voyage Captain Schantze housed a flock of two
dozen chickens in a coop under the forecastle ... in order to insure
himself of fresh eggs during the voyage....
And for fresh meat, he had a huge sow hauled aboard--to be killed later
on....
* * * * *
One morning, when I went forward to fetch the captain's and mates'
breakfast, I found the cook all white and ghastly....
"What's the matter, Cook?"
"To-day's the day I've got to butcher the sow," he complained, "and I'd
give anything to have someone else do it ... I've made such a pet of her
during the voyage ... and she's so intelligent and affectionate ...
she's decenter than lots of human beings I've met."
I kept to the cabin while the butchering was going on.
The cook, the next day, with tears streaming down his face, told me how
trusting the sow had been to the last moment....
"I'll never forget the look in her eyes when she realised what I had
done to her when I cut her throat."
"And I'll never be able to eat any of her. I'd throw it up as fast as it
went down ... much as I do like good, fresh pork."
* * * * *
The ship-boys, Karl and Albert, always stole the eggs, the captain was
sure, as soon as they were laid, though he was never able to catch them
at it.
"Run," he would shout hurriedly to me, "there! I hear the hens cackling.
They've laid an egg."
I'd run. But there'd be no egg. Someone would have reached the nest,
from the forecastle, before I did.
Because the eggs were always stolen as soon as laid, the captain decreed
the slaughter of the hens, too ... not a rooster among them ... the hens
were frankly unhappy, because of this....
* * * * *
The last hen was to be slain. Pursued, she flew far out over the still
ocean. Further and further she flew, keeping up her heavy body as if by
an effort of will.
"Come back! Don't be such a damn fool!" I shouted in my excitement.
Everybody was watching when the chicken would light ... how long it
could keep up....
As soon as I shouted "come back!" the bird, as if giving heed to my
exhortation, slowly veered, and turned toward the ship again. Everybody
had laughed till they nearly sank on deck, at my naïve words.
Now a spontaneous cheer went up, as the hen slowly tacked and started
back....
It was still weather, but the ship was moving ahead....
"She won't make it!"
"She will!"
Another great shout. She lit astern, right by the wheel. Straightway she
began running forward, wings spread in genuine triumph.
"Catch her!" shouted the mate.
Nobody obeyed him; they stood by laughing and cheering, till the hen
made safety beneath the forecastle head.
* * * * *
She was spared for three days.
* * * * *
"If you ever tell the captain on us," First Mate Miller threatened, as
he and the second mate stood over a barrel of Kümmel, mixing hot water
with it, to fill up for what they had stolen, "if you ever tell, I'll
see that you go overboard--by accident ... when we clear for Iqueque,
after we unload at Sydney."
"Why should I tell? It's none of my business!"
I had come upon them, as they were at work. The cook had sent me into
the store-room for some potatoes.
* * * * *
Miller, the first mate, was quite fat and bleary-eyed. He used to go
about sweating clear through his clothes on warm days. At such times I
could detect the faint reek of alcohol coming through his pores. It's a
wonder Schantze didn't notice it, as I did.
* * * * *
Sometimes, at meals, the captain would swear and say, sniffing at the
edge of his glass, "What's the matter with this damned brandy ... it
tastes more like water than a good drink of liquor."
As he set his glass down in disgust, the mates would solemnly and
hypocritically go through the same operation, and express their wonder
with the captain's.
Finally one of the latter would remark sagely, "they always try to palm
off bad stuff on ships."
In spite of my fear of the mates, I once had to stuff a dirty dish-rag
down my mouth to keep from laughing outright. The greasy rag made me gag
and almost vomit.
"And what's the matter with you?" inquired Schantze, glaring into the
pantry at me, while the two mates also glowered, for a different reason.
* * * * *
"You skinny Yankee," said the captain, taking me by the ear, rather
painfully, several days after that incident, "I'm sure someone's
drinking my booze. Could it be you, in spite of all your talk about not
drinking? You Anglo-Saxons are such dirty hypocrites."
"Indeed, no, sir,--it isn't me."
"Well, this cabin's in your care, and so is the storeroom. You keep a
watch-out and find out for me who it is.... I don't think its Miller or
the second mate ... it must be either the cook or that old rogue of a
sailmaker....
"Or it might be some of the crew," he further speculated, "but anyhow,
it's your job to take care of the cabin, as I said before....
"Remember this--all sailors are thieves, aboard ship, if the chance to
take anything good to eat or drink comes their way."
I promised to keep a good look-out.
On the other hand....
"Mind you keep your mouth shut ... and don't find things so damned
funny, neither," this from the first mate, early one morning, as I
scrubbed the floors. He stirred my posteriors heavily with a booted
foot, in emphasis.
* * * * *
The sea kicked backward in long, speedy trails of foam, lacing the
surface of a grey-green waste of waves....
* * * * *
When I had any spare time, I used to lie in the net under the bowsprit,
and read. From there I could look back on the entire ship as it sailed
ahead, every sail spread, a magnificent sight.
One day, as I lay there, reading Shelley, or was it my Vergil that I was
puzzling out line by line, with occasional glances at the great ship
seeming to sail into me--myself poised outward in space--
There came a great surge of water. I leaped up in the net, bouncing
like a circus acrobat. My book fell out of my hand into the sea.
I looked up, and saw fully half the crew grinning down at me. The mate
stood over me. A bucket that still dripped water in his hand showed me
where the water had come from.
"Come up out of there! The captain's been bawling for you for half an
hour ... we thought you'd gone overboard."
I came along the net, drenched and forlorn.
"What in hell were you doing down there?"
"I--I was thinking," I stammered.
"He was thinking," echoed the mate scornfully. "Well, thinking will
never make a sailor of you."
Boisterous laughter.
"After this do your thinking where we can find you when you're wanted."
As I walked aft, the mate went with me pace for pace, poking more fun at
me. To which I dared not answer, as I was impelled, because he was
strong and I was very frail ... and always, when on the verge of danger,
or a physical encounter, the memory of my Uncle Lan's beatings would now
crash into my memory like an earthquake, and render my resolution and
sinews all a-tremble and unstrung.
I was of a mind to tell the captain _who_ was drinking his liquor--but
here again I feared, and cursed myself for fearing.
When the mate told him of where he had found me, at last--what he had
done--what I had said--Schantze laughed....
But, later on, he sympathised with me and unexpectedly remarked:
"Johann, how can you expect a heavy-minded numbskull like Miller to
understand!"
Then, laughing, he seized me by the ear--his usual gesture of fondness
for me--
"Remember me if you ever write a book about this voyage, and don't give
me too black a name! I'm not so bad, am I, eh?"
* * * * *
The Australian coast had lain blue across the horizon for several days.
"Watch me to-morrow!" whispered Franz cryptically to me as he strolled
lazily by....
Next day, around noon, I heard a big rumpus on the main deck, I hurried
up from the cabin.
There lay Franz, sprawled on his back like a huge, lazy dog, and the
mate was shaking his belly with his foot on top of it, just as one plays
with a dog ... but to show he was not playing, he delivered the
prostrate form of the sailor a swift succession of kicks in the ribs....
"You won't work any longer, you say?"
"No."
"I'll kick your guts out."
"Very well."
"Stand on your feet like a man."
"What for? You'll only knock me down again!" and Franz grinned comically
and grotesquely upward, through the gap in his mouth where two of his
teeth had been punched out earlier in the voyage.
It was easy to see that Franz's curious attitude of non-resistance had
the mate puzzled what to do next. All the sailors indulged in furtive
laughter. None of them had a very deep-rooted love for Miller, and, for
the first time, they rather sympathised with the man who had been
shanghaied ... some of them even snickered audibly ... and straightway
grew intent on their work....
Miller turned irritably on them. "And what's the matter with _you_!"...
"Bring him up here!" shouted Captain Schantze.
Four sailors picked Franz up and carried him, unresisting, bumping his
back on the steps as he sagged like a sack half full of flour....
"Here! I've had about enough of this!" cried the captain, furious, "tie
him to the rail again!..."
"Now, we'll leave you there, on bread and water, till you say you'll
work."
"What does it matter what you do," sauced Franz; "we'll be in port in
four days ... and then you'll see what I'll do!"
* * * * *
"What's that?" cried the captain. Then catching an inkling of Franz's
scheme, he hit the man a quick, hard blow in the mouth with his clenched
fist.
"Give him another!" urged the mate.
But the captain's rage was over, though Franz sent him a bold, mocking
laugh, even as the blood trickled down in a tiny red stream from where
his mouth had, been struck.
I never saw such courage of its kind.
They left him there for ten hours. But he stood without a sign of
exhaustion or giving in. And they untied him. And let him loose.
And, till we hove to at Dalghety's Wharf, in Sydney Harbour, unnoticed,
Franz, the Alsace-Lorrainer, roamed the boat at will, like a passenger.
"Wait till I get on shore ... this little shanghaiing party of the
captain's will cost him a lot of hard money," he said, in a low voice,
to me,--standing idly by, his hands in his pockets, while I was bending
over the brass on the bridge railing, polishing away.
"But they've nearly killed you, Franz ... will it be worth it?"
"All I can say is I wish they'd use me rougher."
"You know, Franz, I'm not a bit sorry for you now ... I was at first."
"That so?... I don't need anybody to be sorry for me. In a week or so,
when I have won my suit against the captain through the Sailors' Aid
Society, I'll be rolling in money ... then you can be sorry for the
captain."
* * * * *
Sydney Harbour ... the air alive with sunlight and white flutterings of
sea gulls a-wing ... alive with pleasure boats that leaned here and yon
on white sails.
* * * * *
Now that we were safe in harbour, I hesitated whether to run away or
continue with the ship. For I had signed on to complete the voyage, via
Iqueque, on the West Coast of South America, to Hamburg ... I hesitated,
I say, because, on shipboard, you're at least sure of food and a place
to sleep....
Karl and I had been set to work at giving the cabin a thorough
overhauling. We fooled away much of our time looking into the captain's
collections of erotic pictures and photographs ... and his obscene books
in every language.
And we discovered under the sofa-seat that was built against the side, a
great quantity of French syrups and soda waters. So we spent quite a
little of our time in mixing temperance drinks for ourselves.
Cautiously I spoke to the cook about what Karl and I were doing. For he
knew, of course, that I knew of his marauding ... and of the mates' and
sailmaker's ... so it was safe to tell him.
"You'd better be careful," the cook admonished me.
"But what could Captain Schantze want with so many bottles of syrup and
soda water aboard?"
"The English custom's officer who comes aboard here is an old friend of
Schantze's, and a teetotaler ... so the captain always treats him to
soda water."
"But Karl and I have drunk it all up already," I confessed slowly.
"You'll both catch a good hiding then when he calls for it and finds
there is none."
The next day the customs man came aboard.
"Have a drink, Mr. Wollaston?" Schantze asked him.
"Yes, but nothing strong," for probably the tenth occasion came the
answer.
Then offhandedly, the captain--as if he had not, perhaps, said the same
thing for ten previous voyages: "I have some fine French soda water and
syrup in my private locker, perhaps you'd like some of that, Mr.
Wollaston?"
Mr. Wollaston, whose face and nose was so ruddy and pimply anyone would
take him for a toper, answers: "Yes, a little of that Won't do any harm,
Captain!"
"Karl!--Johann!" We had been listening, frightened, to the colloquy. We
came out, trembling.
"Look under the cushions in my cabin ... bring out some of the syrup and
soda water you find there."
"Very well, sir!"
We both hurried in ... stood facing each other, too scared to laugh at
the situation. The captain had a heavy hand--and carried a heavy cane
when he went ashore. He had the cane with him now.
After a long time: "You tell him there is none," whispered Karl.
"Well, what's wrong in there?" cried Schantze impatiently.
"We can't find a single bottle, sir!" I repeated, louder.
"What? Come out here! Speak louder! What did you say?"
"We can't find a single bottle, sir!" I murmured, almost inaudibly.
Then Karl, stammering, reinforced me with, "There are a lot of empty
bottles here, sir!"
"What does this mean? Every voyage for years I have had soda and French
syrup in my locker for Mr. Wollaston."
"Oh, don't mind me," deprecated the little customs man, at the same time
as furious as his host.
Karl had already began to blubber in anticipation of the whipping due.
The captain laid his heavy cane on everywhere. The boy fell at his feet,
bawling louder, less from fear than from the knowledge that his
abjectness would please the captain's vanity and induce him to let up
sooner.
"Now _you_ come here!" Schantze beckoned me.
He raised the cane at me. But, to my own surprise, something brave and
strange entered into me. I would not be humiliated before a countryman
of my mother's, that was what it was!
I looked the captain straight in the eye.
"Sir, I did not do it, and I won't be whipped!"
"Wha-at!" ejaculated Schantze, astonished at my novel behaviour.
"I didn't touch the syrup." Karl looked at me, astonished and
incredulous at my audacity, through his tear-stained face.
The captain stepped back from me.
I must be telling the truth to be behaving so differently.
"Get to your bunk then!" he commanded.
I obeyed.
"Who is he?" ... I heard the little customs man ask the skipper; "he
doesn't talk like an Englishman."
"He isn't. He just a damn-fool Yankee boy I picked up in New York."
* * * * *
They had rounded Franz up and locked him away. The captain was
determined to frustrate his little scheme for reimbursement, which he
had by this time guessed.
I lie. I must tell the truth in these memoirs.
I had told on him.
But my motive was only an itch to see what would then take place. But
when I saw that the issue would be an obvious one: that he would merely
be spirited forth to sea again, and this time, _forced_ to work, I felt
a little sorry for the man. At the same time, I admit I wanted to
observe the denouement myself, of his case ... and as I now intended to
desert the ship, it would have to take place in Sydney.
So, on the second night of Franz's incarceration, when nearly everybody
was away on shore-leave, I took the captain's bunch of keys, and I let
the shanghaied man, the mutineer, the man from Alsace-Lorraine--out!
It was not a very dark night. Franz stole along like a rat till he
reached the centre of the dock. There he gave a great shout of defiance
... why, I learned later....
The _Lord Summerville_, which had, after all, beat us in by two days,
despite Captain Schantze's boast, was lying on the other side of our
dock. And her mate and several sailors thus became witnesses of what
happened.
The shout brought, of course, our few men who remained on watch, on
deck, and over on the dock after Franz ... who allowed himself to be
caught ... the dock was English ground ... the ship was German ... a
good point legally, as the canny Franz had foreseen.
His clothes were almost torn from his body.
Miller accidentally showed up, coming back from shore. And he joined in.
"Come back with us, you verfluchte _Alsatz_-Lothringer."
The Englishmen from the _Lord Summerville_ now began calling out, "Let
him alone!" and "I say, give the lad fair play!"
Some of them leaped down on the dock in a trice.
"Who the hell let him out?" roared the mate.
I stood on deck, holding my breath, and ready to bolt in case Franz
betrayed me. But nevertheless my blood was running high and happy over
the excitement I had caused by unlocking the door.
"No one let me out. I picked the lock. Will that suit you?" lied Franz,
protecting me.
"What's the lad been and done?" asked the mate of the _Lord
Summerville_.
"I was shanghaied in New York," put in Franz swiftly, "and I demand
English justice."
"And you shall get it, my man!" answered the mate proudly, "for you have
been assaulted on English ground, as I'll stand witness."
A whistle was blown. Men came running. Soon Franz was outside the
jurisdiction of Germany.
* * * * *
The next day Captain Schantze stalked about, hardly speaking to Miller.
He was angry and laid the blame at the latter's door.
"Miller, why in the name of God didn't you guard that fellow better? An
English court ... you know what _they'll_ do to us!"
Miller spread his hands outward, shrugged his shoulders expressively,
remained in silence. The two mates and the captain ate the rest of their
supper in a silence that bristled.
The ship was detained for ten days more after its cargo had been
unloaded.
At the trial, during which the "old maids" and The Sailors' Aid Society
came to the fore, Captain Schantze roared his indignant best--so much so
that the judge warned him that he was not on his ship but on English
ground....
Franz got a handsome verdict in his favour, of course.
And for several days he was seen, rolling drunk about the streets, by
our boys, who now looked on him as a pretty clever person.
* * * * *
It was my time to run away--if I ever intended to. Within the next day
or so we were to take on coal for the West Coast. We were to load down
so heavily, the mate, who had conceived a hatred of me, informed me,
that even in fair weather the scuppers would be a-wash. Significantly he
added there would be much danger for a man who was not liked aboard a
certain ship ... by the mates ... much danger of such a person's being
washed overboard. For the waves, you know, washed over the deck of so
heavily loaded a ship at will.
* * * * *
On the _Lord Summerville_ was a mad Pennsylvania boy who had, like
myself, gone to sea for the first time ... but he had had no uncle to
beat timidity into him ... and he had dared ship as able seaman on the
big sky-sailed lime-juicer, and had gloriously acquitted himself.
He was a tall, rangy young bullock of a lad. He could split any door
with his fist. He liked to drink and fight. And he liked women in the
grog-house sense.
One of his chief exploits had been the punching of the second mate in
the jaw when both were high a-loft. Then he had caught him about the
waist, and held him till he came to, to keep him from falling. The mate
had used bad language at him.
Hoppner had worked from the first as if he had been born to the sea.
He and I met in a saloon. The plump little barmaid had made him what she
called, "A man's drink," while me she had served contemptuously with a
ginger ale.
Hoppner boasted of his exploits. I, of mine.
"I tell you what, Gregory, since we're both jumping ship here, let's be
pals for awhile and travel together."
"I'm with you, Hoppner."
"And why jump off empty-handed, since we are jumping off?"
"What is it you're driving at?"
"There ought to be a lot of loot on two boats!"
"Suppose we get caught?" I asked cautiously.
"Anybody that's worth a damn will take a chance in this world. Aren't
you game to take a chance?"
"Of course I'm game."
"Well, then, you watch your chance and I'll watch mine. I'll hook into
everything valuable that's liftable on my ship and you tend to yours in
the same fashion."
* * * * *
We struck hands in partnership, parted, and agreed to meet at the
wharf-gate the next night, just after dark, he with his loot, I with
mine.
I spent the morning of the following day prospecting. I had seen the
captain put the ship's money for the paying of the crew in a drawer, and
turn the key.
But first, with a curious primitive instinct, I fixed on a small ham and
a loaf of rye bread as part of the projected booty, in spite of the fact
that, if I but laid hands on the ship's money, I would have quite a
large sum.
It was the piquaresque romance of what I was about to do that moved me.
The romance of the deed, not the possession of the objects stolen, that
appealed to my imagination. I pictured my comrade and myself going
overland, our swag on our backs, eluding pursuit ... and joining with
the natives in some far hinterland. I would be a sort of Jonathan Wilde
plus a François Villon.
Before the captain returned I had surveyed everything to my satisfaction
... after supper the captain and the two mates left for shore again.
Now was the time. I searched the captain's old trousers and found the
ship's keys there. They were too bulky to carry around with him.
The keys seemed to jangle like thunder as I tried them one after the
other on the drawer where I had seen him put away the gold.
I heard someone coming. I started to whistle noisily, and to polish the
captain's _carpet slippers!_ ... it was only someone walking on deck ...
The last key was, dramatically, the right one. The drawer opened ... but
it was empty! I had seen the captain--the captain had also seen me. Now
I started to take anything I could lay my hands on.
I snatched off the wall two silver-mounted cavalry pistols, a present
from his brother to Schantze. I added a bottle of kümmel to the ham and
the rye bread. The kümmel a present for Hoppner.
Then, before leaving the _Valkyrie_ forever, I sat down to think if
there were not something I might do to show my contempt for Miller.
There were many things I could do, I found.
In the first place, I took a large sail-needle and some heavy-thread and
I sewed two pairs of his trousers and two of his coats up the middle of
the legs and arms, so he couldn't put them on, at least right away. I
picked up hammer and nails and nailed his shoes and sea-boots securely
to the middle of his cabin floor. Under his pillow I found a full flask
of brandy. I emptied half ... when I replaced it, it was full again. But
I had not resorted to the brandy cask to fill it.
* * * * *
The apprehension that I might be come upon _flagrante delictu_ gave me a
shiver of apprehension. But it was a pleasurable shiver. I enjoyed the
malicious wantonness of my acts, and my prospective jump into the
unknown ... all the South Seas waited for me ... all the world!
But, though every moment's delay brought detection and danger nearer, I
found time for yet one more stroke. With a laughable vision of Schantze
smashing Miller all over the cabin, I wrote and left this note pinned on
the former's pillow:
Dear Captain:--
By the time you read this letter I will be beyond your reach (then
out of the instant's imagination ... I had not considered such a
thing hitherto). I am going far into the interior and discover a
gold mine. When I am rich I shall repay you for the cavalry pistols
which I am compelled to confiscate in lieu of my wages, which I now
forfeit by running away, though entitled to them.
You have been a good captain and I like you.
As for Miller, he is beneath my contempt. It was he who drank all
your wines, brandies, and whiskies ... the sailmaker is to answer
for your beer. The second mate has been in on this theft of your
liquors, too (I left the cook out because he had been nice to me).
Good-bye, and good luck.
Your former cabin boy, and, though you may not believe me, always
your well-wisher and friend,
JOHN GREGORY.
I left what I had stolen bundled up in my blanket. I walked forward
nonchalantly to see if anyone was out to observe me. I discovered the
sandy-haired Blacksmith, Klumpf, sitting on the main hatch. I saw that I
could not pass him with my bundle without strategy. The strategy I
employed was simple.
I drew him a bottle of brandy. I gave it to him. After he had drawn a
long drink I told him I was running away from the ship. He laughed and
took another drink. I passed him with my bundle. He shouted good-bye to
me.
Before I had gone by the nose of the old ship, who should I run into but
Klaus, coming back from a spree. He was pushing along on all fours like
an animal, he was so drunk ... good, simple Klaus, whom I liked. I laid
down my bundle, risking capture, while I helped him to the deck. He
stopped a moment to pat the ship's side affectionately as if it were a
living friend, or nearer, a mother.
"Gute alte _Valkyrie!_.. gute alte _Valkyrie!_" he murmured.
* * * * *
Safe so far. At the outside of the dock-gate Hoppner waited my arrival.
He was interested in the kümmel, and in the pistols, which were
pawnable.
He had been more daring than I. He had tried to pick his captain's
pocket of a gold watch while the latter slept. But every time he reached
for it the captain stirred uneasily. He would have snatched it anyhow,
but just then his first mate stepped into the cabin ... "and I hid till
the mate went out again."
"And what then?"
"I picked up a lot of silverware the captain had for show occasions ...
that I found, rummaging about."
"And him there sleeping?"
"Why not?"
"I found four revolvers that belonged to the mates and captain. I put
them all in one bundle and chucked them into a rowboat over the ship's
side. And now we must go back to your boat--"
"To my boat?" I asked, amazed.
"Yes" (I had told him how nearly I had missed our ship-money).
"To your boat, and ransack the cabin till we locate that coin."
"That's too risky."
"Hell, take a chance, can't you?"
That's what Hoppner was always saying as long as we travelled together:
"Hell, take a chance."
But when I began telling him with convulsive laughter, of the revenge I
had taken on the mate ... and also how I had thrown all the keys
overboard, Hoppner, instead of joining in with my laughter, struck at
me, not at all playfully, "What kind of damn jackass have I joined up
with, anyhow," he exclaimed. "Now it won't be any use going back, you've
thrown the keys away and we'd make too great a racket, breaking open
things...."
He insisted, however, on going back to his own boat, sliding down to the
rowboat, and rowing away with the loot he had cast into it. We had no
sooner reached the prow of the _Lord Summerville_ than we observed
people bestirring themselves on board her more than was natural.
"Come on, _now_ we'll beat it. They're after me."
Hoppner had also brought a blanket. We went "humping bluey" as swagmen,
as the tramp is called in Australia.
The existence of the swagman is the happiest vagrant's life in the
world. He is usually regarded as a bona fide seeker for work, and food
is readily given him for the asking. Unlike the American hobo, he is
given his food raw, and is expected to cook it himself. So he carries
what he calls a "tucker bag" to hold his provisions; also, almost more
important--his "billy can" or tea-pot....
Hoppner and I acquired the tea-habit as badly as the rest of the
Australian swagmen. Every mile or so the swagman seems to stop, build a
fire, and brew his draught of tea, which he makes strong enough to take
the place of the firiest swig of whiskey. I've seen an old swagman boil
his tea for an actual half-hour, till the resultant concoction was as
thick and black as New Orleans molasses. With such continual draughts of
tea, only the crystalline air, and the healthy dryness of the climate
keeps them from drugging themselves to death.
"Tea ain't any good to drink unless you can put a stick straight up in
it, and it can stand alone there," joked an old swagman, who had invited
us to partake of a hospitable "billy-can" with him.
* * * * *
We had long, marvellous talks with different swagmen, as we slowly
sauntered north to Newcastle....
We heard of the snakes of Australia, which workmen dug up in torpid
writhing knots, in the cold weather ... of native corrobories which one
old informant told us he had often attended, where he procured native
women or "gins" as they called them, for a mere drink of whiskey or gin
... "that's why they calls 'em 'gins'" he explained ... (wrong, for
"gin" or a word of corresponding sound is the name for "woman" in many
native languages in the antipodes)....
The azure beauty of those days!... tramping northward with nothing in
the world to do but swap stories and rest whenever we chose, about
campfires of resinous, sweetly smelling wood ... drinking and drinking
that villainous tea.
In Australia the law against stealing rides on freights is strictly
enforced. The tramp has always to walk--to the American tramp this is at
first a hardship, but you soon grow to like it ... you learn to enjoy
the wine in the air, the fragrance of the strange trees that shed bark
instead of leaves, the noise of scores of unseen Waterfalls in the hills
of New South Wales.
The morning that the little sea-port of Newcastle lay before us, I felt
as if I had been on tour through a strange world. For the first time the
story-books of my youth had come true.
But Hoppner rose from the camp fire that we'd been sleeping by,
stretched, and remarked, "now, thank Christ, I'll be able to find a good
seat in a pub again, just like in Sydney, and all the booze I can drink.
We can go to some sailors' boarding house here, tell them we want to
ship out, and they'll furnish us with the proper amount of drinks and
take care of us, all hunky dory, till they find us a berth on ship ...
of course they'll be well paid for their trouble ... two months' advance
pay handed over to them by the skipper ... but that won't bother me a
bit."
From the hill on which we lay encamped we saw all the ships in the
harbour. I no longer feared the sea. Your true adventurer forgets danger
and perils experienced as a woman forgets the pangs of childbirth.
* * * * *
We met a sailor on the street, who, though at first a stranger, soon
became our friend and, with the quick hospitality of the sea, steered us
to a pub known as the Green Emerald, bought us drinks, and introduced us
to Mother Conarty, the proprietress.
"I'll ship ye out all right, but where's your dunnage?"
We confessed that we had run away from our ships down at Sydney.
The old sailor had spoken of Mother Conarty as rough-mannered, but a
woman with "a good, warm heart."
She proved it by taking us in to board, with no dunnage for her to hold
as security.
"Oh, they're good lads, I'm sure," vouched our sailor-friend, speaking
of us as if we had been forecastle mates of his for twenty voyages on
end ... the way of the sea!
Now Mother Conarty was not stupid. She was a great-bodied, jolly
Irishwoman, but she possessed razor-keen, hazel eyes that narrowed on us
a bit when she first saw us. But the woman in her soon hushed her
passing suspicions. For Hoppner was a frank-faced, handsome lad, with
wide shoulders and a small waist like a girl's. It was Hoppner's good
looks took her in. She gave us a room together.
* * * * *
There was a blowsy cheeked bar-maid, Mother Conarty's daughter. She
knew well how to handle with a few sharp, ironic remarks anyone who
tried to "get fresh" with her ... and if she couldn't, there were plenty
of husky sailormen about, hearty in their admiration for the resolute,
clean girl, and ready with mauling fists.
* * * * *
"Mother Conarty's proud o' that kid o' hers, she is."
"And well she may be!"
* * * * *
"I've been thinkin' over you b'yes, an' as ye hain't no dunnage wit' ye,
I'm thinkin' ye'll be workin' fer yer board an' room."
"We're willing enough, mother," I responded, with a sinking of the
heart, while Hoppner grimaced to me, behind her back.
We scrubbed out rooms, and the stairs, the bar, behind the bar, the
rooms back and front, where the sailors drank. We earned our board and
room ... for a few days.
* * * * *
At the Green Emerald I met my first case of delirium tremens. And it was
a townsman who had 'em, not a sailor. The townsman was well-dressed and
well-behaved--at first ... but there lurked a wild stare in his eye that
was almost a glaze ... and he hung on the bar and drank and drank and
drank. It apparently had no effect on him, the liquor that he took.
"Say, but you're a tough one," complimented Molly.
But _it_ began in the afternoon. He picked up a stray dog from the floor
and began kissing it. And the dog slavered back, returning his
affection. Then he dropped the dog and began picking blue monkeys off
the wall ... wee things, he explained to us ... that he could hold
between thumb and forefinger ... only there were so many of them ...
multitudes of them ... that they rather distressed him ... they carried
the man away in an ambulance.
* * * * *
Hoppner and I tired of the ceaseless scrubbing. One day we simply walked
out of the Green Emerald and never showed up again. Hoppner stayed on in
town.
I found that the _Valkyrie_ had run up from Sydney to coal at Newcastle,
for the West Coast. I thought that in this case a little knowledge was
not a dangerous thing, but a good thing, as long as I confined that
knowledge to myself. I knew that the _Valkyrie_ was there. It was not
necessary that the officers of the boat should know I was there ...
which I wasn't, for I turned south, my swag on my back, and made Sydney
again.
* * * * *
In Sydney and "on the rocks," that is with nothing to eat and no place
to sleep but outdoors.
Of course I couldn't keep away from the ships. I arrived at the Circular
Quay. I ran into the Sailors' Mission. They were serving tea and having
a prayer-meeting. I wandered in.
A thin, wisplike man, timid, in black, but very gentlemanly, made me
heartily welcome. Not with that obnoxious, forced heartiness sky-pilots
think the proper manner to affect in dealing with sailors, but in a
human way genuinely felt.
After a service of hearty singing, he asked me if he could help me in
any way.
"I suppose you can. I'm on the rocks bad."
He gave me all the cakes to eat which were left over from the tea. And a
couple of shillings beside.
"I wonder if there's anything else I can do?"
"Yes, I'm a poet," I ventured, "and I'd like to get Chaucer's
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