Part 2

One of Mr. Parke’s resources was changing his clothes. In the country, for instance, he dressed with his usual minuteness for breakfast, but if the gardener sent word that an orchid had bloomed, or that a branch on one of the trees was turning yellow before it ought to, or that some Sunday tripper had left a sardine tin and two eggshells on the cliff walk--if, in fact, he felt it imperative to leave the house even for a short time, the act necessitated a change of costume. He would put on tweed knickerbockers and a kind of shooting jacket. On his return he would change again to still another suit for luncheon, afterwards the tweeds again if he went for a walk, then something else for tea and, finally, evening dress for dinner. They both also spent a great deal of time in showing and explaining their two houses to visitors--the closet doors that could not possibly slam, because their area had been exactly adjusted to the resistance of the number of cubic feet of air inside, or words to that effect; the ventilating apparatus that forced every lungful they breathed through three thicknesses of sterilized cheese cloth; the heating arrangements that did something quite uncanny, I forget what.

“You have seen the unceasing labor of forty years,” Mr. Parke would usually assure you when you had finished the tour of inspection. Their greatest triumph, however, consisted of the fact that, when they left town for the country on April the ninth, they took no luggage with them, not even a small handbag. They drove to the station empty handed, and on arriving at their destination resumed their existence, as it were, in duplicate. To the least detail there were replicas of every garment, every shoe, every toilet article, every skein of worsted and every book the two possessed.

The last time I saw them they had both aged considerably and they were, if possible, more “driven” than usual. A distant cousin had written that he expected to pass through town on his way to Europe, that he wanted to see them both and would like to stay all night at their house. With the letter in her agitated hand Mrs. Parke despairingly appealed to me.

“But how can we?” she wailed, as one of the two men servants who had brought in the tea things quietly restored a book I had disarranged to its geometric site on the mahogany table. “I don’t see how we can. We’ve been back from the country for only three weeks, and the house is in a perfect whirl!” I thought of the eight immense, unoccupied bedrooms upstairs, and for a moment had visions of my own family sleeping on the floor or in the bath-tub or on the sewing machine in order to make room for unexpected guests. But I agreed that the distant cousin was most inconsiderate, not to say unreasonable.

Mr. Parke came in, but could only shake my hand and apologize for running away. For a month he had been worrying for fear the family tomb in Mount Auburn cemetery might be “damp” and he had at last decided that the only thing to do was to drive out there and “see for himself.”

II

THE FOURTH

Twice a day the fourth officer walked rapidly the length of the promenade deck with an easy, swinging stride and then vanished up a steep flight of steps that led to the bridge. These brief appearances began to interest me, for he was extraordinarily young and good-looking, and it seemed to me but natural that he should at least say good morning to some of the young girls who gazed at him over the tops of their books as he went by and who very clearly would have enjoyed making his acquaintance. But he never stopped and he never spoke. It was not until the fifth day out that he smiled gravely and saluted as he passed my chair. The next day we anchored in a landlocked tropical harbor, and as he was on duty at the top of those wobbly steps (I never am able to remember the nautical name for anything) by which one descends against the side of the ship to the launches, and as there was nothing for him to do after he had assured himself that none of the fat ladies and old gentlemen who were going ashore had fallen into the sea, he strolled out of the broiling sun, where he had been standing, immaculate and amiable, for two hours and a half, and came over to me.

I am not exactly a punctilious person, especially on a hot day in the tropics, but as the Fourth did not sit down on any of the numerous vacant chairs in my neighborhood I, somewhat to my surprise, found myself standing up--standing up, as I rarely was inspired to do in the presence of the captain; and the Fourth was almost, if not quite, young enough to be my son. He took my involuntary display of respect for himself and his white uniform as a matter of course, and as the launches were not to return for an hour we leaned against the rail on the shady side and talked, sometimes in English (his English was correct, although limited) but more often in German. That was the beginning of my acquaintance with the Fourth, one that continued under similar circumstances for several months and proved in many respects to be enlightening.

More than anything else, perhaps, it brought home to me the meaning of discipline long continued. He had learned his profession on a German training ship, starting in at the age of fourteen, and from there he had gone to the navy. Now he was an officer on one of the great German passenger ships. In the meanwhile he had found time to take and pass the naval examinations that made him eligible to the command of a German vessel in any part of the world, and his age was just twenty-four.

I confess I gasped when I heard it (it was the second officer who told me), although I ought to have known it without being told, for from the first I had been struck by his impeccable physical refinement, the kind that but rarely survives a quarter of a century. After that, when he was quietly giving orders to middle-aged quartermasters, skilfully directing the movements of the launches, making mathematical calculations on a slip of paper behind the compass at sunset or pacing the bridge, I often found myself contrasting him with various other young gentlemen of twenty-four some five or six thousand miles away. Living night and day with his watch practically in his hand, rarely sleeping more than four hours at a time, obeying orders and observing regulations blindly, faithfully, without a question or even a thought, had done something to him that was to me very curious, very interesting and very fine. It had not crushed him, it had molded him. It had not changed his nature, it had taken charge of it and directed it. It had not in the least made him prematurely old, it had developed to the fullest extent the capacities of his youth.

He was so reserved, so self-contained at first, that I wondered if he was not perhaps just a beautiful piece of Teutonic machinery, until one morning we steamed into a harbor where the company he served had met with the most hideous ill luck. He pointed out to me the dismantled hulls of two noble ships that had run ashore and were a total loss. One of them had struck because it was impossible for anyone on board to know that an earthquake had destroyed the lighthouse the day before; the other lay tragically on its side among the breakers because the captain had attempted to hit the channel in the dark without a pilot. The Fourth had been on that ship at the time and, when he told me about it, I had to occupy myself with my field glasses and pretend I didn’t know that two large tears had welled up, slipped over and were finding their way down his face. He had been off duty and asleep when the accident happened, and knew nothing about it until the quartermaster woke him up, told him, and said that the captain could not be found. In spite of the fact that the captain’s room was dark, something impelled the Fourth to enter.

“Just inside the door, my foot slipped on something,” he said, “and when I turned on the light--”... Well, immediately after the accident the captain had blown the top of his head off with a rifle.

“Under exactly the same circumstances would you have done the same thing?” I asked the Fourth.

“Oh, yes,” he answered simply, “but I should have waited until I got all the passengers safely on shore.” He was far from being a phlegmatic German machine. As I grew to know him well I saw that he was high-strung and nervous, that he was after all just twenty-four with the longings and aspirations, the excellent discontent of an intelligent and spirited boy. It was all there but it was under admirable control. It had been trained to obey, and not to command, the Fourth.

His existence was in many ways an extremely lonely one, and all the more so because it was passed within touching distance of a gay, rich, pleasure-seeking crowd, with which, it was an understood thing by the company, he was to have no friendly relations.

“On a long voyage like this, where we stop every few days and I stand here on duty, it’s different. I can talk to people now and then and get to know them, just as I know you, but on the seven-day trips across the Atlantic I never speak to a soul. Often, when there are five or six hundred passengers on board, I never even see one of them all the way over. I’m either on the bridge, or asleep, or in my room, or on our own deck. We’re supposed to stay on our own deck when we have nothing to do.”

It was also, judged by material standards, a discouraging existence. There had been occasions when for hours at a time the Fourth had been chiefly responsible for the safety of hundreds of lives and about a million dollars’ worth of property; and for his expert knowledge, his anxiety, his prolonged nervous strain he received the munificent salary of twenty-eight dollars a month--but little more than enough in the tropics, where he had to put on always one, and sometimes two suits of white a day, to pay his laundry bills.

“Nobody but the stewards get rich at sea,” he laughed when we were discussing the matter.

“Do you ever think of giving it up--of doing something else?” I asked him.

“I think of it,” he answered, “but I know I shan’t. I like to look forward to having a command, although I’ll probably be eighty when I get one and too old to take it, and, besides, what could I do? I’ve been on the bridge of a ship since I was fourteen. I don’t know how to breathe inside of a house.”

When we were in port and he could get off, we now and then dined together on shore and went to a show. By way of returning these small hospitalities he did the only thing he very well could do, which was to ask me to go to his room in the evening to have a glass of beer. This I liked infinitely better than an evening spent in the restaurant or the theater of some sultry South American town. His room was large and cool, high up and forward, with neither a sound nor a vibration. It always seemed to be detached from the world, suspended in some way between the sea and the sky, and in it the Fourth, when he got to know me better, felt at liberty to wear his second cleanest white ducks instead of his first, to sprawl on the sofa, to play with his pet monkey, to talk nonsense and to be quite frankly the kid he really was.

One evening he put the monkey in bed with its head on the pillow, drew the cover up around its neck and stretched out beside it. A huge, bare-footed sailor came into the room, managed in some inscrutable fashion to take off his cap with a glass of beer for me in one hand and a cup of coffee for the Fourth in the other, placed the things on the table and tiptoed out. Somewhere far below us, young men and girls were waltzing frantically in the heat, women were dripping over games of bridge as if their souls depended on the outcome, men in the smoking room were getting drunk and calling one another names. But where we were it was, as always, cool and silent and peaceful. One has to lead some kind of a life, and as I sat there thinking, it occurred to me that, even if it was poorly paid and at times lonely, there was something very sane and useful and good about the life of the Fourth.

In a little while he would look at his watch and exclaim a trifle diffidently, but with an unmistakable resumption of authority:

“It’s ten o’clock, you must go now.” Then he would almost instantly fall asleep, sleep for four hours, spend four more alone with the trackless waters and the southern stars, bathe, breakfast and begin another day with a clear brain, steady nerves and untroubled eyes.

As often happens when two persons have remained silent in each other’s presence for several minutes, his train of thought was identical with mine, for when he spoke it was to say: “After all, I do like it.”

WANDERLUST

The crew, much to its surprise, was paid off at Havana and furnished with a variety of explanations that did not particularly explain. Most of the men were bitter about it, but Lansing and Hayward were too unsophisticated, too new to the ways of the sea, to realize at first that they had been imposed upon. They had shipped on the wretched little steamer in New York in a sudden and curiously belated access of romanticism. For Hayward, who was twenty-three, had worked as an electrician since he was seventeen, and Lansing, who could scarcely remember a time when he had not driven a grocer’s wagon, was twenty-four. The sea had never been a boyish passion with them; they, indeed, had rarely seen it. As far as their previous relations with it had been concerned, New York might almost have been situated in the middle of a Dakota prairie. Their lives had always been city lives, but not of the kind that finds its way into popular fiction. For, in expressing themselves, they were not accustomed to employ a semi-unintelligible jargon of new slang, and from personal experience they knew almost as little about the Bowery as they knew about the sea. Their vocabularies, instead of being large and florid, were small and simple; their lapses from grammar were too usual to be interesting. They knew a few streets of the immense place exceedingly well, but they were, for the most part, lower-middle-class, commonplace, entirely respectable streets. They both had lived at home and worked hard--conscientiously, one would say, except that in the routine of their existences conscience played but little part. They had worked hard from habit, from the realization that they could easily be replaced and from an innate desire to keep their “jobs.”

It was strange, or perhaps it wasn’t strange (How do I know?), that the sea had all at once irrelevantly called to them. If they had been fond of reading, their embarkation might plausibly have been the practical attempt to make a dream come true. But they rarely read anything except the larger headlines of one-cent newspapers. The voluminous literature of adventure in foreign countries, of a wild, free life on the high seas, was almost as unknown to them as the thing itself. And yet, one day, they went to sea.

Early in April, an electric car smashed into Lansing’s delivery wagon and hurt the horse, to say nothing of the wagon itself and its valuable contents. The fault was neither Lansing’s nor the motorman’s, but the grocer both discharged Lansing and collected two hundred and fifty dollars from the street railway company. Out of employment, Lansing saw something of New York. He had been faithful and careful, and in a dumb, uncomplaining sort of way he felt aggrieved and rebellious. His long, aimless walks, during the first few days of his idleness, sometimes took him to the water’s edge, and one morning he found himself on a Wall Street wharf, just as a steamer was about to leave for the tropics. Although he didn’t precisely know what it all meant, the experience was, somehow, a moving one. There was an army of half-savage negroes--unlike any negroes he had ever seen--wheeling baggage on trucks and, with incoherent yelps, filling with freight a coarse net of rope that lifted, swung, sank, disappeared, and then reappeared limp and hungrily empty. There were fat, inexplicable women with improbable complexions, accompanied by lean, sallow, gesticulating men, who darted from their trunks to the ship and back again in a frenzy of excitement; and there were smells. Lansing did not know it (he knew very little) but it was the smells that, vulgarly speaking, “did the business.” There was a kind of background--a fundamental smell--of pitch, of tar, of resin; but here and there, protruding from this, as he strolled up and down the long, inclosed wharf, was the rank, searching smell of unroasted coffee, the fruity fragrance of pineapples, the pungent acidity of tomatoes, the heavy sweetness of vanilla. As each odor came to him he inhaled it deeply, curiously, and for him, somewhat excitedly.

After the vessel had slipped away and disappeared around the corner of the wharf, Lansing had emerged with the intention of traversing Wall Street and taking an uptown car, but a young and slightly drunken sailor from a warship in the harbor had, àpropos of nothing at all, thrown an arm about his waist and led him to a saloon across the way. They had together only a glass of beer apiece, but they had sat down to it at a little table and the sailor had talked.

In the sphere of life to which they both belonged there is a directness and a frankness in the matter of intercourse that would be impossible for most persons higher in the social order. Lansing had made many acquaintances and even a few friends by speaking or being spoken to by detached young men of his own age standing on street corners. Most of his acquaintances among girls had been begun in the same way. They had spoken to him or he had spoken to them--it was immaterial--and if they found each other congenial they sometimes met again; sometimes they didn’t. But in any event meeting, talking, parting, involved nothing. It was merely an incident, often a pleasant one, of the kind the so-called upper classes know but little. It seemed perfectly natural to Lansing that the sailor, whom he never had seen before and probably would never see again, should offer him a glass of beer and tell him of his voyage around the world, and that he himself should respond with his accident, his discharge from the grocery--in a word, his “troubles,” as he finally called them.

“A sailor _has_ no troubles,” the other declared as they got up to go; and he altogether looked it. After that, Lansing spent most of his time on the wharves and on Sunday afternoon he took Hayward with him.

Hayward’s experience and education was as limited as his friend’s, but he was of finer clay. What Lansing only felt, Hayward both felt and translated into words.

“Gee, look at them turtles!” he would exclaim at a row of the huge, gasping tortured creatures, lying on their backs and bound to a board by ropes punched through their bleeding flippers. “They come out of the water to lay eggs in the sand, and then you run out of the bushes and turn them over on their backs with a pole. I bet there’s money in turtles.” Or, “Gosh, what a lot of pineapples! How would you like to go down there, Lansing, where it’s always summer, and just sit around while the niggers work, and send millions of pineapples back here to be sold at fifty cents apiece?”

“Forty-five,” corrected Lansing, who had “delivered” them all his life, but who, until recently, had impartially given them the same consideration he had been accustomed to bestow upon a potato. Once they stood for an hour in front of ten cages full of white and yellow cockatoos. They were even more disturbing, more convincing than the incoherent negroes, the excitement of departure, the odor of exotic fruits.

“Down there you can see them flying around wild,” Hayward meditated aloud. “Down there!” The words began to mean wonderful, incommunicable things to both of them. “Down there” was the shimmering, beautiful, hot, mysterious and seductive end of the earth that a Frenchman is always able to evoke for an instant, when, in a certain languid, reminiscent tone, he pronounces the words “_là bas_.”

So they shipped on a tramp steamer and after a week they had been paid off at Havana. In Havana they spent an entrancing day and evening (Hayward bought an imitation diamond brooch at a place on Obispo street where the revolving electric lights in the window elicited the last glitter), but the next day was a good deal of a bore. They had seen the town, there was no point in seeing it over again, and they were unused to idleness. Both of them would have jumped at the opportunity of returning to New York, but as no opportunity of doing so presented itself neither of them had been obliged to admit it. On the third day, however, they did move on to Vera Cruz. To Hayward, Vera Cruz was a name he had heard (Lansing had never even heard it), but had he been asked what country it was in he could not have told. He had an idea that it was near New Orleans and Galveston. In another week they were there--paid off again and turned loose in the Plaza.

Again they spent a notable day. They wandered about the streets, they went to a wedding in a church, they marveled at the unmolested buzzards filching garbage from the open drains along the curbstones, they walked at sunset to the end of the long breakwater and watched the fishermen come in with their gorgeous catch of redsnapper. In the evening they went to a moving-picture show where they saw a realistic bull fight and a manufactured American train robbery. (This last gave them their first twinge of homesickness; the Pullman cars and the passengers looked so natural.) When it was over, they again sought the Plaza, where, in the sultry air, a compact mass of people was slowly forcing its way around and around to the music of an enormous band high above them among the trees in the center. They slept at an inexpensive lodging house to which they had been taken by one of the stokers.

But the next day was very like the second day at Havana, except that the possibilities of Vera Cruz seemed to be fewer. They could not walk in any direction without soon coming to the water or to a hot and dreary stretch of sand, and in their unconsciously blasé New York fashion they had become, by the second day, hardened to ragged Indians, enormous straw hats and scarlet _sarapes_. They sat on a shady bench in the Plaza and discussed an immediate return to New York. Lansing was for going overland; he had a hazy idea that they were near the border, and he was amazed and troubled for a moment when the stoker, whom they several times met again, laughed and told them that the border was a half a week away in a train. This, of course, they knew they could not afford, and they decided to work their way back, as they had come, on a steamer.

After that they spent most of their time on the docks, or in front of the hotels and cafés near them, waylaying skippers and mates. But places on ships bound for New York were apparently not to be had for the asking. The men to whom they applied were invariably curt and definite when they weren’t, as sometimes happened, brutally abusive. This was annoying although it was also, now and then, amusing. They, as yet, had not begun to regard matters in the light of a “situation,” for they still had a little money. At this period of their ebbing fortunes it seemed to them that they were making a sort of humiliating concession when they ceased to specify New York as their destination, and resolved to sail on any ship bound for any American port. But here, again, they were met with the same irritated outbursts, or brief, cold denials.