Part 7

Thomas Morley knew the value of promptitude. He was a young man on whom ninety-two seasons had poured benefits and adversities, although many of the latter he took to be the former, his temperament shedding sorrow as a duck does water, to use a castanean simile.

He was a born and bred New-Yorker, but at the time of which we write he had been living for the last ten or twelve months in Uxton, up among the hills of northwestern Connecticut, studying the natives; for he was a writer.

Having filled a portfolio with material for enough dialect stories to run one of the great magazines for a year, he determined to seek his matter in the metropolis, and to that end applied for a reportership on the New York “Courier-Journal,” in which paper many of his brightest things had appeared at remunerative rates.

As has been said, he knew the value of promptitude, so when, at eight o’clock one night, Farmer Phelps’s hired man handed him a letter from James Fitzgerald, managing editor of the “Courier-Journal,” asking him to come and see him in regard to a reportership as soon as possible, he made up his mind to take the train which left Winsonia, four miles distant, at six o’clock next morning. This would enable him to reach the office by half-past ten, and probably catch Mr. Fitzgerald on his arrival at his desk.

Next morning he arose at four, and when he left the house he had sixty minutes in which to walk four miles downhill--ample time, surely.

It was so ample that he would have had fifteen minutes to spare if the home clock had been right. As it was, he arrived at the station in time to see the train rapidly disappearing around a curve, on its way to New York. He laughed good-naturedly with the baggageman, and asked him when the next down train was due.

“Seven-thirty, sharp. You’ll not have to wait long.”

Seven-thirty. That would bring him into the presence of Mr. Fitzgerald at just about the time he arrived at his sanctum. “Better than to have to wait in a presumably stuffy room,” said he to himself, philosophically. He lit a cigar, and, as the air was bracing and he was fond of walking, he struck out into a five-mile-an-hour gait down the main street of Winsonia.

His footsteps led him farther than he had intended going, and when he reached the Baptist church at East Winsonia, he saw by its clock that it lacked but forty minutes of train-time, and he had four miles to make. He threw away the stump of his cigar, which had been out for some time, broke into a jog-trot, and, after covering a mile, he caught his second wind and mended his pace.

His fleetness would have served its turn had not a malicious breeze blown his hat over a high iron fence that surrounded a churchyard. By the time he had climbed the fence and recovered his hat he had consumed so many precious minutes that, although he sprinted the last mile, he arrived at the station only in time to see train No. 2 disappearing around that hateful curve.

The baggageman was standing on the platform, and he said:

“Ain’t once enough?”

“More than enough for most people,” said Thomas, whose rare good nature was proof against even such a remark at such a time.

The next train for New York was due at nine fifty-six. Being somewhat blown, he walked around the corner to a billiard-room, meaning to sit down and watch whatever game might be in progress.

“It may be,” soliloquized Thomas, “that Fitzgerald won’t reach the office until after lunch, and I’ll get there at half-past two, in time to see him when he’s feeling good.”

He met Ned Halloway at the billiard-room, and when Ned asked him to take a cue he consented. Billiards was a game in which he was apt to lose--himself, at any rate; yet to-day his mind was enough on the alert to enable him, after a time, to glance at the clock over the bar in the next room. It was forty-five minutes past eight.

They began another game. Later he looked again at the clock. A quarter of nine. After another game he looked up once more. “Fifteen minutes to ni--. Say, Ned, what’s the matter with that clock?” Ned looked at it, then at his watch. “Why, it’s stopped!”

“You settle--see you later.” And Thomas was gone like a shot.

This time he had the rare pleasure of noting how the rear car of a train grows rapidly smaller as it recedes. In a moment the train disappeared around the curve before mentioned.

“Say, Mr. Morley, you’ve time to miss the next, easy,” said the baggageman, dryly.

Thomas was vexed, but he said pleasantly: “When is it due?”

“Half-past two. Better wait here and make sure of it.”

“Oh, dry up! No; do the other thing; it’s on me.”

After this little duty had been performed, Thomas, with an irrelevancy of action that might have struck an observer as amusing, made his way to the Y.M.C.A. rooms to read the magazines.

“Let’s see,” said he; “I’ll get to his desk at seven. He’ll be hard at work, and, if he engages me, he may send me out on an assignment at once. Glad I missed the other trains.”

Thus was Thomas wont to soliloquize. At one o’clock he went to Conley’s Inn, and sat down to one of those dinners that attract drummers to a hotel. Necessarily, then, it was a good dinner, and one over which he lingered until nearly two. Then he went into the office and sat down.

The room was warm, and his dinner had made him drowsy. He decided to take a little nap. He had the faculty of waking when he pleased, and he willed to do so at fifteen minutes past two. It would be weakness for him to get to the station with too much time to spare, but this would give him a quarter-hour in which to go a half-mile.

His awakening faculty would seem to have been slightly out of order that day, however, and he did not arouse until twenty-nine minutes past two by the hotel clock.

Of course he did not make a fool of himself by trying to do a half-mile in sixty seconds; but he walked leisurely toward the station, intending to get his ticket and have that off his mind.

He laughed heartily at a corpulent fellow who darted by him, carrying a grip.

His laughter ceased, however, when, on turning the corner, he discerned the aforesaid fat man in the act of being assisted on to the platform of the last car by the brakeman, the train having acquired considerable momentum. Then he saw it disappear around a curve which was part of the road at that point. There were three explanations possible: either the train was behind time, or else his awakening faculty was in good repair, or the hotel clock was fourteen minutes fast. The latter proved to be the correct explanation of the somewhat vexing occurrence.

“Say, that’s a bad habit you have of missing trains,” said his friend the baggageman. “Goin’ to miss another--or do anything else?”

“No,” said Thomas, shortly.

He knew that the next train at five was the last. This would make it possible to reach Fitzgerald at half-past nine. “Right in the heat of the work. He’ll engage me to get rid of me,” laughed Thomas to himself. Then he continued: “I never heard of a man missing every train in a day, so I’ll risk calling on Laura before the next one starts.”

Miss Sedgwick, the one he called Laura, lived out of town near the railroad track, and two miles nearer New York than Winsonia station.

She was a captivating girl, and when Thomas was in her presence he never took heed of time. He was lucky enough to find her at home. She seemed glad to see him, and was much interested in his account of how near he had come to catching some trains that day; and as nothing is so engaging as a good listener, the minutes passed on pneumatic tires. When at last he took note of the hour, it was five o’clock.

“That clock isn’t right, is it?”

“Yes, sir. Father keeps it at railroad time. Mercy! you’ve lost your train again, haven’t you?”

“Laura, this time it’s bad. I won’t see him to-day, now, and to-morrow may not do. Let me go and kick myself.”

“I’m awfully sorry, Tom. I hope to-morrow won’t be too late.”

Thomas squeezed her hand and left her, feeling rather blue.

The railroad track was but a block away, and he walked over to it, not with suicidal intent, but just that he might tantalize himself with a view of the train as it sped by, which it should do in about a minute.

“At any rate,” said he, “it won’t be going around that dreadful curve.”

It was the last of December, and the sun had set. When he reached the track he saw, far away, a glimmer of the headlight of the five-o’clock express.

Nearer and nearer it came. A moment more and it would rush by like a meteor. But it didn’t. It slackened up at the very corner on which Thomas stood, to allow an official of the road to jump off.

Thomas was not slow, if he did miss trains now and then. He swung himself on to the smoker.

“Go’n’ far?” asked the brakeman.

“To New York,” was his reply.

“You’re in luck.”

“Well, I’ve not missed more than three or four trains in my life!” said Thomas; and it was strictly true.

Half-past nine to the minute found him outside of the editorial rooms of the “Courier-Journal.”

“Can I see Mr. Fitzgerald?” he asked of a boy who came in response to a knock.

“No, sir; he went out of town yesterday. Be back to-morrow at twelve.”

* * * * *

“Did you get my letter already?” asked Mr. Fitzgerald of Thomas Morley, when he came to his desk next morning and found that young man waiting for him.

“Yes, sir; and here I am.”

“Well, sir, I like your promptness, and I’ll give you the place of a man whom we had to discharge for being too slow. You seem to have what a reporter needs most of all--the ‘get there’ quality.”

“I didn’t allow any trains to pass me,” said Thomas, modestly.

XXXV

THE WRECK OF THE “CATAPULT”

BY CL-RK R-SS-LL

The sea, the sea, the open sea, The blue, the fresh, the ever free. BARRY CORNWALL.

If there be those who love not the sea, with its storms, its seaweed, its sharks and shrimps and ships, this is not the story for them, and they would best weigh anchor and steer for some tale written by a landlubber and full of green meadows and trees and such tommy-rot, for this is to be chock-a-block with nautical phrases.

And who am I, you ask? I am Joseph Inland, the tenth of that name. We have always lived and died here in Birmingham, and followed the trade of cutlers; but when I was a babe of one year father told mother ’twas time one member of the family followed the sea, wherever it went, and that he intended to make a sailor of me.

So before I was six I had heard of sloops and ferry-boats and belaying-pins and admirals and salt-junk, and longed to hear the wind whistling through the maintopgallantmast, and could say “boat-swain” as glibly as any sailor afloat. But father was in moderate circumstances; and so, much as he would have liked to, he could not afford to send me to sea when I was a boy, and that is why my one-and-twentieth birthday came and went and I had never been farther from Birmingham than my legs could carry me in a day; but you may be sure that I subscribed to the “Seaman’s Daily,” and through a friend who knew a sailor I had picked up such terms as “amidships,” “deck,” “boom,” “bilge-water,” “forecastle,” and the like, so that I was a seaman in everything save actual experience.

And in the amateur dramatic society of which I was a member I always played sailors’ parts, and did them so well that when we played “Hamlet” they changed the part of the grave-digger to that of a sailor for me, and I made a great hit in it. The one who played Hamlet didn’t like the change, as it interfered with his lines and his business with a skull, and he refused to come on at all in that act; but I sang a sea-song instead, and the newspaper came out and said that my singing was no worse than his acting would have been, which I thought pretty neat.

But enough of that. I was always fond of joking, and had nigh unto a score of comical sayings that I used to repeat to my friends when they would come to our house of an evening; but they didn’t often come. My father said I was as comical a lad as he ever knew, and would slap me on the back and roar that it was the funniest thing he had heard in a twelvemonth when I made one particular joke, the tenor of which I forget now. But all the jokes dealt with the sea.

Well, so much for my life up to my one-and-twentieth birthday. You have learned that if ever a body was fitted for a sea life, that body was mine.

By the time I was six-and-twenty I don’t believe there was a sea term that I did not have at my tongue’s end, and I always wore my trousers wide at the lower end, and kept a chew of tobacco in my mouth day and night, although after a time I failed to notice any taste in it.

It was a gladsome sight to see me go rolling to my work in the cutler’s shop (for I still followed the old trade), with a hearty “Ho, landsman! good mornin’ to ye!” to all I met, in true sailor fashion.

Our fare at home consisted of loblolly, ship’s-biscuit, salt-junk, and plum-duff, with water drawn from casks. My dear old mother used sometimes to wish for home-made bread and fresh meat and vegetables and pump water; and I remember, one winter, brother died of the scurvy; but I was better content than if he had died of some landsman’s complaint, and mother was glad to put up with anything, she was so proud that I was to be a seaman.

I had a carpenter construct my parents’ bedroom so that the whole floor could be rocked; and on stormy nights I would stay up and by a simple mechanism keep it a-rocking until poor old mother would be as sick as if she were in the Channel. But I never heard her murmur. _She_ was fit for a sailor’s wife.

On such nights father never went to bed, but stayed down-stairs. There was little of the seaman’s spirit in the old man.

When I was one-and-thirty I had a rare chance to ship before the mast on a whaler sailing from Liverpool; but as business was pretty brisk at the shop, I decided to wait, and the offer was not renewed when she returned, three years later.

When I was forty dear mother entered her last port. The doctor, a blundering landlubber, fond of landsmen’s phrases, said she died of insufficient nutriment. Be that as it may or what it may, in her I lost one whose heart was always on my going to sea. Douse my top-lights if ever there was a craft that carried a stancher heart from barnacle to binnacle than did the old lady, and I had her buried in shrouds, with a cannon-ball at the foot of the coffin, as befitted the mother of one who was going to be a seaman.

After she died I became even more impatient to be off to sea, for there’s no air so pure as the sea air, no hearts so true as seamen’s hearts, no weed like seaweed, and no water that’s fit to drink save sea water; but business was pretty good, so, for the present, I decided to stay ashore; but I always read the shipping news with as much keenness as any sailor afloat.

* * * * *

And now I’ve come to the end of my yarn. I named it “The Wreck of the ‘Catapult’” because it had a salty savor. It was the name of one of my favorite Sunday-school books when I was a lad. Now I am an old man, threescore and ten, and have been alone in the world a score of years. Heaven denied me the blessing of children, but I have a grandson who is as hot for the sea as I was.

Ah, me! Next week I am going to apply for admission to the Sailors’ Home; for although circumstances have prevented my ever seeing the ocean or scenting its salty breezes, I have always been, and always shall be, at heart a British seaman.

Shiver my timbers!

ESSAYS AT ESSAYS

XXXVI

THE BULL, THE GIRL, AND THE RED SHAWL

There is no incident in all the realms of literature, from the “penny dreadful” up to the three-volume novel, that has afforded so much material for the pen of the writer of fiction as the delightful episode of the bull, the young girl with the red shawl, and the young girl’s lover. Sometimes the cast includes the lover’s hated rival, but the story may be told without using him.

It is thirty-odd years since I first came across this thrilling adventure in the pages of a child’s book, very popular at the time. How well I remember how my young blood--to be exact, my seven-year-old blood--thrilled as I mentally watched this frail girl, with a start of just three feet, lead the tremendous and horribly savage bull in a three-hundred-yard sprint, only to trip at last on the only obstruction in the ten-acre field; how, just as the bull reached her, she flung her red shawl a few rods to the right; how the bull, leaving her, plunged after it; how she, weak and trembling, ran to the stone wall and managed to vault it just as her lover, a brawny blacksmith, who had seen the whole affair at too great a distance to be of immediate service, reached the wall and received her in his arms. “Oh, Kenston,” she murmured, “you have saved my life!” And then she fainted, and I believe the bull ate up the shawl; at any rate, its part in that particular story was ended.

I have always felt that, thrilling as this scene was, it had not been worked for all it was worth; but an extensive reading since then has brought me to the conclusion that, first and last, it has been worked for its full value.

The next time that I read the enthralling narrative I was some years older, but the memory of the other telling was still fresh within me; and so, when, in the second chapter, I read about a savage old bull, one Hector, the property of Squire Flint, the meanest man in the county,--not that his meanness had anything to do with the story, but it is one of the conventions that a savage bull shall be owned by a cross, crabbed, and thoroughly stingy man,--I say, when I had read thus far my pulse quickened. Inexperienced as I was, I somehow sensed the coming situation. I seemed to know as by clairvoyance that, however limited the heroine’s wardrobe might be in some respects, there was one article of apparel that she surely possessed, or would possess in time to meet the exigencies. True enough, in the very next chapter her maiden aunt, a saintly old lady of ninety, died and bequeathed to her sorrowing niece a red pongee shawl of great value--as a bull-enrager. The book had seemed prosy at the start, but now that I knew what was coming, and that it was _that_ that was coming, I read on breathlessly.

Needless to say that in the next chapter the young girl fell in love with a strapping young fellow, who immediately proposed that they take a walk. How well I knew, though they did not, where that walk would lead them! The mad bull--in this case it was mad, although any old bull will do, mad or not--was rampant in a lot a mile south of the young girl’s house, and they started to walk due north; but I knew full well that they would need to cross that particular pasture before they got home, and a few pages later found them climbing over a stone wall into the bull’s domain, and then they walked along, intent only on their new-found happiness. The day was chilly,--in the middle of a particularly hot July,--so that the girl could have an excuse to wear her red shawl. Now, having brought two of the actors upon the stage, the cue was soon given to the bull; and in a moment the happy lovers, feeling the ground tremble beneath their feet, turned and saw Hector, his horns gyrating with rage, his eyes bulging out, and his head lowered as he thundered along straight for the pongee bequest. To take her under his strong arm and to rush forward were the only things for the young man to do, and he did them; and then the rest ran as per schedule. I believe that in this case the young man threw the girl into a tree and then plunged down a woodchuck’s hole. At any rate, the girl was unharmed. That is the one unalterable formula in constructing these bull stories: save the girl unharmed. You may break the young man’s leg or arm, and you may do what you will with the bull, but the young girl must come through unscathed.

It was years before this moving incident ceased to hold me, and in that time how many changes were rung on it! Once only was the red shawl absent, and I wondered how in the world the bull was to be infuriated, as he was a singularly mild beast in the earlier chapters, and on Maydays had been festooned with garlands. Then, too, the girl was in deep mourning--for her lover! But the ten-acre lot was all right, and as the author was a clever man, I felt that he would find a way to run the act with a small cast and no properties. So I read on, and after wondering, together with the girl herself, what could have caused the peaceful old bovine to chase her, tail up and head down, the full length of a particularly long pasture, she and I found out when she realized that, the day being sunny, she had picked up her cousin’s parasol, which was necessarily of a brilliant scarlet. She had no lover, for, as I say, he had died--two chapters before the book was begun; but she did have presence of mind, and so she inserted the point of the parasol in the bull’s mouth, and then opened it, and while he was extracting it with his fore paws, she reached the fence and vaulted it in the usual way.

The possibilities of the incident are by no means exhausted, and so far from “Amos Judd” being the last story in which it was used, I saw it in a tale published this month, and this time with the full paraphernalia of hated rival, lover, red shawl, and all; but for me it had lost its zest. To be sure, if they would make the hero an athlete, and have him bravely stand his ground while the girl climbed to the top of an enormous elm, and then, just as the bull lowered his head to toss him, have the hero jump high in the air and make the bull pass beneath him, and as he reached ground again seize the bull, not by the horns, but by the tail, and, swinging it three times around his head, dash it against a tree and stun it,--that is, if its tail were securely welded to its body,--there would be an original treatment of the subject. And if its tail were but loosely fixed to it, the hero could pull it out, and the bull, filled with chagrin, would walk off, dismayed and humiliated.

But, pending that form of the story, I am studiously avoiding all novels that contain heroines with red shawls, or that make early reference to fierce bulls, or that speak of a certain ten-acre lot peculiarly adapted for lovers’ peregrinations; for, like the successful burglar, I know the combination.

XXXVII

CONCERNING DISH-WASHING

Has the reader ever considered how much time is wasted every day by busy women in the work of washing dishes? Of course, if a man has plenty of money and, from philanthropic motives, engages a girl to perform this unpleasant--I had almost said “duty”--this unpleasant task, I suppose we cannot, strictly speaking, regard her time as wasted, for she might else be loafing in an intelligence-office without gaining a scrap of that article. I refer to the lives led by weary housewives who, having no aid from a hired housemaid, day out and day in will make themselves thin by the never-ceasing and perfectly useless grind of dish-washing; for the dishes don’t stay clean for more than a few hours.

For years I ate my meals in selfish content, little recking at what cost the clean service was gained, until I discovered that my sister, who is also my housekeeper, had sold her piano, not having time to play upon it. I was shocked to think what a power this custom of dish-washing had over the minds of the feminine portion of our public.