Chapter 6

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.