Part 5

I lived on chestnuts because I found men selling them on the street. I drank water from horse-fountains. After I walked all day and most of the night, and napped for a while, standing up against a building in a dark corner, I began to feel more or less like a horse; I had eaten so much dry fodder and had gulped so much water! There were many adventures, of course, but I have already stated why I may not deal with them.

Staggering from weariness, I fairly bumped, at last, into a door which was labeled: “Trident Wrecking Company, Anson C. Doughty, General Manager.” This was no accident. I reckon I had tramped all the waterfront and had read all the signs except that one.

I went into the outer office, holding my letter by one corner.

Nobody paid any attention to me for half an hour. There were men writing in big books behind a counter, and finally I pushed the letter over to one of them who had stopped to light a cigar. He pushed it back.

“Not here,” he said. “Doesn’t come here.”

“But where will I find him?”

“Don’t know. He’s a diver. They don’t do their diving here in the office.”

There was not a place in that office where I could sit and I was so tired I was sick. The man turned his back on me and I did not dare to ask him any more questions. I backed away from the counter and stood in the middle of the floor, swaying and blinking. I reckon I must have looked like a down-and-out bum. At any rate, when a big man came showing a caller out of a door labeled “General Manager, Private,” he bumped against me when I did not get out of the road and almost knocked me down.

I suppose it was due to my state of mind and body--but till that moment I had never felt what ugly, vicious hatred--desire to kill--meant. The feeling came up in me so suddenly that I was frightened.

The big man went right on with his friend and took no notice of me. He had hairy hands which he flourished as he talked, and the coat of his brown suit had long tails which ended in a sort of scallop at his knees, behind; it came to me in the flush of my boiling hatred that he looked like a fat cockroach. And that bump dealt to me when I was so miserable, that suggestion of the cockroach which always popped up at me as long as I knew him, later made for another decisive turning-point in my life. Again I am calling attention to the fact that matters which I did not reckon on as to amounting to much at the moment have been my mile-stones. As I look back I recognize the mile-stones, though I could not distinguish them at the time. For instance, if you keep on with me far enough, I shall tell you how an affair which counted, perhaps, as the biggest crisis in my life was dominated by a plain, ordinary monkey with an artificial tail.

I followed after that big man with a raging desire to kick him under the sleek tads of that coat--to pound my fists into his fat back. I might have given quite an account of myself, at that, for I was full grown at twenty and as hard as hickory.

“As I say,” I heard before he slammed the door behind him, “you better come along with me down to Trull wharf and talk to Vose himself. He can tell you--”

I gathered my wits and chased along behind. The two of them paid as little attention to me as they would to a prowling cat. But if they were on the way to talk to “Vose himself,” that surely was my opportunity.

It was some distance and by way of devious alleys, but we came at last to where a lighter was tied beside a wharf.

There was a derrick and the scow was loaded with blocks of granite. A man was slowly and ceaselessly turning the wheel of a queer-looking machine, another was carefully handling hose which passed over the side of the lighter and down into the water, and still another was tending ropes. It did not occur to me at first what this activity indicated.

But when the big man called out, “Is Vose about due to come up?” I understood at once and was mightily interested.

I looked down into the dock and saw water like liquid muck, filled with floating refuse, and a good deal of the glamour of a diver’s life departed from my imagination. Somehow I had thought that Jodrey Vose spent his days in blue depths of pure ocean water, looking around at strange fishes and exploring mysterious caves. That he was obliged to go down into any such mess as that and work on blocks of stones with his two hands was a depressing discovery.

After a time there was a bubbling of the turbid water close beside the lighter, and for the first time in my life I saw a diver’s helmet emerge; the goggling eye-plates, the grotesque excrescences, the sprouting antennæ of the hose lines, the venomous hissing of the air from the vents--it all seemed uncanny, and made me shiver.

Men reached down to help him up the ladder, and when he was on deck in full view, scuffing his huge, weighted shoes, a balloon-like creature, as shapeless as the doughnut men my mother used to cut for me when she was in good humor on frying-day, I was sure I had never seen so curious a sight.

After he sat down they twisted off the helmet, and the fat man, whom I reckoned must be Manager Anson C. Doughty, escorted the other man aboard the lighter and the three started a conversation which I could not hear.

I knew the diver for Jodrey Vose because I had seen his picture at the tavern.

The business, whatever it was, did not take much time and the manager and the other man went away. Helpers began to shuck the diver from his suit; it was nearing sundown and work for the day was over, it seemed. When he was free from the bulk of the stuff and was starting for the cabin of the lighter I went to him and gave him the letter.

“From Dod, hey?” Then he told me to follow him.

I looked at him while he read the letter by the light of a bracket lamp. He was a wiry man with a twist of grizzled chin-beard. I was much comforted when he looked up from the letter and grinned.

“Ben Sidney’s boy! Well, your father was the only critter on two legs in Levant, in the old days, who could stand in a barrel, like I could, and jump out without touching the sides. You look as if you have some of his spryness and grit!”

“I hope so, sir. I have always worked at what has come to my hands to do.”

“Dod says business is a mite slow in Levant and that you want a job.”

“Yes, sir.”

Now there was gratitude in me as well as comfort; it was evident that Dodovah Vose had not written that I was a runaway.

The diver laid down the letter and went fumbling for his street clothes in a closet.

“At any rate, you can come up to my boarding-place with me for the night and we’ll talk it all over,” he said, in a very kind way. “If you had only made yourself known a few minutes ago I could have introduced you to Manager Anson C. Doughty. But to-morrow will do as well.”

I did not dare to offer comment. I wondered what there was about Anson C. Doughty to keep my hatred of him so stirred.

“He takes my recommendations as to my helpers,” said Vose. “There is one thing a diver has to be sure about--that’s picking his helpers. We’ll talk it over, I say. If I find there’s considerable of Ben Sidney in you, I reckon we can make a go of it. Have you a hankering to learn the business, itself?”

I blossomed under the warmth of this kindness, I was full of words by that time. I hadn’t opened my mouth to talk for two days. I told him about my evenings in that tavern, my poring over his curios, my ambitions, my dreams and hopes after hearing the stories his brother had to tell me.

When he had finished dressing he clapped me on the shoulder.

“Oh, I calculate you’re going to do,” he told me. “Don’t get your expectations too high. I have given up all the deep work--too old. Five or six years steady at deep work finishes a man. I have nursed myself along. Wharf work--fifteen to thirty feet--that’s my limit these days. But I like your spirit, son. Can’t find boys in the city like that! I should say that you’ve got the real hankering. Cigarettes, ever?”

“No, sir! No tobacco.”

“No cider jamborees? No express packages from the city?”

“No, Mr. Vose.”

“Good! I reckon I’ll keep the old town of Levant on the map in the diving line. I know the game, my boy. And I know how to teach it to the right kind of a pupil.”

“I’m sure you do, Mr. Vose.”

“So we’ll talk it all over this evening--and while we’re about it, if you don’t call me Captain Vose down this way they’ll think you don’t know me very well.”

I blushed, then I followed him out and away.

Before I tumbled into bed that night we had settled upon the future so far as our words to each other went; the bargain only needed the ratification of Anson C. Doughty--and that was secured next morning. I had expected that sleep would soothe my nerves and remove my ugly grouch in the case of that gentleman. However, there must have been something instinctive in my dislike for him; he looked me up and down and caught my scowl.

“You seem to have picked out a pretty surly up-country steer, Vose! However, put him to work if you like that kind!”

So to work I went.

I cleaned diving-suits and thus became familiar with the parts and the mechanism. I soaked out mud-caked ropes, I tended lines and learned signals, and was always busy with a hundred other odd jobs as a satellite of Diver Vose. He used me well enough, though he was never as warm toward me as he was at our first meeting.

After some weeks I lost my fear that I would be followed and taken back to Levant. I was not sure whether I felt more relief than rancor. To be considered as not worth chasing, to know they were saying “Good riddance!” behind my back, gave me thoughts which hurt a certain kind of pride.

I was afraid of the city and I went nowhere except to my work and to my boarding-place. So there was an epoch in my life which was bare of adventure until Diver Vose sent me down for the first time.

He had given me a fine course of sprouts previously, of course.

But in spite of all that the first sensations nigh paralyzed me. I reached bottom and wallowed around without the least thought or remembrance regarding what I had been told to do. A freight-train seemed to be roaring around inside my helmet and I was gasping like a dying skate-fish.

Then in scuffing around in a sort of panic, taking no care of what I was about, I hooked my shoe onto something and began to yank and thresh around in a perfect frenzy. The result was that I pulled the shoe off and my lightened foot was snapped above my head in a finer spread-eagle than any acrobatic dancer ever pulled off. To drag that foot down was beyond my powers, and I tripped and went onto my back. Being up-ended is a diver’s chief peril, because the air bellies up into the legs of the dress and leaves scant supply in the helmet.

In that crisis there was one idea which stuck to me: I must get that lost shoe!

And I did get it. I groped and rolled and struggled and pulled until I did get it. A half-dozen times in my efforts I felt them trying to haul me up. I suppose I must have given signals telling them to quit that. I fought them as best I could, anyway, until I had recovered the shoe; then I yanked for a lift and went up.

Captain Vose was standing in front of me with the helmet in his hands when I had recovered my wits enough to notice anybody.

“Been dancing a jig?” he inquired, caustically.

I shook my head, for I was not able to utter words.

“Which did you lose first down there, your nerve or that shoe?”

When I hesitated, he snapped, “Give me the truth, now, or we sha’n’t get along after this!”

“My nerve!” I told him.

“So I knew--for I lashed on that shoe with my own hands. Very well! What good are you as a diver without your wits or your nerve?”

“No good, sir.”

“You can buy an eighteen-pound shoe at any equipment loft. But how about buying nerve?”

“I reckon it can’t be bought, sir,” I confessed.

“Still, you were almighty _particular_,” he sneered, “to bring back that shoe with you even if you didn’t bring your nerve. Left your nerve on the bottom, eh?”

He was mighty nasty in his tone and his manner, and the men standing around were grinning. Perhaps even all that would not have put grit back into me, for I was dizzy and scared and was owning up to myself that I was better fitted for dry ground than a wet sea-bottom. But just then Anson C. Doughty bellowed from the wharf:

“Say, look here, Vose, let that coward go back upcountry to his steers! We have no time to fool away on greenhorns.”

“If I did leave my nerve on the bottom I’m going back after it, and I’m going right now!” I told the diver. I was holding the shoe and I dropped it on deck and shoved my foot into it. Captain Vose kneeled and began to lash it.

“What are you doing, there?” demanded the manager.

“Making a diver,” stated my teacher, calmly.

“I’m paying you fifty dollars a day to do what I tell you to do, Vose.”

“That’s right, sir!” The captain kept right on with the lashings. “There’s a contract between you and this young man which tells me to teach him how to be a diver, if he shows the capacity.”

“He hasn’t shown it.”

“He is going to in about five minutes, sir.”

He picked up the helmet and bent over me.

“I had a reason for twitting you about that shoe,” he said, in my ear. “You showed what was in you by bringing it back If you hadn’t brought it back I would have stripped this suit off you and sent you hipering! You’ve got it in you! You’re all right! Now go down, son, and set that chain where I told you to set it. The first scare is the vaccination for this kind of work. You’re in a way to be immune from now on!”

The last sound I heard was the snarl of Anson C. Doughty. That sound helped me to go to my job that day. I went down and did what was required of me, and, as I worked below there and became convinced that there was nothing to harm me if I kept my head, I found my nerve, I reckon, for good and all, in the diving business.

And now that this story seems to be settled into a rut of adventure in my chosen line of work, hold breath with me and prepare for a couple of most “jeeroosly jounces,” as old Wagner Bangs used to term his occasional falls from his state of natural grace.

First, I leap as nimbly as I can over three years and a half of hard work, the story of which would hold as little interest as the biography of a mud-clam. I slipped and slid and dug in slime, I shagged granite blocks and dragged chains, I pried into wrecks and had my whack at fumbling in the watery shadows for the drowned--pitiful bundles floating as if they were attempting posthumous gymnastics, head down and fingers trying to touch toes.

I did “deep work” on ticklish jobs.

So I came into the fifty-dollar-a-day class of workers, to the grim content of my mentor.

I have just remarked that the snarl of Anson C. Doughty sent me in earnest to my first job. Also, just as suddenly, that snarl pried me loose from my job.

I wish I did not have to confess what I have to say now. I come to jounce number two!

I have spoken a ways back of mile-stones in my life and suggested that Anson C. Doughty was connected with one.

I wish I could give a real, compelling, manly reason why I tossed my hopes and my prospects so wildly into the air all of a sudden. I have spoken of my ready temper--but that’s no reason.

In fifteen seconds I shifted the life I was living as completely as a derailing-switch shoots a runaway engine off the main line.

The borers of that mysterious hatred for Anson C. Doughty must have been burrowing in me all the time, even as those little teredinoid bivalves we call ship-worms gnaw into submerged piles with the edges of their shells. I was full of burrows and went to pieces all of a sudden.

For I came up one day out of thirty fathoms--and that’s man’s work--and Doughty was giving me green help out of his general meanness--and my head was far from steady; in addition he gave me his snarl for the last time, instead of snarling at his infernal dubs who were risking my life.

I stepped on his foot with a shoe that was loaded with twenty pounds of lead--and that’s some anchor!--I walloped him into insensibility with the end of a rubber hose. Then I resigned informally, while he lay on the deck of the lighter, grunting back to life again.

Nobody stopped me when I said I was going and announced that it would be dangerous to get in my way.

They stood back while I shifted my clothes--and I got away with my diving equipment, even! It was the newest thing out for those days and the going styles of gear, and I had paid good money for it.

I say again, I wish I had a more cogent reason to give for throwing up my work. But I’m giving the truth of the matter. I left just that way. I knew that Anson C. Doughty would have me put in jail if he could catch me. I knew that I couldn’t do any more diving, for divers are marked men and are easily located. It was up to me to go and hide; so I went and hid.

VII--THE PSYCHOLOGY OF A PLUG-HAT

I HAD been about a bit during three years and a half. I own up frankly that I had found out that I had more or less of a cheap streak in me. I’m not disguising it wholly by the name of curiosity; though, of course, a country fellow has a keen hankering to look in on some of the sights of the big city.

When we boys up in Levant used to hand around among ourselves by stealth some of the flashy papers, I didn’t believe there were such things as I read in print and saw in pictures. After some of my sporty associates of the Trident workers began to take me around with them evenings I kept perfectly still about my earlier disbeliefs, and my cheap streak began to talk up to me. Somebody came distributing free admission cards to concerts, managed by religious and fraternal bodies--but I preferred to pay money at the door of a burlesque theater. I liked to go scouting in dance-halls, and I haunted low resorts to hear what I could hear and see what I could see.

We went boldly, for we were husky youths. As for myself, I had licked the boys of Levant at every opportunity--and my Sidney temper afforded me opportunities aplenty. I was never afraid when I went about alone, either. I had a rather quiet way of minding my own business and impressing it on the other fellow that he’d better mind his.

So, it may be guessed, most of my wanderings had been done in the lower quarters of the city.

That’s where I went to hide. And I had knowledge enough of the locality to hide myself effectually and keep hidden.

I did get in touch with one of the fellows who had been around a great deal with me and whom I trusted--for he had no special use for Anson C. Doughty.

Anson C. Doughty was out of doors once more, after spending a week of retirement in the company of a few busy little leeches, and, as to eyes and nose, he was not looking so very badly on the outside, but was evidently having a great amount of trouble with a volcano raging within, so my informant told me. Mr. Doughty was proclaiming that he proposed to catch me so that he could make an example for the sake of discipline in his crews in the future; but according to the program he had promulgated, he proposed to cut me up with a meatchopper before turning me over to the law. So I decided to keep under cover for an indefinite period.

Then I sent word to Captain Jodrey Vose and had him call on me in my castle, because I did not want him to think that he had wasted all his efforts when he had made me a diver.

However, the captain did seem to think so. He frankly said so.

“You’ll never get another job diving on the Atlantic coast,” he told me. “In the first place, you won’t dare to show up as a diver where Anson C. Doughty can grab you. In the next place, Anson C. Doughty has posted you with all the wrecking companies as being as dangerous as an Asiatic tiger with lighted kerosene on his tail. Now tell me what made you do it.”

I told him.

He looked at me with his eyes squizzled up and a frown on his forehead.

“I’m getting along in years and I’m probably losing my mind to some extent,” he said, “but I’ll be cussed if I believe I’ve got entire softening of the brain. It must be that I’m deaf and can’t understand--because I don’t get the least idea of why you did it to him. Tell it over.”

I told him again.

“Yes, I must have softening of the brain,” he grunted. “It’s all a riddle-come-ree to me!”

“It is the same to me--and that’s why I can’t explain,” I told him, frankly. “I hung onto myself all that time, wanting to do it, and then I let go and did it!”

“About as you went to cutting up in Levant before you skipped out,” he snapped.

Up to that time, not by word or look had he let me know that he had any knowledge of why I had left my home town.

“Dod explained it to me in the letter he sent with you. But he had excuses to give.”

I had to admire Captain Vose’s ability to keep his thoughts to himself, as I remembered the placid countenance he showed to me when he had read that letter.

“Now I reckon that Dod was prejudiced in your favor and that you had been a young devil the folks wanted to boost out of town. Dod’s judgment was never very good in the case of any critters who were willing to cater to him. I don’t suppose you dare to go back up there?”

“I don’t want to go.” But all of a sudden a queer wave of homesickness seemed to come swelling up in me and to choke me like water chokes the throat of a dredge-pump. “I’m done with that town for good and all,” I told him. “I got along all right while I was doing dirt as fast as the rest of ’em, but when I tried to be decent they didn’t give me a show!” I snapped my finger. “I wouldn’t give _that_ for anybody in Levant!”

I knew I was lying and I think Jodrey Vose knew it, for he was a keen old chap. He scowled at me and grunted.

“Got any money left after all the rake-helling you’ve been doing for a year past?”

So he knew all about that, too!

“I’m fixed all right!” But I looked up at the ceiling of my room when I said it, and I knew I was not fooling him. I ought to have had a bank account, considering what I had been pulling down. I had all my capital in my pocket--a roll about as big as my thumb. I had considerable of a string of memories, such as they were, regarding money I had spent; I had a brand-new diving dress, and, above all, queer as this may sound, I had a specially new outfit which was my chief pride: a frock-coat and pearl-gray trousers, waistcoat modestly fancy--my real tastes in that direction having been gently suppressed by an honest tailor--and a plug-hat whose shininess fairly put my eyes out. And up to that time I had had no opportunity to wear that suit except in front of the mirror in my hiding-place!

I had tested the tilt of that hat at a dozen different angles; I had nearly broken my neck in efforts to see just how the coat-tails flared in the back. With a chart as help, a card stuck in the side of the mirror, I had practised tying a scarf in Ascot style until my staring eyes watered and my fingers ached. Then I had walked back and forth, trying to get the hang of a cane.

Again I suggest that this may sound queer. But it was only another manifestation of that cheap streak in me, so I reckon. I was not modeling my appearance on the looks of any real gentleman I had ever seen; I had not bought that garb in order to appear at church or to climb into better society. But from the time I was ten years old I had nursed one special, hungry, despairing ambition. At the county fair I saw “Diamond Dick” Shrady marshaling his painted beauties in front of his tent, and, according to my notion, his rig-out was apparel which shaded even the robes of royalty. I could not conceive higher height of happiness than to own and wear for “every day” a suit like that.

Consider the lily--as I considered “Diamond Dick”! Then consider me as I stood in front of that tent!