The Belted Seas Part 8

"Greenough!" he says. "It's next to where Abe Dalrimple lives? Adrian's the name of his town."

I says:

"What do you know of it, Craney?"

"I went there with Abe Dalrimple," he says, "and left him there planting lobster pots. That wouldn't do for me. None of it in mine. Abe's got no more ambition than to dodge the next kettle Mrs. Dalrimple throws at him, but me, I'm ambitious, I got to spread out. I'm a romantic man, Tommy. That's my secret. That's the key of me. Give me largeness. Give me s.p.a.ce for my talents. What do you want with Greenough? You stay with me and I'll show you who's the natural lord of all lands that's fertile and foolish. Ain't I showed you what I could do in a small way? Why, I only just began. That's nothing, I'm a soarer, Tommy, I've got visions."

I took a look at his one hard bright eye, and thought him over, and I thought:

"You've got 'em all right, but they're slippery," and I says:

"Did you hear news of any one in Greenough?"

"Give 'em a name."

"Happen it might be the name of Pemberton," I says. "Madge Pemberton."

"There was a man in Adrian named Andrew McCulloch," he says, "that married a girl named Pemberton from Greenough. Aye, I recollect, Pemberton's was a hotel."

"Madge Pemberton?"

"It was that name."

I recollect it was a little cafe in Corazon, where Craney and I sat that evening. It was thick with smoke and crowded with round tables, at which mixed breeds of people, mostly square-shouldered little men, were discussing the time of day and the merits of wine--which hadn't any--in a way of excitement that you'd think they were crying out against oppression. Each table had a tallow candle on it, burning dim in the smoke.

I says, "Oh!"

Then Craney went on talking, but I don't know what it was about. Then I says, "It don't suit me in Corazon," and I got up. I went out in the steep cobbled street that runs down to the sh.o.r.e of Corazon Bay.

I lay all night on the sh.o.r.e and watched 'the waves come up and crumble on the s.h.i.+ngle. I remembered the verse Sadler used to chant to me in the _Hebe Maitland_ days, when I was acting more gay than he thought becoming to the uselessness of me. "Oh, sailor boy," he says.

"Oh, sailor, my sailor boy, bonny and blue, You're rompin', you're roamin', The long slantin' sorrows are waiting for you In the gloamin', the gloamin'."

I remember, when it came morning, on the beach at Corazon, I got up, and I says:

"Clyde's mucky old bags can stay there till I'm ready," I says. "What's the use!"

I took a dislike to Clyde's money. I bought a pa.s.sage to San Francisco, and came there in the year '75.

There I put the profits of six years on the West Coast into shares in a s.h.i.+p called the _Anaconda_, and s.h.i.+pped on her myself as second mate.

I found Stevey Todd cooking in a restaurant in San Francisco. He'd gone into gold mines, after getting loose from the _Jane Allen_. He'd left his profits from the Hotel Helen Mar in the gold mines. Every mine he'd invested in got discouraged, so he said, but I judge the truth was more likely Stevey Todd was taken in by mining sharks. He'd made up his mind property wasn't his stronghold and gone back to cooking, and never took any more interest in property after that, nor had any to take interest in. But he told me Sadler was in business and getting rich, and in partners.h.i.+p with a Chinaman, and living in a town called "Saleratus,"

sixty miles down the coast, which none of these statements seemed likely at the time. Stevey Todd didn't know why the town was named Saleratus.

He thought maybe Sadler had named it, or maybe gone there on account of the name, foreseeing interesting rhymes with "potatoes" and "tomatoes."

But I didn't look Sadler up at that time.

The Captain turned to Uncle Abimelech, and said:

"Happen you might remember Sadler's tune to that verse, 'Sailor, my sailor boy, bonny and blue'?"

"He never said no such impudent thing to me," said Uncle Abimelech wrathfully. "I'd 'a' whaled him good."

"Why, that's true, Abe," said Captain Buckingham. "You wasn't much on looks."

Stevey Todd said:

"They changed that name, Saleratus."

"That's true too," said Captain Buckingham. "An outlandish name is bad for a town, or a s.h.i.+p, or a man; same as the _Anaconda,_ for the _Anaconda_ had bad luck, same as Abimelech Dalrimple. He'd never've got his brains frazzled if he'd been named Bill."

He paused several minutes before going on, to think over this theory of names.

CHAPTER VII.

LIEBCHEN. THE EWIGWEIBLICHE. THE NARRATIVE RESUMED, WITH THE LOSS OF THE "ANACONDA".

I invested the profits of the Hotel Helen Mar and the Ananias plantation in shares in the _Anaconda_, and s.h.i.+pped myself as second mate. She was carrying a cargo of steel rails for a railroad in j.a.pan.

There was a man named Kreps who came aboard at Honolulu. He was a round-faced, chubby man, with spectacles and a trunk full of preserved specimens, and out of breath with his enthusiasm; and he was a German, too, and a Professor of Allerleiwissenschaft, which I take to mean Things in General. He was around gathering in culture and twelve-sided fish in the Pacific, and had a pailful of island dialects and sentiments that were milky and innocent. But I liked him.

I had no objection to the _Anaconda_ either, except that she went to the bottom of the Pacific without any argument about that, and left me stranded on a little island there along with Kreps, and a hen named Veronica, and a Kanaka named Kamelillo. There was a fourth that got stranded there too. We called her "Liebchen" and she surely acted singular, did Liebchen, but I liked her too. Kreps said she was "symbol," but his ideas and mine didn't agree. He said she was a type of the "Ewigweibliche," which is another good word though a Dutch one.

Maybe she was. Maybe Veronica was another type. I guess it's a word that's got some varieties to it.

Veronica belonged to the s.h.i.+p, but had never been cooked, being thin and stringy; and Kamelillo was a silent, sulky Kanaka that had lived up and down the Pacific, and harpooned whales, and been s.h.i.+pwrecked now and then, and was sometimes drunk and sometimes starved, and had no opinion on these things, except that he'd rather be drunk than starved. I never knew one that took less interest in life, provided he was let alone.

I liked them all well enough, too. I took things as they came in those days. I'd as soon have bunked in with an alligator as a Patagonian.

It was south of Midway Island that we ran into the typhoon come over from Asia. A typhoon is to an ordinary storm what a surf is to a deep-sea wave, for it's short but ugly. When it was done with us the _Anaconda_ began to leak fearful in the waist, and I dare say the typhoon was excuse enough if she'd broken in two. She went down easy and slow, with all I had and owned sticking in her. It's bad luck to give a s.h.i.+p an outlandish name.

There were two large boats and a small one, and trouble came from Kreps'

tin cans of specimens, for the captain wouldn't take them in his boat, nor the first mate in his, so Kreps wanted to put them in the small boat. He shed tears and got low in his mind.

"Dey are von der sciences ignorant, obtuse," he says.

I says, "So's the Pacific Ocean."

"But you, so young, so intelligent! Not as de Pacific Ocean, hein?"

I allowed there was difference between me and the Pacific. Kreps got his tin cans in, and I put the boat off. Kamelillo was spreading the cat-sail and had no opinion. Veronica came flapping over the rail with a squawk, and lit on Kamelillo, and fell into the bottom of the boat. We got away after the other boats, the night coming on clear, and Kamelillo talked island dialects at Veronica for scratching him when he wanted to be let alone. Kreps sat over his specimens, innocent and happy and singing German lullabies.

The next morning the other boats were not in sight. We steered north, for there were odd islands in that direction by the chart, without names enough to go around them; and on the second morning we saw a high sh.o.r.e to port, with surf like a white rag sewed along the bottom, and rags of mist sticking to the black bluffs.

"Ach," says Kreps, and the tears trickled down under his spectacles.