Tramping on Life Part 18

Into my grip I cast a change of clothes, and a few books: my Caesar and Vergil in the Latin, Young's _Night Thoughts_, and Sh.e.l.ley.

South Street ... here were s.h.i.+ps ... 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 pa.s.sing 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 h.e.l.l!" he cried. Then he resumed his way to the cabin, whistling.

The s.h.i.+p 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

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 s.h.i.+rt. 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 ash.o.r.e on a jamboree last night.

You'll see him walking up and down the p.o.o.p 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 prost.i.tutes.

He brought out a batch of obscene photographs, chuckling over them.

It was a German s.h.i.+p--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 fas.h.i.+on, 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 p.o.o.p-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 fas.h.i.+on. 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?"