From Place to Place Part 21

"Enlisted."

"Where? New York?"

"No. Cleveland."

"What made you enlist?"

"Say, wot's this--thoid-degree stuff?"

"I told you just now that I figured I had a right to know. When a man saves your life it puts him under an obligation to you--I mean puts you under an obligation to him," he corrected.

"Well, if you put it that way--maybe it was because I wanted to duck out of reach of you bulls. Maybe because I wanted to go straight a while.

Maybe because I wanted to show that a bad guy could do somethin' for his country. Dope it out for yourself. That used to be your game--dopin'

things out--wasn't it?"

"I'm trying to, now. Tell me, does anybody know--anybody in the Army, I mean--know who you are?"

"n.o.body but you; and you might call it an accident, the way you come to find out."

"Something like that. How's your record since you joined up?"

"Clean as anybody's."

"And what's your idea about keeping on going straight after the war is over and you get out of service?

"Don't answer unless you feel like it; only I've got my own private reasons for wanting to know."

"Well, I know a trade--learnt it in stir, but I know it. I'm a steamfitter by trade, only I ain't never worked much at it. Maybe when I get back I'd try workin' at it steady if you flatties would only keep off me back. Anything else you wanted to find out?" His tone was sneering almost. "If there's not, I think I'll try to take a nap."

"Not now--but I'd like to talk to you again about some things when we're both rested up."

"Have it your own way. I can't get away from you for a while--not with this hole drilled in me shoulder."

However, Ginsburg did not have it his own way. The wound in his leg gave threat of trouble and at once he was shifted south to one of the big base hospitals. An operation followed and after that a rather long, slow convalescence.

In the same week of November that the armistice was signed, Ginsburg, limping slightly, went aboard a troopship bound for home. It befell, therefore, that he spent the winter on sick leave in New York. He had plenty of spare time on his hands and some of it he employed in business of a more or less private nature. For example, he called on the district attorney and a few days later went to Albany and called upon the governor. A returned soldier whose name has been often in the paper and who wears on his uniform tunic two bits of ribbon and on his sleeves service and wound stripes is not kept waiting in anterooms these times.

He saw the governor just as he had seen the district attorney--promptly.

In fact, the governor felt it to be an honour to meet a soldier who had been decorated for gallantry in action and so expressed himself. Later he called in the reporters and restated the fact; but when one of the reporters inquired into the reasons for Sergeant Ginsburg's visit at this time the governor shook his head.

"The business between us was confidential," he said smilingly. "But I might add that Sergeant Ginsburg got what he came for. And it wasn't a job either. I'm afraid, though, that you young gentlemen will have to wait a while for the rest of the details. They'll come out in time no doubt. But just for the present a sort of surprise is being planned for someone and while I'm to be a party to it I don't feel at liberty to tell about it--yet."

Now it is a part of the business of newspaper men to put two and two together and get four. Months later, recalling what the governor had said to the Albany correspondents, divers city editors with the aid of their bright young staff men did put two and two together and they got a story. It was a peach of a bird of a gem of a story that they got on the day a transport nosed up the harbour bearing what was left of one of the infantry regiments of the praiseworthy Metropolitan Division.

Even in those days of regardless receptions for home-arriving troops it did not often happen that a secretary to the governor and an a.s.sistant from the office of the district attorney went down the bay on the same tug to meet the same returning soldier--and he a private soldier at that. Each of these gentlemen had put on his long-tailed coat and his two-quart hat for the gladsome occasion; each of them carried a doc.u.ment for personal presentation to this private soldier.

And the sum total of these doc.u.ments was: Firstly, to the full legal effect that a certain indictment of long standing was now by due processes of law forever and eternally quashed; and secondly, that the governor had seen fit to remove all disabilities against a certain individual, thereby restoring the person named to all the rights, boons, benefits and privileges of citizenship; and thirdly, that in accordance with a prior and privy design, now fully carried out, the recipient of these doc.u.ments had official guaranty, stamped, sealed and delivered, that when he set foot on the soil of these United States he would do so without cloud upon his t.i.tle as a sovereign voter, without blemish on his name and without fear of prosecution in his heart. And the upshot of it all was that the story was more than a peach; it was a pippin. The rehabilitation of Private Pasquale Gallino, sometime known as Stretchy Gorman, gangster, and more latterly still as P. Goodman, U. S. A., A. E. F., was celebrated to the extent of I don't know how many gallons of printer's ink.

Having landed in driblets and having been rea.s.sembled in camp as a whole, the division presently paraded, which made another story deemed worthy of columns upon columns in print. Our duty here, though, is not to undertake a description of that parade, for such was competently done on that fine day when the crowd that turned out was the largest crowd which that city of crowds, New York, had seen since the day when the crowding Dutchmen crowded the Indians off the shortly-to-be-crowded island of Manhattan.

Those who followed the daily chronicles of daily events saw then, through the eyes of gifted scribes, how Fifth Avenue was turned into a four-mile stretch of prancing, dancing glory; and how the outpouring millions, in ma.s.ses fluid as water and in strength irresistible as a flood, broke the police dams and made of roadway and sidewalks one great, roaring, human sluiceway; and how the khaki-clad ranks marched upon a carpet of the flowers and the fruit and the candy and the cigarettes and the cigars and the confetti and the paper ribbons that were thrown at them and about them. These things are a tale told and retold. For us the task is merely to narrate one small incident which occurred in a side street hard by Washington Square while the parade was forming.

Where he stood marking time in the front row of the honour men of his own regiment--there being forty-six of these honour men, all bearing upon their proudly outbulged bosoms bits of metal testifying to valorous deeds--First Sergeant Hyman Ginsburg, keeping eyes front upon the broad back of the colonel who would ride just in advance of the honour squad and speaking out of the side of his mouth, addressed a short, squat, dark man in private's uniform almost directly behind him at the end of the second file.

"Pal," he said, casting his voice over his shoulder, "did you happen to read in the paper this morning that the police commissioner--the new one, the one that was appointed while we were in France--would be in the reviewing stand to-day?"

"No, I didn't read it; but wot of it?" answered the person addressed.

"Nothing, only it reminded me of a promise I made you that night down at the Stuffed Owl when we met for the first time since we were kids together. Remember that promise, don't you?"

"Can't say I do."

"I told you that some day I'd get you with the goods on you and that I'd lead you in broad daylight up the street to the big chief. Well, to-day, kid, I make good on that promise. The big chief's waiting for us up yonder in the reviewing stand along with the governor and the mayor and the rest. And you've got the goods on you--you're wearing them on your chest. And I'm about to lead you to him."

Whereupon old Mr. John J. Coincidence, standing in the crowd, took out his fountain pen and on his shirt cuff scored a fresh tally to his own credit.

CHAPTER VII

WHEN AUGUST THE SECOND WAS APRIL THE FIRST

How Ethan A. Pratt, formerly of South New Medford, in the State of Vermont, came to be resident manager and storekeeper for the British Great Eastern Company, Ltd., on Good Friday Island, in the South Seas, is not our present concern. Besides, the way of it makes too long a tale for telling here. It is sufficient to say he was.

Never having visited that wide, long, deep and mainly liquid backside of the planet known broadly as the South Seas but always intending to do so, I must largely depend for my local colour upon what Ethan Pratt wrote back home to South New Medford; on that, plus what returned travellers to those parts have from time to time told me. So if in this small chronicle those paragraphs which purport to be of a descriptive nature appear incomplete to readers personally acquainted with the spots dealt with or with spots like them the fault, in some degree at least, must rest upon the fact that I have had my main dependence in the preserved letters of one who was by no means a sprightly correspondent, but on the contrary was by way of being somewhat prosy, not to say commonplace, on his literary side.

From the evidence extant one gathers that for the four years of his life he spent on Good Friday Island Ethan Pratt lived in the rear room of a two-room house of frame standing on a beach with a little village about it, a jungle behind it, a river half-mooning it and a lagoon before it.

In the rear room he bedded and baited himself. The more s.p.a.cious front room into which his housekeeping quarters opened was a store of sorts where he retailed print goods staple, tinned foods a.s.sorted and gimcracks various to his customers, these mostly being natives. The building was crowned with a tin roof and on top of the roof there perched a round water tank, like a high hat on a head much too large for it. The use of this tank was to catch and store up rain water, which ran into it from the sloping top of a larger and taller structure standing partly alongside and partly back of the lesser structure. The larger building--a shed it properly was; a sprawling wide-eaved barracks of a shed--was for the storing of copra, the chief article for export produced on Good Friday Island.

Copra, as all know--or as all should know, since it has come to be one of the most essential vegetable products of the world, a thing needful in the manufacture of nearly every commercial output in which fatty essences are required--is the dried meat of the nut of the coconut palm.

So rich is it in oils that soap makers--to cite one of the industries employing it--scarce could do without it; but like many of this earth's most profitable and desirable yieldings it has its unpretty aspects. For one thing it stinks most abominably while it is being cured, and after it has been cured it continues to stink, with a lessened intensity. For another thing, the all-pervading reek of the stuff gets into food that is being prepared anywhere in its bulked vicinity.

Out in front of the establishment over which Ethan Pratt presided, where the sandy beach met the waters, was a rickety little wharf like a hyphen to link the grit with the salt. Down to the outer tip of the wharf ran a narrow-gauge track of rusted iron rails, and over the track on occasion plied little straddlebug handcars. Because the water offsh.o.r.e was shoal ships could not come in very close but must lie well out in the lagoon and their unloadings and their reloadings were carried on by means of whale-boats ferrying back and forth between ship side and dock side with the push cars to facilitate the freight movement at the land end of the connection. This was a laborious and a vexatious proceeding, necessitating the handling and rehandling of every bit of incoming or outbound cargo several times. But then, steamers did not come very often to Good Friday Island; one came every two months about.

The expanse upon which Ethan Pratt looked when he turned his eyes outward was of an incredible whiteness. You would have thought it to be the whitest, most blinding thing in the world until you considered the road that skirted it and some of the buildings that bordered it. For the road was built of crushed coral, so dazzlingly white that to look fixedly at it for thirty seconds in bright weather was to make the eyeb.a.l.l.s ache; and the buildings referred to were built of blocks of white coral like exaggerated cubes of refined sugar. These buildings were the chapels and churches--Methodist, Catholic, Seventh Day Adventist, English Wesleyan and American Mormon. When the sun shone clear the water on beyond became a shimmering blazing shield of white-hot metal; and an hour of uninterrupted gazing upon it would have turned an argus into a blinkard. But other times--early morning or evening or when stormy weather impended--the lagoon became all a wonderful deep clear blue, the colour of molten stained gla.s.s. One peering then into its depths saw, far down below, marvellous sea gardens all fronded and ferny and waving; and through the foliage of this fairy-land went darting schools and shoals of fish queerly shaped and as brilliantly coloured as tropical birds.

At the top of the beach, girdling it on its land side, and stencilling themselves against the sky line, ran a fringing of coconut palms. The trunks were naked almost to the tops, where the foliage revealed itself in flaring clumps of green. Viewed separately a tree was suggestive of a great bird standing on one leg with its head hidden under its wing, its rump up-reared and its splayed tail feathers saluting the skies. Viewed together they made a spectacle for which nothing in the temperate zones, animal or vegetable, offers a measurable comparison. When the wind blew softly the trees whispered among themselves. When the wind blew hard and furiously, as often it did, or when the trade breeze swelled to hurricane speed, the coconuts in their long bearded husks would be wrenched free and would come hurtling through the air like fletched cannon b.a.l.l.s. When one of them struck a tin roof there resulted a terrific crashing sound fit to wake the dead and to stun the living.

Living there Pratt's diet was mainly tinned salmon, which tasted faintly of tin and strongly of copra; and along with the salmon, crackers, which in this climate were almost always flabby with dampness and often were afflicted with greenish mould. Salmon and crackers had come to be his most dependable stand-bys in the matter of provender. True the natives brought him gifts of food dishes; dishes cooked without salt and pleasing to the Polynesian palate. Coming out upon his balcony of a morning he would find swinging from a cross-beam a basket made of the green palm leaves and containing a chicken or a fish prepared according to the primitive native recipe, or perhaps a mess of wild greens baked on hot stones; or maybe baked green bananas or taro or yams or hard crusty halves of baked breadfruit.

To the white man yams and taro taste mighty good at first, but eventually he sickens of them. Pratt sickened sooner than some white men had; and almost from the first the mere sight and savour of a soft-fleshed baked fish had made his gorge rise in revolt. So he fell back upon staples of his own land and ate salmon and crackers.

This island where he lived was an island of smells and insects. Consider first the matter of the prevalent smells: When the copra was curing and the village green was studded with thousands of little cusps, each being brown without and milk-white within, and each destined to remain there until the heat had dried the nut meats to the proper brownish tone, there rose and spread upon the air a stench so thick and so heavy as to be almost visible; a rancid, hot, rottenish stench. Then, when the wind blew off the seas it frequently brought with it the taint of rotted fish. Sniffing this smell Ethan Pratt would pray for a land breeze; but since he hated perfumed smells almost as intensely as he hated putrescent ones, a land breeze was no treat to his nose either, for it came freighted with the sickish odour of the frangipane and of a plant the islanders call _mosooi_, overpowering in their combined sweetness.

In his letters he complained much of these smells and likewise much of the heat, but more than of either he complained of the insects. It would appear that the mosquitoes worked on him in shifts. By day there came day mosquitoes, creatures of the sunlight and matching it in a way, seeing that they were big grey-striped fellows with keen and strident voices. By night there were small vicious mosquitoes, in colour an appropriate black and in habit more bloodthirsty than Uhlans. After dark the flame of his kerosene lamp was to them as the traditional light in the traditional cas.e.m.e.nt is to returning wanderers. It brought them in millions, and with them tiny persistent gnats and many small coffin-shaped beetles and hosts of pulpy, unwholesome-looking moths of many sizes and as many colours. Screens and double screens at the window openings did not avail to keep these visitors out. Somehow they found a way in. The mosquitoes and the gnats preyed upon him; the beetles and the moths were lured by the flame to a violent end. To save the wick from being clogged by their burnt bodies he hooded the top of the lamp with netting. This caused the lamp chimney to smoke and foul itself with soot. To save his shins from attack he wrapped his legs in newspaper buskins. For his hands and his face and his neck and his ears he could devise no protection.