Sonnie-Boy's People Part 17

"He did, did he? Then set this down in your log"--with the end of a prodigiously thick forefinger he was tapping the bar as he said it:--"The _Orion_ will be laying to anchor in Boston Harbor by Christmas Eve or there'll be a _d.a.m.n_ good reason why."

Right here I should say that there was more than a rivalry of craftsmanship between the Sickles cousins. Once, thinking it was the _Sirius_, Norman Sickles's sweetheart, a very pretty and a very good girl, had gone aboard the _Orion_ as it lay in Boston Harbor. Oliver at once locked her in the cabin, put to sea, and carried her to Philadelphia, where, urged by her mother, and to save her good name as she thought, she married Oliver. But that her heart was still with Norman was current gossip in the fleet.

Because he had lately heard that I had been free-spoken in my comment on that exploit was why Captain Oliver now--his forefinger tapping the bar and he eying me from under his hat-brim--added to his "good reason" the word that, no matter what my firm or any other firm thought of this or that, which warn't none o' their business anyway, he wanted 'em all to understand that he was as capable of getting a quick pa.s.sage out of a vessel as any Norman Sickles that ever walked; which gave me a fine chance to say: "Well, the place to prove that is at sea, and not in a barroom ash.o.r.e."

Not very delicate--no; but it sent him almost on the run down aboard his vessel, to clear his decks for loading, which was mostly what I was after.

And I let it leak out--the answer of the two cousins about being in Boston before Christmas. A little rivalry of that kind doesn't do any harm; and I wanted to walk into the office on Christmas Eve and say, "The last of that Newport News coal is lying out there in the stream waiting to dock," and then go home, even as many of the crews would want to go home, with an easy conscience for a Christmas holiday.

II

People in my line used to say that I was pretty young for my job, and some of them to warn me about allowing the underlings to get familiar with me. Well, perhaps I was too young for my job, or for any other job of any account; but as to the other charge I never noticed anybody getting over-familiar with me. Friendly, yes; but even the head of the firm himself couldn't get over-familiar unless I let him.

Part of my job, as I figured it, was to know freights and ships and the masters of ships; and where it hurt the firm's interests if I knew the crews as well, I couldn't see. Some would tell me that the further away I kept from them the more highly they would respect me, and the more highly they respected me the more they would do for me, which would have listened well if their vessels were getting in and out of loading ports any faster than mine did; but n.o.body noticed that they were.

And beyond that: I could never see where a little friendliness to anybody did any harm. I may have been too young for my job, but I wasn't too young to know that the world is alive with una.s.suming little fellows who are full to the hatches with knowledge of one kind or another that they will cheerfully unload to anybody who has time for them. Not that I want anybody to think I am so long-headed or forehanded a chap as to spend time only with people who could tell me things! I didn't do any thinking about it one way or the other. Any man that had time for me, I had time for him.

I had time for Drislane. He was one of the crew of the _Sirius_, and I had been seeing quite a little of him while I was in Newport News this fall on the coal. The _Sirius_ would load, sail, and return; load, sail, and return; and between trips Drislane and I would have sessions.

I'd seen something of Drislane before this in Boston. His mail used to come addressed to our Boston office, where everybody knew that twice a year, toward the end of June and just before Christmas, a check would come to him from his home in the West. When he came up from the vessel after a trip and found that home envelope awaiting him, he would step around to his room, clean up, and in his sh.o.r.e-going suit of clothes come back, have us cash his check, and then, according to our office force, it was--Good night! for two weeks.

The check, always the same--for twelve hundred dollars--would have given him a good two weeks' whirl in highly-rated, expensive places, if he cared for splurge, but I guess he never was influenced much by regulation ratings. Any place he liked the looks of would do for him--and some perhaps that he didn't like the looks of.

It was no use to try to tell the office force that Drislane hadn't a weak joint somewhere. Man, they _knew_! and holding no berths for the purely spiritual, with but one suspicious and unexplained action to work from, would build you up a character of any depth of depravity you were pleased to have. Three guesses, no more, was all they needed for Drislane's case. It was rum, or women, or rum _and_ women. If neither, then there was no hope for him at all--he was insane.

And certainly his judgment in women was something fierce. I'm setting down now the diction, as well as the judgment, of the office force; this last judgment being based on the evidence of the two illuminated occasions when he had come in to cash his check, and each time brought with him a young woman. Naturally, on his departure, the lads in the office had a word to say. The only way they could account for his selections--well, they couldn't account for them. It must be a genius he had--something was born with him--to pick the homely ones.

There wasn't the least evidence to show that there was anything wrong in these companionships of his. My notion of it was--he would never speak of it--that he picked up any kind of people in any kind of place, and made them as happy as he could while his money lasted. He certainly never went off for any two weeks' jamboree. Whatever his experiences were, they seemed to leave him in good shape physically, anyway. At least the marks of too many lonesome hours seemed to be ironed out of his face when he came back.

The man was so everlastingly unconscious that he was different from anybody else that it was refreshing. But there was more than that--to me, at least. I always looked on him as a touchstone, one of those men by whom you may gauge other men. Drislane was sensitized to crooks. He had only to stand in the same room with them to get their moral pictures. If I heard of Drislane distrusting a man or of a man disliking Drislane, I would at once set that man down, knowing nothing of the man, as having a rotten spot in him somewhere.

That was the Drislane who met me this night before the _Sirius_ and the _Orion_ were to sail for their last coal trip of the year, and asked me to have supper with him. And he took me to that same place where I'd had the words with Captain Oliver Sickles the day before--that is, the Tidewater Cafe--where was a drinking bar in front and a restaurant in back, a common enough sort of place, where women of the street could--and did--bring drunken sailors, and they served you pie with a knife.

I speak of that item of serving pie with a knife, not by way of poking fun at anybody; but here was a man five years away from his inland hills, for a whole year owner of an eating-place in a good-sized seaport city, and had not yet noticed that some people ate pie without a knife. By it I fancied I could gauge the man's social inheritance. And there were other customs of the place in keeping with the pie and knife.

I used to speculate on what primitive sort of an upbringing he had that he was so slow to adopt the most ordinary civilized customs.

Drislane seemed to be at home in the place. So was I for that matter; by which I mean I felt safe enough. Several times before this, in my inquisitive ramblings about the port, I had looked in there. So far as that goes, there are not many places where they bother a man who doesn't bother them, always excepting, of course, that he doesn't get drunk and disorderly, and isn't naturally foolish.

While I was studying the place and the people, Drislane ordered supper.

I paid no attention to him until he joggled my elbow. "What do you think of her?" he asked.

"Which one?" I asked, and looked about me afresh to note what worshipful creature it was I had missed.

"You didn't notice," he said, plainly put out with me, "the girl who is waiting on us?"

I had noticed her; but when she reappeared with the first part of our order, I noticed anew. A tall, full-bosomed girl she was, and as she walked across the floor toward us, a load of table things in each hand, she swayed from her hips like a young tree in the wind.

The physical force and poise of the girl was the notable thing about her. She carried her armfuls of dishes and food as if they were handfuls of marshmallows. She must have spent years working like a man in the fields to have developed such physical power. As to her face--it was innocent as a child's.

He introduced me when she had set down her dishes. "Miss Rose"---- I didn't get her surname, and it doesn't matter. "Rose's uncle owns this place," he added.

"Poor girl!" I thought.

She met his enchanted gaze with a slow, red-lipped smile. To me she gave an embarra.s.sed, half-sidewise glance. Strange men as yet were evidently disturbing items in her life.

He watched her when she left us, until she had pa.s.sed through the kitchen-door and beyond sight. "I'm going to marry and settle down," he said.

"This young lady?"

"If she'll have me. I haven't asked her yet." He was fiddling with his bread and b.u.t.ter. Suddenly he burst out with: "If you knew how lonesome I used to get, and the things I was tempted to do to forget it!"

"A man doesn't need, son, to be entirely exiled from his family to believe that; but when you're married will you go to sea just the same?"

I asked.

He did not answer.

I felt sorry for him. She looked to be a good girl, but I foresaw her troubles in a place like this while he would be away to sea. It would be a constant fight. She was possibly nineteen; she didn't look like a girl who had been tempered by temptation's long siege, and Lord knows what resisting power she would develop when so tempted.

From the fragments Drislane fed me with while she was coming and going, I learned that both her parents were dead, that she had been in the city only three months, that her uncle didn't seem to see anything strange in her employment in his place, and that Drislane was the first man who had shown an honest interest in her. "I take her to the theatre regularly,"

said Drislane. "I would to-night, only I want to sit in somewhere and have a long talk with her. You'd be surprised the things she doesn't know about the world."

"I wonder," I thought to myself, "if you realize the things _you_ don't know about the world," and began to wish then for his own sake that he'd hurry up and take to looking at life through the same gla.s.ses other people used.

She was living in sordid quarters in a section where a woman was any man's who could get her, and on any terms he could get her; and she was of the type and at the age which has always been held most desirable by the primitive male; and it was to be doubted if she had had the religious or home training needful to an emotional nature. In a good home, in a community where a woman was respected because she was a woman, all would have been fine; but here--they married, and he most of the time at sea--I felt sorry for her as well as for him.

"Take her out of here when you marry," I said to him before parting.

He shook his head. "No, I had a sc.r.a.p with my people leaving home.

They're all right at home--the best--but they want me to get down on my knees to them."

"Better be on your knees of your own will to your own people than against your will to an enemy," I said, but it had no meaning to him; and I left him to his Rose, almost wishing that something would happen to him soon to shake him up, even if, shaking him up, it shook off a few of the purple blossoms that he thought so necessary to the tree of life. Thinking of him I almost talk like him in his absent-minded moments.

III

I left Drislane to go to the theatre with Captain Norman Sickles. The theatre over, he went with me to my hotel to get a few ship's papers I had for him. After that we sat in for a smoke and a chat.

Not that there was much chatting on Captain Norman's part. He never did have much to say of himself, nor too much of anybody else, though he could praise a man if he liked him. It was the first time I had ever spent more than an hour together with him except on pure business, and I was curious to know just what he thought of a lot of things; among others, of his cousin. I gave him two or three openings, but he didn't rush in. What he did have to say of him he said at one gulp. It was: "Where I was raised 'twas common talk that after you'd been getting naught but fair winds for a long course, it was then a good time to keep a watch out. The headwinds have to come some time, and the longer they be in coming the longer they'll stay with you when they does come.

Oliver Sickles's been runnin' with a free sheet so long that I calc'late he's forgot there's such a thing as headwinds this side the Western ocean."

Even as Drislane, so did Captain Norman look like a terribly lonesome man at times. He probably was not yet over losing that girl who had been tricked into marrying his cousin. His cousin seemed to have got over it.

There was gossip enough between Boston and Norfolk to hang more than a suspicion of that on--for that and the belief that not so much in marrying her as in getting the girl away from his cousin was where Captain Oliver had most likely achieved his main desire.

We talked until Captain Norman thought it was time for him to be getting back aboard his vessel and turning in. As he stood up to go, he said: "'Tis said you like a little sea trip now and again? Why don't you go home with me in the _Sirius_?"

I was pleased at that--he was known to be not over-free with his invitations--and I thanked him, but on my not saying yes or no at once he looked chagrined; seeing which, I explained that early that fall his cousin had invited me, if ever I cared to return to Boston by water, to take pa.s.sage with him on the _Orion_.

He tried to smile. He was a whale of a man, bashful in his ways. He smiled like an overgrown boy who had done something there was no harm in but of which he was ashamed. "He always appears to be gettin' in ahead o' me, don't he?" he said, wistfully-like, after a moment, which hurried me into saying: "But I never said I'd go with him, captain, and he probably thinks he knows me too well to ask me now. I want to go with you, captain, and"--I made up my mind then and there--"I will--and proud to have you ask me."