Tramping on Life Part 29

The morning that the little sea-port of Newcastle lay before us, I felt as if I had been on tour through a strange world. For the first time the story-books of my youth had come true.

But Hoppner rose from the camp fire that we'd been sleeping by, stretched, and remarked, "now, thank Christ, I'll be able to find a good seat in a pub again, just like in Sydney, and all the booze I can drink.

We can go to some sailors' boarding house here, tell them we want to ship out, and they'll furnish us with the proper amount of drinks and take care of us, all hunky dory, till they find us a berth on ship ...

of course they'll be well paid for their trouble ... two months' advance pay handed over to them by the skipper ... but that won't bother me a bit."

From the hill on which we lay encamped we saw all the ships in the harbour. I no longer feared the sea. Your true adventurer forgets danger and perils experienced as a woman forgets the pangs of childbirth.

We met a sailor on the street, who, though at first a stranger, soon became our friend and, with the quick hospitality of the sea, steered us to a pub known as the Green Emerald, bought us drinks, and introduced us to Mother Conarty, the proprietress.

"I'll ship ye out all right, but where's your dunnage?"

We confessed that we had run away from our ships down at Sydney.

The old sailor had spoken of Mother Conarty as rough-mannered, but a woman with "a good, warm heart."

She proved it by taking us in to board, with no dunnage for her to hold as security.

"Oh, they're good lads, I'm sure," vouched our sailor-friend, speaking of us as if we had been forecastle mates of his for twenty voyages on end ... the way of the sea!

Now Mother Conarty was not stupid. She was a great-bodied, jolly Irishwoman, but she possessed razor-keen, hazel eyes that narrowed on us a bit when she first saw us. But the woman in her soon hushed her pa.s.sing suspicions. For Hoppner was a frank-faced, handsome lad, with wide shoulders and a small waist like a girl's. It was Hoppner's good looks took her in. She gave us a room together.

There was a blowsy cheeked bar-maid, Mother Conarty's daughter. She knew well how to handle with a few sharp, ironic remarks anyone who tried to "get fresh" with her ... and if she couldn't, there were plenty of husky sailormen about, hearty in their admiration for the resolute, clean girl, and ready with mauling fists.

"Mother Conarty's proud o' that kid o' hers, she is."

"And well she may be!"

"I've been thinkin' over you b'yes, an' as ye hain't no dunnage wit' ye, I'm thinkin' ye'll be workin' fer yer board an' room."

"We're willing enough, mother," I responded, with a sinking of the heart, while Hoppner grimaced to me, behind her back.

We scrubbed out rooms, and the stairs, the bar, behind the bar, the rooms back and front, where the sailors drank. We earned our board and room ... for a few days.

At the Green Emerald I met my first case of delirium tremens. And it was a townsman who had 'em, not a sailor. The townsman was well-dressed and well-behaved--at first ... but there lurked a wild stare in his eye that was almost a glaze ... and he hung on the bar and drank and drank and drank. It apparently had no effect on him, the liquor that he took.

"Say, but you're a tough one," complimented Molly.

But _it_ began in the afternoon. He picked up a stray dog from the floor and began kissing it. And the dog slavered back, returning his affection. Then he dropped the dog and began picking blue monkeys off the wall ... wee things, he explained to us ... that he could hold between thumb and forefinger ... only there were so many of them ...

mult.i.tudes of them ... that they rather distressed him ... they carried the man away in an ambulance.

Hoppner and I tired of the ceaseless scrubbing. One day we simply walked out of the Green Emerald and never showed up again. Hoppner stayed on in town.

I found that the _Valkyrie_ had run up from Sydney to coal at Newcastle, for the West Coast. I thought that in this case a little knowledge was not a dangerous thing, but a good thing, as long as I confined that knowledge to myself. I knew that the _Valkyrie_ was there. It was not necessary that the officers of the boat should know I was there ...

which I wasn't, for I turned south, my swag on my back, and made Sydney again.

In Sydney and "on the rocks," that is with nothing to eat and no place to sleep but outdoors.

Of course I couldn't keep away from the ships. I arrived at the Circular Quay. I ran into the Sailors' Mission. They were serving tea and having a prayer-meeting. I wandered in.

A thin, wisplike man, timid, in black, but very gentlemanly, made me heartily welcome. Not with that obnoxious, forced heartiness sky-pilots think the proper manner to affect in dealing with sailors, but in a human way genuinely felt.

After a service of hearty singing, he asked me if he could help me in any way.

"I suppose you can. I'm on the rocks bad."

He gave me all the cakes to eat which were left over from the tea. And a couple of shillings beside.

"I wonder if there's anything else I can do?"

"Yes, I'm a poet," I ventured, "and I'd like to get Chaucer's _Canterbury Tales_ to read again." I said this as much to startle the man as really meaning it. I can go so long without reading certain poets, and after that I starve for them as the hungry starve for food. I was hungry for Chaucer.

Such a request, coming from a youth almost in rags, impressed the sky-pilot so deeply that he insisted on giving me a job pumping the organ during services and a little room to sleep in at the mission. What is more, he lent me Skeats' edition of Chaucer, complete. And all the time I was with him he proved a "good sport." He didn't take advantage of my dependence on him to bother me so very much about G.o.d.

He took it for granted that I was a Christian, since I never discussed religion with him.

It began to grow wearisome, pumping an organ for a living. And I had fed myself full on Chaucer.

I began to yawn, behind the organ, over the growing staleness of life in a sailors' mission. And also I was being pestered by a tall, frigid old maid in purples and blacks, who had fixed her eye on me as a heathen she must convert.

"How'd you like a voyage to China?" the sky-pilot asked, one day.

Cathay ... Marco Polo ... Milton's description of the Chinese moving their wheelbarrows along the land by means of sails ... many poetic visions marched across my mind at the question.

"I'd like to, right enough."

"Then here's a chance for you," and he handed me a copy of the Bulletin, pointing out an advertis.e.m.e.nt for cattlemen on the steamboat, _South Sea King_, about to take a cargo of steers from Queensland to Taku, province of Pechi-li, Northern China.

"What are they sending cattle away up there for?"

"Supplies for troops ... The Boxer outbreak, you know ... go down to the number given in the advertis.e.m.e.nt, and I'm sure they'll sign you on as cattleman, if you want the job."