CHAPTER XXIII.ANOTHER SAIL.
Let him be forgotten for the moment. There is a new ship off the Point!
Not an English ship this time—a Yankee, by her beautiful flag.
It is the old scene—the hurried assembling of the people; the signals and answering signals; the manning of the surf boat; the meeting of the elders for consultation as to ways and means of reception. But this meeting is for serious work. The new ship is a trader; and only a ship of war imports no danger to these defenceless folk. There may be a rough crew, not too well in hand, fierce men, beyond punishment for excess, immediate or remote. If they choose to go wrong, the whole Island is at their mercy, not only in goods and chattels, but in the honour of the women, the lives of all.
The troubled Ancient, I think, would like to bury his treasure of maidens for awhile, if only he might hope to dig them up again, safe and sound, when the danger is past. He looks about him with the furtive glance that seeks a hiding-place, like some Jute progenitor on the approach of a pirate horde. But he wisely gives no public sign of alarm, and he sets out in his whaler to board the new-comer, with a cheerful face.
All depends upon the character of the Captain, and we are re-assured upon that point the moment he steps ashore. He gives a ‘candy’ from his pocket to a child, and lifts his hat to one of the girls in a way that is unmistakeable as a sign of genuine respect.
He is unlike all other sea captains, past and present, if not to come. He is a young, blonde dandy, with his hair parted in the middle, regular features, and a silken moustache. These appearances would be altogether difficult to harmonise with his functions, but for the firm set of the lips, and the glance of the clear blue eye. His handkerchief is slightly scented—there cannot be a doubt of it, and he is above the suspicion of a quid.His speech sometimes betrays his origin, but does not, in the least, betray his calling. He ‘shivers’ no ‘timbers’—but none of them ever do that. He occasionally talks like a book, and rather like a book read aloud in class. This, however, is only when he has time to think of himself, and to behave at his best. At these moments, happily rare, his construction is anything but idiomatic; it is classically ornate. The Americanism appears in his puritanical anxiety to give every word, and every letter of every word, its full phonetic value. He extends the principles of the Declaration of Independence to his syllables, and makes them all free and equal, without a trace of accentuation that might render one the tyrant of the rest. His orthoepic constitution for the language, in short, is a constitution without a king. Yet he has the fear of Webster ever before his eyes, and that authority is evidently his Supreme Court.
We lodge him in our house, at my request. This, I believe, anticipates a desire of the Ancient, who, while awaiting fuller knowledge, wants to have him under his eye. He sharesmy chamber, and is accommodated with a spare bed therein. His crew, with one or two exceptions, abide on the ship, but they have shore leave, and, before they have it, so says the Ancient, who brought him off, he makes them a short speech, which is evidently remembered throughout their entire stay. He is a restless man. Almost as soon as he takes up his quarters under our roof, he leaves them; and, before sundown, he has walked all over the Island; has inquired into its systems of government, laws, agriculture, commerce, and manufactures; has recognised the clock as a gift from Chicago, the organ as a present from Salem; and has suggested improvements in nearly every process of industry, that would double the yield. He has also asked to see our newspaper; and, without waiting to learn that we do not possess such a thing, has offered us a bundle of journals of both hemispheres which, he says, may supply ‘items’ of interest for the compilation of the local sheet.
At first he was taciturn, or merely interrogatory; and he showed extreme caution in his communications to us. But, towards evening, all this disappeared, and his fluency, andreadiness to relate his own story left nothing to be desired.
It was the typical American career of the past, and so, for all his freshness and alertness, I thought him an old-fashioned man. The new generation of Americans are mostly men of one career, as we are: this one was of half a dozen. He had begun life as an office boy, had been a real-estate agent, a lawyer, an editor of a newspaper, and was now a skipper, by what he considered a process of quite orderly development. He had sailed from San Francisco, and he was going to make the tour of the world, by way of Suez and the Mediterranean, Liverpool and New York. His ship was his own property, and her cargo was his pocket-money for the voyage. The Ancient asked him how he learned the trade of the sea, but he seemed unaware that there was a trade to learn. He could hardly remember a time when he did not know it, in its elements. As a boy, he used to sail a yacht about New York Bay; and he had served a year in a whaler, before the mast. At one time, he had thought of going into art.
How had he learned editing, then? That,too, he hardly knew. All crafts, he assured us, were governed by the same general principle of common sense. Editing a newspaper was but sailing a ship, under new conditions. You put your mind to it, and you rounded your back for the burden of your inevitable mistakes. If he had a natural turn, he thought, it was for scheming things, and getting down to first principles. In the course of his journalistic experiences, it had once been his duty to turn out a weekly column of jokes. He was not a joker by taste, nor by choice, but he could invent jokes, of course, if it had to be done. He studied out the principles of the thing, and he found that they lay in startling contrasts, and in startling similitudes. With a little practice, he soon became able to make a joke on anything—the inkstand on his desk, the rent in the carpet, the passing shower. He settled the points beforehand, and then worked up to them, straight and sharp. The failures came from ‘fooling around’ the subject. He made two or three jokes for us, as specimens. He did this with a perfectly grave face, apologising for a certain rustiness of habit due to his having beenfor some time out of that line. They were really very fair jokes; and, if we had not been so fully forewarned of the expected result, I think we might have laughed. They had to be ‘popped’ on you, as he explained. The Ancient promised to try them on Reuben, and our new acquaintance warranted they would make him gay. On the same general principle of observation, he had invented a way of simplifying a ship’s rig, saving 45 per cent. in cordage and blocks; and he promised to show us a model of it, made on the voyage.
By nightfall, we felt that he had exhausted us and our little island, and that he would fain be off. This, however, was impossible for the moment: the ship wanted more fresh provisions, and she was, besides, under slight repairs. It fretted him sorely, for he could not be still. Never did I see such feverish activity, such a passion for doing something. His meals were a mockery of Divine Providence; but, as he did not choke, he must have been reserved for special uses. In ten minutes he had disposed of fish, flesh, and his hunk of pie. Only a Rabelais could conceive the war of elements within. There wasno rest in him, nor near him; he was busy all over the surface of life, with no sense of the true uses of any one thing. It was a sheer fury of industrial action, like the old Berserker fury of war. He worked for the love of it, as the children of Starkader fought; and he seemed to have no more profit of his labour than they of their shedding of blood. It seemed quite a triumph to get him to bed.
He slept in my room, as I have said, or he was to sleep. But he could not lay him down till he had analysed the composition of the mattress, and thrown out suggestions for a new kind of stuffing, to be made of something that grew wild at the foot of the Peak. In the midst of his discourse on this point, he fell asleep, as suddenly as though he had turned himself off at the main. I, too, dropped off in a few minutes, and I slept soundly for a fewhours, untilI was awakened, long before dawn, by the gleam of a candle in my eyes.
He, of course, had lit the candle; and he was sitting upright in bed, and peering intently, through an eyeglass, at something which he held betwixt his finger and thumb.
‘See here,’ he said, without any apology for waking me; ‘if that don’t beat all!’
‘What is it?’ I asked in some alarm.
‘Just the strongest moth you ever saw in your life—pulls like a little cart-horse. I was lighting-up for a bit of quiet thinking, and in he buzzed.’
‘Let him go again.’
‘Oh, he can go: I shan’t want him yet,’ and he flung the insect off. ‘Are there many of his sort here, I wonder? We must ask old Forelock,’ so he called our host.
‘What if there are?’
‘See here,’ he said, propping himself up with his pillow, and, to my dismay, preparing for a long talk. ‘See here: I’ll tell you something; that insect is undeveloped Power.’
‘Well, what of that?’
‘Can’t you see?’ he asked in a tone expressive of his certainty that I could not.
I gave him the desired negative, and he went on.
‘That insect means half the motive power in Nature clean thrown away.’
‘I do not follow you, as yet.’
‘I dare say, but you will come to it. How about all the beasts of the field and the rest of them being created for the service of man?’
‘How about it!’ I was still only half awake.
‘Well, they skulk their work, that’s all. Half of them do nothing for their keep; do you begin to follow me now?’
‘How should they?’
‘Set them to work; that’s the idea.’
I was wide awake now. It seemed like a disclosure of some new invention in crime; and, so far, it was appropriate to the midnight hour, the darkness, and the deadly quiet of the scene.
‘You surely never mean to say that you want to put the song birds into factories?’
‘That is just what I do mean. It is only a fad of mine at present, but I shall work it out to something by-and-by. Did you ever see the performing fleas?’
‘No; it is the only thing I have not seen.’
‘Well, sir, I have, and, from that moment, I was a changed man. It is a mere toy with the showmen; to a man that can put two andtwo together, it is what the fall of the apple was to Newton. The first time I saw it, I did not sleep for three nights. I went into a dime show in Broadway, and there were these things, along with a Circassian lady, and, I believe, a calculating boy. I began with the fleas, and I never gave another thought to the rest. There were a dozen of them, of various sizes and nationalities—English fleas, Russian fleas, American, and so on; and there was a good deal of patter, that meant nothing, as to what each nationality could do, all winding up, of course, in honour of the Stars and Stripes. The Russian flea was big, but lazy; the English flea tough, but obstinate; the American flea all sprightliness, audacity, energy, and good sense. I soon stopped that, by making believe I was a Scotchman, when he produced a creature from its bed of wadding in a pill-box, and said it came from Mull, and was the smartest thing in his stables. I gave him a dollar, and asked him not to play the fool, and he fell to business at once. I wanted to get at the principle of the thing, you understand. The creatures were harnessed with a woman’s hair—a man’s wouldhave been too coarse—tied round that dip in their bodies that makes a natural waist. Then, when you had them fast in this way by one end of the hair, you put the other end to whatever you wanted to set going—Queen Victoria’s coach, in cardboard, or the miller’s cart. The flea naturally tried to get away, and that was your motive power. When you wanted him to turn the treadmill, you put him up against the wheel, just like his betters and, the faster he tried to run away, the faster the thing went round. That was always the principle of it; utilise the movement of flight—a new escapement beyond anything in the watchmaker’s art. Well, sir, this showman saw nothing beyond his fleas, but, at a glance, I saw ahead of them to all animal life. Make the animals earn their living, I said to myself; work up your reflex action for the benefit of man. It would solve the labour problem: no more strikes! When once I had got my thoughts in that groove, I seemed to see nothing but loafing idleness in all Nature. Take even the working animals; what do many of them do for Man? There’s nothing serious in beaver dams, for instance,from that point of view. They are generally a mere obstruction, for want of an intelligent foreman of the works. And as for the ants, though I admit they are too small to count in business, why flatter them up? I say nothing of their useless fighting; but did an ant ever make anything to eat, or anything to wear? There, sir, when I got that idea into my head, I couldn’t read the poets, for sheer disgust at the way in which they wrote about these creatures, and missed the real point. It was the same when I went to a menagerie, and I always went when I could. It made me real sad. Think of the waste of power in a cage of apes! Nothing to be done with them but nut-cracking, and swinging on the horizontal bar—never tell me!’
He had now settled himself for a long night’s talk, and, all things considered, I was not loath to find him a listener. There might be still more in it, I thought, than even he perceived; and, as he had looked beyond the showman, others, who were not without a lingering tenderness for a beauty of life fast perishing of the malady of use, might look beyond him. Besides, now that one was fairlyawake, it was so sweet to feel alive again. For, beyond the gleam of his candle, I caught a glimpse of the starry sky, and his monotone was sometimes tempered to the ear by the note of a night bird.
The bird seemed to put him in a rage. ‘Just so! Just so!’ he said with severity, apostrophising the unseen musician through the open casement. ‘How should you know better, when those who ought to know have been encouraging you all their lives? Did you ever read a book called “The Birds of the Poets,” my friend? It is justheart-breaking, if you take it from the point of view of an employer of labour. All this singing—why do they do it? Just because there’s nobody to set them to work. Who does most whistling? The loafer at the street corner. It’s pent up energy, sir, that must find a vent. That’s why there’s so much fuss about feathered love-making: they’ve got to kill time. Develop industry, and you’ll soon have less billing and cooing. Look at Spain and Italy—why it was nothing but that sort of thing till they went into manufactures. There ain’t much guitar playing in Catalonianow; and you’d better not go to Bilbao, if you’ve a taste for the castanets. Men have got to keep themselves employed; and, if they are not making cottons, or smelting iron, they’ll be fighting duels, or running off with one another’s wives. The animal kingdom is full of wasted power, that’s my point. You can’t use all of it: we haven’t got to that pitch of intelligence; but you can begin to try. Did you ever notice a cloud hanging low over the water, not a yard away, and stretching, perhaps, for miles and miles? What do you think it is? Young shrimps bounding up and down, just to show they’re glad—millions, billions, trillions of ’em. There’s power for you, if you could work it up. I don’t say you could, in this case; I don’t want to be fanciful. I only say what a fine thing, if you could: let us talk like practical men. See how the dog has sneaked out of industry. One time he used to earn his own dinner by roasting his master’s; but that’s all over now. I don’t say he costs less than the roasting-jack, but I’m talking of the principle of the thing. What is he now? A machine for licking the hand of his owner,and for barking when visitors pull the bell. It ain’t as though he washed your hand—you’ve got to wash it after him, instead—and if the help is too deaf to hear the bell, she will be too deaf to hear the dog. The dog is a humbug, and his show of affection is only a way of fooling us out of a free lunch. What does it amount to—all this running to and fro after nothing, and all this jumping about? Sheer waste of power. The Dutchmen and the Esquimaux are the only wise people; they turn it to account. Put him in harness, and he’ll soon leave off pawing your pants. As for cats, I am ashamed of them, and I am more ashamed of the human beings that encourage them in their profitless ways. In most houses, they don’t even catch the mice: it’s all done with traps. A pet animal of any kind is an economic monstrosity. Do you know how I interpret the singing of birds in their cages? They are sniggering at man to think they have done him out of their board. There’s a use for everything; why, even tortoises, if you know how to manage them, will tell you when it’s going to rain. Sir, I want to make idleness a caution to the wholeanimal creation—even a caution to snakes. The bloodhound—send him back into the Police service, and give him a blue overcoat for uniform, if you like. There’s power everywhere; why you’ve a perfect sledge hammer in every alligator’s tail! How about the weight of the hippopotamus for crushing cane? I’d just turn your Zoological Gardens into a factory, by thunder I would! and make every blessed animal do something for his living. No song, no supper. The squirrels would do for thread winders; the giraffes, for reaching things off shelves. You’d lose by it at starting, just as you do by prison labour, but you’d soon find out how to make it pay.’
He seemed to be growing drowsy, but I was wakeful enough, and I wanted him to go on. My curiosity seemed to gratify him, and he roused himself for a further effort.
‘You want to begin somewhere, on a small scale—in some place where there’s nobody to laugh. It’s like any other experiment; you’ll have to play with it at first, and keep your own counsel. You want a little place up in a corner; this place would do. Why not this place, eh?’ he said, sitting bolt upright, andfixing me with the inventor’s eye. ‘You are quiet; you are out of the world; you ain’t of much account in creation—you know my meaning—and you’ve no character to lose. Just think of it; one fine day you might send your little specimen of animal manufactures to a European Exhibition, and then you’d be a second hub of the universe. What do you do with your goats, for instance? Why not put ’em into harness? I mean real business, not baby play. How about a goat tramway from old Forelock’s house there, all along the Ridge, to the foot of the Point? fare, a potato, if you must carry your small change about in that way. You are just teeming with life, sir, and life is power. Your sea birds—it’s a sad sight! I know something could be done with ’em. Train up a happy family, new style—a happy factory, the whole lot, cat, and dog, and mouse, and guinea-pig, and barn-door fowl, all at work, instead of sitting on the mope, and all turning out something that would sell by the yard. Then lecture on the utilisation of reflex action all through the States. It would make your fortune as a show, and when that was played out, you couldeasily get up a company to run it as a business concern. You’ve no monkeys, but, lord, you are rich in sea birds! I can’t bring in the birds yet,’ he murmured, as another plaintive note of a night watcher sounded from the outside. ‘I can’t bring in the birds.’
In another instant, he had turned himself off at the main a second time, and was fast asleep.