|WHEN a chicken drinks,” said Dr. Ulswater, “he lifts his head and
thanks God, but when a man drinks he doesn't say anything. That is a
West-Indian proverb.”
I said: “It's a good proverb.”
“Well,” he went on, “I should say it was, with the chicken, possibly, so
to speak, a somewhat mechanical ritual.”
We were nearing the end of our cruise. I never wanted less to go back
to Portate, but my health was too boisterously good to be denied. It was
toward the end of November. In the land of steadfast people, the frost
would be on the grass, the wind in the yellow corn-shocks, the good folk
gathering to their annual feast of gratitude, far from these lazy seas.
Old women with white hair and knitting, old men walking with
canes, pink-cheeked girls and big-handed men, children storming the
banisters--they would all be there.
“What will you do on Thanksgiving day?” I asked, thinking of the cool
cornfields and familiar faces, of farm-yards and houses where chickens
used to drink in prayerful attitudes, where men also thanked God when
they drank, or ate.
“I have left it to Mrs. Mink. She is considering it.”
“How?”
“She is considering me. It amounts to the same thing. Her decision, I
should say, would determine my attitude on the question of gratitude.”
“What do you mean?”
“I have requested her to consider me matrimonially,” he said. “I fear
she is considering me in the light of Foreign Missions.
“I have presented to Mrs. Mink,” he continued, “as bearing on the point,
one of the clearest analogical arguments you ever saw. It is as follows:
The business of the tropic and temperate zones is to entertain and
supplement each other. They trade experiences--as they trade crude
rubber for sewing machines--to the profit of both parties. Put them
together and there arises in the mind of each a sense of romantic
surprise. Providence has supplied the need of man for permanent
astonishment by a trifling gradation of heat, so that when either shall
feel the need for something miraculous and incongruous, it has only to
find the other. I have pointed out to Mrs. Mink that her sailing in the
tropics was only falling in with this arrangement of Providence, and
she was pleased to hear it. Going about on loose seas in lazy climates
sometimes had seemed to her a lax and disorderly kind of conduct, and
having it attached that way to Providence made her feel better. I said
to Mrs. Mink: 'It's a doctrine of the present age that the tropics are
best administered and managed, for the good of all, by the temperate
zone. Civilisation is now tending to that end. Now, you, Mrs. Mink, are
a temperate zone. I am a tropical one. You have administrative ability.
I am a heterogeneous person, untidy, overflowing, and hankering to
be administered. You are the one, I am the other. Hence our mutual
functions, destinies, relations to each other, have been arranged and
foreordained by Providence. _Quod erat demonstrandum_.' That was my
argument to Mrs. Mink.”
I said: “It's a good argument. How does she like it?”
“Mrs. Mink,” he said, “is reflective but unconvinced. The extent to
which she is unconvinced is alarming. I can't deny it.”
I left them the day after Thanksgiving, at San Juan in Porto Rico,
and went back to Portate. Singular town, Portate. Singular man, Dr.
Ulswater. Singular planet around which the _Violetta_ was setting out
with its critical, exploring prow.
It was some two months after, when I received Dr. Ulswater's first
letter. Altogether he sent me four letters. Letters! rather manuscripts,
documents, written in his own mellow and tumultuous style. They made
that wandering hearth and home of the _Violetta_ a vivid enough picture
to my mind. I followed its course from sea to sea, from island to
island, wishing myself aboard her. Here follow the documents.