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 nobody 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 unassuming 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 shore-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 Café--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 embarrassed, half-sidewise glance. Strange men as yet were evidently
disturbing items in her life.
He watched her when she left us, until she had passed 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 butter. 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 glasses 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 scrap 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.