I found her a giantess of a woman, not fat, but raw-boned and tall. Her
cheeks were still as pitted with hollows, her breath as catarrhal as
ever. But she had become a different woman since she had married.
Her husband was a widower with three children already before he took her
in marriage. He was a railroad engineer who drove a switch engine in the
yards. He was as short as she was tall ... a diminutive man, but virile
... with a deep, hoarse voice resonant like a foghorn. The little man
had an enormous chest matted with dense, black hair. It would almost
have made a whole head of hair for an average man. One could always see
this hair because he was proud of its possession, thought it denoted
virility and strength, and wore his shirt open at the neck, and several
buttons lower, in order to reveal his full hirsuteness.
Millie had already given birth to two children of her own, by him. And
she toiled about the house at endless duties, day and night, happy with
him, and loving his children and hers with an equal love. And being
adored in turn by them.
It was "Ma!" here and "Ma!" there ... the voices of the children ever
calling for her.... And she, running about, waiting on the youngsters,
baking ovensful of bread, sewing, scrubbing, dusting ... and talking,
talking, talking all the time she flew about at her ceaseless work....
Uncle Dick loved his joke, and the broader the better. As I sat across
the table from him, at mealtimes, and looked into his amused, small
twinkling eyes, I thought continually of the Miller in Chaucer's
_Canterbury Tales_....
Millie, too, was not slow at having her joke. She was roughly
affectionate of me, in memory of old days. And she continually asked me,
with loud, enjoying laughter, if I remembered this, that, and the other
bad (Rabelaisan) trick I had played on her back in Mornington....
* * * * *
But I was glad to see Haberford and the East again. I was all over my
desire to die a poet, and young.... Principal Balling had me come to see
him. He examined me in Latin and in English and History. He found that,
from study by myself, I had prepared so that I was more than able to
pass in these subjects. But when it came to mathematics I was no less
than an idiot. He informed my father that he had been mistaken in me,
before ... that he had given me a too cursory look-over, judging me
after the usual run ... he announced that he would admit me as special
student at the Keeley Heights High School.
The one thing High School gave me--my Winter there--was Shelley. In
English we touched on him briefly, mainly emphasising his _Skylark_. It
was his _Ode to the West Wind_ that made me want more of him ... with
his complete works I made myself a nuisance in class, never paying
attention to what anyone said or did, but sitting there like a man in a
trance, and, with Shelley, dreaming beautiful dreams of revolutionising
the world.
I awoke only for English Composition. But there, inevitably, I
quarrelled with the teacher over her ideas of the way English prose was
to be written. She tried to make us write after the Addisonian model. I
pointed out that the better style was the nervous, short-sentenced,
modern one--as Kipling wrote, at his best, in his prose. We had
altercation after altercation, and the little dumpy woman's eyes raged
behind her glasses at me--to the laughter of the rest of the class. Who
really did not care for anything but a lark, while I was all the while
convinced with the belief that they sat up nights, dreaming over great
books as I did.
Even yet, though now I know better, I cannot accept the fact that the
vast majority find their only poetry in a good bellyful of food, as I do
in the _Ode to the Nightingale_ and in the _Epipsychidion_....
Dissatisfied and disillusioned, it was again a book that lifted me out
of the stupidity in which I found myself enmeshed. Josiah Flynt's
_Tramping With Tramps_,--and one other--_Two Years Before the Mast_, by
Dana. And I lay back, mixing my dreams of humanity's liberation, with
visions of big American cities, fields of wheat and corn, forests,
little towns on river-bends.
A tramp or sailor--which?
First, the sea ... why not start out adventuring around the world and
back again?
Land ... sea ... everything ... become a great adventurer like my
favourite heroes in the picaresque novels of Le Sage, Defoe, Smollett
and Fielding?
It took me days of talk with the gang--boasting--and nights of dreaming,
to screw myself up to the right pitch.
Then, one afternoon, in high disgust over my usual quarrel with the
English teacher, I returned to my room determined to leave for the New
York waterfront that same afternoon....
I left a note for my father informing him that I had made up my mind to
go to sea, and that he needn't try to find me in order to fetch me home
again. I wished him good luck and good-bye.
Into my grip I cast a change of clothes, and a few books: my Cæsar and
Vergil in the Latin, Young's _Night Thoughts_, and Shelley.
* * * * *
South Street ... here were ships ... great tall fellows, their masts
dizzy things to look up at.
I came to a pier where two three-masted barks lay, one on either side.
First I turned to the one on the right because I saw two men up aloft.
And there was a boy passing down the deck, carrying a pot of coffee aft.
I could smell the good aroma of that coffee. Ever since, the smell of
coffee makes me wish to set out on a trip somewhere.
"Hey, Jimmy," I shouted to the boy.
"Hey, yourself!" he replied, coming belligerently to the side. Then,
"what do ye want?"
"To go to sea. Do you need anybody aboard for the voyage?"
He looked scornfully at me, as I stood there, skinny, shadow-thin.
"You go to hell!" he cried. Then he resumed his way to the cabin,
whistling.
The ship opposite, I inspected her next. It was grand with the
figurehead of a long, wooden lady leaning out obliquely with
ever-staring eyes, her hands crossed over her breasts.
Aboard I went, down the solitude of the deck. I stopped at the cook's
galley. I had gone there because I had seen smoke coming out of the
little crooked pipe that stood akimbo.
I looked in at the door. A dim figure developed within, moving about
among pots and pans. It was the cook, I could tell by the white cap he
wore ... an old, very old man. He wore a sleeveless shirt. His long
skinny, hairy arms were bare. His long silvery-grey beard gave him an
appearance like an ancient prophet. But where the beard left off there
was the anomaly of an almost smooth, ruddy face, and very young,
straight-seeing, blue eyes.
When I told the old cook what I wanted, he invited me in to the galley
and reached me a stool to sit on.
"The captain isn't up yet. He was ashore on a jamboree last night.
You'll see him walking up and down the poop when he's hopped out of his
bunk and eaten his breakfast."
The cook talked about himself, while I waited there. I helped him peel a
pail of potatoes....
Though I heard much of strange lands and far-away ports, he talked
mostly of the women who had been in love with him ... slews of them ...
"and even yet, sixty-five years old, I can make a good impression when I
want to ... I had a girl not yet twenty down in Buenos Ayres. She was
crazy about me ... that was only two years ago."
He showed me pictures of the various women, in all parts of the world,
that had "gone mad about him" ... obviously, they were all prostitutes.
He brought out a batch of obscene photographs, chuckling over them.
It was a German ship--the _Valkyrie_. But the cook spoke excellent
English, as did, I later found out, the captain, both the mates, and all
but one or two of the crew.
Before the captain came up from below the cook changed the subject from
women to history. In senile fashion, to show off, he recited the names
of the Roman emperors, in chronological sequence. And, drawing a curtain
aside from a shelf he himself had built over his bunk, he showed me
Momsen's complete history of Rome, in a row of formidable volumes.
* * * * *
"There's the captain now!"
A great hulk of a man was lounging over the rail of the poop-deck,
looking down over the dock.