"Hist!" the cook motioned me back mysteriously. "Be sure you say 'Sir'
to him frequently."
* * * * *
"Beg pardon, sir. But are you Captain Schantze, sir?" (the cook had told
me the captain's name).
"Yes. What do you want?"
"I've heard you needed a cabin boy."
"Are you of German descent?"
"No, sir."
"What nationality are you, then?"
"American, sir."
"That means nothing, what were your people?"
"Straight English on my mother's side ... Pennsylvania Dutch on my
father's."
"What a mixture!"
He began walking up and down in seaman fashion. After spending several
minutes in silence I ventured to speak to him again.
"Do you think you could use me, sir?"
He swung on me abruptly.
"In what capacity?"
"As anything ... I'm willing to go as able seaman before the mast, if
necessary."
He stopped and looked me over and laughed explosively.
"Able seaman! you're so thin you have to stand twice in one place to
make a shadow ... you've got the romantic boy's idea of the sea ...
but, are you willing to do hard work from four o'clock in the morning
till nine or ten at night?"
"Anything, to get to sea, sir!"
"--sure you haven't run away from home?"
"No-no, sir!"
"Then why in the devil do you want to go to sea? isn't the land good
enough?"
I took a chance and told the captain all about my romantic notions of
sea-life, travel, and adventure.
"You talk just like one of our German poets."
"I _am_ a poet," I ventured further.
The captain gave an amused whistle. But I could see that he liked me.
"To-morrow morning at four o'clock ... come back, then, and Karl, the
cabin boy, will start you in at his job. I'll promote him to boy before
the mast."
* * * * *
I spent the night at Uncle Jim's house ... he was the uncle that had
come east, years before. He was married ... a head-bookkeeper ... lived
in a flat in the Bronx.
He thought it was queer that I was over in New York, alone ... when he
came home from work, that evening....
I could keep my adventure to myself no longer. I told him all about my
going to sea. But did Duncan (my father) approve of it? Yes, I replied.
But when I refused to locate the ship I was sailing on, at first Jim
tried to bully me into telling. I didn't want my father to learn where I
was, in case he came over to find me ... and went up to Uncle Jim's....
Then he began laughing at me.
"You've always been known for your big imagination and the things you
make up ... I suppose this is one of them."
"Let the boy alone," my aunt put in, a little dark woman of French and
English ancestry, "you ought to thank God that he has enough imagination
to make up stories ... he might be a great writer some day."
* * * * *
"Imagination's all right. I'm not quarrelling with Johnnie for that. But
you can't be all balloon and no ballast."
They made me up a bed on a sofa in the parlour ... among all the
bizarre chairs and tables that Uncle Jim had made from spools ... Aunt
Lottie still made dresses now and again ... before she married Jim she
had run a dressmaking establishment.
Uncle Jim set a Big Ben alarm clock down on one of the spool tables for
me.
"I've set the clock for half-past three. That will give you half an hour
to make your hypothetical ship in ... you'll have to jump up and stop
the clock, anyhow. It'll keep on ringing till you do."
* * * * *
My first morning on shipboard was spent scrubbing cabin floors, washing
down the walls, washing dishes, waiting on the captain and mates' mess
... the afternoon, polishing brass on the poop and officers' bridge,
under the supervision of Karl, the former cabin boy.
"Well, how do you like it?" asked the cook, as he stirred something in a
pot, with a big wooden ladle.
"Fine! but when are we sailing?"
"In about three days we drop down to Bayonne for a cargo of White Rose
oil and then we make a clean jump for Sydney, Australia."
"Around Cape Horn?" I asked, stirred romantically at the thought.
"No. Around the Cape of Good Hope."
* * * * *
Early in the afternoon of the day before we left the dock, as I was
polishing brass on deck, my father appeared before me, as abruptly as a
spirit.
"Well, here he is, as big as life!"
"Hello, Pop!"