The advertisement ran as follows:
Schooner _Hauppauge_
FOR SALE
By U.S. Marshal,
April 26, 1 P.M.,
Pier G, Erie R.R.,
Weehawken, N.J.
Built at Wilmington, N.C., 1918; net
tonnage 1,295; length 228; equipped with
sails, tackle, etc.
This had taken the eye of the Three Hours for Lunch Club. The club's
interest in nautical matters is well known and it is always looking
forward to the day when it will be able to command a vessel of its
own. Now it would be too much to say that the club expected to be
able to buy the _Hauppauge_ (the first thing it would have done, in
that case, would have been to rename her). For it was in the slack
and hollow of the week--shall we say, the bight of the week?--just
midway between pay-days. But at any rate, thought the club, we can
look her over, which will be an adventure in itself; and we can see
just how people behave when they are buying a schooner, and how
prices are running, so that when the time comes we will be more
experienced. Besides, the club remembered the ship auction scene in
"The Wrecker" and felt that the occasion might be one of most
romantic excitement.
It is hard, it is very hard, to have to admit that the club was
foiled. It had been told that at Cortlandt Street a ferry bound for
Weehawken might be found; but when Endymion and the Secretary
arrived there, at 12:20 o'clock, they learned that the traffic to
Weehawken is somewhat sparse. Next boat at 2:40, said a sign. They
hastened to the Lackawanna ferry at Barclay Street, thinking that by
voyaging to Hoboken and then taking a car they might still be in
time. But it was not to be. When the _Ithaca_ docked, just south of
the huge red-blotched profile of the rusty rotting _Leviathan_, it
was already 1 o'clock. The _Hauppauge_, they said to themselves, is
already on the block, and if we went up there now to study her, we
would be regarded as impostors.
But the club is philosophic. One Adventure is very nearly as good as
another, and they trod ashore at Hoboken with light hearts. It was a
day of tender and untroubled sunshine. They had a queer sensation of
being in foreign lands. Indeed, the tall tragic funnels of the
_Leviathan_ and her motionless derelict masts cast a curious shadow
of feeling over that region. For the great ship, though blameless
herself, seems a thing of shame, a remembrance of days and deeds
that soiled the simple creed of the sea. Her great shape and her
majestic hull, pitiably dingy and stark, are yet plainly conscious
of sin. You see it in every line of her as she lies there, with the
attitude of a great dog beaten and crouching. You wonder how she
would behave if she were towed out on the open bright water of the
river, under that clear sky, under the eyes of other ships going
about their affairs with the self-conscious rectitude and pride that
ships have. For ships are creatures of intense caste and
self-conscious righteousness. They rarely forgive a fallen
sister--even when she has fallen through no fault of her own.
Observe the _Nieuw Amsterdam_ as she lies, very solid and spick, a
few piers above. Her funnel is gay with bright green stripes; her
glazed promenade deck is white and immaculate. But, is there not
just a faint suggestion of smugness in her mien? She seems thanking
the good old Dutch Deity of cleanliness and respectability that she
herself is not like this poor trolloping giantess, degraded from the
embrace of ocean and the unblemished circle of the sea.
That section of Hoboken waterfront, along toward the green
promontory crowned by Stevens Institute, still has a war-time
flavour. The old Hamburg-American line piers are used by the Army
Transport Service, and in the sunshine a number of soldiers, off
duty, were happily drowsing on a row of two-tiered beds set outdoors
in the April pleasantness. There was a racket of bugles, and a squad
seemed to be drilling in the courtyard. Endymion and the Secretary,
after sitting on a pier-end watching some barges, and airing their
nautical views in a way they would never have done had any pukka
seafaring men been along, were stricken with the very crisis of
spring fever and lassitude. They considered the possibility of
hiring one of the soldiers' two-tiered beds for the afternoon.
Perhaps it is the first two syllables of Hoboken's name that make it
so desperately debilitating to the wayfarer in an April noonshine.
Perhaps it was a kind of old nostalgia, for the Secretary remembered
that sailormen's street as it had been some years ago, when he had
been along there in search of schooners of another sort.
But anatomizing their anguish, these creatures finally decided that
it might not be spring fever, but merely hunger. They saw the statue
of the late Mr. Sloan of the Lackawanna Railroad--Sam Sloan, the
bronze calls him, with friendly familiarity. The aspiring forelock
of that statue, and the upraised finger of Samuel Sullivan Cox ("The
Letter Carriers' Friend") in Astor Place, the club considers two of
the most striking things in New York statuary. Mr. Pappanicholas,
who has a candy shop in the high-spirited building called Duke's
House, near the ferry terminal, must be (Endymion thought) some
relative of Santa Claus. Perhaps he _is_ Santa Claus, and the club
pondered on the quite new idea that Santa Claus has lived in Hoboken
all these years and no one had guessed it. The club asked a friendly
policeman if there were a second-hand bookstore anywhere near. "Not
that I know of," he said. But they did find a stationery store where
there were a number of popular reprints in the window, notably "The
Innocence of Father Brown," and Andrew Lang's "My Own Fairy Book."
But lunch was still to be considered. The club is happy to add The
American Hotel, Hoboken, to its private list of places where it has
been serenely happy. Consider corned beef hash, with fried egg,
excellent, for 25 cents. Consider rhubarb pie, quite adequate, for
10 cents. Consider the courteous and urbane waiter. In one corner of
the dining room was the hotel office, with a large array of push
buttons communicating with the bedrooms. The club, its imagination
busy, conceived that these were for the purpose of awakening
seafaring guests early in the morning, so as not to miss their ship.
If we were, for instance, second mate of the _Hauppauge_, and came
to port in Hoboken, The American Hotel would be just the place where
we would want to put up.
That brings us back to the _Hauppauge_. We wonder who bought her,
and how much he paid; and why she carries the odd name of that Long
Island village? If he would only invite us over to see her--and tell
us how to get there!
[Illustration]