ANOTHER SAIL.
Let him be forgotten for the moment. There is a new ship off the Point!
Not an English ship this time--a Yankee, by her beautiful flag.
It is the old scene--the hurried assembling of the people; the signals
and answering signals; the manning of the surf boat; the meeting of
the elders for consultation as to ways and means of reception. But
this meeting is for serious work. The new ship is a trader; and only
a ship of war imports no danger to these defenceless folk. There may
be a rough crew, not too well in hand, fierce men, beyond punishment
for excess, immediate or remote. If they choose to go wrong, the whole
Island is at their mercy, not only in goods and chattels, but in the
honour of the women, the lives of all.
The troubled Ancient, I think, would like to bury his treasure of
maidens for awhile, if only he might hope to dig them up again, safe
and sound, when the danger is past. He looks about him with the furtive
glance that seeks a hiding-place, like some Jute progenitor on the
approach of a pirate horde. But he wisely gives no public sign of
alarm, and he sets out in his whaler to board the new-comer, with a
cheerful face.
All depends upon the character of the Captain, and we are re-assured
upon that point the moment he steps ashore. He gives a ‘candy’ from his
pocket to a child, and lifts his hat to one of the girls in a way that
is unmistakeable as a sign of genuine respect.
He is unlike all other sea captains, past and present, if not to come.
He is a young, blonde dandy, with his hair parted in the middle,
regular features, and a silken moustache. These appearances would
be altogether difficult to harmonise with his functions, but for
the firm set of the lips, and the glance of the clear blue eye. His
handkerchief is slightly scented--there cannot be a doubt of it, and
he is above the suspicion of a quid. His speech sometimes betrays his
origin, but does not, in the least, betray his calling. He ‘shivers’ no
‘timbers’--but none of them ever do that. He occasionally talks like
a book, and rather like a book read aloud in class. This, however,
is only when he has time to think of himself, and to behave at his
best. At these moments, happily rare, his construction is anything but
idiomatic; it is classically ornate. The Americanism appears in his
puritanical anxiety to give every word, and every letter of every word,
its full phonetic value. He extends the principles of the Declaration
of Independence to his syllables, and makes them all free and equal,
without a trace of accentuation that might render one the tyrant of
the rest. His orthoepic constitution for the language, in short, is a
constitution without a king. Yet he has the fear of Webster ever before
his eyes, and that authority is evidently his Supreme Court.
We lodge him in our house, at my request. This, I believe, anticipates
a desire of the Ancient, who, while awaiting fuller knowledge, wants
to have him under his eye. He shares my chamber, and is accommodated
with a spare bed therein. His crew, with one or two exceptions, abide
on the ship, but they have shore leave, and, before they have it, so
says the Ancient, who brought him off, he makes them a short speech,
which is evidently remembered throughout their entire stay. He is a
restless man. Almost as soon as he takes up his quarters under our
roof, he leaves them; and, before sundown, he has walked all over the
Island; has inquired into its systems of government, laws, agriculture,
commerce, and manufactures; has recognised the clock as a gift
from Chicago, the organ as a present from Salem; and has suggested
improvements in nearly every process of industry, that would double the
yield. He has also asked to see our newspaper; and, without waiting
to learn that we do not possess such a thing, has offered us a bundle
of journals of both hemispheres which, he says, may supply ‘items’ of
interest for the compilation of the local sheet.
At first he was taciturn, or merely interrogatory; and he showed
extreme caution in his communications to us. But, towards evening, all
this disappeared, and his fluency, and readiness to relate his own
story left nothing to be desired.
It was the typical American career of the past, and so, for all his
freshness and alertness, I thought him an old-fashioned man. The new
generation of Americans are mostly men of one career, as we are: this
one was of half a dozen. He had begun life as an office boy, had been
a real-estate agent, a lawyer, an editor of a newspaper, and was now a
skipper, by what he considered a process of quite orderly development.
He had sailed from San Francisco, and he was going to make the tour
of the world, by way of Suez and the Mediterranean, Liverpool and New
York. His ship was his own property, and her cargo was his pocket-money
for the voyage. The Ancient asked him how he learned the trade of the
sea, but he seemed unaware that there was a trade to learn. He could
hardly remember a time when he did not know it, in its elements. As a
boy, he used to sail a yacht about New York Bay; and he had served a
year in a whaler, before the mast. At one time, he had thought of going
into art.
How had he learned editing, then? That, too, he hardly knew. All
crafts, he assured us, were governed by the same general principle
of common sense. Editing a newspaper was but sailing a ship, under
new conditions. You put your mind to it, and you rounded your back
for the burden of your inevitable mistakes. If he had a natural turn,
he thought, it was for scheming things, and getting down to first
principles. In the course of his journalistic experiences, it had
once been his duty to turn out a weekly column of jokes. He was not a
joker by taste, nor by choice, but he could invent jokes, of course,
if it had to be done. He studied out the principles of the thing,
and he found that they lay in startling contrasts, and in startling
similitudes. With a little practice, he soon became able to make a joke
on anything--the inkstand on his desk, the rent in the carpet, the
passing shower. He settled the points beforehand, and then worked up to
them, straight and sharp. The failures came from ‘fooling around’ the
subject. He made two or three jokes for us, as specimens. He did this
with a perfectly grave face, apologising for a certain rustiness of
habit due to his having been for some time out of that line. They were
really very fair jokes; and, if we had not been so fully forewarned
of the expected result, I think we might have laughed. They had to be
‘popped’ on you, as he explained. The Ancient promised to try them on
Reuben, and our new acquaintance warranted they would make him gay. On
the same general principle of observation, he had invented a way of
simplifying a ship’s rig, saving 45 per cent. in cordage and blocks;
and he promised to show us a model of it, made on the voyage.
By nightfall, we felt that he had exhausted us and our little island,
and that he would fain be off. This, however, was impossible for the
moment: the ship wanted more fresh provisions, and she was, besides,
under slight repairs. It fretted him sorely, for he could not be
still. Never did I see such feverish activity, such a passion for
doing something. His meals were a mockery of Divine Providence; but,
as he did not choke, he must have been reserved for special uses. In
ten minutes he had disposed of fish, flesh, and his hunk of pie. Only
a Rabelais could conceive the war of elements within. There was no
rest in him, nor near him; he was busy all over the surface of life,
with no sense of the true uses of any one thing. It was a sheer fury of
industrial action, like the old Berserker fury of war. He worked for
the love of it, as the children of Starkader fought; and he seemed to
have no more profit of his labour than they of their shedding of blood.
It seemed quite a triumph to get him to bed.
He slept in my room, as I have said, or he was to sleep. But he could
not lay him down till he had analysed the composition of the mattress,
and thrown out suggestions for a new kind of stuffing, to be made of
something that grew wild at the foot of the Peak. In the midst of his
discourse on this point, he fell asleep, as suddenly as though he had
turned himself off at the main. I, too, dropped off in a few minutes,
and I slept soundly for a few hours, until I was awakened, long before
dawn, by the gleam of a candle in my eyes.
He, of course, had lit the candle; and he was sitting upright in bed,
and peering intently, through an eyeglass, at something which he held
betwixt his finger and thumb.
‘See here,’ he said, without any apology for waking me; ‘if that don’t
beat all!’
‘What is it?’ I asked in some alarm.
‘Just the strongest moth you ever saw in your life--pulls like a little
cart-horse. I was lighting-up for a bit of quiet thinking, and in he
buzzed.’
‘Let him go again.’
‘Oh, he can go: I shan’t want him yet,’ and he flung the insect off.
‘Are there many of his sort here, I wonder? We must ask old Forelock,’
so he called our host.
‘What if there are?’
‘See here,’ he said, propping himself up with his pillow, and, to my
dismay, preparing for a long talk. ‘See here: I’ll tell you something;
that insect is undeveloped Power.’
‘Well, what of that?’
‘Can’t you see?’ he asked in a tone expressive of his certainty that I
could not.
I gave him the desired negative, and he went on.
‘That insect means half the motive power in Nature clean thrown away.’
‘I do not follow you, as yet.’
‘I dare say, but you will come to it. How about all the beasts of the
field and the rest of them being created for the service of man?’
‘How about it!’ I was still only half awake.
‘Well, they skulk their work, that’s all. Half of them do nothing for
their keep; do you begin to follow me now?’
‘How should they?’
‘Set them to work; that’s the idea.’
I was wide awake now. It seemed like a disclosure of some new invention
in crime; and, so far, it was appropriate to the midnight hour, the
darkness, and the deadly quiet of the scene.
‘You surely never mean to say that you want to put the song birds into
factories?’
‘That is just what I do mean. It is only a fad of mine at present,
but I shall work it out to something by-and-by. Did you ever see the
performing fleas?’
‘No; it is the only thing I have not seen.’
‘Well, sir, I have, and, from that moment, I was a changed man. It
is a mere toy with the showmen; to a man that can put two and two
together, it is what the fall of the apple was to Newton. The first
time I saw it, I did not sleep for three nights. I went into a dime
show in Broadway, and there were these things, along with a Circassian
lady, and, I believe, a calculating boy. I began with the fleas, and
I never gave another thought to the rest. There were a dozen of them,
of various sizes and nationalities--English fleas, Russian fleas,
American, and so on; and there was a good deal of patter, that meant
nothing, as to what each nationality could do, all winding up, of
course, in honour of the Stars and Stripes. The Russian flea was big,
but lazy; the English flea tough, but obstinate; the American flea
all sprightliness, audacity, energy, and good sense. I soon stopped
that, by making believe I was a Scotchman, when he produced a creature
from its bed of wadding in a pill-box, and said it came from Mull, and
was the smartest thing in his stables. I gave him a dollar, and asked
him not to play the fool, and he fell to business at once. I wanted
to get at the principle of the thing, you understand. The creatures
were harnessed with a woman’s hair--a man’s would have been too
coarse--tied round that dip in their bodies that makes a natural waist.
Then, when you had them fast in this way by one end of the hair, you
put the other end to whatever you wanted to set going--Queen Victoria’s
coach, in cardboard, or the miller’s cart. The flea naturally tried to
get away, and that was your motive power. When you wanted him to turn
the treadmill, you put him up against the wheel, just like his betters
and, the faster he tried to run away, the faster the thing went round.
That was always the principle of it; utilise the movement of flight--a
new escapement beyond anything in the watchmaker’s art. Well, sir, this
showman saw nothing beyond his fleas, but, at a glance, I saw ahead of
them to all animal life. Make the animals earn their living, I said to
myself; work up your reflex action for the benefit of man. It would
solve the labour problem: no more strikes! When once I had got my
thoughts in that groove, I seemed to see nothing but loafing idleness
in all Nature. Take even the working animals; what do many of them do
for Man? There’s nothing serious in beaver dams, for instance, from
that point of view. They are generally a mere obstruction, for want
of an intelligent foreman of the works. And as for the ants, though I
admit they are too small to count in business, why flatter them up?
I say nothing of their useless fighting; but did an ant ever make
anything to eat, or anything to wear? There, sir, when I got that idea
into my head, I couldn’t read the poets, for sheer disgust at the way
in which they wrote about these creatures, and missed the real point.
It was the same when I went to a menagerie, and I always went when I
could. It made me real sad. Think of the waste of power in a cage of
apes! Nothing to be done with them but nut-cracking, and swinging on
the horizontal bar--never tell me!’
He had now settled himself for a long night’s talk, and, all things
considered, I was not loath to find him a listener. There might be
still more in it, I thought, than even he perceived; and, as he had
looked beyond the showman, others, who were not without a lingering
tenderness for a beauty of life fast perishing of the malady of use,
might look beyond him. Besides, now that one was fairly awake, it was
so sweet to feel alive again. For, beyond the gleam of his candle, I
caught a glimpse of the starry sky, and his monotone was sometimes
tempered to the ear by the note of a night bird.
The bird seemed to put him in a rage. ‘Just so! Just so!’ he said with
severity, apostrophising the unseen musician through the open casement.
‘How should you know better, when those who ought to know have been
encouraging you all their lives? Did you ever read a book called “The
Birds of the Poets,” my friend? It is just heart-breaking, if you
take it from the point of view of an employer of labour. All this
singing--why do they do it? Just because there’s nobody to set them to
work. Who does most whistling? The loafer at the street corner. It’s
pent up energy, sir, that must find a vent. That’s why there’s so much
fuss about feathered love-making: they’ve got to kill time. Develop
industry, and you’ll soon have less billing and cooing. Look at Spain
and Italy--why it was nothing but that sort of thing till they went
into manufactures. There ain’t much guitar playing in Catalonia now;
and you’d better not go to Bilbao, if you’ve a taste for the castanets.
Men have got to keep themselves employed; and, if they are not making
cottons, or smelting iron, they’ll be fighting duels, or running off
with one another’s wives. The animal kingdom is full of wasted power,
that’s my point. You can’t use all of it: we haven’t got to that
pitch of intelligence; but you can begin to try. Did you ever notice
a cloud hanging low over the water, not a yard away, and stretching,
perhaps, for miles and miles? What do you think it is? Young shrimps
bounding up and down, just to show they’re glad--millions, billions,
trillions of ’em. There’s power for you, if you could work it up. I
don’t say you could, in this case; I don’t want to be fanciful. I only
say what a fine thing, if you could: let us talk like practical men.
See how the dog has sneaked out of industry. One time he used to earn
his own dinner by roasting his master’s; but that’s all over now. I
don’t say he costs less than the roasting-jack, but I’m talking of
the principle of the thing. What is he now? A machine for licking the
hand of his owner, and for barking when visitors pull the bell. It
ain’t as though he washed your hand--you’ve got to wash it after him,
instead--and if the help is too deaf to hear the bell, she will be too
deaf to hear the dog. The dog is a humbug, and his show of affection
is only a way of fooling us out of a free lunch. What does it amount
to--all this running to and fro after nothing, and all this jumping
about? Sheer waste of power. The Dutchmen and the Esquimaux are the
only wise people; they turn it to account. Put him in harness, and
he’ll soon leave off pawing your pants. As for cats, I am ashamed of
them, and I am more ashamed of the human beings that encourage them
in their profitless ways. In most houses, they don’t even catch the
mice: it’s all done with traps. A pet animal of any kind is an economic
monstrosity. Do you know how I interpret the singing of birds in their
cages? They are sniggering at man to think they have done him out
of their board. There’s a use for everything; why, even tortoises,
if you know how to manage them, will tell you when it’s going to
rain. Sir, I want to make idleness a caution to the whole animal
creation--even a caution to snakes. The bloodhound--send him back into
the Police service, and give him a blue overcoat for uniform, if you
like. There’s power everywhere; why you’ve a perfect sledge hammer in
every alligator’s tail! How about the weight of the hippopotamus for
crushing cane? I’d just turn your Zoological Gardens into a factory,
by thunder I would! and make every blessed animal do something for his
living. No song, no supper. The squirrels would do for thread winders;
the giraffes, for reaching things off shelves. You’d lose by it at
starting, just as you do by prison labour, but you’d soon find out how
to make it pay.’
He seemed to be growing drowsy, but I was wakeful enough, and I wanted
him to go on. My curiosity seemed to gratify him, and he roused himself
for a further effort.
‘You want to begin somewhere, on a small scale--in some place where
there’s nobody to laugh. It’s like any other experiment; you’ll have
to play with it at first, and keep your own counsel. You want a little
place up in a corner; this place would do. Why not this place, eh?’ he
said, sitting bolt upright, and fixing me with the inventor’s eye.
‘You are quiet; you are out of the world; you ain’t of much account in
creation--you know my meaning--and you’ve no character to lose. Just
think of it; one fine day you might send your little specimen of animal
manufactures to a European Exhibition, and then you’d be a second hub
of the universe. What do you do with your goats, for instance? Why
not put ’em into harness? I mean real business, not baby play. How
about a goat tramway from old Forelock’s house there, all along the
Ridge, to the foot of the Point? fare, a potato, if you must carry your
small change about in that way. You are just teeming with life, sir,
and life is power. Your sea birds--it’s a sad sight! I know something
could be done with ’em. Train up a happy family, new style--a happy
factory, the whole lot, cat, and dog, and mouse, and guinea-pig, and
barn-door fowl, all at work, instead of sitting on the mope, and all
turning out something that would sell by the yard. Then lecture on the
utilisation of reflex action all through the States. It would make your
fortune as a show, and when that was played out, you could easily get
up a company to run it as a business concern. You’ve no monkeys, but,
lord, you are rich in sea birds! I can’t bring in the birds yet,’ he
murmured, as another plaintive note of a night watcher sounded from the
outside. ‘I can’t bring in the birds.’
In another instant, he had turned himself off at the main a second
time, and was fast asleep.