I
The longest answer to a short question I ever heard given was
delivered by Captain Tom Bowlby, master mariner, in the back parlour
of Jack Rounds’ saloon away back in 1903.
Bowlby still lingers as a memory in Island bars; a large
mahogany-coloured man, Bristol born and owned by the Pacific; he had
seen sandalwood wane and copra wax, had known Bully Hayes and the
ruffian Pease and Colonel Steinberger; and as to the ocean of his
fancy, there was scarcely a sounding from the Kermadecs to French
Frigate Island he could not have given you.
An illiterate man, maybe, as far as book reading goes, but a full man
by reason of experience and knowledge of Life—which is Literature in
the raw.
“And so, usin’ a figure of speech, she’d stuck the blister on the
wrong chap,” said the Captain finishing a statement.
“I beg your pardon, Cap’,” came a voice through the blue haze of
tobacco smoke, “but what was you meanin’ by a figure of speech?”
The Cap’, re-loading his pipe, allowed his eyes to travel from the
window and its view of the blue bay and the Chinese shrimp boats to
the island headdresses and paddles on the wall and from thence to the
speaker.
“What was I meanin’ by a figure of speech?—why, where was you born?”
He snorted, lit up, and accepted another drink and seemed to pass the
question by, but I saw his trouble. He couldn’t explain, couldn’t give
a clear definition off-hand of the term whose meaning he knew quite
well. Can you?
“Well, I was just asking to know,” said the voice.
Then, like a strong man armed, his vast experience of men and matters
came to the aid of Captain Tom:
“And know you shall,” said he, “if it’s in my power to put you wise.
When you gets travelling about in Languige you bumps across big facts.
You wouldn’t think words was any use except to talk them, would you?
You wouldn’t think you could belt a chap over the head with a couple
of words strung together same as with a slung shot, would you? Well,
you can. You was askin’ me what a figure of speech is—well, it’s a
thing that can kill a man sure as a shot gun, and Jack Bone, a friend
of mine, seen it done.
“Ever heard of Logan? He’d be before your time, but he’s well
remembered yet down Rapa way, a tall, soft-spoken chap, never drank,
blue-eyed chap as gentle as a woman and your own brother till he’d
skinned you and tanned your hide and sold it for sixpence. He had
offices in Sydney to start with and three or four schooners in the
trade, _bêche de mer_, turtle shell and copra, with side interests in
drinkin’ bars and such, till all of a sudden he went bust and had to
skip, leaving his partner to blow his brains out, and a wife he wasn’t
married to with six children to fend for. What bust him? Lord only
knows; it wasn’t his love of straight dealin’ anyhow. Then he came
right down on the beach, with his toes through his boots, till he
managed to pick a living somehow at Vavao and chummed in with a trader
by name of Cartwright, who’d chucked everything owing to a woman and
taken to the Islands and a native wife—one of them soft-shelled chaps
that can’t stand Luck, nohow, unless it’s with them. Logan got to be
sort of partner with Cartwright, who died six months after, and they
said Logan had poisoned him to scoop the business. Some said it was
the native wife who did the killing, being in love with Logan, who
took her on with the goodwill and fixtures. If she did, she got her
gruel, for he sold out to a German after he’d been there less than a
year, and skipped again. I reckon that chap must have been born with a
skippin’ rope in his fist by the way he went through life. They say
wickedness don’t prosper; well, in my experience it prospers well
enough up to a point; anyhow Logan after he left Vavao didn’t do bad,
by all accounts; he struck here and there, pearling in the Paumotus
and what not, and laying by money all the time, got half shares in a
schooner and bought the other chap out, took her blackbirding in the
Solomons, did a bit of opium smuggling, salved a derelict and brought
her right into ’Frisco, turned the coin into real estate at San
Lorenz, and sold out for double six months after; then he went
partners with a chap called Buck Johnstone in a saloon by the water
side close on to Rafferty’s landin’ stage, a regular Shanghai and dope
shop with ward politics thrown in, and a place in the wrecking ring,
and him going about ’Frisco with a half-dollar Henry Clay in his face
and a diamond as big as a decanter stopper for a scarf pin.
“He didn’t drink, as I was saying, and that gave him the bulge on the
others. He had a bottle of his own behind the bar with coloured water
in it, and when asked to have a drink he’d fill up out of it, leaving
the others to poison themselves with whisky.
“Then one night James Appleby blew into the bar.