Produced by Avinash Kothare, Tom Allen, Charles Franks and
the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
THE BELTED SEAS
By Arthur Colton
Cold are the feet and forehead of the earth,
Temperate his bosom and his knees,
But huge and hot the midriff of his girth,
Where heaves the laughter of the belted seas,
Where rolls the heavy thunder of his mirth
Around the still unstirred Hesperides.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. PEMBERTON'S.
II. THE “HEBE MAITLAND.”
III. THE HOTEL HELEN MAR.
IV. SADLER IN PORTATE.
V. END OF THE HOTEL HELEN MAR.
VI. TORRE ANANIAS. WHY CAPTAIN BUCKINGHAM
DID NOT GO BACK TO GREENOUGH
VII. LIEBCHEN AND THE EWIGWEIBLICHE.
THE LOSS OF THE “ANACONDA”.
VIII. SADLER IN SALERATUS.
THE GREEN DRAGON PAGODA.
IX. KING JULIUS.
X. THE KIYI PROPOSITION.
SADLER CONCLUDED.
XI. THE VOYAGE OF THE “VOODOO”.
XII. THE FLANNAGAN AND IMPERIAL.
XIII. FLANNAGAN AND STEVEY TODD.
CAPTAIN BUCKINGHAM RETURNS TO GREENOUGH.
XIV. CAPTAIN BUCKINGHAM VISITS THE CEMETERY IN ADRIAN.
ANDREW AND MADGE MCCULLOCH AND BILLY CORLISS.
CAPTAIN BUCKINGHAM'S NARRATIVE ENDS.
XV. THE CONCLUSION OF THE WHOLE.
THE BELTED SEAS
CHAPTER I.
PEMBERTON'S.
The clock struck one. It was the tall standing clock in the front room
of Pemberton's Hotel, and Pemberton's stands by the highway that runs
by the coast of Long Island Sound. It is near the western edge of the
village of Greenough, the gilt cupola of whose eminent steeple is noted
by far-passing ships. On the beach are flimsy summer cottages, and hard
beside them is the old harbour, guarded by its stone pier. Whalers and
merchantmen used to tie up there a hundred years ago, where now only
fishing boats come. The village lies back from the shore, and has three
divisions, Newport Street, the Green, and the West End; of which the
first is a broad street with double roads, and there are the post office
and the stores; the second boasts of its gilt-cupolaed church; the third
has the two distinctions of the cemetery and Pemberton's.
The hotel is not so far from the beach but you can sit in the front room
and hear the surf. It was a small hotel when I used to frequent it, and
was kept by Pemberton himself--gone, now, alas! with his venerable dusty
hair and red face, imperturbably amiable. He was no seaman. Throughout
his long life he had anchored to his own chimneyside, which was a solid
and steady chimney, whose red-brick complexion resembled its owner's.
His wife was dead, and he ran the hotel much alone, except for the
company of Uncle Abimelech, Captain Buckingham, Stevey Todd, and such
others as came and went, or townsfolk who liked the anchorage. But the
three I have named were seamen, and I always found them by Pemberton's
chimney. Abe Dalrimple, or Uncle Abe, was near Pemberton's age, and had
lived with him for years; but Stevey Todd and Captain B. were younger,
and, as I gathered, they had been with Pemberton only for some months
past, the captain boarding, and Stevey Todd maybe boarding as well; I
don't know; but I know Stevey Todd did some of the cooking, and had been
a ship's cook the main part of his life. It seemed to me they acted like
a settled family among them anyway.
Captain Thomas Buckingham was a smallish man of fifty, with a bronzed
face, or you might say iron, with respect to its rusty colour, and also
it was dark and immobile. But now and then there would come a glimmer
and twist in his eyes, sometimes he would start in talking and flow
on like a river, calm, sober, and untiring, and yet again he would be
silent for hours. Some might have thought him melancholy, for his manner
was of the gravest.
We were speaking of hotels, that stormy afternoon when the distant surf
was moaning and the wind heaping the snow against the doors, and when
the clock had struck, he said slowly:
“I kept a hotel once. It was in '72 or a bit before. It's a good trade.”
And none of us disputed it was a good trade, as keeping a man indoors in
stormy weather.
“Was it like Pemberton's?”
“No, not like Pemberton's.”
“Seaside?”
“No, inland a bit.”
“Summer hotel?”
“Aye, summer hotel. Always summer there.”
“It must have paid!”
“Aye, she paid. It was in South America.”
“South America?”
“Aye, Stevey Todd and I ran her. She was put up in New Bedford by Smith
and Morgan, and Stevey Todd and I ran her in South America.”
“How so? Do they export hotels to South America?”
“There ain't any steady trade in 'em.” And no more would he say just
then. For he was that kind of a man, Captain Tom, He would talk or he
would not, as suited him.
Uncle Abimelech was tall and old, and had a long white beard, and was
thin in the legs, not to say uncertain on them, and he appeared to
wander in his mind as well as in his legs. Stevey Todd was stout, with
a smooth, fair face, and in temperament fond of arguing, though cautious
about it. For that winter afternoon, when I remarked, hearing the
whistling wind and the thunder of the surf, “It blows hard, Mr. Todd,”
Stevey Todd answered cautiously, “If you called it brisk, I wouldn't
maybe argue it, but 'hard' I'd argue,” and Pemberton said agreeably,
“Why, when you put it that way, you're right, not but the meaning was
good, ain't a doubt of it;” and Uncle Abimelech, getting hold of a loose
end in his mind, piped up, singing:
“She blows aloft, she blows alow,
Take in your topsails early;”
whereas there was no doubt at all about its blowing hard. But Stevey
Todd was the kind of a man that liked to argue in good order.
The meanwhile Captain Buckingham had said nothing so far that afternoon,
except on the subject of hotel-keeping in South America. But when Stevey
Todd offered to admit that it blew “brisk, but when you say hard, I
argue it;” and when Uncle Abimelech piped:
“She blows aloft, she blows alow,
Take in your topsails early;”
Then Captain Buckingham, who sat leaning forward smoking, with his
elbows on his knees, staring at the fire, at last, without stirring in
his chair, he spoke up, and said, “She blows all right,” and we waited,
thinking he might say more.
“Pemberton,” he went on, “the seaman follows his profit and luck around
the world. You sit by your chimney and they come to you. And if I was
doing it again, or my old ship, the _Annalee_, was to come banging and
bouncing at this door, saying 'Have a cruise, Captain Buckingham; rise
up!' I'd say: 'You go dock yourself.'”
“She might, if she came overland, maybe,” said Stevey Todd, “seeing it
blows brisk, which I admits and I stands by, for she was a tall sailing
ship was the _Annalee_.”
“She was that,” said Captain Tom; “the best ship I ever sailed in,
barring the _Hebe Maitland_.”
Whereat Stevey Todd said, “_There_ was a ship!” and Uncle Abimelech
piped up again, singing these singular words:
“There was a ship
In Bailey's Slip.
One evil day
We sailed away
From Bailey's Slip
We sailed away, with Captain Clyde,
An old, old man with a copper hide,
In the _Hebe Maitland_ sailed, Hooroar!
And fetched the coast of Ecuador.”
“Aye,” said Captain Tom. “Those were Kid Sadler's verses. There's many
of 'em that Abe can say over, and he can glue a tune to 'em well, for
he's got that kind of a memory that's loose, but stringy and long, and
he always had. There's only Abe and Stevey Todd and me left of the _Hebe
Maitland's_ crew, unless Sadler and Little Irish maybe, for I left
them in Burmah, and they may be there. But what I was going to say,
Pemberton, is, I made a mistake somewhere.”
“Why,” said Pemberton, “there you may be right.”
“For I was that kind of young one,” the captain went on, “which if he's
blown up with dynamite, he comes down remarking it's breezy up there. I
was that careless.”
Then we drew nearer and knew that Captain Buckingham was hauling up his
anchor, and maybe would take us on a long way, which he surely did. The
afternoon slipped on, hour by hour, and the fire snapped and cast its
red light in our faces, and the kettle sung and the storm outside kept
up its mad business, and the surf its monotone.
“I was so, when I was a lad of eighteen or nineteen,” Captain Buckingham
said. “I was a wild one, though not large, but limber and clipper-built,
and happy any side up, and my notion of human life was that it was
something like a cake-walk, and something like a Bartlett pear, as being
juicy anywhere you bit in.”