"What with these young schools aboard ship and chocolate caramels where
bottled beer was one time in the cantine, 'tis a changed navy we've
come to."
There was Porto Bello with its painted walls, there was the liberty
boat at the gangway, and there was Monaghan with nothing but abuse for
all present institutions.
"'Twas a good adventure the navy was once, but 'tis a kind of factory
they would be making of it, with pay-days, not fightin' days, the grand
thing to be lookin' for'ard to.
"And oh," he sighs after a breath, "the hearty arguments a liberty
party would find to their elbows in any foreign port of importance in
the old days! But now--puh!"
"Monaghan," I says, "is it in human nature, do you think, to alter so
wonderfully in one short generation?"
"'Tisn't me," says Monaghan, "that reads shelves of books from the
ship's library, includin' poetry. Go on, you; cling to your hopeful
views, till some day you die of them. But for me--I'll go with you on
no shore liberty this day."
So over the side I went without Monaghan, but our executive--him we
called Regulations--was there to speed our going from the gangway
grating.
"Remember, now," says Regulations, "no street brawlings and no ordering
rounds of intoxicating drinks in cantinas. Whoever isn't there when
the liberty boat leaves the landing-pier this afternoon, and whoever
returns aboard here under the influence of liquor I shall send 'em to
the brig. And don't think for one moment that any one of you can fool
me with any cock-and-bull story of what happened you."
No great evil in Regulations, but a pity, I was thinking, he would not
leave a little more to our imagination and maybe good intentions. Some
of us there were, I knew, that would like to think that 'twas maybe not
altogether fear of the ship's discipline would be holding us to our
good behavior.
Meditating, maybe sadly, I was on the distrust of Regulations and the
defection of Monaghan, when I looked up to find myself abreast of a
cantina that was run by an Americanized native called Tony, the same
who one time kept a fruit-stand on West Street in New York till he
discovered that bananas and pineapples and lemons were not the most
staple articles of diet on the water-front of a great American port.
"Tony," I says, "'twould grieve a certain superior officer of my ship
exceedingly were I to order one single draft of spirituous liquor on
this my first day of liberty in two months. But 'tis no summer resort
on the New England coast this is. Will you, in God's name, give me
something to cool the blazing throat of me?"
"When I tended bar in a hotel one time in a prohibition State in your
country," says West Street Tony, "we made one drink especially for
temperance people. I mix one now," he says; and he did.
"Lemonado Porto Bello we call that down here," says Tony.
"'Tis satisfying," I said; and had another, and passed on my way.
'Twas truly a beautiful port--Porto Bello--in the low latitudes; and
there were little children playing in the streets and long-tailed birds
singing in the trees; and from one place to another I passed, having
here and there along the way a lemonado Porto Bello by way of abating
the heat of the hot morning. And so, until approaching noon found me
under the portales of a hotel on a fine high hill.
'Twas in truth a hot morning. The Hot Coast the guide-books in the
ship's library called all that country, and no misname in that; but
when a waiter steps up with a negligée air and a towel and swipes a
battalion of camping flies from the marble deck of my table to the
scuppers of the sidewalk, and says: "Vairy gooda beer on icey--two
bottlas for-r da one-a peso," like a friendly soul who would help out a
thirsty and innocent foreigner, I said no.
"No," I said; "no intoxicating beverages will I order myself this day.
Lemonade Porto Bello," I said: "duo"--holding up two fingers to maybe
help out his lack of his own language. "One for me, one for him," I
said, and pointing to a glass a young fellow with an air of
preoccupation and melancholy at the next table had standing empty to
his elbow.
"Bueno, bueno!" said the waiter, and in good season brought me one and
replaced the empty glass of the abstracted young man with the other.
It was, as I said, a hot day. As to that, I've yet to see a morning in
twenty years of cruising on that blasted coast when it wasn't hot.
Sitting in the shade of the portales on that high hill and almost a
breeze coming in from the waters of the Gulf--even so, all ready to
soak iced Porto Bello lemonados into me, even so it was hot.
And while I'm waiting there having another lemonade, and by and by
another and another, a young girl enters the shade of the portales; and
no man could carry two eyes in his head and not notice the loveliness
of her. Lovely and good. I could feel it in the air when I wasn't
looking straight at her. Women's hats and men's cigarettes bobbed in
high approval, and the watery eyes of two gray-whiskered old rounders
grew almost bright and decent to look at when from over the tops of
their newspapers they gazed after her in passing.
My little table was up by the main entrance, and as if for no more than
to let her lovely glance rest on some manly creature who might be
sitting unattached in the neighborhood, she stopped on the lowest step
of the hotel doorway and her eyes were slanted in my general direction.
"Jeepers!" I said to myself, for even with a gray hair here and there
impinging on the black mop above my temples--even so, I needed no
ship's surgeon to testify that the pension-list was a long way from me
yet. And as for the rank, 'twas well I knew that when the heart goes
cruising 'tis little the rank matters. Gunner's mate, even as an
admiral of the line, may well have his fair romance: that I knew.
But what man of intelligence and natively good intentions may run riot
through the years of tempestuous youth and not arrive some day at a
belated wisdom? After another upward glance I saw that not for me was
that look of virginal yearning and distress. The line of fire of her
gaze had for its target the back of the head of the young fellow who so
melancholy and abstracted was gazing on the blue waters of the Gulf
from the next table.
"Jeepers!" I said to myself, "is he asleep or what?" and above my
lemonade I points a soft cough at him.
But no sign from him, and I coughed again--the short double cough which
is the signal among all males from Kamchatka to Punta Arenas, sailing
east or west, north or south, great or little circles, as you
please--for all males above the age of apprentice boys to stand to
attention--that 'tis lovely ladies coming over the side.
But never a sign of hearing from him, and "Mucho calero, mucho heato,"
I said respectfully, and with a side look of apology, meaning in that
way to intimate to the lovely creature that I had gone as far as the
regulations would permit a rough and simple nature who hadn't been
formally introduced.
I thought she would step down onto the walk beside us there to speak,
but a voice from within the hotel called out: "Marguerite!
Marguerite!" A firm, commanding voice it was, and with it the lovely
vision faded somewhere into the forbidding dark between-decks of the
hotel.
By and by the chin of the young fellow at the next table lifted off his
chest, his eyes came slowly back from the blue waters--or whatever it
was they were staring at--to the white marble top of his table, and he
stared, puzzled, at his full glass. "I thought I drank that," he says,
and has a sip of it.
"I never ordered anything like that," he says, and shoves it from him,
and then he spies me. "Excuse me," he says, "but did you speak?"
"I did," I says, "but so long ago that I've most lost the use of my
tongue. But no harm; I'll speak now again," and I clapped my hands and
"Muchacho! Boyo!" I calls. "Oono lemonado plaino--and oono lemonado
Porto Bello with much frio--you know--mucho iceyo and hurry like
helleo!"
And I explained to the young fellow how long years back my chum
Monaghan had taught me how to talk these tropic languages: the way to
do was to wave both hands, stick an "o" onto every other word and yell
like a bo'son's mate in the morning watch, and, with the waiter maybe
knowing a little American to help you out, you could get what you
ordered every time.
"But I'm wondering who it was called her," I said when the lemonades
had come. "There she was, sort of standing on one foot like she wanted
to talk to somebody, and I know that somebody wasn't me, when
'Marguerite!' a voice called--like that--and whing! she was gone, with
sighs soft as the bubbles in the wake of a torpedo to mark her going."
"Marguerite?" says the young fellow, coming wonderfully back to life.
"What did she look like?"
"Queen o' the Movies--nothing less for looks, but with a touch o' home
and mother and little babies clinging to her neck."
"That's Marguerite! Why didn't you call me?" he says.
He reminded me in his indignation of the rookies aboard ship when
they're first shook up to go on night watch. If you don't haul 'em out
of their hammocks and throw them ten feet down the passageway by their
necks and ankles, they bellow to the skipper at the mast next morning
how no one called them. But I would not tell him that. Let him who
has never felt the sting of the barbed arrow rub salt in the wound it
makes.
"I coughed so loud at you the second time that I had all the Johnnies
along the row looking up over their coffee demi-tasseys, and all the
stout señoras were eying me with more than ordinary female suspicion,"
was all I said to that.
He ran inside the hotel then. By and by he comes back. "She was here,
but she's gone, the clerk doesn't know where."
"I'm sorry to hear that," I says; and, moved by my further words of
sympathy, he tells me how he's been steaming in the wake of the
beautiful young lady through seven European monarchies and four Central
American republics, and of how, whenever he thought he was safe
alongside, the mother would up anchor and leave him riding to a
lonesome mooring in the dark of some foreign port.
"Just ten minutes with Marguerite and her mother together and I know I
could explain how it came about I got mixed up in what they think was a
disgraceful row, but I can't get the chance."
To my way of thinking the young lady at least wouldn't require much
explanation; and, talking of one thing and another, we had a bite of
lunch and after lunch a smoke, and we were absorbing, to abate the
heat--he a plain and myself another lemonado Porto Bello--when a
mahogany-tinted boy with a musical voice and his pants held up by one
suspender stops in front of us to chant of a bull-fight which is to
come off that afternoon.
"Maybe," I says to my new young friend, "this bull-fight would make you
forget your troubles for a while." And he agrees it might. So "Boyo!
Muchacho!" I hail the waiter. "Duo--two-o seatso for the bull-fighteo!
You know--good seatso--the besto!"
"Bueno, señor," says the waiter, and hurries off, and pretty soon is
back with two yellow tickets for three pesos each, proving again what
I'd said about talking the language.
'Twas the advice of the waiter to take a blue-line trolley-car for the
bull-ring, the same being quick and cheap. But it was no blue or any
other colored trolley-car that I hailed from the shadow of the hotel
portales. No, no. A rakish, two-horse cruiser of low freeboard--that
was the craft befitting two American señors of importance to go sailing
through the streets of Porto Bello on a hot day to a bull-fight, and,
that the inhabitants of the benighted place might be fully informed of
our high rating, I stuck both feet over the port side. "And I want to
see any five-foot spig policeman try to put 'em back inboard," I said.
No policeman tried to, and in due season and good order we made
entrance to a plaza that was crowded with long-legged tables piled high
with chile con carnes and olla podridas and various other comestibles
indigenous to the region; and under the tables, where the shade was
deepest, were many cases of native beer piled high with ice.
From behind the tables men and women in green and yellow and red and
blue and purple and I don't know what-all colors of clothes were crying
out what they had to sell, and up and down the long lines of waiting
people were men telling how they had the best seats to sell to the
bull-fight.
"Beer on ice and the speculators with the best seats out on the
sidewalk--it makes me almost feel that I'm back on Broadway," says my
young friend. 'Twas the first sign of life he'd shown since he'd
jumped into the hotel to look for the young lady of his sorrows, and
the same encouraged me to hope that maybe before the afternoon was over
he'd remember that 'twasn't yet the Last Day--that the blue waters of
the Gulf and the golden rays of the sun was still shining and
sparkling, the one to the other below and above us--glory!
'Twas a plaza of promise we had come to. On a stand over by the
bull-ring entrance was a band of hill Indians trying to jam a little
music out of a collection of queer-looking instruments, but making a
poor job of it, not to speak of resting up too frequently to please a
young American bluejacket who was standing by. A festive lad he was,
and he climbed up on the band-stand and stepped a lively jig by way of
speeding up the band.
But the band hadn't come there to be speeded up. It was a hot day, and
after the crazy Americans were come and gone there would be other hot
days--or such, I gathered, was the leader's retort.
"No hurry?" says the young bluejacket. "No hurry uppo? Then you guys
watch me do an imitation of a whirlin' dervish I see one time in the
Caffey dee Joy in Cairo. Watch!"
They watched and saw him revolve himself, one, two, three, four times
atop of the stand, and then down the steps and on to his head in the
plaza area. But he was of unquenchable spirit; without letting on that
that wasn't part of it, he climbed back on to the band-stand and
questioned the leader further. Did he know any American music, and
would he for a peso--or two pesos, say--play some? Did he sabe
Americano musico?
The leader of the band did sabe, and, the two pesos being passed, out
rolled "Marching Through Georgia." Which pleased our dancing
blue-jacket. "Fine!" he says. "My old man was with Sherman's outfit
on that hike. Roll her out again!"
And once more was "Marching Through Georgia" rolling nobly out, and as
it was so rolling, a young American marine--but looking too slim and
melancholy to so much as give back talk to a scuttle-butt--detached
himself from a file of his comrades, and, marching stiffly up onto the
band-stand, said: "What d'you-uns mean tellin' this yer nigger to play
that-a-one for? I was bawn 'n' raised in Jaw-juh. In Jaw-juh, and my
daddy fit with Lee," and he whaled our dancing bluejacket under the ear.
The band-leader was playing an instrument that sounded like a currycomb
rubbing across a battle-hatch. Swishy-swishy, it was going, with a
loud r-r-rump-umph every few bars, and it was shaped like a long-necked
pumpkin. This the young native of Jaw-juh grabbed by its long neck and
bent in several places over the leader's skull. There was a platoon of
native policemen standing by and another platoon within easy signal
distance. With the first shriek of the band for help that first
platoon came limbering up, not forgetting to pass the word for their
watchmates as they came.
But waiting in line for their tickets, or sampling in their strollings
the wares above and beneath the piled-up tables, were a few files and
boatloads of our own marines and bluejackets, and these now came
steaming up to the battle line, meaning harm to nobody in particular,
but curious to know what all the ballyhooing was about and so as to be
handy in case anything was doing.
The native police came galloping up and captured the outraged Georgian
in the first rush, and as they did so up charged in one thin khaki wave
his marine comrades to his rescue. And 'twas a gallant charge, even if
all that came of it was to bury the band-stand under the falling bodies.
The mind of my young friend--it pleased me to know him for being so
thoughtful--was running in much the same groove as my own. "Down under
that pile that poor band-leader is still wondering what he did to get
hit. That marine shouldn't have bothered him," says he.
"You're right," I said. "And this everlasting looking for trouble on
shore liberty--it gives me the needles."
'Twas just then a tall policeman, with a sword and his chin stuck out
belligerently before him gave signs for me to vamose from the plaza.
"And what board of examiners," I says, "gave you a rating to be
ordering me around?" and I relieved him of his sword and drove his chin
back to front dress.
Says the young fellow with me then: "Once in New York I tried to keep
some policemen from taking a couple of friends of mine into a
patrol-wagon, and they took me along too, and my picture was in the
paper next morning--that's what got me in wrong with Marguerite's
mother, and this will probably get me in wrong again. But where a
fellow's people are there's where he must be too, I suppose."
There were almost tears in the poor boy's voice but nothing like them
in his eyes when beside me he waded in knee-deep, and he was a
wide-shouldered, round-chested lad with quick, strong ways to him.
Knee-deep, I say, for by this time the uniformed natives were
threatening to roll over us like some huge, advancing wave. And such
natives as weren't in uniform stood to one side and cheered, or maybe
hove a doby brick or two at intervals.
But not entirely one-sided was it, for every bluejacket or marine
arriving by the blue-line cars, after a quick masthead view of the
situation, took a running hop, step, and a leap into the middle of it.
Our numbers were increasing, and there were other matters to aid us.
The pedlers at the tables were hurrying to remove their wares from the
war zones, but the quick advances of battle overtook the most of them,
and tropical things to eat and drink from above and beneath the tables
were soon adding a grand variety to the first plans of battle. There
was the ice that had been cooling the beer. You take a lump of ice
about the size of a small man's head, point the same carefully at a
range of three or four feet, and hurl it with the full power of a
moderately strong arm and--but 'tis a bad habit, boasting. And a
thick-bottomed bottle of native beer--'tis a useful little article,
too, at close quarters.
It was a hot day. "Mucho calero, mucho heato, be quiet, you!" I
admonished one of the enemy lying prone at my feet, and picked up a
beer-bottle, taking notice that it was not empty and that the cold
beads of a late icing still clung to it. And I snapped free the patent
stopper, and, for better action, loosened the blouse about my neck,
giving thanks at the same time for the lucky man I was to have a blouse
left on me to loosen.
Now, if Regulations had been there to see, it is a fine sermon he could
have preached on the evils of strong drink--how it brings its own
punishment always in its wake. And not a word but would be true. But
a man exalted by the clash of battle is no man to preach to. 'Tis then
he delights in confounding the precepts of his betters. And, man, the
hot day it was! In all my cruisings on that abandoned coast I never
knew a hotter; from the melting asphalt the heat was rising in torrid
waves. I placed the cold bottle of beer to my lips and felt the first
trickle of it on my swollen tongue. But no more than felt it, when the
enemy--who by all rights was out of the combat at my feet--stood up,
and what it was he clouted me with on the back of my head I never
learned, nor does it matter now; war is war. But in falling I remember
saying sad like to myself: "A man that would do that would ship his
mother in the navy!"
Elbow to elbow with me all this time was my new young friend, and he
had in his hand at the moment of my fall the mahogany leg of a table,
that fine-grained mahogany for which, as I had so often read in the
ship's library, that Hot Coast is also justly famous. With the table
leg, the same being of good length and moderately thick through, the
lad reached over and tapped on the temple the party who had exploded
the shell, or whatever it was, on the back of my head. And as
McWarrish, an eye-witness, informed me later, my would-be assassin
shared no further in the glory of that day.
It had been a pleasant and not unequal prospect up to then, but by now
they had routed the colonel of the barracks from his box-seat in the
bull-ring, and "Fix bayonetso!" he calls to his soldiers coming on at
the double, and they fixed bayonets. "Advanceo!" he says, and they
advanced and continued to advance until presently, the ice being melted
and the beer-bottles expended--being, as I should have poetically said,
short of ammunition--such of our bluejackets and marines as were not in
the need of first aid to the injured might presently be seen making the
best of their way back to their liberty boats.
In good time I revived, and I could taste it even then--that one
teaspoonful of cold beer on the end of my swollen tongue, and,
recalling the incident, "The green-eyed spig!" I says. "Is it any
wonder they have revolutions every other week or so in their
God-forsaken land?"
And what did I hear then but a voice calling me, and what did I see
when I turned my head but my young friend with his head in the lap of
the lovely Marguerite, and the rest I knew without being told, for
Marguerite's stern mother was pouring water onto her lace handkerchief
and applying the same to a lump topside of the youth's ears!
A large hearty-looking party was tending to my case. McWarrish was his
name, and he was Marguerite's mother's brother, who managed a silver or
lead (or was it a gold?) mine on that same Hot Coast, which, according
to the ship's library, was likewise rich in oil, rubber, pepper,
tabasco sauce, palm-leaf fans, and all manner of vegetable and mineral
resources: a fertile and auriferous country that needed only the
intelligence and energy of the superior northern races to make of it a
marvellous commercial asset.
I did not have to tell McWarrish about the fight. He had seen it with
the ladies from the veranda of the plaza hotel. And at dinner at the
hotel, where in what was left of my uniform I sat in state, it
developed that McWarrish and myself were of the one mind concerning
Bobbie Burns. He poured six or eight or maybe a dozen libations to the
memory o' rantin' Robbie, and says McWarrish then: "Mon, mon," he says,
"but 'tis inspirin' tae meet wi' sich rare friendliness," and leads me
down to where he had his motor-boat ready to take me out to the ship.
"Would ye no like tae ha' been there," says McWarrish, "the rainy nicht
Robbie cam' ridin' on his horse frae the tavern wi' fower or five, or
eight or ten it micht be, guid measures o' usquebaugh under his shirt
tae keep him wet inside, wi' his cloak doon ower his shouthers tae keep
him dry ootside, the whiles he composed the grandest song ever writ by
the hond o' mon? Listen!" And he rolls out:
"Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled,
Scots wham Bruce has aften led--"
He was a large-boned man, McWarrish, with a voice that left no idle
spaces in the air about him, and I am myself no dwarf, nor weak of
lung; and singing in and out among the fleet we went, while marine
guards looked over top-rails and bluejackets rolled out of their
blankets to give us a cheerful word in passing and sailors on anchor
watch warned us in a friendly way not to run 'em down and sink
'em--from one battleship after another--when in the silvery night they
would loom surprisingly up before McWarrish, who was steering.
"Wull I gae aboard wi' ye, brither," he says to me when by and by we
made my ship, "tae explain the reason o' your delay?"
"Thank you, friend," I said, "but there'll be trouble enough as it is."
And I climbed up the side the while he shoved off for the beach again.
"What," says Mr. Trench, who had the deck, "shall I set down in the log
for your overstaying your liberty after you were so strictly warned?"
"Yes," says Regulations, bobbing up behind him, "what's the alibi this
time?"
And I gives them the log of the day from first to last, even as I've
told it here, omitting, of course, the personal allusions, and all
gravely and respectfully, as befitted an enlisted man to his officers.
"M--m--," says Regulations, and considered the case. "You say you
bought tickets to the bull-fight, eh? And didn't use them?
M--m--m--then you must have the tickets yet. Where are they?"
From the inside of my cap I pulls out two yellow tickets, and passes
them to him. No great evil, as I've said, in the make-up of
Regulations, and doubtless, in good time, by reason of advanced age and
taking no mad chances, he will rise to be commander-in-chief of the
fleet.
He looks at the tickets under the deck light. "H--m," he sniffs;
"h--m," and leaves the deck.
"Just as well, Cohalan," says Mr. Trench, "you saved those two tickets."
"If I hadn't, sir," I says, "there was a hatful of them to be had for
the picking up in the plaza when the battle was over. And they're to
be married next Tuesday, and I'm invited."
Mr. Trench was my division officer, and this was not our first cruise
together. "I'll recommend you for shore liberty," says Mr.
Trench--"providing there's no bull-fight the same day."
And I'm passing on when I hear the whispering voice of Monaghan.
"I was listening to you," says Monaghan, "and thinking while I listened
of what you said one day. 'Nothing like poetry,' says you, 'to develop
the imagination.'"
"More beautiful than the flowers of the imagination," I says to that,
"are the rocks of eternal truth. You were saying only this morning how
when yourself and myself were apprentice lads together, 'twas paroquets
and blue monkeys 'stead o' picture post-cards as in these degenerate
days we would be sending home to show the family and neighbors how we'd
been in foreign parts. And that's true, but such are only the
temporary frivolities of the human creature and not to be measured as
important. I tell you, Monaghan, that in its potentials human nature
has not changed--not yet."
"Not yet?" says Monaghan. "How much longer of this mechanical age will
you be giving it?"
"That," I said, "is to be determined. But 'tis my belief, Monaghan," I
says, "that let the drums beat and the banners wave and the gonfalons
and the various other palladiums and symbols of our liberty be carried
in marching columns before us, and, barrin' the shell-makers and the
spellbinders and the owners maybe of newspapers with increasin'
circulations, 'tis my belief we would march forth to war as cheerfully
and rampageously as any band of red Indians that ever danced around a
red fire in the full of an autumn moon."
"If all you say is true," says Monaghan, "then it must 'a' been a grand
place for an hour or two--that plaza this day. And yourself and myself
and that husky bridegroom-elect standin' elbow to elbow this day--man,
but 'tis talkin' of us in the cantinas they would be for a full
generation to come. And, 'stead o' that, here was I, a man of my
tonnage an' speed under forced draft, lyin' here useless as an old
cruiser in ordinary."
From the little motor-boat, the same being navigated in devious ways
back to the pier, I could hear McWarrish:
"Oh, my luve's like a red, red rose,
That's newly sprung in June;
Oh, my luve's like the melodie--"
Always, or so I've thought, there's something disposing to romance, or
maybe melancholy, in the quiet that lies o'er great waters, and
something, it may be, softening to large voices.
Anyway, 'twas a lovely, moonlit tropic night--fitting close to a
blessed day.