in a certain kind of Americans when some accident obliges them to
confess the infirmity of the natural feelings. They do not ask your
sympathy, and you offer it quite at your own risk, with a chance of
having it thrown back upon your hands. The contributor assumed the risk
so far as to say, “Pretty rough!” when the stranger caused; and perhaps
these homely words were best suited to reach the homely heart. The man's
quavering lips closed hard again, a kind of spasm passed over his dark
face, and then two very small drops of brine shone upon his weather-worn
cheeks. This demonstration, into which he had been surprised, seemed to
stand for the passion of tears into which the emotional races fall
at such times. He opened his lips with a kind of dry click, and went
on:--“I hunted about the whole forenoon in the city, and at last I found
the children. I'd been gone so long they didn't know me, and somehow
I thought the people they were with weren't over-glad I'd turned up.
Finally the oldest child told me that Julia was living with a Mr.
Hapford on this street, and I started out here to-night to look her up.
If I can find her, I'm all right. I can get the family together, then,
and start new.”
“It seems rather odd,” mused the listener aloud, “that the neighbors let
them break up so, and that they should all scatter as they did.”
“Well, it ain't so curious as it seems, Cap'n. There was money for them
at the owners', all the time; I'd left part of my wages when I sailed;
but they didn't know how to get at it, and what could a parcel of
children do? Julia's a good girl, and when I find her I'm all right.”
The writer could only repeat that there was no Mr. Hapford living on
that street, and never had been, so far as he knew. Yet there might be
such a person in the neighborhood; and they would go out together, and
ask at some of the houses about. But the stranger must first take a
glass of wine; for he looked used up.
The sailor awkwardly but civilly enough protested that he did not want
to give so much trouble, but took the glass, and, as he put it to his
lips, said formally, as if it were a toast or a kind of grace, “I hope
I may have the opportunity of returning the compliment.” The contributor
thanked him; though, as he thought of all the circumstances of the case,
and considered the cost at which the stranger had come to enjoy his
politeness, he felt little eagerness to secure the return of the
compliment at the same price, and added, with the consequence of another
set phrase, “Not at all.” But the thought had made him the more anxious
to befriend the luckless soul fortune had cast in his way; and so the
two sallied out together, and rang door-bells wherever lights were
still seen burning in the windows, and asked the astonished people who
answered their summons whether any Mr. Hapford were known to live in the
neighborhood.
And although the search for this gentleman proved vain, the contributor
could not feel that an expedition which set familiar objects in such
novel light? was altogether a failure. He entered so intimately into the
cares and anxieties of his _protege,_ that at times he felt himself
in some inexplicable sort a shipmate of Jonathan Tinker, and almost
personally a partner of his calamities. The estrangement of all things
which takes place, within doors and without, about midnight may have
helped to cast this doubt upon his identity;--he seemed to be visiting
now for the first time the streets and neighborhoods nearest his own,
and his feet stumbled over the accustomed walks. In his quality
of houseless wanderer, and--so far as appeared to others--possibly
worthless vagabond, he also got a new and instructive effect upon the
faces which, in his real character, he knew so well by their looks of
neighborly greeting; and it is his belief that the first hospitable
prompting of the human heart is to shut the door in the eyes of homeless
strangers who present themselves after eleven o'clock. By that time the
servants are all abed, and the gentleman of the house answers the bell,
and looks out with a loath and bewildered face, which gradually changes
to one of suspicion, and of wonder as to what those fellows can possibly
want of _him,_ till at last the prevailing expression is one of contrite
desire to atone for the first reluctance by any sort of service. The
contributor professes to have observed these changing phases in the
visages of those whom he that night called from their dreams, or
arrested in the act of going to bed; and he drew the conclusion--very
proper for his imaginable connection with the garroting and other
adventurous brotherhoods--that the most flattering moment for knocking
on the head people who answer a late ring at night is either in their
first selfish bewilderment, or their final self-abandonment to their
better impulses. It does not seem to have occurred to him that he would
himself have been a much more favorable subject for the predatory arts
that any of his neighbors, if his shipmate, the unknown companion of his
researches for Mr. Hapford, had been at all so minded. But the faith
of the gaunt giant upon which he reposed was good, and the contributor
continued to wander about with him in perfect safety. Not a soul among
those they asked had ever heard of a Mr. Hapford,--far less of a Julia
Tinker living with him. But they all listened to the contributor's
explanation with interest and eventual sympathy; and in truth,--briefly
told, with a word now and then thrown in by Jonathan Tinker, who kept at
the bottom of the steps, showing like a gloomy spectre in the night,
or, in his grotesque length and gauntness, like the other's shadow
cast there by the lamplight,--it was a story which could hardly fail to
awaken pity.
At last, after ringing several bells where there were no lights, in
the mere wantonness of good-will, and going away before they could be
answered (it would be entertaining to know what dreams they caused the
sleepers within), there seemed to be nothing for it but to give up the
search till morning, and go to the main street and wait for the last
horse-car to the city.
There, seated upon the curbstone, Jonathan Tinker, being plied with a
few leading questions, told in hints and scraps the story of his hard
life, which was at present that of a second mate, and had been that of
a cabin-boy and of a seaman before the mast. The second mate's place he
held to be the hardest aboard ship. You got only a few dollars more than
the men, and you did not rank with the officers; you took your meals
alone, and in every thing you belonged by yourself. The men did not
respect you, and sometimes the captain abused you awfully before the
passengers. The hardest captain that Jonathan Tinker ever sailed with
was Captain Gooding of the Cape. It had got to be so that no man would
ship second mate under Captain Gooding; and Jonathan Tinker was with him
only one voyage. When he had been home awhile, he saw an advertisement
for a second mate, and he went round to the owners'. They had kept it
secret who the captain was; but there was Captain Gooding in the owners'
office. “Why, here's the man, now, that I want for a second mate,” said
he, when Jonathan Tinker entered; “he knows me.”--“Captain Gooding, I
know you 'most too well to want to sail under you,” answered Jonathan.
“I might go if I hadn't been with you one voyage too many already.”
“And then the men!” said Jonathan, “the men coming aboard drunk, and
having to be pounded sober! And the hardest of the fight falls on the
second mate! Why, there isn't an inch of me that hasn't been cut over or
smashed into a jell. I've had three ribs broken; I've got a scar from a
knife on my cheek; and I've been stabbed bad enough, half a dozen times,
to lay me up.”
Here he gave a sort of desperate laugh, as if the notion of so much
misery and such various mutilation were too grotesque not to be amusing.
“Well, what can you do?” he went on. “If you don't strike, the men think
you're afraid of them; and so you have to begin hard and go on hard.
I always tell a man, 'Now, my man, I always begin with a man the way
I mean to keep on. You do your duty and you're all right. But if you
don't'--Well, the men ain't Americans any more,--Dutch, Spaniards,
Chinese, Portuguee,--and it ain't like abusing a white man.”
Jonathan Tinker was plainly part of the horrible tyranny which we all
know exists on shipboard; and his listener respected him the more that,
though he had heart enough to be ashamed of it, he was too honest not to
own it.
Why did he still follow the sea? Because he did not know what else to
do. When he was younger, he used to love it, but now he hated it. Yet
there was not a prettier life in the world if you got to be captain. He
used to hope for that once, but not now; though he _thought_ he could
navigate a ship. Only let him get his family together again, and he
would--yes, he would--try to do something ashore.
No car had yet come in sight, and so the contributor suggested that they
should walk to the car-office, and look in the “Directory,” which is
kept there, for the name of Hapford, in search of whom it had already
been arranged that they should renew their acquaintance on the
morrow. Jonathan Tinker, when they had reached the office, heard with
constitutional phlegm that the name of the Hapford, for whom he inquired
was not in the “Directory.” “Never mind,” said the other; “come round
to my house in the morning. We'll find him yet.” So they parted with a
shake of the hand, the second mate saying that he believed he should go
down to the vessel and sleep aboard,--if he could sleep,--and murmuring
at the last moment the hope of returning the compliment, while the other
walked homeward, weary as to the flesh, but, in spite of his sympathy
for Jonathan Tinker, very elate in spirit. The truth is,--and however
disgraceful to human nature, let the truth still be told,--he had
recurred to his primal satisfaction in the man as calamity capable of
being used for such and such literary ends, and, while he pitied
him, rejoiced in him as an episode of real life quite as striking and
complete as anything in fiction. It was literature made to his hand.
Nothing could be better, he mused; and once more he passed the details
of the story in review, and beheld all those pictures which the poor
fellow's artless words had so vividly conjured up: he saw him leaping
ashore in the gray summer dawn as soon as the ship hauled into the
dock, and making his way, with his vague sea-legs unaccustomed to the
pavements, up through the silent and empty city streets; he imagined
the tumult of fear and hope which the sight of the man's home must have
caused in him, and the benumbing shock of finding it blind and deaf
to all his appeals; he saw him sitting down upon what had been his
own threshold, and waiting in a sort of bewildered patience till the
neighbors should be awake, while the noises of the streets gradually
arose, and the wheels began to rattle over the stones, and the milk-man
and the ice-man came and went, and the waiting figure began to be stared
at, and to challenge the curiosity of the passing policeman; he fancied
the opening of the neighbor's door, and the slow, cold understanding of
the case; the manner, whatever it was, in which the sailor was told that
one year before his wife had died, with her babe, and that his children
were scattered, none knew where. As the contributor dwelt pityingly upon
these things, but at the same time estimated their aesthetic value one
by one, he drew near the head of his street, and found himself a few
paces behind a boy slouching onward through the night, to whom he called
out, adventurously, and with no real hope of information,--“Do you
happen to know anybody on this street by the name of Hapford?”
“Why no, not in this town,” said the boy; but he added that there was
a street of the same name in a neighboring suburb, and that there was a
Hapford living on it.
“By Jove!” thought the contributor, “this is more like literature
than ever;” and he hardly knew whether to be more provoked at his own
stupidity in not thinking of a street of the same name in the next
village, or delighted at the element of fatality which the fact
introduced into the story; for Tinker, according to his own account,
must have landed from the cars a few rods from the very door he was
seeking, and so walked farther and farther from it every moment. He
thought the case so curious, that he laid it briefly before the boy,
who, however he might have been inwardly affected, was sufficiently true
to the national traditions not to make the smallest conceivable outward
sign of concern in it.
At home, however, the contributor related his adventures and the story
of Tinker's life, adding the fact that he had just found out where Mr.
Hapford lived. “It was the only touch wanting,” said he; “the whole
thing is now perfect.”
“It's _too_ perfect,” was answered from a sad enthusiasm. “Don't speak
of it! I can't take it in.”
“But the question is,” said the contributor, penitently taking himself
to task for forgetting the hero of these excellent misfortunes in his
delight at their perfection, “how am I to sleep to-night, thinking
of that poor soul's suspense and uncertainty? Never mind,--I'll be up
early, and run over and make sure that it is Tinker's Hapford, before he
gets out here, and have a pleasant surprise for him. Would it not be a
justifiable _coup de théâtre_ to fetch his daughter here, and let her
answer his ring at the door when he comes in the morning?”
This plan was discouraged. “No, no; let them meet in their own way. Just
take him to Hapford's house and leave him.”
“Very well. But he's too good a character to lose sight of. He's got to
come back here and tell us what he intends to do.”
The birds, next morning, not having had the second mate on their minds
either as an unhappy man or a most fortunate episode, but having slept
long and soundly, were singing in a very sprightly way in the way-side
trees; and the sweetness of their notes made the contributor's heart
light as he climbed the hill and rang at Mr. Hapford's door.
The door was opened by a young girl of fifteen or sixteen, whom he knew
at a glance for the second mate's daughter, but of whom, for form's
sake, he asked if there were a girl named Julia Tinker living there.
“My name's Julia Tinker,” answered the maid, who had rather a
disappointing face.
“Well,” said the contributor, “your father's got back from his Hong-Kong
voyage.”
“Hong-Kong voyage?” echoed the girl, with a stare of helpless inquiry,
but no other visible emotion.
“Yes. He had never heard of your mother's death. He came home yesterday
morning, and was looking for you all day.”
Julia Tinker remained open-mouthed but mute; and the other was puzzled
at the want of feeling shown, which he could not account for even as a
national trait. “Perhaps there's some mistake,” he said.
“There must be,” answered Julia: “my father hasn't been to sea for
a good many years. _My_ father,” she added, with a diffidence
indescribably mingled with a sense of distinction,--“_my_ father's in
State's Prison. What kind of looking man was this?”
The contributor mechanically described him.
Julia Tinker broke into a loud, hoarse laugh. “Yes, it's him, sure
enough.” And then, as if the joke were too good to keep: “Miss Hapford,
Miss Hapford, father's got out. Do come here!” she called into a back
room.
When Mrs. Hapford appeared, Julia fell back, and, having deftly caught
a fly on the door-post, occupied herself in plucking it to pieces, while
she listened to the conversation of the others.
“It's all true enough,” said Mrs. Hapford, when the writer had recounted
the moving story of Jonathan Tinker, “so far as the death of his wife
and baby goes. But he hasn't been to sea for a good many years, and he
must have just come out of State's Prison, where he was put for bigamy.
There's always two sides to a story, you know; but they say it broke his
first wife's heart, and she died. His friends don't want him to find his
children, and this girl especially.”
“He's found his children in the city,” said the contributor, gloomily,
being at a loss what to do or say, in view of the wreck of his romance.
“O, he's found 'em has he?” cried Julia, with heightened amusement.
“Then he'll have me next, if I don't pack and go.”
“I'm very, very sorry,” said the contributor, secretly resolved never to
do another good deed, no matter how temptingly the opportunity presented
itself. “But you may depend he won't find out from _me_ where you are.
Of course I had no earthly reason for supposing his story was not true.”
“Of course,” said kind-hearted Mrs. Hapford, mingling a drop of honey
with the gall in the contributor's soul, “you only did your duty.”
And indeed, as he turned away he did not feel altogether without
compensation. However Jonathan Tinker had fallen in his esteem as a
man, he had even risen as literature. The episode which had appeared so
perfect in its pathetic phases did not seem less finished as a farce;
and this person, to whom all things of every-day life presented
themselves in periods more or less rounded, and capable of use as facts
or illustrations, could not but rejoice in these new incidents, as
dramatically fashioned as the rest. It occurred to him that, wrought
into a story, even better use might be made of the facts now than
before, for they had developed questions of character and of human
nature which could not fail to interest. The more he pondered upon
his acquaintance with Jonathan Tinker, the more fascinating the erring
mariner became, in his complex truth and falsehood, his delicately
blending shades of artifice and _naïveté._ He must, it was felt, have
believed to a certain point in his own inventions: nay, starting with
that groundwork of truth,--the fact that his wife was really dead, and
that he had not seen his family for two years,--why should he not place
implicit faith in all the fictions reared upon it? It was probable
that he felt a real sorrow for her loss, and that he found a fantastic
consolation in depicting the circumstances of her death so that they
should look like his inevitable misfortunes rather than his faults. He
might well have repented his offense during those two years of prison;
and why should he not now cast their dreariness and shame out of his
memory, and replace them with the freedom and adventure of a two years'
voyage to China,--so probable, in all respects, that the fact should
appear an impossible nightmare? In the experiences of his life he had
abundant material to furnish forth the facts of such a voyage, and in
the weariness and lassitude that should follow a day's walking equally
after a two years' voyage and two years' imprisonment, he had as much
physical proof in favor of one hypothesis as the other. It was doubtless
true, also, as he said, that he had gone to his house at dawn, and sat
down on the threshold of his ruined home; and perhaps he felt the desire
he had expressed to see his daughter, with a purpose of beginning life
anew; and it may have cost him a veritable pang when he found that his
little ones did not know him. All the sentiments of the situation
were such as might persuade a lively fancy of the truth of its
own inventions; and as he heard these continually repeated by the
contributor in their search for Mr. Hapford, they must have acquired an
objective force and repute scarcely to be resisted. At the same time,
there were touches of nature throughout Jonathan Tinker's narrative
which could not fail to take the faith of another. The contributor, in
reviewing it, thought it particularly charming that his mariner had not
overdrawn himself, or attempted to paint his character otherwise than as
it probably was; that he had shown his ideas and practices of life to be
those of a second mate, nor more nor less, without the gloss of regret
or the pretenses to refinement that might be pleasing to the supposed
philanthropist with whom he had fallen in. Captain Gooding was of course
a true portrait; and there was nothing in Jonathan Tinker's statement of
the relations of a second mate to his superiors and his inferiors which
did not agree perfectly with what the contributor had just read in “Two
Years before the Mast,”--a book which had possibly cast its glamour upon
the adventure. He admired also the just and perfectly characteristic air
of grief in the bereaved husband and father,--those occasional escapes
from the sense of loss into a brief hilarity and forgetfulness, and
those relapses into the hovering gloom, which every one has observed
in this poor, crazy human nature when oppressed by sorrow, and which
it would have been hard to simulate. But, above all, he exulted in that
supreme stroke of the imagination given by the second mate when, at
parting, he said he believed he would go down and sleep on board the
vessel. In view of this, the State's Prison theory almost appeared a
malign and foolish scandal.
Yet even if this theory were correct, was the second mate wholly
answerable for beginning his life again with the imposture he had
practiced? The contributor had either so fallen in love with the
literary advantages of his forlorn deceiver that he would see no
moral obliquity in him, or he had touched a subtler verity at last in
pondering the affair. It seemed now no longer a farce, but had a pathos
which, though very different from that of its first aspect, was hardly
less tragical. Knowing with what coldness, or, at the best, uncandor, he
(representing Society in its attitude toward convicted Error) would have
met the fact had it been owned to him at first, he had not virtue enough
to condemn the illusory stranger, who must have been helpless to make at
once evident any repentance he felt or good purpose he cherished. Was it
not one of the saddest consequences of the man's past,--a dark necessity
of misdoing,--that, even with the best will in the world to retrieve
himself, his first endeavor must involve a wrong? Might he not, indeed,
be considered a martyr, in some sort, to his own admirable impulses?
I can see clearly enough where the contributor was astray in this
reasoning, but I can also understand how one accustomed to value
realities only as they resembled fables should be won with such pensive
sophistry; and I can certainly sympathize with his feeling that the
mariner's failure to reappear according to appointment added its final
and most agreeable charm to the whole affair, and completed the mystery
from which the man emerged and which swallowed him up again.
SCENE
On that loveliest autumn morning, the swollen tide had spread over
all the russet levels, and gleamed in the sunlight a mile away. As the
contributor moved onward down the street, luminous on either hand
with crimsoning and yellowing maples, he was so filled with the tender
serenity of the scene, as not to be troubled by the spectacle of small
Irish houses standing miserably about on the flats ankle deep, as it
were, in little pools of the tide, or to be aware at first, of a strange
stir of people upon the streets: a fluttering to and fro and lively
encounter and separation of groups of bareheaded women, a flying of
children through the broken fences of the neighborhood, and across the
vacant lots on which the insulted sign-boards forbade them to trespass;
a sluggish movement of men through all, and a pause of different
vehicles along the sidewalks. When a sense of these facts had penetrated
his enjoyment, he asked a matron whose snowy arms, freshly taken from
the wash-tub, were folded across a mighty chest, “What is the matter?”
“A girl drowned herself, sir-r-r, over there on the flats, last
Saturday, and they're looking for her.”
“It was the best thing she could do,” said another matron grimly.
Upon this answer that literary soul fell at once to patching himself
up a romantic story for the suicide, after the pitiful fashion of this
fiction-ridden age, when we must relate everything we see to something
we have read. He was the less to blame for it, because he could not help
it; but certainly he is not to be praised for his associations with the
tragic fact brought to his notice. Nothing could have been more trite
or obvious, and he felt his intellectual poverty so keenly that he might
almost have believed his discomfort a sympathy for the girl who had
drowned herself last Saturday. But of course, this could not be, for
he had but lately been thinking what a very tiresome figure to the
imagination the Fallen Woman had become. As a fact of Christian
civilization, she was a spectacle to wring one's heart, he owned; but
he wished she were well out of the romances, and it really seemed a
fatality that she should be the principal personage of this little
scene. The preparation for it, whatever it was to be, was so deliberate,
and the reality had so slight relation to the French roofs and modern
improvements of the comfortable Charlesbridge which he knew, that he
could not consider himself other than as a spectator awaiting some
entertainment, with a faint inclination to be critical.
In the mean time there passed through the motley crowd, not so much a
cry as a sensation of “They've found her, they've found her!” and then
the one terrible picturesque fact, “She was standing upright!”