THE PROEM BY THE CARPENTER
I. “FOX-IN-THE-MORNING”
II. THE LOTUS AND THE BOTTLE
III. SMITH
IV. CAUGHT
V. CUPID’S EXILE NUMBER TWO
VI. THE PHONOGRAPH AND THE GRAFT
VII. MONEY MAZE
VIII. THE ADMIRAL
IX. THE FLAG PARAMOUNT
X. THE SHAMROCK AND THE PALM
XI. THE REMNANTS OF THE CODE
XII. SHOES
XIII. SHIPS
XIV. MASTERS OF ARTS
XV. DICKY
XVI. ROUGE ET NOIR
XVII. TWO RECALLS
XVIII. THE VITAGRAPHOSCOPE
THE PROEM
BY THE CARPENTER
They will tell you in Anchuria, that President Miraflores, of that
volatile republic, died by his own hand in the coast town of Coralio;
that he had reached thus far in flight from the inconveniences of an
imminent revolution; and that one hundred thousand dollars, government
funds, which he carried with him in an American leather valise as a
souvenir of his tempestuous administration, was never afterward
recovered.
For a _real_, a boy will show you his grave. It is back of the town
near a little bridge that spans a mangrove swamp. A plain slab of wood
stands at its head. Some one has burned upon the headstone with a hot
iron this inscription:
RAMON ANGEL DE LAS CRUZES
Y MIRAFLORES
PRESIDENTE DE LA REPUBLICA
DE ANCHURIA
QUE SEA SU JUEZ DIOS
It is characteristic of this buoyant people that they pursue no man
beyond the grave. “Let God be his judge!”—Even with the hundred
thousand unfound, though greatly coveted, the hue and cry went no
further than that.
To the stranger or the guest the people of Coralio will relate the
story of the tragic end of their former president; how he strove to
escape from the country with the public funds and also with Doña Isabel
Guilbert, the young American opera singer; and how, being apprehended
by members of the opposing political party in Coralio, he shot himself
through the head rather than give up the funds, and, in consequence,
the Señorita Guilbert. They will relate further that Doña Isabel, her
adventurous bark of fortune shoaled by the simultaneous loss of her
distinguished admirer and the souvenir hundred thousand, dropped anchor
on this stagnant coast, awaiting a rising tide.
They say, in Coralio, that she found a prompt and prosperous tide in
the form of Frank Goodwin, an American resident of the town, an
investor who had grown wealthy by dealing in the products of the
country—a banana king, a rubber prince, a sarsaparilla, indigo, and
mahogany baron. The Señorita Guilbert, you will be told, married Señor
Goodwin one month after the president’s death, thus, in the very moment
when Fortune had ceased to smile, wresting from her a gift greater than
the prize withdrawn.
Of the American, Don Frank Goodwin, and of his wife the natives have
nothing but good to say. Don Frank has lived among them for years, and
has compelled their respect. His lady is easily queen of what social
life the sober coast affords. The wife of the governor of the district,
herself, who was of the proud Castilian family of Monteleon y Dolorosa
de los Santos y Mendez, feels honoured to unfold her napkin with
olive-hued, ringed hands at the table of Señora Goodwin. Were you to
refer (with your northern prejudices) to the vivacious past of Mrs.
Goodwin when her audacious and gleeful abandon in light opera captured
the mature president’s fancy, or to her share in that statesman’s
downfall and malfeasance, the Latin shrug of the shoulder would be your
only answer and rebuttal. What prejudices there were in Coralio
concerning Señora Goodwin seemed now to be in her favour, whatever they
had been in the past.
It would seem that the story is ended, instead of begun; that the close
of tragedy and the climax of a romance have covered the ground of
interest; but, to the more curious reader it shall be some slight
instruction to trace the close threads that underlie the ingenuous web
of circumstances.
The headpiece bearing the name of President Miraflores is daily
scrubbed with soap-bark and sand. An old half-breed Indian tends the
grave with fidelity and the dawdling minuteness of inherited sloth. He
chops down the weeds and ever-springing grass with his machete, he
plucks ants and scorpions and beetles from it with his horny fingers,
and sprinkles its turf with water from the plaza fountain. There is no
grave anywhere so well kept and ordered.
Only by following out the underlying threads will it be made clear why
the old Indian, Galvez, is secretly paid to keep green the grave of
President Miraflores by one who never saw that unfortunate statesman in
life or in death, and why that one was wont to walk in the twilight,
casting from a distance looks of gentle sadness upon that unhonoured
mound.
Elsewhere than at Coralio one learns of the impetuous career of Isabel
Guilbert. New Orleans gave her birth and the mingled French and Spanish
creole nature that tinctured her life with such turbulence and warmth.
She had little education, but a knowledge of men and motives that
seemed to have come by instinct. Far beyond the common woman was she
endowed with intrepid rashness, with a love for the pursuit of
adventure to the brink of danger, and with desire for the pleasures of
life. Her spirit was one to chafe under any curb; she was Eve after the
fall, but before the bitterness of it was felt. She wore life as a rose
in her bosom.
Of the legion of men who had been at her feet it was said that but one
was so fortunate as to engage her fancy. To President Miraflores, the
brilliant but unstable ruler of Anchuria, she yielded the key to her
resolute heart. How, then, do we find her (as the Coralians would have
told you) the wife of Frank Goodwin, and happily living a life of dull
and dreamy inaction?
The underlying threads reach far, stretching across the sea. Following
them out it will be made plain why “Shorty” O’Day, of the Columbia
Detective Agency, resigned his position. And, for a lighter pastime, it
shall be a duty and a pleasing sport to wander with Momus beneath the
tropic stars where Melpomene once stalked austere. Now to cause
laughter to echo from those lavish jungles and frowning crags where
formerly rang the cries of pirates’ victims; to lay aside pike and
cutlass and attack with quip and jollity; to draw one saving titter of
mirth from the rusty casque of Romance—this were pleasant to do in the
shade of the lemon-trees on that coast that is curved like lips set for
smiling.
For there are yet tales of the Spanish Main. That segment of continent
washed by the tempestuous Caribbean, and presenting to the sea a
formidable border of tropical jungle topped by the overweening
Cordilleras, is still begirt by mystery and romance. In past times
buccaneers and revolutionists roused the echoes of its cliffs, and the
condor wheeled perpetually above where, in the green groves, they made
food for him with their matchlocks and toledos. Taken and retaken by
sea rovers, by adverse powers and by sudden uprising of rebellious
factions, the historic 300 miles of adventurous coast has scarcely
known for hundreds of years whom rightly to call its master. Pizarro,
Balboa, Sir Francis Drake, and Bolivar did what they could to make it a
part of Christendom. Sir John Morgan, Lafitte and other eminent
swash-bucklers bombarded and pounded it in the name of Abaddon.
The game still goes on. The guns of the rovers are silenced; but the
tintype man, the enlarged photograph brigand, the kodaking tourist and
the scouts of the gentle brigade of fakirs have found it out, and carry
on the work. The hucksters of Germany, France, and Sicily now bag its
small change across their counters. Gentleman adventurers throng the
waiting-rooms of its rulers with proposals for railways and
concessions. The little _opéra-bouffe_ nations play at government and
intrigue until some day a big, silent gunboat glides into the offing
and warns them not to break their toys. And with these changes comes
also the small adventurer, with empty pockets to fill, light of heart,
busy-brained—the modern fairy prince, bearing an alarm clock with
which, more surely than by the sentimental kiss, to awaken the
beautiful tropics from their centuries’ sleep. Generally he wears a
shamrock, which he matches pridefully against the extravagant palms;
and it is he who has driven Melpomene to the wings, and set Comedy to
dancing before the footlights of the Southern Cross.
So, there is a little tale to tell of many things. Perhaps to the
promiscuous ear of the Walrus it shall come with most avail; for in it
there are indeed shoes and ships and sealing-wax and cabbage-palms and
presidents instead of kings.
Add to these a little love and counterplotting, and scatter everywhere
throughout the maze a trail of tropical dollars—dollars warmed no more
by the torrid sun than by the hot palms of the scouts of Fortune—and,
after all, here seems to be Life, itself, with talk enough to weary the
most garrulous of Walruses.
I
“FOX-IN-THE-MORNING”
Coralio reclined, in the mid-day heat, like some vacuous beauty
lounging in a guarded harem. The town lay at the sea’s edge on a strip
of alluvial coast. It was set like a little pearl in an emerald band.
Behind it, and seeming almost to topple, imminent, above it, rose the
sea-following range of the Cordilleras. In front the sea was spread, a
smiling jailer, but even more incorruptible than the frowning
mountains. The waves swished along the smooth beach; the parrots
screamed in the orange and ceiba-trees; the palms waved their limber
fronds foolishly like an awkward chorus at the prima donna’s cue to
enter.
Suddenly the town was full of excitement. A native boy dashed down a
grass-grown street, shrieking: “_Busca el Señor Goodwin. Ha venido un
telégrafo por el!_”
The word passed quickly. Telegrams do not often come to anyone in
Coralio. The cry for Señor Goodwin was taken up by a dozen officious
voices. The main street running parallel to the beach became populated
with those who desired to expedite the delivery of the despatch. Knots
of women with complexions varying from palest olive to deepest brown
gathered at street corners and plaintively carolled: “_Un telégrafo por
Señor Goodwin!_” The _comandante_, Don Señor el Coronel Encarnación
Rios, who was loyal to the Ins and suspected Goodwin’s devotion to the
Outs, hissed: “Aha!” and wrote in his secret memorandum book the
accusive fact that Señor Goodwin had on that momentous date received a
telegram.
In the midst of the hullabaloo a man stepped to the door of a small
wooden building and looked out. Above the door was a sign that read
“Keogh and Clancy”—a nomenclature that seemed not to be indigenous to
that tropical soil. The man in the door was Billy Keogh, scout of
fortune and progress and latter-day rover of the Spanish Main. Tintypes
and photographs were the weapons with which Keogh and Clancy were at
that time assailing the hopeless shores. Outside the shop were set two
large frames filled with specimens of their art and skill.
Keogh leaned in the doorway, his bold and humorous countenance wearing
a look of interest at the unusual influx of life and sound into the
street. When the meaning of the disturbance became clear to him he
placed a hand beside his mouth and shouted: “Hey! Frank!” in such a
robustious voice that the feeble clamour of the natives was drowned and
silenced.
Fifty yards away, on the seaward side of the street, stood the abode of
the consul for the United States. Out from the door of this building
tumbled Goodwin at the call. He had been smoking with Willard Geddie,
the consul, on the back porch of the consulate, which was conceded to
be the coolest spot in Coralio.
“Hurry up,” shouted Keogh. “There’s a riot in town on account of a
telegram that’s come for you. You want to be careful about these
things, my boy. It won’t do to trifle with the feelings of the public
this way. You’ll be getting a pink note some day with violet scent on
it; and then the country’ll be steeped in the throes of a revolution.”
Goodwin had strolled up the street and met the boy with the message.
The ox-eyed women gazed at him with shy admiration, for his type drew
them. He was big, blonde, and jauntily dressed in white linen, with
buckskin _zapatos_. His manner was courtly, with a sort of kindly
truculence in it, tempered by a merciful eye. When the telegram had
been delivered, and the bearer of it dismissed with a gratuity, the
relieved populace returned to the contiguities of shade from which
curiosity had drawn it—the women to their baking in the mud ovens under
the orange-trees, or to the interminable combing of their long,
straight hair; the men to their cigarettes and gossip in the cantinas.
Goodwin sat on Keogh’s doorstep, and read his telegram. It was from Bob
Englehart, an American, who lived in San Mateo, the capital city of
Anchuria, eighty miles in the interior. Englehart was a gold miner, an
ardent revolutionist and “good people.” That he was a man of resource
and imagination was proven by the telegram he had sent. It had been his
task to send a confidential message to his friend in Coralio. This
could not have been accomplished in either Spanish or English, for the
eye politic in Anchuria was an active one. The Ins and the Outs were
perpetually on their guard. But Englehart was a diplomatist. There
existed but one code upon which he might make requisition with promise
of safety—the great and potent code of Slang. So, here is the message
that slipped, unconstrued, through the fingers of curious officials,
and came to the eye of Goodwin:
His Nibs skedaddled yesterday per jack-rabbit line with all the coin in
the kitty and the bundle of muslin he’s spoony about. The boodle is six
figures short. Our crowd in good shape, but we need the spondulicks.
You collar it. The main guy and the dry goods are headed for the briny.
You know what to do.