Cape Cod Stories Part 17

"'Feller citizens,' says he, 'I rise to drink a toast. 'Ere's to the beautchous Lobelia 'Ankins, and may she long hornament the lovely island where she now--'

"The Malay at the wheel behind us gave an awful screech. We all turned sudden, and there, standing on the companion ladder, with her head and shoulders out of the hatch, was Lobelia 'Ankins, as large as life and twice as natural.

"Hammond dropped the jug and it smashed into finders. We all stood stock-still for a minute, like folks in a tableau. The half-breed skipper stood next to me, and I snum if you couldn't see him shrivel up like one of them things they call a sensitive plant.

"The tableau lasted while a feller might count five; then things happened. Hammond and me dodged around the deckhouse; the Malays broke and run, one up the main rigging, two down the fo'castle hatch and one out on the jib-boom. But the poor skipper wa'n't satisfied with any of them places; he started for the lee rail, and Lobelia 'Ankins started after him.

"She caught him as he was going to jump overboard and yanked him back like he was a bag of meal. She shook him, she boxed his ears, she pulled his hair, and all the time he was begging and pleading and she was screeching and jabbering at the top of her lungs. Hammond pulled me by the sleeve.

"'It'll be our turn next,' says he; 'get into the boat! Quick!'

"The little boat that the crew had come in was towing behind the schooner. We slid over the stern and dropped into it. Hammond cut the towline and we laid to the oars. Long as we was in the hearing of the schooner the powwow and rumpus kept up, but just as we was landing on the little island that the Malays had left, she come about on the port tack and stood off to sea.

"'Lobelia's running things again,' says Hammond.

"Three days after this we was took off by a Dutch gunboat. Most of the time on the island we spent debating how Lobelia come to be on the schooner. Finally we decided that she must have gone aboard to sleep that night, suspecting that we'd try to run away in the schooner just as we had tried to. We talked about Whiskers and his crew and guessed about how they came to abandon their boat in the first place. One thing we was sartin sure of, and that was that they'd left Lobelia aboard on purpose.

We knew mighty well that's what we'd a-done.

"What puzzled us most was what relation Lobelia was to the skipper. She wa'n't his wife, 'cause he'd said so, and she didn't look enough like him to be his mother or sister. But as we was being took off in the Dutchman's yawl, Hammond thumps the thwart with his fist and says he:

"'I've got it!' he says; 'she's 'is mother-in-law!'

"''Course she is!' says I. 'We might have known it!'"

THE MEANNESS OF ROSY

Cap'n Jonadab said that the South Seas and them islands was full of queer happenings, anyhow. Said that Eri's yarn reminded him of one that Jule Sparrow used to tell. There was a c.o.c.kney in that yarn, too, and a South Sea woman and a schooner. But in other respects the stories was different.

"You all know Wash Sparrow, here in Wellmouth," says the Cap'n. "He's the laziest man in town. It runs in his family. His dad was just the same. The old man died of creeping paralysis, which was just the disease he'd pick out TO die of, and even then he took six years to do it in.

Washy's brother Jule, Julius Caesar Sparrow, he was as no-account and lazy as the rest. When he was around this neighborhood he put in his time swapping sea lies for heat from the post-office stove, and the only thing that would get him livened up at all was the mention of a feller named 'Rosy' that he knew while he was seafaring, way off on t'other side of the world. Jule used to say that 'twas this Rosy that made him lose faith in human nature.

"The first time ever Julius and Rosy met was one afternoon just as the Emily--that was the little fore-and-aft South Sea trading schooner Jule was in--was casting off from the ramshackle landing at h.e.l.lo Island.

Where's h.e.l.lo Island? Well, I'll tell you. When you get home you take your boy's geography book and find the map of the world. About amids.h.i.+ps of the sou'western quarter of it you'll see a place where the Pacific Ocean is all broke out with the measles. Yes; well, one of them measle spots is h.e.l.lo Island.

"'Course that ain't the real name of it. The real one is spelt with four o's, three a's, five i's, and a peck measure of h's and x's hove in to fill up. It looks like a plate of hash and that's the way it's p.r.o.nounced. Maybe you might sing it if 'twas set to music, but no white man ever said the whole of it. Them that tried always broke down on the second fathom or so and said 'Oh, the hereafter!' or words to that effect. 'Course the missionaries see that wouldn't do, so they twisted it stern first and it's been h.e.l.lo Island to most folks ever since.

"Why Jule was at h.e.l.lo Island is too long a yarn. Biled down it amounts to a voyage on a bark out of Seattle, and a first mate like yours, Eri, who was a kind of Christian Science chap and cured sick sailors by the laying on of hands--likewise feet and belaying pins and ax handles and such. And, according to Jule's tell, he DID cure 'em, too. After he'd jumped up and down on your digestion a few times you forgot all about the disease you started in with and only remembered the complications.

Him and Julius had their final argument one night when the bark was pa.s.sing abreast one of the Navigator Islands, close in. Jule hove a marlinespike at the mate's head and jumped overboard. He swum ash.o.r.e to the beach and, inside of a week, he'd s.h.i.+pped aboard the Emily. And 'twas aboard the Emily, and at h.e.l.lo Island, as I said afore, that he met Rosy.

"George Simmons--a c.o.c.kney Britisher he was, and skipper--was standing at the schooner's wheel, swearing at the two Kanaka sailors who were histing the jib. Julius, who was mate, was roosting on the lee rail amid-s.h.i.+ps, helping him swear. And old Teunis Van Doozen, a Dutchman from Java or thereabouts, who was cook, was setting on a stool by the galley door ready to heave in a word whenever 'twas necessary. The Kanakas was doing the work. That was the usual division of labor aboard the Emily.

"Well, just then there comes a yell from the bushes along the sh.o.r.e.

Then another yell and a most tremendous cracking and smas.h.i.+ng. Then out of them bushes comes tearing a little man with spectacles and a black enamel-cloth carpetbag, heaving sand like a steam-shovel and seemingly trying his best to fly. And astern of him comes more yells and a big, husky Kanaka woman, about eight foot high and three foot in the beam, with her hands stretched out and her fingers crooked.

"Julius used to swear that that beach was all of twenty yards wide and that the little man only lit three times from bush to wharf. And he didn't stop there. He fired the carpetbag at the schooner's stern and then spread out his wings and flew after it. His fingers just hooked over the rail and he managed to haul himself aboard. Then he curled up on the deck and breathed short but spirited. The Kanaka woman danced to the stringpiece and whistled distress signals.

"Cap'n George Simmons looked down at the wrecked flying machine and grunted.

"'Umph!' says he. 'You don't look like a man the girls would run after.

Lady your wife?'

"The little feller bobbed his specs up and down.

"'So?' says George. ''Ow can I bear to leave thee, 'ey? Well, ain't you ashamed of yourself to be running off and leaving a nice, 'andsome, able-bodied wife that like? Look at 'er now, over there on 'er knees a praying for you to come back.'

"There was a little p'int making out from the beach close by the edge of the channel and the woman was out on the end of it, down on all fours.

Her husband raised up and looked over the rail.

"'She ain't praying,' he pants, ducking down again quick. 'She's a-picking up stones.'

"And so she was. Julius said he thought sure she'd cave in the Emily's ribs afore she got through with her broadsides. The rocks flew like hail. Everybody got their share, but Cap'n George got a big one in the middle of the back. That took his breath so all the way he could express his feelings was to reach out and give his new pa.s.senger half a dozen kicks. But just as soon as he could he spoke, all right enough.

"'You mis'rable four-eyed shrimp!' he says. ''Twould serve you right if I 'ove to and made you swim back to 'er. Blow me if I don't believe I will!'

"'Aw, don't, Cap'n; PLEASE don't!' begs the feller. 'I'll be awful grateful to you if you won't. And I'll make it right with you, too. I've got a good thing in that bag of mine. Yes, sir! A beautiful good thing.'

"'Oh, well,' says the skipper, bracing up and smiling sweet as he could for the ache in his back. 'I'll 'elp you out. You trust your Uncle George. Not on account of what you're going to give me, you understand,'

says he. 'It would be a pity if THAT was the reason for 'elpin' a feller creat--Sparrow, if you touch that bag I'll break your blooming 'ead.

'Ere! you 'and it to me. I'll take care of it for the gentleman.'

"All the rest of that day the Cap'n couldn't do enough for the pa.s.senger. Give him a big dinner that took Teunis two hours to cook, and let him use his own pet pipe with the last of Jule's tobacco in it, and all that. And that evening in the cabin, Rosy told his story. Seems he come from Bombay originally, where he was born an innocent and trained to be a photographer. This was in the days when these hand cameras wa'n't so common as they be now, and Rosy--his full name was Clarence Rosebury, and he looked it--had a fine one. Also he had some plates and photograph paper and a jug of 'developer' and bottles of stuff to make more, wrapped up in an old overcoat and packed away in the carpetbag. He had landed in the Fijis first-off and had drifted over to h.e.l.lo Island, taking pictures of places and natives and so on, intending to use 'em in a course of lectures he was going to deliver when he got back home. He boarded with the Kanaka lady at h.e.l.lo till his money give out, and then he married her to save board. He wouldn't talk about his married life--just s.h.i.+vered instead.

"'But w'at about this good thing you was mentioning, Mr. Rosebury?' asks Cap'n George, polite, but staring hard at the bag. Jule and the cook was in the cabin likewise. The skipper would have liked to keep 'em out, but they being two to one, he couldn't.

"'That's it,' answers Rosy, cheerful.

"'W'at's it?'

"'Why, the things in the grip; the photograph things. You see,' says Rosy, getting excited, his innocent, dreamy eyes a-s.h.i.+ning behind his specs and the ridge of red hair around his bald spot waving like a hedge of sunflowers; 'you see,' he says, 'my experience has convinced me that there's a fortune right in these islands for a photographer who'll take pictures of the natives. They're all dying to have their photographs took. Why, when I was in h.e.l.lo Island I could have took dozens, only they didn't have the money to pay for 'em and I couldn't wait till they got some. But you've got a schooner. You could sail around from one island to another, me taking pictures and you getting copra and--and pearls and things from the natives in trade for 'em. And we'd leave a standing order for more plates to be delivered steady from the steamer at Suva or somewheres, and--'

"''Old on!' Cap'n George had been getting redder and redder in the face while Rosy was talking, and now he fairly biled over, like a teakettle.

''Old on!' he roars. 'Do I understand that THIS is the good thing you was going to let me in on? Me to cruise you around from Dan to Beersheby, feeding you, and giving you tobacco to smoke--'

"''Twas my tobacco,' breaks in Julius.

"'Shut up! Cruising you around, and you living on the fat of--of the--the water, and me trusting to get my pay out of tintypes of Kanakas! Was that it? Was it?'

"'Why--why, yes,' answers Rosy. 'But, cap'n, you don't understand--'

"'Then,' says George, standing up and rolling up his pajama sleeves, 'there's going to be justifiable 'omicide committed right now.'

"Jule said that if it hadn't been that the skipper's sore back got to hurting him he don't know when him and the cook would have had their turn at Rosy. 'Course they wanted a turn on account of the tobacco and the dinner, not to mention the stone bruises. When all hands was through, that photographer was a spiled negative.

"And that was only the beginning. They ain't much fun abusing Kanakas because they don't talk back, but first along Rosy would try to talk back, and that give 'em a chance. Julius had learned a lot of things from that mate on the bark, and he tried 'em all on that tintype man.