The Wrecker

R >> Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne >> The Wrecker


I was well paid, however, even to sing. Pinkerton and I, after an
average Sunday, had five hundred dollars to divide. Nay, and the picnics
were the means, although indirectly, of bringing me a singular windfall.
This was at the end of the season, after the "Grand Farewell Fancy Dress
Gala." Many of the hampers had suffered severely; and it was judged
wiser to save storage, dispose of them, and lay in a fresh stock when
the campaign re-opened. Among my purchasers was a workingman of the
name of Speedy, to whose house, after several unavailing letters, I
must proceed in person, wondering to find myself once again on the wrong
side, and playing the creditor to some one else's debtor. Speedy was
in the belligerent stage of fear. He could not pay. It appeared he had
already resold the hampers, and he defied me to do my worst. I did not
like to lose my own money; I hated to lose Pinkerton's; and the bearing
of my creditor incensed me.

"Do you know, Mr. Speedy, that I can send you to the penitentiary?" said
I, willing to read him a lesson.

The dire expression was overheard in the next room. A large, fresh,
motherly Irishwoman ran forth upon the instant, and fell to besiege me
with caresses and appeals. "Sure now, and ye couldn't have the heart to
ut, Mr. Dodd, you, that's so well known to be a pleasant gentleman; and
it's a pleasant face ye have, and the picture of me own brother that's
dead and gone. It's a truth that he's been drinking. Ye can smell it off
of him, more blame to him. But, indade, and there's nothing in the
house beyont the furnicher, and Thim Stock. It's the stock that ye'll
be taking, dear. A sore penny it has cost me, first and last, and by
all tales, not worth an owld tobacco pipe." Thus adjured, and somewhat
embarrassed by the stern attitude I had adopted, I suffered myself to be
invested with a considerable quantity of what is called wild-cat stock,
in which this excellent if illogical female had been squandering her
hard-earned gold. It could scarce be said to better my position, but the
step quieted the woman; and, on the other hand, I could not think I was
taking much risk, for the shares in question (they were those of what I
will call the Catamount Silver Mine) had fallen some time before to the
bed-rock quotation, and now lay perfectly inert, or were only kicked
(like other waste paper) about the kennel of the exchange by bankrupt
speculators.

A month or two after, I perceived by the stock-list that Catamount
had taken a bound; before afternoon, "thim stock" were worth a quite
considerable pot of money; and I learned, upon inquiry, that a bonanza
had been found in a condemned lead, and the mine was now expected to do
wonders. Remarkable to philosophers how bonanzas are found in condemned
leads, and how the stock is always at freezing-point immediately before!
By some stroke of chance the, Speedys had held on to the right thing;
they had escaped the syndicate; yet a little more, if I had not come to
dun them, and Mrs. Speedy would have been buying a silk dress. I could
not bear, of course, to profit by the accident, and returned to
offer restitution. The house was in a bustle; the neighbours (all
stock-gamblers themselves) had crowded to condole; and Mrs. Speedy sat
with streaming tears, the centre of a sympathetic group. "For fifteen
year I've been at ut," she was lamenting, as I entered, "and grudging
the babes the very milk, more shame to me! to pay their dhirty
assessments. And now, my dears, I should be a lady, and driving in my
coach, if all had their rights; and a sorrow on that man Dodd! As soon
as I set eyes on him, I seen the divil was in the house."

It was upon these words that I made my entrance, which was therefore
dramatic enough, though nothing to what followed. For when it appeared
that I was come to restore the lost fortune, and when Mrs. Speedy (after
copiously weeping on my bosom) had refused the restitution, and when
Mr. Speedy (summoned to that end from a camp of the Grand Army of the
Republic) had added his refusal, and when I had insisted, and they had
insisted, and the neighbours had applauded and supported each of us in
turn; and when at last it was agreed we were to hold the stock together,
and share the proceeds in three parts--one for me, one for Mr. Speedy,
and one for his spouse--I will leave you to conceive the enthusiasm that
reigned in that small, bare apartment, with the sewing-machine in the
one corner, and the babes asleep in the other, and pictures of Garfield
and the Battle of Gettysburg on the yellow walls. Port wine was had in
by a sympathiser, and we drank it mingled with tears.

"And I dhrink to your health, my dear," sobbed Mrs. Speedy, especially
affected by my gallantry in the matter of the third share; "and I'm
sure we all dhrink to his health--Mr. Dodd of the picnics, no gentleman
better known than him; and it's my prayer, dear, the good God may be
long spared to see ye in health and happiness!"

In the end I was the chief gainer; for I sold my third while it was
worth five thousand dollars, but the Speedys more adventurously held on
until the syndicate reversed the process, when they were happy to escape
with perhaps a quarter of that sum. It was just as well; for the bulk
of the money was (in Pinkerton's phrase) reinvested; and when next I saw
Mrs. Speedy, she was still gorgeously dressed from the proceeds of the
late success, but was already moist with tears over the new catastrophe.
"We're froze out, me darlin'! All the money we had, dear, and the
sewing-machine, and Jim's uniform, was in the Golden West; and the
vipers has put on a new assessment."

By the end of the year, therefore, this is how I stood. I had made

By Catamount Silver Mine..................... $5,000
By the picnics............................... 3,000
By the lecture............................... 600
By profit and loss on capital
in Pinkerton's business...................... 1,350
------
$9,950

to which must be added

What remained of my grandfather's
donation..................................... 8,500
------
$18,450

It appears, on the other hand, that

I had spent.......................... 4,000
-------
Which thus left me to the good............... $14,450

A result on which I am not ashamed to say I looked with gratitude and
pride. Some eight thousand (being late conquest) was liquid and actually
tractile in the bank; the rest whirled beyond reach and even sight (save
in the mirror of a balance-sheet) under the compelling spell of wizard
Pinkerton. Dollars of mine were tacking off the shores of Mexico, in
peril of the deep and the guarda-costas; they rang on saloon-counters
in the city of Tombstone, Arizona; they shone in faro-tents among the
mountain diggings; the imagination flagged in following them, so wide
were they diffused, so briskly they span to the turning of the wizard's
crank. But here, there, or everywhere I could still tell myself it was
all mine, and what was more convincing, draw substantial dividends. My
fortune, I called it; and it represented, when expressed in dollars, or
even British pounds, an honest pot of money; when extended into francs,
a veritable fortune. Perhaps I have let the cat out of the bag; perhaps
you see already where my hopes were pointing, and begin to blame my
inconsistency. But I must first tell you my excuse, and the change that
had befallen Pinkerton.

About a week after the picnic to which he escorted Mamie, Pinkerton
avowed the state of his affections. From what I had observed on board
the steamer, where methought Mamie waited on him with her limpid eyes,
I encouraged the bashful lover to proceed; and the very next evening he
was carrying me to call on his affianced.

"You must befriend her, Loudon, as you have always befriended me," he
said, pathetically.

"By saying disagreeable things? I doubt if that be the way to a young
lady's favour," I replied; "and since this picnicking I begin to be a
man of some experience."

"Yes, you do nobly there; I can't describe how I admire you," he cried.
"Not that she will ever need it; she has had every advantage. God knows
what I have done to deserve her. O man, what a responsibility this is
for a rough fellow and not always truthful!"

"Brace up, old man, brace up!" said I.

But when we reached Mamie's boarding-house, it was almost with tears
that he presented me. "Here is Loudon, Mamie," were his words. "I want
you to love him; he has a grand nature."

"You are certainly no stranger to me, Mr. Dodd," was her gracious
expression. "James is never weary of descanting on your goodness."

"My dear lady," said I, "when you know our friend a little better,
you will make a large allowance for his warm heart. My goodness has
consisted in allowing him to feed and clothe and toil for me when he
could ill afford it. If I am now alive, it is to him I owe it; no man
had a kinder friend. You must take good care of him," I added, laying my
hand on his shoulder, "and keep him in good order, for he needs it."

Pinkerton was much affected by this speech, and so, I fear, was Mamie. I
admit it was a tactless performance. "When you know our friend a little
better," was not happily said; and even "keep him in good order, for he
needs it" might be construed into matter of offence; but I lay it before
you in all confidence of your acquittal: was the general tone of it
"patronising"? Even if such was the verdict of the lady, I cannot but
suppose the blame was neither wholly hers nor wholly mine; I cannot but
suppose that Pinkerton had already sickened the poor woman of my very
name; so that if I had come with the songs of Apollo, she must still
have been disgusted.

Here, however, were two finger-posts to Paris. Jim was going to be
married, and so had the less need of my society. I had not pleased his
bride, and so was, perhaps, better absent. Late one evening I broached
the idea to my friend. It had been a great day for me; I had just banked
my five thousand catamountain dollars; and as Jim had refused to lay a
finger on the stock, risk and profit were both wholly mine, and I was
celebrating the event with stout and crackers. I began by telling him
that if it caused him any pain or any anxiety about his affairs, he had
but to say the word, and he should hear no more of my proposal. He was
the truest and best friend I ever had or was ever like to have; and
it would be a strange thing if I refused him any favour he was sure
he wanted. At the same time I wished him to be sure; for my life was
wasting in my hands. I was like one from home; all my true interests
summoned me away. I must remind him, besides, that he was now about to
marry and assume new interests, and that our extreme familiarity might
be even painful to his wife.--"O no, Loudon; I feel you are wrong
there," he interjected warmly; "she DOES appreciate your nature."--So
much the better, then, I continued; and went on to point out that our
separation need not be for long; that, in the way affairs were going,
he might join me in two years with a fortune, small, indeed, for the
States, but in France almost conspicuous; that we might unite our
resources, and have one house in Paris for the winter and a second near
Fontainebleau for summer, where we could be as happy as the day was
long, and bring up little Pinkertons as practical artistic workmen, far
from the money-hunger of the West. "Let me go then," I concluded; "not
as a deserter, but as the vanguard, to lead the march of the Pinkerton
men."

So I argued and pleaded, not without emotion; my friend sitting
opposite, resting his chin upon his hand and (but for that single
interjection) silent. "I have been looking for this, Loudon," said he,
when I had done. "It does pain me, and that's the fact--I'm so miserably
selfish. And I believe it's a death blow to the picnics; for it's idle
to deny that you were the heart and soul of them with your wand and your
gallant bearing, and wit and humour and chivalry, and throwing that kind
of society atmosphere about the thing. But for all that, you're right,
and you ought to go. You may count on forty dollars a week; and if Depew
City--one of nature's centres for this State--pan out the least as I
expect, it may be double. But it's forty dollars anyway; and to think
that two years ago you were almost reduced to beggary!"

"I WAS reduced to it," said I.

"Well, the brutes gave you nothing, and I'm glad of it now!" cried Jim.
"It's the triumphant return I glory in! Think of the master, and that
cold-blooded Myner too! Yes, just let the Depew City boom get on its
legs, and you shall go; and two years later, day for day, I'll shake
hands with you in Paris, with Mamie on my arm, God bless her!"

We talked in this vein far into the night. I was myself so exultant in
my new-found liberty, and Pinkerton so proud of my triumph, so happy in
my happiness, in so warm a glow about the gallant little woman of his
choice, and the very room so filled with castles in the air and cottages
at Fontainebleau, that it was little wonder if sleep fled our eyelids,
and three had followed two upon the office clock before Pinkerton
unfolded the mechanism of his patent sofa.




CHAPTER VIII. FACES ON THE CITY FRONT.


It is very much the custom to view life as if it were exactly ruled in
two, like sleep and waking; the provinces of play and business standing
separate. The business side of my career in San Francisco has been now
disposed of; I approach the chapter of diversion; and it will be found
they had about an equal share in building up the story of the Wrecker--a
gentleman whose appearance may be presently expected.

With all my occupations, some six afternoons and two or three odd
evenings remained at my disposal every week: a circumstance the more
agreeable as I was a stranger in a city singularly picturesque.
From what I had once called myself, The Amateur Parisian, I grew (or
declined) into a waterside prowler, a lingerer on wharves, a frequenter
of shy neighbourhoods, a scraper of acquaintance with eccentric
characters. I visited Chinese and Mexican gambling-hells, German secret
societies, sailors' boarding-houses, and "dives" of every complexion of
the disreputable and dangerous. I have seen greasy Mexican hands pinned
to the table with a knife for cheating, seamen (when blood-money ran
high) knocked down upon the public street and carried insensible on
board short-handed ships, shots exchanged, and the smoke (and the
company) dispersing from the doors of the saloon. I have heard
cold-minded Polacks debate upon the readiest method of burning San
Francisco to the ground, hot-headed working men and women bawl and swear
in the tribune at the Sandlot, and Kearney himself open his subscription
for a gallows, name the manufacturers who were to grace it with their
dangling bodies, and read aloud to the delighted multitude a telegram of
adhesion from a member of the State legislature: all which preparations
of proletarian war were (in a moment) breathed upon and abolished by the
mere name and fame of Mr. Coleman. That lion of the Vigilantes had but
to rouse himself and shake his ears, and the whole brawling mob was
silenced. I could not but reflect what a strange manner of man this was,
to be living unremarked there as a private merchant, and to be so
feared by a whole city; and if I was disappointed, in my character of
looker-on, to have the matter end ingloriously without the firing of a
shot or the hanging of a single millionnaire, philosophy tried to tell
me that this sight was truly the more picturesque. In a thousand towns
and different epochs I might have had occasion to behold the cowardice
and carnage of street fighting; where else, but only there and then,
could I have enjoyed a view of Coleman (the intermittent despot) walking
meditatively up hill in a quiet part of town, with a very rolling gait,
and slapping gently his great thigh?

Minora Canamus. This historic figure stalks silently through a corner
of the San Francisco of my memory: the rest is bric-a-brac, the
reminiscences of a vagrant sketcher. My delight was much in slums.
Little Italy was a haunt of mine; there I would look in at the windows
of small eating-shops, transported bodily from Genoa or Naples, with
their macaroni, and chianti flasks, and portraits of Garibaldi, and
coloured political caricatures; or (entering in) hold high debate with
some ear-ringed fisher of the bay as to the designs of "Mr. Owstria" and
"Mr. Rooshia." I was often to be observed (had there been any to observe
me) in that dis-peopled, hill-side solitude of Little Mexico, with its
crazy wooden houses, endless crazy wooden stairs, and perilous mountain
goat-paths in the sand. Chinatown by a thousand eccentricities drew
and held me; I could never have enough of its ambiguous, interracial
atmosphere, as of a vitalised museum; never wonder enough at its
outlandish, necromantic-looking vegetables set forth to sell in
commonplace American shop-windows, its temple doors open and the scent
of the joss-stick streaming forth on the American air, its kites of
Oriental fashion hanging fouled in Western telegraph-wires, its flights
of paper prayers which the trade-wind hunts and dissipates along
Western gutters. I was a frequent wanderer on North Beach, gazing at
the straits, and the huge Cape-Horners creeping out to sea, and imminent
Tamalpais. Thence, on my homeward way, I might visit that strange and
filthy shed, earth-paved and walled with the cages of wild animals and
birds, where at a ramshackle counter, amid the yells of monkeys, and a
poignant atmosphere of menagerie, forty-rod whiskey was administered by
a proprietor as dirty as his beasts. Nor did I even neglect Nob
Hill, which is itself a kind of slum, being the habitat of the mere
millionnaire. There they dwell upon the hill-top, high raised above
man's clamour, and the trade-wind blows between their palaces about
deserted streets.

But San Francisco is not herself only. She is not only the most
interesting city in the Union, and the hugest smelting-pot of races and
the precious metals. She keeps, besides, the doors of the Pacific, and
is the port of entry to another world and an earlier epoch in man's
history. Nowhere else shall you observe (in the ancient phrase) so many
tall ships as here convene from round the Horn, from China, from Sydney,
and the Indies; but scarce remarked amid that crowd of deep-sea giants,
another class of craft, the Island schooner, circulates: low in the
water, with lofty spars and dainty lines, rigged and fashioned like
a yacht, manned with brown-skinned, soft-spoken, sweet-eyed native
sailors, and equipped with their great double-ender boats that tell a
tale of boisterous sea-beaches. These steal out and in again, unnoted by
the world or even the newspaper press, save for the line in the clearing
column, "Schooner So-and-so for Yap and South Sea Islands"--steal out
with nondescript cargoes of tinned salmon, gin, bolts of gaudy cotton
stuff, women's hats, and Waterbury watches, to return, after a year,
piled as high as to the eaves of the house with copra, or wallowing
deep with the shells of the tortoise or the pearl oyster. To me, in my
character of the Amateur Parisian, this island traffic, and even the
island world, were beyond the bounds of curiosity, and how much more of
knowledge. I stood there on the extreme shore of the West and of to-day.
Seventeen hundred years ago, and seven thousand miles to the east,
a legionary stood, perhaps, upon the wall of Antoninus, and looked
northward toward the mountains of the Picts. For all the interval of
time and space, I, when I looked from the cliff-house on the broad
Pacific, was that man's heir and analogue: each of us standing on the
verge of the Roman Empire (or, as we now call it, Western civilization),
each of us gazing onward into zones unromanised. But I was dull. I
looked rather backward, keeping a kind eye on Paris; and it required a
series of converging incidents to change my attitude of nonchalance for
one of interest, and even longing, which I little dreamed that I should
live to gratify.

The first of these incidents brought me in acquaintance with a certain
San Francisco character, who had something of a name beyond the limits
of the city, and was known to many lovers of good English. I had
discovered a new slum, a place of precarious, sandy cliffs, deep, sandy
cuttings, solitary, ancient houses, and the butt-ends of streets. It was
already environed. The ranks of the street-lamps threaded it unbroken.
The city, upon all sides of it, was tightly packed, and growled with
traffic. To-day, I do not doubt the very landmarks are all swept away;
but it offered then, within narrow limits, a delightful peace, and (in
the morning, when I chiefly went there) a seclusion almost rural. On a
steep sand-hill, in this neighbourhood, toppled, on the most insecure
foundation, a certain row of houses, each with a bit of garden, and all
(I have to presume) inhabited. Thither I used to mount by a crumbling
footpath, and in front of the last of the houses, would sit down to
sketch. The very first day I saw I was observed, out of the ground-floor
window by a youngish, good-looking fellow, prematurely bald, and with
an expression both lively and engaging. The second, as we were still
the only figures in the landscape, it was no more than natural that
we should nod. The third, he came out fairly from his intrenchments,
praised my sketch, and with the impromptu cordiality of artists carried
me into his apartment; where I sat presently in the midst of a museum of
strange objects,--paddles and battle-clubs and baskets, rough-hewn stone
images, ornaments of threaded shell, cocoanut bowls, snowy cocoanut
plumes--evidences and examples of another earth, another climate,
another race, and another (if a ruder) culture. Nor did these objects
lack a fitting commentary in the conversation of my new acquaintance.
Doubtless you have read his book. You know already how he tramped and
starved, and had so fine a profit of living, in his days among the
islands; and meeting him, as I did, one artist with another, after
months of offices and picnics, you can imagine with what charm he would
speak, and with what pleasure I would hear. It was in such talks, which
we were both eager to repeat, that I first heard the names--first fell
under the spell--of the islands; and it was from one of the first of
them that I returned (a happy man) with _Omoo_ under one arm, and my
friend's own adventures under the other.

The second incident was more dramatic, and had, besides, a bearing on
my future. I was standing, one day, near a boat-landing under Telegraph
Hill. A large barque, perhaps of eighteen hundred tons, was coming more
than usually close about the point to reach her moorings; and I was
observing her with languid inattention, when I observed two men to
stride across the bulwarks, drop into a shore boat, and, violently
dispossessing the boatman of his oars, pull toward the landing where I
stood. In a surprisingly short time they came tearing up the steps; and
I could see that both were too well dressed to be foremast hands--the
first even with research, and both, and specially the first, appeared
under the empire of some strong emotion.

"Nearest police office!" cried the leader.

"This way," said I, immediately falling in with their precipitate pace.
"What's wrong? What ship is that?"

"That's the Gleaner," he replied. "I am chief officer, this gentleman's
third; and we've to get in our depositions before the crew. You see they
might corral us with the captain; and that's no kind of berth for me.
I've sailed with some hard cases in my time, and seen pins flying like
sand on a squally day--but never a match to our old man. It never let
up from the Hook to the Farallones; and the last man was dropped not
sixteen hours ago. Packet rats our men were, and as tough a crowd as
ever sand-bagged a man's head in; but they looked sick enough when the
captain started in with his fancy shooting."

"O, he's done up," observed the other. "He won't go to sea no more."

"You make me tired," retorted his superior. "If he gets ashore in one
piece and isn't lynched in the next ten minutes, he'll do yet. The
owners have a longer memory than the public; they'll stand by him; they
don't find as smart a captain every day in the year."

"O, he's a son of a gun of a fine captain; there ain't no doubt of
that," concurred the other, heartily. "Why, I don't suppose there's been
no wages paid aboard that Gleaner for three trips."

"No wages?" I exclaimed, for I was still a novice in maritime affairs.

"Not to sailor-men before the mast," agreed the mate. "Men cleared out;
wasn't the soft job they maybe took it for. She isn' the first ship that
never paid wages."

I could not but observe that our pace was progressively relaxing; and
indeed I have often wondered since whether the hurry of the start were
not intended for the gallery alone. Certain it is at least, that when we
had reached the police office, and the mates had made their deposition,
and told their horrid tale of five men murdered, some with savage
passion, some with cold brutality, between Sandy Hook and San Francisco,
the police were despatched in time to be too late. Before we arrived,
the ruffian had slipped out upon the dock, had mingled with the crowd,
and found a refuge in the house of an acquaintance; and the ship was
only tenanted by his late victims. Well for him that he had been
thus speedy. For when word began to go abroad among the shore-side
characters, when the last victim was carried by to the hospital, when
those who had escaped (as by miracle) from that floating shambles,
began to circulate and show their wounds in the crowd, it was strange
to witness the agitation that seized and shook that portion of the
city. Men shed tears in public; bosses of lodging-houses, long inured
to brutality, and above all, brutality to sailors, shook their fists at
heaven: if hands could have been laid on the captain of the Gleaner,
his shrift would have been short. That night (so gossip reports) he was
headed up in a barrel and smuggled across the bay: in two ships already
he had braved the penitentiary and the gallows; and yet, by last
accounts, he now commands another on the Western Ocean.