Barter (Rowland)/Part 1
“What Could You and Cyril Do if a Pirate Held You Up When You Had a Cargo? You've Got No Guns, Have You?”
AS I WALKED out of my uncle's boiler factory it struck me that there was a curious change in the hitherto dreary environs of the plant. Everything about the horrid place looked for the first time bright and colorful, seemed to scintillate with a shimmering vitality that infused with picturesque interest even such drab details as freight cars and refuse dumps and those stark waste spaces worse than mere desolation, which are the greasy salt marshes encroached upon by dismal shops for the manufacture of such gross necessities of life as modern conditions require.
It was late September, a chiaroscuro day, with heavy cloud masses drifting across a brilliant sky. Purple shadows sped along beneath them on the tawny flats with a speed that looked out of all proportion to that of the billowy fragments hanging overhead. I remembered how I used to race my pony with them as a boy, trying to keep in the bright sunshine. I had been trying to do that thing for the last few years, but afoot, and the shadow had always caught me up.
Well, here today it seemed to have caught me up again, but this time there was no gloom about it. Only the big boss, my uncle, knew that I had been fired; but he did not know that I was glad of it, that I rejoiced at being obliged to quit an infernal job in a clamoring Hades that must soon have shattered my nerves completely and left me stunned and quivering, like a fish feebly flapping on the surface after the explosion of a submarine mine. My war service six years before had been the command of a mine sweeper on the Bay of Biscay, and I had seen a good many such poor fish flopping round.
That boiler factory had been, speaking literally and without vulgarity, a hell of a job for a man of nervous temperament and one brought up to every luxury of early life. Boiled down, it amounted to the unusual combination of timekeeper and pay clerk; and as such, was a tribute to my uncle's esteem of my honesty, if not to my ability. The rupture had come because, after being warned, I had shown leniency in the matter of docking for short time a riveter about whose family troubles I had interested myself and was sorry for. As my uncle pointed out with more justice than mercy, he objected to being made a philanthropist without his knowledge or consent. My answer to the effect that he would never be one otherwise may have brought us to a better misunderstanding.
Like many employers, there were two bets he overlooked in my dismissal: One, that he might have some difficulty to fill my place with another man as conscientious about his work in most respects and for whom the factory force would work as willingly; and second, that I was really overjoyed at being chucked out of a bedlam in which I felt it my duty to remain even while convinced that it would shatter me in the end. I had always been sensitive to sharp concussions and would probably have been one of the first to go down under shell shock if my war service had been ashore. But in mine sweeping there is apt to be but one such shock, and that to cure all ills.
On this bright day of my most recent failure I was positively glowing with relief as I hopped a trolley car to go back to lodgings between which and the boiler factory there was not much to choose. Past misfortunes were for the moment set aside. Gone was the big estate on which I had been born. Gone the pomp and circumstance that had greeted this event, like the birth of a crown prince, in the matter of rich inheritance.
No such dreary retrospect was in my mind as the nearly empty trolley car bowled along over the filled-in track across the Jersey meadows. Here was the whole wide world open to me. That fact impressed me more than the door to the confines of a job slammed behind me. I became at once intensely interested in the purple cloud shadows drifting across the mellow marsh, and in a big Pennsylvania Pullman train. It looked like an expensive mechanical toy to me at its distance of a mile or two, and to the passengers of that train the trolley car on which I bucketed along must have looked like the cheap toy of a sidewalk vender.
We crossed a clanging bridge where a squat, filthy barge named Fairy Queen was patiently accepting a cargo of muck gnawed out by a dredge. A little beyond it was a settlement of shacks that bore the same relation to the community beyond that a spore might bear to the proliferating cells of a cancer. It was intensely interesting to me to observe this development, although I viewed it inversely to the generally accepted idea of reclamation of waste land. I saw it more as a blot or a desolation hitherto useless but beautiful in its soft neutral coloring and space. Rapidly it was becoming intensively useful and hideous. Yet this fact struck me with no sense of loss any more than it would have seemed to me a loss to burn a hole in a beautiful rug when as a little boy I had experimented with small toy stationary engines. There were lots more marshes like that somewhere in the world, just as there were lots more costly rugs. Little boys had to destroy pretty things for experiment and pleasure, and just so did grown-up ones destroy them fer experiment and profit. It was the function of the earth to supply material! for such adventures in experience.
I was bound now for a haven of peace and quiet where I had spent a week's vacation the month before, first stopping to collect my few effects at a pretty awful lodging house on the fringe of Newark, close to a big railroad yard where switch engines shunted and shouted passionately the night through. Just across the street was a dance hall with a jazz band that drowned its frequent sounds of strife. But my two rooms were in the rear spacious and sunny, looking on one of those vast mud flats where the tide is usually out and the mosquitoes in, with an oily channel where tugboats tooted for the draw. I liked the propinquity of boats.
The place to which I was now going for a brief rest before hunting another job was about as different in the point of noise as one can possibly imagine; Beach City, down on Barnegat Bay. On my vacation the month before, the first two nights bad nearly finished me. They were of that stilly sort in which I had oft awakened because of a peace less heavenly than of the tomb to one accustomed to a never-ending racket. The clean and well-kept cottage where I had found lodging was near the edge of the bay, too far from the channel for the din of poorly muffled motorboats to be disturbing, too removed from any thoroughfare for noisy cars.
I had found it through the kindly offices of a decent young fellow who drove a station taxi, and I really think he drove me there not because it was about as far from the station as you could go in Beach City, but through a friendly wish to do a good turn both to me and to Mrs. Fairchild, whom he greatly admired. She proved to be a sensible and pretty woman of thirty-four or five, the widow of a retired sea captain very much her senior. He had died two or three years before, leaving her the cottage and a sort of combination ship chandler's junk store, which she had turned partly into a notion shop, whatever that may be.
During my week's sojourn there I had seen very little of my hostess, who spent her days in the shop. But in our brief meetings I learned that she hailed originally from Boothbay, Maine, and that her late husband, Captain Fairchild, had also been a Maine seafaring man. I could have told her origin in any case because of her Anglican accent and that fresh bloom that even doughnuts and pie do not destroy in the complexions of the pretty women of the foggy Maine coast, perhaps because they know how to make doughnuts and pies properly.
Having gathered up the remnants of what had once been costly clothes and jammed them into my jaded valises, I called down to a beaver-head who was a sort of self-appointed valet of mine and requested that he scoop up the rest of the detritus and crowd it into a couple of sea bags. Then I enriched him and sent him off with a telegram to Mrs. Fairchild to warn her that I was coming back to Beach City and hoped she could put me up. I was all square with my host, but went into the restaurant underneath and shook hands with him and his wife and gave his little boy a half dollar to remember me by—until he could get to the pastry shop on the corner.
There is this to be said in favor of such places. They are easy to get out of. All roads may lead to Rome, but there are supplementary routes to get you out of Monte Carlo, Havana and Newark. Then, on arriving at Beach City, I was surprised and touched to find Mrs. Fairchild there on the platform to meet me. She had a flivver tucked into the drift of cars against the quay.
“I thought I'd close the shop and come after you myself, Mr. Stirling,” she said. “I can't put you up at my house, so it seemed the least I could do was to see you made comfortable somewhere. A friend of mine has a nice room.”
“But I've set my heart on going back to your house,” I objected. “I shan't be any bother.”
“Of course you wouldn't, Mr. Stirling. The trouble is they are going to foreclose and sell me out. I'm trying now to make a clean sweep of everything and get clear of this port of missing chances while I've got anything left at all.”
“I had no idea it was as bad as that, Mrs. Fairchild.”
“Oh, that's not the half of it, Mr. Stirling. My late husband's ship-chandler business was killed by a new big store down on the wharf, so I turned my shop into notions and things. And now there's a full-powered five-and-ten store just opened opposite me. My cottage is too far out on the flat to have any value, so I might as well let it go. And now to do me to a turn, I've just had news that a hotel I owned a share in down Boothbay way has burned and the insurance allowed to lapse.”
This jeremiad so cheerfully stated made my own perplexities seem slight. I suggested then to Mrs. Fairchild that since I could mobilize in about five minutes, she might as well take me in until she got her sailing orders. I told her that I had got the gate for having dealt leniently with a workman at the cost of the plant, but that I had made a provision for some months of unemployment and so we were to some extent struck adrift in the same boat. Meantime, I wanted a few days and nights of absolute rest.
So Mrs. Fairchild finally gave in and drove back to her cottage.
We Got Out Around Cape Cod in a Clear Strong Nor'wester. It Took Us Down Around Nantucket Shoals
II
AFTER a long night's sleep, the silence of the place now comforting because I was prepared for it, I walked four streets to the trolley and rode down Ocean Avenue until I came to Mrs. Fairchild's store. I wanted to learn how long I might hope to be her lodger and something about her own plans. When a man is so abysmally alone as I was at that time, and not in very good health, a kind friend assumes the proportions of a guardian angel. I liked Mrs. Fairchild and I knew that she liked me, and from what she had said the day before it appeared that we were both in the same blind alley, an impasse from which it might take a little planning to escape.
Mrs. Fairchild's proved to be one of these narrow-fronted shops that you can never tell much about until you get inside. There was a display of small modern trashy articles in its front, seagoing necessities were farther in its depths, and serviceable heavy junk in the rear end of it. Beginning with the ubiquitous cheap jewelry, bead necklaces, three-dollar wrist and other watches, fancy combs, objects partly of apparel, partly decoration, it ran back into miscellaneous hardware of the ten-cent-store kind—rope, wire, boat fit piping, tubing, canned goods, all sorts. Visions that might last indefinitely; and in a sort of storeroom, heaps of heavier gear that would be classed as junk, yet sound and representing a standard value—used galvanized chain and small anchors, paints and oils, sails weathered but still sound, blocks and tackles and the like.
All this was stuff left from the stock of Captain Fairchild, who had run the store for some years after quitting the sea, no doubt with modest savings. But his trade had since been cut from under him by the new big modern store down by the inlet when his widow decided to try a line of such small cheap goods as were displayed in the show windows. This had gone fairly well until the opening of the five-and-ten-cent store across the street. But here now was Mrs. Fairchild's business lopped off at both ends, so to speak, and the poor women left with a great mass of miscellaneous stuff that she could only hope at best to dispose of at a ruinous loss.
Nobody was in sight as I entered; but hearing the murmur of voices from the cubby-hole of an office in the rear, I walked back there and found Mrs. Fairchild in consultation with a tall, big-framed young man whom I had met when there before. His name was Cyril Whitecliff, and Mrs. Fairchild had told me that he embodied the functions of bookkeeper, caretaker and general clerk.
Cyril Whitecliff was an English Jew, born and bred in Bermuda. He was very good looking in a curious old-fashioned way, like a character out of one of Captain Marryat's books; rather of the Spanish or Portuguese Semitic type—tall, lean, big-boned, but graceful, and with an eagerness of manner and expression that was yet modest. Fairchild had told me that he was her chief and only clerk.
The two of them were in striking contrast; Mrs. Fairchild, of Anglo-Saxon fairness, with fluffy light-brown hair, blue eyes and a full, strong figure that was neither fat nor even plump, but more that of a mature woman athlete, swimmer and oarswoman, which indeed she had been as a girl; the young man, with his thick, black, lustrous hair, from which grew down on either lean cheek the sideburns of a Spanish, cavalier, aquiline features and a general shapely ranginess, was not at all the American conception of Hebrew, usually Central European. He looked like one of the early Phenician traders that were the pioneers in building up the broader commerce of the world, a sailor keen in barter who, strictly in the line of business, did not shirk the risks of the sea, nor the greater ones of the rapacious desperadoes that hovered over it. His skin was of a fresh, clear, pale olive, with a tinge of color showing through just now in his excitement.
Mrs. Fairchild looked up at me with a nod and a smile.
“I'm glad you came in, Mr. Stirling. Cyril here is getting me all worked up.”
“Talking business?” I asked.
“Well, he calls it that, but it sounds like bunk. What do you think of the store?”
Not to discourage her by saying what I really thought of her assets, I began guardedly:
“Well, I should say if you were to pick it up just as it stands and set it down at Nome, where they've just made another strike, or up the Mazaruni, where they're getting diamonds, or in the Crimea or some fur region, you might have a ”
This was as far as I got, because the effect of my cautious speech on Cyril was peculiar. He had risen respectfully, and now he flung out his arms with a sort of triumphant gesture.
“There! What did I tell you, Mrs. Fairchild? He takes the very words out of my mouth. Mr. Stirling has got the same idea. I was born in Bermuda, and my father but I have been all over the America as ship's steward, and I know what I am talking about.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“I say the same as you, sir. That all this stock is no good here. It would not fetch five hundred dollars, but there are many places where you could do big trade with it.”
I shook my head. “Not at the present rate of exchange, I'm afraid.”
“But that is just the point,” Cyril cried. “Foreign trade is at a standstill. There is no market for American or British products in the West Indies and South America because of the exchange. Silver is down. Prices are prohibitive on a gold basis. You could not sell this stuff for the price of transportation; but you could trade it off.”
“For what?”
“For the products of the countries where such things are badly needed and are a long way from the centers where they manufacture them. Just now the sources of supply, Great Britain and Germany, are not flowing; and, with the rate of exchange on the American dollar, they cannot buy. This is just the moment for the sort of barter that has made big fortunes in the past.”
“It sounds interesting, even if unfeasible,” I admitted
“But it might be done, Mr. Stirling. And the turnover would be enormous. You could trade this stuff for balata and tonka beans and copal and cacao and sisal, or even coconuts and bananas and vicufia wool and yerba maté ”
“Hold on,” I protested, “you make me dizzy. Then why not citrate of lime in Sicily and salt from Trapani; or if you want to make a real trading voyage, you might go to the Sea of Okhotsk and barter along its shores for ginseng root and sables and elk antlers and mushrooms and illicit gold and sealskins, and around the islands for ambergris and algæ ”
Cyril waved his big powerful hands.
“I see that you have caught the idea, sir. But I am thinking now about the shores of the Caribbean. It is not so far away. You could trade off such stuff as this at a tremendous profit, then bring what you got for it back here to market.”
Mrs. Fairchild looked at me and gave a helpless laugh.
“How did he get this way, Mr. Stirling? It's not catching, I hope.”
“This is the most contagious disorder in the world, Mrs. Fairchild. All adventure is that, but most people are rendered immune by fixed business ideas. A trade adventure is the most insidious, though, because you can usually manage to kid yourself into thinking that it is bound to be profitable.”
“Mrs. Fairchild has no fixed business ideas,” Cyril said; “and so far as the venture goes, she has nothing to lose. This stock of hers is no good here. But in the right place it might be worth a goodish lot. Once when I was aboard the Essiquibo I swapped a cheap belt with a flashy buckle, a set of poker dice, a pair of these new-fangled horsehide shoes and a three-dollar wrist watch bought in a pawnshop, for a pearl I sold afterward for one hundred and fifty dollars. The trade showed a turnover of about 1200 per cent.”
“And how,” I asked, “do you plan to peddle your wares where they may bring so much profit?”
“Ah, sir, that's the problem. Since we've got scarcely any cash to speak of, we would have to find a partner to put up a boat of sorts on a fifty-fifty basis against all this stuff of Mrs. Fairchild's, then be able to navigate it. A small fishing boat, or the like.”
I smiled and shook my head.
“That sort of scheme might appeal to some amateur who owned a boat, just for the fun of it; but as a business venture, I'm afraid it would be hard to interest anybody. Carrying the contents of a general ship chandler's junk and notion store on the verge of bankruptcy to some far distant and dubious market does not sound much of a business proposition, especially when rum running shows the profit that it does.”
“Rum running is not a business, Mr. Stirling, any more than any other sort of smuggling. Besides, it's not such easy money as most people seem to think. The big fellows steal all the bait and the little fish get the gaff.”
“Yes, it's a rotten game at any price,” I admitted. “What you suggest appeals to me a whole lot, though. Some years ago I used to navigate boats of my own in ocean races, and I commanded a fish-boat mine sweeper of the flotilla based on Lorient during the war. But the trouble is I've got no boat and very little cash.”
“That's the trouble here, sir. It seems a rotten shame to give all this stuff away for next to nothing, or wait for the sheriff to grab it, when I know of lots of places where it could be traded off for products of standard value.”
“Would you be let?” I asked.
“You would have to get a trading license for the country, sir, if your plan was to chaffer along the coast. But the best way would be to deal directly with some local storekeeper who was a merchant trader. The profit would be less, but you would not run the risk of being caught up.”
“What's to prevent this merchant trader from doing just what you propose?” I asked.
“Nothing, sir; but he doesn't. He pays money for such stock as Mrs. Fairchild has here, or at least he used to before the exchange was so high. Then, even if he trades a lot of it for native products, it has to be shipped and marketed. Every separate transaction slices off so much of the profit. Besides, there's always the chance of doing a little free trade when it looks safe.”
“That's what appeals to me,” I said; “swapping your stylish hat and stick and gloves for a little pearl or something.”
“Well,” said Mrs. Fairchild, “it all sounds crazy to me. All this new stock of mine must have its money value.”
Cyril shook his head.
“Not here and now, Mrs. Fairchild, with that store across the street just opening up. It would not be worth shifting to some other place, unless you shifted it a long distance, to Nome or the Mazaruni, just like Mr. Stirling says. And then it might be worth a lot, but not in money—in trade.”
I turned this statement in my mind.
“What sort of vessel would you want?”
“A little schooner, sir, with some auxiliary power to get in and out of places. A fifty-ton fishing boat would do the trick. I put a low assets value on this stuff in the store as appraised under conditions here, end of the season and a big competitor across the street. But the stock itself is all right, and so is the junk in the rear. It's mostly ship's gear, a little used, but sound and good.”
“How about your overhead if you were to get hold of the sort of little vessel you need?” I asked. “You would need a stake to run her, and ready cash is just what Mrs. Fairchild hasn't got.”
“That's the trouble, Mr. Stirling,” Cyril admitted sadly. “It seems a pity, though. Given a proper market, all this stock of Mrs. Fairchild's ought to be worth today about four thousand dollars, and just as it stands I doubt if it would net her five hundred.”
There seemed no just ground for disputing this. Cyril appeared to know what he was talking about, and from the long lists on the desk I judged that he had spent a day or two in taking stock. The standardized jokes about selling ice at the North Pole and coals in Newcastle—which latter was actually done not so long ago—appeared now to fit with more grim fact than humorous fancy this junk-notion-ship-chandler's shop that was in a fair way to be the commercial ruin of Mrs. Fairchild.
There was no help for it, that I could see. Just another of those tragic little business failures that do not make more of a ripple in the sea of commerce than does a land bird when it drops into the ocean exhausted after being blown a hundred miles offshore.
Then the destiny of small birds and small businesses took a hand in the affair, just as if the song sparrow when about to give up the losing struggle were to sight a fisherman coming in from the Grand Banks and flutter aboard and find shelter in a dory nested on the deck, and be given some crumbs of biscuit, then the next morning flit out, to find Cape Ann close aboard.
I strolled out into the shop and looked with regret at the many cheap and more or less useful articles displayed in the show cases and on the shelves; all bright, attractive rubbish that is produced in such astonishing volume and disappears no man knows where. Thousands of dollars changing hands for its manufacture and sale and purchase, then vanishing like the colors of a sunset; many people, especially the young ones, delighted immeasurably to possess it for a little while before the ash man garners it.
Then, happening to glance through the street window, I saw at a motor-service station diagonally across the street a girl I knew.
She was a very pretty and expensive looking girl whom I had for several years admired a great deal, but with reservations. Her name was Allaire Forsyth, and I had known her brother very well before the illness that had carried him off.
There is no excuse to be offered for what I did now under the impulse of the moment. It merely happened that way; one of those inconsiderate snatches at opportunity, with no more worth saying. Allaire was at the wheel of a costly runabout that I knew could not be her own. I walked out of the shop and greeted her as an old family friend.
III
ALLAIRE looked at me with a good deal of astonishment. “Pom Stirling, whatever are you doing in this muck hole?”
“Walking up and down, like Satan,” I said, “and hoping that gentleman may find some work for my idle hands.”
“This ought to be a good place for it. Since I've been sitting here three prosperous-looking importers have stopped to ask respectfully if I mightn't be needing a little high-class nerve tonic. Not hard to guess the leading local industry.”
She gave me a keen, curious look. Allaire was almost ash-blond, but was saved from being entirely of this coloring, which I always disliked, by a copper tinge to her hair in certain lights. Her eyes were baffling, long, tawny and hard.
“Do you mind my standing here talking to you?” I asked.
“No, I don't happen to be escapading. Drove over from Atlantic City with Evelyn Lee. She took a cottage for September to clear up the fag ends of the children's whooping cough before returning to Washington.
“Are you going back there with her, Allaire?”
“Oh, yes; always a professional young visitor and little sister to the rich. I'm pretty sick of it, Pom. Sometimes tempted to follow your example and get a real job instead of a masked one. It's pretty awful when you have to be a smoke scream between ” She pulled up short. “Get in beside me, Pom. We have time to swap hard-luck stories. I left Evelyn out here at a truck farm. A former maid of hers married a gardener. Sometimes I feel like marrying one myself, but I'd rather it were a rum runner.”
She shot me another keen yellow gleam from under lashes that were very long and black.
“Well, this ought to be the market place,” I said. “Speaking of jobs, I've been drummed out of the boiler barracks. Dear uncle got sore because I was generous at his expense in the matter of time out on a man who has worked there fifteen years and has sickness in his family.”
“That sounds like uncle,” said Allaire, “but doesn't quite explain your presence here, unless to seek forgetfulness at the fountainhead. But you never did that thing.”
“No; and less now than ever, with the fountain full of filth. My rather hopeless quest at present is to find the owner of some small vessel that isn't earning her upkeep and persuade him to throw in with some of us for a little trading venture.”
Just as I had expected, this statement, which was actually honest, brought a quick response. Allaire turned and gave me another searching look that was brief but intent.
“What sort of trading venture?”
“A voyage south to swap off the stock of a bankrupt ship chandler's notion shop for West Indies products, then bring these back to market here.”
Allaire was silent for a moment, then she said slowly, “That sounds interesting to me, Pom.
“We think it could be made profitable.”
“Who's we?”
“The woman who owns this busted store and her clerk. She is the widow of a coastwise schooner captain and her clerk is a Bermudian who was for some years deck steward of passenger steamers both to Bermuda and the West Indies.”
“They ought to know the ropes,” mused Allaire, “and you dragged up mines during the war ”
“Yes, and before that raced my own boats up and down the coast and to Bermuda. This widow, Mrs. Fairchild, sailed for about five years aboard the four-masted schooner captained by her husband, so we are none of us apt to get seasick.”
Allaire's tawny eyes lightened.
“Who else would you have?”
“Nobody, except a couple of West Indian negroes we might pick up down there—cook and a deck hand.”
She nodded.
“What sort of boat do you want?”
Here was the moment for which I had been maneuvering. I did not know whether Allaire had managed to sell the fifty-five-foot fishing schooner that her brother Jack had bought when his health broke down and converted into a yacht of sorts, to cruise about in what proved to be a futile effort to clear up his lungs, badly shot to pieces from gas and later tubercle bacilli. I doubted that she had, because when I had last seen her in the spring she had asked my advice about the matter and I had told her that the price she asked, five thousand dollars, was too high.
“Oh, about the type of poor Jack's Tinker,” I said; “but I suppose you have sold her by this time.”
She shook her head.
“No, she's still down there in Marblehead. How much would you be willing to pay, cash?”
“We can't pay cash at all,” I said. “We are going to need what little money we can scrape together for current expenses of the first voyage. The best we can do is to offer the owner a third interest in the profits of the trip. This Bermuda clerk who suggested it is convinced that we can make a big turnover. He seems to understand the ins and outs.”
“Perhaps he's right,” said Allaire. “Everybody's doing it.” She rested her elbows on the wheel and stared musingly down the tawdry main street of the uninspiring town.
Then here developed a curious flash of psychology. As if she had spelled it out, I could read the swift trend of thought suggested by my words. There was nothing singular about this, since Allaire had been surprised to find me there in Beach City, the last of all places where she might have expected to find such a ci-devant yachtsman as myself, but where a gentleman in distress, become perhaps a gentleman of fortune who had dire need to repair that thing, might easily gravitate.
Allaire now believed that I had something up my sleeve—intended to become perhaps a sort of independent rum runner. That would explain not only my presence at Beach City but the cryptic words by which I must seem to be sounding her out, the need of a small schooner of which the use might pay a big profit.
It must therefore have struck Allaire that rum running was almost an occupation created for a young man of my temperament in my position. But now, at the lightening of her face, it was suddenly borne in upon me that in this case, so did she also consider it the venture par excellence for a young woman of her temperament and in her position.
It was here that the singularity came in, and it made me feel for a second as if I had taken too much for granted in my estimate of Allaire. Also I hated to disappoint her. Here was a girl of the country's best blood and position and antecedents, with a couple of ancestors who had been Declaration signers, others general officers in the Continental Army, a maternal ancestor who had been governor of Massachusetts; in fact a staff of ancestors who had occupied positions of distinction as statesmen and soldiers, but no business men amongst them. So that she now greeted with a gleam in her clear hazel eyes what she thought to be a chance to make some money in an entirely unlawful way.
It was enough to make her august forefathers turn in their graves. And then again, perhaps they might have turned to laugh. But it did not make me laugh, because I could foresee what her disgust and disappointment would be when I told her the actual nature of the proposition—to use her white elephant of a schooner for trading the contents of a busted general store in and about the Caribbean for local products.
I decided instantly not to tell her. One may guess by this time that even before catching sight of Allaire I had made up my mind to get in on this deal somehow and in any capacity, if only for the fun of the thing. Not having any junk or boat or money or knowledge of trade to contribute, I could not claim much of a lay. But it would certainly be better than having my nerves hammered to pieces by automatic riveters.
It was plain enough that Allaire had taken my vague statement of wanting the schooner for trading junk to mean that I purposed to trade in contraband liquid wares, and that she greeted this idea with enthusiastic hope. It suddenly came into my head that she might as well go on thinking this.
No doubt it was dishonest on my part to let her proceed in such error, but it struck me for the moment that it was her own fault for being so ready to back such a nefarious business as she assumed it to be, and I believed that she stood really to make more and with less risk in the sort of trade proposed by Cyril than if we had actually intended rum running.
So I merely asked, “Well, how about it, Allaire?”
Her answer came with a promptness that showed flattering confidence in my ability and honesty in her direction, if not toward that of the Federal Government.
“It sounds good to me, Pom. Anything that promises me a bit of ready cash would sound good to me. It's pretty thick when it gets to the point where I have to accept presents from my hosts to tip their own servants. No doubt it's a rotten business, but everybody's doing it and I've got to my limit. What's more important is—do you know the ropes? Are you sure you can make it go? I don't want my schooner nabbed.”
“I can promise you that your schooner won't get nabbed,” I said. “As for knowing the ropes, I'm as good an amateur sailor as you could probably find, and the man who has put up the scheme to me appears to know all about the details of the business. He is an English Jew born in Bermuda.”
“You are sure that you won't lose the boat, Pom?”
“I can promise you that she will not be nabbed by the Federal authorities and that you will run no risk of scandal. Your ownership need not appear except among ourselves. For the rest, you will have to trust to my seeing that you will get your share and also to my ability to take care of the schooner.”
“Well, I often wondered at your not doing something of the sort and at your slaving patiently for that old brute of an uncle—an outdoor man and navy war veteran like yourself!”
“Then you're willing to put up the boat?”
“Yes,” she answered promptly. “There seems to be the hand of fate in this. Your meeting me here, of all places, and just as you'd been talking to this Bermuda man. What's his name?”
“Cyril Whitecliff.”
“That doesn't sound Jewish.”
“Well, I suppose it was originally Weisenberg, and the Cyril has an Eastern Europe origin.”
Allaire gave a hard smile.
“That's all right. It won't be the first time I've had business dealings with Jews, and so far I've always got a square deal. My jewelry has gone piece by piece. These earrings are pretty near ten-cent-store stuff. Not so good perhaps. I was just going across the street to get some beads. My turquoise matrix that you may remember went for the last bill for cleaning and copper painting the schooner, and I must say it nearly killed me. That boat lying there idle! i paid it just the other day and it was like pulling teeth.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Stay right where you are.”
I stepped back into the shop and went to the office, where Mrs. Fairchild and Cyril were still talking. They looked up inquiringly.
“It's all right, Cyril. I've got the schooner.”
“Oh, come now, Mr. Stirling!”
“I ran into her owner, Miss Forsyth, just outside, getting gas. I'm going to bring her in here to write me an order for the schooner.”
“My word!” Cyril gasped.
“She thinks we want her for rum running,” I said. “So don't undeceive her. On the other hand, don't say anything to confirm that idea. I've made it plain to her that she's not only to be a silent partner but a deaf one.”
“But, Mr. Stirling ” Mrs. Fairchild expostulated.
“It seers to me all right,” I said. “If we can make her some money in a purely legitimate way, that's certainly better than making her party to an illegitimate deal.”
“Right-o,” Cyril murmured.
“And I want that string of lapis lazuli that's in the show case, Mrs. Fairchild.”
She stared at me, dazed.
“Why, that's a good string, Mr. Stirling; about the only real thing in the shop. Captain Fairchild bought it for me one voyage. I've marked it fifty dollars. What do you want with it?”
“Our first trade,” I said; “to bind the bargain. Call it cumshaw, baksheesh, lagniappe. When dealing with a lady you can't be a piker.”
“You're jolly well right,” Cyril said. “But after she signs the order?” Here spoke the Phenician trader.
“Now mind you,” I cautioned, “don't give anything away. Let her think she's embarking indirectly on a career of crime and easy money—if rum-running money is ever that.”
I went out again. Allaire looked at me inquiringly.
“It's all right,” I said. “My prospective partners seem to think your schooner would be just the trick.”
“I want to see them,” Allaire said.
“I want you to come into the shop.”
There was no indecision in her face as she got out of the car. On the contrary, she had about as hard an expression as such a pretty face can sometimes wear. Allaire's type was Anglican, like that of Mrs. Fairchild, but with the difference that might be expected of their natures. Yet there was a sort of similarity about them. They had the same straight noses, Allaire's a little higher bridged and with the suspicion of a tilt. She looked like one of these cold hard English court beauties, of which there are none more adamantine in a mercenary way. Perhaps I am being a little unjust to Allaire, because her need was very great and her situation as a proud but rebellious sister of the rich growing daily more humiliating.
As we walked to the door, I made the sort of silly error that has got many a person otherwise fairly sensible into trouble. That is offering gratuitous information. For no reason at all, I told Allaire that Mrs. Fairchild was going on this voyage with us. Perhaps it may have been that, knowing and esteeming Mrs. Fairchild as I did, it was in the hack of my mind that this would be a recommendation for the good care of Allaire's boat and our safeguarding it from mishap, as if the little schooner had been a furnished bungalow about the tenants of which the owner would wish some assurance. Allaire looked surprised.
“Really?” she said, and then we walked into the shop.
I discovered immediately that Mrs. Fairchild and Cyril were no less puzzled at the personality of Allaire than was the girl herself at theirs. She may have expected to see in Mrs. Fairchild a sort of square-jawed seagoing, weather-beaten widow of a sea captain, strident of voice from admonishing sailors in the jargon of ships. And perhaps she had pictured Cyril as a low-browed avatar of rapacious Levantine pirates such as used to put out from Jaffa in lateen-rigged feluccas for trade or plunder, as their occasions, lawful or unlawful, offered.
Instead, she found me presenting a comely, pleasant-spoken woman, neatly and simply dressed, whose trim contour did not as yet suggest the approach of middle age; and a big, rangy, good-looking young man, with an eager, boyish face and a modest and respectful manner.
As for Cyril and Mrs. Fairchild, I think they had rather looked for a sort of swaggering, cocktailing post-graduate society flapper who happened to have a yacht of sorts idle on her hands and was ready to turn it to some use that might pay its stable bill, They were therefore considerably surprised to see a tall, supple, perfectly costumed beauty who was neither rakish nor putting on any stylish airs. Allaire gave them a quiet, searching glance from her tawny eyes, and a very pleasant smile.
“Mrs. Fairchild is the widow of a Yankee sea captain and knows the ropes from several long deep-sea voyages,” I said. “Mr. Whitecliff was born in Bermuda, and like most British maritime colonists is at home in any sort of craft. So I think that between us we can take good care of your Tinker.”
Cyril looked eagerly at Allaire.
“Most of my seafaring has been as deck steward on passenger ships, Miss Forsyth. But I was always keen about boats, and as a little spadger in St. George's I used to go out rockfishing on the reef with the local fishermen. Then for about eighteen months I was boat keeper aboard one of the pilot schooners.”
“How did you happen to come here?” Allaire asked.
Cyril looked very much embarrassed.
“Well, Miss Forsyth, I—I always liked to—to spar a bit, and about six months ago one of the passengers took me on with his training squad. He wanted to make a fighter of me, and I did manage to win him a little money. Then I had to be operated on for appendicitis, and he left me on the beach. Our quarters were near here, and afterward I got lodgings at Mrs. Fairchild's cottage and she gave me a job.”
This was a surprise to me, as Cyril looked more like a poet or an actor of romantic rôles than a prize fighter. Still, the bone and muscle were all there, with an uncommon reach and steady, if humorous, eyes.
“It wasn't much of a job,” Mrs. Fairchild said, “what with my business all blown to dishrags, as Captain Fairchild used to say sometimes about his sails. He was a thrifty man and used to nurse them along until, as he said, 'The Lord Almighty reefed 'em.' Not that he was ever really profane. But about all Cyril and I have had to do is to go round every so often and mark down prices.”
“Yes,” Cyril said, “and if we carry on as we're going we'll soon be offering a premium for somebody to take the stuff away; and most of it jolly good stuff, at that.”
“I don't wonder you feel desperate,” Allaire said in her cool voice. “I often feel that way myself. If there's anything worse than being the penniless member of a rich set, I haven't tried it yet. Several times I've been on the point of following Mr. Stirling's example and looking for a job; but each time some moneyed friend has come along and offered me a commission to put a house in order, or run it and look after the children while they go abroad, or go myself as a companion of sorts.”
“Why don't you go in for antiques?” I asked. “You are something of an expert, I've been told.”
“Only in an amateur way, Pom. I know something about rugs and furniture and porcelain, and a little about pictures. But that doesn't include any great knowledge of commercial values. We seem to be all in the same boat.”
“Well, it shows how little you can tell,” Mrs. Fairchild said. “I've looked at your picture in the society papers and magazines and thought what a happy girl you must be. It does seem like there was a fate in it.”
“Are you superstitious, Mrs. Fairchild?” Allaire asked. “Because I am. I believe that things like this don't happen merely by accident.”
“Captain Fairchild used to say that everybody got their chance sometime, if they were able to recognize it. He missed his by putting his savings into the store instead of into a vessel, just before the war came.”
Allaire glanced at her wrist watch.
“I must go after Evelyn, Pom. I'll give you an order for the Tinker. I'm sure you will take good care of her. Then I suppose my part of it stops.”
“Yes, your active part. From now on we assume all costs, obligations and risks.”
Allaire seated herself at the desk and wrote out the order.
“She was put in shape to sell about a month ago. I thought I was going to get rid of her, but the prospective purchaser decided she was too deep-drafted for Florida waters. He bought a center board schooner.”
“I will now give you a receipt,” I said, “in which it will be stated that you are to receive a third interest in all profits to accrue from the use of your schooner and to continue sole owner, of course.”
“How about insurance?” Allaire asked.
“Well, considering the nature of our trade, I should say the matter of insurance is a risk that you will be obliged to take.”
“Of course; I forgot.”
“Besides, Miss Forsyth,” Cyril reminded her, “your risk is only of property.”
It was a subtle touch. It could have meant the personal risk of danger from the sea or that of personal liberty, or both.
I wrote the document, which in the nature of the situation, as Allaire saw it, could be no more than a gentlemen's agreement, if such is possible for unlawful traffic, and naturally not legally valid. It appeared to satisfy her, but I could see that Cyril, on glancing over it, had something on his mind and I could guess what this was. He wondered just where I came in. I caught his eye with a significant warning that he was to make no comment.
Allaire said shat she must go. One might have expected a girl in her position to show a little disquiet, but she did not. Then as we walked out through the shop I calmly made free with Mrs. Fairchild's stock in trade as I had already warned her. Stepping behind the show case, I took out the really handsome string of lapis lazuli.
“You said a few moments ago that you were going to buy some beads in the ten-cent store, Allaire. Mrs. Fairchild wants you to accept these.”
Allaire looked at the string.
“Why, Pom, they're lovely! Mrs. Fairchild, you really mustn't.”
My landlady looked equally pleased. She was an impulsive woman and had fallen completely under the spell of Allaire's charm.
“I want you to have them, Miss Forsyth. They are not ordinary stock. They were brought me by my husband from Naples. There are some corals, too, if you would like them better.”
“No; these are perfect; my color. I have never seen them strung this way, with old beads between to match the gold flecks. They are really exquisite.”
We went out and I put her in Mrs. Lee's ear. Her expression was now profoundly thoughtful.
“I must say, Pom, I seem to be getting away for a good start.”
“I'll say you're getting away for a good sport,” I said.
She seemed to hesitate a moment, then evidently thinking better of what she was about to say, gave me a nod and smile and drove off.
IV
GOING back into the shop, I found my fellow conspirators, if it is fair to call them that, in a benumbed condition. Cyril looked excited, but Mrs. Fairchild had a somber expression. She shook her head at me.
“I don't know about this, Mr. Stirling,” she said.
To tell the truth, I felt a bit guilty and so proceeded to defend myself with vigor.
“Here's a girl with a schooner on her hands and no money for the upkeep of it. She should have sold it for what she could get long ago. But she didn't, because she couldn't bring herself to accept any price offered. And now if Cyril knows what he's talking about—and I should say he does—she's got the chance to make the boat earn her something and still own it, with no risk to speak of. If she chooses to jump to the conclusion that we are going in for rum running, that's her own fault.”
“All the same, you ought to have told her,” Mrs. Fairchild murmured.
“That would have ended it. She's willing to let us have the boat for an unlawful traffic in which she thinks she sees a big profit; and considering her unfortunate position, I can't say that I blame her. It's not the beer and skittles people think to dance attendance on the rich for your bed and board, and for a proud girl like Allaire it must be the devil.”
“All the same, it doesn't seem quite straight,” Mrs. Fairchild said stubbornly; “she's got a right to know what we really mean to do.”
“But hang it all,” I protested, “she'd have laughed at the idea of what we propose! And if you two wonder where I get that 'we,' I may as well tell you that I want in on this.”
Cyril nodded.
“I had a hunch you would, Mr. Stirling, and that's the reason I couldn't quite see your third-share idea. It ought to have been four.”
“I thought of that, too, and waived it,” I said. “For one thing, I don't think that Allaire Forsyth would have taken less than a third, and in fact she's entitled to that when you stop to think. I'll go as sailing master, if you like, and you can pay me what you think to be a fair wage out of the profits of the venture. The next important point is, how much cash can we raise between us for initial expenses?”
Mrs. Fairchild looked distressed.
“There now, Mr. Stirling, that's just the trouble. After this forced sale of my cottage, I doubt if I'll have anything left, after I've paid my bills, except that rickety old flivver that's all falling to pieces.”
“The motor's all right,” Cyril said. “We'll take it out and load it aboard and trade it off for coconuts or something.” He looked down at his big, bony left hand, on the little finger of which was a heavy gold ring with a good-sized diamond set deeply in the safe old-fashioned way. “That stone's been valued at about four hundred dollars. The ring belonged to my father, who was second steward on one of the old Quebec Steamship Company boats. It was given him by the mother of a little boy he saved from drowning. I'll pawn it.”
“Well,” I said, “I've got five hundred dollars; Liberty Bonds that a sanitarium would probably have got some day if I'd stuck on in the boiler factory. That goes into the pool.”
“Then you get a share, Mr. Stirling.” Cyril waved his hands. “I say, let's you and I split a third lay. You're to be captain and I'll be crew, steward and supercargo—commercial agent, so to speak.”
“You're on, Cyril. Then that's that. We will just go liquidate, then run down to Marblehead and bring the schooner here.”
V
I PASS briefly over the events of the next fortnight, I wired to the boatman at Marblehead who had the care of the Tinker—so named not after a mender of tinware but the small-sized run of mackerel—to advise him that I was coming to the little schooner as per written order from her owner.
Cyril and I left that same night. We found the little schooner all that I had hoped and a bit more, because poor Jack Forsyth had lacked funds to convert her completely into a yacht as regards her cabin plan. Or perhaps he may have had in mind that she might ultimately bring more for fishing than for yachting. Amidships, below decks, the hold space had been sheathed up neatly enough, but not bulkheaded off into saloon and staterooms. She was about fifty-five feet water line, but all boat, with broad beam and full bilges, which would give her stability and space for the sort of goods we purposed to barter in. She was as I imagined South Sea traders to be, but on a smaller scale, her fish hold serving not only as trade room but with plenty of space for Cyril and myself to rig our simple accommodations, thus leaving the whole after cabin at the disposition of Mrs. Fairchild.
We got out around Cape Cod in a clear strong nor'wester. It took us down around Nantucket Shoals and then on a close reach until it left us off Barnegat, when we worked in to Beach City early in the morning of the third day.
Mrs. Fairchild was delighted with the little vessel, and, as might have been expected of a woman whose horizon had been several times widely opened by deep-sea voyages, then cramped and carked by vexations of the land, by this time enthusiastic over the whole idea and anxious to be off. Her personal misfortunes were being bruited about by that merciless little set that exists for every woman struggling in a small community, and she confided in me that for her, as her husband used to say:
“Blow east, blow west;
The wind that blows, that wind is best.”
Then curiously enough we spent a week of active trade right there in Beach City, and this was an interesting and educational study in the working of people's minds. If Mrs. Fairchild had plastered her front windows with red-lettered selling-out posters, the interest shown would have been very slight. But on its being noised about that she was willing to trade with no real money in the transaction, the store was besieged with folk who had certain what might be called articles de luxe that they were tired of and desired to exchange for necessities. As a result, she was offered such articles as phonographs and radio sets, small marine motors and even furs, in exchange for clothes and standard commodities. Naturally, we had no use for furs; but we did manage to pick up half a dozen bicycles and a few more of the little hand sewing machines so popular with sailors and on which Cyril placed a high value; also some old-fashioned music boxes which he said might be worth their weight in gold. We got also one small mechanical piano in trade for some bulky articles such as refrigerators.
Our aim always was to reduce bulk for small and preferably gleaming articles of equivalent value. Cyril, who knew native psychology, placed a tremendous value on glitter.
Right there on Main Street we traded a couple of the big three-burner oil stoves for some of the old-fashioned small ones and a lot of electric torches with a stock of batteries.
But Cyril drew the line at firearms, saying that to trade in such wares might get us into a lot of trouble.
“Rum running and gun running are in the same class,” he said. “Profitable, but risky. Besides you're too apt to be pirated if suspected of having either.”
It got to be a sort of popular sport of the local people to drop in for a trade, and this suggested to Cyril's commercial mind another development of such an affair as ours—to buy up the stocks of such money-losing stores as this, put them in a warehouse, then trade them off for the particular sort of small articles best suited for barter in remote regions. In this connection I remembered an army friend of my father's who had shown us one day a very handsome creese, or wavy-bladed Moro sword, inlaid with gold along the runneling and the hilt set with a multitude of seed pearls. A native of Sulu, back in 1900, had refused twenty-five dollars gold for it, then eagerly traded it for a worn pair of spat putties and a campaign hat.
Some African explorer has stated that one could cross the Dark Continent more safely with a barrel organ than with a hundred riflemen; and it was Kipling, I believe, who said that if a pair of breeches were to wash ashore on a cannibal island, the man who found them would be king before night; and bearing this in mind, I suggested that we specialize a little in musical instruments and trousers. There may be something wild and terrifying about an unbreeched man—witness the Highlanders, or Ladies from Hell—but pants give him poise and social prominence. Cyril agreed with me in the main, but warned that natives were more sophisticated than in Columbian days, and always whimsical.
“The beggars understand values too,” he said; “but one thing you can always count on: If they see something that just happens to take their fancy, however piffling, they must have it at any cost. Nine-tenths of native trade is being a good guesser.”
This whimsicality, I may say in passing, is by no means confined to savages. I know a collector of porcelains who is not rich and who would, I am sure, go six months without a drink for a rare piece, and next to porcelains he most likes strong waters. Our ladies, with all their opportunities to shop, will often fix their hearts on some especial gewgaw and want that or nothing. And the simple native has not this chance to shop.
The combination of Mrs. Fairchild's knowledge of relative and Cyril's of trade values with my own insistence on economy of space—for I argued that we might see fit from time to time to take on comparatively bulky cargo in barter as we went along—resulted in our finally assembling a selected line of stock and enormously reducing the bulk of what we had to start with, all this without a cent of money changing hands. It was an interesting lesson in trade economics, since we did not propose to offer anything for money sale either there or elsewhere until our return with whatever we might be able to gather in exchange. After all, this was the fundamental principle of commerce, pursued to profit since the very beginning of the civilized world.
At last, after some of our stuff had actually changed ownership three or four times, Cyril threw up his hands with a gesture of finality.
“Let's call a halt or we may be at it all winter. When it gets so that we start with the forty-year-old grand piano in Mrs. Fairchild's cottage and work down through a flivver motor without the car, a seine net in fairly good condition, and finally wind up with the complete costumery of the Oh, Hell-Hello Burlesque Company, it's time to quit. That was a good trade, though. Fifty collapsible fawn-colored opera hats, fifty pairs of tortoise-shell spectacle frames, fifty shrimp-pink girls' lawn-party costumes, mostly mosquito net and damaged, fifty butterfly nets to match, with a whole mess of grease paint and rouge and make-up gear, also used. We ought to do something with that—if ever we get far enough upriver.”
We decided then to sail. The Tinker had a squat, roomy dinghy with a detachable engine, and we had also picked up a small dory. Our trade goods by this time, though increasing in value, had become so shrunken in bulk that it was no great task for Cyril and me to truck the bales and boxes down to the landing and get them off aboard. As we were now a commercial vessel and not a yacht, it was necessary to have our papers in order. I attended to this detail, though not clearing for any foreign port, as we proposed to work down the coast, to jump off finally from some point in Florida.
I had by this time made the little vessel comfortable and livable, stowing our stuff in such fashion as to leave space for Cyril and myself to billet ourselves in the trade room amidship, so that Mrs. Fairchild could have the cabin to herself. The motor was at the foot of the companionway that Jack Forsyth had caused to be drop down into the part built for carrying fish, the bulkhead of which he had moved forward; a good enough arrangement except that it made it necessary to work at the engine in very confined space.
Our little ship was all ready for sea, stores and trade goods compactly stowed, water and fuel tanks filled with some extra drums of the latter securely lashed on deck. And then, just as we were all set to go, a blow fell. I had, at Allaire's request, telephoned her to say that at last we were ready to sail. She had returned to town and was living in the tiny apartment that she inhabited between her visits. As I had intimated that there was no reason for her to be in evidence as associated with the venture, the last thing I expected was what now occurred.
The three of us were busy straightening out things below preparatory to getting under way when a shore boat sped alongside. I went on deck and was frozen with horror to see Allaire. But that was only part of it. In a dismay too deep for words, I discovered immediately that here was not only Allaire but Allaire's luggage, and that she had come not to wish us bon voyage but to voyage with us.
VI
THERE was no time to take counsel with the others. Neither did it look as if any protest would be of the least avail. Allaire gave me an unruffled “Good morning, Pom,” then directed her boatman to pass her duffel aboard, this consisting of two big valises, a fitted bag and a rug roll, her usual outfit for a yachting cruise.
Helpless and aghast, I received these articles on deck. Allaire paid her boatman, then gave me her hand and came aboard with the nonchalance of what as a matter of fact she was—the owner.
“I've decided to go with you,” she said. “I must say you might look a little more pleased. Where's Mrs. Fairchild?”
This question was answered by Mrs. Fairchild's bright head appearing through the hatch. She stared at Allaire stupefied, but only for a second. Cyril, busy stowing things forward, was not yet aware of our unbidden guest.
“Well, here I am,” said Allaire. “I hope you don't mind. To tell the truth, Pom, I decided to go with you from the moment you told me Mrs. Fairchild was going.”
“But, my dear girl,” I protested, “this is apt to be a pretty rough cruise.”
“Well, it can't be any worse than that cubbyhole of mine. When I found I wasn't booked for any visit until after the first of the year, at least any that I wanted to accept, I rented my cubicle for the winter. I'm due in Palm Beach the second week in January, so I thought I'd get you to drop me off there and save railroad fares.”
There was nothing much to say to this. I had told Allaire that our first stop would probably be the Bahamas, so that Palm Beach was on our way.
Cyril came up at this moment and I was forced to admire his nerve and presence of mind. One would have thought from his eager but respectful welcome that the one thing needed for the success of our voyage was Allaire's presence there.
“This is ripping, Miss Forsyth. Makes yachting of it.”
“Can you stow me away as far as Palm Beach?” Allaire asked. “I don't think I'll be in the way, and I'm not a bad quartermaster.”
Mrs. Fairchild took her cue from Cyril.
“You shall have the cabin, of course. The foc'sle has been cleaned and painted and the two men can shift in there. I'll move into the trade room.”
Allaire smiled.
“That's a good name for it, but you'll do nothing of the sort. You are all to stay where you are and I'll occupy the foc'sle myself.”
“Well, just as you like,” I said. “The foc'sle is not so bad if you're a good sailor.”
“I'm that and more,” said Allaire. “I've done enough yachting to be an able seaman. I didn't think you would mind.”
“Mind!” Cyril echoed. “We're proud, honored and delighted. Please consider me your steward.”
“Well then,” said Allaire, smiling, “since I'm to live in the foc'sle, I'm crew. You might have worse, too, captain, if I do say it as shouldn't.”
“All right,” I said. “Then get forward and shift and man the windlass.”
She gave me a dangerous look, then saluted and went forward.
I could never have pictured Allaire sleeping in a sailor's bunk or doing any sort of rough work even in the line of sport. She was not the sort turned out by Girl Scouts. She might have gone into Central Africa with a big safari, more of the luxuries of life carried on woolly heads than most of us enjoy at home; but rough camp would never have appealed to her, I thought.
There was a fresh nor'wester blowing, and gasoline being about the most precious thing we carried and a commodity we could not afford except in urgent need, we planned to work almost entirely under sail. The mainsail was already hoisted, and Cyril and I now swung on the foresail halyards, then manned the windlass.
The cable was hove short when Allaire popped up reckon the hatch. She was, for a long-haired A.B., becomingly costumed in white sweater, short sport skirt, woolen stockings, sponge rubber deck shoes and chamois gloves. The only note of color was an orange tam. I had never thought of her as a particularly robust girl and was now a bit surprised to see how she filled out her clothes. We were also to discover that her claim to being a sailor was no idle boast.
Cyril was so fascinated that he stopped heaving.
“Break her out,” I snapped, and started aft to take the wheel.
But Mrs. Fairchild had anticipated this maneuver, and before I got there was already putting the helm down. It struck me that whatever might or might not be said for and against our venture, we had at least a competent ship's company.
So away we went and headed out for open sea. I took the wheel and Mrs. Fairchild went below to prepare some food. Allaire came aft, and giving me a bleak, autumnal look from her yellow eyes, went down to help. It was plain to me that I had got away for a bad start with this girl, but that was nothing compared to what I might expect if she were to find out how I had let her fool herself about our actual intentions. I did not believe that any amount of argument would convince Allaire that what we proposed to attempt was more than a piffling venture. But I saw a very real danger—that if she were to find us out she might bully us into really attempting what she thought to be the object of the voyage.
Once outside, the fresh nor'wester took us on the quarter. It was a sparkling, glittering day, but not cold. Allaire came up and asked to take the wheel. She soon proved herself entirely able to steer a true compass course, which, as we ran offshore, was no easy matter in the puffs and with a choppy quartering swell. But then she was used to the boat, having cruised one summer with her brother Jack. Watching her now, I realized what a flood of saddened reminiscence this must bring and felt repentant for my ungracious reception of her. Also I admired the cheerful face she turned to conditions that would have plunged most girls into gloom.
“This is good, Pom,” she said presently. “Nothing like being on your own.”
“It beats the boiler factory,” I admitted.
“So it does yachting, where you eat and drink and sleep too much. No everlasting bridge and mah-jongg to kill time.”
“You are apt to find it dull in Florida just now, aren't you?”
“Perhaps. But there's a reason for my going. I learned the other day that a friend of mine, a rich man twice divorced, is going South on his yacht right after New Year's. It's ostensibly a yachting party—Palm Beach and Miami and Nassau and Havana. But he wants a Southern winter base, sort of fishing camp, and his idea is to buy a key and build on it. I know him very well and know his tastes, and I thought I might scout a little and possibly find a location that would suit him.”
“Why the gratuitous service, Allaire?”
“It wouldn't be quite that. I know precisely what he wants, and if I find it I might get a four months' option, then wire him to come and look it over. If the place happened to suit him, I would stand to make a good turnover.”
I shook my head.
“A little risky, Allaire. If he didn't, then you would be stuck for the option.”
“That's a chance I'd have to take. I wouldn't give much for the option. I know where I can borrow the money if the proposition looks good enough.” She hesitated, then said, “You know my prospective client. He's Nick Sayles.”
“Of course. I might have guessed. He's a good sort and no piker. All the same, I should say that your idea is taking too long a chance. Look, Allaire, you say you like this better than yachting, and you've got a third interest in the venture. We appraise the value of Mrs. Fairchild's stock as equal to that of the boat, so she is in for a third, and Cyril and I have scraped up about a thousand dollars cash between us, which, with our trained services, we figure at a third to be shared equally between us. Now it's manifestly impossible for you and Mrs. Fairchild to remain aboard a rum runner actively engaged in that risky and unlawful traffic, but you both could stop on aboard if we were to abandon the rum running for legitimate trade.”
“What sort of trade?” Allaire asked suspiciously.
“Old-fashioned barter.” And I outlined briefly and as convincingly as I was able our actual intention, without stating it as such. But it was a wasted effort and left Allaire cold.
“Too visionary, Pom. Like treasure hunting. If there was anything in it, somebody would have done it long ago.”
“That's what they did, from time immemorial.”
“Well, they would be doing it still.”
“So they are, in many parts of the world. It was the founding of the Astor fortune and a good many others since.”
“Too slow and uncertain and deadly dull.”
“But it wouldn't be dull,” I protested. “And it would solve your immediate problems of where and how to live. Why not give it a tryout?”
“No, I want more and quicker action. I've reached a point, got in a jam, where I don't give a hang about the ethics of the thing. You stick to your original idea and I'll manage somehow. All the same, it's good of you to want me, Pom.”
I groaned in spirit. It did not need a crystal ball to show me what we must look like to Allaire when she discovered how she had been duped; or, to be exact, how we three had let her dupe herself. It was her idea that, lacking sufficient funds to purchase any great amount of contraband, we counted on being able to trade off the goods below for alcoholics enough to give us a start, a stake for future operations. She had not asked for particulars as to how we hoped to accomplish this or to dispose of our cargo, but evidently took it for granted that we had made our arrangements for ons so with some of the guild at Beach City.
Presently she put me on the rack by asking, “Why are you so sure that the schooner mayn't be seized, Pom, or pirated or something?”
“Because we are not going to carry an contraband where patrol and pirate craft hang out.”
“All the same, you might just happen to fall foul of one.”
“Yes, you might get held up almost anywhere these days, either on sea or land. We might hit a reef, for that matter. But with painstaking care we hope to avoid those things.”
Allaire glanced at the compass and gave the wheel a spoke.
“What could you and Cyril do if a pirate held you up when you had a cargo? You've got no guns, have you?”
“Don't worry,” I said. “When we start to run a cargo of rum we are pretty apt to have some means of defending it.”
“Yes, I should imagine so. You and Cyril are not precisely the sort of men to see your goods grabbed off without a fight, I should say.” She looked at me with a gleam in her tawny eyes, and I writhed. “After all, there is a lot of romance in it, Pom.”
“Is there? Well, I suppose from one point of view there's romance in any sort of outlawry, especially at sea. But so there is in lots of legitimate pursuits where you have to match your brain against elemental forces part of the time and other human brains the other. The bigger the commercial profit and the greater the risks, the more the romance, I suppose.”
“I wish I could go with you, Pom.”
“So you can, for any legitimate venture. It's up to you.”
“Well, I think it's dear of you to put it that way. But right now there's just one thing that interests me, and that's money. You must feel the same way about it. If you happen to be to the manor born, it's too humiliating to be an intermittent guest in other people's manors, with your wretched attic in between.”
“Look here, Allaire,” I said desperately, “why don't you marry? Pick out a rich one, like Nick Sayles, and marry him. That would solve your problems.”
“Oh, come, Pom, you know as well as I do that for a girl like me to commit cold-blooded premeditated matrimony with avarice aforethought is a worse crime than murder or burglary or a suicide pact. The only sanction for it is to benefit your family. Since I haven't any, that doesn't enter in.”
(TO BE CONTINUED)