The Adventures of Million Dollar Smith/The Million
The Million
“BOY!” said Lauretta, “I’ve got a longing for pie à la mode—and lobster that hasn’t died a lingering death before it’s popped into boiling water—and strawberry shortcake—and coffee that doesn’t taste like sheep-dip—and watermelon and fudge sundae—and clam chowder ….”
“And a good, old-fashioned, day-after-Thanksgiving tummyache!” laughed Canfield Smith. “What’s the matter? Don’t they give you enough grub here in London?”
“I’m dieting!” she said severely, unreasonably.
“Then—what—”
“Look!” she shrugged very slim, very charming shoulders toward the window.
Outside, a thick fog oozed from the skies like an immense shutter, smoothly, evenly, as if sliding in well-oiled grooves. A shroud it seemed, punctured orange and vermilion here and there where a street-lamp was trying, without much success, to pierce the gray, sooty desolation.
“Homesick, kid?” inquired Canfield.
“You said it. Besides, my European engagement is nearly over—and I had a cable from Flo Ziegfeld to hurry across just as soon as I can and be starred in the new Follies.”
“Oh!” came his regrettable pun—“to help him win the battle of Legs-ington?”
“Yes.”
“When d’you think of going?”
“I give my last performance three weeks from Saturday. I’ll sail right away—on the following Monday.”
“I’m going with you, Laurette.”
“That’s where the well-known rub comes in.”
“Why—don’t you want me to?”
“Don’t be a goof. You bet I do. But ….”
“Well?”
“You see,” she explained, “all the steamships are packed with Americans rushing home to show off their brand-new British accent and guaranteed all-Scotch D.T.’s. Finally I found there’s a stateroom left—just one—on the Gigantic—and it isn’t exactly a stateroom either!”
“What is it?”
“The bridal suite, Canfield!”
They looked at each other.
“And so ….” she continued—slurred—stopped.
“And so—if you were my wife ….”
“And you my husband ….”
“Going to be, kid!” he said calmly.
“Great! Let’s ’phone to the desk clerk.”
“For what?”
“We don’t know the ropes here … Ask him how to get a marriage license. ….”
“Not just yet!”
“What d’ you mean—not just yet?” she demanded.
“You know!”
“Don’t be so stubborn!”
“It ain’t stubbornness. It’s a principle.”
“Sure!” she rejoined sarcastically. “It wasn’t the alcohol went to my head. It was the sugar!”
“I can’t help it.”
“Don’t you love me any more, Canfield?”
“Sure I do. More than ever.”
“Then why won’t you …?”
“I swore I wouldn’t until ….”
“Aw!” she exclaimed. “You make me wild!”
“Well—it was your own fault!”
“It wasn’t!”
“It was!”
“It wasn’t!”
But it was—in a way.
For—to go back to the Genesis of this tale—nearly a year earlier Canfield Smith, formerly a cowboy, had come into possession of the rich Dixie Glory mine.
His pockets full of money and large checks coming in every month as the mine panned out to be a small Bonanza, he had gone abroad to see the world. In Paris he had met Laurette de Roze, née Bridget O’Mahoney—the one and only Laurette, whose meteoric rise from San Francisco’s Barbary Coast to Pantages’s circuit, from Pantages’s to the twinkling, stammering lights of Broadway and thence to the Casino de Paris and the London Alhambra, was the talk of all the theatrical green rooms and the Sunday supplements. He had fallen in love with her. But she had refused to marry him because he was too “flighty” and did not work.
Love him?
Sure she did! She had admitted it.
But she had a practical little head on those charming shoulders of hers, and had added that she “wasn't going to marry no man who doesn’t earn his living. It ain’t the jack. You’ve got that. It’s the—now—principle of the thing. Ain’t there some proverb about the Devil and idle hands …?”
SHE had warned him, furthermore, against his European acquaintances—“to them you’re just an easy-mark, a typical American sucker!”—and she had been right since, when through litigation over the title of the mine he had lost it and had found himself suddenly penniless in Paris, all his supposed friends had turned against him. Embittered by the experience and, too, due to Laurette’s insisting—if he had not been in love with her he would have called it nagging—that “I told you so!” and “you better go back to America where you belong!” he had decided to avenge himself on the Europeans by hurting them in their most vulnerable spots, namely—their pocketbooks, and had sworn not to propose to her again until he had earned a million dollars here in Europe.
He had made a bully start in Paris, winning a hundred thousand dollars at poker—draw, stud, and down-the-river, and, when Laurette had gone to Rome to fill an engagement and he, dutifully, had trailed along, had doubled his pile there by selling what he called a “swell line of fake ancestors” to various snobbish ladies with the help of an impecunious East Indian Rajah.
Indeed a good beginning. But two hundred thousand was not a million, and Laurette said so:
“You’re eight hundred thousand smackers to the bad. And I don’t want to marry anybody except you—nor do I want to die an old maid!”
“Very well,” he laughed. “You go and take the bridal suite for me and my bitter, I mean better half—while I’ll look after the marriage license and the narrow gold ring.”
“Oh!” She jumped up, delighted, and kissed him. “You’ve given up that crazy, stubborn notion of yours …?”
“Not a bit, honeybunch! But I’ll get me the rest of my million before we step up to the altar.”
“You’re off your bean. You can’t make eight hundred thousand berries in a little over three weeks—not unless you rob the Bank of England!”
“No? Well—I’ve got a hunch, kid!”
He had more than a hunch. He had an idea, a plan. But he did not tell her.
And so, leaving the hotel, he went to a small shabby boarding house back of the British Museum and called on Señor Esteban Garda y Machado, admiral of the non-existing fleet of the Central American republic of San Sonate.
He had met the admiral a few days earlier at a stag banquet given by the American Chamber of Commerce in London.
It was the usual sort of banquet, with the usual sort of toast-master securing silence for the usual sort of post-prandial oratory, English gushing over Americans and vice versa; and of course, as at all such functions, there were to be observed a number of gentlemen upon whom all eloquence was wasted and for whom periods had been polished, tongues silvered, epigrams coined, and “this reminds me” jokes rehearsed in vain.
Pulling solemnly at cold cigars, fingering their watch chains, the stems of their wine glasses, or their mustaches reflectively, their heads bowed over snowy, crumpled shirt fronts, their faces wreathed in vacuous smiles, they sat remote from current events deaf to the speaker of the moment and his most impassioned appeals to their patriotism and civic pride, plunged in an inner contemplation of the spirit worthy of an esoteric Buddha.
And Canfield Smith was one of them.
He was on the point of dropping off to sleep—in spite of the Honorable Jeremiah S. Higginbotham’s splendid remarks that “blood is thicker than water!” and “the Bard of Avon belongs to both England and America!” and “the Stars and Stripes and the Union Jack entwined into a symbol and bulwark of peace and justice!”—when suddenly he was awakened from his trance by the sobs, the distinct sobs, of the man at his left.
He had not exchanged more than a dozen words with him during the evening, having devoted most of his attention to the man at his right, Mr. Burton Pinkey, the famous New York publicity specialist and advertising agent, on a business trip to London to boost Teeka-no-Kora, the new American breakfast beverage guaranteed to be free of caffeine, tannic acid, alcohol, sugar, nicotine, spices, and whatever other ingredients make breakfast half-way enjoyable. But Canfield had noticed the other; a very tall, very lean man, sallow-skinned, hook-nosed, wedge-chinned, the general sharpness of his features emphasized by the martial upsweep of a heavy, black mustache, and dressed in a gorgeous, dark blue, naval uniform, with braiding and epaulets of heavy gold.
Again the man sobbed as if his heart would break.
“Hello,” asked Canfield, “what’s wrong? Too many patriotic speeches—or too much champagne?”
“Neither”
“What is it then?”
“It is,” came the slow, dignified reply, with not the faintest trace of a metallic Latin intonation, “that my heart is shivered to pieces—my soul excoriated—and my spirit flagellated!”
“Gosh! What a swell herd of stem-winding words! Tell me more!”
The language was slangy, but accents and attention sympathetic; and the stranger introduced himself. He was Señor Esteban Garcia y Machado, admiral of the Republic of San Sonate.
“Pleased to meet you, Admiral. I’m Canfield Smith. Where’s your fleet? Visiting British parts?”
"No, no! I have no fleet!”
“Well—where’s your ship?”
“Ah—voldame Dios!—I have no ship!”
Again the heart-rending sob.
“That what you’re so upset about? Come—tell your Uncle Dudley!”
"You see,” said the other, “for a week now my fatherland has been at war with the Republic of Santa Anna, a foul and stinking country—you may believe me, sir—inhabited entirely by the unwholesome descendants of uncleean Indians with hardly a drop of Castilian blood.”
And to Canfield’s further friendly questioning, he related a simple but tragic story—tragic, at least, from his point of view.
For it appeared that, for a number of years, there had been ill-feeling, border troubles, and the threat of war between the two neighboring republics. A month or two earlier, San Sonate had lent its admiral aboard with instructions, also a handsome sum of money, to buy a gunboat in one of the British yards. He had started negotiations with Messrs. M’Corquodale, M'Eachrane, M’Murtrie & M’Kilree, ship builders, Glasgow, Belfast and London, for the purchase of a neat little craft, built originally for another small nation that had become bankrupt, complete from spanker boom to scuttlebutt and with a full complement of guns that were not too rusty for casual Central American warfare.
The deal had been nearly finished when Santa Anna had sent over its own admiral, Señor Juan Maria D’Alvarez, with similar instructions, but an even handsomer sum of money as well as a skeleton crew. Immediately the canny Scotch firm had switched to the higher bidder, selling the ship to Santa Anna, and, inside of twenty-four hours, the latter republic had declared war.
“THE gunboat,” continued Garcia y Machado, “will harass our coast trade and bombard our port. Ah—my poor, unhappy fatherland! Ah—the cruel, unhuman wretches!”
“And what would you do if you had the gunboat?”
“Why—” exclaimed the other naïvely—“I would harass their coast trade and bombard their port. What else?”
Canfield suppressed a smile.
“Can’t you buy another ship here, or perhaps in Holland or Norway?”
“No ship builder would sell to us in wartime. It would be against the law of nations. And so—que cosa hay mas cruel here I am; an admiral—and no ship—no crew. ….”
“But still you have the dough!”
“The—what?”
“The old pesetas!”
“Sir!” thundered the admiral. “Do you imagine that I would steal?”
“Keep your shirt on, old timer. I meant nothing of the sort. But I do mean that wherever there’s the kale, there’s a way. Tell me,” he went on after a pause, “where’s that gunboat now? Sailing across the Atlantic?”
“No. She is right here in London port. At the India Docks. Taking on coal and water and provisions.”
“Isn’t that against the law of nations, too?”
“No.”
“Know when she’s going to sail?”
“As soon as she is ready. Inside of three weeks, I should think.”
“And you marooned here—an honest-to-God admiral, without the makin’s! Now ain’t that tough?”
“Very, very tough—by the Blessed Virgin!”
“Still,” repeated Canfield, musingly, “you have the dough. How much dough, by the way?”
“Two million dollars gold.”
“Gee! that’s lots, boy!”
Canfield was silent. An idea was shaping in his shrewd, bullet-shaped head.
Then, cutting sharply through his thoughts, he became aware of clipped, nasal accents as the man at his right, Mr. Burton Pinkney, the famous New York publicity specialist and advertising agent, was praising his chosen vocation to the Englishman on the other side of him:
“Newspaper publicity—the printed word—there you have the whole secret of modern success! If people read it black on white they believe it’s true—at least if they read it often enough. Give me enough money, and I can sell anything—not only my wares, but ideas, superstitions, even a new religion. Why—if you let me map out your campaign—you can sell safety razors to a Wop barbers’ convention—digestive pills to the South Sea cannibals—illustrated copies of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the far, far mint-julep fastnesses of Virginia—tickets to a benefit performance for Armenian Relief to a Turkish Pasha—and Ku Klux Klan regalia to the Grand Rabbi of Jerusalem. Just hand me the money. Give me carte blanche as to methods. Then watch my smoke.”
“‘Strawd’n’r’y, ‘strawd’n’ry!” drawled the Englishman, while Canfield Smith, his idea crystalizing in his brain, poked his countryman in the ribs.
“Look here!” he whispered without further preliminaries. “Are you willing to do a little business that will net you—oh—fifty thousand berries for a couple of weeks’ work?”
“You interest me, stranger!”
“All right.” He turned to the Central American. “Admiral, shake hands with Mr. Pinkney.”
“Pleased to meet you, sir.”
“I am charmed, senor.”
“By the way, admiral,” went on Canfield, “you’ve gone and hired Mr. Burton Pinkney.”
“Pardon?”
“To the tune of fifty thousand dollars.”
“But—but,” spluttered the other, “I fail to understand.
“You’ll understand in the shake of a lamb’s tail. Let’s go to my hotel, and I’ll explain. Come on, gents.”
So ex-cowboy, publicity specialist and admiral left the banquet and went to Canfield’s room where, after a long conversation, they signed certain papers, shook hands, and parted with expression of glowing, mutual respect, and it was a few days later that Canfield told Laurette about his hunch of earning the rest of his million before they sailed home to America as man and wife, and went direct from her hotel to the admiral’s boarding house back of the British Museum.
Arrived there, he pulled a morning newspaper from his pocket and pointed at a blue-marked half-column on the third page, with the headline:
MEHMET ALI EL-GHAZI
SULTAN OF MASKAT
Entertained by the President of France
the article going on to say that, according to confidential information, the Sultan of Maskat was leaving for London at the end of the week. He would spend a week there but incognito, for reasons of state and the last lines, while not in so many words, yet gave the reader to understand that the matter was important and that the “reasons of state” boded ill for the British Empire.
“Are you ready?” asked Canfield.
“Yes,” replied the admiral, pointing at a packed suitcase.
“Well pick up my bag on the way to the station. Pinkney will meet us there. Foggy day, though. 1 guess we’ll have a bad crossing.”
“I am afraid so,” sighed the other. “And I get seasick very easily.”
“You’re one hell of an admiral!”
“Sir!” exclaimed Garcia y Machado, unwittingly paraphrasing Napoleon, “I fight with my sword—not with my stomach!”
They found Pinkney waiting for them at the railway station whence the ex-cowboy sent a telegram to Laurette which read:
“Going to Paris on business back shortly don’t forget bridal suite lots of love
(signed) Canfield.”
DURING the next few days, there being a temporary dearth of divorce cases, blackmail scandals, and political assassinations, the London and too, the provincial dailies had a great deal to say about the Sultan of Maskat.
They caught the ball of news. They gilded and tinseled, embossed and embroidered it. They flung it wide, and caught it again.
The following morning—cut in below a screaming bit of editorial hysteria which accused the Liberal ministry in power of having sold the Empire to the Americans, the Hollanders, the Russians, the Portuguese, and the Fiji Islanders—the Tory Times brought a letter from “Old Subscriber” saying that the fact of the Sultan having been lavishly entertained by the French government while he intended visiting England incognito, was an insult to the Union Jack and a challenge to all Britons who never, never shall be slaves!
So the Times tossed the ball to its Fleet Street neighbor, the Daily Graphic, which acted up splendidly. For it printed a rotogravure portrait of the Sultan in a border of nautch girls, sacks of gold, brawny executioners, camels, and French cocottes and mentioned that France had loaned him fifty million francs.
“WHY?” demanded the tart, succinct word on its front page in four-inch Gothic.
This put the odium straight on the threshold of the Radical-Liberal Manchester Guardian which, after a short invocation to the manes of the late Mr. Gladstone, proceeded to prove that modern, meretricious, sabre-rattling imperialism was at the root of this as of all other evils, and that naturally—what with the League of Nations and the Fourteen Points and the Awakening of Subject Races—the Sultan of Maskat was right in making an alliance with France. For at least, with all its faults, France was a republic.
“Traitors!” shouted the Times.
“Short-sighted fools!” retaliated the Manchester Guardian.
Other papers joined in the chorus. Sir James Greatorex, M.P., Conservative whip in the House of Commons, challenged the government benches to explain; the Laborites demanded a new election; the editor of the Manchester Guardian was offered a baronetcy, the proprietor of the Times a dukedom; in the Burlington Arcade the young bloods shopped for neckties in the national colors of Maskat, green, rose, and purple; Miss Ermintrude La Fleur, the Gaiety chorus girl, began a breach of promise suit against the Sultan. In fact, from Wembley to Charing Cross, from the Tilbury Docks to Bond Street, all the great macrocosm of London commenced to stir and buzz like a beehive—and to turn out in its thousands with reporters and cameramen and even a deputation from the Foreign Office when, a week later, the Sultan of Maskat arrived at Waterloo station.
He was a short muscular man with a clear, light-olive complexion, humorous, twinkling, intensely brown eyes, and a nose that, starting in a haughty Wellingtonian curve finished disconcertingly in an undignified tilt to starboard. Dressed in a plain, blue serge suit, the only Oriental touch being supplied by a crimson fez and turquoise and silver ear rings, he walked with a decidedly rolling gait, like a sailor or a cavalryman. He was accompanied by two dignitaries. One was very tall and lean, robed in gorgeous, purple brocade, an immense turban of the same material shadow-blotching his face so that only his beak of a nose caught a point of sunlight, while the other was a stout, nondescript individual in sober black frock coat and black astrakhan cap.
The Sultan motioned the Foreign Office deputation away with a graceful wave of his hand, saying in delightfully broken English.
“I am—what you call—incognito, eh? No, no, no—no talkee, no talkee!”
He gave the same reply to the clustering reporters; and when the special feature writer for the New Statesman—the famous Ernest Royd, whose erudition matched his beard, who knew all about everything, and gloried in his mastery over seventeen languages—bowed before him and addressed him in what he fondly, and quite rightly, hoped was fluent and elegant Muskatese, spicing his speech with select quotations from the Muskatese classics, the Sultan asked him: “What language you talkee, Mister?” thereby gaining the undying affection of all the other newspapermen.
THE afternoon papers spoke of his arrival. They mentioned, too, that instead of putting up at the Ritz, usually the rendezvous of rich Oriental potentates, he had engaged rooms at the Tudor, a small hotel with medieval plumbing on the Strand mostly frequented by South and Central Americans—“doubtless for sinister political reasons,” commented the Daily News.
Not a single reporter noticed that, in the same hotel, eagerly waiting for his gunboat, recently christened La Libertad, to get ready for sea lived Señor Juan Maria d’Alvarez, admiral of the republic of Santa Anna.
A day passed. A second.
On the third another sensation—something about the young Earl of Vavassour-Brabazon having varied the monotony of last year’s marriage to, and divorce from, a Sussex dairymaid by this year’s elopment with his colonel’s grandmother—boomed along and stirred the London streets and set the London tongues wagging, and so, quickly, the Sultan of pass into the limbo of negligible half-remembered things.
In fact on the following Saturday Canfield Smith called on Laurette.
“Just back from Paris, kid,” he said—and mentioned having met the Sultan, Laurette, who read never a book but all the newspapers, was puzzled.
“Oh, yes. I’ve come across his name somewhere. What about him?” she replied.
“He says he’s crazy to meet you.”
“Bring him around some night after the show.”
“Promise not to fall in love with him?”
“I love you, Canfield—even though you’re as stubborn as a Missouri mule. You—with your million dollars—why—you got about as much chance to earn them as—”
“Maybe I’ll laugh last, kid,” he interrupted
“Sure—and he who laughs last is usually the dumbest!”
Yes. The Sultan was almost forgotten.
But there was one man on whom he made a vivid impression, and this was Señor d’Alvarez, the admiral of Santa Anna, a short, obese, clean-shaven individual with avaricious eyes and a favorite pose in which he fancied he resembled Napoleon.
He met the Sultan on the day of his arrival at Tudor. He recalled, as reported in the British papers, the latter’s success in borrowing fifty million francs from the French government, and—here was news unknown to his colleague and enemy, the admiral of San Sonate—he thought of recent exchanges of cabled messages in code between himself and Señor Roderigo Zelaya, the president of his country:
“Cable money. Have no more. Nor credit. Can not provision ship.
- (signed) d’Alvarez, Admiral."
“Treasury empty. You used last money to buy ship. This is a war not a tea fight. Hurry over. Bombard San Sonate port. Then collect war indemnity.
- (signed) Zelaya, President”
“Can’t sail without money.
- (signed) d’Alvarez, Admiral.”
“Borrow. (signed) Zelaya, President.”
“No credit. (signed) d’Alvarez, Admiral.”
“Get money or credit somehow.
- (signed) Zelaya, President.”
“How? (signed) d’Alvarez, Admiral.”
There had been no reply to his last cablegram. The gunboat had stopped taking on provisions. The few officers and the skeleton crew had received no pay for over a fortnight and were grumbling. And here now, like an answer to d’Alvarez’ prayers came this resplendent and wealthy Oriental potentate who—he showed an extraordinary familiarity with Central American affairs—declared himself a friend of Santa Anna and an enemy of San Sonate; who seemed a good sport, spending money like water and entertaining the admiral at numerous dinner and theater parties, and who, when the latter finally took the bit between his teeth and mentioned a loan, did not shy off like the cold-blooded London business men, but replied in his charming broken English:
“All right, Mister Admiral. Some day we talkee money. I have plenty. Tonight we no talkee money. Tonight we dancee, eh?”
The Sultan excused himself, saying he was going to telephone to the Fireflies’ Supper Club to reserve a table, and, strangely, it was Canfield Smith who a few minutes later called up Mr. Burton Pinkney, the publicity specialist.
“Burt,” he said, “the sucker is swallowing the bait. Get the harpoon ready.”
“A harpoon for a sucker?” laughed the New Yorker.
“This sucker is a whale!”
“When do you think that …?”
“Day after to-morrow—Sunday—late at night. I'll let you know the exact time. By the way—doing anything special Monday morning?”
“No. Why?”
“I want you to be my best man.”
“Getting married?”
“Sure. Sailing directly after the ceremony—on the Gigantic.”
SHORTLY afterwards Mr. Burton Pinkney communicated with Admiral Garcia y Machado—let us mention here that, shortly after the Sultan’s arrival, his small retinue had returned to Maskat—and, later in the evening, the two, dressed in their shabbiest clothes, took a taxicab to the docks, east of the Tower.
Thence they proceeded on foot down Ratcliffe Highway, past “model tenements” that hide their feculent, maggoty souls behind white stucco fronts, past Jamrach’s world-famed “Wild Beast Shop” where the spectacled proprietor boasts that, on a day’s notice, he can sell you any animal from a white Siamese elephant to a blue Tibetan bear, past Donald M’Eachran’s “Murray Arms” saloon bar where a nostalgic Highlander sells the cockney equivalent for Athol Brose, and turned into Shadwell’s smelly, greasy, gin-soaked purlieus.
Here, the East India and Commercial and Victoria Docks spill over with taverns and sailors’ boarding houses and ship-chandlers’ and second-hand stores where every last mildewy curio a sailor, for reasons only known to himself, packs in his dunnage, from Korean brass to broken bits of Yunan jade, from white Gulg corals to bundles of yellow Latakia tobacco leaves, can be bought. Too, men from all the corners of the globe—men who go down to the sea in ships and come up from the sea, as often as not, in hansom cabs to spend the bitter wages of six weeks’ battling with storm and rotten timbers in one night’s scarlet spree amongst the girls and the pubs of sneering Limehouse.
Romance here!
Romance of the docks, where brown Laskar and sooty Seedee-boy and yellow Chinese finds that his money gives him the rollicking, ribald waterfront equity which the forecastle denies him!
Romance that starts with a double drink of gin and perhaps a chandoo pipe in the backroom of a Wapping tavern and winds up, quite possibly in a perambulator with a half-breed child peeping out, wonderingly, protestingly!
Brutal, sordid romance—romance of knife and pistol and thudding blackjack!
Romance of a hundred ports; of far, purple isles in nameless oceans and dozing lagoons below tropic skies; of steely clash of weapons from the Golden Horn to Maracaibo; of piracy and barratry and gun-running!
Romance of “no questions asked” when two gentlemen in shabby clothes but with gold in their pockets passed from dive to dive, picking out here a man because he had a crooked scar across his brows, and there one because his eyes were roving and reckless—here a man because he laced his English with great Spanish oaths, and there one because there was that on his shifty face which showed he had cheated the hangman.
“Think you can handle those birds?” asked Mr. Pinkney rather nervously, as they returned up Ratcliffe Highway.
“Sir, I can handle anything on the high seas except—ah—occasionally,” with a little self-conscious smile, “my stomach in choppy weather. Besides, I noticed amongst the riffraff one or two broken gentlemen whom I shall be able to trust.”
In the meantime the Sultan of Maskat and Admiral d’Alvarez had gone to the Fireflies’ Supper Club where, what with the former’s fez and earrings and the latter’s splendid uniform, they were quite the rage of the women—stout burgess ladies, mostly from Hempsted Heath and Queen’s Gate, the sort who employ two parlor maids, know DeBrett’s Peerage by heart, and only rarely drop their H’s.
But the admiral was not enjoying himself.
For, worried at having received no reply to his last telegram from the President of Santa Anna, he had left word at his hotel to forward all messages to the Fireflies’ Supper Club, and it had been brought to him a minute earlier—a cable which announced grimly:
“Have arrested your father and your three sons. Hurry here with gunboat, or I shall have them shot as traitors to the republic.
- (signed) Zelaya, President.”
He turned pale, and when the Sultan came back to the table after a fantastic one-step with a Bloomsbury butcher’s widow whose flame-colored frock should have been higher up the back and lower at the ankles, the Central American, without another word, produced the cablegram.
“Señor,” he said with dignity, “I throw myself upon your mercy.”
“Mister,” replied the Sultan with equal dignity, “my mercy is yours— So is my purse!”
Told by the other that fifty thousand pounds sterling were needed to finish provisioning the ship, to settle with pressing creditors and give the grumbling officers and crew their back pay, he made a grandiose gesture. He opened his pocketbook, drew out a wad of crinkly, white Bank of England notes, and passed over the sum required.
Followed a dramatic scene to this day remembered in the annals of the Fireflies’ Supper Club.
For the admiral rose, dropped on his knees before the Sultan, and Hssed his hands.
“I love you!” cried d’Alvarez.
“And I love you!” replied the Sultan.
And he raised the other from the ground and clasped him to his broad chest, whereupon the Bloomsbury butcher’s widow remarked to a lady from Wapping:
“Stroike me pink! But ain’t them Orientals just too ’eavenly for words!”
All the next day—it being Saturday—and far into Sunday afternoon, the gunboat La Libertad was a scene of commotion.
The squeak of block and tackle. The heaving and pushing and puffing and wheeling of great loads. The thud of hatch coamings. The patter of sailor’s naked feet. The thumping of stevedores’ hobnailed boots. The ringing clank of the engineer’s hammer on coupler-flange and spindle-guide. The gurgle of oil. The noisy testing of follower-bolts. The sob and suck of the feed pumps. The deep basso of the crank throws. The sighing of the thrust blocks. The “yo-ho!” that is the chant of all the oceans where keels run. The whole salty, scarred symphony of the gray seas and a ship! Hustle and bustle.
Hustle and bustle, too—that Sunday-in the life of Canfield Smith.
A telegram to a badly worried Laurette who for a number of days, had not seen him nor heard from him:
“Get ready for wedding tomorrow Monday morning, have license and ring.”
Came a long conversation with Mr. Pinkney and Admiral Garcia y Machado, and finally a visit to a little tavern in Coal Yard Street, off Drury Lane, that ancient, crooked alley still fragrant with the memories of Nell Gwynne. There in the back room with its black, oaken settle and its neat, sanded floor, Dugald Grant the landlord—who had drowned his proverbial Scotch conscience in his proverbial Scotch greed—was waiting for Canfield.
“Got the stuff?” asked the latter.
“Here ye are!” Grant pointed at a large hamper.
“Sure it’s all right?”
“Would ye care for a wee drappie?”
“Not I!” laughed Jack.
“Well,” said the Scotchman, “there’s always Jim.” He stepped to the door, called out: “Jim!” And when a bleary-eyed individual appeared from the bar room where he had been wiping glasses: “Here’s an American gentleman who wants to treat ye to a nip!”
“Thank ye kindly, sir!”
So they drew a bottle at random from the hamper, uncorked it, filled a glass …. and it was late that Sunday evening that the Sultan of Maskat, followed by a porter who carried a hamper, boarded the gunboat La Libertad and shook hands with Admiral d’Alvarez.
“Señor,” said the latter, “never shall I be able to express my thanks to you. You shall have the money back as soon as—”
“No, no!” expostulated the Sultan. “It is—what you call—a gift to Santa Anna!”
“The entire republic,” proclaimed the admiral, “bows before you. And now—” as he led the way to the cabin—“your suggestion was charming. A little farewell dinner aboard before we sail. My officers are waiting—they wish to thank you in person.”
“I brought wine,” said the potentate, and, in his delightful broken English, “me like drinkee!" he pointed at the hamper. “Maybe a few bottles for your brave crew?”
“Not too much, your Royal Highness. Remember—we sail at midnight!”
“Oh!” the Sultan suppressed a laugh, “a few bottles will be enough—quite enough.” Some hours later, shortly before midnight, a casual passer-by along the docks might have heard the sound of profound snoring issuing from a little gunboat that flew the national colors of Santa Anna, and, waiting and watching, might have seen a number of dim figures led by a tall man in a gorgeous naval uniform, leave a disused ramshackle water-front warehouse, hurry to the pier, and clamber aboard.
There a gentleman in a red fez and earrings awaited them.
“Everything's cocked and primed,” he whispered to the tall, lean man. “They’re dead to the world—as full as the Atlantic. Gee! But those knock-out drops I bought at Grant’s would make a fortune on the Barbary Coast”
“Speaking about fortunes,” smiled Garcia y Machado, as he passed over an immense roll of bank notes, “here is yours—and well earned!”
“Thank you!”
“It is I who thanks you, señor! Ah—the entire republic of San Sonate bows before you!"
And Canfield laughed as he thought of Admiral d’Alvarez’ similar words.
It was early the next morning, with the Gigantic thrusting outward bound through a heavy swell and the white cliffs of Dover racing away to the northeast, that Canfield turned to Laurette.
“How d’you like married life?” he asked.
“I’d like it better if you weren’t so close-mouthed.”
“What d’you mean? Asking for a kiss, are you, kid?”
“No. Asking for information. You haven’t told me yet how you earned that last eight hundred thousand.”
“I did, too! I told you I was an assistant pirate—and got kissed by a couple of Central American admirals—and—”
“Please be serious!”
“All right, Frau!”
And he began:
“You see—that evening at the American Chamber of Commerce banquet, when I heard that thin guy sigh I felt sorry for him—and so I ….”