The Isle of Seven Moons/Chapter 14
CHAPTER XIV
ENTER SPANISH DICK
At seven of this same morning, the sun was shining quite as brightly—far more brightly, Sally would have declared—on a beach a few hundred miles to the southwest of Salthaven, where, not far from the inlet, stands the Barnabee Light, one of the most ancient on the Jersey shore, or, in fact, on the whole Atlantic coast. The life saving station here established had the honour, a generation back, of trying the first breeches buoy, with considerable success, losing not a life from the wreck. This reputation they and their successors guarded zealously, and now in the early morning light, they were inspecting the tackle of the ugly device that had brought them so much fame.
But today a strange and new figure, unenlisted and uninvited, was assisting in the inspection. Rather roughly ordered to stand off, he watched them for a while, grinning good-naturedly at their chaffing, then wearily sat him down on the sands, and untied a knotted bandana. From its gay folds he produced a frugal repast, appearing quite hurt that none of the guards who had just seemed so friendly would share in it. However, his moods being as variable as the waves or the sunbeams that played on them, he soon forgot this slight to his sacred hospitality, and, between mouthfuls, started a song, quaint and very old, the sort that can come only from the sea. For tattered and torn and weather-beaten this wanderer might be, but never, even at the lowest ebb of his fortunes, anything but cheerful, highly diverting, and picturesque. These fortunes were about at their neap tide now. Three days before he had been paid oft in Philadelphia where his ship had docked; had been robbed of that total ten minutes later; then, seized by some inexplicable wanderlust, had crossed the ferry to Camden and footed it through the sands and pines of south Jersey, only to land again on the shore, with the fourth sun-up.
The song over, he doffed his stiff brogans; rolled up to his knees a pair of trousers which had been stained by many waters to a characterless green; and plunged his feet in the sands. That he had two garments was obvious—the possession of more was extremely doubtful. This second, a denim shirt, matched the nether one in nondescript hue, opening to reveal a neck as brown and hairy as his shanks, and adorned in tattoo with some one of his patron saints. This design was intricate and must have cost much time and pains, to say nothing of physical agony, but it was not nearly so elaborate as the decorations on the arms which were veritable totem poles with their wealth of anchors, birds of paradise, hearts, suns, moons, and stars, etched in vari-coloured inks.
A curling brown beard, circular brass earrings, and a red and yellow handkerchief, bound fillet-wise about his forehead, completed the picture, all framing the seamed and leathery scroll of a face wherein one could read, not the wisdom of books but an infinitely wiser lore. For Spanish Dick with his mixture of Spanish, Portugee, Italian, and who knows what Romance and even Romany bloods, was only in part a sailor. A goodly slice of him was gypsy and troubadour—but he was wholly an irresponsible love-child of the sea. He could cook fairly, and reef a sail in a storm with some dispatch. But while he performed the duties before the mast with perhaps only sufficient skill to escape being thrown overboard, in other arts he reached an almost miraculous perfection. He could curse as ingeniously as Old Man Veldmann, but with infinitely less of offence and more of music; spin a smacking good yarn; dance divinely; sing like an angel all the sailors chanteys that ever were written; yes, and very quickly lull to sleep a restless child. Sally's still have this in their memories.
Even now he was sharing his repast with a little yellow dog who, between whiles, was boring for fleas, thumping his sausage of a tail on the sands, and looking up at his master with eyes quite as soft and almost of the same liquid brown.
"Señor Alfonso," the man was saying to his yellow companion, as he tossed him a bit of the cheese, "we always go feefty-feefty, non?"
Now his language was a linguistic Joseph's coat of many and quaint colours, a wonderful mosaic of grammatical and ungrammatical expressions from the Seven Seas, in which, as in his veins, no one could tell what strain predominated, no more than they could swear who was his mother, or where his father or grandfathers came from. But the dog seemed to understand him, and thumped his tail again in an ecstatic affirmative.
But the actual answer came from another auditor, who seemed to be resenting the inattention to his Worshipfulness.
"The Hell you say, the Hell you say!"
The charming commonplace was uttered in a raucous and miscreant voice, but one should be charitable in judging the speaker, for it suggested rather an unmoral than an immoral attitude towards life.
Now Spanish Dick was a bit of a ventriloquist, but he couldn't have been responsible, for his mouth was at the moment gagged by a slice of bread and cheese full two inches thick. The real culprit swung in a cage three feet to the north of him, the greenest, the most scarlet, the foulest-mouthed, and the most ingenious parrot sailor ever trained in the doubtful Montessori system of the seas.
Lady Parrot seemed to have a predilection for bromides of the sulphurous sort. She repeated her observation with the delight of an urchin who does not altogether understand the significance of an expression picked up of an afternoon, but senses it, decidedly relishing its flavour, and the prospect it offers of later shocking his elders at the dinner-table.
For a while she kept it up, shattering the silences with her uncouth chatter, then the three drowsed on the sands, the man soundly, the dog lazily and a little on guard, but the bird with a pale, wafer-like lid, half -lowered over one smouldering eye like a camera diaphragm, which, when any came near, opened in a most vicious close-up, accompanied by a shrieked blasphemy, at which her master but turned over and snored the more loudly.
And through all these precious minutes, a bottle was tossing on the waves, a bare three hundred feet away.
Roller after roller bore it gently, until with the tide it reached the bare feet of the sleeper, and he awoke.
Don Alfonso nosed it playfully, without any comprehension of its momentous cargo, but Spanish Dick, his curiosity aroused, picked it up and looked at the little roll of bark in side. There seemed to be characters of some sort on it, undecipherable through the brown gloom of the glass.
The strength of his fingers could not turn the improvised cork, so swollen was it, so he called on his clasp-knife, and the message, its long voyage over, was released at last. Now, with all his crazy patchwork vocabulary, the wanderer could read but a few words and these in Spanish, so with a childlike bewilderment he turned the odd scroll this way and that, vainly trying to make it out, then looked from left to right at his companions as if asking for counsel.
But Alfonso, though he looked volumes of intelligence, was quite inarticulate. And Mariuch the parrot, observing her master scratch his head—a familiar gesture, with him expressing mere bewilderment, with the dog a more annoying disturbance—merely cocked one eye, and forcefully predicted that her soul would be lost, a quite unnecessary prophecy when that eye expressed so clearly the Tophet road she had chosen—very early in her young life it must have been. It is a sad perhaps cynical thing to record but Mariuch always made one believe in predestination.
So, not finding any help from his companions, the tattered figure rose, and looked up and down the sands. The life-guards had disappeared, but over by the creek a little man was jerkily zigzagging his way, whistling determinedly the while, in staccato fashion, as if he had all the time in the world but was of too nervous an organization to know what to do with it.
As he neared the Light, he was hailed by a chorus of shrieks and barks, and the quaint jabberings of a tongue which he decided, after much speculation, was human.
"Holy cats!" said he, "did my ticket read New Jersey or the Spanish Main?"
The colourful figure was extending a bottle and a piece of bark, and saying something that sounded like:
"Bona dias, señor, you reeda da Ingleese?"
Before the bottle, the newcomer held up his hands in the holiest of horrors.
"On the wagon, don't tempt me!" he wailed, then, glancing down at the bark,—"No thanks, none of your yellow sheets. If you see it in the Star, it's so!"
Now, Butts was a little whippersnapper of a reporter, with restless eyes constantly asking questions, and a glib tongue that bombarded his victims with more—in fact so many that he never stopped for the answers, merely substituting for them his own preconceptions, which usually happened to be shrewd enough to keep his chief out of libel suits. He was too good a newspaper man, and too curious, to ignore a rival sheet, so after all he extended his hand.
"Here, old top, let's see your three star extra—and what Arthur Busybrain an Ellawillerwillies are getting off their chests this fine afternoon.
"'Shipwrecked!'" He whistled again. "'On island—about latitude, eighteen north'—Where the heck did you get this?"
"From the sea it came, señor, in the bottle."
"Your uncle Dudley wasn't born yesterday, so easy on your persiflage, old Flying Dutch."
"Si, si, señor," said the other earnestly, scenting the skepticism though not the expressions which conveyed it, "from the sea it came—in a bottle—I swear it, by all the saints, Santa Caterina de Sienna, an' San Agnolo de Padua, an''"
"Never mind your telephone directory of the Celestial Boulevards—h'mmm" he was reading it over—"'long, six two west, alive—well—notify Sally Fell— Salthaven'—is that burg on the map?"
He searched his pockets which were bulging with stub pencils, wads of clay-coloured copy paper, and time-tables, and selected one of the latter.
"For the luv of Pete, if it ain't! But ye gods! it's a hoax, a plant, surest thing you know. But what a lulu of a Sunday spread it'd make—three running, too! Perhaps it's a hunch, and I never overlooked one yet. So goodbye, vacation, and"—here he counted a rather slender roll, "twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-one, tuh, three—" he saluted the greenbacks with his lips, then turning to his new friend, shot at him,
"Are you on?"
The tattered one looked his bewilderment, and Butts tried to make things clear.
"Are you game—to visit this dame called Sally and restore her own troo love? It means a little voyage on a steam road—ever see one, Columbus?"
Seeing that the befuddlement of the stranger was utter and complete, he tried pantomime,
"Railway, wheels," his hands revolved—"steam, savvy? Choo choo—toot, toot—ah, for Ned's sake, yuh stone wall from the Alhambra, come on!" and he seized the old fellow by the arm, and, like a self-important tug, hurried his strange convoy, man, dog, parrot, cage, and bandana bundle, to the railway station.