Part 11 (2/2)

Then you'll tell him he's a three-cornered idiot, because you'll admire the truth, and come back and we'll have a drink.”

”All right,” he says, absent-minded and calm, and went off up Market Street. By-and-by the agent came down with Craney floating behind.

”This is Mr. J. R. Phipp,” says the agent, ”who has chartered the _Good Sister_. Get her ready. Mr. Phipp will superintend cargo himself and sail with you.”

That was the way it happened. Craney spent days going round the stores in the city and buying everything that took his eyes. He bought house-furnis.h.i.+ngs and pictures, toys, horns, drums, cases of tobacco and spirits, gla.s.s ornaments and plaster statues, crockery and cutlery, guns, clothes, neckties, and silk handkerchiefs, and cheap jewelry. He'd go in and ask for a drygoods box. Then he'd potter around the shop till the box was full. He'd buy out a show case of goods, and maybe he'd buy the show case. He bought barrels full of old magazines and books on theology and law, and a cord or two of ten-cent novels, and some poetry that was handy, and three encyclopaedias, and two or three kinds of dogs, and a basket phaeton with green wheels, and a printing press, and a stereopticon. The agent says to me:

”He has a scheme for trading in the South Pacific. He's a lunatic, and he's paid for six months. Send me news when you get a chance, and come back by Honolulu for directions. He's a lunatic,” he says, ”and you'd better lose him somewhere and get a commission on the time saved.”

Then he hurried off the way you'd think he was a man with energy, instead of one that would sit still and let the weeds grow in his hair.

But Craney went on buying chandeliers and chess-boards and clocks and women's things, such as dresses and ostrich-feathers hats, and baby carriages, and parasols, and an allotment of a.s.sorted dinner-bells, and one side of a drug store. I don't know all there was in his cases, only I judged there wasn't any monotony. I says:

”Maybe now you might be done.”

He came aboard and looked thoughtful. Then he felt in his pocket and pulled out a bunch of knitting needles, and looked thoughtful.

”Well,” he says. ”I rather wanted to look up some front porches, ready made, with door-knockers, but I didn't get to it. It's just as well.”

We dropped out of the Gate with the tide on a Sat.u.r.day night, and stood away to the southwest.

Craney was always a talkative man, liking to open out his point of view.

At first I thought he'd gone lunatic of late, and then again when he showed me his point of view, I found he hadn't changed so much, as got more so.

Many nights we sat on deck in the moonlight and with a light breeze pus.h.i.+ng in the sails, for the weather in the main was steady, and he'd smoke a fat cigar, and look at the little s.h.i.+ning clouds. He'd talk and speculate, sometimes shrewd, and then again it was like a matter of adding a s.h.i.+pload of pirates to the signs of the zodiac, and getting the New Jerusalem for a result. By-and-by, I felt that way myself, as if, supposing you kept on sailing long enough, you might run down an island full of mixed myths and happy angels. Sure he was romantic.

”I'm a romantic man, Tommy,” he says. ”That's my secret. Yes, sir, Romance, that's me! That's the centre of my circ.u.mference, that's the gravity of my orbit, that's the number of my combination. Visions, ideals! I'm a man to get up and look for the beyond. I want to expand! I want to permeate! I want the beyond! Here I am, fifty years old. I gets up and looks out on to the world. I says: 'J. R., this won't do. Is it for nothing that you're a man of romance? Is it for nothing that you long to permeate, to expand? The soul of man' I says, 'is airy; it's full of draughts. Your soul, J. R., flaps like a tent,' I says, 'in the breezes of dawn. The world is round. Time is fleeting. Is man an ox? No.

Is he a patent inkstand? No. Was he created to occupy a house and fit his head to a hat? No. Then why delay? Why smother your longings?' I says; 'J. R., this won't do. This ain't your destiny. Rise! Be winged!

Chase the ideal! Get on the vastness! Seek and find!' But what? I says, 'Fame, fortune, a vocation that's worthy of you.' Where? I says, 'In the beyond.' Then I took a map, Tommy, and looked over the world; I examined the globe; I took stock of the earth, and compared lands, seas, climates. The likeliest-looking place appeared to be the South Pacific Ocean. Why? It appeared to be, in general, beyond. It was the biggest thing on the map. It was tropical. Palm-trees, spicy odours, corals, pearls. 'All right,' I says: 'J. R., it wouldn't take much to be a millionaire in those unpolluted regions. You'd be a potentate. You'd wear picturesque clothes, and lie on poppies and lotuses. You'd be a Solomon to those guileless nations. You'd instruct their ignorance and preserve their morals. You'd lead their armies to victory on account of your natural gifts. You'd have your birthdays celebrated with torch-light processions. You'd be a luxurious patriot.' Now that's a pleasant way of looking at it. But it seemed to me the likeliest thing was to go out as a trader. Now as to trading. Sitting on a stool and figuring discounts is business, and trading cheese-cloth for parrots is business too. A horse is an animal, and so's a potato-bug. But I take it where society is loose and business isn't a system, there's always chance for a man with natural gifts. But you're going to ask me: What for is all this mixture I've got aboard? If some of it's tradable, you'd say, there must be a deal of it isn't. And I ask you back, Tommy: Take it in general, haven't I got a mixture that represents civilisation?

Did you ever see a s.h.i.+p that had more commodious, miscellaneous, and sufficient civilisation in her than this? I'm taking out civilisation.

Maybe I'm calculating on a boom. Now, the secret of a boom is to spread out as far as you can reach, and then flap. That's business. When you've got people's attention, you can settle down and make your bargains. Mind you,” says Craney, turning on me an eye that was cold and calm--”mind you, I don't say that's what I'm going to do, nor I don't say what I'm calculating to trade for. Maybe I have an idea, and maybe I haven't.”

I says, ”Course you have.”

”You think so?” he says. ”It's no more than reasonable. But look at all this now”--with one thumb in the armhole of his vest and waving his cigar with the other hand toward the moon and sea--”look at this here hemisphere. It's big and still. The kinks and creases of me are smoothing out. I'm expanding, permeating. I look out. I see those there s.h.i.+ning waves. I says to myself, 'J. R., as a romantic man, you may be said to be getting there.'”

He used to read some in the daytime, but mostly he'd smoke and meditate and pull his chin beard, sitting on deck in a red plush-covered easy-chair, with his feet on the rail. One time he had a volume of poetry in his hand, turning over the leaves.

”Some of it appears to be sawed down smooth one side,” he says, ”and left ragged on the other, and some of it's ragged both sides.”

Then he read a bit of it aloud, but it didn't go right, for sometimes he'd trot, as you might say, when he ought to have galloped, and sometimes he'd gallop when he ought to have trotted, and sometimes he'd come along at a mixed gait. As a rule, he b.u.mped.

He was no hand at poetry. Nor was he romantic to look at, but thin, and sinewy, and one-eyed, and some dried up, clean shaven except for a wisp of greyish whisker on his chin, and always neatly dressed now. When he'd laugh to himself, the wrinkles would spread around his eyes, one blind, and the other calm and calculating, and absent-minded. He'd sit with his cigar tilted up in one corner of his mouth, and his hat tilted forward, and whittle sticks. He'd talk with anybody, but mostly with me and Kamelillo, whom he appeared to be asking for information. Kamelillo knew island dialects about the same as he did English, but wasn't much for conversation. Craney came one day with a bundle of charts, and he collected me and Kamelillo in a corner and spread his charts on the deck. They were old charts.

”Now,” he says, ”here is the lines of trade.”

He had the regular routes all marked on his charts.

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