Part 21 (2/2)
Having landed in driblets and having been rea.s.sembled in camp as a whole, the division presently paraded, which made another story deemed worthy of columns upon columns in print. Our duty here, though, is not to undertake a description of that parade, for such was competently done on that fine day when the crowd that turned out was the largest crowd which that city of crowds, New York, had seen since the day when the crowding Dutchmen crowded the Indians off the shortly-to-be-crowded island of Manhattan.
Those who followed the daily chronicles of daily events saw then, through the eyes of gifted scribes, how Fifth Avenue was turned into a four-mile stretch of prancing, dancing glory; and how the outpouring millions, in ma.s.ses fluid as water and in strength irresistible as a flood, broke the police dams and made of roadway and sidewalks one great, roaring, human sluiceway; and how the khaki-clad ranks marched upon a carpet of the flowers and the fruit and the candy and the cigarettes and the cigars and the confetti and the paper ribbons that were thrown at them and about them. These things are a tale told and retold. For us the task is merely to narrate one small incident which occurred in a side street hard by Was.h.i.+ngton Square while the parade was forming.
Where he stood marking time in the front row of the honour men of his own regiment--there being forty-six of these honour men, all bearing upon their proudly outbulged bosoms bits of metal testifying to valorous deeds--First Sergeant Hyman Ginsburg, keeping eyes front upon the broad back of the colonel who would ride just in advance of the honour squad and speaking out of the side of his mouth, addressed a short, squat, dark man in private's uniform almost directly behind him at the end of the second file.
”Pal,” he said, casting his voice over his shoulder, ”did you happen to read in the paper this morning that the police commissioner--the new one, the one that was appointed while we were in France--would be in the reviewing stand to-day?”
”No, I didn't read it; but wot of it?” answered the person addressed.
”Nothing, only it reminded me of a promise I made you that night down at the Stuffed Owl when we met for the first time since we were kids together. Remember that promise, don't you?”
”Can't say I do.”
”I told you that some day I'd get you with the goods on you and that I'd lead you in broad daylight up the street to the big chief. Well, to-day, kid, I make good on that promise. The big chief's waiting for us up yonder in the reviewing stand along with the governor and the mayor and the rest. And you've got the goods on you--you're wearing them on your chest. And I'm about to lead you to him.”
Whereupon old Mr. John J. Coincidence, standing in the crowd, took out his fountain pen and on his s.h.i.+rt cuff scored a fresh tally to his own credit.
CHAPTER VII
WHEN AUGUST THE SECOND WAS APRIL THE FIRST
How Ethan A. Pratt, formerly of South New Medford, in the State of Vermont, came to be resident manager and storekeeper for the British Great Eastern Company, Ltd., on Good Friday Island, in the South Seas, is not our present concern. Besides, the way of it makes too long a tale for telling here. It is sufficient to say he was.
Never having visited that wide, long, deep and mainly liquid backside of the planet known broadly as the South Seas but always intending to do so, I must largely depend for my local colour upon what Ethan Pratt wrote back home to South New Medford; on that, plus what returned travellers to those parts have from time to time told me. So if in this small chronicle those paragraphs which purport to be of a descriptive nature appear incomplete to readers personally acquainted with the spots dealt with or with spots like them the fault, in some degree at least, must rest upon the fact that I have had my main dependence in the preserved letters of one who was by no means a sprightly correspondent, but on the contrary was by way of being somewhat prosy, not to say commonplace, on his literary side.
From the evidence extant one gathers that for the four years of his life he spent on Good Friday Island Ethan Pratt lived in the rear room of a two-room house of frame standing on a beach with a little village about it, a jungle behind it, a river half-mooning it and a lagoon before it.
In the rear room he bedded and baited himself. The more s.p.a.cious front room into which his housekeeping quarters opened was a store of sorts where he retailed print goods staple, tinned foods a.s.sorted and gimcracks various to his customers, these mostly being natives. The building was crowned with a tin roof and on top of the roof there perched a round water tank, like a high hat on a head much too large for it. The use of this tank was to catch and store up rain water, which ran into it from the sloping top of a larger and taller structure standing partly alongside and partly back of the lesser structure. The larger building--a shed it properly was; a sprawling wide-eaved barracks of a shed--was for the storing of copra, the chief article for export produced on Good Friday Island.
Copra, as all know--or as all should know, since it has come to be one of the most essential vegetable products of the world, a thing needful in the manufacture of nearly every commercial output in which fatty essences are required--is the dried meat of the nut of the coconut palm.
So rich is it in oils that soap makers--to cite one of the industries employing it--scarce could do without it; but like many of this earth's most profitable and desirable yieldings it has its unpretty aspects. For one thing it stinks most abominably while it is being cured, and after it has been cured it continues to stink, with a lessened intensity. For another thing, the all-pervading reek of the stuff gets into food that is being prepared anywhere in its bulked vicinity.
Out in front of the establishment over which Ethan Pratt presided, where the sandy beach met the waters, was a rickety little wharf like a hyphen to link the grit with the salt. Down to the outer tip of the wharf ran a narrow-gauge track of rusted iron rails, and over the track on occasion plied little straddlebug handcars. Because the water offsh.o.r.e was shoal s.h.i.+ps could not come in very close but must lie well out in the lagoon and their unloadings and their reloadings were carried on by means of whale-boats ferrying back and forth between s.h.i.+p side and dock side with the push cars to facilitate the freight movement at the land end of the connection. This was a laborious and a vexatious proceeding, necessitating the handling and rehandling of every bit of incoming or outbound cargo several times. But then, steamers did not come very often to Good Friday Island; one came every two months about.
The expanse upon which Ethan Pratt looked when he turned his eyes outward was of an incredible whiteness. You would have thought it to be the whitest, most blinding thing in the world until you considered the road that skirted it and some of the buildings that bordered it. For the road was built of crushed coral, so dazzlingly white that to look fixedly at it for thirty seconds in bright weather was to make the eyeb.a.l.l.s ache; and the buildings referred to were built of blocks of white coral like exaggerated cubes of refined sugar. These buildings were the chapels and churches--Methodist, Catholic, Seventh Day Adventist, English Wesleyan and American Mormon. When the sun shone clear the water on beyond became a s.h.i.+mmering blazing s.h.i.+eld of white-hot metal; and an hour of uninterrupted gazing upon it would have turned an argus into a blinkard. But other times--early morning or evening or when stormy weather impended--the lagoon became all a wonderful deep clear blue, the colour of molten stained gla.s.s. One peering then into its depths saw, far down below, marvellous sea gardens all fronded and ferny and waving; and through the foliage of this fairy-land went darting schools and shoals of fish queerly shaped and as brilliantly coloured as tropical birds.
At the top of the beach, girdling it on its land side, and stencilling themselves against the sky line, ran a fringing of coconut palms. The trunks were naked almost to the tops, where the foliage revealed itself in flaring clumps of green. Viewed separately a tree was suggestive of a great bird standing on one leg with its head hidden under its wing, its rump up-reared and its splayed tail feathers saluting the skies. Viewed together they made a spectacle for which nothing in the temperate zones, animal or vegetable, offers a measurable comparison. When the wind blew softly the trees whispered among themselves. When the wind blew hard and furiously, as often it did, or when the trade breeze swelled to hurricane speed, the coconuts in their long bearded husks would be wrenched free and would come hurtling through the air like fletched cannon b.a.l.l.s. When one of them struck a tin roof there resulted a terrific cras.h.i.+ng sound fit to wake the dead and to stun the living.
Living there Pratt's diet was mainly tinned salmon, which tasted faintly of tin and strongly of copra; and along with the salmon, crackers, which in this climate were almost always flabby with dampness and often were afflicted with greenish mould. Salmon and crackers had come to be his most dependable stand-bys in the matter of provender. True the natives brought him gifts of food dishes; dishes cooked without salt and pleasing to the Polynesian palate. Coming out upon his balcony of a morning he would find swinging from a cross-beam a basket made of the green palm leaves and containing a chicken or a fish prepared according to the primitive native recipe, or perhaps a mess of wild greens baked on hot stones; or maybe baked green bananas or taro or yams or hard crusty halves of baked breadfruit.
To the white man yams and taro taste mighty good at first, but eventually he sickens of them. Pratt sickened sooner than some white men had; and almost from the first the mere sight and savour of a soft-fleshed baked fish had made his gorge rise in revolt. So he fell back upon staples of his own land and ate salmon and crackers.
This island where he lived was an island of smells and insects. Consider first the matter of the prevalent smells: When the copra was curing and the village green was studded with thousands of little cusps, each being brown without and milk-white within, and each destined to remain there until the heat had dried the nut meats to the proper brownish tone, there rose and spread upon the air a stench so thick and so heavy as to be almost visible; a rancid, hot, rottenish stench. Then, when the wind blew off the seas it frequently brought with it the taint of rotted fish. Sniffing this smell Ethan Pratt would pray for a land breeze; but since he hated perfumed smells almost as intensely as he hated putrescent ones, a land breeze was no treat to his nose either, for it came freighted with the sickish odour of the frangipane and of a plant the islanders call _mosooi_, overpowering in their combined sweetness.
In his letters he complained much of these smells and likewise much of the heat, but more than of either he complained of the insects. It would appear that the mosquitoes worked on him in s.h.i.+fts. By day there came day mosquitoes, creatures of the sunlight and matching it in a way, seeing that they were big grey-striped fellows with keen and strident voices. By night there were small vicious mosquitoes, in colour an appropriate black and in habit more bloodthirsty than Uhlans. After dark the flame of his kerosene lamp was to them as the traditional light in the traditional cas.e.m.e.nt is to returning wanderers. It brought them in millions, and with them tiny persistent gnats and many small coffin-shaped beetles and hosts of pulpy, unwholesome-looking moths of many sizes and as many colours. Screens and double screens at the window openings did not avail to keep these visitors out. Somehow they found a way in. The mosquitoes and the gnats preyed upon him; the beetles and the moths were lured by the flame to a violent end. To save the wick from being clogged by their burnt bodies he hooded the top of the lamp with netting. This caused the lamp chimney to smoke and foul itself with soot. To save his s.h.i.+ns from attack he wrapped his legs in newspaper buskins. For his hands and his face and his neck and his ears he could devise no protection.
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