The Belted Seas

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I says, "Oh!"

Then Craney went on talking, but I don't know what it was about.
Then I says, "It don't suit me in Corazon," and I got up. I went out
in the steep cobbled street that runs down to the shore of Corazon Bay.

I lay all night on the shore and watched 'the waves come up and
crumble on the shingle. I remembered the verse Sadler used to chant
to me in the _Hebe Maitland_ days, when I was acting more gay
than he thought becoming to the uselessness of me. "Oh, sailor boy,"
he says.

"Oh, sailor, my sailor boy, bonny and blue,
You're rompin', you're roamin',
The long slantin' sorrows are waiting for you
In the gloamin', the gloamin'."

I remember, when it came morning, on the beach at Corazon, I got up,
and I says:

"Clyde's mucky old bags can stay there till I'm ready," I says.
"What's the use!"

I took a dislike to Clyde's money. I bought a passage to San
Francisco, and came there in the year '75.

There I put the profits of six years on the West Coast into shares
in a ship called the _Anaconda_, and shipped on her myself as
second mate.

I found Stevey Todd cooking in a restaurant in San Francisco. He'd
gone into gold mines, after getting loose from the _Jane Allen_.
He'd left his profits from the Hotel Helen Mar in the gold mines.
Every mine he'd invested in got discouraged, so he said, but I judge
the truth was more likely Stevey Todd was taken in by mining sharks.
He'd made up his mind property wasn't his stronghold and gone back to
cooking, and never took any more interest in property after that, nor
had any to take interest in. But he told me Sadler was in business
and getting rich, and in partnership with a Chinaman, and living in a
town called "Saleratus," sixty miles down the coast, which none of
these statements seemed likely at the time. Stevey Todd didn't know
why the town was named Saleratus. He thought maybe Sadler had named
it, or maybe gone there on account of the name, foreseeing
interesting rhymes with "potatoes" and "tomatoes." But I didn't look
Sadler up at that time.

* * * * *

The Captain turned to Uncle Abimelech, and said:

"Happen you might remember Sadler's tune to that verse, 'Sailor, my
sailor boy, bonny and blue'?"

"He never said no such impudent thing to me," said Uncle Abimelech
wrathfully. "I'd 'a' whaled him good."

"Why, that's true, Abe," said Captain Buckingham. "You wasn't much
on looks."

Stevey Todd said:

"They changed that name, Saleratus."

"That's true too," said Captain Buckingham. "An outlandish name is
bad for a town, or a ship, or a man; same as the _Anaconda,_ for
the _Anaconda_ had bad luck, same as Abimelech Dalrimple. He'd
never've got his brains frazzled if he'd been named Bill."

He paused several minutes before going on, to think over this theory
of names.

CHAPTER VII.

LIEBCHEN. THE EWIGWEIBLICHE. THE NARRATIVE RESUMED, WITH THE LOSS OF
THE "ANACONDA".

I invested the profits of the Hotel Helen Mar and the Ananias
plantation in shares in the _Anaconda_, and shipped myself as
second mate. She was carrying a cargo of steel rails for a railroad
in Japan.

There was a man named Kreps who came aboard at Honolulu. He was a
round-faced, chubby man, with spectacles and a trunk full of
preserved specimens, and out of breath with his enthusiasm; and he
was a German, too, and a Professor of Allerleiwissenschaft, which I
take to mean Things in General. He was around gathering in culture
and twelve-sided fish in the Pacific, and had a pailful of island
dialects and sentiments that were milky and innocent. But I liked him.

I had no objection to the _Anaconda_ either, except that she
went to the bottom of the Pacific without any argument about that,
and left me stranded on a little island there along with Kreps, and a
hen named Veronica, and a Kanaka named Kamelillo. There was a fourth
that got stranded there too. We called her "Liebchen" and she surely
acted singular, did Liebchen, but I liked her too. Kreps said she was
"symbol," but his ideas and mine didn't agree. He said she was a type
of the "Ewigweibliche," which is another good word though a Dutch
one. Maybe she was. Maybe Veronica was another type. I guess it's a
word that's got some varieties to it.

Veronica belonged to the ship, but had never been cooked, being thin
and stringy; and Kamelillo was a silent, sulky Kanaka that had lived
up and down the Pacific, and harpooned whales, and been shipwrecked
now and then, and was sometimes drunk and sometimes starved, and had
no opinion on these things, except that he'd rather be drunk than
starved. I never knew one that took less interest in life, provided
he was let alone. I liked them all well enough, too. I took things as
they came in those days. I'd as soon have bunked in with an alligator
as a Patagonian.

It was south of Midway Island that we ran into the typhoon come over
from Asia. A typhoon is to an ordinary storm what a surf is to a
deep-sea wave, for it's short but ugly. When it was done with us the
_Anaconda_ began to leak fearful in the waist, and I dare say
the typhoon was excuse enough if she'd broken in two. She went down
easy and slow, with all I had and owned sticking in her. It's bad
luck to give a ship an outlandish name.

There were two large boats and a small one, and trouble came from
Kreps' tin cans of specimens, for the captain wouldn't take them in
his boat, nor the first mate in his, so Kreps wanted to put them in
the small boat. He shed tears and got low in his mind.

"Dey are von der sciences ignorant, obtuse," he says.

I says, "So's the Pacific Ocean."

"But you, so young, so intelligent! Not as de Pacific Ocean, hein?"

I allowed there was difference between me and the Pacific. Kreps got
his tin cans in, and I put the boat off. Kamelillo was spreading the
cat-sail and had no opinion. Veronica came flapping over the rail
with a squawk, and lit on Kamelillo, and fell into the bottom of the
boat. We got away after the other boats, the night coming on clear,
and Kamelillo talked island dialects at Veronica for scratching him
when he wanted to be let alone. Kreps sat over his specimens,
innocent and happy and singing German lullabies.

The next morning the other boats were not in sight. We steered
north, for there were odd islands in that direction by the chart,
without names enough to go around them; and on the second morning we
saw a high shore to port, with surf like a white rag sewed along the
bottom, and rags of mist sticking to the black bluffs.

"Ach," says Kreps, and the tears trickled down under his spectacles.
"Gott sei dank! I am mude of the sea. It iss too large."

"How she get up them high?" Kamelillo says. "No! Maybe dam hen fly
up. Not me. No!"

We coasted by the east side a little way and came to a place where
the water was quiet and black in a slip of maybe a hundred feet in
width, where the bluff had broken in two. The channel appeared to
curve, so that you could only see a little way up. We dropped sail
and pulled through. It might have been twenty feet deep in the
channel, being high tide, and running in slow. Wine-palms and
cocoanut trees grew on the bluffs on each side. Some leaned over,
with roots out where the earth had caved away. We came about the
curve and saw a closed bay, shut in by the bluffs from the outer sea
and even the winds. It was wooded on the north and very rocky on the
south, and might have been a quarter of a mile across. We landed on
the north side and camped, and set a signal on the bluffs, and then
we laid off to wait for accidents. I knew there were whalers cruising
in the neighbourhood, and thought likely it would be seen.

Now Liebchen came in one day at high tide, chasing those little
goggle-eyed squids that lived so many in the harbour. The first
we saw was tons of her gambolling around in the water. She was a
medium-sized whale, and might have been forty feet in length, but I
never was in the whaling business, and Liebchen was the only one I
ever got real acquainted with. I've heard it's common for them to be
stranded on shallow shores, and get off again if let alone. The harbour
may have been Liebchen's boudoir for aught I know. Maybe she'd come
there before. She surely knew how to get out if let alone. After an
hour or so she was over by the entrance trying to leave. She seemed
to be in trouble, and then we saw the tide had gone out, and left the
channel too shallow to heave over.

When Kreps understood that she was penned in, he acted outrageous,
and pranced like a red rubber balloon.

"Gieb mir das axe! Ich will de habits of de cetacean studieren!" he
says.

He ran away through the woods around the north shore, and I ran
after, to see him study the habits of the cetacean. Liebchen had
sidled off and was rolling about in the middle of the harbour when we
came to the bluffs, where the wine-palms and cocoanut trees leaned
over and the channel was narrow. Kreps fell to chopping the landward
roots, and I saw he wanted to block the channel.

We slid a tree down under the water, and then another, and so on,
till it was a messy-looking channel, a sort of log jam, with roots
and palm-tree tops mixed in, which I thought the tide would float
out, and it did afterward, some of it.

Then we went back to where Kamelillo was cooking, squatted on the
shore with his bare back turned to the water. He took no interest in
Liebchen. He was making a kind of paste of ground roots, called
"poi," which wasn't bad, if you rolled a fish in it, and baked it on
the coals, and thought about something else. But at that time
Liebchen came round the north shore in a roar of foam, bringing her
flukes down now and then with a slap to make the harbour ache, and
she slapped near a barrel of water over Kamelillo and his fire and
his poi. Kamelillo says:

"Why for? She not my whale. You keep her out a my suppa. Why for?"

Kreps was disgusted because Kamelillo didn't like Liebchen. He went
and stood on the bank, in the interest of science, and studied the
habits of the cetacean, but he got no results. She had no habits, to
speak uprightly, only notions. They weren't any use to science.
Sometimes she'd flutter with her fins, and twitter her flukes, and
sidle off like she was bashful, and then she'd come swooping around
enough to make the harbour sizzle, and stick her nose in the bottom
and her tail in the air, trembling with her emotions, and then she'd
come up and smile at you a rod each way. I judged she meant all
right, but she didn't understand her limitations. Her strong hold was
the majestic. She appeared to have it fixed she wanted to be
kittenish. That was the way it seemed to me. But Kreps studied her
mornings and afternoons and into the night, and day after day it went
on, and she bothered him. Then he saw he was on the wrong tack, and
put his helm about, and he says:

"She is de Ewigweibliche. She is not science. She is boetry. She is
de sharm of everlasting feminine," and he heaved a sigh. I says:

"Ewigweibliche!" I says. "Everlasting feminine! What's the use of
that?"

I took to studying Liebchen too, and it appeared to me Kreps' idea
wasn't useful He was a man to have sentiments naturally. He'd sit out
on the end of a log moonlight nights, with his fat face and
spectacles shining, and Liebchen would muzzle around with a ten-foot
snout like an engine boiler, and a piggy eye; and he'd sing German
lullabies; "Du bist wie eine Blume." I didn't think she was like a
flower. She was more like an oil tank.

So Kreps would sing to her in the moonlight, but Kamelillo didn't
like her. Veronica didn't like her either, and would stand off and
cackle at her pointedly. She seemed to think Liebchen carried on
improper and had no refinement. Why, I guess from her point of view
sea bathing wasn't becoming, and when Liebchen stood on her head in
the water, Veronica used to take to the woods with her feelings
pretty rumpled. Kamelillo disliked Veronica on account of her
fussiness, and because she had lit on him and scratched him when he
wanted to be let alone. He wanted to make Veronica into poi, but I
didn't think there was any real nourishment in her; and he wanted to
break the log jam and let the whale out, but I told him it was Kreps'
jam.

"Ain' harbour belong him," said Kamelillo. "Ain' him slap harbour on
me. Thas whale bad un. I show him." He went to Kreps. "I tell you,
dam Dutchman," he says, meaning to be soothing and persuasive. "I
tell you, we cutta bamboo, harpoon whale. Donnerblissen! Easy!"

"Du animal!" says Kreps. "Mitout perception, mitout soul, mitout
delicate!"

"Oh!" says Kamelillo; "girl whale. All right, dam Dutchman, me fren.
You break jam. Letta go."

"It iss not of use," said Kreps, and he sighed. "You understand not
de yearning, de ideal. Listen! Liebchen, she iss de abstraction, de
principle. Aber no. You cannot. De soul iss alone, iss not comprehend."

"All right," says Kamelillo. "You look here. Go see thas girl whale
on a bamboo raft. No good sit on log all night, sing hoohoo song."

Kreps was taken with that notion. "So, my friend?" he says.

"You teach her like missionary teach Kanaka girl," says Kamelillo,
getting interested. "You teach her to she wear petticoat, no stan' on
her head. You teach her go Sunday school."

I says, "Look out, Kreps. That whale'll drown you. She's got no
culture."

But Kreps was calm. "I vill approach Liebchen more near," he says.
"It iss time to advance. I vill go mit Kamelillo, my friend."

Kamelillo spent the morning making a bamboo raft, and in the
afternoon they put out. Liebchen was over by the harbour entrance,
lying low in the water and maybe asleep. Kamelillo had a bamboo pole
in his hand to pole the raft with, but he had shod it with his
harpoon head. They drew alongside, and Kreps was facing front, with
his back to Kamelillo. He lifted his oar to slap the water, and
Kamelillo drew off, and cast the harpoon. Liebchen, she came out of
her maiden fancies. She acted plain whale. That's a way of acting
which calls for respect, but it's not romantic. She slapped the
bamboo raft, and there was no such thing. She swallowed the harbour
and spit it out. She whooped and danced and teetered. She let out all
her primeval feelings. She put on no airs, and she made no pretences.
She turned everything she could find into scrambled eggs, and played
the "Marseillaise" on her blow-hole. She did herself up into knots to
break whalebone, and untied them like a pop of a cork. She was no
more female than she was science. She was wrath and earthquakes and
the day of judgment. She scooped out the bottom of the harbour and
laid it on top, and turned somersets through the middle of chaos.
Veronica took to the woods. I ran along the north shore, thinking
they were both scrambled, but I found Kamelillo pulling Kreps through
the shallows by his collar, and shaking the water out of his eyes,
and not seeming to be disturbed. But Kreps took off his spectacles
and wiped them, and he says:

"Ach, Liebchen!" he says. "She iss too much."

"Thas whale!" says Kamelillo. "Thas all right!"

"Liebchen iss too much of her," says Kreps very dignified, and
stalked to the camp.

"Thas whale!" says Kamelillo. "Thas all right!"

He chopped the jam that afternoon, and it floated out in the night
or early morning with the ebb. We went to the bank when the tide was
in again to watch Liebchen go out. Kreps was pretty tearful.

"Aber," he says, "she iss too much of her."

She came feeling her way through the channel with her snout under
water. Kamelillo's bamboo stuck out of her fat side six feet or more.
Veronica cackled at her, and her feathers stood up, so that you could
see she thought Liebchen was no lady. Liebchen passed close beneath
us. Seemed like she felt mortified. Kreps broke down, but Kamelillo
was gay.

"Dam hen!" he says, and grabbed Veronica with both hands. "Go too!"
and he flung her at Liebchen, and she went through the air squawking
and fluttering. She lit on Liebchen's slippery back, and she slid
till she struck the bamboo, and roosted. If she had had time to think
she might have flopped ashore, but she was flustered, and Liebchen
got out of the channel and steered into the Pacific. Veronica
squawked a few times, and no more. The sea was quiet. The two moved
off, going eastward very slow. Kamelillo went back to his camp fire
and made poi, but Kreps and I watched, expecting that Liebchen would
go under and Veronica be lost. But they kept on till there was only a
black spot near the edge of the sky.

It came on afternoon. The tide was out, and we lay about. There was
not enough wind to flutter the signal on the bluffs, which was Kreps'
red shirt, and hung there to entertain any one that might come by.
Kamelillo suddenly sat up. "Hear im?" he says.

There was a great noise over in the channel out of sight, a kind of
splashing, thumping, and blowing, and the waves rolled into the
harbour. We ran along the shore and came to the bluffs. There was
Liebchen! She appeared to have grounded in the channel, trying to get
in quick at low tide. But there were two harpoons, more than the
bamboo, sticking in her very deep, and the lines were hitched to a
longboat, the longboat coming inshore now full of men. Veronica
squatting on the thwart of the same, comfortable and dignified.

Kamelillo says, "Whale ain't got sense, thas whale!" And Kreps says,
"Ach, Liebchen!"

She struck her last flurry, and filled the air with spray. The
longboat held off, seeing she was likely to stay there and needed all
the room. After a while she grew quiet. A few motions of her flukes,
and that was all. The longboat came in, and we slid down the bluffs.
The man in the stern says, "That your hen?"

I said I was acquainted with her.

"Oh! Maybe that's your whale?"

"Ach, Liebchen!" says Kreps.

Kamelillo waded in, and looked at the harpoons, and shook his head,
for he knew the laws and rights of the trade.

"No," he says. "Thas your whale."

"Been cast up, have ye?" says the steersman, looking around. "We
struck that whale ten miles out. We comes up quiet, and I see that
bamboo sticking in her, with that hen squatting on it. 'Queer!' says
I. And just as Billy here was letting her have it, the hen gives a
squawk and comes flopping aboard; and Billy lets her have it, and
Dick here lets her have it, and she goes plumb down sudden. Then up
she comes and starts, like she was going to see her Ma and knew her
own mind, and up this channel she comes, and runs aground foolish. I
never see a whale act so foolish. Thought she might be a friend of
yours," says he, "meaning no reflections."

I said I was acquainted with her, and Kreps took off his glasses and
wiped his eyes.

"She vass of de tenderness, das Zartlichkeit." It made him sad
to see Liebchen dead, that was full of sensibility, and Veronica come
back with dignity, she being a conventional hen and scornful and cold
by nature.

"Ach, Liebchen!" he says; and we went back to gather up his tin
cans; and I says:

"Ewigweibliche's a good word, though a Dutch one;" then we came away
on the whaler.

But all I owned went down on the _Anaconda_. I got back to San
Francisco in course of time, but no richer than when I left
Greenough, and ten years or more older.

Kreps was a man very given to sentiments, in particular about
"Ewigweibliche," and I never knew a man that kept himself more
entertained. He settled down for the time, with Veronica and
Kamelillo for his family, in a fine house in the upper town of San
Francisco. Kamelillo used to cook unlikely things which Kreps and
Veronica ate peaceable between them. Kreps was well-to-do, and he
seemed cut out for a happy life. Any kind of cooking suited him. The
whole world grew knowledge for him to collect. He could suck
sentiment out of a hard-boiled egg. But I went to live with Stevey
Todd where the cooking was better, and loafed about the streets and
docks, wondering what I'd do next. I never knew what became of Kreps
after we left San Francisco.

CHAPTER VIII.

SADLER IN SALERATUS. THE GREEN DRAGON PAGODA. THE NARRATIVE GOES ON.

One day I was by the docks, where some people were busy and
some were like me, loafing or looking for a berth; and I came on a
neat-looking, three-masted ship, named the _Good Sister_, which
appeared to me a kindly name. She was being overhauled by the
carpenters. I asked one of them, "Where's the captain?"

"She ain't got any," he says. "It's the owners are doing it."

"Maybe you'll remark," I says, "who they happen to be."

"Shan and Sadler of Saleratus," he says.

"I believe you're a liar," I says, surprised at the name.

"Which there's a little tallow-faced runt in perspective," he says,
climbing down the stays, "that I can lick," he says, being misled by
my size. And when that was over, I started for Saleratus.

It was a town to the south, down near the coast. That's not its name
now, because it's reformed and doesn't like to remember the days
before it was regenerated. At that time some of it was Mexican, and
more of it was Chinese, and some of it wasn't connected with anything
but perdition.

Shan and Sadler did a mixed mercantile business, and they seemed to
be prosperous people, but I take it Fu Shan mainly carried on the
business, and Sadler was the reason why the firm's property was
respected and let alone by the Caucasians. There is a big Chinese
company in Singapore, called "Shan Brothers," whose name is well
known on bills of lading, and Fu Shan was connected with them. But a
man wouldn't have thought to find Sadler a partner in banking,
mercantile, and shipping business, with a Chinaman. He'd been the
wildest of us all in the _Hebe Maitland_ days, and always acted
youthful for his years. There were two things in him that never could
get to keep the peace with each other, his conscience and his
sporting instinct. Yet he was a capable man, and forceful, and I
judge he could do 'most anything he set his hand to.

He and Fu Shan lived just outside the town of Saleratus in two
ornamented and expensive houses, side by side, on a hill that was
bare and mostly sand banks, and that hung over the creek which ran
past the town into the bay. Sadler lived alone with Irish, but Fu
Shan was domestic. He was a pleasant Oriental with a mild, squeaking
voice, and had more porcelain jars than you would think a body would
need, and fat yellow cheeks, and a queue down to his knees. He wore
cream-coloured silk, and was a picture of calmness and culture. Irish
hadn't changed, but Sadler was looking older and more melancholy,
though I judged that some of the lines on his face, that simulated
care, came from the kind of life folks led in Saleratus to avoid
monotony. We spoke of Craney among others, but Sadler knew no more of
Craney than I did. Likely he was still in Corazon.

We were sitting one evening on Sadler's porch, that looked over the
creek, waiting for supper. Fu Shan was there, and Sadler said
Saleratus was monotonous. Yet there were going on in Saleratus to my
knowledge at that moment the following entertainments: three-card
monte at the Blue Light Saloon; a cockfight at Pasquarillo's; two
alien sheriffs in town looking for horse thieves, and had one
corralled on the roof of the courthouse; finally some other fellows
were trying to drown a Chinaman in the creek and getting into all
kinds of awkwardness on account of there being no water in the creek
to speak of, and other Chinamen throwing stones. But Sadler said it
was monotonous.

"I don't get no satisfaction out of it,"

Over the top of the town you could catch the sunset on the sea, and
the smoke of the chimneys rose up between. There were red roses all
over the pillars and eaves of the porch. Seemed to me it was a good
enough place. Fu Shan smoked scented and sugared tobacco in a
porcelain pipe with an ivory stem. The fellows down by the creek ran
away, feeling pretty good and cracking their revolvers in the air,
and the Chinamen got bunched about their injured countryman.

"Have no water in cleek," says Fu Shan, aristocratic and peaceful.
"Dlied up."

"Dried up. Played out," says Sadler, not understanding him. "Fu
Shan's a dry-rotted Asiatic. Doesn't anything make any difference to
him. Got any nerves? Not one. Got any seethin' emotions? Not a seeth.
He's a wornout race in the numbness of decrepitude."

Fu Shan chuckled.

"But me, I'm different," says Sadler, "The uselessness of things
bothers me. Look at 'em. I been in Saleratus five years, partner with
Fu Shan. Sometimes I had a good time. Where is it now? You laugh, or
you sigh. Same amount of wind, nothing left either way.

What's the use?
You chew tobacco and spit out the juice.
What's the use?

If there's anybody with a destiny that's got any assets at all, and
he wants to swap even, bring him along. Look at this town! Is it any
sort of a town? No honesty, for there ain't a man in it that can
shuffle a pack without stackin' it. No ability, for there ain't
more'n one or two can stack it real well. No seriousness, for they
start in to drown a Chinaman in a dry creek, and they cut away as
happy as if they'd succeeded. I sits up here on my porch, and I says,
'What is it but a dream? Fu Shan,' I says, 'this here life's a
shadow!' Then that forsaken, conceited, blank heathen, he says one of
his ancestors discovered the same three thousand years ago. But, he
says, another ancestor, pretty near as distinguished, he discovered
that, if you put enough curry on your rice, it gives things an
appearance of reality. Which, says he, they discovered the
uselessness of things in Asia so long ago they've forgot when, and
then they discovered the uselessness of the discovery. They
discovered gunpowder, he says, long before we did, but they use it
for fireworks in the interests of irony. They've forgotten more'n we
ever knew, says he, the stuck-up little cast-eyed pig. Go on! I'm
disgusted. Haven't I put on curry till it give me a furred mouth and
dyspepsia of the soul? What's the use?"

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