CHAPTER II.—LACRIMÆ RERUM—THE THREE MEN IN THE PUBLIC.
It was in the latter part of September that I first observed the three strangers at the corner table in the public room, though they may have been there before. Afterwards, whenever passing through, I would look for them, and they were noticeable men; the eldest of the three an easy-looking gentleman with an air of commanding and greyish hair and beard; the second, who always sat beside him against the wall, was odd and humorous in his manner and had a look of imperturbable happiness, round faced, smooth-shaven, with straight hair and rather long, thin lips sticking out when something amused him, a well-muscled, large-framed man; the third stranger always sat opposite the others, with his back and square, slender shoulders to the rest of the room. And when all three men were there, the first two seemed to talk to the third loudly and genially; but sometimes these two came alone, and then they talked to each other and were more quiet.
One afternoon I stood within the door that led from the long verandah to the hall and floor above, the door of the public close beside it; and my father was asleep in his chair far at the other end of the verandah.
I heard the three strangers come to the door of the public, heard the third say good-by, not two yards from my ear, and go down the steps briskly. And in a moment the elder stranger spoke thus in a drawling way:
“He's close, Dan, he is. He takes a man's confidence like it belonged to him natchully, but he don't appear to have any opinion on it. Hey?”
“Folks are diff'ent, cap,” said the other blandly. “You don' expect a te'apin to open hisself. He can't 'ithout bustin', an' he may be a very good sort of te'apin an' a warm-hearted te'apin. An' another man comes along whoopin', 'How d'ye do! Here's me. Who are you?' like he couldn't help his candor, Ever hear o' the snake in the gyarden o' Eden, cap? He was very co'dial, that snake.”
“Still,” said the first, “I shan't open on him till the time comes, He can have his choice then.”
“As how, cap?”
“Not here. Offshore.”
With that they went down the steps also. My father woke with the noise, and they nodded to him pleasantly.
After a time Tony, the waiter in the public, came out and winked at me wonderfully.
“Those fellies is fittin' a ship,” he said. “Say, she's jus' goin' in der navvy yard. Say, I hear 'em tell she's a keener.”
My father only gazed down the slip with absent, pathetic eyes, thinking, as always, those September days, of what was slipping away from us in the white-curtained room above that looked out on the garden.
When I think of the thing we call death in a general way, spelling it maybe with a capital, it never seems to me a going down at sea—and I have seen that—or any violent accident; but it seems like a white-curtained room with a little breeze blowing the curtain in, and outside you hear the rattle and mutter of the city, as though it were making comments on the matter in a hoarse undertone. A broad white bed is near the wall, the doctor and nurse are sometimes in and out of the room, and on the pillows is a thin white face with the hair drawn neatly back. The lips are moving with a faint sound, and the eyes look out softly and peacefully, at me kneeling beside, and my father sitting with his chin on his crutch and his beard rumpled. There is a lost look in his eyes, wide and lonely; like a man under whom a ship is going down at sunset, who sees the sun for the last time and the red clouds doing his burial service. My mother is speaking; her voice is not like any sound that seems natural to the earth, but thin, creeping, and slow, like the mists you see in the early morning that cling and whisper to slack sails.
“You were always my big boy, Tom,” she says, “like Ben, only bigger.”
“Ben's growing,” says my father, hoarsely.
“You'll not remember it against me, Ben, for it was not I. And he shall go to sea, Tom, remember, like all the Bensons and Crees, all sailing folk and proud to be, proud to be all sailing folk. But I'm glad you're not a woman, Ben, for the sea's hard on women, very hard.” When I went to school in the brick schoolhouse on Willet Street I studied Latin in a green-covered book of selections, which for the most part I greatly disliked. There was a passage ending with these words, “sunt lacrimæ rerum”; and what “lacrimæ rerum” means I find less easy to say in common English than I did then, when we called it “the tears of things,” and appeared to satisfy the master with that. But now I suppose it might mean, there is a hidden sorrow in the middle of God's universe that likely has been there always. However it may be, I suppose it quite beyond a plain man to describe his idea of the matter. But whenever I think of those words, “lacrimæ rerum,” they sound to me as if spoken in my mother's voice, sighing, plaintive, and moving away from me; or as if she might have meant the same thing in saying, “The sea's hard on women, very hard.”
The wind blew the curtain in so that it wavered in the room. “Lacrimæ rerum. The sea's hard on women,” a kind of sighing sound that moved far and far away.
It was now come to the latter part of November, and about the middle of a certain morning I heard Tony calling my name. At my coming he winked in a manner to make me think he knew all about something, only that he always winked to show his knowingness, whether he knew anything or not. He pointed with his thumb to the door of the inn parlour, where I went in, and found my father sitting with the three strangers.
Their names, as I came to hear them, were these: the eldest, Captain Cavarly; the odd-looking one, Mr. Dan Morgan; and the third, Mr. Sabre Calhoun—a curious name, and he was tall and thin, and, like his name, not to be quickly forgotten. Indeed, he was a man I never understood, and, seeing that I came to have such chances of knowing him as do not commonly fall between men, there must have been something odd with him or with me. He had sandy hair, and grey eyes that seemed very lively and shrewd.
“I make you acquainted with these gentlemen,” said my father, “if the captain don't mind your hearing his yarn.”
“Shuly,” said he, with a fine wave of his hand. “Glad to know you.”
Mr. Calhoun nodded.
“Why, why,” said Mr. Morgan, looking at my red cheeks. “You ain't got any liver complaint. Well, sir, when I was so old I used to bust the seams o' my clo'es, an' it hurt my feelins te'ible. I grew like a yellow punkin, ve'y similar.”
The captain went on with the story, which my coming had interrupted.
“Well, sir, then I started for Washington in a hurry, to see the Sec'etary o' the Navy, an ol' gen'lman from hereabout 'ith a beard like a palm leaf fan, yes, sir; an' I said to him, 'Sir, this country is fairly leakin 'ith pat'iotism. Here's parties, that don't wish their names known for private reasons—say they're Baltimore parties, but they want me to tell you, 'Here's the Octarara in Baltimore docks, small and steady, steam ten knots, an' here's Cavarly an' Dan Morgan knowin' the coast better'n Webster's Primer consid'able. Let the Gove'nment commission her, an' Cavarly an' Dan'll raise the crew an' run her for high an' mighty? An' there you are, sir.' An' there he was, that ol' gen'lman 'ith the palm leaf beard, calm as a fish in his natchul element, an' me bustin' 'ith glory.
“'The Gove'nment doesn't commission privateers,' he says. 'Do I understand the parties offer this vessel to the Gove'nment? In that case——' Then I saw of co'se it would have to be all regular, an' quite right he was though too much like ref'ige'ated fish, an' I inte'upted him. 'The parties wouldn' be satisfied unless Morgan an' I sailed her, bein' sort of in it ourselves——'
“'In fact you are the parties,' said he.
“I said, 'Not altogther. But it would be like this, sir. If we offer the Octarara, an' the Gove'nment puts her in commission, and furnishes equipments, arms, ammunition, mess, the parties might see it was only right the Gov'n-ment should put in its own crew, quite regular, especially gunners, sir. Sir,' I said, 'I reckon I can take the Octarara into the back dooryard of Virginia closer'n most, but put it you wanted to target practice on the back door—I'm no gunner myself.'
“'Ah,' lie says, 'but you're not in the service now. That will of co'se be neces-sa'y. Well, sir, the Administ'ation appreciates your gen'osity,' he says. 'You'll convey the Administ'ation's thanks to these myste'ous parties,' he says, looking extraor'nary calm an' fishy. An' I goes back to Baltimore feelin' a trifle damp, but still pat'iotic. Well, sir, they're prompt at that Department, if they are damp. In three days I got orders to take the Octarara up here to be fitted out an' commissioned an' manned, an' instead of a family party there won't be but four Baltimore men aboard her.”
“They couldn't have anything that looked like privateering,” said my father, after a pause, “with a lot of Confederate privateers locked up in the Tombs here for piracy.”
“Tha's what I said to Dan. 'Twasn't reason to be sure. Dan wanted the family party; but he saw reason, an' brought the Octarara up, an' I came later, an' here we are, bustin' 'ith pat'iot-ism and ordered to Hampton Roads, maybe they know when. I don't myself.”
“Yes, sir,” broke in Mr. Morgan. “They do say huntin' blockade is like a dog after fleas, respectin' their liveliness, ve'y similar; him not knowin' where they are till he's bit.”
Captain Cavarly seemed to disapprove of this saying, glancing sharply at Mr. Morgan, whether because he felt it a slur on the navy, or for another reason, I could not guess at that time; moreover, they all now fell to looking at me inquiringly, which made me nervous and out of countenance.
“I'll have to refer you to the p'oper official, Mr. Cree,” said Cavarly.
“Ben, boy,” said my father, in a voice quickly growing husky, while his eyes looked dim and sad, “your uncle advises you ship naval apprentice, and he thinks you're as well not aboard the Saratoga as yet.”
“He's quite right, sir,” said Cavarly. “There was no favo'itism where I learned seamanship.”
“Man can't throw the necessa'y belayin' pins at his relative,” said Mr. Morgan. “It lace'ates the feelin's.”
“And Captain Cavarly is good enough to——”
“Oh, tha's all right, tha's all right.”
“He'll see if he can't get you a berth with him, if you like, Ben, supposing you feel that way.”
My father paused, looking troubled and uncertain, while Cavarly murmured, “Tha's all right,” soothingly, and Morgan, “Don' lace'ate the feelin's.”
For me, I felt bewildered, and my heart seemed to be pumping my head full of confusion, so that I stammered, saying I would go. Then Cavarly and Morgan and my father went on talking, while Calhoun sat quietly listening, and I was content enough to have no further notice taken of me.
So it came about that I went with my father and Captain Cavarly that afternoon, and climbed to a little upstairs office, where an orderly stood within the door; and there I was examined and entered a naval apprentice, with the privilege of full seamanship in a year, all the while in that state of excitement I would not have known the difference if they had listed me a porpoise with the privilege of becoming a whale.
And afterwards we went by ferry to the navy yard, and saw the Octarara lying in dock, two-masted, side-wheeled, as steaming vessels mostly were in those days; neat though small; it might be less than two hundred tons, but a wonder in my eyes and very threatening to the Southern Confederacy. There seemed to be little doing on the Octarara, though the yard was full of noise and bustle. We found Morgan playing a banjo in the cabin and singing:
“This world is full o' trouble an' sin;
Don' keep me mournin' here, 0 Lord!
Don' keep me mournin' long.”
“Howdy, Mr. Cree,” he said. “The cap'en, he's troubled because we ain' goin' to be fit in time to crush the Southern Confede'acy. It's the sins an' sorrows o' this world troubles me. 'Don' keep me mournin' long.' Your son, sir, hasn't the liver complaint?”
And, seeing Cavarly looking at him uneasily, he fell to playing his banjo again.
The captain's trouble, which Morgan spoke of, lest the Octarara should not be fit in time to crush the Confederacy, seemed to me more and more natural. For the weeks went by, and the yard all the time rushed with work, and it seemed a slight on the Octarara, that wonderful craft, that they passed her by in the way of preparation. December slipped away. On Christmas Day my father had the captains, Morgan and Calhoun, up to a handsome dinner, where there was great exchange of cordiality, and much grumbling at the delay, with great comfort taken out of the grumbling.
It was notable how gladly we listened to Calhoun. The captain particularly seemed to ponder on what he said, and turn it over in his mind, as if looking for a secret meaning. The great variety of Calhoun's information was odd in one not very old in years, and especially his knowledge of foreign lands and seas, trade lines and ocean navigation at large, whereas I gathered that Cavarly had never been beyond coasting trade.
Calhoun in his talk let himself be easily led to speak of the South Atlantic, and what amount of American shipping was found there. And all through it ran the stream of his personal adventure, from which I thought, even so early in my knowledge of him, that seldom was so foolhardy a man, to walk into any danger or adventure, wherever he could find it, and walk out again when ready to do so. Indeed, I think this of Calhoun, and may say so now, that he was never so pleased and satisfied, as when edging along in some peculiar and perilous circumstance, and that he would go far out of his way to find that circumstance. It is a secret hid in the nature of many that they love nothing better than the chance to fight skilfully for their own lives, and seek this chance by jungles, glaciers, and high seas. But I never knew one who sought it more inquisitively than Calhoun.
In January Cavarly went away, and was gone, it might be, a week, but whether to Washington or Baltimore he did not say. Morgan said he was “after a list of Southern cities desirable to bombard.”
And it was the 17th of February when we stood out into the river at last. My father was among a crowd of people cheering on the dock in the Wall about Canal.
The wind was blowing bitter and cold, and cakes of ice were floating about us, as we slid into the bay after a tug that made a great swash and tumult in front. But the sky was as clear as if it were the first and newest of all days.