“I'll write to Dorcas,” I said, getting up. “I seem to have run through my usefulness.” While I was writing in the cabin I could hear the chain and wheel where the crew was hauling in anchor. The hands of the cabin clock pointed to one o'clock.
Had Mrs. Ulswater contracted a habit of coups-d'état? Certainly her riot didn't look like workings of infallible good sense.
CHAPTER XXXI—SUSANNAH—END OF THE VOYAGE OF THE VIOLETA
IF Mrs. Ulswater, then, had planned her riot in order to make my position in Portate untenable—as a sort of explosion of blasting powder to loosen me from South America, it seemed reckless. It was not like her to make a mess of a man's business in order to please only a notion of hers to have him in her floating asylum. She had had, as I remembered her, a curious awe of business. It was implanted in her, I supposed, by Mr. Mink of Ohio. One would say offhand, of course, that she had meant, by these incendiary proclamations, merely to frighten the Mayor into releasing me, and had not seen beyond that. Of course, that might be the case.
But when I asked her just what was the extent of her plan, she seemed reserved, and wanted to talk of settling somewhere in the States again. She thought Portate a past issue. She wouldn't say whether or not her conscience was clear about the riot, but she didn't seem to be troubled. She was figuring about what kind of place would interest Dr. Ulswater to live in.
We were to go first to San Francisco, where the doctor meant to ship Hannah Atkins to the Eastern museum for which he collected. She asked my advice about a place to settle in. Doctor Ulswater was fond of unsettled travelling and might be hard to satisfy. She didn't find my advice of much use. I judge there were too many rolling waves of moonlit imagination in it. Something seemed to be lacking, but she wouldn't say what the flaw was. I suspected she wasn't precisely stating the nature of her aim and purpose. She began to consult Sadler instead of me, and I took to running down Hannah Atkins to Dr. Ulswater, so as to induce his eloquence, calling her obsolete and stolid, or criticising the way she'd been laid out rather hunched up; and he would pour out South-American archaeology till everybody took a new interest in life. All you had to do to start him, like a spring flood in a thirsty land, was to begin something like this:
“Of course,” you'd say, “I'm not real well acquainted with mummies, and I'll take your word Hannah's a good specimen of her kind, only I'd call her laying out pretty economic and bunchy; and of course she's not in it with an Egyptian mummy for a minute, but we won't quarrel about that, though on the outside she's pretty much like a bag of meal, and when opened up, the difference is all in favour of the bag of meal; but that isn't the point—-” and so on. Give him an opening, and he'd shed knowledge like rain off a roof, till you felt glad to be alive.
Or else I would go off with Susannah and help her write her poem on me. That poetry was so candid that it got away from me. It soared off on the wings of truth, and dealt too much with pure facts. My nose not being straight, it stated the fact, not brutally, but simply. Any weakness I had, and there was a rhyme for it, down it went, and if there wasn't a rhyme, she just planted it in the beginning of the line instead of at the end. Technical difficulties never balked her of that. There were one thousand, two hundred and fourteen lines before we got to California. I wouldn't take a fortune for that poem. It was more than a photograph. It fitted me like the skin of a snake. But that's not its main value.