“You’m an open-handed chap, wherever you’ve comed from,” said Merryweather Chugg, “an’ us all drinks long life an’ good health to you an’ yours, if so be you’m a family man.”
“I’ll come to that,” answered Mr. Bates. “Let me sit by the fire, will ’e? I do love the smell of the peat, an’ where I come from, us don’t trouble about fires, I assure ’e, for a body can catch heat from the sun all the year round.”
“You was always finger-cold in winter,” said Mr. Pearn. “I mind as a boy your colour never altered from blue in frosty weather, an’ you had a chilblain wheresoever a chilblain could find room for itself.”
“’Tis so; an’ when I runned away to mend my fortune, ’twas the knowledge that a certain ship were sailing down to the line into hot weather as made me go for a sailor. To Plymouth docks I went when I ran off, an’ there met a man at the Barbican as axed me to come for cabin-boy; an’ when he said they was going where the cocoanuts comed from, I said I’d go.”
“My dear life!” murmured Mrs. Capern,—“to think what little things do make or mar a fortune!”
“’Tis so;—a drop of rum cold, mother, then I’ll start on my tale. An’ I may as well say that every word be true, for Providence have so dealt by me that to tell a falsehood is the last thing ever I would do.”
“Not but what you used to lie something terrible when you was young, Bob,” said Mr. Pearn, from the corner.
“I know it, Jacob,” answered the traveller; “an’ hard though you hit, you never hit hard enough to cure me of lying. ’Tis a damned vice, an’ I never yet told a fib as paid for telling. But ’twasn’t you cured me; ’twas a man by the name of Mistley, the bo’sun of the ship I sailed in. I told un a stramming gert lie, an’ he found it out, an’—well, if you want to know what a proper dressing-down be, you ax a seafaring man to lay it on. In them days they didn’t reckon they’d begun till they’d drawed blood out of ’e; an’ so often as not they’d give ’e a bucket of salt water down your back arter, just so as you shouldn’t forget where they’d been busy. One such hiding I got from Mistley, an’ never wanted another. I’d so soon have told that man a second lie as I’d told God one to His shining face. An’ long after, to show I don’t bear no malice, when I fell on my feet, I went down to the port when my old ship comed in again two years later, an’ in my pocket was five golden pounds for Mistley. Only he’d gone an’ died o’ yellow jack in the meantime down to the Plate, so he never got it. An’ you boys there, remember what I say, an’ never tell no lies if you want to get on an’ pocket good wages come presently. ’Tis more than thirty years ago, an’ the man that did it dust; yet I wriggles my shoulders an’ feels the flesh crawl on my spine to this day when I thinks of it.
“But I’m gwaine too fast, for I haven’t sailed from Plymouth yet. Us went off in due course, an’ I seed the wonders of the deep, an’ I can’t say I took to ’em; but there—I’d gone for a sailor, an’ a sailor I thought ’twould have to be. Us got to a place by name of Barbados in the West Indies presently—Bim for short. A flat pancake of an island, with not much to tell about ’cept that there’s only a bit of brown paper between it an’ a billet I hope none of us won’t never go to. Hot as—as need be, no doubt; but there was better to come, for presently we ups anchor an’ away to St. Vincent—a place as might make you think heaven couldn’t be better; an’ then down to Grenada, another island so lovely as a fairy story; an’ then Trinidad—where the Angostura bitters comes from, Mrs. Capern—an’ then a bit of a place by name of Tobago, as you could put down on Dartymoor a’most an’ leave some to double up all round. Yet, ’pon that island, neighbours, I’ve lived my life, an’ done my duty, I hope, an’ got well thought upon by black, white an’ brindled; for in them islands I should tell you the people be most every shade you could name but green. Butter-coloured, treacle-coloured, putty-coloured, saffron-coloured, peat-coloured, an’ every colour; an’ sometimes, though a chap may have the face of a nigger—lips an’ nose an’ wool an’ all—yet he’ll be so white as a dog’s tooth; an’ you know there’s blood from Europe hid in him somewheres. They’m a mongrel people; yet they’ve got souls—just as much as they Irish-Americans; an’ God He knows if they’ve got souls, there’s hope for everything—down to a scorpion. My own wife, as I’ve left out in Tobago with my family—well, I wouldn’t go for to call her black; an’ for that matter I knocked a white man off the wharf to Scarborough in Tobago, who did say so; but you folks to home—I dare swear you’d think her was a thought nigger-like, owing to a touch of the tar-brush, as we call it, long ways back in her family history. But as good a woman—wife an’ mother—as ever feared God an’ washed linen. A laundress, neighbours—lower than me by her birth, so my master said; then I laughed in his face, an’ told un I was a workhouse boy as couldn’t name no father but God A’mighty. A nice little bungy, round-about woman, wi’ butivul black eyes, an’ so straight in her vartue as a princess. Never a man had no better wife, an’ her’d have come to see old Dartymoor along with me but for my family, as be large an’ all sizes.
“Well, to Tobago it was that, lending a hand to help lade a Royal Mail Steam Packet as comed in—just to make a shilling or two while we was idle, I got struck down. Loading wi’ cocoanuts an’ turtle her was; an’ ’twould make you die o’ laughin’, souls, to have seen them reptiles hoisted aboard by their flippers. No laughing matter for them though, poor twoads, because, once they’m catched by moonlight ’pon the sandy beaches there, ’tis a very poor come-along-of-it for ’em. Not a bit more food do they have, but just be shipped off home in turtle-troughs an’ make the best weather they can. Us had a stormy journey back last fortnight, an’ I knowed by the turtle-soup o’ nights that the creatures were dying rapid an’ somebody had made a bad bargain. But if you gets the varmints home alive, they be worth a Jew’s eye.