Portuguese Joe was a totally different being the next morning from the besotted wretch that I had seen the day before. Fat and pompous, dressed as if to attend a fancy ball, he paraded up and down the seamens’ rendezvous, interviewing a captain here, stopping for a tête-à-tête with another boarding master or a runner there, and scowling haughtily at the common sailors who ventured to approach him.
Joe was a fair example of the type that is the visitation of seamen ashore. Jack Tar is the most prodigal of existing beings, either with the earnings in his pocket or with those he has yet to toil for, and he bears with far too much resignation the knavery of these shipping masters. With all its romance, life on the ocean wave is a dreary and precarious enough existence to the man before the mast, yet many are the nations that enhance the misery of his lot by tolerating these human sharks and their nefarious practices in their ports. When Jack comes ashore, his one desire, in most cases, is to spend his accumulated earnings as soon as possible. At sea, money is the most worthless of commodities. The man in the forecastle on a long voyage would not sell his share of the soggy “plum-duff” that comes with his Sunday dinner for a month’s wages in cash. Small wonder, then, that he is lavish with his pounds and shillings during his few days ashore, and that he rarely thinks of shipping again until his last coin is spent. It is then that the careless prodigal falls an easy prey to Portuguese Joe and his ilk. Joe boasted of “never having done a tap of work” in his life. His mixture of Portuguese and negro blood had made him a tolerably quick-witted fellow, with considerable tact, as that quality goes among seafaring men. He had picked up a practicable use of most of the European languages, and enough knowledge of the niceties of French law to know how far he could go with impunity in fleecing his victims. In various ways he had ingratiated himself with captains and the agents of ships sailing from Marseilles, until he had become one of several absolute monarchs in that port over slow-witted, spendthrift Jack Tar. Was business going badly? Then Joe was down aboard some ship talking his way with his oily tongue into a seat at the captain’s table. Were sailors in demand? Then he was picking them up everywhere, giving them a meal or two, and shipping them off with nothing but a bag of ragged “gear” to show for the month or six weeks’ advance on their wages, which he hastened back to throw on the gambling table or to spend in the nasty vices of a great seaport. To be sure, some of this money would have gone the same way if the sailor had received it. But one could more easily have tolerated its squandering by the man who had undergone the sufferings and privations of a long voyage to earn it, and at least we “beachcombers” should have been spared the sight of Portuguese Joe and his cronies, strutting back and forth across the Place Victor Gélu, and putting their heads together to evolve new schemes for robbing other victims.
There were few accommodations in Joe’s hovel, and on the second day I was transferred to a seamens’ boarding house in the dingy backwater of the Avenue de la République. The establishment was run by Joe’s brother, a burly mulatto known in all the lower quarters of the city as “Portuguese Pete” who, like his brother, lay claim to no family name; and by his wife, a slatternly white woman of French parentage. In the windowless upper story were a score of foul nests that ranked as beds. The one to which I was assigned was a broken-backed cot. After a vain attempt to sleep, doubled up like a pocketknife, amid the uproar of my roommates, who were snoring in several languages, I crept down stairs to borrow a plank from the kitchen wood-pile, and propping up the pallet, fell asleep. Some time must have passed, for I was in deep slumber and not even the house cat was stirring, when the cot, mattress, bedding, and prop came down with a crash that certainly awakened the policeman in the next block, and left me entangled in a Gordian knot of sheets and counterpanes of the width of a ship’s hawser. I slept on the floor during the rest of my stay with Portuguese Pete.
There was one advantage—and one only—gained by the change from the Asile to this new lodging. The habits of Pete and his spouse were by no means as austere as those of the monks who turned us out into the cold, grey dawn. The meals we were to pay so dearly for, when we shipped, were on a par with the sleeping accommodations. Each morning, after taking turns in pounding on the proprietor’s door for an hour or two, we usually succeeded in inducing his consort to descend, in négligé and a vicious temper, to serve us each a cup of tepid water with a smell of chickory about it, and a wedge of bread. At noon and night we did duty alternately before the black, smoky fire-place, in assisting Madame Pete to prepare the soup and macaroni that were served in painfully meager quantities with bread and brackish wine. Like the pupils of Squeers, we dared not ask for more, lest we call down upon our heads the mighty wrath of Pete.
Pete spoke a cosmopolitan language, an Esperanto of his own making, concocted from all the tongues represented around his board, with no partiality or predeliction for any particular one. He who did not know at least French, English, Italian, and Portuguese or Spanish, with something of the patois of Provence, had small chance of catching more than the drift of Pete’s remarks. English words with Italian endings, Portuguese words with a French pronunciation, French words that started out well enough but ended with a nondescript grunt, all uttered in a voice that made the rafters ring and the wine-glasses on the table dance excitedly, were the daily accompaniments of our gatherings. Yet Pete, with all his bellow, was the exact antithesis of his brother. He had spent years before the mast and had been rated an excellent sailor, before he drifted into Marseilles and became the understudy of unscrupulous Joe. He was as slow of wit as the seamen who quailed before his wife’s bleary eye—and as for tact! The only influence or coercion which Pete could bring to bear on those of his fellow-men who did not heed the roar of his mighty voice were his no less mighty fists. More than once he had threatened, like the giant Antiguan, to use these powerful arguments on his brother’s anatomy; for Joe had never hesitated, when there was something to be gained by it, to entrap Pete in the meshes of his Machiavelian plots. As when, during a season of sharp demand for sailors, he had generously served Pete with “knock-out drops,” dragged him on board a ship bound for the fever-infected, west-African coast, and made merry with the two months’ advance offered for any seaman that could be captured. But Joe let himself be caught only in the glare of daylight and on the public squares, and there the wrath of Pete and many another who had fought his way back to Marseilles with the avowed intention of throttling the rascally half-breed, had vanished at the sound of that oily tongue. Pete was kind-hearted and prodigal by nature, and years in the forecastle had by no means cured him of these faults. Those who knew told tales of his favors to boarders and of the groaning of his table in the days of prosperity. But evil times had fallen on Marseilles and, like my fellow-boarders, I always left Pete’s hovel with a gnawing hunger, and divided my days between following the clue of some job and wandering with envious eyes through the market-places.
The band that rose from our table to follow Pete to the ship-chandler’s office or to tramp at Joe’s heels, by night or by day, to the far end of the breakwater, in pursuit of a rumor that a ship was “signing on,” was as variegated in experience as in color. Two hulking, good-hearted Baltimore negroes were the heroes of the party. In a strike riot of two months before they had been arrested for killing a gendarme, a crime of which they were really, though unintentionally, guilty. The prosecution, however, had not succeeded in proving a case against them. The older had been sentenced to sixty days and the younger, who had been shot during the mélée, was left to recuperate in the city hospital. They burst in upon us almost at the same time during my first days at Pete’s, and took the head of the board at once. Two nights later the hospital patient—a youth of nineteen—gave an exhibition of cool, collected grit that is rarely equaled even among seafaring men. A half-dozen of us had stepped into a cabaret in the unconventional section of the city. A quarrel began over some question of racial dislike. In the free-for-all battle that ensued an Italian drew a long, double-edged sheath knife and sprang for the youth from Baltimore. The latter had scarcely finished knocking down another assailant but, without stepping aside ever so little, he calmly grasped the finely ground blade in his left hand, and while the blood gushed down his forearm, as the Italian strove to twist the knife out of his grip of iron, he drew from his hip-pocket a razor, opened it behind his back as tranquilly as for a morning shave, and slashed his opponent from ear to chin. With the Italian’s necktie bound tightly around his wrist, he marched homeward, singing plantation ballads at the top of his voice, washed his mutilated palm in a bucket, tied it up with the tail of a shirt, and sallied forth in quest of new adventures.
As near-heroes, there was a stocky little Spaniard, once a banderillero, who had abandoned the bull-ring for the forecastle with a dozen scars from sharp horns on his neck and body. His tales were rivaled by a Jamaican negro, the only survivor of a shipwrecked crew, who had risen to power in a South-Sea island, and by an Australian who was credited with having thirty-six wives. An Italian who had been on the operatic stage—what for, we could not find out; a Finn who chewed tobacco while he ate; and a runaway boy from Madeira, who flooded his macaroni with tears so regularly that his portion was always served unsalted, were likewise on exhibition. Then there was “Antoine de la Ceinture” (Tony of the Belt). Tony was one of the last-but-not-least sort. Were we bound for the chandler’s office? Then Tony could be trusted to bring up the rear. Was dinner late in being served? It was because Tony had not yet put in an appearance. Was Joe lining us up for inspection before some skipper? Then everyone knew without looking that it was Tony who answered to his name at the end of the line. But Tony’s most remarkable feature was his belt. Many of the workmen of France wear in lieu of suspenders, long, gaily-colored sashes. Yet no belt in the length and breadth of France could rival Tony’s. It was as red as the blood that flowed on the night of the mélée—when Tony had lived up to his reputation by being the farthest from the center of action;—it was a good yard wide and longer than the longest royal brace ever rove through a block; and forty times each day Tony must unwind it from around his waist, give an end to one of us, with a warning to keep it stretched to its full width, and march off down the street with the other end. There he would take the first turn around his body, pull the sash taut; and with a flutter of coat-tails and arms, up the street would come Tony, spinning round and round as if carried along by a whirlwind, until he reached his temporary valet, when he would heave a sigh of regret because the belt was not longer, or brighter, or wider, or didn’t make him look enough like the spool on which a bolt of cloth is wound, or for some other reason quite beyond our comprehension; and, tucking in the end, would tag at the queue of our company to some other section of the city, there to unwind and wind himself up again.
My entrance into Paris in the corduroy garb and with the usual amount of baggage of the first months of the trip
