“And now let me see what you owe me, and then we’ll be able to square the yards, Monsieur Redburn.”
“Owe him!” Melville confesses to thinking; “what do I owe him but a grudge.” But Melville concealed his resentment. Presently Captain Riga said: “By running away from the ship in Liverpool, you forfeited your wages, which amount to twelve dollars; and there has been advanced to you, in money, hammers and scrapers, seven dollars and seventy-five cents; you are therefore indebted to me for precisely that sum. I’ll thank you for the money.” He extended his open palm across the desk.
The precise nature of Melville’s eloquence at this juncture of his career has not been recorded. Penniless, he left the ship, to trail after his shipmates as they withdrew along the wharf to stop at a sailors’ retreat, poetically denominated “The Flashes.” Here they all came to anchor before the bar.
“Well, maties,” said one of them, at last—“I s’pose we shan’t see each other again:—come, let’s splice the mainbrace all round, and drink to the last voyage.”
And so they did. Then they shook hands all round, three times three, and disappeared in couples through the several doorways.
Melville stood on the corner in front of “The Flashes” till the last of his shipmates was out of sight. Then he walked down to the Battery, and within a stone’s throw of the place of his birth, sat on one of the benches, under the summer shade of the trees. It was a quiet, beautiful scene, he says; full of promenading ladies and gentlemen; and through the fresh and bright foliage he looked out over the bay, varied with glancing ships. “It would be a pretty fine world,” he thought, “if I only had a little money to enjoy it.” He leaves it ambiguous whether or not he imbibed his optimism at “The Flashes.” Equally veiled does he leave the mystery by which he came by the money to pay his passage on the steamboat up to Albany: a trip he took that afternoon. “I pass over the reception I met with at home; how I plunged into embraces, long and loving,” he says:—“I pass over this.”
For the home we return to, is never the home that we leave, and the more desperate the leave-taking, the more bathetic the return.
CHAPTER VI
PEDAGOGY, PUGILISM AND LETTERS
“It is often to be observed, that as in digging for precious metals in the mines, much earthly rubbish has first to be troublesomely handled and thrown out; so, in digging in one’s soul for the fine gold of genius, much dulness and common-place is first brought to light. Happy would it be, if the man possessed in himself some receptacle for his own rubbish of this sort: but he is like the occupant of a dwelling, whose refuse cannot be clapped into his own cellar, but must be deposited in the street before his own door, for the public functionaries to take care of.”