All depends upon the character of the Captain, and we are re-assured upon that point the moment he steps ashore. He gives a ‘candy’ from his pocket to a child, and lifts his hat to one of the girls in a way that is unmistakeable as a sign of genuine respect.
He is unlike all other sea captains, past and present, if not to come. He is a young, blonde dandy, with his hair parted in the middle, regular features, and a silken moustache. These appearances would be altogether difficult to harmonise with his functions, but for the firm set of the lips, and the glance of the clear blue eye. His handkerchief is slightly scented—there cannot be a doubt of it, and he is above the suspicion of a quid. His speech sometimes betrays his origin, but does not, in the least, betray his calling. He ‘shivers’ no ‘timbers’—but none of them ever do that. He occasionally talks like a book, and rather like a book read aloud in class. This, however, is only when he has time to think of himself, and to behave at his best. At these moments, happily rare, his construction is anything but idiomatic; it is classically ornate. The Americanism appears in his puritanical anxiety to give every word, and every letter of every word, its full phonetic value. He extends the principles of the Declaration of Independence to his syllables, and makes them all free and equal, without a trace of accentuation that might render one the tyrant of the rest. His orthoepic constitution for the language, in short, is a constitution without a king. Yet he has the fear of Webster ever before his eyes, and that authority is evidently his Supreme Court.
We lodge him in our house, at my request. This, I believe, anticipates a desire of the Ancient, who, while awaiting fuller knowledge, wants to have him under his eye. He shares my chamber, and is accommodated with a spare bed therein. His crew, with one or two exceptions, abide on the ship, but they have shore leave, and, before they have it, so says the Ancient, who brought him off, he makes them a short speech, which is evidently remembered throughout their entire stay. He is a restless man. Almost as soon as he takes up his quarters under our roof, he leaves them; and, before sundown, he has walked all over the Island; has inquired into its systems of government, laws, agriculture, commerce, and manufactures; has recognised the clock as a gift from Chicago, the organ as a present from Salem; and has suggested improvements in nearly every process of industry, that would double the yield. He has also asked to see our newspaper; and, without waiting to learn that we do not possess such a thing, has offered us a bundle of journals of both hemispheres which, he says, may supply ‘items’ of interest for the compilation of the local sheet.
At first he was taciturn, or merely interrogatory; and he showed extreme caution in his communications to us. But, towards evening, all this disappeared, and his fluency, and readiness to relate his own story left nothing to be desired.
It was the typical American career of the past, and so, for all his freshness and alertness, I thought him an old-fashioned man. The new generation of Americans are mostly men of one career, as we are: this one was of half a dozen. He had begun life as an office boy, had been a real-estate agent, a lawyer, an editor of a newspaper, and was now a skipper, by what he considered a process of quite orderly development. He had sailed from San Francisco, and he was going to make the tour of the world, by way of Suez and the Mediterranean, Liverpool and New York. His ship was his own property, and her cargo was his pocket-money for the voyage. The Ancient asked him how he learned the trade of the sea, but he seemed unaware that there was a trade to learn. He could hardly remember a time when he did not know it, in its elements. As a boy, he used to sail a yacht about New York Bay; and he had served a year in a whaler, before the mast. At one time, he had thought of going into art.
How had he learned editing, then? That, too, he hardly knew. All crafts, he assured us, were governed by the same general principle of common sense. Editing a newspaper was but sailing a ship, under new conditions. You put your mind to it, and you rounded your back for the burden of your inevitable mistakes. If he had a natural turn, he thought, it was for scheming things, and getting down to first principles. In the course of his journalistic experiences, it had once been his duty to turn out a weekly column of jokes. He was not a joker by taste, nor by choice, but he could invent jokes, of course, if it had to be done. He studied out the principles of the thing, and he found that they lay in startling contrasts, and in startling similitudes. With a little practice, he soon became able to make a joke on anything—the inkstand on his desk, the rent in the carpet, the passing shower. He settled the points beforehand, and then worked up to them, straight and sharp. The failures came from ‘fooling around’ the subject. He made two or three jokes for us, as specimens. He did this with a perfectly grave face, apologising for a certain rustiness of habit due to his having been for some time out of that line. They were really very fair jokes; and, if we had not been so fully forewarned of the expected result, I think we might have laughed. They had to be ‘popped’ on you, as he explained. The Ancient promised to try them on Reuben, and our new acquaintance warranted they would make him gay. On the same general principle of observation, he had invented a way of simplifying a ship’s rig, saving 45 per cent. in cordage and blocks; and he promised to show us a model of it, made on the voyage.
By nightfall, we felt that he had exhausted us and our little island, and that he would fain be off. This, however, was impossible for the moment: the ship wanted more fresh provisions, and she was, besides, under slight repairs. It fretted him sorely, for he could not be still. Never did I see such feverish activity, such a passion for doing something. His meals were a mockery of Divine Providence; but, as he did not choke, he must have been reserved for special uses. In ten minutes he had disposed of fish, flesh, and his hunk of pie. Only a Rabelais could conceive the war of elements within. There was no rest in him, nor near him; he was busy all over the surface of life, with no sense of the true uses of any one thing. It was a sheer fury of industrial action, like the old Berserker fury of war. He worked for the love of it, as the children of Starkader fought; and he seemed to have no more profit of his labour than they of their shedding of blood. It seemed quite a triumph to get him to bed.
He slept in my room, as I have said, or he was to sleep. But he could not lay him down till he had analysed the composition of the mattress, and thrown out suggestions for a new kind of stuffing, to be made of something that grew wild at the foot of the Peak. In the midst of his discourse on this point, he fell asleep, as suddenly as though he had turned himself off at the main. I, too, dropped off in a few minutes, and I slept soundly for a few hours, until I was awakened, long before dawn, by the gleam of a candle in my eyes.
He, of course, had lit the candle; and he was sitting upright in bed, and peering intently, through an eyeglass, at something which he held betwixt his finger and thumb.
‘See here,’ he said, without any apology for waking me; ‘if that don’t beat all!’