Many of the guests at the Manager's table had now resumed their poise. Some at the farther end resumed conversation, overlooking the story-teller and wondering a little at his bad form to monopolize the talk of the complaisant dinner humor. But some of the men nearest the Manager still listened and the old Captain watched them with his dark bright eyes, eyes which seemed to sparkle like diamonds in the light. They were the eyes which had pointed the way to many millions of dollars' worth of cargo, many thousand passengers, and they watched over them through many a wild and stormy night upon the bridge of his ship in mid-ocean where the mind has much time to ponder over the methods, the ethics of the commercial human.
"I found him at the hospital," went on Cone. "He was shaky, but he fought his weakness back and went home at the end of two weeks to find his wife down with pneumonia and the house full of famished children."
Cone stopped speaking for a moment and gazed across the table at the polished buffet, seeming to see something in the mirror back of it. The Manager looked up, saw his gaze and spoke:
"I know there's lots of hardships, Captain," said he, "and I don't lay it all to the drink habit. Let your glass be filled—what?"
"Pardon me," said the old seaman. "I am old and forgetting my story—I was just thinking a bit. This is not a temperance lecture at all—no, no, that is not what I was thinking of." And he gazed at the prohibitionist across the board who was fingering his napkin.
"No, the thing that I was coming to is this. Jones found things in a desperate condition at his home. He must have money. It was an absolute necessity to have medical attendance at once for his wife, and he dreaded the free ward of the hospitals—he had gone into one once himself and knew what it meant. He must have money for his children."
"A man might steal under those conditions without being very bad," interrupted a man sitting next to him.
"That isn't what he did," said the old Captain. "He met a friend on the street while on his way to a pawnshop—and the friend heard his tale. His friend was a bank messenger, at least he was carrying the proceeds of a ship's cargo in a bag. You see, in those days, captains were allowed to collect freights at certain points, being in the companies, and these moneys were carried aboard the ship until she reached her home port. Sometimes there were many thousand dollars. This friend had been with Jones in the old days and he knew his history. The money he carried was freights from an oil ship just arrived. There was fifteen thousand dollars of it in gold, and it was the property of the very corporation which had squeezed Jones and ruined him. Well, the friend did the obvious, did the human thing. He opened the bag and gave Jones just five hundred dollars in gold and then went along to try and fix the matter up with the firm—it required lying—that is bad; it required many other things which we will not discuss here, but they are eminently bad, bad as they can be—and by dint of lying, and pilfering, and—well, the friend made good the loss without ever getting found out—yes, a horrible example, I admit. He made good the five hundred and no one ever knew he was a thief. No one knows to this day—except—anyway, Jones saved his wife, and at the end of the money the friend helped him to buy into a schooner and he got command. They paid twenty-five per cent. in those days and he pulled out making enough to save the rest from abject poverty."
"But you don't mean you approve of that fellow, that thief who appropriated other people's money, his employers' money, do you?" asked the Manager in amazement. "The thing for him to have done was to have gone to the firm and stated the case, told of the poverty of Jones, told how he should be helped. No human being would have refused him."
"On the contrary, the friend did just those things—afterward—and as I said before, corporations know no laws but their own. They are relentless as the laws of Nature, as implacable as the laws of health. Go where there is cholera, get the germ into your system, and you will understand what I mean. No human feeling, no sympathy—nothing will save you but your own powers of resistance. You will necessarily die unless you can stand it. Most people die. And it may be right to have things this way—I don't know, I don't set up as a judge; I am a sailor. But I am human—and I don't hate my neighbor, I don't look upon my friend as my enemy. Perhaps I am wrong. Still the thief in this case suffered much. He was for years afraid of being found out. That shows the whole horrible futility of it all. He suffered more than Jones, for Jones knew from where the money came, knew it was money which by his judgment should have gone to him anyway. Jones refused to pay it back and wanted to publish the fact that he had gotten even with the corporation to the extent of five hundred dollars.