"Glauber's Academy"—"Einstein's Restaurant"—"Herald Square"—
I can't tell you how bizarrely those half-fabulous names fell from Signet's lips in the turquoise and gold of the afternoon. It was like the babble of some monstrous and harmless mythology. And all the while, as he kicked his bare heels on the deckhouse and harassed me with his somnolent greed for "talk," one could see him wondering, wondering, in the back of his mind. So he would have been wondering through all the hours of weeks, months—it had come to the dignity of years, on the beach, in the bush—wondering more than ever under the red iron roof of the Dutchman: "What in hell am I doing here? What in hell?"
A guttersnipe, pure and simple. That's to say, impure and unpleasantly complex. It was extraordinary how it stuck. Even with nothing on but a pair of cotton pants swimming out to me among the flashing bodies of the islanders, men, women, girls, youths, who clung to the anchor cable and showed their white teeth for pilot biscuit, condensed milk, and gin—especially gin—even there you could see Signet, in imagination, dodging through the traffic on Seventh Avenue to pick the Telegraph Racing Chart out of the rubbish can under the Elevated.—
I hadn't an idea who the fellow was. He burst upon me unheralded. I sail out of west-coast ports, but once I had been in New York. That was enough for him. He was "pals" in ten minutes; in fifteen, from his eminence on the deckhouse, with a biscuit in one hand and a tumbler of much-diluted Hollands in the other, he gazed down at his erstwhile beach fellows with almost the disdainful wonder of a tourist from a white ship's rail.—
"Gi' me an article you can retail at a nickel—any little thing everybody needs—or gi' me a song with a catchy chorus—something you can turn out on them ten-cent records.—That makes me. Don't want any Wall Street stuff. That's for Rockefeller and the boobs. But just one time le' me catch on with one little old hunch that'll go in vaudeville or the pi'tures—get Smith and Jones diggin' for the old nickel.—That makes me. Then the line can move up one. That's the thing about New York. Say, man, len' me a cigarette.—But that's the thing about Broadway. When you make, you make big. I know a guy turned out a powder-puff looked like a lor'nette—a quarter of a dollar. You know how the Janes'll fall for a thing like that—"
It was completely preposterous, almost uncomfortable. It made a man look around him. On the schooner's port side spread the empty blue of the South Pacific; the tenuous snowdrift of the reef, far out, and the horizon. On the starboard hand, beyond the little space of the anchorage, curved the beach, a pink-white scimitar laid flat. Then the scattering of thatched and stilted huts, the red, corrugated-iron store, residence and godowns of the Dutch trader, the endless Indian-file of coco palms, the abrupt green wall of the mountain.—A twelve-year-old girl, naked as Eve and, I've no doubt, thrice as handsome, stood watching us from the mid-decks in a perfection of immobility, an empty milk tin propped between her brown palms resting on her breast. Twenty fathoms off a shark fin, blue as lapis in the shadow, cut the water soundlessly. The hush of ten thousand miles was disturbed by nothing but that grotesque, microscopic babbling:
"Say you play in bad luck. Well, you can't play in bad luck f'rever. Not if you're wise. One time I get five good wheezes. Good ones! Sure fire! One of 'em was the old one about the mother-'n-law and the doctor, only it had a perfectly novel turn to it. Did I make? I did not. Why? Well, a good friend o' mine lifts them five wheezes, writes a vaudeville turn around 'em, and makes big. Big! What does that learn me? Learns me to go bear on friendship. So next time I get an idea—"
The girl had put the milk tin down between her toes on deck and turned her head.
"Digger!" I called to the mate. "Clear the vessel! Shove them all overboard! Here comes the Dutchman!"
Before the advance of the trader's canoe, painted vermillion like his establishment and flying over the water under the paddle strokes of his six men, Signet took himself hastily overboard with the rest. There was no question of protest or false pride. Over he went. Rising and treading water under the taffrail, and seeing the trader still some fathoms off, he shook the wet from the rag of a beard with which long want of a razor had blurred his peaked chin and gathered up the ends of the conversation: