Tramping on Life. Harry 1883-1960 Kemp
took me days of talk with the gang—boasting—and nights of dreaming, to screw myself up to the right pitch.
Then, one afternoon, in high disgust over my usual quarrel with the English teacher, I returned to my room determined to leave for the New York waterfront that same afternoon. …
I left a note for my father informing him that I had made up my mind to go to sea, and that he needn't try to find me in order to fetch me home again. I wished him good luck and good-bye.
Into my grip I cast a change of clothes, and a few books: my Cæsar and Vergil in the Latin, Young's Night Thoughts, and Shelley.
South Street … here were ships … great tall fellows, their masts dizzy things to look up at.
I came to a pier where two three-masted barks lay, one on either side. First I turned to the one on the right because I saw two men up aloft. And there was a boy passing down the deck, carrying a pot of coffee aft. I could smell the good aroma of that coffee. Ever since, the smell of coffee makes me wish to set out on a trip somewhere.
"Hey, Jimmy," I shouted to the boy.
"Hey, yourself!" he replied, coming belligerently to the side. Then, "what do ye want?"
"To go to sea. Do you need anybody aboard for the voyage?"
He looked scornfully at me, as I stood there, skinny, shadow-thin.
"You go to hell!" he cried. Then he resumed his way to the cabin, whistling.
The ship opposite, I inspected her next. It was grand with the figurehead of a long, wooden lady leaning out obliquely with ever-staring eyes, her hands crossed over her breasts.
Aboard I went, down the solitude of the deck. I stopped at the cook's galley. I had gone there because I had seen smoke coming out of the little crooked pipe that stood akimbo.
I looked in at the door. A dim figure developed within, moving about among pots and pans. It was the cook, I could tell by the white cap he wore … an old, very old man. He wore a sleeveless shirt. His long skinny, hairy arms were bare. His long silvery-grey beard gave him an appearance like an ancient prophet. But where the beard left off there was the anomaly of an almost smooth, ruddy face, and very young, straight-seeing, blue eyes.
When I told the old cook what I wanted, he invited me in to the galley and reached me a stool to sit on.
"The captain isn't up yet. He was ashore on a jamboree last night. You'll see him walking up and down the poop when he's hopped out of his bunk and eaten his breakfast."
The cook talked about himself, while I waited there. I helped him peel a pail of potatoes. …
Though I heard much of strange lands and far-away ports, he talked mostly of the women who had been in love with him … slews of them … "and even yet, sixty-five years old, I can make a good impression when I want to … I had a girl not yet twenty down in Buenos Ayres. She was crazy about me … that was only two years ago."
He showed me pictures of the various women, in all parts of the world, that had "gone mad about him" … obviously, they were all prostitutes. He brought out a batch of obscene photographs, chuckling over them.
It was a German ship—the Valkyrie. But the cook spoke excellent English, as did, I later found out, the captain, both the mates, and all but one or two of the crew.
Before the captain came up from below the cook changed the subject from women to history. In senile fashion, to show off, he recited the names of the Roman emperors, in chronological sequence. And, drawing a curtain aside from a shelf he himself had built over his bunk, he showed me Momsen's complete history of Rome, in a row of formidable volumes.
"There's the captain now!"
A great hulk of a man was lounging over the rail of the poop-deck, looking down over the dock.
I started aft.
"Hist!" the cook motioned me back mysteriously. "Be sure you say 'Sir' to him frequently."
"Beg pardon, sir. But are you Captain Schantze, sir?" (the cook had told me the captain's name).
"Yes. What do you want?"
"I've heard you needed a cabin boy."
"Are you of German descent?"
"No, sir."
"What nationality are you, then?"
"American, sir."
"That means nothing, what were your people?"
"Straight English on my mother's side … Pennsylvania Dutch on my father's."
"What a mixture!"
He began walking up and down in seaman fashion. After spending several minutes in silence I ventured to speak to him again.
"Do you think you could use me, sir?"
He swung on me abruptly.
"In what capacity?"
"As anything … I'm willing to go as able seaman before the mast, if necessary."
He stopped and looked me over and laughed explosively.
"Able seaman! you're so thin you have to stand twice in one place to make a shadow … you've got the romantic boy's idea of the sea … but, are you willing to do hard work from four o'clock in the morning till nine or ten at night?"
"Anything, to get to sea, sir!"
"—sure you haven't run away from home?"
"No-no, sir!"
"Then why in the devil do you want to go to sea? isn't the land good enough?"
I took a chance and told the captain all about my romantic notions of sea-life, travel, and adventure.
"You talk just like one of our German poets."
"I am a poet," I ventured further.
The captain gave an amused whistle. But I could see that he liked me.
"To-morrow morning at four o'clock … come back, then, and Karl, the cabin boy, will start you in at his job. I'll promote him to boy before the mast."
I spent the night at Uncle Jim's house … he was the uncle that had come east, years before. He was married … a head-bookkeeper … lived in a flat in the Bronx.
He thought it was queer that I was over in New York, alone … when he came home from work, that evening. …
I could keep my adventure to myself no longer. I told him all about my going to sea. But did Duncan (my father) approve of it? Yes, I replied. But when I refused to locate the ship I was sailing on, at first Jim tried to bully me into telling. I didn't want my father to learn where I was, in case he came over to find me … and went up to Uncle Jim's. …
Then he began laughing at me.
"You've always been known for your big imagination and the things you make up … I suppose this is one of them."
"Let the boy alone," my aunt put in, a little dark woman of French and English ancestry, "you ought to thank God that he has enough imagination to make up stories … he might be a great writer some day."
"Imagination's all right. I'm not quarrelling with Johnnie for that. But you can't be all balloon and no ballast."
They made me up a bed on a sofa in the parlour … among all the bizarre chairs and tables that Uncle Jim had made from spools … Aunt Lottie still made dresses now and again … before she married Jim she had run a dressmaking establishment.
Uncle Jim set a Big Ben alarm clock down on one of the spool tables for me.
"I've set the clock for half-past three. That will give you half an hour to make your hypothetical ship in … you'll have to jump up and stop the clock, anyhow. It'll keep on ringing till you do."
My first morning on shipboard