Books: Nonsense Novels
S >>
Stephen Leacock >> Nonsense Novels
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 | 6 |
7 |
8
"Tompkins," said the Captain as the bosun's mate entered, "be good
enough to stand on the locker and stick your head through the stern
port-hole, and tell me what you think of the weather."
"Aye, aye, sir," replied the tar with a simplicity which caused us
to exchange a quiet smile.
Tompkins stood on the locker and put his head and shoulders out of
the port.
Taking a leg each we pushed him through. We heard him plump into
the sea.
"Tompkins was easy," said Captain Bilge. "Excuse me as I enter his
death in the log."
"Yes," he continued presently, "it will be a great help if they
mutiny. I suppose they will, sooner or later. It's customary to
do so. But I shall take no step to precipitate it until we have
first fallen in with pirates. I am expecting them in these latitudes
at any time. Meantime, Mr. Blowhard," he said, rising, "if you can
continue to drop overboard one or two more each week, I shall feel
extremely grateful."
Three days later we rounded the Cape of Good Hope and entered upon the
inky waters of the Indian Ocean. Our course lay now in zigzags and,
the weather being favourable, we sailed up and down at a furious rate
over a sea as calm as glass.
On the fourth day a pirate ship appeared. Reader, I do not know if
you have ever seen a pirate ship. The sight was one to appal the
stoutest heart. The entire ship was painted black, a black flag hung
at the masthead, the sails were black, and on the deck people dressed
all in black walked up and down arm-in-arm. The words "Pirate Ship"
were painted in white letters on the bow. At the sight of it our crew
were visibly cowed. It was a spectacle that would have cowed a dog.
The two ships were brought side by side. They were then lashed
tightly together with bag string and binder twine, and a gang plank
laid between them. In a moment the pirates swarmed upon our deck,
rolling their eyes, gnashing their teeth and filing their nails.
Then the fight began. It lasted two hours--with fifteen minutes off
for lunch. It was awful. The men grappled with one another, kicked
one another from behind, slapped one another across the face, and in
many cases completely lost their temper and tried to bite one another.
I noticed one gigantic fellow brandishing a knotted towel, and
striking right and left among our men, until Captain Bilge rushed at
him and struck him flat across the mouth with a banana skin.
At the end of two hours, by mutual consent, the fight was declared a
draw. The points standing at sixty-one and a half against sixty-two.
The ships were unlashed, and with three cheers from each crew, were
headed on their way.
"Now, then," said the Captain to me aside, "let us see how many of
the crew are sufficiently exhausted to be thrown overboard."
He went below. In a few minutes he re-appeared, his face deadly pale.
"Blowhard," he said, "the ship is sinking. One of the pirates (sheer
accident, of course, I blame no one) has kicked a hole in the side.
Let us sound the well."
We put our ear to the ship's well. It sounded like water.
The men were put to the pumps and worked with the frenzied effort
which only those who have been drowned in a sinking ship can
understand.
At six p.m. the well marked one half an inch of water, at nightfall
three-quarters of an inch, and at daybreak, after a night of
unremitting toil, seven-eighths of an inch.
By noon of the next day the water had risen to fifteen-sixteenths
of an inch, and on the next night the sounding showed thirty-one
thirty-seconds of an inch of water in the hold. The situation was
desperate. At this rate of increase few, if any, could tell where
it would rise to in a few days.
That night the Captain called me to his cabin. He had a book of
mathematical tables in front of him, and great sheets of vulgar
fractions littered the floor on all sides.
"The ship is bound to sink," he said, "in fact, Blowhard, she is
sinking. I can prove it. It may be six months or it may take
years, but if she goes on like this, sink she must. There is
nothing for it but to abandon her."
That night, in the dead of darkness, while the crew were busy at the
pumps, the Captain and I built a raft.
Unobserved we cut down the masts, chopped them into suitable lengths,
laid them crosswise in a pile and lashed them tightly together with
bootlaces.
Hastily we threw on board a couple of boxes of food and bottles of
drinking fluid, a sextant, a cronometer, a gas-meter, a bicycle pump
and a few other scientific instruments. Then taking advantage of a
roll in the motion of the ship, we launched the raft, lowered
ourselves upon a line, and under cover of the heavy dark of a
tropical night, we paddled away from the doomed vessel.
The break of day found us a tiny speck on the Indian Ocean. We
looked about as big as this (.).
In the morning, after dressing, and shaving as best we could, we
opened our box of food and drink.
Then came the awful horror of our situation.
One by one the Captain took from the box the square blue tins of
canned beef which it contained. We counted fifty-two in all.
Anxiously and with drawn faces we watched until the last can was
lifted from the box. A single thought was in our minds. When the
end came the Captain stood up on the raft with wild eyes staring
at the sky.
"The can-opener!" he shrieked, "just Heaven, the can-opener." He
fell prostrate.
Meantime, with trembling hands, I opened the box of bottles. It
contained lager beer bottles, each with a patent tin top. One by
one I took them out. There were fifty-two in all. As I withdrew
the last one and saw the empty box before me, I shroke out--"The
thing! the thing! oh, merciful Heaven! The thing you open them
with!"
I fell prostrate upon the Captain.
We awoke to find ourselves still a mere speck upon the ocean.
We felt even smaller than before.
Over us was the burnished copper sky of the tropics. The heavy,
leaden sea lapped the sides of the raft. All about us was a
litter of corn beef cans and lager beer bottles. Our sufferings
in the ensuing days were indescribable. We beat and thumped at
the cans with our fists. Even at the risk of spoiling the tins
for ever we hammered them fiercely against the raft. We stamped
on them, bit at them and swore at them. We pulled and clawed at
the bottles with our hands, and chipped and knocked them against
the cans, regardless even of breaking the glass and ruining the
bottles.
It was futile.
Then day after day we sat in moody silence, gnawed with hunger, with
nothing to read, nothing to smoke, and practically nothing to talk
about.
On the tenth day the Captain broke silence.
"Get ready the lots, Blowhard," he said. "It's got to come to that."
"Yes," I answered drearily, "we're getting thinner every day."
Then, with the awful prospect of cannibalism before us, we drew lots.
I prepared the lots and held them to the Captain. He drew the longer
one.
"Which does that mean," he asked, trembling between hope and despair.
"Do I win?"
"No, Bilge," I said sadly, "you lose."
* * * * *
But I mustn't dwell on the days that followed--the long quiet days of
lazy dreaming on the raft, during which I slowly built up my strength,
which had been shattered by privation. They were days, dear reader,
of deep and quiet peace, and yet I cannot recall them without shedding
a tear for the brave man who made them what they were.
It was on the fifth day after that I was awakened from a sound sleep
by the bumping of the raft against the shore. I had eaten perhaps
overheartily, and had not observed the vicinity of land.
Before me was an island, the circular shape of which, with its low,
sandy shore, recalled at once its identity.
"The treasure island," I cried, "at last I am rewarded for all my
heroism."
In a fever of haste I rushed to the centre of the island. What was
the sight that confronted me? A great hollow scooped in the sand, an
empty dress-suit case lying beside it, and on a ship's plank driven
deep into the sand, the legend, "_Saucy Sally_, October, 1867." So!
the miscreants had made good the vessel, headed it for the island of
whose existence they must have learned from the chart we so
carelessly left upon the cabin table, and had plundered poor Bilge
and me of our well-earned treasure!
Sick with the sense of human ingratitude I sank upon the sand.
The island became my home.
There I eked out a miserable existence, feeding on sand and gravel
and dressing myself in cactus plants. Years passed. Eating sand and
mud slowly undermined my robust constitution. I fell ill. I died.
I buried myself.
Would that others who write sea stories would do as much.
_IX. -- Caroline's Christmas: or, The Inexplicable Infant_
IT was Xmas--Xmas with its mantle of white snow, scintillating from
a thousand diamond points, Xmas with its good cheer, its peace on
earth--Xmas with its feasting and merriment, Xmas with its--well,
anyway, it was Xmas.
Or no, that's a slight slip; it wasn't exactly Xmas, it was
Xmas Eve, Xmas Eve with its mantle of white snow lying beneath
the calm moonlight--and, in fact, with practically the above list
of accompanying circumstances with a few obvious emendations.
Yes, it was Xmas Eve.
And more than that!
Listen to _where_ it was Xmas.
It was Xmas Eve on the Old Homestead. Reader, do you know, by sight,
the Old Homestead? In the pauses of your work at your city desk,
where you have grown rich and avaricious, does it never rise before
your mind's eye, the quiet old homestead that knew you as a boy
before your greed of gold tore you away from it? The Old Homestead
that stands beside the road just on the rise of the hill, with its
dark spruce trees wrapped in snow, the snug barns and the straw
stacks behind it; while from its windows there streams a shaft of
light from a coal-oil lamp, about as thick as a slate pencil that
you can see four miles away, from the other side of the cedar swamp
in the hollow. Don't talk to me of your modern searchlights and
your incandescent arcs, beside that gleam of light from the coal-oil
lamp in the farmhouse window. It will shine clear to the heart
across thirty years of distance. Do you not turn, I say, sometimes,
reader, from the roar and hustle of the city with its ill-gotten
wealth and its godless creed of mammon, to think of the quiet
homestead under the brow of the hill? You don't! Well, you skunk!
It was Xmas Eve.
The light shone from the windows of the homestead farm. The light
of the log fire rose and flickered and mingled its red glare on the
windows with the calm yellow of the lamplight.
John Enderby and his wife sat in the kitchen room of the farmstead.
Do you know it, reader, the room called the kitchen?--with the open
fire on its old brick hearth, and the cook stove in the corner. It
is the room of the farm where people cook and eat and live. It is
the living-room. The only other room beside the bedroom is the small
room in front, chill-cold in winter, with an organ in it for playing
"Rock of Ages" on, when company came. But this room is only used for
music and funerals. The real room of the old farm is the kitchen.
Does it not rise up before you, reader? It doesn't? Well, you darn
fool!
At any rate there sat old John Enderby beside the plain deal table,
his head bowed upon his hands, his grizzled face with its unshorn
stubble stricken down with the lines of devastating trouble. From
time to time he rose and cast a fresh stick of tamarack into the fire
with a savage thud that sent a shower of sparks up the chimney.
Across the fireplace sat his wife Anna on a straight-backed chair,
looking into the fire with the mute resignation of her sex.
What was wrong with them anyway? Ah, reader, can you ask? Do you
know or remember so little of the life of the old homestead? When
I have said that it is the Old Homestead and Xmas Eve, and that the
farmer is in great trouble and throwing tamarack at the fire, surely
you ought to guess!
The Old Homestead was mortgaged! Ten years ago, reckless with debt,
crazed with remorse, mad with despair and persecuted with rheumatism,
John Enderby had mortgaged his farmstead for twenty-four dollars and
thirty cents.
To-night the mortgage fell due, to-night at midnight, Xmas night.
Such is the way in which mortgages of this kind are always drawn.
Yes, sir, it was drawn with such diabolical skill that on this night
of all nights the mortgage would be foreclosed. At midnight the men
would come with hammer and nails and foreclose it, nail it up tight.
So the afflicted couple sat.
Anna, with the patient resignation of her sex, sat silent or at times
endeavoured to read. She had taken down from the little wall-shelf
Bunyan's _Holy Living and Holy Dying_. She tried to read it. She
could not. Then she had taken Dante's _Inferno_. She could not read
it. Then she had selected Kant's _Critique of Pure Reason_. But she
could not read it either. Lastly, she had taken the Farmer's Almanac
for 1911. The books lay littered about her as she sat in patient despair.
John Enderby showed all the passion of an uncontrolled nature. At times
he would reach out for the crock of buttermilk that stood beside him and
drained a draught of the maddening liquid, till his brain glowed like
the coals of the tamarack fire before him.
"John," pleaded Anna, "leave alone the buttermilk. It only maddens you.
No good ever came of that."
"Aye, lass," said the farmer, with a bitter laugh, as he buried his head
again in the crock, "what care I if it maddens me."
"Ah, John, you'd better be employed in reading the Good Book than in
your wild courses. Here take it, father, and read it"--and she handed
to him the well-worn black volume from the shelf. Enderby paused a
moment and held the volume in his hand. He and his wife had known
nothing of religious teaching in the public schools of their day, but
the first-class non-sectarian education that the farmer had received
had stood him in good stead.
"Take the book," she said. "Read, John, in this hour of affliction;
it brings comfort."
The farmer took from her hand the well-worn copy of Euclid's
_Elements_, and laying aside his hat with reverence, he read aloud:
"The angles at the base of an isoceles triangle are equal, and
whosoever shall produce the sides, lo, the same also shall be equal
each unto each."
The farmer put the book aside.
"It's no use, Anna. I can't read the good words to-night."
He rose, staggered to the crock of buttermilk, and before his
wife could stay his hand, drained it to the last drop.
Then he sank heavily to his chair.
"Let them foreclose it, if they will," he said; "I am past caring."
The woman looked sadly into the fire.
Ah, if only her son Henry had been here. Henry, who had left them
three years agone, and whose bright letters still brought from time
to time the gleam of hope to the stricken farmhouse.
Henry was in Sing Sing. His letters brought news to his mother of
his steady success; first in the baseball nine of the prison, a
favourite with his wardens and the chaplain, the best bridge player
of the corridor. Henry was pushing his way to the front with the
old-time spirit of the Enderbys.
His mother had hoped that he might have been with her at Xmas,
but Henry had written that it was practically impossible for him
to leave Sing Sing. He could not see his way out. The authorities
were arranging a dance and sleighing party for the Xmas celebration.
He had some hope, he said, of slipping away unnoticed, but his doing
so might excite attention.
Of the trouble at home Anna had told her son nothing.
No, Henry could not come. There was no help there. And William,
the other son, ten years older than Henry. Alas, William had gone
forth from the homestead to fight his way in the great city!
"Mother," he had said, "when I make a million dollars I'll come
home. Till then good-bye," and he had gone.
How Anna's heart had beat for him. Would he make that million
dollars? Would she ever live to see it? And as the years passed
she and John had often sat in the evenings picturing William at
home again, bringing with him a million dollars, or picturing the
million dollars sent by express with love. But the years had
passed. William came not. He did not come. The great city had
swallowed him up as it has many another lad from the old homestead.
Anna started from her musing--
What was that at the door? The sound of a soft and timid rapping,
and through the glass of the door-pane, a face, a woman's face
looking into the fire-lit room with pleading eyes. What was it
she bore in her arms, the little bundle that she held tight to her
breast to shield it from the falling snow? Can you guess, reader?
Try three guesses and see. Right you are. That's what it was.
The farmer's wife went hastily to the door.
"Lord's mercy!" she cried, "what are you doing out on such a night?
Come in, child, to the fire!"
The woman entered, carrying the little bundle with her, and looking
with wide eyes (they were at least an inch and a half across) at
Enderby and his wife. Anna could see that there was no wedding-ring
on her hand.
"Your name?" said the farmer's wife.
"My name is Caroline," the girl whispered. The rest was lost in
the low tones of her voice. "I want shelter," she paused, "I want
you to take the child."
Anna took the baby and laid it carefully on the top shelf of the
cupboard, then she hastened to bring a glass of water and a
dough-nut, and set it before the half-frozen girl.
"Eat," she said, "and warm yourself."
John rose from his seat.
"I'll have no child of that sort here," he said.
"John, John," pleaded Anna, "remember what the Good Book says:
'Things which are equal to the same thing are equal to one another!'"
John sank back in his chair.
And why had Caroline no wedding-ring? Ah, reader, can you not
guess. Well, you can't. It wasn't what you think at all; so there.
Caroline had no wedding-ring because she had thrown it away in
bitterness, as she tramped the streets of the great city. "Why,"
she cried, "should the wife of a man in the penitentiary wear a ring."
Then she had gone forth with the child from what had been her home.
It was the old sad story.
She had taken the baby and laid it tenderly, gently on a seat in the
park. Then she walked rapidly away. A few minutes after a man had
chased after Caroline with the little bundle in his arms. "I beg
your pardon," he said, panting, "I think you left your baby in the
park." Caroline thanked him.
Next she took the baby to the Grand Central Waiting-room, kissed it
tenderly, and laid it on a shelf behind the lunch-counter.
A few minutes an official, beaming with satisfaction, had brought
it back to her.
"Yours, I think, madame," he said, as he handed it to her. Caroline
thanked him.
Then she had left it at the desk of the Waldorf Astoria, and at the
ticket-office of the subway.
It always came back.
Once or twice she took it to the Brooklyn Bridge and threw it into
the river, but perhaps something in the way it fell through the air
touched the mother's heart and smote her, and she had descended to
the river and fished it out.
Then Caroline had taken the child to the country. At first she
thought to leave it on the wayside and she had put it down in the
snow, and standing a little distance off had thrown mullein stalks
at it, but something in the way the little bundle lay covered in
the snow appealed to the mother's heart.
She picked it up and went on. "Somewhere," she murmured, "I shall
find a door of kindness open to it." Soon after she had staggered
into the homestead.
Anna, with true woman's kindness, asked no questions. She put the
baby carefully away in a trunk, saw Caroline safely to bed in the
best room, and returned to her seat by the fire.
The old clock struck twenty minutes past eight.
Again a knock sounded at the door.
There entered the familiar figure of the village lawyer. His
astrachan coat of yellow dogskin, his celluloid collar, and boots
which reached no higher than the ankle, contrasted with the rude
surroundings of the little room.
"Enderby," he said, "can you pay?"
"Lawyer Perkins," said the farmer, "give me time and I will; so help
me, give me five years more and I'll clear this debt to the last cent."
"John," said the lawyer, touched in spite of his rough (dogskin)
exterior, "I couldn't, if I would. These things are not what they
were. It's a big New York corporation, Pinchem & Company, that makes
these loans now, and they take their money on the day, or they sell you
up. I can't help it. So there's your notice, John, and I am sorry!
No, I'll take no buttermilk, I must keep a clear head to work," and
with that he hurried out into the snow again.
John sat brooding in his chair.
The fire flickered down.
The old clock struck half-past eight, then it half struck a quarter to
nine, then slowly it struck striking.
Presently Enderby rose, picked a lantern from its hook, "Mortgage or
no mortgage," he said, "I must see to the stock."
He passed out of the house, and standing in the yard, looked over the
snow to the cedar swamp beyond with the snow winding through it, far
in the distance the lights of the village far away.
He thought of the forty years he had spent here on the homestead--the
rude, pioneer days--the house he had built for himself, with its
plain furniture, the old-fashioned spinning-wheel on which Anna had
spun his trousers, the wooden telephone and the rude skidway on which
he ate his meals.
He looked out over the swamp and sighed.
Down in the swamp, two miles away, could he have but seen it, there
moved a sleigh, and in it a man dressed in a sealskin coat and silk
hat, whose face beamed in the moonlight as he turned to and fro and
stared at each object by the roadside as at an old familiar scene.
Round his waist was a belt containing a million dollars in gold coin,
and as he halted his horse in an opening of the road he unstrapped
the belt and counted the coins.
Beside him there crouched in the bushes at the dark edge of the swamp
road, with eyes that watched every glitter of the coins, and a hand
that grasped a heavy cudgel of blackthorn, a man whose close-cropped
hair and hard lined face belonged nowhere but within the walls of
Sing Sing.
When the sleigh started again the man in the bushes followed doggedly
in its track.
Meanwhile John Enderby had made the rounds of his outbuildings. He
bedded the fat cattle that blinked in the flashing light of the
lantern. He stood a moment among his hogs, and, farmer as he was,
forgot his troubles a moment to speak to each, calling them by name.
It smote him to think how at times he had been tempted to sell one of
the hogs, or even to sell the cattle to clear the mortgage off the
place. Thank God, however, he had put that temptation behind him.
As he reached the house a sleigh was standing on the roadway. Anna
met him at the door. "John," she said, "there was a stranger came
while you were in the barn, and wanted a lodging for the night; a
city man, I reckon, by his clothes. I hated to refuse him, and I
put him in Willie's room. We'll never want it again, and he's gone
to sleep."
"Ay, we can't refuse."
John Enderby took out the horse to the barn, and then returned to
his vigil with Anna beside the fire.
The fumes of the buttermilk had died out of his brain. He was
thinking, as he sat there, of midnight and what it would bring.
In the room above, the man in the sealskin coat had thrown himself
down, clothes and all, upon the bed, tired with his drive.
"How it all comes back to me," he muttered as he fell asleep, "the
same old room, nothing changed--except them--how worn they look,"
and a tear started to his eyes. He thought of his leaving his home
fifteen years ago, of his struggle in the great city, of the great
idea he had conceived of making money, and of the Farm Investment
Company he had instituted--the simple system of applying the
crushing power of capital to exact the uttermost penny from the
farm loans. And now here he was back again, true to his word, with
a million dollars in his belt. "To-morrow," he had murmured, "I
will tell them. It will be Xmas." Then William--yes, reader, it
was William (see line 503 above) had fallen asleep.
The hours passed, and kept passing.
It was 11.30.
Then suddenly Anna started from her place.
"Henry!" she cried as the door opened and a man entered. He
advanced gladly to meet her, and in a moment mother and son were
folded in a close embrace. It was Henry, the man from Sing Sing.
True to his word, he had slipped away unostentatiously at the
height of the festivities.
"Alas, Henry," said the mother after the warmth of the first
greetings had passed, "you come at an unlucky hour." They told
him of the mortgage on the farm and the ruin of his home.
"Yes," said Anna, "not even a bed to offer you," and she spoke of
the strangers who had arrived; of the stricken woman and the child,
and the rich man in the sealskin coat who had asked for a night's
shelter.
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 | 6 |
7 |
8