Читать книгу Back where I came from - A. J. Liebling - Страница 9

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Comrade Osterhahnsen understood the comedy of situation, but Professor Charles Edwards was my favorite sea-going character comedian. The Professor was a solemn, chubby old fellow with a round and innocent face. I called him Professor because he had spent so much time instructing undergraduates who were working their way to Europe on cattleboats. The last time I saw Professor Edwards he called at the office of the New York World-Telegram to tell me that “the call of the sea had outpulled the lure of the footlights, you might say,” and that he was sailing away on the old Leviathan.

“I had numerous offers from carnival shows touring the most populous centres of Arkansas and Texas,” said the professor, “but the sea after all you might say, is my element. And when a ship breaks down you get a tow to port, which, when a show busts, you might say, you are on the beach.”

“As soon as you decide to do one thing you are sorry you didn’t do the other,” he said a little sadly. “The show business is certainly exciting. Yes, sir, the last outfit I was with we travelled down in Texas, and we had a wrestling and boxing show, a cooch show, a car of games and a balloon excension.

“I used to dress as a farmer, with a straw in my mouth, and play those thimble games and win. Then the other hicks would play and lose. Anything to earn an honest dollar.

“Also I used to go ahead of the show and meet the local boxers, and tell them to go easy with the boxer in the show and he would go easy with them. They would box a draw all fair and square the first night the show came to town, and then toward the end of the week we would have a return match and bet on it. The hick would think it was fixed again, and he would go easy and our fellow would knock him out.”

The benevolent professor beamed.

“The fellow with the show was a fine boxer,” he said. “But he got hurt in a balloon excension. He wasn’t no good after that, but he got a job as an armless man, only his wife used to beat him up.

“She was a featherweight boxer, too. They was exactly the same size and we used to put curls on the man so you couldn’t tell them apart. We would have the girl out in front of the tent and promise $50 to any man who could stay three rounds with her and then, coming into the tent, we would switch, and the husband would do the fighting.

“They both used to make balloon excensions, too, and they had a balloon hound.”

“A what?”

“A balloon hound. He was built more like a dachshund with long legs like a greyhound. He would always want to go in the balloon with the woman, but they would never let him. They would hold him back and he would watch the balloon getting smaller and smaller in the sky, and then when it was three or four miles away the boss of the show would fire a shot. That was the signal for the woman to jump out with her parachute.

“When they heard the shot they would let the dog go, and he would put his nose to the ground and run straight to the place the balloon landed.

“Only once I seen him fail. The balloon got tangled in the horns of a herd of deer and scared them and they run it straight over the border into Mexico. The show people went to get it, but there was a revolution and the rebels had took it to bomb Porfirio Diaz. So we lost that balloon.”

Now and then something happens to remind New Yorkers that there must be another side to the ocean. For example pilot Christopher Ahearn of the Cobh of Cork gets carried to sea in a storm and pays the town a visit. Ahearn is the pilot for the United States Lines at Cobh, and when he takes a ship out in rough weather the captain makes him stay aboard. “It’s for why I always carry my bag with a good suit of clothes,” Ahearn says. He doesn’t mind being carried away. “Oh, God sir,” he once told me, “I have a fine time in New York. It be full of people belonging to Queenstown—that is to say, Cobh.” Ahearn has two American ships a week at Cobh and the rest of the time he pilots colliers up the River Lee to Cork. He is a decent man, and when I was a reporter it was always a pleasure to greet him. It was the only way I could keep up with the politics of Ireland, or “trouble” as Ahearn called it, the words being interchangeable in Queenstown, that is to say Cobh. Since I last saw the pilot I have lost track of them entirely. “We’re on De Valera to a man,” he said to me that time,—it was on the Manhattan—“and if there was an election tomorrow, he would walk in. I don’t know O’Duffy” (General Eoin O’Duffy, the Irish Fascist) “but sure, I don’t approve of him. And his Blue Shirts! We’ll paint them green surely.” He would never talk of politics for very long at one session. He always seemed preoccupied. “Oh, God sir,” he used to say, “I have a fine time in New York.”

It was in the convalescent ward at the Marine Hospital on Ellis Island that Frank Watt, a retired ship’s carpenter, told me about a slave ship.

“The strangest Christmas I remember was fifty-four—no, maybe it was fifty-five—years ago,” Watt said. Watt was a cardiac case, a seawise and kindly man, and probably by now he is dead.

“It was aboard the square-rigged brig Rosalie. American crew and British registry, plying between Safa in Morocco and Pernambuco in Brazil, and she was lying about a hundred miles west of the Cape Verde Islands on her westbound voyage.

“The captain, I misremember his name, but he was a Sunday school man, would call all hands aft of a Sunday and there he would preach to us for at least an hour. On Christmas Day he would preach two hours, and he would not have a man aboard that had no Bible.

“This Christmas was a fair day, and the ship loafed along, while we all stood out in the sun and the Captain preached. His text was, ‘The Word shall make ye free,’ and the way he jawed about it we thought we would never get to the dinner the cook had put together out of the finest selected salt pork and sourdough bread and coffee.

“And all the time he was talking the cargo was looking up through the open hatches and jabbering and smiling and wondering what the talk was for. The cargo was 300 Negro slaves, and there were we, eight men, a-freighting them across the Atlantic Ocean.”

The fellow in the next bed muttered something like “How could eight men manage 300?” But the ship’s carpenter was ready with his answer.

“They were like children,” he said. “Mild and wide-eyed. We threw them their food in the morning and we sluiced out the hold at night, and barring one or two that died and we had to throw overboard, we had no trouble with that cargo. The Moors brought them aboard in boats, and in Dom Pedro’s empire the coffee planters called for them, and that was all there was to it.”

Sometimes a thing you hear in one New York world will set you thinking of another thing that you have heard in a different microcosm. This story of Watt’s reminded me of a saying of Battling Norfolk’s, an old colored pugilist who works at Stillman’s Gymnasium where the fighters train.

“My ancestors wasn’t run here,” Bat says when he gets into an argument with a white man. “They was brought here. They came here By Request.”