Читать книгу Four Months Afoot in Spain - Harry Alverson Franck - Страница 5

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Not the least of the virtues of the private schools of New York City is the length of their summer vacations. It was an evening late in May that I mounted to my lodgings in Hartley Hall, rollicksome with the information that I should soon be free from professional duties a full four months. Where I preferred to spend that term of freedom was easily decided. Except for one migratory "year off," I had not been so long outside a classroom since my fifth birthday; and it seemed fully as far back that I had begun to dream of tramping through Spain. If the desire had in earlier days battened on mere curiosity, it found more rational nourishment now in my hope of acquiring greater fluency in the Spanish tongue, the teaching of which, with other European languages, was the source of my livelihood.

There was one potent obstacle, however, to my jubilant planning. When I had set aside the smallest portion of my savings that could tide me over the first month of autumn, there was left a stark one hundred and seventy-two dollars. The briefest of mathematical calculations demonstrated that such a sum could cover but scantily one hundred and twenty days. Yet the blithesome project would not be put to rout by mere figures. I had been well schooled at least in the art of spending sparingly; with a long summer before me I was not averse to a bit of adventure, even the adventure of falling penniless in foreign lands. A permanent stranding was easily averted--I had but to leave in trust a sum sufficient for repatriation, to be forwarded to whatever corner of the globe insolvency might overhaul me. Which, being done, I pocketed in express checks and cash the remainder of my resources--to-wit, one hundred and thirty-two dollars--tossed into a battered suit-case a summer's supply of small clothes and a thread-bare costume for ship wear, and set out to discover what portion of the Iberian peninsula might be surveyed with such equipment.

Thus it was that on the morning of June first I boarded the "L" as usual at One Hundred and Sixteenth street; but took this time the west side express instead of the local that screeches off at Fifty-third into the heart of the city. A serge suit of an earlier vintage and double-soled oxfords were the chief articles of my attire, reduced already to Spanish simplicity except for the fleckless collar and the cracked derby I had donned for the flight through exacting Manhattan. As for the suitcase that rocked against the platform gate as we roared southward, it was still far from a pedestrian's scrip. For with the ambitious resolution to rectify during the long sea voyage before me some of the sins of omission, I had stuffed into it at the last moment a dozen classic volumes in Sixth-avenue bindings.

"Christ'fer!" croaked the guard.

I descended to the street and threaded my way to the ferry. Across the river Hoboken was thronged with luggage-laden mankind, swarthy sons and daughters of toil for the most part; an eddying stream of which the general trend was toward a group of steamship docks. With it I was borne into a vast two-story pier, strewn below with everything that ships transport across the seas and resounding above with the voice of an excited multitude. Near the center of the upper wharf stood an isolated booth bearing a transient sign-board:

"SCHNELLDAMPFER.

PRINZESSIN ----."

Within, sat a coatless, broad-gauge Teuton, puffing at a stogie.

"Third-class to Gibraltar," I requested, stooping to peer through the wicket.

The German reached mechanically for a pen and began to fill in a leaf of what looked like a large check-book. Then he paused and squinted out upon me:

Ah--er--you mean steerage?"

"Steerage, mein Herr; to Gibraltar."

He signed the blue check and pushed it toward me, still holding it firmly by one corner.

"Thirty dollars and fifty cents," he rumbled.

I paid it and, ticket in hand, wormed my way to the nearer of two gangways. Here I was repulsed; but at the second, an officer of immaculate exterior but for two very bleary eyes, tore off a corner of the blue check and jerked a thumb over his shoulder toward the steamer behind him. As I set foot on her deck a seaman sprang up suddenly from the scuppers and hurled at my chest a tightly rolled blanket. I caught it without a fumble, having once dabbled in football, and, spreading it out on a hatch, disclosed to view a deep tin plate, a huge cup, a knife, fork and spoon of leaden hue, and a red card announcing itself as "Buono per una razione."

A hasty inspection of the Prinzessen ---- confirmed a suspicion that she would not offer the advantages of the steamers plying the northern route. She was a princess indeed, a sailor's princess, such as he may find who has the stomach to search in the dives along West street or down on the lower Bowery. At her launching she had, perhaps, justified her christening; but long years have passed since she was degraded to the unfastidious southern service.

The steerage section, congested now with disheveled Latins and cumbrous bundles, comprised the forward main deck, bounded on the bow by the forecastlehead and aft by an iron wall that rose a sheer eight feet to the first-class promenade, above which opened the hurricane deck and higher still the wheelhouse and bridge. This space was further limited by two large hatchways, covered with tarpaulins, of which a corner of each was thrown back to disclose two dark holes like the mouths of a mine. By these one entered the third-class quarters, of which the forward was assigned to "single men" and the other to any species of the human race that does not fall into that category. I descended the first by a perpendicular ladder to a dungeon where all but utter darkness reigned. As my eyes accustomed themselves to this condition, there grew up about me row after row of double-decked bunks, heaped with indistinct shapes. I approached the nearest and was confronted by two wolfish eyes, then another pair and another flashed up about me on every side. My foresighted fellow-passengers, having preëmpted sleeping-space, were prepared to hold their claims by force of arms--and baggage.

Every berth seemed to be taken. I meandered in and out among them until in a far corner I found one empty; but as I laid a hand upon its edge, a cadaverous youth sprang at me with a plaintive whine, "E mío! è mío!" I returned to the central space. A sweater-clad sailor whom I had not made out before was standing at the edge of an opening in the deck similar to that above.

"Qui non ch' è più," he said; "Giù!"

I descended accordingly to a second bridewell below the water-line and lighted only by a feeble electric bulb in the ceiling. Here half the bunks were unoccupied. I chose one athwartships against the forward bulkhead--a wooden bin containing a burlap sack of straw--tossed into it blanket and baggage, and climbed again to daylight and fresh air.

At eleven the sepulchral bass of the steamer sounded, the vast pier, banked with straining faces and fluttering handkerchiefs, began slowly to recede, sweeping with it the adjoining city, until all Hoboken had joined in the flight to the neighboring hills. We were off. I pitched overboard the cracked derby and crowded with a half-thousand others to the rail, eager for the long-anticipated pleasure of watching the inimitable panorama of New York grow smaller and smaller and melt away on the horizon. But we were barely abreast the Battery when three officers, alleging the impossibility of checking their human cargo on the open deck, ordered the entire steerage community below. When, long after, it came my turn to be released, my native land was utterly effaced, and the deck was spattering with a chilling rain before which we retreated and frittered away the remnant of the day with amical advances and bachelor banter.

In the morning the scene was transformed. Almost without exception my fellow-voyagers had changed from the somber garb of America to the picturesque comfort of their first landing in the Western world. The steerage deck, flooded with sunshine, resembled the piazza of some Calabrian city on a day of festival. Women in many-hued vesture and brilliant fazzoletti sat in groups on the hatches, suckling their babes or mirthful over their knitting. Along the rail lounged men in bag-like trousers and tight-fitting jackets of velveteen, with broad scarlet sashes. Jaunty, deep-chested youths strolled fore and aft angling for glances from winsome eyes. Unromantic elders squatted in circles about the deck, screaming over games of mora; in and out among them all raced sportive bambini. High up on a winch sat a slender fellow Turkish fashion, thumbing a zither.

Though there was not one beside myself to whom that tongue was native, English was still the dominating language. Except for a handful of Greeks, the entire 'tweendecks company hailed from southern Italy or her islands. But force of habit or linguistic pride still gave full sway to the slang-strewn speech of east New York or the labor camp. There were not a few who might have expressed themselves far more clearly in some other medium, yet when I addressed them in Italian silence was frequently the response. The new world was still too close astern to give way to the spell of the old.

But it was in their mother tongue that I exchanged the first confidences with three young men with whom I passed many an hour during the journey. The mightiest was Antonio Massarone, a vociferous giant of twenty, whose scorn was unbounded for those of his race who had pursued fortune no further than the over-peopled cities of our eastern coast. Emigration had carried him to the mines of Nevada, and it was seldom that he refrained from patting his garnished waistband when tales of experience were exchanging. But the time had come when he must give up his princely wage of three dollars a day and return for years of drudgery and drill at as many cents, or forever forfeit the right to dwell in his native land. When his term was ended he would again turn westward; before that glad day comes what a stalwart task confronts certain officers of the Italian army!

Nicolò, too, expected to return. In fact, of all the steerage community a very few had resolved to remain at home, and for each of these there were a score who had emigrated a half-dozen times in the face of similar resolutions. Nicolò was a bootblack, proud of his calling and envious of no other. Already there hovered in his day dreams a three-chair "parlor" in which his station should be nearest the door and bordering on the cash-register. Conscription called him also, but he approached the day of recruiting light of heart, knowing a man of four feet nine would be quickly rejected.

As for Pietro Scerbo, the last of our quartet, his home-coming was voluntary, for the family obligation to the army had already been fulfilled by two older brothers. Pietro had spent his eighteen months kneading spaghetti dough in the Bronx at seven dollars a week; and he physically quaked at the sarcasm of 'Tonio on the subject of wages. Still he was by no means returning empty-handed. "To be sure, I am not rich with gold, like 'Tonio," he confessed one day, when the miner was out of earshot, "but I have spent only what I must--two dollars in the boarding-house, sometimes some clothes, and in the winter each week six lire to hear Caruso."

Thirty dollars a month and the peerless-voiced a necessity of life! I, too, had been a frequent "standee" at the Metropolitan, yet had as often charged myself with being an extravagant young rascal.

The steerage rations on the Prinzessin were in no way out of keeping with her general unattractiveness. Those who kept to their bunks until expelled by the seaman whose duties included the daily fumigation of the dungeons, were in no way the losers for being deprived of the infantile roll and the strange imitation of coffee that made up the European breakfast. Sea breezes bring appetite, however, especially on a faintly rippling ocean, and it was not strange that, though the dinner-hour came early, even racial lethargy fled at its announcement. Long before noon a single jangle of the steward's bell cut short all morning pastimes and instantly choked the passages to the lower regions with a clamorous, jocose struggle of humanity as those on deck dived below for their meal-hour implements and collided with the foresighted, fighting their way up the ladders. Once disentangled, we filed by the mouth of the culinary cavern under the forecastlehead, to receive each a ladleful of the particular pièce de résistance of the day, a half-grown loaf of bread, and a brimming cupful of red wine. Thus laden, each squirmed his way through the multitude and made table of whatever space offered,--on the edge of a hatch, the drum of a winch, or on the deck itself. Unvaryingly day by day boiled beef alternated with pork and beans. Then there was macaroni, not alternately, nor yet moderately, but ubiquitously, fourteen days a week; for supper was in no way different from dinner even in the unearthly hour of its serving. It was tolerably coarse macaroni, but otherwise no worse than omnipresent macaroni must be when boiled by the barrel under the watchful eye of a rotund, torpescent, bath-fearing, tobacco-loving, Neapolitan ship's cook. For the wine we were supremely grateful; not that it was particularly good wine, but such as it was not even the pirates in the galley could make it worse.

The ensembled climax of this daily extravaganza, however, had for its setting the steerage "washroom," an iron cell furnished with two asthmatic salt-water faucets. To it dashed first the long experienced in the quick-lunch world, and on their heels the competing multitude. The 'tweendecks strongholds housed six hundred, the "wash-room" six, whence it goes without saying that the minority was always in power and the majority howling for admittance and a division of the spoils. Yet dissension, as is wont, was rampant even among the sovereign. From within sounded the splashing of water, the tittering of jostled damsels, or the shouting for passage of one who had resigned his post and must run the gauntlet to freedom through a vociferous raillery. In due time complete rotation in office was accomplished, but it was ever a late hour when the last gourmand emerged from the alleyway and carried his dripping utensils below.

The Prinzessin plowed steadily eastward. Gradually, as the scent of the old world came stronger to our nostrils, the tongue of the West fell into disuse. Had I been innocent of Italian I must soon have lost all share in the general activities. As it was, I had the entrée to each group; even the solemn socialists, seated together behind the winch planning the details of the portending reversal of society, did not lower their voices as I passed.

How little akin are anticipation and realization! Ever before on the high seas it had been my part to labor unceasingly among cattle pens or to bear the moil of watch and watch; and the unlimited leisure of the ticketed had seemed always fit object for envy. Yet here was I myself at last crossing the Atlantic as a passenger, and weary already of this forced inactivity before the voyage was well begun. The first full day, to be sure, had passed delightfully, dozing care-free in the sun or striding through the top-most volume in my luggage. But before the second was ended reading became a bore; idling more fatiguing than the wielding of a coal-shovel. On the third, I sauntered down into the forecastle more than half inclined to suggest to one of its inmates a reversal of rôles; but the watch below greeted me with that chill disdain accorded mere passengers, never once lapsing into the masculine banter that would have marked my acceptance as an equal. As a last resort I set off on long pedestrian tours of the deck, to the astonishment of the lounging Latins, though now and then some youth inoculated with the restlessness of the West, notably 'Tonio, fell in with me for a mile or two.

It was the miner, too, who first accepted my challenge to a bout of hand-wrestling and quickly brought me undeserved fame by sprawling prone on his back, when, had he employed a tithe of science, he might have tossed me into the scuppers. From the moment of its introduction this exotic pastime won great popularity. Preliminary jousts filled the morning hours; toward evening the hatches were transformed into grandstands from which the assembled third-class populace cheered on the panting contestants and greeted each downfall with a cannonade of laughter, in which even the vanquished joined.

More constant and universal than all else, however, was the demand for music. The most diffident possessor of a mouth-organ or a jew's-harp knew no peace during his waking hours. Great was the joy when, as dusk was falling on the second day out, a Calabrian who had won fortune and corpulence as a grocer in Harlem, clambered on deck, straining affectionately to his bosom a black box with megaphone attachment.

"E un fonógrafo," he announced proudly; "a present I take to the old madre at home." He warded off with his elbows the exultant uprising and deposited the instrument tenderly on a handkerchief spread by his wife on a corner of the hatch. "For a hundred dollars, signori!" he cried; "Madre di Dío! How she will wonder if there is a little man in the box! For on the first day, signori, I do not tell her how the music is put in the fonógrafo, ha! ha! ha! not for a whole day!"--and the joke came perilously near to choking him into apoplexy long before its perpetration.

A turn of the key and the apparatus struck up "La donna è móbile," the strikingly clear tones floating away on the evening air to blend with the wash of the sea on our bow. A hush fell over the forward deck; into the circle of faces illumed by the swinging ship's lantern crept the mirage of dreams; a sigh sounded in the black night of the outskirts.

"E Bonci, amici," whispered the Calabrian as the last note died away.

The announcement was superfluous; no one else could have sung the sprightly little lyric with such perfection.

Bits of other operas followed, plantation melodies, and the monologues of witty Irishmen; but always the catholic instrument came back to "La donna è móbile," and one could lean back on one's elbows and fancy the dapper little tenor standing in person on the corner of the hatch, pouring out his voice to his own appreciative people.

Thereafter as regularly as the twilight appeared the Calabrian with his "fonógrafo." The forward deck took to sleeping by day that the evening musicale might be prolonged into the small hours. Whatever its imperfections, the little black box did much to charm away the monotony of the voyage, in its early stages.

But good fortune is rarely perennial. One night in mid-Atlantic a first-class passenger of the type that adds, by contrast, to the attractiveness of the steerage, his arms about the waists of two damsels old enough to have known better, paused to hang over the rail. Bonci was singing. The promenader surveyed the oblivious multitude below in silence until the aria ended, then turned on his heel with a snort of contempt. The maidens giggled, the affectionate trio strolled aft, and a moment later the cabin piano was jangling a Broadway favorite. When I turned my head the Calabrian was closing his instrument.

"No, amici, no more," he said as protest rose; "We must not annoy the rich signori up there."

Nor could he be moved to open the apparatus again as long as the voyage lasted.

Amid the general merriment of home-coming was here and there a note of sadness in the caverns of the Prinzessin. On a hatch huddled day by day, when, the sun was high, a family of three, doomed to early extinction by the white-faced scourge of the north. Below, it was whispered, lay an actress once famous in the Italian quarter, matched in a race with death to her native village. A toil-worn Athenian, on life's down grade, who had been robbed on the very eve of sailing of seven years' earnings of pick and shovel, tramped the deck from dawn to midnight with sunken head, refusing either food or drink. Now and again he stepped to the rail to shake his knotted fist at the western horizon, stretched his arms on high, and took up again his endless march.

Then there were the deported--seven men whose berths were not far from my own. One had shown symptoms of trachoma; another bore the mark of a bullet through one hand; a third was a very Hercules, whom the port doctors had pronounced flawless, but who had landed with four dollars less than the twenty-five required. With this single exception, however, one could not but praise the judgment of Ellis Island. The remaining four were dwarfish Neapolitans, little more than wharf rats; and the best of Naples bring little that is desirable. Yet one could not but pity the unpleasing little wretches, who had risen so far above their environment as to save money in a place where money is bought dearly, and whose only reward for years of repression of every appetite had been a month of misery and frustration.

"Porca di Madonna!" cursed the nearest, pointing to three small blue scars on his neck; "For nothing but these your infernal doctors have made me a beggar!"

"On the sea, when it was too late," whined his companion, "they told me we with red eyes should not go to New York, but to a city named Canada. Madre dí Dío! Why did I not take my ticket to this Canada?"

"You will next time?" I hinted.

"Next time!" he shrieked, dropping from his bunk as noiselessly as a cat. "Is there a next time with a book like that?" He shook in my face the libretto containing a record of his activities since birth, lacking which no Italian of the proletariat may live in peace in his own land nor embark for another. Across every page was stamped indelibly the word "deported."

"They ruined it, curse them! It's something in your maledetta American language that tells the police not to let me go and the agenzia not to sell me a ticket. My book is destroyed! Sono scomunicato! And where shall I get the money for this next time, díceme? To come to America I have worked nine, ten, sangue della Vergine! how do I know how many years! Why did I not take the ticket to this Canada?"

On the morning of June seventh we raised the Azores; at first the dimmest blot on the horizon, a point or two off the starboard bow, as if the edge of heaven had been salt-splashed by a turbulent wave. Excited dispute arose in the throng that quickly mustered at the rail. All but the nautical-eyed saw only a cloud, which in a twinkling the hysterical had pronounced the forerunner of a howling tempest that was soon to bring to the Prinzessin the dreaded mal di mare, perhaps even ununctioned destruction. One quaking father drove his family below and barricaded his corner against the tornado-lashed night to come.

An hour brought reassurance, however, and with it jubilation as the outpost of the eastern world took on corporate form. Before sunset we were abreast the island. An oblong hillside sloped upward to a cloud-cowled peak. Villages rambled away up tortuous valleys; here and there the green was dotted with chalk-white houses and whiter churches. Higher still the island was mottled with duodecimo fields of grain, each maturing in its own season; while far and near brilliant red windmills, less stolid and thick-set than those of Holland, toiled in the breeze, not hurriedly but with a deliberate vivacity befitting the Latin south. Most striking of all was a scent of profoundest peace that came even to the passing ship, and a suggestion of eternal summer, not of burning days and sultry nights, but of early June in some fairy realm utterly undisturbed by the clamorous rumble of the outer world.

Two smaller islands appeared before the day was done, one to port so near that we could count the cottage windows and all but make out the features of skirt-blown peasant women standing firm-footed in deep green meadows against a background of dimming hills. As the night descended, the houses faded to twinkling lights, now in clusters, now a stone's-throw one from another, but not once failing as long as we remained on deck.

For two days following the horizon was unbroken. Then through the morning mists of June tenth rose Cabo San Vicente, the scowling granite corner-stone of Europe, every line of its time-scarred features a defiance to the sea and a menace to the passerby. Beyond stretched a wrinkled, verdureless plateau, to all appearances unpeopled, and falling into the Atlantic in grim, oxide-stained cliffs that here advanced within hailing distance, there retreated to the hazy horizon. All through the day the world's commerce filed past,--water-logged tramps crawling along the face of the land, whale-like oil tanks showing only a dorsal fin of funnel and deck-house, East Indiamen straining Biscayward, and all the smaller fry of fishermen and coasters. A rumor, rising no one knew where, promised that early morning should find us entering the Mediterranean. I subsidized the services of a fellow-voyager dexterous with shears and razor and, reduced to a tuft of forelock, descended once more to the lower dungeon.

Long before daylight I was awakened by the commissario, or steerage steward, tugging at a leg of my trousers and screeching in his boyish falsetto, "Gibiltèrra! Make ready! Gibiltèrra!" It was no part of the commissario's duties to call third-class passengers. But ever since the day he had examined my ticket, the little whisp of a man who never ceased to regard me with suspicion, as if he doubted the sanity of a traveler who was bound for a land that was neither Italy nor America. Of late he seemed convinced that my professed plan was merely a ruse to reach Naples without paying full fare, and he eyed me askance now as I clambered from my bunk, in his pigwidgeon face a stern determination that my knavery should not succeed.

Supplied with a bucket by a sailor, I climbed on deck and approached the galley. The cook was snoring in a corner of his domain; his understudy was nowhere to be seen. I tip-toed to the hot-water faucet and was soon below again stripping off my "ship's clothes," which the obliging seaman, having bespoken this reward, caught up one by one as they fell. The splashing of water aroused the encircling sleepers. Gradually they slid to the deck and gathered around me, inquiring the details of my eccentric plan. By the time I was dressed in the best my suitcase offered, every mortal in the "single" quarters had come at least once to bid me a dubious farewell.

The commissario returned and led the way in silence along the deserted promenade to the deck abaft the cabins. The Prinzessin lay at anchor. A half-mile away, across a placid lagoon, towered the haggard Rock of Gibraltar, a stone-faced city strewn along its base. About the harbor, glinting in the slanting sunlight, prowled rowboats, sloops, and yawls, and sharp-nosed launches. One of the latter soon swung in against the starboard ladder and there stepped on deck two men in white uniforms, who seated themselves without a word at a table which the commissario produced by some magic of his own, and fell to spreading out impressive documents. A glance sufficed to recognize them Englishmen. At length the older raised his head with an interrogatory jerk, and the commissario, with the air of a man taken red-handed in some rascality, minced forward and laid on the table a great legal blank with one line scrawled across it.

"T 'ird classy maneefesto, signori," he apologized.

"Eh!" cried the Englishman. "A steerage passenger for Gibraltar?"

The steward jerked his head backward toward me.

"Humph!" said the spokesman, inspecting me from crown to toe. "Where do you hail from?"

Before I could reply there swarmed down the companionway a host of cabin passengers, in port-of-call array, whom the Englishman greeted with bared head and his broadest welcome-to-our-city smile; then bowed to the launch ladder. As he resumed his chair I laid my passport before him.

"For what purpose do you desire to land in Gibraltar?" he demanded.

"I am bound for Spain--" I began.

"Spain!" shouted the Briton, with such emphasis as if that land lay at the far ends of the earth. "Indeed! Where are you going from Gibraltar, and how soon?"

"Until I get ashore I can hardly say; in a day or so, at least; to Granada, perhaps, or Málaga."

"Out of respect for the American passport," replied the Englishman grandiloquently, "I am going to let you land. But see you stick to this story."

I descended to the launch and ten minutes later landed with my haughty fellow-tourists at a bawling, tout-lined wharf. An officer peeped into my handbag, and I sauntered on through a fortress gate under which a sun-scorched Tommy Atkins marched unremittingly to and fro. Beyond, opened a narrow street, paralleling the harbor front and peopled even at this early hour with a mingling of races that gave to the scene the aspect of a temperate India, or a scoured and rebuilt Egypt. Sturdy British troopers in snug khaki and roof-like tropical helmets strode past; bare-legged Moors in flowing bournous stalked by in the widening streak of sunshine along the western walls; the tinkle of goat-bells mingled with the rhythmic cries of their drivers, offering a cup fresh-drawn to whomever possessed a copper; now an orange woman hobbled by, chanting her wares; everywhere flitted swarthy little men in misfit rags, with small baskets of immense strawberries which sold for a song to all but the tourists who tailed out behind me.

Suddenly, a furlong beyond the gate, a signboard flashed down upon me, and I turned instinctively in at the open door of the "Seaman's Institute." I found myself in a sort of restaurant, with here and there a pair of England's soldiers at table, and a towsled youth of darker tint hanging over the bar. I commanded ham and eggs; when they were served the youth dropped into the chair opposite and, leaning on his elbows, smiled speechlessly upon me, as if the sight of an unfamiliar face brought him extraordinary pleasure.

"Room to put me up?" I asked.

"Nothin' much else but room," sighed the youth, in the slurring speech of the Anglo-Spanish half-cast, "but the super 's not up yet, an' I 'm only the skittles."

I left my baggage in his keeping and, roaming on through the rapidly warming city to the Alameda Gardens, clambered away the day on the blistered face of the great Rock above.

The "super," a flabby-muscled tank of an Englishman, was lolling out the evening among his clients when I reëntered the Institute. My request for lodging roused him but momentarily from his lethargy.

"Sign off here?" he drawled.

"Left the Prinzessin this morning," I answered, suddenly reminded that I was no longer a seaman prepared to produce my discharge-book on demand.

"A.B., eh?"

"Been before the mast on the Warwickshire, Glen--"

"All right. A bob a night is our tax. But no smoking aloft," he added, as I dropped a coin on the table before him.

"'Ow ye like Gib?" asked the half-cast, leading the way up a narrow stairway.

"Like it," I replied.

"Yes, they all does," he mourned, "for one day. But 'ow if you 'ad always to bask on the stewin' old Rock, like a bally lizard? Saint Patrick! If only some toff 'ud pay me a ticket to America!"

He entered a great room, divided by thin wooden partitions into a score of small ones, and, tramping down a hallway, lighted me into the last chamber. Opposite the cot was a tall window with heavy wooden blinds. I flung them open and leaned out over the reja; and all at once, unheralded, the Spain of my dreams leaped into reality. Below, to one side, flowed the murmuring stream of Gibraltar's main thoroughfare; further away the flat-roofed city descended in moonlit indistinctness into the Mediterranean. From a high-walled garden a pebble-toss away and canopied with fragrant fruit-trees, rose the twang of a guitar and a man's clear voice singing a languorous air of Andalusia. Now and again a peal of laughter broke on the night and drifted away on the wings of the indolent sea-breeze. I rolled a cigarette and lighted it pensively, not in contempt for the "super's" orders, but because some transgression of established law seemed the only fitting celebration of the untrammeled summer that was opening before me.