Tom Cringle's Log

by Michael Scott

  “No,” said Wagtail “really I do not.”

  “Lord, man, it had a pudding in its belly.”

  “Oh, now I remember,” said Wagtail.

  Bang laughed outright, and I could not help making a holy in my manners also, even prepared as I was for my jest by my sable crony Pegtop.—To proceed.

  Aaron looked at me with one of his quizzical grins; “Cringle, my darling, do you keep these Logs still?

  “I do, my dear sir, invariably.”

  “What,” struck in little Wagtail, “the deuce!—for instance, shall I, and Paul, and Aaron there, all be embalmed or preserved” (“Say pickled,” quoth the latter) “in these said Logs of yours?” This was too absurd, and I could not answer my allies for laughing. As for Gelid, he had been swaying himself backwards and forwards, half asleep, on the hind-legs of his chair all this while, puffing away at a cigar.

  “Ah!” said he, half asleep, and but partly overhearing what was going on; “ah, Tom, my dear, you don’t say that we shall all be handed down to our poster”—a long yawn—”to our poster”—another yawn—when Bang, watching his opportunity as he sat opposite, gently touched one of the fore-legs of the balanced chair with his toe, while he finished Gelid’s sentence by interjecting “iors” as the Conch fell back and floundered over on his stern, his tormentor drawling out in wicked mimicry—

  “Yes, dear Gelid, so sure as you have been landed down on your posteriors now—ah—you shall be handed down to your posterity hereafter by that pestilent little scamp Cringle. Ah, Tom, I know you.—Paul, Paul, it will be paulo post futurum with you, my lad.”

  Here we were interrupted by my steward’s entering with his tallow face. “Dinner on the table, sir.” We adjourned accordingly.

  After dinner we carried on very much as usual, although the events of the previous day had their natural effect; there was little mirth, and no loud laughter. Once more we all turned in, the calm still continuing, and next morning, after breakfast, friend Aaron took to the Log again.

  But the most amusing exhibition took place when he came to the description of the row in the dark stair at the agent’s house, where the negroes fight for the scraps, and capsize Treenail, myself, and the brown lady, down the steps. *

  “Why, I say, Tom,” again quoth Aaron, “I never knew before that you were in Jamaica at the period you here write of.”

  “Why, my dear sir, I scarcely can say that I was there, my visit was so hurried.”

  “Hurried!” rejoined he, “hurried—by no means; were you not in the island for four or five hours? Ah! long enough to have authorised your writing an anti-slavery pamphlet of one hundred and fifty pages.”

  I smiled.

  “Oh, you may laugh, my boy, but it is true: what a subject for an anti-slavery lecture!—listen, and be instructed.” Here our friend shook himself as a bruiser does to ascertain that all is right before he throws up his guard, and for the first five minutes he only jerked his right shoulder this way, and his left shoulder t’other way, while his fins walloped down against his sides like empty sleeves; at length, as he warmed, he stretched forth his arms like Saint Paul in the Cartoon—and although he now and then could not help sticking his tongue in his cheek, still the exhibition was so true, and so exquisitely comical, that I never shall forget it.—”The whole white inhabitants of Kingston are luxurious monsters, living in more than Eastern splendour; and their universal practice, during their magnificent repasts, is to entertain themselves, by compelling their black servants to belabour each other across the pate with silver ladles, and to stick drumsticks of turkeys down each other’s throats. Merciful heaven!—only picture the miserable slaves, each with the spaul of a turkey sticking in his gob! dwell upon that, my dearly-beloved hearers, dwell upon that—and then let those who have the atrocious hardihood to do so, speak of the kindliness of the planters’ hearts. Kindliness! kindliness! to cram the leg of a turkey down a man’s throat, while his yoke-fellow in bondage is fracturing his tender woolly skull—for all negroes, as is well known, have craniums much thinner and more fragile than an egg-shell—with so tremendous a weapon as a silver ladle! Ay, a silver ladle!!! Some people make light of a silver ladle as an instrument of punishment—it is spoken of as a very slight affair, and that the blows inflicted by it are mere child’s play. If any of you, my beloved hearers, labour under this delusion, and will allow me, for your edification, to hammer you about the chops with one of the aforesaid silver soup-ladles of those yellow tyrants for one little half-hour, I pledge myself the delusion shall be dispelled once and for ever. Well, then, after this fearful scene has continued for I dare not say how long, the black butler—ay, the black butler, a slave himself—oh, my friends, even the black butlers are slaves—the very men who minister the wine in health, which maketh their hearts glad, and the castor-oil in sickness, which maketh them anything but of a cheerful countenance—this very black butler is desired, on peril of having a drumstick stuck into his own gizzard also, and his skull fractured by the aforesaid iron ladles—red hot, it may be—ay, and who shall say they are not full of molten lead? yes, molten lead: does not our reverend brother Lachrimæ Roarem say that the ladles might have been full of molten lead? and what evidence have we on the other side that they were not full of molten lead? Why, none at all, none—nothing but the oaths of all the naval and military officers who have ever served in these pestilent settlements; and of all the planters and merchants in the West Indies, the interested planters—those planters who suborn all the navy and army to a man—those planters whose molasses is but another name for human blood. (Here a large puff and blow, and a swabification of the white handkerchief, while the congregation blow a flourish of trumpets.) My friends—(another puff)—my friends—we all know, my friends, that bullocks’ blood is largely used in the sugar-refineries in England; but, alas! there is no bullocks’ blood used in the refineries in the West Indies. This I will prove to you on the oath of six Dissenting clergymen. No. What, then, is the inference? Oh, is it not palpable? Do you not every day, as jurors, hang men on circumstantial evidence? Are not many of yourselves hanged and transported every year, on the simple fact being proved of your being found stooping down in pity over some poor fellow with a broken head, with your hands in his breeches pockets in order to help him up? And can you fail to draw the proper inference in the present case? Oh no, no! my friends, it is the blood of the negroes that is used in these refining pande-moniums—of the poor negroes, who are worth one hundred pounds apiece to their masters, and on whose health and capacity for work these same planters absolutely and entirely depend.”

  Here our friend gathered all his energies, and began to roar like a perfect bull of Bashan, and to swing his arms about like the sails of a windmill, and to stamp and jump, and lollop about with his body as he went on.

  “Well, this butler, this poor black butler—this poor black slave butler—this poor black Christian slave butler—for he may have been a Christian, and most likely was a Christian, and indeed must have been a Christian—is enforced, after all the cruelties already narrated, on pain of being choked with the leg of a turkey himself, and having molten lead poured down his own throat, to do what?—who would not weep?—to—to—to chuck each of his fellow-servants, poor, miserable creatures! each with a bone in his throat, and molten lead in his belly, and a fractured skull—to chuck them, neck and crop, one after another, down a dark staircase, a pitch-dark staircase, amidst a chaos of plates and dishes, and the hardest and most expensive china, and the finest-cut crystal—that the wounds inflicted may be the keener—and silver spoons, and knives, and forks—yea, my Christian brethren, carving-knives and pitchforks—right down on the top of their brown mistresses, who are thereby invariably bruised like the clown in the pantomime—at least as I am told he is, for I never go to such profane places—oh, no!—bruised as flat as pancakes, and generally murdered outright on the spot. Last of all, the landlord gets up, and kicks the miserable butler himself down after his mates, into the
very heart of the living mass; and this not once and away, but every day in the week, Sundays not excepted. Oh, my dear, dear hearers, can you—can you, with your fleshy hearts thumping and bumping against your small ribs, forget the black butler, and the mulatto concubines, and the pitchforks, and the iron ladles full of molten lead? My feelings overpower me; I must conclude. Go in peace, and ponder these things in your hearts, and pay your sixpences at the doors. Exeunt omnes, piping their eyes, and blowing their noses.”

  Our shouts of laughter interrupted our friend, who never moved a muscle.

  Again, where old Crowfoot asks his steward—”How does the privateer lay?” *

  “There again, now,” said Aaron, with an irritable girn—”why, Tom, your style is most pestilent—you lay here, and you lay there; are you sure that you are not a hen, Tom?”

  One more touch at Massa Aaron, and I have done. After coming to the description of the horrible carnage that the fire from the transport caused on the privateer’s deck before she sheered off,† I remarked, “I never recall that early and dismal scene to my recollection—the awful havoc created on the schooner’s deck by our fire—the struggling and crawling, and wriggling of the dark mass of wounded men, as they endeavoured, fruitlessly, to shelter themselves from our guns, even behind the dead bodies of their slain shipmates— without conjuring up a very fearful and harrowing image.”

  “Were you ever at Biggleswade, my dear sir?”

  “To be sure I was,” said Mr Bang.

  “Then did you ever see an eel-pot with the water drawn off, when the snakelike fish were twining, and twisting, and crawling, like Brobdignag maggots, in living knots, a horrible and disgusting mass of living abomination amidst the filthy slime at the bottom?”

  “Ach—have done, Tom—hang your similes. Can’t you cut your coat by me, man? Only observe the delicacy of mine.”

  “The corbie craw, for instance,” said I, laughing.

  “Ever at Biggleswade?” struck in Paul Gelid. “Ever at Biggleswade? Lord love you, Cringle, we have all been at Biggleswade. Don’t you know” (how he conceived I should have known, I am sure I never could tell)—”don’t you know that Wagtail and I once made a voyage to England, ay, in the hurricane months, too—ah—for the express purpose of eating eels there; and Lord, Tom, my dear fellow” (here he sank his voice into a most dolorous key), “let me tell you that we were caught in a hurricane in the Gulf, and very nearly lost, when, instead of eating eels, sharks would have eaten us—ah—and at length driven into Havannah—ah. And when we did get home”—(here I thought my excellent friend would have cried outright)—”Lord, sir! we found that the fall was not the season to eat eels in after all—ah—that is, in perfection. But we found out from Whiffle, whom we met in town, and who had learned it from the guard of the North mail, that one of the last season’s pots was still on hand at Biggleswade; so down we trundled in the mail that very evening.”

  “And don’t you remember the awful cold I caught that night, being obliged to go outside?” quoth Waggy.

  “Ah, and so you did, my dear fellow,” continued his ally. “But gracious—on alighting, we found that the agent of a confounded gormandising lord mayor had that very evening boned the entire contents of the only remaining pot for a cursed livery-dinner—ah. Eels, indeed! we got none but those of the new catch, full of mud, and tasting of mud and red worms. Wagtail was really very ill in consequence—ah.”

  Pepperpot had all this while listened with mute attention, as if the narrative had been most moving, and I question not he thought so; but Bang—oh, the rogue—looked also very grave and sympathising, but there was a laughing devil in his eye, that showed he was inwardly enjoying the beautiful rise of his friends.

  We were here interrupted by a hail from the look-out man at the mast-head—”Land right ahead.”

  “What does it look like?” said I.

  “It makes in low hummocks, sir. Now I see houses on the highest one.”

  “Hurrah, Nassau, New Providence, ho!”

  Shortly after we made the land about Nassau, the breeze died away, and it fell nearly calm.

  “I say, Thomas,” quoth Aaron, “for this night at least we must still be your guests, and lumber you on board of your seventy-four. No chance, so far as I see, of getting into port to-night; at least if we do, it will be too late to go on shore.”

  He said truly, and we therefore made up our minds to sit down once more to our rough-and-round dinner, in the small, hot, choky cabin of the Wave. As it happened, we were all in high glee. I flattered myself that my conduct in the late affair would hoist me up a step or two on the roster for promotion, and my excellent friends were delighted at the idea of getting on shore.

  After the cloth had been drawn, Mr Bang opened his fire.

  “Tom, my boy, I respect your service, but I have no great ambition to belong to it. I am sure no bribe that I am aware of could ever tempt me to make ‘my home upon the deep;’ and I really am not sure that it is a very gentlemanly calling after all—Nay, don’t look glum; what I meant was, the egregious weariness of spirit you must all undergo from consorting with the same men day after day, hearing the same jokes repeated for the hundredth time, and, whichever way you turn, seeing the same faces morning, noon, and night, and listening to the same voices. Oh! I should die in a year’s time were I to become a sailor.”

  “But,” rejoined I, “you have your land-bores in the same way that we have our sea-bores; and we have this advantage over you, that if the devil should stand at the door, we can always escape from them sooner or later, and can buoy up our souls with the certainty that we can so escape from them at the end of the cruise at the farthest; whereas if you happen to have taken root amidst a colony of bores on shore, why you never can escape, unless you sacrifice all your temporalities for that purpose; ergo, my dear sir, our life has its advantages, and yours has its disadvantages.”

  “Too true—too true,” rejoined Mr Bang. “In fact, judging from my own small experience, borism is fast attaining a head it never reached before. Speechifying is the crying and prominent vice of the age. Why will the ganders not recollect that eloquence is the gift of heaven, Thomas? A man may improve it, unquestionably, but the Promethean fire, the electrical spark, must be from on high. No mental perseverance or education could ever have made a Demosthenes or a Cicero in the ages long past; nor an Edmund Burke—”

  “Nor an Aaron Bang in times present,” said I.

  “Hide my roseate blushes, Thomas,” quoth Aaron, as he continued. “Would that men would speak according to their gifts, study Shakespeare and Don Quixote, and learn of me; and that the real blockhead would content himself with speaking when he is spoken to, drinking when he is drucken to, and ganging to the kirk when the bell rings. You never can go into a party nowadays, that you don’t meet with some shallow, prosing, pestilent ass of a fellow, who thinks that empty sound is conversation; and not unfrequently there is a spice of malignity in the blockhead’s composition; but a creature of this calibre you can wither, for it is not worth crushing, by withholding the sunshine of your countenance from it, or by leaving it to drivel on, until the utter contempt of the whole company claps—to change the figure—a wet nightcap as an extinguisher on it, and its small, stinking flame flickers and goes out of itself. Then there is your sentimental water-fly, who blaws in the lugs of the women and clips the King’s English, and your high-flying dominie body, who whumles them outright. I speak in a figure. But all these are as dust in the balance to the wearisome man of ponderous acquirements, the solemn blockhead who usurps the pas, and, if he happen to be rich, fancies himself entitled to prose and palaver away as if he were Sir Oracle, or as if the pence in his purse could ever fructify the cauld parritch in his pate into pregnant brain. There is a plateful of P’s for you, at any rate, Tom. Beautiful exemplification of the art alliterative—ain’t it?

  ‘Oh wad some power the giftie gie us,

  To see ourselves as ithers see us!’

  My de
ar boy, speechifying has extinguished conversation. Public meetings, God knows, are rife enough, and why will the numbskulls not confine their infernal dulness to them? why not be satisfied with splitting the ears of the groundlings there? why will they not consider that convivial conversation should be lively as the sparkle of musketry, brilliant, sharp, and sprightly, and not like the thundering of heavy cannon, or heavier bombs. But no—you shall ask one of the Drawleys across the table to take wine. ‘Ah,’ says he—and how he makes out the concatenation, God only knows—’this puts me in mind, Mr Thingumbob, of what happened when I was chairman of the county club, on such a day. Alarming times these were, and deucedly nervous I was when I got up to return thanks. My friends, said I, this unexpected and most unlooked-for honour— this—’ Here, blowing all your breeding to the winds, you fire a question across his bows, into the fat pleasant fellow, who speaks for society, beyond him, and expect to find that the dull sailor has hauled his wind, or dropped astern—(do you twig how nautical I have become in my lingo, under Tailtackle’s tuition, Tom?)—but, alas! no sooner has the sparkle of our fat friend’s wit lit up the whole worshipful society, than at the first lull, down comes Drawley again upon you, like a heavy-sterned Dutch dogger, right before the wind—’As I was saying—this unexpected and most unlooked-for honour’—and there you are pinned to the stake, and compelled to stand the fire of all his blunt bird-bolts for half an hour on end. At length his mud has all dribbled from him, and you hug yourself—’Ah, come, here is a talking man opening his fire, so we shall have some conversation at last.’ But alas and alack-a-day! Prosey the second chimes in, and works away, and hems and haws, and hawks up some old scraps of schoolboy Latin and Greek, which are all Hebrew to you, honest man, until at length he finishes off by some solemn twaddle about fossil turnips and vitrified brickbats; and thus concludes Fozy No. 2. Oh, shade of Edie Ochiltree! that we should stand in the taunt of such unmerciful spendthrifts of our time on earth. Besides, the devil of it is, that whatever may be said of the flippant palaverers, the heavy bores are generally most excellent and amiable men, so that one can’t abuse the sumphs with anything like a quiet conscience.”