There were wooden eyes painted white with black pupils on either side of the bow of each sampan or junk. They were supposed to watch for rocks or evil spirits. Those eyes used to give me the willies, always staring that way, seeming to bulge in some kind of dumb wonder. I’d wake up at night remembering those eyes and wondering where the Admiral was.
But it got Tony more than me. Tony was a hard guy. He was said to have killed a cop in Baltimore and shipped out to get away. I always thought the old man knew, but he never said anything, and neither did the rest of us. It just wasn’t any of our business, and we knew none of the circumstances. Something to do with payoffs, we understood.
Tony took to our family as if they were his own flesh and blood. I never saw a guy get so warmed up over anything. He was a tough wop, and he’d always been a hard case and probably never had anybody he could do for. That’s what a guy misses when he’s rambling around—not somebody to do something for him but somebody to think of, to work for.
One day when we were working over the side on a staging, the sampan came under us, and Tony turned to wave at the Admiral. “Lookit, Duke,” he says to me, “ain’t he the cute little devil? That red silk handkerchief sure sets him off.”
It was funny, you know? Tony’d been a hard drinker, but after our family showed up, he began to leave it alone. After he gave that red silk handkerchief to the Admiral, he just quit drinking entirely, and when the rest of us went ashore, he’d stay aboard, lying in his bunk, making something for the Admiral.
Tony could carve. You’d have to see it to believe how good he was. Of course, in the old days of sail, men aboard ship carved or created all sorts of things, working from wood, ivory, or whatever came to hand. Tony began to carve out a model of our own ship, a tramp freighter from Wilmington. That was the night we left for Hong Kong and just a few hours after the accident.
We had been painting under the stern, hanging there on a plank staging, and it was a shaky business. The stern is always the worst place to paint because the stage is swinging loose underneath, and there isn’t a thing to lay hold of but the ropes at either end.
Worse still, a fellow can’t see where the ropes are made fast to the rail on the poop deck, and those coolies are the worst guys in the world for untying every rope they see knotted. One time at Taku Bar I got dropped into the harbor that way. But this time it was no trouble like that. It was worse.
We were painting almost overhead when we heard somebody scream. Both of us turned so quickly we had to grab the ropes at either end to keep from falling, and when we got straightened around, we saw the Admiral in the water.
Our family had been coming toward our ship when somehow the Admiral had slipped and fallen over the side, and now there he was, buoyed up by the bladder fastened to his shoulders, the red handkerchief still on his head. Probably that had happened a dozen times before, but this time a big Dollar liner was coming upstream, and she was right abeam of us when the Admiral fell. And in a minute more he’d be sucked down into those whirling propeller blades.
Then the plank jerked from under my feet, and I fastened to that rope with both hands, and I felt my heart jump with sudden fear. For a minute or so I had no idea what had happened, and by the time I could pull myself up and get my feet on the staging again, Tony was halfway to the Admiral and swimming like I’d seen nobody swim before.
It was nip and tuck, and you can believe it when I say I didn’t draw a breath until Tony grabbed the Admiral just as the big liner’s stern hove up, the water churning furiously as she was riding high in the water. Tony’s head went down, and both he and the Admiral disappeared in the swirl of water that swept out in a wake behind the big liner.
There was a moment there when they were lost in the swirl of water behind the steamer, and then we saw them, and Tony was swimming toward the sampan towing the Admiral, who had both hands on Tony’s shoulder.
That night when we slipped down the Whangpoo for Hong Kong, Tony started work on his boat. For we were coming back. We had discharged our cargo and were heading south to pick up more, and by the time we returned, there would be cargo in Shanghai for us.
You’d never guess how much that boat meant to us. All the time we were gone, we thought about our family, and each of us picked up some little thing in Hong Kong or Kowloon to take back to them. But it was the carving of the boat that occupied most of our time. Not that we helped, because we didn’t. It was Tony’s job, and he guarded it jealously, and none of us could have done it half so well.
We watched him carve the amidships house and shape the ventilators, and we craned our necks and watched when he fastened a piece of wire in place as the forestay. When one of us would go on watch, the mate would ask how the boat was coming. Everybody on the ship from the old man to the black cook from Georgia knew about the ship Tony was carving, and everyone was interested.
Once the chief mate stopped by the fo’c’s’le to examine it and offer a suggestion, and the second mate got to telling me about the time his little boy ran his red fire engine into the preacher’s foot. Time went by so fast it seemed no time at all till we were steaming back up the Whangpoo again to anchor at Wayside Pier. We were watching for our family long before they could have seen us.
The next morning the boat was finished, and Chips took it down to the paint locker and gave it a coat of paint and varnish, exactly like our own ship; the colors were the same and everything. There wasn’t much of a hold, but we had stuffed it with candy. Then we watched for the sampan.
Dick was up on the cross-tree of the mainmast when he saw it, and he came down so fast it was a crying wonder he didn’t break a leg. When he hit the deck, he sprinted for the rail. In a few minutes we were all standing there, only nobody was saying anything.
It was the sampan. Only it was bottom up now and all stove in. There wasn’t any mistaking it, for we’d have known that particular sampan anywhere even if it hadn’t been for the red silk handkerchief. It was there now, a little flag, fluttering gallantly from the wreckage.
THE MAN WHO STOLE SHAKESPEARE
Without any question of doubt, the most exciting city in the world in my lifetime was Shanghai, China. Thirteen flags were flying over Shanghai at that time. I went into a nightclub one night and we counted the uniforms of twenty-nine different armies and navies on the floor at once. The major part of town was called Frenchtown but there was an international section also and there were wonderful nightclubs there and a lot of very fine hotels and some of the best food in the world. You could get a good meal for six cents and you could also get one for six hundred dollars and that was in a time when things were a lot cheaper than they are now. Everybody there was making money. Everybody was on the take.
WHEN I HAD been in Shanghai but a few days, I rented an apartment in a narrow street off Avenue Edward VII where the rent was surprisingly low. The door at the foot of the stairs opened on the street beside a money changer’s stall, an inconspicuous place that one might pass a dozen times a day and never notice.
At night I would go down into the streets and wander about or sit by my window and watch people going about their varied business. From my corner windows I could watch a street intersection and an alleyway, and there were many curious things to see, and for one who finds his fellow man interesting, there was much to learn.
Late one afternoon when a drizzle of despondent rain had blown in from the sea, I decided to go out for coffee. Before I reached my destination, it began to pour, so I stepped into a bookstore for shelter.
This store dealt in secondhand books published in several languages and was a jumble of stacks, piles, and racks filled with books one never saw elsewhere and was unlikely to see again. I was hitch-reading from Sterne when I saw him.
He was a small man and faded. His face had the scholarly expression that seems to come from familiarity with books, and he handled them tenderly. One could see at a glanc
e that here was a man who knew a good book when he saw one, with a feeling for attractive format as well as content.
Yet when I glanced up, he was slipping a book into his pocket. Quickly, with almost a sense of personal guilt, I looked toward the clerk, but he was watching the rain. The theft had passed unobserved.
Now, there is a sort of sympathy among those who love books, an understanding that knows no bounds of race, creed, or financial rating. If a man steals a necktie, he is a thief of the worst stripe. If he steals a car, nothing is too bad for him. But a man who steals a book is something else—unless it is my book.
My first thought when he slipped the book into his pocket was to wonder what book he wanted badly enough to steal. Not that there are only a few books worth stealing, for there are many. Yet I was curious. What, at the moment, had captured his interest, this small, gentle-seeming man with the frayed shirt collar and the worn topcoat?
When he left, I walked over to the place where the book had been and tried to recall what it might have been, for I had only just checked that shelf myself. Then I remembered.
It had been a slim, one-play-to-the-volume edition of Shakespeare. He had also examined Hakluyt’s Voyages, or at least one volume of the set, Huysmans’s Against the Grain, and Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy.
This was definitely a man I wished to know. Also, I was curious. Which play had he stolen? Was it the play itself he wished to read? Or was it for some particular passage in the play? Or to complete a set?
Turning quickly, I went to the door, and barely in time. My man was just disappearing in the direction of Thibet Road, and I started after him, hurrying.
At that, I almost missed him. He was just rounding a corner a block away, so he had been running, too. Was it the rain or a feeling of guilt?
The rain had faded into a drizzle once more. My man kept on, walking rapidly, but fortunately for me, he was both older than I and his legs were not as long.
Whether he saw me, I do not know, but he led me a lively chase. It seemed scarcely possible for a man to go up and down so many streets, and he obviously knew Shanghai better than I. Yet suddenly he turned into an alley and dodged down a basement stairway. Following him, I got my foot in the door before he could close it.
He was frightened, and I could understand why. In those wilder years they found several thousand bodies on the street every year, and he perhaps had visions of adding his own to the list. Being slightly over six feet and broad in the shoulder, I must have looked dangerous in that dark passageway. Possibly he had visions of being found in the cold light of dawn with a slit throat, for such things were a common occurrence in Shanghai.
“Here!” he protested. “You can’t do this!” That I was doing it must have been obvious. “I’ll call an officer!”
“And have to explain that volume of Shakespeare in your pocket?” I suggested.
That took the wind out of him, and he backed into the room, a neat enough place, sparsely furnished except for the books. The walls were lined with them.
“Now see here,” I said, “you’ve nothing to worry about. I don’t intend to report you, and I’m not going to rob you. I’m simply interested in books and in the books people want enough to steal.”
“You’re not from the bookstore?”
“Nothing of the kind. I saw you slip the book into your pocket, and although I did not approve, I was curious as to what you had stolen and why.” I held out my hand. “May I see?”
He shook his head, then stood back and watched me, finally taking off his coat. He handed me the book from his pocket, which was a copy of Henry IV, bound in gray cloth with a thin gold line around the edges. The book was almost new and felt good to the hands. I turned the pages, reading a line or two. “You’ve a lot of books,” I said, glancing at the shelves. “May I look?”
He nodded, then stepped back and sat down. He certainly was not at ease, and I didn’t blame him.
The first book I saw was Wells’s Outline of History. “Everybody has that one,” I commented. “Yes,” he said hesitantly.
Ibsen was there, and Strindberg, Chekhov, and Tolstoy. A couple of volumes by Thomas Hardy were wedged alongside three by Dostoevsky. There were books by Voltaire, Cervantes, Carlyle, Goldoni, Byron, Verlaine, Baudelaire, Cabell, and Hume.
The next book stopped me short, and I had to look again to make sure the bookshelf wasn’t kidding. It was a quaint, old-fashioned, long-out-of-date Home Medical Advisor by some Dr. Felix Peabody, published by some long-extinct publisher whose state of mind must have been curious, indeed.
“Where in the world did you get this?” I asked. “It seems out of place stuck in between Hegel and Hudson.”
He smiled oddly, his eyes flickering to mine and then away. He looked nervous, and since then I have often wondered what went through his mind at that moment.
Scanning the shelves to take stock of what his interests were, I came upon another queer one. It was between Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey and George Gissing’s Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft. It was Elsie’s Girlhood.
After that I had to sit down. This man was definitely some kind of a nut. I glanced at him, and he squirmed a little. Evidently he had seen my surprise at the placement of some of the books, or the fact that he had them at all.
“You must read a lot,” I suggested. “You’ve a lot of good books here.”
“Yes,” he said; then he leaned forward, suddenly eager to talk. “It’s nice to have them. I just like to own them, to take them in my hands and turn them over and to know that so much that these men felt, saw, thought, and understood is here. It is almost like knowing the men themselves.”
“It might be better,” I said. “Some of these men were pretty miserable in themselves, but their work is magnificent.”
He started to rise, then sat down again suddenly as though he expected me to order him to stay where he was.
“Do you read a lot?” he asked.
“All the time,” I said. “Maybe even too much. At least when I have books or access to them.”
“My eyes”—he passed a hand over them—“I’m having trouble with my glasses. I wonder if you’d read to me sometime? That is,” he added hastily “if you have the time.”
“That’s the one thing I’ve plenty of,” I said. “At least until I catch a ship. Sure I’ll read to you.”
As a matter of fact, he had books here of which I’d heard all my life but had found no chance to read. “If you want, I’ll read some right now.”
It was raining outside, and I was blocks from my small apartment. He made coffee, and I read to him, starting with The Return of the Native for no reason other than that I’d not read it and it was close at hand. Then I read a bit from Tales of Mean Streets and some from Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding.
Nearly every day after that I went to see Mr. Meacham. How he made his living, I never knew. He had some connection, I believe, with one of the old trading companies, for he seemed very familiar with the interior of China and with people there.
The oddity of it appealed to some irony in my sense of humor. A few weeks before I’d been coiling wet lines on the forecastle head of a tramp steamer, and now here I was, reading to this quaint old gentleman in his ill-fitting suit.
He possessed an insatiable curiosity about the lives of the authors and questioned me about them by the hour. That puzzled me, for a reader just naturally acquires some such knowledge just by reading the book jackets, and in the natural course of events a man can learn a good deal about the personal lives of authors. However, he seemed to know nothing about them and was avid for detail.
There was much about him that disturbed me. He was so obviously alone, seemingly cut off from everything. He wasn’t bold enough to make friends, and there seemed to be no reason why anybody should take the trouble to know him. He talked very l
ittle, and I never did know where he had come from or how he happened to be in such a place as Shanghai, for he was a contradiction to everything one thinks of when one considers Shanghai. You could imagine him in Pittsburgh, St. Louis, or London, in Glasgow or Peoria, but never in such a place as this.
One day when I came in, I said, “Well, you name it. What shall I read today?”
He hesitated, flushed, then took a book from the shelf and handed it to me. It was Elsie’s Girlhood, a book of advice to a young girl about to become a woman.
For a minute I thought he was kidding, and then I was sure it couldn’t be anything else. “Not today,” I said. “I’ll try Leacock.”
When I remembered it afterward, I remembered he had not seemed to be kidding. He had been perfectly serious and obviously embarrassed when I put him off so abruptly. He hesitated, then put the book away, and when I returned the next day, the book was no longer on the shelf. It had disappeared.
It was that day that I guessed his secret. I was reading at the time, and it just hit me all of a sudden. It left me completely flabbergasted, and for a moment I stared at the printed page from which I was reading, my mouth open for words that would not come.
Yes, I told myself, that had to be it. There was no other solution. All the pieces suddenly fell into place: the books scattered together without plan or style, with here and there books that seemed so totally out of place and unrelated.
That night I read later than ever before.
Then I got a job. Dou Yu-seng offered to keep the rent paid on my apartment (I always suspected he owned the building) while I took care of a little job up the river. I knew but little about him but enough to know of affiliations with various warlords and at least one secret society. However, what I was to do was legitimate.
Yondering: Stories Page 9