So Softly Walked the Lady

I

THIS question arose (and how should mariners resolve it?): Why should the three kittens of Josephine have been born in the afterpeak among the ropes and gear, rather than in the galley or the forecastle, where they would have been shown every courtesy? As easily explain the wanton and quite inconsequential scuttling of dice across a blanket.

Was it because Josephine was modest enough to seek out a dark corner for her lying in? Hardly that. She was an old hand of the blowzy sisterhood of ships’ cats, who spent her nights ashore in no better condition and conscience than the crews of the several vessels she had served aboard.

She was a brazen one, — Cat Josephine, — an old blister off the waterfront, and if she chose to deliver herself among the ropes and roaches it was from motives other than delicacy. Damn perverseness of cat and female combined, we said. We were provoked at her secretiveness toward us. For, while she shared our ship, she neither owned our presence nor shunned it. She was our companion by circumstance only, there being no poetical bond of feeling between Josephine and us of the ship’s company. Her brats were clawing around with their eyes open before we knew she had them.

Her dark ways earned her no good luck, certainly. When she fetched the first up to the light of day, she chose just the moment a squally comber licked over the side. It sucked the cub from her very jaws. We saw the last of him swimming stoutly, but to no purpose. He had no will to drown before the last bit of strength had gone out of him. He swam because he wanted to live — a tiny morsel of cat among the slanting, spume-hatched wastes. ‘Man overboard!’ we said, and looked at one another. But we didn’t laugh.

The second of the litter scalded to death in the cook’s scrubbing pail, so that left Josephine and one.

We began to say she was jinxed. Not that she showed it. She nursed her last remaining cub for a week or so, and then shook it off. Not even would she let it snuggle her at sleepy time, having about as much family feeling as sailors are accounted to have — or less. We then took turn about having the little one in our blankets at night or under our peacoats when we went forward. It squirmed and mewed until it began to get some sense.

Josephine was next to go.

We made port and went into overhaul as soon as the cargo was out. We lay there for three or four weeks with Josephine making free with herself about the dockyard. Presently the fumigators came aboard to rid the ship of rats and roaches, according to the letter of the law. The old man called us to his holy of holies and explained it to us, giving to each a paper dollar in lieu of the day’s board (which was a tidy bargain), as well as a word of caution about staying ashore until the gases had cleared out of the forecastle.

He forgot to tell Josephine, and we forgot, likewise, to take her ashore. The kitten followed Big Eric to the gangplank and so got itself taken along for a holiday which Big Eric spent at Dago Mary’s playing checkers with the old woman and drinking needle beer.

Old Konrad, who couldn’t get fifty paces off the wharf without smelling out a gin mill, got his dollar’s worth in short order, and managed to sneak aboard a bit too soon. Nobody noticed him. We found him sleeping it off in his bunk, and that snooze was the deep and final. The coroner’s men carried him down the plank in his patched dungarees and greasy coat.

It must have been a week later (for we were well out to sea) before we missed Josephine — and only then when her voice came up through a ventilator. She sounded boozy, down under hatches, shut up in the hold with the cargo. That night we set a lookout while Big Eric loosened the grating in the ventilator. We then lowered Mexican Joe on a rope’s end. After a while he brought up Josephine and some cans of cranberries he had broken out of the cargo.

Josephine was sick and wouldn’t eat, so we figured she had been below since before fumigation. Quartermaster Roarty, who was from Nova Scotia, said this couldn’t be so, that fumigation gas kills everything — just as, for example, it did for old Konrad. Since he was from Nova Scotia, and a wooden-ship sailor, his word should have decided us, but we didn’t like his way and his crazy yarns, so we all insisted Josephine had been fumigated, and carried her to the cook to be looked after. Then we wise heads gave Joe the devil of a talk for breaking into the cargo, and made him divvy up on the cranberries.

When in a day or so Josephine died, we reaffirmed that she had been gassed. Being what she was, a compound of catgut, fur, and spite, naturally she took longer to die than old Konrad. At any rate, since neither had filled any strong position, no vacancies were left in passing. Two old hooligans — a man, a cat.

II

We shipped a new quartermaster in place of Roarty, who had been dropping hints about a mate’s berth on a collier out of Hampton Roads. The new specimen had henna-red hair with a band of white running through, fore and aft. He was, so we decided, a cultivated person, well out of the ordinary. He garnished the cap and trade of quartermaster with a certain ministerial indirection of speech and manner that gave the sea lawyers something to fret about. In course of time we identified him as ‘the preacher.’ His gaunt frame and cadaverous hands may have given substance to the name. If such he was, his devilishly humorous eyes, his snuff dipping, and a Gulf Coast brogue thicker than molasses made him a singular cleric, and an easy one to live with.

The little kitten, a dainty fluff-ball, with erect lynx-tufted ears, adopted him immediately. She took up residence in the preacher’s bunk. She came to him for her food. In time she grew to resemble the preacher — seeming to absorb finicky ways from his deceptive gentleness; from his serenity, disdain. He in return pampered her until she would not accept food from any other man of us, unless, by way of exception, the flying fish that occasionally blundered aboard by night, and from which we must carefully cleanse away all traces of oil and dirt. For such a tidbit our kitty would flourish her tail grandly and show us the best of cat manners.

Our cook, always a lonely man, was visibly upset by this turn of affections. Ordinarily the cook would be a cat’s choice for prime minister. Moreover, our cook was no ordinary wage slave. He presided over his range magisterially, like an organist at the keyboard, with only a cob pipe to denote any kinship to the rest of us and to the world of ships. He was a creative artist with a canny head and hand for dough, who, out of such flour, sugar, and lard as the owners allotted him, could conjure the most incredible puffs, crusts, flakes, and furbelows of pastry that ever came out of an oven.

The captain’s mess, of course, and not the crew’s, was the destination of all such unseamanly truck, yet enough of it got filched from the galley porthole to secure to him a dignity and consequence far above his calling.

And when this excellent man would appear calling, ‘Keet-ty, keet-ty, keetty,’ and sweetly proffering a bowl of warm milk, the saucy animal would flirt her tail and stare him down. So cold. Then the audience would abash the cook and his overtures with ribaldry until he would slink back to his galley pots.

‘She’s fixin’ to be a real high and proper lady,’ we would say. And remembering old Josephine, her mother, we would declare, ‘Not just anybody’s cat, but a regular princess.’

So it began to seem. The spoiling business went on until she became picky about what she would and would not eat even from the cleric’s hand. One scorching noon, our preacher came out of the mess carrying a dripping portion of curried beef. Kitty disdained it, and not unjustly, in truth, since it was not fit food for mariners, much less for a lady.

The preacher stood her rebuff poorly, staring after her with more hurt than exasperation in his eyes, then murmured, ‘She won’t have slum no more, she won’t — she demands hamburger.’

‘Turkey,’ growled Big Eric.

‘Por’ chope,’ corrected Mexican Joe.

This pork-chop idea of Joe’s was apocryphal among us, for there was no such item on the bill of fare when we sailed for the Starvation and Hunger Line. Yet Joe never called a watch, in calm or storm, morning, night, or noon, without holding forth a breakfast of pork chops as the principal enticement.

‘Hi! You see-leep!’ he would scream, pulling at the sleeper. ‘Hi! Hi! No see-leep! Eess time por breakpa! Gotta por’ chope por breakpa!’

A blithe awakening, which usually provoked an exchange of blasphemies. We tried calling him ‘Por’ Chope Joe,’ but, as this made him ugly, we kept it for use in the third person.

Thus did kitty spurn our sailors’ slum, and the reverend gentleman got gravy on his fingers all for nothing.

The heat broke that evening, and an uproar of tropical rain confined us below. The preacher entertained me until late, so that before my watch was called we had consumed a quantity of strong drink, with which he managed to be supplied notwithstanding the Articles of Agreement. Along with the refreshment he delivered, for a space of hours, an able discourse on the Monastery of San Pedro Martir, the ruins of which he said we were then breasting, though some leagues offshore. All this he ornamented richly with scriptural citations and references to certain works unfamiliar to me then as now. A more hilarious sermon I had never before heard, nor have I since heard a better one.

When I came off watch expecting to awaken him to his, I found him up, there being nothing to indicate his having slept. In fact, he was quite drunk now, and unfit for duty. He had the kitten cradled in his arms, rocking it, while he half crooned, half chanted: —

‘They mount up to the heaven, they go down again to the depths: their soul is melted because of trouble. They reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man, and are at their wit’s end.’

I reported him ill and took the wheel for him.

III

We cruised now for several months among various ports, changing one cargo for another, ploughing west, ploughing east. The kitten increased in stature, and if not wisdom — sauciness. She was our darling. We carried her about our work, whether forward, aloft, or below. She even got herself taken ashore, and set her eyes on strange sights that do not in any way pertain to navigation.

From time to time as she ripened in maidenhood, the matter of her name was brought up for discussion. Our preacher held that he would name her ‘Balthazar,’ for as he said, if he possessed a child of his own he should certainly call it ‘Balthazar.’ While no one offered objection to this on grounds of gender, yet other names were tried — none of them with much conviction. It seems probable that there is not yet a name in any language that would have been exactly suited to such a subject.

Balthazar she eventually became.

We were somewhere off Barnegat Light, inward bound, late of a blustery winter afternoon. We were idling in the crew’s quarters until the clangor of the mess boy’s gong should call us up to supper. As we gabbed and smoked — a few sleeping — the preacher let himself in. His eyes were kindled with a mischief that is frequently impelled by alcoholic stimulus. From the embrasures of his dripping oilskins he produced the kitten, dry and in a good state of disdainfulness. Steadying himself against a bulkhead, he intoned:—

‘The time is at hand that this cat should get christened with a name. I affirm that she has now attained the age of discretion. Further, my brethren, the hour of our passing is not revealed to us, but stealeth upon us as a thief in the night. Now if anything were to happen to this little one tonight — a shipwreck and peril of the sea — well, that is — if she were to be called to her judgment and we had neglected to equip her with a name — which, as we well know, is a right, necessary, and Christian thing — I say — well — we’d all feel like a bunch of heels.’

He took a pinch of snuff, and stood stroking the little animal with his long pointed fingers, while his yellowed eyes covered us meaningfully. The fumes of his favorite tonic enveloped him with an invisible, fragrant aura.

The howl of the wind outside keyed higher. The steering engine banged. The poop bucked away from the rudder like a wild horse. Mexican Joe awoke with a yell and swung his legs over the side of his bunk. The door appeared to leave its fastenings. We all jumped save the preacher, who stood braced, rigid, and serene. It was only Big Eric. He drew his bulk in. The door slammed to.

The preacher resumed the thread of his purpose.

‘Eric, my lad, the Living Presence has guided you here. The godmother.’

He tucked the squirming fluff-ball into Big Eric’s startled, yet compliant, arms; then draped him about the hips with a brown blanket, swathed his head in a towel.

Seizing Mexican Joe out of his bunk by his straight black hair, our preacher stood him at Big Eric’s side.

‘The godfather,’ he explained.

Next he took up a water jug, — a brandy bottle, to be sure, with a wire hook twisted about its neck, — and began to deal out the words: ‘Deahly beloved . . .’

Joe doubled up and backed away in a fit of hysterical laughter that clattered about the forecastle. His eyes were frightened. The preacher extended a bony arm and pulled him back to order.

Big Eric glared. ‘You be good boy nu, Yoe. Purdy soon coom chow call. Purdy soon ve gat cotta hocus pocus ve go eat por’ chope.’

Then once more,‘Deahly beloved . . .’

But again Godfather Joe backed out. To Joe this was not a subject for buffoonery. He tore away laughing, but with the laugh of a wretch who mocks his executioner.

Herman, the Danish mulatto from St. Thomas, laughed reflexively, a mirthless crowing. He was enmeshed in the first poisonous-white tentacles of paresis, and was beginning to lose his way about.

Then, under the blazing eyes of the cleric, Joe was constrained to quiet, if not calm.

‘Que sacrilegio?’ he objected, half inquiring, half accusing.

‘ No sacrilegio es,’ retorted the preacher. ‘It is necessary, right, and reasonable. Without a name there can be no soul. The Holy Ghost cannot reside in the unbaptized.’

Then, exasperated, he snatched the candidate from Big Eric, and with one movement doused it into a wash bucket. Joe crossed himself, and Herman, seeing, started to do likewise, only to end by scratching his nose absently. The preacher galloped through the baptismal service and brought up with a thumping ‘Balthazar.’

At that instant the Filipino threw open the door, bidding us to eat, having failed to make the gong audible above the whooping of the wind. The terrified Balthazar bounded past him like a cast-out devil, so that, not seeing her, he could make nothing at all of the tableau within, or guess why we howled like demons.

IV

Now we chanced to sail south presently, and were gone for some time. Our vessel slipped serenely through such clean bright expanses of blue and gold that we forgave the world its meannesses toward us. We all became fine sociable chaps. The North-of-Hatteras ports were left to freeze and fog while we went to sail the Caribbean — taking to the weather like sea birds. It was a fine life, and a fine ship. We were all smart fellows indeed, forty-odd men and a cat. Even poor Herman seemed to benefit. At least he could now hold up a hand of cards to play a proper game of cooncan. Day by day we sunned the frost out of our bones, until it seemed we should all be whole again, each in his own way. So much so that our Lady Balthazar came to forget the outrage we had visited on her, and her relenting gladdened us.

Consider the men who get their livelihood from ships. They settle with life on hard terms. Angels must weep for the bleak and precarious lives they spend both aboard and ashore. They are so poor that the least shred of a thing — an idea, a quarrel, or a penny’s worth of gossip — is handed back and forth and about until, far from becoming threadbare, it is improved, immensely improved. The long-continued preoccupation with petty cares, enforced by the nature of their trade, seems to be the only sure escape from the psychopathic reverses and undoings which inhabit the fringes of boredom.

Why else should sailors tattoo their hides? Or knot string belts? Or drink up their pay when they need sea boots and underwear? Or why, why indeed, should Big Eric spend good hours teaching a pussycat to spring over his hairy arms? Big Eric’s arms — ending in mighty bear-paws. From the anterior aspect of the right forearm a scarlet sunrise leered over a blue shipwreck. It bore the explanation ‘A Sailor’s Grave.’ Similarly, the left arm exhibited a skewered heart, presumably human. The legend expressed the stout resolution, ‘Death before Dishonor.’

With an utmost content in his babyblue eyes, he sprawled on the hatch. Little things to gabble about — less to do. The days came and dazzling skies stood over us; the nights when the Caribbean stars hung suspended like blue and yellow swords. The watches changed. Sleep, eat. The watches changed again — and again. The expanses might be broken for a moment by a point of land somewhere. We would gaze idly. When again we looked about, the horizon would have resumed its perfectly circular aspect with us cutting through the centre. The weather held calm. The weeks whiled away.

‘Yoomp, keety,’ commanded Big Eric, ‘ yust yoomp, nu! ‘

Kitty jumped. She had been able to comprehend this much. She must jump over the arms.

‘Good yoomp,’ said Big Eric. ‘Smart keety you are. Sometime you have marriage — nize hoozban’. Settle down, dat stuff — you know how to raise babeese? By God now, tall you vat — we gat to N’Vyoork aye yust buy you good boy frien’. Yoomp, keety, yoomp.’

Balthazar springs over the arms.

‘ When the endocrine balance becomes established — ‘ interposed the preacher.

‘Huh?’

‘When nature has completed her work in a given instance she has provided for its infinite continuance.’

‘Sure. All right. I dunno — you min she’s gat to have hoozban’?’

‘My friend, spare yourself much trouble.’

Mexican Joe turned a fishy eye on the preacher.

‘For what reasone you don’ like haf de papa? Eess true, w’ere eess de mama mooz be also de papa.’

‘Yoomp, keety, yoomp.’

Balthazar — a buxom lass with decided views. For want of mice, she had grown uncommonly preoccupied with the flying fish, and would patrol the hatch coamings and winches each morning. We said to one another that she was doing well and had, to be sure, nothing of old Josephine in her ways. We had reared her carefully, allowing her no shore leave except as suitably chaperoned.

At times Big Eric and Joe were to be found deep in earnest conversation. Once Big Eric was heard to mutter, ‘Yah, aye tank bast t’ing is for preachers is dey should stick by preaching. You yoost see van ve gat to N’Vyoork — aye show him vech vay is starbour-r-rd hallum.’

V

The circle completed, we had berthed in our port of registry. Spring was in the air. It was midnight. The shouts of the seamen died away. The lines were fast. Stevedores swarmed over the hatches. The preacher took up his watch at the head of the plank. Mexican Joe was preparing to go ashore. He applied perfumed pomade to his hair. Herman was doddering about waiting for someone to give him a push. The cook, rigged out in his shore-going suit, hastened down the plank on urgent business. He must be on hand to prepare breakfast in a few hours. The hatch covers came off and shortly the winches began to hammer.

Big Eric appeared to be shutting Balthazar in the afterpeak.

‘Yah,’ he reassured her, ‘yah, you ban nize lady cotta. Yoost you vait har nu. Yoe and Eric, ve goin’ gat you good staddy boy frien’. Good night nu.’

Joe and Big Eric emerged from the confusion, passing the preacher in the waist. Big Eric swung down the plank without a nod. Joe paused to declare with pride and some truculence, ‘We haf plan.’

The preacher nodded. ‘Yes, I know.’ He handed Joe a gunny sack in which was rolled a pair of canvas gloves. In the gloom Joe was not able to discern the wrinkles of an indulgent smile on the mouth of the old-young quartermaster. Joe accepted the bundle and hurried on.

Big Eric and Joe set out on an expedition that night. A big blond fellow and a small brown one — they faded along the wharf under the floodlights. The fall ropes sang. The winches heaved and throbbed. The watches changed again.

VI

It was still night — the same night. The quartermaster’s quarters were invaded by two men carrying a gunny sack. The preacher was interrupted in his reading of a large book. He observed that his visitors were his shipmates — Mexican Joe, who displayed considerable excitement, and Big Eric, who was flushed and seemed pleased. Both were a bit blown, as though they might have been recently engaged in a running exercise. Big Eric’s hands presented superficial lacerations and abrasions. Mexican Joe had mud on his trousers.

‘Be seated, gentlemen,’ said the preacher, wiping his glasses and snapping them into a case.

Big Eric directed that the ports be closed and secured. Then he loosened his tie and wiped perspiration from his face.

The cook materialized in the doorway, his business ashore likewise completed. He stood balancing with difficulty, a sad and slight figure of an old man — the embodiment of all dolorous things, with his beaten eyes and drooping walrus mustaches. The sack drew his attention like a rare and mysterious presence. Big Eric expanded at the prospect of witnesses to his audacity. He beamed at the cook.

‘He’s yoost about gat avay. Yoe, he couldn’t hold him. My gollies, vat a vopper ve shanghai for cotta. Yah, he vas tough von. Odder side Fourt’ Avenue. Close hatch, cook.’ He opened the bag with circumspection, and a yellow back-alley mauler emerged — a tom tiger — a sultan with cynical eyes.

The cook started and seemed on the point of coming to life.

'Ja wohl, Landsmann, I recognize him, dot fella. Dot’s Chosephine’s uncle.’

Big Eric made no apology. ‘Yoost you look, boyse, almost he is bigger as Yoe.’

The tiger strutted stiff-legged over the preacher’s bunk.

‘Aye tall you dat vas some yob. Coom — ve go nu.’

They raised the afterpeak hatch cautiously, and descended, handing down a cat in a sack. Balthazar was not immediately discovered. Then, by the dim light, Big Eric was seen to stiffen while a wave of blood mounted his neck. The spectacle that met his eye was that of Lady Balthazar, down among the ropes, nestling a family of three. And his great shoulders drooped when she flew at her lately intended, raking his nose and spitting great purple curses in his face.

The preacher took some snuff. ‘She ain’t no lady no more, my boys. She’s done been around.’

‘Yah,’ agreed Big Eric, wearily. ’Yoost like Yosephine — born har in afterpeak — her ol’ man, he must been brown rat — huh?’