Fo'castle Waltz

Why, the crew couldn't do that to me. Not after what I'd done for them. When I stood up to the Mate it wasn't for myself alone—it was for all of them. When I fought for the right to smoke and sing, it wasn't only for my right I was fighting—it was the right of all of us. And when the Mate howled me down it wasn't only at me he directed his blasphemy—I just happened to be nearest. And finally when they put me in irons and threw me into the brig, it wasn't only I that had suffered that indignity—they all were being handcuffed (at least two more of them would have easily fit into that first pair of shackles). It wasn't that I had developed a Messiah complex; by an accident of Fate I was chosen to serve all and I did—cheerfully, almost joyously. But here I just ask this guy Mush to just do a little thing for me—get my shoes and that volume of Emerson—

Emerson—there's a fine one to have with you when you're locked up for fighting intolerance, man's inhumanity to man. Thoreau was more my kind of a guy. He, too, was locked up and was privileged to serve his fellow man with martyrdom— something about water taxes or something—and where was this guy Waldo Emerson then? On the outside looking in, according to accounts I've read. What do you there within that prison? said Waldo. What do you there without? replied Henry. (They were both well-bred, profoundly educated men of the period— naturally, their English was perfect.) He gave Abe Lincoln enough trouble with his poisonous pen too, when Abe was putting up his fight to free the slaves. Yeah, Waldo wrote that Abe was a big vulgar jackanapes or something equally Back Bay. Maybe he'd have thought I was a short, crude, bean pot—with just as little reason.

So, Nuts to him, too. And I flung that copy of Emerson's Essays—Second Series which didn't contain the dissertation on "Heroism" out the porthole. It landed on the hatch with a bang.

The Mate had just come out of the officers' mess and stood on the upper deck picking his teeth when that book landed out on the hatch and lay there with its leaves fluttering in the sun; he squinted toward my porthole and turned abruptly and went back into the passage.

What for? To get a cat-o'-nine-tails I bet. Anything could happen aboard this lousy tramp.

There hadn't been much talk that I could remember about mutiny. It seems I recall just a vague reference—something about six years in Federal prison (or was it sixteen?) for mutiny on the high seas. Somehow the crew had avoided that subject in the thousand and one discussions we'd had on everything.

As far as I was concerned, mutiny was something with blood and cutlasses in it—the next thing to piracy. And who could have known that a harmless dispute about a pair of cheap shoes would degenerate into mutiny—irons and brigs, and now, maybe cat-o'-nine-tails?

But it hadn't—not yet. The Mate came out on the upper deck holding a covered tray, and he juggled it down the ladder and up the forward deck toward me.

It was dinnertime. ... I was getting room service!

30. Freedom of the Seas

THE BRASS KEY RATTLED IN THE LOCK and the mate's arm shoved open my door just far enough to set his burden down on the deck. He whipped off the clean napkin.

"There's your dinner."

The unveiling had revealed two warped slices of white bread and a heavy China pitcher arranged (with no attempt at pattern) on a large tin pie plate. The pitcher was half full of water—that's all. That was my dinner—no salt, pepper, or condiments of any kind.

The Mate watched me out of a corner of his eye to see how I'd take it. This was a moment for decision. The plastic arts train the reflexes to react quickly. Doing water colors, for example, with the trigger judgment the work develops—such as controlling an overflowing cerulean sky to keep it from dripping down over the horizon and gumming up a well-indicated chrome yellow barn so that it becomes an unpleasant brown one—has prepared me to make capital of accidents of Fate and recognize and grasp immediately the unpremeditated contributions such discords may add to a plastic expression or to reject them. Shall I permit a bit of momentary exuberance— obviously hatched by ennui—which had been responsible for that little unpleasantness and those harsh words early in the day to ruin completely the cordial relation that has always existed between the Mate and me?

Should a paltry three pairs of shoes, a dispute on musical values, and his probable concern for my health (I was still a growing boy and one knows what nicotine does to rabbits) destroy that gracious esteem we have had for one another? And finally, was it fair to the Mate with all the things he had on his mind, obviously piled up like an inverted pyramid necessitated by its infinitesimal breadth, to reduce him to the level of a bread-and-water-serving bus boy?