Fo'castle Waltz

The first few days in port everybody worked. The black gang had a lot of stuff they had to do down in their engine room and they always came topside looking blacker and greasier than ever—all except old Pat, the oiler, who had held down his regular table at the Chicago Bar and was never sober enough to hear the young cherubic-faced First Engineer, whose watch he was on, give him hell. The First was an Irishman too, and Pat knew how to manage him.

The deck crew worked pretty steadily. That quick, complete squelching of Perry and the Polack had stifled their imaginations somewhat and had taken the spine out of them. They all turned to promptly and put in a good day's work—or seemed to.

The one who appeared to be concentrating most on port work, whose face seemed a little grimier than anyone else's, who always walked the deck with the intent look of a man profoundly concerned with doing his daily stint to the best of his ability, and seemed "to live [as Marcus Aurelius Antoninus has assured us in his Commentaries we should] each day as if it were his last—then if there be gods. . . ." I guess I've got that mixed up. The one who worked like that was my pal Joe, A.B., M.S.—able-bodied seaman and master staller—to my complete befuddlement, until, after studying his intense calculated movement carefully for a day or two, I realized the master hadn't let me down. He was still the biggest, laziest, canniest staller on the seven seas. And I quickly apprenticed myself to him, since a deck boy is an apprentice to an A.B.

I learned about stalling from him. That accomplishment has stood me in good stead through all these years and I have a deep debt of gratitude to Joe for my ability to do nothing with an air of such busy concentration that it broods no interruption. That is no mean ability, and lest I've given the impression that Joe or I or anyone else who has studied the science of stalling are just a bunch of good-for-naughts, or indigent, shiftless, bums, accept my assurance I have precedent, authorities, and persuasive arguments.

Stalling has the same relation to performance that platform presence, showmanship or personal touch has to any and all creative work, and requires as much careful training. It is my conviction that the concert pianist's hair tossing, wiggling and squirming at the stool (some prefer a backed chair, others a wide smooth bench, longer and wider than their bottoms, allowing for a slide either way), the needlessly high-flung hands for beating out the deeper fortissimo, the back-breaking crouch for tender pianissimo, is all a planned and calculated stall. What is known to the trade as platform presence.

The honored master of them all, of course, was De Pachmann with his individualized piano juggling, plumbing its legs with his vest-pocket plumb-bob, his chatter and mugging, etc. The pendulous swaying and tiptoe straining for the high notes by the artistes of the Opera, topped by that genius, Caruso, is froth from the same brew. I only heard the master's voice on the His Master's Voice Red Seal recordings. (Why should I mention the name of the recording company? I'd offer them this plug and receive no response—not even a curt no.) And in those recordings it struck me that the ingenious chest-collapsing wails with which he ended every high note and every second musical passage was a definite display of his training and ability for the stall.

The concert violinist's ceremonious large silk handkerchief thrust into his collar before applying the fiddle to the neck, preparing his audience for the sweat he expects to pour down on his rose-amber Stradivarius; even the desperate prayerful frown of the cornetist, a suggestion he fears he mightn't reach the phenomenal high C he's blowing for—are all of a piece with the circus performers who amble across the tightrope (to quote the Chinese again, a very admirable, useful people if only for that reason) with the care and heroic courage of a "man walking on the tail of a tiger."

Friends of mine have told me they have seen these same performers, these funambulists who timidly advance and retreat along the silver thread of their taut wire at scheduled performances, saunter carelessly across the same route shod in flopping galoshes with their hands in their pockets some mornings on their way out to breakfast. It seems they prefer that type of footing to the unswept circus floor after the chariot races which are usually the grand finale of the previous night's performance.