Fo'castle Waltz

I find whenever Fm getting along socially—the life of the party, so to speak—on my repertoire of bright stories, lilting songs, and sparkling anecdotes, some dim-witted, inarticulate character with a bony pinhead and facile feet suggests let's all dance, hike, or play tennis, and my social brilliancy fades, flickers, and goes out.

On occasion I've been led in the gentle, kindly arms of girls who could not be persuaded that I was purely the mental type and insisted I needed only sympathetic coaching to become an excellent terpsichorean. And after they had grimly struggled with my resisting bulk they'd usually straighten their bodies, pat down their coiffures and dresses, and in short pants breathlessly assure me I was coming along fine. And they'd leave me with a strange smile on their flushed faces which plainly said, "What a man"—that, I hope, not in its worst sense. So I'd creep off into some lonesome corner with a morbid heavy tome of pessimistic philosophy and try to pull the covers down over my head to deaden the sounds of the tinkling laughter of those charming girls pirouetting with that bony-headed moron with the educated feet who had lured them away from me.

Dancing, tennis playing, and mountain climbing or brisk hikes are three diversions which have always reared their ugly heads (singly or in toto) at every social gathering in which I find myself. Here it was in the fo'castle.

So I felt no resentment—as most everyone else did—when the Swede Mate stuck his head in the fo'castle door and shouted politely: "Please, pipe down on that goddam racket. The Skipper's got a headache." And our fo'castle party thinned out and finally died altogether, since we couldn't have fun without noise, and the wine bottles had run dry.

20. Two Sad Stories

THE RED-HEADED SECOND MATE LEANED HIS ELBOWS on the rail as he gloomily looked down at a frantic little tugboat.

"I hear you're studying to be an artist," he said.

That caught me unawares. He'd been howling just a few minutes before what a thick-witted, incompetent imbecile I was—he hadn't used those words—because I'd handled the big hawsers so clumsily and tied them so badly the little tug had gone chugging down river towing nothing more than our line. Our ship stayed put while the hawser whipped out after the busy little tug. Our lines were adjusted and he had calmed down.

Some years ago I remember a high-school teacher, Elly May Pluck (who looked like that—sort of a bloomer-girl type), scornfully asking me pretty much the same question, apropos of nothing, while I was mispronouncing a passage from As You Like It in oral exercise—Slobodkin, so you're going to be an artist? There was definitely the implication that one -who pronounces "hey nonino" "hi-non-nin-no" could never reach the Olympian heights of intellectual development necessary to push a lump of clay around or knock chunks off a stone until it looks like the form you're hunting, or smear clean sheets of paper until you've hoodwinked ever}'one including yourself that you've created an illusion of shape and space.

There was no use reminding that woman of little faith that I was then, at fourteen, the chief cartoonist of the Garnet and Gray, our high-school newspaper. She must have known that and disapproved heartily. Maybe she felt all members of the G. and G. staff should have a passing scholastic record like the football squad before they were allowed to play with the arts. For her information, if she's still around and hasn't corroded her innards with her own vitriolic nastiness, and for all others who sneer at inarticulate, mispronouncing, infinitive-splitting plastic artists—it is the boast of some of the best sculptors and painters I've ever known that they're completely illiterate and, for some reason, proud of it.

Her question had come out of the blue. I was having enough trouble with Shakespeare's vagaries without her heckling, and all I could answer was yeh! But I felt that was inadequate, and now that the Mate had sprung the same thing I was wary.

Maybe there was more than meets the eye in his simple query. It was the first time he'd ever spoken to me outside of his line of duty since I'd been aboard, and his orders were usually so larded with roaring expletives I couldn't understand them even if I could do the work. He might have been pumping me for the Skipper, who had assumed before I came aboard I was giving up my career as an artist.

The Second repeated his question and added: Are ya—or am t ya :

"N-o-o, not exactly. Well, I've exhibited—I had a studio before I shipped out. And though an artist never stops studying—

"Keep at it, kid. Never take up this goddam life. A sailor's life is a lousy way of livin'—"

I didn't know what to say to that—whether I'd politely agree with him or admit I'd taken this job aboard a ship just to settle an argument brought on by a young cat—but it seems the Second didn't want any answers. He was grouchy and rebellious and was sounding off.