The Argonauts
by
A few months ago I attended a banquet and left it as I always leave such functions, hungry. Entering an all-night lunch room I took a seat, and gave my order to a waiter, who, when he had filled it, sat down at the table with me. It was very late, and his duties were light.
“You’re looking well,” he remarked, as his glance traveled over my evening clothes. “You’re dead swell, but the last time I saw you, you were covered with mud, carrying a stern line ashore in the Welland Canal.”
I took stock of him. He was white-haired, but had the keen, intelligent face of a man of forty-five who had not yet given up the fight; a lively, hopeful face, one that comes to those who win oftener than lose. His skin was brown, as though the sun and wind of all the zones had smitten it. His eyes, gray, steadfast and humorous, had in them when half closed the twinkle of self-confidence, but also, in their wide-open stare, the intensity of a man of initiative and sudden action. In his voice were character, individuality, and the habit of command; yet he wore the short jacket of a waiter, and might have accepted a tip. I could not recall having met him.
“You seem to have the advantage of me,” I said. “I know the Welland Canal, however, though I am trying to forget that ditch.”
“You can’t,” he laughed. “No man can who ever went through it. That trip with you in the old Samana was my first and last. I struck for salt water again when the old man paid me off at Port Colborne. Don’t you remember going to school with me?” He mentioned his name, and with a little effort I recalled him–a schoolmate a little older than myself, who had gone to sea early in life, and returned a full-fledged salt-water navigator, to ship, on his record, as first mate in the schooner that carried me before the mast, and to meet his Waterloo in the Welland Canal, the navigation of which demands qualities never taught nor acquired in the curriculum of sea-faring. After grounding the schooner several times, parting every line on board, and driving us to open revolt by the extra work coming of his mistakes, he was discharged by the skipper. As I thought of all this the grumbling sailor rose within me, and there at the table, he a waiter, I a writer, we fought out a grudge of twenty years’ standing. But it ended amicably; I called him a farmer, he called me a soldier, and we shook hands.
“I’ve learned,” he said, as we settled back, “only in the last month or so, that you’re the fellow that writes these rotten sea stories. Why don’t you write real sea stories?”
“For the same reason that you don’t serve a real Welsh rabbit,” I answered, tapping the now cold concoction he had served me. “I couldn’t sell a real story. Truth is too strange to pose as fiction.”
“That’s so,” he answered, slowly. “Who’d think that you could have become a writer, and I a hash slinger? Making lots of money, I suppose.”
“No, I’m not, or I wouldn’t be in your society to-night.”
“We’re all bluffers, I guess. You are, here in this beanery with your glad rags on. I am, too–no, not now. I’m slinging hash, and glad of the chance. But I was a millionaire for a time. Not long. But while it lasted I had dreams–big dreams.”
I asked him about this, and there followed his story. It was interrupted every few moments by calls for “ham and–,” “corn beef and–,” “mystery and white wings,” and it kept me at the table until daylight. He preluded it by the advice to write it up as a real sea story, but asked that I suppress his name until he had saved enough to get him to Cuba, where he had new plans for advancement. And now, after months of thought, I am following his advice; for no effort of the creative mind, and no flight of conventional fancy, can equal the weird, grim yarn that he reeled off between orders.