Captains Courageous by Rudyard Kipling (best classic books of all time TXT) 📕

MacDonald and swore in Gaelic. The car could go back to Boston, where, if he were still of the same mind, they would take him West.

With the “Constance,” which in his heart of hearts he loathed, departed the last remnant of Cheyne’s millionairedom, and he gave himself up to an energetic idleness. This Gloucester was a new town in a new land, and he purposed to “take it in,” as of old he had taken in all the cities from Snohomish to San Diego of that world whence he hailed. They made money along the crooked street which was half wharf and half ship’s store: as a leading professional he wished to learn how the noble game was played. Men said that four out of every five fish-balls served at New England’s Sunday breakfast came from Gloucester, and overwhelmed him with figures in proof—statistics of boats, gear, wharf-frontage, capital invested, salting, packing, factories, insurance, wages, repairs, and profits. He talked with the owners of the large fleets whose skippers were little more than hired men, and whose crews were almost all Swedes or Portuguese. Then he conferred with Disko, one of the few who owned their craft, and compared notes in his vast head. He coiled himself away on chain-cables in marine junk-shops, asking questions with cheerful, unslaked Western curiosity, till all the water-front wanted to know “what in thunder that man was after, anyhow.” He prowled into the Mutual Insurance rooms, and demanded explanations of the mysterious remarks chalked up on the blackboard day by day; and that brought down upon him secretaries of every Fisherman’s Widow and Orphan Aid Society within the city limits. They begged shamelessly, each man anxious to beat the other institution’s record, and Cheyne tugged at his beard and handed them all over to Mrs. Cheyne.

She was resting in a boardinghouse near Eastern Point—a strange establishment, managed, apparently, by the boarders, where the table-cloths were red-and-white-checkered and the population, who seemed to have known one another intimately for years, rose up at midnight to make Welsh rarebits if it felt hungry. On the second morning of her stay Mrs. Cheyne put away her diamond solitaires before she came down to breakfast.

“They’re most delightful people,” she confided to her husband; “so friendly and simple, too, though they are all Boston, nearly.”

“That isn’t simpleness, Mama,” he said, looking across the boulders behind the apple-trees where the hammocks were slung. “It’s the other thing, that what I haven’t got.”

“It can’t be,” said Mrs. Cheyne quietly. “There isn’t a woman here owns a dress that cost a hundred dollars. Why, we—”

“I know it, dear. We have—of course we have. I guess it’s only the style they wear East. Are you having a good time?”

“I don’t see very much of Harvey; he’s always with you; but I ain’t near as nervous as I was.”

“I haven’t had such a good time since Willie died. I never rightly understood that I had a son before this. Harve’s got to be a great boy. ‘Anything I can fetch you, dear? ‘Cushion under your head? Well, we’ll go down to the wharf again and look around.”

Harvey was his father’s shadow in those days, and the two strolled along side by side, Cheyne using the grades as an excuse for laying his hand on the boy’s square shoulder. It was then that Harvey noticed and admired what had never struck him before—his father’s curious power of getting at the heart of new matters as learned from men in the street.

“How d’you make ‘em tell you everything without opening your head?” demanded the son, as they came out of a rigger’s loft.

“I’ve dealt with quite a few men in my time, Harve, and one sizes ‘em up somehow, I guess. I know something about myself, too.” Then, after a pause, as they sat down on a wharf-edge: “Men can ‘most always tell when a man has handled things for himself, and then they treat him as one of themselves.”

“Same as they treat me down at Wouverman’s wharf. I’m one of the crowd now. Disko has told every one I’ve earned my pay.” Harvey spread out his hands and rubbed the palms together. “They’re all soft again,” he said dolefully.

“Keep ‘em that way for the next few years, while you’re getting your education. You can harden ‘em up after.”

“Ye-es, I suppose so,” was the reply, in no delighted voice.

“It rests with you, Harve. You can take cover behind your mama, of course, and put her on to fussing about your nerves and your high-strungness and all that kind of poppycock.”

“Have I ever done that?” said Harvey, uneasily.

His father turned where he sat and thrust out a long hand. “You know as well as I do that I can’t make anything of you if you don’t act straight by me. I can handle you alone if you’ll stay alone, but I don’t pretend to manage both you and Mama. Life’s too short, anyway.”

“Don’t make me out much of a fellow, does it?”

“I guess it was my fault a good deal; but if you want the truth, you haven’t been much of anything up to date. Now, have you?”

“Umm! Disko thinks … Say, what d’you reckon it’s cost you to raise me from the start—first, last and all over?”

Cheyne smiled. “I’ve never kept track, but I should estimate, in dollars and cents, nearer fifty than forty thousand; maybe sixty. The young generation comes high. It has to have things, and it tires of ‘em, and—the old man foots the bill.”

Harvey whistled, but at heart he was rather pleased to think that his upbringing had cost so much. “And all that’s sunk capital, isn’t it?”

“Invested, Harve. Invested, I hope.”

“Making it only thirty thousand, the thirty I’ve earned is about ten cents on the hundred. That’s a mighty poor catch.” Harvey wagged his head solemnly.

Cheyne laughed till he nearly fell off the pile into the water.

“Disko has got a heap more than that out of Dan since he was ten; and Dan’s at school half the year, too.”

“Oh, that’s what you’re after, is it?”

“No. I’m not after anything. I’m not stuck on myself any just now—that’s all… . I ought to be kicked.”

“I can’t do it, old man; or I would, I presume, if I’d been made that way.”

“Then I’d have remembered it to the last day I lived—and never forgiven you,” said Harvey, his chin on his doubled fists.

“Exactly. That’s about what I’d do. You see?”

“I see. The fault’s with me and no one else. All the same, something’s got to be done about it.”

Cheyne drew a cigar from his vest-pocket, bit off the end, and fell to smoking. Father and son were very much alike; for the beard hid Cheyne’s mouth, and Harvey had his father’s slightly aquiline nose, close-set black eyes, and narrow, high cheek-bones. With a touch of brown paint he would have made up very picturesquely as a Red Indian of the storybooks.

“Now you can go on from here,” said Cheyne, slowly, “costing me between six or eight thousand a year till you’re a voter. Well, we’ll call you a man then. You can go right on from that, living on me to the tune of forty or fifty thousand, besides what your mother will give you, with a valet and a yacht or a fancy-ranch where you can pretend to raise trotting-stock and play cards with your own crowd.”

“Like Lorry Tuck?” Harvey put in.

“Yep; or the two De Vitre boys or old man McQuade’s son. California’s full of ‘em, and here’s an Eastern sample while we’re talking.”

A shiny black steam-yacht, with mahogany deck-house, nickel-plated binnacles, and pink-and-white-striped awnings puffed up the harbour, flying the burgee of some New York club. Two young men in what they conceived to be sea costumes were playing cards by the saloon skylight; and a couple of women with red and blue parasols looked on and laughed noisily.

“Shouldn’t care to be caught out in her in any sort of a breeze. No beam,” said Harvey, critically, as the yacht slowed to pick up her mooring-buoy.

“They’re having what stands them for a good time. I can give you that, and twice as much as that, Harve. How’d you like it?”

“Caesar! That’s no way to get a dinghy overside,” said Harvey, still intent on the yacht. “If I couldn’t slip a tackle better than that I’d stay ashore… . What if I don’t?”

“Stay ashore—or what?”

“Yacht and ranch and live on ‘the old man,’ and—get behind Mama where there’s trouble,” said Harvey, with a twinkle in his eye.

“Why, in that case, you come right in with me, my son.”

“Ten dollars a month?” Another twinkle.

“Not a cent more until you’re worth it, and you won’t begin to touch that for a few years.”

“I’d sooner begin sweeping out the office—isn’t that how the big bugs start?—and touch something now than—”

“I know it; we all feel that way. But I guess we can hire any sweeping we need. I made the same mistake myself of starting in too soon.”

“Thirty million dollars’ worth o’ mistake, wasn’t it? I’d risk it for that.”

“I lost some; and I gained some. I’ll tell you.”

Cheyne pulled his beard and smiled as he looked over the still water, and spoke away from Harvey, who presently began to be aware that his father was telling the story of his life. He talked in a low, even voice, without gesture and without expression; and it was a history for which a dozen leading journals would cheerfully have paid many dollars—the story of forty years that was at the same time the story of the New West, whose story is yet to be written.

It began with a kinless boy turned loose in Texas, and went on fantastically through a hundred changes and chops of life, the scenes shifting from State after Western State, from cities that sprang up in a month and—in a season utterly withered away, to wild ventures in wilder camps that are now laborious, paved municipalities. It covered the building of three railroads and the deliberate wreck of a fourth. It told of steamers, townships, forests, and mines, and the men of every nation under heaven, manning, creating, hewing, and digging these. It touched on chances of gigantic wealth flung before eyes that could not see, or missed by the merest accident of time and travel; and through the mad shift of things, sometimes on horseback, more often afoot, now rich, now poor, in and out, and back and forth, deck-hand, train-hand, contractor, boardinghouse keeper, journalist, engineer, drummer, real-estate agent, politician, dead-beat, rum-seller, mine-owner, speculator, cattle-man, or tramp, moved Harvey Cheyne, alert and quiet, seeking his own ends, and, so he said, the glory and advancement of his country.

He told of the faith that never deserted him even when he hung on the ragged edge of despair—the faith that comes of knowing men and things. He enlarged, as though he were talking to himself, on his very great courage and resource at all times. The thing was so evident in the man’s mind that he never even changed his tone. He described how he had bested his enemies, or forgiven them, exactly as they had bested or forgiven him in those careless days; how he had entreated, cajoled, and bullied towns, companies, and syndicates, all for their enduring good; crawled round, through, or under mountains and ravines, dragging a string and hoop-iron railroad after him, and in the end, how he had sat still while promiscuous communities tore the last fragments of his character to shreds.

The tale held Harvey almost breathless, his head a little cocked to one side, his eyes fixed on his father’s face, as the